"I was a first officer then," she said. "I flew regional routes for a small carrier that no longer exists. On a cold November night, we were scheduled to fly a short hop between two mountain towns. The aircraft had a minor warning light that had been flickering on and off for a week. Maintenance had written it up as an electrical nuisance. The chief pilot told us that it was nothing, that it was a sensor glitch, that the flight was important and the weather was clear.
"The captain I flew with that night was a man named Walter Brandt. He was fifty-eight years old, thirty-one years a pilot, the kindest person I ever worked for. He did not like the light either. But he was tired, and the company was under pressure, and he told me that if he refused, there would be a replacement aircrew by morning and a note in his file. So we went."
She swallowed. The candle flames in the room seemed to lean toward her.
"We were forty minutes into the flight when the warning light came on and stayed on. Then another one joined it. By the time we understood what was happening, we had lost two of our three hydraulic systems, and the third was failing. We did everything that the manual said. Walter held that aircraft in the air for eleven minutes using nothing but muscle and instinct and a kind of prayer.
"We landed it. It was not graceful. We hit the runway hard and went off the end and into a field of frozen mud. But the fuselage held. Of the thirty-seven people aboard, thirty-four walked away."
She stopped. The room was entirely quiet.
"Walter did not walk away," she said. "He died in the hospital two days later. Before he did, he looked at me, and he told me something I have never forgotten. He said: 'It was not your fault, Imani. It was never the pilot's fault. The fault was in the room where they decided how much our lives were worth.'"
She lifted her eyes, and they were bright and steady. "I promised him, in that hospital room, that I would never again fly an aircraft I knew was unsafe, and that I would never again be silent. I have kept the first promise for seventeen years. Tonight, I am keeping the second."
Margaret Ellison wiped her eyes with the corner of her napkin. The young director looked at the floor. The woman in pearls was weeping openly.
Harold Sterling sat motionless, his hands flat on the white tablecloth. For the first time, there was no anger in his face. There was only a slow, terrible comprehension, like a man reading a verdict that he has known for years was coming.
CHAPTER 12: THE EMERGENCY SESSION
The emergency session of the board of Meridian Skyways began at eleven-fifteen that night, in a glass-walled conference room on the fortieth floor of the company's headquarters.
Rain had begun to fall across the city, soft at first, then steady, streaking the enormous windows and turning the lights below into long smears of gold and red. Twelve directors sat around a polished oval table. Two seats were empty. One of them belonged to Harold Sterling, who had been asked, courteously and firmly, to wait in an adjoining room until the board was ready to hear him.
Imani sat at the foot of the table, still in her gray uniform. Beside her, Daniel Hale had opened a leather folder and begun to lay out documents in neat, careful rows. Margaret Ellison, in the chair at the head, called the meeting to order with a single tap of her pen against a water glass.
"I will be brief," she said. "This board has received credible evidence that the chairman of its audit committee, Mr. Harold Sterling, has knowingly and repeatedly authorized the operation of aircraft with documented safety faults, in violation of company policy, aviation regulations, and the basic duty of care that we owe to every passenger and crew member who trusts us with their lives."
A pause. Rain tapped softly at the glass.