“Something has turned up, and you’re about to be the only person I’ve told,” I reply as I watch the sun peek above the horizon, painting streaks of orange across Prussian blue. “I’ve not told the FBI or anyone what I’m about to say to you. We need to be extremely strategic about how the information is shared because it appears we’re dealing with a weapon that at least in part has been fashioned from a meteorite—”

“All right, hold on,” he interrupts me. “Say that again.”

I tell him about panguite as I keep thinking about what Ernie said.

You’d have to go around testing space rocks in every museum in the world …

Before he mentioned that, I wasn’t thinking about museums. But now I am.

“Of course someone could have bought pieces of meteorites on the Internet but they wouldn’t necessarily contain panguite. So we need to consider how someone acquired it and then had the ability to engineer it into something dangerous,” I’m explaining to Tom Perry. “For example, was it stolen from a collection somewhere? Just as priceless art can be heisted from museums, so can rare rocks.”

“Obviously you’ve not talked to Benton yet,” Perry says, and I imagine the secretary-general’s smiling eyes and easygoing manner.

No matter how busy he is, he never acts like he’s in a hurry. Some of the nicest, longest business lunches I’ve ever had have been with him in Lyon, and he knows French wines dangerously well for an American.

“Obviously you’ve talked to Benton if you’re asking me that. I’ve not talked to him since he left here with Lucy, headed to Maryland,” I reply as light flares mirror bright on the surrounding Harvard and MIT apartment and academic buildings.

CHAPTER 43

SHADOWS MOVE OVER BRICK and granite. In the distance the skyline of downtown Boston is more sharply outlined and begins to glitter as the sun rises higher in the cloudless sky.

“Do you know who William Portison is?” Tom Perry says, and I’m betting Benton has talked to the man Elisa Vandersteel once worked for.

“Lucy says he’s a tech CEO in London, clearly very wealthy,” I reply. “The address for their Mayfair house is what Elisa had on her driver’s license. We found it near her body.”

“He’s an alum of MIT, and so is his ne’er-do-well brother, both of them British. One is a mega-success worth billions and the other just as smart but missing a few wires or they’re crossed or something. I’d call Theo in the spectrum, a whack-job genius.”

“Theo?” I look out at pastel streaks changing in shape and intensity as sunlight flickers like shiny fish in the slow-moving current of the river across the street.

“Theodore Portison. He goes by Theo when he’s not using an alias.”