He did not answer right away, and she liked that. He stood in the doorway and thought about her question like a question, not like a test.
"Yes, ma'am. I'm current, I'm rested, I've got the before-start done through the APU. If Ops gets someone out here who's current on the 650, we can be wheels up inside of forty minutes from when he walks on. I'll need to run the whole checklist again with him from the top. I'm not going to skip that."
"Good."
"Ma'am." He stopped. "I read the sheet this morning. I knew who you were when you came up the stairs. I should have said something to him before he unstrapped. I'm sorry. I froze."
"How long?"
"Ma'am?"
"How long did you freeze."
He thought about it honestly. "Six seconds. About."
"And then you came back."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Then you're ahead of most people I've met," she said, and took her phone out of her pocket, because it was already ringing.
In White Plains, Marco Bellini had made two calls in five minutes.
The first had been to Lena Voss, the CEO, who was in a car on the Hutchinson River Parkway and who had said, after he told her, "Say it again," and then, "Give me her cell. I'll call her at 2:32. Have a captain on the way before I do." The second had been to Kyle the dispatcher, who sat eleven feet away and whom Marco had walked over to and said, quietly, "Read me the notes field on 417. Now read me the first line," and Kyle had read it, and looked up, and his face had done the thing, and Marco had said, "Tomorrow. Right now I need a 650 captain at TEB in thirty minutes," and Kyle had said, "Jenkins," because everybody at Altitude knew that Carl Jenkins lived eleven minutes from Teterboro and answered his phone.
Marco made the third call at 2:31.
"Jenkins."
"Carl, it's Marco. Where are you?"
"Home. Reading a book on my porch like a retired person. What's wrong."
"I need you at TEB on 417. Right now. Pruitt's been relieved. The owner's on the airplane with her mother and a two-thirty slot that's already gone. Reinholt's in the right seat and he's good. I need you in the left."
A pause, and in it Marco could hear a screen door, and birds.
"Relieved for what."
"I'll tell you when you land. Not on the phone."
"The owner's the woman," Carl said. It was not a question. "Kessler-Ward. I flew her once in November. Her mother's the one with the hip."
"That's right."
"I'll be there by three-oh-five," Carl Jenkins said, and hung up, and Marco sat back and looked at the yellow flag beside N417KW and thought about the two folders marked HANDLED and about what he was going to say when someone asked him, as someone certainly would, what exactly had been handled and by whom.
At 2:32, Naomi's phone rang, and the name on it was Lena Voss.
Lena Voss was forty-four and had built Altitude Private from four aircraft to thirty-one in nine years. Naomi had hired her company because its safety record was the best of the five she had looked at and because the management contract was eleven pages long instead of forty. Lena had never once mistaken her for anyone's assistant, which Naomi had noted and filed.
"Ms. Kessler-Ward. It's Lena Voss. I'm so—"
"Lena. I'm going to tell you what I want, and then you're going to tell me whether you can do it, and if there's a part you can't do, you're going to tell me that too. All right?"
A breath on the line. The sound of a car. "All right."
"One. Captain Pruitt is off this aircraft today, which Marco has done, and off this account permanently. Not reassigned to my account under another name in six months. Off it."
"Yes."
"Two. There are two prior complaints in his file. A cabin attendant and a line service technician. Both marked handled. I want a written explanation, from you, with your name on it, of what handled means, who handled it, and why nobody above those two people was asked whether it was handled to their satisfaction. I want it within a week. I don't want it to be good. I want it to be true."
A longer pause. "You'll have it."
"Three. Tobias Reinholt. He's in the right seat. He read the trip sheet. He knew who I was. He froze for six seconds and then he came back and stood in that doorway and told his captain the truth in front of a cabin full of people, in eight words, which is more than two folders managed in a year. I want his name on the next captain-upgrade list. Not a promise. The list."
"Ms. Kessler-Ward, the upgrade process has—"
"I'm aware it has a process. I'm not asking you to skip it. I'm asking you to put his name at the top of the list of people who go through it. If he fails the check ride, he fails the check ride. He won't."
"His name will be on it."
"Thank you. Marco's sending Carl Jenkins. I know Carl. That's fine. Is there anything else you need from me right now?"
"No. I—no. I'm sorry this happened on your airplane."
"It didn't happen on my airplane, Lena. It happened on yours. You crewed it. I'll see the letter."
She ended the call and put the phone face down on the walnut table and looked out the round window at the ramp, where Devon was crouched by the nose gear doing something with the chocks that did not need doing, because he did not want to go inside.
Aft, Danielle had put the tray down at last and was sitting on the edge of the divan beside Ruth with one hand on the older woman's knee.
"I'm fine," Ruth said. "Stop looking at me like that."
"You had your hand on your chest, Mrs. Ward."
"That's where I keep it when I'm angry. My mother did the same thing. It's not my heart, it's my temper." She patted Danielle's hand once and moved it off her knee, gently, the way she would have moved a child's hand off a book it was not supposed to touch. "Now, if we're going to sit on this ramp for an hour I would like some of that mango before it goes brown. And a cup of tea."
Danielle laughed. It surprised her. It came out of her like something that had been held under water.
At 3:05 a grey Honda Accord with a Meridian ramp pass on the dash pulled through the gate and parked in the crew spots, and a man got out and took a black flight bag from the back seat and put on a uniform jacket over a white shirt and walked across the ramp toward N417KW with the unhurried walk of a man who had been walking across ramps for thirty-eight years and had never once seen the point of running on one.
Carl Jenkins was sixty-one, grey in his close-cut hair and his moustache, with the slightly stooped shoulders of a tall man who had spent a career fitting himself into flight decks.
Devon straightened up from the nose gear when he saw him coming.
"Captain Jenkins."
"Devon. You still here? Your shift ended at three."