And then, that autumn, someone finally had.

An audit was coming, the thorough kind, the kind that opens the drawers no one has opened in a decade.

A cornered man of ordinary cowardice would have run, or lawyered up, or begun shredding.

Sterling was not of ordinary cowardice.

He had decided, the detectives believed, that the surest way to make a paper trail vanish was to make the airplane it led to vanish with it, into water deep enough that nothing would ever be recovered and the loss would be written off as a tragedy of weather and bad luck.

He had engineered the emergency himself.