I looked up, my eyes darting across the aisle.
Henderson was no longer reading his newspaper. He was holding a sleek, black metallic device, about the size of a smartphone, with a small, glowing blue LED light flashing on the top. He was staring directly at me, a cold, mocking smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
He was wirelessly intercepting and copying the data from my tablet using a localized, military-grade signal wrapper.
I quickly yanked the flash drive out of the tablet, but the red icon on the screen remained, the progress bar showing eighty percent complete. The signal wrapper was already draining the cached files from the tablet's temporary memory.
I had to stop the transmission. I stood up, intending to walk toward the galley to find Marcus or a flight attendant, but as I did, my hand brushed against the pocket of my trench coat hanging in the wardrobe.
My fingers felt something small, hard, and unfamiliar pressed into the lining of the coat.
With a sinking heart, I reached into the coat pocket and pulled out a small, black plastic disc, no larger than a quarter. A tiny, red light was blinking slowly on its surface.
It was a localized tracking and signal-boosting beacon.
It hadn't been there when I left my house.
I realized with a jolt of horror when it had been planted. When Chloe, the ground agent, had grabbed my boarding pass, she had leaned over the counter, brushing her hand against my coat wardrobe bag which was draped over my arm.
She hadn't just been trying to humiliate me. She had been placing the beacon that allowed Henderson’s device to bypass my tablet's security protocols.
Suddenly, the cabin lights flickered and died, plunging the first-class compartment into a dim, eerie twilight.
The low, comforting hum of the engines suddenly changed pitch, dropping into a high-pitched, screaming whine.
The nose of the aircraft pitched violently downward, throwing me back into my seat as the plane entered a steep, terrifying dive.
The yellow oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling with a loud, clattering snap, dangling like plastic ghosts in the darkened cabin as the emergency alarms began to wail.
The violent, sickening sensation of weightlessness pressed my stomach into my throat as the aircraft plunged through the sky.
In the main cabin behind the first-class curtain, a chorus of terrified screams erupted, a chaotic wall of sound that was instantly swallowed by the roaring wind and the screaming of the over-speed warning alarms.
"Decompression! Put on your masks!" Sarah, the flight attendant, screamed from her jumpseat, her face white with terror as she struggled to pull her own oxygen mask over her face.
But my forty years of flight experience overrode my fear. I didn't reach for my mask.
I looked at the cabin altitude indicator on the bulkhead. It wasn't dropping. The cabin wasn't depressurizing. The oxygen masks had been deployed manually, a systemic override trick designed to create mass panic and force the passengers to remain strapped into their seats, unable to move.
This wasn't an accident. It was a controlled, simulated emergency.