Phoenix Rising

by Nance, John J. ;

  He smiled and nodded, letting her twist over the back of the couch to retrieve the phone.

  “Ron? Elizabeth. I just came in and heard your voice.”

  There was a grateful response on the other end, and she sat back down on her ankles in the same position as before, concentrating on the conversation, and not noticing that Brian had moved around behind her with a mischievous grin.

  “Who did you talk to?” she asked, concentrating on Ron Lamb’s reply.

  Brian could hear the company president’s voice as a series of electronic squawks through the earpiece as he bent over to kiss her neckline, and slowly reached down with both hands along her thighs, grabbing the hem of the gown and working it back up toward her hips. She seemed oblivious to his efforts, even when he hugged her from behind, letting his hands slide under the gown and around to softly cup her breasts for a minute. She merely patted one of his hands and kept on talking.

  “Ron, I really don’t think it’s a good idea to keep on calling these people over the weekend,” she was saying, as she automatically raised her right arm for Brian to pull the gown free and over her head.

  “No, Ron. No, I don’t. I need time to work on this next week in New York. You alert too many people, and we will have a confidence crash.”

  She cradled the phone between her bare shoulder and her face for a second as she pulled her left arm through the sleeve, then resumed holding the receiver in her left hand, apparently unaware that she was completely naked.

  He gasped to himself. She was even more beautiful than he had remembered, her breasts still firm and substantial, the flickering orange from the fire bathing her in thermal light.

  Elizabeth nodded her head to something Ron Lamb was saying.

  “That’s right. I don’t think any of them has a need to know unless we’re sure we can’t work a deal.”

  There was another long soliloquy from Ron Lamb’s side of the conversation as Brian moved around to the other end of the couch to face her.

  He thought about slipping out of his clothes as well, but she seemed almost oblivious to what he was up to and it would be more fun to see how much she could take without having to end the phone call.

  “Why? Because, Ron, that’s the way it has to work. Let me explain what I’m planning to do.”

  As she launched into a detailed analysis of her game plan, Brian leaned forward and nuzzled the soft valley between her breasts before brushing his lips over her left nipple. Her hand stroked his head in response, but there was no break in the meter of her voice, until one of her routine murmurs of acknowledgement—what had been intended as an “um-hum”—became an extended “um-m-m-m-m!” and he felt her hand tighten on the back of his head as she promptly added, “Okay, I see, Ron.”

  Brian looked up at her, grinning, as she looked down and flared her eyebrows in mock anger while swatting at him gently and mouthing the word “No.”

  Which was exactly what he had wanted to see. He turned his full attention to her breasts now, massaging and kissing them, feeling her responses become more pronounced as he slowly pulled more and more of her consciousness away from the conversation.

  When he knew she could no longer tune out what he was doing, Brian began gliding his tongue slowly, sensuously, down her stomach and abdomen, as his finger traced a feather-light path down her right side. He felt her shudder in response as she swatted him again in mild protest. The infrared heat from the fire had warmed her skin, and his face was fully flushed and hot as he kissed her lightly now, brushing his lips against her in a dozen places, leaving a sparkling trail of exciting sensations, and pressing a hand to each thigh, feeling her tense suddenly as her body and mind anticipated the next caress, knowing where his experienced tongue was headed.

  There was no way she could concentrate on what Ron Lamb was saying.

  “Ron …”

  She took a deep and somewhat ragged breath.

  “I … ah … better call you back in a few minutes. I’ve … got to take care of something.”

  He felt her reach to replace the phone. She would come to him now, her eyes glazed and her head in the clouds.

  That was what he expected. That was the Elizabeth he knew, sensuous and responsive and hungry once they reached a certain point.

  But instead, she reached out to stop him, gently pulling his head up.

  “Honey, I need to concentrate.”

  “I want you to concentrate, too, but on us.”

  Elizabeth sat up and pulled Brian to her, kissing him deeply.

  “No business tonight, remember? We agreed.”

  “I have to do this, Brian. Duty calls. I have to call the man back.”

  “You can’t solve anything tonight, Elizabeth.”

  She patted his face. “It won’t take long. We’ve got all night.”

  Brian struggled with himself, fighting down irritation as she re-placed the call to Ron Lamb and tried her best to keep it short, while Brian kept his distance. But Lamb was in an inconsolable mood, and it was twenty minutes before she hung up. When she turned back to Brian at last, her preoccupation was as deep as his rising frustration, and when he gathered her in his arms and kissed her, something was missing.

  Brian carried her effortlessly up the spiral staircase to the bedroom with the lights of nighttime Seattle sparkling behind them through the fifteen-foot-high picture windows. He laid her gently on the bed and kissed her in a long and lingering promise before excusing himself for a minute. She heard the door to the bathroom click just before Ron Lamb called again.

  Distracted and burning with desire for Brian, she only wanted to finish the conversation with Lamb. She was angry with herself for answering, but he already knew she was in. She had to get off before Brian emerged from the bathroom, and she was doing just that when Ron Lamb mentioned the name of Irwin Fairchild.

  “Ron … what did you say? What was that name?”

  “Irwin Fairchild. Of the old Bankers Trust, now with Lassen Associates. He’s an acquaintance who’s been helpful with advice over the last year or so.”

  “Who introduced you?” she asked, already suspecting what the answer would be.

  “I don’t know, Elizabeth, is it important? Oh, wait. It was our previous CFO, Bill Hayes.”

  Ron Lamb heard silence on the other end.

  “Why does that interest you, Elizabeth?”

  She heard the sound of the bathroom light being turned off as Brian opened the door.

  “Nothing. I’ll tell you later. I’ve got to go.”

  “Okay. Sorry to bother you again. Good night.”

  She murmured good night and replaced the receiver, but it was too late. Brian had already seen her, and his face showed puzzlement.

  “Lamb again?”

  “Yes, but I got rid of him. Come here, lover.”

  He smiled and came to her, conscious immediately that she was trying too hard, her attention riveted elsewhere.

  For nearly an hour, with increasing frustration, he tried everything he knew that had ever turned her on, and though she tried to react, her mind was racing with the implications of Ron Lamb having been influenced by Irwin Fairchild. There was no way that could be an accident! William Hayes had been something more than a poor financial officer. He had been an instrument for someone else’s purpose.

  But what purpose, and to what end?

  “Goddammit, Elizabeth!”

  Brian had sat up suddenly, immensely frustrated. The only edge either of them seemed to be going over was distraction. She was enjoying what he was doing only in the background, and he’d had enough.

  Brian threw off the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, looking at her. “I don’t know where you are tonight, but you’re not with me.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “What did Lamb say to you this time?”

  She started to tell him, and stopped. It was just a suspicion that was consuming her.

  She started to lie, then, and say it was nothing, but he would see th
rough that as well.

  “He mentioned the name of a man who’s a notorious manipulator of greenmail and other nefarious activities on Wall Street. It’s a name I know well. A major deal I put together was destroyed by this guy.”

  “So?”

  “So, well …” She sat up and pulled her legs up, hugging her knees, missing his touch as he sat angrily a few feet away and brushed his hair back. “If this man is involved with Pan Am, we could be in even more trouble than I thought.”

  He leaped to his feet and started pacing the floor.

  “Elizabeth, dammit, can’t you compartmentalize? Can’t you put away business for a while? You used to be able to do it, but now”—he swept his arm through the air in disgust—“now I get to play second fiddle to phone calls and corporate concerns on the first evening we’ve had together in years, with … with all the promise of a future for us, and—”

  “Brian.” A hard edge had crept into her voice. “I’m trying to save your job, too.”

  “Well, thank you, ma’am, but kindly do it on Monday, okay? You have any idea how demeaning it is to be ignored in bed?”

  “I wasn’t ignoring you! I’m in a fiduciary position with respect to—”

  “Don’t give me that formal crap, Elizabeth!”

  “Brian, listen to me!” She wanted to cry, but anger was overwhelming her. How could he be so childish? “You’re grossly overreacting. We’ve got all night, and if I’m a little preoccupied right now—”

  He whirled on her.

  “A little? What I was just doing used to send you over the edge two or three times. You’re oblivious! I might as well be trying to make love to an inflatable woman.”

  The phrase That could be arranged! formed in her mind, but she suppressed it with great difficulty.

  “Brian, come back to bed. Come hold me.”

  He continued pacing. “What, exactly, is the financial problem you’ve got to solve next week?”

  “I … really shouldn’t go into it.”

  “Bull.”

  “Really, I can’t tell you.”

  Brian stopped and looked at her suspiciously.

  “Why not?”

  “Well … there are things that are, more or less, privileged information, and—”

  “From me?”

  “Brian, I’m a corporate officer.”

  He looked at her with an expression she had never seen before, a combination of hurt, anger, and frustration—as if she had just turned into something frightening, threatening his being.

  “And I’m just a peon, right? A stupid working stiff.”

  “Brian, cut it out!”

  “No, I hadn’t paid any attention to the rank difference. I didn’t think you would, either. I didn’t think you’d ever forget we came up together, Miss High and Mighty. But you obviously have.”

  “Brian—”

  She couldn’t sleep after he’d left, angry with herself for a thousand things not said and not done. He was right and he was wrong. She should have shouted at him and thrown him out, and she should have apologized to him. Back and forth the recriminations echoed through her head, until she found herself crying uncontrollably and calling his phone without success. He had apparently disconnected even the answering machine.

  She dressed at 4:00 A.M. and drove to his house, across Lake Washington in Bellevue, relieved to see his car in the driveway.

  Sullen and bleary-eyed, he let his guard down and answered the door, surprised that she’d come.

  They talked for an hour, never touching, and she told him everything she had refused to reveal earlier.

  They parted at his door in a sad, passionless embrace.

  “Elizabeth, I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I love you. I always have. But I don’t know if I can live with you—or you with me.”

  12

  Sunday, March 12

  Tacoma, Washington

  Bill Conrad collapsed the antenna of the cordless phone and fairly slammed the instrument back in its cradle.

  “Goddamn bureaucrats!” he muttered, grabbing his coffee cup from the counter and leaving a small tidal wave of the liquid behind. He ignored the spill and paced off instead in the direction of the fireplace. Bill had paced the floor most of the afternoon and evening. The dark clouds of an advancing cold front, which had rolled in around dusk, matched his mood, and not even the slow emergence of the twinkling city lights of Tacoma across Commencement Bay from his Brown’s Point home could bolster his spirits.

  On the coffee table behind him, faxed copies of a half-dozen clippings from as many Sunday newspapers lay in haphazard profusion, some of them merely hinting at potential Pan American maintenance incompetence, others actually raising the issue of how safe Pan Am really was—with a Monty Pythonesque wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

  He had called Jake Lovesy again after reading the last one, begging him at least to tell the media about the intrusion at Moses Lake. But it was painfully clear that the NTSB was not going to publicly acknowledge the possibility of sabotage—even though Lovesy hinted broadly that the FBI might already have found something “interesting.”

  Lovesy, once again, had counseled patience.

  “Patience, my ass!” Bill Conrad muttered.

  There was an underlying nervousness—an apprehension—eating away at his conscience, a chilling realization that Pan Am was still in danger. If what had happened to Ship 612 was sabotage, and if it was a professional job, as Jake Lovesy had suggested, there was no reason to believe that the saboteur had gone away—or given up. And next time the crew might not be able to bend the laws of aerodynamics and get themselves back on the ground safely. He was beginning to feel like the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, his voice of alarm lost on the wind.

  No one else, though, seemed to see the urgency. Chad Jennings was only mildly alarmed, and had even questioned the extra money for the added security precautions his director of maintenance had ordered throughout the system. He had approached the president as well, but even Ron Lamb wouldn’t believe it until the NTSB formally agreed that someone had purposefully monkeyed with a Pan Am airplane.

  No, no one was listening, so it was up to him to force the issue.

  He charged back across the room suddenly and grabbed the phone once more, fumbling for the small scrap of paper that held the number he had decided to call. He was drumming his fingers restlessly as the last ring was replaced by the voice of a Seattle Chronicle reporter.

  “Adrian Kirsch.”

  “Mr. Kirsch? This is Bill Conrad, of Pan Am.”

  Monday, March 13, morning

  New York City

  Elizabeth pushed through a gaggle of commuters blocking the subway exit, and maneuvered into the filthy corridor beneath Vanderbilt Avenue, checking her watch as she walked. Fifteen minutes to go. The crowd between her and Grand Central’s main atrium was heavy, but not unmanageable. Long ago she’d learned to handle the challenges of an appointment in midtown during rush hour.

  Eric’s lengthy memo had been hopeful, and she needed hope. He’d obviously spent most of Saturday putting together a list of the sources most likely to let themselves be persuaded to loan Pan Am eighty-five million dollars, and had precontacted several of them, leaving a list of their home phone numbers for her to reach Sunday night from Eric’s loaned condo.

  In typical fashion, Eric had left the papers on a bedside table in the Victorian-decorated mini-mansion, along with a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne with a tiny sticky note reading, “In case of success, break seal.”

  And, true to form, he’d left his token sexual overture as well, a gilt-edged handwritten note just beneath the covers, saying, “Wish I were here!”

  The incredible noise and echo of Grand Central’s main concourse now surrounded her like a dowdy old friend as Elizabeth accelerated toward the east exit to Lexington Avenue. She had paused to buy a copy of The New York Times on boarding the subway, but had yet to open it. The dossier on Harold Hudgins—her first appoi
ntment—was more important reading. He was one of the principals in a consortium of investors consisting mostly of U.S. banks, and for them, eighty-five million would be a drop in the bucket.

  And he’d indicated to Eric that Pan Am was not an unwelcome applicant.

  She pushed through the heavy doors to Park Avenue and turned left, northward, letting her thin leather briefcase flop slightly against the side of her full-length coat, a black cashmere meant for slightly colder weather, but fashionable in the big city. There was a gray overcast above with the temperature in the fifties, and the winds were whipping through the canyons of Manhattan from the north, blowing discarded scraps of paper in the air and requiring Elizabeth to keep her coat firmly buttoned over the tailored hunter-green dress she had chosen to wear.

  As she moved toward the target building on East Forty-fourth, she forced herself to avoid looking up at the renamed building once owned by Pan Am. It towered like a specter on her left, and she was acutely aware of its presence. Most New Yorkers who loved aviation had thought the sale of the building in the seventies the final indignity for Pan Am. Then came the bankruptcy and shutdown. But the ultimate desecration of the airline had been the removal of those huge blue letters. At least it had been a tombstone, and now even that had been kicked over.

  The building’s presence seemed to loom over her confidence as well as her person, an exclamation point made of steel, a cynical reminder that even the mightiest of companies can fail—a contemptuous monolith of scorn for someone who would seek to raise the dead.

  Who is this little girl, it seemed to glower, who would challenge the mighty tide of Wall Street common wisdom?

  She closed her eyes and shivered for a split second to exorcise the demons of doubt, and found herself crossing on a red light.

  A bank of television screens swam into her peripheral vision in a corner electronics shop as she hurried past, hardly noticing, but for some reason she glanced in that direction, startled to see her company’s logo filling each set.

  She came to an instant halt and pressed her nose to the storefront, a small shiver of apprehension flashing through her as she wondered what had happened now. The logo receded to an over-the-shoulder box as one of the morning-show hosts began a story she couldn’t hear.