Cold Fire

“I'm not afraid of you,” she said.

“Good. There's no reason to be.”

Vibrations were conducted well by the burnished-steel walls of the lavatory. The deep drone of the engines was somewhat louder there than in the main cabin.

She said, “What do you want?”

“You've got to do exactly what I tell you.”

She frowned. 'Listen, I—

“Exactly what I tell you, and no arguments, there's no time for arguments,” he said sharply, wondering what the hell he was talking about.

'I know all about your—

“I don't care what you know. That's not important now.”

She frowned. “You're shaking like a leaf.”

He was not only shaking but sweating. The lavatory was cool enough, but he could feel beads of sweat forming across his forehead. A thin trickle coursed down his right temple and past the corner of his eye.

Speaking rapidly, he said, “I want you to come forward in the plane, sit farther front near me, there're a couple of empty seats in that area.”

“But I—”

“You can't stay where you are, back there in row twenty-three, no way.”

She was not a docile woman. She knew her own mind, and she was not used to being told what to do. “That's my seat. Twenty-three H. You can't strongarm me—”

Impatiently, he said, “If you sit there, you're going to die.”

She looked no more surprised than he felt — which was plenty damn surprised. “Die? What do you mean?”

“I don't know.” But then unwanted knowledge came to him. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God. We're going down.”

“What?”

“The plane.” Now his heart was racing faster than the turbine blades in the great engines that were keeping them aloft. “Down. All the way down.”

He saw her incomprehension give way to a dreadful understanding. “Crash?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“I don't know. Soon. Beyond row twenty, almost nobody's going to survive.” He did not know what he was going to say until he said it, and as he listened to his own words he was horrified by them. “There'll be a better survival rate in the first nine rows, but not good, not good at all. You've got to move into my section.”

The aircraft shuddered.

Holly stiffened and looked around fearfully, as if she expected the lavatory walls to crumple in on them.

“Turbulence,” he said. “Just turbulence. We've got … a few minutes yet.”

Evidently she had learned enough about him to have faith in his prediction. She did not express any doubt. “I don't want to die.”

With an increasing sense of urgency, Jim gripped her by the shoulders. “That's why you've got to come forward, sit near me. Nobody's going to be killed in rows ten through twenty. There'll be injuries, a few of them serious, but nobody's going to die in that section, and a lot of them are going to walk out of it unhurt. Now, for God's sake, come on.”

He reached for the door handle.

“Wait. You've got to tell the pilot.”

He shook his head. “It wouldn't help.”

“But maybe there's something he can do, stop it from happening.”

“He wouldn't believe me, and even if he did … I don't know what to tell him. We're going down, yeah, but I don't know why. Maybe a mid-air collision, maybe structural failure, maybe there's a bomb aboard — it could be anything.”

“But you're a psychic, you must be able to see more details if you try.”

“If you believe I'm a psychic, you know less about me than you think you do.”

“You've got to try.”

“Oh, lady, I'd try, I'd try like a sonofbitch if it would do any good. But it won't.”

Terror and curiosity fought for control of her face. “If you're not a psychic — what are you?”

“A tool.”

“Tool?”

“Someone or something uses me.”

The DC-10 shuddered again. They froze, but the aircraft did not take a sudden plunge. It went on as before, its three big engines droning. Just more turbulence.

She grabbed his arm. “You can't let all those people die!”

A rope of guilt constricted his chest and knotted his stomach at the implication that the deaths of the others aboard would somehow be his fault.

He said, “I'm here to save the woman and the girl, no one else.”

“That's horrible.”

Opening the lavatory door, he said, “I don't like it any more than you do, but that's the way it is.”

She did not let go of his arm but jerked at it angrily. Her green eyes were haunted, probably with her own visions of battered bodies strewn across the earth among smoking chunks of wreckage. She repeated herself, whispering fiercely this time: “You can't let all those people die.”

Impatiently, he said, “Either come with me, or die with the rest of them.”

He stepped out of the lavatory, and she followed him, but he did not know whether she was going to accompany him back to his section. He hoped to God she would. He really could not be held responsible for all the other people who would perish, because they would have died even if he had not come aboard; that was their fate, and he had not been sent to alter their destinies. He could not save the whole world, and he had to rely on the wisdom of whatever higher power was guiding him. But he most definitely would be responsible for Holly Thorne's death, because she would never have taken the flight if, unwittingly, he had not led her onto it.

As he moved forward along the port aisle, he glanced to his left at the portholes and clear blue sky beyond. He had a too vivid sense of the yawning void under his feet, and his stomach flopped.

When he reached his seat in row sixteen, he dared to look back. Relief flooded through him at the sight of Holly trailing close.

He pointed to a pair of empty seats immediately behind his and Christine's.

Holly shook her head. “Only if you'll sit down with me. We have to talk.”

He glanced down at Christine, then at Holly. He was acutely aware of time slipping away like water swirling down a drain. The awful moment of impact was drawing closer. He wanted to pick the reporter up, stuff her into the seat, engage her seatbelt, and lock her in place. But seat-belts didn't have locks.

Unable to conceal his extreme frustration, he spoke to her through gritted teeth. “My place is with them,” he said, meaning with Christine and Casey Dubrovek.

He had spoken quietly, as had Holly, but other passengers were beginning to look at them.

Christine frowned up at him, craned her neck to look back at Holly, and said, “Is something wrong, Steve?”

“No. Everything's fine,” he lied.

He glanced at the portholes again. Blue sky. Vast. Empty. How many miles to the earth below?

“You don't look well,” Christine said.

He realized that his face was still sheathed in a greasy film of sweat. “Just a little warm. Uh, look, I ran into an old friend. Gimme five minutes?”

Christine smiled. “Sure, sure. I'm still going over a mental list of the most-eligible.”

For a moment he had no idea what the hell she was talking about. Then he remembered that he had asked her to play matchmaker for him. “Good,” he said. “Great. I'll be right back, we'll talk.”