The thump of landing gear retracting and locking into place, and the noisy, steep rate of climb of the jet airliner frightened Jennifer MacPherson. As she read, and re-read an article in the in-flight magazine -which she would never remember- her mind was laughing at a pun that her fear of flying was groundless.

"After all," she reasoned, "I did grow up flying." The daughter of a U.S. Air Force Command Pilot, she had even been named for his first love, a Curtis JN-4D trainer. This craft was affectionately known, by those daring young men of open cockpit aviation just prior to World War II, as the "Jenny."

Jenny hadn't always been afraid of flying. As a surprise eighth birthday present, her father had snuck her aboard for a hot-rod hop in a twin-seat T33 jet trainer. It wasn't until her last year in high school, after her dad had experienced a flame-out, and crashed into the winter wilderness of the Alaska Range, not far from Mt. McKinley, and the subsequent uncertainty of not knowing if he had survived or perished, for 56 long days, that her nightmares about falling from the sky had begun.

To try to conquer this fear, she had taken flying lessons. But, once Jenny had soloed, this self-therapy program had a side effect of producing negative feelings whenever anyone else was in command of an aircraft, and she the helpless passenger. And after learning about lift, the sight out of her window of the minimal airfoil supporting this flying bus caused her to glance around for some other visual reinforcement of stability.

The prattle of the other passengers, pretending they were bored with the thought of the plane's climb into one of the busiest airways in the nation, did not help. In desperation, Jenny turned to the window to play a mind-game of naming geographic features. As it happened, she looked right down upon Manhattan, and the distinctive United Nations Building. To be exact, the Conference Building, a long, low structure of Portland Limestone and glass laying along the East River. For a moment, studying her place of employment from this unusual perspective, Jenny felt a moment of inner calm.

Then she remembered Mario, and anxiety gripped her once again. She had loved him. She still did. Her life would have been so perfect if Mario had not been so unreasonable about the justice of his cause.

The issue he wanted altered would have had no consequences effecting the security, or the well-being of the Free World. What he proposed was so deceptively simple that the act would have been considered a harmless prank if she had been caught.