Kate and I walked with them.
At the ocean’s edge, the victims’ families lit one candle for each of the 230 dead, and the candles stretched along the beach, flickering in the soft breeze.
At 8:31 P.M., the exact time of the crash, the family members joined hands along the beach. A Coast Guard helicopter shined its searchlight on the ocean, and from a Coast Guard cutter, crew members threw wreaths into the water where the searchlight illuminated the rolling waves.
Some family members knelt, some waded into the water, and nearly everyone threw flowers into the surf. People began embracing one another.
Empathy and sensitivity are not my strong points, but this scene of shared grief and comforting passed through my own death-hardened shell like the warm ocean breeze through a screen door.
Small knots of people began drifting away from the beach, and Kate and I headed back toward the tent.
I spotted Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a bunch of local politicians and New York City officials, who were easy to identify because of the reporters trailing alongside them, asking for quotable statements. I heard one reporter ask Rudy, “Mr. Mayor, do you still think this was a terrorist act?” to which Mr. Giuliani replied, “No comment.”
Kate saw a couple she knew, excused herself, and went over to speak with them.
I stood on the boardwalk near the tent watching the people straggling in from the beach where the candles still burned. The helicopter and boat were gone, but a few people remained on the beach, some still standing in the water looking out to sea. Others stood in small groups talking, hugging, and weeping. Clearly, it was difficult for these people to leave this place that was so close to where their loved ones fell from the summer sky into the beautiful ocean below.
I wasn’t quite sure why I was here, but the experience had certainly made this five-year-old tragedy less academic and more real for me. And this, I suppose, was why Kate invited me to come; this was part of her past, and she wanted me to understand this part of her. Or, she had something else in mind.
On a day-to-day basis, Kate Mayfield is about as emotional as I am, which is to say not very. But obviously this tragedy had personally affected her, and, I suspected, had professionally frustrated her. She, like everyone here this evening, didn’t know if they were mourning the victims of an accident or a mass murder. For this brief hour, maybe it didn’t matter; but ultimately, it did matter, for the living, and for the dead. And, too, for the nation.
While I was waiting for Kate, a middle-aged man dressed in casual slacks and shirt approached me.
He said, not asked, “John Corey.”
“No,” I replied, “you’re not John Corey. I’m John Corey.”
“That’s what I meant.” Without extending his hand, he said to me, “I’m Special Agent Liam Griffith. We work in the same place.”
He looked a little familiar, but in truth all FBI agents look alike to me, even the women.
He asked me, “What brings you here?”
“What brings you here, Liam?”
“I asked first.”
“Are you asking officially?”
Mr. Griffith recognized a little verbal trap when he heard one. He replied, “I’m here as a private citizen.”
“Me, too.”
He glanced around, then said to me, “I guess you’re here with your wife.”
“Good guess.”
We both remained silent for a while and stared at each other. I love these macho-eyeballing contests, and I’m good at them.
Finally, he said, “Your wife, as she may have told you, has never been fully satisfied with the final determination of this case.”
I didn’t reply.
He continued, “The government is satisfied. She—and you—work for the government.”
“Thanks for the hot tip.”
He looked at me and said, “Sometimes the obvious needs to be stated.”
“Is English your second language?”
“Okay, hear me on this—the case is closed. It’s enough that we have private groups and individuals questioning the government’s findings. That is their right. But you, me, your wife—all of us in Federal law enforcement—cannot lend credence to those who have alternative and perhaps paranoid theories about what happened here five years ago. Understand?”
“Hey, pal, I’m just along for the ride. My wife is here to honor the dead and comfort the families. If there’s any paranoia here, it’s yours.”
Mr. Griffith seemed to take offense, but kept his cool. He said to me, “Perhaps the point I’m making is too subtle for you to understand. What happened here, or didn’t happen here, is not the issue. The issue is your status as a government agent.” He added, “If you retired—or got fired—tomorrow, you could spend all the happy hours you want looking into this case. That would be your right as a private citizen, and if you found new evidence to reopen the government’s case, then God bless you. But as long as you work for the government, you will not, even in your off-duty hours, make any inquiries, conduct any interviews, look at any files, or even think about this case. Now, do you understand?”
I keep forgetting that nearly all special agents are lawyers, but when they speak, I remember. I said, “You’re making me curious. I hope that wasn’t your intent.”
“I’m telling you the law, Mr. Corey, so later, if it comes up, you can’t plead ignorance.”
“Hey, pal, I’ve been a cop for over twenty years, and I teach criminal justice at John Jay College. I know the fucking law.”
“Good. I’ll note that in my report.”
“While you’re at it, note, too, that you told me you were here as a private citizen, then read me my rights.”
He actually smiled, then switched to good cop and informed me, “I like you.”
“Well, I like you, too, Liam.”
“Take this conversation as friendly advice from a colleague. There’ll be no report.”
“You guys don’t take a crap without making out a ten-page report.”
I don’t think he liked me anymore. He said, “You have a reputation of being difficult and not a team player. You know that. You’re the golden boy for the moment as a result of the Asad Khalil case. But that was over a year ago, and you haven’t done anything spectacular since then. Khalil’s still free, and by the way, so are the guys who put three bullets in you up in Morningside Heights. If you need a mission in life, Mr. Corey, look for these people who tried to kill you. That should be enough to keep you busy and out of trouble.”
It’s never a good idea to coldcock a Federal agent, but when they use this condescending tone, I should go ahead and do it. Just once. But not here. I suggested to Mr. Griffith, “Go fuck yourself.”
“Okay,” he said, as though he thought that was a good idea. “Okay, consider yourself on notice.”
I replied, “Consider yourself gone.”
He turned and went away.
Before I could process the conversation with Mr. Griffith, Kate came up beside me and said, “That couple lost their only daughter. She was on her way to Paris for a summer study program.” She added, “Five years hasn’t made a bit of difference, nor should it.”
I nodded.
She asked me, “What was Liam Griffith talking to you about?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Did he want to know what we were doing here?”
“How do you know him?” I asked.
“He works with us, John.”
“What section?”
“Same as ours. Mideast terrorism. What did he say?”
“Why don’t I know him?”
“I don’t know. He travels a lot.”
“Did he work the TWA case?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. Why didn’t you ask him?”
“I meant to. Right before I told him to go fuck himself. Then the moment was gone.”
“You shouldn’t have said that to him.”
“Why’s he here?”
She hesitated, then replied, “To see who else is here.”
“Is he sort of like an Internal Affairs guy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Did my name come up?”
“He said you weren’t satisfied with the government’s final determination of this case.”
“I never said that to anyone.”
“I’m sure he deduced it.”
She nodded, and like a good lawyer not wanting to hear any more than she’d be willing to repeat under oath, she dropped it.
Kate looked out over the ocean, then up at the sky. She asked me, “What do you think happened here?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know you don’t know. I worked the case, and I don’t know. What do you think?”
I took her hand, and we began the walk back to the Jeep. I said to her, “I think we need to explain the streak of light. Without the streak of light, the evidence is overwhelming for a mechanical failure. With the streak of light, we have another very credible theory—a surface-to-air missile.”
“And which way do you lean?”
“I always lean toward the facts.”
“Well, you have two sets of facts to pick from—the eyewitnesses and their testimony regarding the streak of light, and the forensic facts, which show no evidence of a missile strike and do show some evidence of an accidental center fuel tank explosion. Which facts do you like?”
I replied, “I don’t always trust eyewitnesses.”
“What if there are over two hundred of them who all saw the same thing?”
“Then I’d need to speak to a lot of them.”
“You saw eight of them on TV the other night.”
“That’s not the same as me questioning them.”
“I did that. I interviewed twelve of them, and I heard their voices and I looked into their eyes.” She said to me, “Look into my eyes.”
I stopped walking and looked at her.
She said, “I can’t get their words or their faces out of my mind.”
I replied, “It might be a good idea if you did.”
We got to the Jeep, and I opened the door for Kate. I got in, started the engine, and backed onto the sand road. The scrub pine bounced back, taller and fuller than before I’d run over it. Trauma is good for wildlife. Survival of the fittest.
I joined a long line of vehicles leaving the memorial service.
Kate stayed quiet for a while, then said, “I get myself worked up when I come here.”
“I can see why.”
We made our way slowly toward the bridge.
I suddenly recalled, very distinctly, a conversation I’d had with Special Agent Kate Mayfield, not too long after we’d met. We were working the case of Asad Khalil, recently mentioned by my new friend, Liam. Mr. Khalil, a Libyan gentleman, had come to America with the purpose of murdering a number of U.S. Air Force pilots who had dropped some bombs on his country. Anyway, I guess I was complaining about the long hours or something, and Kate had said to me, “You know, when the ATTF worked the TWA explosion, they worked around the clock, seven days a week.”
I had responded, perhaps sarcastically, maybe presciently, “And that wasn’t even a terrorist attack.”
Kate had not replied, and I recalled thinking at the time that no one in the know replied to questions about TWA 800, and that there were still unanswered questions.
And here we were, a year later, now married, and she still wasn’t saying much. But she was telling me something.
I turned onto the bridge and crept along with the traffic. To the left was the Great South Bay, to the right Moriches Bay. Lights from the far shore sparkled on the water. Stars twinkled in the clear night sky, and the smell of salt air came through the open windows.
On a flawless summer night, very much like this one, exactly five years ago, a great airliner, eleven and a half minutes out of Kennedy Airport, on its way to Paris with 230 passengers and crew on board, exploded in midair, then fell in fiery pieces into the water, and set the sea ablaze.
I tried to imagine what that must have looked like to an eyewitness. Certainly, it would have been so far out of the realm of anything they’d ever seen that they couldn’t comprehend it or make any sense of it.
I said to Kate, “I once had an eyewitness to a shooting who said he’d been standing ten feet from the assailant, who shot the victim once from a range of five feet. In fact, a security camera had recorded the whole scene, which showed the witness at about thirty feet from the assailant, the assailant twenty feet from the victim, and three shots being fired.” I added, unnecessarily, “In cases of extreme and traumatic situations, the brain does not always comprehend what the eyes see or the ears hear.”
“There were hundreds of eyewitnesses.”
“The power of suggestion,” I said, “or false-memory syndrome, or the desire to please the interrogator, or in this case, a night sky and an optical illusion. Take your pick.”
“I don’t have to. The official report picked them all, with emphasis on optical illusion.”
“Yeah. I remember that.” In fact, the CIA had made a speculative reconstruction animation of the explosion, which they’d shown on TV, and which seemed to explain the streak of light. In the animation, as I recalled, the streak of light, which over two hundred people had seen rising toward the aircraft, was, according to the animation, actually coming from the aircraft as a result of burning fuel dropping from the ruptured fuel tank. The way this was explained in the animation was that it was not the initial explosion that caught the attention of the witnesses—it was the sound of the explosion that would have reached them fifteen to thirty seconds afterward, depending on where they were located. Then, when they looked up toward the sound, what they saw was the burning stream of jet fuel, which could be mistaken for a rocket or missile streaking upward. Also, the main fuselage of the aircraft actually rose, according to radar sightings, a few thousand feet after the explosion, and this burning section of the plane may also have looked like an ascending missile.
Optical illusion, according to the CIA. Sounded like bullshit to me, but the animation looked better than it sounded. I needed to see that video animation again.
And I needed to ask myself again, as I did five years ago, why it was the CIA who made the animation, and not the FBI. What was that all about?
We reached the far side of the bridge and got onto the William Floyd Parkway. I looked at my dashboard clock and said, “We won’t get back to the city until about eleven.”
“Later than that, if you want.”
“Meaning?”
“One more stop. But only if you want to.”
“Are we talking about a quickie in a hot-sheet motel?”
“We are not.”
I seemed to recall Liam Griffith strongly advising me not to make this case my off-duty hobby. He didn’t actually say what would happen if I didn’t take his advice, but I guessed it wouldn’t be pleasant.
“John?”
I needed to consider Kate’s career more than my own—she makes more money than I do. Maybe I should tell her what Griffith said.
She said to me, “Okay, let’s go home.”
I said to her, “Okay, one more stop.”
CHAPTER FOUR
We got off the William Floyd Parkway and headed east on Montauk Highway. Kate directed me through the pleasant village of Westhampton Beach.
We crossed a bridge over Moriches Bay, which led to a thin barrier island where we turned onto the only road, Dune Road, and headed west. New houses lined the road—oceanfront houses to the left, ocean view houses to the right.
Kate said, “This was not very developed five years ago.”
An offhand observation, perhaps, but more likely she meant this was a more secluded area at the time of the accident, and therefore, what I was about to see and hear should be put into that context.
Within ten minutes a sign informed me that I was entering Cupsogue Beach County Park, officially closed at dusk, but I was official
ly on unofficial police business, so I drove into the big parking field.
We passed through the parking field, and Kate directed me to a sand road, which was actually a nature trail, according to the sign that also said NO VEHICLES. The trail was partially blocked by a roll-up fence, so I put the Jeep into four-wheel drive and drove around the fence, my headlights illuminating the narrowing trail, which was now the width of the Jeep, flanked by scrub brush and dunes.
At the end of the trail, Kate said, “Turn down here, toward the beach.”
I turned between two dunes and down a gradual slope, nailing a scrub oak on the way.
“Be careful of the vegetation, please. Turn right at this dune.”
I turned at the edge of the dune, and she said, “Stop here.”
I stopped, and she got out.
I shut off the ignition and the lights and followed her.
Kate stood near the front of the Jeep and stared out at the dark ocean. She said, “Okay, on the night of July 17, 1996, a vehicle, most likely a four-wheel drive like yours, left the road and stopped right about here.”
“How do you know that?”
“A Westhampton village police report. Right after the plane went down, a police car, an SUV, was dispatched here, and the officer was told to walk down to the beach and see if he could be of any help. He arrived at eight-forty-six P.M.”
“What kind of help?”
“The exact location of the crash wasn’t known at that point. There was a possibility of survivors—people with life vests or rafts. This officer had a handheld searchlight. He noticed tire marks in the sand, ending about here. He didn’t think anything of it and walked down to the beach.”
“You saw this report?”
“Yes. There were hundreds of written reports on every imaginable aspect of this crash, from dozens of local law enforcement agencies as well as the Coast Guard, commercial and private pilots, fishermen, and so forth. But this one caught my eye.”
“Why?”
“Because it was one of the earliest and one of the least important.”
“But you didn’t think so. Did you talk to this cop?”
“I did. He said he walked down to the beach.” She started down to the beach, and I followed.