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  ‘We’re not supposed to be carrying.’

  The state of Illinois had a strict No-Issue policy over concealed weapons, meaning that no permit could be obtained from the courts or local law enforcement. Only Illinois and the District of Columbia had such policies in place. Ethan shrugged as he slipped the weapon into a shoulder holster beneath his jacket.

  ‘I got tired of chasing dudes like Decker here with nothing more than pepper spray.’

  Lopez hauled Decker to his feet. The shaven-headed, tattooed criminal towered over her.

  ‘I got my rights!’ he shouted at Ethan. ‘You’re carrying and you shot at me!’

  Ethan was about to answer when the sound of roaring engines cut him off. He turned to see a pair of Police Interceptors screech alongside them, blocking off the lane as four officers tumbled out of the vehicles with their weapons drawn.

  ‘Drop the piece!’

  Ethan winced in disbelief as he raised one hand while carefully laying his pistol down on the asphalt at his feet. From the corner of his eye he saw Decker flash a spiteful grin. Ethan reached to the badge dangling from his neck and showed it to the officers as they advanced, their weapons aiming unwaveringly at his chest.

  ‘Bail Bondsmen, custody’s ours, guys.’

  The larger of the two officers reached out and grabbed the badge with thick fingers before ripping it from Ethan’s neck. As his partner covered him he grabbed Ethan’s shoulders and span him around before ramming him up against the Yukon’s crumbled hood.

  ‘You had custody, right up to illegally discharging a weapon on a public highway.’

  ‘Give us a break, guys,’ Lopez called, holding Decker by his cuffs like a dog on a leash. ‘We spent over a week chasing this walking trash down.’

  The second pair of officers yanked Decker away from her and prodded him toward their patrol vehicle.

  ‘You’ll be more careful next time then, won’t you,’ one of them shot back at her.

  Ethan felt the cold steel of handcuffs wrap around his wrists, and then he was hauled upright and twisted around to face his arresting officer. The podgy man’s pallid face shone with the satisfaction of mindless spite.

  ‘You ever been to Cook County Jail before?’ he uttered.

  Ethan was about to answer when a black Dodge Durango SUV pulled in alongside the reservation. Ethan watched as two men in gray suits and sunglasses climbed out, moving to flank an elderly man in a dark blue suit who hurried toward them.

  Ethan watched as the old man surveyed the crashed Yukon, the cops, Ethan’s cuffs and the blown-out tire.

  ‘Release him immediately,’ he ordered the cops and pointed at Ethan. ‘He’s on government time.’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ the podgy officer uttered, his face now twisted with indignation.

  ‘Douglas Jarvis,’ the old man replied. ‘Defense Intelligence Agency.’

  ‘He’s under arrest for illegal discharge of a firearm,’ the cop protested. ‘He’s going nowhere but jail.’

  Jarvis reached into his jacket and produced a cellphone that he brandished like a weapon.

  ‘One phone call and your career will be over. Finished. I’m here on government business and you’re an obstruction. There was no gun, no discharge and you were never here. Either remove yourself from this scene or I’ll remove you from your job. Your call, son.’

  ‘You’ve got no jurisdiction,’ the cop snapped back, but his resolve was weakening before Jarvis’s uncompromising glare.

  ‘The Pentagon is my jurisdiction,’ Jarvis replied. ‘You feel lucky?’

  The cop’s jowls trembled with suppressed rage for a long beat as he glanced at the identity tag hanging from the lapel of the old man’s jacket. His brain slowly digested the gravity of the threat, and then he cursed and unlocked Ethan’s cuffs before marching back toward his vehicle. Jarvis wasted no time as he directed his men.

  ‘Get this mess cleared up. We’ve got to move, right now.’

  Ethan stared at Jarvis in surprise. ‘Where’s the fire?’

  ‘Still haven’t got the hang of abiding by the law, Ethan?’ Jarvis asked, gesturing to the wrecked Yukon and the Beretta pistol at his feet.

  ‘The job gets done,’ he replied. ‘I take it this isn’t a social call?’

  ‘It’s a clean-up operation now,’ Jarvis said moodily, and gestured to one of his men. ‘Find the bullet in that Yukon’s tire and lose it.’ He looked at the cops now holding Decker. ‘You guys dump that moron back at Cook County Jail where he belongs.’

  ‘I got my rights!’ Decker shouted as he was shoved toward one of the squad cars, and pointed at Ethan. ‘I want him arrested for shooting at me!’

  Jarvis glanced at the fugitive with an expression of mild disgust.

  ‘Son, you lost your rights the moment you broke the law. You’re not out of here in the next sixty seconds I’ll arrange life without parole in Pelican Bay for you. Agreed?’

  Lopez shook her head and started toward Jarvis. ‘No way, we need that bond money.’

  ‘Too late, you’ve lost it,’ Jarvis shot back. ‘We don’t have time to argue. I need you in Florida, right now.’

  ‘The hell you do!’ Lopez snapped and jabbed a finger at him. ‘You can’t just come out here, click your fingers and take us off the street! That bond will pay the bills for two months.’

  ‘There was no bond after what Ethan did,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Are you ready to go to work for some real money, or shall I just leave and let Ethan get himself arrested?’

  Lopez simmered in fury but did not reply. Ethan, suddenly ashamed for having wrecked their latest mark, looked across at the old man.

  ‘We got time to pick up some stuff before we leave?’ he asked.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ the old man nodded. ‘Believe me, there’s no time to lose.’

  5

  RIVER FOREST, ILLINOIS

  June 28, 07:22

  Ethan Warner pulled off his leather biker jacket and tossed it onto a couch in the office that he and Lopez had rented since founding Warner & Lopez Inc. Lopez and Jarvis followed him inside. The office contained little more than two desks, some filing cabinets, a safe, a cooler and a small television. Posters on the walls portrayed numerous bail-jumpers in the Chicago area, right out as far as the Michigan border. Being bail bondsmen wasn’t a glamorous part of their work, and nor was being hired as private detectives, but both jobs paid the bills.

  Since losing everything years before in the aftermath of his fiancée’s disappearance, Ethan had been prudent with the money that Warner & Lopez Inc. brought in, but Lopez was another story. Impulsive to the point of recklessness, she had bought her Lotus despite having only managed to furnish half of her tiny apartment. Forced to send a third of her salary home to her impoverished family south of the border, she seemed to have given up on her once responsible attitude and thrown caution entirely to the wind.

  Lopez shot Jarvis a dirty look as she tore an image of Hayden Decker from the wall and tossed it into a waste-basket with a flourish.

  ‘Eighteen thousand bucks down the drain,’ she said to him. ‘Thanks.’

  Jarvis said nothing as Ethan and Lopez gathered cameras, notepads, cans of pepper spray and, from the safe, two sports bags that contained a change of clothes for each of them. Jarvis surveyed them from one side of the office, checking his watch every few moments.

  The old man had once been Captain of a United States Marines rifle platoon, and Ethan’s senior officer from his time in the Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their friendship, cemented first during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and later when Ethan had resigned his commission and been embedded with Jarvis’s men as a journalist, had led to Warner & Lopez Inc.’s unusual and discreet accord with the Defense Intelligence Agency, where Jarvis continued to serve his country. So far, Ethan and Lopez had been involved in two major investigations for the DIA, both of which concerned what the agency liked to discreetly term anomalous discoveries.

  ‘So what’s the story?’
Ethan asked as he hefted his pistol thoughtfully in his hand. Then he stuffed it into his kit bag. Better safe than sorry.

  Jarvis frowned at the weapon but did not protest.

  ‘Homicide, way down in Miami. County Sheriff sends in officers to investigate a witness report of a man fleeing his home under suspicious circumstances. The cops arrive, gain entry and find a dead woman and child, both executed with a single shot to the head.’

  Ethan grimaced.

  ‘Any idea on the perpetrator? Could be family if the kid was shot too.’

  ‘The man who fled the scene is one Charles Purcell, the husband and father of the victims. He hasn’t been seen since, but he has contacted the police.’

  Both Ethan and Lopez stopped what they were doing.

  ‘Why’d he do that?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘That,’ Jarvis replied, ‘is why you’re heading down there right now. He made a call to the officer heading up the investigation and told him to contact you, Ethan.’

  Ethan stared at Jarvis for a long moment. ‘I don’t know anybody down in Miami.’

  ‘We’ve already run checks,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘There’s nothing to show that the two of you have ever met.’

  Ethan felt a wave of foreboding sweep over him. Visions of a psychopathic serial killer with twisted plans of vengeance for some unknown or long-forgotten offense flickered darkly through his mind. Most all victims of the truly insane had no real understanding of why they were targeted, often because the reasons made sense only within the tortured crucible of their killer’s mind.

  ‘Then how does this guy Purcell know who I am?’ Ethan asked. ‘And what the hell’s a suspected murderer want with me?’

  ‘That’s what’s bothering us,’ Jarvis admitted. ‘This guy must have gone to some lengths in order to locate you.’

  Ethan almost laughed at the absurdity of it all, but he glanced out of the office windows as though he were being watched. ‘How would he know where to find me if he doesn’t know me? It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Believe me,’ Jarvis replied, ‘not much about this case makes any sense right now. You two ready?’

  Ethan, his thoughts fogged with confusion, zipped up his bag as Lopez slung hers over her shoulder and they walked out of the office onto the street outside. Ethan had just locked the door when a UPS truck pulled up alongside and the driver stepped out with a board-back envelope in his hand.

  ‘Ethan Warner?’ the driver asked him.

  Ethan stepped forward and signed the driver’s palmtop, then took the envelope and looked at it.

  ‘You can open it when you get back,’ Jarvis said as he snatched the envelope away and slipped it through the mailbox. ‘We’ve got to move, okay?’

  Ethan shrugged and followed Lopez and Jarvis into the Durango, which immediately pulled out and sped toward the nearest freeway heading south. Ethan experienced a mild sense of self-importance as he glanced around the hushed interior of the SUV and saw several other Durangos join them on the on-ramp and form an honor-guard around them as they sped through morning traffic. Silent hazard lights flashed on the roofs. Working for the DIA had often proved dangerous, but it had its advantages too.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Scott Air Force Base, Belleville,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I’ll explain when we get there.’

  ‘What’s the rush?’ Ethan asked. ‘Fugitive’s on the run. The first forty-eight hours are crucial, but isn’t local law enforcement on the case already?’

  ‘We’ve shut them down for now. Only the senior investigating officer is still in the loop. As far as we know we have about twelve hours to solve this case. Time is everything.’

  ‘Fill us in then,’ Lopez suggested, as the SUV careered through the rush-hour traffic. ‘What’s so special about this guy Purcell?’

  Jarvis opened a glossy black folder emblazoned with the DIA’s logo, handing Ethan and Lopez each an identical file as he read.

  ‘Charles Purcell is a physicist who worked for fifteen years at NASA, down at Cape Canaveral. He was a major player in many of the scientific experiments that were carried into space aboard the Shuttle, not to mention his contribution to the Hubble space telescope. Apparently, however, the central focus of his work within the agency was the study of time.’

  Ethan felt a faint glimmer of relief. As psychopaths went, a diligent scientist was somewhat less threatening than a coked-up Hell’s Angel. He raised an eyebrow. ‘So he was a clock-watcher then?’

  ‘I’ll do the jokes,’ Jarvis replied, without looking up from his file. ‘Purcell made some astounding theoretical breakthroughs during his career, but they were considered so radical that NASA routinely denied him funds to conduct experiments to confirm his equations, preferring to support more conventional work instead.’

  ‘So what happened to him?’ Lopez asked as she leafed through her copy of the file without interest and twirled a loop of her long black hair through her fingers.

  Jarvis turned a page in his file.

  ‘Purcell resigned his post at NASA and began working freelance for various private organizations, many of them charities.’

  ‘That’s a major change of pace for a physicist,’ Ethan observed. ‘You think that he just got tired of doing equations?’

  ‘Quite the opposite, or so we suspect,’ Jarvis replied. ‘You see, Charles Purcell had followed in his father’s footsteps for most of his life. Montgomery Purcell had worked with the US Government on the Manhattan Project, which led to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and the end of the Second World War. From what we can gather, Purcell Senior continued working in the government’s weapons programs until his death.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Ethan asked. ‘He can’t have been very old when he died, if Charles Purcell is his son.’

  ‘That’s the interesting bit,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Montgomery Purcell disappeared without trace whilst flying a light aircraft in 1968. No wreckage was ever found, nor were there any witnesses to the crash. Essentially, he vanished.’

  After the trauma of recent years, Ethan considered himself something of an authority on vanished people. Even before Joanna had disappeared they had worked together on government corruption scandals in various countries that had involved enforced abductions of wealthy citizens: ransom to order. Many of the unfortunate victims had been located and liberated due to their investigations in countries like Mexico and Colombia.

  ‘Where exactly was he when he vanished?’ Lopez asked Jarvis.

  The old man looked up at them. ‘The Bermuda Triangle.’

  6

  During his military years Ethan had spent a fair amount of time training out in the Florida Straits, so the area was familiar, but he had never before even considered the fact that he’d probably spent much of that time in the legendary Triangle.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Lopez uttered, flipping the file in her lap shut. ‘You want us to go down there because you think this guy’s dad disappeared in a puff of smoke in the Bermuda Triangle?’

  ‘There may be some kind of connection,’ Jarvis replied. ‘We’re keeping an open mind about it.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ Lopez replied.

  ‘Some kind of connection how?’ Ethan asked. ‘The father disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle is one thing, but the murder of Charles Purcell’s family is another entirely. They don’t share anything in common.’

  Jarvis tapped the file in his lap with his finger. ‘There’s nothing to suggest that Montgomery Purcell was murdered, but then there’s nothing to say that he wasn’t either. However Charles Purcell’s wife and daughter were most definitely the victims of homicide.’

  ‘You think that this has something to do with a death that occurred over forty years ago?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Wow, Doug, this just gets better and better,’ Lopez murmured and glanced across at Ethan. ‘Doesn’t want us to grab bail-running criminals down the road in Chicago, but he’s happy to send us all the way to Florida to look
for rotting corpses.’

  ‘Montgomery Purcell was a big enough name during the Cold War that the agency feels there’s justification to send you two down there,’ Jarvis pointed out. ‘By all accounts what Purcell didn’t know about nuclear weapons wasn’t worth knowing. Not only that, but there may have even been sensitive documents or similar on his person when he disappeared.’

  ‘They’d have rotten to nothing by now,’ Ethan said. ‘If he went down in the water there’s not much that would have survived the best part of fifty years.’

  ‘The risk warrants the effort,’ Jarvis replied and gestured out of the window. ‘Terrorist organizations would kill, literally, for the chance to obtain details of nuclear weapons, even those from half a century ago.’

  Lopez looked at Ethan with interest as she spoke.

  ‘So why send us down there and not official DIA agents? Because of what the police said, that Purcell was asking for Ethan?’

  Jarvis smiled as he closed his folder.

  ‘It’s not so much what he asked as the way that he asked it.’

  Ethan blinked. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You’ll have to see that for yourself,’ Jarvis said. ‘Right now, we need to get down to Miami as fast as possible, and for that we’ll need a ride.’

  ‘We?’ Lopez echoed.

  Jarvis’s jaw twisted into a tight grin.

  ‘The Defense Intelligence Agency has some concerns about the way the operations that involve Warner & Lopez Inc. have been conducted. You’ll remember Washington DC, and of course Santa Fe.’

  Ethan sighed and leaned back in his seat. Years after they had gone their separate ways from the Marine Corps, Jarvis had approached Ethan in Chicago and begged him to search for his granddaughter, who had gone missing in Israel. At the time, Ethan had been grieving for the loss of Joanna. Tempted by the possibility of resurrecting the search for his missing fiancée in Gaza, Ethan had agreed. The chase had brought them back to Washington DC, where he had met Nicola Lopez and founded Warner & Lopez Inc. Much later, he and Lopez had travelled to New Mexico as partners on another mission for the DIA. The resulting carnage out in the lonely deserts had proved difficult for Jarvis’s department both to justify and to cover up.