The airplane had barely cleared the active runway before the lights found it, the hard blue strobes of police vehicles swinging across the rain, converging on the aircraft as it stopped on the taxiway.

The evacuation went by the book, mobile stairs rolled up to the doors, passengers taken off in the orderly exhausted shuffle of people who have used up every feeling they own.

And at the base of the jetway, officers were already waiting, and they moved in on a well-dressed man in a first-class suit before he reached the bottom of the stairs, and Maya, holding Leo’s hand, watched them take Richard Sterling into custody without surprise, because she had already understood on the flight deck what kind of man would try to talk his way through a locked cockpit door.

He saw her as they brought him past.