And he had poisoned the first officer’s coffee, so that when the airplane began to fight, there would be one pilot instead of two, overwhelmed and alone, and the odds would fall the way he needed them to fall.

Three hundred people.

A young mother and her baby.

The boy in row 6.

He had been willing to spend all of them to bury a maintenance ledger.

I have thought about that a great deal since — the particular coldness of it.

Voss was not a man in a rage.

He had not snapped.