My thanks to master aircraft mechanics Dan and Brian Torrey for their insights on all things mechanical, and to editors Barbara Baker, Barb Hallett, and Joslyn Pine for their expertise. Thanks also to esteemed writer and friend Sara J. Henry for helping keep my prose honest. To cover designer Lon Kirschner, website guru Kevin Pacotti, my agent extraordinaire Jill Marr, and publishers Judith and Martin Shepard, I am deeply indebted, as I am to the many family members and good friends who have opened their hearts, doors, and, not infrequently, wallets, in my pursuit of the writer’s life. My gratitude also to those anonymous intelligence professionals, true heroes all, who each day help keep us safe without expectation of reward. You know who you are.

The dead man wanted Lobster Thermidor and a good bottle of Pinot Noir.

“Who does he think he is,” the warden said, “Wolfgang Puck?”

They compromised on a bacon cheeseburger, onion rings, and two cans of cold Pepsi from the roach coach parked out in the visitors’ lot, the aroma of sizzling grease wafting through the exercise yard like a tantalizing reminder of freedom itself. Thankful at having avoided a dust-up over last meal menus, the warden threw in what remained of a carrot cake left over from his executive assistant’s baby shower.

“The upside of capital punishment,” the dead man said as he licked cream cheese frosting from his fingertips. “No more worrying about bad cholesterol.”

Dinner concluded at 5:30 P.M. Last rites were performed half an hour later, courtesy of a junior priest from one of Terre Haute’s lesser parishes who’d volunteered for the task. The rest of the evening was spent writing farewell letters and playing five-card stud with the earnest young cleric, who would’ve lost his collar in smokes that night had the wagering been for keeps.

At 10:30 P.M., a nurse practitioner exuding all the warmth of a turnpike toll booth collector arrived from the prison infirmary with a syringe of diazepam. “To relax you,” she said.

The dead man refused the injection. Few people, he said, can ever know in advance the precise moment at which they will cease producing carbon dioxide. He had every intention of experiencing it with a clear head. Besides, he quipped, he was scared to death of needles. Nobody laughed.

The captain of the guards appeared at 11 P.M., flanked by two underlings garbed in riot gear and built like the junior college offensive linemen they’d once been. The dead man was made to stand. They manacled his ankles, strung a chain through the belt loops of his prison-issued khakis, then locked his wrists to his waist.

“We’re good to go,” one of the correctional officers said when they were finished.

“Easy for you to say,” the dead man said on legs turned suddenly to rubber.

With chains jangling and the priest reciting the Lord’s Prayer in his wake, he shuffled through the otherwise tomb-silent penitentiary, officers steadying him, to a small, nondescript building outside the cellblocks. The death house.

“You can dispense with the holy roller nonsense, father,” the dead man said. “I stopped believing a long time ago.”

“It’s OK, my son. We’re all God’s children.”

“Yeah? Tell it to the FBI. They think I’m Ted Bundy.”

The execution chamber was hospital antiseptic, its walls tiled in a soothing asparagus green. Guards hoisted him onto a futuristic gurney padded black and bolted to the floor in the center of the room. They unhooked his wrists, then strapped him down with five Velcro restraints, lashing his arms, palms up, to two perpendicular extensions, like a horizontal Christ on the cross.

The nurse practitioner reappeared wearing latex gloves. The dead man watched with strained bemusement as she tied off his forearms with surgical tubing, found two good veins, and expertly slid a needle into each wrist.

“No alcohol wipe? What if I get an infection?”

“The least of your problems right now,” the nurse practitioner said, taping down the catheters through which the chemical cocktail would soon flow, stopping his heart.

The dead man tried to smile but couldn’t. Gone, finally, was the false bravado. He would take his last breath one minute after midnight, on May 28—Amnesty International Day, it said on the wall calendar they’d allowed him to keep in his cell. The irony of it, dying by the government’s hand on a day honoring human rights. Tears sluiced down his cheeks.

The witnesses were ushered into two rooms flanking the execution chamber. They would watch him die through bulletproof glass — his defense attorney, eight federal agents, five pool journalists, and the three-member U.S. Justice Department team that had prosecuted him. Family members of his former girlfriend, a lithe, brilliant Annapolis graduate he’d been convicted of butchering nearly a decade earlier, would look on via a closed-circuit video feed from more than 2,000 miles away, in San Diego, not far from the beach where her body had been found.

The warden, a one-time rodeo rider, entered as if on cue at 11:55 P.M. Those who worked for him said his weathered features resembled a used sheet of sandpaper, though never to his face. From the breast pocket of his suit he removed an index card, cleared his throat, and read aloud in a keening tenor.

“Dorian Nathan Munz, you’ve been found guilty of the crime of capital murder and condemned to death by order of the court. Is there anything you wish to say before your sentence is carried out?”

The dead man slowly gazed up at the video camera aimed down at him from the ceiling.

“Funny,” he said in a voice tremulous with rising fear, “you should ask.”

A pilot was in trouble. For once, it wasn’t me.

He’d radioed approach control that his vacuum pump had quit, rendering his directional and attitude indicators useless. He was also running precariously low on fuel. Probably no more than ten minutes of flying time left.

None of that would’ve mattered much had Rancho Bonita been enjoying its usual postcard-perfect weather. You don’t need many gauges or even a working engine to land an airplane safely when the skies are crystalline and you can see the runway from miles out. You simply glide in. But this was June, and June on California’s central coast means fog, along with 300-foot cloud ceilings that can hang around for weeks like your couch-surfing, unemployed brother-in-law.

The airport was socked in.

“Mooney Seven Seven Delta, do you wish to declare an emergency at this time?” the controller asked over the radio like it was just another day at the office.

“Affirmative,” the pilot responded calmly in a slow Georgia drawl.

My eyes no longer tested 20/10 like they did when I was on active duty, but the old peepers were still plenty good enough to spot his airplane from afar. He was at one o’clock high and about three miles off the nose of the Ruptured Duck, my scruffy Cessna 172—a dark speck that stood out against the unbroken batting of soft white stratus like the mole on Marilyn Monroe’s cheek. The carpet of clouds stretched horizon to horizon beneath our two small ships. To survive his predicament, the Mooney pilot would have to descend through that half-mile-thick overcast — no easy task without fully functional flight instruments. Even the most skilled airman can become disoriented when his eyes are deprived of the ability to distinguish heaven from earth, up from down. A touch of vertigo and pretty soon they’re digging your charred carcass out of the abstract sculpture that used to be an airframe.