Chapter 3 - The Ghost-White Screen
The cabin had grown so silent you could hear the distant hiss of the jet bridge ventilation system two sections away.
“Ryan?” Linda prompted, stepping closer, her tone dripping with impatient sarcasm. “Are you going to move him, or do I need to call the gate agent back onto the plane to escort him to the rear?”
Slowly, I stood up. My knees felt weak, and my hands were actually shaking as I gripped the handheld device. I looked past Linda, past the angry attorney in row three, and straight toward the forward galley where my coworker, Sarah—who had been managing the forward drink cart—was walking over to see what all the commotion was about.
“Sarah,” I croaked, my voice cracking slightly. “Get over here. Now.”
Sarah frowned, jogging down the aisle with a puzzled expression. “What is it, Ryan? Did we have a baggage discrepancy?”
Without a word, I turned the handheld terminal around and pressed the screen directly in front of her face.
Sarah glanced at the display.
In a fraction of a second, the color completely vanished from her face. Her eyes widened to the size of saucers, her jaw went slack, and she staggered backward half a step, catching herself against the armrest of seat 1C. She let out a small, breathless gasp that sounded like she had just been struck by lightning.
“Oh... oh, sweet mother of God,” Sarah whispered, her hands flying up to cover her mouth.
Linda scoffed, clearly losing her patience with our dramatic reactions. “Will both of you stop acting like absolute children? It’s a boarding pass! What could possibly—?”
“Shut up, Linda,” Sarah hissed, her voice trembling with a level of pure, unadulterated terror I had never heard from her in ten years of working together. She turned her wide, horrified eyes toward Linda. “Do you have any idea whose seat you just tried to drag him out of?”
Linda blinked, her defensive posture faltering for a split second. “Whose... whose seat? It’s just a kid!”
Sarah turned the screen toward Linda, tapping the display with a trembling finger. “Look at the corporate sponsor code. Look at the passenger ID. Look at the ticketing tier.”
Linda peered down at the small screen. I watched the exact moment her eyes registered the data fields.
First, her smug expression froze.
Then, her eyes scanned the corporate billing profile linked to the reservation: AeroGlobal Holdings & Private Aviation Group – Executive Tier 1 Master Account.
Beneath that, the passenger name field: Noah Parker. And beneath that, the accompanying guardian profile linked to the master corporate contract: CEO & Majority Shareholder, Jonathan Parker.
Jonathan Parker.
The name alone was enough to make the entire airline industry tremble. Parker was the multi-billionaire titan who owned the largest private defense logistics firm in North America, controlled a massive share of commercial aerospace manufacturing, and—most terrifyingly for everyone currently standing on this aircraft—had recently acquired a controlling thirty-four percent equity stake in our very airline.
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He was the man who could make a phone call to the board of directors from his private yacht and have every single senior executive fired before lunch.
And Linda Mercer, veteran flight attendant of twenty-five years, had just grabbed his six-year-old son by the arm, humiliated him in front of the entire first-class cabin, and tried to throw him into coach like an unwanted stray.
