“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?” She looked at him oddly, and he realized the phrase was alien to her. He also realized that for the last five minutes his mind had been off the controls and his body had been flying the plane flawlessly. Keep talking, he thought. And don’t stop to think about flying. “Hans-Peter-I don’t believe you’re CIA, if that’s what you’re still claiming.” “I never claimed to be CIA. That was your assumption. I let you believe it because the alternative, telling you the truth, was too damn risky!” Why was he shouting at her as though she were to blame? “Risky for whom?” she shouted back. “Really!” “For you,” he said, desperately trying to convince himself that this was the truth. “I thought they’d kill you if they knew you knew, not just tie you up and throw you in a cell.” It wasn’t the whole truth, he thought in disgust. And so he added: “And for me, because I thought you would just walk out the door without even stopping to slap my face.” In shock, she turned and looked at him. There was a terrible vulnerability in his voice and it stopped her anger cold. “I can’t bear to lie to you anymore,” he said. “Which puts me in something of a bind, doesn’t it? The kind they used to think caused schizophrenia,” he went on, aware she might think he was babbling. “I’m hopelessly in love with you, it’s beyond insanity and I don’t want to die again.” She blinked, thought, softened. “Again?” He closed his eyes against tears. “And the worst of it is, you remind me so much of my wife.” “Oh, God,” she groaned.
“I know it’s horrible for you to hear. But it’s true.” “I remind you of Yvette?”
He shook his head. “Beatrice. My wife’s name is Beatrice. She’s back at the base and I don’t know what kind of danger she’s in. If she’s smart and feels the way I do, she’ll play possum, maybe hope I’m making a run for 60 Minutes or the New York Times. In which case, however, you would be useless as bait, and we would both be utterly expendable.” Elizabeth fell silent, her hands shaking. “On the other hand,” Peter went on, wanting to get it over with, “Beatrice may be so angry with me she can’t see straight, as angry as you are at this moment. For which I can’t blame either of you. She may be of a mind to cooperate with the organization that thinks it owns us both, which makes contacting her potentially suicidal. At least that’s how I see it,” he said, a note of uncertainty creeping into his voice again. There’s something I’m missing here, he thought, something vastly important to both of them. “Why would you go to the Times? What is it you’ve been working on?” “I’m working on stopping something,” he heard himself say. “Something I started.” Then he blurted it out. “A weapon.” He felt her stiffen, but at the same time her gray eyes softened, as though thanking him for his attempt at honesty, no matter how addled she might believe him to be. “What kind of weapon?” she asked.
“Like any other kind,” he said. “It kills. It just happens to do it especially well.” “Like a nuclear device?” she asked, fear creeping into her voice. “Better than that. Or worse, I should say. It can kill selectively, from a safe distance. Nothing can act as a shield against it. We were making it small and it will get smaller. There’s no radiation. You could exterminate a city and move into it the next day. It’s just what the doctor ordered, people will say, to put an end to war in the twenty-first century. But it could also vastly expand war, make it cheaper for the aggressors to destroy anyone they don’t want in their way. Now,” he said, feeling the plane start to roll, “what do you know about air lanes?” “Not much,” she said. Her voice was small and her skin had paled visibly in the last moments of his confession. “Just what you tried to teach me. “What Hans tried to teach you. Go on.
“I know we’re supposed to fly a certain direction at a certain altitude.” “Like?”
“Like odd-numbered altitudes for north and south, even-numbered for east and west. Then it’s broken down further, like 2,000 feet for east, and 2,200 feet for west.” “Is that it? Odd for north and south, even for east and west, at those altitudes?” “I just made up those altitudes as an example,” she protested. “I’m not sure what they really are-” She broke off as a plane shot by about a thousand feet to their left. It went by like a bullet, sobering both of them. “What’s the lowest you’re allowed to fly?” Peter asked quickly “Five hundred feet over water, I think, but the air lanes start higher than that.” “Okay, then if we fly at five hundred feet more or less, we shouldn’t be meeting anybody else, you think?” “I think so,” she said.
He pushed the control column down and they dropped, lower and lower until they could see the tops of the waves. He leveled off and kept it there. In the back of what he could only think of as his no mind, he knew it would keep them out of radar view as well, but it was nerve-wracking flying at best. Spray from the breakers bounced off the windscreen; he entertained visions of an errant seagull plowing through the Plexiglas like a cannon shell. “I think it’s over there,” Peter said, referring to a glow on the horizon that he hoped was Puerto Rico. He angled the airplane toward it, but when they drew nearer, it turned out to be a cruise ship. They flew over it so low they could see some deckhands looking up in alarm. Then they were on into inky blackness, again. With Elizabeth’s help, he found the fuel gauge. It was enough like a car’s to read, and it was dangerously close to empty. “Which direction are we going?” “I think we’re heading out to sea,” she said, with a glance at the instrument panel. “East is toward Africa. That’s five thousand miles away. We want to go west to find Puerto Rico. That’s eight miles.” A sense of humor, he thought. That’s a hopeful sign. He turned the plane around as best he could-too much cerebration again-and watched the needle on the compass swing around until it pointed at 270 degrees. Then he heard Elizabeth gasp as he looked up to see the lights of Puerto Rico swing into view, a huge panorama of welcome luminescence. He realized that he must have been flying with the island directly behind him for the last five minutes. “There!” said Elizabeth, pointing at a sweep of green searchlight. Ahead Peter saw the lights of a major runway. He had to fight much harder this time to still his thoughts: he knew instinctively that landing was the most dangerous part of flying. He imagined his mind to be a jumbleful of sticks that represented thoughts and bulldozed them into oblivion. The plane banked easily toward Puerto Rico’s San Juan International Airport, as if he had suddenly learned how to fly. Perhaps it was just that he was too scared to think about it, and Hans, in fact, had taken over. He circled three times, each time closer, until he saw a big jetliner abort its descent and climb back up. He gambled that they had been spotted and that traffic was now being diverted. He headed in, letting his hands and feet do the work, trimming rudder, dropping ten degrees flaps, pulling back on the throttle and letting the plane nose down. He felt the flaps braking the plane and relaxed, confident that his body was doing everything required. The plane was coming in for a perfect three-point landing when Peter’s racing brain broke through the curtain of competence. He was thinking that they needed to get out of the plane before it came to a stop and was wondering how best to land the plane for the maneuver. His hand faltered, the plane came down hard and Peter instantly reverted to his driver’s instincts, trying to steer the aircraft like a car. He turned the control column to the left, which only moved the ailerons, unusable at that speed. Dimly he sensed he should be using his feet on the rudder pedals, but the only foot he was using was his right one, pressing down on the right rudder pedal as though it were a cars brake. The plane banged down hard on the runway and leapt back into the air at a crabbed angle, engine roaring. Now there was no time for thinking or not thinking: the aircraft was out of airspeed and slammed back hard in an ungainly stall. The right landing gear buckled and the plane’s nose went to the runway, its propeller splintering in a shower of sparks. The Cessna skidded right, went up on one wing tip, then collapsed into immobility. On wobbly legs, they scrambled out,