She pointed to the locking pin in the wing. "Have you photographed it?"

"Oh sure. We're fully documented."

"Then pull it," she said. "I'll take it to Metals. By the way, could this situation give you a slats disagree warning?"

Doherty gave a rare smile. "Yes, it could. And my guess is, it did. You got a nonstandard part, Casey, and it failed the aircraft."

Coming off the wing, Richman was chattering excitedly. "So, is that it? It's a bad part? Is that what happened? It's solved?" He was getting on her nerves. "One thing at a time," she said. "We have to check."

"Check? What do we have to check? Check how?"

"First of all, we have to find out where that part came from," she said. "Go back to the office. Tell Norma to make sure the maintenance records are coming from LAX. And have her telex the Fizer in Hong Kong to ask for the carrier's records. Tell him the FAA requested them and we want to look at them first."

"Okay," Richman said.

He headed off toward the open doors of Hangar 5, out into the sunlight. He walked with a sort of swagger, as if he were a person of importance, in possession of valuable information.

But Casey wasn't sure that they knew anything at all.

At least, not yet.

She came out of the hangar, blinking in the morning sun. She saw Don Brull getting out of his car, over by Building 121. She headed toward him.

"Hello, Casey," he said, as he slammed the door. "I was wondering when you'd get back to me."

"I talked to Marder," she said. "He swears the wing isn't being offset to China."

Brull nodded. "He called me last night. Said the same thing." He didn't sound happy.

"Marder insists it's just a rumor."

"He's lying," Brull said. "He's doing it."

"No way," Casey said. "It doesn't make sense."

"Look," Brull said. "It doesn't matter to me, personally. They close this plant in ten years, I'll be retired. But that'll be about the time your kid starts college. You'll be looking at those big tuition payments, and you won't have a job. You thought about that?"

"Don," she said "You said it yourself, it doesn't make sense to offset the wing. It'd be pretty reckless to-"

"Marder's reckless." He squinted at her in the sunlight "You know that. You know what he's capable of."

"Don-"

"Look," Brull said. "I know what I'm talking about. Those tools aren't being shipped to Atlanta, Casey. They're going to San Pedro-to the port. And down in San Pedro, they're building special marine containers for shipment."

So that was how the union was putting it together, she thought. "Those are oversize tools, Don," she said. "We can't ship them by road or rail. Big tools always go by boat. They're building containers so they can send them through the Panama Canal. That's the only way to get them to Atlanta."

Brull was shaking his head. "I've seen the bills of lading. They don't say Atlanta. They say Seoul, Korea."

"Korea?" she said, frowning.

"That's right."

"Don, that really doesn't make sense-"

"Yes, it does. Because it's a cover," Brull said. "They'll send them to Korea, then transship from Korea to Shanghai."

"You have copies of the bills?" she said.

"Not with me."

"I'd like to see them," she said.

Brull sighed. "I can do that, Casey. I can get them for you. But you're putting me in a very difficult situation here. The guys aren't going to let this sale happen. Marder tells me to calm 'em down-but what can I do? I run the local, not the plant."

"What do you mean?"

"It's out of my hands," he said.

"Don-"

"I always liked you, Casey," he said. "But you hang around here, I can't help you."

And he walked away.

The morning sun was shining; the plant around her was cheerfully busy, mechanics riding their bicycles from one building to another. There was no sense of threat, or danger. But Casey knew what Brull had meant: she was now in no-man's land. Anxious, she pulled out her cell phone to call Marder when she saw the heavyset figure of Jack Rogers coming toward her.

Jack covered aerospace for the Telegraph-Star, an Orange County paper. In his late fifties, he was a good, solid reporter, a reminder of an earlier generation of print journalists who knew as much about their beat as the people they interviewed. He gave her a casual wave.

"Hi, Jack," she said. "What's up?'

"I came over," he said, "about that wing tool accident this morning in 64. The one the crane dropped."

'Tough break," she said.

'They had another accident with the AJs this morning. Tool was loaded onto the flatbed truck, but the driver took a turn too fast over by Building 94. Tool slid off onto the ground. Big mess."

"Uh-huh," Casey said.

"This is obviously a job action," Rogers said. "My sources tell me the union's opposed to the China sale."

"I've heard that," she said, nodding.

"Because the wing's going to be offset to Shanghai as part of the sales agreement?"

"Come on, Jack," she said. "That's ridiculous."

"You know that for a fact?"

She took a step back from him. "Jack," she said. "You know I can't discuss the sale. No one can, until the ink's dry."

"Okay," Rogers said. He took out his notepad. "It does seem like a pretty crazy rumor. No company's ever offset the wing. It'd be suicide."

"Exactly," she said. In the end, she kept coming back to that same question. Why would Edgarton offset the wing? Why would any company offset the wing? It just made no sense.

Rogers glanced up from his pad. "I wonder why the union thinks the wing's being sent offshore?"

She shrugged. "You'll have to ask them." He had sources in the union. Certainly Brail. Probably others as well.

"I hear they've got documents that prove it."

Casey said, "They show them to you?"

Rogers shook his head. "No."

"I can't imagine why not, if they have them."

Rogers smiled. He made another note. "Shame about the rotor burst in Miami."

"All I know is what I saw on television."

"You think it will affect the public perception of the N-22?" He had his pen out, ready to take down what she said.

"I don't see why. The problem was powerplant, not air-frame. My guess is, they're going to find it was a bad compressor disk that burst."

"I wouldn't doubt it," he said. "I was talking to Don Peterson over at the FAA. He told me that incident at SFO was a sixth-stage compressor disk that blew. The disk had brittle nitrogen pockets."

"Alpha inclusions?' she said.

"That's right," Jack said. "And there was also dwell-time fatigue."

Casey nodded. Engine parts operated at a temperature of 2500 degrees Fahrenheit, well above the melt temperature of most alloys, which turned to soup at 2200 degrees. So they were manufactured of titanium alloys, using the most advanced procedures. Fabricating some of the parts was an art-the fan blades were essentially "grown" as a single crystal of metal, making them phenomenally strong. But even in skilled hands, the manufacturing process was inherently delicate. Dwell-time fatigue was a condition in which the titanium used to make rotor disks clumped into microstructure colonies, rendering them vulnerable to fatigue cracks.

"And how about the Transpacific flight," Rogers said. "Was that an engine problem, too?"

'Transpacific happened yesterday, Jack. We just started our investigation."

"You're QA on the IRT, right?"

"Right, yes."

"Are you pleased with how the investigation is going?"

"Jack, I can't comment on the Transpacific investigation. It's much too early."