In our ignorance we might have mistaken it for a spaceship or a weapon, but the truth is that I recognized it as a kind of monument as soon as I could see it clearly. Imagine a truncated Washington Monument made of sky-blue glass and gently rounded at all corners. I couldn’t guess who had made it or how it had got here — apparently in a single night — but for all its strangeness it did look distinctly man-made, and men make such things for a single purpose: to announce themselves, to declare their presence and display their power. That it should be here at all was dazzlingly strange, but there was no mistaking the solidity of it — the weight, the size, the stunning incongruity.

Then the mist rose up and obscured our view.

Two uniformed men strode toward us, loose-limbed and surly. “By the look of it,” Hitch said — his muted Southwestern drawl sounding a little too lazy, given the circumstances — “we’ll probably have U.S. and U.N. assholes all over us before long, plus a lot more fucking BPP.” Already, an unmarked but obviously military helicopter was circling the ridge, its downdraft stirring the ground haze.

“So we go back,” I said.

He snapped a single photograph, then tucked the camera away. “We don’t have to. There’s a smuggler’s trail up around that hill. It leaves the road about a half mile back. Not too many people know about it.” He grinned again.

I suppose I smiled back. The second thoughts were coming thick and fast, but I knew Hitch and I knew he wouldn’t be argued out of this. I also knew I didn’t want to be left at this checkpoint without a ride. He wheeled the motorcycle around and we left the Thai cops glaring at our tailpipe.

This was maybe two or three in the afternoon, about the time Kaitlin began to ooze bloody pus from her left ear.