Joseph Finder - Power Play

Then, abruptly, she looked away.

"Ali?" I said.

But she pretended not to hear me and entered the cabin without turning back.

By the time I boarded, Ali was nowhere to be found, and I was left feeling as if I'd been kicked in the solar plexus. Or someplace a little lower.

She'd seen me: No question about that. And whether she'd put me on the guest list or not, she had to know I'd be here.

Why, then, the cold shoulder?

I've always thought that living with a woman is like visiting a foreign country where no one speaks English and the signs are all in some strange alphabet that almost looks like English, but not quite. If you want to buy coffee or order dinner or get a seat on a bus, you have to learn a few basic phrases of the local dialect.

So in the year and a half that Ali and I went out, I learned to read the nuances in her voice. I became reasonably fluent. I stopped needing to consult the Berlitz book. And I still hadn't lost the ability to speak Ali.

But her reaction was baffling.

I assumed she'd gone off to work with Cheryl in the CEO's private lounge. It took all the restraint I could summon to keep from walking down there and asking her what was going on.

Instead, I took a seat in the main salon. Most of the seats were taken by the time I got there, but I found a chair off by itself, next to where Hank Bodine was holding court with Hugo Lummis, Kevin Bross, and someone else. I was close enough to hear them talking, but I'd sort of lost interest in hearing them compare watches, as fun as that was, so I tuned out.

Anyway, my mind had been derailed. As much as I tried not to, I couldn't stop thinking about Ali. And it wasn't just her strange behavior. It was simply seeing her after so long. I was like a parched man lost in the desert for weeks who'd just been given a thimbleful of water. My thirst hadn't been slaked; it had been whetted.

I thought about Ali, presumably sitting with Cheryl Tobin in the executive lounge, which included a private office, bedroom suite, exercise studio, personal kitchen, even a shower. Even among the superprivileged who got to fly on private corporate jets, there was first class. I loved that. You finally claw your way to the top only to discover there's still one more rung above you, a rarefied VIP echelon you'd never even heard of.

The rest of us weren't exactly in steerage, though. The main salon looked like an English gentleman's club, not that I'd ever actually seen such a thing. It certainly didn't look like any airplane I'd ever been in before. The cabin walls were paneled in Brazilian mahogany. The floors were covered with antique-looking Oriental rugs. Huge, cushy, black leather club chairs were arranged in little "conversation groups" around marble-topped tables. There was a burlwood standalone bar.

Two beautiful blondes were circulating with trays of little Pellegrino bottles, taking drink orders. I wanted a real drink, but I was at work, after all, so I decided I'd better just get a Pepsi.

My chair swiveled and tilted. All around me was wide-open space. There was no seat six inches in front of mine that would tip back into my knees. Very nice. I could get used to this.

Granted, the furnishings were a little much-all that dark wood and antique rugs and black leather-but the plane was pretty great. The Hammond Business Jet was far and away the best on the market. It left the Gulfstream G450 and the Boeing Business Jet and the Airbus Corporate Jetliner in the dust. The Hammond had the widest body and the largest cabin of any private corporate jet on the market. Even configured as luxuriously as it was, it easily held twenty-five people.

The pitch we used to convince companies to spend fifty million bucks for one of our planes was that it wasn't simply a means of transportation. Oh, no. It was a productivity tool. It allowed an executive to make good use of his travel time. And a relaxed and refreshed executive could seal a deal much more effectively than his travel-worn counterpart.

Yeah, right. You can always justify any obscene luxury on the grounds of productivity, I've found.

In addition to the CEO's executive suite and the main salon, this plane also had a conference room (with videoconferencing capabilities), a small office suite, and three lavatories with showers. People sometimes called it the "flying penthouse" or the "flying boudoir." Or the "mile-high palace." The dйcor, someone once told me, was the legacy of our previous CEO, James Rawlings. The story was that he and his wife had flown on some other company's jet as the guests of the CEO and were both blown away by the way the cabin was outfitted, which made Hammond's jets look shabby by comparison. Mrs. Rawlings hounded her husband until he gave in and let her hire her favorite interior designer to overhaul one of the Hammond jets, the same designer who'd also done their house and their yacht.

While I waited for the waitresses, or the flight attendants, or whatever they were called, to take my drink order, I took out my laptop and powered it on. I had work to do-I had to download the files Zoл had sent so I could try to get Bodine the answers he wanted-but I was finding it hard to concentrate.

My computer located the wireless Internet signal, and I logged on to my e-mail. Opened Zoл's e-mail and read it over twice. Then I opened the zipped folder containing the Aviation Daily photos, eight high-resolution close-ups of the Eurospatiale crash, including the part that had ripped off, the inboard flap. They were big files and took a while to download.

Meanwhile, I could hear Hugo Lummis saying to the others, in his booming voice and mellow Southern accent: "You gonna tell me that's a level playing field? Uh-uh, no sir. So I'm having dinner at Cafй Milano with the Secretary of the Air Force just last week, and he keeps talking about 'the Great White Arab Tribe' and I finally say to him, 'What in God's name are you talking about?' And he says, 'Oh, that's just our nickname for Boeing.' So how does Cheryl think we're supposed to compete with that kinda favoritism if we don't grease the skids a little?"

I looked at him, without meaning to, and Kevin Bross noticed my glance. He made some kind of a quick, subtle hand gesture, and then Lummis's voice suddenly died down.

After a while, I started smelling cigar smoke, and I looked over and saw Bodine and Lummis smoking a couple of big ugly stogies. Thick white tendrils of smoke wreathed their heads. I guessed this wasn't a no-smoking flight.

When one of the beautiful blond flight attendants finally came over to me, I decided to order a Scotch. Seeing Ali had set me back, I realized; I really did need a drink. So I asked for a single-malt Scotch, and she wanted to know what kind. Apparently I could get whatever brand I wanted. I said Macallan. She asked me how old. I asked what my choices were.

"Would you like the eighteen?" she said.

I told her I would.

Just then, someone made an announcement over the speakers that we'd be taking off momentarily and asked us to fasten our seat belts. It was a polite, almost apologetic request, not the sort of imperious demand they make when you fly commercial. No one ordered me to turn off all electronic equipment. No one said anything about stowing our bags in any overhead compartments. Not that there were any overhead compartments to jam our stuff into.

The flight attendant apologized profusely that I'd have to wait for my drink until after takeoff. She asked me to fasten my seat belt, then excused herself so she could do the same.

I could feel the idling engines roar to life-two Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 turbofan engines, with a three-shaft layout-and we began the takeoff roll. Seventy-five thousand pounds of thrust lifted us off the ground; but for all that power, you could barely hear any noise. One of the reasons it was so quiet is that the big fan in the engine moves a lot of air around the turbine, and that acts like a muffler. Plus, the engine nacelle inlet is lined with a one-piece acoustic barrel to absorb sound.