By Order of the President (Presidential Agent 1)

MacIlhenny nodded again as well as he could and said, “Yes, sir.”

The man said something in a foreign language that MacIlhenny did not understand. The hand grasping his hair opened and he could hold his head erect.

“You may lower your hands,” the man said, and then, conversationally, added: “You seemed to be taking a long time in your preflight walk-around. What was that all about?”

MacIlhenny, despite the heat, felt a sudden chill and realized that he had been sweating profusely.

Why not? With an Uzi pointing at your stomach and a knife against your throat, what did you expect?

His mouth was dry, and he had to gather saliva and wet his lips before he tried to speak.

“I came here to make a test flight,” MacIlhenny began. “This aircraft has not flown in over a year. I made what I call the ’MacIlhenny Final Test’ . . .”

“Is that not the business of mechanics?”

“I am a mechanic.”

“You are a mechanic?” the man asked, dubiously.

“Yes, sir. I hold both air frame and engine licenses. I supervised getting this aircraft ready to fly, signed off on the repairs, and I was making the MacIlhenny Test . . .”

“What test is that?”

“It’s not required; it’s just something I do. The airplane has been sitting here for more than twenty-four hours, with a full load of fuel . . . at takeoff weight, you’ll understand. I take a final look around. If anything was leaking, I would have seen it, found out where it was coming from, and fixed it before I tried to fly it.”

The man with the Uzi considered that and nodded.

“It is unusual for a captain to also be a mechanic, is it not?”

“Yes, sir, I suppose it is.”

“And did you find anything wrong on this final test?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“And what were you going to do next if your final test found nothing wrong?”

“I’ve arranged for a copilot, sir. As soon as he got here, I was going to run up the engines a final time and then make a test flight.”

“Your copilot is here,” the man said. “You may look into the passenger compartment.”

MacIlhenny didn’t move.

“Look into the fuselage, Captain,” the man with the Uzi said, sternly, and something hard was rammed into the small of MacIlhenny’s back.

He winced with the pain.

That wasn’t a knife and it certainly wasn’t a hand. Maybe the other guy’s got an Uzi, too. A gun, anyway.

MacIlhenny stepped past the bulkhead and looked into the passenger compartment.

All but the first three rows of seats had been removed from the passenger compartment. MacIlhenny had no idea when or why but when LA-9021 had left Philadelphia on a sixty-day, cash-up-front dry charter, it had been in a full all-economy -class passenger configuration—the way it had come from Continental Airlines—with seats for 189 people.

Lease-Aire had been told it was to be used to haul people on everything-included excursions from Scandinavia to the coast of Spain and Morocco.

MacIlhenny knew all this because he was Lease-Aire’s vice president for Maintenance and Flight Operations. The title sounded more grandiose—on purpose—than the size of the corporation really justified. Lease-Aire had only two other officers. The president and chief executive officer was MacIlhenny’s brother-in-law, Terry Halloran; and the secretary-treasurer was Mary-Elizabeth MacIlhenny Halloran, Terry’s wife and MacIlhenny’s sister.

Lease-Aire was in the used aircraft business, dealing in aircraft the major airlines wanted to get rid of for any number of reasons, most often because they were near the end of their operational life. LA-9021, for example, had hauled passengers for Continental for twenty-two years.