I winked and said, "Your government thanks you."

She winked back and replied, "Put that in a tax rebate and I'll know you mean it. Now, if you'll excuse me… I have to begin boarding." She picked up her microphone and went through her announcement, which got the crowd excited and moving.

I walked directly across the aisle to the waiting area for Gate 47 and stood behind a thick pillar from where I could observe without being observed. An elderly lady in a wheelchair, a middle-aged guy on crutches, and a well-dressed couple who looked perfectly robust and healthy-impatient pricks from first class, probably-were lined up, fingering their boarding passes and IDs.

Despite Bian's reservation on this flight, I was still concerned, because now I had an idea how her mind worked. I knew she was smart and cunning and, most important, diabolically evasive. I mean, this could be another ruse. In other words, it was time to consider whether this reservation was a diversion to draw me away from something else. That was a stretch, but I no longer underestimated this lady.

The first-class passengers now were queuing up, an interesting mixture of mostly Asians, who were old and looked overdressed, and a few occidentals, all of whom were young and attired almost impossibly badly-an interesting snapshot in international contradictions.

I had another thought. If Bian was Captain Ahab, oozing hatred and obsession, there still were two white whales she hadn't bagged, Tigerman and Hirschfield.

While Clifford Daniels was most directly responsible for Mark's death, Tigerman and Hirschfield were directly responsible for Clifford Daniels's. If you thought about it hard enough, as surely Bian had, these were the two officials who authored the circumstances that put Mark in a killer's crosshairs-by placing a small, weak subaltern into the position where he could do so much harm, by fostering his relationship with Charabi, and afterward, once Charabi's lies were exposed and made them all look like idiots, by twisting Daniels's arm into doing something stupid and hysterically desperate to restore a little luster to their disintegrating reputations.

Also, I was having difficulty with the Diane Andrews angle. I mean, in almost every way, it made sense. Andrews definitely had earned a high place on Bian's hit list, and clearly the MOs in her murder and Daniels's were similar. Not identical, but similar. Further, if not from the lips of Diane Andrews, where else did Bian learn about Cliff?

Except… well, there were those troubling differences. The hand that tortured and killed Diane Andrews was enraged, brutal, and the manner of her execution abrupt and perfunctory. Cliff's killer seemed cooler and, I thought, less impulsive. And then there were those interesting staging aspects that suggested passions more byzantine than rage. But what did that mean? Two different minds? Or a single mind clever enough about police investigations to avoid a signature method? Whenever the killer is a veteran cop, you have a real problem on your hands.

But when two plus two equals five, you have to go back to the beginning and recompute. So I asked myself, had Sean Drummond been the first responder on the scene of both murders, what would have been his impressions?

I thought he would've hypothesized that Diane's killer was a male-somebody with big-time macho problems, a bad attitude toward women in general, and some fairly serious anger control issues. No finesse, no subtlety, just whack-down she went. Plus the killer used a hatchet, hardly a feminine tool. And the amputated fingers, maybe that was indicative of torture. But maybe it wasn't. Because maybe, as Phyllis had theorized, Diane's hand had merely been in the path of the deathblow.

And by comparison, he would've observed that Daniels's murder was more artful, more complexly dramatic, and in its sexually peculiar way, more vindictive. And that would reinforce something he already well knew: In matters of life, and of death, men are shallow. Women think of the little things-the birthday gift wrapped in colorful paper with a fancy bow, or the naked corpse with his hand gripped around his woodie-the special touches that make life or, in this case, death, more interesting.

And, if I carried that logic a step further, had Bian been Diane's assassin, for her this was all or nothing. Everybody with a hand in Mark's death was going to atone; maybe, or especially, Tigerman and Hirschfield.

So if Bian was in the airport, she wasn't killing Tigerman and Hirschfield. And maybe she had killed Cliff, but maybe not Diane. Did it matter? Technically, no. Murder is murder-says so in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It was irrelevant how many she killed; just that she did commit murder. And Sean Drummond, sworn officer of the law, was supposed to do his duty and help apprehend the perp. Right?

Damn it, no. It did matter.

The counter person was calling for seat numbers 50 through 25, and a fresh crop of people began lining up. I no longer had a good view, so I left my hiding place and shifted to the middle of the aisle for a closer look.

And ten people back from the front of the line, with her back turned, stood an elderly Vietnamese lady with stooped shoulders, and directly to her rear, a thin, broad-shouldered young Vietnamese male, short-haired, wearing baggy black dress slacks and a shapeless white office shirt, with a red knapsack slung casually over the left shoulder. At that moment, the elderly lady turned around and exchanged words with the slender boy to her rear, and I recognized her-Bian's mother.

Except for that look, I never would've recognized Bian. She stood like a male, erect, with her shoulders perfectly squared, just as she had been trained and molded in her first month at West Point.

So now all that stood between Bian Tran and a new life were the last few people before her in line, and me. I took a deep breath.

Flight or capture? Nobody would ever know. Nobody would know that she wasn't in the hands of Iraqi kidnappers. Nobody would ever know she was alive and hiding out in Vietnam. And nobody would know that Sean Drummond had put his heart above his duty.

Three more passengers entered the boarding walk. Bian and her mother took a few more short steps, closer to freedom.

Possibly it was my ego, but I just could not believe Bian was a ruthless killer. And I knew what would happen if I apprehended her-a certain conviction for murder, possibly treason, and a slew of lesser charges tacked on for good measure by an overeager prosecutor. While I doubted she would get the chair, I was sure she would never leave Leavenworth and she would know I had sealed her fate.

Could I be responsible for that? What would I do if the love of my life died because a bunch of venal bureaucrats back in Washington were playing career games? I didn't know for sure, and I hoped I would never find out. But I would like to believe I would've found some clever way to make them pay.

So that was it; I would let her go, but first, I would have a word with her. I wanted to tell her I knew what happened. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for her pain. But, most of all, after all we had been through, after all we had shared, I needed to say good-bye.

I stepped forward, when suddenly a hand grabbed my arm. I turned around, and a man in a dark suit said, "Excuse me, sir. Detective Sergeant Jones. Would you please step over here?"

The suit looked nice and expensive, and the man was about my height, only larger, with more powerful shoulders. "Why?" I asked him.

"A lady reported that she was assaulted by a soldier in uniform. You fit her description."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"You know what?" He smiled and tightened his grip. "They never do."

I looked and saw that only two people were now ahead of Bian and her mother. I said to him, "Show me your badge."