English?"

"Yes, he speaks English," the kid shot back. He had a thick accent but he was perfectly understandable.

"You got a name?"

"They call me Ti-Malice." Pleasantries concluded, Ti-Malice came right to the point. "You want to know about the strangers who were here."

"Yes. Ivar gave you a description."

"Yes."

"And they looked like that?"

"Yes, they looked like that," the kid said, aping his deliberate speech. "How much you gonna pay me to tell you where they went?"

"How much you gonna want for the information?" Patrick said.

They haggled back and forth for a few minutes before settling on twenty American dollars, which seemed to be the going rate for anything that could be bought. Patrick hoped the bean counters never questioned this particular informant fee on his expense sheet.

"Some they come by the ferry, which you know," Ti-Malice said. "Some they come by seaplane, which you don't. One, he come by car, through the jungle. He the leader."

"How do you know that?"

Ti-Malice looked at him with contempt. "They come to him with questions, he give them answers. When they leave, he get on the boat first. He the leader."

"How many of them were there?"

"Ten."

"When did they leave?"

Ti-Malice shrugged. "Six days ago, maybe?"

"What kind of a boat did they leave on?"

"Sailboat." But Ti-Malice's eyes slid away from Patrick's.

It was too blatant to be anything but intentional. Patrick sighed and got out another twenty-dollar bill. He held it out of the kid's reach. "Okay, Ti-Malice, what's the rest of it?"

"They not the only people on board this sailboat," Ti-Malice said.

"ISA'S ON A BOAT SMUGGLING MIGRANTS INTO THE U.S.?" THE AGENT with the Conrad fetish said over the roar of the seaplane's engine as they took off from the tiny harbor. "What's that about?"

Patrick frowned through the windshield. There was something he was

missing, some link in Isa's recent series of activities that he couldn't quite put his finger on.

Why would Isa go to all the trouble of infiltrating a boatload of Haitian migrants inbound for America? Look at how he had waltzed in and out of New York and Florida. He'd been in Florida for six months without anyone spotting him. Why go to all the trouble and expense and endure the discomfort of a smelly cruise on what sounded like a marginally seaworthy vessel?

He worried at the problem all the way back to Miami, in the throes of July Fourth celebrations that in Miami seemed to require much shooting off of guns into the sky. Traffic was slow coming in from the airport, and it was nine o'clock before the taxi dropped him off at his hotel.

He was still worrying when he unlocked the door to his hotel room.

Melanie was waiting for him.

His mouth dropped. "Melanie?"

"Hello, Patrick," she said. She walked toward him in the pencil skirt and slender heels she always wore, today topped by a thin, powder blue sweater with a scoop neck that hinted at cleavage. She was suddenly closer to him than she'd ever been before, and this time there was no desk between them. He backed up, only to hit the door. He dropped his bag. "What are you doing here?" he said weakly.

"I thought I could help," she said. "Here, let me get your coat."

Firm hands turned him around and lifted his coat from his shoulders. "My, you need a shower," she said. "Or do you prefer a bath?"

His tongue tied itself in knots for a moment. "Sh-sh-shower," he managed to say.

She gave him a sweet smile. "I showered when I got here-I hope you don't mind-but there are clean towels left."

"I, uh, okay," Patrick said, and fled.

When he came out, slightly pink from the scrubbing he had given himself, and the belt of the terry-cloth robe knotted very tightly around his waist, she was sitting next to a table set with Caesar salad, a crusty loaf of bread, and a bottle of chardonnay, which she'd already poured into two glasses.

He sat down in the chair opposite her with a thump, his legs oddly incapable of holding him up any longer. He stared at her. "Melanie, what are you doing here?"

She waved her hand at a briefcase sitting on the desk across the room. "There was some paperwork I thought I'd better deliver in person." She dimpled delightfully. "And I've never been to Miami."

He knew he was being seduced, probably at Kallendorf's instigation, and he couldn't do a thing to stop it. When they finished eating and she took his hand and led him to the bed, he did not resist.

"That was wonderful, Melanie," he said later, and kissed her in gratitude. "Thank you."

She smiled and held her hand to his cheek. "You're very sweet, Patrick. I've wanted this for a long time."

He couldn't tell if it was a lie or the truth, but he didn't really care. He sighed and reached for the robe discarded on the floor. "I'd better take a look at what you brought."

"It's a report from Mr. Rincon. He faxed it to the office this morning."

He forgot the robe and trotted over to the briefcase naked, riffling through the paperwork to find the report with the institute's deliberately vague logo, a quill pen crossed with a broadsword and the words littera scripta manet written beneath in a discreet little font. It was only when you looked more closely that you saw that the pen was larger than the broadsword and in a fair way to eclipsing it altogether.

"Mrs. Mansour was right, he is Pakistani," he said, reading rapidly. "Akil Vihari, brother of-holy shit."

"It's an awful story, isn't it," she said gravely. "Yes, I read it when it came in. I know I wasn't supposed to, Patrick, but I couldn't resist."

"I remember reading about this," Patrick said, unheeding. "It was something of a cause celebre, especially when her brother disappeared and Amnesty International and the rest of them figured he'd gone for revenge against the tribesmen and they'd killed him. It was in Time, it was on the Nightly News and BBC."

There was a picture of Adara, the one taken for her identity card. It was blurry but it looked familiar. It took him a minute before he made the connection.

"She looks like Zahirah Mansour." He thought of what they had found in the backseat of that car and felt a little sick.

She dozed off while he skimmed through the rest of the report. No wonder, he thought, looking at her slumbering form, lovingly outlined by the sheet. It was after eleven. She must be exhausted.

He'd be happy to crawl in beside her but he felt restless. The television was on. He skimmed the news channels. Nothing new; a bombing in Baghdad and another on the West Bank, a small plane crash in Alaska that everyone had walked away from, a mudslide in California and a tornado in Kansas. NASA was about to launch another space shuttle, and among the crew there was a relative of a World War II hero after whom someone had named a ship, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. There was a clip of her parents on the cutter, standing next to the captain, a fit, handsome man in his midforties who looked as if he wished he were anywhere else but there. Patrick wished he looked like him. Then maybe Melanie would have slept with him because she wanted to, not because Kallendorf did.

He clicked over to NTV for a little mindless entertainment, and watched as time-lapse photography darkened the sky over the agglomeration of ship and fuel tanks waiting next to the great steel Tinkertoy that held it upright until ignition. They were set to launch at midnight.

The scene switched to the standard NASA-issue press conference, the six astronauts dressed in the now-familiar blue flight suits with the mission patch on the breast sitting at a long table, facing a room full of reporters with notepads and microphones and cameras. It was the second mission for the commander and one of the mission specialists, the first for the pilot and the other two mission specialists. The sixth was a Qatari who worked hard at giving the impression that his job was to single-handedly launch the ARABSAT-8A, the communications satellite for the Al Jazeera news network.