The hijacker, still looking at Deepti and Priti, pointed his knife to his side, asking them to give way. Priti walked to the side and pulled Deepti along. The man then entered the cockpit. The other man started pointing his knife toward the passengers. As he moved his knife from left to right, the passengers screamed in succession.

“Silence! Not a word. If you do as I say, nobody will be harmed”, he yelled.

“How did they get the knives past security?”, A passenger whispered to his neighbor. It was the same passenger who told earlier that he didn’t believe the hijackers brought the bomb in.

The hijacker heard his whisper and walked to him.

“Looks like someone is very curious about our methods”, he said. Then he placed his knife close to the whisperer’s neck. He continued, “I like curious people. So, Mr. curious, let me teach you our magic.

“We cannot keep our knives in our pockets because during security check, the metal detectors will find them. But we can keep them in the cabin baggage. The X-ray equipment used to screen them transmits parallel scanning rays vertically. If we keep the knife in just the right direction, it will be parallel to the rays. Do you know what a knife kept parallel to the scanning rays looks like? It looks like a thin wire. Of course, we had to store the knife handles separately so that the entire knife looks like a single wire. And thanks to the not-so-smart security guards monitoring the insides of our bags, they didn’t...