Chapter 6 Takeoff
TAKEOFF
TORQUE
She’s early.
Her footsteps echo on the hangar concrete—measured, deliberate—as I run the pre-flight checklist on the Baron. The same controlled rhythm I’ve been cataloging since she walked through our front door.
“You’re early, Director.” I don’t look up from the fuel sumps. One more drain, checking for water contamination. Clear.
“I’m never late.”
“No.” I straighten, wiping my hands on the rag I’ve had stuffed in my back pocket for the last three hours. “I don’t suppose you are.”
Blazer back on. Hair still pulled tight enough to give me a headache just looking at it.
The manila folder is tucked under her arm like a security blanket.
But something’s different in the way she’s watching me—less judgment, more assessment.
Like I’m a puzzle she hasn’t solved yet, instead of one she’s already dismissed.
The hangar encounter changed something. I’m not sure what.
“This is what we’re flying?” She circles the Baron, studying the twin engines, the low-wing configuration, the sleek lines that hide three decades of reliable service.
“Beechcraft Baron. Twin-engine piston. Cruise speed around two hundred knots, range of about fifteen hundred nautical miles.” I pat the fuselage the same way I patted the helicopter earlier. “She’s not flashy, but she’s solid. Gets the job done without drawing attention.”
“Flight plan filed?”
“No. We’re going VFR. Visual flight rules. Harder to track.” I move to the cockpit door and pull it open. “We’ll stay below eighteen thousand, avoid the controlled airspace corridors. Anyone looking for Director Sarah Vance won’t find her on an instrument flight plan because there won’t be one.”
She nods. Accepts the logic without argument.
Progress.
“Pre-flight’s almost done. I’ve been over her twice.” I gesture to the open engine cowling. “Oil’s good, fuel’s clean, control surfaces are responsive. She’s ready.”
“You’ve been here all night.”
Not a question. An observation.
“Couldn’t sleep.” I shrug. “Might as well be useful.”
Something flickers across her face. Recognition, maybe. We’re both running on empty, both too wired to rest. The difference is she’s trying to hide it, and I stopped bothering years ago.
“Stow your gear in the back. We leave in ten.”
The Baron’s cockpit is tight but functional.
Two seats up front, instrumentation that’s been upgraded from the original 1990s panels to something approaching modern.
Not glass cockpit fancy—Cerberus doesn’t waste money on pretty—but reliable.
Accurate. Everything I need to keep us in the air and out of the ground.
She settles into the right seat without complaint. Finds the four-point harness, threads it correctly on the first try, and clicks the buckle home. Most passengers fumble with aircraft restraints—too many straps, unfamiliar buckles. She handles it like she’s done it a thousand times.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Part of the job.” Her tone is clipped. Dismissive.
But her hands moved with a familiarity that suggests more than just being a passenger.
The way she adjusted the shoulder straps before tightening the lap belt.
The automatic check of the inertia reel.
That’s not a passenger who’s been briefed on restraint systems—that’s someone who’s strapped into a cockpit before.
I file it away. Another piece of the puzzle she’s not volunteering.
The startup sequence flows through muscle memory.
Master switch on. Fuel selectors to the main tanks.
Mixture rich. Throttles cracked. The left engine catches on the third blade, coughing to life with a rumble that vibrates through the airframe.
The right follows two seconds later. The sound evens out into a synchronized growl—two Continental IO-550s producing five hundred horsepower of controlled fury.
Oil pressure rising. Alternators online. Avionics master on. Radios humming. The instrument panel glows in the pre-dawn darkness, green, amber, and white.
This is where I make sense. Where the noise in my head goes quiet because there’s no room for it. Every neuron focused on airspeed, altitude, engine health, and the thousand small decisions that keep metal in the sky.
The keys are in my pocket. Not spinning. Not needed.
“Cerberus Base, Baron November-Seven-Four-Tango-Mike, ready for taxi.”
Brass’s voice crackles through the headset. “Seven-Four-Tango-Mike, wind is calm, altimeter two-niner-niner-two. You’re clear for departure. Main team deploys in six hours. Check in when you’re on the ground.”
“Copy. Tango-Mike rolling.”
I release the brakes, and the Baron eases forward, nose wheel tracking the yellow line toward the threshold. Sarah’s hands are flat on her thighs. Controlled. No white-knuckle grip on the armrest, no tension in her shoulders. She’s watching the procedure, not fearing it.
We reach the hold-short line. I swing the Baron into the wind and run the engine checks. Magnetos cycling clean on both engines. Props exercised. Controls free and correct. Everything in the green.
“You ready?”
She looks at me. In the dim glow of the cockpit, her eyes are darker than I remember. Deeper.
“Ready.”
I push the throttles forward.
The engines roar, the airframe shudders, and the Baron lunges down the runway. Airspeed climbing through forty, fifty, sixty knots. The control yoke goes light in my hands. Seventy knots. Rotation.
The nose lifts. The wheels leave the ground. And just like that, we’re flying.
The Cascades slide beneath us, black ridges slowly separating from the black sky as dawn approaches from the east. Seattle’s lights fade behind us, replaced by the deep wilderness of central Washington—forests, lakes, and mountains that have never heard of Phoenix or satellites or fathers who trade their daughters’ trust for power.
I climb to ninety-five hundred feet, level off, and let the Baron settle into cruise. Two hundred and ten knots over the ground, engines humming at sixty-five percent power. The sound is steady, almost hypnotic. Like a heartbeat.
Sarah hasn’t spoken since takeoff. She’s watching the world scroll past below us—the gradual shift from green to brown as we cross into the Oregon high desert. Her reflection is ghosted in the windscreen, superimposed over the brightening horizon.
“First time seeing it from this altitude?”
“No.” She doesn’t look away from the window. “But I usually see it through satellite feeds. Pixels. It’s different up here.”
“Better or worse?”
She considers the question. Takes her time with it. “Different. More—immediate. The data doesn’t capture this.”
Below us, the sun crests the eastern ridgeline and light spills across the desert like liquid gold. The shadows of mountains stretch for miles, purple and blue against the ochre sand. It’s beautiful in a way that doesn’t translate to briefing documents or intelligence reports.
“That’s why I fly.” The words come out before I can stop them. “Up here, it’s just you and the sky and the machine. No politics. No history. No—”
I catch myself. Stop.
She’s watching me now. Those analytical eyes missing nothing.
“No, what?”
“Nothing.” I adjust the mixture, leaning the engines for the altitude. Unnecessary. Just something to do with my hands. “Just thinking out loud.”
The silence stretches. Not uncomfortable—we’re past that, somehow—but weighted with the things neither of us is saying.
“You do that a lot,” she observes. “Start sentences you don’t finish.”
“Bad habit.”
“Or a defense mechanism.”
I don’t answer. Don’t have to. We both know she’s right.
Thirty minutes into the flight, she shifts in her seat. The movement is small, controlled, but I’ve spent enough time reading people’s body language in tight spaces to recognize restlessness when I see it.
“Something on your mind, Director?”
“The cover story.” She’s staring straight ahead now, at the brightening horizon. “The marriage angle. Is it really necessary?”
“Ghost seemed to think so.”
“Ghost isn’t here.” She turns to look at me. “We’re an hour out from Vegas. We could skip the theatrical elements. Go straight to the conference. I approach Costa, make my case, and extract the codes. Clean and simple.”
“Clean and simple.” I let the words hang there. “When has anything involving Phoenix ever been clean and simple?”
“I’m serious. The marriage pretense adds unnecessary complexity. More variables to manage. More ways for things to go wrong.”
“It also adds the only cover story that might actually keep you alive.”
Her jaw tightens. “Explain.”
“You’ve been tracking Phoenix for weeks.
You know its capabilities. Facial recognition.
Traffic cameras. Cell tower triangulation.
Digital breadcrumbs everywhere.” I keep my voice level.
Factual. “The second you surface in Vegas, Phoenix is going to know. The question isn’t whether it sees you—it’s what it sees. ”
“So we move fast. In and out before—”
“Before, what? Before an AI that processes data at the speed of light figures out you’re not supposed to be there?
” I shake my head. “Director, Phoenix has eyes everywhere. Street cameras, hotel security, ATMs, traffic lights … Vegas is one of the most surveilled cities on the planet. You can’t move fast enough to outrun that kind of coverage. ”
She’s quiet. Processing.
“So we don’t outrun it,” I continue. “We give it a story. A narrative that explains why Director Sarah Vance suddenly reappeared after three days of going dark. A narrative that’s so personal, so impulsive, so completely out of character that even an AI built on probability matrices won’t see it coming. ”
“The elopement.”