Terminal Velocity (Charlie Pike)($13.99Value)

Description

SunCoast Air promises friendly skies. Someone inside the airline is using them to move something no passenger was ever meant to see. Every day, SunCoast flies thousands of tourists into Orlando families chasing theme parks, grandparents escaping winter, vacationers looking for a week in the Florida sun. Above the wing, everything looks ordinary. Below it, something is moving in the dark. Off-book cargo containers are being slipped onto late tourist flights, carried airside without proper scans or manifests, then quietly removed through a trusted catering contractor and driven to a warehouse beyond the airport perimeter. For years, the system works because nobody thinks to look. Then Dennis Aldridge does. SunCoast’s longtime Vice President of Operations knows every inch of the airline’s ground operation. When cargo weights begin appearing that do not match the official manifests, Dennis starts pulling records, comparing flights, and asking questions. He tells his daughter he is going to “fix it.” Days later, Dennis is found dead inside his car on the fourth level of an airport parking garage. Carbon monoxide. Engine running. A typed suicide note beside him. A clean, believable ending to a stressed executive’s life. His daughter Renata refuses to believe it. Her father was angry, determined, and closing in on something. He was fighting not giving up. So she hires private investigator Charlie Pike . With Cy at his side, Charlie begins where Dennis left off: cargo manifests, unexplained weight discrepancies, numbered security seals, access logs, missing camera footage, and late-night flights carrying more than anyone admits. The deeper Charlie digs, the smaller the circle becomes. Only a handful of people have the access to move freight through secure airside areas without being questioned. Even fewer have the power to make surveillance footage disappear. And one of them has spent an entire career being the man everyone trusts. Helpful. Respected. Always there when something goes wrong. As Charlie follows the phantom cargo from the belly of passenger jets to the industrial outskirts of Orlando, SunCoast’s machinery begins closing around him. Records vanish. Witnesses get scared. Doors that were once open suddenly require authorization. And somewhere inside an airport built to move millions of people without ever slowing down, a killer is counting on one simple truth: If everyone is looking toward the sky, no one notices what is moving underneath it.