‘If nothing else, I can go to Newton and track Maalouf down in person – or at least try to find out where he might be.’

And maybe he can tell me just what the hell is going on, he thought.

Once she had signed off, Saul found himself reliving his memories of her body, the way she had whispered his name over and over as he moved inside her, all those many years ago. It had been hard sitting next to her the day before in the bar, wanting to reach out and touch her but keeping his distance nonetheless.

He sighed and pulled himself off the bed, striding across the darkened room. Sleep clearly wasn’t coming any time soon. He dropped himself into an armchair by the window and linked into the ASI’s security databases, and from there to its personnel files.

He paused before bringing up Farad Maalouf ’s data. What he was doing now had gone beyond just helping a friend, and he knew as well as Olivia that he’d be leaving a data trail that might trigger an alert, should someone else have already linked Maalouf’s ASI files to Jeff’s. But his anger at the way Donohue had treated him drove him on, regardless.

What little information he found on Farad Maalouf proved to be out of date. The most recent records were more than a year old, at which point Maalouf had presumably ceased to be employed by the ASI. Then Saul found something that puzzled him. He should have been able to find information on where Maalouf had gone after departing the ASI, but instead there was nothing. It was as if he’d simply vanished for the better part of a year.

Saul felt a prickling sensation throughout his body when he found the situation was much the same with Jeff Cairn’s own personnel records. The curious gaps in the data trail for both men might be explained by their working off-world but, if so, there was no official record showing their time of departure. And hadn’t Olivia told him that Jeff had returned from his work only a few days ago? Again, there was no evidence, either way, that he had passed through the Array.

Of course, Olivia had pointed out that Jeff was working on some secret project for the ASI, therefore it was entirely conceivable it had been secret enough for the security services to want to conceal both men’s movements.

He next checked Dan Rush’s files, and felt little surprise when it turned out to be the same story all over again. He subsequently ran a side-by-side comparison, and found they had all ceased to be in the official employ of the ASI on the exact same date, two years previously.