But where we do, one person appears. Many names, but just one person, one face. You want to guess who that is?"

The woman in the photograph. The woman who had been seen with Lise's father.

"So Sulean Moi shows up on facial-recognition data from the docks at Port Magellan, and when we arrive to investigate we find Lise, who has a prior connection, has been going over this same ground, talking to her father's old colleagues and so forth. For perfectly legitimate reasons, granted. She's curious, it's a family mystery, she thinks knowing the truth would make her feel better. But that leaves us with a problem. Do we interfere with her? Do we let her go on doing what she's doing, and just sort of supervise? Do we warn her that she's in dangerous territory?"

"Warning her didn't work," Brian said.

"So we have to make use of her in some other way."

"Make use of her?"

"Instead of physically arresting her—which is what some of my superiors have been advocating—we think a wait-and-watch approach might be more informative in the long run. She's already connected with other persons of interest. One of them is Turk Findley."

Turk Findley, the freelance pilot and general fuck-up. Bad as it was that Brian had not been able to sustain his marriage to Lise, how much worse that she had taken up with someone so wayward, dysfunctional, and generally useless to his fellow man? Turk Findley was another variety of fallout from the Spin, Brian thought. A maladapted human being. A purposeless drifter. Possibly something worse, if Sigmunds implication was correct.

"You're saying Turk Findley has some connection to this elderly woman, apart from the fact that she once chartered a flight with him?"

"Well, that's certainly suggestive right there. But Turk has other contacts almost as suspicious. Known and suspected Fourths. And he's a criminal. Did you know that? He left the United States with a warrant on him."

"Warrant for what?"

"He was a person of interest in a warehouse fire."

"What are you telling me, he's an arsonist?"

"The case lapsed, but he may have burned down his old man's business."

"I thought his father was an oil man."

"His father worked in Turkey at one time and had some connections with Aramco, but he made most of his money on an import business. Some kind of bad blood between the two, the old man's warehouse burns down, Turk skips the country. You can draw your own conclusions."

It just gets worse, Brian thought. "So we have to get Lise away from him. She might be in danger."

"We suspect she's been drawn into something she doesn't understand. We doubt she's under any kind of duress. She's cooperating with this man. It was probably Turk who told her to stop taking calls."

"But you can find them, right?"

"Sooner or later. But we're not magicians, we can't just conjure them out of the void."