“Sir?”

“Nothing, Boyle. I’m practically talking in my sleep here. My mind’s still back in that bunker.”

“Intense work, sir.”

“Eh. Sounds like you’ve put in your share of hard days, Boyle.”

“I have, sir. But it’s okay. I’m good with it. Nothing compared to what you all were doing in there. Not that I know for sure, but I think I have an idea. Of course, we’re at opposite ends of it. But you’ve got a hell of a lot better chance of impacting this fucking thing than I do.” Boyle winced at his curse word. “Sir.”

Fisk thought back to bin Laden’s words, which might turn out to be his final statement, his ghoulish message from the grave. They must be made to believe that we repeat ourselves out of a desperation to act.

Fisk could not quite decipher it right now. He only knew that it meant one thing.

Something was coming.

Part 4

Chatter

A Few Years Later

Thursday, July 1

Chapter 14

Boston Center, Scandinavian 903 heavy is with you. We’re out of Atlantic Uniform, flight level three six zero, direct Newark.”

“Scandinavian 903 heavy, Boston Center. Good morning. Maintain three six zero. Expect descent clearance at 1655 UTC.”

“Roger, Boston Center. Maintain three six zero, clearance at 1655. Scandinavian 903 heavy.”

Captain Elof Granberg raised his arms over his head in a groaning stretch, his fingertips pointing to the cabin ceiling. The pressure in his bladder had just reached a level of discomfort, which he knew would intensify once he stood. He reached for the direct passenger cabin intercom on the center console.

“Almost done, Maggie,” he said to the flight attendant who picked up on the other end. “Initial descent in about twenty. Anders and I will pay our visits, then you can let the pax move around a bit before sitting them down for landing. Please let me know when we’re secure.”

Granberg then leaned across the console and tapped his copilot on the shoulder. “You take the first head call, Anders. I have the airplane.”

“You have the airplane,” copilot Anders Bendiksen said. Bendiksen unbuckled his shoulder harness, pushed the straps off his shoulders, and slid his seat back, standing to wait for the flight attendant to confirm that there were no passengers in front of the cockpit door.

The intercom handset buzzed. Bendiksen picked it up.

“All clear for you.”

“Thank you, Maggie,” said Bendiksen. “Coming out now.”

The mandatory protocol for cockpit door opening in American airspace had been in place since the attacks on New York and Washington. One flight attendant blocked the aisle leading from the front of the passenger cabin, standing before the drawn privacy curtain. A second flight attendant was a backup, standing on the other side. The armored door to the flight deck could be opened only from the inside, or outside from a keypad. The code was changed for every flight, and was known only to the pilots.

On U.S. domestic flights, a wire screen was unfurled and secured, sealing off the vestibule from the first-class cabin while the pilots moved about, one at a time, outside the cockpit. On an international flight aboard a twin-aisle jet like the Airbus 330, the guard post was a ten-foot-long vestibule in front of the flight deck door. On one side was a bathroom, on the other, a bar and coffee galley.

A half-bulkhead separated the vestibule from the business-class cabin. The aisles began on each side of it, running aft through business, economy extra, and economy-class sections to the rear of the airplane.

As the purser on the SAS nonstop from Stockholm to Newark, Maggie Sullivan took her position as the forward blocker. Maggie was a solid five-four with dark hair in a French plait and a long, angular face bred from centuries of black Irish seafaring stock. She possessed that perfect combination of politeness and firmness common to the best flight attendants and nurses—but as a sentry, she was hardly imposing.

Her colleague that flight, a slight Nordic blonde named Trude Carlson, stood behind her. Seven years before, they had together attended a daylong instructional seminar from a martial arts trainer who taught them incapacitating kicks, chops, and pressure-point gouges. The aim, the trainer told them, was to delay an assailant at least long enough to secure the door to the flight deck, and therefore the controls of the airliner. Self-sacrifice, should it be necessary, was implicitly part of the job.

They had performed the door-opening procedure so many times that it had become a ritual rather than a tactic of true vigilance. So when the cockpit door opened, Maggie and Trude were chatting through the curtain about their plans for the unusually lengthy seventy-two-hour layover. They planned to visit the TKTS discount ticket booth in Times Square and were discussing the current must-see Broadway shows. And Trude had an old flame who lived on the Upper East Side who might have a friend for Maggie.

The cockpit door was thrust open and Anders Bendiksen appeared. “Hej-hej,” he said, with the singsong lilt of the customary Scandinavian greeting.

Trude chirped “Hej-hej” back to him, glancing over her shoulder.

“Good group this flight?”

“Not bad,” said Maggie, still steamed about the man in 11D who had spilled tomato juice on her shoe. Her stocking squished with every step, and she would never get the odor out.

Anders opened the lavatory door and ducked inside, sliding the OCCUPIED lock behind him.

The passenger was on Maggie before she even turned her head back toward the seats.

No outcry. No noise from the business-class cabin. No warning.

A blur, his first contact with her. An arm across her chest, crushing her breasts. Lifting her off her feet, startling her painfully. Jerking her inside the privacy curtain.

His other hand was at her throat. She felt something else there: the icy sting of a sharp blade.

Trude froze. She got her hands in the air, but they were empty. She felt powerless and stunned. This was not happening.

“ON YOUR KNEES!” he shrieked, his English heavily accented, and further warped by rage. He pulled Maggie deeper into the vestibule, out of sight of the majority of the passengers. “BOTH OF YOU! NOW!”

Trude looked around for help, for a weapon, for anything. A pitcher of coffee sat in the galley, but it was nowhere near scalding, and anyway out of her reach. She looked at Maggie’s face and saw a long-stare look in her eyes that frightened her as much as the intruder.

“Now!” the man ordered. “She dies now! Obey me!”

Trude fell forward to her knees. The man lowered Maggie, pushing her down to the floor. He thrust out his other hand, showing them a contraption molded out of toy plastic, with wires extending from it into the cuff of his black cotton shirt.

“I have a bomb!” he declared, showing them the detonator trigger. He spoke loudly enough to be heard in the lavatory, and perhaps even inside the flight deck. He pounded once on the lavatory door with his knife hand.

His eyes were wide, his face intense, like a man staring into a blazing fire. He was young, in his very early twenties. Obviously of Arabic descent, though dressed as a Westerner, his skin tan, his face beardless.

Maggie remembered him in a microsecond flash of her brain cells. He had boarded, took the front row aisle seat on the right side in business class, held an open magazine during takeoff, wrapped himself in a blanket, and slept all the way from Stockholm. His seatmate, a woman, was geared up with the expensive kit of a well-off executive road warrior. Loose-fitting designer gym suit, plush eyeshades, Bose headphones, and a neck pillow leaned against the cabin window. She had slept most of the way too, dropping off soon after takeoff. Neither of them took any service at all until water at wake-up before preparing for landing.