As I approached the ticket counter, my phone vibrated in my palm. It was an incoming call from an unlisted local number. I swiped the screen to answer, pressing the phone tight against my ear to block out the noise of the terminal.
"Mr. Mercer," a low, measured voice said. It wasn't Vance. The voice was older, smoother, speaking with the deliberate cadence of a corporate attorney. "You are making a very complicated situation considerably worse for your niece."
"Who is this?" I demanded, stopping near the edge of the concourse seating area.
"My name is Arthur Pendelton. I represent the legal interests of Apex Bio-Logistics," the man said smoothly. "Your late sister was in possession of proprietary intellectual property belonging to our research division. That property was left in her personal effects, which are currently in Apollo's physical possession."
"Her mother's personal journals belong to her estate," I said. "The probate judge in Chicago denied your motion for temporary seizure."
"Jurisdictional orders from Illinois have limited reach once property enters an interstate transit corridor," Pendelton replied without a trace of anger. "The flight was rerouted to facilitate an orderly administrative review at our Phoenix facilities. Apollo will be treated with the utmost care and returned to your custody once the proprietary material is secured. If you attempt to interfere at Sky Harbor, airport authorities will detain you under the provisions of the federal transit interference report Supervisor Vance filed ten minutes ago."
"She is a child," I said, my hand shaking against the phone. "She had major thoracic surgery six weeks ago. She cannot be subjected to this."
"Which is precisely why you should allow this process to proceed without creating a scene in Phoenix," Pendelton said. "Board your connection, Mr. Mercer. We will contact you when the inventory is complete."
The line clicked off. I stood in the middle of Concourse C, staring at the blank phone screen as the terminal loudspeakers chimed with an announcement for a late departure to Salt Lake City. They weren't just trying to recover files; they were using the administrative chaos of the airline's baggage system to bypass the legal court system entirely.
I turned away from the customer service desk and walked rapidly toward the lower-level car rental center. I wasn't going to take the Denver connection. Taking a commercial flight meant putting myself back into the airline system where Vance and Pendelton could track my itinerary, delay my clearance, or have local airport police waiting for me at the gate in Arizona.
Instead, I pulled up my contacts and dialed a number I hadn't called in four years—a charter pilot who operated out of a private airfield twenty miles south of Chicago in Gary, Indiana.
"Sam," I said as soon as the call connected. "I need an aircraft on the ramp right now. Direct to Phoenix Executive Airpark."
"Julian?" Sam’s voice was gravelly, backed by the metallic noise of a hangar workspace. "I'm in the middle of an engine inspection on the King Air. What's going on?"
"I need to beat a commercial flight from O'Hare to Phoenix," I said, entering the parking garage elevator. "I have cash, and I have a court order showing my niece is being illegally transported."
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I could hear the clink of a wrench dropping onto a workbench. "How much time do you have before their flight lands?" Sam asked.
"Three hours and twenty minutes," I replied. "If I'm not in Phoenix when that plane touches down, I might lose her completely."
"Get to Gary in thirty minutes," Sam said. "I'll have the twin-engine Piper prepped and fueled. But you're paying for the high-altitude fuel burn."
Thirty minutes later, my rental sedan screeched to a halt beside the perimeter fence of the Gary Jet Center. The gray industrial fog of the southern shore of Lake Michigan hung low over the asphalt, but the sky to the west was clear. Sam was already standing on the apron beside a sleek, dark-blue Piper Cheyenne twin-turboprop, its propellers turning slowly in the cool wind.
I ran across the tarmac, carrying only my small duffel bag and the folder containing Apollo's legal papers. Sam pulled me up the short cabin steps and slammed the door shut behind us, locking the latch with a heavy mechanical click.
"I called ahead for a direct route vector," Sam said, sliding into the pilot's seat and putting on his headset as the twin engines roared to high idle. "We have a tailwind over Iowa, but commercial flight eight-forty-two has a thirty-minute head start and a higher cruise altitude. It’s going to be extremely close."
"Just get us into Phoenix Airpark before eight-forty-two touches down at Sky Harbor," I said, strapping myself into the co-pilot’s seat. "If we can land at the executive field, I can reach Sky Harbor’s south baggage terminal by taxi before their passenger deboarding is complete."
The Piper taxied rapidly to the edge of runway twenty-two, its twin turbines whining as Sam pushed the throttles forward. The small aircraft accelerated down the concrete strip, lifting off into the gray cloud layer before banking sharply to the southwest toward the open plains of the Midwest.
Below us, the endless pattern of farmland and highway intersections blurred into a steady expanse of gray and brown. I leaned against the window, staring at the flight tracker app on my phone. Flight 842 was currently cruising at thirty-six thousand feet over eastern Iowa, moving at four hundred and eighty knots. Our Piper was lower and slower, but we were flying a direct vector to a smaller airport that didn't require the lengthy approach vectors and holding patterns of a major hub like Sky Harbor.
I opened the torn paper fragment I had taken from Vance’s desk and laid it flat on my knee. On the back of the thermal slip, hidden beneath the pre-printed logo of the airline, was a handwritten nine-digit tracking code. I typed the code into a private cargo tracking portal my sister had used during her work with Apex.
The screen flickered, then loaded a secure manifest sheet: ASSET CONTAINMENT / SUBJECT: MERCER, A. / AUTHORIZATION: APEX SECURITY SPECIAL SERVICES / DESTINATION: BAGGAGE HOLD 4, SKY HARBOR TERMINAL 3 / TRANSIT ESCORT: AGENT R. VANCE.
My stomach dropped. Marcus Vance wasn't just a dirty gate agent taking a bribe to look the other way. The signature on the transit escort line belonged to his brother, Richard Vance, a former private security contractor who had been hired by Apex two years earlier. They were operating a coordinated pipeline within the airport's internal transfer system.
"Sam," I said over the intercom, my voice tight. "Can we push the fuel consumption to maximum?"
Sam looked over at me, his eyes reflecting the soft green glow of the instrument panel. "We're already running at ninety-five percent power, Julian. Any faster and we're going to hit our fuel reserves before we reach the New Mexico border."
"Do it," I said. "I'll double your rate for the return trip."
Sam hesitated for a second, then reached up and adjusted the fuel mixture levers. The twin turboprops deepened their hum, and the airspeed indicator nudged forward as the plane cut through the thin air at twenty-four thousand feet.
For two hours, we flew in near-silence, watching the digital icon of Flight 842 move across the map toward the Southwest. Over New Mexico, the smooth prairie gave way to the sharp, jagged ridges of the Rocky Mountain foothills, bathed in the deep crimson light of the setting sun.
"Flight eight-forty-two has begun its descent into the Phoenix basin," Sam reported, pointing to the secondary screen on the avionics stack. "They are fifteen minutes out from Sky Harbor. We are twelve minutes out from Phoenix Executive Airpark."
"How far is the executive airfield from Sky Harbor’s south baggage hold?" I asked, checking my watch.
"Ten miles by road," Sam said, leaning forward as he adjusted the flap controls for our approach. "If traffic on the interstate is clear, you can make it in fifteen minutes."
The Piper dropped through the desert haze, the bright grid of Phoenix streetlights expanding beneath us like a circuit board laid out on the sand. The runway lights of the small airpark flashed into view, two lines of crisp white LEDs cutting through the darkness.
The tires squealed against the hot asphalt as Sam touched down, applying heavy reverse thrust to slow the aircraft before we even reached the midpoint of the runway. He didn't even taxi all the way to the main terminal building; instead, he swung the aircraft around toward the perimeter fence where a local rental car had been staged near the gate.