'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.'

'What was the company called?' Jarvis asked.

'Pacific Ignition,' Ryker said with a wry smile. 'Sounds ominous, until you realize that the word Pacific means peaceful.'

'What's the interesting bit?'

'The person who founded the company,' Ryker replied, and handed Jarvis a black-and-white photograph of a stern-looking man with a broad mustache. 'Isaac Abell.'

'Joaquin Abell's father,' Jarvis murmured.

'The very same,' Ryker confirmed. 'Charles and Joaquin's fathers were rivals for almost a quarter of a century after the end of the Second World War, each competing for government funding. Montgomery Purcell sought money for weapons research, while Isaac Abell focused on the holy grail of energy generation: controlled nuclear fusion. He'd begun experiments off the coast of South Bimini Island in 1941, experimenting with huge magnetic-field generators, but got sidetracked into the Manhattan Project.'

'The plot thickens,' Jarvis murmured. 'What happened after Ivy Mike?'

'The Eisenhower administration remained focused on the defense of America, so weaponry maintained the upper hand when it came to funding from Congress. The other problem for Isaac Abell was that nuclear fusion is so incredibly difficult to produce on earth: the pressures required are tens of thousands of atmospheres, the temperatures in the millions of degrees. It's only in the last few years that it's become a potential reality: our National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California has reported that it may achieve ignition soon, and in Cadarache, southern France, they're building the ITER reactor, which may possibly become the first commercial nuclear-fusion reactor.'

'Sixty years later,' Jarvis said. 'So Isaac Abell failed.'

'It wasn't his fault,' Ryker explained. 'The man was a genius and a hero, a real philanthropist, who, like most scientists, was working to benefit all mankind. But he was trying to build a device using 1950s technology that could ignite and entrap a miniature star and keep it burning just like our sun. Isaac spent over a billion dollars of taxpayers' money on his work, with no positive results, and was rumored to have built some kind of underground test chamber before Congress cut his funding in 1964. Pacific Ignition continued with private funding, but at nowhere near the levels required to make progress.'

Jarvis nodded, and glanced at a picture of Montgomery Purcell.

'And Charles's father?'

'Montgomery Purcell continued working for the United States Army and Air Force after Ivy Mike, building ever more dangerous weapons, culminating in the most powerful detonation in American history: the Castle Bravo shot, off Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. He was at the height of his power and reputation when he is reported to have been invited by Isaac Abell into talks about how to combine their work. Abell was at that time struggling for funding, and Pacific Ignition could not continue its research without financing its operation by doing weapons work.'

Jarvis raised an eyebrow. 'They went into business together?'

'Monty Purcell attended the talks in the Bahamas, but apparently walked out after a blazing row with Isaac Abell. Purcell got into his plane, took off for Miami and was never seen again, the aircraft lost without trace in the Bermuda Triangle.'

Jarvis looked down at the photograph of Isaac Abell. 'What happened to Abell's company, Pacific Ignition?'

'With Monty Purcell dead, Isaac Abell found himself on the receiving end of new government grants, some for weapons research, some for nuclear-power projects. Looks like the government was forced to compromise in order to get him back on their books, to replace Monty Purcell. Isaac Abell worked for them for several years, but after his failure to achieve nuclear fusion, funding for Pacific Ignition's research was finally halted in 1968. Isaac Abell committed suicide in 1973. A trust was maintained by Isaac's wife until she died twelve years later. It seems that Isaac was smart enough to filter a large sum of money from government grants and royalties from patented inventions into a trust fund for their son to inherit on his eighteenth birthday.' Ryker smiled at Jarvis. 'Joaquin Abell did exactly that, and then changed the company name.'

'To International Rescue and Infrastructure Support,' Jarvis guessed. 'Joaquin inherits a fortune and his father's life's work.'

Ryker tapped the picture of Isaac Abell with his hand.

'Before their fathers became enemies they worked together and were the best of friends. It's unlikely that their sons were unaware of their connection. It's plausible that they might even have met from time to time, as young children. Either way, Joaquin certainly knew exactly who Charles Purcell was, long before he gained access to his father's fortune.'

Jarvis saw it all come together in his mind.

'Joaquin didn't inherit his father's mathematical mind, so he used Charles Purcell's skills to continue his father's work.' He thought for a moment. 'But it still doesn't explain how Joaquin can now see through time.'

'No,' Ryker agreed, 'but it gives us a clue. Isaac Abell built a facility using government funding, that much we know. But we don't know where he built it. There's mention here of the construction of large tokamaks, torus-shaped devices that are designed to produce magnetic fields to contain plasma in modern nuclear-fusion generators; and the purchase of vast amounts of graphite.'

'What does that tell you?' Jarvis asked.

'That Isaac Abell was on the right course for building an ignition chamber that could contain a nuclear-fusion reaction,' Ryker replied. 'But the only way that such a device could be used in order to twist the fabric of time is if the star created within it were crushed to such densities that the electron repulsion of the atoms within it were overcome. Mankind does not have the ability to do this, but if by some chance reaction it did occur, then a heavily modified tokamak chamber might just be able to contain it.'

'Contain what?' Jarvis asked. 'The star?'

'A different kind of star,' Ryker said. 'I can't believe I'm even considering it, but if such a collapse of ordinary matter were to occur, then there are only two possible outcomes: firstly a neutron star, a tiny ball of degenerate material where all of the space between the atoms has been squeezed out. An object of this matter the size of a grape would weigh as much as a mountain.'

'And secondly?'

Ryker shook his head.

'If the pressure was too great, the neutron star would continue to collapse, and would condense time and space down to a singularity: it would become a black hole.'

38.

FLORIDA EVERGLADES.

June 28, 15:17 The powerful V-8 engine propelled the airboat across the silky waters, more like an aircraft than a boat, as the huge eight-foot-diameter propeller roared behind Ethan. The simple, square hull contained two rows of seats, a raised pilot's chair and the engine at the stern. He reveled in the breeze as they soared between enormous sawgrass marshes and reed islands stranded in the endless expanses of cypress swamps, estuarine mangrove forests and pine rockland.

The subtropical wetlands of the Everglades comprised the southern half of a large watershed that was born in the Kissimmee River, which discharged into Lake Okeechobee. Essentially a slow-moving river sixty miles wide and more than a hundred miles long, the system represented the perfect hiding place for a lone fugitive: if they could survive 'The Native Americans that used to live here called it Pahayokee, the "grassy waters",' Lopez said above the roar of the engine. 'But it only looks pretty. Living here would have been hard at the best of times.'

Ethan scanned the broad waters filled with periphyton, a mossy golden-brown substance that floated on bodies of water throughout the Everglades, and the scattered islands of ubiquitous sawgrass, a sedge with serrated blades so sharp they could cut through clothing.

'The satellite's GPS coordinates fixed Charles Purcell's position five miles to the southwest!' Ethan shouted up to Scott Bryson, who nodded as he glanced down at a GPS screen next to the airboat's wheel.

'Was he alone?' Bryson called back.

'Yeah,' Ethan nodded, 'or at least he was a couple of hours ago.'

'How can you be sure?'

'Never mind.'

Ethan turned back around in his seat and looked straight at Lopez as she watched Bryson guiding the airboat. She had been able, with her considerable charm, to convince Bryson to continue helping them, with the proviso that no more of his property was exposed to bullets or blades. Considering what they were going up against, it was of considerable interest to Ethan that Bryson had agreed. Then he looked at Lopez again, and guessed that maybe it wasn't just the captain's sense of honor that had guided him.

Lopez's long black hair streamed behind her in the wind as she reached up and pinned it back. Ethan found himself watching her openly as she flicked her head to one side and tied her hair off into a ponytail. The speed of the airboat across the water and the thrill of the wind had touched her face with a bright smile that lit her features like the sunlight on the racing water beneath them. It was something that he saw less and less in her these days.

For a brief moment Ethan forgot where he was and realized that, despite everything, despite the fact that Joanna might yet still be alive somewhere out in the world, Nicola Lopez meant more to him than he was comfortable admitting to himself. Maybe it was a sign of just how big a stick he had up his ass that it had taken him this long to realize it. This realization in turn raised the ugly and unwelcome question of what he was going to do about it. An image of Joanna flickered like a phantom through the darkened vaults of his mind, her long blonde hair, green eyes and quiet confidence contrasting with Lopez's dark looks and fearsome temper. Somehow, though, as he pictured Joanna in his imagination, the differences weren't so great after all.

'You need a photograph?'

Ethan blinked. Joanna vanished and he found himself staring straight at a bemused Lopez. He stopped breathing.

'Just enjoying the view. You want to get out of the way?'

Lopez laughed out loud. 'You're an ass sometimes, Ethan.'

Before Ethan could answer, Bryson's voice bellowed down at them.

'I reckon he's swallowed a love bug, honey!'

Lopez's laughter turned to a curious smile as she stared at Ethan, who avoided her gaze whilst turning to look at Bryson.

'You need a wooden leg to go with that eye, skipper?'

Bryson let out a belly laugh but said nothing. Ethan turned back in his seat, not looking at Lopez, but he could see out of the corner of his eye that there was still a smile on her lips. He was trying to come up with something useful to say when the engine note changed as Bryson throttled down. Ethan glanced over his shoulder at the captain, who lowered his voice and gestured ahead of them.

'The island's just up there. We'll coast in the last hundred meters. Get tooled up.'

Ethan reached down behind his seat to where a canvas sack lay on the deck. He unzipped it and retrieved a pair of M-16s, both fully loaded and with two spare clips each. Ethan handed one to Lopez before picking up the other weapon.

'Jesus,' Lopez said as she checked her rifle.

'We're not getting caught out again. To hell with the goddamn rules.'