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  To his horror, he saw the assassin’s orange-and-red image stride down the main hall of the house below them and into the lounge, where two more figures were stationary, one standing and the other lying down on what Ethan guessed was a couch. In one terrible moment, Ethan saw the two figures’ heads turn sharply to face the intruder. Then, the big man pointed at the standing figure.

  A fleeting, hair-thin thread like a laser beam zipped from the man’s arm and hit the standing figure, who slammed into a nearby wall and collapsed. Ethan realized that the passage of a bullet heating the air around it had caused the line. He felt a grinding hatred seethe through his guts as the man turned and pointed at the small figure on the couch. The child barely had time to try to scramble away before another hot little line flashed and her head jerked violently sideways.

  ‘Bastard,’ he heard Lopez whisper.

  The man lowered his arm and seemed to stand for a moment regarding his handiwork before he hurried away down the hall and out of the front door. Ethan turned off the IR view and flew down alongside the giant, watching as he climbed into his car and drove away.

  ‘We should follow him too and see where he goes,’ Lopez suggested, moments later.

  Ethan was about to reply when a taxi appeared at the end of the street, and they saw Charles Purcell climb out and run toward his house. Ethan switched back to IR view and felt his rage turn to empathy for the man who now sprinted inside, down the corridor and then stopped in the lounge. Slowly, Purcell collapsed to his knees. Ethan watched in silence as Purcell held his head in his hands and began thumping the floor beside him and tearing at his hair. Lopez’s voice murmured softly.

  ‘We need to get this information to Captain Kyle Sears, right now. They’re hunting down an innocent man.’

  ‘Wait,’ Ethan said.

  He watched as Purcell slowly got to his feet. The scientist stood for several moments, wiping his sleeve across his eyes and then running a hand through his hair. Then he turned and walked across to the mantelpiece, close to where the body of his wife now lay. He picked up an object and shook it, then placed it back on the mantelpiece. Then Purcell turned and ran through the house and upstairs toward the bedrooms.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Lopez asked, mystified.

  ‘Taking the picture that was missing from the mantelpiece when we visited,’ Ethan guessed.

  ‘What for?’ Jarvis asked.

  Ethan watched Purcell rush into the master bedroom and rifle through a drawer.

  ‘He had a plan,’ he replied. ‘He already knew what he was going to do if he was too late to save his family.’

  Purcell ran out of the bedroom with what looked like a folder or file and then hurried back downstairs into the kitchen. He grabbed a pen and a pad, and wrote several messages. Ethan squinted as he tried to pick out what Purcell was doing, then saw Lopez descend into the house below them, ignoring the walls as she passed through them like a ghost until she was almost alongside Purcell’s shadowy orange avatar.

  ‘It’s a folder,’ Lopez said, identifying the package Purcell had retrieved from his bedroom. ‘Maybe the documents he sent to Macy Lieberman?’

  Ethan descended alongside Lopez and saw Purcell produce a smaller, blockier object from his pocket.

  ‘The diary,’ Ethan guessed, as he recognized its shape, ‘the one he sent to me at Cape Canaveral.’

  Purcell spent several minutes writing on the folder and the diary, and then he produced from a shirt pocket two smaller sheets of paper and scribbled something on the back of each before enclosing them all in separate envelopes and writing addresses on each.

  ‘One of those must be the college picture of you that he sent to Kyle Sears,’ Lopez guessed. ‘Probably got it off the Internet or something. But what was the smaller one?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ethan replied, ‘but I’ve got a feeling it’ll show up soon enough.’

  Purcell got up and dashed from the house, climbing into a red car as Ethan turned off the IR camera and watched as the scientist drove away. To Ethan’s left, a woman holding a small white dog watched as the car accelerated away.

  ‘We can’t follow him all day like this,’ Ethan said. ‘Ottaway, what’s the chances of speeding time forward and finding out where Purcell is right this minute?’

  Ottaway’s voice came back a moment later.

  ‘The most recent images I can give you will be about an hour old. It takes that long for the computers to process the data streams coming from the satellites.’

  ‘It’ll do,’ Ethan replied. ‘We’ve got to get to Purcell before that assassin or the Miami police do.’

  ‘Stand by.’

  Ethan watched as Purcell’s car vanished into the distance. Lopez appeared alongside him.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘Why did the assassin kill Purcell’s family? They had nothing to do with this, as far as we know.’

  Ethan shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know. Best guess is that Purcell may have been compiling evidence against IRIS for a long time, and that folder he took from his bedroom contained what he knew. Maybe IRIS couldn’t afford to take the chance that he had told his family about what was happening, in which case IRIS has them iced to prevent exposure after Purcell is killed.’

  ‘Then why not just steal the folder back instead of murdering them?’

  ‘Whatever IRIS is hiding must be worth a lot more than just money,’ Ethan said, himself unsure of Joaquin Abell’s true motivation. ‘There’s something big behind all of this, and whatever it is it’s enough to have entire families killed.’

  Ottaway’s voice cut through their chatter.

  ‘The computer’s found Purcell, transporting you there now.’

  Ethan held onto the railings beside him on his platform, and then the leafy suburb vanished in a flickering blur of color and light as he and Lopez raced across the Florida mainland. The maze of gray cityscape and angular streets and suburbs suddenly turned the green and blue of racing trees and flashing water. Ethan came to an abrupt halt above a spit of land in the center of a river flowing through a vast expanse of wilderness.

  ‘Jesus,’ Lopez uttered, ‘what the hell’s he doing out here?’

  Ethan looked around and keyed his microphone. ‘Can you see him? How far away is he?’

  ‘One hundred meters southwest of you,’ Ottaway replied.

  Ethan grabbed his joysticks and elevated himself a hundred feet above the dense foliage of the Florida Everglades, then turned and glided across the landscape. Almost immediately he saw the figure of a man standing alone on the tiny spit.

  ‘I see him, closing in.’

  Ethan flew until he was directly above the figure and then descended. As he did so, he saw that the figure was standing in front of hundreds of small stones that had been arranged to spell out a message on the sand before him.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Lopez murmured as they got close enough to read the words.

  Charles Purcell stood with his head tilted back, staring up at the sky and, it seemed, straight into Ethan’s eyes. Slowly, Purcell raised his arms as though he was imploring god for assistance as Ethan read the words on the sand.

  I AM HERE, ETHAN WARNER, AND I AM WAITING.

  ‘Get a GPS fix on his position,’ Ethan said.

  ‘Already on it,’ Jarvis responded.

  Suddenly, Purcell’s desperate and pleading face disappeared as the screen went blank. Ethan wavered on the spot and grabbed the railings for balance before he reached up and pulled the helmet from his head. Lopez yanked hers off, her hair falling in thick black whorls across her shoulders.

  ‘We need to get out there fast,’ she said.

  Ethan jumped down off the platform and rushed to the railings.

  ‘Ottaway, get your guys to use Watchman and find out where the assassin went after the hit on Macy Lieberman!’

  Michael Ottaway nodded, and Ethan looked at Jarvis. ‘We’re going to need another ride.’

  ‘Get Scott Bryson on
the case,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘If his boat’s not in danger, he’ll be more pliable. I’ll head upstairs and chase up Montgomery Purcell’s history to see if I can find any links with what Charles was doing at IRIS.’

  Jarvis was about to turn away when Ethan grabbed his arm and leaned in close.

  ‘You knew about Project Watchman when Joanna went missing.’

  ‘I didn’t have this level of security clearance back then,’ Jarvis said defensively. ‘And the DIA would never have cleared you in here anyway, Ethan. You were a wreck, remember?’

  ‘Times have changed,’ Ethan snapped. ‘I want in.’

  Jarvis shook his head. ‘I’m sorry Ethan, but it’s not going to happen. There’s just no way the DIA will let you have time here searching for Joanna.’

  ‘We’re right here,’ Ethan hissed.

  ‘No, we’re leaving,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Get to the Everglades and find Purcell. We’ll talk about this another time.’

  Jarvis yanked his arm free of Ethan’s grip and strode away toward the elevator. Ethan watched him depart as he tried to ignore the suppressed fury that burned like acid through his veins.

  ‘What’s up?’ Lopez asked, her dark eyes filled with concern.

  Ethan forced himself to unclench his jaw. The urge to tell Lopez that he may have a way of finding Joanna slammed to a halt within him, because he knew that if he found Joanna, he might well lose Lopez.

  ‘Nothing. We’d better get moving.’

  37

  KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, MERRIT ISLAND, FLORIDA

  June 28, 14:48

  Doug Jarvis arrived at Thomas Ryker’s office with Ethan’s angry accusations still ringing in his ears. The fact that Jarvis had been aware that the Defense Intelligence Agency possessed the means to find out what had happened to Joanna Defoe years before did not mean that he had either the rank or the influence to make it happen. Ethan, Lopez and even Jarvis himself were merely tiny cogs in the vast machine that was the United States’ intelligence community, and besides, there was always somebody watching.

  Jarvis was reminded of that the moment he saw two armed guards outside Thomas Ryker’s office. The men blocked his way, only parting when Jarvis showed them his identification. He pushed open the door to the office, and was surprised to see a tall man with long, drawn features turn to face him. Dressed in an immaculate suit but bearing no identification, Jarvis knew him only by his last name. Wilson. Central Intelligence Agency, attached to the Pentagon. Security clearance far beyond that which Jarvis possessed. The last time Jarvis had seen him he had just ensured Ethan Warner’s silence over events in Israel years before.

  ‘Jarvis,’ Wilson said, with a cold and dispassionate gaze. ‘I was just leaving.’

  Thomas Ryker was sitting in a chair before Wilson, with his hands in his lap and concern etched into his features so deep it could have been carved there with a scalpel. Wilson buttoned his black jacket and turned for the door. As he passed, Jarvis deliberately blocked his way and whispered low enough for Ryker not to hear.

  ‘What are you doing here? I thought the CIA would be busy with Pakistan right now?’

  Wilson did not smile. His gaunt features belied the fact that he was probably twenty years Jarvis’s junior. His smart suit hid a superbly honed physique and his calm demeanor a lengthy career in covert operations. He looked down at him with eyes that reminded Jarvis of a bird of prey scanning for its next victim.

  ‘What you need to know about me, you already do,’ he replied. ‘Everything else, you never will. Don’t make me move you.’

  Jarvis backed off, and Wilson strode past. Jarvis let out a breath as he closed the door behind him.

  ‘Who in hell was that?’ Ryker uttered, standing up. ‘I thought the grim reaper had come to visit.’

  ‘He’s a spook,’ Jarvis replied. ‘High-level CIA. What did he want?’

  ‘What didn’t he want?’ Ryker said. ‘Asked about everything that you’re doing here. What’s his problem? I thought you government guys were all on the same side?’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ Jarvis replied, and looked at a nearby table scattered with files and photographs. ‘What have you got for me?’

  ‘There’s a lot of information here,’ Ryker said, pulling at his scrawny beard. ‘But I’m not sure how it will help your case.’

  Jarvis sat alongside him at the table. Some of the files before them were decades old, drawn from NASA’s archives. Most of them bore the name Purcell and most were stamped ‘Classified’ or ‘Top Secret’. The passing decades had seen many of the files being declassified by various administrations, a drip-feed of information leaking out into the world, until once-sensitive documents vital to national security became fodder for television documentaries and books by historians.

  ‘Why don’t you start at the beginning and help paint a picture of what went on?’ Jarvis suggested. ‘Your friend Charles seems to think that the answers are in America’s nuclear program from the fifties, so why not start there?’

  Ryker sat back in his chair and gestured to one of many photographs on the desk. Jarvis looked at the black-and-white image of an icon of destruction, the towering pillar of a mushroom cloud soaring over a desert.

  ‘The Trinity Test,’ Ryker said. ‘America detonates the first atom bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, just southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, July 16, 1945. Its success resulted in the dropping of atomic weapons on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the Pacific Campaign and the Second World War. What most people don’t know is that, in the short time between those two bombs being dropped, the technology was already advancing at a terrific rate. The bomb that hit Hiroshima was a fission weapon using Uranium-238, whereas the Nagasaki weapon was a more advanced plutonium-based implosion weapon.’

  ‘Keep it simple,’ Jarvis cautioned.

  ‘Essentially, a nuclear weapon is like making a small sun on earth,’ Ryker said, ‘that’s why they’re so powerful. But instead of the reactions being contained by gravity, like our sun, they radiate outward entirely in an explosive manner. However, all of the Trinity weapons used nuclear fission, the splitting of the atom, to produce their power by chain reaction. Our sun uses nuclear fusion, the fusing of atoms under immense gravitational pressure, to produce energy, and it’s much more powerful. So Montgomery Purcell and his team began working on building a weapon based on fusion, using tritium or deuterium as a fuel.’

  Jarvis scanned the documents before them. ‘And that’s where this Ivy Mike comes in, right?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Ryker enthused. ‘Look, here’s Montgomery Purcell’s name on the Manhattan Project roster for work on uranium enrichment at Sylacauga, Alabama, and at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This work led to the Trinity test and ultimately the end of the war. But the work does not stop. As the Cold War got into full swing and McCarthyism got everybody hysterical about Communism, so scientists like Montgomery Purcell found themselves the subject of immense demand. National laboratories were opening up everywhere as America raced to stay ahead of its nuclear rivals, and men like Purcell were offered resources they could only have dreamed about a decade earlier.’

  Jarvis was well aware of the escalating nuclear arms race of the post-war years, and the associated paranoia and fear of atomic Armageddon that had overshadowed the lives of every human being on the planet. For almost half a century, governments had maintained secret bunkers designed to withstand the tremendous devastation that modern nuclear weapons could unleash. Ordinary families, meanwhile, had been sent leaflets detailing how best to survive the coming holocaust, and had built their own pitifully inadequate bunkers in their backyards stocked with dehydrated food and bottled water. None of them had realized that, with the world outside consumed by the nuclear fires and irradiated for decades, surviving the initial attacks only guaranteed them a later, much slower death amid the crumbling remnants of civilization.

  ‘Where did Montgomery Purcell go?’

  ‘The Pacific proving grounds,’ Ryker informed
him. ‘He becomes one of the leading scientists on Operation Crossroads, testing and detonating atomic weapons on Bikini Atoll. Soon after, he’s in Nevada on Operation Ranger, a further series of tests. Finally, he ends up back in the Pacific for the legendary Ivy Mike shot, part of Operation Ivy.’

  ‘Early fifties?’ Jarvis hazarded.

  ‘Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, November 1, 1952,’ Ryker confirmed. ‘It was the location of the first ever fusion-bomb detonation, a true thermonuclear device that let fly with a blast of over ten megatons, or the equivalent of ten thousand tons of TNT – four hundred-fifty times more powerful than the Nagasaki weapon. The Ivy Mike shot produced a fireball over three miles wide and a mushroom cloud that reached an altitude of twenty-five miles in less than five minutes. The shot entirely destroyed the island of Elugelab in the atoll, totally vaporized it. That was pretty much the start of the Cold War, right there.’

  Jarvis rifled through the documents, searching for Purcell’s name.

  ‘How does this figure with what his son might have achieved, this ability to see into the future?’

  Ryker leaned forward, stroking his beard. ‘That’s the really interesting bit,’ he said, and picked up one of the documents as though he recognized it on sight. ‘Montgomery Purcell was being provided with almost limitless funds to continue his research. Congress was willing to virtually write blank checks, so obsessed were they with maintaining their lead over the Russians. But there were other groups working on entirely different uses for nuclear detonations.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Earth moving,’ Ryker said. ‘The Sedan test on July 6, 1962 yielded a blast of 104 kilotons, but it was detonated underground, demonstrating that weaponry was not the only product of the nuclear age. Such bombs could be used for industrial purposes, and of course for power generation via controlled nuclear fission. One of the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project had resigned from the military soon after the war, to continue his research using a private company he’d founded before the war, seeking government funding to research peaceful uses for nuclear power.’