A former financier, Mr Finbarr Ross, is on his way to Northern Ireland on foot of an RUC extradition warrant but last night there was an official clampdown on his exact whereabouts.
Early yesterday morning he was taken from Muskogee County Jail, Oklahoma, where he has been held since March 4th last year when FBI agents arrested him at the Light of Christ Community Church where he was an ordained minister.
Since then, Mr Ross has been fighting the extradition sought by the RUC on 41 charges arising from the collapse of his International Investments Ltd in 1984, with debts to investors of about £7 million.
The Irish Times was able to establish that last night Mr Ross was being held in a federal detention centre in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington DC.
But Federal Marshal John Clark would only confirm that Mr Ross was being held in "the Washington area".
Mr Clark apologised for not being able "for security reasons" to give any more details as to when Mr Ross will be handed over to the RUC. But Mr Ross himself believes that this will happen on Friday.
He is hoping to make contact with the Washington attorney, Mr Tom Patton, who argued against his extradition in the federal court in Oklahoma.
Mr Clark said it would not be normal for prisoners "in transit" to speak to their lawyers unless some new element in the case had arisen.
Mr Ross, who is from Co Cork but is now a US citizen, has been resigned to being extradited to Belfast since his appeal was dismissed on February 17th. His case attracted a lot of attention in Oklahoma as it was the first extradition from there. Mr Ross had claimed that he would be unlikely to get a fair trial in Northern Ireland because he was from the Republic.
The judge ruled that the case was not political. He also rejected the defence arguments that the five-year statute of limitation under US law should apply to Mr Ross, as the alleged offences were committed up to 1984.
The judge said that since Mr Ross came to the US in 1983 he was a "fugitive from justice", so that he could not benefit from the statute of limitation.
Mr Ross denied this and pointed out that he kept his own name and made no attempt to hide while he lived in Houston and Dallas before moving to the community of the Light of Christ Church in Talequah, Oklahoma.
By coincidence, Mr Roy Beggs, the MP for East Antrim who has been campaigning for Mr Ross's extradition, was in Washington this week himself with a delegation from the House of Commons Committee on Northern Ireland. He said yesterday that he had no knowledge of what was happening with the extradition.