The girl on the plane next to Henry Makepeace smelled like cantaloupes. She was short enough that her feet didn’t touch the nauseatingly patterned carpeting beneath their seats, and she was swinging her left leg impatiently while the stewardesses, or cabin staff, or whatever you call them these days, were roaming up and down the aisles, tucking bags into overhead compartments and telling people to put their trays up. Henry Makepeace had his laptop tucked neatly under the seat in front of him, with the folder of documentation on the plane he was going to examine in the pocket in front of him, wedged in front of the airsickness bag, the tattered safety instructions card, and an abandoned fashion magazine with some vapid star on the cover, tousled hair and sultry eyes.

Henry Makepeace was annoyed.

He had a habit of arriving at airports early, and he had intended to do just that, taking the train so as not to inconvenience Gregory’s wife, as the airport was rather distant from the hospital and her lodgings. He had a carefully arranged schedule all worked out, which involved taking the 7:09 train, or the 7:24. Either way, he would be there in plenty of time to check in and go through security, with his laptop and light overnight bag.

He arrived at the station at 7:00, after eating Indian food with Gregory’s wife, and with a faint hint of indigestion rippling through his stomach, Henry started thinking about the events of the last week, and wondering what would come of them. Officer Carlisle, he suspected, was doing a bit of investigation on the side, FBI be damned, and the policeman seemed to suspect that the arson at Giuseppe’s and the disappearance (and subsequent reappearance) of George McInroe might be linked. Where Brad Whittaker was, nobody knew.

The 7:09 didn’t come, though, and the commuters on the platform got restless, shuffling their feet and sighing deeply as the platform grew steadily more packed, gradually filling with strange smells and a cacophony of sound, interrupted occasionally by unintelligible announcements from the speakers overhead. Trains seemed to come from the other direction every few minutes, causing even more expressions of irritation from commuters as they craned their necks hopefully, hearing the distant screech and thunder, only to realize that it was coming from the train pulling up to the other side of the platform.

At 7:20, Henry Makepeace began to fret, on a low level, and by 7:30, he was beginning to be extremely irritated, so he cornered a harried looking policeman and asked him where the train was, but the policeman didn’t know, and the speakers crackled and gargled overhead, but nothing came out. And then, as seems to happen in large masses of people, a rumor spread, slowly at first and then flashing like wildfire across the platform. There was a fire, maybe, a station down, or perhaps someone had fallen in front of a train, and suddenly there was a stampede for the exits.

Henry was not familiar with this city, The City, as the people in his town called it, and when he was disgorged into the surface streets among a mass of teeming humanity, he was deeply confused. There were buses, he knew, and some other train, perhaps, but he didn’t know where it went, or where the station was, and he ended up flagging an electric green cab and asking for the airport, only the cabbie didn’t know which airport, so first they went over the wrong bridge, and once that was straightened out with a rapid turnaround in some desperately rundown looking industrial neighborhood, Henry Makepeace despaired of ever making his flight.

Fortunately for Henry, traffic was light that evening, no shootings or accidents or roadwork, and he arrived at the airport at the time passengers are usually expected to arrive for 11:00 flights. He rushed through the self check-in kiosk, and muttered in despair because his preferred bulkhead or exit seats were all taken, so he would be forced to sit in a regular seat, hemmed in on all sides by seats which were altogether too tightly packed rather than being able to stretch out, and then he cooled his heels in the security line, and then, inexplicably, he was pulled aside.

He could see several uniformed officials conferencing over the chipped plastic tub with his laptop in it, but he couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, and the man who pulled him aside told him they would “get his things,” so Henry Makepeace stood, barefoot and humiliated, while passengers streamed around him, some looking back curiously at the portly man with the woeful expression and the wrinkled suit, stained with Henry’s nervous and frustrated sweat, and then an official picked up the wrong bag, and a thin, strident woman started shrilling about search and seizure, and finally Henry Makepeace and his two bags and his shoes and a little plastic tray full of his watch, wallet, phone, and keys were sitting at a table in a room off some shadowy hallway, and he was clinging limply to his ticket.

There were, it emerged, two separate problems.

The first was that something in his laptop had looked suspicious, so the airport personnel had swabbed it, and it was positive for some sort of residue, fertilizer, maybe, and Henry tried to say that his gardener had borrowed the laptop for a few days, and maybe it was that, but the officials weren’t looking at him, and they were discussing what should be done, and then the second problem emerged.

And that problem was that Henry Makepeace had a folder stuffed with plans for an airplane, along with a sheaf of images of a flame-gutted airplane, and a stack of documents about propellants and accelerants and vectors and other complicated things. And while Henry Makepeace could see how such a thing might be misunderstood, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise to explain, and he began to realize that he might, in fact, be in serious trouble, and he asked if perhaps he could call his employer, and then they took his phone away.

After that, Henry Makepeace was left alone, for a time, while his bags went somewhere else, and so did his shoes, and presently a policeman appeared, a real policeman, not one of the nebulous uniformed people who manned the security gate, and the policeman asked a lot of questions, which Henry tried to answer. At one point, he snapped irritably that if he was planning to bomb the plane, surely he didn’t need to take the plans for the bomb with him, since presumably a bomber would have his plan together by the time he arrived at the airport, but this didn’t seem to impress the policeman. He told them to call Halcyon, to call his boss, to look through the files on the laptop, whatever it took, and he tried to tell them that it was crucial that he get on the 11:00 flight, someone was meeting him on the other side, and he was very tired, and then the policeman went away again.

There was no clock in the room, and Henry’s watch was gone, along with the rest of his possessions, so he stared blankly at the table and wondered if the airline would re-seat him because he had been mistakenly held captive by airport security, but he doubted it. Henry Makepeace was also hungry, and longing for the extra pakoras he had packed away in the front pocket of his laptop bag, and he wanted his shoes, very passionately.

Have you ever been in one of the bland, windowless rooms along the dull, nameless corridors of an airport? If you have, you probably know how Henry Makepeace felt, and you can understand why he was so glad when four people burst through the door, three security people and someone in a uniform from the airline, all of them extremely apologetic.

It transpired that because Henry flew on that airline rather a lot, and always took the same flight when he did, the staff grew concerned when he checked in at the counter and failed to show up at the gate. And one of them had the presence of mind to assume that he had been caught by security, so she went to the security office to find out, and after some hemming and hawing, the security people admitted that they did indeed have Henry, and she radioed the gate and told them to hold the plane, and she plunged into the fray to rescue Henry, along with his luggage, which is how Henry found himself running down that bland, nameless corridor barefooted and trailed by three contrite security officers holding his luggage, shoes, and the little plastic tray, with the airline employee keeping pace with them and talking rapidly into her walkie.

Have you ever been the last person to walk onto a plane? And had all the passengers staring at you, wondering if you are the reason the plane was held? If you have, you know how Henry Makepeace felt, slinking barefoot down the aisle trailed by the three security officials with his luggage. And when he reached his row, of course, the girl was sitting in his seat, clearly under the impression that today was her lucky day, and she would have three seats to herself, and the girl glared at him, and a stewardess glared at him, and while the security agent stowed his overnight bag in the luggage compartment, all of the compartments on the other side popped open, raining luggage on the passengers below, and the other two security officials wordlessly thrust his laptop, shoes, and plastic tray of tawdry personal effects on him before fleeing the plane.

Henry, being courteous, asked if the girl wanted the window or the aisle, and she shrugged indifferently but kept standing in the aisle, as though she expected Henry to take the window. He was also an orderly sort, so stacked his belongings on the empty seat between him and the girl and set about organizing them, replacing his watch, keys, and wallet where they belonged and then stowing the laptop under the seat, after pulling out the folder and wedging it into the seat pocket, and tucking his shoes in on either side of the laptop bag. The pakoras, mysteriously, were gone.

He was left holding the plastic tray from security, and eventually he decided to stuff it into the seat pocket of the middle seat in front of him, while the cantaloupe-scented girl bobbed her head and tried to look as disinterested as possible, and finally the “fasten seatbelts” light clicked on, and the plane was rolling back from the gate, and the stewardesses were doing the safety presentation, which Henry ignored, and then the plane was pulling away from the tarmac and Henry was watching the lights of The City recede behind him.

It was then that he realized he’d failed to make arrangements to get a ride home upon his return.

And that he hadn’t gotten his phone back.