Lockout

CHAPTER TEN

Mojave Aircraft Storage, Mojave, California (2:45 p.m. PST / 2145 Zulu)

The owner of Mojave Aircraft Storage slammed the receiver down as hard as he could manage, trying his best to fracture the rest of the ancient telephone desk set, speaking through gritted teeth in seething anger.

“Okay, team. Guess what? They’ve already launched and are on the way here from Colorado with an ETA of fifteen minutes. I called them two hours ago, and they’re almost here… our clients with the missing airplane who are going to want some answers we don’t have, and I seriously doubt… THAT THEY’RE HAPPY!” The yelled words bounced off the walls of the line office, but this time the general manager was a bit beyond cringing, having already endured an hour of Ron Barrett’s fury and verbal abuse. After almost six hours of meticulously examining the identification plates of every Airbus A330 on the windswept desert airfield, the conclusion had been inescapable: They had, indeed, dispatched the wrong airplane a week before to Pangia World Airways, one of their best customers—an identical aircraft owned by a Colorado company no one knew anything about. The company had responded by launching their senior executives on a business jet, and Barrett was all but terrified at the upcoming confrontation.

Mojave Aircraft’s attorney, Jaime Lopez, had dropped everything and raced in from nearby Lancaster to join Barrett in pacing holes in the floor, waiting for word that the missing A330 wasn’t missing after all.

But it was.

Barrett was snarling again at the three people in the office. “You idiots know that it’s probably the goddamned CIA we’re screwing with, right?”

“We’re not sure they’re government, Ron,” Lopez replied, but Barrett whirled on him, his eyes tiny little pinpoints of red, his overgrown eyebrows flaring almost comically.

“Who the hell else would have a $200 million airplane registered to an unknown company none of us can find anything about? Not even a secretary of state listing in Colorado. Strike you as strange?”

Barrett continued pacing before speaking again, this time at a slightly lower volume. “Whoever they are, we’ve screwed it up and they’re almost here, and I’m going to have to call Pangia Airways now and tell them they’re using someone else’s airplane illegally.”

“Not illegally, Ron,” Jaime Lopez reminded him. “They just… are going to need to return it… at our expense. We released it, true, but Pangia’s pilots flew it out, so it was more of a mutual mistake. Have we pulled a copy of whatever communiqué came from Pangia Airways asking us to deliver one of their airplanes?”

The manager lifted a folder off the desk. “I checked the serial number of the jet we mistakenly sent away,” he began, “but we got an email ordering us to pull that very aircraft!”

Ron Barrett was on his feet, moving to the desk to verify the conclusion.

“What?”

“I think we’re in the clear!” the manager added.

“Let me see that, please,” Lopez asked, moving in behind Ron Barrett, who was holding the single sheet of paper triumphantly.

“The bastards created their own problem!” Ron Barrett was saying. “How are we to know that’s the wrong serial number?”

Jaime Lopez closed the folder and placed it back on the desk. “We have a duty to double-check, Ron, and unfortunately, that emailed order did not come from the true owner of the jet. We are decidedly not off the hook.”

“But Pangia misled us!”

“Did anyone authenticate this message?” Lopez asked. “Did we independently call Pangia’s maintenance base and verify? Did anyone validate the email address on this order?”

Silence met the question, and the lawyer shook his head. “Guys, the sender is, indeed, listed as Pangia World Airways and the email seems to be from them, but did any of you notice that the company name is misspelled?”

“What?” Ron whirled and moved to the lawyer’s side to look at the paper.

“After the ‘at’ symbol, it says ‘Pangiawordlair dot com.’ Why would a major airline be unaware that its email server’s name is misspelled? This isn’t just a repeated email address, this is the address from which the message was sent! And I just looked… each of the previous orders from Pangia comes from ‘Pangiaworldair dot com.’ In the message we received, there is one more addressee listed, ‘XL@pangiawordlair dot com.’ The ‘l’ and the ‘d’ have been juxtaposed.”

“What are you saying?” Ron asked.

“I’m saying,” Jaime Lopez said, metering his words, “…that on the face of it, it looks like we dutifully responded to a request that was specifically designed to look like a valid order to deliver to Pangia’s possession a $200 million aircraft that does not belong to Pangia. I’m saying that the email address of whoever sent the order may be bogus. And I’m saying that the fact that we received, and innocently acted on, that order does not change the reality that we handed over someone else’s property without their permission.”

The cascade of sound from a decelerating jet outside marked the arrival of the team from Colorado Springs, and Ron Barrett looked up, swallowing hard, his mind on the millions of dollars he’d spent to buy this storage operation, and how quickly it could all disappear.