She did not look like a guest. She did not look like staff, either, which was precisely what made the nearest diners pause with their forks halfway to their mouths. She wore a uniform of deep charcoal gray, tailored close to the body, buttoned to the throat with a stiff, upright collar. On each shoulder lay an epaulette striped with gold, three bright bars that caught the chandelier light. Above her left breast pocket sat a small pair of golden wings, polished until they glowed.
She was perhaps forty years old, tall and straight-backed, with short black hair cropped close to her head in a halo of tight curls. Her skin was a deep, warm brown, her cheekbones high, her eyes dark and steady. There was nothing hurried about the way she walked. She moved like someone who had spent her life in places where panic was a luxury that could kill you, and had learned to carry calm the way other people carried keys.
Her name was Captain Imani Okafor, and she had flown for Meridian Skyways for seventeen years.
She had come straight from the airfield. The leather of her shoes still held a faint gray dust from the tarmac, and a single strand of wind had pulled loose a curl above her ear. Under her left arm she carried nothing. In her right hand, held loosely at her side, was a phone.
The maître d', a thin, silver-haired man named Alphonse who had guarded the door of the Aurelian Room for twenty-two years, moved to intercept her. "Madame," he began, in the soft, apologetic tone of a man who has turned away presidents' cousins. "I am afraid this is a private dinner. If you are looking for the staff entrance..."
"I am not," Imani said. Her voice was low and clear, and it carried further than she seemed to intend. "I am looking for Mr. Harold Sterling. He is expecting me, or he will be in about thirty seconds."
Alphonse hesitated. Something in her eyes told him that to stand in her way would be a mistake that he would think about for years. He stepped aside.
She walked down the center of the room. The murmur of conversation did not stop all at once. It frayed, one table at a time, as diners noticed the uniform and turned their heads. A woman in an emerald dress whispered something to her husband. A gray-bearded man at the bar lowered his glass. The pianist, sensing a shift in the air, faltered on a note and then went on more quietly.
Daniel Hale saw her first, because he had been waiting for her. His stomach tightened. He glanced at Sterling, who had his back half-turned, deep in a story about a yacht, and he felt the old, familiar fear rise in his chest. It was the fear of a man who knows that something is about to break and is standing in the wrong place when it does.
Imani stopped beside the center table. She stood perfectly still. The chandelier threw a net of light across her shoulders, and the gold stripes on her epaulettes flashed.
"Mr. Sterling," she said.
Sterling did not turn at once. He finished his sentence, took a sip of wine, and set the glass down with deliberate slowness. Only then did he lift his head, and the pale, restless eyes traveled up the length of her uniform, from the polished buttons to the gold wings to her face.
"Yes?" he said, in the tone one uses with a waiter who has brought the wrong order. "Can I help you?"
"Captain Imani Okafor," she said. "Meridian flight 408. I believe we need to talk about tomorrow morning."
The word "tomorrow" hung in the air. Around the table, forks stopped moving.
CHAPTER 3: A VOICE USED TO OBEDIENCE
For a moment, Harold Sterling simply looked at her, and the look was a strange mixture of amusement and irritation, like a man discovering a stain on a freshly pressed shirt.