Forged in Fire by Trish McCallan

a look at the passengers waiting to board.”
    “And you didn’t check any baggage.” Zane sounded grimmer by the moment.
    Alarm skittered down Beth’s spine. “Well, no, even if a seat became available I wasn’t going to take it. I was going to cancel the listing.”
    “Did you at least tell someone else about this dream and what you were planning to do?”
    “Uh… no.” At the sharp curse that echoed through the room, Beth flinched and stumbled into more explanations. “The whole thing seemed so crazy… and I didn’t want anyone at work to think that I was… well… crazy.”
    “Great. Just. Fucking. Great.” Zane swung around, frustration stamped across his face.
    “You’re buying trouble,” Simcosky told him calmly. “We don’t know whether weapons are stashed on that plane.”
    “The hell we don’t.” Zane squared off against his buddy, every muscle in his body radiating aggression. “You know what I—” He broke off, glanced at Beth and shook his head. “She repeated—word for word—that entire exchange in the terminal. An exchange that took place an hour before she arrived. If she’d been listening in from somewhere, I would have known. I would have sensed her.”
    Rawlings nodded in solemn agreement. “His spontaneous erection would have given her away.”
    He spoke with such sincerity it took a moment for his words to register. When they did, Beth’s face flared like a stovetop.
    Zane sent his mouthy friend a glare, but Simcosky ignored the comment.
    Without even glancing in the blond jokester’s direction, Simcosky focused on Beth’s face. “You have these dreams often? The kind that come true?”
    Beth shook her head and wished she could fan some of the heat from her face. “Never. I’m not psychic.”
    “True.” There was an undercurrent of dryness in Simcosky’s tone. “Psychic visions aren’t nearly so detailed.” He paused a moment and raised his eyebrows, his gaze steady on Zane’s face. “Or helpful.”
    Beth frowned, watching another round of silent messages shoot back and forth.
    Zane swung back to her. “What made you question this dream? Most people would shrug it off the next morning.”
    “The dream didn’t start in the terminal. It started with me driving to work… only I couldn’t take my normal route because of a fire in an abandoned warehouse. And then when I got to work, I got this call from a friend—”
    Zane instantly picked up on what she hadn’t said. “The fire happened, so did the call from your friend. That’s what sent you to the terminal to check out the passengers.”
    Beth nodded and coughed to clear her throat. “After Shelby called, I started wondering about the plane. It kept niggling at me, so I asked for a vacation day and listed myself on standby. But I never expected to recognize anyone.”
    With quick strides, Zane paced back to her side. “We must have come as a shock.”
    “You have no idea.”
    Zane grinned, but it quickly faded. For a long moment he stared into space. “How many hijackers are we talking about?”
    “There were six. Two sets of three. They were seated across the aisle from each other, in the middle of the plane.”
    There was a pregnant pause. Rawlings broke it. “If the guns were already on board, there has to be an inside man,” he said, his face devoid of the lazy humor Beth associated with him.
    “No shit.” Zane scowled into the corner of the supply closet.
    “Odds are it’s someone from PacAtlantic,” Rawlings pressed.
    Zane growled and pivoted to face Beth. “Who would have access to the plane between flights?”
    “Well, of course the bag smashers have access.” When Zane grinned, Beth realized what she’d said and flushed. The company didn’t appreciate that particular nickname.
    She held up a hand and started ticking off the possibilities as they occurred to her. “The cleaners, caterers, gate agents, mechanics, fuelers, the flight crew…. She fell silent as a final department