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doesn’t leave for three hours. The departure screens show a Cathay Pacific flight leaving for New York in thirty-five minutes, with a two-hour layover at Narita in Tokyo. Presenting my worn passport at the Cathay counter, I let the ticket agent gut me for full fare on a first-class ticket. The money would buy a decent used car in the States, but after what happened in the museum, I can’t sit shoulder-to-shoulder with some computer salesman from Raleigh for twenty hours. That potential reality brings another to mind, and I ask the female agent if she can seat me next to a woman. On this day of all days, I cannot deal with being hit on, and twenty hours gives a guy a long time to strategize. Last year, on a flight from Seoul to Los Angeles, some drunk jerk actually asked if I wanted to go to the restroom with him and join the Mile High Club. I told him I was already a member, which was true. I’d joined nine years earlier, with my fiancé, in the cargo hold of a DC-3 somewhere over Namibia. Three days later, he was captured with some SWAPO guerrillas and beaten to death, which put me in an even more exclusive club: the Unofficial Widows. Now, at forty, I’m still single and still a member. The Cathay Pacific agent smiles knowingly and obliges my request.
    Which puts me where I am now: three scotches down and my short-term memory back in gear. The alcohol is serving several functions, one of them being to damp the embers of grief stirring at the bottom of my soul. But nineteen hours is a long time to hide from yourself. I have a supply of Xanax in my fanny pack, for the nights when the open wound of my sister’s unknown fate throbs too acutely for sleep. It’s throbbing now, and it’s not even full dark yet. Before I can second-guess myself, I pop three pills with a swallow of scotch and take the Airfone out of my armrest.
    There’s really only one useful thing I can do from the plane. After a few swipes of my Visa and some haggling with directory assistance, I’m speaking to the operator at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, who transfers me to the offices of the Investigative Support Unit. The ISU has more impressive digs than it once did, but Daniel Baxter, the chief of the unit, likes the bunker atmosphere of the old days, the era before Hollywood overexposure turned his unit into a myth that draws eager young college grads by the thousands. Baxter must be fifty now, but he’s a lean and hungry fifty, with a combat soldier’s eyes. That’s what I thought when I first saw him. A guy from the ranks who found himself an officer by default, the result of a battlefield promotion. But no one will ever question that promotion. His record of success is legendary in a war where victories are few and the defeats almost unbearable. To wit, my sister and her ten sisters in purgatory. Baxter’s unit scored a big zero on that one. But the grim fact is, when a certain kind of shit hits the fan, there’s no one else to call.
    â€œBaxter,” says a sharp baritone voice.
    â€œThis is Jordan Glass,” I tell him, trying to hide the slur in my voice and not doing well at all. “Do you remember me?”
    â€œYou’re hard to forget, Ms. Glass.”
    I take a quick swallow of scotch. “A little over an hour ago, I saw my sister in Hong Kong.”
    There’s a brief silence. “Are you drinking, Ms. Glass?”
    â€œAbsolutely. But I know what I saw.”
    â€œYou saw your sister.”
    â€œIn Hong Kong. And now I’m in a 747, bound for New York.”
    â€œYou’re saying you saw your sister alive?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI’m not sure I understand.”
    I give Baxter as lucid a summary as I can manage of my experiences at the museum, then wait for his response. I expect some expression of astonishment—maybe not a Gomer Pyle “Shazam,” but something—but I should have known better.
    â€œDid you recognize