Sykes lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “No one knows. Gone.”

“And the nuns?”

A shadow skittered across Sykes’s face. Wolgast could tell that he’d hit the mark without even meaning to. Jesus, he thought. The nuns, too? Had it been Richards or somebody else?

“I don’t know,” Skyes answered.

“Look at you,” Wolgast said. “Yes, you do.”

Sykes said nothing more about it, his silence telling Wolgast, This line of conversation is over. He rubbed his eyes and returned the photos to their envelope and put it away.

“Where is she?”

“Agent, the thing is—”

“Where’s Amy?”

Sykes cleared his throat again. “That’s the reason I’m here, you see,” he said. “The favor. We think Amy may be dying.”

Wolgast wasn’t allowed to ask any questions. He wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone, or look around, or step from Sykes’s line of vision. A detail of two soldiers led him across the compound, through the damp morning light. The air felt and smelled like spring. After almost five weeks in his room, Wolgast found himself taking deep, hungry breaths. The sun was painful to his eyes.

Once they were in the Chalet, Sykes took him down an elevator, four floors. They exited onto an empty hallway, Spartan and white, like a hospital. Wolgast guessed they were fifty feet belowground, maybe more. Whatever Sykes’s people kept down here, they wanted at least that much dirt separating it from the world above. They came to a door marked MAIN LAB, but Sykes passed it without slowing his stride. More doors, and then they came to the one Sykes wanted. He slid a card through the reader and opened it.

Wolgast found himself in some kind of observation room. On the other side of the broad window, in dim, blue light, Amy’s small form lay on a hospital bed, alone. She was connected to an IV, but that was all. Beside her bed was a plastic chair, empty. From tracks on the ceiling hung a group of color-coded hoses, coiled like the pneumatic hoses at a garage. Otherwise the room was bare.

“This is him?”

Wolgast turned to see a man he hadn’t noticed before. He was wearing a lab coat and green scrubs, like Wolgast’s.

“Agent Wolgast, this is Dr. Fortes.”

They nodded without shaking hands. Fortes was young, not even thirty. Wolgast wondered if he was an MD or something else. Like Sykes, Fortes appeared exhausted, physically spent. His skin was oily, and he needed a haircut and a shave. His glasses looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in a month.

“She has an embedded chip. It transmits vitals to the panel here.” Fortes showed him: heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, temperature. Amy’s was 102.6.

“Where?”

“Where what?” The doctor’s eyes floated with incomprehension.

“Where’s the chip?”