So there was no information here and no clues from the wreckage. She had just been downstairs. The pieces of sampan had been examined for fragments of another boat. Perhaps the target vessel had been damaged in the explosion. There was nothing. The blast had occurred locally, on the sampan. Forensics had even pulled particles of algae from the wood. They had hoped it might point them to a specific area of the Celebes Sea where the sampan had been sailing in the hours before the blast. Unfortunately, the organisms the scientists had identified all belonged to colonies that existed throughout the region.

A blank ship and, for now, a blank sailor. Word had reached her while they were at sea. There were over 500 Lee Tongs listed at the Singaporean Office of Registry and Taxation. More than half of them were the right age to be this man. COSCOM was checking them out. But the research would take days, possibly weeks. If they could find this one, they might be able to learn who he spent time with ashore. Whether anyone else on the sampan survived. Dr. Lansing had told her he would jolt Tong awake again if she could prove that tens of thousands of lives depended on the answers the pirate would give. But the pirate had not said much before. Lansing and Ellsworth both agreed there was no reason to imagine a second try would produce different results. Loh felt it was certainly worth a try. If she thought that Tong would survive, she would have insisted that he be transferred to a hospital in Singapore. The doctors there might be no less reluctant to wake him than Dr. Lansing, but they would have no choice. Criminals have few rights in Singapore. The government would put public safety before the well-being of a pirate.

Instead of working with what might be scraps of information from the source, they were going to make plans based on ideas from an American spy. This Bob Herbert could be a brilliant intelligence operative. But whatever he came up with would still be exploratory. That was like sailing without charts. It was not something Loh preferred to do.