“Eric has explained the situation,” he told her, “and I think I can help. I understand security is necessary, so I will treat this as completely confidential.” He handed her a lengthy list of financial firms and houses in London, four of them circled in red, and one starred.
“You’ll no doubt be somewhat startled to find that the chap I want to steer you to first is at my own Lloyds of London, on the main floor. Alastair Wood is his name, from Brighton. A common chap, really, with the heart of a shark, and very young at twenty-nine, but the best financier I’ve come across in the U.K. in many years.”
“What’s he doing in Lloyds, then?”
Lloyd White lifted his head a bit and laughed softly. “Moonlighting, I truly think. So happens he enjoys underwriting as head of a syndicate more than he likes banking and investments, and Elizabeth—if I may call you Elizabeth …”
“I’d be crushed if you didn’t.”
“That’s gracious of you, thank you. Elizabeth, he’s the best off-the-cuff dealmaker around. He’s got the cunning of a Fagin, though he’s thoroughly honest. But if he likes the depth of the challenge, he’ll figure out a way to do the deal.”
They talked strategy for nearly an hour before White reached into his pocket and produced a small notebook. He unscrewed a fountain pen and opened it to a blank page.
“Now … there’s one other thing you should do, Elizabeth. There is a chap up in Scotland who used to be one of Sir Freddy Laker’s executives when Laker Airlines was alive. He left and started his own airline in the Midlands, and was roundly hated by the major European carriers and everyone else who believes in monopolies. Eventually they ran him out of business—forced him to sell, really—by a campaign that bears a striking resemblance to what you’re going through over here.”
“You mean someone was interfering with his corporate borrowing?”
“No, I mean he and his little airline were subjected to a full-blown campaign of economic destruction. It took him eight years in the courts to win a massive lawsuit against the culprits, but win he did. He’s sitting up there near Inverness now with more money than he can ever spend, but he’s still bitter, and what he learned the hard way about how such campaigns operate might help your company.”
White tore the page out and handed it to her.
“Thank you very much,” she said, examining the name.
“A bit of a warning, though.”
“Sure.”
“The old boy’s as sour as a lemon drop and has a peculiar attitude toward women.”
“You mean he’s gay?” she asked with an amused smile.
Lloyd White looked for a split second as if he’d been struck. He threw his head back and roared with laughter until Elizabeth was laughing too.
“What?” Elizabeth managed, smiling but puzzled.
“Well, you see … ah … I’m frightfully sorry, but … the very thought of Craig MacRae chasing after anything but females is a hilarious image.” He wiped an eye with his napkin and shook his head again. “No, dear girl, watch yourself around Laird MacRae. He’s a raging chauvinist heterosexual who believes a woman’s place is in the kitchen and the bedroom, not the boardroom.”
“He certainly won’t like me, then!” she said, smiling.
“Depends entirely on the context. In regard to your role as a female executive, he’ll be outraged and hostile. In regard to your charms as a woman, he’ll be intrigued and challenged.” He winked at her as he got to his feet. “But by all means ring him up. The advice will be worth it to you and your company, I promise—though I’d wager you’ll have to go see him. He rarely leaves his Highlands estate these days, and it’s certainly not likely he’d leave it for a wee lass, if you understand my meaning.”
Elizabeth found the limo waiting to take her to Eric’s condo to get her things. It felt different this time, as if the realization that it had been penetrated by someone else made it feel dirty and contaminated.
She was ready to close the door behind her when the sight of a blinking message light on the answering machine registered.
It was the voice of Virginia Sterling.
“Elizabeth, I hope this is the right number, because that sounds like Eric Knox’s voice on the message. Anyway, Kelly and I are going to Europe on Brian’s Pan Am flight this afternoon for two days. We’ll be back late Friday night. Your secretary has the schedule. Take care, honey, and good luck. I’ll call you when we get back to Bellingham.”
Eric loved logistics and planning details of trips, and he had exceeded himself this time. The driver took Elizabeth directly to La Guardia, where she bought her decoy ticket on United before being met by an airport security officer who quietly escorted her through back rooms and a maze of corridors to a waiting car, which in turn took her to Eric’s helicopter in the same spot where he had met her before. In fifteen minutes they were approaching JFK, and within an hour she was sitting in the upper first-class section of a 747 just getting ready to push back for London.
“Don’t fly Pan Am,” Eric had warned her. “Whoever’s been watching you may be on the inside in Seattle. They may have the computer programmed to look for your name in the reservations or passenger lists.”
“How about British Airways?”
“A competitor. Good. But use only the initial L for your first name, and have them misspell Sterling with two r’s or something. If their computer’s looking for ‘Sterling,’ it won’t find you.”
“I could be seen at JFK, you know,” she said.
“True. You won’t be invisible or undetectable, the way I’ll get you out there,” Eric told her, “but unless they have an army following you, or someone slipped a homing device in your bra, they’ll be looking for you back in Seattle this evening instead of in London.”
She had kissed him before getting out of the Jet Ranger at JFK, a tender kiss, full on the lips. There was nothing but a thank-you involved, and he knew it, but he well understood the significance of the gesture.
In all their years of partnership, that had never happened before.
Tuesday, March 14
Mount Vernon, Washington
Adrian Kirsch had all but taken up residence in the back alcove of the Farmhouse Restaurant where the pay phones were located. The restaurant sat on the main highway to Anacortes, and in the midst of tulip country—a verdant river bottom of rich farmland that exploded each spring in a rainbow of colors when the flower fields came in bloom. With a deadline looming, there was no time to drive back to his Seattle newsroom to do the research.
The fact that their pies were incredibly good didn’t enter into the decision—or so he told himself. After all, he was still on a diet.
The NTSB’s field man had been some help in Anacortes, but not much. Michael Rogers claimed he didn’t have a copy of the FBI lab report. Neither could he confirm their exact metallurgical findings other than to say that yes, chromium was found on the fragment taken from the underside of the right wing of Pan Am Clipper Ten, just above the area where number-three engine had fragmented—or “scattered,” in his terminology.
But when it came to an on-the-record quote about where chromium could or could not be found on a 747, Rogers kept his mouth shut tight.
So had the FBI agent in charge of the investigation, whom Adrian had reached by phone. The agent had been downright hostile, and not even Adrian’s threat to use a Freedom of Information Act request to break loose a copy of the lab report had impressed him.
He hadn’t told Rogers about the anonymous call at first—not until he could squeeze out anything Rogers would tell him. But he had to turn over the information. He wasn’t a lawyer, but he was damned nervous about sitting on such an accusation as a wrench in the engine. When he was sure Rogers had said as much as he was going to, Adrian told him the details of the call.
Amazingly, Rogers had feigned disinterest.
“We get a lot of tips,” he’d said, “and that one’s unique, but it was probably a crackpot.”
Lo
gic had guided him from there. The anonymous tipster who had rousted him out of bed had said that the chromium came from a wrench left in the engine. If there was virtually no other way chromium could have normally been in or around a 747 engine, then the presence of the stuff would tend to validate the possibility. At least it would indicate that something foreign to the engine—including a wrench—had been inside when it exploded.
He’d spent a solid two hours on the pay phones hunting down metallurgical experts, a former FBI agent, two jet engine mechanics, a tool and die company, and several others. At last he felt he had enough confirmation.
At 11:00 A.M., having missed two of the four daily deadlines for the afternoon paper, he called his editor—who decided to go with the story.
By midafternoon the story was gaining nationwide attention and moving on the news wires, alerting the public to the possibility that there was something more to the drama of Clipper Ten than the NTSB, the FBI, or Pan Am had yet admitted. By late afternoon the story had become the lead on the three major national networks.
Tuesday, March 14, 3:30 P.M.
Pan Am Operations, Seatac Airport
Captain Dale Silverman was beat. The flight in from New York was the last one he was scheduled to fly for a week, and he was more than ready for a rest as he put his flight bag in his assigned locker in the Seattle pilot lounge and remembered that he had one more duty to perform.
There was a mechanic in Denver who needed some talking to.
Brian Murphy’s office was just down the corridor of the operations center, and he headed that way now, smiling at several people he knew along the way.
He’d thought about the situation all weekend and into Monday. He had fully expected to see an entry in the logbook Saturday morning when he and his crew had returned to their Boeing 767 at Denver’s airport for the live charter flight back to Seattle. After all, he had seen the mechanic and his tool kit on the flight deck the night before, along with a couple of rack-mounted electronic boxes he assumed were to be swapped with their counterparts in the electronics bay beneath the cockpit.
But there was nothing in the aircraft’s maintenance log, and the operations supervisor claimed no work had been done.
It could be nothing, but just in case something had been done and not documented, the mechanic had to be confronted.
Brian Murphy’s secretary was at her desk, and recognized him immediately.
“Dale! How’re you doing, Captain-san?”
“Gail!” he responded in a feigned Texas drawl, “Ah’m jes’ fine, ma’am, high yew? Is the head birdman in?”
She shook her head. “Nope. The head birdman has gone off to commit an act of aviation, this time to Frankfurt. He took off about thirty minutes ago.”
“Oh.” He looked nonplussed.
“Something I can do?” she asked.
He could tell her the story, knowing she was quite competent to find the right people to deal with it in Brian’s absence. But there was something unsettling about the whole thing that only a fellow captain would fully understand. Gail might think it trivial.
“That’s okay. It’ll wait. Probably nothing, anyway.”
He waved goodbye and headed for the parking lot, making a mental note to drop in on Brian next week.
There was plenty of time.
16
Tuesday, March 14, 11:32 P.M.
In flight, Clipper Forty
There it was again.
Brian Murphy stared at the screen that covered the forward center instrument panel and waited. The computer-driven engine instrument displays had flickered a second time, all the information scrambling for a few seconds before returning to normal.
He leaned closer now, his eyes challenging the CRT screen to repeat the episode as he leveled an index finger at the engine readouts and addressed the copilot.
“Tyson, did you see that?”
First officer Tyson Matthews followed the captain’s finger to the engine-monitoring portion of the Boeing 767’s “glass” cockpit.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
“All the engine displays turned to garbage for a split second, then recovered.”
Tyson shook his head. He hadn’t seen it.
Brian’s gaze remained on the panel, though he had to fight the urge to rub his eyes. I’m fatigued! he admitted to himself. It had been nearly 2:00 A.M. before his head had hit the pillow after combing through the Pan Am personnel files. He had been determined to provide the FBI agent with all the fingerprint files for those with authorized access to Pan Am pilot records. Now, any other prints the FBI lab might find on First Officer Willis’s folder would have to belong to the thief. Brian had left instructions with Gail to call him anywhere, anytime, when the FBI agent reported back with results. His hopes were high that they were closing in on the bastard.
Brian refocused his attention on the center panel. There were three main displays, two of them identical flight instrument displays for the pilot and copilot respectively, and the center screen. The engine readout displays on the center screen remained mockingly normal, but he could feel himself getting edgy and apprehensive. Forty-one thousand feet below them now was land—but it was wilderness—whose barren, frigid nature had always made him uneasy. He was more comfortable flying over the middle of the ocean.
Brian thought suddenly of Kelly and her mother, back in Compartment Class, and a feeling of immense guilt rolled over him. He had enticed them into coming along—the three most important people in Elizabeth’s life on the same airplane!
Without a whisper of warning, the engine display screen exploded in gibberish again, this time in a kaleidoscopic burst of symbols and lines that went rippling across the CRT’s face with the intensity of a silent explosion. Again, just as abruptly, it returned to normal—leaving both pilots stunned.
“I sure as hell saw that!” Tyson said, snapping forward in his seat. “What on earth?”
“I don’t know. I’ve seen transient warnings before, but never an in-flight psychedelic display like that.”
Tyson looked down at the flight computer to double-check their position. “We’re just above seventy degrees north right now, north of Hudson Bay,” he told the captain.
Brian chuckled out loud. “And if we decided to pop in somewhere and have maintenance take a look at this, which way would we head, Tyson?”
“About a thousand miles in any direction but north.”
“You got that right.”
The sound of a warning chime resonated through his head, sending a small chill down his back.
What now?
On the forward CRT screen, a computer-generated message—
RIGHT ENGINE THRUST REVERSER NOT LOCKED
—suddenly appeared.
“Tyson, you see anything on the right side?” Brian asked.
The copilot had already whipped his head to the right window. Now he looked back at Brian.
“No, I don’t. I don’t feel anything, either, at least nothing that would suggest we’ve had a reverser come out.”
“Lord! I think this is how the Lauda 767 accident sequence started,” Brian said, motoring his seat forward a few inches. He rested his feet on the rudder pedals just in case, mentally running through the procedure for recovering from an unusual attitude—the sort of high-speed dive a suddenly opened thrust reverser could cause in flight in a 767.
Then, as quickly as it had illuminated, the thrust-reverser warning light went out on its own.
Brian scanned the engine panel again and looked at the flight instruments. Everything seemed to have returned to routine readouts—but both pilots were now adrenalized and on full alert.
Yet another master annunciator warning chime sounded as the screen flashed a fuel icing warning.
In several seconds that, too, was gone.
“Jesus Christ, Brian! What is this? A simulator ride?
“Look at that!” Tyson pointed to the engine gauge display when it flashed back on for a few se
conds between malfunction messages. The engine instruments—displayed as small colored round dials on the computer screen—were also showing strange readings. Every thirty seconds or so the scrambled data they had seen before would return in an artful burble of colors.
“Is there a circuit breaker that could explain this?” Brian asked.
The copilot began searching the breaker panels and shaking his head. “I haven’t got a clue what’s going on. It almost looks like we’ve got some sort of weird short in the symbol generator.”
“Yeah,” Brian replied, “but there’s nothing wrong with the other displays. The flight instruments are steady on both sides.”
“I don’t know, boss, but it’s probably not dangerous. We’ll want to get the system fixed in Frankfurt, though.”
Brian started to agree, but the raucous sound of an engine fire warning bell rang through the cockpit at the same moment. Brian’s full attention snapped to the annunciator panel. Number-one engine on the left side, according to the indications, was burning.
Tyson silenced the fire alarm as Brian looked to the left, pressing his nose against the side window glass in an effort to see the engine.
“I see nothing out here,” he said.
“You want to run the engine-fire checklist, or wait?” Tyson asked as Brian turned back to the center panel.
“I think I’d better have you run back to the cabin and look the engine over. I don’t believe it’s on fire. Not with all the weird indications.”
Tyson was already in motion, the seatbelt flying away from his lap as he released it and headed for the cockpit door.
The number-two-engine fire warning came on as the copilot’s hand touched the cockpit door knob.
“Jesus!” Tyson jumped with alarm as he looked back up front and watched Brian cancel the audible warning. Bright red lights were now glowing in both fire handles.
“Now I know this is a false alarm!” Brian said over his shoulder. “But go ahead and check the right engine too.”
The door closed behind Tyson, and Brian picked up the radio microphone in a reflexive reaction.
Phoenix Rising Page 17