1 By the time the nine of them squeezed into the back of Earhart’s Electra, the morning sun had risen from the sea. The cabin was cramped and had no seats, stuffy and hot like breath inside. From where he sat, Jack watched the Captain climb down into the pilot’s seat from the hinged door in the cockpit ceiling.
The Captain checked the various gauges all around him. He looked out the window at both wings, then began to fiddle with the dial that regulated the engine’s mix of oxygen and fuel. They’d found a bladder of gasoline in the ground just west of the runway and siphoned enough to fill the tanks.
“If you’re the praying type…,” he began. But he didn’t finish. He pushed a white button and the propellers began to twist. At first there was a grating sound, like the scraping of a muffler against an undercarriage, and then whatever was sticking gave out and the aircraft hummed loudly around them, shifting back and forth, a racehorse behind the gate.
The Captain found a pair of aviator glasses tucked into a binder resting on the jump seat and slipped them on. He peered out the windshield. The robots had finished their job and the runway continued through the park now. That section wasn’t paved, but the gravel was tightly packed.
The Captain opened the throttle and the aircraft lunged forward, picking up speed. Through the porthole, Jack looked out at the city of Peshtigo three miles to the west. It gave no commentary on their departure, but its silence was judgment enough. As they accelerated, the plane jostled side to side. Jack’s ass bounced against the cabin floor. Nils’s big frame squished Cole against the wall. D.B. and Becky tried to pull him free.
The Captain shouted something, but Jack couldn’t make it out. He looked down the length of the plane, out the windshield. He could see the end of the runway now, a wall of bong trees, their tops chopped off.
“Hey!” Jack shouted. “There isn’t enough room! Let’s try again!”
But the Captain didn’t slow. He adjusted a dial and pushed the throttle as far as it could go.
“Hey! Goddamn it! Stop!”
The Captain grabbed the wheel and pulled hard. The plane pitched up and everyone tumbled over one another to the back of the cabin, where the compartment narrowed into a cone. There was a bump and then a violent shudder as the wheels touched down again, tilting to the right. The Captain cursed and pulled back hard again. The trees loomed. They were up. Higher. A gnarled tree reached out with white claws, but it was too late; they were in the sky, in the blue, and Mu was shrinking beneath them, that incongruous capital city and its treasury of forgotten stories marking their retreat like a giant eye.
2 It was Monday morning, September 10, and Paige was late for school. Jean brushed her hair out, teasing out the nappy parts that had formed in the night, a bobby pin in her teeth. “Hold still, dear,” she said.
Paige stuck her tongue out at the mirror’s reflection of her mother.
The bus had come five minutes ago. The whine and hiss as it stopped at the end of their drive had awakened her. This was getting to be habit. Jean was finding it difficult to adjust to her new routine—though she had never been happier.
Jean ran Nostalgia now. Had since late June. It was hard work. Not just the refab of the dressers and curios, but the day-to-day inventory and Internet sales. That first month had been killer, but she felt as though she was getting the hang of it. If September went as well as August, she might get the store back in the black. Anyway, it was nice to have a job again. It felt good to honor Sam’s memory.
Paige was tying her shoes when the phone rang. Jean almost ignored it. But it was a little too early for a telemarketer. She picked up the receiver on the third ring.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jean,” said Jack. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”
3 It was late when Sam returned to the motel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a twelve-passenger van she’d snagged from a shady rental company outside Logan, her last task for the day. They’d gotten into Boston at five o’clock, on a commuter plane from Seattle they’d hopped after ditching the Electra in a hangar at a muni airport outside Ariel. Jean and Paige would be arriving at the motel soon. It was all coming together. Too easy, she thought, and shivered. She was only being paranoid.
In their room, Sam showered with Jack. He washed her hair. He kissed her wet shoulders. After a bit, he sat on the bed, wrapped in his towel. He rang the front desk for a wake-up call and flipped through channels until he found CNN. The screen was locked on a shot of women and children holding candles in a park in Newtown.
Sam came to him, dripping wet, and pushed him down against the mattress. Her hands found his towel and tugged it off. Her thin fingers slid across his thighs and his body reacted. It was a refined lust, their lovemaking, varying between favorite positions and ending in caresses and laughter. When she finally came, she held him tightly.
“You okay?” he asked, after.
“Of course not.” Sam curled an arm behind her head. She looked up, chewing on her bottom lip. “I’m afraid I might fuck it all up.”
“What? You? You’re probably the best fake pilot on our team,” he said, forcing a laugh.
“I thought about just shutting the fuck up, because I thought if I said something, it might undo all this. But I’m going to tell you anyway, because you need to know in case something bad happens tomorrow. So you have to promise right now that no matter what, you’re going to do what we came here to do.”
“Sam, there’s honestly nothing you could say that could change my mind.”
“I’m pregnant.”
4 “Hey,” said Tony when Jack stepped out of his motel room. Tony was sitting on the stoop, a twelve-pack of Miller Lite between his legs. He handed one to his old friend. Something had changed, Tony thought. Jack suddenly looked five years older.
“Thanks,” said Jack. He sat on the concrete beside Tony and twisted off the cap, chucked it into the parking lot. “What are you doing?”
“Organizing,” said Tony. He pulled his suitcase around and unzipped the top. Inside were sixteen boomerang belts, each without its buckle—they’d left the buckles back on Mu. There was one for each of their crew and the hijacked pilots. He had spent the last hour writing names on each with a wax pencil. “So what’s eating you? She throw you out or something?”
“Nah, just needed some air.”
“Spill it.”
“Not tonight.”
Tony let it drop and looked over to Nils, who leaned against the brick wall under a sodium arc light, talking to his wife on the pay phone. “Poor bastard,” said Tony. “I wonder how you explain disappearing the way he did.”
“You should know.”
“Touché.” He stood, stretched his back. “Hey, man, watch these, will ya? I need a smoke. I saw some Swisher Sweets at the gas station. You want one?”
Jack shook his head.
“Cheer up, Jack. We’re saving the world tomorrow.” He walked away then, leaving Jack alone. A few minutes later, Cole came out of his room and shuffled over.
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do tomorrow, after we’re done?” the boy asked.
“I haven’t thought about it,” said Jack. “I might just find a place to take a good, long nap. What about you?”
“I’m going to ask Constance for a copy of that book.”
“What book?”
“The one my dad got rid of. The one with the funny name. I’m going to make a million copies and give one to everybody I meet for the rest of my life.”
“Tell me the story,” said Jack.
Cole did. And as he finished, Jean pulled into the lot. Paige waved excitedly from the backseat. They were a long way from Franklin Mills, but they were finally home again.
5 “Wake up, old man.”
It was Jack, standing above the Captain’s bed in the unforgiving light of the stale motel room. There was gray in his son’s hair now, but still, whenever he heard his voice, he pictured the child first, the five-year-old who used to sit on his lap watching Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. He could remember how his hair had smelled: like the sunlight and the grass and the wind and the rain.
With effort, the Captain sat up and glanced at the clock. Five minutes till four. They should leave soon—some of them had connecting flights.
“It’s oh-dark-hundred,” he grumbled. “What the hell are you so chipper about? Goddamn, I hate morning people.”
“Dad,” said Jack. “Cole figured something out. I think we can all talk to each other up there.”
The Captain found his clothes: a Hawaiian shirt and khakis. “Well? Stop chewing cud and tell me.”
“You said we shouldn’t use the radio to communicate with each other. But Cole, he got to thinking last night. What if we all just called into the same place?”
“I’m not following, brainiac.”
“A conference call. We can use disposable cell phones to call into a designated line. Cole already put it together. And he bought four phones to spread around.”
“Not bad,” he said. “And the other stuff?”
“What other stuff?”
“The box cutters?”
Jack tensed and looked away. “He got those, too.”
The Captain waited until Jack met his gaze. “You understand what’s at stake, don’t you?”
“Of course. But nobody has to die.”
“We can plan all we want and something could still go wrong. The more complicated the plan, the easier it is for something to fuck it up. And this is a damned complicated plan we have here.”
“I can’t kill anybody,” said Jack.
“You might have to. And if things go wrong…”
“Nothing will.”
“If something happens, you owe it to the rest of us to keep going. If we don’t finish it today, you may have to try again.”
Jack didn’t say anything. He sat on the bed and watched his father gather his things. “Dad?” he asked after a while.
“Huh?”
“After everything you saw in Vietnam, why did you have kids?”
The Captain laughed. “You and Jean helped me forget Vietnam,” he said. “You were the only way I could put it behind me.”
6 Becky’s job was relatively easy, but she was still scared. You could tell. She stood in the middle of Jean’s motel room, jumping up and down on her toes a little, watching Cole nervously. Her father was there, too. And Jack. Jack helped her with the belt, making sure both belts were secured tightly around her hips. Only one of the belts was missing a buckle.
“How many pounds can it carry?” asked D.B.
“Nils is three-eighty,” said Jack. “It worked on him.”
“But will it still work so far away?”
“Of course it will.”
But of course nobody knew, not for sure. That’s what Becky’s whole job was about. She was the guinea pig, even though they didn’t say so. There were eight pilots, all too important to risk. But her? They could risk her.
“Let me go,” D.B. said.
“No,” the Captain barked. “Stop it. It’s too late to change the plan.”
“It’s okay,” Becky said, nodding her head. “I’m ready.”
Jack pushed the button where the missing buckle was. Then he removed the remaining buckle on her second belt. He passed it to her father.
“Back in a sec,” Becky said.
One … two … three …
Suddenly she was falling. Down. Up. Slantways. Falling everywhere at once and inside herself. It was dark and cold wherever she was, but Becky had the distinct impression that she wasn’t alone, that there were things in the dark here, in the void of distance, the in-between. The Everywhen. Mindless old monsters floating in the ether …
And then she was back in the hangar in Mu. It was very dark there, still the middle of the night. Though she wasn’t keen on falling back into that void, Becky did as instructed and unclasped the buckle from the belt and left it revolving in midair with the other ones. Then she pushed the button on her second belt. Already, her head was buzzing the way it sometimes did when she spun around and around on the beach too fast. How many times was a person supposed to use these things? Could it hurt her if she did this more than once a day?
In a minute she was back in the motel room, the return belt snapping into the buckle her father had placed above the bed. She landed softly atop the mattress and sighed with relief. D.B. went to her and stroked her hair.
“You okay, darling?” he asked.
“You bet,” she said.
They brought Paige in then. Becky held her close and Jack tied the belt that would take them both to Mu tightly around them. Jean kissed her daughter.
“I’ll see you soon,” she said.
“Mom!” said Paige, but they were already falling and falling and Becky held the girl still and shushed her so that the things in the void couldn’t hear, and soon they were back on Mu, where they could do nothing but wait for the others to return.
7 The lights of Boston Logan were grim beacons on the horizon, will-o’-the-wisps by the water. They abandoned the van at long-term parking and took the shuttle to the arrivals entrance for American Airlines. There they separated for a few minutes as D.B., Sam, Nils, Jack, and Tony walked to the United Airlines kiosk.
Tony knew as soon as he saw the security guard that his carry-on was going to be searched. He tried to lower his heart rate. He thought of his father and a trip they had taken to a carnival when he was very little. “Sir, step over here, please,” said the guard, motioning to a cubicle beyond the metal detector.
Jack pretended not to notice as he put his new phone into a doggie dish.
“May I have permission to search your luggage?”
“Sure,” said Tony.
The guard unzipped his suitcase. Secured to the inside lining were sixteen boomerang belts and four box cutters. “What’s this?” she asked.
“I’m a contractor,” he said. “The belts are presents for my crew.”
She touched a belt, fingering the place where the buckle snapped into the front. “Oh, these are nice,” she said. Then she zipped the suitcase closed and passed it back to Tony. “Have a safe trip.”
Five minutes later they met in the food court and had a light breakfast. The mood was oddly upbeat, teammates before a big game. There were no tears shed. Tears came later.
8 “We gotta do something about Newtown,” the man said to Scopes over the phone. “I can’t get the Maestro on the phone. Why isn’t he answering his phone?”
Scopes sighed. He was back in his office at Area 51, recoding the algorithm as best he could. It was slow going.
“The Maestro is dead,” said Scopes. “But I can patch it up. Just give me a couple days.”
“While you’re dicking around, our stock is tanking. It had to be a Halliburton guy, didn’t it? Fuckin’ contractor shooting up kids because of all that PTSD he brought back from Iraq. It’s all the news cares about. That it’s Halliburton. Oil futures all skittish now. What we need is a story about some nut kid went crazy. That’s what you need to write into their memories. Make the debate about gun control. That’ll get the right fired up again, make the NRA stronger, fill out their rosters for the year. Do that. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” said Scopes. These guys. They had a way of finding the evil before he could even walk them over to it. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. Finish the Deepwater story while you’re at it.”
Scopes hung up. Not a moment later, his cell phone rang. He looked at the screen. It was Nikko, a lieutenant Hound back east.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Tony Sanders’s passport just popped up at Boston Logan,” the Hound said. “Thought you should know.”
He clicked on the television he kept in the corner and found CNN. It was happening. Just like he’d been told.
9 D.B. and Zaharie handed their tickets to the attendant and walked to the waiting 767 jumbo jet at precisely 7:26 a.m. They placed their bags in the overhead bins and sat in seats 2A and 2B, in first class. The air inside was cold and stale and made D.B.’s nose run. He wiped it on the sleeve of his shirt and looked out his window into the lightening morning. The last time he’d hijacked a plane, it was a morning just like this.
“Empty plane,” Zaharie whispered as a flight attendant closed and locked the door.
D.B. peered down the aisles. About half the seats were vacant.
At 7:59, American Airlines Flight 11 pushed away from the gate and rolled toward runway 4R.
“It’s time,” Zaharie said.
D.B. nodded and pulled the box cutter from his pocket.
“On three. One, two…”
10 “Mimosa?” the flight attendant asked, leaning over Tony.
“Yes, please,” he said, taking a flute from her tray.
Jack shook his head. “I don’t think we should be drinking,” he whispered when she left. They had barely made it to Gate A17 after their connecting flight landed at Newark International twenty minutes late. They needed to focus.
“This is a hopeless fucking plan, man,” said Tony. “We’re going to end up in Guantánamo by the end of the day. Have a drink.”
The attendant appeared again, crossing the cabin to secure the door.
“Where’s everyone else?” asked Jack.
Tony followed his gaze and looked down the aisle. He estimated the 757 had about 180 seats, but he counted only forty passengers.
“It’s weird, right?” said Jack.
“I read an article once,” Tony said. “Some statistician looked at a bunch of plane crashes, found out how many people were on them compared to planes that didn’t crash. Turns out, full airplanes crash less often. It’s like people feel an accident coming and for one reason or another find an excuse to skip the flight.”
Their seats rocked a bit as United Airlines Flight 93 pulled away from the gate. Tony reached under his seat and pulled out a box cutter.
“I don’t want one,” said Jack.
“Suit yourself,” said Tony. He downed the rest of his drink and wiped his mouth. “Let’s roll.”
11 The Captain and Cole jogged toward Gate D26 at Washington Dulles International as the attendant announced final boarding.
“Wait!” yelled Cole.
The attendant took their tickets. “Just made it,” she said.
They were the last two passengers on American Airlines Flight 77 that morning. The stewardess closed the door behind them as they entered.
“Creepy,” said Cole, pointing at the empty seats. Less than half of them were filled. He sat in 12A and the Captain slid into 12B after him.
“Ready for this?” the Captain asked as the plane pulled away from the gate with a rough jerk.
Cole nodded, but his stomach was a tight knot and he felt lightheaded, as if he wasn’t getting enough oxygen.
“Stay with me.”
12 Sam and Nils were seated in the second row of the first-class compartment on United Airlines Flight 175, which was also mostly empty that morning. When the airplane pulled away from Gate 19 at Logan International at 8:00 a.m., Sam’s mind was on the baby inside her womb. Was it a girl? She hoped it was.
“Samantha,” said Nils. “We gotta do this right now.”
She nodded and gripped the box cutter tightly.
Then Nils jumped out of his seat and ran toward the cockpit door.
13 “Listen to me, damn it,” Jean yelled into the pay phone. “There are bombs in the World Trade Center. Both towers. And the Pentagon. Set to explode in a half hour. You have to evacuate everyone. Get them out of there, now!”
“Calm down, ma’am,” said the voice on the other end, which she mistook for a woman’s.
But Jean was not calm. She could see the Twin Towers ten blocks down Church Street and nobody was running out. This was her third call to the police. The buildings were filling with people on their way to work. Her job was supposed to be the easiest part of the plan. And nothing was happening.
“I’ll calm down when you get those people out of there.”
“Ma’am, I assure you the World Trade Center is in no danger today,” the voice said, calm, self-assured.
“Listen to me. If you don’t get everyone out of there in thirty minutes…”
“Jean.”
Jean froze. This wasn’t the police. “Who is this?”
“Jean, I commend your altruism,” said Scopes. “But you can go home now. Go home and get ready to forget this terrible day. We know what Jack is up to. Steps have been taken to prevent the attack. You needn’t worry. Nothing will bring these buildings down today. Now, please, go home and leave the rest to us.”
The phone clicked as the call disconnected. Jean looked around. Was she being watched? It didn’t matter. They could lock her up in prison, an asylum if they wished, but she was going to get those people out of the towers.
She hailed a taxi. “World Trade Center,” she said. “Fast as you can.”
14 “Stop the plane,” the Captain said, his voice a calm tenor. He held the box cutter to the pilot’s neck, a gaunt man with white hair. There was a drop of scarlet at its tip where it had punctured the man’s skin. “Call for air stairs. Get the passengers off. Now.”
Cole held another knife to the back of the first officer’s neck. He willed himself not to faint.
“What are you doing?” the pilot asked.
“I’m hijacking your goddamn plane and I will put this thing in your heart if you don’t do exactly as I say.”
The man coughed. He eyed his first officer. Then he pushed a button on his armrest and spoke clearly to the tower. “Ground control, this is American Airlines Flight 77 requesting assistance on runway thirty. We have a situation in the cockpit. We have been hijacked.” He looked at the Captain, afraid he had said something wrong, but the Captain only nodded for him to continue. “Request air stairs be brought to our position.”
“Flight 77,” said a male voice through a burst of static. “This is Dulles ground control. Please repeat.”
“We’ve been hijacked,” said the pilot. “There are two men in the cockpit with knives. They want stairs, pronto. I think they want to let the passengers out.”
“Ground control to Flight 77, come again?”
“Tell them we have a bomb,” said the Captain. “And if they don’t get that staircase out here in two minutes, I’m going to set it off.”
The pilot relayed the information, less calmly this time.
“Roger that, Flight 77. We have stairs en route.”
“Ten-four, Dulles.”
“Do they have any demands?” asked the controller.
“Tell him to shut up until we get everyone off the plane,” the Captain barked.
“Uh, Dulles. Radio silence, please.”
A minute later an odd-looking truck pulled away from the concourse and drove toward them. Slanted over its roof and down the back was a set of stairs. Cole noticed other planes were frozen on the runways across the tarmac. Soon there would be sirens. They needed to be gone before that happened.
“Tell your attendants to get everyone off. Right now,” said the Captain.
The pilot gave the order. Beyond the cockpit door that Cole had barricaded with a fire extinguisher, they heard the airtight seal open and a clamor of activity as the passengers disembarked. When there was no more noise, the Captain nodded at the boy.
Cole opened the cockpit door. The plane was empty.
“Door’s still open!” he shouted to the Captain.
“Close it!”
“I don’t know how.”
“There’s instructions!”
Cole found a graphic decal on the wall beside the door. It was pretty simple, really. He closed it, turned the red latch until it locked, and the seal gave a short hiss. He ran back to the cockpit and took his place behind the first officer.
“Get us up,” said the Captain.
The pilot and his first officer began checking the instrumentation around them. Then the pilot pushed the throttle forward and the plane started down the runway, engines whining.
“Dulles tower, this is Flight 77. We’ve been ordered to take off. Please clear the air.”
“Negative, Flight 77,” the controller responded. “Stand down.”
“Do it,” said the Captain.
“We are going to take off, Dulles.”
“Negative, Flight 77. Stand down. We have FBI five minutes out. They are ready to listen to demands.”
The pilot pivoted the plane on the runway until it was pointed down the length of it. “These men have no more demands, Dulles. My apologies. Somebody call my wife.”
“Go,” said the Captain. “Take us to twelve thousand feet.”
15 “Don’t you have more than one set of air stairs?” Nils asked, his voice betraying his anxiety.
From the cockpit of Flight 175, they watched the last few passengers unload from Flight 11, D.B. and Zaharie’s plane, which was parked a hundred yards in front of their own.
The air stairs pulled away and they watched Flight 11 roll onto the runway and lift into the air. But instead of driving toward them, the air stairs turned back toward the concourse.
“What the hell?” said Nils.
“Call them back,” Sam shouted to the pilot.
The pilot pushed a button and spoke loudly into his mic. “Newark ground control, this is Flight 175. We need those stairs.”
But nobody answered.
“Goddamn it!” said Nils. “What the fuck is going on?”
As if to answer him, twelve police cars turned onto the runway from behind a low concrete terminal, lights flashing angrily.
“Motherfucker!” yelled Sam.
“It’s over,” said the pilot. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
16 At 8:15, United Airlines Flight 93 leveled out at twelve thousand feet over western Pennsylvania. Tony opened the backpack and removed two boomerang belts with “pilot” written in wax pencil on the leather.
“Punch in the autopilot and then climb out of your chairs,” he instructed.
The pilots climbed out of their seats. The cockpit was now crammed with their four bodies and Tony hurriedly strapped the belts around the men’s waists before they could take advantage of the close quarters.
“Belts?”
“It’s too hard to explain,” said Tony. He pushed the buttons where the buckles should be. When the pilots vanished, Tony and Jack were pulled into the void they left behind, thumping together like characters from a silent comedy.
Jack picked himself up and went to the console between the seats. The transponder was right where his father had said it would be, a little black box with four knobs. He turned a dial until it clicked off, then he climbed into the first officer’s chair and slipped his headphones on. Tony climbed into the pilot’s seat.
Tony pulled a cell phone from his pocket, dialed a number, and hit the button for speaker. Then he used a piece of electrical tape to secure it to the dash. While he did that, Jack found Reagan National Airport on the computer’s autopilot feed and programmed it to turn the jet toward D.C.
“Anybody there?” came a male voice from the phone’s speaker.
“Who’s this?” asked Tony.
“It’s D.B. Tony? Is that you?”
“Yes, we’re here. Everything okay on your end?”
“On ours, yes, but it looked like Nils and Sam were having some trouble back there.”
“Who’s this?” asked a gruff voice, just keying in. “Who’s there?”
“Dad? It’s Jack. I’m here with Tony. D.B. and Zaharie are fine. How ’bout you and Cole?”
“We’re hanging on,” said the Captain. “Where’s Samantha? She here yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Guys, we’re turning back for New York,” said D.B. “We’re ten minutes out.”
“Sam,” said Jack. “Sam, you there?”
Only silence. Jack looked out the window. The sky was vivid blue, full of puffy white clouds. “Oberlin Center to United Airlines Flight 93,” said a voice in his ear. “Come in, 93. We’ve lost your signal.”
“Dad,” said Jack. “You turn your transponder off?”
“Yep.”
“Shit,” said D.B. “Thanks for the reminder.”
“Oberlin Center. Come in, Flight 93. Oberlin Center to Flight 111. You have visual on Flight 93?” asked the air traffic controller from the open channel coming through their headsets.
“Negative, Oberlin Center,” said another pilot’s voice.
“Where the hell did they go?”
“Sam?” said Jack, again. “You there?”
Tony looked to Jack. Sam and Nils should be at twelve thousand by now. If they were still on the ground, they were fucked.
They sat in silence, watching the world below. When seen from this distance, it was impossible to tell what side anybody was on.
“Hey! Hey, uh, hello?”
“Nils?” yelled Jack, sitting up.
“We’re here,” said Nils, out of breath. “We’re level at twelve thousand.”
“What took you so long?”
“Jack,” said Sam. “Jack, we have a big fucking problem.”
“What?”
“We couldn’t get rid of the passengers. They’re still on board.”
Jack stared at the console, unable to speak. Tony pulled out the smartphone he’d secretly purchased from the gas station in Cambridge when he’d gone looking for Swisher Sweets. He entered a command on an app he’d downloaded last night.
“Jack?” said Sam. “Did you hear me? I still have sixty people on board.”
“It’s all right, Sam,” said Tony. He looked at Jack, his first real friend. What he’d done with Sam had broken Jack’s heart. And he’d wanted it to break. As much as he’d loved Jack, he’d wanted to break his heart, because Jack had always had everything he ever wanted. It had always been easy for him. Having Sam on top of everything else was too much. But that betrayal was nothing compared to what he had to do now. “Nobody has to die today,” he said. “I want you all to listen to me for a minute. Just listen. I have something to say. I decided to go along with this stupid fucking plan, thinking if we could pull it off, fine. But I kept a contingency open because I knew it was too complicated to work. I made a deal with that Hound, Scopes. He’ll let us go back to Mu and keep the island a secret from the world, until the end, but we have to turn around and land the planes first. We can’t take out a single relay. It’s over. I’m sorry.”
“You son of a bitch,” said the Captain. “You little fucking brat.”
“I made up my mind last night,” said Tony. “I decided that if anyone might really be killed, I’d call it off. I’ve just keyed in a command to disable your belts. They won’t work. If you crash your planes into those buildings, you’ll die, too.”
Jack stared at him, eyes wide. He didn’t say anything. Maybe he couldn’t. He just sat and stared. And time ticked onward.
“Why?” the Captain asked.
“This world can’t be saved,” said Tony. “And why should we fight to wake them up when they just want to forget? I’m just giving them what they want.”
There was silence, and then they heard Nils’s voice. “If the belts don’t work, you’ve killed us anyway. We don’t know how to land.”
“These jets can land on autopilot,” said Tony. “Ask the Captain. The control towers will walk you through it.”
Somewhere, hundreds of miles away, Sam sighed loudly. “I hate you, Tony,” she said. “I hate you and no signal is strong enough to make me forget that. I will feel it so deeply forever.”
“What do you want to do, boss?” asked D.B. Everyone knew the question was directed at the Captain.
After a moment the Captain answered, and when he did his voice was full of emotion. “The way I see it, nothing has changed. Tony is still the little shit that he is. And we still have a job to do.”
“What do you mean?” asked Nils.
“Jack,” said the Captain. “You remember that story you hated in Sunday school? The one the priest told you when you were six years old? You were so mad, you yelled at Father Donohue. Told him it was a stupid story.”
Jack nodded. “The kid on the bridge.”
“Yes.”
“It was an allegory,” Jack explained to the others. “But I didn’t know it then. I just thought it was a sad story. Father Donohue said there was this guy who worked on a bridge. One of those bridges on the Cuyahoga that opens up in the middle to let the big ships through. The guy took his three-year-old son to work with him one day. Somehow the kid got away from his dad, ends up on the bridge when this big ship comes up the channel. The ship is full of people and it can’t stop because it’s going too fast. The man, the father, sees his son out there on the bridge and realizes he must make a choice: open the bridge and let his son fall to his death or keep the bridge closed, which would save his kid but kill all the people on the ship. He sacrifices the boy to save all those other lives.”
Nobody said anything for the space of many seconds. He thought he heard Sam sniffling.
“Oh, hell,” said D.B.
“Count me in,” said Cole.
“But what about the people on Sam’s plane?” asked Tony. He could hear the fear in his own voice and was ashamed of it. This was something he hadn’t planned on. They could not do this. Not when they were all so close to a better ending.
“We’re waking up the world today,” said the Captain. “If the world knew that true freedom only cost sixty souls, people would line up to volunteer. That’s the difference between true heroes and you, Tony. Some people are willing to sacrifice themselves.”
“They’ll call you terrorists,” said Tony.
“They’ll call us patriots.”
“Okay,” said Sam. “We’ll do it. I can do it.”
“You’re all being stupid!” Tony screamed into the mic. “You’re going to die. You’re going to die for a world that wants to forget. Don’t you know they voted to forget? They willingly gave up their freedom.”
“The difference is,” said the Captain, “now they don’t have that choice.”
“Well, you need all four planes for it to work. And this plane is not going to crash.”
“Jack?” asked Sam.
“I’ve got this,” he said, a resolute and humorless grin stretching across his face.
“I will put this thing in the ground before I let you crash it into the Washington Monument,” said Tony.
“No you won’t,” said Jack. “Because you’re not ready to die.”
Tony laughed. “My belt still works, asshole. I’ll turn the plane upside down and transport out of here and be back on Mu before it crashes.”
“Tony, Tony, Tony,” said Jack. “You think I could ever forget what you did to me? I know better than to trust you. When you showed me the belts, I wondered to myself, why would he label them if they all do the same thing? I tried to think what you might be up to. I never expected this. But as a precaution, I switched the names on the belts.”
“Good boy,” said the Captain.
“So who the fuck has my belt?”
“Who do you think?”
“Jack, no!” said Sam. “I don’t want it. Don’t. Jesus. I don’t want to be the only one left to remember all this.”
“You know why you have to live,” said Jack.
“He’s right,” said the Captain. “Somebody should survive. Somebody should know what happened here.”
“Goddamn it, Jack!” she yelled. “Goddamn it!”
“No,” said Tony. He was pushing at the button where his buckle should be. It glowed red for an instant, then faded away. “No!”
“I hate to interrupt, gentlemen,” said Zaharie. “But I can see the two towers.” They all heard the scream of a plane’s engine over the phone as Zaharie nosed down.
“Don’t!” screamed Tony.
“Goddamn,” said D.B. “New York was always so beautif—”
Their transmission cut off, followed by a burst of static, then nothing.
“I’m proud of all of you,” the Captain said. “So damn proud.”
And then Tony was on Jack and they rolled to the floor behind the controls, at each other’s throats.
17 “There are bombs in both towers,” Jean told the security guard at the front desk. “You have to evacuate. Right now, man.”
“Calm down,” said the guard, standing up.
“Don’t tell me to calm down, damn it. Get everyone out.”
“I’m not going to do that. I’ve already been briefed about your hoax. If you’ll just wait here, help is on the way.”
Cursing the guard, Jean ran toward a red fire alarm set into the granite wall by the bank of elevators.
“Don’t!” a woman shouted at her.
Jean turned. The woman had curly brown hair and was dressed like some special agent with the FBI, although Jean suspected she really worked for a forgotten branch of the NSA.
“What are you doing, Ms. Felter?” she asked.
“Two planes are about to crash into the towers. We have to get everyone out.”
“I want you to calm down and come with me. Let’s sort this out together.”
An elevator opened and a dozen businessmen walked out between the agent and Jean. She disappeared behind them, into the empty car. She pushed a button and then thumbed Close Door. The doors shut tight and carried her up.
To reach the top, Jean had to transfer elevators twice. It took her seven minutes to reach the 110th floor. There she found herself in an area full of glass cubicles crammed with electronic equipment. Technicians walked about, pushing buttons and speaking into headsets.
“Get out!” she shouted. “Everyone out! Hey! Listen to me! There’s a bomb in the building! You need to evacuate right the fuck now!”
People stared, waiting for the punch line of the joke. The older men looked for Allen Funt. The younger ones expected Ashton Kutcher.
“I’m serious! Everyone outside! Go! Go! Go!”
“Is this for real?” asked a young woman with a headset.
“This building is about to come down. You need to get out! Everyone out!”
The woman threw her headset and ran for the elevators. Four men ran after her. That opened the floodgates and soon everyone in the office was running.
“No!” Jean shouted as a woman was about to get into the elevator she was holding. “Use the stairs! If the bomb goes off, the elevators won’t work. Down the stairs. Tell everyone you see!”
Jean stepped back inside and keyed the button for the next floor. Floors 108 and 109 were filled with more electronic equipment. Floor 107 was a bustle of activity, though, a wide expanse of restaurants.
“Get out!” she screamed. “This building is going down! Everyone evacuate! Right now! Let’s go! Down the stairs!”
By the time she reached the ninety-ninth floor, word had traveled and people were running out of the offices of some company called Marsh USA. They were lining up at her elevator, pushing against each other.
“The stairs!” she shouted. “You need to take the stairs!”
When the doors opened on ninety-four, a crowd of insurance brokers pushed inside like a wave, forcing Jean out. “No, damn it! You have to take the stairs!” But the people inside only stared back, eyes wide with fright, as if they had just remembered they were part of a chaotic world and their bank accounts meant nothing. They looked like children, a box full of children squished together, frightened by a storm.
The doors closed, so Jean ran through the offices shouting at those who remained. She stooped to speak to a man who had crawled under his desk.
“We have to leave,” she said, reaching out to him. He took her hand and stood. His eyes moved past her, to the windows, and he screamed.
Jean turned. The jumbo jet bore down on them, growing in size exponentially. She could see into the cockpit, could see the pilots sitting at the controls.
There was a deafening sound of crumbling metal and glass and a great pressure upon her chest. And then there was silence and the only sensation was the feeling of weightlessness. No pain. No worries. No notion of which way her body was going or if she were still attached to it. And then Jean knew no more.
18 Jack grabbed Tony’s face, digging a finger into his good eye. Tony pulled away, landing a kick against Jack’s sternum, sending him falling against a panel of controls. Jack launched himself off the wall and brought his shoulder down, plowing it into Tony’s chest, knocking the wind from his lungs. Tony pulled Jack’s hair as they fell, wrapped his arms around Jack’s back, bringing him down, and they were a pile upon the floor, a folded mass of arms and legs and sweaty torsos hitting and kicking and grabbing.
“I … fucking … loved you,” said Jack, landing punches between words.
“You’re ruining it!” Tony screamed at him. “Nobody wants to remember.”
“What do you get out of this?” Jack asked, grabbing at Tony again, scratching at his face, squeezing his cheeks together in his hand. His eyepatch caught in Jack’s grip and fell away, revealing the torn, twisted, and scarred tissue beneath.
“Peace,” he said. “I get peace.”
19 “Here we go,” the Captain said, twisting the yoke to the right and pushing down while he nudged the throttle forward. “Help me.”
Cole pushed, too, and soon they were picking up speed. He was crying. He couldn’t help it. His chest heaved in great sighs for all the experiences he would never have. But he found he did not hate the universe. He felt an overwhelming sense of grace, for having loved so many people in a short time.
Suburban homes rushed to meet them. Cole could not yet see any capital landmarks. The Captain seemed to know where they were going, though. Their target was low and only the Captain could hit it at this speed.
“It’ll be too quick to notice,” the Captain said. “You won’t feel a thing.”
20 “Stay calm,” Sam said into her microphone. She was speaking to the sixty passengers and crew in the cabin beyond the locked door. “We have some bombs. They are meeting our demands so we are returning to the airport. Please remain in your seats.”
“Why’d you tell them that?” asked Nils.
“Let them have a little hope.”
“There!” Nils pointed out the windshield as the New Jersey foothills fell away, revealing the island of Manhattan. Black smoke boiled up from the North Tower, darkening the city.
“They did it,” said Sam.
“Help me,” said Nils.
Sam took the yoke and pulled the plane to the right and nosed her down, gently, just like the Captain had taught them. Then Nils pushed the throttle forward. The airplane picked up speed in a hurry and soon the landscape became a green and gold blur. The engines protested, whining loudly. Someone pounded on the cockpit door.
“Go,” said Nils. “Go now.”
She pushed the belt’s button, picturing the baby inside her, hoping it was a girl and not a boy.
“Jack!” she cried.
“I’m here!” he shouted.
“I love you. I love you. I love…”
And then she was being pulled as if by an invisible hand, out of the airplane, out of the sky, out of the world, through that dark void, back to the hangar on Mu.
21 “How you doing, Jack?” the Captain asked, nosing down, increasing their pitch and speed as they approached D.C.
Through the cell phone’s speaker came the sound of a fist smacking its target. “I’ve got it under control.”
“Good boy,” he said. He looked at Cole and nodded. The kid put his weight into the throttle, kicking it up a notch. The engines were angry banshees. “I probably never told you this, but I was scared as shit the day you were born.”
Jack didn’t answer. The sounds of his struggle came clearly through the phone.
“I was so worried that something might go wrong. That something might be wrong with you. The world is so hard, you know? I didn’t want you to have some extra handicap or something to make it harder. Never been so scared in all my life. But then the doctor pulled you out and you were this big, fat baby, this healthy baby lying on the cart. And you started crying. Crying so loud you hurt my ears. But you were so big I knew you were fine. That you would be fine. And I’ve never had to worry again. You were a good kid. A good goddamn kid and I never told you that enough. I was only hard because the world is hard.”
Over a patch of trees, the Pentagon appeared.
“This is it!” said Cole.
The Captain adjusted the yoke slightly and nosed it down so that they were pointed at the center of a long gray wall.
“God is great,” the Captain whispered.
In the second before impact, the Captain was filled with such a sense of calm, of rightness, that he couldn’t help but smile. The plane was traveling so fast he did not perceive the exact moment when the cockpit crumpled and the velocity and the physics of it all turned his mortal body into particles that merged with the wreckage and the building until he was no more.
22 Jack, bloodied, a tooth broken, nose busted, picked himself off the floor and came for Tony. But Tony was done fighting. He pulled the box cutter from his pocket and stuck it into Jack’s side. Jack cried out and fell against the console. The plane tilted wildly and seven indicator buttons flashed bright red. Alarms went off. The engines protested. The plane banked. Jack fell to the floor, the knife tumbling away.
Tony went to the controls and stabilized the airplane. Then he stood over Jack, watching him, shaking his head. “All I ever wanted was a little peace.”
“It wouldn’t be real,” said Jack. “It would be meaningless. And it wouldn’t be earned.”
“Earned,” said Tony. “What do you know about it? You always had happiness.”
“No, Tony. You took that from me, remember?”
Alarms sounded again and the aircraft shook violently. Tony pulled back on the yoke, but it tore free from his hands. He tried the throttle, but it wouldn’t budge. “Fuck me,” he said. “I think you broke it.” Tony looked out the cockpit window. They were somewhere over Cleveland, heading east, the plane moving swiftly along, angled low on the horizon.
“We did it,” said Jack. “We did what you set out to do when you left Franklin Mills. Help me finish it. It’s not too late. We turn this bird around and head for D.C. The Washington Monument is the last piece. If it falls, millions of people will remember everything they’ve forgotten. Don’t you want that? Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Nobody out there cares. So why should I?”
“You could have made a perfect life with Sam.”
Another alarm sounded. A low whoop, whoop, whoop. The lights in the cockpit went off. The console buttons blinked. Jack smelled burning plastic.
“How?” Tony asked him.
“You could have had kids, you stupid idiot. Didn’t you ever think about that? You could have made a family with her. You could have given those kids what you never had. And you could have seen the world through their eyes. That’s what it’s about. Making the world just a little better for the next generation. Make their story a little better than your own. Eventually we’ll get it right.”
“You don’t know, Jack. You don’t fucking know.”
“Sam’s pregnant,” said Jack. “You’re right. I don’t know. But I want to.”
“You’re lying. You’re fucking lying!”
“You know me well enough to know when I’m lying. Am I lying?”
The alarms went silent and the aircraft sputtered. Then the two engines on the port side failed and suddenly the plane was rolling. Jack fell onto the ceiling, hard, his cheek smashing against a panel of lights.
Tony picked himself up again.
“You’d kill yourself knowing you had a child in this world?”
“I’d sacrifice myself if I knew it meant freedom for my children,” said Jack. “Yes.”
“I was so happy,” said Tony. “Why was that taken away when I was still a kid?”
“I don’t know, man. I don’t know. But you had us. And that’s more than some people ever get.”
“Goddamn. Goddamn it, Jack.” Tony reached into his bag and came out with a shiny buckle. He tossed it near the door to the cabin, where it hung in the air and rotated slowly. The red light began to blink at once, speeding up, merging into a steady light.
“What are you doing?” mumbled Jack. He was beginning to lose consciousness.
Tony picked up the box cutter and pointed it at a space about a foot above the buckle. When Scopes appeared a second later, Tony drove the knife into the flesh of its neck and across its throat, opening a wide gash. The Hound tried to talk, tried to reach out for Tony with his paws, but only managed to grab Tony’s watch. The timepiece ripped from Tony’s wrist as the Hound fell to the ground, dead.
An explosion rocked the aircraft. There would be no fixing it. Jack felt his body rise, weightless, off the floor as they fell, with the aircraft, back to earth.
Tony pushed off a wall, sending his body floating after the Hound’s body. He rammed into it and held tightly, spinning against it in the air. He undid the Hound’s second belt, the one it kept for a return journey, and brought it over to Jack.
Tony wrapped it around his old friend as they twisted around each other like dancers. “I don’t know where this takes you. Probably the Underground. But the Underground is better than dead, right?”
“Can you come with me?”
“Not this time.”
Once he had it around Jack’s waist, Tony pushed away.
“Be a good dad,” he said, grinning.
Through the cockpit window, Jack saw the ground rushing to meet them, a patch of hillside in the country, a gravel pit in the distance. Just before the aircraft collided with the earth, Jack’s body was pulled from the plane.