“I was expecting to end up somewhere I didn’t expect, I just wasn’t expecting it to be Albuquerque, that’s all.”

“Sounds like it’s an excellent destination for you, Mr. Gently. Enjoy your flight.”

He did. He sat and ruminated quietly to himself over the events of the last couple of days, arranging them in his mind not in such a way that they made any kind of sense yet, but in suggestive little arrays. A meteor here, half a cat there, the electronic threads of invisible dollars and unexpected airline tickets that connected them. Before touching down in Chicago, his self-confidence had been in tatters, but now he felt a thrilling tingle of excitement. There was something or someone out there that he had engaged with, something that he uniquely had found and that he was being drawn towards. The fact that he still had no idea who or what it was no longer troubled him. It was there, he had found it, and it had found him. He had felt its pulse. Its face and its name would emerge in their proper times.

At Albuquerque airport he stood silently for a while under the high painted beams, surrounded by the dark, staring eyes of the drunk-driving lawyers peering from their billboards. He breathed deeply. He felt calm, he felt good, he felt able to meet with the wild, thrashing improbabilities that lie an atom’s depth beneath the dull surface of the narrated world, and to speak their language. He walked unhurriedly to the long escalators, and sailed slowly downwards like an invisible king.

His man was waiting for him.

He could tell him immediately—another still point in the scurrying airport. He was a large, fat, sweaty man with an ill-fitting black suit and a face like a badly laid table. He stood a few feet back from the foot of the escalator, gazing up it with an inert but complicated expression. It was as well that Dirk had been ready to spot him because the sign he held, which read D. JENTTRY, was one he might otherwise easily have missed.

Dirk introduced himself. The man said his name was Joe and that he would go and get the car. And that, rather anticlimactically, Dirk felt, was that.

The car drew up at the curbside, a slightly elderly, black stretch Cadillac, gleaming dully in the airport lighting. Dirk regarded it with satisfaction, climbed into it, and settled into the backseat with a small grunt of pleasure.