Until now, with Castro looking at her map and excitedly calling Raymore over to her station, and the two of them staring at her display.

“Do you see what I see?” Castro said.

“Pa rum pum pum pum,” he said, nodding.

She didn’t catch the reference. But he wasn’t keeping score.

“I see,” he said.

They looked at each other, almost giddy.

“This has to be it,” she said.

Two minutes later, Castro’s Needlefish map replaced the photos on Morse’s wall screen.

“I know that neighborhood,” Musil said, looking at it. “If it’s where my daughters are, it would be minutes from their school.”

“Malkira might be playing us,” Harris said. “He could’ve planted one of their phones there to throw us off.”

“Or not,” Carmody said.

Musil’s face was tense and thoughtful in equal measure. They had shifted to the map’s satellite view, and he was looking at an aerial photo image of the tagged house: a single-family bungalow on a dead-end street named Meadows Court.

“My daughters know they have Needlefish on their phones,” he said. “After last August, Raysa started having nightmares. She was terrified someone would take her away and we wouldn’t find her.”

“Like you found that little boy in the park,” Harris said.

Musil nodded.

“She saw the news stories. She knew Anton Ciobanu would have killed him. I installed the software to set her mind at ease,” Musil said. “I told her she had nothing to worry about. That I would know where she was even if the city went dark and the phone service went out again. I remind her every morning when I drop them off.”

“So you think she held on to it?”

“Or hid it. I don’t know how she could do either. But she would try before letting anyone take it from her.”

The room was quiet. After a moment Carmody pushed himself off the wall.

“Time for us to quit standing around and do something,” he said.

17

April 19, 2024
New York

Dragonfly leaped up from the Terminal vertipad at three fifteen.

It quickly rose to a thousand feet and swung east across Manhattan, skirting the southern border of Central Park, then climbing another thousand feet into the air to cruise at twice the legal altitude of civilian helicopters. Crossing a narrow strip of the East River, its flight path bisected Roosevelt Island lengthwise, then took a sharp dogleg north and east above the tidal strait spanned by the Hell Gate Bridge.

Ten minutes after takeoff the VTOL shot over eastern Queens. Overflying power plants and smokestacks and the remnants of the old waterfront manufacturing district, it took seven more minutes to cross the residential grid of Jackson Heights and reach Flushing Bay.

In his cockpit, Lucas tapped a button on a touch-screen panel. The modular rack unit on the right side of his fuselage had been installed just minutes before takeoff. Eight screwlike connectors and it was on.