“	[I don't] care what anybody else says, next time I'm taking the train.	”
— Alec Hardison

From TNT: When an ailing defense contractor steals a heart on its way to a 15-year-old recipient, the team races against the clock to recover it in time... all while stuck at an airport layover.

The Client

Linda Johnson, a transplant nurse who is transporting a human heart from Detroit to Cincinnati. When she arrives at the Cincinnati airport, she is forced to give up the heart to ensure the safety of her daughter, Tonya. Upon hearing her story, the team get involved.

The Mark

Dean Chesney, the CEO of a defense contractor who is dying of a heart condition. Due to his age, he does not have high priority on the transplant list, so he arranges to steal a heart that has been designated for Joshua Spin, a 15-year-old boy in Cincinnati.

The Con

Since the mark is originally unknown, the team makes getting back Tonya, Linda's daughter, their first priority; both to ensure the girl's safety and to learn about the men who took her. They find that the kidnapper is a local hire and unconnected to their mark. They narrow down the potential suspects by determining who could benefit from Joshua's heart. Dean Chesney, a person Nate has been monitoring as a potential mark, is on the list and is the only person with enough influence and money to steal a heart. Since he is in Chicago, the heart must be flown to him. The team goes about running minor cons and pick-pocketing to obtain the equipment and three types of airport security badges needed to stop any planes heading to Chicago.

Hardison gains access to the flight tower and grounds the private plane heading to Chicago, but the thief and the heart have disappeared by the time Eliot and Parker arrive. Nate calls Chesney and tells him that he has stolen his heart and asks for $1 million. This causes Chesney to check in with his thief, allowing Parker and Eliot to figure out which passenger boarding the commercial flight to Chicago has the heart.

In order to get the thieves off their commercial flight, Nate tells Hardison to fake a tornado warning because its the only way to get people to deplane without calling in the authorities. Since a tornado warning can't be called in from the radar tower, Nate and Sophie run a con they call a Mass DOT (Massachusetts Department of Transportation) Special. This consists of them calling the National Weather Service multiple times as different people who are all faking reports of a tornado. While this takes place, Hardison must land an incoming plane that cannot be diverted. He tries to wave them off, but when that is unsuccessful, he calls up a flight simulator to help him guide the plane in.

As the thief deplanes, Parker runs up and steals the suitcase with the heart and leads the thief on a chase through the airport. Eliot disables the muscle while Parker runs into a luggage cart driven by Sophie which appears to give the thief the opportunity to steal the heart back. In reality, Sophie and Parker switch the suitcase with another that has the extra heart transplant cooler. The thief goes back to the private plane and takes off for Chicago. Nate and the team take the heart and find an ambulance outside waiting for them. Nate punches the ambulance driver, because Nate correctly assumes he is working for Chesney--proven by the fact that Eliot takes a handgun from the "EMT's" waistband before jumping in the vehicle (EMTs do not carry weapons). They take the ambulance and get the heart to the hospital.

Joshua's surgery goes ahead as planned while Chesney later contacts Nate, who informs the millionaire that he is now keeping tabs on his business, his people, his money, and even his heart monitoring equipment.

Episode Notes

• The fictional airport code for Cincinnati Metropolitan Airport is CQG, one letter different from the real Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport's CVG.
• Goof: the motif for the airport code has the letter Q reversed, most noticeably on the wall in the control tower.
• The Madrid to Cincinnati flight Hardison help land was shown to be a Boeing 727 which has a maximum range of 5,000 km; far below the distance of 6,600 km between Madrid and Cincinnati.
• Take-off and landing scenes feature an Alaska Airlines 737 regional jet, used on the majority of their flights along with west coast of the US and Canada. Although Alaska Airlines does have some intercontinental flights, it does not fly to Cincinnati. It's likely the footage was shot at Portland Airport.
• The exterior night shot of the airport was not CVG, but rather was London's Heathrow Airport, easily recognizable because of its radar tower and red brick control tower.
• After what happened to his son, Nate takes this case very personally. The audience gets a glimpse of his darker side when Nate first calls Chesney, promising to kill him after Nate has personally destroyed everything Chesney owns. The second time, presumably with Hardison's help, Nate has managed to gain full access of Chesney's accounts and is keeping tabs on him as well as monitoring the millionaire via a hacked camera.
• Linda says, "You never want a heart to be outside of a body for more than four hours. It may not stay viable. It already took over two hours to get here from Detroit." In reality, it would take at least four hours if she drove. Flying would have presumably taken about the same amount of time even under the best conditions. Oops!

Episode Trivia

• As the gang deplanes, we see on the board that Vista Atlantic flight 277 from Montserrat has just arrived; Parker complains that she never got to see "the emerald" on their trip, and Eliot corrects her, telling her (for the last time) that the island's nickname is "The Emerald of the Caribbean" and she hadn't missed seeing any real jewels.  Other difficulties on the "train wreck" of a trip were Sophie getting sunburnt in some very sensitive places while having to play a "French heiress on the topless beach"; after creating a fake volcanic eruption, Hardison endured the loss of his laptop (which sank) while struggling with continuing problems with the earbuds underwater- experienced by Eliot, who was literally shipwrecked and had "just fought 3 ex-Brazilian combat divers with spear guns, underwater!"
• Eliot claims that he fought someone with a nerf sword in Damascus in 2002.
• When the walkie-talkies fail near the airport control tower, Eliot has the airport paging system call "Mr. Picard, Mr. Kirk Picard," a reference to Star Trek's two most famous captains. Further, Hardison later signals "Leverage Airlines 1701" via radio. 1701 is part of the registry number of almost every Starship Enterprise in Star Trek.
• When Nate and Sophie call in a fake tornado to the National Weather Service, they refer to it as a "MassDOT Special", referring to how they called in a fake landslide to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to steal a train in The Gone Fishin' Job. In both cases, they also e-mailed a picture they found on the internet to support their claim.
• The "Microsoft Flight Simulator X" that Hardison uses to learn how to land the incoming Madrid flight is a real program (and real version, circa 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator_X); after a 14 year break, the next version came out not too long before the release of Redemption (August 2020): [Flight Simulator]
• Chesney claimed to have 8 contingency plans.  Assuming the original plan was the kidnapping of the transplant nurse's daughter, then "Mr. Woods" and the other thieves flying the heart to Chesney on a private jet flight, some of the contingencies were:   

• Vista Atlantic flight 831 to Chicago departing at 10:25pm from Gate B-19 for the thieves and the heart when they abandoned the private jet at Private gate 1-3 after Hardison grounded it for mechanical difficulties;
• back to the Private jet to sneak the takeoff (for which Nate assumes Chesney will gladly pay any FAA fine) after Parker and Eliot steal the heart back from the 3 thieves waiting to board at Gate B-19 that gets grounded by the "MassDot Special" fake tornado; we later find out this private jet took off with the duplicate cooler holding the Cincinnati Reds snowglobe;
• the fake ambulance driver in case all flights failed- but by Nate's count that is contingency "Number 7."