The captain stopped beside 36B, came to full attention, and saluted me while my father was still laughing in first class.-

The captain told Brent to return to his seat. Brent started talking about a misunderstanding, a contract, a mistake, all the usual words people reach for when they’re trying to get ahead of the truth.

Naomi cut in and said he had spilled coffee on me on purpose and had been guarding that laptop ever since.

That changed the air around us.

The captain took one look at me, one look at the computer, and told Naomi to hold the aisle. Then he motioned me forward.

I carried the laptop into the cockpit with coffee still drying cold against my shirt.

The door shut behind us.

I opened the machine on the jumpseat and went straight to the mail client. My hands were steady. My stomach wasn’t.

The answer was there in less than ten seconds.

The file had not been sent.

The draft email was still sitting in the outbox with a failed transfer notice time-stamped right when the plane dropped and the connection broke. That was the first full breath I’d taken in five minutes.

It lasted maybe two seconds.

Because right below the failed send, I found the sync log.

Three upload attempts. One blocked transfer. And an external storage device mounted fifteen minutes before Brent spilled coffee on me.

So no, he hadn’t emailed the file.

But he had almost certainly copied it.

The captain asked the only question that mattered.

Did the threat end with the laptop?

I told him no.

If Brent had cloned the file to a drive, then the machine was only half the problem. The other half was still somewhere in the cabin, or on Brent, or in the hands of someone waiting at the other end of our route.

The captain nodded once and reached for the interphone.