"At last," he said when Nathan returned. "Are we ready to go?"
"Richard," Nathan began, lowering his voice, "we need you to return to your assigned seat."
Richard stared at him. "What?"
"Your ticket is for 4C. The company has decided to restore the original seating arrangement."
Richard laughed once, certain he had misunderstood. "You spent twenty minutes getting that fellow out of here. I'm not moving now because somebody complained."
"The person you displaced isn't merely a passenger," Nathan said before he could stop himself. "He's—"
"I don't care if he's the president," Richard interrupted. "I was promised this seat."
Margaret Ellis looked at Richard over the top of her magazine. "He was also promised it. His promise came with a ticket."
Richard turned toward her, furious that a stranger had joined the conversation. "Madam, this is between the airline and me."
"No," Margaret replied. "You made the rest of us watch it. Now we are involved whether you like that or not."
Paul's hand rested on hers. He had been silent at the beginning, and he felt a small but distinct shame about how easily he had hoped the problem would simply end. "She is right," he said. "The gentleman you pushed out had every right to sit there. You knew it."
A flight attendant asked the passengers to remain seated while the crew resolved a departure issue. Richard stood halfway, announced that his business relationship with Northstar would suffer, and demanded to speak with William Parker directly. Nathan listened with an increasingly blank expression. The privileges he had distributed so freely now threatened to reveal the private network through which he had distributed them.
Clare approached Richard, and the older man looked at her with disbelief. "You told me it was taken care of."
"I did," Clare said. She glanced toward the gate. "And I was wrong."
The sentence surprised her. It was the first honest statement she had made about the dispute since Nathan called her into the galley. Richard did not appreciate it. He complained about the delay, declared the airline incompetent, and finally returned to his ticketed seat under the attention of an entire cabin that had stopped granting him the benefit of the doubt.
At the gate, Denise's radio crackled with a message. "Operations requests that Mr. Brooks remain nearby. Executive response wants to speak to him before he leaves the terminal."
Denise repeated the message reflexively. "Mr. Brooks, they want us to hold you here until someone comes."
Ethan turned. "Hold me?"
"They don't mean physically," she said quickly. "I think they mean wait."
Officer Price moved forward. "Mr. Brooks is free to leave. There is no law enforcement detention."
Ethan looked at Denise. "Then please don't use that word. People in authority should be precise when they talk about someone's freedom."