“Welcome aboard, then,” said the attendant.
Jessica walked the makeshift passageway between the terminal and the Concorde, and there the flight attendant smiled warmly and showed her into the cockpit. She found the cockpit of the largest passenger plane in the air dazzling and mesmerizing. Her interest in airplanes and flight took center stage as she shook hands with the captain and his female copilot, both of whom remarked on her having helped out the Crown. “So you must expect to be treated here as royalty,” Captain Carlisle warned, and there were laughs all around.
The takeoff, and her vantage point, seeing it from over the shoulder of the captain, proved one of the most exciting moments of Jessica's life. However, still weak from her hospital convalescence, she knew she would soon be at peaceful rest.
Some hours later on the flight, Jessica awoke from dozing in the cockpit. Her eyes went direcdy to the stars and the empty darkness that filled the Concorde's windshield. A physical pain like a hot poker, at once took her breath away and attacked her heart, making Jessica gulp, leaving her trembling at all she had been through, at the depth of horror and evil she had seen in London. It brought up a heartache and forlorn desolation like none she'd ever known, and the strength of this monster emotion's grip held her heart in icy fingers. She knew the meaning of this; underlying her nightmare reaction to all that Luc Sante had done, she sensed the truth of her own inner demon. She felt a sense of overwhelming aloneness, coupled with waste and solitude, coming full upon her in the form of never feeling herself in Richard Sharpe's arms ever again. Never being in his embrace again. She feared something would keep them apart, that something would end or poison their love, that she would lose him as she had every man in her life: her father, Asa Holcraft, Otto Boutine, Alan Rychman, James Parry…
The plane sped forward through the blackness of empty sky that revealed only an eerie void-nothing out there… yet everything out there… and it all awaited Jessica Coran's return to America, to Quantico, Virginia-to home.
