overspread Albert's face - and then it froze. "In that case, the pilot would be one of us," he said.
"Yes and no. In my scenario, Albert, the pilot is the pilot. The pilot who just happened to be on board, supposedly deadheading to Boston. The pilot who was sitting in first class, less than thirty feet from the cockpit door, when the manure hit the fan."
"Captain Engle," Albert said in a low, horrified voice.
Jenkins replied in the pleased but complacent tone of a geometry professor who has just written QED below the proof of a particularly difficult theorem. "Captain Engle," he agreed.
Neither of them noticed Crew-Neck looking at them with glittering, feverish eyes. Now Crew-Neck took the in-flight magazine from the seatpocket in front of him, pulled off the cover, and began to tear it in long, slow strips. He let them flutter to the floor, where they joined the shreds of the cocktail napkin around his brown loafers. His lips were moving soundlessly.
2
Had Albert been a student of the New Testament, he would have understood how Saul, that most zealous persecutor of the early Christians, must have felt when the scales fell from his eyes on the road to Damascus. He stared at Robert Jenkins with shining enthusiasm, every vestige of sleepiness banished from his brain.
Of course, when you thought about it - or when somebody like Mr Jenkins, who was clearly a real head, ratty sport-coat or no ratty sport-coat, thought about it for you - it was just too big and too obvious to miss. Almost the entire cast and crew of American Pride's Flight 29 had disappeared between the Mojave Desert and the Great Divide... but one of the few survivors just happened to be - surprise, surprise! - another American Pride pilot who was, in his own words, "qualified to fly this make and model - also to land it."
Jenkins had been watching Albert closely, and now he smiled. There wasn't much humor in that smile. "It's a tempting scenario," he said, "isn't it?"
"We'll have to capture him as soon as we land," Albert said, scraping one hand feverishly up the side of his face. "You, me, Mr Gaffney, and that British guy. He looks tough. Only... what if the Brit's in on it, too? He could be Captain Engle's, you know, bodyguard. Just in case someone figured things out the way you did."
Jenkins opened his mouth to reply, but Albert rushed on before he could.
"We'll just have to put the arm on them both. Somehow." He offered Mr Jenkins a narrow smile - an Ace Kaussner smile. Cool, tight, dangerous. The smile of a man who is faster than blue blazes, and knows it. "I may not be the world's smartest guy, Mr Jenkins, but I'm nobody's lab rat."
"But it doesn't stand up, you know," Jenkins said mildly.
Albert blinked. "What?"
"The scenario I just outlined for you. It doesn't stand up."
"But - you said - "
"I said if it were just the plane, I could come up with a scenario. And I did. A good one. If it was a book idea, I'll bet my agent could sell it. Unfortunately, it isn't just the plane. Denver might still have been down there, but all the lights were off if it was. I have been coordinating our route of travel with my wristwatch, and I can tell you now that it's not just Denver, either. Omaha, Des Moines - no sign of them down there in the dark, my boy. I have seen no lights at all, in fact. No farmhouses, no grain storage and shipping locations, no interstate turnpikes. Those things show up at night, you know - with the new high-intensity lighting, they show up very well, even when one is almost six miles up. The land is utterly dark. Now I can believe that there might be a government agency unethical enough to drug us all in order to observe our reactions. Hypothetically, at least. What I cannot believe is that even The Shop could have persuaded everyone over our flight-path to turn off their lights in order to reinforce the illusion that we are all alone."
"Well... maybe it's all a fake," Albert suggested. "Maybe we're really still on the ground and everything we can see outside the window is, you know, projected. I saw a movie something like that once."