Brussels? Why Brussels? It seemed an unlikely place to hide a family, but perhaps that was reason enough to choose it. He set his iPhone alarm to warn him when the aircraft would be approaching Brussels. It was very important that the family be intercepted and followed at the airport, because once in the city, they might be impossible to find.

—

AT EIGHT-THIRTY PM his alarm chimed, and he went back to the tracking software to recalculate the Gulfstream’s landing time. Its tail number was nowhere to be seen. He rebooted the software and looked again; the aircraft was not on the line between its former mid-Atlantic position and Brussels. He felt a rising wave of panic; if he lost these people St. Clair would kill him.

Then he saw the tail number, not over the English Channel, where he would have expected it, but over southern England. He got out an aeronautical chart of the area and put the position of the airplane between the Bournemouth and Southampton airports, headed west. He watched as the aircraft made a 180-degree turn back to the east, and a couple of minutes later it stopped moving. That was impossible; the airplane couldn’t hover, and there was no airport where it had landed. You didn’t put down an aircraft of that size on a grass strip somewhere; you needed pavement, and a lot of it, if you ever planned to take off again.

He continued to stare at the symbol, and perhaps ten minutes later it began to move again, very slowly. It was taxiing back to the west end of what must be a runway for takeoff. Sure enough, as he watched it picked up speed and left, turning toward the Channel. Clearly, the family had been dropped off in an area with no airport.

He brought up the opposition research file on Stone Barrington and looked for a connection with England. There it was: he owned a house called Windward Hall, on land just south of the village of Beaulieu. He Googled Windward Hall and found a history of the house, including the information that, during World War II, British Bomber Command had had a base on the property, with a seven-thousand-foot runway. It had been used mainly for intelligence and surveillance flights, and as a departure point for Special Operations executive agents being parachuted into France. That would have kept it off aeronautical charts; that and camouflage would have made it difficult for the Germans to locate.

He picked up the phone and called Christian St. Clair.

“Yes?”

“It’s Erik. I’ve found the family,” he said. He explained what had happened.

“It’s damned clever of you to figure that out, Erik,” St. Clair said.

“Thank you, sir. How do you want to proceed?”

“You know who to call in my London office,” St. Clair said. “The two of you should assess the situation and take action.”

“How extreme an action?”