Arena spent most of the rest of the day teaching Sophia and Yates how to ride the board. Yates turned out to be pretty good.

  “I like snowboarding,” he said at one point. “It feels like that.” He looked at Arena. “Ever try snowboarding?”

  She didn’t look amused. “There’s not a lot of snow in Hawaii. Or LA. And I’ve never exactly had a lot of cash to go off on random trips.”

  Yates actually grinned at her. “Well, maybe after this we ought to change that. You know there’s an indoor skiing mountain in L. A., right?”

  Arena shrugged, because truthfully, she hadn’t heard about it. She probably couldn’t have afforded it anyway.

  Sophia had more trouble staying on the board, but she seemed to be having so much fun falling off that it didn’t matter.

  “Did they ever find out how it worked,” Arena asked Yates. They were sitting in the common area while Sophia flew back and forth down the hallway.

  “They have a theory, but R&D was very angry that Fieldhaven took the board out of their hands after so little time.” He folded his hands primly. “It seems that it mostly operates magnetically, repelling underground pipes. You could float it over a car, I suppose, too. So it wouldn’t work everywhere, but on most city streets it would work just fine. Wouldn’t work over water or land with no subterranean systems. Not as sophisticated as they had hoped, but still a landmark invention. Could have numerous applications. And now with the technology, we can develop it further.”

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  This didn’t seem surprising to Arena. Sophia buzzed past them hanging off the board, screaming with laughter. He raised an eyebrow at her, a flicker of something else on his face.

  Their handhelds buzzed. Yates turned grim. “Conference room,” he ordered.

  “Adam Rignall escaped,” he said when the others arrived. Some of them looked at him blankly, including Arena. “The man with the scar? Anyway, the only way we think he could have escaped was if someone internal let him out. This is going pretty far, even for them.”

  Sterling nodded. “They are getting reckless, and are bound to make a mistake. They must be desperate. What did we know about Rignall anyway?”

  “He showed up on a few alerts, mostly for middle-level theft. We thought he was a mercenary or hired muscle, but either he is important, or he knows something important. We didn’t really get anything out of him, though--nothing we didn’t already know.” Yates grimaced.

  Sterling pulled his netbook around, “I’ve been looking at the data Yates gave us, and I think I found a lead. There’s a couple of these numbers that don’t quite add up. When I started looking deeper into them, they seemed to originate from an IP address in Sydney, Australia.”

  Arena suddenly perked up. “The guy who was at the hotel had an Australian accent. The one Bertha took out.”

  Sterling rubbed his chin. “I think I can trace it to an exact location. It may not lead us anywhere, but it would be a start.”

  “Good, keep working on it. Kershaw, Schmidt, and I will get on a plane to Australia. By the time we get there, maybe you’ll have a better lead.”

  Sterling looked up at Arena, shocked. “I’m going, too.” he said. “I can do this on the flight, and I will tie in to Anita as we go.”

  Yates seemed uneasy. “I really don’t think...”

  “I’m going.” There was no talking him out of it.

  “Fine. Pack up, and let’s go, then.”