Four seats away, Gerald Pierce laughed once at something on his phone, briefly and without warmth, and the sound moved through the gate area like a draught. Imani watched him over the rim of other people's luggage. He did not know yet. Whatever else was true of him — and she had a list — he did not know about this. She could see it in the unguarded ease of him, a man still entirely inside the smaller, simpler story where he was the only actor. For one strange second she almost pitied the size of the thing travelling toward him.
"Miss Brooks."
She looked up. The woman had crossed the gate area and was standing in front of her, not looming, at a respectful distance, with her hands empty and her attention complete. Up close she was younger than her severity suggested, and very tired, and looking at Imani the way Imani's best debate coach looked at speakers: as if listening were a discipline.
"I'm Susan Park," she said. "I'm the Director of Corporate Integrity and Internal Investigations at Solstice Air. That means that when something inside this company doesn't add up, it's my job to add it up." A pause, deliberate. "Your reservation was confirmed for seat 2A. It was altered this morning. I am not going to pretend otherwise to you, and I'm not going to tell you more than I know, because right now I know less than I intend to."
Imani nodded. Her voice, when she found it, came out steadier than she felt. "Okay."
"Can you tell me—" Park glanced, once, toward Pierce, and then back. "Did anyone call you this morning? Anyone from the airline, about your seat, a change, an upgrade, anything of that kind?"
"No," Imani said. "Nobody called me about anything."
Park wrote that down herself, in a small notebook, in handwriting too quick to read upside down. "Thank you. That's helpful, and I'll tell you why one day." She straightened, and her gaze went past Imani to the gate desk, to the agent, to the screen with its two versions of the truth, one laid over the other like a hand over a mouth.
Then Susan Park said, clearly enough for the whole small country of the gate desk to hear her:
"Get me the audit ledger."
Chapter 8 — What Was Done in His Name
Gerald Pierce made the telephone call the way he did everything: as if the person at the other end had been waiting all morning for the privilege of it.
Imani watched from her seat at the end of the row, four chairs and a world away, while he paced the stretch of carpet in front of the gate windows with his phone at his ear and his free hand describing shapes in the air. The Atlanta morning had brightened outside the glass. Aircraft came and went out there in cheerful ignorance — other people's flights, leaving on time, trailing their shadows across the concrete. Flight 64 stayed where it was, parked at Gate A17 with its door open and its story unfinished, and the departure board above the desk had given up on times altogether and said only DELAYED.
"—then handle it," Pierce was saying. "That's what I'm saying, Margaret. Handle it. I've been taken off an aircraft by a committee." He listened. His hand stopped moving. "No, not removed, I was — we were all brought up to the gate, it's a procedure, that's not the—" He listened again, longer this time, and Imani saw the precise moment the call changed direction under him, the way you could see a debater feel a round turn: not in the face first, but in the shoulders.
"What do you mean, on our side?" he said.
She should not listen. She knew she should not listen; her mother had raised her with a horror of other people's telephone calls, and her father said a person who listened at doors eventually heard their own name. But there was nowhere else in Gate A17 to put her attention, and Pierce, who had spent the morning performing for the cabin, had forgotten that a gate area was also an audience. His voice carried the way it was built to carry, into boardrooms and across trading floors, and it carried now across four empty seats to a fourteen-year-old girl with a teal backpack and nothing whatsoever to do but hear him.
"Slow down," he said. "Say that again. Slowly."
Imani looked down at her hands and studied them with enormous concentration, the bitten thumbnail, the ink smudge from her debate notes. She would remember this later, when people asked — and people would ask, endlessly, in tones that assumed she must have loved it — she would remember that she had not loved it. Watching certainty come apart in a man was not satisfying up close. It was like watching a building settle. Everything held, and everything had moved.
"When?" Pierce said. "When did we ask them that?"
A gate agent pushed a luggage cart past, its wheels clicking over the seams in the carpet, and for a few seconds the clicks were the only sound Imani let herself hear. When they faded, Pierce's voice was lower, and lower was worse. Lower was a man doing arithmetic he did not like.
"'Look after' me," he repeated, very quietly, to the person on the phone. "Those are the words that were used. 'Look after Mr. Pierce on the Seattle flight.'" A silence. "And who decided that looking after me meant—" Another silence, the longest yet. Imani watched his reflection in the gate window, superimposed on the bright apron and the taxiing aircraft, a ghost standing inside the morning. "No. I did not know that. I want that understood. I did not—"
He stopped. Whatever was said at the other end, it went on for some time. He received it standing perfectly still, and Imani understood that the stillness was costing him more than the pacing had. This was a man, she thought, who had built a life on the confidence that his name, spoken in the right rooms, produced obedience in the world — doors opened, tables materialised, windows seats, presumably, were simply where he ended up, the way water ends up downhill. It had probably never once occurred to him to ask about the machinery. You did not ask about machinery when it had never, in sixty-odd years, made a sound.
And now it had made a sound, at 30,000 feet's worth of volume in reverse — down here, at a gate, in front of witnesses — and the sound had her name on it.
"Nobody touches anything," he said at last. "No calls to the airline. Not from you, not from anyone. If they ring again, you refer them to me personally." He paused. "Yes, I know what that contradicts. I said it anyway." Another pause, and something in his tone shifted so slightly that Imani might have imagined it, except that she had been trained by three years of judges to hear the exact moment a speaker stopped believing his own brief. "Margaret. Did we — did anyone from my office suggest which seat?"
The answer, when it came, was short. She knew it was short because of what his face did in the window's reflection: a small, involuntary rearrangement, gone almost before she could name it.
"I see," he said. "Thank you. I'll call you from Seattle."