Free Contact by Susan Grant

to alert air traffic control that they had both a hijacking-in-progress and an emergency. Only after transmitting her emergency messages did she notice that the tall, dark-eyed man was standing outside, in front of the plane. More importantly, he was alone. The goons who had accompanied him before were nowhere to be seen. The albino woman was absent, too.
    Hands on his hips, he waited patiently for her attention. When he saw that she watched him, he withdrew his gun—or what she assumed was a gun—from his belt and laid it on the floor. A gesture of peace? Palm toward her, fingers spread, he raised his right hand. He paused, as if expecting her to respond.
    She mirrored his gesture, and somehow withheld the powerful urge to show him her middle finger.
    He brought his hand to his mouth and then pointed at her. He wanted to talk to her. Well, she could certainly do that without letting him inside, she thought.
    Walking away, he disappeared from view under the fuselage of the aircraft. Then it hit her: Door 1-L. It was the only door that didn’t have a slide! An unprotected entrance.
    Her heart flipped in her chest, and she dashed out of the cockpit, leaping over Brian’s body. Bolting downstairs, she shouted, “Take your stations!” The flight attendants echoed her call. Passengers and crew darted in all directions. The children—there were fourteen under twelve, three of those infants—took shelter in the bulkhead between economyand business class, along with three pregnant women to watch them.
    The efficiency of their defensive preparations surprised Jordan. Many passengers had passed the hours sleeping, having succumbed to shock, exhaustion, and poor air quality. Others showed symptoms resembling those of motion sickness. Already the air was rank with the odor of feces and vomit. Before long, all their lavatories would be clogged and unusable. But when called upon to defend the plane, none of that mattered. “Natalie, Ben, we need a slide-raft at One-Left!
Now
—”
    Mid-shout, she crashed into Dillon, the red-haired Irishman. He was slim, but he was as solid as a bank safe. She stumbled backward and fell hard on her rear. A businessman caught Dillon, but the AED he’d clutched went flying—into the hands of one of the Marines, Garrett Brown, who caught the defibrillator like a football.
    From where she was sprawled in the middle of the first-class aisle, Jordan felt as if she were watching a screwball comedy. Unfortunately, her sense of humor was at an all-time low. Would this have happened to the typical, Hollywood-version, six-foot-plus, gray-haired airline captain with the Oklahoma twang? She doubted it.
    The Marine, Garrett, helped her to her feet. Her chest stung and her eyes watered as she tried to catch her breath. Then he gave her the AED, and she balanced it in her shaking hands as Dillon apologized profusely. “I’m sorry, Captain. But I couldn’t wait to tell you. It’s ready.”
    Jordan’s eyes shifted to the device in her arms. “You mean it works?”
    Dillon grinned. “I had to cannibalize my laptop and a couple of cell phones, but, yes, I think it’ll work beautifully.”
    “It’ll shock someone?”
    “It’ll shock the bloody hell out of someone.”
    “Will it . . . kill someone?” she asked carefully.
    “Depends on where you aim it and how long you hold it there.” Dillon’s singsong brogue made her wish he was describing purple horseshoes and four-leaf clovers instead of how to electrocute another human being.
    The flight attendants had gathered around them. “What’s going on?” Ben asked.
    “One of them wants to talk to us. Again.”
    Frightened murmurs rippled through the crowd of eavesdroppers.
    “This time he’s alone. And I think we do need to open a line of communication.”
    The murmurs turned into shouts. Not for the first time, Jordan wished she was deep in the anonymous sea of onlookers and not in the spotlight—not the leader forced into making