"People didn’t fly the Atlantic any more if they could help it, except from bravado. Even if your plane wasn’t sabotaged or hijacked, it was certain to be behind schedule. Not that there was much to be said for ocean travel either, since the sinking of the Paolo Rizzi last summer and the drowning of thirteen hundred passengers in a sea made foul by a hundred and eighty thousand tons of oil from the tanker she’d collided with. Moral, definitely: stay home."