It was not until eleven o’clock the following morning that she was really able to get down to work on the NAG, the North American Gambit, which was her name for the theory that Jones had found some way to fly his stolen business jet directly from Xiamen to this continent. Here in the Seattle office of the FBI, signs were obvious that her local contacts were being controlled by persons in Washington, D.C., who were quite serious about working this theory in a systematic way. This was both good and bad. Obviously it was helpful that they liked her theory well enough to take it seriously and devote resources to its investigation. But whoever was running this project in D.C. was an Organization Man or Woman, someone with a studious engineer-like mind-set, who spent a lot of time worrying about accountability. No Seamus Costello, in other words. It seemed that a lot of duplication of effort was going on in which that hypothetical flight was being wargamed and flight-simulated in precisely the way that had already been done at MI6 more than a week ago. Ever newer and better "resources" were being "brought online" and ever more "scary-smart" analysts being "looped in" and "brought up to speed." These developments were relayed second- and thirdhand to Olivia, and it was obvious from the tones of the emails and the expressions on people’s faces that she was expected to be gratified by each of these improvements. And yet from this remove, thousands of miles from whatever Beltway conference room where all the action was taking place, all these enhancements yielded zero results other than additional delays. It was not until about twenty-four hours after her meeting with Richard Forthrast that she finally began to get access to some of the data she needed to evaluate the NAG in a serious way: lists of the tail numbers of private airplanes that had landed at U.S. airports around the time in question (a week and a half ago now, long enough to give her the sense that she was pursuing a hopelessly cold trail) and high-resolution satellite images of out-of-the-way bits of the northwestern United States where computer-image-processing algorithms had detected white shapes that looked like they might conceivably be jet airplanes.