The truth. Nothing else. Whitfield looked like a man who had just been asked to swallow a live grenade. "That kind of announcement, the PR implications alone, it would be on social media in seconds. It would it already is," Naomi said, gesturing almost imperceptibly toward the curtain that separated First Class from the rest of the aircraft.
There is a young woman standing behind that curtain who has been live streaming this entire incident to at last count well over a 100,000 viewers. Your cabin is already on the internet, George. The truth is already out there. The only question is whether it comes from you with whatever shred of integrity you can still claim or whether it comes from a 100,000 strangers who will tell it their own way. She sat back.
Make the announcement and I'll know your airline is at least capable of honesty, even if it's not yet capable of decency. Refuse and I plane and you can explain the cancellation however you wish, but we both know how that story ends. Whitfield stood motionless in the aisle. Behind him, Captain Miller watched from the galley partition, his face a mask of professional resignation. In seat one, a Harper Fontaine was nodding slowly as if watching a verdict being delivered that she had long ago drafted in her own mind.
In three, J.Jack Medina's camera captured Whitfield's expression the moment a man realized he was choosing between two forms of destruction and trying to determine which one left something standing. In one, see Vincent Greer had stopped smirking. His arms were uncrossed, now his champagne untouched. He looked like a man who had just realized the game he thought he understood was being played on a board he couldn't see. In three H, Patricia Lel was staring at her hands.
And then from seat 2K, directly across the narrow aisle from Naomi, a woman stood up. Elena Voss was 42, Germanorn with sharp cheekbones, wire- rimmed glasses, and the kind of lean, efficient posture that suggested she viewed excess of any kind, physical, emotional, or verbal, as a form of engineering failure. She was a tech executive, the CTO of a Berlin-based cloud infrastructure firm, and she had been watching the entire scene with the silent, attentive focus of someone cataloging data points for a report she was already writing in her head. She addressed Captain Miller and George Whitfield simultaneously, her accented English precise and unhurried. "Excuse me," she said, adjusting her glasses.
I think there is something you both should know, and I think you should know it before you make any more decisions tonight. Miller and Whitfield turned to her two men drowning who would grasp at any floating object. I sat beside Dr. Blackwell at the Global Cyber Summit in Munich last October. Helena said her voice carrying the clinical authority of someone presenting findings at a conference. She delivered the keynote address to an audience of 300 CEOs from 42 countries.
When she finished, every person in that auditorium stood. 300 chief executive officers gave her a standing ovation that lasted 4 minutes. I have never seen anything like it in 20 years in this industry. She paused, letting the image settle. Her encryption protocols protect the financial data of 200 million people across six continents.
Her algorithms are used by central banks, defense ministries, and unless I am very much mistaken, she looked directly at Whitfield, by the payment processing infrastructure that handles your own airlines credit card transactions. Whitfield's face went from pale to gray. The color change was so dramatic it was almost cinematic. He turned to Miller. Miller turned to Darren.