The techs headed back to FBI Portsmouth in their van, a straight ten-or twelve-minute drive south. But Dragonfly would have a much longer trip down to New York, and Musil had anticipated more than corporate stonewalling from CloudCable. It left him disappointed.

He walked across the blacktop with Kali. She had spoken perhaps a dozen words all morning, none to him. But it did not escape him that they might be the most significant words of their meeting with Olsen. Aside from Olsen’s response.

The tilt-rotor’s side panels were wide open, its propellers vertical to the ground but not yet spinning. Musil saw Lucas waiting on the rubber outside.

“News flash, Jot,” he said as the agent approached. “There’s a last-minute detour.”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to head up to Maine,” the pilot explained. “Way up. A place called Chacagua Island. Couple of our wireheads got caught in the storm last night.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“One’s Natasha Mori. The other is Bryan...not sure I caught his second name...”

“Ferago?”

“That’s it.”

Musil looked puzzled. “What were they doing here?”

“No clue.” Lucas spread his hands. “They say Mori’s OK, but Ferago needs some medical attention.”

Musil knew them a little. Especially Bryan, who had interned with FBI Cyber in the old days. A nice young man, very intelligent. Musil had thought him merely introverted before finding out he was on the autism spectrum. Both he and Natasha had been grad school students at Director Michaels’s Columbia University cyber lab and were presently instructors at Net Force boot camp.

“How long a flight is it to the island?” he asked.

“Half hour on the hop,” Lucas said. “We need to add a little time for a stop at the Coast Guard station in Boothbay Harbor. They have a new hospital facility and vertiport, and I want to pick up a paramedic. It’d also be a good place to get a refuel/recharge for Dragonfly. Though, if we’re dropping Ferago off there, I might wait till the return trip.”

Musil nodded.

“We should get going,” he said.

Kali was already climbing up into the cabin. He hurried to enter behind her and strapped in. Then Lucas started the engine, and they were up in the air.

Olsen waited two or three minutes before following the small group out of his office, then stood in the glass lobby as they crossed the parking lot toward the vertiport. He watched until their little air taxi took flight, shooting skyward straight as a string.

As it zipped off toward the north he went over to the entrance and pushed through into the sunshine.