Della
At ten past eight on Thursday night Ronnie told me what Tess had said to him with the light off, a sentence and a lot of breathing, and by half past I'd found out who she was by looking up her mother.
I don't do faces. I do captions. The passenger file had an emergency contact for Tess Aldana, Rosalind Aldana, mother, a street in Merritt Island, and I typed that into a search bar at a desk in the back of the showroom while a man two rows over argued with a vending machine. The third picture was a memorial service. A woman in black holding a folded flag, and beside her a girl of about ten in a dress that didn't fit, looking at the camera like it owed her an answer. The caption said Rosalind Aldana, widow of test crew Rafe Aldana, with her daughter, on the anniversary of the Tolliver Recovery.
I read it twice. I'd read it nine times on the passenger list, as a surname, because it was one.
Things I knew. One, her father had died in the story we were selling. Two, she was sitting two seats from Ronnie with a camera arm that reached him, a red light and a cable into the ship's panel. Three, Ronnie had told me her father's watch was the twin of the one on his wrist, because I'd told him, on Monday, in a voice with nothing in it. It went to Rafe's family. Four, she'd looked at it.
I said, "Christ."
I put the phone face down, and picked it up, and got up. I needed to ask somebody a question I should have asked on Wednesday.
Kip was at his console, in the second row, with a sixth can of the green stuff in his hand and a pencil behind each ear. I'd decided on Wednesday that he was a child, and nothing since had made me feel I'd been unfair. I stood beside his chair and bent down so my mouth was by his shoulder.
"Kip. Can anyone in this room hear my channel?"
He didn't look up. He had his hand on the can and his thumb on the tab, and I watched the thumb stop. It stopped for a long second, in the middle of a pull. His face did the thing a screen does when it freezes, all of it at once, mouth a bit open.
"It's encrypted," said Kip.
"Can anyone hear it?"
"Basically, it's encrypted." He cracked the tab.
"That's not an answer, Kip, that's a word."
"I'm going to get a drink," said Kip, who was holding a drink, and he got up and walked away down the aisle with it, and I watched him go to the kitchen and stand in front of the returns desk without going in.
I wrote him off. It took about a second. I'm good at it, it's what I do for a living, and I put a line through him in my head and said into my phone, very quietly, "Kip. Useless." Then I went back to the desk and took out another list. Plan A, I wrote. Then I looked at it. Plan A was the Federal Aviation Administration, and the number was under the word Jail.
I did it on the floor.
I went to Kip's empty console, which was three feet from Royce's desk and four from Ailsa Strachan, who'd taken the next chair along with her tea and her laptop and her tube of mints. Kip's desk phone was grey, with a speaker button the size of a thumb. I read the number off my own screen, off the word Jail, and I dialled it, and I pressed speaker.
It rang. It rang a long time. Then there was a voice, a recorded one, that said all of our representatives were assisting other callers and my call was important, and a pan flute came on.
It was a pan flute cover of the song that tells you everything's going to be all right, which is a lie in any key. A man at the next desk looked at the phone, and Ailsa crunched a mint, and Royce looked up from his own desk with the face of somebody watching a stranger's dog walk onto his lawn.
I took my own phone out of my pocket and said into it, low, "One. Do not go to prison to a pan flute."
I stood there. I can't hold still on a hold. I walked round the console, once, twice, and on the third turn I thought about a sentence.
Two years ago I wrote a sentence for a car-seat company in Louisiana. It was a good sentence. A buckle on a child's seat had come undone in a rear-end collision on the interstate outside Baton Rouge, and a boy of four had broken his collarbone. The company asked me what to say. I said, an isolated incident. It was true when I wrote it. It ran in the paper the next morning, word for word.
Three months later it happened again. Same buckle, a child in Shreveport. She was two. She didn't break a collarbone.
Her father wrote to me. Once. The email was four lines and didn't have a swear word in it. I typed a reply, and it was still in my drafts folder, first line and all. I looked at it on planes.
It wasn't a story. It was a buckle.
"Thank you for holding," said a human being. It was a tired man's voice, and he said his name was something and that this was the duty desk. "How can I help you?"
I leaned over the console and said it to the speaker, loud enough for the floor. "My name's Della Quint. I work for Halyard. I'm calling about the flight that's up now, Constance. There's a man in the commander's seat who isn't Mack Tolliver."
Nobody on the floor moved. I saw Kip's empty console, and Ailsa Strachan, who'd stopped chewing, and Royce, who had put down his pen.
"Ma'am," said the man, "can you say that again?"
I said it again. I said the rest. I said the ship had gone off its path on Wednesday, and I said it wasn't a correction that ran long, and I said the commander had been trained for a week and could fly nothing. I could hear the man at the other end writing, a pen on paper, a man who still used paper.
"Thank you, Ms Quint. I'm going to need to verify this with the operator. If you'll hold."
The flute came back. It played the song about everything. And six feet away from me, on his desk, the landline rang.
I'd like to say Royce picked up on the third ring. He picked up on the first. He had the receiver at his ear before the ring had finished, and he was standing, and he had a voice I'd never heard him use, even on investors. It was smooth as a window.
"Royce Ambler. Yes. Yes, absolutely, I'm glad you called."
I stood there with the pan flute in my hand.
"No, that's right, she's one of ours. Della's a consultant. A very dedicated one. She's been up for four days, and I think she's, you know, I'd say she's emotional." He turned. He looked at me and smiled. He kept looking at me through the whole next minute, and he didn't blink once. "I'll tell you what, let me send you something. Hold on."
He opened his laptop and he held the phone up to the speaker. I heard it come out of the laptop, small and tinny, in Mack's voice: "Well, now. I'm married to the sky, ma'am, and to Bette, in that order. Don't tell Bette." Then a long beat of the stream's laughter. Royce tapped a key. "Sent," he said. "Have a look at him waving."
"That's the commander," said Royce, into the phone, "this afternoon, live, in front of three million people. He's in great health. He's flying a manual burn on Saturday, which we've planned for months. Big Linda's right on her marks."
A pause on the line. I could hear the man at the other end say a name.
"Constance. The ship. It's a nickname, the room likes it. Big Linda. She's a beauty." He laughed. "We're all very emotional up here."
I stood there, with the flute going. I heard the man laugh, on the line, a small tired laugh, the kind you give a boy who's said something funny at a funeral, and I hated it more than I've hated anything since the buckle.
The pan flute cut off. The duty officer came back to me.
"Ms Quint? I've spoken with Mr Ambler. He's confirmed that the commander is on board and that the anomaly's within planned parameters. He's sent us a clip. Is there anything else you want to tell us?"
"There's a man," I said.
"I understand you're under a lot of strain. We'll log it, and we'll follow up with the operator in the usual way. Thank you, Ms Quint."
He hung up. The line went dead, and I looked at the handset for a while, and then I put it down in its cradle, and Royce put his own receiver down on his desk, very gently, and neither of us said anything for a count of about four.
In the next chair Ailsa Strachan took another mint out of the tube, put it in her mouth, and crunched. Flat, quick, Scottish, to nobody:
"Every hour of this takes a million off the price, Mr Ambler. That's not a threat. It's arithmetic."
"Ailsa," said Royce, "it's handled."
"Aye, well," said Ailsa, and she gathered up her tea. "Arithmetic doesn't care what's handled."
She walked away down the aisle. Royce watched her go. Then he came across the carpet to me, with his phone in one hand and his other hand in his pocket, and he stood beside me at Kip's console, shoulder to shoulder, like men at a urinal, and he smiled for the room, and he said, so low that the room couldn't hear it:
"You call anyone again, and the fallback goes out tonight. With your name on it. As author."
I'd written it in a hotel room on a Saturday. Four hundred words. He'd asked twice.
"I didn't say anything," I said.
"You said enough." He patted my arm, twice, as if I'd done well. "Great job today, by the way. The pencil. I wept."
I went out to the Sentra at midnight, because I needed a room I could swear in.
I put the seat all the way back and the engine on for the air, and I sat there with my hands on the wheel and swore, in order, for four minutes, starting with the pan flute and working up. Then somebody tapped on the glass.
It was Sully. He was standing by the driver's door in a polo shirt with the Halyard rope on it, a big man in a car park at midnight, holding two paper cups from the machine. He didn't smile. He held one up and waited. I put the window down.
"I'd have scrubbed," said Sully. "You know that." He put the cup in my hand. It was hot enough to hurt. "Drink this."
I drank it. It tasted of sofa.
"That's the machine," said Sully. "It's got no standards. Kid said you made a call."
"I did."
"And Royce took it."
"He took it in about a second."
He nodded. He leaned an arm on the roof of the Sentra, and the whole car dipped. He drank some of his own coffee and looked across the tarmac at the control room.
"Mack was quiet, his last week," said Sully. "Quieter than usual. I asked him what was eating him. He said Royce wanted a speech out of him, and he'd rather eat the ship." He drank. "That was Mack. Hated a speech."
I didn't say anything. The steam went up off the cup.
"Kid's doing better than I thought," said Sully. "Your clown. I heard the pencil." He pushed himself off the roof. "Sleep four hours. Kip's got the numbers through Saturday. Nobody's going to do anything you can fix between now and breakfast."
"Thank you."
"It's coffee," said Sully, and walked away across the car park with his cup.
I took out my phone. I turned it round, so the little red light was facing me, and I put it on record.
"One," I said. "Ronnie. If they've taken me, the numbers are on the card and Kip's got the rest. Two. Say every number twice. Three. Don't trust Royce." I stopped. "Four."
I waited. The Sentra ticked. Across the tarmac somebody turned off a light.
I couldn't think of a four.
I played it back. I listened to myself say three, and then say four, and then do nothing at all for eleven seconds. Then I pressed delete. The phone asked me if I was sure.
I wasn't. I pressed it.