“What I meant was we found which plane it is, but we don’t know where it is. We used the thread for the guy you captured—who, I can tell you, has no idea what’s going on, by the way—but his thread led us to the pilot. Then we, and by we, I mostly mean Sarah Beth—who is awesome—located the pilots. There’s actually two of them. I’m sending you a sketch . . .” There was some fumbling and she spoke to someone off the phone, but it sounded muffled; then the tablet dinged in his other pocket. “I saw this through the eyes of the pilot.”

Jed held the phone against his shoulder with a head tilt and fished out his tablet and opened it with his thumbprint, then tapped the incoming message icon. He was looking at the control panel of an airplane. Ben joined him and Bill walked up to look from the other side.

“What am I looking at here?” he asked, holding the tablet and switching the phone to speaker.

“Well, there’s a couple of things,” Corbin said, her voice a teenager telling a story of being asked to the prom. “Hopefully, from the layout of the dials and stuff you can figure out what kind of plane it is.”

Jed glanced over at Bill, who nodded with a definitely doable expression.

“And that,” the Army intel officer said, tapping a finger on the screen to a small rectangular plaque with some numbers and letters on it, “is the aircraft’s tail number. N6677L. That’s a US-registered plane.”

“That’s what we thought,” Corbin said excitedly. “And look at the radio panel between the seats—can you see it?”

“Yeah,” Jed said. The bottom of the two was larger and had the numbers 135.2 glowing in pale blue. The top one seemed more narrow compared to the one beneath. The numbers 0427 glowed red in the panel.

“So he set that code into the one on top. Josh—he’s another Watcher—he’s like a total airplane geek. He wants to fly fighters for the military or something. Anyway, he knows about that stuff and he said that code is how the air traffic controllers can identify a specific plane . . .”

“It’s a transponder,” Bill agreed. “The code is called a squawk code. And your friend Josh is exactly right.”

“Yes! That’s what Josh said. Jed, he was so excited. So you can find them, right?”

“Yes,” Bill said confidently. “If it’s all turned on and pinging, we can find them.”

“But what if they’re using a different squawk code now?” Eli chimed in. “They might have changed it.”

“I don’t think so,” Corbin said. “I watched him set this code just a minute ago. They’re, like, literally taking off right now.”

“They’re in the air?” Jed asked, his chest getting tight.

“Yes, but you can find them, right?”