“He wouldn’t believe me, and even if he did. . . I don’t know what to
tell him. We’re going down, yeah, but I don’t know why. Maybe a
mid-air collision, maybe structural failure, maybe there’s a bomb
aboard-it could be anything.”
“But you’re a psychic, you must be able to see more details if you try.”
“If you believe I’m a psychic, you know less about me than you think you
do.”
“You’ve got to try.”
“Oh, lady, I’d try, I’d try like a sonofabitch if it would do any good.
But it won’t.”
Terror and curiosity fought for control of her face. “If you’re not a
psychic-what are you?”
“A tool.”
“Tool?”
“Someone or something uses me.”
The DC-10 shuddered again. They froze, but the aircraft did not take a
sudden plunge. It went on as before, its three big engines droning.
Just more turbulence.
She grabbed his arm. “You can’t let all those people die!”
A rope of guilt constricted his chest and knotted his stomach at the
implication that the deaths of the others aboard would somehow be his
fault.
He said, “I’m here to save the woman and the girl, no one else.”
“That’s horrible.”
Opening the lavatory door, he said, “I don’t like it any more than you
do, but that’s the way it is.”
She did not let go of his arm but jerked at it angrily. Her green eyes
were haunted, probably with her own visions of battered bodies strewn
across the earth among smoking chunks of wreckage. She repeated
herself, whispering fiercely this time: “You can’t let all those people
die.”
Impatiently, he said, “Either come with me, or die with the rest of
them.”
He stepped out of the lavatory, and she followed him, but he did not
know whether she was going to accompany him back to his section.
He hoped to God she would. He really could not be held responsible for
all the other people who would perish, because they would have died even
if he had not come aboard; that was their fate, and he had not been sent
to alter their destinies. He could not save the whole world, and he had
to rely on the wisdom of whatever higher power was guiding him. But he
most definitely would be responsible for Holly Thorne’s death, because
she would never have taken the flight if, unwittingly, he had not led
her onto it.
As he moved forward along the port aisle, he glanced to his left at the
portholes and clear blue sky beyond. He had a too vivid sense of the
yawning void under his feet, and his stomach flopped.
When he reached his seat in row sixteen, he dared to look back.
Relief flooded through him at the sight of Holly trailing close.
He pointed to a pair of empty seats immediately behind his and Chris
tine’s.
Holly shook her head. “Only if you’ll sit down with me. We have to
talk.”
He glanced down at Christine, then at Holly. He was acutely aware of
time slipping away like water swirling down a drain. The awful moment
of impact was drawing closer. He wanted to pick the reporter up, stuff
her into the seat, engage her seatbelt, and lock her in place. But
seatbelts didn’t have locks.
Unable to conceal his extreme frustration, he spoke to her through grit
ted teeth. “My place is with them,” he said, meaning with Christine and
Casey Dubrovek.
He had spoken quietly, as had Holly, but other passengers were beginning
to look at them.
Christine frowned up at him, craned her neck to look back at Holly, and
said, “Is something wrong, Steve?”
“No. Everything’s fine,” he lied.
He glanced at the portholes again. Blue sky. Vast. Empty. How many
miles to the earth below?
“You don’t look well,” Christine said.
He realized that his face was still sheathed in a greasy film of sweat.
“Just a little warm. Uh, look, I ran into an old friend. Gimme five
minutes?”
Christine smiled. “Sure, sure. I’m still going over a mental list of
the most-eligible.”
For a moment he had no idea what the hell she was talking about.
Then he remembered that he had asked her to play matchmaker for him.