“Kinda awkward. Like the pope is kinda Catholic.”
He grunted a sort of laugh, then said, “Sorry to hear that, Doc.”
“Makes two of us.” I blew out a long breath. “If the FBI was about to come down hard on Janus, I get why he might fake his death. But I don’t get how. How’d he get that plane to crash into that mountainside, carrying a decoy body and his bloody teeth?” Maddox didn’t answer, so I ventured a guess. “The autopilot?”
“The autopilot? How do you mean, Doc?”
“Could Janus program the autopilot to make the plane take off on its own, then turn south and level off?”
“Sure, Doc,” Maddox said, “if this was a Hollywood movie. Or if that Citation was a CIA drone. Otherwise, no way. He had to’ve been at the controls.”
“But how?”
Maddox sighed. “I’m probably not supposed to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Turns out there might’ve been a way—there was a way—for Janus to jump from the plane in flight.”
I pulled the handset away from my ear and stared at it, as if the phone were Maddox himself. “But you said there wasn’t. You said he’d’ve smashed into the engine right after going out the door.”
“He would’ve—if he’d gone out the cabin door. Which, you may recall, couldn’t be opened in flight. So that’s all true.”
“Then how?” I was starting to sound like a broken record.
“Like I say, I shouldn’t be telling you things. But I can’t keep you from guessing, can I? So think about it, Doc. If he couldn’t go out that door . . .”
He’d made it easy for me to finish that sentence. “He went out another door—a different door.” I searched my mental data banks and called up an image of the aircraft. “But what different door? You showed us the cutaway. There is no other door on a Citation.”
“Well . . . not when it rolls out of the Cessna factory, there’s not.” He waited, as if he had given a big enough hint to allow me to solve the riddle.
“Ah,” I said, the light dawning. “Janus had the Citation modified, didn’t he? Bigger engines. Bigger fuel tanks. ‘So he could crash harder and burn hotter’—wasn’t that how you put it?”
“Good memory. Those were among the mods . . .”
“So he had other changes made, too,” I said. “Like adding another door somewhere.”
“Bingo. And what kind of door might a guy like Janus—a guy delivering stuff to remote villages—want to add?”
“A cargo door. But could that be opened in flight?”
“Depends on the kind of cargo door,” he said. “You know what a clamshell belly door is?”
“Is that like a bomb-bay door on a B-17?”
“Bingo,” Maddox said. “Main difference between a bomb and a cargo pallet is what happens when it hits the ground.”
“And the belly door on the Citation could be opened in flight?”
“That’s the whole point of a belly door,” he said. “Pretty crazy—the Citation can’t carry a lot of cargo, and it must’ve cost a damn fortune to install that door. But I guess it paid for itself the first time he dropped a pallet-load of cocaine.” He paused briefly, as if considering whether or not to tell me something. “You know he had a little private airstrip a few miles from Brown Field, right? Perfect place to do drug drops on his way back from Mexico.”
I was still playing catch-up, but it was all starting to make sense. “So you’re thinking Janus took off, opened the belly door, and bailed out just before the plane hit?”
“Sure looks like it.”
“But he wouldn’t have time to open a parachute, would he? That mountain was coming up fast to meet him.”
“At the end, yeah, but not at first, Doc. I’ve looked again at the terrain profile and the aircraft’s altitude. The airport, Brown Field, is about five hundred feet above sea level, and so is Lower Otay Lake, where he changed course and headed south. We all thought he was turning toward Mexico, you know? But I think he was aiming straight for Otay Mountain all along. If he jumped when he was over his airstrip, he’d’ve been a good fifteen hundred feet AGL.”
“AGL?” The term wasn’t familiar to me.
“Above ground level.”
“Fifteen hundred feet? That’s high enough to jump?”
“If you know what you’re doing,” he said. “And if you’re lucky. Skydivers are required to pull the cord by two thousand feet AGL. Gives ’em time to pop their reserve chute, if the main doesn’t open. Combat jumps can be as low as five hundred feet. But those lunatics that jump off buildings and bridges—BASE jumpers, I think they’re called? Some of them jump from two, three hundred feet. Dumb-asses with a death wish.”
“So he could’ve done it.”
“Hell, yeah, he could’ve done it. Would’ve been pretty fascinating, though.”
“Fascinating?” It seemed an odd word to use.