Lucid Intervals (2010)

instrument approaches. “Today, we’re going to fly out west of here to a practice area and do some air work: steep turns, slow flight and stalls. Then we’ll grab some lunch and fly some approaches at other airports. When we’re done, we’ll come back here and fly whatever approach is in use. Got it?”
    “Got it,” Stone said.
    Phelan opened his briefcase and unfolded a very large photograph of the Garmin G-1000 instrument panel in the Mustang. “I understand you’ve already got a couple of cross-country flights in with Mr. Hackett, so you must be a little familiar with this.”
    “Jim did all the avionics operation,” Stone said. “I just flew the airplane. I have read the cockpit reference guide, though.”
    Phelan produced a checklist for the airplane and had Stone go through it step-by-step and show him where the controls were for each item. Then they did it again. An hour and a half later, Phelan said, “Okay, let’s go flying.”
    They took over an hour to do a detailed preflight inspection of the aircraft, then go through the checklist of the startup procedures, entering the weights of people, baggage and fuel to be carried; getting a clearance; and entering a flight plan into the G-1000. Finally, they were ready to taxi, and fifteen minutes later they were in the air, climbing to 10,000 feet and headed west.
    Phelan explained each air-work procedure they would do and then gave Stone the throttle settings and speeds for each. Stone performed them twice—a little shaky on the first try but much more confidently on the second—then they flew an instrument approach into an airport, had a hamburger and got back into the airplane. They flew another half-dozen approaches into various airports, a couple of them by hand without the help of the autopilot, then headed back to Teterboro and flew an instrument landing system to a full-stop landing.
    They put the airplane to bed and walked back into the terminal. “You did well,” Phelan said. “You’re clearly up-to-date on your instrument procedures, and you did a pretty good job of hand-flying the airplane.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Tomorrow we start on engine-out procedures: approaches, missed approaches and landings, all on one engine. It’ll be fun.”
    Stone shook the man’s hand, walked back to his car, got in and rested his head on the steering wheel. He felt as though he had been machine-washed and fluff-dried; every muscle ached. He got out his cell phone and called Mei, a Chinese lady, and scheduled a massage before dinner.
     
     
     
    BY THE TIME Mei had finished with him, he felt human again and hungry.
    Dino was waiting for him at Elaine’s. “You look like shit,” he said pleasantly.
    “Let me tell you how I got that way,” Stone said, taking his first, grateful sip of his Knob Creek.

37
    W hen Stone walked into his bedroom, he found Felicity sitting up in bed, reading from a folder with a red stripe stamped across it. She closed the folder and put it into her briefcase, which was next to her on the bed. “How goes the flying?”
    “Pretty good, but I’m exhausted,” he said, peeling off his clothes and getting in bed beside her.
    “No playtime tonight?”
    “I’ll do better in the morning,” he said. “How’s the search for Hackett’s Paratroop Regiment records going?”
    “Extremely slowly,” she replied. “If my documents people don’t find something soon, I’m going to have to pull them off the job.”
    “How about the search for his fingerprints with the State Department?”
    “Oh, we found those,” she said. “They’re the same as Hackett’s current prints.”
    “I hate to let the air out of your balloon, Felicity,” Stone said, “but when Hackett came to this country twenty-five years ago, Whitestone was still working in your service, was he not? And he couldn’t be in two countries at once.”
    “Don’t you think we’ve thought of that?” she asked. “It’s funny, but the more convinced I become that Whitestone is Hackett, the more convinced you are that he’s not. Could that be because he’s letting you fly his jet airplane? Could that be because you like him?”
    “I do like him,” Stone confessed, “and I suppose that could mean I have a bias in his favor, but it doesn’t affect the facts of the situation, and you have a lot of facts that you just can’t reconcile.”
    “Yes, we do,” she admitted, “but you don’t have any facts to support Hackett’s innocence.”
    “Of