"We go out there together," Vance whispered, her posture tightening into that of a hunter stalking through brush. "We check the forward galley disposal. If the drive is gone, Lind already has it."

Chapter 12: Turbulence and Treachery

The descent through twenty-eight thousand feet was immediately greeted by the violent, unsettled air of a deep North Sea trough.

Without warning, the deck of the Boeing 777 dropped four feet beneath Elena’s heels, a sickening sensation of zero gravity that left her stomach suspended in her throat before slamming her down into the rubberized floor of the forward service galley. Plates rattled in their locked aluminum carts with a sharp, discordant metallic chatter.

Brody’s voice came over the interphone, taut and flat. "Cabin crew, take your jumpseats immediately. Severe turbulence expected through the lower flight levels."

Elena didn't sit. She caught herself on the corner of the dry-goods bulkhead, her sneakers providing traction against the non-slip galley flooring. Outside the small oval porthole in the L1 boarding door, the blackness had been replaced by a churning, violet fog. Sheets of rain, whipped to horizontal fury by ninety-knot crosswinds, screamed against the multi-layered stretched acrylic windows, shrieking like buckshot.

"Stay down," Vance murmured, bracing her shoulder against the forward lavatory partition. Her weapon was still concealed, but her hand remained inside the pocket of her tailored jacket, fingers wrapped around the textured grip.

Elena knelt by the stainless-steel trash receptacle built into the galley counter. She released the spring-loaded latch and pulled the bin outward on its heavy rollers.

The heavy plastic liner was torn open.

"It’s gone," Elena said, looking up, her face pale in the harsh galley fluorescents. "Richter wrapped the encrypted flash drive in a hot-towel napkin and pushed it through the waste flap when he went to the head. It’s not here. Someone came in while we were in the flight deck."

"The turbulence gave them their cover," Vance said, her eyes narrowing as she glanced toward the curtain that separated the galley from the Business Class cabin. "Everyone is strapped in, heads down, waiting for the drops to stop. It was the perfect window."

A violent jolt rocked the airframe horizontally—a Dutch roll maneuver induced by an aggressive wind shear layer at twenty-two thousand feet. The aircraft groaned, the composite overhead bins flexing within their engineered tolerances, emitting a chorus of plastic creaks that Elena had learned to interpret like the dialect of a living creature. Through the curtain, a child cried out in the middle cabin, followed by the hurried, hushed murmurs of anxious travelers.

Elena parted the curtain by an inch, shielding her silhouette behind the high partition wall.

The business cabin was illuminated only by the dim, mood-lit blue of the ceiling coves and the harsh, flickering squares of seat-back entertainment screens. Most passengers were reclined, blankets pulled to their chins, eyes shut tight against the violent bucking of the plane.

Seat 4B was empty.

"Lind isn't in his seat," Elena whispered, her heart hammering against her ribs.

"The lavatories?"

"All three forward lavatories show green—unoccupied," Elena noted, scanning the status indicators on the central cabin management panel near the galley jumpseat. "Wait. The floor display. The mid-galley service door."

Elena’s gaze fixed on a tiny illuminated amber LED on the crew interface terminal: DOOR 2L ATTENDANT ACCESS ACTIVE.

"He’s not trying to hide," Elena said, her analytical mind piecing together the layout of the aircraft she had walked for over a decade. "The satellite communications transceiver—the SATCOM datalink distribution block—is housed in the crown area above the ceiling panels at the Door 2 cross-aisle. There’s an emergency avionics access ladder hidden behind the crew rest compartment door."

"If he cuts our transponder and datalink, Brody loses contact with London Radar," Vance said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, icy register. "Heathrow won't know if we’re on an emergency approach or if we’ve suffered an onboard catastrophic failure. The ground units will be thrown into complete disarray, and in this soup, an aircraft without a beacon is a ghost."

A second figure suddenly emerged from the shadows of row seven, stepping into the aisle with a fluid, disciplined balance that defied the aircraft's erratic swaying.

It was not Lind. It was a younger man, dressed in the dark navy sweater of an off-duty courier, his face obscured by a low baseball cap. He moved with a heavy, purposeful gait toward the forward curtain, his right hand buried deep inside the pocket of an oilskin windbreaker.

"They have two," Elena breathed, pulling back from the curtain aperture. "One to climb into the ceiling space, one to secure the threshold."

"He’s coming here to ensure Richter is dead or extracted," Vance said. She took a slow, deep breath, her eyes flicking across the galley, assessing lines of sight, angles of ricochet, and the terrible vulnerability of a pressurized aluminum tube packed with three hundred innocent souls. "I cannot fire a weapon in this cabin, Elena. The exterior skins at this altitude are thin, but worse, the main hydraulic lines for the flight controls run right through the ceiling and floor chases of this forward vestibule. A single stray round could sever the rudder cable or punch through an oxygen manifold."