"Bob Richman," he said. "I'm your new assistant." His handshake was polite, reserved. She couldn't remember which side of the Norton family he was from, but she recognized the type. Plenty of money, divorced parents, an indifferent record at good schools, and an unshakable sense of entitlement.

"Casey Singleton," she said. "Get in. We're late."

"Late," Richman said, as he climbed into the car. "It's not even seven."

"First shift starts at six," Casey said. "Most of us in QA work the factory schedule. Don't they do that at GM?"

"I wouldn't know," he said. "I was in Legal."

"Spend any time on the floor?"

"As little as possible."

Casey sighed. It was going to be a long six weeks with this guy, she thought. "You've been over in Marketing so far?"

"Yeah, a few months." He shrugged. "But selling isn't really my thing."

She drove south toward Building 64, the huge structure where the widebody was built. Casey said, "By the way, what do you drive?"

"A BMW," Richman said.

"You might want to trade it in," she said, "for an American car."

"Why? It's made here."

"It's assembled here," she said. "It's not made here. The value’s added overseas. The mechanics in the plant know the difference; they're all UAW. They don't like to see a Beamer in the parking lot."

Richman stared out the window. "What are you saying, something might happen to it?'

"Guaranteed," she said. "These guys don't screw around."

"I'll think about it," Richman said He suppressed a yawn. "Jesus, it's early. What are we rushing to?"

"The IRT. It's been pushed up to seven," she said.

'The Incident Review Team. Every time something happens to one of our planes, the IRT meets to figure out what happened, and what we should do about it"

"How often do you meet?'

"Roughly every two months."

"That often," the kid said.

You 're going to have to start him from the beginning.

"Actually," Casey said, "two months is pretty infrequent. We have three thousand aircraft in revenue service around the world. With that many birds in the air, things happen. And we're serious about customer support. So every morning we hold a conference call with the service reps around the world. They report everything that caused a dispatch delay the day before. Most of it's minor stuff: a lav door jammed; a cockpit light failed. But we track it in QA, do a trend analysis, and pass that on to Product Support."

"Uh-huh…" He sounded bored.

"Then," Casey said, "once in a while, we hit a problem that warrants an IRT. It has to be serious, something that affects flight safety. Apparently we've got one today. If Marder's pushed the meeting up to seven, you can bet it's not a bird strike."

"Marder?"

"John Marder was the program manager for the widebody, before he became chief operating officer. So it's probably an incident involving the N-22."

She pulled over and parked in the shadow of Building 64.

The gray hangar loomed above them, eight stories high and nearly a mile long. The asphalt in front of the building was strewn with disposable earplugs, which the mechanics wore so they wouldn't go deaf from the rivet guns.

They walked through the side doors and entered an interior corridor that ran around the perimeter of the building. The corridor was dotted with food dispensers, in clusters a quarter of a mile apart Richman said, "We got time for a cup of coffee?" She shook her head. "Coffee's not allowed on the floor." "No coffee?" He groaned. "Why not? It's made overseas?" "Coffee's corrosive. Aluminum doesn't like it." Casey led Richman through another door, onto the production floor. "Jesus," Richman said.

The huge, partially assembled widebody jets gleamed under halogen lights. Fifteen aircraft in various stages of construction were arranged in two long rows under the vaulted roof. Directly ahead of them, she saw mechanics installing cargo doors in the fuselage sections. The barrels of the fuselage were surrounded by scaffolding. Beyond the fuselage stood a forest of assembly jigs-immense tools, painted bright blue. Richman walked under one of the jigs and looked up, open-mouthed. It was as wide as a house and six stories tall.

"Amazing," he said. He pointed upward at a broad flat surface. "Is that the wing?"

"The vertical stabilizer," Casey said.

"The what?"

"It's the tail, Bob."

"That's the tail' Richman said.

Casey nodded. "The wing is over there," she said, pointing across the floor. "It's two hundred feet long-almost as long as a football field."

A Klaxon sounded. One of the overhead cranes began to move. Richman turned to look.

"This your first time on the floor?"

"Yeah…" Richman was turning around, looking in all directions. "Awesome," he said.

"They're big," Casey said.

"Why are they all lime green?"

"We coat the structural elements with epoxy to prevent corrosion. And the aluminum skins are covered so they don't get dinged during assembly. The skins are highly polished and very expensive. So we leave that coating on until Paint Shed."

"Sure doesn't look like GM," Richman said, still turning and looking.

"That's right," Casey said. "Compared to these aircraft, cars are a joke."

Richman turned to her, surprised. "A joke!"

"Think about it," she said. "A Pontiac has five thousand parts, and you can build one in two shifts. Sixteen hours. That's nothing. But these things"-she gestured to the aircraft looming high above them-"are a completely different animal. The widebody has one million parts and a span time of seventy-five days. No other manufactured product in the world has the complexity of a commercial aircraft. Nothing even comes close. And nothing is built to be as durable. You take a Pontiac and run it all day every day and see what happens. It'll fall apart in a few months. But we design our jets to fly for twenty years of trouble-free service, and we build them to twice the service life."

"Forty years?" Richman said, incredulous. "You build them to last forty years?"

Casey nodded. "We've still got lots of N-5s in service around the world-and we stopped building them in 1946. We've got planes that have accumulated four times their design life-the equivalent of eighty years of service. Norton planes will do that. Douglas planes will do that. But no one else's birds will do that. You understand what I'm saying?"

"Wow," Richman said, swallowing.

"We call this the bird farm," Casey said. "The planes're so big, it's hard to get a sense of the scale." She pointed to one aircraft to their right, where small clusters of people worked at various positions, with portable lights shining up on the metal. "Doesn't look like many people, right?"

"No, not many."

"There's probably two hundred mechanics working on that plane-enough to run an entire automobile line. But this is just one position on our line-and we have fifteen positions in all. There's five thousand people in this building, right now."

The kid was shaking his head, amazed. "It looks sort of empty."

"Unfortunately," Casey said, "it is sort of empty. The wide-body line's running at sixty percent capacity-and three of those birds are white-tails."

"White-tails?"

"Planes we're building without customers. We build at a minimum rate to keep the line open, and we haven't got all the orders we want. The Pacific Rim's the growth sector but with Japan in recession, that market's not placing orders. And everybody else is flying their planes longer. So business is very competitive. This way."

She started up a flight of metal stairs, walking quickly. Richman followed her, footsteps clanging. They came to a landing, went up another flight. "I'm telling you this," she said, "so you'll understand the meeting we're going into. We build the hell out of these planes. People here are proud of what they do. And they don't like it when something s wrong."