Contact by Susan Grant

be a pilot, too. But she had been hired by an airline and he wasn’t. Her home life went to hell after that. Craig stopped working and started drinking. God, sometimes he’d seemed more like a high-maintenance child than a husband. Her father and brother had never acted that way. Big hearts and quiet strength, that’s what they had, the kind of guys who were there when you needed them. Why she’d sought different characteristics in a husband, she’d never know. Youthful inexperience maybe; Craig’s emotional volatility and chattiness had been a novelty after the more reserved men of her household. It wasn’t until later that she realized the magnitude of her mistake.
    She’d tried to help him work through his jealousy, feelings of inadequacy and depression, but it was made painfully clear that she’d failed when his drinking culminated in a fatal head-on with a parked car. Roberta was only nine months old.
    It had taken a long time, but finally, after months of counseling and the unwavering support of her close-knit family,Jordan capitulated, accepting that she wasn’t to blame. Now this:
She
might die as a result of her job, leaving Roberta with no parents at all. What a nightmarish example of circularity.
    A soft tinkling sound broke into her glowering trance. Music. She lurched forward and squinted outside. The white radiance obliterating the wall had transformed into a sheet of light, undulating in a rainbow of colors. A melody played. Inexplicably beautiful. Eerily foreign. And hypnotic.
    She tensed. Were the music and lights designed to soothe? Were they purposefully mesmerizing to put her off guard? She noticed that when she averted her eyes from the colors, the effect was not as strong. She pushed away from the instrument panel. If the hijackers wanted to drug her, they were going to have to try a lot harder than this.
    Ben and Ann burst into the cockpit. “We’re all ready down below,” the purser announced. His gaze flew to where Jordan still stared. “When the hell did
that
start?”
    “Just now.” The music faded into a husky female voice enunciating words in a monotonous beat, as if she were counting numbers and not speaking.
    “It sounds like words picked at random.” Jordan cocked her head. “And in several different languages.”
    Ann said, “I speak Korean. She just said ‘best wishes.’ ”
    “I heard ‘olive tree’ in Spanish,” Ben said. “And also ‘blue.’ ”
    On and on the verbal presentation went, with no apparent pattern. “Earth” was repeated many times, but the monologue might as well have been gibberish, so unrelated were the string of words.
    Jordan sagged back in her seat. “How could they not know what language we speak? United Airlines is a flag carrier. The stars and stripes are painted on the fuselage. You can’t miss it.”
    The voice went silent. The music ended, too. Then two people walked onto a platform that she hadn’t noticed before in the shadows off the nose of the 747.
    So . . . these were the people who had taken them.
    The man and woman were fit and athletic. The man was tall, and he had medium brown hair, while the woman’s was so blond that it was almost pure white. Her skin was unusually fair, almost pink. Was she an albino? The woman stood too far away to reveal whether her eyes were red.
    “Behind them,” Jordan murmured. “There are more.”
    At least four burly men loomed in the shadows behind the couple. Bodyguards? Soldiers? They wore similar clothing to the first pair, which struck Jordan as uniforms. Crisp, blue-gray jumpsuits with thick black belts, from which hung various pieces of hardware, some with illuminated faces and other things with blinking lights. Communications equipment? Hi-tech computers?
    She could hear Ben’s breathing accelerate. “They’re armed,” he said. “All of them.”
    Jordan nodded grimly. “I don’t recognize all of what they’ve got on their belts, but it’s hard to disguise a gun in a