“Might be his line of work. We crossed our records with the Canadian authorities, and they think they have him pegged as a fellow named Clay Zak.”

“Are they going to pick him up?”

“They would if they knew where to find him. He’s a suspect in a twenty-year-old murder at a Canadian nickel mine. His whereabouts have been unknown ever since.”

“A nickel mine? Might be a tie to his use of dynamite.”

“We’re following up on that now. The Canadians might not find him, but if he sets foot in the country again we’ll have a good chance at picking him up.”

“Nice work, Dan. You’ve accomplished a lot in short order.”

“A lucky break that you recalled your encounter. There’s one more thing that you might be interested in knowing. Lisa Lane’s lab assistant, Bob Hamilton. We were able to obtain a search warrant on the guy’s financial records. It seems that he just had fifty thousand dollars wired into his bank account from an offshore entity.”

“I suspected something was amiss with that one.”

“We will do a little more digging, then bring him in for questioning at the end of the week. We’ll see if there is a connection, but I have to say, things look promising at the moment.”

“I’m glad the investigation has legs. Thanks for your efforts.”

“Thank you, Dirk. You’ve given us a nice jump on the case.”

Pitt wondered how his own research was going and took the stairwell down to the tenth-fl oor computer operations center. He found Yaeger seated at his console conversing again with Max, who stood before a large projection screen. A flattened map of the globe was displayed, with dozens of pinpoint lights flashing from scattered points across the oceans. Each light represented a buoy that relayed sea and weather info via satellite link to the headquarters building.

“Problem with the sea buoy system?” Pitt asked, taking a seat beside Yaeger.

“We’ve had an uplink problem with a number of segments,” Yaeger replied. “I’m having Max run some software tests to try and isolate the problem.”

“If the latest software release had been properly tested before going operational, we wouldn’t be incurring this problem,” Max injected. Turning to Pitt, she said good morning, then eyed Pitt’s bandage. “What happened to your head?”

“I got in a slight fender bender on a rocky road,” he replied.

“We’ve tracked the information on the jet tail number that you phoned in about,” Yaeger said.

“It can wait. Fixing the sea buoy data is more important.”

“I can multitask with the best of them,” Max offered with a touch of indignation.

“She’s running a test that will take twenty minutes,” Yaeger explained. “We can exercise her until the results come back.”

Turning to the holograph image, he said, “Max, bring up the data on the Canadian Gulfstream jet.”