Phoenix Rising

by Nance, John J. ;

  Judge Richard Kenton sat back for a moment with an acid scowl on his face while the other two judges listened. He moved forward again, suddenly.

  “Very well. Mr. Moscowitz, you’re correct that the facts are insufficient. But Mr. Rawly is correct as well that under the rule, Judge Hayes had the authority to take reasonable actions to protect against catastrophic and irreparable result. He can do that by merely accepting Mr. Rawly’s representations. Mr. Rawly has not yet proved a collusive connection between the admittedly onerous actions of Mr. Fairchild and Mr. Hudgins on one hand, and your client on the other. But I cannot say categorically that Mr. Rawly will be unable to prove such a connection. He swears that he can, given time.”

  Kenton looked hard at Jack Rawly. “Mr. Rawly, I’ll give your client some gasping room, but not for the purpose of launching any last-minute flights. I’ll give you until five P.M. this afternoon to come back here and demonstrate why I should believe that there really is a connection between this lender and the things done to your client. I will reverse Judge Hayes and vacate his TRO at five P.M. if you fail to present the required additional evidence before that date and hour. I’ll be available to you all afternoon through my clerk.”

  Moscowitz was on his feet again with a whining tone. “Your Honor, I’d like to implore you to reconsid—”

  Judge Kenton shook his head. “Overruled, Sol. You’ve got a half-full glass here. Wait until five-oh-one P.M., and you can hand them your papers if they can’t find a rabbit in their hat.”

  Kenton rose and disappeared into his chambers as the small contingent got to their feet.

  Monday, March 27, 7:30 A.M.

  Seatac Airport

  As Elizabeth and the Pan Am team were leaving the courthouse in Manhattan in a state of mild shock, Brian Murphy taxied from the gate at Seatac to the end of Runway 16 Left for takeoff. The passenger load was light for a 747—only 142 people—but the aircraft was booked full out of New York for the first leg to London on what would become Pan Am Flight One—their first round-the-world flight.

  Brian glanced up at the stream of cirrus shooting by in the teeth of the jetstream high overhead, the only cloud formations in an otherwise crystal-clear sky. With light winds from the south and mild temperatures, it was a perfect day for flying—despite the gnawing worry about possible sabotage.

  Ship 609 had been all but disassembled and reassembled, and kept under twenty-four hour guard in the hangar. Brian was confident no saboteur could have slipped through the net. But there was a rumbling nervousness in the pit of his stomach when he thought about the tempting target they made, because of the publicity surrounding the inaugural flight. Maybe they should have canceled the flight, just to be completely safe. But how could they do that with no evidence or warning of sabotage? The damage in the eyes of the public, coming on the heels of the other near disasters, would most certainly be an irreparable death blow to Pan Am—even if they were, by some miracle, able to get the $140-million payment today. It was too late to cancel now, of course, but his feeling of something dangerous left undone was visceral, like that of a worried vacationer who can’t remember turning off the oven.

  He’d be relieved when they blocked in at JFK and he could safely turn the ship over to the crew flying to London.

  His thoughts turned to Elizabeth for a second as the first officer called for takeoff clearance. After the sendoff ceremony, he planned to monopolize her time for the rest of the evening. They needed time together. They needed to talk.

  And he needed to buy a ring.

  “Clipper Fifteen, cleared to go, one-six left.”

  “Clipper Fifteen’s rolling.”

  33

  Monday, March 27, 10:25 A.M.

  Near Kennedy Airport

  Singhman Nahjib passed the exit for Interstate 278 just seconds before he caught sight of the taxi he’d been ordered to follow.

  He’s headed south!

  Pure fear gripped him as he realized there was no way he could correct the error and get off the Grand Central Parkway in time to catch them, but his two passengers hadn’t yet noticed.

  If they see what has happened, he concluded, they will kill me!

  He pressed the accelerator harder, weaving in and out of traffic as a desperate distraction until one of the men in the back yelled at him.

  “I was trying to catch up,” Singhman explained.

  “You sure they went this way?”

  He nodded vigorously.

  By the time he had changed course and reached the interchange leading to the Queens-Midtown tunnel, it was obvious the other cab had eluded them.

  “He had too much head start!” one of the men in the back muttered.

  Nahjib confirmed that the cab they were following was equipped with a two-way radio to communicate with several other cabs in a special group. They ordered him now to stop at a phone booth. The shorter of the two phoned the company whose name had been on the side of Voorster’s cab. After he’d spent five minutes claiming to be an FBI agent and making threats, the manager relented.

  “Okay! He’s goin’ to the federal courthouse in Brooklyn.”

  “Good. Tell him to wait there with his meter running. I will pay the wait time. We must talk with him, but do not tell him the FBI is involved.”

  The man hung up and jumped back in with his partner as he gave new directions to Nahjib. Nahjib turned south and sped up, blending back into the moderate parkway traffic as he glanced in the rearview mirror, horrified to see one of the men quietly screwing a silencer on a chrome-plated nine-millimeter pistol.

  Monday, March 27, 10:45 A.M.

  New York City

  The Pan Am team left the grand Federal Courthouse Building in Foley Square in a daze. the victory of the night before now reduced to nothing more than a temporary reprieve.

  Elizabeth, Creighton, Jack Rawly, and the two New York Pan Am attorneys stood on the sidewalk in some confusion, talking in low, urgent tones, while a cold breeze tugged at their overcoats and a fast-moving carpet of cumulus clouds sailed by overhead.

  “We’ve got six hours,” Elizabeth said at last. “The question is, how can we use them to maximum advantage?”

  Jack Rawly shook his head sadly, looking at his shoes, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his coat. “I don’t know.” He looked up at Creighton suddenly. “Can you think of any other possibilities? Anything to show that Intertrust is colluding with Costas?”

  Creighton sighed and shook his head as well.

  Bill Phillips, one of the two New York Pan Am attorneys, hailed two cabs to move all of them to his nearby office, where Elizabeth immediately commandeered a phone. Twenty minutes later she hung up and sat down on an office couch with Jack Rawly, as Creighton MacRae continued an animated conversation with someone in an adjacent office.

  “Jack, if we virtually empty the corporate accounts, we’ve got seventy-three million dollars. We need sixty-seven million more. Ron says there are representatives from the lessors already calling and asking the location of each aircraft, and it’s obvious they’re going to try to repossess the entire fleet instantly, wherever they are at five-oh-one P.M. So what I need to know is this: if I’m able to find enough cash, how do we handle the situation? Will these vultures take a cashier’s check, and if so, how far in advance of five P.M. do we have to place it in their hands?”

  Jack Rawly nodded. “I’ll get my entire staff on it back in Seattle.”

  “Ron authorized me to use all the cash we’ve got, since, if we don’t succeed, we’re instantly out of business anyway.”

  “How’d he sound?” Jack asked.

  “Actually, it was his wife, Louise, reading what he was typing out on his computer screen. But she says he’s doing better every day.”

  Jack grimaced and smiled. “Thank God. Ron’s a good friend, and a fighter too, as you can tell.”

  Creighton materialized beside them suddenly and settled onto the corner of the desk across from the couch. “Well, I just talked
to Jason Ing. He’s recovering slowly, he’s been conscious for the last few hours, and he said to tell you the loan is definitely authorized for the first one hundred forty million, Elizabeth.”

  “Yes!” She slapped the table and smiled.

  Creighton looked mildly alarmed and shook his head as he raised the palm of his right hand.

  “But … the bad news is that there’s no way they can transfer it in time. The earliest is noon tomorrow, Hong Kong time, which is eleven P.M. tonight here in New York.” He turned to Rawly. “Jack, can we go back to the judge and ask for six more hours?”

  Jack Rawly shook his head. “Not without more evidence. A scrap of paper, a smidgen of testimony, anything new, and I could beg for more time. Without it, we could try, but we won’t succeed, because it’s obvious these people don’t care about the money. They just want us out of business. They’ll fight any extension request to a standstill.”

  Elizabeth had been chewing on a fingernail in deep thought. She looked up at Creighton suddenly. “You know Jack Bastrop well. Would he have enough money, and enough gambling instinct, to loan us sixty-seven million dollars for twenty-four hours?”

  Creighton was silent for a few seconds as he toyed with his fountain pen, then looked up and into Elizabeth’s eyes.

  “If I ask him, he’ll do it, provided he’s got that much in cash.” He stood up.

  “I’ll give him a call right now.”

  Monday, March 27, 11:00 A.M.

  New York City

  Dieter Hoffman, the cabby driving Jacob Voorster, had heard the words “federal courthouse” and driven straight to Brooklyn. The surprise at finding another Dutchman in his cab was pleasant but short-lived; the fellow seemed preoccupied and only marginally responsive—even when he spoke to him in Dutch.

  “Are you in trouble?” Dieter asked him in Dutch after a long silence.

  “Ja,” he said, “I have lost my freedom and my job. Other than that, there is nothing wrong.”

  Dieter stayed silent and pulled up in front of the courthouse feeling sorry for the man in the back, but suddenly anxious to be rid of him. He wished him well as he accepted his fare and pointed the way to the courthouse entrance.

  Dieter looked at his watch as he set his meter to the waiting position. He would probably have to wave off a half-dozen prospective fares while he waited for the incoming fare his partner had assigned him, but it was so rare to be asked to wait that he was curious and couldn’t refuse.

  Once inside the courthouse, Jacob stuck his head in several offices, asking for the court where the Pan Am matter was going on. Each bored or harassed employee whose eyes he caught motioned him wearily to yet another office. Eventually he reached the office of the chief clerk.

  “Oh, the Pan Am matter on TV a while ago? I was watching that. You’re in the wrong place. That was the Southern Federal District Court of Appeals, on the sixteenth floor of the Foley Square courthouse. This is the Eastern District. You want to take the subway or a taxi and go into Manhattan.” The clerk saw confusion in Jacob Voorster’s eyes.

  “Hold on, I’ll write it down. Take a cab, ’cause the cabby can find it for you.”

  The squeal of brakes caused Dieter Hoffman to look up from his newspaper. Another cab had stopped inches from his rear bumper. It was being driven by a man with swarthy features whose two fares were spilling out of the backseat and moving in his direction.

  Both of the men appeared at his driver’s window as he rolled it down.

  “Did you just drop off a man named Jacob Voorster?”

  Dieter nodded before thinking.

  “Which entrance did he take?” the taller man asked with obvious menace. The man had cold eyes, Dieter noticed, cold and hateful.

  “You owe me waiting time, you know,” Dieter replied weakly.

  A twenty-dollar bill was tossed unceremoniously through the window and fluttered into Dieter’s lap like a snide insult.

  But it was money, nevertheless.

  “The main entrance—there.” He pointed in the distance at the building.

  “That’s all. You can go,” the shorter man said.

  Dieter made a show of changing his meter to “off duty.” as the two men stepped back by the rear bumper of his car and lapsed into German, in which Dieter was completely fluent. Their words chilled him.

  “We can’t kill him in a federal courthouse. There are guards with guns there. I’m not even sure we can get our guns in there. They use security screening,” the tall man said.

  “You take my gun, then. I’ll go through any security they have and find Voorster, and get him to come out the same entrance. We’ll get him back here and find another place to dispose of him.”

  Dieter tried to look engrossed in his paper as the gun changed hands, the transaction visible in his rearview mirror.

  Jacob got out of the elevator on the ground floor, just as another elevator door closed next to him. He reread the directions. It would be easier, the clerk had told him, to cross the main avenue to the east to catch a cab into Manhattan. He headed for the other exit now, pulling his overcoat around himself more tightly against the cold wind as he reached the curb and looked back.

  He saw two taxis waiting on the opposite side of the building where he had arrived, and noticed one of them suddenly race away. There were also taxis streaming by on Adams, the main street he was facing, all of them headed toward Manhattan as the clerk had said.

  He turned and walked briskly toward the crosswalk.

  Dieter negotiated the next intersection and then turned north on Adams toward the bridge, driven by the urgent need to put distance between himself and the killers at the courthouse. He had the number of the other cab, and had relayed that as well.

  The image of a tall man in an overcoat with a briefcase shot by on his left as Dieter passed the crosswalk.

  It was Jacob Voorster!

  Dieter pulled across two lanes of traffic toward the curb. The maneuver was met by the sound of squealing brakes, honking horns, and a few shouted obscenities.

  Voorster looked up, but didn’t understand. Dieter opened the door and yelled at him, relieved when Voorster broke into a trot and finally reached his cab.

  “Get in! Don’t ask why, just do it!” He’d said it in Dutch, not realizing he had lapsed out of English.

  They were halfway across the bridge to Manhattan before Dieter finished blurting out the story, noticing the haunted look on Jacob Voorster’s face as he sat forward in the backseat and faced the fact that someone had been hired to kill him.

  “You want me to take you to the police? I think that’s best.”

  “No. I must go to this address.”

  Dieter looked down at the slip of paper.

  “Another courthouse?”

  “You took me to the wrong one,” Jacob told him evenly. “I should be angry with you, but perhaps you have saved my life.”

  “I’ll save it again, Mr. Voorster. Don’t go to the courthouse. Go to the police!”

  Jacob Voorster shook his head. In his mind, there was a short-range problem and a long-range problem. Pan Am’s assistance was the key to getting his job and his reputation and freedom back. Without them, the short-range problem of being stalked by hired killers seemed immaterial.

  He checked his watch, which had been reset to New York time.

  It was 11:40 A.M. With any luck, the Pan Am officers would still be there.

  Monday, March 27, noon

  Manhattan

  The midtown law offices of Jamison, Reed, Owen, and Phillips had become Pan Am’s de facto war room. Elizabeth called another impromptu conference after finishing a call from Jeremy Ing in Hong Kong. Creighton, too, had just finished a round of calls to Jack Bastrop. Both of them were looking grim as Jack Rawly joined them with the news that an attempt to talk Intertrust Bank into postponing the deadline six more hours had been rudely rejected.

  “I even used the argument,” Jack began, “that since the minute we shut down they lose
perhaps a hundred million, so their unwillingness to wait a few hours is conclusive evidence that they don’t care about getting their money back. What they’re determined to do is ruin us, which validates the allegations we’ve already made.”

  “What was the reaction?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I was talking with Moscowitz. He’s convinced his client is blameless, and that they just want to cut their losses. He says I’d be laughed out of court with that argument, and he may be right.”

  Jack sat heavily in an office chair and looked at them sadly. “I know it’s there. I know that somewhere, almost within our reach, there is some piece of paper, some testimony, some evidence we could thrust in the faces of those three judges that would save the day, and it’s driving me crazy that I don’t know where to look, or whom to call.”

  Creighton raised a finger. “I am right, am I not, that all you need is evidence that the money transfers to Intertrust from Hong Kong were not arm’s-length transactions?”

  Jack nodded. “I need to show that those payments, and the revolving loan to Pan Am, were all part of a plot to get Pan Am dependent, like a drug addict, on money that could be yanked away at the appropriate moment. They could call the loan any time they wanted, because of that stupid loan agreement we signed, but what they had to be sure of was that we couldn’t repay it when they called it. I’m convinced this whole thing has been a masterful plot to eliminate us as a competitor, and there is some company out there other than ITB or Intertrust or Fairchild or Costas orchestrating all of it.” He sighed deeply. “But without evidence, they’re going to win. I think we’d better face it.”

  Elizabeth looked at Creighton, hoping for another lifebuoy, but he shook his head. “Jack Bastrop is worth ten times what we need, Elizabeth, but the most he could put together in the next few hours would be thirty-five million, and the penalties and interest it would cost to break that free is steep. He’ll do it if you need it, but it still leaves us short by thirty-two million.”