Convicted murderer and ex Harvard professor Santiago Laurelle, boards a plane for a one-day prison leave. The jet engines catch fire and he thinks back to the day his son Conrad disappeared. Santiago had finally found Conrad living in a dog shed in Vera cruz. The Mexican police discovered his car at the bottom of the ocean along with two dead girls. Back in the U.S. Conrad was placed in a clinic for the mentally ill, where he killed himself. At Conrad's fiuneral Santiago discovered that his son's suicide was in fact a murder. And Santiago had decided to find his son's killer. Now with the plane about to make a crash landing Santiago's nihilism abandons him and he suddenly wants to survive.