She was sixty, perhaps sixty-two, dressed in an immaculate, double-breasted navy cashmere pantsuit tailored with the architectural precision of Savile Row.
Her fingers clamped around my right forearm.
Not a weak, pleading grasp.
An iron, mechanical vise that dug through my suit sleeve, the gold ring biting straight into the bone of my ulna with enough linear force to leave purple hematomas beneath my skin.
She pulled my face down until her lips were half an inch from my ear.
Her breath smelled of pure metallic ozone and sublingual nitroglycerin:
*”The manifest…”* she rasped.
The word was paper-thin.
A dry husk dragged over broken flint:
*”…the manifest in the console… Sebastian… don’t let… don’t let Carter touch the seal…”*
Then her pupils dilated until the gray of her irises vanished completely into black.
Her head snapped backward against my knee.
Her heart stopped.
***
CHAPTER 2: THE SIX MINUTES ON ROUTE SIX
