“Can’t sleep?”

Leonora Tesla turned from the glowing screen of her laptop to see Charley Middleton framed in the doorway to the hotel suite’s bedroom. “Looks like I’m not the only one. You should try, you know.”

Charley smiled weakly. “So should you,” she retorted, padding across the room, settling herself on the sofa. “Besides, it’s morning.”

Tesla glanced at the clock in the bottom corner of her screen and was surprised to see that it was almost five. “Barely,” she said.

“What are you doing?”

“Just following a hunch.”

“You want to fill me in? I’m not going anywhere.”

The Queen Elizabeth Hotel, with its friendly, lived-in atmosphere and compliant staff, was a charming cage if ever there was one, but it was, for the time being at least, a cage nonetheless. After their confrontation with the well-dressed Brit, they were reluctant to venture outside the walls of the hotel. If that man could find them, Tesla knew, others could as well.

“I found out more about what your father was telling us about Sikari’s younger days,” Tesla said. “When he was a teenager, he was chosen, along with two other boys, to go to school in England. The whole thing was financed by an anonymous source. Six years at boarding school, then Cambridge. And after they graduated they were each given start-up capital. We haven’t been able to figure out why, but we think it was some kind of social experiment. All three boys were Hindu, but one was Pakistani, one was Indian, and one—Sikari—was Kashmiri.”

“Social experiment sounds kind of ominous,” Charley remarked. “What makes you think it wasn’t just plain old philanthropy?”

“That’s what we thought before we found out that Sikari was the only one of the three still alive. The Indian, a man named Sanjiv Das, drowned in New Delhi twenty years ago, and the Pakistani, Santash Grover, died after drinking bad well water a few years later. Are you starting to see a pattern?”

Charley looked skeptical.

“That’s not the only thing,” Tesla continued. “Guess what all three studied at Cambridge?”

“Don’t tell me.”

“You guessed it: engineering, energy and hydrology.”

“So who’s the source?” Charley asked.

“There doesn’t seem to be one. So far all Wiki’s been able to find is an impressive collection of shell companies. But that’s not what I’m interested in.”

“No?”

“There’s been so much focus on Sikari that no one’s bothered to find out about the two dead men,” Tesla explained. “I figured it wouldn’t hurt to do some poking around.”

Charley Middleton sat forward on the couch, propping her chin on her palms. “And? What did you find?”

Tesla scowled. “Not much so far. But then I don’t have a lot to work with.”

Charley pointed at black and white photograph of a group of people displayed on the screen. “What’s that?”