Chelsea had covered a fair number of disturbing stories in the past. A Kenyan college student attacked brutally and without provocation by a white police officer. A murdered Boston politician, a Medford pastor shot in his own home. All around Massachusetts, children went missing, spouses got beat up, victims were abused repeatedly every single day.
For most of her career, Chelsea found ways to separate herself from the trauma she covered. It was the only way she could keep on doing what she did. That didn’t mean she was without compassion or empathy. It was just that because she was so compassionate and empathetic, she had to come up with coping mechanisms to protect herself from the terror and crimes she reported about on a daily basis.
Now, Chelsea wasn’t even thinking about herself as a journalist. It didn’t matter that her editor continued to give her bigger and more high-profile cases to cover. It didn’t matter that this trip to Detroit meant Chelsea was breaking out of her local sphere and into the world of national reporting.
Who cared?
And what was it all for if Chelsea was going to be the next person to die when Bradley’s timer went off anyway?
He was continuing to pace the aisles when his phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and answered with a smirk.
“This is Bradley.” He wasn’t what she would have expected a terrorist to sound like. When she looked at him, it felt as if she were staring at a man who could have been her third-grade teacher or the guy working on his laptop beside her at the corner café.
Bradley’s phone was set on speaker, and Chelsea strained her ears to hear the lifeline whose voice rang out from the other side.
“This is Frank,” the man said. “Brad, is that you? May I call you Brad?”
Chelsea watched as the hijacker’s face and expression grew even more angry and irritated. “What do you want?” he growled. “I want to talk to the superintendent.”
“I know, Brad. I know.”
Chelsea tried to picture Frank on the other end of the line, tried to imagine who this man was, how he managed to get through to a cell phone on an airplane flying thirty thousand feet in the air. It wasn’t until she started to get lightheaded that she realized she was holding her breath. Would this Frank person, whoever he was, manage to convince Bradley to put down his gun and let them all go?
Chelsea had never covered a real-life hostage situation before. Of course, she was familiar with the most famous cases. The Stockholm bank heist gone wrong. The Patty Hearst ordeal, where the victim ended up shocking the police and FBI by siding with her captors. Chelsea recalled details from a true-crime podcast she listened to where a rich young heiress was kidnapped, held for ransom, and ended up falling in love with her abductor.
Of course, not every hostage developed feelings of dependency on their captors. Sitting where she was, cowering in fear and drenched in sweat, Chelsea wondered how anybody could sympathize with someone like this madman in their cabin.
It certainly wasn’t the first time that Chelsea had felt scared during a job. There was that riot that broke out when she was covering what should have been a peaceful prayer vigil. In another instance, Chelsea had gotten threatening letters, strongly urging her in no uncertain terms to drop a case she was covering about a senator’s daughter who got kidnapped a few years ago.
In each and every one of those situations, Chelsea had been able to convince herself she wasn’t in any real danger. People faced hazards at work no matter what career they chose. Chelsea’s job as a journalist was tame when you compared it to the risks that firefighters and soldiers and policeman, sometimes even public schoolteachers, took each and every day.
The man on the other end of Bradley’s cell phone identified himself as a hostage negotiator, but Bradley refused to talk to anybody but the Detroit superintendent. Chelsea wondered how Selena felt, the superintendent’s daughter who had been kidnapped.
Chelsea had never heard of any parent threatening anybody just because they were unhappy with school district policies. Of course, the scandal at Brown Elementary and its location on toxic soil was far more serious than whose child did or didn’t make it into honors band or whether or not high school seniors should be allowed to drive themselves off campus during lunch.
If her editor realized she was here on this hijacked flight, he’d expect her to be taking notes, documenting the terror second by second. As Bradley got more and more agitated, arguing with the professional negotiator, Chelsea couldn’t think about work at all.
She couldn’t think about the story she could write as a first-hand witness to Bradley’s murderous rampage. Couldn’t think about how much time and effort he and his men must have put into planning this takeover.
In the grips of her terror and fear, Chelsea could hardly find the strength to pray.
She wondered if her mom was watching the news, if her parents had any idea what Chelsea was experiencing right here on Flight 219. Were they praying for her? Did they even know? Maybe they were just going about their normal, everyday lives, completely unaware that their daughter’s plane had been hijacked. Chelsea thought about her friends. Of course, everybody at work would be seeing these events and covering them in real time, but had any of them put the puzzle pieces together to realize that one of their own was aboard this flight? What about Brie? Chelsea’s best friend was notoriously bad at keeping up with current events unless she stumbled across them in her Facebook feed. Brie was probably the last person to guess what was happening on this plane.
Chelsea had lost the flow of Bradley’s conversation with the hostage negotiator, but his yelling snapped her attention back to the phone call.
“You tell Weston that he calls me in two minutes,” Bradley snarled, “or another hostage dies.”