Falling by T.J. Newman

CHAPTER FOUR

JO STEADIED HERSELF WITH Ahand on the galley counter.

Bill had tried to make this look like a typical conversation during a typical bathroom break, casually walking her into the galley. Once out of eyesight, he’d cleared his throat and told her everything.

Jo stared up at him, mouth agape. The slow shake of her head wasn’t a denial. It was a realization that from here on out, nothing would ever be the same.

“Repeat everything you just said.”

“No,” Bill said. “We don’t have time. Look. My cockpit, my communications—it’s all being monitored on the FaceTime call. I’m wearing headphones so Ben can’t hear, but when…”

The captain’s voice trailed off, each word getting softer and farther away. Jo gazed into the cup of coffee she’d poured for the elderly woman in 2C that sat on the galley countertop cooling. Coffee she had poured in what now felt like a different lifetime. Her life before Bill told her of their situation.

Steam billowed in balletic swirls and twirls as little bubbles rose to the coffee’s dark surface, reflecting the fluorescent purple glow of the overhead light. She observed all this abstractly; the graceful steam, the singsong lilt of a far-off voice, the flowing movement of light and shadow. A gossamer, dreamlike state was the lens through which she viewed reality and, while Jo was not a sleepwalker, she distantly wondered if this is what it felt like.

“I had to take the risk,” Bill said. “He said he’d kill them if I told anyone. But you and the crew have to…”

Bill’s voice was talking about something or other. A family? What family? Hers? No, Michael and the boys were home. Safe. She looked at the tiny bubbles and envisioned herself inside one. Unnoticed by her crewmates, by the other passengers, she would slip into it quietly, the bubble cocooning her in its completeness. Nothing would come in, nothing would leave. She’d sit down, hug her knees to her chest, and just observe everyone else carrying on without her. She could feel the silence of the bubble, the weightlessness of her body as she bobbed on the surface of the coffee. Maybe she could be poured down the drain, tiny and hidden, sliding away on her secret escape. She would be along for the ride, unable to steer and not wanting to. The corners of her lips tugged into an inappropriate smile. She couldn’t help herself. There was just so much relief in being so small.

“What did you just say?” Jo said suddenly, cutting Bill off.

Bill looked confused, as if he didn’t know what he had just said either.

“I… I said I don’t know how to get someone to my house. I can’t just call the FBI.”

“No,” Jo said. “But I can.”

Tossing the yellowed houseplant into the trash can under his desk, FBI agent Theo Baldwin wondered how long it had looked like that.

“Those things need water, Theo,” Agent Jenkins said, on his way to the break room.

“Noted,” Theo replied, opening the file on the top of the stack. Scooting his chair in, his phone lit up with an incoming text. Checking the sender, he hit the button on the side of the phone, the screen going dark.

Across the room in a fishbowl of an office, his new boss paced behind her desk with a phone pressed to her ear. The door was shut, but Theo didn’t need to hear what was said to know it wasn’t an enjoyable conversation for the other end of the line. He looked away quickly when she caught him watching.

Theo liked coming into the office on a Saturday. It was quiet. He could get boring paperwork out of the way quickly so he could focus on more interesting cases. Having read the first page, he turned to the second but soon went back to the beginning after realizing he hadn’t absorbed a single word.

Tossing his pen on the stack of dead-end, low-level case files, he rubbed his eyes.

Who was he kidding? He didn’t have more interesting cases to get to. Being at the office on a Saturday was a thinly veiled attempt at brownie points. No, not even that. It was a pathetic attempt at redemption. He’d been with the bureau for close to three years, but that modest seniority didn’t matter anymore. Six months back, the clock had started over.

It shouldn’t have been a big deal. It was as standard a drug raid as possible. Their intelligence was airtight: they knew exactly who was in the house, where they were located, what they had done, what they would be charged with. It was practically over before it even started.

But by the end of the night, the crack house was riddled with bullet holes and Theo’s reputation as the rising star of the bureau was just as shot. He tried to justify his breach of protocol only once. After that, he wisely kept his mouth shut and his head low. Acting on a “hunch” was as respectable as saying a green fairy whispered in his ear. Five disciplinary meetings, a two-week suspension without pay, and a questionable professional forecast meant the only thing Theo could do was punch the clock, stick to the rules, and hope in time all would be forgiven.

He took a sip of coffee and doubled down on the paperwork.

“Should we be worried,” Jenkins said, coming out of the break room with a bag of chips, “that we’re the only assholes with nothing to do on a Saturday?”

Theo’s phone lit up again. He didn’t see it.

“I think,” Theo said, leaning back in his chair, “we’re the only assholes who are dedicated to their jobs.”

“And I think we need to get laid,” Jenkins said through a full mouth. “Let’s go get a drink. Tell hot chicks we’re FBI agents.”

Theo’s phone glowed yet again. Picking it up, he saw seven unread texts from his aunt Jo. His stomach dropped, immediately going to the worst. His mom, Jo’s sister. Something happened. Or maybe Aunt Jo’s sons, who were more like his brothers than cousins.

“Well? We going?” Jenkins said, leaning against his cubicle.

Theo stared at his phone. It was too unbelievable, he had to read it all twice. If anyone else had sent the messages, he would have had doubts.

But Theo knew his aunt Jo.

Grabbing his badge and pushing his chair back, he paid no attention to the toppling stack of files, unfinished paperwork fluttering to the ground.

Bill shut the door quietly and slid the lock to the right, the fluorescent light in the lav brightening as he did. He stood there for a moment, frozen, as though he had forgotten what he’d come there to do. The flimsy plastic door squeaked in protest as he leaned his forehead against it. His tie dangled forward from his neck.

This was not a scenario he had ever anticipated. This was not a threat he had considered and discussed with his colleagues. There was no page in the manual to reference, no protocol to put in place, no checklist to run. All his training seemed embarrassingly naive, now. Safeguards and redundancies were devised for actual attacks on the flight deck.

Bill turned to the mirror, taking in his reflection. He felt like a guy in a pilot’s costume. It no longer looked right on him. He looked at the gold wings on the front of his shirt and wondered something he never had: Was he worthy of wearing the uniform? Had he ever been?

He peed and pressed the button, wincing at the loud suck of an airplane flush. The sink was just as hostile, icy water assaulting his shaking hands as they wrung out their options.

This would be his only moment alone. This was when he needed to figure it out. Figure out how to fix it. He leaned his face closer to the mirror as though looking for the answer on the other side.

He found nothing.

Grabbing a few paper towels, he entertained an irrational thought of annoyance: the audacity of needing to pee. Couldn’t his body make an exception right now? Didn’t it know there was no time to waste on the unnecessary?

The faucet leaked. One by one, drops of water fell into the sink. Rhythmically, one after another like a drum. A pause. Then one random drop. Then another. There seemed no pattern to the flow.

Bill watched the water drip, his pupils dilating as the pieces in his mind moved closer together. His hands stopped shaking. His breathing slowed. He stood up straight.

It was a Hail Mary of an idea. But it was an idea.

Sliding the lock to the left, Bill went back to work.

Theo’s boss stared at the phone for a long time before tossing it across her desk. It landed to the side of her nameplate, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR MICHELLE LIU reflecting brightly in the screen’s glow. Running her hands across the crown of her head, she slicked her thick black hair into a tidy ponytail. Forcibly pulling it taut, her arms came to rest, crossed, across her body.

“You’re serious,” she said.

He nodded. “Unfortunately.”

She began to pace behind the desk. Liu had been at the Los Angeles field office for three months already, but it had been a relatively calm three months and Theo hadn’t had a real opportunity to see her act under fire. He knew she’d been with the bureau for twelve years and that the reputation of her short temper preceded her. But what he didn’t know was why she seemed angry about the situation he’d brought her. Or maybe she was pissed at him? He couldn’t tell which.

“You know it’s not just us,” she said. “Homeland Security. The Department of Defense. Metropolitan Police Department. FAA. TSA. NORAD. The White House.” She paused. “Theo, if we go—the president will be in the Situation Room.”

He could feel his heartbeat in his ears. “I say we go,” he said.

She scoffed.

“You want me,” she said, eyes narrowing, “to raise the alarm on an impending terrorist attack on Washington, DC. You want me to send Hostage Rescue into a suburban LA neighborhood in broad daylight. And all of this, based off intel you and you alone got in a text message. From your aunt.”

Theo didn’t respond but he didn’t look away either. He felt his face flush as he watched Liu chew at the inside of her cheek. He knew he was being sized up.

His test scores were off the charts and his ambition unmatched—but surely Liu had been told the full account of the night of the raid. An “intuition first, intelligence second” kind of agent was a liability, not an asset. That’s what he’d overheard her say to another agent, and though he couldn’t know for sure, he’d sworn she’d glanced at him after she said it. Keeping him buried under paperwork until she could get a better bead on him seemed to be her tactic so far.

But now this.

Maybe that’s why she seemed so angry.

“Look,” he said, “I know this situation is… insane. I’m asking you to trust first and verify second. Which, coming from me, is a lot to ask. But I know my aunt. Believe her.”

“Her? I don’t know her.”

“Fair. But what’s her motivation for faking this? She has everything to lose. Her job, her reputation. Liu. This is real.”

“And if it’s not?”

“And if it is?” he said a bit too forcefully, quickly adding, “Ma’am, you’re taking a risk either way. But only one option ends with people dying.”

She continued to pace. Theo glanced at the clock on the wall.

“Ma’am, with all due respect—that plane is midair. The pilot and the passengers are running out of time. So is the family.”

Closing her eyes, Liu took a deep breath, swearing on the exhale.

“Code it,” she said. “FBI SWAT move in immediately, we’ll consult with HRT en route. Get everybody in. And Theo?” she said, stopping him as he left the office. “Don’t forget. You’ve already got two strikes.”

Jo flipped through the passenger manifest scanning the logistical snapshot of everyone on board. She was just finishing poring over the last page when Bill came out of the bathroom.

“Anything?” he asked.

She picked up her phone, checking to see if Theo had replied. “Not yet. And no passenger is also a Coastal employee.” Opening the drawer under the coffeepot, she laid the manifest on top of her lipstick and book, closing it with a metallic click. Bill had asked her to check if anyone on board was traveling on company privileges. Perhaps they had another internal mole on board? Maybe that was the backup? But it was a dead end.

Jo knew assumptions were dangerous in a situation like this, though. Bill crossed his arms and stared into the dim cabin, his eyes narrowing toward the back galley.

“Do you trust the other flight attendants?” he said.

“Absolutely. Well, I mean, our third, Kellie, is junior as hell. We just met. She was assigned the trip off airport reserve. But my intuition says yes.”

Bill nodded. “Okay. Then we go with that.”

“Do you trust Ben?”

“Completely. But that’s my intuition.”

Jo nodded. “Then we go with that.”

“Wait to tell the other two until after the break. And don’t mention it to Ben when he comes out.”

“I thought you trusted him?”

“I do. But how can he help me?”

“Plus—we don’t know how he feels about you.”

“Exactly. If he thinks I’m going to kill him…” Bill trailed off and cleared his throat. “Look, I just can’t risk him taking this into his own hands. I can’t risk my family like that.” He glanced at the cockpit door. “Dammit, I gotta get back up there.”

“Okay, but wait. What about the passengers?” Jo said.

Bill and Jo looked out, scanning the tops of the heads in the cabin. Everyone was reading, sleeping, watching TV. Nothing felt amiss, nothing felt off. No one was watching them, no one seemed to care about what they were doing.

They knew better.

“The passengers can’t know, Jo. We can’t tip off whoever is on board to make sure I make a choice. I mean, they’re going to know something is up because you guys are going to have to figure out a way to protect them. But they can’t know about the whole situation. DC? No. And they can’t know about my family. They cannot know about the choice. They’ll assume I’ll choose my family. There’s no way they’d trust us.”

She didn’t reply.

“You know I’m not going to crash this plane. Right?”

One of their first layovers together had been in Seattle some twenty years ago. The whole crew was heading back to the hotel after happy hour downtown when a drunk walking by muttered a racial slur. As the only Black member of the crew, Jo knew it was meant for her but she didn’t say anything. Bill, on the other hand, let the man know exactly what he thought. The next day, the first officer had to fly all three legs because Bill’s broken fingers kept him from fully grasping the joystick.

Delays, mechanicals, unruly passengers. She’d passed him a million leftover first-class meals and poured him twice as many cups of coffee. On September 11th, she was one of the first people he checked in with. When his father died, she sent flowers. Their families exchanged Christmas cards every year. After more than two decades of flying, Bill wasn’t a coworker. He was a friend, he was family. Jo knew Bill.

“Yes,” she replied. “I know you’re not going to crash this plane.”

But something deep in Jo’s gut stirred as she said it.

Her phone vibrated against the metal countertop. Reading the message, she smiled.

“The FBI is on their way to your house.”

Grabbing her shoulders, Bill kissed her forehead, tears of relief filling his eyes.

He picked up the phone to call the cockpit but paused before pressing the button. “The FBI will take care of my family, and we’ll take care of the plane. I’ll try to communicate, but no guarantees. You guys may be on your own back here. But eyes open. You know you’re not alone.”

Jo nodded.

“Most likely,” said Bill, “I’m going to have to play along. I will do everything I can to not throw that canister. But I may have no choice. Assume a gas attack will come from the cockpit unless the FBI gets my family first. He will kill them if he thinks I chose the plane.”

“Okay.”

“The cabin needs to be ready, okay?”

“It will be, captain.”

“Jo, dammit! I might be the captain, but once that door shuts, you’re on your own. Do you understand? This is your cabin.” His eyes burned with urgency and, transfixed under his gaze, her confidence swelled. “You have my word that I am not going to crash this plane. But how I accomplish that I haven’t figured out yet. As far as back here goes, it’s up to you all to figure out how to get this cabin ready for an attack. Understood?”

Jo nodded silently as Bill rang the cockpit to give Ben the cue to open the door and let him back up. She turned to block. The pilot and the flight attendant stood back to back, one facing away, one facing toward the cockpit.

“I trust you, Jo. We have control of this aircraft.”

The door opened and closed behind her and Jo was alone. Alone in her cabin.