"It's been inspected by TSA by hand. It cannot go through an X-ray. There's a sticker on the side."
"So it has not been screened."
"It has been inspected," Laverne Grier said, in a voice that had made a great many sophomores sit down, "by hand. Captain."
Billie watched Gunnar's jaw. He had big Scandinavian jaws, broad and pale, and when he was tired a muscle in the hinge of the left one jumped. It jumped now. She saw him glance at his watch. She saw him look down the aisle toward the rows in the back, a hundred and forty-four people, a full airplane, a hold coming, and she saw him make the same arithmetic she had seen him make once before, the arithmetic that said one passenger is one problem and one problem is easier to set on the jet bridge than to solve.
"Ma'am," he said, "I'm going to ask you to bring your things and step off the aircraft with the agent for a few minutes while we sort out the seat assignment, and have security take a look at that container. If everything's in order, we'll get you right back on."
The cabin around them had gone quiet in the particular way an airplane cabin goes quiet, which is not silence. It was the sound of thirty people in the first rows of economy pretending to read their phones. A man in 4D had taken out an earbud. The young mother in 3A had put her hand on her baby's back.
"Captain," Laverne said, "I can't do that."
"I'm not asking."
"I understand that. I'm telling you that if I step off this airplane with this, it may not get back on it, and if it doesn't get back on it, somebody in Baltimore is going to die." She said it without raising her voice at all, the way you would read a dosage off a bottle. "I'd be happy to show you the letter. In the galley."
"Then I'll have to ask you to deplane," Gunnar said.