THE FOLLOWING MORNING at eight, Stone walked into the pilot’s room at Jet Aviation and looked around. Various uniformed corporate crews sat around gazing blankly at CNN on a large television set. A man in a battered leather flight jacket, dark trousers and a white shirt stood up and walked over.
“Stone Barrington? I’m Dan Phelan.” They shook hands.
“I guessed.”
“Let’s go sit down in a quiet corner for a few minutes.” They took a vacant table and two chairs. “Let me see your license, your medical certificate and your logbook.”
Stone handed them over, and Phelan started with the license. “I understood you’ve been flying a JetProp,” he said. “How come you have a multiengine rating?”
“I got it in anticipation of buying a Beech Baron twin, but then I changed my mind and bought a Malibu, and later had it converted.”
“So the only twin time you have is your training for the rating? Six hours?”
“That’s correct.”
“Well, by the time you take your check ride for your Mustang-type rating, you’ll have a lot more.” He examined Stone’s medical certificate and handed it and the license back to him, then he began flipping through the logbook. “I see you’ve flown in and out of Teterboro a lot over the past few years.”
“I’m based here,” Stone replied.
“That will stand you in good stead,” Phelan said. “Teterboro is the busiest general aviation airport in the country; if you can handle an airplane here, you can handle it anywhere.” He handed Stone a sheaf of copies of New Jersey instrument approaches. “Today, we’re going to fly out west of here to a practice area and do some air work: steep turns, slow flight and stalls. Then we’ll grab some lunch and fly some approaches at other airports. When we’re done, we’ll come back here and fly whatever approach is in use. Got it?”
“Got it,” Stone said.
Phelan opened his briefcase and unfolded a very large photograph of the Garmin G-1000 instrument panel in the Mustang. “I understand you’ve already got a couple of cross-country flights in with Mr. Hackett, so you must be a little familiar with this.”
“Jim did all the avionics operation,” Stone said. “I just flew the airplane. I have read the cockpit reference guide, though.”
Phelan produced a checklist for the airplane and had Stone go through it step-by-step and show him where the controls were for each item. Then they did it again. An hour and a half later, Phelan said, “Okay, let’s go flying.”
They took over an hour to do a detailed preflight inspection of the aircraft, then go through the checklist of the startup procedures, entering the weights of people, baggage and fuel to be carried; getting a clearance; and entering a flight plan into the G-1000. Finally, they were ready to taxi, and fifteen minutes later they were in the air, climbing to 10,000 feet and headed west.
Phelan explained each air-work procedure they would do and then gave Stone the throttle settings and speeds for each. Stone performed them twice-a little shaky on the first try but much more confidently on the second-then they flew an instrument approach into an airport, had a hamburger and got back into the airplane. They flew another half-dozen approaches into various airports, a couple of them by hand without the help of the autopilot, then headed back to Teterboro and flew an instrument landing system to a full-stop landing.
They put the airplane to bed and walked back into the terminal. “You did well,” Phelan said. “You’re clearly up-to-date on your instrument procedures, and you did a pretty good job of hand-flying the airplane.”
“Thank you.”
“Tomorrow we start on engine-out procedures: approaches, missed approaches and landings, all on one engine. It’ll be fun.”
Stone shook the man’s hand, walked back to his car, got in and rested his head on the steering wheel. He felt as though he had been machine-washed and fluff-dried; every muscle ached. He got out his cell phone and called Mei, a Chinese lady, and scheduled a massage before dinner.
BY THE TIME Mei had finished with him, he felt human again and hungry.
Dino was waiting for him at Elaine’s. “You look like shit,” he said pleasantly.
“Let me tell you how I got that way,” Stone said, taking his first, grateful sip of his Knob Creek.
37
When Stone walked into his bedroom, he found Felicity sitting up in bed, reading from a folder with a red stripe stamped across it. She closed the folder and put it into her briefcase, which was next to her on the bed. “How goes the flying?”
“Pretty good, but I’m exhausted,” he said, peeling off his clothes and getting in bed beside her.
“No playtime tonight?”
“I’ll do better in the morning,” he said. “How’s the search for Hackett’s Paratroop Regiment records going?”
“Extremely slowly,” she replied. “If my documents people don’t find something soon, I’m going to have to pull them off the job.”
“How about the search for his fingerprints with the State Department?”
“Oh, we found those,” she said. “They’re the same as Hackett’s current prints.”
“I hate to let the air out of your balloon, Felicity,” Stone said, “but when Hackett came to this country twenty-five years ago, Whitestone was still working in your service, was he not? And he couldn’t be in two countries at once.”
“Don’t you think we’ve thought of that?” she asked. “It’s funny, but the more convinced I become that Whitestone is Hackett, the more convinced you are that he’s not. Could that be because he’s letting you fly his jet airplane? Could that be because you like him?”
“I do like him,” Stone confessed, “and I suppose that could mean I have a bias in his favor, but it doesn’t affect the facts of the situation, and you have a lot of facts that you just can’t reconcile.”
“Yes, we do,” she admitted, “but you don’t have any facts to support Hackett’s innocence.”
“Of course I do. Whitestone could simply not have worked for your service on a full-time basis while simultaneously establishing a fabulously successful business in this country. That is a fact.”
“No, it’s not; it’s a factoid.”
“What’s a factoid?”
“Something that seems to be true, but isn’t what it seems, like a humanoid in a sci-fi movie?”
“Well, I don’t know what else to do to help you. As it is, I’m spending all my time getting type-rated in an airplane I’m never going to be able to own or even fly, except with or for Jim Hackett. How is that helping you?”
“You’re gaining his confidence,” Felicity said, “and he’s paying you to do it. That sounds like a win-win situation to me.”
“Maybe for me, but not for you.”
“When you’ve earned his confidence it will be easier to poke holes in his legend.”
“When are you going to tell me why your people still care about Whitestone?”
“When I’m allowed to but not before,” she replied. “And I may never be allowed to.”
Stone pulled the covers up. “I can’t think about this anymore,” he said.
“See you in the morning,” she replied and switched off her bedside lamp.
THE NEXT DAY Stone and Dan Phelan were taking off from Teterboro with Stone at the controls, when Phelan pulled the left throttle back to idle and said, “You’ve just lost an engine; handle it.”
Stone applied right rudder and used the rudder trim to take the pressure of holding it off his leg.
“Very good,” Phelan said.
“The airplane doesn’t really handle any differently on one engine as long as the rudder is neutralized,” Stone said.
“That’s right; the airplane is very benign. Now let’s go fly some single-engine instrument approaches and missed approaches.”
AFTER THEY LANDED at Teterboro and secured the airplane, Phelan said, “You’re doing well, but you’re going to have to pay a lot more attention to your heading, airspeed and altitude when you’re hand-flying the airplane. Your FAA check ride will be to Air Transport Pilot standards, and that means plus or minus five degrees of heading, ten knots of airspeed and a hundred feet of altitude.”