The girl, who looked a little more awake and with it now, said: "I don't suppose they leave a key under the doormat or anything, huh?"
Nick looked at her, startled, then back at Brian. "Do they by any chance leave a key someplace?"
Brian shook his head. "I'm afraid not. It's an anti-terrorist precaution."
"Of course," Nick said. "Of course it is." He glanced at the girl and winked. "But that's using your head, just the same."
The girl smiled at him uncertainly.
Nick turned back to Brian. "Ready, then?"
"Ready."
"Right, then. One... two... three!"
They drove forward into the door, dipping down in perfect synchronicity just before they hit it, and the door popped open with absurd ease. There was a small lip - too short by at least three inches to be considered a step between the service area and the cockpit. Brian struck this with the edge of his shoe and would have fallen sideways into the cockpit if Nick hadn't grabbed him by the shoulder. The man was as quick as a cat.
"Right, then," he said, more to himself than to Brian. "Let's just see what we're dealing with here, shall we?"
5
The cockpit was empty. Looking into it made Brian's arms and neck prickle with gooseflesh. It was all well and good to know that a 767 could fly thousands of miles on autopilot, using information which had been programmed into its inertial navigation system - God knew he had flown enough miles that way himself - but it was another to see two empty seats. That was what chilled him. He had never seen an empty in-flight cockpit during his entire career.
He was seeing one now. The pilot's controls moved by themselves, making the infinitesimal corrections necessary to keep the plane on its plotted course to Boston. The board was green. The two small wings on the plane's attitude indicator were steady above the artificial horizon. Beyond the two small, slanted-forward windows, a billion stars twinkled in an early-morning sky.
"Oh, wow," the teenaged girl said softly.
"Coo-eee," Nick said at the same moment. "Look there, matey."
Nick was pointing at a half-empty cup of coffee on the service console beside the left arm of the pilot's seat. Next to the coffee was a Danish pastry with two bites gone. This brought Brian's dream back in a rush, and he shivered violently.
"It happened fast, whatever it was," Brian said. "And look there. And there."
He pointed first to the seat of the pilot's chair and then to the floor by the co-pilot's scat. Two wristwatches glimmered in the lights of the controls, one a pressure-proof Rolex, the other a digital Pulsar.
"If you want watches, you can take your pick," a voice said from behind them. "There's tons of them back there." Brian looked over his shoulder and saw Albert Kaussner, looking neat and very young in his small black skull-cap and his Hard Rock Cafe tee-shirt. Standing beside him was the elderly gent in the fraying sport-coat.
"Are there indeed?" Nick asked. For the first time he seemed to have lost his self-possession.
"Watches, jewelry, and glasses," Albert said. "Also purses. But the weirdest thing is... there's stuff I'm pretty sure came from inside people. Things like surgical pins and pacemakers."
Nick looked at Brian Engle. The Englishman had paled noticeably. "I had been going on roughly the same assumption as our rude and loquacious friend," he said. "That the plane set down someplace, for some reason, while I was asleep. That most of the passengers - and the crew - were somehow offloaded."
"I would have woken the minute descent started," Brian said. "It's habit." He found he could not take his eyes off the empty seats, the half-drunk cup of coffee, the half-eaten Danish.
"Ordinarily, I'd say the same," Nick agreed, "so I decided my drink had been doped."
I don't know what this guy does for a living, Brian thought, but he sure doesn't sell used cars.
"No one doped my drink," Brian said, "because I didn't have one."
"Neither did I," Albert said.
"In any case, there couldn't have been a landing and take-off while we were sleeping," Brian told them. "You can fly a plane on autopilot, and the Concorde can land on autopilot, but you need a human being to take one up."
"We didn't land, then," Nick said.
"Nope."
"So where did they go, Brian?"
"I don't know," Brian said. He moved to the pilot's chair and sat down.