No one answered.

“I didn’t think so,” the bald man said sadly. “This is the era of specialization. A shameful time to be alive.” With this philosophical pronouncement, Baldy retreated once more to business class.

Laurel looked down and saw that, below the rims of the dark glasses with their jaunty red plastic frames, Dinah Bellman’s cheeks were wet with tears. Laurel forgot some of her own fear and perplexity, at least temporarily, and hugged the little girl. “Don’t cry, honey — that man was just upset. He’s better now.”

If you call sitting there and looking hypnotized while you tear a paper napkin into teeny shreds better, she thought.

“I’m scared,” Dinah whispered. “We all look like monsters to that man.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Laurel said, surprised and a little taken aback. “Why would you think a thing like that?”

“I don’t know,” Dinah said. She liked this woman — had liked her from the instant she heard her voice — but she had no intention of telling Laurel that for just a moment she had seen them all, herself included, looking back at the man with the loud voice. She had been inside the man with the loud voice — his name was Mr Tooms or Mr Tunney or something like that — and to him they looked like a bunch of evil, selfish trolls.

If she told Miss Lee something like that, Miss Lee would think she was crazy. Why would this woman, whom Dinah had just met, think any different?

So Dinah said nothing.

Laurel kissed the girl’s cheek. The skin was hot beneath her lips. “Don’t be scared, honey. We’re going along just as smooth as can be — can’t you feel it? — and in just a few hours we’ll be safe on the ground again.”

“That’s good. I want my Aunt Vicky, though. Where is she, do you think?”

“I don’t know, hon,” Laurel said. “I wish I did.”

Dinah thought again of the faces the yelling man saw: evil faces, cruel faces. She thought of her own face as he perceived it, a piggish baby face with the eyes hidden behind huge black lenses. Her courage broke then, and she began to weep in hoarse racking sobs that hurt Laurel’s heart. She held the girl, because it was the only thing she could think of to do, and soon she was crying herself. They cried together for nearly five minutes, and then Dinah began to calm again. Laurel looked over at the slim young boy, whose name was either Albert or Alvin, she could not remember which, and saw that his eyes were also wet. He caught her looking and glanced hastily down at his hands.

Dinah fetched one final gasping sob and then just lay with her head pillowed against Laurel’s breast. “I guess crying won’t help, huh?”

“No, I guess not,” Laurel agreed. “Why don’t you try going to sleep, Dinah?”

Dinah sighed — a watery, unhappy sound. “I don’t think I can. I was asleep.”

Tell me about it, Laurel thought. And Flight 29 continued east at 36,000 feet, flying at over five hundred miles an hour above the dark midsection of America.

Chapter 3

The Deductive Method. Accidents and Statistics. Speculative Possibilities. Pressure in the Trenches. Bethany’s Problem. The Descent Begins.

1

“That little girl said something interesting an hour or so ago,” Robert Jenkins said suddenly.

The little girl in question had gone to sleep again in the meantime, despite her doubts about her ability to do so. Albert Kaussner had also been nodding, perchance to return once more to those mythic streets of Tombstone. He had taken his violin case down from the overhead compartment and was holding it across his lap.

“Huh!” he said, and straightened up.

“I’m sorry,” Jenkins said. “Were you dozing?”

“Nope,” Albert said. “Wide awake.” He turned two large, bloodshot orbs on Jenkins to prove this. A darkish shadow lay under each. Jenkins thought he looked a little like a raccoon which has been startled while raiding garbage cans. “What did she say?”

“She told Miss Stevenson she didn’t think she could get back to sleep because she had been sleeping. Earlier.”

Albert gazed at Dinah for a moment. “Well, she’s out now,” he said.

“I see she is, but that is not the point, dear boy. Not the point at all.”

Albert considered telling Mr Jenkins that Ace Kaussner, the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi and the only Texan to survive the Battle of the Alamo, did not much cotton to being called dear boy, and decided to let it pass... at least for the time being. “Then what is the point?”

“I was also asleep. Corked off even before the captain — our original captain, I mean — turned off the NO SMOKING light. I’ve always been that way. Trains, busses, planes — I drift off like a baby the minute they turn on the motors. What about you, dear boy?”

“What about me what?”

“Were you asleep? You were, weren’t you?”

“Well, yeah.”

“We were all asleep. The people who disappeared were all awake.”

Albert thought about this. “Well... maybe.”

“Nonsense,” Jenkins said almost jovially. “I write mysteries for a living. Deduction is my bread and butter, you might say. Don’t you think that if someone had been awake when all those people were eliminated, that person would have screamed bloody murder, waking the rest of us?”

“I guess so,” Albert agreed thoughtfully. “Except maybe for that guy all the way in the back. I don’t think an air-raid siren would wake that guy up.”

“All right; your exception is duly noted. But no one screamed, did they? And no one has offered to tell the rest of us what happened. So I deduce that only waking passengers were subtracted. Along with the flight crew, of course.”

“Yeah. Maybe so.”

“You look troubled, dear boy. Your expression says that, despite its charms, the idea does not scan perfectly for you. May I ask why not? Have I missed something?” Jenkins’s expression said he didn’t believe that was possible, but that his mother had raised him to be polite.

“I don’t know,” Albert said honestly. “How many of us are there? Eleven?”

“Yes. Counting the fellow in the back — the one who is comatose — we number eleven.”

“If you’re right, shouldn’t there be more of us?”

“Why?”

But Albert fell silent, struck by a sudden, vivid image from his childhood. He had been raised in a theological twilight zone by parents who were not Orthodox but who were not agnostics, either. He and his brothers had grown up observing most of the dietary traditions (or laws, or whatever they were), they had had their Bar Mitzvalis, and they had been raised to know who they were, where they came from, and what that was supposed to mean. And the story Albert remembered most clearly from his childhood visits to temple was the story of the final plague which had been visited on Pharaoh — the gruesome tribute exacted by God’s dark angel of the morning.

In his mind’s eye he now saw that angel moving not over Egypt but through Flight 29, gathering most of the passengers to its terrible breast... not because they had neglected to daub their lintels (or their seat-backs, perhaps) with the blood of a lamb, but because...

Why? Because why?

Albert didn’t know, but he shivered just the same. And wished that creepy old story had never occurred to him. Let my Frequent Fliers go, he thought. Except it wasn’t funny.

“Albert?” Mr Jenkins’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. “Albert, are you all right?”

“Yes, just thinking.” He cleared his throat. “If all the sleeping passengers were, you know, passed over, there’d be at least sixty of us. Maybe more. I mean, this is the red-eye.”

“Dear boy, have you ever—”

“Could you call me Albert, Mr Jenkins? That’s my name.”

Jenkins patted Albert’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. Really. I don’t mean to be patronizing. I’m upset, and when I’m upset, I have a tendency to retreat... like a turtle pulling his head back into his shell. Only what I retreat into is fiction. I believe I was playing Philo Vance. He’s a detective — a great detective — created by the late S.S. Van Dyne. I suppose you’ve never read him. Hardly anyone does these days, which is a pity. At any rate, I apologize.”