Burke’s phone vibrated in his pocket, and he pulled it free. It was a message from Allanon: I tracked down the key card you found in Ty Loria’s wallet to its source. It was for a cosmetics research and development facility in SA. The place not-so-coincidentally burned to the ground a couple of days ago. The company website listed Julia Raskin as an employee. She seems to match the description of your mysterious redhead. Also, Loria owns a large portion of the company through a shell corporation.

Burke typed back: Thanks, oh great and powerful mage, your wisdom and counsel are indispensable to the twelve kingdoms.

Allanon quickly responded: Obvi, which Burke knew was short for obviously.

Then another message came through: Also, dug into Yoshida’s personal finances and found that he just bought the domains freepowerforall.com and batteryofthefuture.com and hired a dude who used to work for WikiLeaks to design a site for him. Used your logging software on the spook’s phone and found a message from Yoshida telling the designer that he’d be sending all the data tonight and wants the site live and redundant asap. You owe me big time!

Burke considered the implications. Loria was obviously neck-deep in all of this. He wasn’t merely the CEO of GoBox. He was complicit in all the illegal activities that Yoshida had orchestrated. Loria knew about not only the battery, but the bioweapons research. And Yoshida had some pretty significant plans of his own brewing.

Burke reached into his backpack and retrieved his iPad. This new data needed to be added to his sketch notes and the sum of all the parts reanalyzed. He stared at the mural, and all of the pieces seemed to be lined up now. Although, he had little proof and a lot of conjecture.

His handheld radio came to life, and Nic’s voice said, “Burke, you were right on the location. But Kruger’s in the wind. We did find the redhead, and she gave us something to help with the dying hostages.”

“Copy that,” Burke said.

“Our first priority is getting this treatment back to the hostages as soon as we can, but I need you to be thinking about where Kruger could be headed.”

Burke keyed the mic and replied, “Affirmative.”

He looked down at the mural of his sketch notes and considered Kruger’s next move.

“So, do you know where Kruger is headed?” Isabel asked.

Burke shrugged. “It’s hard to say with any certainty, but considering that Yoshida and Loria are held up at Loria’s mansion, which is undoubtedly guarded and secure, and they have Kruger’s money, he’ll probably be headed there. He knows we’re getting closer and that we may even know his name, known associates, and other compromising data. He’ll want to make the trade-off as soon as possible and escape the country. But that’s just an educated guess.”

Isabel nodded and said, “That sounds good enough for me.”

With a blur of movement, she slipped out of her handcuffs—apparently already having picked them—elbowed Burke in the nose, and pulled the Glock out from beneath his right thigh. He saw white and couldn’t have been more surprised if she had sprouted wings and flown away. By the time he regained his composure and the throbbing in his face subsided enough for rational thought, she had the Glock 23 aimed at his head and full control of the situation.