Wheldon stopped walking and stared into the camera.

“Because how could it be a prop plane, my little birdie told me, when we fished two Rolls-Royce jet engines out of the water?”

Gannon felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He couldn’t believe this. The FBI director. Now the crash.

Everything was starting to snowball. It was all blowing up now.

And he was smack-dab dead center in the middle of it.

“That’s a pretty darn good question, isn’t it?” Wheldon said.

“I’ll say,” said Gannon, dry-mouthed.

“Anybody out there know the answer?” Wheldon said.

37

Atop the concrete subway steps, Ruby stopped and stood still in the massive flow of hurrying people.

She gaped up at the giant TV screen billboards. The cartoons and lingerie ads. The streaming ABC News electronic billboard beside her that said it was twenty-nine degrees.

She checked her watch. It was almost midnight. Her train had arrived in New York City at eleven fifteen, but it took a little while in the chaotic disorienting swirl at Penn Station to figure out which subway she needed to take to get to Times Square.

Disorienting, Ruby thought, looking around.

Yep. Disorienting was the theme of her week all right.

Even after a full minute, she kept standing there, staring. She knew she looked like a tourist, but she didn’t care.

She had one or two other things on her mind right now, she thought.

She found a Starbucks half a block west of the subway and went in and got a tall black. Looking out through the foggy, greasy glass to get her bearings, she could see there was some kind of frantic commotion going on at the corner. People were stopped and staring and some of them were pointing phones at some other people there on the ground.

She thought maybe it was a fight. But then the crowd parted, and she saw it was a smiling Buzz Lightyear and green-painted Lady Liberty break-dancing together on a flattened cardboard box.

“My, my, my,” she said.

On the morning of the day before, she’d left the rental van in the parking lot of a mall near Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport and taken a series of cabs to Yemassee, South Carolina, where she got on the Amtrak to New York.

It was Eric Wheldon’s idea that she ditch the van for the Amtrak. She’d called him the moment after she bought a new prepaid burner phone. The first thing he told her was to take out as much cash as she could from an ATM and not to use her credit card.

She had wanted to call her sister, Lori, to make sure she and the kids were okay, but he said no way. That they would definitely be tapping her line. Which thoroughly sucked, but at least her brother-in-law, Mitch, would be home by now.

She slammed back the last of her coffee and dropped the cup into the trash hole and pulled the door back out to the grim, frigid sidewalk. She was supposed to meet Wheldon on the corner of 44th and Broadway, and when she arrived, there was a crowd on the corner. It was some kind of nightclub opening, and there were photographers standing by a red carpet and a velvet rope.