When he entered the lobby twenty minutes later, the aroma of breakfast wafting from the restaurant nauseated him. Food was the farthest thing from a mind wholly occupied by the impending agony of dealing with hours aboard an airplane bearing Meridian’s logo. Even their emblem on the ticket folder had roiled his stomach, and he thought again about canceling the trip. But it would be too late for his host to find a replacement cardiologist. He had to go.
The ride from the hotel on the north side of the huge airport to Terminal 4 was a numbing series of tunnels and traffic. Brian followed the others out of the bus at the other end, wondering how something as simple as the name of the airline on the terminal entrance could create such instant stress.
Inside the Meridian logo was everywhere. It pressed in on him, mocking him, fanning an incendiary reaction he knew had passed the illogical. It took a Herculean effort to stand in their line and present their ticket to their personnel without coming apart. Three times he had to return to the TV monitor to read the number of his departure gate, a necessary bit of information his mind refused to retain. After the third try he wrote it down, but the piece of paper with the gate number instantly became as offensive as the fact that Meridian was still in business. He forced himself to memorize the gate number and crushed the scrap of paper to the size of a spitball, tossing it as far away as he could manage.
The gesture was seen by a police officer usually intolerant of litter in his airport, but something about the demeanor of the offender warned the officer away. There was deep anger there, and besides, the scrap of paper the man had thrown had immediately rolled under an ATM machine and disappeared.
No evidence, no offense, he concluded.
As the local passengers departing on Flight Six converged on Heathrow’s ticket counter, Meridian Station Chief James Haverston walked quickly to the head of a utilitarian stairway off the main concourse and stopped to consult his clipboard. Ancient technology the clipboard, he thought, but it got the job done. The computer rosters had come off the printer many hours before in operations, but now the job of corralling the through passengers who had just arrived from Chicago and getting them to the gate and eventually back on the aircraft would keep him unnecessarily busy. He’d begged Meridian’s brass in Denver to keep the through passengers aboard, but Heathrow authorities wouldn’t hear of it. There were merchants in the terminal waiting to separate the inbound masses from their money.
His two-way radio squawked to life with a question from one of his agents, and he raised the walkie-talkie without looking.
“Say again, please?”
“I need the through count on Flight Six, James,” a woman said, the voice low and the accent precise.
“One hundred and six through passengers to Cape Town,” he answered.
By now, he knew, far too many of those continuing passengers would be roaming Terminal 4 at will, doing progressive damage to their credit cards and the potential gross weight of the airplane by stocking up on overpriced so-called “duty-free” items they scarcely needed. Some, of course, were merely sitting like stunned cattle near the gate waiting to re-board the flight, while a lucky few from first class were being catered to in Meridian’s so-called “Regents’ Lounge.” Through the dirty windows of the lounge, the inbound Boeing 777 could be seen as a tug pulled it away to be replaced by the outbound 747, but hardly anyone noticed.
James turned to descend the stairs just as a flight attendant rounded the landing below, her well-proportioned, petite figure triggering an initial flash of pleasurable recognition as she looked up at him.
“Janie! How are you, old girl?”
Janie Bretsen trudged the last few steps to the top and hugged him briefly, giving him a tired smile when she pulled away.
“Exhausted, James,” she said with a sigh. “But it’s good to see you.”
“And, the call from crew sked?” he asked, already suspecting the answer. He’d relayed the message by radio to his agent as the jet pulled into the gate to have her call crew scheduling in Denver immediately.
“They … didn’t talk you into continuing on to Cape Town, did they?” James asked.
She shook her head and forced a short laugh. “As if you didn’t already know, Judas.”
“Janie,” he protested, trying to sound hurt. “I didn’t put them up to it. I just reported the other girl’s illness.”
“Yeah, well, it was the usual,” Janie said, adopting a whining voice. ‘Please, Janie! PLEASE! If you don’t go, we won’t be legal and we’ll have to cancel the flight, shoot the station manager, fire all the crew members, and withdraw from serving London.’”
“Dear me.” He laughed.
“Oh, they’re good, James!” she said. “At least Golden Globe—level performances for the asking.” She dropped her voice back into a feigned accent. “Janie, I promise, all you have to do is get back on board and lend your body to the cause. You’ll have a first-class seat. You can sleep! We’ll be legal, and you get more money.”
“Who’s senior on the outbound leg?” James asked.
He heard her sigh again, this time with greater fatigue as she ran her hand through her chestnut-colored hair, fluffing it slightly.
“Our favorite Machiavellian firebrand. Judy Jackson.”
“Good heavens! After all the troubles you’ve had with her personally?”
“Well, that’s ancient history, but she’s still never forgiven me for suspending her.”
“When you were the Denver manager of flight attendants?”
“Temporary manager of flight attendants. After that, I had to go rob little old ladies and abuse children to regain my self esteem.”
“I’m always surprised when she shows up here. I keep thinking the company’s going to can her. I’ve never met a meaner woman.”
Janie’s hands migrated to her hips as she cocked her head. “Why would they can her, James? You guys in management won’t tell Denver what she’s really like out here, so she goes on reducing flight attendants to quivering wreckage, alienating passengers, and pissing off pilots at a furious rate.”
“She is good at it,” he said.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t say ‘pissing off.’ Isn’t ladylike.”
“But, you’re bang-on right about Jackson.”
“Well, anyway … thanks, old friend,” Janie said, patting his arm. “If I survive two legs with Mistress Jackson and her chamber of tortures, I’ll see you day after.” Janie moved past him heading back to the gate as James watched her go in mild alarm. When they’d first met, Janie was filled with the energy of an eighteen-year-old with the face and body to match. She’d been a devastatingly attractive twenty-six at the time, her petite, perfectly proportioned figure making her seem at a distance like a well-dressed child until one drew closer and discovered the very capable woman within. Janie had always had an elegance about her that made her sexy and desirable—an allure that had propelled them into a brief affair many years ago, a six-month-long delight marred by his neurotic concern that his six-foot frame would eventually injure her somehow. She seemed fragile, though she was anything but.
Yet, those same years, he thought, were taking an inordinate toll on her. He could see the struggles beginning to show in her face, around the corners of her widely set eyes, and in the slight slump of her little shoulders as she trudged off to do a major favor for crew schedulers who, he was sure, had already completely forgotten her concession.
No one but a close friend would notice her fatigue, he thought. Janie still turned male heads in waves, like a stiff breeze through a wheat field. But he could see the damage.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HEATHROW AIRPORT, LONDON
9:25 A.M. Local
The temperature had climbed to the lower seventies by eight o’clock, portending another scorching summer day for the U.K. in the age of global warming.
Three Meridian gate agents—all of them British citizens increasingly alarmed at the decline of their American employer—took up positions at the pod
ium in the gate area and began shuffling the stacks of paper and endless strings of computer entries needed to fuel a 365-passenger airplane with the human cargo that produced airline revenue. The continuation of Meridian Flight Six to Cape Town, South Africa, was a thrice-weekly affair, but seldom were they as full as this morning. Two hundred eighteen people would be joining the original one hundred and six from Chicago in the maw of the uncomfortably warm boarding lounge, many of them eyeing the door to the jetway as if boarding normally began with the crack of a starting pistol.
Several hundred feet down the concourse, Martin Ngume replaced a pay-phone receiver and sat in silence for a few moments trying to part the curtains of fatigue that were clouding his mind. Once more he had asked the owner of the little store in Soweto to take a crowbar, walk the quarter mile down the road, and pry the padlock off his mother’s door. “Please, Joe, please be sure she is not inside and injured or something.” At last Joe had promised to do so. But there would be no chance to call again until Cape Town. There were satellite phones on the plane, but they were far too expensive.
Martin got to his feet and picked up the small valise he’d carried aboard in Chicago, wishing London hadn’t been the destination of the American woman, Claire, who had been so sympathetic. She’d checked on him inflight several times on the way to London and knelt by his seat to talk. He felt good around her, even while drowning in worry.
“What am I to do if … if my mother is dead?” Martin had asked her somewhere in the night over the Atlantic.
“Survive,” Claire had replied. “You’ll survive, as we all have to learn to do when our parents die.” She had patted his arm and he appreciated her sympathy, but he could never explain to her or to anyone how every single day living in the United States had been lived for his mother as well as himself. He had written her daily in a large, cursive handwriting, since her eyes were so bad, and mailed the journals weekly. She had written back several months ago that for the first time in her life she felt her spirit soaring free of her mean circumstances in Soweto. “I am living this wonderful experience of yours through your words, son. I am seeing and feeling and learning these things as if I, too, were a university student.” The letter had moved him to tears, and he longed for the day, not too far in the future, when he could bring her to America and show her his new world in person. He had said the same thing to a newspaper reporter who had come to the campus to research a Sunday feature on foreign students, and the resulting article had been accompanied by the picture of his mother he always carried.
Martin smiled at the memory. He’d sent her several copies but didn’t know if she’d seen them yet.
He returned to the lounge and found a seat across from a young mother and her two children, winning a weak smile from the woman as he sat down.
Karen Davidson was beyond exhausted, and with more than ten hours of flight time to go, she couldn’t let herself think about it. Her infant daughter was finally asleep again, as was Billy, who alternated between being reasonably good and marginally controllable.
Karen watched the handsome young black man as he sat across from her, and wondered again about the haunted look in his eyes. There were human stories of all kinds among the exhausted travelers and those joining them from London, but there was a special air of sadness and mystery about him.
Two of the agents bustled past, but one came back and knelt beside her.
“Are you and the kids quite all right?” she asked. The thought of asking which airline she worked for crossed her mind, but Karen suppressed it. The agent was obviously being kind, and obviously British, and obviously nothing like the hateful, uncaring Meridian personnel she’d encountered thus far.
“Thanks for asking. We’re okay.”
“Very well, then. We’ll be boarding soon.” She smiled and returned to the podium.
“Would passenger Martin Ngume kindly come to the podium?” one of the agents said over the gate area PA. “Mr. Ngume, if you are currently in the waiting area, won’t you please respond?”
Martin jumped to his feet as if scalded, his heart rate leaping into overdrive as he moved toward the ticket agent, wondering if she had information about his mother.
“I am Martin Ngume,” he said as quietly as possible.
“Oh! Smashing. We have an upgrade for you, Mr. Ngume.”
“I’m sorry … a what?”
“An upgrade to first class all the way to Cape Town.”
Martin tried to give her an appreciative smile through his confusion. “Thank you, but that’s not necessary, you know.”
“Well,” the agent said, reading a note fresh off the printer. “Do you know someone named Claire Langston?”
His smile was immediate and apparently infectious, since the agent smiled broadly in return as she waited for him to answer.
“Ah, yes. Claire. She was very kind to me coming from Chicago.”
“Well, Mr. Ngume,” the agent said, still smiling as she took his right hand and gently laid the new, gold-colored ticket envelope in his hand, “she has also been very kind to you going to Cape Town. Ms. Langston purchased the upgrade for you a little while ago at our front counter.”
With the cabin cleaners finishing up their interior preparation of the Boeing 747’s cabin and the flight attendants setting up their galleys, all that remained was a call from the lead flight attendant. It was a small, but somewhat traditional, rule with Meridian. Only the lead attendant could trigger the avalanche of boarding passengers, no matter how eager the gate agents were to empty the boarding lounge.
At the end of the jetway, lead flight attendant Judy Jackson stepped from the aircraft into the jetway to make the “ready for boarding” call, but stopped for a moment at the sight of her image. Someone had decreed that mirrors be placed in the jetways as apparent insurance against arriving passengers being confronted with an unkempt agent, thus giving the wrong image of British workers. Good idea, Judy decided. At times any woman could accidentally look like a nightmare, and even male agents could look scary with a case of jet-blasted hair and reddened eyes.
She studied her reflection for a few seconds, satisfied with what she saw: slightly fluffed, shoulder-length dark blond hair, and very few lines in her nicely tanned forty-year-old face. Her eyeliner was on just right, and she had no traces of lipstick on her teeth—the bane of her existence. She straightened her back, trying to stretch to the five-foot-seven height she always claimed.
And for what?
The thought intruded like an unexpected spark of static electricity. Her history with men was a void for the past few years, and some mornings—had there been no airline image to keep up—the nightmare look would have suited her just fine. Why try, after all? Guys didn’t seem to target her any more, no matter how fit she kept her bikini-friendly figure.
Judy leaned over and looked through the small window of the jetway into the terminal. Her latest passenger load was milling around, impatient to be scrunched into their Boeing-built aluminum tube. She glanced at her watch.
They could wait a minute more, Judy decided, as she pressed her face against the small window again and tried to catch a glimpse of the man she’d noticed a half hour before.
He was old enough to be her father, and that was the problem: he looked disturbingly like her deceased father, and the resemblance had sent cold chills down her back. Not that she ever wanted to see her father’s face again, but it—or effigies of it—kept popping up all over the world and destabilizing her whole day in ways she could never explain. As if he were watching her. As if he wasn’t through torturing her.
There! she thought to herself. The one on the left … No, that’s not him.
She made a mental note to walk the aisles after takeoff and search for the man. It was a strange obsession, she knew, and she’d exhausted three psychologist-counselors over time talking about it. She was weary of trying to answer their same question, asked in so many unimaginative ways: “Why do you obsess about such faces in the crowd?”
“If I knew that,” she’d yelled at one of them—a rotund male with a Vandyke beard—“I wouldn’t need a shrink! Right?”
There had been another instance years before that had added grease to the skids of her marriage. A face in the crowd at an airport on vacation had distracted her so profoundly she’d left her already dissatisfied husband at the gate for nearly an hour as the flight boarded. He had become increasingly frantic. She’d returned at the last second after chasing the look-alike all the way to a parking lot, but the damage had been done. Her soon-to-be ex refused to speak to her for days, and the vacation collapsed in a bonfire of accusations.
But whenever the face appeared again, it compelled her attention. She had to find it and confront it and expiate it in person.
“You’re simply trying to make sure he’s still dead,” one of the psychologists had concluded, somewhat grandly.
“And for that ‘Well, DUH’ observation I’m supposed to pay you?” she’d snapped.
Judy brought her mind back to the present as she watched an agent walk to the window of the Heathrow boarding lounge and press her nose against the glass, wondering what was going on out at the aircraft.
I guess I’ve toyed with them long enough, she mused, reaching for the phone. “Okay, this is the head mama. Open the cattle chutes.”
Jimmy Roberts suppressed another huge yawn and smiled at his wife as Brenda hefted her shoulder bag and prepared to slide into the boarding line slowly snaking toward the jet-way entrance.
“What’s our row again, darlin’?” she asked.
“Twenty,” he replied, checking the boarding passes, aware they were standing beside one of the most vocal of the complaining passengers from Chicago. That whole aircraft had been filled with angry people, Jimmy knew, and it was upsetting to see so many of the same faces now as they got back on.
“You see that fellow with the computer off to the right?” Brenda asked in a whisper.
“Yeah.”
“I heard him ask a man in front of him real nice to please not recline the seat, and the guy got furious, and shoved it back so hard the computer screen snapped shut on the fellow’s hands. I thought they were going to get in a fistfight.”
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