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stopped having any meaning to him. Empty roads and unbounded spaces seem to have more resonance than whatever lies on either side.
    He looks up when he hears the sound of a car approaching from along the road from the north. After a while its headlights, used earlier in the afternoon than is the local custom, peer up over the hill. Soon the car follows them down into the village, past the small general store and videotape library. It is a Lexus, very black and new. It stops smoothly outside the inn.
    The car makes a ticking sound as the engine cools. Nobody gets out for a few moments. Zandt watches it until he is sure that the shapes inside are looking at him. His own car, something cheap and foreign he bought off a bleak lot in Nebraska, is sitting in front of the outbuilding that holds his room and several others. The keys to the car are in his pocket, but he cannot get to it without takinghimself closer to the Lexus. He could turn, walk across the bridge and between the houses on the other side, head up into the hills, but he does not have a mind to. He should, he knows, have paid cash for his lodging. That is his usual practice. But when he arrived he had none, and it was late. Withdrawing some from an ATM in the nearest town would have left just as clear a sign. The time to avoid this confrontation, whatever it may hold, is two weeks past. He merely looks down again at the water below, and waits.
    Over at the car, the passenger door opens and a woman climbs out. She has medium-length dark hair, wears a dark green suit, and is of average height. Her face is striking, meaning that you will either find her plain or beautiful. Most people put their money on the former, which is fine by her. Her silence on the journey has already irritated Agent Fielding, who first met her three hours previously—and who, had he not been tasked with driving her down to Pimonta, could have been home several hours by now. Fielding still has no idea why he has been dragged all this way, which is just as well, because it could only barely be classified as official business. He is simply doing what he is told, a much-underrated skill.
    The woman closes the door with a soft clunk that she knows the man at the bridge can hear. He doesn’t move, or even look up, until she has walked down past the inn, past the boarded-up premises of a defunct local potter, and onto the bridge.
    She walks to within a few yards of him and then stops, feeling slightly absurd and rather cold.
    “Hello, Nina,” he said, still without looking.
    “Very cool,” she replied. “I’m impressed.”
    He turned. “Nice suit. Very Dana Scully.”
    “These days we all want to look that way. Even some of the guys.”
    “Who’s in the car?”
    “Local agent. From Burlington. Nice man gave me a lift.”
    “How did you find me?”
    “Credit card.”
    “Right,” he said. “Long way to come.”
    “You’re worth it.”
    He looked skeptically at a woman he had once thought striking, and now found plain once more.
    “So what do you want? It’s cold. I’m getting hungry. I’d be surprised if we have anything to say to each other.”
    For just a moment she looked beautiful again, and hurt. Then as if this meant nothing to her, or ever had.
    “It’s happened again,” she said. “Thought you’d want to know.”
    She turned on her heel and walked back up toward the car. The engine was running before she opened the door, and within two minutes the valley was empty and quiet again, leaving just a man on a bridge, his mouth slightly open, his face pale.
     
    HE CAUGHT UP WITH her twenty miles south, driving hard down narrow mountain roads and slinging the car around every bend. Southern Vermont isn’t designed for speed, and the car twice started to plane on ice patches. Zandt noticed neither this nor the handful of local drivers who had just time to register his approach before he was behind them, gaining speed, leaving their cars rocking in his wake. At Wilmington he