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had on before.  
    “Everything okay?” he asked.  
    She shook her head. He focused on her eyes. Where there had been playfulness and joy in them a moment ago, she was now all business.  
    “Jules, what’s up?” he stood up from the large chair and pushed the recliner in, then walked toward her.  
    “We need to go to Brazil.”  
    Ben wasn’t sure how to respond. “Excuse me? Brazil? The country?”  
    “That was a friend of mine from college. He told me Drache Global had surfaced down there, and that he thinks they’re planning something again.”  
    Ben felt his blood run cold. Drache Global. After he’d spent two months trying to research what the company actually did — and more importantly, who was behind it — he’d all but lost hope. The government, if they knew anything at all, wasn’t offering any help, and Julie’s position at the CDC hadn’t been quite high enough for her to negotiate anything useful.  
    All he knew was that they were one of the subsidiaries of the real organization behind the attacks at Yellowstone National Park months earlier, and they’d mostly gotten away with the act of terror. No one but Ben and Julie knew how close the nation had come to total destruction, and he made a vow to himself that he’d never stop looking for them. They had a few different names of other subsidiaries that might be involved, including Dragonstone and Drage Medisinsk, but searches for those companies only turned up public information on their dealings in whichever countries they operated. Nothing illegal, nothing that might link them to the attacks, and nothing for Ben to follow. He’d already spent too many waking hours trying to find and follow a thread, and he’d nearly thrown in the towel.    
    Now, someone was handing them a lead, beckoning.  
    He’d be damned if he let the opportunity slip through his fingers.  

7
    JULIETTE RICHARDSON STARED OUT THE small oval window of the 737 as it flew south over the Caribbean Sea. She longed to be down there, cruising around in the bright blue waters between Mexico and Jamaica. The cruise she’d chosen would have taken them to three ports in Cozumel, Grand Cayman, and Port Royal, and they’d have spent a luxurious seven days aboard a gigantic floating 5-star hotel.  
    Instead, they were flying over the open waters and onward toward Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where they would have a plane change and then fly north again to a smaller municipality in Central Brazil called Marabá, where they would land in the stifling heat and overwhelming humidity to spend God-knows-how-long tracking down an organization they weren’t sure really existed. They would meet up with Dr. Meron, Paulinho’s acquaintance, at her research firm, NARATech, and try to piece together tidbits of information that might — or might not — point back to Drache Global.  
    She turned to Ben, who was sitting in the seat next to her. “You think we’ll find them?” she asked.  
    He opened his eyes. “Hm?”  
    “Sorry, I thought you couldn’t sleep on planes,” she said.  
    He rubbed his eyes and sat up straighter in the seat. “I wasn’t asleep. Just couldn’t hear you…”  
    She watched him pop a piece of gum into his mouth and waited for him to respond. It took another ten seconds.  
    “Yeah, I think we’ll find something,” he said.  
    She raised her eyebrows, hoping to get the message across. We could have been on a cruise right now, but you’re dragging me halfway around the hemisphere because you think we’ll find something ?  
    He got the hint.  
    “Fine,” he said. “Yeah, I think we’ll find them. It’s a company, or an organization, or whatever. But it deals in currency, just like the rest of us. They’ve got to have their fingerprints there somewhere.”  
    She nodded.  
    “And you said that this ‘Paul’ — Paulinho — guy had some information that tied Drache Global to his friend’s company?”
    She nodded. “Yes. He told