Instead of looking away after the lie, he kept staring—studying her face with an enigmatic expression that was more complicated than the fear she expected under the circumstances.

“What?” Randi said, popping open her beer and taking a swig.

“You…” Maple started. “You look like someone I used to know.”

Randi didn’t immediately react. Maple and Smith had been friends for a long time. Long enough for him to have met her sister.

“You mean Sophie.”

His eyes widened. They looked enough alike that Randi had become used to the reaction. It was still gut-wrenching to think about her dead sister—Jon’s dead fiancée—but at least she was practiced at it now.

“You’re Randi Russell?” Maple said.

“In the flesh.”

“CIA.”

She nodded.

“I knew it!” Maple said, pulling up a folding chair. Their knees almost touched in the tiny space. “He’s military intelligence. You’re working together.”

“That’s right,” she said. It was the obvious assumption and she decided to run with it.

“Where is he? Is he okay?”

That was a hard question to answer because she honestly didn’t know. According to Klein, when Smith had called to set up a meeting between the president and Takahashi, he’d sounded fine. There was no way to know if that was still the case, though.

“We’ve lost him.”

“Lost?”

“Misplaced,” she corrected. “Temporarily. And in the meantime, I’m filling in.”

“Is that why you had me kidnapped?” he said with a little understandable anger coming to the surface.

She decided not to acknowledge it. “It’s my understanding that you’ve taken the lead on this nanotech problem. I need to know what you’ve learned.”

“You could have picked up a phone instead of dragging me all the way to Japan.”

“Phones are too hard to secure, Greg. I prefer to have my conversations face-to-face. Now drink your beer before it gets warm.”

He popped open the can obediently and took a swig, but it didn’t seem to make him any less nervous.

“So? Have you figured out anything that can help me?”

He shook his head. “Probably not that can help you, but things that are…amazing.”

“Let’s hear those, then. Keeping in mind that I’m not Jon. I’m not a scientist.”

“Okay. I found a couple of structures that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the machine’s ability to copy itself.”

“Jon told me about them. You didn’t know what they were for. Have you figured it out?”