CHAPTER Four
I would have rather flown anything else, even a Chinese airline, but the Ministry insisted that I take their advice. “We’ve booked you on the U.S. national flag carrier,” the travel clerk said. “We know airlines, don’t worry.” So on Tuesday afternoon, I climbed into a middle seat and took my last full breath for twelve hours. The man next to the window was as big as an ox; the woman on the aisle had hips. The ox and the hips both ate their dinners without looking up. I left mine on the tray. When the lights went out for the movie, I listened briefly to the engines, closed my eyes, and tried to think.
New York. I was bound for New York, where I could expect orders that would officially tell me less than what Pak had already told me informally. The orders would be encoded, but try as the code clerk could, he would not be able to make them sensible because, at base, they would be meaningless, almost certainly designed to use what I already knew to lead me away from what I really needed to learn. Whatever I was supposed to discover in New York, I wasn’t supposed to understand how it fit into a larger picture. Pak had told me as much as he knew. Well, almost as much.
This had not been a simple investigation to begin with, even if that is what Pak insisted we could make it. Simple investigations don’t send inspectors to strange places, in such proximity to strange hips. Someone in Pyongyang was abnormally worried about the dead woman’s fate, and was frantically searching for clues on at least three continents, maybe more. More and more, it looked like that “someone” was Pak’s acquaintance, the one for whom he was suddenly doing favors. The one for whom I was only a Padua stone, put on the board wherever he needed. Nothing simple about it. Either the woman was extremely important in her own right—and what little I’d seen so far didn’t suggest anything along those lines—or she was involved in something very sensitive. Or maybe none of the above. There was still that final possibility, the one that kept popping into line and wouldn’t disappear. Maybe she wasn’t really the focus of whatever it was that was going on.
Besides the woman, there was Jen?. No connection between the two of them that I could see, except that they dropped into my life more or less at the same time. Jen? had an inordinate interest in missiles. The woman might have been killed in Pakistan. I didn’t know if there were tabs and slots in all that, but it was worth bearing in mind.
As long as there was nothing else to do, it would have been good to make a few notes, but there wasn’t enough room to move my arm.