Stratton lay alone, dreaming of coffins. Slowly the pain drained from his limbs, but cotton clung to his mind. He could hear the sound of a city outside his window. A police siren. Screeching tires. A jet roaring down the Potomac. The noise crashed over him, triple amplified. His ears rang. His head felt like plaster.

He had to get up. Hours crawled by.

A maid rapped on the door.

"Not now," Stratton mumbled.

He had to get up. Move. Open your eyes.

The room was bright. The clock on the bedstand said eight o'clock.

"Jesus Christ." He had spent a full day in bed.

He made a wobbly journey to the shower. He found a crimson dot on his leg, still tender from the hypodermic injection. He stood under the hot water for twenty minutes, letting his blood wake up.

Sorting out the reality from the nightmare wasn't easy. Just where did Linda Greer fit in now? She had zapped him with something-elephant tranquilizer, it felt like. Why? And where was she?

On her own, that's where. No Langley, no Peking. Wang Bin had become a personal project, but why? And how personal?

Stratton was angry, restless and, above all, baffled. She had let them get away.

For whatever reason, that's what she had done. It was one truth that had survived the horrible night.

Stratton toweled off and pulled on a pair of jeans. He called room service and ordered a big stack of pancakes, three eggs and a pitcher of black coffee.

His options were dismal. He could run to the State Department and lay it all out. Someone very polite would call China, and someone in Peking would reply-very tersely-that the body found in the Ming reservoir was positively Deputy Minister Wang Bin; that no clay soldiers were missing from the Xian excavation; that no visa had ever been issued to an American named Harold Broom.

That's what the Chinese would say-because they had to. They would admit nothing, because they could never permit themselves to be seen as fools.

And that would be it.

A better option would be confiding in old friends at the CIA. But what proof could Stratton offer? Vandalized grave plots? Hardly a red-hot trail.

It all came back to Linda. Was she in league with Broom and Wang Bin? Or was she trying for that solo coup that would edify her career-bringing the old Chinese bastard in from the cold? He remembered their dinner talk in Peking. Yes, that was probably it.

Either way, the lady had guts. Wang Bin was a killer, not easily induced, coerced or charmed. With some defectors it was easy. Bring them in gently. Pay them. Pump them. Pay them some more. A new name, a new passport, off you go.

Linda was wrong if she imagined it would be that simple with the deputy minister. He was the ultimate pragmatist.

Maybe she knew that. Maybe she was way ahead of him. I'm the one who's fresh out of clues, Stratton thought ruefully.

He wolfed down his breakfast and went downstairs. He bought a copy of the Post in the lobby and walked out into the sticky heat to think. There was an empty bench on the mall near the Smithsonian, and Stratton sat down. Hearty joggers and lean cyclists flew by him, a reminder that he did not yet have his strength back. The sidewalks swarmed with foreign tourists who seemed to walk twice as fast as everyone else.

Stratton imagined himself back in Tiananmen Square, where the order and propriety that ruled Chinese history seemed also to govern those who came to celebrate it. Here in Washington, among the functional granite monuments to democracy, there was a holiday festiveness; in China, among the wildly extravagant temples, sobriety.

To Stratton's eye, it was not merely a culture gap, but a canyon. Chinese tourists traveled thousands of miles just to stand where the emperor's scholars had once gathered in the Hall of Supreme Harmony. In Washington, people lined up for blocks to watch the Treasury print money. Talk about awe.

If Americans seemed transparent, the Chinese mind was opaque. For Stratton this had become tragically obvious, first at Man-ling-a fatal grant of trust to a young boy-and now, with humiliating emphasis, at Arlington.

Stratton would never forget Wang Bin's face as Stratton had aimed the gun. Such magnificent defiance. Stratton would have liked him to have begged for his life, but he would have settled for one tear from the steely bastard. A tear for his own brother.

Yet all that had shone in the deputy minister's eyes had been an iron, immutable spirit. Stratton despised it.

He sat on the bench, watching a group of young girls from a parochial school chase a runaway kite, their plaid skirts beating together as they ran. Their laughter trailed off after the kite string.

Stratton opened the Post. The front section was clotted with the usual turgid political news. Stratton dismissed it and turned to the local pages to see if there was any mention of the grave robbery. There, on 10-C, a headline midway down the page grabbed his attention: ART BROKER FOUND DEAD IN BURNING AUTO.

The article was an Associated Press report from Grafton, West Virginia:

Two persons were found dead Monday at the scene of a single-car traffic accident on Shelby Road, two miles south of Grafton.

Police said the victims were discovered in a burning automobile after the car apparently had run off the highway and crashed. Grafton Police Sgt. Gilbert Beckley said that rescue workers who reached the scene were forced to wait for the fire to subside before approaching the car.

Authorities have identified one of the victims as Harold G. Brown, an art dealer from New York. Police said Broom carried business cards listing him as an associate of the Parthenon Gallery and the Belle Meade Exhibition Center in Manhattan.

The second victim found in the car carried no personal belongings and has not yet been identified, police said. The accident was reported by a Greyhound bus driver who passed the scene but did not stop.

Tom Stratton stuffed the newspaper into a trash basket, bought himself a lemon ice, and jogged exultantly back to his hotel.

Gil Beckley was not what Stratton had expected. He was not a middle-aged hillbilly with hemorrhoids, but an athletic young cop with a Jersey accent and two junior college diplomas on the wall. If Beckley felt it was beneath him to work traffic accidents, he hid the resentment well. In fact, he seemed pleased to meet this angular, quiet man who had arrived with information about the Shelby Road fatalities.

Stratton introduced himself and said, "I read about the accident this morning in the Post."

"That was the official version," Beckley said.

"What do you mean?"

"The two people in that car didn't die in any wreck. They were shot. Classic murder-suicide, I'd say."

Stratton was dazed.

"When you called, you said you knew something about the passengers," Beckley prodded. "Can you help us out?"

Mentally Stratton dusted off his story.

"Harold Broom was doing business with a good friend of mine. They'd been traveling together for the last week or so."

"Had you seen them recently?"

"Yes," Stratton said. "Day before yesterday. In Washington. They rented a car."

"So you think the other victim could be your friend?"

"I'm afraid so," Stratton said. "That's why I drove straight over here after I saw the story in the paper."

"We appreciate it," Beckley said. From a bottom drawer in the gray metal desk the policeman withdrew a stiff brown envelope. "How's your stomach, Mr.

Stratton?"

Stratton took the envelope. His hands trembled. He scratched at the gummed flap.

He wasn't acting anymore.

"What was your friend's name?" Beckley inquired.

Stratton pretended not to hear. Be there, he said silently.

He slipped the photographs from the envelope. They were black-and-whites, the usual eight-by-tens. The top picture captured what was left of Harold Broom after he had been dragged from the smoldering car. His clothes dangled like charred tinsel. His chest and face were scorched; the flesh on the upper torso was scabrous. The face was raw, frozen in a death scream. The eyelids had burned away completely, leaving only a viscous white jelly in the sockets. Broom's out-reached arms had constricted into the common rigor mortis of burn victims-elbows sharply bent, fists clenched in front of the face, as if raising a pair of binoculars.