Hollins hadn't reacted. He'd accepted the presence of the flight attendant beside him with the particular non-reaction of someone who had anticipated exactly this and had already decided what it meant for his plan. His plan, as best he could tell, was still on track: the aircraft was supposed to be in an uncontrolled descent by now. The fact that it wasn't—the fact that the PA had carried a child's voice saying words like fuel crossfeed and trim fault—had introduced a variable he hadn't anticipated, and he was working through what that meant.
He looked calm. His hands were in his lap. He was watching the seatback.
But Danielle had moved to the row behind him after her address to the cabin, and she'd been watching him for six minutes. And what she saw was a man performing stillness rather than experiencing it. The difference was in the small things: the way his jaw worked occasionally without producing sound; the way his eyes didn't move the way eyes moved in genuine shock or fear; the way his hands were in his lap rather than gripping the armrest the way almost every other passenger was.
"Gerald," she said quietly. She leaned forward.
Gerald turned.
"He hasn't reacted to anything," she said. "Not the masks, not the announcement, nothing. He's not scared."
Gerald looked at Hollins, looked back at Danielle. "What do you want to do?"
"I want to know who he is."
Keely had his boarding pass information from the manifest: Derek Hollins, ticketed through a corporate account. Listed employer: a consulting firm with a name that meant nothing—Meridian Advisory Group. But the detail that snagged was the seat assignment: he'd been ticketed to a window seat in row eight; he'd asked the gate agent to change to the middle seat in row 24.
Row 24: right seat, left side. The rear equipment panel was at row 22, left side of the fuselage.
Danielle showed the seat change information to Gerald on the printed manifest copy Keely had pulled from the galley storage. Gerald looked at it for a moment.
"He moved himself to within two rows of the panel," Gerald said.
"And he had his bag on his lap for the first 40 minutes of the flight," Danielle said. "My niece noted that before the crisis started." She folded the manifest. "Someone needs to ask him some questions."
Gerald straightened. He was not a confrontational person by nature: 19 years of cabin service had trained him toward de-escalation, toward smoothing things over, toward keeping everyone comfortable. But the aircraft he was responsible for had been deliberately targeted: the pilots were unconscious, and a 12-year-old was keeping them alive from the right seat of the cockpit.