“Not so far. They blew their big chance to talk to the Kovacs contact. He smelled them coming and took off.”

“Cheer up. Even if you find him, there's no assurance he knows anything about Kovacs's secrets.”

“I came to the same conclusion. So I went back to Kovacs. I programmed a massive search of everything written and said about him. I started with the premise that if he had lived, he would have continued his research.”

“Quite the leap of faith. His work destroyed his family.”

“He'd be careful, but his fingerprints would be hard to hide. My program combed every scientific publication written since the war. It found a number of articles mentioning unique commercial uses of electromagnetic fields.”

Barrett leaned forward in his chair. “You've got my attention.”

“One of the pioneers in the research was a company incorporated in Detroit by a European immigrant named Viktor Janos.”

“Janus was the two-faced Roman god who looks to the past and the future. Interesting.”

“I thought so. The parallels with Kovacs's work were too weird to be true. It's as if Van Gogh copied Cézanne. He might master impressionistic light, but he couldn't stop himself from using colors that were bold and basic.”

“What do you know about Janos?”

“Not a lot. Money can buy anonymity. He was supposedly Romanian.”

“Romanian was one of the six languages Kovacs was fluent in. Tell me more.”

“His lab was in Detroit, and he lived in Grosse Pointe. He must have run whenever he saw a camera, but he couldn't hide the fact that he was a generous philanthropist. His wife was mentioned in the local society pages. There was a birth notice of their child, a son, who died with his wife in a car crash.”

“A dead end, literally?”

“That's what I thought. But Janos had a granddaughter. I referenced her name and struck gold. She had done a graduate thesis about woolly mammoths.”

“The ancient elephants? What's that got to do with Kovacs?”

“Stay with me. She maintains that the mammoths were wiped out by a natural catastrophe that was a more devastating version of what we're trying to do. Here's the interesting part. In her writing, she said that had this happened today, science would have been able to neutralize the catastrophe.”

“The antidote?” Barrett snorted. “You're kidding.”

Margrave retrieved a portfolio from the table and tossed it into Barrett's lap. “After you read this, I think you'll change your mind about the project.”

“What about the granddaughter?”

“She's a paleontologist, working with the University of Alaska. Gant and I decided to send someone up there to talk to her.”

“Why not hold off on the project until we find out what she knows?”

“I'll wait, but I want to get all the pieces in place so that we can hit the ground running.” Margrave turned to Doyle, who had been quietly absorbing the discussion. “What do you think about all this?”