As he turned toward the exit and quickened his step, he spied a familiar figure: the tall form of Agent Pendergast, striding across the polished marble floor, black suit flapping behind him.

D’Agosta was startled to see him — particularly here, in the Museum. He hadn’t seen Pendergast since the private dinner party the FBI agent had hosted the month before in celebration of his impending wedding. The meal, and the wines, had been out of this world. Pendergast had prepared it himself with the help of his Japanese housekeeper. The food was unbelievable… At least until Laura, his wife, had deconstructed the printed menu the following day, and they realized they had eaten, among other things, fish lips and intestine soup (Sup Bibir Ikan) and cow’s stomach simmered with bacon, cognac, and white wine (Tripes à la Mode de Caen). But perhaps the best part of the dinner party was Pendergast himself. He had recovered from the tragedy that had befallen him eighteen months before, and returned from a subsequent visit to a ski resort in Colorado having lost his pallor and skeletal gauntness, and now he looked fit both physically and emotionally, if still his usual cool, reserved self.

“Hey, Pendergast!” D’Agosta hurried across the Rotunda and seized his hand.

“Vincent.” Pendergast’s pale eyes lingered on D’Agosta for a moment. “How good to see you.”

“I wanted to thank you again for that dinner. You really went out of your way, and it meant a lot to us. Both of us.”

Pendergast nodded absently, his eyes drifting across the Rotunda. He seemed to have something on his mind.

“What are you doing here?” D’Agosta asked.

“I was… consulting with a curator.”

“Funny. I was just doing the same thing.” D’Agosta laughed. “Like old times, eh?”

Pendergast didn’t seem to be amused.

“Look, I wonder if I could ask you a favor.”

A vague, noncommittal look greeted the question.

D’Agosta plowed ahead gamely. “No sooner do I get back from my honeymoon than Singleton dumps this murder case on me. A technician in the Osteology Department here was found last night, head bashed in and stuffed into an out-of-the-way exhibit hall. Looks like a robbery that escalated into homicide. You’ve got such a great nose for these things that I wonder if I could just share a few details, get your take…”

During the course of this mini-speech, Pendergast had grown increasingly restive. Now he looked at D’Agosta with an expression that stopped him in midsentence. “I’m sorry, my dear Vincent, but I fear that at present I have neither the time nor the interest to discuss a case with you. Good day.” And with the shortest of nods, he turned on his heel and strode briskly in the direction of the Museum’s exit.

Deep within the stately German Renaissance confines of the Dakota, at the end of a succession of three interconnected and very private apartments, beyond a sliding partition of wood and rice paper, lay an uchi-roji: the inner garden of a Japanese teahouse. A path of flat stones wound sinuously between dwarf evergreens. The air was full of the scent of eucalyptus and the song of unseen birds. In the distance sat the teahouse itself, small and immaculate, barely visible in the simulacrum of late-afternoon light.

This near-miracle — a private garden, in exquisite miniature, set down within the fastness of a vast Manhattan apartment building — had been designed by Agent Pendergast as a place for meditation and rejuvenation of the soul. He was now sitting on a bench of carved keyaki wood, set just off the stone path and overlooking a tiny goldfish pond. He remained motionless, gazing into the dark waters, where orange-and-white fish moved in desultory fashion, mere shadows.

Normally, this sanctuary afforded him relief from the cares of the world, or at least a temporary oblivion. But this afternoon, no peace was to be found.

A chirp came from the pocket of his suit jacket. It was his cell phone, its number known to less than half a dozen people. He glanced at the incoming call and saw UNKNOWN NUMBER displayed.

“Yes?”

“Agent Pendergast.” It was the dry voice of the unnamed CIA operative he had met with at the firing range two days before. On prior occasions, the man’s voice had contained a trace of wryness, as if detached from the workaday goings-on of the world. Today the irony was absent.

“Yes?” Pendergast repeated.

“I’m calling because I knew you’d want to hear the bad news sooner rather than later.”

Pendergast gripped the phone a little tighter. “Go on.”

“The bad news is that I have no news at all.”

“I see.”

“I’ve deployed some serious assets, expended a great deal of currency, and called in favors both locally and abroad. I’ve had several undercover operatives risk exposure, on the chance that certain foreign governments might be hiding information related to Operation Wildfire. But I’ve come up empty-handed. No sign that Alban ever surfaced in Brazil or elsewhere abroad. No records of his entering the country — I’ve had facial-recognition server farms at both Customs and Homeland Security working on it, without a hit. No local or federal law enforcement bread-crumb trails that have led anywhere.”

Pendergast took this in without a word.

“It’s still possible something will surface, of course — some nugget from an unexpected quarter, some database we overlooked. But I’ve exhausted everything in the standard bag of tricks — and then some.”

Still Pendergast said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” came the voice over the cell phone. “It’s… it’s more than a little mortifying. In my job, with the tools at my disposal, one gets used to success. I fear I may have seemed overconfident at our last meeting, raised your hopes.”

“There’s no need to apologize,” Pendergast said. “My hopes were not raised. Alban was formidable.”

There was a brief silence before the man spoke again. “One thing you might want to know. Lieutenant Angler, the NYPD’s lead investigator on your son’s homicide… I took a look at his internal reports. He’s got a decided interest in you.”

“Indeed?”

“Your lack of cooperation — and your behavior — aroused his curiosity. Your appearance at the autopsy, for example. And your interest in that lump of turquoise, which you convinced the NYPD to loan you and which is now, I understand, overdue. You may be heading for a problem with Angler.”

“Thank you for the advice.”

“Don’t mention it. Again, I’m sorry I don’t have more. I still have eyes on the ground. If there’s any way I can be of further assistance, call the main number at Langley and ask for Sector Y. Meanwhile, I’ll let you know of any change in status.”

The line went dead.

Pendergast sat for a moment, staring at the cell phone. Then he slipped it back into his pocket, stood up, and made his way down the stone walkway and out of the tea garden.

In the large kitchen of the apartment’s private quarters, Pendergast’s housekeeper, Kyoko Ishimura, was at work chopping scallions. As the FBI agent passed through, she glanced over and — with a deaf person’s economy of gesture — indicated there was a telephone message waiting. Pendergast nodded his thanks, then continued down the hall to his office, stepped inside, picked up the phone, and — without taking a seat at the desk — retrieved the message.

“Um, ah, Mr. Pendergast.” It was the rushed, breathy voice of Dr. Paden, the mineralogist at the Museum. “I’ve analyzed the sample you left me yesterday with X-ray diffraction, brightfield microscopy, fluorescence, polarization, diascopic and episcopic illumination, among other tests. It is most definitely natural turquoise: hardness 6, refractive index is 1.614 and the specific gravity is about 2.87, and as I mentioned earlier there is no indication of stabilization or reconstitution. However, the sample exhibits some, ah, curious phenomena. The grain size is most unusual. I’ve never seen such semi-translucence embedded in a large spiderweb matrix. And the color… it doesn’t come from any of the well-known mines, and there is no record of its chemical signature in the database… In short, I, ah, fear it is a rare sample from a small mine that will prove difficult to identify, and that more time than I expected will be needed, perhaps a lot more time, so I’m hoping that you will be patient and won’t ask for the return of the painite while I…”