MUCH OF WHAT happened after that was out of her purview: they got loads of data about Zula. Loads more about the Russian. They guessed, but Olivia refused to confirm, that Mr. Y was Sokolov. They brought in RAF types who knew a great deal about airplanes and radar and put aeronautical charts up on the whiteboards and hooked up a flight simulator programmed to simulate that exact type of business jet and tried flying it out of Xiamen. Olivia looked out of the simulator’s virtual cockpit windows and saw the beach at Kinmen where she had been standing with Sokolov, and almost fancied that if she strained her eyes enough she might see two columns of pixels down there, blurred representations of herself and of "Mr. Y" staring up at this simulated plane. Extremely childish/romantic. The true and serious purpose of this was to investigate possible flight plans that Jones might have followed after taking off that morning. Several of these were "wargamed," which sounded like fun until it became evident that 90 percent of the wargaming had to do with the internal doings of air traffic control centers and protocols for filing flight plans in various Southeast Asian countries. A faction badly wanted to demonstrate that Jones could have flown the jet all the way to Pakistan, but gaping holes were blasted in this scenario as expert persons pointed out all the restricted military airspace around the disputed border regions of India/China, Pakistan/India, et cetera. Another faction was all for the idea that he had taken the jet all the way to North America. But to justify this they had to piece together a somewhat tangled tale that could explain how he had evaded radar detection while flying up a crowded and well-monitored air traffic corridor, and they had to provide some justification for why the plane had initially taken off southbound—an injudicious use of fuel. They were able to do that by composing an argument having to do with domestic Chinese flight plans. No one could prove that they were wrong, but all were uneasy with the story’s complexity. By far the simplest and most plausible scenario was that Jones had simply dropped the plane down to wavetop level and flown it straight to Mindanao and ditched it. Olivia favored that theory if for no other reason than that, if true, it meant that Jones had already been on the ground and the plane sunk beneath the waves by the time Sokolov had given her the tail number, and so she couldn’t be blamed for having delayed passing it on.