It is the kind of crime that stays invisible right up until an airplane it lives inside decides to come apart.

And an audit had been coming.

A surprise inspection that would have pulled the real records against the real parts and ended him.

So he had done the math a certain kind of man does, and decided that the cleanest way to erase a paper trail was to erase the airplane it was written on — to engineer a catastrophic failure over the deep Atlantic, where a jet goes down and is never truly recovered, where the evidence sinks four kilometers into the dark with everyone who might have testified to it.

He had rigged the flight-control computer to turn against the crew.