He paused next to a mother and young daughter traveling together. The young girl's hand was still nestled inside her mother's. Both appeared relaxed.
Eph said, "No panic, no nothing."
Nora said, "Doesn't make sense."
Viruses require transmission, and transmission takes time. Passengers becoming sick or falling unconscious would have caused an uproar, no matter what the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign said. If this was a virus, it was unlike any pathogen Eph had ever encountered in his years as an epidemiologist with the CDC. All signs instead pointed to a lethal poisoning agent introduced into the sealed environment of the airplane cabin.
Eph said, "Jim, I want to retest for gas."
Jim's voice said, "They took air samples, measured in parts per million. There was nothing."
"I know but...it's as if these people were overcome by something without any warning whatsoever. Maybe the substance dissipated once that door opened. I want to test the carpeting and any other porous surfaces. We'll test lung tissue once we get these people in post."
"Okay, Eph-you got it."
Eph moved quickly past the widely spaced, leather-appointed seats of first class to the closed cockpit door. The door was grated and framed in steel along each edge, with an overhead camera in the ceiling. He reached for the handle.
Jim's voice in his suit hood said, "Eph, they're telling me it works on a keypad lock, you won't be able to get-"
The door pushed open under his gloved hand.
Eph stood very still at the open doorway. The lights from the taxiway shone through the tinted cockpit windshield, illuminating the flight deck. The system displays were all dark.
Jim said, "Eph, they're saying to be very careful."
"Tell them thanks for the expert technical advice," said Eph before moving inside.
The system displays around the switches and throttles were all dark. One man wearing a pilot's uniform sat slumped in a jump seat to Eph's immediate right as he entered. Two more, the captain and his first officer, were seated in the twin chairs before the controls. The first officer's hands lay curled and empty in his lap, his head drooped to the left with his hat still on. The captain's left hand remained on a control lever, his right arm hanging off the armrest, knuckles brushing the carpeted floor. His head was forward, his hat resting in his lap.
Eph leaned over the control console between the two seats in order to push up the captain's head. He checked the captain's open eyes with his flashlight, the pupils fixed and dilated. He eased the man's head back down gently onto his chest, and then stiffened.
He felt something. He sensed something. A presence.
He stepped back from the console and scanned the flight deck, turning in one complete circle.
Jim said, "What is it, Eph?"
Eph had spent enough time around corpses not to be jumpy. But there was something here...somewhere. Here or nearby.
The strange sensation passed, like a dizzy spell, leaving him blinking. He shook it off. "Nothing. Claustrophobia, probably."
Eph turned to the third man inside the cockpit. His head hung low, his right shoulder propped up against the side wall. His jump seat harness straps hung down.
Eph said aloud, "Why isn't he belted in?"
Nora said, "Eph, are you in the cockpit? I'm coming to you."
Eph looked at the dead man's silver tie pin with the Regis Air logo. The nameplate over his pocket read REDFERN. Eph dropped to one knee before him, pressing his thickly gloved fingers against the man's temples to raise his face. His eyes were open and down turned. Eph checked his pupils, and thought he saw something. A glimmer. He looked again, and suddenly Captain Redfern shuddered and emitted a groan.
Eph jerked backward, falling between the two captains' chairs and against the control console with a clatter. The first officer slumped against him, and Eph pushed back at him, trapped for a moment by the man's limp, dead weight.
Jim's voice called to him sharply, "Eph?"
Nora's voice held a note of panic. "Eph, what is it?"
With a surge of energy, Eph propelled the first officer's body back into its chair and got to his feet.
Nora said, "Eph, are you all right?"
Eph looked at Captain Redfern, spilled onto the floor now, eyes open and staring. His throat, though, was working, bucking, his open mouth seeming to gag on the air.
Eph said, wide-eyed, "We have a survivor here."
Nora said, "What?"
"We have a man alive here. Jim, we need a Kurt isolation pod for this man. Brought directly to the wing. Nora?" Eph was talking fast, looking at the pilot twitching on the floor. "We have to go through this entire airplane, passenger by passenger."
INTERLUDE I
ABRAHAM SETRAKIAN
THE OLD MAN STOOD ALONE ON THE CRAMPED SALES floor of his pawnshop on East 118th Street, in Spanish Harlem. An hour after closing and his stomach was rumbling, yet he was reluctant to go upstairs. The gates were all pulled down over the doors and windows, like steel eyelids, the night people having claimed the streets outside. At night, you don't go out.
He went to the bank of dimmers behind the loan desk, and darkened the store lamp by lamp. He was in an elegiac mood. He looked at his shop, the display cases of chrome and streaked glass. The wristwatches showcased on felt instead of velvet, the polished silver he couldn't get rid of, the bits of diamond and gold. The full tea sets under glass. The leather coats and now-controversial furs. The new music players that went fast, and the radios and televisions he didn't bother taking in anymore. And there were, here and there, treasures: a pair of beautiful antique safes (lined with asbestos, but just don't eat it); a suitcase-size wood-and-steel Quasar VCR from the 1970s; an antique 16mm film projector.
But, on balance, lots of low-turnover junk. A pawnshop is part bazaar, part museum, part neighborhood reliquary. The pawnbroker provides a service no one else can. He is the poor man's banker, someone people can come to and borrow twenty-five dollars with no concern as to credit history, employment, references. And, in the grip of an economic recession, twenty-five dollars is real money to many people. Twenty-five dollars can mean the difference between shelter or homelessness. Twenty-five dollars can put life-prolonging medicine within reach. So long as a man or woman has collateral, something of value to borrow against, he or she can walk out of his door with cash in hand. Beautiful.
He trudged on upstairs, turning out more lights as he went. He was fortunate to own his building, bought in the early 1970s for seven dollars and change. Okay, maybe not for so little, but not for so much either. They were burning down buildings for heat back then. Knickerbocker Loans and Curios (the name came with the shop) was never a means to wealth for Setrakian, but rather a conduit, a point of entry into the pre-Internet underground marketplace of the crossroads city of the world, for a man interested in Old World tools, artifacts, curios, and other arcana.