“Like a bus, right?” the mechanic repeated.
“That’s right,” Hail said. “Is the Gulfstream ready to go?”
“Yes, Sir. Topped off, pre-flight checked and ready to fly.”
“Great, thanks,” Hail said and reached out to shake the mechanic’s hand. The mechanic hesitated and Hail realized that the mechanic’s hands were covered with grease. He reeled his hand back in.
“No hard feelings,” the mechanic laughed.
Hail settled with patting the man on the back and he then turned and started walking toward the jet.
The plane’s stairs were down and Hail went straight up into the craft. As per international regulations, the cockpit door was closed and locked, so Hail turned right and stepped into the cabin.
When Hail had purchased the plane, he had been offered a number of different seating combinations. He had opted to start with four white CEO seats that faced one another at the front of the aircraft. Tables could be pulled up from the wall to create a desk in between each set of seats. Past that seating area was a long white leather couch and a fixed inlayed mahogany coffee table that ran another ten feet down the side of craft. Opposite the couch, on the other side of the aisle, was a full bar, sink and wine collection. Deeper into the aircraft was the bedroom area and a bathroom. This area was separated from the rest of the cabin with inlayed veneer wall panels and a formal sliding door. Mounted in dozens of spaces were various sizes of flat panel displays. The design of the multimedia system was laid out so a screen could be seen from any seat in the aircraft. No passenger had to strain their neck to watch a movie, take in a sporting event, check a computer display or attend a video conference.
Hail plopped himself down in one of the thick CEO flight chairs. The big overstuffed chairs were more like lazy-boy recliners with seat belts than aircraft seats. The main difference was these thick chairs were bolted to the fuselage.
The cockpit camera was already on and his pilot Daniel Chavez was sitting at the controls. Hail could see the pilot on the video screen mounted to the bulkhead wall in front of him.
“How are you doing today, Marshall?” Chavez greeted him. “I see you survived your helicopter flight from the Nucleus.”
“To tell you the truth, Daniel, I’m getting old and I’m kind of tired,” Hail replied. “At least I feel like I’m getting old. Maybe I need to work out more.”
The pilot said nothing.
Hail looked at his young pilot over the video link and thought to himself, Daniel has no idea what I am talking about. Hail thought back to the time when he was the same age as his pilot. Was he ever tired at that age? Did the word tired even enter his mind back then? Getting old certainly didn’t. At that age you thought you would live forever.
The pilot checked over his controls and pressed a few buttons and Hail heard the engines begin to spin up.
“Alrighty,” Chavez said. “Well, you get some rest, Marshall. I’m sure you’ll wake up when we touch down at Dakhla for fuel. You might want to get out and stretch your legs at bit.”
“Sounds good,” Hail responded. He retrieved a remote control from a hidden compartment under his chair’s armrest. The pilot clicked off and Hail switched the input of the screen to CNN. He didn’t think that the North Korean’s death would make prime-time news, but then he didn’t know how the North Koreans would play it. They would either keep Chang’s death an internal matter and no one would ever know the man was dead, or they would try to blame it on someone and make an international incident out of it.
Hail watched CNN until the wheels of the Gulfstream left the ground and the plane climbed. The video began to show static, but Hail was already sleeping comfortably in his big white chair. As he slept, his dreams drifted in and out between love, death and heart crushing loss.
Fairfax, Virginia ― Mansion on the Chain Bridge Road
The poor little rich girl went home to her mansion; at least she was sure that’s what her fellow workers at the CIA thought of her. And she couldn’t argue the fact. It was true; all of it except for the fact that she was not little. At five-eleven she was taller than most women, but the rest was true. She was rich. Well, to be exact her parents had been rich. Being the only child, when they had died, then she had inherited it all. Everything. The Virginia mansion, the vacation homes, the cars and the millions.
But when her rich neighbors walked by the mansion, walking their dog Fifi or Fufu, they would probably assume that the property was vacant or maybe even abandoned. The only reason they would suspect that someone was living in the estate would be the dirty McLaren F1 her father had driven and her mother’s Pagani Huayra. The luxury car and supercar sat unused on the circular paved driveway, neglected to the point where they were literally rotting away. She drove the dirty Aston Martin One-77, that was only a tad cleaner than the more expensive cars.
The poor little rich girl had never been one of the tidiest people in the world. She never had to be. Even as a young little rich girl, she could never recall a time when there hadn’t been a maid around to pick up anything she had dropped onto her bedroom floor. She would leave a huge mess in her bathroom and minutes later she would come back from getting clothes out of her massive walk-in closet, and the bathroom would look like brand new. It was kind of spooky. It was like little cleaning ghosts were always floating around the mansion just looking for messes to ascend upon. For the longest time, she thought that Mr. Clean, the guy who did those funny old commercials for some cleaning liquid, was real. She thought he lived in the mansion and followed around behind her, magically cleaning messes she had made.
When her parents had died, all the upkeep on the mansion just kind of went away. The sad little rich girl neglected opening mail and paying bills and one day those ghosts just stopped cleaning. The outside ghosts that mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges and tended to the pool and cleaned the scum out of the pond and all the other things that grew and grew stale, well, they all went away too. The yards encircling the mansion were overgrown to the point where trick-or-treaters were too scared to walk up and ring the bell. Not knowing how to clean clothes, make food or most of the other skills humans learn when growing up, she was operating in a world that was very foreign to her. She bought clothes and threw them away when they were dirty. She ate at restaurants or picked up take-out to eat at home. And all of those workarounds made her feel like she was dumb, that she was not a real person. She had been the beautiful doll that had been kept in the immaculate doll house her entire life. And dolls didn’t have to know how to do anything. Everyone knew that.
The poor little rich girl had turned into an unhappy little rich girl. She had become consumed by the death of her parents. They were good people. Wonderful parents. She knew they had cared about her a great deal and had always told her how much they had loved her. When they had died, the purpose of the poor little rich girl had died as well.
Like everything else in her world, her life had already been planned for her. She didn’t have to worry about that task. She would go onto college and become a famous doctor like her father or maybe even a real estate mogul like her mom. That’s the way her parents had told her that things would work out, and she always believed that. Her parents had always been in control and very much in charge of their own lives. Therefore, when they said something would happen, it normally did. But her folks didn’t count on a natural skillset being ensconced in their child’s DNA. And that was the ability to learn languages very quickly.