Snake screamed and yanked his bleeding hand away from Jenny's mouth. He brought his other hand up hard, hitting Jenny with the gun barrel under her jaw. Her head snapped back and she dropped off of him, into the aisle.

"You fuckin' BITCH," he screamed, kicking at her. "I'm gonna KILL YOU, YOU FUCKIN' BITCH." Jenny, on her back, tried to scrabble away up the aisle.

"YOU AIN'T GETTTN' AWAY, BITCH," screamed Snake, raising the gun.

Then he heard it, over the plane noise, a thump behind him. He spun and looked. Eddie, blood spreading quickly over his thigh, had managed to shove the suitcase against the lower lip of the open doorway. His eyes closed, his teeth gritted, he was pushing it over the lip. It was leaning out now, into the shrieking wind.

"NO!" screamed Snake. He dove to the back of the plane. As he got there, Eddie gave the suitcase a last desperate shove, toppling it slowly over the lip. Kicking Eddie aside, Snake leaned out of the doorway and grabbed for the suitcase handle with his left hand. He caught the handle, and he almost got the suitcase pulled back. But he'd leaned forward a little too far, and the weight of the suitcase was a little too much. Snake felt it pulling him out of the plane. He grabbed for the side of the door with his right, but he still had the gun in that hand, and he couldn't get a good grip. If he'd have let go of the suitcase, he could have grabbed the stairs, could have stayed on the plane and saved himself. But he wanted that suitcase; that was his kingpin suitcase. Snake held on to it as it bounced down to the bottom of the hanging stairs, then off the last stair, dragging Snake along, into the rushing black nothingness, over the vast black ocean.

Justin heard the bumps and felt the sudden weight change at the back of the plane. He looked back where the maniac had been, where the suitcase had been. He began shouting into his headset microphone.

Greer was shouting into the special phone, now, causing airline passengers to stop on the concourse and stare at him.

"ABORT ABORT ABORT," he shouted. "DO YOU HEAR ME? ABORT ABORT ABORT."

Snake was falling, falling. He was very afraid, but he was still thinking clearly. He had not let go of the suitcase. He would not let go of the suitcase. This was his kingpin suitcase. He would hold on to it for the rest of his life.

fourteen

The next day's newspaper was full of news.

The big story was the rogue wave, estimated to be somewhere between eight and twelve feet high, that hit both South Florida and the Bahamas. The wave was felt by even the big freighters; it capsized a number of smaller boats, although fortunately nobody was hurt. It was also fortunate that the wave hit at night, when there were few people on the beaches. There were some scary moments and a fair amount of damage, but nobody drowned.

The cause of the wave was, for the moment, a mystery. The best guess from the experts was that it was caused by some freak seismic event on the seafloor under the Gulf Stream. Rogue waves had hit Florida before; Daytona Beach had had one in July of 1992. As one oceanographer quoted in the newspaper put it: "Every now and then, Mother Nature throws you a curve."

There was also a dramatic story of a hijacking attempt aboard an Air Impact! turboprop flight from Miami to Freeport. A man — described by one of a group of retirees who'd been on the plane as "a complete lunatic"  — managed to smuggle a gun on board and ordered the pilot to take off without clearance. A Miami police officer, Monica Ramirez, had somehow — details were not yet available — gotten on the plane and tried to apprehend the hijacker, who had shot her. Other passengers had also fought the hijacker, and during the struggle, he had apparently fallen from the plane to his certain death in the ocean. Officer Ramirez, who was described by the police chief as a hero, was still alive when the plane returned to Miami; she was in critical condition, but doctors said her chances for survival were good. A passenger identified as Edward Porter also sustained a gunshot wound to the leg; he was listed in satisfactory condition.

By bizarre coincidence, there was another, totally unrelated story involving the airport at around the same time. Somehow, a thirteen-foot python had gotten loose in the main concourse and attacked a passenger, identified as Leonard Pflund, a forty-two-year-old consultant from East Orange, New Jersey. He was rescued by his business associate, identified as forty-seven-year-old Henry Algott, also of East Orange, who killed the snake with a handgun. Police had taken possession of the handgun and detained Algott pending further investigation of the incident. Police said they would file charges against the snake's owner, Neil Hart, when he was released from the hospital, where he was being treated for injuries sustained while resisting arrest.

Police reported two unusual incidents in Coconut Grove. In one, a man identified as Jack Pendick, twenty-eight, of the Harbour Oakes Manour Trailer Court in Cutler Ridge, had been apprehended after firing a handgun several times near the Coco Walk shopping complex. Nobody had been hurt, but the incident and subsequent apprehension of Pendick had attracted a crowd of tourists, who had temporarily blocked Grand Avenue. A few hours later, in a residential section of the Grove, a Miami police officer identified as Walter Kramitz had been discovered in the middle of Garbanzo Street handcuffed to a large metal object, along with a local business executive identified as Arthur Herk. This apparently was the result of a home-invasion-style robbery at Herk's home, but the details of the incident, and especially how Kramitz and Herk ended up in the street, were still sketchy.

Finally, traffic on busy Le Jeune Road had been shut down completely for several hours when a group of goats had somehow gotten loose on the roadway.

The newspaper ran this story as a «bright» on the bottom right-hand comer of the front page, with a picture of a sweating animal-control officer, surrounded by cars, chasing a frisky, cheerful-looking goat. This picture produced identical reactions in thousands of readers: They shook their heads, smiled, and said, "Only in Miami."

epilogue

In the weeks that followed, oceanographers up the Atlantic coast detected elevated radioactivity levels in the waters of the Gulf Stream; in addition, some mariners noted an unusually large quantity of dead deepwater fish floating on the ocean surface. Various explanations were offered for these phenomena, including the possibility that they, and the rogue wave, were caused by a catastrophic malfunction aboard a nuclear submarine. This allegation was aggressively advanced on the Internet by a number of people, most notably Pierre Salinger; the fact that the U.S. government said there had been no submarines of any kind in that area only reinforced their belief that they were right. But no concrete evidence ever surfaced, and eventually the matter became just another random piece of conspiracy-nut lore.

The Federal Aviation Administration immediately suspended all flights on Air Impact! which soon filed for bankruptcy. In response to outrage expressed by the public and political leaders over the apparently lax security at Miami International Airport, a high-level task force was formed to root out problems and recommend solutions. After months of hearings, a number of measures were implemented, the most significant being the hiring of an expert consulting firm to oversee passenger checkpoint operations. This lucrative contract was awarded to See-Cure Tech, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Penultimate, Inc.