Phoenix Rising

by Nance, John J. ;

  “If we don’t repay one hundred forty million in seven days,” she explained, “they declare us in default, the lessors reclaim the airplanes, wherever they are, and we’re no longer an airline.”

  “Can we do it?” Brian asked, his voice as cold sober as she had ever heard.

  “No. Not conventionally. I mean, I’ll try my best, but …”

  “What can you do?”

  She rubbed her eyes and thought. “I’ve tried to talk to the lead banker, but he’s as cold as ice and about as responsive. I’ll keep trying to negotiate, but, Brian, I don’t think they want to negotiate. This is part of the campaign, don’t you see? I surprised them by getting the eighty-five million. They didn’t think that would happen. When it did, they had to find another way to shut us down, and this is it.”

  “Then it’s all but over,” he said.

  “Not necessarily. I could save us if I could replace the entire credit line, which was what I was getting ready to do anyway and eventually can …”

  “You need more time, then?” Brian asked.

  “Yes. If we could get that deadline extended somehow, I think I could do it.” She winced inside at floating such a pretty lie to Brian. There was no outside source of money to go to. She had already been to the one trough not contaminated by whoever their enemy was, but now the entire financial community of Planet Earth would be alerted.

  There was another line holding for Elizabeth. She ended the call with Brian and punched the appropriate button, unprepared for Creighton MacRae’s baritone voice to fill her ear. She had all but forgotten about MacRae.

  “I want you to call me back in thirty minutes from a public phone somewhere else in the city. The reason should be obvious,” MacRae said, and relayed the number.

  “Creighton, we’ve got a major crisis in progress, and I shouldn’t leave the office.”

  “You want to solve that crisis?”

  “Of course. Yes.”

  “Then do as I ask. Please.” There was a long pause before he continued. “Do you remember I warned that you might be dealing with a very powerful adversary?”

  “I remember.”

  “Turns out I was right. Call me in thirty minutes, and don’t be followed to whatever phone you use. With modern surveillance equipment, people can read lips from a thousand yards, or pick up the vibrations of your voice from the same distance.”

  She left the office almost immediately, and took the elevator to street level, walking north at a brisk pace as the cellular phone rang in her purse with Brian on the other end.

  “Elizabeth. Marvin Grade was our saboteur!”

  “What?”

  “They found plastic explosive, timing devices, false ID badges, the whole works in his house, and electronic parts stolen from United in San Francisco. They got him, honey. The son of a bitch was just too ham-handed to do things right, and he blew himself up accidentally. He wasn’t after either of us.”

  “Thank God for that,” she said, wishing she could sound more convinced. “But what was he doing there?”

  Brian was breathing hard with excitement. Even against the background noise of the traffic, she could hear him almost gasping for breath.

  “Probably getting ready to sneak into the hangar and wire up another airplane to explode in mid-flight. I feel sure this is the same character who rifled my files and got us in trouble with the FAA. This should clear away all that talk about the FAA considering a Pan Am shutdown.”

  “It doesn’t explain all the other things, though,” she said.

  “What? You mean the financial stuff?”

  “And the computer interference with reservations, and our baggage computer, and the creepy thing in New York at Eric’s apartment.”

  “Yeah, well, Grade monkeying with our airplanes at the same time someone else out there is hurting us through financial dirty tricks is probably just a spooky coincidence. We’re still obviously on somebody’s target list, but at least we know now that that somebody isn’t an assassin or an attempted mass murderer.”

  I wish I could be sure, Elizabeth thought.

  “Where are you?” he asked. “I can hear traffic.”

  “Heading up the street to a meeting,” she lied.

  “With whom?” he asked.

  It seemed an idle question, but when she decided not to mention Creighton MacRae, a small shiver of apprehension ran down her back, as if she were about to do something wrong and might be caught.

  “Just a small matter with one of the banks,” she told him, unhappy with herself that the little lies were flowing so easily from her lips.

  Elizabeth dodged a young man on a delivery-service bicycle and stepped off the curb momentarily before regaining the sidewalk.

  “I’d better go before I run into a wall talking on this thing,” she told him, promising to check in later.

  Seattle was radiant beneath clear blue skies, but in her mind the city had already begun to fade at the same rate as Pan Am’s prospects. The thought of a happy and stable life in Seattle with Brian and Pan Am had seemed like a distant dream back on Cape Cod as she had stared westward and wondered whether to accept Ron Lamb’s offer. Her relationship with Brian had seemed ethereal and uncertain, but the closer she got to Seattle, the more real it had promised to be.

  Now she caught herself thinking about Eric in New York, wondering whether she should tell him to cancel the sale of her partnership. She remembered all too clearly the disastrous night in the new condo with Brian. A sudden suffocating pall of sadness draped itself over her determination, as if defeat were inevitable. Returning to Manhattan would be a loser’s retreat, but where else could she go?

  Elizabeth realized she had come to a halt in the middle of the block, and several people were trying not to stare. She folded the phone and put it away as she resumed walking, making certain no one was tailing her.

  She found the perfect pay phone in a back alcove in the Four Seasons Hotel—out of sight, out of earshot, and out of the mainstream.

  MacRae answered immediately.

  “Can you meet me this afternoon in Vancouver?” he asked.

  “I … suppose so. Why not Seattle?”

  “You’re being watched in Seattle. Even if you got away, you could be spotted again.”

  “Watched? You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Elizabeth, I’m in Houston, Texas, at the airport. I’ve got an old friend here who’s interested in helping. We’re flying up there in his jet in a few minutes. I’ve arranged for a financier from Hong Kong to meet us in Vancouver as well. Incidentally, I’m aware of what your president did last Friday. While he’s correct that the interests of the three major airlines are involved, they’re not responsible.”

  “I don’t understand. You mean United and—”

  “All three airlines stand to benefit greatly if Pan Am fails, but it isn’t the airlines themselves who’ve been working against your interests. Their hands are clean. Someone else is doing all this to protect their investment in the big three, someone who obviously feels you’re going to impact the comfortable cornering of the market the big three have managed under deregulation. You’ve made the mistake of becoming too successful and upsetting their neat little plan for raping the U.S. airline consumer.”

  “My God, Creighton, how do you know all this? Do you have hard proof? Do you have anything we could take to court?”

  “Not yet, but I’m certain of what I’m saying. I can’t tell you why just yet, and I can’t tell you who’s doing it. I’ll tell you more in Vancouver.”

  “Our enemy is a stockholder of all three airlines?”

  “My guess is a huge, very rich company.”

  “You don’t have a … a suspect, for want of a better word?” she asked.

  “I know what to look for, but I’ve got to find the needle-in-the-haystack financial trail through the electronic banking networks first. That’s going to take a bit of bother. In the meantime, you need money.”

  “More tha
n you know.” She filled him in on the cancellation of the revolving credit line. Creighton MacRae was silent on the other end for so long, Elizabeth began to suspect the line had gone dead.

  “Very well,” he said at last, “then we’re going to have to dance to their deadline. March twenty-seventh, you say?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Next Monday. The same day our new round-the-world service is supposed to start from New York. I suspect they timed this for maximum public-relations impact so they could seize the airplanes in front of network camera crews.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Creighton, if we had anything we could take to court about this linking the revolving debt holders with any of these dirty tricks, we could get an injunction and stop the clock.”

  “I understand that. I just don’t have the proof yet. It should be easier and quicker to get you the money to pay them off than to find enough evidence to make a court case this rapidly. As I warned you last week, people at that level are very good about covering their tracks.”

  “If it’s a stockholder common to each airline, shouldn’t the name show up pretty easily by examining their stockholder lists?”

  “We’ve already looked,” Creighton responded. “No one company or name shows up substantially on all three, and that wouldn’t be a very smart way for them to do it, in any event. What I suspect they’ve done is to purchase a large amount of common voting stock of each airline. Then they scatter it in the hands of many small dummy holding companies that are all, in turn, owned by the single large company. It could take weeks of digging to ferret out such a clandestine ownership chain, and it might be impossible to uncover—unless we get a lucky break.”

  “You feel lucky, I hope?” she asked without a tinge of humor.

  His reply was almost sarcastic.

  “I always hope for luck, dear lady, but I never depend on it. The bottom line is this: I don’t know who the ultimately responsible company is, but it’s very powerful. If you expect to refinance that revolving line, you’re going to have to do so in complete secrecy. That’s what I’m trying to arrange.”

  “When do you want me to be in Vancouver?”

  “First let’s deal with the method of getting you there without uninvited guests tagging along. Hire a car and drive. Don’t fly. If you talk to an airline, they’ll pick your name up in the reservations computer in a second. Use some disorganized, computer-poor, second-level hire-car company. Just walk up. Don’t make a reservation, and for heaven’s sake, don’t tell anyone at your office.”

  He gave her the rendezvous address in Vancouver and rang off. They would meet in the Tai Pan Suite of the Delta Court Hotel at 6:00 P.M.

  25

  Monday, March 20

  Seatac Airport

  Captain Dale Silverman had been the only Pan Am employee to get a good look at the man who’d apparently sabotaged Clipper Forty’s electronics in Denver on March 10. The description he’d later given the FBI fit the late Marvin Grade like a glove. Silverman had been on a layover in Tokyo when he heard the news of Grade’s death from an inbound Pan Am pilot. Back home at last, the Pan Am captain stood at the bulletin board in the pilot’s lounge at Seatac Operations, intensely scanning a clipping about Marvin Grade’s demise—a story containing a picture the local newspaper had obtained from Grade’s ex-wife in New Jersey. Grade, it reported, was a disappointed job-seeker who’d stalked the new Pan Am with murderous intent, and sabotaged two Pan Am aircraft.

  There was only one thing wrong.

  Silverman removed the clipping and walked straight to Brian Murphy’s office, finding the chief pilot behind his desk.

  “Brian, you got a minute?”

  “Of course, Dale. What’s up?”

  “You’ve seen this picture?” Dale Silverman carefully placed the clipping on the desk in front of Brian and pointed to the face in the photograph.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Brian, this is not the man I saw in Denver!

  Monday, March 20, evening

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  Elizabeth accelerated across the Cambie Bridge and into the heart of Vancouver, her attention momentarily lost in the sheer magnificence of the scene before her.

  Beyond the frieze of downtown structures, a carpet of twinkling lights climbed the north shore of Vancouver’s harbor beneath an indigo sky as the last vestiges of orange and red disappeared to her left over the craggy outline of Vancouver Island. At sundown, the premier metropolis of western Canada transformed itself with magical synergy into a rare and exquisite blend of manmade and natural beauty, and to Elizabeth—having grown up just to the south, in Bellingham—it was always like coming home.

  There was a single parking spot left on the street near the hotel. Elizabeth took it gratefully, locking the car and pulling her briefcase from the trunk—surprised when the routine act suddenly brought back the horror of Friday night.

  With three hours on the road from Seattle to think, the elusive memory she’d searched for over the weekend returned. The doomed man in the old Chevy had been in the process of getting out when she last saw him. Somehow that seemed significant. She would call Brian later and relay the information—though it probably meant nothing.

  A gaunt young man with pronounced Asian features and a distinct Chinese accent answered the door of the Tai Pan Suite and introduced himself as Jason Ing from Hong Kong. Creighton MacRae had already arrived with Jack Bastrop, the owner of the three-engine Falcon 50 business jet that had carried them up from Texas in a four-hour flight. Both men got to their feet to greet her.

  She wasn’t prepared for Jack Bastrop. He stood well over six feet tall, but the physically intimidating effect of his barrel chest and heavily jowled round face became even more pronounced when he extended a huge, beefy hand to Elizabeth, shaking hers with shocking gentleness. His voice, too, was subdued. He spoke in deep, rumbling tones.

  “Delighted to meet you, Miss Sterling,” he said, relaxing her with a friendly smile.

  Creighton’s handshake in turn was proper. But it was not businesslike, and she realized he had lingered a few seconds with her hand in his. She refused to let herself acknowledge the warmth his touch aroused—the same feeling that had shocked her in Scotland.

  “It’s good to see you, Creighton,” she said, managing her voice.

  Creighton motioned them all to the large couch. Elizabeth sat next to Jack Bastrop as Creighton took a flanking chair closest to her and leaned forward earnestly.

  “In brief, Jack is the man who helped me when no one else on the planet would consider it. In the end, we didn’t succeed in keeping the airline alive, but—”

  Bastrop raised his hand to silence Creighton, and finished the sentence for him. “We didn’t succeed, Miss Sterling, because the consortium against Creighton was far too well organized. I, too, have a score to settle, whether your attacker is the same group or not. This is not altruism, of course. I expect to make a profit on anything I do for you. But I’m equally incensed, and equally eager to block international bullying.”

  “Please, call me Elizabeth,” she told him. “You … think there’s a chance I’m fighting the same company?”

  Jack Bastrop looked at Creighton MacRae as if to ask how much he should tell her. MacRae nodded.

  “Elizabeth,” Bastrop began, “does the name Irwin Fairchild ring a bell?”

  She knew she looked shocked, but there seemed no reason to hide it. “I should have known that worm was involved!” Elizabeth said through clenched teeth. “I saw him in New York last week, and yes, I know the felonious little snake all too well.”

  Jack Bastrop explained that Fairchild had been the operative who spent more than a year engineering the financial isolation of Creighton MacRae’s start-up airline in Britain.

  “He was working,” Bastrop continued, “for want of a better description, under contract to a group of corporations in the U.K., France, and Germany. When Creighton finally won his lawsuit, it was against that consortium, b
ut Fairchild escaped liability. Yet, he was the dirty-tricks facilitator—the financial trigger man, so to speak.”

  “So he’s doing the same thing to us, and for the same people?” she asked.

  “No,” Creighton interjected. “We’re sure it’s not the same group. But we were equally sure walking in here that Fairchild is involved. You’ve just confirmed it.”

  She filled in the details of the New York encounter, and Fairchild’s obvious interference with the loan she had been trying to arrange.

  “By the way, Jason knows Fairchild from an even closer perspective. Fairchild does a lot of his money laundering through a bank in Hong Kong, a competitor of Jason’s called the International Trading Bank, or ITB.”

  Jason Ing had disappeared before they sat down. He returned now, and sat opposite Creighton on Elizabeth’s left. A bartender appeared quietly to take drink orders, and just as quietly departed to fill them. The background was filled with the sounds of a Vivaldi concerto.

  Creighton spread a hand-drawn chart on the table. “Elizabeth, I want to get to the subject of securing Pan Am enough money to replace your five-hundred-million credit line, but first let me give you a clear picture of what I believe you’re facing, and why.”

  “In our opinion,” Jack Bastrop added.

  “Right,” Creighton agreed, turning to Jason Ing. “Jason, this is for your benefit, too.” He looked back at Elizabeth. “Jason represents a substantial investment house in Hong Kong that has never held any airline interests.” He pointed to the names of United, American, and Delta along the bottom of the chart. “Okay. U.S. deregulation was an unmitigated disaster, of course. The idiot idea of zero government control of what is essentially a public utility destroyed the U.S. airline industry. It also created opportunities for fast-buck artists like Irwin Fairchild and Nick Costas and others to steal billions and leave old-line airlines like Columbia Air in ruins. What’s left are the big three and a few successful niche carriers, like Southwest and Alaska. Now, Elizabeth, when your Congress finally awoke and decided to block foreign takeovers of U.S. airlines, that frustrated a powerful group of investors in Europe and Asia who had been planning to cash in on the lucrative U.S. airline market. That’s the major part of this story, because those chaps didn’t go away. They’ve now secretly secured a huge interest in each of the big three airlines—or so we believe—and you’ve become a threat to their plans.”