He was quiet for a moment, thinking. "Stabilizer trim actuator fault, or, less commonly, a pitch computer input error." He looked at the overhead panel. "Or something physical. Something that's been introduced into the system." He said the last part carefully; they both knew what he meant.
She thought about the man in the middle seat, the rear panel, the 60 seconds. "Check the pitch trim circuit breakers," she said. "All of them. Tell me if anything looks pulled or modified."
He started checking. She held the aircraft level and thought about what she knew, and what she was starting to understand about why this plane was the one that had been chosen, and why this flight specifically, and what it had to do with a man in Denver who'd wanted to meet the daughter of Marcus Washington.
"Two circuit breakers," Warren said quietly. "Pitch trim monitoring circuit. Both pulled."
She absorbed that. "Someone knew exactly what they were pulling," she said.
"Yes," Warren said.
She looked at the attitude indicator: 16,000 feet, stable, heading west-southwest toward a runway she hadn't seen yet and couldn't visualize beyond what the charts and her memory told her. 140 people behind her, two pilots who couldn't help her, an engineer who was doing everything he could from the wrong seat, and somewhere in the back of the aircraft, a man who had done this on purpose and was now sitting quietly in his seat waiting to see what happened.
"This plane isn't just failing," she said—not loudly, not dramatically, just clearly, the way you state a thing when you want the record to be accurate. "Someone did this."
Warren looked at her.
She keyed the mic: "Reeves, 7702. Ready for those vectors. Let's get this done."
Controller Reeves had been working air traffic for 19 years, and in that time he had handled two declared emergencies, one midair communication failure, and one aircraft that had come in with a landing gear malfunction that had kept him awake for three nights afterward. He had never, in 19 years, had a conversation like this one.
He kept his voice even; that was the job. "7702, turning you left heading 240. Caldwell Regional is at your 11:00, 81 miles. Winds at destination are 180 at 12, slight gusts reported. Emergency services are being staged. Over."
"Copy 240."
The girl's voice on the radio was the strangest thing he'd encountered in a career full of strange things. Not because it was young, but because of what it wasn't: it wasn't shaking; it wasn't performing calm the way untrained people did when they were trying to sound calm and failing. It was just steady—the kind of steady that came from somewhere genuine.