She stopped. The excitement and wry amusement that had raced across her face disappeared. “Ah, well,” she said in a resigned way, and leaned back in the seat. Rowland watched the moonlight move across her face.

He said: “Would you let me explain?”

“Now? Here?”

“We might as well. Before we go back to Max’s. There’ll be fewer interruptions, and besides, it won’t take long. Are you cold?”

“A little.”

“I’ll leave the engine running, and the heater.” He paused, then cut the lights. He waited until his eyes had accustomed themselves to the darkness. He gestured to a track, silver in the moonlight, which led up across the fields.

“You see that track? It’s another route to that barn. But this story, as you’ve gathered, doesn’t begin there. It doesn’t begin with Cassandra’s dying, or even a man called Star. Until today I’d never heard of Star. It begins…”

He paused; he knew that if he were entirely truthful, he would have to say that for him, it had begun years before, in Washington—but such feelings, which he intended not to reveal, were irrelevant now.

“It begins in Amsterdam. Last year…”

“Last autumn,” Rowland said, “I’d been working on a series of drug investigations. Shortly before I joined the paper, I was given a new lead. I was advised to take a closer look at a relatively small drug-manufacturing outfit based in Amsterdam. Up until then I’d primarily been concerned with heroin and cocaine, the new smuggling routes, the involvement of the Mafia in Russia, and so on. Those investigations are still continuing; this story was one I wanted to pursue. The outfit in Amsterdam had a specialty, you see: designer drugs, the drugs of the future, some people say—although they’re already very successful, of course, in this brave new world of ours.”

He glanced toward her as he said this, perhaps to see if she had picked up that last reference. Then, frowning, looking out across the fields and in profile to her, he continued.

His manner of speaking, succinct and dry, interested her; once or twice she would have said that he experienced stronger emotions than he betrayed, and she thought she could sense a buried anger, which he kept under tight control.

“The outfit in Amsterdam,” he continued, “was the brainchild of two young men. One was an American who’d operated for years on the fringes of the narcotics-smuggling world, a supplier and a user as well. The other, his partner, was a gifted young Dutch chemist. Both men had had some success manufacturing and selling MDMA, otherwise known as Ecstasy, and variations upon it. By last year, however, they had sensed that the market for Ecstasy had peaked—the teenagers in the clubs who were their prime market were getting leery. There had been Ecstasy deaths, there was a growing realization that the drug wasn’t the sexual panacea it had seemed, and the market was being flooded with impure imitations, some of which were little more than aspirin, or chalk, and some of which were lethal. Fashion plays a large part in the youth drug market. Teenagers who won’t go near a syringe, who wouldn’t risk mainlining, are perfectly willing to take pills or capsules—but they’re always on the lookout for something new, something that gives a better turn-on, a bigger thrill.