The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

examined in detail. It contained an impressive pumping and filtering system, built to draw seawater in from the harbor at hundreds of gallons per minute, which would fill the pool in less than an hour. The kind of thing only someone with a hundred million dollars would think he needed. But no quantum computer.
    The ATC logs for Owen Roberts International Airport on Grand Cayman turned up something interesting. A few times a year, an Airbus A318, big enough to hold over a hundred passengers but registered as a business jet, landed there. Each time, it departed again within eight hours. The jet’s ownership was in Cook’s name, but it was based at Dallas-Fort Worth, where he owned a permanent hangar for it. The plane didn’t seem to be Cook’s personal transport. For that, he had a Dassault Falcon that he kept right there on Grand Cayman. The Airbus, it seemed, didn’t take Cook anywhere, but instead brought people to him. A lot of people, all at once. The implication was pretty obvious: that Cook’s house on the island was the group’s base of operations. Or one of its bases, anyway. But the search of the house revealed no evidence of that, and the data mining of real-estate records showed no other land or property on Grand Cayman with his name on it.
    Travis saw the tension building on Paige’s shoulders, as the day went on without any actionable information. She bore it as well as anyone could have, but he could tell this was hard on her, being amped up to do something—anything—and having nothing to direct that energy at. Like it would be hard on an engine to detach it from its working load, and rev it past the redline for hours.
    More than once, Travis heard people comment that Paige’s father would’ve been a godsend at a time like this, when answers were both critical and hard to come by. Each time, Paige’s reactions were subdued, difficult to read. Late in the afternoon she left to be alone for a while, and returned looking emotionally drained.
    By nine o’clock at night, the team at the Cayman house had finished. For the time being, there was no more evidence to look over. Nothing to work on at all.
    Crawford gave Travis a keycard to a vacant residence on Level B12. He found his way to it, and entered to find a living space about twice the size of his apartment in Fairbanks. Granite counters in the kitchen. Eighty-inch LCD in the living room. The Sub-Zero refrigerator was well stocked, as were the cupboards. The master bathroom, decked out in natural stone, was a thing of beauty. The image in the mirror wasn’t. Travis hadn’t shaved in a week. Hadn’t showered in several days, during which time he’d been active, to understate things a bit. He opened the medicine cabinet and found shaving cream, and razors still in the package. Shampoo and unused soap in the shower. Twenty minutes later he felt human again.
    The master closet was filled with a wide array of clothing. He picked out some jeans and a T-shirt, and was in the kitchen thinking about a sandwich when he noticed the message button flashing on the wall phone. It hadn’t been flashing earlier. He pressed the button and heard Crawford’s voice, telling him that Tangent had retrieved two messages from his voice mail in Fairbanks, and routed them here.
    “Obviously there are security measures we take with outgoing calls,” Crawford’s recorded voice said. “If you need to contact anyone, speak to me and we’ll see what we can arrange.”
    The first message was a telemarketer’s robo-call trying to sell him an extended warranty on his Explorer. The second was from his brother, Jeff.
    “Hey, Travis. Give me a shout when you get this. Cool news. Whitebird’s almost official. It just beat Level One in Fog of War without my help. It’s still buggy, needs a shitload of work, but I’m geeked, man. You can still get in on this with me, if you want. Call me. Out.”
    Whitebird was a computer system, both hardware and software, that Jeff had been working on for years. It was a narrow form of artificial intelligence, meant to improve the performance of computer-driven enemies in video games. Jeff had been testing its capability by letting it take on the role of the human player in older, simpler games, mostly martial-arts stuff on 8-bit systems from the eighties and nineties. Now he was up to modern games like Fog of War. Pretty impressive. He probably stood to make millions selling the technology to a game developer, once he had all