Rawly looked back up with a strained smile. “They’ll immediately try to get a hearing to vacate this TRO. They’ll send in a battery of people to swear they’ve had nothing to do with Irwin Fairchild or Nick Costas or anyone else. They want to shut us down tomorrow, when the media is set to watch us anyway on the round-the-world inaugural.”
“But can they succeed?” The question hung there, and she hated asking it. She noticed Creighton, deep in his own conversation with the other two lawyers.
“Let’s put it this way, Elizabeth. If there’s any way you can still make that payment, make it. If we hand the bastards the one hundred forty million as demanded, they can’t do a thing until the next repayment is due. That’s the only guarantee I can give you.”
“I called Hong Kong on the way over here,” Elizabeth told him. “Jason Ing is still missing, and his house won’t invest a penny without him. I’ve also been on the phone for hours with my assistant in Seattle. We can raise about half of it internally, but we wouldn’t have a penny left in our corporate bank accounts.”
Rawly was nodding. “Please keep trying, Elizabeth. We’ve won this inning and we’re leading by one run in the top of the ninth. But they’ve still got one turn at bat, and their pitcher is showing no signs of fatigue.”
She smiled at Rawly. “I hate baseball analogies!”
Creighton was seated diagonally across the table and had been half-listening to their conversation. He leaned in her direction now with a mischievous look. “I take it you feel the same way about golf analogies?”
Elizabeth met his eyes, smiling slowly as she recalled his love of the game.
“On the other hand, I’ve always found golf to be a deeply exciting game.” Her eyes stayed locked on his.
Jack Rawly heard the crackle and spark and resumed looking at his drink. It was, he figured, to be expected. He had seen the handsome Scot’s eyes linger on their CFO more than once in the past few hours.
When Creighton entered his room at 10:30 P.M., an envelope lay under the door with a message to call Jack Bastrop in Houston.
“Jason’s been found,” Bastrop told him. “He’s alive, but he’s been beaten pretty badly, and one of his brothers wants to talk to you.”
It was 11:00 P.M. Sunday night in New York and noon on Monday in Hong Kong when Jeremy Ing, Jason’s brother—a key executive of Cathay Alliance—came to the phone. Jason had been dumped in a wooded area near the Chinese border, he said, and had staggered to a highway several hours later, asking for help.
“In his conscious moments he’s frantic to know whether Elizabeth Sterling is okay, but he’s unconscious right now,” Jeremy told Creighton. “I’m with him here in the hospital. The doctors expect a full recovery. When he’s awake, which is only a few minutes at a time, he keeps saying he has something important to tell you, Mr. MacRae.”
“Elizabeth is fine. Tell him that when he wakes up next time. She got away safely, thanks to him. She’s with me in New York. But please tell him Pan Am still needs that loan most desperately.” He gave Jeremy his hotel and room number in New York. Jeremy Ing agreed to call him back as soon as Jason came around again.
“I’ll stay here by the phone,” Creighton promised.
Sunday, March 26, 11:45 P.M.
Near Kennedy Airport
Jacob Voorster turned off the TV and the bedside light in another room of the same hotel he had occupied the night before. Sunday morning he had gone to the Pan Am terminal only to find that his flight had been cancelled. He had agreed to stay over another day at Pan Am’s expense and meet with Chad Jennings in Seattle on Monday instead.
As Voorster drifted into sleep, a few miles away at the international arrivals terminal used by Lufthansa, two neatly dressed men stepped off a flight from Frankfurt and entered customs. Once they had cleared through, they stepped over to a bank of hotel phones and quietly began going down the list of airport area hotels, hoping for an easy break.
The call to the desk clerk of the Airport Ramada Inn was the thirteenth one they made.
“Excuse me, I am looking for a Mr. Jacob Voorster. Is he registered in your facility?”
The clerk was doing the nightly billings, which were a mess. Papers and registration lists lay everywhere on the counter, and instead of clearing a path to the computer, he grabbed the printout he assumed was current.
“Yes, here he is. Oh, wait a minute.” The printout was for the night before, but the registration had been for one night only, direct-billed to Pan Am. There was no need to look for the current registration printout. “I’m sorry, sir. He checked out this morning.”
Monday, March 27, 8:00 A.M.
New York City
Creighton MacRae awoke to a ringing phone, confused that daylight was streaming in the window. He was still in a shirt and tie, lying on top of his bed.
It was Jeremy Ing, calling from Hong Kong. Jason was stable and had been conscious long enough to tell his brother to go ahead with the hundred-forty-million-dollar loan to Pan Am.
“It is nine at night here. We cannot finish the deal until tomorrow, but I will work on it.”
“Should I have Elizabeth Sterling call you back?” Creighton stood and shook his head to clear the cobwebs.
“Yes, but in the morning. In the meantime, tell her that Jason is afraid for her life.”
“What do you mean?”
“The people who kidnapped him? They were looking for her. They were trying to find out where she was, because they believed she had something, some information they wanted.”
He had barely replaced the phone in its cradle when Jack Rawly called with the news that Intertrust Bank, as expected, had scheduled an emergency hearing to attack the temporary restraining order.
“When, Jack?”
“Ten A.M., and not before Judge Hayes, either. They went to Judge Hayes last night and he refused to vacate the TRO. You know, as I explained to you, TROs are usually not appealable. But these clowns are claiming they’re about to be greatly damaged, and they’ve filed a writ of mandamus—”
“A what?” Creighton asked.
“Oh, sorry. It’s basically a request for the higher court to order the lower court to do something it doesn’t want to do on the grounds that the judge of the lower court has screwed up badly. In this case, they want the appeals court to force Judge Hayes to throw out our TRO. So we go to the seventeenth floor of the Foley Square courthouse and fight it out before three circuit judges.”
“Circuit judges? There’s another bloody term I don’t know, Jack.”
“Well, a circuit judge is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals. They’re one level above Judge Hayes.”
“They can tell him what to do, then.”
“They can indeed. And we should leave the hotel here by nine-fifteen this morning at the latest.”
“Have you talked to Elizabeth?”
“Yes, I woke her up. One more thing, Creighton. The media are onto this. The other side probably tipped them to make us look bad. We can keep cameras out of the courtroom, but there will undoubtedly be bad publicity and all our faces on the news today.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
Monday, March 27, 9:55 A.M.
Manhattan
Two television camera crews and a handful of print reporters were waiting for them in front of the courthouse. One of the TV cameras was broadcasting live to the New York area, the reporter reminding his viewers that the successful resurrection of Pan Am was suddenly in trouble, the company facing disaster on the very day it was supposed to launch its new round-the-world service.
“A-control, as CNN’s nerve center in Atlanta was called, elected on the spur of the moment to pick up the broadcast from Manhattan and take it live on the main CNN line around the world. Creighton MacRae was shown walking just behind Elizabeth up the courthouse steps, both of them identified—mistakenly in Creighton’s case—as officers of Pan Am arriving to make a last-ditch attempt to rescue the airline from an immediate s
hutdown.
A battery of three attorneys and the chief operating officer of Intertrust Bank were waiting inside with the grimmest of faces when the Pan Am contingent walked in. Neither introductions nor words were exchanged before the three appeals court circuit judges entered and took their places in the marble and granite courtroom.
Monday, March 27, 9:57 A.M.
Near JFK Airport
Jacob Voorster had repeated almost exactly the routine of twenty-four hours before. He found himself seated in the identical compartment of the same 747, now getting ready for departure for Seattle. He had noticed the personal entertainment system the previous morning, but this time he turned it on, amazed at the quality of the liquid-crystal color TV screen as he tuned across several stations and settled on one in New York that was covering some sort of trial.
Suddenly Pan Am’s name caught his ear, along with the chilling explanation that Pan Am’s lenders were preparing to find the airline in default and seize all their aircraft.
My God! There is no time for a flight to Seattle!
The face of an attractive blond woman moved past the camera, and the newsman identified her as Elizabeth Sterling, the corporate officer he had been told was in Seattle, and the one he had barely missed in London.
But it was the face of the man with Sterling that propelled Jacob into action. Jacob Voorster had seen that face in the financial press years before. He knew of his accomplishments, his failures, and his successful suit against a group of European companies—which included VZV.
That was, without a doubt, Creighton MacRae!
Jacob grabbed his briefcase and rushed to the door, which was closing.
“No! Stop! I must get off!”
With some puzzlement, the flight attendant pushed the door open again far enough to let Jacob escape up the jetway at a dead run. He raced for the driveway at the entrance to the terminal, passing a host of curious passengers, and startling the two men who had arrived from Frankfurt the night before in search of the person they now saw submerging in the backseat of a New York taxi.
One of the men grabbed the other and swung him around by the collar, speaking excitedly in his own language.
“Da! Er ist da! Das ist Voorster!” Together they raced for the curb, shoving their way past a line of people and into another waiting yellow cab whose driver immediately got out and refused to move.
The taxi dispatcher heard and saw what was happening. Two foreign jerks, he concluded, who don’t give a damn about local rules.
“Hey, mister! Both of you! This is America, capisce? You gotta stand in line like everyone else.”
The cabby had been standing by the left rear window of his cab when he suddenly felt something shoved in his stomach from within the vehicle. Looking down, he saw the barrel of a gun. The man holding it was warning him through clenched teeth to get back in the cab instantly and drive, or take a bullet in the gut, and probably through the spinal column.
“Awright! Awright!” The cabby swung into the driver’s seat and jammed the car into gear as the dispatcher realized his instructions weren’t being followed.
“Hey, jerk! Get outta that seat! You go two inches, I got your medallion!”
Tires squealed as the cabby accelerated away from the curb and pulled into traffic, trying desperately to carry out the demands of the two men in the rear who wanted to follow the previous hack, which was now out of sight.
The dispatcher cursed and threw his hat on the ground, angry and embarrassed at being ignored. “Number 46657, the bastard! Where’s my pen? Hey, Harry! You see that? Where’s my goddam pen!”
On the other side of the terminal, at Gate 14, Voorster’s suitcase had been removed from the forward baggage bin while a mechanic quickly checked over the compartment he had occupied in the cabin, looking for anything suspicious.
He found nothing out of the ordinary. The plane departed on schedule.
Monday, March 27, 10:10 A.M.
Manhattan
The lead attorney for Intertrust, Sol Moscowitz, a senior partner of the heavy-hitting firm of Shearson, Moscowitz, and Katz, went through the background of the arguments used by Pan Am for the TRO before tearing into each allegation. No one in their bank or their lenders’ consortium, he claimed, had any knowledge of any actions taken against Pan Am by Nick Costas or anyone else.
Moscowitz, a stubby, angry, but well-dressed man, adjusted the lightweight podium set five feet in front of the bench and waved his glasses as he warmed to his argument with restrained outrage.
“Your Honors, virtually all these allegations, even if proved, amount to absolutely no proof at all! They have shown virtually nothing but a series of perfectly legal commercial transactions between ITB, which they allege is owned by Mr. Costas in Hong Kong, and our bank, which deals extensively in the international banking arena. Without even addressing the highly questionable methods by which some of the evidence presented before Judge Hayes was obtained, and without attacking specifically the late-hour sessions Saturday and Sunday before Judge Hayes, which were conducted without adequate attempts to notify us, what these plaintiffs have shown here is nothing but a frantic determination to save themselves through misuse of the court. They allege that the mere fact that we and ITB have transferred funds in like amounts justifies a temporary restraining order. I submit that it does no such thing.”
Moscowitz looked down at the podium before him and consulted his notes before looking up at the judges and continuing.
“Legally borrowing funds from an institution does not make you automatically liable for the misdeeds of that institution. Yet that’s what’s being alleged here. Even assuming ITB in Hong Kong set out, for God knows what reason, to ruin Pan Am, proving only that we have borrowed money from them does not make us a party to such actions, nor does it justify using the doctrine of estoppel to stay our hand in recovering our money.”
Moscowitz moved back to a counsel table and took a drink of water.
“The facts are, Intertrust and the consortium lenders in the Pan Am revolving loan have legally notified Pan Am that they have lost confidence in the airline’s ability to repay its obligations. We have demanded our money back in accordance with the repayment schedule. One hundred forty million dollars is due today, this morning—now. They say they can’t pay it. That means they are now in default. We request that you overrule Judge Hayes and vacate this ridiculous temporary restraining order so that we may hand them here and now their notice of default, which I have in my briefcase.”
The man took a deep breath and sat down.
Jack Rawly took the three judges through the evidence again, reminding him that Pan Am stood on the brink of imminent destruction.
“We need the time to bring forth the evidence to establish this nefarious relationship and justify an injunction. The purpose of a TRO is to stop irreparable harm, and that’s what we’re facing if you permit him to hand us that notice of default. The lessors of our aircraft will follow within the hour with a notice of seizure. By this afternoon, Pan Am will have no airplanes and be forced into bankruptcy, which we believe to have been the plan all along.”
Rawly fell silent as one of the judges glared down at him.
“Are you through, Mr. Rawly?”
“I’d like to reserve the right to comment or move further if necessary, Your Honor.”
“Granted.”
The three judges conferred among themselves for a minute before the chief judge turned back to the attorneys and continued.
“If that’s your case, Mr. Rawly, we can’t see that you’ve set out sufficient reason to grant an injunction. Yes, you will be irreparably harmed, and I can accept your attempts at notifying your lenders as sufficient, but Mr. Moscowitz is correct in saying that you’ve presented no credible evidence or claim that Intertrust and their lending consortium had a hand in whatever Mr. Costas or Mr. Fairchild or Mr. Hudgins did or did not do to Pan Am.”
Jack Rawly moved back to the podium.
“J
udge, this is an action for a temporary restraining order, but the court appears to be holding us to the level of proof required for an injunction. For a TRO, all I have to do is honestly swear to the court that we truly believe the evidence is there and that, given some small amount of time, we can find it. But, in essence, you’re saying that we can’t have the time to develop the proof you want to see until we’ve already developed the proof you want to see, by which time we will need neither a TRO nor an injunction, because there will be no Pan Am left to prosecute the case. This becomes, then, a legal tautology, or a Catch-22, and that’s not what Rule 65 is all about.”
Judge Kenton, the chief judge, began to speak, but Rawly held up his hand.
“Your Honor, I swear to you that I am completely confident, in accordance with the spirit and intent and the statutory requirements of Rule 65, that given the time requested, we can provide the proof that the connection between ITB and Intertrust was something other than benign. At least don’t interfere with Judge Hayes’s decision until nine A.M. tomorrow.”
Moscowitz was on his feet instantly. “Your Honor, that’s a transparent ploy. They’ve got no hope of producing anything new out of thin air. There’s nothing there to begin with, of course, but what he’s attempting to do is let this TRO run past the departure time for their new round-the-world service. They want to launch the flight as a last futile gesture, and put us off until the next banking day. Don’t be a party to such manipulation, Your Honor.”
Jack Rawly glared at Moscowitz. “That’s a slanderous accusation! We do indeed have reasonable grounds for saying that by tomorrow morning, or before, we may well be able to provide proof that would satisfy this or any other court. This is not a ploy to get our aircraft off the ground. Consider, though, Your Honor, that even in the absence of proof, a few additional hours might also give us the time to make the payment they appear to be so desperate to receive, thus forestalling a default. Since they will undoubtedly lose tens of millions of dollars if they push us into a bankruptcy by the mere act of handing us that notice of default now burning a hole in Mr. Moscowitz’s briefcase, delaying that move through this TRO prevents, in effect, a form of irreparable harm to Mr. Moscowitz’s client as well. The alternative is the wanton and possibly unnecessary destruction of a successful new airline that employs thousands of honest Americans who deserve to have the chance to prove that they are the victim here.”
Phoenix Rising Page 38