“Just as long as you recognize we’re working the same street, Tony.”

“So who is he?” Langdon asked. We were at a hot dog stand, and she was getting her lunch.

“CEO of AltiStar Investments,” I said.

“Never heard of them.”

“Unless you have a couple hundred million to invest, you wouldn’t. It’s a private company that works exclusively with high-end investors who want to play in emerging markets. Heavy engagement in southeast Asia, Africa and Central America, and also in eastern Europe.”

“You’re an expert now.”

“I can read a Wikipedia article and a bunch of stories from Google News.”

“What else did Google News tell you?” Langdon bit into her lunch, made a face and then picked out the jalapeno from her dog. “I told you no jalapeno,” she said to the hot dog man, who shrugged. She turned her attention back to me. “This shouldn’t be a hard thing to remember.”

“You have my sympathy.”

“Uh huh. Wooldridge. What else about him.”

“His wife just passed away. Elaine Wooldridge. Cancer.”

“Okay. So?”

“So that would be Jimmy’s private gig.”

Langdon frowned. “What?” I asked.

“So, like you were doing when I met you? Being on call in case an operation went south?”

“Possibly but not necessarily. He could have been doing remediation work with her.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Someone who is sick but not necessarily on the edge of death might try experimental therapies, meant to offer an immediate medical benefit. If they work, great. If they don’t, and they end up making the patient sicker, a dispatcher deals with it. That’s remediation.”

“What does that offer her?”

“It resets her to before the therapy was tried.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you’re dispatched your body goes back to a state several hours before when you were dispatched. I told you about that when we were talking about the heart operation from yesterday.”

“Is there a set amount of time? Like, you always return to how you were six hours earlier?”

“We don’t think it’s exact. We think it’s in a range from twelve to thirty hours. It just depends.”

“How does that even work?

I held up my hands in a questioning movement. “How does any of this shit work? We’re not supposed to come back when we’re dead. There’s no science we’ve figured out to explain it. What we know about it is what we observe. This is what we’ve observed.”

Langdon took another bite of her dog. “It really is unsettling, you know.”

“What? That we don’t know how this all works?”