'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 fiancee 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.

'We did what we could under extremely difficult circumstances.' Ethan glanced at Lopez. 'Sometimes you just can't keep these things entirely under the radar.'

'Indeed,' Jarvis murmured. 'Abraham Mitchell has insisted that in this case I accompany you on your investigation and provide a full report on your methods.'

Ethan knew Abraham Mitchell, Director of the DIA, as a towering pillar of patriotism and not a man he would cross lightly. But placing Jarvis in the line of fire was an uncharacteristically reckless gesture. Christ, he was in his sixties. Ethan stared at the old man. 'No offense, but that could slow us down, Doug.'

'Wasn't my decision,' Jarvis said with a shrug. 'I'm too damned old to be charging about, but I can oversee and hopefully justify your work to Command.' He leaned forward in his seat. 'Fact is, I gave up a great deal in order to get this department of the DIA sanctioned and provided with both a budget and trust. After what happened in New Mexico, there's concern that you're unable to maintain a discreet profile.'

'We get results,' Lopez challenged.

'You do,' Jarvis conceded. 'But if the cost is too high then this whole thing will be over and I'll be looking at retirement, so let's just play the game the way the high and mighty want to, and see what comes up. Right now, our priority is getting down to Miami the fastest way possible.'

A shadow of concern fell across Lopez's features. 'Just how fast are you thinking?'

7.

LOIZA, PUERTO RICO.

June 28, 07:31 'I've never seen anything like it.'

Joaquin Abell stood on a roof on the outskirts of what was one of the poorest towns, in one of the poorest nations, in the western world, and surveyed the scene of utter devastation lining the shores of the Rio Grande de Loiza river. He smoothed down his glossy black hair and straightened his tie. His expensive suit, a blue so dark it almost seemed black, contrasted sharply with the dust-coated piles of shattered rubble beneath him.

A handful of television crews from international networks focused their lenses on him as he slowly turned on the spot and took in the entire panorama.

The magnitude-7 earthquake had hit just twelve hours previously, the mysterious depths of the Puerto Rico Trench that surrounded the island shuddering with a force equivalent to innumerable nuclear explosions as the strain on tectonic plates far beneath the earth's surface had been released in a spasm of seismic energy. Joaquin knew that the Puerto Rico Trench was a unique geological formation due to plate subduction, and one that geologists had for decades been predicting would produce a major quake. Warnings of increased seismic activity in the Caribbean had gone largely unheeded by the population and the world at large, and now the consequences were writ bare upon the landscape.

The roof on which he stood was only four feet off the ground, the building having collapsed in a cloud of fractured masonry. Seventy school children and their teachers had been entombed in the debris, none had survived. Beyond, the roads were churned like the desiccated plates of a dry river bed, immense chunks of asphalt split and upturned to expose the raw soil deep beneath them. The palm trees lining the roads had been torn from their roots to block what little access to the town remained. Across the landscape, dotted amongst the handful of standing trees, was a barren wasteland of collapsed houses and apartment blocks, drifting clouds of cement dust churned by countless desperate hands clawing to locate family members suffocating in their macabre tombs.

But worse even than the collapsed buildings were the now-silent rivers of mud encrusted with lethal shards of splintered wood and debris, and upturned and half-buried vehicles lodged like discarded toys, filled with unmoving bodies that were already beginning to rot in the sweltering heat. The sullen gray sky above seemed to reflect the somber mood in the town, which had been destroyed overnight by the savage power of the tsunami that had engulfed it minutes after the quake.

Joaquin turned to face the cameras. A silent, motionless throng of local citizens and emergency-response teams, their faces and clothes caked in grime and blood, stared up at him, their faces rigid with the paralysis of shock.

'This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when people fail to act in the defense and support of their neighbors,' Joaquin said, his voice sounding muted in the listless, muggy heat. 'This is what happens when lack of investment, lack of infrastructure and lack of political will strands a population in poverty and exposes them to nature's wrath. These people could have been helped: instead they were abandoned by our government, by their government, by us all.'

Abell, his flawlessly tanned skin sheened by the heat, gestured to a brilliant white helicopter that had landed nearby on what had once been the school playground. The craft was emblazoned with a bright blue logo: IRIS.

'It is for just this reason that International Rescue and Infrastructure Support was founded, the legacy of my father's success, to go where our hallowed leaders fear to tread, to provide the kind of support that politicians have proven themselves too conservative, too greedy, to give. It will take the United Nations weeks to even begin to organize the humanitarian effort necessary to lift the people of this island nation out of their tragedy.' Joaquin directed a stern gaze at the cameras and pointed down at the churned earth beneath their feet. 'I'll put four hundred trained experts on the ground here and ten million dollars into the rebuilding of this country before the sun goes down tonight!'

From behind the camera crews a meager crowd of locals gave a muted cheer, their ragged clothes and weary faces blossoming with new hope as translators gave them Joaquin Abell's good news.

'There are some thirty-five million people living here in Puerto Rico and the surrounding islands,' Abell went on, 'all low-lying territories vulnerable to both earthquakes and tsunamis. Despite all of the natural disasters that have occurred around the world in recent years, from Aceh to Haiti, despite all of the warnings, still world governments wait until tens of thousands of people are maimed and killed before they even begin to act. Already there are reports that this disaster alone, when disease and starvation from lack of resources are taken into account, will result in the loss of up to one hundred thousand lives.'

A voice called out from among the reporters.

'What makes you think that you can make a difference? IRIS is a powerful company, but you can't change the world in one stroke.'

A lance of irritation pierced Abell's studied calm. It was followed by a vision of the late, great Isaac Abell: upstanding, proud, his jacket buttoned tight along with his collar, a pipe jutting from beneath his neatly trimmed moustache. His words echoed through Joaquin's mind. No man can do everything son, but all men can make a difference.

Isaac Abell had been a product of a generation more noble than that which had inherited the earth, a man of rigid principles and immaculate morals. Born just early enough to witness the unspeakable horror of the rise of the Kaiser and the First World War, when millions of young lives had been lost in senseless slaughter amidst trenches of freezing French mud, Isaac Abell had returned home from those bitter killing fields aged just twenty-one. As he had related to his son a thousand times, he had sworn that he would devote his life to the task of learning, not killing. Within a few years he had become a physicist and a brilliant star in the dawning of the atomic age.

And then his worst fears had been realized, as once again Europe was torn apart in the wake of the Third Reich's rise to power. When the United States dropped the world's first atomic weapon on Hiroshima, Isaac Abell was transformed from a valiant champion of scientific endeavor into an embittered recluse consumed by the conviction that mankind was incapable of saving itself from an endless abyss of self-destruction.

'You're not the Pope,' another reporter pointed out, breaking Joaquin's somber reverie.

Abell smiled as the images of his father vanished, whipped away by an uncaring wind sweeping in from the nearby ocean.

'Thankfully, no, I am not,' Joaquin replied. 'Because I deal in reality, not fantasy. The difference that IRIS can make is to show the world, to show those who govern our world, that it is beneficial to help our fellow human beings without reserve, without thought to the consequences, because if we help each other then we become greater than the sum of our parts. Why wait? Why debate whether or not we can afford to help? Why debate anything at all when people are dying, right now, right here? Would you prefer that we delay, sir?'

The reporter said nothing in reply and Joaquin Abell surveyed the watching, growing crowds.

'It's just as my rocket-scientist father once said: it's not rocket science,' Joaquin continued, and was rewarded with faint chuckles from the news crews. 'Either we move without hesitation, without compromise, without condition, to the aid of our fellow human beings, or we leave these people to rot whilst we in the wealthiest countries worry ourselves over which restaurant we're going to dine in tonight. I'm going to provide the funds that these people need to save themselves, so if you'll excuse me ladies and gentlemen . . .'

A ripple of applause clattered amongst the Puerto Ricans, many of whom crowded around Joaquin as his last words were translated, their skeletal hands patting his back and clouding his suit in dust as he climbed carefully down off the collapsed roof of the school.

Joaquin reached up and brushed the dust from his shoulders as a swarm of his personal staff huddled protectively around him. One, a striking red-haired woman called Sandra, who had been his personal assistant for the past ten years, strode to his side and held out a thick wad of papers.

'Court orders from Mexico, blocking our donations to the rebuilding of wells in the southern territories. They're citing unspecified health-and-safety concerns.'

'Build them anyway,' Abell replied briskly as they walked. 'What can they do, sue us?'

Sandra flipped the page over and selected another.

'We're also getting obstruction from landowners in Aceh, who want to build hotels on the land destroyed by the tsunami in 2004. What should we do?'

'Tell them that if they don't back off, I'll buy the controlling share of their hotel chains and then raze them to the ground. They don't own the land, the people do. Get our people in Singapore onto it they know the legal terrain out there.'

Sandra produced another file.

'And New Orleans? We're still bogged down by the new wave of building regulations being enforced by the mayor. If we're pushed out, you know that they'll build malls rather than replace the homes destroyed by the hurricane.'

Joaquin considered for a moment.

'Get the people to rally, in their thousands. Organize something really visual and let IRIS pick up the bill for it. If the mayor doesn't fold he'll probably lose office over it. People-power, Sandra, is sometimes more effective than lobbying Congress.'

Sandra was about to answer when her cell trilled. She picked it up immediately, and Joaquin turned away as two noisy children bounded toward him, delight on their faces. Joaquin knelt down on the debris-strewn road as Jacob and Merriel leapt into his arms. At four and six years respectively, they seemed oblivious to the tragedy around them.

'How are my two firecrackers?' Joaquin asked, holding them tightly.

Behind them, Joaquin saw his wife glide up the road, dressed in a smart charcoal suit and with her long auburn hair flowing like liquid velvet across her shoulders. Katherine smiled at him as she picked her way through the debris, and as he picked up the two children she leaned in and kissed him on his cheek.

'How did it go?' she asked.

'As well as can be expected,' Joaquin replied. 'Let's hope that when the government sees the news tonight, they'll be provoked to get off their asses and start doing something about what's happened down here. We need investment, not debate.'

Katherine smiled.

'I know you'll get it.'

Before he could reply Sandra tapped him on the shoulder, a phone to her ear and a concerned expression on her face. Joaquin set his children down beside their mother and joined Sandra as she beckoned him discreetly to one side.

'What's wrong?' Joaquin asked.

'There's been an accident,' Sandra whispered. 'One of our planes crashed in the Bahamas yesterday evening. I'm afraid there were no survivors.'

8.