Pitt looked up at the sky. Not much of the day was left. The late-afternoon sun was partially shaded by the tops of the fit trees rising behind Colburn's store. He set the grocery bags on the rear passenger seat of his rental car and climbed behind the wheel. He turned the ignition key, shifted into drive and pressed the accelerator. Five minutes later, he turned off the asphalt highway onto a dirt road leading to the Foley cabin on Orion Lake. For two miles the road meandered through a forest of cedar, spruce and hemlock.

At the end of a quarter-mile straight, he came to a fork, each road skirting the shore of the lake in opposite directions until meeting up again on the far side, which happened to be Qin Shang's extravagant retreat. Pitt could not help but agree with the grocer's description. The former cannery had truly been transformed into an architectural miscarriage, totally inappropriate for a beautiful setting on an alpine lake. It was as though the builder had begun a modern structure of copper-tinted solar glass intermingled with exposed steel beams, then changed his mind and turned it over to a fifteenth-century Ming-dynasty contractor who topped the building with a golden tile roof straight off the majestic Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City at Beijing.

After being told that the owner was cloistered by an elaborate security system, Pitt, while enjoying the solitude of the lake, now assumed his movements were being observed. He turned onto the road bearing left and continued for another half-mile before stopping beside a wooden stairway leading to a porch that ran around an attractive log cabin overlooking the lake. He remained sitting in the car for a minute, gazing at a pair of deer that were feeding in the woods.

The soreness had gone out of his injuries, and he could exercise movement almost as well as he could before the tragedy. The cuts and burns had for the most part healed. It was his mind and emotions that were taking longer.

He was ten pounds lighter and not making a concerted effort at putting the lost weight back on. He felt as if he had lost all sense of purpose. It was a case of actually feeling worse than he looked. But deep down there was a spark that was fanned by an inherent urge to peer into the unknown. The spark burst into flame soon after he carried the groceries inside the cabin and set them on the kitchen sink.