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Avenue and Fortieth Street. She was dressed in a blue suit and high heels; she had just concluded a meeting with a client. She hopped in, flung her briefcase in the back of the car, fastened her seat belt, and waved her fist in the air. “I am ready for war,” she announced.
    “Oh, please,” I said, smiling. “The agency was your recommendation, remember?”
    “Mark’s,” she said. “I was merely the conduit of good hope.”
    Yellow was the dominant color in the ever busy Manhattan traffic, thanks to the ubiquitous cabs whose drivers kept giving me the middle finger, a few even lowering their windows to shout something unflattering about female drivers. In her warrior mood, Melinda would shout back or show them the same finger. I didn’t enter the war but continued weaving in and out of the lanes, down Broadway to Chinatown. After circling the block, I got a parking space half a block away from our destination.
    The smells of soy sauce and pepper were a cruel reminder to my belly that I had not eaten lunch. Melinda said her tummy agreed with mine, and we entered the very next restaurant. It was crowded with men and women in suits. “Chinatown feeds the business district of New York,” Melinda commented. “Do you know,” she continued as we tackled our chicken and noodles, trying but not too successfully to use chopsticks, “that New York claims this is the biggest Chinatown outside China?” I said, “I’ve heard that Los Angeles makes the same claim.” “And San Francisco,” we said in unison, and laughed.
    Our tummies full, we walked on and soon came to the supposed location of Kasla. It was a building with huge padlocks on the metal doors.
    “They definitely moved, it’s confirmed,” Melinda said as we stood outside, staring at and then trying the giant padlocks as if they would somehow open at a call of “open sesame.”
    My head spun with unanswered questions: the conflicting immunization dates; whether Kobi had nameless parents or a parent named Abla; the links between Kasla, now closed, and the Alaska Enterprises. Melinda’s suspicions of Mark, vague though they were, added to the confusion, but the biggest puzzle was that Zack had called them the day before and they had responded by faxing the papers.
    “Zack spoke to somebody,” I said. “That somebody faxed those papers to Zack. So to whom did he speak? From what location? From what machine?”
    “Simple. Ask Zack,” Melinda said, but she added a rider: “He probably called, and they faxed him some paper with the hope that he would get off their backs. They may have closed the agency and still exist virtually. You don’t need a physical space in these days of the Internet. As a financial analyst, I deal with many companies that exist online.”
    It was plausible. But something was amiss.
    “You’re the computer kid. Can you see if this Kasla exists online? Track them down in cyberspace.”
    “I will see,” she said. “I am a specialist in cyber warfare!”
    Melinda was right about one thing. I should ask Zack. Yes, ask Zack. He had talked of visiting a physical place and not some cyberspace. And then the unthinkable crept in.
    Then I did not realize that in a few months, in the deadly Kenyan streets, hunted on all sides by forces that were not yet clear to me, I would shudder at the recall of the sudden attack of doubt, the moment of disbelief, the inner fight to cling to the previous state of certainty, the question rearing its head, barring my attempt to return to innocence: Was Zack involved in deceit, and knowingly?
    We were on the road. My instinct was to rush back and confront him. I caught myself pressing heavily on the gas pedal. I pulled over to compose myself.
    A little panic seized me. “No, I have to get my facts right,” I murmured to myself, fighting back the doubt. Panic gave way to confusion: Where and how was I going to get the facts? Then I recalled a possible ally. Ben the African.

5
    I was in my fourth year