"An' le chaut sauvage ... he wasn't there. Must've been on the plane got away."

Megan nodded again.

"Another thing bothers me's that we still don't know why they went to the trouble they did breakin' into this compound in the first place, use all a' that fancy equipment just to try and blow a low-security warehouse got nothin' besides spare parts in it," he said. "Can't make any sense of it, you know?"

She patted his arm.

"Sleep," she said. "It's been a long day, and there's nothing more we can do right now."

Dimming the light, she lifted her purse off her chair, and strode toward the door.

"Meg?" he called weakly from behind her.

She turned toward him, her hand on the knob.

"Somethin' goes down in Kazakhstan, you think this Ricci gonna be up to takin' care of it?"

She stood there for a long moment, then merely sighed.

"Tomorrow's another day, Rollie," she said.

Then she stepped out into the hall, softly closing the door behind her.

TWENTY-ONE - KAZAKHSTAN APRIL 26, 2001

TWENTY-ONE

KAZAKHSTAN APRIL 26, 2001

PERHAPS BECAUSE OF THE DARK CLOAK OF SECRECY under which Russia's spacecraft testing has long been conducted in southern Kazakhstan, the region has since the early 1950's been the scene of hundreds of unexplained UFO sightings by local peasants. Sugar-beet farmers, grain growers, goatherders, cattlemen, sinewy Mongol horse traders ... many have had stories of strange airborne vehicles glimpsed above the brown, moraine-covered steppes, some accounts accurate, others embellished over the course of time and countless retellings, a considerable number complete fabrications contrived to amuse friends and kinsmen and add a little brightness to the drowsy tedium of life in their remote, mountainous comer of the world.

The dark, disc-shaped object that went skimming over the promontories near the Baikonur Cosmodrome around sundown on April 26--a singularly overcast evening in what had been an even more extraordinary spell of damp, cloudy weather--would be spotted by the entire al-Bijan clan, from great-grandparents on down to its children, all sixty-seven of them gathered outside an ancestral home still occupied by family members to feast on grilled horseflesh, drink potent alcoholic beverages (at least in the case of the adults), dance to chords strummed on the three-stringed komuz, and generally celebrate the wedding of one of its daughters to the son of a well-respected and, by Kazakh standards, well-heeled livestock breeder.

In this instance, their subsequent accounts of its appearance did not require any exaggeration.