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open it when you get back,’ Jarvis said as he snatched the envelope away and slipped it through the mailbox. ‘We’ve got to move, okay?’
    Ethan shrugged and followed Lopez and Jarvis into the Durango, which immediately pulled out and sped toward the nearest freeway heading south. Ethan experienced a mild sense of self-importance
as he glanced around the hushed interior of the SUV and saw several other Durangos join them on the on-ramp and form an honor-guard around them as they sped through morning traffic. Silent hazard
lights flashed on the roofs. Working for the DIA had often proved dangerous, but it had its advantages too.
    ‘Where are we going?’ Lopez asked.
    ‘Scott Air Force Base, Belleville,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I’ll explain when we get there.’
    ‘What’s the rush?’ Ethan asked. ‘Fugitive’s on the run. The first forty-eight hours are crucial, but isn’t local law enforcement on the case
already?’
    ‘We’ve shut them down for now. Only the senior investigating officer is still in the loop. As far as we know we have about twelve hours to solve this case. Time is
everything.’
    ‘Fill us in then,’ Lopez suggested, as the SUV careered through the rush-hour traffic. ‘What’s so special about this guy Purcell?’
    Jarvis opened a glossy black folder emblazoned with the DIA’s logo, handing Ethan and Lopez each an identical file as he read.
    ‘Charles Purcell is a physicist who worked for fifteen years at NASA, down at Cape Canaveral. He was a major player in many of the scientific experiments that were carried into space
aboard the Shuttle, not to mention his contribution to the Hubble space telescope. Apparently, however, the central focus of his work within the agency was the study of time.’
    Ethan felt a faint glimmer of relief. As psychopaths went, a diligent scientist was somewhat less threatening than a coked-up Hell’s Angel. He raised an eyebrow. ‘So he was a
clock-watcher then?’
    ‘I’ll do the jokes,’ Jarvis replied, without looking up from his file. ‘Purcell made some astounding theoretical breakthroughs during his career, but they were considered
so radical that NASA routinely denied him funds to conduct experiments to confirm his equations, preferring to support more conventional work instead.’
    ‘So what happened to him?’ Lopez asked as she leafed through her copy of the file without interest and twirled a loop of her long black hair through her fingers.
    Jarvis turned a page in his file.
    ‘Purcell resigned his post at NASA and began working freelance for various private organizations, many of them charities.’
    ‘That’s a major change of pace for a physicist,’ Ethan observed. ‘You think that he just got tired of doing equations?’
    ‘Quite the opposite, or so we suspect,’ Jarvis replied. ‘You see, Charles Purcell had followed in his father’s footsteps for most of his life. Montgomery Purcell had
worked with the US Government on the Manhattan Project, which led to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and the end of the Second World War. From what we can gather, Purcell Senior continued
working in the government’s weapons programs until his death.’
    ‘What happened to him?’ Ethan asked. ‘He can’t have been very old when he died, if Charles Purcell is his son.’
    ‘That’s the interesting bit,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Montgomery Purcell disappeared without trace whilst flying a light aircraft in 1968. No wreckage was ever found, nor were
there any witnesses to the crash. Essentially, he vanished.’
    After the trauma of recent years, Ethan considered himself something of an authority on vanished people. Even before Joanna had disappeared they had worked together on government corruption
scandals in various countries that had involved enforced abductions of wealthy citizens: ransom to order. Many of the unfortunate victims had been located and liberated due to their investigations
in countries like Mexico and