"When do we leave?"

"We'll give the highway boys a couple of hours to scrape the roads. You take the car - it has front-wheel drive and you won't have any problem driving. I'll take the van. There's no hurry, right? We don't want to take chances?"

"That is right."

"Let's go inside 'fore we both freeze."

"They really gotta clean up the air in this place," Clark said, when he finished coughing.

"It is pretty bad," Chavez agreed.

They'd rented a small place near the airport. Everything they needed was tucked away in closets. They'd made their contacts on the ground. The usual service team would be sick when the 747 came in. It would be a fiscal illness, of course. It turned out that getting the two CIA officers aboard wasn't all that hard. The Mexicans did not especially like the Japanese, at least not the government kind, whom they regarded as more arrogant than Americans - which, to a Mexican citizen, was remarkable. Clark checked his watch. Nine more hours until it swooped in through the pollution. Just a brief courtesy visit to see the Mexican president, supposedly, then off to Washington to see Fowler. Well, that made things easy for Clark and Chavez.

They started off for Denver just at midnight. The Colorado state-roads teams had done their usual professional job. What could not be scraped was salted and sanded, and the usual one-hour drive took merely an additional fifteen minutes. Marvin handled the check-in, paying for three nights with cash, and making a show of getting a receipt for his expense account. The desk clerk noted the ABC logo on the truck, and was disappointed that the rooms he'd given them were around back. Had they parked in front, maybe he could get more business. As soon as he left, the clerk went back to dozing in front of the TV. The Minnesota fans would be arriving the next day, and they promised to be a raucous, troublesome crowd.

The meet with Lyalin proved easier to arrange than expected. Cabot's brief get-acquainted session with the new head of the Korean CIA had gone even more smoothly than he'd dared to hope - the Koreans were quite professional - allowing him to fly off to Japan twelve hours early. The Chief of Station Tokyo had a favorite spot, a hostess house located in one of the innumerable meandering backstreets within a mile of the embassy, and also a place very easy to secure and surveil.

"Here is my latest report," Agent MUSHASHI said, handing over the envelope.

"Our President is most impressed with the quality of your information," Cabot replied.

"As I am impressed with the salary."

"So, what can I do for you?"

"I wanted to be sure that you are taking me seriously," Lyalin said.

"We do that," Marcus assured him. Does this fellow think we pay in the millions for the fun of it? he wondered. It was Cabot's first face-to-face with an agent. Though he'd been briefed to expect a conversation just like this one, it still came as a surprise.