Taker

by Patrick Wong

  Suddenly, the clamor surrounding Nicole drained back in — whatever she’d done, it hadn’t stopped what was going on in the cockpit.

  She couldn’t Balance.

  With tears rolling from her eyes, Nicole sat back. She could see the worried look on her best friend’s face, but she could also tell that Amy was trying to be brave.

  “Thanks…for not leaving me alone…” Liam whispered.

  “Stay with me, Liam!” Nicole cried. She cupped his face with her hands.

  Just a second later, though, the man who was once the boy who loved ice hockey — with memories of listening to Guns N’ Roses in his parents’ backyard, stealing finger scoops of raw cake mix, and tickling his beloved cat, Marty — closed his eyes for the last time. The memories dissipated. The man had passed on.

  “No!” Nicole moaned. She couldn’t — wouldn’t — believe it.

  She grasped the sides of his face and shut her eyes again, furiously trying to summon Allen and bring back Liam.

  But it was useless. The only pain she felt now was her own, and her heart was pounding from frustration. Why couldn’t she reach the hijacker? Lead-lined doors, perhaps? Was that her kryptonite?

  “He’s gone,” Drake said. “The wounds were too much.”

  “I’m not giving up,” Nicole whispered. “We’ll figure out another way. We have to find someone else sick on this plane.”

  They surveyed the rows of frantic students. Although a group was huddled around one girl who was having an asthma attack from the panic, the girl didn’t appear to be ill enough to help.

  “I’ll start searching,” Amy volunteered.

  “And I need to get close to him. The hijacker.”

  “How?”

  Amy’s mouth opened but no words came out. They both knew the answer. They were going to have to storm the cockpit.

  Frustration-Aggression

  Theory

  Bishop leaned and rested much of his weight over the monitors in the PRESS surveillance jet. He took a moment to situate himself here, among the floor-to-wall LED screens with state-of-the-art recording and analysis devices. All this technology, and still they couldn’t bring home a hijacked plane.

  Bishop and his team had spent the past 10 minutes listening to the control tower at Orlando trying to make contact with the imperiled flight.

  “Flight 91, this is Orlando Tower. Repeat, please come in.”

  It had all been in vain. There had been silence — no demands, ransom or otherwise. Whoever had taken the cockpit knew what they were doing, but they were keeping the why a mystery.

  Bishop knew what this silence would signify — the imminent deployment of U.S. fighter jets from a nearby military base. Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security had declared a policy of downing a radio-silent plane, and not even a planeload of innocent U.S. citizens could prevent it. Everyone knew the human cost of a rogue plane piloted with murderous intentions. This situation had to be treated as a worst-case scenario.

  Then the door to the ops room opened and the agent he had been waiting for arrived, reams of printed paper in her hand. Agent Velasquez was a rising star in PRESS and had a nice mix of new-technology smarts and old-school dedication. Bishop had known her father years back. Elena Velasquez reminded Bishop of the old agents who had come before — agents who’d had a passion for the agency that seemed to be lacking in most of the younger agents these days. Most evenings he’d pass her office on his way home, her desk lamp on, Velasquez craning over details of her latest mission.

  “The crew manifest and passenger details, sir. I’ve made a dent.”

  “What have you got so far? Other than our girl?”

  “Nothing came up on our initial scan of the manifest. None of the passengers raised any domestic red flags, and each had low NTI ratings — even your girl Nicole. Given that we had nothing, I submitted a cross-check of this manifest against the INTERPOL database, the International Criminal Police Organization. That’s when I discovered one of the passengers on Flight 91 is flying on a stolen Russian passport.”

  Bishop’s interest piqued. “Interesting. And he was still allowed to board?”

  “This information is hot off the press. He would’ve been prevented to board now, but when Flight 91 took off, the stolen passport was clean.”

  Bishop appeared more and more concerned after every detail Velasquez provided him. “This could be bad. So we have some kind of international terrorist on board?”

  “That’s what I was expecting to find. But this is a potential domestic terrorist threat. We have to take into account that the plane is packed with a high school marching band traveling out to Adventure World. The media will create a frenzy if we don’t get on top of it. Also, take a look at these.” Velasquez pulled out several color photographs, still video images from security cameras, and printouts of profiles from the FBI database. “We analyzed video footage and still footage of the passengers as they were boarding the airplane, and isolated the image of our suspect. We then did a facial-recognition match of his image against all of our criminal database.”

  “And?”

  “We still came up empty.”

  Bishop looked down and folded his hands. His disappointed reaction to her words pleased Velasquez. It was exactly what she had been hoping for. This was her moment to prove herself to Bishop and the team.

  “Fortunately, I have connections with most of the casinos in Las Vegas,” Velasquez continued.

  The tension appeared to be getting to Bishop. Why was Las Vegas able to find something that his own agency couldn’t? “OK. Explain it to me, please. Why Las Vegas?”

  “The Vegas casinos have the most powerful facial-recognition computers in the world. Their facial database is larger, and their systems are exponentially more powerful than ours.”

  Velasquez slid a photo across the table. “Vegas says this guy is a near 100 percent match. And we know his car arrived at the airport-parking garage on the day of the flight. I can say with extremely high confidence that this is our guy: Allen Kreschkensky. He’s American. And he used to be lead engineer at the airline, but he got laid off … last June.”

  “How old?”

  “48.”

  “Not old enough to retire, so the severance package may not have been what he wanted.”

  “Exactly. A brief trawl through social media shows he’s bad-mouthed the airline left, right and center.”

  Velasquez offered her tablet and scrolled down Allen Kreschkensky’s Twitter page. Sure enough, every day he’d posted something new about the airline and its iniquities.

  “He’s the only one we got so far, other than Nicole Aaronson. But Psych reckons she’s not a suspect.”

  “Really?” Bishop snorted. “How so?”

  Velasquez handed him the file with the details. Bishop scanned through. “‘Plane hijackers are psychopathological with an aim in mind.’” This contradicted the secrecy Nicole’s actions seemed to suggest she wanted. For Allen, the motive would be straightforward — some kind of revenge.

  “What about this frustration-aggression theory? This shrink didn’t see her that day. That girl was seriously pissed.”

  “But think about it, sir. Hasn’t she done everything she’s wanted? Frustration always involves aggression. But healing a young boy and her sick friend? She got to do it. Where’s her frustration?”

  “With us?”

  “What’s she going to achieve by bringing down a plane full of just the kind of people she’s wanted to save? It doesn’t add up. Also, oppression theory won’t help you out here either. She’s an A student with parents who are socioeconomically comfortable, and only in the past few months have her so-called gifts shown themselves.”

  “What if she’s struggled with all this for years and this is her tipping point?” Bishop was reaching here, but, with a twinkle in her eye, Velasquez was going to humor him.

  “Sure, but Psych won’t see it. She has no history of depression or anxious symptoms, and iden
tity-wise, she was pretty set.”

  “She’s a teenage girl.”

  “And? Your point is that a hormonal girl can down a plane? Sure! I can list you about half the passengers on Flight 91 who fit that criterion.”

  “A hormonal girl with special powers.”

  “Unproven. You want me to go on scientific fact, OK? Psych says that she has exhibited no self-esteem problems or identity issues. Her dad is away half the time, and her mom works in the local ER, so I would say just from the outside there aren’t any controlling parental issues here either. They’re not home enough to extol the kind of pressure that would need. Also,” hardly drawing a breath, Velasquez turned to a further page in her Psych doc, “the closest you would get would be narcissism theory — lack of maternal empathy, possible early emotional neglect and the creation of a kind of God complex.”

  “God complex! Now you’re talking!” Bishop’s eyes lit up.

  “Wait, wait, wait. Don’t get ahead of yourself, sir. With respect, I majored in psychology, and I’m telling you, it’s not this girl.”

  “Thanks. We’ll see.” Bishop snatched away the clipboard and turned back to his monitors. He couldn’t help but feel the anticipation building in him now. This hijacking would be enough to bring Nicole in.

  “Control, this is Bishop. Update me.”

  “No news, sir. Jets scramble in T-minus 10.”

  Bishop nodded. He hoped Velasquez was right and that Nicole wasn’t hijacking the plane. God complex or not, they sure needed a hero up there.

  Bang!

  In the cockpit, Allen Kreschkensky was recalling the time his brother Alex had stolen his favorite G.I. Joe toy. It was returned to him after a boxing match. Alex had covered its face with permanent red ink so it would look, in his words, more like it had been in an actual boxing match. Allen didn’t know why this memory had hit him right then, there in the cockpit of the plane he’d just hijacked. The memory accompanied a fist-clenching sense of outrage.

  Maybe it was all the red he’d seen that day. Or perhaps it was the drugs the professor had given him, which Allen had injected while he was hiding out in the airplane lavatory, waiting for his weapons to print. The dosage had helped him do what he’d needed to do, plus furnished an odd cocktail of side effects. It was the adrenalin spike that had spurred him to his actions, and it had also numbed him to their horror.

  He had stabbed a woman. The family he had grown up in would not have tolerated even harsh language toward the fairer sex, and there he had been, pushing a knife into one.

  He knew he should feel ashamed, but he couldn’t access the feelings. The drugs again. He was just a vessel. He knew he was doing this for his own good reasons. Though he was having trouble explaining those reasons to the pilot.

  The pilot, a bearded man with salt-and-pepper hair, stared back through blank brown eyes, blood dripping from his wounds, his breaths rattling painfully. Allen had tied his hands to stop him from fighting anymore. He had put up a fight, but the monstrous, drug-induced influence in Allen had overpowered him.

  “You got family, right?” Allen asked.

  The pilot closed his eyes. He’d had enough of the chat.

  “I got family. They depend on me. Or did. My wife works shifts now. We can’t afford the things we used to. I feel guilty.”

  Or felt guilty. That was one of those inaccessible feelings.

  “Thirty years I worked there. From nothing to engineer. Worked so many late nights. I was working so hard to make sure they’d be OK that I was too busy to watch them grow up. I missed it all.”

  “You still have a chance.”

  “I’m a stranger to them. Besides, they’re teenagers. What would they want me for? My wife — she loves me. Or she did. She loved me as the engineer, but now she just looks at me so sad. Like she doesn’t see me the same way. Guess I’m not the same way. Other airlines want young engineers with life in them. Cheaper. And I’m past it. Better off dead than alive. They will be, anyhow.”

  The radio crackled to life again, and Allen rolled his eyes.

  “Flight 91, this is Orlando Tower. Please respond immediately or we will be forced to take action against you.”

  “They’re going to send the jets if you don’t let me reply,” the pilot said, his voice weak and labored.

  “I know.”

  They’d already been through what Allen wanted, and the hijacker’s objectives weren’t going to be achieved this side of life.

  “Please. At least let me land the plane. I have a little girl. She’ll miss me if I don’t come home.”

  Allen blinked down at the pilot.

  “But my little girl is more important than yours,” Allen replied, reveling in the blindingly obvious illogic of his statement.

  “What if our positions were reversed? What would you do then?”

  Allen stared at him. This was a different line of thought. The drugs were making it hard for him to focus on new ideas, but somewhere in Allen, there seemed to be a glint of understanding.

  Bang!

  A heavy object suddenly smashed against the cockpit door, causing both Allen and the pilot to jump back.

  Bang, bang, bang! It reverberated again and again, its cacophony coinciding with repeated blunt pressure on Allen’s skull.

  The hijacker gave a short scream and grabbed his head. This sudden turn of events had shaken him out of his moment of doubt.

  He sat up, secured the door, and checked the instruments and radar. Allen then looked out the front cockpit window, and, on the horizon, he could see his target.

  Soon this would all be over.

  Just Go with the Knife

  So far, the heaviest, most effective object that could potentially knock down the cockpit door was a fire extinguisher. It wasn’t perfect, but with enough outrage behind it, it just might work.

  Ben had been observing Drake head up a team of male passengers — the larger guys from the marching band — who were taking turns wielding the large red cylinder at the impenetrable door. This was alpha male territory, all of these guys uniting in their determination to infiltrate the cockpit.

  The attempts to break down the cockpit door were all occurring in spite of off-duty pilot Raymond’s protests. The lean, dark-haired, olive-skinned man had been adamant that the fact that they had heard no gunshots meant the pilot was still alive. The pilot could be negotiating with air traffic control, Raymond reasoned, and any attempt to interrupt such efforts could tip the delicate balance of power in the cockpit.

  “It’s a reinforced bulletproof door; you’re not going to be able to break it down with a fire extinguisher,” Raymond said to the group of young men. The off-duty pilot’s case for inactivity had silenced many in the cabin who had been supporting those up front, but not Drake.

  “Look, Raymond, until you can come up with a better plan than standing around and protesting, I’m going to keep trying to break down this door,” Drake asserted. He took up the red canister again, readying himself to lunge forward.

  Across Flight 91, the passengers had quieted down, and a blanket of stifled panic had settled upon everyone on board. There was some gentle sobbing here and there. Friends huddled together, communing over the imminent threat to their precious futures. Members of the cabin crew, trained to face such situations, were having to draw on their own reserves, especially now that one of their own had been mortally injured. There were no fake smiles or other superficialities — only the necessities mattered now.

  Some of the frail and young had swapped with those in the business class aisles to get away from the cockpit. Money and status no longer counted for much up there. The sole currency was life and death.

  Nicole knew she could do something about all of this. While others could try bashing down doors or resign to weeping in despair, helplessness was the last emotion Nicole felt. She alone could make a difference in this situation, and it was this knowledge that held her resolve strong as she moved from person to person, scanning for someone ill to
Balance the hijacker against.

  She could see the abject fear written on the faces of her fellow passengers. If they hadn’t witnessed the stabbings at the front, perhaps they would know nothing of the hijacking and would assume that the pilot was still in charge? Perhaps he was?

  The illusion of control.

  Nicole pushed on.

  Meanwhile, Ben was trying to shove similar thoughts aside to focus on doing what he did best — getting a grip on a new technology. The 3-D printer, which under any other circumstances would be an exciting prospect to savor for hours like a fine wine, sat before him in all of its sleek, black glory. In the few rushed minutes Ben had spent with the device, he’d been able to conclude that it was much more than a “normal” 3-D printer.

  If Ben weren’t mistaken, it looked a lot like a bio-replicator he had read about on one of his technology forums. He’d thought this technology was still experimental, but here it was, right in front of him. This replicator would allow medics on the battlefield to create replacement bones or entire limbs within minutes. But the hijacker had cleverly used it to print out his gun and knife at unbelievable speeds. It would have been much faster than any printer you could buy, and its lightweight material meant it was portable, too, and battery-operated. How had Allen gotten his hands on cutting-edge tech like this?

  Drake took a break from ramming the extinguisher against the cockpit door to observe Ben examining the processing log of the device.

  “He was in here for 30 minutes producing a composite gun and knife.”

  “What about bullets?”

  “It can’t make bullets. Only the gun,” Ben explained. “He must have smuggled the bullets on board.”

  “Or maybe somebody planted the bullets here ahead of time.”

  “Probably,” Ben said. Drake turned out to be pretty sharp.