One audience member laughed at this, but her name was Cody so she was the only one.

827

Cody Jameson was a writer. She was roughing it because she was blocked. She’d dyed her hair and was wearing tinted contact lenses to stay incognito. She was sitting at the back and thinking about crime and nerve.

826

From the hole John didn’t spot a single familiar face. Not Benny. Not the hen party of stewardesses the manager had promised. Not no one.

He went back to pacing.

825

Today Michael Davies had had no panics, no complicated vectoring. The weather had been decent. His coffee hot. His new shirt complimented. His chair refurbished.

But there had been more traffic than normal. A couple of planes diverting from East Midlands. A light aircraft was off course. Nothing you’d call an emergency, just a little more concentration needed, and he felt he was running short.

He wondered if his mind was losing its sharpness. He did mental arithmetic: forty-five times thirty-seven. He timed himself.

824

You Too Can Fly. Rose the cleaner said it wasn’t really about flying, it was about fear. She’d found the tape in a bin at the airport and had listened to it on her headphones. She gave it to Michael as he left the tower.

He insisted he didn’t need it. Rose said ’course he didn’t and patted him on the shoulder.

823

One thousand four hundred and eighty. Twenty-four seconds. Mind razor sharp. Michael Davies overtook and undertook and cut people up.

He would give You Too Can Fly to Beth.

Beth could only manage very short flights to Europe and only if she was dosed up with drink and tranquilizers. Aerophobia. Or pteromerhanophobia, depending on which sort of flying one was afraid of. Beth believed she had both.

She thought she’d try boring herself out of the problem. Skipping the Channel was never going to give her long enough to exhaust the phobia but if she flew to another continent her body might run out of energy to worry anymore.

Tomorrow she’d fly to New York City. There and back, first class.

It would cost her more money than she could afford, but if it worked, money well spent.

It might not, of course. She could have ten of the most hellish hours of her life. But no one said busting a phobia would be a walk in the park.

Not that Beth found a walk in the park a walk in the park.

Michael wasn’t going with her. He made things much worse on the whole.

She stared at her suitcase, packed and ready, and felt pinpricks of sweat pop out over her scalp. She turned the news up louder.

A tennis star had tested positive for drugs, a shuttle had successfully repaired a space station, and in New York City a crude explosive device had been discovered under the car of the CEO of a pharmaceutical company.

822