Free Fly by Wire: A Novel by Ward Larsen

the main entrance a woman sat behind a table. She was shuffling papers, a bureaucratic bird featherbedding her nest with forms and messages. She was good at it, three neat piles. In, Out, Trash, Davis guessed. If she were a cashier, she'd be the type who put every bill in the tray face up, aligned the same way. He stopped right in front of her.
    "Bonjour. Je suis Jammer Davis." He pronounced the J in his name hard, not wanting anybody to start calling him Zhammer.
    The woman smiled officiously. "Yes, Mr. Davis. The investigator-in-charge has been expecting you."
    She had gone right to English. Davis wondered if his French was that rusty. The woman checked his NTSB identification and said, "Follow me."
    At the mouth of a hallway they passed a single rent-a-gendarme. He was sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette and reading Le Monde. Security, Davis reckoned. The first stop was a small office. The woman arranged Davis against a blank wall, then picked up a camera that was connected to a computer by a cable.
    "Don't smile," she said.
    "But I'm happy."
    A disapproving frown.
    Davis gave a subtle kink to his upper lip. All the pose needed was a number board hanging around his neck, maybe a height scale on the wall.
    There was a click, and the woman started pressing buttons to feed his picture to the computer. As they waited for the finished product, she handed him a folder. Inside was a single page labeled, "Rules of Conduct for Investigators." Don't talk to the press without approval. Dress standards. A code of personal conduct. At the top of the page was a little cartoon policeman blowing a whistle. In case you didn't know what "rules" were, Davis supposed.
    Minutes later, the woman handed over a smart photo ID with a lanyard. Davis hung it around his neck and fell back into formation. As they left the room he discreetly dropped the rulebook into a trash can.
    They ended up in the hangar, a cavernous place with bright fluorescent lights that gave full detail and color to every thing. The place was cold, and Davis wondered if it simply wasn't heated or if the heat had been turned off in some misguided effort to preserve evidence. An assortment of tugs, forklifts, and handcarts buzzed around in a frenzy, clearing the concrete floor so the remains of World Express 801 could be brought to its postmortem slab.
    He followed his escort to the middle of the place where a group was gathered around someone giving a talk. The angles changed as Davis got closer, and he was surprised to see a large piece of wreckage. Usually debris was left in the field for the best part of a week, until every inch had been meticulously mapped and documented. This investigation was barely forty-eight hours old, so Davis decided that whoever was in charge was either very efficient or very rushed.
    He settled into the fringe of the crowd. The wreckage was a large section of the cockpit, left front side. The captain's seat was still recognizable, though its back panel had been exposed to heat -- the plastic was discolored and shot with a thousand tiny bubbles. It was a mystery how airplanes broke apart. Jagged metal and scorched wire bundles might surround a pristine section of seats or instruments, hardware that looked as fresh as the day it had come out of the factory. A photographer was at least snapping pictures from all angles, and a young woman was busy labeling parts and entering data into a laptop. Maybe they were just organized.
    A man stood in front of the group talking and gesturing. He might have been lecturing a class of undergraduates. His frame was tall and angular, the face dominated by high cheekbones and a prominent nose. He had clear skin with few lines -- mid-fifties, but not a guy who spent time outdoors. The gray hair on top was thin, but on the sides it was long and wavy and tousled. His outfit was a classic -- tan cotton shirt and vest, pants with lots of pockets, and at the bottom a virgin set of hiking boots. Indiana Jones minus the