Miller turned a page. The paper rattled sharply in the dry air. "Sterling hasn't been down in a maintenance bay since the buyout closed. But his Delaware counsel brought four locked aluminum cases into the forward cargo compartment under an armed courier manifest twenty minutes ago. They bypassed the airline's standard hazmat logging. They stamped them as privileged executive property."
I stared at the back of the seat in front of me. The plastic was scuffed with years of shoe heels and luggage abrasions. "What's in the cases, Tom?"
"The physical deed registry for the Everett and Indianapolis maintenance facilities," Miller said, his voice dropping into the low mechanical rumble of the floor beneath us. "The board didn't buy those facilities in the reorganization, Arthur. Your father’s family partnership leased them to the operating company on thirty-year paper. That lease expires at midnight tonight. Sterling thinks if he deposits the physical instruments with a foreign escrow bank in London before business hours on Monday, the operating company can claim adverse possession through the international registry."
He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a small brass maintenance key stamped with an anchor emblem, and slid it beneath my blue voucher on the tray.
"The forward belly hold access hatch is behind the mid-galley galley cart stanchion," Miller whispered. "The cabin pressure equalization valve in the floor uses this bypass. But the master circuit breaker in the cockpit has to be live. If Sterling figures out why you didn't leave the gate when Vance tore your pass, he'll have the flight deck lock the lower deck access from the forward panel."
Forward in the cabin, the heavy armored cockpit door pulled shut with a sharp, pneumatic thud. The chime rang twice through the ceiling speakers. The captain's voice came over the public address system, smooth and distant: Cabin crew, prepare doors for departure and cross-check.
Outside my small, scratched window, the ground tug hooked onto the nose gear with a heavy metallic clunk that rattled up through the airframe. The jet bridge began to peel back from the silver skin of the plane, exposing the rain-streaked blacktop of Gate B12.
On the bulkhead monitor four feet in front of Row 31, the digital cabin manifest blinked, flickered, and then wiped clean. My name disappeared from the passenger roll. In its place, the glowing blue display showed only an empty grey block: SEAT 31F: VACANT / CARGO EQUALIZATION OVERRIDE.
Sterling hadn't just downgraded my seat. He had instructed dispatch to scrub my physical presence from the digital flight log before the wheels even left the tarmac. If this airplane crossed the ocean, according to every commercial database in North America, I had never walked down that jet bridge.
I picked up the brass key from the tray table and closed my fingers around it until the notched edges cut into the meat of my palm.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
"They don't know the hydraulic lines run right beneath our feet," Miller said, his lips barely parting as the cockpit chimed once to signal ten thousand feet. "When your father laid out the specs for the extended-range retrofit in ninety-four, he insisted on mechanical cable redundancy for the lower cargo bays. Sterling replaced the avionics bay switches with digital bus relays three months ago to cut weight, but the physical bypass cable for the forward freight door still terminates right behind the galley waste compactors."
"Where did the couriers put the four cases?" I asked.
"Pallet Seven," Miller said. "Directly forward of the wing box. Right under First Class. The Delaware lawyers think the cargo hold is an empty steel drum. They don't know the forward bin has an auxiliary observation port cut into the inspection tunnel. If those cases are sealed under an unmanifested diplomatic waiver, the fire suppression system has to be manually isolated from the service panel. If it isn't, the lithium batteries in their tamper seals violate federal air freight protocols the second we clear Canadian airspace."
The seatbelt sign chimed off above our heads. A soft wash of white cabin lights illuminated the coach aisle as passengers began reaching for blankets and water bottles.
I slipped the brass key into my trousers pocket, stood up, and stepped out into the aisle. My knees ached from the cramped angle of the bulkhead bracket. In Row 28, an off-duty mechanic nodded once toward the carpet, deliberately avoiding my gaze, but his hand moved aside to give my hip clearance. They all knew the flight numbers. They all knew who owned the certificate number stenciled on the fuselage frame behind the lavatory mirror.
I walked forward against the draft of the recirculation vents.
At the mid-cabin galley, the heavy blue privacy curtain hung drawn across the food prep stations. I pulled the seam aside and stepped into the narrow space.
Evelyn was standing beside the beverage trolley, checking the plastic seals on the liquor canisters with a felt-tip pen. When the curtain clicked shut behind me, she dropped the pen into her apron pocket and stepped directly between me and the forward curtain that led into the business class cabin.
"You can't be up here, Arthur," she said, keeping her voice low beneath the roar of the air ducts. "Sterling’s junior partner came back to the galley three minutes after takeoff to ask if anyone had seen a passenger without a printed boarding pass. He had an iPad with the live gate manifest. Your seat is officially listed as an empty maintenance block."
"The maintenance block gives me operational access to the lower bay," I said.