Those who want peace must learn to make war, Sharmila Jalayan recalled the man had told her, as she strapped herself into her Cessna Caravan and began warming up its twin engines. War is not a necessary evil, he had taught them, a regrettably unpleasant means to a worthy end. On the contrary, war is the end, an ongoing struggle that must be waged unceasingly throughout our entire lives. For peace is forged only in the heat of battle, emerging as the dynamic balance between opposing forces. It is created by war, defined by war, nourished by war, sustained by war--and withers and disappears in the absence of war.

So was she finally ready to make war? Sharmila wondered. Devoted wife, mother of three, Red Cross surgeon, skilled amateur pilot, United Nations peacekeeper and now a possible candidate for that organization's next Secretary-General, the very idea seemed antithetical to everything she had ever believed in. Certainly it was no exaggeration to say that the entire world would have been shocked beyond belief if it had known that she was about to try to start a war. This, after all, was the same woman who had gutsily told the global press just three months ago that, if chosen, her number one priority as Secretary-General would be to eradicate forever all possibility of armed conflict on earth. That the purpose of the UN, in her view, was not just to mediate disputes between nations, but to create a world where such disputes could not exist.

Her unrelenting opposition to war had been based on the sort of deep personal experience that only a doctor of the dispossessed can have. In her thirty years with the Red Cross and the UN, Sharmila had witnessed up close and nakedly all the kaleidoscopic horrors of human conflict, which often claims more victims indirectly than directly, through starvation, disease, and the breakdown of social order. She had grown intimate with death in the way that is usually possible only for those who face it suddenly and personally: shock, followed by anger, then depression. Deciding that she wanted to be the one to guide the UN into the twenty-first century had been her way of avoiding stage four, the logical next step she had never been able to make: realistic acceptance.

As the engine reached normal idle turnover, she made a quick check of the cockpit controls. Going over in her mind again and again every detail in the flight ahead of her, all the dangers involved, all the things that could go wrong, an image of Jake--she preferred this preposterously inappropriate nickname, for it made him seem more approachable--flashed into her awareness. We are all condemned to die, she could hear him mocking her, those extraordinary eyes of his--so intense, so unserious--challenging her, challenging all of them to join him on the brink of the abyss. Our death is the most precious possession we have, the only force in the universe powerful enough to teach us lazy, fallible creatures how to live. Death is not our enemy, but our ally.

His words frightened her, but also drew her in. After all, that life can end at any time is a not so terribly remote possibility that every major political figure must confront, and particularly one whose job is to enter the line of fire. Though her work as a doctor and a peacekeeper had won her a huge audience of admirers, particularly among the developing nations, Sharmila was well aware that fame of any flavor is always a risk factor. Who, after all, had been more widely revered than the most famous Indian of the twentieth century, the man who--until Jake had come along--had been her personal hero?

But some would say she didn't just accept the risks associated with her profession, she aggravated them. She didn't have to make personal visits to all the world's hotspots, her private, brooding husband Shail quietly but frequently nagged her, and particularly not in a small plane that she frequently flew herself. She didn't have to continue practicing medicine at every one of her stops where doctors were scarce, even her own profession counseled her, especially in areas known or suspected to harbor the planet's most deadly viruses. And she didn't have to be so vocal in promoting her vision of a unified world government, every leader of a Western nation agreed, and particularly not at meetings in New York, the cultural capital of the country with the world's greatest concentration of people violently paranoid of the notion of any political order transcending nationhood. She didn't, in other words, have to be anything more than the sublime but safe symbol of a decidedly non-unified relationship that all her predecessors had been.

Many people, forced to become intimately acquainted with death relatively early in their life, turn to religion for a perspective in which to place it. But this had always been difficult for Sharmila, not because she had no religion, but because for so long she had had two, which is one too many. Unlike most Indian Nationals, she had been raised a Christian, and her devotion to its teachings was symbolized by the small statue of Jesus on the Cross that she had mounted in the cockpit of her plane. She had thought Jake would ask her to abandon that, as he had asked her to abandon so many other things in her life, but he had just shrugged and said, "There is nothing wrong with being a real Christian, a genuine Christian. The problem is that so few people understand what that means."

At the same time, though, she was an open admirer of the other major religion of the West, now its overwhelmingly dominant faith: technological materialism. Any religion that can feed, house, and clothe all its people, after all, has to appear attractive to an Indian national. Sharmila herself had grown up in the poverty that so many of her countrymen still had not escaped, so she knew first-hand that an unwillingness to accept the reality of the material world is its own worst punishment.

As different as the two religions sometimes seemed to be, she had always needed them both. Christianity helped her accept the presence of suffering and death that she saw everywhere in the world, to see it as a natural part of a larger cosmic plan. But science held out to her hope that this condition was not, after all, inevitable. All of this became especially obvious to her whenever she prepared, as she ostensibly was doing now, to set off on one of her peace-keeping missions. For it was the Christian in her that drove her to wander the globe, ready to witness and administer to all the horrors of human existence; yet it was science that determined how she would go and what she would attempt to do when she got there.

"You will be back next week, won't you?" asked the other man in her life, the one standing on the ground next to her plane. Their marriage had always been like that, it occurred to her in an odd moment of illumination: she was forever flying off into the skies, while he waited patiently on earth for her to return. Shail was a small, wiry-figured businessman with thick-lensed glasses and a way of thrusting his face forward that gave him a perpetually inquisitive look.

He had driven her to the airfield as he always did, and had walked out to the plane with her as he always did. And now he was trying to convince her not to go--he always did that, too. It was all part of their leave-taking ritual, and they had always played it well, for their marriage had known so many of them. The cause this time was an unexpected chance to jumpstart the stalled negotiations between the two Koreas. Both sides had asked for her specifically, and typically, she was ready to go almost immediately.

"You could at least stay a few more days," he half suggested, half pleaded with her.

She could barely hear his voice over the sound of the plane's engines, an eternally rising roar that she had, in the past, always associated with the thrill of impending adventure. But even louder than that now was the sound of her mind. It threatened to drown out her awareness of everything else. She tried to quiet it as Jake had taught her, in her intense concentration taking her eyes off the cross, going deep into herself. Dressed very informally in jeans and a leather jacket, her medium-length hair tied back in a scarf bright with the pattern that her home city of Madras had made famous, she was plump and somewhat slow and deliberate in her motions, making her appear deceptively relaxed and easy-going. A glance at her face, which was somehow very, very old without being aged, quickly dispelled that notion. Her skin was still fairly smooth, but the stress of her life was etched into something much deeper.

"It was nice of you to call the kids," Shail continued. Their three grown children were all living and working in the West. "They were very surprised to hear from you."

What an understatement that was. Even when they were growing up, Sharmila had not been able to spend much time with them, and in recent years she had hardly made even token attempts to stay in touch. She was always too busy, it seemed. Too busy with Red Cross missions. Too busy with peacekeeping missions. Too busy with meetings in New York, or London, or Geneva, or Tokyo.

"Everyone is selfish," Jake had replied to her when she had confessed to the enormous guilt that she had finally begun to recognize as such. "Selfishness is what makes the world go around. The question is, who is the self? What self are you passionately devoted to?"

Her answer to that had always been: the global village, the family of humankind. She had no real home except this plane and where it would take her next; no real family except the other representatives of the UN back in New York; no real friends except those who had benefited from the most recent dispute she had settled.

And up until now her family had somehow managed to accept that. Though Shail was hardly immune to wounded male vanity, upstaged as his career and his accomplishments were by hers, she knew that deep down he was bursting with pride for this woman he had married, whose career he had helped make possible. A man much better at handling numbers than people, Shail, like so much of the rest of the world, never ceased to marvel at his wife's skills in bringing together parties of the most disparate views and backgrounds, not so much finding common ground as creating it where it had not previously existed. The world's greatest politician, the editor of one of the local newspapers had recently crowed, but to Shail, that was an insult. The most successsful politicians were those adept at concealing from their constitutents the real consequences of their actions. His wife's special skill was in pointing the consequences out, then going ahead and persuading people to accept them, anyway.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life addressing the superficial symptoms of war? Jake had demanded of her abruptly during their first meeting. A country lacking some natural resource here, a dictator seeking to expand his territory there, an ideology trying to spread its message? Or are you ready to confront unblinkingly the root basis of all war, to understand why it is human beings have never had any choice but to commit violence against one another? How badly do you want peace on earth?

Badly enough, it seemed, that she would make this flight without the faith that had sustained all her former peacekeeping missions. Badly enough that she was willing to jettison the certainty that she was making a difference in the world, that the good she was doing far outweighed the hardships she created at home. Jake and his insanely audacious plan had turned all of that upside down--indeed, he had severely shaken her faith in just about everything, including her most basic understanding of what was right and what was wrong. She felt overwhelmed with confusion, understanding least of all what it was, deep down inside her, that had persuaded her to join Jake and the others, to lend her support to them. What if his plan--so totally at odds with the most basic tenets of common sense, a plan no one in the entire world except Jake was even capable of understanding--did not work? It was one thing to risk her own life, and the misery of her family, but what about the lives of hundreds of thousands of unknowing people...

"Are you all right?" asked Shail.

She knew she should at least turn to look at him, but she was still afraid to, afraid he would see what was in her heart at that moment. Odd, disconnected scenes from their life together began to flash through her mind. Their honeymoon in America, the first trip outside of India for both of them. Her early child-bearing years--the happiest years of his life, she knew--when she had stayed at home while he built his multinational business from scratch. Her first, and his last, Red Cross mission in the West African jungle. Their numerous meetings in New York, at first sharing a hotel room, and later their town house, for a few days before they had to go their separate ways.

"This time I really do have to go," she mumbled quietly.

She could feel the jolt that this totally uncharacteristic remark produced in him. You must tell him without telling him, was Jake's rule. Whatever the hell that meant, she thought. If I could just tell him, honestly and openly. I want to tell him so much. I have to tell him, I must tell him.

"You must break all attachments," Jake continued. "People think this means not caring, being indifferent. On the contrary, we can only truly care about something when we have no attachment to it. Only then can we see it clearly, without the prejudice of our thoughts and desires."

So easy to say, she thought bitterly, so hard to practice. For the first time since she had met Jake she was beginning to understand what he meant when he said that this was the most difficult path that a human being can follow. That nothing else that people do or ever have done can even be compared to it. That only one who wants something with all of her soul--peace, truth, understanding, it can be any desire as long as it is an aching one--can have sufficient motivation even to begin it, let alone pursue it.

"Tu-tu..." said Shail softly, finally resorting to her nickname, the name no one but her immediate family members used or even knew.

She could stand it no longer. She had to leave now, or she never would. She finally turned to face her husband of twenty-seven years, trying to hide all the guilt, shame and betrayal that she felt. What she wanted to say at that moment, more than anything else, was: Please forgive me for what I have done in the past, and much, much more, for what I am about to do now.

"I love you, Shail. I always have and I always will."

Again, something completely out of character. Of course, they expressed affection for each other often. But never at the moment of departure. It was one of those unspoken rituals, superstitions, perhaps, of their marriage. They would never speak deeply of themselves at this time, for to do so was to remind themselves of what lay behind those words. That maybe she would never come back from one of these trips, that maybe they were seeing each other for the last time. They could and did talk about such things when they were home, when no separation was imminent; they even made plans about what the survivor would do. But not now.

But she could not hold her feelings in check now. She could not play out the ritual the way it was supposed to be played, the way they had always played it before. Impulsively, she reached out and grabbed him, pulling him close and so tight it must have hurt him a little. The final kiss was not the usual one, quick and efficient, cheerful and curt. It was an act at once far more open, revealing, and vulnerable, and at the same time, more secretive and mysterious, than any she had ever expressed to him before. It was heartfelt, soulful, as though trying to express an entire lifetime in one moment. A last kiss.

It tooks weeks of searching the Indian Ocean to discover the site of the crash, and even then there were no clues as to what had happened. Though much of the plane was eventually recovered, the flight recorder was never found, nor was the body of Sharmila Jalayan.

The predictable outpouring of grief and condolences was, for a refreshing exception regarding celebrities, totally sincere. In many parts of the world, Sharmila had been the best-known and most popular political figure, overshadowing even the leaders of America and other major countries. There was not a national leader anywhere in the developed or underdeveloped world who had nothing glowing to say about her, and the two Koreas, in an unprecedented show of respect for her memory, jointly agreed on the next major step in their eventual reunification.

"She was both fascinated and perplexed by the problem of political diversity," recalled a reporter for the New York Times who had occasionally travelled with Sharmila on her far-flung assignments. "It was both the central motivating force of her life, and at the same time the source of an unbearable degree of frustration to her. So many times I remember her asking how it was that different people could be presented with the same set of facts and problems, yet come to such diametrically opposite conclusions about how to deal with them. Why are there liberals and conservatives, she wanted to know, Democrats and Republicans, Capitalists and Socialists, Hindus and Moslems, Christians and Jews? What is it exactly that makes human beings completely unable to understand the other side of an argument, to be so totally positive that their way of seeing things has to be the right way?"

The reporter went on to describe some of the adventures she had shared with Sharmila, recounting some small but powerfully revealing anecdotes of the woman in action, then ended her story by returning to the main theme of the article. "She confided in me once that her real dream was to create a true consensus, a set of universal values and mores that everyone on earth could agree upon and share."

Such praise, of course, was of small consolation to the man who had been made a widower. In the weeks following the disappearance of the plane, even before the wreckage was found, Shail was haunted by those final moments with his wife. He turned them over again and again in his mind, trying to sift them for clues. Had she known she was going to die? he wondered. And if so, how? And why had she insisted on flying at that time if she had been so sure?

No obvious answers to these questions seemed to be offered by the crash itself. An investigation of the remains of the small plane that were found eventually concluded that the cause of the accident had been an engine failure. While the possibility of sabotage could not be completely ruled out, it appeared that a simple mechanical malfunction had been responsible for Sharmila's death. Yet just prior to her flight the plane had been thoroughly checked out, as always, by her trusted team of mechanics.

Puzzling over this, Shail himself went through the wreckage, piece by piece, not really sure what he was looking for, perhaps only wanting some reminder of his wife. Each of the hundreds of fragments of fuselage, engine or cabin had been carefully labelled and displayed in a small warehouse not far from the examiner's office in Madras. Upon first entering this storage area with the examiner, Shail was almost overwhelmed by the sense of destruction, of the chaotic mess that was all that remained of the small plane that had been his wife's most beloved possession, indeed, had been her second home.

One fragment, however, clearly stood out from all of the others. It would have been noticed by anyone walking through that room, for in a way it seemed not to belong at all to this world of disorder and destruction. It contained the small statue of Jesus, completely intact and still attached to a large piece of the plane's dashboard. On the latter were all of the plane's vital dials, indicators and other flight controls. Far from being irregular in shape, and jagged around the edges, as one would expect a fragment from a fatal crash to be, the piece was remarkably uniform in its appearance. The flight panel was a nearly perfect rectangle in shape, and its edges as clean and sharp as though they had been cut with a high precision blade.

"How very strange," remarked Shail as he hefted up the piece from the table on which it was sitting, and studied it closely.

"It certainly is," agreed the examiner. "In all the crashes I've investigated, I can't recall ever having seen anything like that before. The odds that a piece of this size and uniformity would break off are absolutely astronomical. It simply beggars belief."

Still holding the piece in both hands, Shail turned to him in curiosity.

"Are you saying that she did this...?"

"I think she must have, don't you? It's really the only rational explanation."

Shail tried, with great difficulty, to imagine the scene. The plane was going down. Sharmila pulls out --what? what kind of tool must she have had to cut this? A saw of some sort? Certainly he had never seen anything like that aboard the plane.

"But why?"

"I don't know. Perhaps she was trying to get at something behind the panel. Maybe she thought there was a loose wire or something. There wasn't time to use a screwdriver, so she went at it with brute force."

Shail stared at the other man in perplexity.

"I never heard of anyone doing something like this. Have you?"

Obviously as frustrated by his ignorance as Shail was, the examiner shook his head helplessly.

"No, but why else would she have done it? You tell me, Shail. You were her husband." He took the piece of wreckage from Shail, and carefully set it back on the table. Gazing at it, it suddenly occurred to him how incongruous the juxtaposition was, the statue of faith perched on top of all that state-of-the-art technology.

"All I know," concluded the examiner, "is that when the moment of her death arrived, it all went overboard. None of it could save her."

For a philosopher, Bernard Jouvet had one of the most recognizable faces in the world, but after the fire got through with him even his own daughter could not identify him. Indeed, had it not been Professor Jouvet's own cottage in the south of France that had been destroyed by the blaze, no one would have had a clue as to whom what remained of the body had once belonged to. There weren't even any teeth to check, though that was in itself one of the most crucial findings turned up by the investigators. Bernard had no teeth.

The cause of the fire was a great mystery. From the pattern of destruction, the investigators were able to determine fairly easily that the fire had begun within the cottage, not from outside. From the position of Jouvet's flame-ravaged body, moreover, he had apparently been in his small but very valuable personal library at the time. But there was nothing to be found in the charred remains that might have suggested how the fire started.

"No, pa did not smoke," daughter Miriam told the investigators as she looked morosely over the blackened ruins. Jouvet's sole survivor, she had driven down from Paris as soon as she heard the news. As a girl, she had spent many idyllic summers in this little seaside cottage, and the loss of her father--her last close relative--was measurably increased by the virtual total destruction of this last symbol and remembrance of her family. "He didn't object to visitors who wanted to smoke, but other than me, I don't think he hardly ever had any here. That's why he came here, of course."

Standing with Miriam in the small yard in front of the black, barren foundation, Thierry Lemerle, one of the police inspectors, nodded. Jouvet's small but priceless collection of books on philosophy, history, and political theory had also been obliterated by the blaze. "We can find no evidence that anyone else was here, though of course any evidence that might have existed could have been destroyed." The cottage was fairly isolated, and the embers had actually begun to cool before anyone discovered the fire. Its isolation, however, had at least one positive effect; there had been little danger of the fire spreading. There were no trees on the little lot, and the soil was mostly rocky and bare.

Lemerle, a loose, lanky man with tousled sandy hair and a way of glancing frequently to one side, paused before asking his next question. Like a surprisingly large percentage of Frenchmen, he knew who Jouvet was, and had at least a general understanding of the source of the philosopher's fame. The deceased, it seemed quite clear, was not the kind of man to make enemies, at least not the kind of enemies who settled their differences by violence. What about suicide? he wondered to himself. A strange way to do it, destroying not only oneself but all of one's heritable possessions as well. There wouldn't seem to be any reason to do that--unless, of course, the suicide had been intentionally staged so as to appear like an accident. A suicide, in other words, that was not supposed to be recognized as such. If that were the case, Lemerle's quickly-moving powers of deduction realized, there should be some traces of the real killer--poison or a bullet hole--in the body. No one, surely, would burn himself alive.

"How recently had you seen your father?" he asked Miriam.

"About two months ago," she replied. She was a thin, busily efficient woman in her early fifties who had her father's aquiline nose, narrow face, and small but bright eyes. "I came down here for his eightieth birthday. Of course, he had a big celebration thrown by his colleagues back in Paris, but he wanted to share a quieter moment with me." Tears came to her eyes at the recollection of this touching gesture, so unlike the usual behavior of this highly independent man who all his life had displayed little need for familial support. Had he ever even remembered his own birthday before--or for that matter, that of his wife and daughter? This point was followed in her mind by a more sobering thought that she only partially succeeded in discarding from her awareness: Could her father have possibly known that this was the last time he would see her? Is that why he had insisted she come to see him?

"How did he seem?" Lemerle pursued. "He lived alone after your mother died, didn't he?"

Miriam nodded. "Yes, but he seemed to enjoy it enough. As I'm sure you can appreciate, Inspector, my father led a very reclusive life most of the time. Even when Ma was alive, and I was living with them, I didn't see a lot of him. At breakfast and at dinner, and not much in between."

"How was his health?"

"Very good. The only problem I was aware of was an enlarged prostate, which is pretty common in men his age, I understand."

The Inspector nodded, then smiled as he moved to his next question. "I won't ask you about the condition of his mind. He obviously was not senile. But could he have been a little...well, absent-minded at times?"

Miriam understood immediately where the conversation was going.

"I've often wondered myself," she replied. "Unfortunately, I just didn't see enough of him in recent years to judge. He certainly seemed on top of things when I last saw him. But better, I suppose, that you ask his colleagues at the Sorbonne."

As it turned out, it was Miriam herself, perhaps out of a twinge of guilt at having not spent more time with her father in his final years, who did the asking. There was certainly no problem in finding those who had known and worked with the man. The entire campus was in mourning. Bernard Jouvet was being hailed posthumously as one of France's greatest philosophers, compared in his intellect to Bertrand Russell, in his boldness to Immanuel Kant, and in his influence to Descartes. As she basked in all this reflected glory, Miriam, who was not a scholar herself--intellectually, she had always taken after her late mother--found herself wanting, for the first time in her life, to know more about what her father had done to set the academic world on fire.

After asking around, she was eventually guided to Alain Verdun, a young graduate student who had worked closely with the great man in his final years. A thin, intense man who seemed strangely alone even after she had entered his small, very neatly kept office, Alain appeared genuinely gratified, even honored to meet the daughter of Bernard Jouvet--though she quickly made it clear to him that her intellectual inheritance was even poorer than her material one had been.

"I know next to nothing about philosophy," she confessed to him after a few introductory remarks had passed between them, including Alain's heartfelt condolences, "but I would like to be able to appreciate at least a little of what my father did. Do you think you could it explain it to me in very simple terms?"

Alain thought about that for a moment. At twenty-two, he was young enough to remember clearly his own feelings of humility and ignorance the first time he had encountered Bertrand Russell, or Immanuel Kant--or Professor Bernard Jouvet.

"Your father's major professional interest was in epistemology," he began, "that is, the age-old question of how we can know anything, have objective knowledge of the world. This question has of course preoccupied some of the greatest intellects of humankind for several thousand years, but in the past century, the terms of the debate radically changed. This was due to the triumph of science, and it increasing dominance in all areas of our life. Science, as I'm sure you appreciate, claims to have a method for obtaining certain knowledge, or facts, about existence. This was something new, something completely different in our history."

Miriam nodded. "Oui. Je comprends."

"Philosophy reacted to this triumph of science in several ways," Alain continued. "One group of thinkers, known as the positivists, embraced it completely, and sought to model philosophy after it. They argued that the methods of science should apply not merely to the natural world, but to philosophy itself and all the other traditional social disciplines as well. More traditional philosophers--and your father was in this group--objected strongly to this approach. They argued that while science may be a valid means of understanding the natural world, it is an inadequate tool for understanding the social world. The key problem, in their view, was that of values. Philosophy has never been just about knowledge, about the nature of the world; it has also been about ethics, about the proper way for human beings to act. Most traditional philosophers, in fact, felt that the two questions were inseparable, or at any rate very closely related."

Now Miriam found herself getting lost.

"I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand what you mean," she confessed. "Do you suppose you could you give me an example?"

Alain briefly started at this interruption, but quickly caught himself.

"Certainment," he replied. He thought for a moment, his head facing one of the shelves in the room, his eyes darting rapidly back and forth. He was the kind of person who rarely looked at someone else with whom he was talking to, not--in this case, anyway--from shyness, but because the process of articulation was too important to him to share with anything else. Finally, with a quick grunt of self-satisfaction, he asked, "Do you have a job?"

"Oui," she replied.

"What do you do?"

"I work in an office," Miriam explained.

"Do you have your own room, or do you work in a large room with others?"

"A large room," she replied immediately. "I have my own cubicle, but it's very small."

"Do you enjoy working there?"

Miriam shrugged, growing increasingly surprised and puzzled at the personal direction in which the conversation was going, especially as it seemed to have nothing at all to do with philosophy.

"Not really," she replied. "It's very cramped, and there's no privacy."

Alain nodded.

"Exactly," he replied. "The reason your organization is set up like that is that it is considered to be more efficient. More employees can be packed into a smaller space, with the minimum spent on construction materials. The use of science exclusive of other considerations frequently leads to designing businesses in this way. The goal is to maximize material production."

"At the expense of the employees," suggested Miriam.

Alain shrugged.

"To science, the emotional state of employees is not something that can easily be measured, and thus from the point of view of a scientistic philosopher, it doesn't really exist. That, in a nutshell, is the traditional philosopher's point: that the practice of science presupposes certain values. Sometimes these values may be considered worthy, and sometimes not, but make no mistake, they are always lurking there."

Miriam thought about that for a moment, feeling encouraged to pursue this idea.

"The ironic thing is that I would probably be more productive if I had my own office. I think most of the others that I work with would be, too."

Alain turned to look her right in the eye for the briefest moment, throwing a swift, boyish smile.

"A second important point that your father always insisted on: knowledge and ethics are not distinct."

He left Miriam to think that over while he continued.

"The question to traditional philosophy thus became how to address this increasing encroachment of science into every aspect of human life. And here, philosophers divided roughly into two camps. One camp, especially prominent in Germany, tried to develop a method for exposing and criticizing the values underlying science. This is called critical theory."

He started to expound on this, then caught himself, and changed the direction of the conversation. Again he glanced at her, this time a little longer.

"For example, let us consider your work environment again. A critical theorist would begin with a long historical study of your business, examining how it was founded and gradually developed over the years. This study, he would hope, would reveal the values that are inherent in the decisions underlying this business. Then, armed with this knowledge, the critical theorist would proceed to reorganize the business completely, taking into account what he had learned."

Miriam thought about that for a moment.

"But how do I know I would like the way this person ran the business any better?" she asked.

"Exactly," replied Alain, brightening that she had realized this on her own. "That is just the point that opponents of critical theory have raised--that it has its own values, its own hidden agenda. That it is no more objective than the science it attempts to criticize."

His gaze fell on her again for a moment, before wandering off to other parts of the room.

"The other approach taken by philosophy in reaction to science was perhaps the most radical development of all. This movement, which we call postmodernism, claims that there is no absolute truth--not in science, nor in philosophy, nor in anything else. To postmodernists, truth is a relative idea. Different points of view may all be valid."

Relaxing more as he became increasingly comfortable around his visitor, Alain put his hands behind his head and sat back in his chair.

"Again, go back to the example of your work environment. A postmodern approach might be to go around and ask everyone what he or she feels is the best way to set up the organization. On that basis, decisions on how to reorganize the business would be made."

"I like that," Miriam commented. "It sounds democratic."

"Very much so," Alain agreed. "Nevertheless, some philosophers feel it has a very great weakness." He looked encouragingly at her. "What would that be?"

She thought about that for a moment, then shook her head. "I don't know," she said.

He shrugged.

"Well, how do we know that the opinions of the employees are any better guide to setting up the work environment than the old way? Suppose all of you believe you should be getting paid twice as much as is currently the case? Or that you should only have to work two or three hours a day? Or that each of you should have a huge, expensively furnished office? After all, none of you, presumably, has ever run a business before--what makes you qualified to say how it should be done?"

Miriam nodded slowly. "Yes, I see what you mean."

"In other words," Alain summarized, "if truth is relative, then postmodernism--the very idea that truth is relative--is also relative. There can be no way of showing that it has any ultimate validity, that we should pay it any more attention than any other idea."

He paused for a moment to see if she had grasped that idea, then went on.

"This is the background that you need in order to appreciate your father's position. As I said before, what it really boils down to is: how can we be sure that we know anything? Professor Jouvet was very much caught up in this debate. As a Frenchman, he was deeply influenced by the postmodernists, so many of whom were and are French--men like Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. On the other hand, by temperament, he had a great deal of sympathy for the German school. He sought to forge some kind of synthesis between the two. He accepted the postmodernist view that truth, in all the forms of existence that present themselves to us, is relative; yet he kept coming back to the very ancient notion--it goes all the way back to Pythagoras and Plato, of course--that there is an eternal truth, which is the proper measure by which to understand the world and guide our actions."

Alain threw up his hands.

"How to reconcile the two? That was the major aim of your father's life. He kept coming back to the same idea--that language and thought were ultimately the problem. It seemed very clear to him that as long as human beings lived and interacted in the realm of thought and language, that truth was relative--that any form of communication between humans could be interpreted, or deconstructed as the postmodernists say, in a variety of ways. So, at the end of his life, he was coming to the conclusion that if a system of absolute truth existed, it had to be beyond thought and language--in other words, beyond the realm of philsophy, science, or any other human activity as we know it."

There was a long silence as Miriam digested these words. When Alain continued, he spoke in a very quiet, almost timid voice, as if suddenly very unsure of himself.

"That's why the way Professor Jouvet died strikes me as so...well, fitting in a way. I mean, of course, if he had to die at all."

Miriam looked at him sharply. This was the first thing the young man had said--indeed, that anyone had said--that might possibly offer a clue as to why her father had died.

"What do you mean by that?"

To her mild annoyance, Alain did not immediately answer. For a moment, he just sat there, looking uncomfortable. Then finally he got up and began to wander about his office, toying with some of the books on the shelves, opening them and closing them rather idly, but making no attempt to read them. When he finally replied, his back was turned to Miriam. His voice, though, sounded far more intimate and vulnerable than it had at any time earlier.

"I had the great honor and privilege of visiting your father a few weeks ago, in his little cottage. It was the first time he had ever invited me there, and I know that very few of his older, more respected colleagues were ever allowed to see him there. As it happens, I must have been one of the very last people to see him, for of course he died before returning to Paris. While I was there, I saw that magnificent library of his which was later destroyed in the fire." He almost choked a little as he said these words, clearly overcome by the reminder of all that had been destroyed by the blaze. "It was probably as complete a collection of all the essential writings of Western philosophers as existed anywhere in the world. In particular, every important statement or argument on the question of truth and knowledge was there. Many of the volumes, as you probably know, were original editions."

Miriam nodded quickly, still hanging on Alain's previous statment, wondering if it could possibly provide her with some understanding of the circumstances surrounding her father's death. "Yes, but so what? Why do you consider his manner of death fitting?"

Alain closed the book he had been leafing through, and replaced it on the shelf.

"I remember browsing through that library of his, absolutely enthralled by everything that was there, and telling your father how much I wished I could have even a fraction of it in my own possession. And do you know what he said in response?"

She shook her head.

Alain now turned around to face her, a sad, puzzled expression on his face.

"He said--and this was one of the last things Professor Jouvet ever said to me, or for that matter, I suppose, to anyone else--he said that real philosophy begins after all the books are burned."

3. THE MISSING ANGLE

Ordinarily, Shigeru Kuroda was a hyper-cautious man, which was why his behavior on that fateful morning was so difficult to understand. As CEO of Zogeshiro, the third largest bank in the world, he was a natural target for kidnappers. He had already received several death threats, and they weren't the work of amateurs. In just the past nine months, there had been seven attempted abductions of major Japanese executives, three of the raids successful. One man had died in one of the assaults, and several others had been seriously wounded.

There was a time when the possibility of such brazen crimes committed in broad daylight would have been unthinkable, a time when Tokyo was recognized as one of the safest cities in the world. But Japan, which had long ago caught up to America in economic affluence, was now discovering that every fulfilled wish brings with it unanticipated and unwanted baggage. The social order in the country was breaking down; no one was really sure why, any more than anyone really knew in America, either.

The response of most Japanese businessmen to this new threat was to continue doing what, more than anything else, had led to this mess in the first place: blindly follow the lead of the Americans. On a social level, they campaigned for more jails and a harder line against criminals. And on a personal level, they adopted a bunker mentality. They hired bodyguards. They equipped their homes, their cars, and their persons with the latest anti-crime technology. They spent as little time as possible travelling between home and work, always changing the time and the route.

No one who knew Shigeru Kuroda even casually was surprised that he took this approach to its limits. Kuroda, one of the leading economists in Japan, was a man of somewhat greater than average intelligence and unsurpassed drive. Even by Japanese standards, his capacity for work was legendary. Sixteen hour days were normal to him, and several times a week he would not even go home at all, sleeping in at his private suite at the bank. And even those regrettably necessary hours that all human beings must spend in a state of unconsciousness were not allowed to be wasted. He played tapes to himself while he slept. Not motivational tapes, because there was no room in his psyche for further motivation. Sheer information was what his subconscious listened to--lists and lists and lists of economic statistics that even his own colleagues tired of looking at.

His approach to his own safety was equally thorough. His main residence outside of Tokyo was fortified not only with fences, walls, moats, dogs, cameras and guards, but detectors that could monitor the activity of any human being within hundreds of yards. He had built a bomb shelter below the main structure, stocked with enough food, water and energy to maintain himself and his family for months. His car was equipped not merely with the usual bullet-proof armor, but had a surface that could be altered by computer to take on the appearance of another kind of vehicle entirely.

Kuroda himself, however, was never armed, which was what made his behavior so inexplicably and uncharacteristically rash that day.

"He insisted that I stop the car so that he could get out, go to a couple of stores," his badly shaken chauffer and bodyguard told the police. "He had never done that before. That was my job. I was always the one to run the errands."

"Do you know why he wanted to do it himself?" they asked him.

Junichi Sato shrugged. He did not look like a bodyguard; he was rather small and thin, and to the casual onlooker, deceptively timid in appearance. But a man armed with the best weapons that money can buy does not have to be physically large and tough. Junichi had been chosen by Kuroda primarily for his inhumanly fast reactions, for his ability to spot and respond to anything in the surroundings that appeared unusual.

"He said that he was tired of living in a prison. That he never met ordinary people any more, that he didn't even know what ordinary people were. He wanted to get out, to rub shoulders with the crowd." Junichi's tone of voice clearly expressed disbelief in what had happened. It would have been remarkable enough if Kuroda, always the man in a hurry, had wanted Junichi to run the errand, use up precious minutes of his time to do something that his chauffeur might have done later, when he was not taking Kuroda to work. But for Kuroda to do it himself...It was almost as though he had become another person.

"Why didn't you go with him?"

"He wouldn't let me. He insisted that he had to do this alone."

The police went over with Sato again exactly where he had let his employer out of the car, in what direction Kuroda had been walking when last seen. He had stopped the car near the Tsujkiji Market, which was always teeming with shoppers in the early morning hours.

"When did you suspect that he had met with foul play?"

"He told me he would return in thirty minutes," Junichi replied simply. "I was supposed to wait in the car for him, right here." To anyone who knew Kuroda, that was all that had to be said. In all the years Junichi had worked for him, he had never known his boss to be late for anything. Not even five seconds late.

After scouring the area where Kuroda had disappeared, Junichi had called the police, who had conducted another, more serious search. But there were no leads at all, no clues as to Kuroda's disappearance. Like most extraordinarily wealthy men, Kuroda had shied away from the public limelight; his face was not well known, not even in Japan. So his presence on the street would not have attracted any particular attention, and the police were subsequently able to find very few who could even remember having seen a man fitting his description.

If the disappearance of Shigeru Kuroda had taken place under the oddest of circumstances, what followed was equally mysterious. The next day, a letter sent to a major newspaper in Tokyo declared that Kuroda had been apprehended, tried and executed by an organization calling itself The Second Triad. Though the name sounded like that of a Chinese underworld organization, the stated goal of this group suggested that it was not a gang but a political organization: "to bring about the only genuine revolution possible in human society, a transformation encompassing the body, feelings and mind of every human being on earth." Kuroda's "crime", the message went on to explain, was "an obsessive preoccupation with material wealth" and an "inability and unwillingness to submit himself to the necessary discipline required to free himself from this preoccupation."

A subsequent interview with Kuroda's wife, however, suggested that the missing executive's behavior might not, after all, have been as totally spontaneous as it had seemed to his chauffeur.

"I think he was trying to warn me that this was going to happen, and soon," she said.

"Did he tell you that he feared anyone specific?" the officer asked. "Did he mention any names?"

Reiko Kuroda shook her head. She was a very pretty, petite woman who even now, coming to terms with the loss of her husband, seemed remarkably composed. As she sat on the imported white leather sofa in the large living room of the veritable castle in which Kuroda had lived, a lightness in her eyes and mouth was evident that, in most other women confronting widowhood, would have appeared shockingly disrespectful, even suspicious. Was she still recovering from the shock of the disappearance, Inspector Akira Yamamura wondered, or did she perhaps not believe that her husband was really dead?

"No, it wasn't like that. He would just tell me that he would not always be here for me. He even went so far as to transfer ownership of some of his business holdings to my name." She paused and glanced out into the adjacent atrium, a partly tiled room with ferns and other plants growing around a small waterfall. "I thought that what he was referring to was his health. You see, my husband had a minor heart attack several years ago. Though he recovered fully, his doctor warned him that if he continued to push himself in his work he would probably suffer another, more serious one." She flashed that charming light smile again. "Anyone who knows my husband knows that he could no sooner slow down than stop breathing. I thought that was what he meant."

Yamamura nodded. And maybe that was all Kuroda had meant, he thought. Yet coupled with his inexplicably rash behavior that day...Was it possible, the investigator wondered, that Kuroda, somehow learning in advance of an attack, had elected to get out of the car and go into hiding? That he felt his life was in such danger that he couldn't tell anyone, even his wife or his bodyguard, of his plans? But this possibility seemed to be negated by the fact that the car he had left behind with Junichi had gone completely unmolested. There was no reason to believe that it had been under any threat at all.

"I'm sure you heard of the Triad of Truth announcement, Mrs. Kuroda. Did he ever mention a group like that? Would you have any idea what it is, what it represents?" He paused for a moment to observe her reaction, and then added, "We're not really sure if it's a criminal gang or a communist organization of some sort."

Reiko Kuroda, who for the first time had begun to sniff a little at the reminder that her husband was indeed thought to be dead, seemed very surprised at that last point.

"Why would a communist group want to kill my husband?" she blurted out from her tears. "After all he did for them."

It was the Yamamura's turn to look surprised.

"What do you mean?" he demanded of her. "You husband wasn't involved in any left-wing causes, was he?"

Reiko was silent for a moment. Yamamura guessed that she regretted what she had said, that she had perhaps broken some confidence of her husband's. He waited a moment, needing this information very badly but not wanting to push her too hard if he could avoid it. During this pause, a maid entered the room with some tea, pouring a cup for her mistress and her guest. Reiko sipped in silence for a moment, and now the tears flowed freely. However, her voice was steady when she resumed speaking, answering Yamamura's question.

"Not publicly, to be sure," she replied, setting down her tea, "and not recently. But he contributed a great deal of money to several far left groups less than two years ago."

Inspector Yamamura nearly choked on his tea. He couldn't believe he was hearing this.

"Shigeru Kuroda? One of the wealthiest men in the world?"

"Oh, yes. This may surprise you to hear this, officer, but my husband was not the hardline capitalist that everyone thought he was." Her voice was now tinged with pride, and the words, which had been cautious and reluctant before, came tripping out of her mouth. "I think he always felt a little guilty about all his wealth--that it really wasn't fair that he had so much more than almost anyone else. I remember one night about two years ago we had just returned home from a party, where, as usual, everyone had been sort of fawning over him, trying to become friends with him. As we were lying in bed that night, drifting off to sleep, he told me that the very idea that one person could be worth a thousand or even a million times more than someone else was absurd, that it was out of all proportion to individual differences in ability. He said there had to be something fundamentally flawed in an economic system that allowed such inequities to exist. And he used to worry constantly that the gap between the rich and the poor was growing, that if the trend continued on in this manner, it could eventually destroy our society. He was very concerned about that."

Yamamura listened to all of this with great interest. He was seeing a side of Kuroda that the world knew nothing at all about, and for a brief moment, he forgot the object of his visit. Then he returned to that point, following this promising new lead.

"So he began to support left-wing causes. Do you know which groups in particular your husband contributed to?"

Reiko shook her head.

"He never told me the specifics--which ones, or how much. And anyway, he eventually stopped giving money to them. I'm not sure, but I think he became disillusioned with them, too."

A light came into Yamamura's eyes Here was a perfect motive for assassination, he thought. Kuroda cozied up with some militant group, then had a falling out. Angry at the rejection, at having the plug suddenly pulled, they struck back.

"Why do you think that happened? Do you have any idea what was going on? Did he have any meetings with any of these people? Did he ever introduce you to any of them?"

She quickly shook her head.

"Oh, no, certainly no one like that ever came here, to our home."

"Then how do you know he stopped funding them?"

She took a sip of her tea and thought about that for a moment.

"I guess just from the fact that at a certain point, he stopped talking about them. When it started, a couple of years ago, he was talking to me about them constantly. He was obsessed with them, and I was the only one he felt he could confide in." Here she paused for a moment, reminded that she had broken this confidence, even if for what seemed to be a very worthy reason. "Then he just stopped," she continued. "I remember once around that time he remarked that what the world really needed was a completely new economic system--neither capitalist nor socialist. But he never raised that subject again. He seemed very...well, confused, I guess. Like he really didn't understand what he believed in any more."

The two of them sipped their tea in silence as Yamamura tried to make sense of everything that had been said so far. He still thought the left wing angle a promising one, except that if the break had been made as long ago as Kuroda's wife seemed to think, why was the revenge being carried out now? And anyway, there was still the odd behavior of Kuroda during his last moments to account for.

"Were you yourself, Mrs. Kuroda, surprised to learn what your husband did? Getting out of the car alone like that, and losing himself in the crowd?"

She seemed to think that over very carefully before replying.

"Yes and no. It certainly wasn't something he did very often, and never, as far as I know, when he was travelling to work. But you do have to understand, officer, that my husband was a very headstrong man. If he made up his mind that he wanted to do something, he would just do it. Though the people he worked with thought of him as extremely cautious and conservative, the fact was that he could, at times, be very impulsive, act on a sudden intuition. He once told me that he was never afraid to take a risk, even a great risk, if he thought the potential rewards were high enough."

That last statement struck Yamamura as being particularly significant, but rather than try to pursue it at this time, he merely filed it away in his memory and pushed on.

"Junichi, the chauffer, said that when he asked your husband why he wanted to leave the car on his own, Mr. Kuroda replied that he was tired of being trapped by his wealth and position. He said he wanted a chance to live more normally, to get out and move about on the street like an ordinary person. Did he ever say anything like that to you?"

For the first time since Yamamura had mentioned the possible communist connection, Reiko Kuroda appeared definitely surprised.

"My husband said that wanted to be like an ordinary person?" she repeated.

The officer nodded. "Yes, according to Junichi."

Reiko glanced into the atrium, her features wrinkled in thought.

"How very odd," she said. "I must talk to Junichi myself about this."

"He never said anything like this to you?"

Reiko emphatically shook her head.

"Officer, as you well know, my husband was not an ordinary man, nor did he ever want to be. If he had a single defining feature, it was his desire not to be ordinary--to stand out from the rest of the world, to accomplish something truly unique with his life."

"Yet he flirted with communism once," Yamamura reminded her. "Surely he must have understood that under that type of economic system, he would have lost most of his wealth."

She nodded freely.

"Yes, that's true," she conceded. "In fact, I remember asking him once if he thought he could be truly happy living in a society where wealth was fairly evenly spread, a system that might not allow him to become so rich. He just shrugged and said money was not really that important to him any more. I was quite surprised at this. I did not know he felt this way. So then I said to him, 'Could you really be happy just being an ordinary person? No different from anyone else?'"

She smiled through her tears at the memory.

"He looked at me as though everything he held dear in life were being threatened. Never, never, never, he replied, very strongly, almost angrily. I could never be an ordinary person. You can take away my home, my job, my money, all my possessions, but I would find something else to do with my life that no one else could do. I would die before I would become just one of the crowd."

Evelyn Scranton, 43d President of the United States, sat behind her desk in the Oval Office, watching the movie screen on the opposite side of the room. Like all of her top military and foreign and civilian intelligence advisors who were present with her, she did so in growing disbelief and discomfort. Unlike so many of the pictures and tapes all of them had seen in the past, in books and on television shows, the UFO that starred in this video left nothing to the imagination, required no creative interpretation. It could not be dismissed as an unusual formation of clouds or gas, an exceptionally bright star or planet, or a human-made satellite or weather balloon. Caught in flight about two hundred feet off the ground, skimming over the tops of tall trees and buildings, it was clearly an aircraft, but one made by no nation on earth.

What made its appearance so distinctive was that it didn't really have an appearance, that is, a fixed form. Before their disbelieving eyes, its shape, its color and even the apparent texture of its surface constantly changed. One moment it looked like the classic flying saucer, the next it had elongated into a cigar-shaped form. One moment its surface was dark and metallic; the next, it had turned white and fluffy, like a cloud rushing across the sky; then it melted invisibly into the sky itself. Thus even as the assembled leaders of the most technologically sophisticated nation on earth watched, the aircraft moved constantly into and out of view, as though it could enter and leave at will an invisible dimension.

"We have three separate tapes of it, made by three independent observers at three different times and at three widely scattered places," FBI Director Earl Waters explained to his thoroughly cowed audience in the darkened room. "There have also been at least a half dozen other sightings of what appears to be the same type of craft, though we don't know at this point whether it's the same one, or if there's more than one. As you can readily appreciate, every sighting is a little different; the only constant is, as the old saying goes, change itself."

Nor was the technological ingenuity underlying the spacecraft confined to appearances. Several times in the video it stopped in midair, hovering above a single spot on the ground. Then, so fast that it seemed physically impossible, it would move again, in any direction, at eye-blurring speed. There were several points in the tape when it left the scene of view so fast that it almost seemed to evaporate.

Bernard Kleinbaum, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, watched as the mysterious aircraft again began to alter its shape and surface color.

"Can you pick it up on radar?" he asked Waters.

"We don't know. Periodically, of course, we get reports of unidentified aircraft on radar, but as yet we have no correlate of such a report with a known visual sighting."

"Has it ever landed?" asked Wilson Tremaine, Director of the CIA.

Waters hesitated a moment before replying.

"We're not certain. One person, a pilot flying at low altitude, reported seeing the spaceship below him; it appeared to be resting on the ground. However, it could have been hovering at a low altitude. In any case, there have been no definite reports of a landing, with people on the ground in the vicinity. But of course, given that the spaceship has the ability to camouflage itself, it's entirely conceivable that it could land even in a fairly densely populated area and not be seen."

"So there have been no reports of actual encounters?" Tremaine pursued. "No sightings of...whoever or whatever is flying this craft"

Again, Waters shook his head.

"Uh-uh. Again, as you all know, we do get unconfirmed reports of alien encounters, abductions, and so forth, from time to time, but no one yet has described this particular craft. That is to say, a craft that can change its appearance. We feel pretty confident that if it has landed, it has done so in a remote area, where it was not sighted by anyone."

Walter Robinson, head of the Air Force, raised his hand.

"Earl, as we all know, UFO sightings go back a long time in this country. Many of these reports were eventually accounted for by other explanations, such as weather balloons, unusual astronomical phenomena, and so on. Given that this spacecraft can apparently create the appearance of anything, has it occurred to you that some of these so-called false sightings may in fact have been for real? That the spacecraft actually looked like a balloon, or something, in order to camouflage itself and throw off anyone who saw it?"

Waters nodded. The FBI's No. 1 was a large black man with a paunchy belly, a round face and hair cropped short to the point of baldness. He had worked his way up through the ranks of the law enforcement hierarchy, beginning with a ten year stint on the Los Angeles police force. He was the first of the new breed of cop to reach the top of his profession--a man as familiar with sensitivity training sessions as drug busts, a veteran of on-the-spot marriage counseling as well as back alley shoot-outs. But nothing in all his background had ever prepared him for this.

"That's a very interesting idea, Walt, one I wondered about myself. Of course, until we know more about this craft, it has to remain pure speculation, but if you are right, this thing is not new. It has been visiting our planet for years, perhaps even decades."

"Or perhaps it has just been here all the time," added Robinson.

There was a visible stirring in the assembled group at the implications of those words. Waters continued to narrate the tape until its conclusion, at which point he waddled over to one side of the room and turned on the lights. Everyone in the room just sat there blinking for a moment, as if each wasn't sure that what he or she had seen was real, as if it could hopefully have been just a dream.

Then a hand went up. It belonged to Julio Novasperanza, Special Advisor to the President. Novasperanza, a young man of movie star looks who wore earrings, was well known in this administration for his flippant comments and irreverence towards almost everyone and everything. True to form, he was the only person in the entire room who seemed less than overwhelmed by what he had just seen.

"Mr. Director, you're surely aware that with today's technology, a video such as this could easily have been created. What evidence do you have that this film is genuine?"

Waters nodded as returned to the projector, where he proceeded to remove the film.

"A very good question. That was, in fact, our own suspicion at first. However, as I said earlier, three independent individuals furnished us with films of the spacecraft. One of the submissions was anonymous, but based on our background checks of the other two individuals, we have no reason to believe they knew each other or the third party." Waters grinned very slightly as he made this last point, but no one in the room noticed it.

"Does the spacecraft look the same in each video?" Novasperanza persisted. "I mean, I understand that it changes its form, but is what actually appears on the film consistent with its being the same craft, or type of craft?" He briefly stretched his hands over his head. "For example, maybe there are certain shapes or colors that it tends to adopt again and again."

Waters shrugged, a small movement that set his entire girth into motion like a bowl of jello.

"Yeah, I see what you mean. No, I can't really say that. All I can say is that the UFO in each of the films can change its form. But that in itself seems to me very suggestive that the same craft is involved."

"Have all the sightings been in the U.S.?" asked Bernard Kleinbaum.

"To the best of our knowledge. There have been no public reports from other countries that I'm aware of. Of course, it may very well be that the governments involved have managed to hush things up, but this would not be possible if there were a great many people claiming to have seen it."

"Have we reached that point in the U.S.?" asked the President pointedly, looking around the room at her advisors. An uncommonly tall woman in her late fifties with a square face and red hair cut almost to male lengthness, she had been uncharacteristically at a loss for words throughout this meeting. But then, who wouldn't have been? When she had been running for this office, she thought wryly, no reporter had ever asked her how she would respond to a genuine UFO sighting. No member of Congress had ever grilled her on her policy towards aliens (and if they landed in the U.S., she wondered in a rare second of mental irrelevance, was that foreign or domestic policy?). Her honorable opponent had never accused her of lacking the will to get tough on non-humans. "I have seen no reports of this spacecraft in the media. Given the quality of this picture, I find that quite surprising. Hasn't any of these individuals tried to sell his film to a TV station?"

Waters had now finished removing the precious film from the projector. He stood there for a moment, holding it carefully in one hand, as though afraid someone would try to take it from him.

"So far, Ms. President, we have been extremely lucky in this regard. One of the videos was made by the pilot of a small plane--he encountered the craft while in the air--and he was apparently sufficiently shaken by the experience not to want to talk about it further. He simply sent the film to us anonymously, with a brief description of when and where he made it. We don't think he's going to go to the media with this--at least he hasn't yet. It seemed pretty clear from his note that he did not even want to believe what he had seen."

Some eyebrows went up around the room at this. Waters, meanwhile, now walked slowly back to his seat, on the left of the President.

"A second film was made by chance," he continued. "The individual was actually filming a flock of ducks, when the spacecraft suddenly intruded into the picture. Its appearance was so brief, and it was at such a great distance from the camera, that it's difficult to be certain what it is. In fact, as I shall explain in a moment, this craft actually has the ability to mimic the appearance of a flock of birds. Therefore, it was only when this film was compared with the other two that it immediately suggested itself to me that it was the same craft, or type of craft."

Waters paused, holding the film he had just shown up in the air for emphasis as he looked around at the rest of the group.

"The third film--this one that you have just seen--was made by me."

A gasp went up from the others.

"You shot that video, Earl?" asked the President of the United States, disbelievingly.

Waters nodded, and looked slowly around at the others, daring anyone to challenge him.

"That's why I'm so sure this is for real," he replied simply. "I know what I saw with my own eyes."

A brief moment of total silence followed this remark, with the eyes of the others turning from Earl Waters to look at one another. The FBI Director himself had seemingly been prepared for a deluge of questions, perhaps even expressions of disbelief. But since there was none of either, he finally set the film down on the President's desk and began to describe his encounter with the UFO. He spoke in a deep, somewhat hoarse voice.

"It happened a few weeks ago, down at the small farm that I own in southern Pennsylvania. It's out in the country, fairly isolated from the neighboring homes and villages. It was late afternoon and my wife, June, had just taken the car to pick up some things at the store. I was lying in a hammock that I had put up between two small trees in the front yard, reading a book, when I became aware of something large moving across the sky. My first thought, before I looked at it directly, was that it must be a flock of birds, as it was so quiet. Then I put the book down and looked right up at it."

Waters paused and glanced around at the other men and women, a collection of the highest-ranking officials of the U.S. government. He had the rapt attention of all of them; even Julio Novasperanza seemed to have abandoned his earlier skepticism.

"The amazing thing is that it did look like a flock of birds, at first. What I mean is, it did not appear as a single large object, but rather as a group of smaller ones, all moving together in rigid formation. From a distance the effect was very realistic; in fact, the only reason I knew immediately that it wasn't a flock of birds was because the objects didn't flap their wings the way birds would of course do. Anyway, after a few seconds, the spaces between the individual objects seemed to fill in, so that a single large object emerged."

Waters gestured briefly with his large, fleshy hands to illustrate this important point, for this particular phenomenon had not been on the film that he had shown.

"I got up and ran into the house, where I had a camcorder that I use occasionally at family gatherings. I was very worried that by the time I could get back outside with it and start shooting, the craft would be out of sight. Apparently while I was indoors, though, the craft circled, because when I came back out into the yard, it was now moving in the other direction. I don't have to describe any further what I saw; it's all on that film that I just showed you."

A long silence followed, in which everyone there went over in his or her mind the evidence they had just seen. Though they had already asked Waters all the relevant questions they could think of, he wisely gave them time to think things over further. A few of them made notes, but only very brief ones.

When President Evelyn Scranton finally spoke, she voiced one of the central concerns of everyone in the room.

"If this spacecraft is for real, it surely is only a matter of time before more sightings are reported." She looked around at her advisors. "At what point do we come clean? At what point do we go public with what we know? Or do we?"

"I definitely think it would be a mistake to come right out and make this film public," CIA Director Tremaine commented. "We need to know more about what exactly this thing is, where it's come from, and so on."

"The problem is," Walter Robinson of the Air Force countered, "is that before we get this information--even assuming we can get it--there may be many more sightings. The existence of this thing may become common knowledge. At that point, our denials are going to look ludicrous."

"We don't have to deny anything," Julio Novasperanza maintained. "We publicly maintain a position of open-mindedness. We just don't tell the public everything we know."

"It's true," mused Kleinbaum, "that there isn't anything we can do at this point, anyway. Even if we're positive about this thing, I don't see that publicizing it will do anything except alarm the public."

Robinson smiled faintly.

"Alarm, Bernard? An awful lot of people in this country would love to hear their government admit what they feel it has been hiding all along. And if we're really serious about learning more about it, what better way than to have millions of alert citizens looking for it?"

"Then all the cranks come crawling out of the woodwork," Novsperanza pointed out.

"They're already out and about," Robinson replied. He looked about the room at his colleagues. "We don't have to take sides, actually. We could make this film public, and just say that we're continuing to study the matter, which is absolutely the truth. The public will appreciate our honesty, and at the same time, we're not on record as having announced a confirmed UFO sighting."

The President nodded.

"I like the honesty part," she said. "I like the idea of admitting that we have seen this film. It will make everything else we say or do in this area in the future infinitely more credible."

"Since when does the government have to tell its citizens everything it knows?" Novasperanza persisted. "As Bernard says, we can't do anything now, anyway." He stretched his arms over his head again, acting as though he wee bored with the whole affair. "My advice, Ms. President, for what it's worth, is not to say anything. If there are more sightings, and reporters start asking questions, just tell them you're aware of the situation, and are trying keep an open mind about it."

Evelyn Scranton nodded, then turned and looked at her FBI Director, the man who had provided the actual evidence.

"Earl? What do you think?"

Waters shrugged uncertainly. When he had set up this meeting, he really had no idea what to do with this film, other than to share it with other high officials. He had been following the discussion with interest, seeing value in both sides of the argument.

"I don't know, Ms. President," he replied. "But if you can give me just a couple of more days, I may possibly have some more information on this spacecraft. I suggest you postpone making any decision about publicizing this film until that time."

Eyebrows were raised around the room, but no one said anything except Evelyn Scranton.

"Very well, Earl, give me a call as soon as you know more. In the meantime, gentlemen, nothing about what we've seen is to leave this room."

The sudden disappearance of Japanese tycoon Shigeru Kuroda created a stir throughout the global press, but had particular significance at the London Star. Acting on a vague, completely unconfirmed rumor that Kuroda might be having an illicit affair with a well-known British actress, the tabloid had from time to time assigned a reporter to tail the elusive multimillionaire when he ventured west. Unfortunately, no one had been on the case in Japan, costing the Star a chance to solve or perhaps even prevent a kidnapping and apparent assassination.

The day after Kuroda's disappearance, however, Cheryl Weller, the reporter who had been responsible for following him around in Europe and the U.S., knocked on the door of the office of her editor, Joe Savage.

"Yeah, what's up?" Joe asked her. In his early fifties, he had a thick shock of curly silver hair, bushy eyebrows, and very large, bright eyes. He was a physically fit man with broad, muscular shoulders who moved restlessly about his office, constantly rearranging furniture, books or the pictures on the wall, as though just waiting for the word to set him off on his own assignment.

"It's about Shigeru Kuroda," Cheryl began. A slender woman of medium height with stringy, dirty blonde hair, a flat, sallow-complexioned face and a very straight, almost uptight posture, she stood somewhat hesitantly in front of her boss' desk. Thirty-one years old, she had held a number of relatively humdrum jobs before deciding to make a stab at journalism. The Star had been the first opportunity that came along, though not necessarily the most appropriate. An inherently somewhat shy, polite woman, she was still learning how to develop the boldness, lack of sensitivity, and ability to improvise demanded by her assignments.

"There's something I think I should tell you that I found out about him when I was in New York last April. I didn't think it was significant at the time, but now I'm not so sure."

Actually, Cheryl thought everything that happened to her was significant, which sometimes made her life rather confusing. She was constantly on the lookout for coincidences in her encounters with other people, for she believed they held a deep meaning for the direction in which her life was to go. The first thing she did every morning when she woke up was to go over the previous night's dreams, if there had been any she could remember, and write down all the people or events in them that seemed to be related, or potentially could be related, to current events in her life. What she was about to relate to Joe Savage, however, had not been previewed in any dream.

"Go on."

Cheryl sat down tentatively, the way she did almost everything, so that she would be ready to leave again at a moment's notice if Savage dismissed her story. She didn't have a lot of confidence in herself, and was constantly fretting about getting in other people's way. Indeed, it had taken some effort for her to decide that she should come to Savage with her story at all.

"He had a meeting with Sharmila Jalayan. Just the two of them."

Joe Savage was silent for a moment. Cheryl did not, of course, have to remind her boss that the UN's Secretary-General had herself disappeared recently--just ten days, in fact, before Kuroda did. Coincidence? It would certainly seem so. But maybe not...

"Where?"

In response, Cheryl began to explain how she had managed to find the hotel Kuroda was staying in while in New York, staked it out, and eventually was able to follow her quarry to a small Italian restaurant about thirty miles upstate of the metropolitan area. Though Cheryl herself did not realize it, Kuroda and his bodyguards would have been very impressed--and worried--had they known that this quiet, unassuming woman had managed to tail one of the most elusive men in the world, without calling attention to herself. But perhaps not too worried. After all, who could possibly believe that this mousy little thing could do any soul harm?

"I--I didn't know who she was," Cheryl confessed, obviously embarrassed to admit not recognizing one of the best known political figures in the world. "An older but still fairly attractive Indian woman, I assumed at first that she was his mistress. I managed to get a couple of pictures of them together, and when I showed them to Charlie"--here she referred to another employee of the London Star--"he immediately set me straight."

Savage nodded, still thinking hard. Though the meeting might have nothing at all to do with the disappearance of either party, it was still unusual enough to warrant hearing more. It was clear from Cheryl's description that Kuroda had not particularly wanted to be seen with Jalayan, and that piqued his interest.

"What did they talk about? Did you get close enough to hear anything?"

Cheryl nodded. She had taken a table not far from the couple's, and for a few moments had managed to get even closer by feigning interest in some photographs hanging on the wall almost right next to the two of them. While Kuroda and Jalayan talked in low tones, they did not make an undue effort to make certain their voices were not overheard.

"A little. It was at that point that I immediately realized the meeting was about business, not pleasure. They were talking about something called UNOP."

Savage stared at her.

"UNOP?"

"Yes. U-N-O-P. At the time, I had no idea what they meant, but after I found out who she was, it occurred to me that they must have been talking about a UN organization." She hesitated, again flushing slightly with embarrassment. "Do you know what UNOP stands for, Joe?"

Savage immediately shook his head.

"No, but I can certainly find out," he assured her. "What else?"

"There was definitely money involved. I think--I'm not sure, but I think--that Kuroda was offering to give her money for this UNOP thing. I couldn't really catch all the words, you understand, but Kuroda wanted to know how much money she needed, and when."

Savage raised his huge eyebrows in renewed interest.

"Any specific figures mentioned?"

She shrugged. "Ten, twenty million dollars. I heard him throw out these numbers--I'm not sure what her exact response to them was."

Savage whistled softly. "That's a lot of money for a charitable contribution, isn't it? But I guess to Kuroda, it's pocket change." He thought this over for a moment. "What else did they say?"

"That was about it. As I say, I could only hear fragments of the conversation. I was afraid to stay standing there right next to their table for very long, so I moved back to my own table, ordered dinner, and just watched them. By this time, it seemed pretty clear to me that this was not a romantic tryst. I assumed that the woman was just one of Kuroda's business partners, and I probably wouldn't have even stayed except that it would have appeared strange to walk out without eating."

Savage nodded.

"So you heard nothing more at all?"

"Not really." She hesitated for a moment, trying to recollect clearly. "Oh, yes. There was one other thing. They kept referring to someone or something else. A third party or organization or whatever that apparently both of them were familiar with."

"Something else with initials? Something else beginning with UN?"

She immediately shook her head.

"No. It was two words, like a name, but not an ordinary name." She paused, her brow wrinkled in concentration. "It sounded like Noah something."

"Noah? As in Noah's Ark?

She shook her head. "It wasn't Noah's Ark. It sounded more like Noah's Seer or Noah's Sphere. Something like that. Anyway, the way they were using it, it was clear that it referred to either another person or some organization."

Cheryl concluded by noting that she had hurried through her dinner so that she could leave the restaurant before the couple did.

"The two of them came out separately. He went first, and since I was pretty sure he would go back to his hotel, I let him go, so that I could concentrate on her. She came out about fifteen minutes later. I followed her back to the city, where she entered another hotel. Not the same one as his."

Joe nodded. "I'm sure we can confirm that Jalayan was staying at that hotel. What about Kuroda? Did he have any more meetings with her or with anyone else while he was in New York?"

Cheryl shook her head. "Not as far as I know. He checked out of the hotel the next day, and returned to Japan."

Joe shrugged. "It was probably exactly what it would appear to be--a legitimate contribution to a legitimate cause. For the kind of money Kuroda deals with, a personal meeting with a major official of the UN would be quite in order. He might have wanted to know exactly what the money was going to go for." He paused, his fingers rapidly tapping his desk. "Still, it is strange that both of them would disappear at about the same time."

He glanced speculatively at Cheryl.

"Did you ever follow Kuroda again after that? I can't remember."

Cheryl nodded immediately. "Yes. Just once more. He turned up in Paris a few months later. I followed him around for about three days."

"What was he doing in Paris?"

Cheryl paused, trying to remember.

"Some bankers' meeting, I think. And I think he visited the Sorbonne once. But anyway, he didn't meet with Sharmila Jalayan, I'm sure of that."

Savage frowned. "A guy like that gets around the globe so much that he's likely to turn up anywhere," he muttered, pursing his lips. "He must have known dozens of people as famous as Jalayan. Probably doesn't mean a damn thing...Oh, what the hell."

On an impulse, he picked up the phone on his desk, punched in a number, and asked for a name. A moment later, someone came on the other end of the line.

"Evan? Joe here. What is UNOP? U-N-O-P. I believe it's a committee or organization within the United Nations--the initials stand for United Nations something or other. What can you tell me about it? What does it do?"

There was a pause, and a moment later Cheryl could see that her boss was frowning again.

"You positive about that? OK--thanks."

Joe shrugged, and hung up the phone, a puzzled expression on his face.

"There is no United Nations organization called UNOP. Are you sure you heard it right?"

The last painting begun by Theresa Salvatore before her tragic death was unlike any she had ever created before. It was not a portrait--one of those faces seething with all the conflicts of modern society that had brought her fame far beyond her native Argentina--but a geometric design. In the center of the design was a nine-sided figure, and at each of the vertices she had started adding other kinds of symbols. It represented such a radical departure from her usual style--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was a definite style, whereas she had never been known for having one--that it was hard to believe that she was the artist.

The design remained unfinished on the easel in her home studio in Buenos Aires, unmoved and untouched, as though the artist, poet and playwright had taken a short break, and intended to return soon. Like her life itself, it was colorful, complex, many-faceted, mysterious, and hinted at far more than appeared on the surface. But also like that life, it was incomplete, and now appeared that it always would be.

For many days after her death, her surviving husband Raoul could not bring himself to move or even touch anything in that studio. Whether this was out of some quixotic desire to preserve and prolong his wife's last days with museum-like authenticity, or because deep down he thought she still might somehow come back, he himself could not say. He would go into that room often, at least once every day, and whenever he did, he would find his gaze drawn as though by some invisible, irresistible force to that painting. He would try to see in it something that could remind himself of his wife's life--and perhaps of her death, too.

"It was very difficult for her," he would explain to his friends, who came by to share his grief. "She used to say it was the most difficult painting she had ever attempted."

"Why?" one of these common acquaintances of the former couple asked. Looking at it carefully, he remarked, "It's certainly very beautiful, but it's also very simple, in a way. Everything's geometric."

"Exactly," Raoul replied. "She used to tell me that the position of every single figure in that painting--every stroke of the brush, she once put it--was specified by some rule. Everything had to be done just so, and in no other way. And she hated that. She hated rules. As an artist, she was always trying to break them, not follow them. So it was very hard for her. Though she was very disciplined in her own way, this required a kind of discipline she was not really familiar with, nor had she ever wanted to be."

"Then why did she paint the figure?"

Raoul shrugged.

"I don't really understand that myself. She once told me, in fact, that she didn't want to. She said she was painting it because she had to."

Theresa had begun the painting not long after she had returned from a tour of the United States. The purpose of the tour, in its broadest sense, had been to promote not simply her work, but art in general. America's National Endowment for the Arts, facing a slow and painful extinction as its funding was steadily eroded by Congress, had asked a number of well-known writers, painters, musicians and other artists to lend support to its efforts to reverse what it saw as a dangerous trend not simply in the U.S., but all over the world. Theresa had gladly accepted, remembering her own long struggle to financial self-sufficiency, a struggle she might not have won without the help and support of her husband. She not only contributed to the travelling exhibit with several of her paintings, but gave several speeches along the way, in selected cities across the country. Her great prominence in the world of art assured that these lectures were always heavily attended.

"The question I hear so many people ask today," she began at her last stop, in the auditorium of a museum in Boston, "is why should the government promote the arts? Why should taxpayers be forced to pay money to support the work of someone they may not like, understand, agree with or even respect? My answer to that question is, for the same reason we support basic research in science: because the purpose of art, like that of science, is to know the world, to understand it, and this is far too important to all of us to leave it to the private sector. Knowledge, like education, like health care, and like the power to vote, should be available to all of us."

Theresa was an unnoticeably small, short woman of almost bulimic proportions--or lack of same--with long, dry, very puffed out hair that was untypically light for someone of Latin heritage. Her natural tone of voice was distinctively soft and slightly hoarse, which somehow made people more attentive to it, particularly in this setting. Even for an artist, she was unusually intense and inner-directed, so speeches before large groups of people did not really come easily to her. Though practice born from the great demand she was in had taught her how to attain a degree of what, for her, passed for relaxation, no part of her body was ever still for more than a fraction of a second.

"Some people will say in response to this, science is an investment that eventually pays for itself. It creates new forms of technology, like automobiles and computers and medicines. What, these people ask, does art produce? Well, some artist created the building we are all in now, and most of the other buildings that make Boston the lovely city that it is. Science may have been required to produce the materials, and to move them into place, but it was art that combined these materials into something more than a heap of stone, metal, wood and glass. Art also created all the stories, plays, pictures, songs and other written and visual images that we pass from one generation to the next to help us all understand what it means to be human beings. To say that none of these creations has any practical value, that civilization could survive without them, would be about as true, and as untrue, as to say that we could survive without our automobiles, computers and medicines. In other words, only if you define survival in the narrowest, bleakest and most primitive terms.

"But, you protest, so much art that we see or hear about today appeals to a very narrow audience. Very few people will ever understand, appreciate, or even be aware of it, so why in the world should they have to help pay for it? But the same can be said of science. There are many kinds of science, just as there are many kinds of art, and many of them have not, do not and perhaps never will produce anything of much interest beyond a few explorers within that particular field. There are branches of physics, of mathematics, of astronomy and of biology that are supported by the governments of the United States and many other countries not from any expectation of practical payoffs, but simply because as human beings, we should want to understand everything we can about the universe we live in. It is not necessary that everyone be educated in what is happening in these areas; it is necessary that society find room for them, for all of them."

To provide further support for her point that art was just as valid a way of knowing about the world as science, Theresa went on to compare and contrast them. She argued that while science revealed, or created, a shared world of objects outside the human observer, only through art was it possible for one individual to communicate her immediate, personal experiences of that world to another. She illustrated her main themes with several slides, one of them showing one of her own paintings, and in each case explaining to the audience what specific experience she thought the artist was trying to communicate.

"The purpose of any artistic creation--whether it be a painting, a poem, or a play--is to evoke certain experiences in the viewer. In a novel, for example, we want the reader to see the world through the mind and the heart of someone who may be very different from the reader herself--a character who has a different psychological makeup, a different kind of upbringing, or different life experiences. The same is true, I would argue, of a painting--we are trying to teach the viewer to perceive the world in a manner or from a point of view with which he may not be ordinarily familiar. This is what is being communicated, a way of knowing about the world that is different from, but just as valid, as that of science."

When she was finished, Theresa received, as always, a very warm round of applause from the highly sympathetic audience, consisting of people of all ages and backgrounds. The floor was briefly opened to some questions, some of them touching on art in general and others on the specific problems and compromises presented by limited funding. Finally, the evening drew to a close, and everyone began to file out of the auditorium. As Theresa herself was preparing to leave, however, a single man approached the stage. He was considerably older than she was, perhaps in his early seventies, and was mid-Eastern in his appearance. Somewhat to her surprise, he spoke to her in excellent Spanish, though it was clear to her that it was not his first language.

"You have said that the purpose of art is to evoke certain experiences in the viewer," the man began, picking up on one of her main points. "Certain ideas, certain emotions, certain sensations. To allow the viewer to see the world from the perspective of someone else. But wouldn't you agree that the highest form of art aims to go beyond thinking and feeling and sensation entirely--all the normal channels to what we call knowledge--to see the world from a perspective different from that of any ordinary human one?"

Theresa, who had been in the process of packing up the slides she had used to illustrate her lecture, stopped and looked up at the man curiously.

"What do you mean?"

In response, the man opened a small portfolio that he was carrying with him, and withdrew a picture, an unframed portrait. As he did so, Theresa let out an involuntary gasp. It was a portrait of her husband that she herself had painted nearly twenty years ago, not long after they had married. It had been her favorite painting at the time, and though she had long since abandoned such a realistic style, as she looked at the portrait now, all those years, and all the development and evolution that had taken place in her as an artist, seemed to melt away. She had never, it occurred to her with certainty at that moment, done anything better in her entire life.

She recalled how badly she had wanted to keep the painting at the time, as a gift to Raoul, but they had needed the income, and perhaps even more important, she had needed the recognition, so she had sold it to a wealthy collector. From the latter it had somehow found its way into the hands of this stranger. Until this moment, she had never laid eyes on it again, nor had she ever expected to.

Overcome as much by all the memories this painting evoked--her early days as both an artist and as a wife--as by the shock of encountering it so suddenly and unexpected after all these years, she simply stared at it in silence for several seconds.

"Wasn't your aim here more than just to portray what this man was thinking and feeling at the time?" the old man continued. "Isn't this man supposed to represent all men? Isn't his face not just that of a very particular person at a particular time and place, but at one and the same time the face of every man or any man? Wasn't your intention to express the entire human race in that face?"

Theresa nodded slowly, overcome by the man as well as the moment. Trying to sort out her complex feelings, it gradually dawned on her that it wasn't just that he had produced this precious work of hers out of the blue, nor even that he had managed to put into words a critical point that she herself was well aware of, but had not touched upon at all during her lecture. There was something about the man himself that arrested her. His very presence seemed to have a powerful effect on her.

The man held the painting, no more than a foot square, with both hands in front of his chest.

"So a painting like this really points to another form of existence, doesn't it? A state of existence beyond all thought and feeling, an existence in which we can actually see the universal and the eternal in everything."

His words seemed to mesmerize her. She had completely forgotten about the lecture she had just given. Holding the half-filled box of slides in one frail, uncharacteristically limp hand, some of them beginning to slip precariously close to falling out onto the floor, she stared at the man intently.

"But only points to it," the man emphasized. "Only suggests, hints at this higher state of existence. So the real question is whether art can ever do anything more than this, isn't it?"

To her surprise, the man now handed the painting to Theresa in silence, then turned and began to walk off the stage. For a moment, she was too stunned at this turn of events to do anything but stand there and watch him. He was descending the steps to the main floor of the auditorium when she finally found her tongue. Her words seemed ridiculously banal to her in the context of what he had been talking about, but at that moment, she could think of nothing else to say.

"Are you giving this to me?" she said, referring to the painting. "Don't you want it?"

"Do you?" replied the man without turning around, continuing to walk out of the auditorium. ""Do you want a taste of the infinite, the barest hint of what it can mean to live fully awake to all the possibilities that are open to us--or do you want to experience that state of being always? Do you want to talk about it, write about, paint it, mold it, express it--or to live it? Do you want to create something outside of yourself, or create your own being?"

Confused, Theresa looked down at the painting. Suddenly, it seemed to her nothing but a simple material product, a lifeless arrangement of pigments.

"But how?" she asked. "I don't understand what you mean."

Now halfway out of the auditorium, in the center aisle that sloped gently up to the doors at the opposite end of the hall from the stage, the man turned around. His words seemed to reverberate throughout the chambers, now completely empty except for the two of them.

"A special kind of art," he replied. "An art so certain about what it wants to achieve, and how to do it, it could be called science. Yet a science that reveals so clearly our true nature that it could be called art."

Theresa's death had occurred several months after beginning the painting, while climbing in the Andes near the small alpine home that she and her husband escaped to during the long, hot summers in Buenos Aires. As Raoul explained to the investigators later, it had been a freak accident in one way, and something far more inexplicable in another.

"She was out alone, and had just descended from that small peak up there," Raoul said, pointing to the spot where he and his wife often climbed. "Though I was not with her, I could see her clearly from where I was, off over there." He indicated his rough position with a wave of his hand.

"Didn't she hear the avalanche coming?" asked the inspector.

"Oh, yes, she had to have. You could hear it all over the valley. And I was screaming at her to run, too. That was what was so strange about her behavior. She clearly knew it was coming, but she didn't respond. She didn't make a move to escape."

The inpsector looked at Raoul, puzzled.

"Do you have any idea why not?"

Theresa's widower shook his head.

"No. I only know that it was totally out of character for her. You must understand, inspector, that this woman was an artist. She was such a spontaneous, impulsive person, guided in almost everything by her feelings, her intuition. What she should have done, as soon as she heard that roar, seen those boulders coming, was run. If she had done that, she almost certainly would have escaped. There would have been time. But instead, she remained rooted to the spot, as if trying to plan the best move, to find a place to hide among all those rocks." He looked sadly over the rubble. "As if trying to find the one perfect move that could save her life."

The inspector shook his head in sympathy.

"Well, the rocks themselves certainly did a good job of hiding her. I don't know if we'll ever be able to find her body, Raoul."

Evelyn Scranton briefly rose to greet Earl Waters as the FBI Director entered the Oval Office. Noticeably taller than him, taller in fact than most of her male colleagues, the President of the United States had a habit of leaning slightly to one side when she stood--rather like a tree that had not quite grown straight--and she walked with a slight limp that somehow seemed to emphasize her physical and political prominence. Both these postural quirks were the result of a leg injury that she had acquired sometime back in her college years. The official explanation was that it had resulted from a skiing accident, though there were persistent rumors that she had actually been physically assaulted.

The first woman to call this office her place of business had followed a route there that was conventional in some respects, unique in another. Evelyn had come up through the ranks of Congress and the Senate, and had served as head of the Environmental Protection Agency in an earlier administration. Few if any people in Washington, however, including she herself, had ever seen her as a future Chief Executive, not just because of her gender, but even more, because she possessed an unusual combination of qualities that seemed to be the antithesis of the successful Presidential candidate. On the one hand, she was extremely blunt and outspoken, refusing to hedge her positions on issues that she believed strongly in; on the other hand, she lacked the aggressiveness, the so-called killer instinct, to exploit weaknesses, particularly character flaws, in her political opponents. In other words, she ran as she was, rather than as her opponents were not. Nevertheless, she had been an irresistible choice as running mate for her party's unusually conservative Presidential nominee, for her presence on the ticket brought in many crucial blocks of traditional Democratic voters in addition to women.

Then something happened that had never before occurred in the history of American Presidential politics. After the convention, but before the election, the Presidential nominee was suddenly incapacitated by a major stroke, and was forced to withdraw from the race. With barely six weeks to go before the election, it was too late to repeat the nominating process in any manner that would have been perceived as fair by all the party's various factions. The king-makers, quite reluctantly, therefore had no choice but to elevate Evelyn Scranton to the top of the ticket, filling the Vice-Presidential slot with a more conservative male candidate of its own choosing, not hers.

Just before this happened, the original ticket had been leading in the polls by a comfortable but not unassailable eight to twelve points. After Evelyn became the party's new standard bearer, this lead evaporated literally overnight; the margin was virtually reversed, and her party was widely believed to be on the way to defeat. The turning point, however, came during the first Presidential debate, held less than a week later, when the country got its first detailed look at the mind of this woman who had served for so long in the shadows of her male colleagues. Unlike her opponent, indeed, unlike nearly every other candidate who had ever participated in these debates in the past, Evelyn actually answered the questions as they were put to her. Many other doubts about her were put to rest by interviews--one of her strongest forums--in the closing weeks of the campaign. One of the most memorable of these was an appearance on a nationally televised talk show, where she proceeded to parody herself so devastatingly that even the show's host, a conservative who had been unabashedly critical of her, almost choked with laughter.

"All right, Earl, what's up?"

Earl Waters had been one of her most popular political appointments, and also a key to her winning the office of President in the first place. She had gone to great lengths to gain his support, for he was one of those rare individuals with appeal to both ends of the political spectrum. As a former cop in Los Angeles, a highly decorated veteran of street wars, he engendered tremendous respect from conservative, law-and-order elements. He was unrelenting in his opposition to drugs, favoring heavy, enforced sentences for pushers. He gained instant credibility on this issue later in his career when, as a federal prosecutor, he helped send another prominent black politician to jail.

At the same time, however, Waters was an outspoken defender of affirmative action and minority rights, which made him the darling of the left. At a time when government assistance programs were becoming increasingly unfashionable, he never tired of pointing out that one such program had given him his own start in life. He also favored gun control, like most other law enforcement officials, and aid to illegal immigrants, an explosive issue in his home state of California.

More than his political beliefs and values, however, Waters won over others through the sheer force of his personality. As a professional, he was tough and hard-nosed; he ran the FBI in a hands-on fashion, and already in this nascent administration was gaining a reputation for ruthless efficiency and cost-cutting. Yet off-duty, he was an extremely approachable, easy-going man who played in his own amateur band and formed an organization to take street youths to summer camp. His only serious political weakness seemed to be a fondness for extra-marital affairs, hardly a fatal flaw in Washington for anyone who could learn discretion. Earl, though, was still learning.

"The spaceship has landed, Ms. President. It's come down on American soil."

She looked at him in stunned silence for a moment, not yet able to absorb the full impact of what he was saying. Then the obvious questions began pouring out, automatically, even as the rest of her mind still struggled to accept that she actually was asking such questions.

"When? Where? Who are they? What are they like? What do they want?"

But Earl Waters could answer only one of those questions.

"The spaceship was discovered in the desert in southeastern New Mexico--about 30 miles north of Roswell--by one of my agents," he explained. "A man I sent out there to investigate. One of the films of it, you will recall, was taken by a pilot flying low over that area. My agent found it more or less where the pilot said he saw it. But that's all he found. There was no one inside of it."

Evelyn Scranton sat back for a moment, clearly dumfounded. The news that a spaceship had actually landed was disruptive enough of her ordinary mental processes, but this latest twist to the story took her shock and confusion and wrenched it into another direction. It made it all the harder to come to terms with what she still hadn't psychologically completely accepted. One naturally expected that if a UFO really did land, the next thing one would learn was who was aboard, what they looked like. She didn't know quite what to make of this, where to go from there.

"No one? The spaceship was empty?"

Waters nodded.

"Is it possible that it's not from outer space at all? That it was built by someone here on earth?"

Waters somehow managed both to nod and shake his head at the same time, praising his boss' ability to think of that explanation so quickly, even as he shot it down.

"We did consider that possibility, but have pretty much ruled it out. In the first place, of course, why would anyone on earth build such a craft, and then just abandon it there, in the middle of the desert? But more important, the technology is well advanced of our own. I won't go into details, which I don't even have at this point, but the spaceship seems to run on an energy source we aren't familiar with. It doesn't use hydrocarbons, but a far more powerful and efficient fuel. It may be nuclear fusion, or it may be something else entirely; we're not really sure. My agent is no expert in these matters, and for the time being, he's under my orders to avoid disturbing the craft, leaving any evidence that he has seen or been inside it."

At this point, he handed the President a picture of the spacecraft. Actually, as he explained to her, it was a computer recreation, based on all the information his agent had been able to give him.

"Also, the surface of the craft is very unusual," he continued. "You will remember from the film I showed you that the surface is capable of changing its appearance. Well, it turns out that it is more than just the appearance that changes. The surface of the craft can actually transform its chemical composition. My agent thinks it contains these tiny computers, nanobots I believe they're called, which can analyze the chemicals in their surroundings, and convert the surface to the same substance. This is how the spacecraft can camouflage itself so perfectly. In fact, when my agent found it, it looked exactly like a very large rock formation. If he had not been literally right on top of it, poking around, he would never have noticed it at all."

Scranton's quick mind, still trying to recover from this extraordinary news, all the more difficult to deal with because it was so removed from her areas of expertise, suddenly remembered a critical point.

"Earl, didn't you tell me that in the film the pilot made, the spaceship was distinct from its surroundings? That it appeared white against the desert land?"

"Good point," Waters agreed. "What this means is that someone must have been inside the spaceship before my agent found it, someone who knew enough about how it worked to alter the surface."

There was a long moment of silence as the President tried to give her rational mind time to catch up with her emotions. Picking up the picture of the spacecraft that Waters had given her, and studying it carefully for the first time, she considered the situation as objectively as possible. She was not an utter novice here, she reminded herself; at any rate, she understood technology issues at least as well as Waters did.

"Is it possible that these computers could be programmed to change automatically, Earl? What I'm getting at is, could this possibly be an unmanned mission of some sort? An exploratory vehicle sent from another part of the universe?"

Waters shook his head.

"According to my agent, the inside of the spacecraft appears to have been constructed for inhabitants of some kind. If this were an unmanned craft, one would expect it to be loaded with complex equipment of some kind--cameras, sensors, scientific tools, and the like. But it's not. On the contrary, it looks very much as though it were designed to transport some kind of living creature. There are empty rooms with doors, tables, chairs, shelves, and so on."

"So you think someone or something has landed in this spacecraft," she replied slowly. "They're somewhere on earth right now."

Waters nodded.

"That seems to be the only reasonable conclusion. The spacecraft clearly did not crash. It's perfectly intact. Also, my agent tells me that there are signs that someone or something was in the immediate area of the spacecraft--broken branches on the plants, depressions in the soil, things like that. These could have been made by humans, of course, but the area is fairly remote, and it seems strange that these signs would be found right in this particular vicinity."

"Hmm... But where would they be? Is it possible that when they came out, they weren't prepared for our atmosphere, and they all died somewhere?"

Waters shrugged.

"That might have happened. Actually, the thing that puzzles me most is why all of them would leave the craft. If they were going to explore the terrain, you would think they would leave someone to guard the spaceship. But maybe they didn't go very far. My agent is scouring the area now, trying to find them, or some evidence of them."

"How long has he been looking?"

"Well, he just started, actually. This news is hot, Ms. President. He just called me this morning. He found the spacecraft yesterday."

"Who else knows about this besides you, him and me?"

"Nobody else, Ms. President, and frankly, I was hoping we could keep it that way, at least for now."

He leaned back in his chair and studied her thoughtfully for a moment. His attitude towards her was decidedly mixed. Politically, they were natural allies, agreeing on almost all major issues. But he had serious doubts that this woman, that most any woman he knew, had the mental toughness to make the kind of decisions a President had to make. She was certainly going to be tested to the limit now.

"You will appreciate that this is a very difficult situation," he continued. "On the one hand, I would prefer not to publicize the existence of this spaceship until we know more about it and its possible owners. As you well know, if we were to release this information to the press, the area would immediately be inundated with crowds of people. Think about it, Ms. President: Roswell, New Mexico. Where aliens supposedly landed half a century ago. If the inhabitants of this craft are alive and in the area, and they suddenly discover their spacecraft is surrounded by humans, who knows how they would react? But if they're dead, our search for any evidence of who they are and where they came from would be much more difficult with everyone tramping around in the desert. I would like to keep everyone out of this area until it can be thoroughly searched."

"But on the other hand," the President added, "if there really are aliens from another part of the universe roaming around down there, our citizens have a right to be informed. They could be dangerous; we have no way of knowing at this point. We have a duty to protect everyone in the area."

"Yes, I understand."

The President sat back in her chair, again looking over the picture of the spacecraft. Suddenly all those stories she had heard about UFO coverups surged into her awareness, all those rumors that high government officials in past administrations had had actual contact with aliens. She had never taken those rumors very seriously, and certainly since taking office, just three short months ago, no one had come forward to her with evidence that there was any truth to them. Not until now.

For the first time it dawned on her that just because the spaceship had been discovered less than a day earlier did not necessarily mean that it had landed recently. Assuming it was the same craft that had been seen and filmed by three separate observers, it had been in the planet's neighborhood for at least several weeks. Therefore, it could have landed that long ago or even much longer, even fifty years ago, for all she and Earl Waters knew. After all, who would notice something so well camouflaged? Come to think of it, that would also explain why no one was there when the agent had stumbled upon it. The occupants of the spacecraft, whoever they were, had parked their vehicle there more or less permanently whenever they visited the earth, confident that no one would ever find it.

So we tread softly here, she decided. We really don't know anything at all about them, who they are, why they're here, or what they want.

"Very well," she replied. "I'll give your agent forty-eight hours to find something or someone. If he doesn't, we'll have to take steps to alert the residents of the area. I'm not sure how much we'll tell them at this point, but we'll have to say something."

"That sounds fine," agreed Waters. "But what if he does find them?"

The President shrugged. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

As she took a seat in front of Joe Savage's desk, Cheryl Weller tried to control the excitement that she felt. She had never imagined in her wildest fantasies when she took this job at the London Star that she would end up pursuing a story as important as this one seemed to be becoming. She had expected to be chasing gossip and snooping on celebrities, not exposing secrets about the largest political organization in the world. Though she was not experienced or knowledgeable enough to be able to judge accurately just how significant her research was, it certainly was far more meaningful to her than a sex scandal. This was almost like working for a real newspaper. It was a dream come true.

Though he appeared calmer and more relaxed, her editor, for his part, was perhaps even more intrigued. He had been in the business long enough to smell a major scoop before all the pieces of it were on the table.

"First of all, Shigeru Kuroda and Sharmila Jalayan had at least three meetings in the past, besides the one I told you about before. Two of these other ones were also in New York, while the UN was in session. The third was in Tokyo, when Jalayan came to speak at activities commemorating the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"How did you find out about them?"

"The meeting in Japan was official. After her speech, Jalayan met with a group of Japanese government officials and businessmen, and Kuroda was in that group. Then later, according to one of the men who was there, Jalayan and Kuroda talked alone."

"Interesting. And in New York?"

"One of the meetings was in Kuroda's hotel suite. I was able to find an employee of the hotel who remembered the meeting. She came up to his room alone, stayed there for about two hours, then left. The other one was at the UN building. Kuroda visited Jalayan at her office. His name was on the visitors' records."

Savage nodded.

"So there was nothing surreptious about these meetings?"

She shook her head. "Absolutely not. I also interviewed Jalayan's husband. He said his...former wife had spoken of Kuroda once, that she thought very highly of him."

"Did he mention money? Did he know anything about a possible contribution from Kuroda to the UN?"

"No. He said that it was quite possible Kuroda had given money to the organization, but he wasn't aware of any specific times or amounts."

A thought suddenly occurred to Joe Savage.

"Did you tell Jalayan's husband about the meeting between her and Kuroda, where money was mentioned?"

To his immense relief, Cheryl quickly shook her head.

"No. Since I really didn't know very much myself, I saw no reason to raise the issue."

"Good. Go on. What about UNOP? Have you been able to find out anything more about that?"

Cheryl immediately nodded, her eyes lighting up. This was clearly what she had been waiting to talk about.

"You were right that there is no official organization called UNOP, Joe. But there was a proposal to create an organization with this name, made by Sharmila Jalayan shortly before she died...er, disappeared. I was able to find this out from an official at the UN. Again, it wasn't really a secret--it just wasn't very well known outside of the highest circles."

"What was the organization supposed to do?"

"The acronym stood for United Nations, One Planet, and its general purpose, I was told, was to promote world unity. It had several specific aims." She paused for a moment as she looked down at her laptop computer. All the results of her research were on the screen, and she would periodically refer to them, scrolling down when necessary. "The first was to promote regional forms of government, based on shared economic interests. In Jalayan's view, the most potentially unifying force in the world as it exists today is economics. With the breakdown of the Soviet empire, most nations have come to accept some kind of capitalist system. Jalayan thought it was crucial to begin building on this base. She was especially interested in the European Economic Union; she saw it as a model system for other parts of the world. She wanted UNOP to encourage other regions, such as North America and Asia, to adopt a similar type of structure, in which the individual nations within the region would form a larger union with a common currency, free trade, and so forth. UNOP was supposed to promote these developments by providing studies that would demonstrate the social and economic benefits to everyone involved."

As she described UNOP's economic plans further, Cheryl marvelled at how much the focus of her life had changed since she had begun digging into the relationship between Kuroda and Jalayan. A few weeks earlier she had known almost nothing about either Jalayan or the UN; now she surprised even herself with her easy familiarity with the subject, as though she had been a longtime scholar of the organization. The long hours of research and legwork had been fun; she couldn't get enough of them.

When she had first decided to go into journalism, she had been attracted mainly by the possibility of becoming famous, of having her face, her voice, or her byline known to millions. She had regarded the research part of the job as necessary drudgery. And some of it was. But it was also fascinating to uncover things she had never dreamed of, to find her curiosity driving her to learn more than what was available on the surface. Learning to find the people who could tell her what she wanted to know, then persuading them to open up for her.

"The second major aim of UNOP," she continued, "was to make a detailed study into the causes of wars and other social conflicts--not just the general economic and social factors, but particularly the psychological ones. Sharmila Jalayan, I was told, felt very strongly that the role of individual psychology in the initiation of war was underappreciated. She thought if more were known about how people come to adopt certain values and beliefs, it would be possible to understand how these values came into conflict, ultimately leading to aggression."

She went on to explain how UNOP was supposed to set up workshops round the globe, where people would come together and discuss their experiences and findings that were relevant to understanding the causes of aggression.

"Finally, UNOP had a third major aim, which was the most controversial of all. Jalayan wanted the UN to make a thorough study of all the world's religions, both past and present. She envisioned a panel of religious scholars, theologians, historians, as well as priests, missionaries, monks, and other practitioners of specific religions, who would report on both the theoretical and the actual beliefs and practices of religions. The ultimate goal of this study was to determine whether it would be possible to achieve some kind of unity among the world's religions, a common core of values and beliefs that everyone on earth could share. The rationale for this, of course, was that religious differences are often a major source of national conflicts."

When Cheryl had finished relating everything she had been able to find out about UNOP, Joe, who had been listening intently, taking his eyes off her only to make an occasional note of what she had been saying, was silent for a moment. He didn't have to be an expert in international relations to understand that what Cheryl had uncovered about UNOP was potentially explosive--almost literally as well as figuratively. Maybe the organization and its very general aims had not been a closely guarded secret, but much of the details of what Cheryl had just told him had never, he was sure, seen the light of day. If they had, he certainly would have heard it. In and by themselves, regardless of whether they had been implemented, they constituted a major story.

"So what happened to UNOP? Is it still being developed?"

Cheryl shook her head.

"I was told by the UN that the idea was eventually discarded. Apparently there was a tremendous amount of opposition to it, particularly from representatives of the developed nations. They saw it as a thinly-disguised attempt to create a world government that would eventually supercede their own authority in military, economic and social matters. There was also a great deal of controversy about the religious studies. Members of individual religions believed UNOP was trying to abolish their religions, and invent and impose an entirely new one. Because of these problems, they refused either to authorize or fund the organization."

"So it appears that Jalayan had appealed to Kuroda for private funding. She was going to go over the heads of the others at the UN."

"Exactly. But, Joe, the organization would have had no official sanction from the UN. The idea had been permanently tabled. Wouldn't this have been...well, I don't know if the word 'illegal' applies, but certainly she was breaking some kind of rules."

Savage thought about that for a moment, well aware that he was now in an area where he had little expertise.

"She couldn't set up UNOP as a UN-sponsored organization, I suppose," he argued, "but I see no reason why it still couldn't function as a private organization. If Kuroda wanted to fund it with his millions, there's certainly no law against that. They might not be able to use the term "United Nations" in its name--for sure, that would be a sticky legalistic matter--but they could certainly found an organization to do all those things that you described."

"Yes, but..."

Cheryl did not have to complete that sentence. As two members of a profession that lived by observing and describing the frailties and depravities of human nature, both Joe and Cheryl were well aware of the tremendous controversy that would be generated by an organization with UNOP's avowed aims. Both of them were now thinking the obvious--that Jalayan and Kuroda had made powerful enemies, who had made sure that neither would live to put UNOP's radical ideas into practice. As Joe mulled that over, another thought occurred to him.

"When you first reported to me that Jalayan and Kuroda met in New York, you mentioned another name that kept coming up between the two of them. Noah something, I think you said it was. Did that come up at all in your research?"

Cheryl shook her head.

"No, but something else did." The light of excitement returned to her eyes, animating the face of this shy, rather low-key woman whose previous high points in life had been the occasional trip abroad to follow one of her assignments.

"What was that?"

She responded to his question with one of her own.

"Have you ever heard of Theresa Salvatore?"

Joe thought for a moment.

"Isn't she an artist or something like that?"

Cheryl nodded. "Was, actually. She also disappeared recently." Cheryl went on to describe the few facts available in that case.

Joe Savage raised his bushy brows.

"And now you're going to tell me that her disappearance is connected to Jalayan's and Kuroda's?"

Cheryl nodded again.

"What's your evidence?"

Cheryl hesitated. The problem was that she didn't have any evidence. She didn't have any proof that the artist had even met with either of the other two people who had disappeared, let alone had worked with them on the organization UNOP. So she had no rational reason for believing all three disappearances were connected. All she had to go on was that it seemed to her to be a remarkable coincidence--a world famous political leader and a world famous businessman disappear, followed by a world-famous artist. In her mind, she was certain there had to be a connection. But how was she going to convince her boss of that?

She was not, by nature, a confident, assertive woman. She had trouble enough asking for a day off or her own desk, let alone what she wanted to request now. But she knew she had to do it. She was right, positive she was right, and she had to do whatever it took to get her way now.

"My case is not really well-developed yet," she answered cautiously, surprising herself with her ability to be vague. "I have some things to go on, but I really need to go to Buenos Aires and interview her family. I think if I could do that, then I could not only show how Theresa is connected to the other two, but also learn more about UNOP."

After she had finished, she held her breath, having no idea how her boss would react.

Savage was silent for a moment. He knew his employee only professionally, and so was not at all aware of her belief in the meaning of coincidences. If she had come out and really told him why she believed so strongly that Theresa Salvatore was a key figure in UNOP, he might have laughed in her face. But as a veteran reporter, he was well aware of the value of instincts. Cheryl had already uncovered a gold mine of useful information. If she wanted to spend a few days in South America following up a lead that might possibly add to their understanding of this story, who was he to stand in her way? If it didn't work out, he could regard it as a reward for what she had accomplished so far.

Abruptly he rose from behind his desk, dismissing her with a wave of his hand.

"I'll give you one week," he said. "Go down there and find out everything you can about this Theresa Salvatore. In the meantime, I'll get another reporter digging deeper on Kuroda and Jalayan."

"You really don't think it was an accident, do you?" said George Martin.

Peter ("Kit") Carson shrugged in response to that provocative question, took careful aim at the target with his Glock 27, and fired off another round of bulls-eyes.

"If someone blew up her plane," he replied after he had finished, glancing from Martin to the other men in the small group, "why aren't they claiming credit for it? Now there's a killing that's worth bragging about."

This statement brought a scowl of disapproval from one of the other men, standing somewhat apart from the rest of them.

"You sound like you think one of our own might have done it, if they could have."

"What do you mean, if, Treble?"

Carson, a heavy set-man with a fleshy face and small-lensed glasses that gave him a piggish appearance, peered briefly at this other man, then snorted as he began reloading his gun. "I know you educated types think the rest of us are just a bunch of stupid white boys who like to play with guns," he added, a surprising degee of resentment in his voice, "but we coulda pulled this off. We coulda brought that plane down."

"Well, I hope to hell none of us did," declared Treble emphatically in his high-pitched tone that always seemed to have complaint in it.

Having finished reloading his gun, Carson stopped to blow his nose into one hand, wiping the snot off on a nearby beam.

"What's that 'sposed to mean?"

Treble, short, flat-chested with narrow shoulders and undeniably somewhat more intelligent and more refined in his appearance, looked away in disgust at that animalistic habit. Unlike the others, who wore old jeans and work shirts, Treble was dressed in a suit and tie, and looked rather ludicrously out of place in a barn. He was almost obsessively careful about where he stepped or what he touched.

"Whoever did assassinate Sharmila Jalayan did not do us the big favor you seem to think they did. The last thing the Minutemen should be doing now is putting the whole world on alert. This is exactly the wrong time to be sending the message to national leaders to increase their security, to be careful where they go."

"What are you saying? That the lady's death is gonna make it harder for us to move on the government?"

"Of course it will," replied Treble, a trace of annoyance in his voice. He had to exert some degree of self-control to restrain himself from adding, "you stupid fool." "Our plan is very clever, but it's not foolproof. If a rash of mysterious disappearances occurs just before we're ready to move, do you really think the President of the United States isn't going to think twice before exposing herself in public? Do you really think she's just going to walk right into our waiting arms?"

Gun now ready for more action, Carson paused for a moment before resuming his target practice. About half a dozen of them, all leaders of the Minutemen, were on Carson's small farm outside of Fort Sumner, New Mexico, inside the barn where a small firing range had been set up. Far from any main road or neighbor, the place was deserted but for the small group; and between Carson's rounds, it was so quiet that when he did fire, the air itself seemed to fracture around them.

"We're only talking about one disappearance," Carson reminded Treble.

"So far. But one is already too much, and whoever did this may strike again. At the very least, this is going to mean increased government surveillance of everyone, including us. And if one of our militias did this, and God help us, is planning more actions like it, then they could easily blow the whole operation."

As he spoke, Treble occasionally glanced about nervously, as if he expected half a dozen government agents to be eavesdropping on him and the others from inside the barn. These meetings were always difficult for him, and not just because he expected informers to be everywhere in the militias nowadays. He was not entirely comfortable working with people who were not his intellectual equal, whose reasoning, aside from the common goals they sought, was simplistic and uninformed. People he couldn't really trust to understand the simplest strategies, people who had to be led by the hand like little children.

Granted, he did have to admit that there was more to Carson than met the eye--there just about had to be. The man did have, it turned out, excellent organizing and leadership skills for someone who presumably had been a blue collar worker all his life--he must have been active in some union, Treble guessed--and it was in fact these skills that enabled Treble to work with him on Project Elopement. Treble was the brains behind the idea, the one who planned the grand strategy, but Carson was indispensable for executing it. He was the main man Treble relied on to get all the members of the more than fifty right-wing militias all across the U.S. to fall into step behind their leaders.

It had been a real struggle just to get this far, Treble realized, to the point where they even had a centralized leadership with a well-defined purpose. There was a lot of useful energy in these amateur revolutionaries, but face it, most of them were stupid white boys who played with guns. Until he had come along, Treble realized with simultaneous feelings of pride and disbelief, they were nothing but one more comical chapter in the history of lost movements. For guys who supposedly knew their early American history, they had a pathetically poor concept of how to organize into a military unit that could do anything but reveal sporadic outbursts of irrational hate.

"At the meeting in Phoenix next week," he continued, in a softer but still commanding tone, "I want you to ask around, see if anyone knows anything. Do this quietly--no public announcements, please, just take aside each of the delegates, one by one. If it wasn't one of us, there's nothing we can do about it. But if it was, the guilty party has to be disciplined, and fast."

This was a bit too much for Carson.

"Oh, right, sure. What am I supposed to say? You expect someone to feel remorse--to apologize, for Christ's sake--for murdering the architect of world government, for striking a blow against a United Nations takeover of the United States of America? You want me to say that we're all 'sposed to like the lady, that we were sorry to see her go?"

Before giving Treble a chance to reply, Carson angrily fired off another round of shots. In this context, where they were supposed to be discussing deadly serious matters, Treble hated the sound; it drove him virtually nuts with distraction. He was not unfamiliar with guns--little did Carson know that he could probably handle one better than that fat slob--but he didn't have to bang off a hundred rounds a day to prove his manhood. It was a measure of just how much he valued secrecy, the chance to see Carson and the others where he was certain he was not being watched, that he would agree to meetings in this barn at all. He would have vastly preferred a secluded bar or cafe somewhere.

When the sound had finally subsided and the smoke had cleared, Carson--as though reading Treble's thoughts--did not reload his gun, but replaced it in a rack on a nearby wall, then took an informal seat on a bale of hay. The feel of bullets pumping out at the touch of his finger seemed to have a cathartic effect on him.

"You know," he continued in a mellower tone, "it would be a hell of a lot easier for me to get everyone marching together if I was allowed to tell them more about what we're up to. You keep saying that we got to maintain a low profile--no bombings, no shoot-outs, no threats of any kind. But how are the rank-and-file 'sposed to appreciate that, when they don't know anything about Elopement? Just about everyone's in the dark, Treb. Even the delegates don't know we're planning anything special, let alone what. These guys aren't going to sit around cleaning their rifles forever. They want action. They feel like they've been tied down."

To get away from the sound of the gun, Treble had walked a little ways away from the crude target range, across the dirty, straw-strewn floor to where some old rusty tools hung.

"We've been over all this before, Pete. We have to assume that government agents have penetrated some of our groups by now--actually, probably most of them." He paused and stared icily around at the others, a look that made all of them uncomfortable. "The less anyone knows, the better." Removing an old hoe, Treble, improbably, began to swing it like a gulf club, an automatic habit of his until he realized it wasn't doing anything to improve his image with Carson and the others. Putting it back on its holder on the wall, he added, "If these guys are serious, if they want some real action, they should understand all this by now. They shut up, lay low, and do what they're told, when they're told to do it. This is not fun and games any more. It's war."

Idly picking up a piece of straw, Carson put one end of it in his mouth and chewed it lightly. For his part, he regarded Treble as a little too clever, a little too full of himself. Like most educated types, Treble thought he knew a lot more than he did, thought that one could learn about anything just by reading a book about it. Not that Carson had anything against books. It would never occur to Treble that he, Pete Carson, was a fairly well read man, that he knew about a lot of things besides guns. Or that he was smart enough not to show off this other side of himself in places where it was, at best, irrelevant.

But Carson, too, accepted their unusual partnership. He had been looking for someone with real brains in the militia movement for a long time, and when Treble came along, he knew he was the man. Treble was not only very smart, but had the kind of connections that were essential to the success of their crazy-ass plan for bringing the government of the United States back to its rightful owners. Carson had come up with this plan on his own--well, he had some help--but Treble knew how to get it all started. Carson would have been impotent without Treble, and he knew it.

"What can I tell them at this meeting? Can I tell them the date? The time? The place?"

"You can tell them the place, certainly. Everybody's got to be there, ready, when it happens. You can give them an approximate date--two or three days before the action starts."

"What else? I gotta give them some reason why we want six thousand armed men camping out in the middle of some god-forsaken desert in New Mexico."

"Tell them it's a training exercise. We're just going to get together to have a few beers, shoot a few rounds, and have a good old time together. Nothing more."

Carson shook his head knowingly.

"That horse won't fly, Treb. A lot of guys won't come if that's all they think it is. Why should they? They can drink and shoot with their buddies back at home, why should they hole up in some goddamned little Indian town to do that? If we want our full numbers out here, we have to give them something more. I'm not saying we have to tell them exactly what we're going to do, but they gotta know there's some kind of action involved."

It was Treble's turn to balk. This was so typical of their give-and-take relationship, he thought. He wanted to keep everyone in the dark; everyone who didn't know was one less person who could blab. Carson, who actually worked with the rank-and-file, wanted them to know everything he knew. From his point of view, everyone who knew was one more highly motivated soldier. Somewhere in the middle, there had to be a compromise both of them could live with.

Treble sighed.

"All right, then, tell them the truth. Not all of it, but some of it. Tell them that we're going to test a new weapon. When they show up in two weeks, they will all see just what that weapon can do."

This statement brought stares of wonder from the other men. Carson, who initially had been just as puzzled as the rest of them, was about to open his mouth to protest, then stopped, as he realized what Treble was getting at.

"All right," he replied, giving a surreptious wink at the other men. "That might work. I'll do the best I can with it."

Treble nodded, and preparing to leave, gave a last look around at this motley bunch. Some confederates, he thought. All of them were at least twenty years younger than he was. Most of them had probably never gone beyond high school, if that far. They had never travelled, seen or known any culture outside of the U.S. They knew nothing about history, about economics, about the great political movements of the past. And they were the future of America? Well, he had to work with what the good Lord gave him. There was no room in his life for complaining over his lot.

"Any more questions?"

"Yeah, just one more," George Martin piped up. He was the newest member of their cabal, and fast becoming Treble's favorite, his little pet. Unlike Carson and the others, Martin appeared to have some brains, some education. He could actually think for himself, didn't have to be programmed like a machine. It had not escaped Treble's attention that it was Martin who brought the subject of Jalayan up in the first place. He was perceptive, somewhat attuned to what was going on around all of them; he understood that the Minutemen did not and could not operate in a vacuum.

"Who do you think did kill Jalayan? Assuming it wasn't one of us? Some foreign terrorist group?"

Treble shook his head emphatically.

"Which one would want to?" he challenged him. "The Arabs? IRA? Germans? Japanese? South Africans? Come on, George, none of these folks had anything major against Jalayan. Hell, to a lot of them she was a hero. She stood up to the big boys for them."

Carson and the others nodded slowly. Treble knew more about these things than they did. Treble followed foreign affairs carefully. "You're probably right about that," Martin acknowledged. "But who does that leave?"

Treble seemed to hesitate for several seconds before replying.

"Maybe the CIA did it," he suggested, putting these words out slowly and carefully, as if testing them.

Pete Carson did a double-take at this notion.

"The CIA! Why in the hell would the CIA want to kill Sharmila Jalayan?" he protested. "Everyone knows they were working hand-in-glove with her. They were helping her get ready for a United Nations invasion and takeover of this country."

Treble scoffed. "Now you're being paranoid again, Pete. Like I've tried to explain to you before, there is no evidence of any planning for an invasion. True, some elements in the government would love to see the UN take us over, but they're not stupid enough to think it could be done by military means."

He watched Carson's reaction carefully, then added softly, "Besides, it could have been a rogue operation. Unauthorized at the top. Didn't that ever occur to you? By a guy who still loved his country."

Carson seemed to be genuinely pleased by that possibility.

"You think there are still guys left in the CIA who love their country, Treb? Really love it?"

Treble nodded.

"Yeah, I do, Pete. I really do."

There was an almost embarrassingly tender moment of silence between the two men. Then Treble shrugged, turned and walked out of the barn, carefully stepping around the areas of manure-stained hay. As soon as he was out of sight, however, Carson began to snicker.

"What's so funny, Pete?" George Martin asked him.

"The CIA," replied Carson, now laughing outright.

"You don't believe it?"

"Nope--and neither does he." He pointed in the direction of where Treble had gone.

Martin stared out the door, puzzled.

"Why would he say that, then?"

Carson lifted his somewhat ponderous frame up from the bale of hay and walked over to the tool rack.

"'Cause he can't think of any other possibility. And neither can I--'cept for one."

"What's that?"

"That she was abducted by aliens from outer space."

They all laughed at that.

Most athletes would have felt they had nothing more to prove after winning an Olympic Gold Medal in the decathlon, playing on a World Cup soccer team and getting a tryout in the NBA, but not Reggie Olabando. He wanted to be master of not only land and air, but sea as well. That was why he had entered the Ironman Classic, the world's premiere endurance event, held every summer in Hawaii. Not even Reggie himself expected that he would win the grueling combination of long-distance swimming, bicycling and running--not on his first try, anyway--but for a classic power athlete even to finish the triathlon would be a major accomplishment.

"I want to be a complete athlete, the total athlete," he had explained to reporters in his native Nigeria six months earlier, when he announced his intention to enter the contest. "Even the decathlon does not test all of man's physical skills. There is no swimming. There is no extended endurance. These require different sets of muscles, different kind of training."

Reggie's announcement sparked a lively debate on the limits of athletic diversity. A very engaging and articulate man who was also pursuing a career in sports medicine, the superathlete, noting that many observers thought that individual athletic performances were reaching their limits, suggested that the next athletic frontier might belong not to specialists but generalists. To athletes who were extremely proficient at performing all the great variety of physical feats of which the human body was capable.

"But where does it end?" one of the reporters at the news conference had asked. "Do you see an expanded decathlon in the Olympics of the future? One that includes other Olympic events like swimming and biking?"

Reggie shrugged, thrusting one huge fist against the open palm of his other hand. It was well known that he was always in training of some kind, always trying to improve his physical condition, even when, as now, he was officially taking a break. He had learned a series of isometric exercises that he could practice anywhere--not only at press conferences, but while at home or in med school, travelling to events--and he went through the routine now, even as he answered questions. It was a practice that drove his coach nuts, for Reggie did not seem to understand that rest, too, was an essential part of any athletic program. Indeed, all his competitors understood that if Reggie had a single significant flaw as an athlete, it was his tendency to overtrain, to ask his body to do more than it, more than any human body, possibly could.

"I'm willing," he replied. "I think that would be very interesting. Why not have a super-decathlon--what would you call it? a centathlon?--one with a little bit of everything that is in the regular Olympics. Weight-lifting, rowing, gymnastics, archery--I see no limits to this except time."

In response to a further question, Reggie went on to disclose that he had in fact trained in some of these events, just as a challenge to see how well he could perform in them. In many cases, it was clear, he was already close to an Olympic performance level in them, bringing gasps of astonishment to his audience. He also reminded the media of his exploits on the soccer field and the basketball court, leading to a suggestion that basic skills in some of the most popular team events could also be included. The discussion was becoming more and more wide-ranging, almost chaotic, as each suggestion seemed to lead to more.

"Why stop there?" a voice coming from the back of the crowd argued. "Why not a contest including not just athletic skills, but physical skills in general? What about carpentry and pottery and weaving, lumberjack skills, homemaker skills, craft skills? Mountaineering, survival skills, fishing and hunting skills? Driving a car or sailing a boat or flying a plane? Operating machinery? And while we're at it, what about mental and emotional skills? Ability to think logically and abstractly, creatively, mathematically, scientifically, philosophically, artistically, psychologically ....Having a relationship, raising a child, settling a dispute, meeting with strangers?...Why not a contest to determine the most well-rounded human being in the world!?"

The entire crowd of media representatives burst out laughing at this notion that had trumped them all, but Reggie himself reacted surprisingly quietly and seriously. He peered out over the crowd to identify the woman who had made this preposterous suggestion. She was quite young, dressed in athletic shorts, and appeared very strong and fit, as though she herself were preparing to compete in the triathlon.

"You raise a very good point," Reggie agreed amiably. "No matter how much we think we have accomplished, there is always more. That, to me, is what life is all about--an endless series of challenges. Trying to be the very best that I can be, to become master of everything."

"Is the point to become master of everything," the young woman replied, "or just to become master of ourselves?"

"What do you mean by that?" Reggie asked the woman. By now, everyone else in the crowd had turned to look at this stranger.

"As long as we want to be the best at what we do," the woman replied, "then that desire is our master. It tells us what to do, and when to do it, and how to do it. We are master of ourselves when we are free from all desire, when we no longer have to prove anything to anyone, not even to ourselves. When it no longer matters whether we win or we lose."

The first leg of the triathlon was a two and one quarter mile swim. The contestants lined up on the beach and at the starter's signal, splashed into the water and swam out to a buoy in the bay, around it, and back to shore. This part of the race went about as well as Reggie's support team had hoped. Though he scrambled ashore in the middle of the pack, about fifteen minutes behind the leaders, he was well positioned to make up time in the next event, a 112-mile bicycle ride. For relatively short distances, Reggie was one of the fastest cyclists in the competition, and his ruthless conditioning program of the preceding months had given him the stamina to sustain that pace. Hurriedly cramming on his riding shoes, he mounted his bike and took off like an arrow.

As with the swimming leg, the cycling portion of the triathlon was an out and back affair. Reggie reached the turnaround point, fifty-six miles into the race, in a little more than two hours, passing more than a dozen competitors along the way, and gaining on all but the top three or four of the others. He still appeared very strong, reaching out a hand occasionally to grab food or water from one of the periodic sag stations along the route, but maintaining a steady cadence on the flats, and holding his own on the hills, traditionally the weakest part of biking for large men.

Back at the other end, where the final leg of the triathlon, the marathon, would begin, Reggie's team waited expectantly. With about an hour to go in his ride, he was in seventeenth place overall, with a reasonable chance of moving up a few more notches by the end of this stage. Soon the leaders began to appear, and repeatedly glancing at their stopwatches, Reggie's supporters began impatiently waiting for a glimpse of their man.

But he didn't appear. Reggie's closest friend and supporter, Abdul Karraghon, was puzzled. If Reggie had had an accident or some other kind of delay, his team would have known about it. Support cars were plentiful along the route; no bicyclist would remain in trouble and alone long. But no problems had been reported. As more and more cyclists finished the leg, Abdul and some of the other team members got into a car, and drove in the direction of the area at which Reggie had last been seen. They drove the entire distance without seeing him, finally turning around and driving back, now much more slowly, searching the sides of the road for a trace of the great athlete.

They finally found his bike about twenty-five miles from the finish. It lay at the base of a cliff that dropped sixty feet from the side of the road down to the ocean. At first glance, it seemed clear what had happened. Coming down a precipitious descent in the road, where the racers routinely reached speeds in excess of sixty miles an hour, Reggie had not been able to hang onto a strong curve in the road, and went over the side. Or had he? For if he had, his body, dead or alive, should have turned up not far from where his bike landed. But the body of Reggie Olabando was never found.

The subsequent investigation shed both more light and more mystery on the strange disappearance of the world's greatest athlete. The driver of one of the support vehicles quickly came forward to report that he had seen one of the competitors--and from his description, it was clear it must have been Reggie--abruptly stop riding not far from where his bike was eventually found.

"Did he have a flat tire?" Reggie's close friend Abdul wanted to know. "Some mechanical problem?"

"Didn't seem to," replied the man. "The bike was rolling along fine, and in any case, he didn't pay any attention to it. He wasn't even looking at it."

Abdul was puzzled at this odd behavior.

"Did he appear sick or faint?" Heat exhaustion was not uncommon in the torrid Hawaiian climate.

Again, the driver shook his head.

"Sure didn't appear to be. He was just standing there with his bike on the shoulder of the road. He was panting from exhaustion, of course, but other than that, there didn't seem to be anything wrong with him. And whatever the problem was, he didn't want any help. He just waved us off, so we kept going."

The mystery deepened as it gradually dawned on everyone that the stretch of road in which Reggie Olabando had disappeared was bounded on one side by the cliff to the sea, and on the other by an equally sheer face that rose up from the road. Thus it would have been virtually impossible for anyone to leave the road at that point. Reggie almost certainly would have had to keep walking along the road in one direction or the other, in which case other people should have seen him.

At the very least, if Reggie had wanted to leave the road in that area, it would have required several hours of painstaking climbing--either down to the ocean, or up to a plateau above the road. If Reggie, for whatever inexplicable reason, had actually attempted to do this--if it was even possible for him or anyone else without equipment to do it--he surely would have been spotted by one of the search parties before he could have left the area.

So where had the great athlete gone? Had he been kidnapped? Could someone have come by in a car, nominally a support vehicle but actually bent on abducting Reggie? Could the road have been accessed from above by someone? No matter what they tried to imagine, Reggie's disappearance made no sense. He had seemed to vanish into thin air.

Yet as impossible as the situation seemed to be to explain, it was not Reggie's disappearance that struck his good friend Abdul as the most inexplicable part of it all. It was what had happened before, Abdul kept insisting, that was the real mystery It was what Reggie had been doing when last seen.

"Why would he stop in the middle of a race like that if he wasn't sick and his bike was fine?" Abdul kept saying over and over again.

He looked around at the others in disbelief.

"I can believe almost anything else about this," he commented, "but the one thing I would have bet my life on is that Reggie Olabando would never quit a race. He would never acknowledge his limits; to him they just didn't exist."