Phoenix Rising

by Nance, John J. ;

  “That’s a ridiculous suggestion.”

  “Well, in my years of experience, it’s not unusual for the boss to be unaware of something going on right beneath his nose.”

  Brian Murphy sat quietly for a split second, rolling an explosive retort around in his mind, and deciding at last to fire it off.

  “That cuts both ways, doesn’t it, Mr. Schaffer? Are you aware of virtually everything your people do? I admit I don’t know who removed our records, but the culprit’s ID card could have the FAA’s emblem on it as easily as Pan Am’s.”

  “Now, I resent that, dammit!” Larry DePalma’s voice shot across the desk. “We didn’t take your damned records, Brian.”

  Brian turned back toward the desk, slightly startled at the furious expression on DePalma’s face.

  “Neither did any of our people, Larry. Not … at least not …” Brian found himself stumbling, a scary possibility flitting across his mind. “… not anyone with authorized access to those records.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Brian. Anger and accusations are going to get us nowhere. Frankly, I’m still pretty upset at being chewed on by your vice-president of operations yesterday afternoon.”

  Brian let that drop. He would question DePalma in private later. Not that he could control Chad Jennings, but he hated hearing that Jennings had let his temper get the best of him again, leaving yet another mess for Brian to clean up.

  Well, Brian thought, I guess we understand the hostility here. They don’t like Jennings, therefore they don’t like Pan Am.

  Brian glanced over at Schaffer, then back at DePalma.

  “I need some relief, gentlemen. I need forty-eight hours with no violations for letting my people continue to fly while we’re trying to prove to you that we’re guiltless in this.”

  Larry DePalma was looking down again—a bad sign. He wasn’t going to take the heat, certainly not with Schaffer in the room. Brian looked over at Schaffer, who met his gaze with a neutral expression and a single word.

  “No.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Again, Captain, you’re already in violation. We can’t suspend the rules.”

  The hell you can’t! Brian thought, stopping short of a spoken retort.

  “So what do I do?” Brian asked in a more subdued tone.

  “I think,” Larry replied, “we’ve already outlined the answer to that.”

  Brian Murphy had been gone from the office for a full minute—the sound of the elevator door closing in the hallway encapsulating his departure—before either DePalma or Schaffer spoke.

  “You were pretty hard on him, Ken,” Larry DePalma said.

  Schaffer shrugged again as he got to his feet. “He’s a goddamned hothead.”

  Larry was shaking his head. “No, he’s not. His boss, Chad Jennings, is a certified hothead. No, Ken, what you’ve got there in Brian Murphy is an honest, frustrated chief pilot who’s being royally screwed by someone.”

  Schaffer paused at the door. “He’s going to be even more frustrated in another hour or so. Headquarters is announcing that Pan Am is going to be fined big-time.”

  Brian Murphy worked hard at self-control. With his height and build, he had long since learned that he could be physically intimidating when he meant nothing of the sort. Self-control in aggravating circumstances was vital, and he practiced it now all the way to the FAA parking lot. He climbed calmly behind the wheel, closed the door, and finally permitted himself to slam his fist into the padded dashboard.

  “Goddammit!”

  There was a cellular phone in the car, and he turned to it now, dialing his secretary to trigger the action he had hoped to avoid. All nine of the affected captains would have to be pulled off the line. One was in Hong Kong, another in Tokyo, and several more in offshore locations, which meant that other captains would have to be sent out unproductively as passengers and positioned to each station to replace the grounded captains. The possibility of delayed flights was very high, a fact he had avoided facing until now.

  Brian accelerated away to regain Interstate 405 for the short ride back to Seatac. Something was nagging at the back of his head, something that had flitted across his mind earlier in the meeting with DePalma and Schaffer. You haven’t been focusing on the obvious, have you, Brian? he thought. The question is not how or why the records got taken, but by whom. Who had access? Who may have left a trail? If I can find out who, I can find out why.

  He began picturing the file cabinets at the office, wondering how to breach the security precautions they had taken.

  And that was, in itself, a revelation. There were very few precautions. The file cabinets were locked at night with a combination kept by several people, but they were open during the day. They were even left open at lunch, but there was always at least one secretary around as a barrier, wasn’t there? And at night and on weekends, the windowless room the file cabinets occupied was locked with a key.

  Is there any way to figure out when this was done? he wondered. Wait a minute! One of the guys was in the simulator just a few days ago. The last date of entry in the computer could tell us something.

  Brian realized he was sitting forward against the steering wheel, anxious to get back. If there was a trail, he was going to find it! He pressed the accelerator even harder, a firm resolve causing a thin, mean smile to play around the corners of his mouth.

  If I catch the bastard who did this to us …

  3:30 P.M.

  Pan Am Headquarters

  The fallout from the network deathwatch suddenly sparked by the FAA’s announcement had already rolled through the fifty-sixth floor, leaving everyone stunned. Elizabeth had spent the day on the phone, it seemed, bypassing the need to learn the ropes of the financial structure in her new company in order to deal with the life-or-death crisis of the credit line and bond payments. She had called Eric Knox in addition to a dozen other friends on the Street in an initial search for the soft underbelly of the money market, preparing the way to find eighty-five million dollars by the twentieth. Eric had been out, but now her former partner was on the line from his home, and Elizabeth asked him to hold while she closed her office door, a precaution that seemed rather curious when she thought about it consciously.

  “Eric. Hi! It’s very good to hear your voice!”

  “Hello, beautiful former partner in the boondocks. Ready to come home now?”

  “That’s not funny, Eric. This ship’s in a lot of trouble.”

  “The ship’s sunk, if you ask me. What the hell’s happening out there? You’re there two days, and the place flies apart. Such talent!”

  “Seriously, Eric, cut it out. I’m in the middle of a real-life corporate crisis, and much of it’s sitting on my shoulders. And … and it’s a bit frightening.”

  His voice changed timbre and tone immediately.

  “Can I help?”

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. There was a barrier between them now that had never been there before, a fiduciary barrier that prevented open discussion of sensitive corporate information. She had to tiptoe through the minefield and decide what could be said. It was too new a position to be comfortable.

  She told him about the loan she needed to arrange, asking for help and guidance if possible, without telling him why it was needed so fast. Eric, however, had been at the game a long time.

  “You’ve got some hellacious note due, or bond payments, or something. Don’t answer. I’m just saying I understand.”

  They talked for half an hour professionally, Eric promising to do what he could, before the conversation dropped back to the personal level they had always enjoyed.

  “Elizabeth, technically you’re still a partner.”

  “Eric, I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. You’ve triggered your parachute. I read it over, remember? They didn’t tell you everything they could have told you, and you’re entitled. We’ll get our lawyers on it. They’re too weak to fight.”

  She realized the sh
aking of her head couldn’t be seen in New York.

  “Eric, you know me better than that. I made a commitment … I have a commitment. I can’t walk out on these people, even if they did gloss it up a bit. Lord, we’ve done the same thing a hundred times and held our breath on various underwritings.”

  He chuckled on the other end. “No comment. I didn’t hear that, and neither did the Securities and Exchange Commission wiretapper.”

  “I wish I were back there, but—”

  “Think about it. I’ll pigeonhole the partnership sale papers for a few weeks. Call me night or day. I miss you.”

  “You’ll call about the other stuff?”

  “In the morning. Without fail.”

  They disconnected then, as Elizabeth looked around her bright new office, which so effectively exuded professionalism and success. The spectacular view of Seattle and Elliott Bay underlined the heights to which she’d climbed, yet she felt like running and hiding.

  Those same feelings again.

  Dictating the same solution.

  Elizabeth got to her feet and closed her briefcase. Seattle was a very walkable city, almost like a miniature New York in some respects. A good, fast, mind-numbing walk was what she needed. After all, she reminded herself, her mother was due in shortly, and she would need all her strength to deal with the latest chapter in her mother’s never-ending criticism of Kelly’s upbringing.

  10

  Friday, March 10, night

  Denver Airport

  What struck Captain Dale Silverman most about the new Denver airport was how empty it seemed. Even now, at midnight, as he and his copilot taxied one of Pan Am’s two 767s, Ship 102, toward one of the jetways, the place looked like a thoroughly modern ghost town.

  Of course, Silverman reminded himself, we’re on the Columbia Airlines concourse. There’s nobody home because they’re still dead.

  The variation on an old “Saturday Night Live” gag caused him to chuckle out loud. Pan Am had been “still dead” too, until Ron Lamb and company had breathed new life into the name.

  Dale Silverman had struggled through many years as a pilot with the original Pan American as it took a decade to die a slow and painful death.

  A lone figure wearing white coveralls appeared beneath the docking lights with a pair of lighted wands and waved them in. Silverman wondered if the man was a recycled Columbia Air employee. Ever since mighty Columbia Airlines had collapsed in bankruptcy and utter ruin the previous year, their people had run into great difficulty finding new jobs in the airline business.

  By the time Dale Silverman remembered his reading glasses, his crew and all their baggage had been loaded into the hotel van. He hated to admit he needed glasses, but without them he’d be too blind to deal with flight paperwork in the morning.

  “You guys go on and get checked in and send the driver back for me. I left something on board.” After eight hours’ rest, Silverman and crew were scheduled to fly a tour group back to Seattle—an urgent replacement, he had been told, for another charter operator who had come up short on aircraft to fulfill his contract.

  Getting back through security was the usual idiotic hassle, as if an airline crewmember with a valid ID might be planning to hijack an airplane. He was forced to shed his coat with the metal buttons and empty his pockets before being waved on, all the time mentally muttering his usual litany of anger.

  Not one recorded case of an airline pilot hijacking an airliner, and they put us through this crap so the FAA can lie and say it’s done something of value for safety!

  It was so incredibly stupid.

  As he passed through the boarding lounge, headed for the jetway, he noticed through the window that the lights of the cockpit had been turned back up to full bright, which was curious.

  A mechanic he had never seen before greeted him from the door of the cockpit as he approached the front of the 767. The man was wearing the same color coveralls and insignia of the individual who had blocked them in, but his face and build were different, Dale noted.

  “Hello, Captain. Forget something?” the mechanic said breezily.

  “My glasses,” Dale replied. “Be out of your way in a second.”

  He squeezed past the mechanic, who seemed rooted to the spot.

  “No hurry, sir,” the man said. “I’m just waiting for the fuelers.”

  That explains the cockpit lights, Dale thought. He’s going to refuel her tonight. He hadn’t recognized the small company logo on the man’s coveralls. Probably the logo of yet another tiny contract service outfit, he supposed, hired to take care of the occasional charter flight for carriers that didn’t normally serve Denver.

  Silverman entered the cockpit and reached over the left seat, relieved to find his glasses still sitting where he’d left them, right by his flight bag—which still appeared to be there.

  What the hell?

  He’d already put his flight bag on the bus with the rest of the crew—hadn’t he?

  Now that would be a great sign of advancing senility! Like I’m going into Alzheimer’s, or something.

  That corner of the cockpit was shaded by the seat, and he had to look closely to see what was there. It wasn’t his flight bag. It was the mechanic’s tool kit, along with two rack-mounted electronic black boxes apparently destined for his airplane.

  Oh, good! he thought. So I’m not losing my mind.

  “What’re the boxes for?” Dale asked as he left the cockpit.

  “Routine swap-out for one of the computer components. Your people back in Seattle requested it.”

  “Okay. Sorry to hold you up.” Dale smiled at the mechanic and left.

  He was halfway back to the hotel before the mechanic’s words coalesced in his mind. Why would Pan Am order components swapped at a station without Pan Am maintenance, unless there had been an open maintenance writeup in the log he’d failed to notice.

  He resolved to ask the copilot about it in the morning.

  Saturday, March 11, afternoon

  Downtown Seattle

  Elizabeth looked at her mother, tracking the latest wrinkles around her eyes, and feeling guilty. Brian was right, of course. She was a sweet lady, and one who had always stood by her daughter and granddaughter, no matter what—even if she did have the ability to drive Elizabeth to distraction over Elizabeth’s methods of mothering Kelly. After all, this was the woman who left her home to move to a tiny flat in Massachusetts to help her daughter through the first eleven months of her granddaughter’s life when Elizabeth was struggling to get started in Harvard Business School.

  I guess she deserved a more loyal child than she got in me, Elizabeth thought. I haven’t been very supportive of her.

  “You sure you two have everything?” Elizabeth asked, almost wistfully. She had hovered around the door of the condo for the last two trips as her mother and Kelly loaded the minivan downstairs. She found herself wishing she could take time to go, too.

  The fact that Brian would be coming through the same door in a few hours entered her thoughts as well, and a slow flush of warmth began a secret and sensuous ripple through her body. She felt transparent and a bit embarrassed when she realized her mother was standing in front of her, as if her thoughts could be seen.

  Virginia Sterling stopped in the doorway with two bulging pillowcases pressed into use as impromptu bags, one for Kelly’s dirty clothes, the other stuffed with odds and ends—the result of the decision they’d made together last night. Kelly would attend public school classes in Bellingham until early June, and enroll in a private school in Seattle the following autumn. Elizabeth had bristled at first at the suggestion. Here was her mother once again trying to alter every decision she made regarding Kelly. But the logic was irrefutable. She knew deep down that the Pan Am battles ahead of her would once again leave Kelly a work-orphan, this time in Seattle. With her mother so close, that made little sense—as Virginia had pointed out.

  Virginia smiled and rolled her eyes. In her full-length camel’s-hai
r coat and with her hair perfectly coiffed, the image was as incongruous as Mrs. Howell of “Gilligan’s Island” carrying a pig.

  “This is almost like having you back in undergraduate days,” she said, inclining her head toward the laundry bag. “Only this time, your mom has to come get the laundry. Usually you’d at least bring it to me to wash.”

  At fifty-nine she was still the glamorous woman Elizabeth had always known, trim, blond, feminine, and attractive. She had dated a few times since the death of Elizabeth’s father, a decade ago, but if she had a love life, her daughter was unaware of it. Elizabeth worried about her being alone, but if loneliness bothered Virginia Sterling, she never let it show.

  Virginia had disappeared down the hallway with the load as Kelly came back for one more, bubbling with excitement.

  Elizabeth caught herself being distracted by the television again. The TV had been turned to CNN all morning as she watched for more on Pan Am and tried to assess the damage from the tsunami of bad press that had washed over them in the past two days.

  “Well, I think we’re ready.” Her mother was standing at the door with Kelly, and Elizabeth snapped off the television, piqued at herself for getting lost in the news again.

  “Okay, Mom. I’m sorry I can’t go with you.”

  Virginia looked at Elizabeth quietly for a second.

  “That was a good talk last night, wasn’t it, honey? I didn’t get upset, you didn’t get upset, and we carved out a better course, I think.”

  “It was, Mom. The best in a long time. I’d gotten used to running for cover whenever we … well, you know …”

  “I do know. I’ve been too quick to fire at you all these years.” She gestured to her granddaughter. “Gotta admit, you haven’t done too badly.”

  Elizabeth hugged her energetically. “I do love you, Mom.”

  “And I love you, Elizabeth. I appreciate your listening to me this time. I really do. Starting Kelly in that private school with only two months left was a noble idea, but not a good one.”