“He hasn’t done anything. You know that, you bastards.”

“Calm down, Thomas.”

“Has Connor been here?”

“No.”

“Has anyone seen him?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

Thomas turned to Kane. “Have you seen my son?”

“Not tonight. What’s happened?”

“He’s gone. What happened to Lauren Carter?” Thomas said. “She’s missing, my son’s missing. What the hell are you doing sitting here interrogating a fucking professor who’s been on the island twenty-four hours?”

“Get out.” Reid moved toward him. Thomas stepped backwards into the Administrator, turned.

“And you,” he said, up close to the Administrator’s face. “You know. You know.”

“Everyone’s anxious,” the Administrator said. “Calm down.”

“Tom, come on. Let’s go home.” An American officer tried to grab Thomas’s arm, but Thomas shook him off. It wasn’t clear what happened next, but it seemed Thomas had taken ahold of the Administrator. They both staggered unsteadily toward the crowd. The police dived out. Thomas took a swing at Morrogh, who backed away from the blow. Reid got his arms around Thomas’s neck and wrestled him to the ground. Morrogh had the presence of mind to shut the police station door.

Kane heard the shouts continue: “Help me hold him down.”

“Get his arms.”

“They’re out there,” Thomas screamed. “And you’re fucking around here.”

Kane sat in front of Rory’s box file. He looked at the Polaroids, picked the exercise book up from the desk where it had been left. Secret. He turned through, gazing at the troubled drawings, until he came across a building. He’d seen it last time he’d looked, but it hadn’t meant anything then. Low and square, it had been drawn hurriedly in pencil but was immediately familiar now as the ruins he’d seen up at Devil’s Ashpit. There were even the concrete stumps on either side. On the facing page was a list: People who saw it. In childish scrawl: Petra, Lauren, Connor. There were spaces for more, but it seemed no one joined them.

Kane studied the drawing. Above the padlocked door of the ruined building Connor had added a sign that said NASA. Kane didn’t remember seeing anything like that when he’d driven by earlier. But he knew that NASA had built a tracking station on Ascension Island in the 1960s. It had been instrumental in the moon landing. This had to be it: the ruins of the old NASA site.

Kane felt there was a good chance that Rory had been there shortly before dying. Which meant a distinct possibility it played a role in other trouble. Petra, Lauren, now Connor. It also seemed plausible that, for one reason or other, no one else was looking in that direction right now, and that if he was going to stop whatever was happening, he had to get there himself.