She returned to the moment when he had come out of the house and switched back to visible light. He moved about thirty feet, then, in under a twenty-fifth of a second, was gone. The next time she picked him up, she had to go to infrared, because he was already beneath the trees.

She sat staring at the screen, then ran it again. He came down off the porch, turned toward the woods, took a few steps—and then again, that blur.

In other words, he’d gone over fifty yards in under the twenty-fifth of a second it took the optics to refresh themselves.

This satellite had no high-speed camera, so she couldn’t see more detail of his movements when he was going extremely fast. She didn’t need to, though, because there was no question in her mind. No human being, no matter how fast, could do what she was seeing him do.

Turner reached over and hit her pause button. “You will find that after getting his entire unit killed by his compadres who were hiding in the woods, he personally delivered the coups de grâce.”

Again, she looked at the image, but this time she let it run. She watched Mark in the forest, saw his dying men come slowly toward him. At that moment, the bright twin stars of the attacking jet’s afterburners flooded the infrared image as the plane sped between the satellite and the ground.

When imagery returned, Mark and Linda were leaving the woods. Then the whole picture erupted with yellow-white haze as the napalm exploded a few hundred yards away.

Gina shifted back to visible light and watched the two of them cross to the van, which immediately started up and drove off down the road. Nothing abnormal about his movements when Linda was present.

Gina returned to the steps he had taken from the house to the woods—and again, there was that flicker, just like a hybrid. She went to the frame counter, ran it. Every frame was intact, nothing dropped. So this was not equipment or signal failure.

“So now you know what he is,” the doctor said. “What’re you going to do about it?”

For the moment she was too shocked to respond.

“What are you going to do!”

“Excuse me, but you didn’t pull his name out of a hat. You sent me his file for a reason, Dr. Turner. What was that reason?”

“Classified.”

“I have an obvious and urgent need to know!”

“What I need to know is how you intend to contain this threat.”

She looked at her phone. Picked it up. No hesitation. This had to be done.

“Hi, Gina,” George Hammond said, “I’m listening on your feed, so I’m up to speed.” Yeah, her “feed.” Read bug. Her office was bugged. So was her house, she assumed. Her whole damn life, actually.