SIXTEEN

In El Solitario, above the water-filled pit with the little green island, I appeared on a ledge some fifty feet above the water. The walls stretched another fifty feet above me, but this ledge was over deep water. Besides, dropping from a hundred feet, you would reach fifty-five miles per hour before hitting the water. Though high divers did it, you could still break your neck if you hit at the wrong angle.

The sun wasn't high yet, and only the upper reaches of the opposite wall were lit by direct sunlight. Still, the rock was light limestone and it reflected the light well. The water below was an unblemished mirror, showing the blue sky and white walls and me.

I stepped off the ledge and dropped. It would take 1.767 seconds to reach the water, but at a little over one second, the wind starting to whistle in my ears, I jumped away, to the top of the pit, looking down at the unblemished water.

I took a deep breath. The water looked very cold and hard, like polished iron.

Again, only this time, I didn't appear on the ledge—I appeared two feet out from the ledge, in midair. Again, I dropped, jumping away before hitting the water.

I did this again and again and again.

Athens, Beirut, Cairo, Tehran, Baghdad, Amman, Bahrain, Kuwait City, Istanbul, Tunis, Casablanca, Rabat, Ankara, Karachi, Lahore, Riyadh, Mecca, Knossos, Rhodes, Smyrna, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Damascus, Baghdad, Naples, Venice, Seville, Paris, Marseilles, Barcelona, Belfast, Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, Bonn, Amsterdam.

I couldn't get a visa for Tripoli, in Libya, but I went anyway, not even buying a ticket, just jumping past the gate agent and the flight attendant. It was not a popular flight—the plane was half empty. I repeated the process at the other end.

I tried to do at least one airport a day, sometimes two. I would get up at two or three in the morning, jump to the departing city, sleep fitfully on the plane, acquire the new jump site, and be back by ten in the morning. Then I'd call Manhattan Media Monitoring and see if there were any hijackings.

There was only one during the month of January, an Aeroflot flight diverted to Kabul, Afghanistan, by several Soviet convicts. They'd given themselves up shortly after arrival. I didn't know what I would have done if they hadn't. I didn't have a jump site in Afghanistan at that time.

After a week of legal huffing and puffing, Millie agreed to a federal judge-supervised interview by the NSA with her lawyer present. She told me about it after I'd jumped her to the cliff dwelling late one night.

"They brought your friend in from Washington."

"Who, Perston-Smythe?"

She shook her head. "No, no. Cox, Brian Cox, the guy from the NSA with the sidewalls."

"Sidewalls?"

She touched the side of her head. "Shaved on the sides. Fleshy neck. Big shoulders?"

"I knew who you meant. I just didn't know what you meant by sidewalls."

"Ah. Well, he starts by asking where you are."

"What did he say exactly?"

" 'Where is David Rice?' I answered with the literal truth. I said I didn't know, adding that we'd broken up in November. Both of these things were true—you were off flying around Europe and we did break up in November."

I nodded. "Go on."

"Well, I had to lie, then. He asked if I'd seen you since we broke up. I said no. I was afraid I wouldn't sound very convincing, but I think I sounded great. I'm afraid you're a very bad influence.

"Cox then asked if I'd heard from you. I said no. I said the breakup was very nasty and that I didn't ever want to hear from you." She kissed me on the cheek. "Another lie."

I smiled and waited for her to continue.

"He asked about the cause of the breakup and I told him about the call from the NYPD. He didn't look very surprised."

"No," I said. "They had to talk to Washburn and Baker to get to you, so they've already heard their version. I wonder if they found out about Washburn's wife? If they interviewed them separately, they probably did. Especially if they polygraphed them."

Millie looked angry at that. One of the NSA's demands had been to interrogate Millie on a polygraph machine. The judge had rejected it out of hand. It didn't help the NSA's case that they wouldn't talk about the purpose of their investigation.

"Cox next asked when I'd met you, how often we'd seen each other, and how intimate we'd been. I answered the first two questions and refused to answer the last one. Again I asked what you'd done to merit this investigation. He refused to answer, so I got up to leave."

I laughed. "Vicious. I love you."

She shrugged. "He partially relented then, saying that he couldn't say why you were under investigation as it was classified. He did say he could tell me if I'd reconsider the polygraph. I didn't have time to answer—Mark and the judge practically jumped down his throat then. The judge has been on our side ever since we found the illegal wiretaps."

"Good for him."

"I felt kind of sorry for Cox. I think he wanted to know how intimate I was with you so he could judge whether you were human or not. I almost relented and told him that I wondered why you had four testicles and a marsupial pouch, but I wasn't going to bring things into the twilight zone. If I didn't know about you disappearing into thin air, how was he going to ask the question so he didn't sound like a lunatic?"

I nodded. "He has a double problem. If I'm an alien or even an unaligned human, he doesn't want to let other governments know about me. What if they got to me first? The country that controls teleportation controls the world!"

"God bless America," she said, dryly.

"Unfortunately, this also doesn't tell us if they have any experience with teleports besides me. Unless they said something that implied that?"

"No. Well, he did ask if I thought there was anything unusual about you, in the way you behaved. I said, 'What? Like does he speak Russian in his sleep or something? Not that I noticed.' Then I told a half-truth. I said, 'He's a nerd. A cute nerd, but a nerd. Christ, he's from Ohio. What do you expect?' "

"Owww. Which part was the truth? Being a nerd?"

She laughed and squeezed me. "You are from Ohio. Cox gave up then. He asked me to contact them if I heard from you and that surveillance would be withdrawn."

"Has it?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. Certainly the obvious stuff has, but the house for sale down the block, the one that hasn't sold for three years, suddenly did. Who buys a house in January? I don't know."

"So we assume they're still watching. You go back to school in two weeks. It might pay to have someone sweep your apartment for wires when you get back. Luckily," I said, letting my fingers wander a little, "I know your bedroom already."

Her back arched and she drew in breath sharply. She moved her hand down my back. "Yeah. Once school starts, you know I can't spend as much time with you. I'll need my sleep."

"But I won't be able to see you during the day, even during the weekends! It's not fair."

Her hands moved below my waist. "We'll see," she said.

 

After a crowded flight into Glasgow, from London, I jumped to New York, as usual, and called MMM, Manhattan Media Monitoring. We'd evolved a little ritual. I would call, the operator would check my name on the computer, and she would say, "No, nothing." I would thank her and hang up, checking again about five in the afternoon.

Today, she heard my voice and said, "Ah, Mr. Ross, we have something for you."

"Yes?" My heart began beating faster.

"An Air France 727 has been hijacked after taking off from Barcelona. It's being diverted to Algiers. We only have the initial UPI wire report. Should we fax it to you?"

My heart was now pounding and I was having trouble catching my breath.

"No. Is there any indication of how many hijackers are aboard?"

"Not in the UPI report."

"Has it actually landed in Algiers?"

"The report doesn't say, but it does say that the Algerians will let it land."

"Thanks. Well, keep an eye out for more info. I'll call later."

I hung up and jumped, first to Texas, for binoculars and a small bag of odds and ends, then to Algiers, to the airport.

Inside the terminal a barrier had been strung blocking off the VIP terminal. Darak al Watani guarded it, armed with machine guns. There was a crowd of curious onlookers but they stayed well back from the barrier. I edged along the periphery of the crowd, asking what was happening over and over again until I found someone with enough English to answer me.

"Hijackers have landed a plane, just ten minutes ago."

The man who answered me spoke with an American accent, overlaid with French. He carried a laptop computer and a camera bag.

"Are you with the press?"

He nodded. "Reuters. I was heading home after covering the OPEC ministers meeting, but I guess I'll miss my flight." He looked around. "I wonder where they'll set up the press?" He walked off, skirting the crowd and heading for one end of the barrier. I followed at a distance and heard him speak in rapid French to one of the guards, who pointed back down the terminal. The reporter turned back and began walking briskly in that direction.

The barrier was set up before the turn into the VIP terminal, so it was not possible to see what was happening down its length. I jumped, blind, to the spot I'd visited on my first trip to Algiers. There was a group of people at the gate itself, farther down the hall.

I looked out the window and saw an Air France 727 parked out on the taxiway, perhaps a hundred yards short of the gate. The front door was open, but there was no boarding walkway rolled up to it. Through the binoculars I saw a figure in the door, a man with an Uzi-like machine gun and wearing a purple bag with eyeholes over his head. He was standing back from the door, looking out, and I had the impression he was looking into my eyes. Then he turned his head to the left, toward the cockpit, then right, toward the passengers.

When I shifted the binoculars to the cockpit windows, I could only see the pilot and the copilot, sitting very still. The shades on all the passengers' windows were drawn.

Someone shouted at me and I glanced down toward the gate. A uniformed man was talking at me, first in Arabic, then in French. I looked back at the doorway of the plane, studying each detail. I heard steps coming up the terminal, toward me. When I looked back at the voices, two Darak al Watani were walking toward me, accompanied by the other man, probably an army officer.

I looked down onto the tarmac below me. There was a baggage trailer parked in the shadow of the terminal. I jumped to it, then stepped around it, so I wasn't visible from the VIP terminal.

Using the binoculars, I studied the doorway again, waiting, hoping for my chance. I had enough detail to jump onto the plane, now, but I'd appear right by one of the terrorists. If he were the only one, that would be fine, but if there were others, I needed to know that.

There'd be a lot of dead hostages if I fucked up.

My knees suddenly threatened to give way. What the hell do you think you're doing, Davy? The enormity, the arrogance, and the danger of what I was attempting suddenly hit me. It frightened me, made my stomach hurt, made it hard to breathe. Should I give up?

Staring down at the tarmac, the same kind of concrete apron that Mom died on, drove back the doubts.

I'll be careful. Please, please, please, don't let me fuck up.

I don't know who I was talking to, but it made me feel better.

The purple-headed terrorist in the door suddenly turned and went back toward the passengers, the Uzi swinging up sharply. The entranceway was clear.

Oh, God!

I set the binoculars down and jumped.

Someone was shouting around the corner. I flattened myself against the storage closet for hanging bags that was to the right of the door. Directly across from me was the galley for the first-class passengers. It was empty. I glanced forward and I could see into the cockpit. The copilot, twisting his head to see what the shouting was about, saw me. His eyes were very wide.

I held up my forefinger in front of my lips and mouthed the word "Quiet."

He blinked several times and nodded. I noticed that his wrists were taped to the armrests of his chair. I also noticed that there was a space behind him, between the bulkhead and his seat. I jumped to it.

Both the copilot and the pilot started violently. The pilot said very loudly, "Merde!"

I held up my finger again, but it was too late. Footsteps pounded up the aisle. I jumped away, back to the tarmac, by the baggage trailer. I saw Purple-bag cross the entrance-way headed for the cockpit. I lifted the binoculars and watched him hit both pilots in the face with openhanded slaps. Their heads rocked and I gritted my teeth.

You son of a bitch.

He left the cockpit, paused in the doorway to survey the area around the aircraft, then went back to the passenger section.

I jumped back to the cockpit.

This time the pilot started, but remained silent. When I appeared, he was staring at the doorway, hatred in his eyes. There were red marks on his face and his lip was bleeding.

Again, I held up my finger for silence. He nodded firmly. I leaned over to the copilot's right ear. "How many hijackers?"

"Three," he whispered.

"What weapons do they have?"

"I have seen pistols, machine guns, and hand grenades."

Shit.

I asked him, "Do they have the pins pulled?"

"Sometimes."

I turned and took a small dentist's mirror out of my bag of odds and ends. I pushed it slowly around the corner and used it to look down the aisle.

The cabin lights were on and the thin shades covering the passengers' windows glowed a dull orange on the side of the plane facing the sun. I couldn't see any passengers, but the three terrorists were in the aisle, two at the back of the first-class section and the other one halfway down the coach section, constantly swiveling his head around.

The first-class section was empty of passengers. I figured they'd moved everybody back to coach and they were making them keep their heads down.

Each of the hijackers had a different-colored bag on his head. Purple-bag, closest to me, carried his machine gun at the ready, one hand on the trigger, one hand on the stock. The next hijacker, Orange-bag, had his machine gun slung over his shoulder by the strap and a pistol stuck in his waistband. He was lecturing the passengers and tossing a grenade from hand to hand.

At least that meant the pin was still in.

The last hijacker, Green-bag, held his machine gun at the ready, like Purple-bag. I saw him skip back toward the rear of the plane suddenly, and strike at one of the hidden passengers with the barrel of the gun. I gritted my teeth and marked the hijackers' positions well.

Those bags were a benefit to me. They provided no peripheral vision and so, when I moved, they didn't see me.

I jumped behind Purple-bag and grabbed him, jumped to the pit, fifty feet above the cold, hard water, and let go, jumping away immediately. I appeared behind Orange-bag, his head turning to see what the brief grunt of surprise from Purple-bag meant, his hand going to the machine gun.

I grabbed him, jumped him to the pit, dropped him, and jumped away. Just before I did, I heard the splash as Purple-bag hit the water. I wondered if he would surface in time for Orange-bag to hit him.

I appeared six feet behind Green-bag. He'd charged forward from where he'd been, up the aisle. He was shouting. I jumped forward, to close the distance, but he was out of arm's reach again, still moving. Damn. I jumped immediately in front of him, my hand sweeping the machine-gun barrel up away from me and away from any passengers. The gun went off, carving pieces of plastic out of the ceiling, and his body slammed into mine, carrying me back, him on top of me.

Before I hit the carpeted aisleway, I grabbed him, and jumped to the pit, appearing in midair, but tumbling backward, unsettling for me, terrifying for Green-bag, who found himself facedown fifty feet in the air.

I jumped to the cliff above and watched him hit the water right next to where Purple-bag flailed weakly on the surface. There was a tremendous gout of water; then I saw Orange-bag splash to the surface sputtering. He was trying to hold on to the machine gun, but it seemed to be pushing him under. Finally he let go of it.

Green-bag surfaced then. His bag had twisted underwater and he was pawing frantically at it, trying to get it off before it suffocated him. He pulled it free and I could hear his coughing gasps for air from the top of the cliff. He'd lost his machine gun in the water.

I looked closer. Green-bag's hair was soaked and darkened by the water, but there didn't seem to be any doubt that it was blond. His face was very white, from the cold of the water, but also his natural complexion.

They made their way, weakly, to the island, collapsing in the shallows, unable to pull themselves any farther.

I jumped down to the island, waded out into ankle-deep water, and dragged Purple-bag up onto dry land by his collar. He struggled weakly, reaching for his waist. I took a deep breath and kicked him in the stomach. He stopped struggling and vomited. I finished pulling him ashore, then took a large nylon cable tie out of my bag and used it to lock his wrists behind him. Then I dragged the other two out and did the same to them.

I frisked them, taking away two pistols, three grenades, and a knife. Only then did I pull the other two bags off.

European features, light coloring. Neither one was Rashid Matar.

"Who are you?"

They stared at me, dazed, uncomprehending. The water was on the low side of 60° F. They were probably suffering from some degree of hypothermia. Hitting the water at over forty miles an hour probably didn't help, either.

I fired one of the pistols into the water near them. They jerked, more alert, the sound doubly intimidating because of the confinement of the cliff walls. "Who are you?"

The one who'd worn the orange mask said weakly, "Red Army Faction." He had a German accent.

Not Shiite extremists. Not by a long shot. I thought about asking them about Rashid Matar, but it seemed unlikely they would know anything.

It was now less than five minutes since I first moved on the hijackers. The green bag drifted to shore nearby, floated by trapped air and pulled along in the hijacker's wake. I fished it out of the water and pulled it over the blond's head. Then I put the other men's bags on.

"What are you doing?" Orange-bag asked. I pulled him to his feet. He was barely able to stand. I jumped to the first-class section of the airplane and let him collapse into a seat; then I fetched the other two as well. I brought some of their weapons back, as well, for evidence.

The passengers were coming out of their paralysis. They all looked fearfully up the aisle when I appeared, some ducking back into their seats, but none of them had ventured as far as the cockpit. The flight attendants, it turned out, were taped to seats at the back of first class.

"It's okay," I called down the plane. "It's over. Somebody cut these people free." I pointed at the flight attendants. I moved up to the cockpit and, with the captured knife, cut the pilots free. I told them the same thing. "It's over. The hijackers are tied up in first class."

The pilot looked at me, dazed, puzzled. "What should we do now?"

"Whatever you want," I said, then jumped.

I stood with the press as the plane was taxied up. The regular crowd was still held behind the barrier, but the press were close enough to see the passengers come out. I'd picked up my binoculars from the baggage cart before coming up here. I tried to stand at the back of the reporters, using them to shield me from the Algerians and the passengers.

The adrenaline was still flowing through my system and my stomach was hollow, my hands shaking. I felt like laughing but nothing was funny.

The Reuters reporter was taking pictures rapidly; he was flipping a new roll of film into his camera when he saw me. I nodded politely. He nodded back, a puzzled expression on his face, and went back to taking pictures.

A statement from the Algerian press liaison had been read aloud just before the plane taxied to the gate. It claimed that the passengers had overwhelmed the hijackers and taken them prisoner.

As the passengers went by, steered carefully away from the press by the Algerians, they joked, but the laughter sounded strained, as if it might crack easily. I recognized the sound. It was how I felt.

The crew came off last and I saw the copilot glance in my direction, then stare as he spotted my face at the back of the group of reporters. I held up my finger again, over my lips, as I'd done on the plane. Shhh. He frowned and I grinned at him, then jumped.

The soupspoon was halfway to my mouth and Millie said, "Bang."

"Millie!"

She took her hand and pointed it like a gun, thumb up, forefinger extended, and pressed it against my forehead. "Bang! Too late. The first one got you in the abdomen, maybe they could have saved you, but this one got you in the brain. Too bad, nothing left to fix."

I put the soupspoon down. We were in Manhattan, in a booth at Bruno's on East Fifty-eighth, and the zuppa de mussels was really good, but suddenly I didn't feel like eating. "You sure know how to spoil a guy's appetite."

"We had an agreement," she said.

I nodded. "Yeah, okay. I'm sorry. It won't happen again."

She relaxed a little. "Okay. Finish your soup."

I picked up a spoonful of the stock, pushing aside the open shells of the mussels. It was halfway to my mouth when she said, "I don't want anything to happen to you, but if it does, I want you to survive it."

I nodded.

"I love you and... bang."

I jumped, spoon still in my mouth, to a recessed nook in the emergency room of Baltimore's Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. A nurse walked by but didn't look in my direction. The walls were white and I smelled methyl alcohol and disinfectant. My nose wrinkled. The smells did not go with the soup, but Shock Trauma was rated as one of the best emergency rooms in the country.

I jumped back to the street outside of Bruno's and went back in, the spoon hidden discretely in my hand and the napkin from my lap tucked into my back pocket. The waiter looked puzzled as I came back to the table. Millie smiled and kissed me as I sat back down.

We'd been playing this game ever since I described the way the machine gun had gone off during the hijacking. At any point during the time we were together, if she said "Bang" I was supposed to jump to the e-room, no questions, no delays. It wasn't supposed to matter if I was naked, eating, or sitting on the toilet.

In addition, I'd bought several alarm clocks. They were lying around the cliff dwelling, facedown. Millie reset them each night to different times. When they went off, I was also supposed to jump to the e-room.

I'd been much better about responding to the alarms, even jumping, naked, to the e-room alcove when my normal alarm woke me up one morning. A nurse screamed at me, more shocked at my sudden appearance, I suppose, than at my nudity.

It was 11 P.M. in New York. Millie, back at school, had turned in early, and I'd jumped her away to Manhattan, for our first "date" in almost a month.

"CNN did another interview with the American and the two Britishers who are willing to say you appeared and disappeared in the plane. Then they did a longer interview with a psychologist who talked about the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Nobody believes what really happened."

I smiled. "Or admits it. The NSA may be suppressing some of it. Even if there aren't any teleports at the NSA, any teleports watching the news know I exist. If there are other teleports."

Millie shrugged. "If they exist, they may be saying, 'How stupid to be public' "

"How did the experts explain the water? That the terrorists were soaking from head to foot?"

She laughed. "Sweat. Nervous sweat."

"Sounds like a dramatic failure of their antiperspirant."

She laughed again.

"What's the official story?"

"The original one—that a passenger managed to capture all three terrorists, but that he left the plane in Algiers instead of taking the replacement jet on to Rome."

A smile died on my face. "I really don't care who gets the credit. I just wish Rashid Matar had been aboard."

Millie frowned. "There are two hundred innocent people who are alive and well today, because of what you did. Isn't that enough for you?"

I wiggled in my seat, uncomfortable.

"What do you intend to do to him, if you catch up with him?"

"When I catch up with him. When, not if. And I don't know."

She shivered. "Well, think about what it would do to you to use his methods. Whatever you do, don't become like him, okay?"

The thought chilled my bones and, again, the soup tasted funny.

"Okay," I said.

She said, "Bang."

 

I hadn't seen Dad since before Christmas, when I'd met him on the sidewalk outside his bar, so I jumped to the backyard one evening and looked at the house. His car was in the driveway, but all the curtains were drawn. There were lights on in the kitchen and living room, none in my old room.

When I jumped to my room, it was dark and the door to the hallway was slightly ajar, spilling a thin wedge of light across the floor. There were footsteps in the dust.

Behind me I heard someone move and then a soft coughing sound, mechanical, and the world's largest bee stung me in the back of my leg.

I flinched away, jumping, appearing in the fiction section of the Stanville Public Library.

So much for all the work I'd done with Millie, I thought, twisting to look at what my hand found. It was metal, tufted with foam at the end, about an inch and a half long. I tugged it out. The needle on the end was three-quarters of an inch long and fat enough that there was blood on it. A clear liquid dripped out of the tip.

Shades of "Wild Kingdom."

The room started to spin and I jumped, dart in hand, to the cliff dwelling, where I fell forward onto my bed. I'm not sure whether I passed out before or after I hit the mattress.

In spy movies, the gallant hero wakes up after being shot with the tranquilizer dart clear-eyed and clearheaded, completely aware of his surroundings.

My first memories were of hanging facedown over the edge of the bed and puking my guts out. I think that's the first memory. From the later evidence, I must have done this several times before I was awake enough to check the time.

Fourteen hours had passed since I'd visited Dad's house. I was having trouble thinking, and the stench was making me sick again. I rolled to the other side of the bed, away from the mess, and it occurred to me that the NSA didn't have Dad under covert surveillance—they'd moved in with him.

Well, with any luck, they'd make his life more miserable than Millie's. I hoped they'd interrogate him on drugs. Perhaps he'd feel as bad as I did now.

I jumped to my favorite oasis; the sun was shining and the temperature was in the high sixties. I rinsed my mouth out at the spring and washed my face in the cold water.

It occurred to me that I hadn't seen Millie last night and that she was probably worried sick. I considered jumping to her apartment and waiting for her to get back from class, but I might run into her roommate or show up on their tapes if they'd bugged the place.

I was getting very angry.

There was a homeless woman at the Stillwater bus station who took my offer of a hundred dollars. I wrote the message out for her and dialed Millie's number on the pay phone, standing so I blocked the dial. When their answering machine message finished, I handed the receiver to her.

In a surprisingly pleasant voice she said, "Millie, I heard from Bruno and he's fine. He thought he had a job in a hospital, but it didn't work out. He's sorry he hasn't answered your last letter but he promises to write real soon. I'll talk to you later."

Bruno's was where we'd had dinner the night before. The homeless woman handed the phone back and I hung it up. I gave her another four hundred dollars. She looked surprised.

"Hell," she said. "I thought you were going to take the money away from me after I made the call."

"Get off the street," I said. "It's a hard life."

"Ain't that the truth."

I walked around the corner, to a hardware store, and bought a mop and bucket.

 

Millie wanted me to avoid Dad from then on, but all she could get me to promise was to be careful.

I showed her the dart, after jumping her to the cliff dwelling at midnight. She stared at it, then insisted on cleaning the wound. She wanted to know when I'd last had a tetanus shot.

"Two years ago."

She chewed on her lip. "That should be all right.... Damn! I'm really starting to hate these guys! What's that smell?"

"Disinfectant," I said, and changed the subject.

 

"A Pan Am 727 was hijacked on takeoff from Athens. It landed in Larnaca, on the Turkish half of Cyprus. The authorities say there is only one hijacker, but he's wired himself with explosives and the plane's fuel tanks are over three-quarters full."

"I'll call back," I said.

I jumped to Texas, than Larnaca. The press pointed cameras like cannon from the terminal. Fire trucks circled the aircraft like Western wagons under Indian attack. Where was John Wayne when you needed him? I settled in the shadow of a foam truck and used the binoculars.

The plane's doors were shut and one of the plane's engines was idling, to run the air-conditioning, I guessed. The passengers' windows weren't shaded and I could see worried faces staring out through them.

At the other end of the truck, the firemen were gathered around the open door of the cab, listening to the radio. I moved closer until I could hear.

"... and unless my demands are met, I will detonate my explosives, killing all two hundred and twelve passengers and crew." The voice was calm, matter-of-fact. The accent was Middle Eastern. I wondered if it was Matar, but I doubted it. He might blow up the passengers, but never himself.

I looked back at the plane. If the hijacker was on the radio, then he was up in the cockpit.

I jumped to the top of the wing, by the fuselage, near its trailing edge. I could just see in one of the windows. A terrified face looked back at me.

I held up my finger over my lips. The man blinked rapidly but didn't seem to say anything. I moved up the wing to the next window. That window and center seats on this side of the plane were empty, but a woman in the aisle seat saw me and held her hand over her mouth, then let it drop and clamped her lips shut.

I jumped into the plane, into the empty seat.

The plane stank of fear; the woman in the aisle seat jumped when I appeared, and shrieked. Down the plane, a baby cried suddenly and there was a collective gasp in reaction to both noises.

"Silence!" a voice yelled from the front of the plane. It was the voice from the radio, but I couldn't see past the partition at first class to see him.

The woman next to me held both hands over her mouth. She alternated between looking up the aisle and looking at me. I shifted into the middle seat, motioning her to be quiet. She leaned away from me, avoiding contact.

From the middle seat I could see into the first-class section almost all the way to the front galley. I couldn't see into the cockpit, but the hijacker chose that moment to walk back to the barrier between coach and first class.

It wasn't Matar. He was a slight Arab, young, with steel-rimmed glasses. At first I thought he was wearing a down vest, but I was wrong. It was the explosives, fastened to some sort of harness, wires running to detonators, batteries clipped to his belt. In his left hand he held a switch on a wire extension. His thumb was poised a quarter-inch above a small, red button. A quarter inch.

Jesus! Jump away!

In his right hand he held a pistol, a compromise, for threatening individuals rather than whole groups. I didn't care about the pistol. It was the quarter-inch gap that worried me, the little red button.

He walked past us, all the way to the back of the plane. I saw heads lower as he came by, avoiding eye contact. There wasn't any doubt who had dominance in this pack. But the eyes raised again, as soon as he was past, straining to see the explosives, the button, as if watching could somehow prevent the detonation.

A quarter-inch.

At least it wasn't a dead-man switch, a switch that would close when a person let go of it. He walked forward, headed back to the front of the plane. When he was past me I took the metal rod from my bag of odds and ends.

It was steel, a half-inch thick, twelve inches long. The bottom four inches were wrapped in cloth tape, to form a grip. It weighed slightly over one pound and was the color and hardness of the hijacker's eyes.

When the hijacker walked out of sight again, I jumped to the partition, at the edge of first class. The three men seated there jerked, but the admonition from the hijacker kept them from shouting. I motioned for silence and they blinked at me.

I used the dentist's mirror to look around the corner.

The hijacker was talking to one of the flight attendants, a stunning blonde with a very white face and spots of sweat soaking the armpits of her uniform. The hijacker would emphasize what he was saying with motions of his left hand and the stewardess would twitch in sync with the motion of the switch.

A phrase from my recent reading came, unbidden. Insh'allah, I thought. If God wills.

I raised the rod over my head, then brought it down very fast, very hard. Before it reached the height of the hijacker's arm, I jumped.

I appeared next to him just in time for the rod to smash into his ulna, two inches back from his wrist. As I hoped, his thumb straightened, lifting away from the switch. His other fingers loosened and the switch fell free, swinging on its cord down to his thigh.

The pain must have been considerable—I'm sure I heard the bone break—but his right hand whipped the gun around very fast. The rod was moving back up then and it smashed into the bottom of that wrist, knocking the gun up as it fired. Grains of burning powder stung my cheek and the bullet burned along the top of my shoulder. The pistol fell behind him and his right hand reached for the switch.

I grabbed him then, and jumped to the pit. As I let him go, he was still twisting, trying to grab the button. I flinched away, jumping to the edge of the pit above.

He detonated five feet above the surface.

A giant hand slammed into me, lifted me off my feet, and I jumped away, even before the sound reached me, before I could land on the rocks. I staggered out from the alcove at the Shock Trauma e-room and fell to the floor. My shoulder was bleeding, my face stung, and I was having trouble breathing.

A nurse walked up to me and started asking questions, but I was still struggling to catch my breath, so I ignored her. Finally I took in a great gasp of air, followed by several progressively easier breaths.

I kept seeing the initial flash of the blast. My mind filled in the results, even though I wasn't there, from Mom's death.

"Sorry," I said. "What did you want?"

I killed him. I blew him up, just like Mom.

She saw the blood then on my shoulder, saw the powder burns on my face. "You've been shot." She turned her head and shouted, "Gurney here!"

They seemed disappointed, almost, when the source of the blood turned out to come from a shallow graze across the shoulder and the only other wounds were the powder burns. After dressing the shoulder, a nurse carefully picked the grains from my face using very fine tweezers. "If we don't get 'em out, they'll be like tattoos."

Before she finished with me, two Baltimore policeman showed up and took station just outside the door. I asked her what they were there for.

"Gunshot wound. We had to report it. You'd be surprised at the number of drug deals gone wrong that end up in this place. They don't want to talk to the cops, either, but they also want to live. We're the best, so their friends dump 'em here and leave. Who shot you?"

I shook my head slowly, carefully, avoiding tugging on the shoulder. I stared at the wall. Dead.

She frowned and checked my pupils again, using a small light to check the contraction, searching for a concussion. "It's not my problem. You'll have to tell them." She put down the light and dabbed the small facial wounds with Neosporin. "Not even worth Band-Aids. Keep 'em clean and they'll heal right up. Unless you get shot again."

I nodded slowly, still looking at the wall. "Thanks."

She walked out between the cops through the only door to the room. "He's all yours," she said.

They both turned to watch her walk down the hall. While their heads were turned, I jumped.

 

I used a full wet suit and scuba gear to recover as much of the hijacker's body as possible.

It wasn't a matter of respect for the dead—more a matter of respect for the environment. I didn't want him to rot in the water. Every time I thought about his blood in the water, my lips clamped tighter around the mouthpiece of the scuba regulator.

There were a lot of small pieces, but the blood had cleared out. An underground waterway filled the pit and an underground waterway drained it away, a fact I didn't realized until I noticed the current moving me sideways along the bottom. I carried a mesh bag to put the pieces in and I could only work at midday, when the sunlight touched the surface of the water.

The legs and arms were mostly intact and I'd found the head facedown, hair floating up like some aquatic plant. I didn't look at the face, just pushed the head into the bag, averting my eyes.

I threw up a lot.

The first time I didn't get the regulator out of my mouth and the vomit filled the mouthpiece. I was twenty feet down, about the deepest the water got, and I had to kick for the surface, choking and spitting. I jumped to the box-canyon spring to rinse the mouthpiece.

I didn't want to use the water from the pit.

On the second day, when I had as much of him as I thought I was going to find, I dumped three buckets of bluegill perch, two buckets of small catfish, and four buckets of crawdads into the water. When I'd bought the fish, the Stillwater bait supplier had lectured me on trotline fishing at great length. I'd listened to him very carefully and thanked him when he was through.

It was my hope that the fish and crawdads would find the rest of the hijacker. Call it my own form of bioremediation.

Three days after the hijacking, I left the pieces of the body on the taxiway in Larnaca, Cyprus, in a galvanized washtub, covered with clear plastic to thwart the flies. I'd considered leaving a note, explaining that his own bomb did this to him, but I thought it would be better left unexplained. If they wanted to think I'd done that to him, fine. Maybe it would deter the next hijacker.

Who picked up Mom's body?

Millie held me every night while I cried.