“Okay,” Casey said, forcing a smile. “See you Sunday.”
Their arrangement was that Allison stayed with her father one week a month, leaving Monday and returning the following Sunday.
“Sunday.” Jim nodded curtly. “Same as always.”
“Sunday at six.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“I’m just checking, Jim.”
“No, you’re not. You’re controlling, the way you always do — ”
“Jim,” she said. “Please. Let’s not”
“Fine with me,” he snapped.
She bent over. “Bye, Allie.”
Allison said, “Bye, Mom,” but her eyes were already distant, her voice cool; she had transferred her allegiance to her father, even before her seat belt was fastened. Then Jim stepped on the gas, and the Lexus drove away, leaving her standing there on the sidewalk. The car rounded the comer, and was gone.
Down at the end of the street, she saw the hunched figure of her neighbor Amos, taking his snarly dog for a morning walk. Like Casey, Amos worked at die plant. She waved to him, and he waved back.
Casey was turning to go back inside to dress for work, when her eye caught a blue sedan parked across the street There were two men inside. One was reading a newspaper; the other stared out the window. She paused: her neighbor Mrs. Alvarez had been robbed recently. Who were these men? They weren’t gang bangers; they were in their twenties with a clean-cut, vaguely military appearance.
Casey was thinking about taking down the license plate when her beeper went off, with an electronic squeal. She undipped it from her shorts and read:
She sighed. Three stars signaled an urgent message: John Marder, who ran the factory, was calling an IRT meeting for 7 a.m. in the War Room. That was a full hour before the regular Morning Call; something was up. The final notation confirmed it, in plant slang—BTOYA. Be There Or It’s Your Ass.
BURBANK AIRPORT
6:32 a.m.
Rush hour traffic crept forward in the pale morning light. Casey twisted her rearview mirror, and leaned over to check her makeup. With her short dark hair, she was appealing in a tomboyish sort of way—long limbed and athletic. She played first base on the plant softball team. Men were comfortable around her; they treated her like a kid sister, which served her well at the plant.
In fact, Casey had had few problems there. She had grown up in the suburbs of Detroit, the only daughter of an editor at the Detroit News. Her two older brothers were both engineers at Ford. Her mother died when she was an infant, so she had been raised in a household of men. She had never been what her father used to call “a girly girl.”
After she graduated from Southern Illinois in journalism, Casey had followed her brothers to Ford. But she found writing press releases uninteresting, so she took advantage of the company’s continuing education program to get an MBA from Wayne State. Along the way, she married Jim, a Ford engineer, and had a child.
But Allison’s arrival had ended the marriage: confronted by diapers and feeding schedules, Jim started drinking, staying out late. Eventually they separated. When Jim announced he was moving to the West Coast to work for Toyota, she decided to move out, too. Casey wanted Allison to grow up seeing her father. She was tired of the politics at Ford, and the bleak Detroit winters. California offered a fresh start: she imagined herself driving a convertible, living in a sunny house near the beach, with palm trees outside her window; she imagined her daughter growing up tanned and healthy.
Instead, she lived in Glendale, an hour and a half inland from the beach. Casey had indeed bought a convertible, but she never put the top down. And although the section of Glendale where they lived was charming, gang territories began only a few blocks away. Sometimes at night, while her daughter slept, she heard the faint pop of gunfire. Casey worried about Allison’s safety. She worried about her education in a school system where fifty languages were spoken. And she worried about the future, because the California economy was still depressed, jobs scarce. Jim had been out of work for two years now, since Toyota fired him for drinking. And Casey had survived wave after wave of layoffs at Norton, where production had slumped thanks to the global recession.
She had never imagined she would work for an aircraft company, but to her surprise she had found that her plain-spoken, midwestern pragmatism was perfectly suited to the culture of engineers that dominated the company. Jim considered her rigid and “by the book,” but her attention to detail had served her well at Norton, where she had for the last year been a vice-president of Quality Assurance.
She liked QA, even though the division had a nearly impossible mission. Norton Aircraft was divided into two great factions—production and engineering—which were perpetually at war. Quality Assurance stood uneasily between the two. QA was involved in all aspects of production; the division signed off every step of fabrication and assembly. When a problem emerged, QA was expected to get to the bottom of it. That rarely endeared them to mechanics on the line, or the engineers.
At the same time, QA was expected to deal with customer support problems. Customers were often unhappy with decisions they themselves had made, blaming Norton if the galleys they had ordered were in the wrong place, or if there were too few toilets on the plane. It took patience and political skill to keep everybody happy and get the problems resolved. Casey, a born peacemaker, was especially good at this.
In return for walking a political tightrope, workers in QA had the run of the plant. As a vice-president, Casey was involved in every aspect of the company’s work; she had a lot of freedom and wide-ranging responsibility.
She knew her title was more impressive than the job she held; Norton Aircraft was awash in vice-presidents. Her division alone had four veeps, and competition among them was fierce. But now John Marder had just promoted her to liaison for the IRT. This was a position of considerable visibility— and it put her in line to head the division. Marder didn’t make such appointments casually. She knew he had a good reason for doing it.
She turned her Mustang convertible off the Golden State Freeway onto Empire Avenue, following the chain-link fence that marked the south perimeter of Burbank Airport. She headed toward the commercial complexes—Rockwell, Lockheed, and Norton Aircraft. From a distance, she could see the rows of hangars, each with the winged Norton logo painted above—
Her car phone rang.
“Casey? It’s Norma. You know about the meeting?”
Norma was her secretary. “I’m on my way,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“Nobody knows anything,” Norma said. “But it must be bad. Marder’s been screaming at the engineering heads, and he’s pushed up the IRT.”
John Marder was the chief operating officer at Norton. Marder had been program manager on the N-22, which meant he supervised the manufacture of that aircraft. He was a ruthless and occasionally reckless man, but he got results. Marder was also married to Charley Norton’s only daughter. In recent years, he’d had a lot to say about sales. That made Marder the second most powerful man in the company after the president. It was Marder who had moved Casey up, and it was—
“… do with your assistant?” Norma said.
“My what?”
“Your new assistant. What do you want me to do with him? He’s waiting in your office. You haven’t forgotten?”
“Oh, right.” The truth was, she had forgotten. Some nephew of the Norton family was working his way through the divisions. Marder had assigned the kid to Casey, which meant she’d have to babysit him for the next six weeks. “What’s he like, Norma?”
“Well, he’s not drooling.”
“Norma.”
“He’s better than the last one.”
That wasn’t saying much: the last one had fallen off a wing in major join and had nearly electrocuted himself in radio rack. “How much better?”
“I’m looking at his resume,” Norma said. “Yale law school and a year at GM. But he’s been in Marketing for the last three months, and he doesn’t know anything about production. You’re going to have to start him from the beginning.”
“Right,” Casey said, sighing. Marder would expect her to bring him to the meeting. “Have the kid meet me in front of Administration in ten minutes. And make sure he doesn’t get lost, okay?”
“You want me to walk him down?”
“Yeah, you better.”
Casey hung up and glanced at her watch. Traffic was moving slowly. Still ten minutes to the plant. She drummed her fingers on the dashboard impatiently. What could the meeting be about? There might have been an accident, or a crash.
She turned on the radio to see if it was on the news. She got a talk station, a caller saying, “—not fair to make kids wear uniforms to school. It’s elitist and discriminatory—”