That, Maya said, is the thing about numbers.

You can sink an airplane.

You cannot sink arithmetic.

And she meant it as more than a grim joke, because it pointed at the one genuinely hopeful thing buried in the whole ugly business.

Sterling had been, in his way, a careful and intelligent man, and his plan had the terrible logic of a certain kind of mind: if the evidence is a paper trail, and the paper trail leads to an airplane, then destroy the airplane and the trail ends in deep water and the problem is solved.

But it was wrong, fundamentally, in a way she found almost reassuring about the universe.