As I walked through the lobby I remembered that I'd only booked for a couple of days after the funeral, and stopped by the desk to extend. The girl nodded absently, not taking her eyes off a television tuned to a global news channel. The newscaster was rehashing the scant details that had so far emerged in the mass killing in England, which I'd heard about on the radio on the way out to Billings. It didn't seem like they'd found out anything new. They were repeating the same stuff over and over, like a ritual, breathing it into myth. The guy had barricaded himself somewhere for a couple hours, then killed himself. Probably at this very moment his house was being torn apart by the cops, trying to find some explanation, somebody or something to blame.

'Terrible thing,' I said, mainly to check if I had genuinely caught the receptionist's attention. Hospitality boards in the lobby indicated that the hotel would be hosting a comprehensive slate of corporate brainstorms and deep-thinks over the rest of the week, and I didn't want to suddenly find myself without a room.

She didn't respond immediately, and I was about to try again when I noticed that she was crying. Her eyes were full, and one tear had escaped to run nearly invisibly down one cheek.

'Are you okay?' I asked, surprised.

She turned her head toward me as if dreaming, nodded slowly. 'Extra two days. Room 304. That's fine, sir.'

'Great. Are you all right?'

She quickly wiped the back of one hand across her cheek. 'Oh, yes,' she said. 'It's just sad.'

Then she turned back to the television again.

I watched her as I stood in the elevator, waiting for the doors to close. The lobby was deserted. She was still staring at the screen, motionless, as if looking out of a window. She couldn't have been more

caught up in this event — which had taken place thousands of miles away in a country she'd probably never even visited — if she'd lost a relative of her own in it. I wish I could say that it exacted the same degree of unthinking empathy from me, but it didn't. It wasn't that I didn't care, more that I couldn't get the feeling to sink to my heart out of my head. It wasn't like the World Trade Center, something vile and astonishing within our own borders, happening to people who'd saved coins of the same currency in their piggybanks when they were children. I knew intellectually that shouldn't make a difference, but it seemed to. I didn't know these people.

When I was inside my room I got my laptop out of the wardrobe, put it down on the table, and fired her up. While I waited, I got the DVD-ROM out of my pocket. My father's videotape was hidden in the tyre well of the rental car. What I had on the disk was a digitized version of it. When the PowerBook had gone through its wakeup routine — a shower, slurp of coffee, quick read of the newspaper, whatever the hell else it is that takes it so long — I stuck the cartridge in the slot in the side. It appeared as a disk on the desktop. The video had been saved onto it as four very large MPEG files. It had been too long to digitize at full resolution and still fit on one disk: so, while I was at one of the workstations in the Billings copy shop with no one hovering over me, I ripped the first and last sections down at high resolution, together with the portion of the middle section that had taken place at my parents' house. The long section in the bar I'd laid down at a lower frame rate. It still took a while. The whole shebang barely fit on the eighteen-gig disk.

First I tried using CastingAgent, an old piece of editing shareware that is buggy as shit but sometimes lets you do things other software won't. It crashed so conclusively I had to hard boot the computer. So then I reverted to standard stuff, and got the movie playing on the screen.

I spooled forward to the end of the first section, the one taken somewhere up in the mountains, and took a clipping of the last ten seconds. I saved this to the hard disk. Then I used MPEGSplit to axe out the video portion of the file, leaving me with just the audio track. I knew what the picture showed: a group of people wearing black coats, standing in a loose group. What I wanted to know was what had been said by the cameraman.

I saved the file, swapped out of the video software, and launched a professional battery of sound-processing applications — SoundStage, SFXlab, AudioMelt Pro. For the next half-hour I jiggered the track, trying different filters to see what they brought up. Increasing the amplitude just made it sound worse, but louder; scattershot down-sampling and noise reduction made it muddier. The best I could tell was that it was two or three words.

So then I got serious, and took another audio clip from the section of the tape just before the dialogue. I analysed the frequencies of the background wind, then set up a band-pass filter. I ran this on the other section of the tape, and it started to sound clearer. A little more refining and slowly the noises began to coalesce into words. Un craunen? Vren ouwnen? When I'd done all I could, I got some headphones out of the laptop bag and put them on. I set the track to loop and closed my eyes.

After about forty times through I got it. 'The Straw Men.'

I stopped the loop; took the headphones off. I was pretty sure that was it. The Straw Men. Problem was, it was meaningless. Sounded like an indie rock band — though I doubted that the people on the tape had earned a living through under-produced caterwauling. The members of bands don't live together in ski resorts. They build themselves mock-Tudor mansions on opposite sides of the planet, and only meet up when they're being paid. All I'd done was add another layer of inexplicability to what was captured on the tape. I watched the video again, running it off the DVD just in case the different format helped me to notice something new. Nothing struck me.

I sat in the chair for a while, staring into space, feeling the night catching up with me. Every now and then I heard the sound of someone walking past my door in the corridor, and from outside came the occasional swish of cars or floating fragments of distant conversations between people I didn't know and would never meet. None of this meant anything to me either.

At just after six my cell phone rang, jerking me out of half-sleep. I picked it up blearily. 'Yo,' said a voice. In the background there was the sound of other voices, and muffled music. 'Ward,

it's Bobby.'

'My man,' I said, rubbing my eyes. 'Thanks for the tip. Place in Billings worked out just fine.'

'Cool,' he said. 'But that's not why I'm calling. I'm in some place, what the fuck, the Sacagawea I

think it's called. Kind of a bar thing. Kind of. On the big main street. Huge-ass great sign.'

Suddenly I was awake. 'You're in Dyersburg?'

'Sure am. Flew in.'

'Why the hell did you do that?'

'Well, thing is, after you called, I was kind of bored. Picked up on something you said, did a little

poking around.'

'Poking around in what?'

'Some stuff. Ward, get your butt down here. Got a beer sitting waiting for you. I got something to tell,

my friend, and I'm not doing it over the phone.'

'Why?' I was already packing up the computer.

'Because it's going to freak you out.'

10

The Sacagawea is a large motel on the main drag. It has a huge multicoloured neon sign that can be seen from about half a mile in either direction, drawing the unwary like a magnet. I'd stayed there for about ten minutes once, the first time I'd come to visit my parents. The room I was given was a museum-standard tableau of cheap '60s design and had carpets like an unloved dog. At first I thought this was kind of funky, until I looked closer and realized it simply hadn't been redecorated since around the time I was born. On discovering there was no room service I checked the hell out again. I won't stay in a hotel without room service. I just won't stand for it.