Dragonfly angled away from the dock and overflew a low rectangular building on the west side of the facility. About a dozen vehicles were nosed up to it, among them a long white van with the Net Force emblem on its sliding panels. The mobile digital forensics team from Bedford.

Above the helipad now, the air taxi’s rotors went vertical, and its wheels deployed with a slight bump. Moments later it made a smooth landing on the rubber.

Musil unbuckled and shrugged out of his harness. Kali did the same. Then Lucas appeared from the forward cabin.

“We’re here,” he said.

“We want to oblige your request,” Jack Olsen said from behind his desk. He was CloudCable New Hampshire’s managing director. “I just need to ask that you present the appropriate warrants.”

Musil sat across the desk, looking at him. Olsen was a fit, clean-shaven man in his fifties with wire-framed glasses and horseshoe male-pattern baldness. His hair was cropped short on the sides to make his bare pate less conspicuous to the eye.

Musil admired the artful camouflage. Fortunately, he had no personal experience with that particular litmus of male vanity, owing to the thick, uncut black mane of hair piled under his dastār, the traditional peaked head wrap of Sikh religion. Whatever potential his genes denied him in height—he stood five foot six in shoes—seemed to have been channeled into his follicles.

But hair was not the issue here. His or Olsen’s. The issue was Mr. Olsen’s surprising uncooperativeness at a juncture when he should have welcomed help with open arms.

Musil wasn’t sure what to make of it.

He sat looking thoughtful, Kali in a chair to one side of him. The room was warmer than Dragonfly’s rear cabin, and she had lowered her hood—or cowl—to reveal her own jet-black hair, which was short with scarlet streaks. Standing behind them near the door was a young forensic technician from the van named Jase Hudson, his hands clasped in front of him.

“Mr. Olsen, your ship is missing,” Musil said after a moment. “We’re trying to learn what happened to it.”

Olsen’s gaze suddenly moved away from him. The office was modern minimalist in its layout and design: clean lines, white walls, soft lights, wide windows, a spacious white filing credenza the only furnishing besides the desk and chairs. Atop the credenza was a big cutaway replica of a cable-laying ship. Also on it was an enlarged cross-section of an undersea fiber-optic cable segment. Beside that in a transparent display cube were what looked like several authentic lengths of cable or cable connectors. Otherwise, the room was free of decoration.

Musil realized Olsen was staring at the model ship. It didn’t seem a conscious look. His eyes had just gone there and lingered. After a moment he seemed to catch himself.