“It’s a done deal.” He pulled the fax he’d gotten from the Thai foreign office before he left KL. He unfolded it. “ ‘You will deliver the remains to Mr. Paul Ward of the United States Embassy.’ That is what it says.”

The man nodded, reading the letter. Then his eyes met Paul’s. His eyes pleaded. “Please tell me in confidence what has happened.”

“He met with a misadventure.”

You rarely saw anger in the Thai. They were a reserved and very polite people. But the inspector’s eyes grew hard and small, and Paul knew that there was fury seething within him. Thailand had never been colonized for a reason. The Thai might be polite, but they would fight for their independence quite literally to the last man. No deals. “I would like to know, then, if I may, whether or not we are likely to see any more such murders.”

Paul gestured toward the yellow, sticklike corpse. “I’m a scientist. I’m trying to figure it out.”

“Is it, then, a disease?”

“No, no, he was killed. You can count on that.”

The room was full of police and forensics experts. Bangkok was not happy with this bizarre situation. Interpol was not happy, and asking all sorts of questions about who the hell had been running around with forged ID of that quality in his wallet, while at the same time pretending to Thailand that they knew who the guy was. Lots of secret handshakes being traded all around.

Somebody was going to have to tell the widow and her three kids, too, and Paul suspected that he would be elected.

“I am Dr. Ramanujan,” a compact man said, jostling up, gesturing with his sterile gloves. “What has done this? Do you know what has done this, because I do not know?”

Paul hated to lie, and he did not lie now. He kept his secret and revealed it at the same time.“A killer did it, using a very special and unusual method of fluid extraction.”

“And where are the body fluids? The blood, for example?”

“The fluids are gone.”

“Gone?” “We will not find the fluids.”

Ramanujan grinned, shaking his head. “Riddles, sir, riddles instead of answers.”

They bagged the body for him and delivered all their forensic gleanings in a series of plastic pouches, each neatly labeled in Thai and English.

On the way down, the colonel inspector said, “Would you care to have a drink with me?”

Paul would have loved a drink right now. Twenty drinks. But he had an urgent mission halfway around the world. As fast as humanly possible, he and his crew had to follow “Marie Tallman” to Paris. And not on tomorrow’s flights, either.

“I’ll take a raincheck. I need to get to Paris as quickly as possible.”

“There are no more flights from Bangkok to Paris today.”

“There’s one.”

“I know the schedules very well, I am sorry.”