Van Nuys Airport sank beneath them. The jet turned south, crossing the flat, glowing expanse of the Los Angeles Basin. The flight attendant brought Evans coffee. On the little screen, it said 6,204 miles to destination. Flying time was nearly twelve hours.

The flight attendant asked them if they wanted dinner, and went off to prepare it.

“All right,” Evans said. “Three hours ago, I’m coming to help Sarah deal with a robbery. Now I’m flying to Antarctica. Isn’t it time somebody told me what this is about?”

Kenner nodded. “Have you heard of the Environmental Liberation Front? ELF?”

“No,” Evans said, shaking his head.

“Not me,” Sarah said.

“It’s an underground extremist group. Supposedly made up of ex-Greenpeace and Earth First! types who thought those organizations had gone soft. ELF engages in violence on behalf of environmental causes. They’ve burned hotels in Colorado, houses on Long Island, spiked trees in Michigan, torched cars in California.”

Evans nodded. “I read about them…. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies can’t infiltrate them because the organization consists of separate cells that never communicate with one another.”

“Yes,” Kenner said. “Supposedly. But cell phone conversations have been recorded. We’ve known for some time that the group was going global, planning a series of major events around the world, starting a few days from now.”

“What kind of events?”

Kenner shook his head. “That, we don’t know. But we have reason to think they’ll be big—and destructive.”

Sarah said, “What does this have to do with George Morton?”

“Funding,” Kenner said. “If ELF is preparing actions around the world, they need a lot of money. The question is, where are they getting it?”

“Are you saying George has funded an extremist group?”

“Not intentionally. ELF is a criminal organization, but even so, radical groups like PETA fund them. Frankly, it’s a disgrace. But the question became whether better-known environmental groups were funding them, too.”

“Better-known groups? Like who?”

“Any of them,” Kenner said.

“Wait a minute,” Sarah said. “Are you suggesting that the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club fund terrorist groups?”

“No,” Kenner said. “But I’m telling you that nobody knows exactly what any of these groups do with their money. Because government oversight of foundations and charities is extraordinarily lax. They don’t get audited. The books don’t get inspected. Environmental groups in the US generate half a billion dollars a year. What they do with it is unsupervised.”

Evans frowned. “And George knew this?”

“When I met him,” Kenner said, “he was already worrying about NERF. What it was doing with its money. It dispenses forty-four million dollars a year.”

Evans said, “You’re not going to tell me that NERF—”

“Not directly,” Kenner said. “But NERF spends nearly sixty percent of its money on fund-raising. It can’t admit that, of course. It’d look bad. It gets around the numbers by contracting nearly all of its work to outside direct-mail advertisers and telephone solicitation groups. These groups have misleading names, like the International Wildlife Preservation Fund—that’s an Omaha-based direct-mail organization, that in turn outsources the work to Costa Rica.”

“You’re kidding,” Evans said.

“No. I am not. And last year the IWPF spent six hundred fifty thousand dollars to gather information on environmental issues, including three hundred thousand dollars to something called the Rainforest Action and Support Coalition, RASC. Which turns out to be a drop box in Elmira, New York. And an equal sum to Seismic Services in Calgary, another drop box.”

“You mean…”

“A drop box. A dead end. That was the true basis of the disagreement between Morton and Drake. Morton felt that Drake wasn’t minding the store. That’s why he wanted an external audit of the organization, and when Drake refused, Morton got really worried. Morton is on the NERF board; he has liability. So he hired a team of private investigators to investigate NERF.”

“He did?” Evans said.

Kenner nodded. “Two weeks ago.”

Evans turned to Sarah. “Did you know this?”

She looked away, then back. “He told me I couldn’t tell anyone.”

“George did?”

“I did,” Kenner said.

“So you were behind this?”

“No, I merely consulted with George. It was his ball game. But the point is, once you outsource the money, you no longer control how it is spent. Or, you have deniability about how it is spent.”

“Jesus,” Evans said. “All this time, I just thought George was worried about the Vanutu lawsuit.”

“No,” Kenner said. “The lawsuit is probably hopeless. It is very unlikely it will ever go to trial.”

“But Balder said when he gets good sea-level data—”

“Balder already has the good data. He has had it for months.”

“What?”

“The data show no rise in South Pacific sea levels for the last thirty years.”

“What?”

Kenner turned to Sarah. “Is he always like this?”

The flight attendant set out placemats, napkins, and silverware. “I’ve got fusilli pasta with chicken, asparagus, and sun-dried tomatoes,” she said, “and a mixed green salad to follow. Would anyone like wine?”

“White wine,” Evans said.

“I have Puligny-Montrachet. I’m not sure of the year, I think it’s ’98. Mr. Morton usually kept ’98 on board.”

“Just give me the whole bottle,” Evans said, trying to make a joke. Kenner had unnerved him. Earlier in the evening, Kenner had been excited, almost twitchy-nervous. But now, sitting on the airplane, he was very still. Implacable. He had the manner of a man who was telling obvious truths, even though none of it was obvious to Peter. “I had it all wrong,” Evans said finally. “If what you’re saying is true…”

Kenner just nodded slowly.

Evans thought: He’s letting me put it together. He turned to Sarah. “Did you know this, too?”

“No,” she said. “But I knew something was wrong. George was very upset for the last two weeks.”

“You think that’s why he gave that speech, and then killed himself?”

“He wanted to embarrass NERF,” Kenner said. “He wanted intense media scrutiny of that organization. Because he wanted to stop what is about to happen.”

The wine came in cut glass crystal. Evans gulped it, held out his glass for more. “And what is about to happen?” he said.

“According to that list, there will be four events,” Kenner said. “In four locations in the world. Roughly one day apart.”

“What kind of events?”

Kenner shook his head. “We now have three good clues.”

Sanjong fingered his napkin. “This is real linen,” he said, in an awestruck tone. “And real crystal.”

“Nice, huh?” Evans said, draining his glass again.

Sarah said, “What are the clues?”

“The first is the fact that the timing is not exact. You might think a terrorist event would be precisely planned, down to the minute. These events are not.”

“Maybe the group isn’t that well organized.”

“I doubt that’s the explanation. The second clue we got tonight, and it’s very important,” Kenner said. “As you saw from the list, there are several alternate locations for these events. Again, you’d think a terrorist organization would pick one location and stick to it. But this group hasn’t done that.”

“Why not?”

“I assume it reflects the kind of events that are planned. There must be some uncertainty inherent in the event itself, or in the conditions needed for it to take place.”

“Pretty vague.”

“It’s more than we knew twelve hours ago.”

“And the third clue?” Evans said, gesturing to the flight attendant to refill his glass.

“The third clue we have had for some time. Certain government agencies track the sale of restricted high technologies that might be useful to terrorists. For example, they track everything that can be used in nuclear weapons production—centrifuges, certain metals, and so on. They track the sale of all conventional high explosives. They track certain critical biotechnologies. And they track equipment that might be used to disrupt communications networks—that generate electromagnetic impulses, for example, or high-intensity radio frequencies.”

“Yes…”

“They do this work with neural network pattern-recognition computers that search for regularities in great masses of data—in this case, basically thousands of sales invoices. About eight months ago, the computers detected a very faint pattern that seemed to indicate a common origin for the widely scattered sale of certain field and electronic equipment.”

“How did the computer decide that?”

“The computer doesn’t tell you that. It just reports the pattern, which is then investigated by agents on the ground.”

“And?”

“The pattern was confirmed. ELF was buying very sophisticated high technology from companies in Vancouver, London, Osaka, Helsinki, and Seoul.”

“What kind of equipment?” Evans said.

Kenner ticked them off on his fingers. “Fermentation tanks for AOB primers—that’s ammonia-oxidizing bacteria. Mid-level particle-dispersal units, military grade. Tectonic impulse generators. Transportable MHD units. Hypersonic cavitation generators. Resonant impact processor assemblies.”

“I don’t know what any of that is,” Evans said.

“Few people do,” Kenner said. “Some of it’s fairly standard environmental technology, like the AOB primer tanks. They’re used in industrial wastewater treatment. Some of it’s military but sold on the open market. And some of it’s highly experimental. But it’s all expensive.”

Sarah said, “But how is it going to be used?”

Kenner shook his head. “Nobody knows. That’s what we’re going to find out.”

“How do you think it’s going to be used?”

“I hate to speculate,” Kenner said. He picked up a basket of rolls. “Bread, anyone?”