Like off a vial.”

I felt the whole thing turn over and lock into a single picture — the computer made to lie, the poisoned coffee, the vanished thermos, and now a company executive clawing at the flight-deck door in the middle of the emergency, wanting in.

I had spent a career learning to see a shape in scattered facts.

This shape I knew.

In the air you don’t get to solve a puzzle at your leisure; you get to name the threat fast enough to act on it, or you don’t get to act at all.

So I named it.