It was 1:00 pm on Thursday, and Lobec knew he was running out of time. The longer Kevin Hamilton and Erica Jensen remained at large, the greater the chance that he would never be able to recover the Adamas notebook, that they would turn it over to the police or someone else who may eventually understand the significance of it. Then the chase would be over. Every minute was valuable, and he and Mr. Bern were wasting it by following his arrogant boss’s orders. Lobec hadn’t thought even Tarnwell would be foolish enough to bet everything on an untested technology. Then Tarnwell had proclaimed to the shareholders and press that he would announce a revolutionary new process next Tuesday, five days from now. With Adamas, his net worth would triple overnight. But if Tarnwell didn’t have the invention in hand at the time of the press conference, the stock would plummet, leaving him with no way to service the debt on the new company. It was all or nothing. Lobec supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised.
