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Steve glanced over at the girls. He couldn’t help it. As if being a semi-heliophobic nerd sitting with a laptop wasn’t enough of a turnoff, now he was hanging out with a hunched-over, fiftysomething old man.

The girls were pulling on sweats.h.i.+rts of their own, stepping into form-fitting jeans. The temperature was dropping.

“I’m not lazy,” Steve said to Bo Pan. “I’m efficient — my work is done, remember?”

The old man shook his head. “No longer. We have a search location.”

Steve sat up. He forgot about the girls, forgot about the sun.

“A location?”

The older man smiled, showing the s.p.a.ce where his front right incisor once resided.

A location. Five years of effort, millions of dollars spent — Steve didn’t know exactly how much, but it was a lot — the whole reason his family and the People’s Party had hidden him away in this inflamed hemorrhoid of a town, and now it was finally his moment to s.h.i.+ne. He didn’t know what to think, how to feel. Afraid? Excited? After all this time, was it finally his turn?

“A location,” Steve repeated. “How did we get it?”

Bo Pan shrugged. “The American love of money knows no bounds.”

“No, I mean how did we, or they — or whatever — get the location? Satellite? Did someone properly model the entry angle? Did someone find …” His voice trailed off.

Did he dare to hope?

Gutierrez’s green men. The story of the century. Steve’s task: build a machine that could dive, undetected, to the bottom of Lake Michigan. Could there be actual pieces of an alien s.p.a.cecraft?

“Wreckage,” he said. “Did someone find wreckage?”

Bo Pan shook his head. “You don’t need that information.”

Steve nodded automatically, acquiescing to Bo Pan as if the man was something more than a simple go-between.

Wreckage. It had to be. Steve had finished work on the Platypus three months earlier. His baby was more a piece of art than a cutting-edge unmanned underwater vehicle. It sat in a crate like a caged animal, unable to move, unable to fulfill its purpose. Other than midnight test runs, there had been no point in putting the UUV to work. Unless Steve knew where to look, he couldn’t have the machine go out and explore 22,400 square miles of Lake Michigan.

But now, they had a location.

The old man cleared his throat, dug his left pointer finger into the folds of flesh below his left eye, rubbed there. “When I last spoke with you, you said you had researched a local vessel that could take your machine far out on the water?”

Steve nodded. “JBS Salvage.”

“A small operation, as I asked? Not a big fleet of s.h.i.+ps?”

“Just two men,” Steve said. “Only one boat.”

“Good. And you check on them frequently?”