When the seatbelt light was turned out, the stewardesses arose and began their first task – cocktails for about one hundred and fifty at about 24,000 feet and rising. The pilot, meanwhile, has programmed the autopilot to level the plane off at 36,000 feet and fly east on heading thus-and-such. A few passengers –
eleven of us, in fact – have fallen asleep. Of the rest, some are dozing, perhaps (but not deeply enough to save them from whatever happened), and the rest are all wide awake.’
‘Building their nests,’ Albert said.
‘Exactly! Building their nests!’ Jenkins paused and then added, not without some melodrama: ‘And then it happened!’
‘What happened, Mr Jenkins?’ Albert asked. ‘Do you have any ideas about that?’
Jenkins did not answer for a long time, and when he finally did, a lot of the fun had gone out of his voice.
Listening to him, Albert understood for the first time that, beneath the slightly theatrical veneer, Robert Jenkins was as frightened as Albert was himself. He found he did not mind this; it made the elderly mystery writer in his running-to-seed sport-coat seem more real.
‘The locked-room mystery is the tale of deduction at its most pure,’ Jenkins said. ‘I’ve written a few of them myself – more than a few, to be completely honest -but I never expected to be a part of one.’
Albert looked at him and could think of no reply. He found himself remembering a Sherlock Holmes story called ‘The Speckled Band.’ In that story a poisonous snake had gotten into the famous locked room through a ventilating duct. The immortal Sherlock hadn’t even had to wake up all his brain-cells to solve that one.
But even if the overhead luggage compartments of Flight 29 had been filled with poisonous snakes – stuffed with them – where were the bodies? Where were the bodies? Fear began to creep into him again, seeming to flow up his legs toward his vitals. He reflected that he had never felt less like that famous gunslinger Ace Kaussner in his whole life.
‘If it were just the plane,’ Jenkins went on softly, ‘I suppose I could come up with a scenario – it is, after all, how I have been earning my daily bread for the last twenty-five years or so. Would you like to hear one such scenario?’
‘Sure,’ Albert said.
‘Very well. Let us say that some shadowy government organization like The Shop has decided to carry out an experiment, and we are the test subjects. The purpose of such an experiment, given the circumstances, might be to document the effects of severe mental and emotional stress on a number of average Americans.
They, the scientists running the experiment, load the airplane’s oxygen system with some sort of odorless hypnotic drug
‘Are there such things?’ Albert asked, fascinated.
‘There are indeed,’ Jenkins said. ‘Diazaline, for one. Methoprominol, for another. I remember when readers who liked to think of themselves as “serious-minded” laughed at Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels. They called them panting melodrama at its most shameful.’ Jenkins shook his head slowly. ‘Now, thanks to biological research and the paranoia of alphabet agencies like the CIA and the DIA, we’re living in a world that could be Sax Rohmer’s worst nightmare.
‘Diazaline, which is actually a nerve gas, would be best. It’s supposed to be very fast. After it is released into the air, everyone falls asleep, except for the pilot, who is breathing uncontaminated air through a mask.’
‘But -‘ Albert began.
Jenkins smiled and raised a hand. ‘I know what your objection is, Albert, and I can explain it. Allow me?’
Albert nodded.
‘The pilot lands the plane – at a secret airstrip in Nevada, let us say. The passengers who were awake when the gas was released – and the stewardesses, of course – are off-loaded by sinister men wearing white Andromeda Strain suits. The passengers who were asleep – you and I among them, my young friend –
simply go on sleeping, only a little more deeply than before. The pilot then returns Flight 29 to its proper altitude and heading. He engages the autopilot. As the plane reaches the Rockies, the effects of the gas begin to wear off. Diazaline is a so-called clear drug, one that leaves no appreciable after-effects. No hangover, in other words. Over his intercom, the pilot can hear the little blind girl crying out for her aunt.
He knows she will wake the others. The experiment is about to commence. So he gets up and leaves the cockpit, closing the door behind him.’
‘How could he do that? There’s no knob on the outside.’
Jenkins waved a dismissive hand. ‘Simplest thing in the world, Albert. He uses a strip of adhesive tape, sticky side out. Once the door latches from the inside, it’s locked.’
A smile of admiration began to overspread Albert’s face – and then it froze. ‘In that case, the pilot would be one of us,’ he said.
‘Yes and no. In my scenario, Albert, the pilot is the pilot. The pilot who just happened to be on board, supposedly deadheading to Boston. The pilot who was sitting in first class, less than thirty feet from the cockpit door, when the manure hit the fan.’
‘Captain Engle,’ Albert said in a low, horrified voice.
Jenkins replied in the pleased but complacent tone of a geometry professor who has just written QED
below the proof of a particularly difficult theorem. ‘Captain Engle,’ he agreed.
Neither of them noticed Crew-Neck looking at them with glittering, feverish eyes. Now Crew-Neck took the in-flight magazine from the seatpocket in front of him, pulled off the cover, and began to tear it in long, slow strips. He let them flutter to the floor, where they joined the shreds of the cocktail napkin around his brown loafers. His lips were moving soundlessly.
2
Had Albert been a student of the New Testament, he would have understood how Saul, that most zealous persecutor of the early Christians, must have felt when the scales fell from his eyes on the road to Damascus. He stared at Robert Jenkins with shining enthusiasm, every vestige of sleepiness banished from his brain.
Of course, when you thought about it – or when somebody like Mr Jenkins, who was clearly a real head, ratty sport-coat or no ratty sport-coat, thought about it for you – it was just too big and too obvious to miss.
Almost the entire cast and crew of American Pride’s Flight 29 had disappeared between the Mojave Desert and the Great Divide … but one of the few survivors just happened to be -surprise, surprise! – another American Pride pilot who was, in his own words, ‘qualified to fly this make and model – also to land it.’
Jenkins had been watching Albert closely, and now he smiled. There wasn’t much humor in that smile. ‘It’s a tempting scenario,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’
‘We’ll have to capture him as soon as we land,’ Albert said, scraping one hand feverishly up the side of his face. ‘You, me, Mr Gaffney, and that British guy. He looks tough. Only … what if the Brit’s in on it, too? He could be Captain Engle’s, you know, bodyguard. Just in case someone figured things out the way you did.’
Jenkins opened his mouth to reply, but Albert rushed on before he could.
‘We’ll just have to put the arm on them both. Somehow.’ He offered Mr Jenkins a narrow smile – an Ace Kaussner smile. Cool, tight, dangerous. The smile of a man who is faster than blue blazes, and knows it. ‘I may not be the world’s smartest guy, Mr Jenkins, but I’m nobody’s lab rat.’
‘But it doesn’t stand up, you know,’ Jenkins said mildly.
Albert blinked. ‘What?’
‘The scenario I just outlined for you. It doesn’t stand up.’
‘But – you said -‘
‘I said if it were just the plane, I could come up with a scenario. And I did. A good one. If it was a book idea, I’ll bet my agent could sell it. Unfortunately, it isn’t just the plane. Denver might still have been down there, but all the lights were off if it was. I have been coordinating our route of travel with my wristwatch, and I can tell you now that it’s not just Denver, either. Omaha, Des Moines – no sign of them down there in the dark, my boy. I have seen no lights at all, in fact. No farmhouses, no grain storage and shipping locations, no interstate turnpikes. Those things show up at night, you know -with the new high-intensity lighting, they show up very well, even when one is almost six miles up. The land is utterly dark. Now I can believe that there might be a government agency unethical enough to drug us all in order to observe our reactions. Hypothetically, at least. What I cannot believe is that even The Shop could have persuaded everyone over our flight-path to turn off their lights in order to reinforce the illusion that we are all alone.’