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arms, still brooding. At the end they’d revealed the carrot, the only reason that the mission really would appeal to me. If I went, I’d get to keep my new passport, with its clean pages and embassy stamp. I now had a legal method of entry back into the country that had ordered me deported because I’d once unlawfully entered a room to find evidence. I’d been caught by the Japanese police, and that was the end of me; greater good to society be damned.
    Since that nightmare a year earlier, returning to Japan seemed akin to penetrating a high-security vault. Now I was being offered the passkey. The question was whether I could live with myself if I spied.
    Hendricks and Martin had hammered into me the classified nature of the operation: nobody, not even Hugh, could know that I was working as an informant. Michael Hendricks had explained the story I’d give people: I’d been hired as a consultant to the Sackler, to shop for some antique Japanese ceramics at a major Tokyo auction taking place in two weeks’ time. I’d spend a week or two in Japan, ostensibly visiting auction houses and catching up with old friends, among them Takeo Kayama, whom I was to refer to by the code name Flowers, Flowers-san, or Mr. Flowers. The code word for the ibex vessel that I was hunting down was Momoyama Period Vase, so it would sound to anyone listening as if I really were after seventeenth-century Japanese ceramics.
    Feeling sick, I dragged myself into the locker room, stripped, and went to the showers. The water pounded down on my hurting head. I knew that my shoulders and arms would be throbbing with new pains the next morning. I didn’t usually do straight weight lifting, just as I didn’t usually go to espionage planning sessions or contemplate lying to Hugh.
    Several women were waiting for showers now, women whose voices were slightly raised in irritation. I turned off the water and grabbed a towel, stepping out of the shower so fast that I slipped. Down I went on the ceramic tile floor, so fast that the women gasped but couldn’t reach out in time to catch me.
    The truth was that nobody could save me. As I struggled to my feet and wrapped the skimpy gym towel around myself, I knew that it was up to me, entirely, to save myself.
     
    “Good timing,” Angus Glendinning said when I walked back into the apartment an hour later. He was sprawled on Hugh’s leather sofa, an unfolded map covering his chest like a blanket. Around him were scattered the remnants of breakfast: a five-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and some half-eaten bagels.
    “What’s doing?” I asked dully. I was too upset about my own situation to care about the mess.
    “Do you know the way to Baltimore?” Angus sang in a dreamy voice. “We’re supposed to be playing a live bit on a radio program in an hour and a half—”
    “An hour and a half?” I repeated, looking at him, shirtless and shoeless and wearing trendy thigh-length gray underpants. “And you need to get through the DC traffic and out to the freeway and then to downtown Baltimore?”
    “It’s not downtown. The station’s in an area called Tozen.”
    “What?” I took his creased itinerary and discovered that he was supposed to go to the campus radio station at Towson University. Towson was just north of the city, so the trip would be longer than he’d thought. “You’re looking at a good hour and a quarter, if you hurry.”
    “Sridhar went out to pick up our van. The parking in this neighborhood’s wretched. We had to park a bloody mile away last night.”
    Sridhar had to be the Indian tabla player, I guessed, because he was the only one of the band I couldn’t physically place. The Caribbean bassist was at the dining table, smoking a cigarette and reading Hugh’s copy of the Wall Street Journal . Through the open door to the powder room in the hallway, I could see the blond bagpiper working on his hairstyle. He was wearing a very nice terrycloth bathrobe—mine, I