Night Fall by Nelson DeMille Page B

fuel for a rising rocket. What do you think?”
    He looked at me, then pointed his thumb into the air and asked me, “This way is up. Right?”
    “Last time I checked.” I said to him, “The other possibility, also shown in this animation, is that this aircraft actually continued to rise a few thousand feet, and what eyewitnesses saw was the burning aircraft ascending, which looked to people on the ground like a rising streak of light from a missile.” I asked him, “What do you think?”
    “I think I know the difference between a streak of light, which is accelerating and ascending, trailing a white smoke plume, as opposed to a burning aircraft in its death throes. I’ve seen both.”
    I had the disturbing thought that Special Agent Mayfield had done a better job of questioning Captain Spruck than I was doing. I asked him, “Is this basically the same testimony you gave Ms. Mayfield?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did she ask good questions?”
    He looked at me as though I’d just asked a stupid question, but replied politely, “She did.” He added, “We went through the sequence of events for over an hour. She said she’d be back and could I please think about what I saw and call her if anything new came to mind.”
    “And did you?”
    “No. Two gentlemen-FBI agents-visited me the next day and told me they were going to do a follow-up interview and that Agent Mayfield had moved on to other witnesses. Apparently she did initial interviews… there were six to eight hundred witnesses according to a news report, and about two hundred of those saw the streak of light. The others saw only the explosion.”
    “I read that, too. So these two guys-did you get their names?”
    “Yes. And their cards.” He took two business cards from his pocket and gave them to me. I turned on the desk lamp and read the first card.
Liam Griffith
. That sort of surprised me, but not that much. The second card really surprised me. It was an FBI card, but the name on it was of a CIA guy-Mr. Ted Nash, to be more precise. This was the gentleman who I’d first met on the Plum Island case, then actually worked with on the Asad Khalil case. Ted had many annoying habits, but two stood out-the first was his pocketful of business cards and credentials that identified him as an employee of whatever government agency fit his purpose or his mood of the moment; his second annoying habit was his thinly veiled threats to terminate yours truly whenever I pissed him off, which was often. In any case, Ted and I had put all that behind us, mostly because he was dead.
    I said to Captain Spruck, “Can I keep these cards?”
    “Yes. Miss Mayfield said I could give them to you.”
    “Good. And do you have Ms. Mayfield’s card?”
    “No. Mr. Nash took her card.”
    “Really? Okay, so what did these two guys talk to you about?”
    “They had listened to the taped statements I’d given to Miss Mayfield and said they wanted to go over them again.”
    “And did you ever get a transcribed statement of your taped interview to sign?”
    “I did not.”
    Very unusual. I said, “Okay, so these guys had a tape recorder, too?”
    “Yes. Basically they wanted me to repeat what I’d said the day before.”
    “And did you?”
    “I did. They tried to find inconsistencies in what I was saying to them and what I’d said to Miss Mayfield.”
    “And did they?”
    “No.”
    “Did they ask you about your eyesight?”
    “Several times. I had perfect distance vision, then and still do.”
    “Did they ask if you’d been drinking or on drugs?”
    “They did. I told them I found the question insulting. I don’t take drugs, and I don’t sail when I’ve been drinking.”
    To lighten the moment, I said, “I only drink with other people, or when I’m alone.”
    It took him three seconds to get the joke, and he sort of laughed.
    I said to him, “In other words-and I don’t mean this in a pejorative way-they tried to shake your testimony.”
    “I suppose so. They