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said.
    "Maybe we'll do that. But I'm not sure he's making plans for his own departure. Another Asian?"
    "At a guess, I'd say the name is unimportant. How many sets of I.D. might he have, Quent?"
    After a long pause, he exhaled for what seemed like forever. "Harve, you are definitely paranoid—I'm happy to say. Now you've torn the lid off this little box with a missing engineer in it, and I find a much bigger box inside, so to speak. And there wasn't a second ticket there—so Ghaffar may still intend to go back aboard. Or not. But I'll tell you this: Our machinist is no machinist, and he certainly isn't spending his time ashore as if he had the usual things in mind."
    I couldn't fault his reasoning. "So where are we headed?"
    "Korean social club. Maybe we'll find Hong Chee there."
    "And not Park Soon?" All I got was a shrug and a glance, and I didn't like the glance. Quent found a slot for the Volvo in a neighborhood of shops with signs in English and the odd squiggles that weren't quite Chinese characters; Hangul has a script all its own. "You might try calling Dana while I'm inside," Quent said. "Let her know we've got a gooey Kleenex for her."
    So I did, and was told she was in the field, and I tried her cell phone. She sounded like she was in a salt mine and none too pleased about it. She perked up slightly at my offer of the evidence. "I'll pick it up when we're through here," she said, and sneezed. "I thought the incoming cargo might be dirty, but the spectral analyzer says no. A few pallets are too heavy, though. My God, but wood dust is pervasive!"
    "You're in a warehouse," I said, glad that she couldn't see me grinning. Climbing around on pallets of logs probably hadn't been high on her list of adventures when she joined up. "I haven't seen the stuff, but if it's that dusty maybe it's not plain logs. Probably rough-sawn, right?"
    She said it was. "What would you know about it?"
    "I've seen how balsa is used in high-tech panels. The stuff is graded by weight per cubic meter and it varies from featherweight, which is highly prized, to the density of pine. In other words, pallets could vary by a factor of three or so."
    "Well, damn it to hell," she said. "Excuse me. Scratch one criterion. What's the significance of its being sawn?"
    "Just that it may make it easier for you to see whether some of it's been cut lengthwise with a very fine kerf and glued back."
    "What's a kerf?"
    "The slot made by a saw. Balsa can be slitted with a very thin saw-blade. It occurs to me that it might be the lighter timbers you should be checking for hollowed interiors. Bags of white powder aren't that heavy, Dana."
    I think she cussed again before she sneezed. She said, "Thanks," as if it were squeezed out of her.
    "But I don't think you'll find anything," I said.
    She demanded, "Why not?" the way a kid says it when told she can't ride behind the nice stranger on his Superninja bike.
    "I just feel like whatever's being delivered, if anything, hasn't been. The monkey wrench your people threw into their schedule didn't delay those pallets— gesundheit —but they're behaving as if you did delay something. They're waiting, apparently with patience."
    She said she'd get back to me and snapped off. To kill time, I played back our conversation on StudyBabe. Dana had a spectral analyzer with her? I had thought they were big lab gadgets. Right, and computers were room-sized—once upon a time.
    While I was still muttering "Duhh" and thinking about possible uses of Dana's gadgetry, Quent came down out of a stairwell in a hurry. He motioned for me to drive, pocketing his phone. "You love to drive like there's no tomorrow, and I don't. Please don't bend the Volvo," he begged. "Just get us across the bridge to Jackson and Taylor."
    While I drove, he filled me in on his fresh lead. He'd struck out again upstairs, but had just taken a call on his cell phone from Ali Ghaffar. His buddy Hong, said the Paki, had returned. Ghaffar had asked about Park. Oh,