Dependable, reliable Matt. Kelly sure had him trained well. Eph watched his son go inside under Matt’s arm, Zack glancing back one last time at Eph.

Alone now, he and Kelly stood facing each other on the little patch of grass. Behind her, over the roof of her house, the lights of the waiting airplanes circled. An entire network of transportation, never mind various government and law enforcement agencies, was waiting for this man facing a woman who said she didn’t love him anymore.

“It’s that airplane, isn’t it.”

Eph nodded. “They’re all dead. Everybody on board.”

“All dead?” Kelly’s eyes flared with concern. “How? What could it be?”

“That’s what I have to go find out.”

Eph felt the urgency of his job settling over him now. He had blown it with Zack—but that was done, and now he had to go. He reached into his pocket and handed her an envelope with the pin-striped logo. “For tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “In case I don’t make it back before then.”

Kelly peeked at the tickets, her eyebrows lifting at the price, then tucked them back inside the envelope. She looked at him with an expression approaching sympathy. “Just be sure not to forget our meeting with Dr. Kempner.”

The family therapist—the one who would decide Zack’s final custody. “Kempner, right,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

“And—be careful,” she said.

Eph nodded and started away.

JFK International Airport

A CROWD HAD GATHERED outside the airport, people drawn to the unexplained, the weird, the potentially tragic, the event. The radio, on Eph’s drive over, treated the dormant airplane as a potential hijacking, speculating about a link to the conflicts overseas.

Inside the terminal, two airport carts passed Eph, one carrying a teary mother holding the hands of two frightened-looking children, another with an older black gentleman riding with a bouquet of red roses across his lap. He realized that somebody else’s Zack was out there on that plane. Somebody else’s Kelly. He focused on that.

Eph’s team was waiting for him outside a locked door just below gate 6. Jim Kent was working the phone, as usual, speaking into the wire microphone dangling from his ear. Jim handled the bureaucratic and political side of disease control for Eph. He closed his hand around the mic part of his phone wire and said, by way of greeting, “No other reports of planes down anywhere else in the country.”

Eph climbed in next to Nora Martinez in the back of the airline cart. Nora, a biochemist by training, was his number two in New York. Her hands were already gloved, the nylon barrier as pale and smooth and mournful as lilies. She shifted over a little for him as he sat down. He regretted the awkwardness between them.

They started to move, Eph smelling marsh salt in the wind. “How long was the plane on the ground before it went dark?”

Nora said, “Six minutes.”

“No radio contact? Pilot’s out too?”

Jim turned and said, “Presumed, but unconfirmed. Port Authority cops went into the passenger compartment, found it full of corpses, and got right out again.”