Flight 19

by Grant Finnegan

  Dave managed to move his feet. He shook his head free of the thoughts of the last couple of weeks. At any moment, the door in front of him would slowly open. Christ—his heart was pounding so hard against his chest he wondered if it were going to break through. He felt a strange cocktail of overwhelming emotions: he was nervous beyond anything he had ever felt before, and more excited than at any other moment in his life.

  D.C. had been there when his two children came into the world, and as time slowed down now like he was in a scene from the Matrix movies, it almost felt the same—Emily was coming into the world again.

  Dave closed his eyes for only two seconds, and breathed in deeply through his nose. At that very moment, every hair follicle on his neck, shoulders, and arms tingled, as if a breeze of cold air had brushed against his face.

  “Dad!”

  He opened his eyes, and they did something they had never done before—flooded with tears.

  Emily ran to him, and as their eyes met she burst into tears herself and launched herself at him, nearly sending him to the floor.

  Father and daughter cried openly for what seemed like minutes. They held each other not caring how they looked to those around them.

  Many stifled sobs and tears themselves. Soon they and those who followed them would be repeating for the same scene.

  Nearly everyone else in the room, in those few moments, was overcome by the intoxicating and almost contagious flood of emotions coming from the two surviving members of the Collins family.

  Everyone but Charles Lewinson.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Charles’s dark brown eyes peered down past his rather long and pointy nose, toward the two people who only meters away were still wrapped in each other’s arms, sobbing and muttering words to each other he could not decipher. Not that he cared.

  Though he guessed they were father and daughter, he still muttered to himself, “get a room,” quietly enough to make sure he was the only one who heard. He’d seen Dave Collins earlier while his wife’s AFOA counselor had been dribbling on about how his wife was coping, and imagined that if the guy could have heard his comment, he might comfortably knock Charles’s front teeth out. He had the build for it.

  Speaking of teeth, Charles’s set of choppers was worth about 30 grand.

  Lewinson’s wealth aside, one of his friends once said that only an idiot the size of the Sydney Opera House would have had so much gold stuck into his mouth. All his fillings were 22-karat, and there were plenty. But more than half the cost was in his high-grade porcelain false teeth. Those front teeth must have come from Queen Elizabeth’s dinner plates, for fuck’s sake.

  Nothing sitting in your mouth should have cost that much. But Charles was rich, and he was vain. His sparkling teeth and large eyes may have been somewhat acceptable to anyone who cared about looks as much as he did, but the rest of him lacked natural beauty. His tall frame sat uncomfortably between skinny and too skinny. Even the best-tailored suit with padded shoulders couldn’t disguise the lightness of his figure.

  His face was often gaunt, and his lips were lifeless and thin, much like his eyebrows, which he had meticulously plucked once a month. If he went more than a couple of months without this facial maintenance, it would look as if two hairy caterpillars had fallen asleep above his eyes. His dark brown hair was short and knotty, impossible to keep neat despite his combing it many times a day, and was capped off with two small, rather childlike ears.

  What Charles Lewinson lacked in looks, he made up for in the ability to create a facade of charm, which he wore like a mask for just about every waking moment of his life.

  And the guy was smart. He had multiple degrees, with an MBA thrown in for good measure, and was shrewd with his investments. He had started his internet business at just the right time, at the dawn of the World Wide Web. Australia, like everywhere else, couldn’t get enough of it.

  Melanie Molloy met Charles Lewinson in the Australian summer of early 2004. Her law firm had been representing one of Chalew IT Holdings’ fiercest competitors, who, having failed to find an investor to fund their latest expansion plans and with their cash reserves all but gone, was trying to negotiate a fair price for Lewinson to buy them out.

  Melanie, heading up the beleaguered firm’s legal team, had on occasion nearly come to blows with Chalew’s lawyer during the protracted negotiations. When progress had stalled, Charles Lewinson stepped in one Friday night and asked to speak to Melanie in person.

  Although they had never met, Charles had heard about Melanie before. She was revered in Sydney’s legal fraternity for two reasons: her remarkable good looks and her reputation for being one seriously focused and successful woman. She was in demand throughout Australia, and was, just by herself, one of the reasons her firm was flat out and commanding a top rate for its services.

  Charles had turned on his charm when they first met. Melanie, typically good at smelling a rat, either chose to ignore the telltale signs of a con-artist or was blindsided by his eyes and smile. She knew the deal was close to being done, so in the early hours of the Saturday morning, was successful in throwing some of her own charm Charles’ way, and closing the negotiations and the sale of her client to Chalew IT Holdings.

  Charles, a bachelor for most of the previous decade and already very wealthy, had been unexpectedly smitten by the successful lawyer. For her part, Melanie had been single a few years, having divorced her previous husband for his alcoholism, after failing dismally in her repeated attempts to get him dried out.

  Within four months of their first late-night business meeting, Charles and Melanie were openly dating.

  As she got to know Charles, Melanie learned that while he wasn’t the world’s most attractive man, funnily enough, he wasn’t a bad shag. And he seemed to treat her well.

  Also, though this was public knowledge, he had enough money for them both to live very comfortably for the rest of their lives. Two years later, Melanie had moved into Charles’s Point Piper mansion, which was small—as far as mansions went—but nevertheless opulent, and realized for the first time that she’d consider marrying the shmuck if he ever asked.

  Sure enough, just over two years later, Melanie became a Lewinson. It had all gone well for another year or so until Charles started getting a little agitated by her increasing workload and overseas travel. He had argued with her for some time that she didn’t need to work anymore, and even mentioned the subject of offspring. When they had discussed children before they were married, Melanie had thought she’d made it clear that she was focused on her career and not especially interested in being a mother. True, she had possibly made it seem like she wasn’t totally closed to the idea, but he hadn’t directly expressed a wish to be a father, either. They’d left the subject hanging, she thought, with the understanding that children were unlikely, if not impossible. And she had considered motherhood; it was just that after that consideration, her decision was—no.

  From there, the rift between them had grown slowly but surely, until their antipathy had come to a head a little more than a year before Flight 19 disappeared. On returning to Sydney from a long and exhausting trip to London, Charles had finally shown Melanie his other side.

  It was the day before Christmas, 2017, and Melanie had just walked in the front door. It was late, and she realized that Charles had been doing two things: drinking, and fuming about her—yet again—not having been there. In the ensuing argument, Charles threw a vase Melanie’s mother had given them straight into the 100-inch flat-screen television on the wall, destroying both items. Then, to make matters much worse, he slapped Melanie hard in the face. Not good, Charles.

  So, that Christmas Day, he was alone in his mansion from sunrise to sunset. Melanie spent the day with her mother and two sisters on the other side of Sydney Harbor.

  Once she was far enough away from Charles to calm herself, she realized that the charm he had laid on her for the past few years had been an act.

  Although she had her l
ittle habits involving white powder before meeting Charles, it had been years since she last indulged. Then, just a short while into 2018, she had snorted a few lines in New York while there on business.

  Soon the late-night trysts resumed, too, and she had relatively high suspicions that she was not the only Lewinson horizontally folk-dancing with other people.

  On her way home from her business trips, she would tell herself that this was her way of coping with the monotony that had crept into their marriage. Their relationship grew less loving as the year headed for another end, and then, months later, Charles lost her for good.

  Or so it had seemed.

  When Flight 19 vanished, Charles had mixed feelings. It’s funny—being in a relationship with someone he no longer loved, apprehension and loathing became part of his daily life. But when his wife disappeared, presumed dead, his feelings became somewhat mixed.

  So Charles Lewinson did feel a twinge of sadness, although in uncomfortable moments of introspection, it struck him that he may, in fact, have been more relieved that she was dead, or that she was no longer a threat to his insecurities, and that this left him free to mourn her.

  He pushed such thoughts aside and moved on, unburdened.

  Still, when he found out from a friend with links to Sydney’s legal fraternity, two years to the day from Flight 19’s disappearance, that Melanie had indulged in a dalliance with a young lawyer in her firm, Charles was livid.

  He wondered if he should visit the guy and smack him around the ears a little, or get someone to do it for him. In Charles’s mind, it was okay for him to sleep with someone else, but his wife doing it was entirely out of the question. Even if she was now dead. When she married him, she was supposed to remain faithful. That was his way of thinking and, with his money and power and status, he found it entirely reasonable to hold such a double standard.

  Melanie stood motionless on her side of the door. She could almost sense her husband standing on the other side, and wondered how the past five years had been for him.

  For a moment she wondered if he would have met someone else and remarried, since she’d been gone for the last five years. But she discounted this; he wouldn’t have come if he had remarried, right? The AFOA would have told her he wasn’t coming (and why), and arranged for someone else to travel to Vandenberg.

  But no, Charles was here. He had not remarried. Would he have aged at all, as far as looks? The last time she saw him, he had looked a little more gaunt and pasty than usual. Presiding over a multi-million-dollar fortune could be a little stressful for some, or so it seemed.

  Melanie smiled faintly and reached for the door handle, turning it slowly and for a moment opening it to see what was on the other side. When she locked eyes with Charles, she smiled more openly and opened the door enough for her to walk through.

  Charles had taken plenty of time to rehearse the next few moments. The charm mask he had worn with her years ago returned triumphantly for another season, even though Melanie knew it was nothing but a facade—and he knew she knew.

  “Melanie.” Charles stepped forward, and as she entered the room properly, the door behind her closed. He raised his left hand, and Melanie saw that he was holding a pistol. He pulled the trigger and shot her.

  “Melanie,” he whispered a second time. Her daydream of him killing her had blinded her to reality.

  Charles had stepped forward and raised his left hand to reveal a small bunch of flowers, which he held out awkwardly, wondering if she would take them.

  “Charles,” she whispered back, leaning in and kissing him lightly on the cheek. With other people in the room looking at them, she felt a little awkward, and was not, in any case, a big fan of public displays of affection at the best of times.

  Melanie sensed that the grin Charles had parked across his face was a struggle to keep up, and was at risk of inverting and turning into a snarl at any moment. The temperature in the room was already cool, but Melanie sensed an even colder breeze coming off Charles, as if he had just stepped out of a walk-in freezer.

  From talking among themselves, and from their counseling, all of the passengers expected that their reunions might be emotionally and mentally taxing, maybe even downright awkward. Even if they were meeting a husband or wife, the counselors insisted that the first few moments were likely to be “strange.”

  “Guilt” was another word that the counselors had used frequently. As they spoke with all 210 of the passengers and crew, they wanted to make sure that none fell into the dark trap of blaming themselves for what had happened, and whatever had befallen them and their loved ones as a result, in the past five years. Melanie thought about those conversations in those split seconds, as she studied her husband.

  He almost seemed to be squinting at her.

  Although she had a veneer of titanium confidence, in the deepest recesses of her mind there was a hint of insecurity. Could Charles have…?

  She and Charles were thinking about the same person.

  As Charles led her out the front doors into the SUV that waited to whisk them back to LAX and Charles’s private jet, she wondered how long it would be before the two words came spilling out of his mouth.

  As it turned out, there were three.

  “Kevin. Fucking. Brewster.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The AFOAs took possession of 250 cell phones within the first 30 minutes of the Pacific International flight entering Hangar 19. Although many protested, the AFOAs argued it was for the sake of national security.

  It was the only time they used a slightly heavy hand with the passengers and crew, taking a somewhat aggressive tone regarding terrorism and the like. This being the first instance of a missing plane reappearing five years later, they were in uncharted territory.

  The passengers and crew were also advised, within the first few minutes of leaving the plane, that their phones would not have worked anyway: a communication-blocking system was active within the hangar.

  In fact, only two phones from the 250 confiscated were still connected to their original services. The others, as you would expect, had long been disconnected by grieving loved ones, or due to unpaid bills. In hindsight, the AFOAs were glad they mentioned the comms-blocking system to the passengers and crew. It was far easier, in the beginning, than explaining the real reason no one’s phone was working.

  And you may ask why even two of these phones were still active. The belonged to people whose spouses had not been on the flight and who, broken-hearted, could not bring themselves to disconnect the phones. One of these passengers had a wife, the other a husband, and five years since the disappearance, they still held on to hope that one day, their own phone would ring and their long-lost partner would be on the other end.

  There had nearly been three such phones, in fact. Dave Collins had kept Emily’s connected right up until the day after what would have been her twenty-eighth birthday, only three months before the day of their eventual reunion.

  The AFOA had made agreements with the world’s largest media organizations. In exchange for agreeing not to approach any of the passengers and crew, the media outlets would be allowed behind-the-scenes access to what had unfolded at Vandenberg. There were also discussions about access to the plane, though that would certainly have to wait for the further deliberation of Pacific International and the AFOAs.

  As this was such an unprecedented event, the AFOAs had given almost presidential levels of Secret Service protection to all passengers and crew. If they were American, they would be left alone for at least six months; no media outlet of any kind would be allowed within a hundred meters of them.

  Long-range photography was also banned. A representative from a large American publicity agency would be the conduit between the passengers or crew for any media offer, in any shape or form.

  For all passengers and crew who were not US citizens or residents, the AFOAs arranged safe and protected passage to their respective countries. If any foreign passenger stayed in the US, the
y would fall under the same rules of protection and protocol that the Americans had. It did affect some passengers, who ended up staying on US soil.

  For some of these people, the reason was as simple as it was heartbreaking: they no longer had a home to go home to. And without a mental or emotional beacon to guide them anywhere, they ironically stayed close to the object that had caused them so much heartache.

  As Dave drove them away from Vandenberg, he and Emily tried to glance at each other without the other knowing, in the hopes of getting an unguarded glimpse of the other’s expression. As they caught each other in the act, their smiles broke into grins.

  “God,” Dave’s words tumbled unreadily from his mouth as if each one was frozen in a block of ice. “I cannot tell you how much I have missed you, honey.” Emily’s tears started flowing again, and she reached over and rested her hand on her father’s shoulder.

  She smiled. “Dad,” she said, and nodded her head as if to try and comprehend what had happened to her and all the other passengers, “I am so glad you’re alive!” She couldn’t think of what else to say. It was the first thing she had thought of when they were told they had been gone five years. She knew her father wasn’t that kind of man—not one to quit—but after everything she’d been through, she would hardly have blamed him if it had driven him to suicide.

  If Dave had been gone, Emily would have struggled to find the will to live herself. She would never be able to explain the feeling of exhilaration on finding out that he was alive to anyone, not even to him. She would never be able to put a price on it; there wouldn’t have been enough money on earth to make up for the loss of her father’s love and protection.