The visitor expressed embarrassment over such flattery. He insisted that his own life was much more prosaic. Back home in China, before joining his nation’s foreign service, he said, he had been a teacher and a gymnast.

That afternoon, Hana brought up a picture of Jet Li on her workstation computer via the Internet. She said she’d love to take him home, cook for him, and “seduce him with European culture and keep him all to myself.”

The other women crowded around, admired the picture, and agreed. After that, they referred to Johnny Sun as their “movie star.”

As a movie star in Zurich, however, he had a short run. He appeared only one more time, early that same evening to manage the shipping of Yuan’s remains “back to his family in China.” Sun was again infinitely courteous and thanked everyone at police headquarters. He wore a black suit and a funereal black tie for the pickup of the deceased. He arrived with his own vehicle and two Chinese helpers for the occasion.

Hana made an attempt to turn her school-girl fantasy into reality. Cornering him alone for a moment, she invited him to dinner at her place, he could pick the day.

He declined with grace and regret. His immediate responsibility, he said, would be to accompany the body of Yuan back to China. They-he and the corpse-would be leaving within a few hours.

So John Sun disappeared as abruptly as he had appeared. It was a strange irony: they hadn’t known much more of John Sun than Lee Yuan, and they both had vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

“The mysterious East,” one of the women said.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 6, EVENING

At the front desk of the Ritz, Alex inquired about where to buy a new laptop. She knew there would be no shortage of expensive stores nearby, which catered to wealthy tourists and business people traveling on someone else’s tab. In Madrid, being a late city even by European standards, there was an array of shops open near the hotel in the early evening. The concierge at the hotel provided her with the address of the best.

She went back to her room and threw on a pair of jeans and some comfortable walking shoes. To anyone observing her, she might have looked like a graduate student on summer holiday. In actuality, the anxiety of being back on the job was setting in, and she was already entertaining premonitions of danger, made worse by the persistent memories of the events of the previous months.

She also wished, for example, that she were carrying a weapon. She hated to use it and knew that violence leads only to more violence. Yet she had no illusions about the world and the evil of some of the people in it. Sometimes guns and physical force, lamentable as they were, were as much a part of life as food, water, and air. There wasn’t much she could do about it.

She made her computer purchase within a half hour of leaving the hotel. Her clerk was a young Madrileno who was fascinated with her and couldn’t tell her nationality until she presented her passport as identification with her credit card.

He had visited London and New York, he told her, and began speaking very good English. He wished to practice it, so she indulged him by conducting the final parts of the transaction in English.

She took her new purchase back to the hotel. She booted it and started to download the proper software. The procedure would take several hours. So she left the computer and went out again for a walk. She was alone in a city she had loved very much in brief visits as a student many years previously. And her hotel-bless her bosses and the American taxpayers who were underwriting this back in Washington-was excellent.

After her computer was properly set up, Alex caught up with some evening sightseeing. Then, toward eleven, she had a light dinner and a half bottle of Rioja at a quiet little place two blocks from the hotel, one where she could find a quiet table in a corner, watch the endlessly interesting street scene, and not be bothered by anyone.

Might as well enjoy it, she told herself. She was already back in the government harness and as usual had no idea where that might lead. She would attend the next day’s meeting, take a conscientious assessment of the museum theft, and see what she wanted to do next.

It wasn’t all bad, she told herself. She was back to work and felt much better about it than she had expected she would. She was glad she had taken this assignment and noticed, as she sat in the café and tuned into several conversations around her, that she was already thinking in Spanish.

BARCELONA, SEPTEMBER 6, LATE EVENING

In the hours after picking up their cargo from Habib, Jean-Claude and his two assistants had driven northward past Naples, then the next day continued past Rome. Driving and sleeping in shifts, they eventually had driven past Pisa and Florence until they arrived at the massive shipyards of Genoa.

There they had waited until the proper ship was ready for them. The ship was a freighter named El Fuguero, a Portuguese merchant vessel that flew a Liberian flag. Their secret cargo remained in twenty separate packets, each weighing about five kilos, or ten pounds. For good measure, Jean-Claude had repacked them in fresh luggage purchased at an Italian department store along the route to Genoa. Jean-Claude’s henchmen then left the ship, but Jean-Claude, using his French passport, bought passage in one of the steamer’s inexpensive staterooms.

The next morning, El Fuguero hoisted anchor and sailed westward from Genoa. It was the twenty-ninth of August. It made a stop in Corsica and then another in Marseilles, where it docked for two days. There the crew enjoyed the run of the sunny old port, the bars, the cafés, the gambling parlors, and, in particular, the international brothels.

Jean-Claude had struck up friendships with a few of the crew members along the way and accompanied them on their lusty evening exploits while in port, particularly the fleshier locations. He boldly informed his new friends that he was a professional teacher with a job waiting for him to teach language in October in Brooklyn, New York. But he also cited his affection for the fresh sea breezes of the Mediterranean and wanted to enjoy a brief holiday before flying to America.

Then, after two evenings in Marseilles, the ship hoisted anchor again and sailed southward through a stretch of the western Mediterranean that was busy with cruise ships, merchant vessels, and private yachts chartered by wealthy men and the women who, for a price, loved them.

El Fuguero was never far from the coast of mainland Europe. It passed the distant mountains of the Pyrenees, the border between France and Spain, and ultimately entered Spanish territorial waters. It easily navigated the tricky currents off Cap de Creus on the Spanish coast and came within fifteen knots of Barcelona. There it stopped and dropped anchor in a peaceful but ever-changing sea, swept by sun and wind.

It was the evening of September 4. El Fuguero waited. So did its clandestine cargo, and so did Jean-Claude, a much appreciated passenger, who was gracious to all and raised the suspicions of none.

On the evening of September 6, a berth opened unexpectedly in the commercial shipyard in Barcelona. El Fuguero sailed into the harbor with the late evening high tide and docked. An hour later, Jean-Claude disembarked like any other tourist or citizen of the European Union. He had both duffel bags slung over his left shoulder and held his passport in his right hand.

As he walked past Spanish customs, he nodded amiably to inspection officers who nodded back to him.