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expected. I do not intend to lose one of my best recruits because of it. I am your superior and so responsible for you. Take the check and we will say no more of it. The matter is settled.”
    The Vietnamese was not much of a man. Nicholas was disappointed by the appearance of the slightly built individual in the doorway to his hotel room. The cockroach was gone, scuttling for its lair the moment the rap fell upon the closed door. Nicholas had stood aside while he opened the door left-handed.
    The man limned by the buzzing fluorescent of the hallway was slender, slim-hipped. His face was partly in a shadow cast by his American-style fedora. He was dressed in a finely tailored business suit that nevertheless had about it the unmistakable lines of a made-to-measure job. His tie and shirt-were woven of Thai silk, and he smelled faintly of a floral cologne that made Nicholas’s nose itch. The whole had a vaguely affected look that he did not care for, but the man was careful to keep Nicholas’s right hand in view, and this was impressive because in this instance it would have been Nicholas’s primary weapon.
    The man stepped into the room, said, “You are Goto?” That was the pseudonym Nicholas had given the friend of Shindo’s friend who had agreed to help them.
    “Right.”
    The man looked around the room with curiosity rather than suspicion. “Ready to go?”
    “I don’t know your name.”
    He shrugged. “Call me Trang. One name’s as good as another, isn’t it, Chu Goto?” Trang smiled, revealing white, even teeth behind pouty lips.
    Nicholas grabbed his jacket and they went out. He didn’t bother to lock the door behind him; he had paid for the room in advance and he wasn’t coming back.
    “You always pick such, ah, luxurious accommodations?” Trang’s voice had a husky, midrange tone, as if he were a heavy smoker and drinker, which, Nicholas thought, could be all too true.
    A bevy of half-naked women were lounging in the entryway to the hotel. They were as over-made-up as rock groupies and just as young, Nicholas thought. What a life. They made sucking sounds with their lips and grabbed at their breasts as the two men pushed past them. They smelled of cheap perfume and of sex.
    Trang had long, quick strides and Nicholas found himself having to push himself in order to keep up with the Vietnamese as he darted amid the late-night throngs that swarmed along Liem Van Chau Boulevard. Choking exhaust from the traffic combined with clouds of smoke from street stalls in which meats and vegetables roasted over charcoal fires.
    What Nicholas had told the skittish friend of Shindo’s friend was that he had obtained a prototype of a second-generation neural-net chip. What he needed was a theoretical-language technician who could decipher the new technology and build a workable machine around it—fast. And whoever it was, Nicholas had cautioned, had better know how to keep his mouth shut. The idea had been that whoever had put together Tinh’s computer with a first-generation neural-net chip would jump at the chance to get his hands on a second-generation chip, because upon learning of the illegal computer, Nangi had moved to shut it out of the East Asian gray market.
    The promise of a second-generation chip was like being offered a billion dollars tax-free—the possibilities were unlimited for constructing a cybernetic machine so advanced it would blow all competition out of the water.
    Seventy-two hours later, the friend of a friend had phoned him to give him the particulars of the meeting. Nicholas had agreed to the date and time—the next day at midnight—but had changed the venue to the Anh Dan Hotel in Cholon, where Shindo was familiar with the layout, including entrances, exits, and cover as well as the general surroundings. That was sensible, as well as prudent. It was essential, Nicholas had long ago discovered, to catalog what he called “the smell” of a site for any rendezvous—a mosaic of sight,