Jeff stood and began pacing the otherwise empty conference room. “Now we know they’ve got something to hide. Did she give you a name for the corporate guy?”

“Yes. Dr. Harry Winslow. I looked him up—he’s some kind of vice president and director of research at AgriMed.”

“A VP?” Jeff frowned. “Seems odd that a multinational would send a VP out to the middle of nowhere to pay hush money to some girl who saw their dirty little secrets.”

“Alleged dirty secrets,” Nate said. “Remember, AgriMed claims the military had already torched the island by the time they arrived. And we only know about any of this because of them.” Nate drummed his fingers on the table as his mind raced. “I doubt they would have called us in if they were doing something squirrely over there.”

“Maybe… I sure wish we had some information on what was going on on that island.”

With a smile, Nate withdrew a sheet of paper from his suit jacket and placed it on the desk—a summary document of all the paperwork that the woman had turned over to him. “You mean like a bunch of classified documents that Miss O’Reilly smuggled off that God-forsaken island, including names, descriptions, and all sorts of things that I’ll need subject-matter experts to make sense of.”

“You’re shitting me!” Jeff grabbed the sheet and looked at it. “How the hell did she manage… never mind. DARPA? As in our DARPA?”

“Yup.” That had jumped out at Nate too. If the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was involved, things were getting even more curious. “They were represented by a Dr. Ian Wexler. He’s a program manager at the Biological Technologies Office in DARPA. He’s also a medical doctor who used to work at the CIA, doing lord knows what.”

Jeff ran his finger down the page. “And who’s this? Dr. Reinhardt from… Bundesnachrichtendienst?”

“I’m impressed you managed to spit that word out on the first try. Hans Reinhardt might be associated with German intelligence, but I’m not certain on that yet. It’ll take a while to be sure—in part because much of it’s in German, in part because it’s some pretty technical mumbo-jumbo. But they’re using some kind of evolution algorithm, and they’re applying it in experiments on animals. In particular, they were messing around with finches.” Nate grinned. “Jeff, this is a smoking gun if there ever was one.”

Jeff didn’t return Nate’s smile. In fact, his expression was grave. “Nate, what this is is some serious shit. I’m going to go to the top with this. No more of this pussyfooting around. These people have at least one MIA to answer for and a whole lot of messed-up shit going on. Plus, somehow our military is involved, maybe the CIA, German intelligence… it makes no sense.”