Fly by Night by Ward Larsen Page A

Khoury and his bunch don’t give tours.”
    “That seems a little secretive,” Davis suggested. “Is that where Khoury hides the cargo he doesn’t want people to see?”
    “Damned if I know.”
    “And would you tell me if you did know?”
    There was a long silence, until Schmitt crossed his thick forearms on the desk, and said, “You know what I think, Davis? I think you’re going to make this whole thing personal. I don’t think you even care about this accident.”
    “You’re half right.”
    Schmitt sat there looking like a well-shaken beer, pressure building, just waiting to blow.
    “I want two things,” Davis said. “First, a place to stay. Second, I want a good look at the flight line. I need to see how things run around here.”
    “All right. I’ve got one empty room.”
    Davis wanted to make a crack that he likely had two empty rooms, but he held back.
    “And as for the flight line tour,” Schmitt said, “help yourself.”
    “I don’t need any clearance? An ID or something?”
    Schmitt fished into his drawer and pulled out a small plastic card. He tossed it over the desk and Davis caught it. It was Schmitt’s FBN Aviation ID.
    “Try that. Staple your own picture on if you want. I haven’t used it since I got here.”
    Davis dropped it back on the desk.
    Schmitt chuckled. “Welcome to Africa, Jammer.”
    Schmitt gave Davis directions and a key—not a plastic card with a magnetic strip, but the old-fashioned metal kind with teeth. Davis went to find his room, and as he walked through the operations building, people stopped what they were doing and stared at him. Maybe they’d been briefed that somebody was coming to perform an investigation. Maybe they’d been told to look professional or pretend to help. Rumors had to be swirling by now—Davis had been here all of twenty minutes, which was plenty of time. Whatever the case, the looks weren’t much different than those he’d gotten in a hundred other places.
    A short hallway ran from the operations building to the residence area, and Davis took the stairs to his third-floor room. When he walked in, the air conditioner was blowing at hurricane force, the room chilled to the level of a meat locker. The place stank of sweat and nicotine. Davis went to the thermostat and saw it had been turned full cold, probably by the cleaning staff. People did things like that when they weren’t paying the electric bill. He turned it off and took stock of the place. It was a studio with an attached bathroom. There was one window, one chair, but no desk. A nightstand carried a cheap alarm clock. The bed was shoved against a wall that had to be common to the elevator shaft. Just then, the window began to rattle as a jet outside thundered to takeoff power. Davis figured Schmitt had given him the most uncomfortable room of those available, maybe hoping he wouldn’t get any sleep. Truth was, the bed looked better than most to Davis. There was no headboard or footboard. For a guy his size, that was a home run.
    Davis went to the window. The cheap curtains had clothespins clipped to the inner edges. He pulled them off, and bright light streamed in. He could see the runway in the distance, and one corner of the main passenger terminal. Closer in was a parking lot, half asphaltand half dirt, that would hold a hundred cars. There were three. Right under his nose was a recovering swimming pool, bone dry, two men slapping Spackle in the deep end. What wasn’t there—and what he’d hoped to see from the third floor—was FBN’s hangar. He knew from the satellite photos that it was roughly a mile east of here, but his internal compass kicked in and told him that east was at his back.
    Davis retrieved the file Schmitt had given him. It seemed thin, weighed almost nothing. Even so, there might be something useful inside, one golden nugget that could be a pretext for gaining access to the hangar. He opened the folder, spread the contents on the bed, and started to