Polar Quest

37

Duroc sat in his Midtown Manhattan office reading through two reports prepared by his research staff. The first described the arson fire that had consumed the offices of the Sterling Private Bank and the murder of Cayman banker Hugh Harley. According to the Cayman Compass, Harley’s murder had become the crime of the year, with rumors about the banker’s illicit activities with drug lords running rampant over the islands. Officially, no suspects had been identified and no evidence of motive for the crime found.

Next were routine background checks on Roxanne Tao and Nolan Kilkenny. The report on Tao’s personal history was short — she had none. Duroc’s investigators failed to find anything on Tao that predated her appearance in Ann Arbor as the head of a new field office for a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm.

The report on Nolan Kilkenny was far more substantial. He was a resident of Michigan, living near the village of Dexter. Living with him at his family’s farm were his father and paternal grandparents. Duroc paused when he read the section regarding Kilkenny’s employment as a project director for the Michigan Applied Research Consortium and acting CEO of UGene.

So that’s why he’s nosing around my trades, Duroc thought.

Highlighted in the report was a notation of Kilkenny’s graduation from the United States Naval Academy and service as an officer in the SEALs. Like his own DGSE, the SEALs were considered one of the world’s premier fighting forces.

The final page tracked Kilkenny and Tao’s movements over the past few weeks, starting with the most recent and working back in time. Duroc noted, with some satisfaction, that they had missed the return leg of their Cayman trip. Then he saw recent flights to Rio de Janeiro, Tucson, and Waco.

Tao’s trail went no farther back than a flight from Washington to Detroit in early March, when she apparently sprang into existence. For Kilkenny, Duroc’s researchers identified a series of commercial and military flights that described a journey to and from Antarctica. That list ended with a note indicating no record could be found for Kilkenny’s trip from New Zealand back to Michigan.

He was there on the day of the raid, Duroc realized from the dates.

He rechecked Kilkenny’s background and found the note on MARC. Flipping through the research file on NASA’s LV Station project, he found MARC and UGene listed on the project team.

Kilkenny must have been the one who attacked us.