Falling: A Novel

As the politician approaches the Hoffman house, he pauses to take a phone call. Theo worries that approaching him will cause a scene that will attract attention from inside. Theo moves into the man’s periphery and begins waving his arms. The politician knocks on the door. When he gets no answer, he begins to push a flyer through the mail slot in the door. Theo gets the politician’s attention and flashes his badge. The man pulls away from the mail slot just as an explosion tosses Theo into the side of the neighbor’s house.

Jo grabs a fire extinguisher and gloves, then rushes to the bathroom. She goes through the protocol of checking for heat before opening the door. When she does open the door, she discovers nothing. Big Daddy comes up behind her and tells her he set it off with dry shampoo in order to save her from the angry passengers.

Jo, Big Daddy, and Kellie discuss their next move. They understand that the passengers need to know the truth but decide they don’t need to know everything. The passengers don’t need to know the target is Washington, DC or that the oxygen masks only supply 12 minutes of oxygen. However, they aren’t sure how to make this announcement without using the PA. Jo worries that telling them row by row will only lead to more panic. Kellie makes a suggestion.

Theo is treated for a dislocated shoulder. Liu tells Theo to go home, but when another agent shows them the viral picture from Rick, she agrees to let Theo stay so that he can communicate with his aunt. Liu expresses concern that if Bill learns his family is dead, it will affect his mental health. Liu tells her agents to tell the gathering media that the explosion was caused by a gas leak. A fireman approaches and tells Liu the fire is under control and should be out soon. Liu asks when they can recover the bodies, but the fireman says that other than the politician, there are no bodies to recover.

Bill receives several texts from his neighbors and learns about the fire in his home. Bill assumes his family is dead, but within minutes is contacted over FaceTime. Sam tells Bill that he suspected Bill had told someone, so he moved the family out of the house. Sam shows Bill a news clip about the fire. Carrie begins to cry. Sam says it is time to go to Plan B. A moment later, Ben cocks a gun and points it at Bill.

Liu puts out a city-wide alert to search for Carrie’s car. She sends Theo to speak to the press. Theo tells the press that the explosion was caused by an isolated gas leak. One reporter, Vanessa Perez, gives Theo her card as she openly questions the gas leak story. As Theo walks back to the vehicle where Liu is, he recalls his mother leaving his father in the middle of the night when he was six and moving in with Aunt Jo, then moving into the house a few doors down. He remembers how Jo and her husband, Mike, offered Theo a sense of family while also treating him like a peer. An agent stops Theo and tells him Carrie’s car has been located. Theo rushes to tell Liu only to hear her express the need to begin thinking about secondary protocol: shooting the plane down before it can crash into a highly populated area.

Ben remembers when he was a child living in his Kurdistan village. The villagers gathered in a small café to watch the film Top Gun. Although they couldn’t understand the language, Ben and his friend, Sam, enjoyed the beauty of the setting and the airplane. Sam and Ben began forming a plan to move to the United States and become pilots.

Ben comments on the fact that air traffic control must be aware of the situation on their flight since the FBI likely informed them. On the FaceTime call, Carrie asks Sam how he knows Ben. Sam says they are close friends, like brothers. Ben expresses outrage that this country they adopted as their own allowed atrocities to happen in their home country, due in part to apathy on behalf of the citizens. As Ben and Sam talk, Bill hears clicks on his earphones that he realizes are coming from the secondary radio frequency, a fact that tells him someone has heard his cry for help.

As they prepare to send out their message, Jo and Big Daddy remember their training in terrorism and how it changed after September 11, 2001. Jo sends a text to Theo.

Theo is traveling with Liu to the location of Carrie’s car. Theo receives the text from Jo and tells Liu to pull up the news on her tablet. They watch as the news reporter says that they are about to have a live broadcast from the plane. Jo, using Kellie’s phone, speaks directly to the passengers. She tells them about Bill’s kidnapped family and the kidnapper’s insistence that Bill throw the gas canister before crashing the plane. She insists that the passengers can trust that Bill will not crash the plane. She explains why she and the other flight attendants dropped the oxygen masks and asks the passengers to cooperate with her, Big Daddy, and Kellie in keeping everyone safe.

Carrie sees that Sam is overheated in his shirt and explosive vest, so she helps him roll up his sleeves. As she does, she comments that her father had alcoholism and died when he drove his car into a tree. Sam asks her if her father was religious, and this causes her to remember finding a note her father had written in her childhood Bible. She showed the note to Bill and they summarized its meaning as “everyone dies” (137). Carrie tells Sam the last time she saw her father alive he came into the kitchen as she discussed choosing a major at school with her mother. Her father told her it didn’t matter what she chose as long as she lived. Sam expresses an understanding of what her father meant.