Abdulraheem was loquacious, neither fierce nor defiant, and often pathetic, like a neglected child who had been bad and looked forward to the attention punishment would afford him. The drug contributed to Abdulraheem’s mood, clouding his true character, but to Fisk it was evident that the would-be hijacker was not very bright. He was hardly the embodiment of the fear, suspicion, and anxiety one might expect, as he would no doubt be portrayed by the media.

As they huddled outside afterward, Fisk translated a few of his answers for her. He could not mask his annoyance. He understood the need for immediate intervention, but mood-altering drugs should be a method of last resort. Especially when the administrator was unsure of the proper dose, as had been the case here.

“Bottom line?” said Fisk. “Not a major player.”

“A lone wolf?” said Gersten. “The odds are against it.”

“I’m not making any final pronouncements,” said Fisk. “Maybe he’s dogging me—maybe he’s Keyser Söze. But I don’t think so. More likely he’s double-digit IQ, led more by religion than reason.”

“He got himself on the plane,” said Gersten. “He got a knife on there.”

Fisk nodded, rechecking his briefing notes, finding the passenger list. “And he—or someone else—paid for a business-class seat.”

Before Fisk and Gersten finished, the task force released the other passengers and crew, and SAS Flight 903 departed for Newark, its original destination. Each passenger answered direct questions about departure points and destinations, and each was completely rescreened by TSA. In all, their total inconvenience time was seven hours.

By the time Fisk and Gersten got to the five remaining passengers and one crew member, the balm of free food, relief, and camaraderie had worn thin. Someone made the mistake of telling them about the plane continuing on without them. Now the flight attendant and five passengers just wanted to be someplace else—anywhere but Bangor, Maine.

Fisk was immediately impressed that a group of people this disparate could come together in the heat of the moment and swiftly overwhelm the hijacker. He supposed that this was part of the legacy of 9/11: when faced with an onboard threat, very few airline passengers would risk waiting to let things play out. These five happened to be the first into action.

He knew he risked a backlash if he inconvenienced them much further, but he needed to get some additional perspective on Abdulraheem. Like radioactive matter, eyewitness accounts degraded over time, so he put on his most friendly face and went around the room to each in turn.

The Six, as the preliminary report in his hands had christened them, all gave approximately the same response when asked about their heroic moments in the vestibule outside the cockpit of SAS 903.

Alain Nouvian, a fifty-one-year-old cellist returning to New York from a brief concert tour in Scandinavia, was a small-eyed man with an unruly comb-over of dyed black hair. He approached the questioning with great care, like a man interviewing at a job fair. “I . . . I didn’t think. I didn’t think I had it in me to do what I did. It looked like I was dead no matter what . . . and I wasn’t going to just sit there. To be frank, I’m still coming to grips with my actions. This is the most alive I’ve felt in thirty years. There was a test earlier today, life or death . . . and I acted. As they say, I rose to the occasion. That maniac was going to blow up the plane, for Christ’s sake—or at least crash it into something. Instead, I crashed into him.”

Douglas Aldrich, a sixty-five-year-old retired auto parts dealer from Albany, had been returning from a four-day visit to his daughter and grandson in Göteborg. “Instinct. I don’t even have to think about it. I was more worried about getting some feeling back into my legs at the end of the flight—you know, that thrombosis stuff. I was standing in the aisle trying to stretch out these old muscles when I heard the commotion. I’m a Vietnam vet, which was a long time ago, but today it felt like yesterday. I don’t think of myself as a brave man. There was no orchestra music, you know what I mean? No moment of heroic decision. I—and I think the others—just did what I had to do. The people I’m thinking about right now? Those others on the plane. Who just sat there. All the people in business who didn’t stand up when this terrorist attacked. That’s what’s spinning my mind at this moment. Them getting into their beds tonight. Lying there in the dark with their thoughts. Tell you what—I’m going to sleep like a goddamn baby.”

Colin Frank, forty-five and paunchy, was a journalist working on an assignment for The New Yorker on a piece about the rise in popularity of Swedish crime literature. His reading glasses were perched high on his forehead, one of the lenses showing a threadlike crack. He had not yet come to grips with what happened. “I haven’t the slightest idea why I did it. I’m being honest—I remember nothing. My body was moving without thought. It’s like a switch was flipped. One minute I was in my seat reading Henning Mankell—and the next I was on top of a terrorist at the front of a plane. I went from reading a crime thriller to starring in one—kind of seamlessly. It didn’t seem extraordinary, the situation . . . and at the same time it didn’t seem real either. Like I was still in the book.” He smiled, lifting off his glasses and admiring the imperfection in the lens, as though needing evidence of his actions. “Sort of like reading a baseball book and then finding yourself rounding home plate. Right place, right time, I guess. I just feel so goddamn lucky to be alive.”

“When do we get to Newark?” asked Joanne Sparks, thirty-eight, the general manager of an IKEA store in Elizabeth, New Jersey. A fit frequent-flyer business-class traveler, she was returning from the company’s home office in Stockholm and had been seated next to Abdulraheem for the entire flight.

“Soon,” answered Fisk.

“How soon?”

Unlike the others, Ms. Sparks addressed Fisk and Gersten not as an interviewee, but as an equal, with the candor and polish of a combatant on a television talk show.

“I’m not aware of the exact details, but I—”

“So we’re not going right home. Are we.”

Fisk smiled, changing tactics. “Probably not. Again, it’s not my call. But my guess is you six will be bundled onto a government aircraft and flown to LaGuardia for further questioning. This is a big deal, you should realize.”

“How long?”

“How long in New York? At least a day.”

“Bullshit. What am I, under arrest?”

Gersten jumped in. “No, ma’am. You are not under arrest. You are material witnesses to a terror attack—”

“He’s a fucking malcontent with delusions of grandeur. There was no boom at the end of those wires. There was nothing. False alarm.”

Fisk said, “It’s not that simple. But I suggest you take up your complaints with the FBI.”

“The FBI?” said Sparks, doing a double take. “Wait a minute. Then who are you?”

He explained himself again. “I’m just trying to get some context on the hijacker. You were seated next to him for the entire flight. Is there anything you can give me?”

Sparks threw up her hands. “You know how often I travel? I board, the eyeshades go on, the shoes come off, I’m gone.” She softened a little, Fisk’s earnestness working on her. She was angry about the inconvenience, but proud of her courage. “Look, it was pure reaction. Pure fucking gut reaction. Adrenaline, whatever. Fight or flight. Or rather—fight on a flight, right? This guy . . . he had been asleep the entire way. And I mean sound asleep, to the point that I presumed he’d taken something for the flight. In fact, when he first got up and went right at the flight attendant, my thought was, you know, Ambien. I’ve seen that before on a plane. Jesus. You fly enough, you see crazy things. But there it is. I can’t give you much more than that. Didn’t pay him the slightest attention, nor he me. It was like he was dead next to me for hours, then all of a sudden he was up like a zombie and trying to take over the plane. Crazy motherfucker.”