I said: not yet. Let it fly.
I have been asked about that sentence more than any other part of this and people assume it was strategy.
It was not. I said it because there were eleven people on that aircraft with meetings the following morning, and because I have never in my life been able to make somebody else’s day worse in order to make a point.
Through the narrow window in the door I could see her already talking into his ear again.
His face had already relaxed. Eleven seconds, maybe twelve, after his wife walked off an aircraft.
I stood at the top of those steps and watched a man’s shoulders come down.
He was not worried. Not for one second.
He expected me back on that aircraft within about four minutes, once I had walked down the steps and had a think and swallowed it — which is what he has watched me do for four years, perhaps thirty times, in rooms exactly like that one.
He was right to expect it, based on the evidence. That is the part I cannot be angry about.
PART 4
I went down the stairs into the private terminal.
Eleven steps. I counted them on the way down, which is a thing I apparently do.
It was warm on the tarmac. Somebody held a door for me and said good morning.
My phone filled up on the way. Missed calls, messages, one from his assistant asking whether I needed a car.
And then one name that stopped me on the tarmac, with the engines still running behind me.
I had to stand still to read it, which is a thing I have not done since 2020.
Daxon. His chief financial officer.
Nine years in that company, two of them before I ever put money into it, which matters because it means he was there when the thing nearly died.
He is fifty-one and he has never once in six years said anything to me at a dinner that was not about the weather.
He asked whether I had left the aircraft. I said yes.
And he wrote: we need to talk. There’s something you should know about her.
And then, before I could reply: not over text. And don’t trust anybody in his circle.
I asked him later why he sent the second message so fast, and he said: because I knew you’d ring somebody to check on me.
