Maria was quiet for a beat. "Is something wrong with the flight?"
"I've encountered a problem that may be relevant to our investment. I'm safe. Please don't send anyone here unless I ask."
"Understood. Chicago office or Cleveland?"
"Both. Have the Chicago team ready by video. Tell them to preserve all the relevant correspondence from our airline partnership, including the foundation grant."
"You sound like you do when a vendor fails an audit."
"That may be what this is."
He ended the call. It had lasted forty-seven seconds. Dr. Voss caught only the words shareholder agreement and governance session, but those were enough to make her study him again.
He stood near the gate window, gazing down at the luggage carts as though nothing significant had happened, and she realized she had been doing her own version of guessing from appearances. She had assumed he was a middle manager on his way to a conference. She had not asked him anything about himself.
Marcus's company was privately held but not small. Chen Industries began twenty years earlier as a freight-routing software business in a rented office over a tire shop. He had written the first version of its scheduling system after watching Victor's garage lose customers because replacement parts arrived three days late. A software engineer at a large corporation told him the problem was too local to matter. Marcus built a working solution anyway, sold it to six regional distributors, and spent the next four years sleeping in airports while expanding it.
Now the company held interests in logistics, industrial software, medical supply chains and transportation technology. In the previous fiscal year, its annual revenue had reached approximately 2.4 billion dollars. Marcus owned less of it than strangers assumed and spent far more time discussing operational details than riding in expensive cars. He disliked the celebrity version of successful business ownership because it erased the people who had built anything alongside him. His executive biography mentioned the company, the acquisitions and the foundation. It said almost nothing about why he still carried a briefcase Victor had given him seventeen years earlier.
Six months before Flight 447, Chen Industries had acquired twenty-three percent of Atlantic Airways through a publicly disclosed transaction worth approximately 1.9 billion dollars. It was a significant minority investment, not control. The airline's board still governed the company, its executives still answered to that board, and Marcus could not simply order an employee fired by announcing he was a shareholder. He had supported the investment because Atlantic needed modernization in fleet planning, customer operations and internal reporting, all areas where his teams had experience.
Chen Industries also booked approximately 847 flight segments a year with Atlantic, spending roughly 1.2 million dollars on corporate travel. Marcus considered that business a responsibility as much as a bargaining advantage. A vendor relationship should be measured by how ordinary employees and passengers were treated, not merely by the benefits offered to executives.
There had been warnings in due diligence. Customer satisfaction trailed competitors. Formal complaints about biased treatment were increasing, though the reporting system made precise comparisons difficult. Staff described pressure to close cases quickly, while managers measured resolution times without consistently measuring whether passengers believed their complaint had been understood. Marcus had insisted on making those issues part of the investment oversight agenda. The board had approved a review and then, as boards sometimes did, returned to the more convenient work of talking about margins.