Final Call, page 4
What do you think they mean?
Nothing. There’s no legal trouble. She flashed him a grin. You’d know, right. That’s your job!
He wagged his head from side to side in a noncommittal gesture. There could be something.
Like you said. Nothing that would show up like this. If it was the regulators, or a class action suit of some kind, we’d hear formally. Not some weird threat.
I suppose. He paused and caught her eye. But how do they know we’re in the air?
There are ways, I’m sure. Flight tracker, that kind of thing.
He didn’t look convinced, but he accepted with a nod, and turned to his seat. I guess we’ll find out.
They returned to their seats. Kevin Anderson was watching her, a thoughtful expression on his face. She didn’t like him, much. He was polite and courteous – he was highly trained in that kind of thing, coming from his private school and liberal arts college – and he never gave any hint of anything but the utmost professionalism, but after every Thank you for your time, Jill, she heard a silent you fucking stupid woman.
And then there was the way he looked her up and down, assessing her body. He did it every time he looked at her, and she had seen him do it to every other woman he met. That afternoon, when they were returning from lunch, he’d studied Marcia’s butt as she crossed the room. It was a nice butt, for a sixty-year-old, but she didn’t think he was interested in her. It was just a reflex. She wasn’t sure he even knew he was doing it – in fact, she was sure he didn’t know – but it was so ingrained in him he had no idea, or ability to stop it.
She sat down and opened her laptop. After a moment, she pushed it away and looked out of the window. She wanted some time to think about the email Varun had shown her. It was probably nothing, but there was something about it, something that disturbed her.
It was the tone. It wasn’t threatening, it wasn’t triumphalist.
It was matter-of-fact.
And that worried her.
Marcia Fournier
She slipped the empty plastic bottle into her bag and pulled out the second one. She had drunk quite a lot already – maybe a quarter of a bottle of vodka – but she was just getting started. She glanced around; across the aisle, Varun was typing something, a frown on his forehead. Jill Stearns was staring into the distance, lost in thought. There was a vulnerability about her which she worked hard to keep hidden; at least, that was what Marcia thought. It was possible she was as tough as she presented, which was not the case for Kevin Anderson. He was a lawyer, and full of bravado, but it was all front. It made him dangerous; his insecurity left him prone to lashing out if he felt threatened, which he often did.
Behind him was Jeff Ramos. He’d been around forever, held every job. He was a veteran – some kind of special forces – and it gave him an aura. People deferred to him, whether they were his senior or not. To his left was the nurse, Mary Jo. Marcia had no idea how and why she’d ended up on the company plane, but there she was.
And then there was Chip Markham, reading a newspaper, his legs crossed at the knee. Their affair had ended abruptly; she was wounded by his sudden declaration that it was over and on many occasions she had imagined the revenges she could wreak upon him, but nothing had happened. It was imperative that the private and the professional were kept separate.
It still hurt, even though it was now a decade ago, back when her daughter was near college age and his son – who even then he rarely saw – was in his early twenties. They had both been focused on work, spending long hours in the office. It had begun when they were working on an acquisition, and, on a trip to New York, had gone out drinking after the deal was finally done.
They had drunk martinis, hers vodka, his gin. Looking back, it had been inevitable. They had both known they would end up in the same hotel room that evening, and so they had.
In a strange city, anonymous and on a high, they were different people for an evening, people who could do whatever they wanted, could allow all the anticipation and buildup to become what they had both known it would.
And then it had ended. It hadn’t made any difference to their professional relationship; if office affairs did that then there wouldn’t be many functional workplaces in the country.
Because – in her experience, at least – there were a lot of affairs. Take her, for example: she was happily married, had no intention of breaking up with Mike, but their sex life had dwindled to more or less nothing sometime in her mid-forties. She wasn’t ready to give up sex altogether, so she had found it elsewhere.
Did he know? If he’d asked, she would have told him. She didn’t want to lie, at least not about that. Drinking was another matter entirely.
But he’d never asked. And she’d never asked him.
She took the bottle from her bag and checked again to see if anyone was watching. The coast clear, she opened the second bottle, and took a sip, unseen.
That was the problem. She wanted someone to notice. She wanted someone to be watching, wanted someone to realize she had a problem, that she was drinking in secret. She had become too good at disguising it, too skilled at hiding the amount she drank. There was the bottle of vodka – pretty much odorless so perfect for secret swigs – she kept in the car. The bottle she kept in the basement. The bottle she kept in her office at home.
Mike – Marcia and Mike, M and M, always the life and soul of every party, known for the great bashes they put on every year in the run-up to Christmas – would see her settle down with a glass of white wine, sipping it slowly over an hour or two. What he didn’t see was the gulp she took after she parked in the garage and before she got out, or the two nips she bought at the gas station, or the quick shot she inhaled when she went into her office for a few minutes to ‘check on some things’. Had she told him, he wouldn’t have believed her. He didn’t drink much, so for him the idea that someone could drink a large glass of vodka – maybe a sixth of a bottle – in a minute or two, just because they needed it, would have been ludicrous. He sometimes commented on her drinking – Do you think you should have a glass every night? – but he had no idea what was really going on.
She wished he did. She wished he had worked it out, become suspicious and tracked what she was drinking. Then he could have confronted her and she could have found a way to stop. But how could he? She was far too good at hiding it. She’d had years of practice, after all.
So she was left like this. An old, hopeless drunk, who was desperate to stop but had no means of doing so.
She took another sip, then another. That was the thing with drinking: it made you hate yourself, and the only way you could get the self-loathing to stop was to drink it away.
She realized, with sudden horror, that she needed the bathroom. The jet had a small bathroom at the rear. It was cramped and not very private and people rarely used it. She could have used the bathroom in the hangar but hadn’t thought she needed to. She should have, as there was now an insistent – and growing – pressure in her bladder. She looked out of the window. Below her, mountains sloped down to a sandy beach. They’d bank left shortly, and head for Portland, Maine. She knew the route; she’d flown it many times. There was about ninety minutes to go. She’d be fine, she thought, just about.
The beach veered away to the left. She waited for the plane to follow, to make the turn for home.
It did not. It headed out over the water.
She looked up, checking if anyone else had noticed. Everyone was staring at their phone or laptop or newspaper, everyone except the nurse, who turned to meet her gaze.
Marcia looked away. A nurse could probably see the glaze in her eyes and the flush in her neck and know exactly what was causing them.
She looked out of the window again.
They should not be going this way.
It was OK. She told herself there would be an explanation. A change in the flight plan.
But it didn’t help. Even through the numbing fog of the alcohol, panic fluttered in her stomach. In a small metal cylinder thousands of feet above the Earth’s surface, anything out of order, however small, was magnified.
They should be headed north, and they weren’t.
Kevin Anderson
The nurse was sitting behind him. He could tell that at one point she’d been quite hot; the fact she was a nurse added to it. Nurse porn was one of his favorites; he’d watched so much of it that every time he was in a medical appointment he found himself fantasizing that it would end up in some kind of group sex with the nurses.
She’d come to the board meeting to pick up a check the company was donating to some hospital foundation. Stearns had made a speech about it, a look of fake concern on her face.
Our key workers were the front line in the struggle against COVID, a struggle that is ongoing, Stearns had told the assembled press, and we want to make clear our gratitude. Our people – our greatest asset – have donated over a million dollars to support the efforts of our key workers, and we have matched their donation dollar for dollar. We are honored to have a nurse, Mary Jo Fernandez, with us today to accept the check on behalf of her colleagues.
Then she had handed her the check, but Kevin could see she was not impressed, could see she was thinking if they could afford this why not thirty million? Or three hundred? Or why not get their jet to fly her and her exhausted colleagues to a beach somewhere and let them rest for a week or two?
It was too obvious this was a token gesture, something to show how socially engaged the company was, so when he had bumped into her afterwards he had asked about her travel plans.
Four o’clock flight, she said. Probably be delayed. It’s chaos, these days.
Why don’t you come back on the jet?
It was meant to show that he was different, he was sincere in caring about others. He’d do something practical to help her. It was an added bonus that it felt good, that he got to be the medieval knight helping out the fair maiden, the wealthy Victorian gentleman bestowing a gift on a lowly maid.
She’d replied, Is that OK? and he’d nodded. There’s a spare seat. It’s like a car. You just hop in. And now here she was. On a private jet.
He’d tell Katie about it later. Make her see what a great guy he was – and give her a hint of what he could offer her, if she played the game. Another benefit.
He sat back and picked up his phone. Still no message; still no Wi-Fi. This was becoming annoying. The pilot had the cockpit door closed – normally it was open – but if it didn’t come back soon he would head up there and find out what was going on. He needed to know if Katie was available; if not, he wanted to line Laura up. He intended to get laid that evening, and he wasn’t about to let some dodgy Wi-Fi stop him.
Marcia Fournier half-stood in her seat, looking around the cabin. She peered out of her window, then looked past Kevin so she could see out of his.
‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
‘Look,’ she replied. Her face was strained and nervous.
He turned to the window. It took a few moments for him to understand what she was saying.
They were over the ocean. They should not have been.
He looked back. Behind him, Jeff Ramos was also looking out. He caught Anderson’s eye.
‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ Anderson said, his voice rising. ‘Are we going the right way?’
The Pilot
She listened to the man’s question. She could hear everything they said, thanks to the microphone she had positioned above the door to the cockpit.
Are we going the right way?
So he had noticed something was wrong. It was quite obvious, really. They had no business heading east over the Atlantic. Soon they’d realize that the next stop was Portugal, or North Africa maybe, and that was not their destination. In any case, both those places were well out of their range. They’d run out of fuel well before they arrived. The engines would sip the last of the aviation fuel and sputter and die and the plane would glide, silently, onto the ocean.
It would not skip over the surface and slow to a halt, bobbing on the waves. They would not climb out onto a survival raft and await an unlikely rescue. If a plane hit the water at 200 miles per hour it might as well have hit concrete. It would disintegrate on impact.
She didn’t need to tell them the answer to the question he had asked. They would figure it out for themselves.
No, they were not.
At least, not as far as they were concerned. This was going exactly the way she wanted.
Another voice spoke, a woman’s voice strained with worry.
I don’t think we are. What’s going on?
Maybe she had noticed the Wi-Fi was down. Or been shown the email the pilot had sent to Miller. Or both. They would cause worry.
They were designed to.
Either way, it was time to up the ante.
It was time to introduce herself.
Chip Markham
Jeff Ramos’s question – are we going the right way? – fell into an uneasy silence.
It was broken by Marcia.
‘I don’t think we are. What’s going on?’
Chip looked at her. She was wide-eyed and nervous. He knew that expression, had seen it many times. He knew a lot about her, about how fragile and unpredictable and needy she was. It was the neediness that had turned him off in the end. He had been worried about how she would react, although he hadn’t expected the drunken late-night visit and the threats to kill herself if he didn’t reconsider.
You have a husband, and a family, he said. Just accept it’s over.
I want you, Chip. You’re everything to me.
This is crazy, Marcia. You have to move on.
No! We’re meant to be! She had tried to force her way into his house. Chip! We love each other. You know we do.
He’d shaken his head, which was when the suicide threats had come. He hadn’t been sure whether he would see her the following day at the office, but they had passed in the corridor, and she had nodded and smiled, as though it had never happened.
‘Anyone?’ she said. ‘What’s happening?’
She also looked drunk, although where she was getting the booze, he had no idea.
Ramos spoke first. ‘It’s unusual. There’s no doubt about that.’
‘What do you think it is?’ Marcia said.
‘Don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Could be nothing.’
‘Doesn’t it seem strange?’ Marcia said.
He tilted his head to the side. ‘I guess it does.’ Chip was surprised how calm he was. Too calm, almost. He’d been an Army Ranger, so maybe that was how they were trained to be. ‘But there could be any number of explanations.’
‘Like what?’ Jill Stearns said. She was far less composed; there was an edge of tension bleeding into her voice.
Ramos shrugged.
‘A problem at an airport meaning planes are stuck in a holding pattern and can’t land. Or maybe Air Force One’s in the area.’
Chip nodded. That had happened to him once. The president – it was Obama – had been flying into DC. Since it was the tenth anniversary of 9/11, security was tighter than usual and all planes in the vicinity had been grounded. His plane had spent two hours on some crumbling airstrip in the middle of nowhere.
‘That sounds reasonable,’ Chip said. ‘I’ve had something like that happen before.’
‘Except,’ Marcia said, her voice thickening with fear, ‘we’re not in a holding pattern. We’re heading over the ocean and there’s no reason we should be.’
Chip’s stomach stiffened. He felt an ache in his back. He looked at Jeff for reassurance, but Ramos’s expression had tightened.
‘This is weird,’ he said. ‘We shouldn’t be going this way. There’s no reason for it.’
Chip could feel the rising panic in the plane. That was not what they needed now. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Just a different route.’
‘Could be,’ Jeff replied. ‘But it feels odder than that.’
‘And the Wi-Fi’s not working,’ Kevin said. ‘Great flight. You need to get onto the aviation department, Chip.’
Chip glared at him. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
Varun coughed.
‘There’s something else,’ he said. ‘An email.’
Chip turned to him. He was wide-eyed with terror.
Jill Stearns looked from face to face. ‘Varun just mentioned it to me. It’s—’
She was interrupted by a crackle from the PA system.
‘Hello,’ a woman’s voice said. ‘This is your pilot. I hope you’re enjoying the flight.’ There was a long, heavy pause. ‘As some of you have noticed, there’s no inflight Wi-Fi. So no emails, news, text messages. I apologize for the inconvenience. I know you like to keep busy on these flights. As compensation, I’m going to help you pass the time.’
Ramos’s spine pricked. Something was wrong here. Something was very wrong.
The pilot gave a laugh. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘but we’re going to play a little game.’
Barrow, Maine 2018
Stacy Evanston
The phone call – as she would come to think of it – came when Stacy Evanston was at work.
She was at her desk in a small Air Force recruiting station on a former base – the recruiting station was the last remaining military presence on it – in Barrow, Maine, where she lived with her husband, Dan and her daughter, Cherry. It was their last two weeks there; they were due to move to South Carolina next month, and she was going to miss Barrow. It was a small town, but it was lively and welcoming, with good schools and a thriving downtown. Dan had found a job he loved in construction management and he didn’t want to give it up, but that was the military life.
At least she would have some news to share with Dan before they left. She had been due to get her period four days ago, but it had not arrived. They had been trying since Cherry was born for a brother or sister, and on a few occasions she had been late, but they had all been false alarms.
