"Pick it up," Hendricks said, his tone neither hostile nor convinced. "We're going to the station desk at Gate 14. If there's an administrative glitch with the airline's software, customer service sorts it out upstairs. You don't litigate ticket disputes inside the first-class galley."
"The flight door closes in seven minutes," I said. "If this plane pushes back with Vance's courier in that seat, the manifest record shows I never showed up to board. That triggers a failure-to-appear clause on the regional hearing docket at nine o'clock."
"Mr. Cole," Elena said, her voice completely flat as she reached out with her free hand to grip the heavy aluminum door lever. "The system says you are not on this aircraft. I am closing the cabin door."
She pulled the lever upward with a sharp, pneumatic thud. The yellow safety strap dropped into its bracket, the heavy latch engaged, and the smooth white skin of the fuselage sealed shut between us, cutting off the smell of warm cabin coffee and the sight of the man who had bought my seat with county money.
Hendricks placed a firm hand on the center of my back, guiding me up the long, rising incline of the jet bridge. Marcus walked beside us, his thumbs flying across the keyboard of a handheld company terminal.
"This doesn't make sense, officer," Marcus muttered, his screen reflecting in his glasses. "The seat went back into inventory under code VML-88. That's an administrative override reserved for municipal travel accounts. But the override was logged from terminal B-4."
"Where is terminal B-4?" I asked, looking at him as we pushed through the double doors into the brightly lit departure concourse.
Marcus stopped dead under the overhead gate monitor. The screen above our heads had already refreshed: FLIGHT 2140 TO ALBANY / STATUS: CLOSED / ON TIME.
"Terminal B-4 is the customer service supervisor's desk in the south baggage claims office," Marcus said quietly. "Nobody has logged into that workstation since the early-morning shift change at five."
"Who was on the desk at five?" Hendricks asked, stopping beside the podium.
Marcus hesitated, his gaze sliding from Hendricks's badge down to his own clipboard. He flipped the standby sheet over. On the back of the printout, scrawled in red ballpoint pen beside the flight number, was an eight-digit employee authorization number paired with a single handwritten note: HOLD 1A FOR MR. KARR / AUTHORIZED BY DIRECTOR VANCE.
"The terminal belongs to my shift lead, Greg Miller," Marcus whispered, the color draining out of his cheeks as he realized what he had just read aloud in front of a Port Authority officer. "Greg is the brother-in-law of Vance's chief operations officer."
I pulled my phone from my coat pocket and held the screen toward Hendricks. The home screen showed three missed calls from the county clerk's private line in Albany, each timestamped between 5:45 and 6:10 this morning, accompanied by a single text message sent twelve minutes ago from an unknown number: Better check your gate, Arthur. Weather in Albany looks bad for people who travel alone.
Hendricks stared at the text message, then at the closed jet bridge door behind us. The low, rising whine of jet engines outside the reinforced plate glass announced that Flight 2140 was already pulling away from the pushback tug.
"Marcus," Hendricks said, unhooking the heavy microphone clipped to his left shoulder. "You and I are going down to baggage claim to pull the log off workstation B-4 right now. And Mr. Cole, you're coming with us. Don't make any phone calls."
I looked down through the glass wall at the tarmac. The regional jet was turning its nose toward the taxiway, its wingtips clearing the guidance lines. Inside row 1, behind the second oval window of the forward fuselage, a dark silhouette remained perfectly still, watching the concourse shrink into the gray morning mist.
I picked up my briefcase, gripped the leather handle until my knuckles turned white, and stepped into line between Marcus and the officer. The flight was gone, but the paper trail had just dropped its first physical name onto the counter.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
The door swung outward into the subterranean tunnel running beneath the south concourse. The air here was damp, humming with the continuous thud of tractor tugs overhead and the rattle of luggage chutes dropping hard-shell cases onto stainless steel rollers. We rounded a corner of rough cinderblock painted industrial yellow, heading toward an unmarked steel door labeled OPS BAGGAGE / LEAD AGENT.