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terminal, she found Parson waiting, along with a gray-haired man who looked older than Parson. Gold could not tell the man’s rank; he wore a Bass Pro Shops baseball cap and a Vanderbilt University sweatshirt. Parson also wore civilian clothes—jeans and a wrinkled shooting shirt with a pad on the right shoulder. It was nearly six p.m. local time. Evidently, new base regs permitted civvies after duty hours.
    Parson had aged little in the months since she’d last seen him. And his old limp seemed less pronounced, old scars on his arms and fingers less noticeable. Eyes still alert, but without that hint of hypervigilance. The years might have eroded his youth, but maybe they’d given something back in healing. Gold hoped so, anyway.
    She embraced him. Parson held her tightly enough that it hurt her chest. She uttered a little inadvertent cry of discomfort. He let go.
    â€œSorry, Sophia,” he said. “Stupid of me.” She took a step back from him but held on to his arm long enough to let him know it was all right. “This is Colonel Webster,” Parson added.
    â€œTerry,” the colonel said. He shook Gold’s hand.
    â€œGood to meet you, sir,” Gold said. “Thank you for your e-mails. How did you know people at the UN?”
    â€œLet’s talk about it over a beer,” Webster said.
    â€œWe’ll take you to Pete’s Place,” Parson added.
    Whose place? Gold wondered, until she saw that the bar in the Manas rec center was named for Peter Ganci, the New York City fire chief who died on 9/11. A sign read THIS BAR DEDICATED TO
COALITION MEMBERS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE WAR ON TERROR.
    Gold and Webster sat in metal folding chairs at a wooden table. Parson went to the bar. She smiled when he brought her a glass of red wine; he hadn’t even had to ask. He handed a Guinness to Webster and opened a Bud for himself.
    She tried to gauge Parson’s manner, as well as the colonel’s. Gold had made a life of communicating, of reading people. Something worried these guys. The crash, of course, provided reason enough to feel down. To witness untimely deaths, she knew far too well, unhinged you a little, even if you didn’t know the deceased. But Gold sensed Parson and the colonel had something else on their minds. She didn’t know how to approach the topic, so she stayed on safe territory by asking Webster about his background.
    â€œI’m playing hooky from my day job,” Webster said. “My law firm back in Knoxville does some international work. UN, ICC, that sort of thing.”
    â€œInterstate Commerce Commission?” Parson asked.
    â€œInternational Criminal Court,” Gold said.
    â€œOh.”
    â€œSo when Michael said he needed you,” Webster explained, “I called in some favors. But I told everybody not to lean on you.”
    â€œThey didn’t,” Gold said. That was true. Her superiors had said only that she could go if she wanted. And of course she wanted to help Parson.
    â€œThanks again for coming,” Parson said. “I hoped this would amount to a little break for you, but it’s getting more complicated.”
    â€œHow’s that?” Gold asked.
    â€œWe found opium in the wreckage,” Webster said. He took a sip from his Guinness.
    The news saddened Gold, but it did not surprise her. About ninety percent of the world’s opium came from Afghanistan. And the Afghan military had a long way to go toward rooting out corruption.
    â€œHow were they hiding it?” Gold asked. “Or could you tell?”
    â€œWe could,” Parson said. He explained how the smugglers disguised the opium as packing material. Drug-sniffing dogs would have found it in an instant, but if the Afghans had brought dogs to this cargo at all, the animals would have been bomb-sniffing dogs. Somebody in the narcotics operation knew something about military air cargo.
    Gold wondered if the crew’s