'It doesn't mean anything,' she said. 'It's just junk.'

Ethan grinned and reached out to tap her head with his knuckles.

'Don't tell me you can't see it. What do we know about Charles Purcell's father?'

Kyle Sears stared at the symbols.

'Looks familiar somehow,' he said.

'Purcell's father was a physicist too, but he died in a plane crash in the Bermuda Triangle, right?' Lopez said. 'Still doesn't add up to much.'

'Yes it does,' Sears replied as he suddenly recognized the configuration. 'Tail code? I drive past O'Hare airport virtually every day and I'm sure I've seen codes like that on small aircraft.'

'November two-seven-six-four-charlie,' Ethan con firmed. 'It's a standard tail code for a civilian-operated aircraft in the United States. My sister got her pilot's license a few years ago, and she flies a light aircraft with a similar number.'

'I'll be damned,' Kyle Sears said.

'So will I,' Lopez murmured as she looked at Ethan. 'You never told me you have a sister.'

Ethan didn't respond to her and turned instead to Captain Sears.

'Whatever the reason, it seems that Charles Purcell wants us to follow the clues he's leaving. You think you could check out that aircraft and find out where it is? My guess is that it belonged to his father.'

'I'll get right on it.'

Sears left the room as Ethan stared up at the code on the wall.

'Okay,' Lopez said, 'you've done good, but let's not dwell on it. What's your sister's name?'

'Natalie,' he replied, still staring vacantly at the symbols on the wall.

'How come you never mentioned her before?'

Ethan stared up at the wall and the code, but for a moment his thoughts switched to his family. His folks were both retired, his father from the Marine Corps and his mother from banking, living out their lives in peaceful seclusion in the Chicago suburbs. Truth was, he saw them rarely and had only recently begun speaking to his father again, long after he'd resigned his commission in the marines and ended his father's dreams of a high-ranking son. Natalie was studying politics at college in New York City, shooting for a job at the White House last he'd heard. There wasn't much he could tell Lopez about any of them.

'It never came up,' he replied, dodging her question as deftly as he could.

'That's crap,' Lopez scolded him. 'You don't talk about them, but I know that you'd have bugged out of the Windy City a long time ago if they weren't important to you.'

Ethan blinked. What did keep him in Illinois? He shrugged it off as he looked up at the odd symbols and rubbed them with his finger.

'Will you cut it out?' Lopez laughed. 'Your work here is done, Einstein.'

'Why'd you think Purcell would do this?' Ethan asked her. 'Leave messages like these for us to find?'

Lopez shrugged. 'He's a scientist they get their rocks off on stuff like this.'

Ethan shook his head.

'He's just lost his wife and child in a brutal murder that he says he did not commit. I don't reckon he'd be interested in playing mind games if he's trying to prove his innocence. Surely he'd just write the tail code in big letters like he did the other message, or he'd just call the police again and tell them to search for the aircraft in question, not conceal them in a tiny scribble up here.'

Lopez fell silent for a few moments as she considered this.

'Unless maybe there's somebody else looking for him too,' she suggested. 'Somebody who he knows might not search as thoroughly as the police have. But then why leave the blatant message for you on the other wall? Why not hide everything?'

Ethan spoke without breaking his gaze.

'Maybe the real message is the coded one, the rest just enough to satisfy whoever he thinks is pursuing him. So he hides the coded message here behind the curtain, maybe figuring that the police will search more thoroughly and have more resources to figure out what he's trying to tell them, before whoever else he's hiding from finds him.'

Lopez looked across the room at the scrawled message.

'He'd still have to know in advance that we'd definitely be here.'

Ethan turned on his heel and looked at her. 'And how might he know that? Sure, he called Sears and told him to contact me, but how could he be absolutely sure that I'd turn up?'

'I don't know,' Lopez admitted, 'but why else would he have written your name up here and then left a code for you to find?'

Ethan was about to respond when another voice answered for him.

'Because Nicola is right, and he knew that you would be here.'

Ethan turned and saw Jarvis standing in the doorway of the room. The military transport he'd travelled down on was not even half as fast as the F-15s, but Ethan knew they'd have been given priority status as they raced south. The old man sauntered in with his hands in his pockets and looked up at the walls where the scrawled messages taunted them.

'That's crazy,' Ethan pointed out. 'You saying this guy really can see into the future?'

'We're not sure,' Jarvis admitted. 'But he's leaving you clues and he must have a reason for doing so. I was just listening to what you said, and there's no point in Charles Purcell concealing selected information in codes unless he's hiding something from one person whilst trying to inform another.'

'Sure,' Lopez agreed, 'but who's to say that it's us Purcell wants to figure all this out? Maybe this is all a double bluff to throw us off the scent, and he really did murder his family.'

Jarvis shook his head.

'Given what we know about him I'd say it's unlikely. He has no history of mental instability and was by all accounts extremely happy in his work at NASA.'

'But he works for somebody else now, right?' Lopez pointed out. 'Maybe something happened?'

Sears re-appeared in the apartment.

'I'll say,' he said, as he waved a piece of paper at them. 'I had that aircraft checked out for you.'

'Did you find it?' Ethan asked.

'Kind of.'

Lopez looked at the captain with an uncomfortable expression. 'The hell does that mean?'

Sears looked somewhat pale as he replied.

'It didn't belong to Charles Purcell's father. November two-seven-six-four-charlie was a Grumman Mallard that went down yesterday afternoon off the coast of South Bimini island in the Bahamas. There were no survivors.'

Ethan stared at Sears for a moment and then looked at the code that Charles Purcell had scrawled across the wall.

'When was Purcell booked into this apartment?' he asked.

'Checked in yesterday at five thirty in the evening, and according to the hotelier he left in his car two hours later and did not return . . .' Sears broke off as he realized what Ethan was getting at.

'When did the aircraft go down?' Jarvis prompted the captain.

'Radio contact was lost just before seven thirty in the evening,' Sears replied. 'The aircraft was reported missing at just after eight, after it failed to land at Miami International at the allotted time.'

Ethan looked at Jarvis. 'Purcell wrote that coded message before the aircraft had gone down.'

'He knew it was going to crash,' Lopez said. 'You think he somehow saw the crash in advance, like the scene at his home yesterday evening?'

Kyle Sears shook his head. 'It's more likely that Purcell had something to do with the plane going down than that he's able to see the future. We could be dealing with a mass murderer.'

'Has any wreckage been found?' Ethan asked.

'That's part of the problem,' Sears replied. 'The aircraft vanished without trace. The Miami Coastguard conducted a search at the aircraft's last known position but nothing was found. The airplane was travelling through the Bermuda Triangle when it disappeared from radar screens.'

'The Bermuda Triangle,' Ethan echoed.

'This is getting weirder by the minute,' Lopez said.

Ethan turned to Jarvis.

'Purcell used to work at NASA. We need to go and talk to some of his colleagues and find out what he was doing there.'

Jarvis nodded as he slipped a cellphone out of his pocket.

'I'll get us a ride. We'll be in Cape Canaveral within the hour.'

Ethan stared at the wall and its cryptic message.

'What's up?' Lopez asked him.

Ethan sighed.

'I want to know,' he replied, 'what happens at 20:48 on June 28. I've got a feeling that, whatever it is, it's not going to be good.'

13.

MANDARIN ORIENTAL HOTEL, MIAMI, FLORIDA.

June 28, 10:02 Joaquin Abell stood at the ceiling-to-floor windows of his penthouse suite and looked across the water to the Miami skyline, where the British Consulate dominated the scenery. The channel between the hotel and Bricknell Key, a wedge-shaped island just off the shore, glittered in the morning sunshine as it flowed south in deep eddies before trailing away to be lost into the endless ocean, like time irretrievably passing him by. Lost, but still there.

And at what price? The late, great Isaac Abell watched him from history and gave a deep and disapproving shake of his head. Joaquin swallowed thickly.

'This is worth it, Father.'

The words spilled from Joaquin's lips without conscious effort, as though even now he was compelled to justify himself. Once, he had been intimidated and dwarfed by the incorruptible morals of his father, which seemed too pristine and too perfect to follow. And then the towering monolith, the indestructible center of Joaquin's entire universe, had toppled and fallen, his father's life extinguished not by disease or years but by the insufferable disgrace of suicide.

'What's worth it?'

Joaquin bit his lip and cursed his melancholic reverie as he turned to see Katherine walk over to join him. She had changed into a smart, knee-length suit with a crisp white shirt, and as usual looked stunning.

'Everything that IRIS is doing,' he replied with a smile, as she slipped her arm round his waist.

'And what is IRIS doing?'

'Right now?' he asked rhetorically. 'Right now it is on the verge of being able to not just come to the aid of those suffering natural disasters around the world, but to prevent those disasters from happening in the first place.'

Katherine looked at her husband for a few moments and smiled brightly, but a veil of confusion shadowed her green eyes.

'You can't save the entire world, Joaquin,' she said. 'It's too big, even for you.'

Joaquin chuckled. 'Never say that. Nothing is impossible.'

'The government wouldn't let you do it, even if you could,' she replied. 'You know that.'

Joaquin sighed.

'They're far too busy looking after themselves to be concerned with the needs of so many anonymous lives.'

It was that same truth that had so embittered Isaac Abell and sent him into alternating paroxysms of fury and despair over the callousness of humanity and the self-interest of those charged with representing and protecting their fellow human beings.

There were approximately seven billion people on earth, yet their lives were governed by just a few thousand politicians, many of whom struggled to serve honorably under the crippling demands of corporate capitalism, the twisting arm of the media and the machinations of countless narrow-minded pressure groups concerned only with their own personal or religious views of the world. Such idiocy enraged Joaquin as much as it had infuriated his father. No president, no matter how adept, could reach the White House without asserting their belief in God, despite the fact that nobody on earth even knew if any such deity existed. The media and major corporations funded the very campaigns that launched the careers of presidents, safe in the knowledge that their investments would result in policies carefully tailored to ensure their profits. The whole charade was a circus of self-serving, profiteering bullshit, democracy lost at the expense of civil liberties and justice.

And so Joaquin had infiltrated the halls of power and set his organization to work rebuilding lands devastated by natural disasters, ravaged by disease and scoured of life by the horrors of man's endless conflicts. Contracts were awarded by Congress, often after months of lobbying by IRIS, to reconstruct entire cities shattered by war, while at the same time IRIS was fighting off the equally determined lobbying of corporate giants which sought those same contracts purely for profit. Those contracts that IRIS won were used to bring peace where once chaos had reigned. Over, and over, and over again. It was becoming harder and harder to secure funding for charitable ventures, forcing Joaquin to entertain ever more radical ideas to force the hands of the politicians.

'Your mind's wandering,' Katherine interrupted his thoughts with a gentle jab to his shoulder, 'and the look on your face suggests weighty concerns that you can't solve alone.'

Joaquin sighed again.

'You're right,' he said, 'as ever. Maybe soon this will all come to an end, but for now I must try to convince the governor of Florida to lobby Congress to provide us with the funds we need to get supplies and medical equipment on the ground in Puerto Rico.'

Katherine's features sagged.

'I thought we were staying here for a few weeks,' she complained. 'I only have to defend IRIS against a civil action, for which there is no evidence, and then I'm done. The kids have barely seen you these last two months and school's out in a couple of weeks. You promised them.'

Joaquin nodded and rubbed his temples.

'I know, it just can't wait. I'll have to spend some time out on the reef at Deep Blue. It should only take a day or so at the most in fact I know it will, and then we'll be free.'