Chapter 14 - THE FLIGHT THAT NEVER HAPPENED
I remembered a canceled flight.
Six weeks before I left for Dubai.
I was supposed to fly privately from Málaga to London.
Two hours before departure, the aircraft engineer found a problem with a fuel-pressure sensor.
The flight was canceled.
At the time, Mateo handled the inconvenience.
He arranged another aircraft.
He apologized repeatedly.
I never thought about it again.
Now police reopened the maintenance report.
The sensor had not failed naturally.
A connector had been deliberately loosened.
Not enough to guarantee a crash.
Enough to create risk.
Enough to make investigators very interested.
Security footage from the hangar had been missing.
Mateo controlled the vendor contract.
Then another coincidence surfaced.
Three months earlier, one of my cars suffered brake problems outside Madrid.
I was not driving.
My assistant was.
Nobody was injured.
The mechanic originally blamed a defective line.
Police examined the stored part.
It had been cut.
I sat across from Gabriel.
“You think they were trying to kill me.”
“I think police are investigating whether someone intentionally created dangerous failures.”
That was the correct legal sentence.
I hated it.
Mateo denied everything.
Beatriz denied knowing anything.
Then investigators found an audio recording on one of the USB drives.
Mateo’s voice.
“The plane was too risky.”
Beatriz answered.
“You said it would look mechanical.”
“It might.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
A long silence.
Then Beatriz said,
“I’m not going to prison because you get ambitious.”
Mateo laughed.
“You like the money.”
“You just don’t like knowing how money gets protected.”
The recording was dated three days after the canceled flight.
My hands became cold.
Then Beatriz said something else.
“Forget him.”
“Dubai gives us time.”
“Move the money.”
“Send the girl away.”
“Then we leave.”
That sentence clarified everything.
At some point, they had considered something far worse.
Then they abandoned it because theft was easier.
I should have felt lucky.
I did not.
That evening, I sat beside Isabella while she built a model house from cardboard.
She placed two bedrooms upstairs.
One for her.
One for me.
“No room for guests?”
I asked.
She thought seriously.
“Maybe Marta.”
I smiled.
Then she added a tiny paper lock to the front door.
“What’s that?”
“So bad people can’t come in.”
I looked at the cardboard house.
“No bad people get to come in.”
May you like
I promised.
And for the first time, I understood that every promise I made to her from now on would have to be proven by repetition.
