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I’d be grateful for any suggestions you have on the best way to accomplish that.”
    Rachel wanted to cry. Instead, she racked her brain for some means of getting them rescued, even if it meant walking out of the jungle on her own. One fact she did face with characteristic forthrightness: she was going to be spending the night in the jungle with Harrison Bartley whether she wanted to or not.
    â€œListen,” Bart said, tilting his head. Rachel heard it, too. The sound of an engine, moving closer from the direction in which they’d just come. “Someone’s coming.We couldn’t ask for better timing. With any luck we’ll get a tow out of this swamp.”
    â€œWith any luck,” Rachel said grimly, then added, “Do you have a gun?”
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    â€œT IGER’S GOING TO HAVE US strung up by the thumbs if we don’t catch up with Rachel Phillips and her Ivy League embassy flunky pretty quick.”
    â€œI don’t know how the hell they got off the main road without us seeing them,” Lonnie said. He’d been dozing off and on for the past hour and didn’t even know it.
    â€œWe must be slippin’, buddy.”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œThey can’t be too far ahead now. I just wonder how they found the road leading to the wat in the first place.” He didn’t know if it was by luck or design, but he was damned sure going to find out.
    â€œMaybe they have a map.”
    Billy downshifted the jeep and shot Lonnie a questioning glance. “What makes you say that?”
    â€œNo reason.”
    â€œYou might have somethin’ there, buddy. If they do have a map that shows the temple’s location, it’s gotta disappear. Damn fast.”
    â€œGot you, Sarge.”
    From then on they drove in silence. Lonnie Smalley sat grim-faced and white-lipped. Billy had told him to stay in Chiang Mai but Lonnie didn’t listen to him. He didn’t listen to anybody anymore, except Tiger. The voices in his head, the dream people he encountered in drug-induced sleep appealed to him far more than anything in the real world.
    Billy hoped that once he got word back to Tiger that Micah McKendrick’s sister was safe and sound they could get on with the job they were supposed to be doing. If they could carry off the deal with Khen Sa, the Opium King, they could write their own ticket, shape the world to their own mold. If, that is, he caught up with Rachel Phillips and her companion soon enough to keep them from falling into the Thai warlord’s hands and ruining everything they’d worked so hard to bring about.
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    R ACHEL TRIED TO FIGURE her chances of making it across the stream and through the tangle of dusty scrub along the side of the road to the dubious safety of a hiding place in the jungle beyond. Her heart beat high and fast in her throat. Her palms were sweaty and she wiped them along the sides of her dark green cotton skirt. She should have worn slacks, and heavier shoes. She glanced ruefully down at her thin canvas loafers. She wasn’t any better equipped for being out in the bush than Bart was. It would be suicide to run. Instead, Rachel squared her shoulders and lifted her chin to face the tall black man advancing from the battered American army jeep that blocked the narrow road. His face was impassive, his eyes unreadable behind the mirrored sunglasses he wore. He looked very strong and very dangerous.
    The red-haired man beside him, shorter, thin to the point of emaciation, was almost as frightening, except for his eyes. Green as new leaves on a maple tree, they held so much sadness in their depths that Rachel was almost shaken out of her fear. Until she looked again and saw his pupils were narrowed to pinpoints. That was enough. She didn’t need to see the needle tracks on his arms orhis throat to know, with another sickening lurch of fear, that the man was a heroin addict. They stopped a few feet short of the mired Land