Airframe Read Free Page B

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 thesecond 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—”
    Casey pushed a button, changing the station.
    “—trying to force their personal morality on the rest of us. I don’t believe a fetus is a human being—”
    She pushed another button.
    “—these media attacks are all coming from people who don’t like free speech—”
    Where, she thought, is the
news?
Had an airplane crashed or not?
    She had a sudden image of her father, reading a big stack of newspapers from all over