Musil pulled a chair up alongside him. It was now almost three in the afternoon. His slow, inching drive back to Manhattan had taken over twice as long as the crawl out to Jersey.

“What’s this?” he said and nodded at the three-screen setup.

“You tell me,” Ki said. “Then I’ll tell you.”

Musil studied the monitors. The middle one showed a collection of photographs. All were portrait shots of a man he didn’t recognize, someone with a long thin face and light brown hair. He saw a school graduation picture, a few others that looked like ID photos. They probably spanned more than a decade and were arranged in two horizontal rows. From oldest to most recent, he guessed, although the man’s features didn’t change significantly from one to the next.

Musil’s eyes went to the right-hand screen, then to the monitor on the left. Each displayed what appeared to be a screenshot of the same Facebook post—a photograph and text—with one very strange and glaring difference between the photos on the left and right. Both photos showed a group of four men posing spontaneously in a bar or restaurant. Three were sitting down at the end of the table, gathered close for the shot. The fourth stood behind the others, casually resting his arms on one of their shoulders, a redheaded guy with a mustache. All were smiling. On the tabletop were empty plates, half-filled glasses, scattered pieces of silverware, rumpled cloth napkins, the photo obviously taken after their meal.

The post had been made by someone named Garrett Schmidt, and his profile photo to its left matched the red-haired man in the group shot. The text entered underneath the post read:

Better days. A bunch of us from the CS Alliance in Glasgow two years ago. My buddy Steve Gelfland is the guy standing up. He’s with the 77 missing in the SCS. Praying for the safety of all. #FONOPS #Shipmates #Stalwart77

Ki watched Musil studying the screen.

“The second and third hashtags are self-explanatory,” he said. “That first one, FONOPS, stands for Freedom of Navigation Operations. It’s DoD lingo for US Navy ops challenging other countries’ marine territorial claims. In the real world, the policy’s meant as pushback against the main international offenders. Namely the Chinese in the South China Sea.”

Musil gave a vague nod, thinking hard. “The Stalwart is a privately owned vessel. It wasn’t on FONOPS. Or connected to the Navy.”

“Not directly, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that the CloudCable deal has the CIA and NGIA mixed up in it. So we can’t really say Stalwart’s activities were strictly commercial.” Ki shrugged. “Look, it could be Schmidt’s just supporting our right to navigate those waters. I don’t know. But that isn’t why I put up those group shots.”