'Loud and clear.'

'Roger that,' Ethan said.

'Stand by, patching you in.'

The blackness flickered in front of Ethan's eyes and then suddenly bright sunlight flared. Ethan squinted as his eyes adjusted to the brightness, and he gasped and almost lost his balance as the world appeared before him with absolute clarity. A brilliant ocean glittered, hundreds of sailing boats moored on the blue water, the sky above clear blue. People walked everywhere, cars rolled past nearby and a seagull arced through the sky above him. Ethan looked about and saw a stylized figure nearby, dressed in a strange silver suit with the virtual-reality helmet on. He realized that Lopez's image was deliberately designed to stand out, to make recognition easier.

The only thing missing was the sound, for the virtual world around them was entirely silent. As Ethan looked more carefully he saw patches of pixilated ground, shadows that shifted erratically, and deep black holes within shop windows and inside cars. The virtual world moved with incredible fluidity and yet looked stark and unnatural, like a highly realistic computer game that had not quite been finished.

'Ethan, Nicola, we can see him. Can you confirm you have visual on the target? He is in the queue by the dock.'

'Stand by,' Ethan replied.

A line of people were walking away from a ferry that was docked beside the quay. Ethan scanned their faces, their clothes, and their shadows on the ground as they walked. A seagull wheeled above them and Ethan noticed that it was jet black on its underbelly, its edges blurred and pixilated. The orbiting satellites could not see beneath the gull, so there was no information to relay into the virtual-reality world.

'I see him' Lopez said. 'Fifth from the front, white shirt.'

Ethan stepped instinctively to one side for a better view and almost fell as the rolling platform shifted beneath him with a slight delay.

'Step slowly and carefully,' Ottaway advised over the microphone, 'it'll take time to get used to it.'

Ethan moved slowly to his right and saw Purcell amongst the crowd. He looked flustered, sweaty and nervous as he pushed past the people in front of him and dashed away from the dock to flag down a taxi. Almost before Ethan could move, Purcell was aboard and the taxi pulled away. He started walking swiftly in pursuit.

'How do we keep up with him?'

'Wave your hand in front of your face,' Ottaway replied. Ethan complied, and a digital list appeared to hover in front of his vision. 'Now select Manual Guidance.' Ethan's hand in front of his face had automatically become a cursor, and he selected the option before him. 'Good. There will now be two joysticks activated either side of the railings beside you on the platform. The one on the right controls speed and direction, the one on the left altitude. You can fly in our virtual world.'

Ethan fumbled either side of him and then got hold of the two joysticks. He gasped again as he was elevated instantly into the air. A sense of vertigo plunged through his belly as his brain caused the very sensation it expected to feel as he lifted off. Ethan, his eyes fixed on the taxi, flew along behind it in pursuit.

'Lopez, are you with me?'

'Way ahead of you,' came the reply.

Ethan looked up to see Lopez's silvery form zipping past in pursuit of the taxi. Ethan followed as the cab weaved its way through Miami's late-afternoon traffic.

'He's heading west, probably directly home,' Ethan guessed. 'If he saw what was going to happen to his family, maybe he tried to prevent it.'

'Stand by, I'll move you to his house and accelerate time until his arrival.'

Ethan watched as the dense Miami cityscape beneath him blurred briefly and he was whipped across the surface of the earth to be deposited outside Coral Gables with Lopez alongside him.

As they waited, Ethan saw the time-accelerated clouds race by overhead, the scenery around him flickering with bright sunlight and cloud shadows and trees quivering rapidly in the breeze as the sun arced down toward the west. Airliners zipped across the broad sky and cars raced past at impossible speed. Suddenly a cream Chevrolet appeared like lightning outside Purcell's house and then vanished.

'Wait,' Ethan said. 'Rewind that by a few seconds.'

The world around them froze and then was whipped into reverse. The Chevrolet appeared again and raced away backwards from Purcell's house.

'There,' Ethan said, 'play from there.'

The world returned to normal speed and Ethan watched as the Chevrolet rolled casually past him and pulled up alongside the Purcell residence, the interior of the vehicle a pixilated miasma of darkness. Ethan moved in alongside the vehicle as the door opened and the driver climbed out.

Over six feet tall, hugely muscular and with short-cropped blond hair.

'I think we just found the killer of Purcell's family,' Lopez said.

36.

'Follow him.'

Ethan obeyed without question, following the giant man as he walked toward the front door of Purcell's house. Ethan realized that the man's brazen approach was either reckless or brilliant: what assassin would hit their target in broad daylight?

Ethan looked about, but there were no other people on the street. No witnesses. The date stamp hovering on his menu list was the same as the estimated time of death of Purcell's wife and daughter.

The big man got to the front door and reached into his pocket. To Ethan's amazement he produced a key and slipped it into the lock, then turned it slowly before pushing the door inward. It opened, and Ethan looked instinctively inside.

'Damn!'

The interior of the house was jet black, devoid of any visual data.

'Could we switch to infrared and get above the house?' Lopez asked. 'We might pick something up.'

'IR view is on your visual menu,' Ottaway confirmed. 'Try it out.'

Ethan waved his hand in front of his face again and selected the IR view. Instantly the world changed from near-perfect visual clarity to a shadowy mixture of cool blue tones and hot oranges and reds as the recorded data from the keyhole satellite's heat-sensing cameras took over. Ethan grabbed his joysticks and levitated up over the roof of Purcell's house alongside Lopez.

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.