Now he felt Dragonfly give the merest of shivers as the Little Wing drone was ejected from its rack pod.

A small autonomous aircraft launching from a larger one is a major aerodynamic challenge. The obstacles to its success only increase if its parent aircraft is hurtling through the air at three hundred miles an hour. It has to instantly overcome the speed and direction of the wind drag and its own weight, among other powerful forces trying to swat it out of the sky.

This drone was a marvel of flight engineering and nanocomputer technology. Three feet long, tubular, with a cone-shaped nose, it tumbled and spun in the crosswinds a moment, its slender wings completely folded in on themselves. But after a second or so the drone’s twin-bladed tail prop boosted it away from Dragonfly, and they telescoped outward to their full eight-foot span.

Self-stabilized and oriented, Little Wing dashed across the bay, locked in on the phone signal Needlefish had been picking up.

Watching the drone fly off through his windscreen, Lucas nodded, mouthed a silent prayer for those little girls and then radioed the Terminal.

“Baby’s on the way,” he said into his headset.

Carol Morse and Leo Harris sat watching the drone’s streaming video imagery on her wall screen as it flew toward its destination. They were alone in front of her desk, their chairs close together. The others had cleared the room almost half an hour ago.

Morse drank some lukewarm coffee from her Yeti, reached over to set it down on the desktop and happened to notice Leo’s wan, tired features. Regarding him a second, she tapped his wrist to get his attention, motioned to her wireless headset and switched it off.

He did the same and looked at her.

“You OK?” she said.

“No, Car. I’m not.”

“Me neither.”

Harris nodded slowly.

“Ki’s dead,” he said. “Some Russian super-whatever killed him and took Musil’s kids. And I can’t figure out why.”

She nodded. “You’re thinking Musil isn’t all of Net Force. We’re a government organization. Someone would pick up where he left off.”

“And Malkira would know,” Leo said. “This isn’t his first time around the block.”

“Agreed.”

He looked at her.

“Something else,” he said. “We all think Malkira was on the Stalwart to make sure the Chinese ops got aboard. But how’s that jibe with him being Russian?”

Morse was nodding again. “I’ve asked myself the same thing, Leo,” she said. “Especially because Carmody and Kali showed up here today with evidence supporting a Chinese connection.”

“What kind?”

“A personnel file. They pulled it from Seven Winds Malaysia’s HR system. It links that kitchen crew to the same Chinese government officials Alex told us about,” she said. “But there’s a catch. They’re convinced the file was planted. Or at least that someone wanted it to be found by us.”

He looked at her.