That idea fell apart almost at once. No, he and Dani had already heard what the military thought of all this, in the tape-recorded conversation in her father’s office. The government was losing its shit trying to figure out what was going on. Besides, if the military had wanted to restart some old project like Rigel, they could have just done it. Officially. They wouldn’t need to sneak around kidnapping their own people to work on it. They could order them to work on it.

Dani’s eyes suddenly narrowed. “Wait … if the work happened here … then the people they kidnapped would’ve been here, too.”

She thought about that for another second, then took a deep breath and cupped her hands to her mouth.

“Lauren!”

The screamed word echoed off the strange geometry of the underground rooms.

Nobody answered.

Dani screamed it again, and then a third time.

Nothing.

She turned back to Sam. She looked more afraid than she had even a moment earlier, before Sam had opened the door from the shaft.

He understood why. The bad guys were gone. Whatever they’d been working on here, they’d finished it. They hadn’t needed their equipment anymore, so they’d destroyed it. And if they hadn’t needed the captives anymore—

Dani seemed to read what he was thinking. Her jaw shook.

“Let’s just take it one room at a time,” Sam said softly.

Dani nodded, and together they crossed to the first of the three doorways.

The room beyond was no larger than a walk-in closet. It seemed to have been someone’s office. There was a computer set up on a card table, with a plastic lawn chair in front of it. The computer, like all the others, had been taken apart and methodically destroyed. Yet the room bore signs of more careless destruction, as well—marked by the bloody paw prints and claw scrapes of the baboon. The thing had smashed the plastic chair into three pieces, and pounded a deep bow into the front edge of the card table.

All that had survived the damage was a section of newspaper, lying folded between the computer monitor and the tower case. Sam pulled it out and let it fall flat atop the table. It was called the Wells Town Post. Sam recognized the town’s name at once, and turned to Dani. She was nodding—she’d made the connection, too.

“Wells Town, British Virgin Islands,” she said. “One of the places Watchdog is keeping tabs on.”

They studied the front page together. The lead story was about a boating accident that’d injured four people. It was accompanied by a big photo of a tropical harbor, and someone being carried from a boat on a stretcher.

“Look at this one,” Dani said. She pointed to a smaller story in the lower corner. Sam leaned over it and began to read: