GONE
ABOVE THE PACIFIC OCEAN
JULY, 2001
“JULY 21ST, 2001 . . . damndest storm I’ve ever flown through. 747s aren’t supposed to pitch and roll like this.”
He peered out the window. Deranged lightning cavorted among the clouds. What would be an appropriate score for this, he wondered to himself? Mahler, or maybe Prokofiev. He blinked as another bolt split the sky entirely too close.
The man added another note to his daily journal. “Blue lightning, not pink.”
The jumbo took another bump. A few nervous gasps rose from seats further toward the back. Around him his fellow upper class passengers continued to read, work, sip wine or watch films in silence. Flying in First Class carried with it certain responsibilities, among which could be accounted the maintenance of a certain decorum. He hoped it wouldn’t bounce like this all the way from Hong Kong. They were not yet halfway through the flight.
“Sorry about the weather, ladies and gentlemen.”
Tinged with the distinctive Aussie accent, the pilot’s voice was what every passenger wanted it to be: calm, evenly modulated, the verbal equivalent of warm milk.
“We’ve had to detour somewhat to the east to get out of the worst of these storms. Right now we’re almost over the island of Pohnpei on the Micronesian chain, though you can’t see it very well through these clouds. The ride should smooth out shortly and we’ll make up for our late departure.”
There was no doubt at this rate he’d now be late for the meeting in Sydney. Not that they wouldn’t wait for him. He was the meeting.
This was the risk when flying commercial. But there was nothing to be done for it. When your Gulfstream is grounded for maintenance, you fly with the flock. But somebody would answer for the oversight.
Athletic, imposing, expression characteristically unfathomable, with a scalp kept close-shaven out of a desire for hygiene rather than appearance, he was continuously reminding his vice-presidents at Burroughs Labs to plan the work, work the plan and always have a back-up.
Out-think, out-perform and out-pace, or you don’t work for Raef Eisman.
Giggling rose above the steady thrum of Ansett Flight 888’s engines. Rising slightly in his seat while trying not to crease his work suit of grey Italian silk, he looked toward the rear of the nosecone cabin. He saw the other two girls first. Emily and . . . what was the other girl’s name? Alyssa. According to what Paige had told him, Emily was heading to Sydney for a music concerto with an Australian choir. Her Singaporean parents watched movies in Row 4. Alyssa was enroute as an unaccompanied minor to visit her grandparents in Australia.
The only other kids in First Class, the pair and Paige had struck up an immediate friendship. Since the mid-week flight wasn’t crowded, the crew had sensibly given the well-behaved children the run of the cabin and let them commandeer the unoccupied last row of seat pods as their palace, their fort, their shopping mall; it had served as all three on the flight so far. Except for a few arched eyebrows at the occasional shriek, the other passengers ignored them. Soon enough the window shades would come down, the cabin lights would be dimmed, and even a trio of energetic ten-year olds would lapse into slumber.
Unless the storm kept them awake. But the Captain had just announced that they would soon be leaving behind the worst of it. Raef peered out of his cabin window at the darkening azure sky and performed a ritual he had long observed on every flight.
Letting his eyes relax just out of focus he looked for the shapes that floated lazily across his iris, silhouetted against the backdrop of blue. Soon came the dust motes, those perfect rings and strings, and as he tuned his focus ever so slightly more inwards, so came the almost imperceptible flickerings. Whether they were on the surface of his eye, between the layers of plate glass, or skimming across the airliner’s hull he didn’t know. But for years now he had been aware that if he could ratchet his lens by the tiniest of degrees and hold his stare, he could see something else in the air, something he could never seem to spy at ground level.
Slowly at first just a single will-o’-the wisp stirred in the center of sight, taunting him. Then, if he looked without looking, stared without staring, the window would shimmer as if through a heat haze, and the one was joined by another, then another, until he could discern a thousand vague shapes, moving across the flat membrane of air like skaters on a pond.
His silent companions were there now, the window awash with motion, and as he brought his eyes inward in one final degree of cross-eyed concentration, everything attained the clarity of a sunburst. A thousand pinpricks of brilliant white light rapidly spun and winked, coming and going busily in and out of this micro-thin layer, this slice of the universe that only came to him at high altitude.
He had once been convinced it must be a trick of the cornea, the shapes attached to his eye. But then why, when he looked just to the sides of the window, could he not see them inside the cabin? Whatever they were, they were benign; they weren’t static electricity, weren’t sparks, and posed no threat. But they were such a curiosity. Sometimes he found himself thinking they were curious about him. Nobody else he had mentioned them to seemed to know what he was talking about. Maybe he alone had special sight?
These musings were interrupted as Paige appeared at his side. Her gleeful smile warmed him.
Just turned ten, she had already travelled more than most adults manage in a lifetime, bemusing the staff at numerous frequent flyer lounges as she strode through their sliding glass doors and waved her membership card with the confidence of a business scion attending their home away from home. A small army of nannies saw to it that she ate correctly, exercised properly, and was educated in a dense curriculum of home schooling made possible by the Internet, though she was made to wear a twee little school uniform to delineate school time from cool time.
Paige had the singular advantage of seeing first-hand the cultures, geography, and history she read about online; juggling exchange rates between currencies for math studies and grasping the common roots of foreign words for language. Paige Eisman was gaining a classical education the rival of any preparatory school, with the perspective of world affairs that only travel across cultures can really provide, even to a child.
Oval-faced with eyebrows that jaunted upwards as if laughing at a private joke, she shared her father’s cloven chin but her mother’s shoulder length chocolate-hued hair, and those same umber eyes. The other physical reminder of Jade Eisman was the twined metal knot-within-a-knot that Paige forever wore around her neck, once the mother’s favorite necklace, now the daughter’s priceless heirloom.
Extending an arm, Paige proffered a brightly colored sheet of paper to her father. “Alyssa, Emily and I are playing,” she explained breathlessly, “I drew you a sunrise. Hold it for me, daddy!”
He smiled as he took the paper and appraised it with the same eye that had valued many internationally known works of art in his private collection. “Good form, good color. Maybe they’ll hang it in the Louvre.”
Paige giggled with delight. Her father always made her feel important.
“Daddy you are my air!” she said brightly.
“And you take my breath away,” was the appropriate response.
It was a phrase Paige had made up a couple of years ago. She had told him seriously one morning that ‘I love you’ was special, and not to be shared in public with strangers. This is what she’d come up with as an alternative. He marveled at how one so young could so perfectly capture how he felt about her. She was his world.
“You girls have fun now. And don’t break the airplane.”
Making no promises, she darted back to the rear of the cabin. He followed her with his eyes until the strain on his neck forced him to turn away. Away, and back to the work he had spread out before him.
Though it was hard to concentrate on business when she was around he could not resist bringing her along on his frequent business trips whenever he could. He was away from home so much that if he didn’t take her with him he would hardly see her at all. He didn’t want to concentrate on work when she was around. She was his anchor, his antidote, the effervescence that put life into his existence. After a long day of executive meetings, poring over reports and statistics, trying to divine what governments and corporations wanted and devising the best and most cost-effective way to sell it to them, he liked nothing better than to come home, share a staff-cooked meal, and help her with her schoolwork.
And horsey. Even a billionaire could be good at horsey.
Watching her caused a smile to crack the set expression that usually dominated his visage. He waved. She waved back and turned toward Emily on her left. Both giggled anew. Then Alyssa sprang up with a blanket over her head and all three girls dropped out of sight.
Settling back in his seat, he returned to his work. He wondered what it must be like to be that young, that innocent, that ten. He didn’t remember. He didn’t remember much of anything, really, before being found by traders from the Vanavara trading post. Half dead from starvation, half frozen from the Siberian cold, he had been nursed back to health by the locals, his name found in a hand-scrawled slip of paper in his pocket.
In his delirium he had babbled in a strange language. Or perhaps several. His deeply religious rescuers believed that he had been speaking tongues.
Whatever he had been speaking, in the course of his gradual convalescence he had demonstrated a remarkable facility for languages, rapidly acquiring Russian, Mandarin, and lastly English. Since he was obviously neither Russian nor Chinese, the local authorities presumed he had somehow wandered into their territory from the nearby District of Alaska. A lost hunter perhaps, or an overly ambitious gold prospector from Nome.
Returned home by ship to Ketchikan and then sent down to Seattle, it was assumed that like so many prospectors the benumbed stranger had lost everything.
He spent some time recovering in a veteran’s hospice with a spare cot, then worked for food and board by sweeping streets.
Marveling one day at one of the new adding machines that held pride of place in the administration office where he redeemed his vouchers, he was drawn to the round keys and ink ribbon that replaced so much manual accounting drudgery. People called it a computer. He called it a wonder, and went to work for the American Arithmometer Corporation, the company that manufactured it, later called Burroughs1.
Decades of time, hard work, and a piercing brilliance led him from the sales room to the Boardroom, eventually becoming head of a division, and then CEO of its 1986 high-tech spin-off, Burroughs Labs.
Though he had acquired money, power, and the notoriety that came with both, still he felt unfulfilled. Something was missing.
Something significant. Something of great importance. Something of himself.
He’d met Jade in the summer of 1989. Beautiful, intelligent, and most important of all unquestioning, she had given him happiness.
And Paige.
If only her mother had lived to see what a startlingly bright, vivacious child their girl had become. But their joy proved too brief. Jade was taken from them in childbirth, and he had been plunged again into darkness.
His daughter was a flickering ember of the light that once was, and as Paige grew, her father found solace and purpose as her provider, protector, and teacher.
But though she gave Raef Eisman a lightness, she could not bring him light. Deep in his soul were secrets, told only to Jade, that he was no closer to unlocking.
For example, how he continued to look and feel not a day over fifty when by his own account he must be at least one hundred and twenty.
His ‘great uncle’ was the one who had taken the job at Burroughs in Detroit. It was his ‘father’ who had risen to the crest of the company. And it was the ‘son’ who now sat as Chairman of the Board of Burroughs Labs. All the same man, a clever century-old ruse to forestall questions.
It had worked well, as had most everything he had tried in four generations as he built his assets and made astute investments in property, stocks, and people. Live long enough and you see patterns repeat, the law of averages, the purity of numbers. With the foresight that experience brings, fortune was almost a certainty, even if it seemed at times like he got whatever he wanted, just for saying it out loud . . .
Ten years from now he would have to set the stage for his next heir to help up the corporate ladder. Maybe a distant ‘nephew’ for it was known that Raef had no son, and the industrial military complex was not his choice for Paige. Some day he would find an explanation for the mystery of his ongoing youth. Some day he might even find out how he had come to be stumbling around Siberia in 1908. Some day.
But today he was on a plane to Sydney with his little girl, and tomorrow there were important meetings to be had at Burroughs’ Oceania office.
He turned back to his sheaves of work.
It was a single bolt that struck the plane.
All the lights went out and screams filled the darkness as a flash of blue efflorescence rippled through the inside of the cabin in an instant. As the big jumbo dropped a couple of hundred feet and oxygen masks unfurled from their hidden overhead compartments, panicked screams rose anew.
More stoic than most, even Eisman clutched at the armrests of his seat. As soon as the plane steadied from its violent shaking, interior lights snapped on. He blew a sigh of relief and immediately turned to the rear of the cabin. Stewards trying to right a crashed drinks cart blocked his view of Paige’s row, and he ignored their cries to put on his seatbelt as he tried to push past them.
The slight strain in the Captain’s voice as it reverberated over the intercom system was understandable.
“Sorry about that, folks. Something to tell your friends about when we arrive in Sydney. We have clear skies ahead, the storm is now behind us and as soon as we get the cabin back in order I’m sure there will be a run on beverages, so please be patient as we fill your orders.”
Relieved sighs and nervous tittering sounded from various corners of the plane. A good executive, Eisman reflected. Someone he wouldn’t mind having on his staff at Burroughs.
Still blocked in the aisle, Raef saw that the metal drinks cart had slammed hard into the rear of one of the passenger pods. It actually appeared to be steaming and fused into the plastic, though that was clearly impossible.
Impatient with a delay of mere seconds when it prevented him checking on his girl, he doubled back and made better progress up the opposite aisle.
“Paige?”
No response. He raised his voice.
“Paige.” Still nothing. Had she slipped out of her seat belt? Given the speed and severity of the drop, she could have slammed into the overhead bins. The closer he got to the rear of First, the more uneasy he became.
Hopes of seeing Paige and her new friends leap up from behind the last row to laugh and make faces at him faded swiftly as he neared the rear curtain. It was too quiet. Had all three of them been hurt and if so, how seriously?
“Paige, are you and your friends all ri—?”
The last word caught in his throat. He couldn’t tell if his daughter was all right or not.
Because she wasn’t there.
Neither were the other two young travelers, Emily and Alyssa. Like trail markers, open packages of candy and chips showed where they had been sitting. But of the girls themselves there was no sign. He frowned and looked around sharply.
“All right, Paige, ladies. Enough. Come on out from wherever you’re hiding.” Little girls and their games, he thought. His irritation increased as he commenced a search of First Class, checking under seats and behind rows as well as in front of them.
The bathrooms, he told himself. They had retreated, fled, or simply rushed to use the bathroom. That made sense. Both lavatories were in use. He waited patiently. But as adults emerged from each one his irritation grew. Maybe the girls had left First and gone back into the Business Class section. The most likely area was the upper deck. Climbing stairs inside a plane was still a novelty for children.
But they weren’t upstairs, either.
Paige had flown with him often enough to know better than to take off her seat belt and run around a plane while the Fasten sign was still illuminated. Maybe she or one of her friends had needed to use the bathroom real bad, and with both of the lavatories in First occupied they might have rushed aft no matter what the seat belt sign said. Muttering to himself, he returned to their row to await their return.
It was then that he saw it, almost hidden under a mess of scribbles and papers on their seats. Paige’s bronze and gold amulet. The one she never took off. It lay on the leather seat without the gold strand that normally looped through it, and without the girl it was ever attached to.
He picked it up, warm to the touch, then rang for the attendant.
“Where are my daughter and her friends?”
The stewardess blinked as she met the passenger’s gaze. Looking at the empty seats she replied: “Everyone was belted in for the storm.” She smiled professionally. “Kids that age are full of pent up energy. Probably running it off somewhere in back.”
He didn’t smile. “I’ve looked there already, and upstairs. What about the parents of the dark-haired girl, Emily? Check with them—and find all three girls right now.”
“Yes sir.” The attendant bustled away while Raef made another sweep of the economy cabin from fore to aft.
When the stewardess found him twenty minutes later it was with the head steward and the father of the other girl in tow. That was not encouraging, Eisman thought. They were accompanied by the co-pilot. That was downright ominous. Eisman’s gaze swept them all. They wore a unified look of unease. It was left to the steward to step forward.
“Sir . . . Mr. Eisman. We . . . we can’t find your daughter. Or the other two girls.” The other father was pale and agitated, eyes wide with concern.
Eisman’s voice was as cold as the air outside the plane. “What do you mean, you can’t find them?”
The steward wished to be anywhere else in the world but on that particular flight at that particular moment.
“We’ve checked every seat, both over and under. I had the crew make a full search of the plane. We checked everywhere, every possible hiding place in case the girls were playing a game. Under seats, every luggage compartment, every lavatory. We checked the crew sleeping quarters down in the tail, we even checked the empty serving carts in the galleys. On the unlikely possibility they somehow managed to access the cargo bay, the assistant steward and I put on masks and coats and went down there too. Of course we can’t check every piece of cargo while we’re in flight, but once we’ve landed we can . . .”
The co-pilot broke in. “I’ve already radioed Sydney, Mr. Eisman. A special medical team will be waiting on the ground as soon as we pull up to the gate. If the girls are somewhere in the belly . . .” He stopped, unwilling to go on. He didn’t have to. If Paige and her friends had become trapped in the cargo section of the plane they were unlikely to survive the remaining hours of cold and thin air. It was not impossible, but—
Raef headed back to the nosecone of the plane where he knew a hatch in the forward deck of First Class gave access to a small electronics bay, through which the cargo section could be accessed.
“I want to go down there. Now. I’ll look for myself. Give me a breathing mask.” Despite the circumstances he nearly smiled. “Cold doesn’t bother me.”
By the time AN888 arrived in Sydney he was exhausted from searching the cargo bay from one end to the other, pawing through stacks of luggage and forcing paths between pallets of commercial goods. Having to rotate personnel to accompany him, the crew could only marvel at his stamina in the biting cold and low pressure.
They had to all but force him back into his seat while the plane landed. Then it took three members of airport security to wrestle him bodily off the plane. He was crying and fighting the whole time. Curses and threats alternated with tears as he screamed his daughter’s name.
“Paige, Paige!”
His eyes blazed as he fought wildly with the police and airport personnel who now surrounded him. “Let go of me! I want that plane sealed. Sealed and taken apart rivet by rivet until she’s found!” His voice cracked. “I’ll fire everyone, you understand? Everyone! I’ll buy the goddamn airline! I’ll . . !”
Inconsolable and out of his head with grief, he was whisked by dark suited Burroughs Labs representatives to a private hospital on the harbor city’s North Shore. It took two days and a combination of sympathetic visitors and proper medication to calm him down. What remained was a smoldering determination.
The duty nurse who entered the room on the third morning expected to encounter a convalescing patient. She was shocked to discover him standing by the window, dressed complete to tie and hand-made shoes. Holding a phone to his ear, he turned to acknowledge her presence.
“Mr. Eisman—sir—you’re supposed to be in bed. The doctor—”
“Tell the doctor to attend to sick people. This is a hospital; I’m sure there are plenty of them. I’ll be checking myself out shortly.”
“Checking your— Sir, you can’t. Only a senior member of staff can authorize that.”
A thin smile creased the patient’s face. “Watch and learn.” As the stunned nurse retreated to find a superior, the billionaire’s connection came through.
“This is Raef Eisman. I need to speak to William Hills. Yes, I know what time it is in New York. Wake him up—we’re buying a healthcare company today.” He looked down at himself, reasonably pleased.
Hospital garb had never suited him.
