She located the voice, turned toward it and froze. The maitre d' pointed at her. He stood near the fire exit, an old black man in tails, with a face like a skull and a gaping hole torn in his throat. Perhaps that was how he spoke without moving his lips, and why his voice seemed so inappropriate to his body. He floated toward her and she struggled with her inability to scream or run. He grabbed her shoulder, she flinched in terror and then, with a sudden rush of relief, woke to the fact that both voice and touch belonged to Sister Catherine. Gilman opened her eyes in the darkened hospital tent and remembered she'd thrown herself down on an empty cot, too exhausted to return to her own tent and undress.

"Sorry I startled you. Are you awake? Really?"

"Yes," Gilman said. The meager pillow felt impossibly comfortable. "What time is it, anyway?"

"Three. If you'll sit up, I've got coffee, or what passes."

Gilman forced herself to a sitting position. It was unusually chilly in the tent and she gratefully gripped the hot mug. She hoped she wasn't about to have another bout of malaria.

"Why'd you wake me?"

"Two things. The falciparum who came in this afternoon's been convulsing."

"Stopped now?"

"For the time being."

"Temp?" Gilman got to her feet, shaking, and swallowed a great gulp of coffee.

"It's 109."

"Shit." Fried brains. Gilman took another scalding mouthful and winced. She looked at Sister Catherine. "I'll get right on it. You'd better take over here."

Gilman pointed to the cot and cut off the nun's unformed protest with a practiced stare.

"The other thing..." knowing better than to argue, Sister Catherine sat down on the bed and handed Gilman the letter she carried.

"What the..." Gilman wondering, turned the object over. Heavy expensive paper. An invitation, she thought for one loopy moment. She tore it open and pulled out the sheet of parchment, reading aloud.

"To Gilman: Incompetent even in murder.

I survive. Your agent Paul killed Sandy in my place.

Be sure of me, for you cannot be sure of anything else. Watch for me always. Everywhere. Until we meet again."

She stared over the rim of the paper at Sister Catherine.

"What the hell? I saw Sandy a week ago. Nothing was wrong with her."

Even as she spoke the words, she looked down again at the paper.

"It can't be Lindsey's handwriting...Sandy? Dead? No."

She saw only an answering puzzlement in Sister Catherine's eyes.

"Sandy's one of your American friends?"

"Yeah. Where'd this come from?"

"A boy gave it to me. Half an hour ago, I guess."

"It can't be. This is sick," Gilman said. But she didn't know. She turned from Sister Catherine, seeing Sandy's face.

"It can't be," she said again. She swallowed hard. She turned as if she could turn from the idea and went from the tent out into the darkness. "No, impossible," she said again into the night. She tried to feel if Sandy was dead-would she, could she know, wouldn't she sense a loss so basic to her world? But Sandy was healthy, strong as ever, ready to keep the faith. Rumor could be pitiless, and mistaken. Malice, well that was far more likely, though she couldn't imagine who hated her so much. She walked away from it, but the idea followed her, a shadow, a puzzle rooted in dread.

Chapter 84: Lindsey.

April 1969 Lagos, Western Region, Nigeria Lindsey came to see Wilton. In a few minutes the nurse would sedate her for the journey to the airport. Wilton looked a little more composed. She stood free in the room. Lindsey, pinned by the blank frightening gaze, didn't know what to say.

"It's all right, Wilton," she said. "You're going home."

The door behind Wilton opened and Lindsey saw her friend shrink in terror at the abrupt sound. Lindsey's anger subsided at the bland calm in the face of the nurse.

Lindsey looked once more at Wilton-was there a wrenching loneliness in the unnatural eyes? We say good-bye for the long run, here. Now. She remembered much, words and acts of the past came unsummoned.

She took Wilton's shuddering hands in hers and stilled them. She looked at Wilton as though the intensity of her emotions could communicate through all barriers. Lindsey's voice came thin. Words should have been unnecessary between them.

"Of what I owe you," she said, "there can be no reckoning...There is no measure."

She noted that a flicker of curiosity surprised the impassivity of the nurse's face, but no response in Wilton. Lindsey released Wilton's hands and stepped back.

"We're ready to take her now," the nurse said. She opened her carrying case, brought out alcohol and cotton, put down a syringe box and tiny bottle of clear fluid.

"Yes," Lindsey said. "Take her away."

Chapter 85: Gilman.

April 1969 Uli, Biafra The incandescent light glowed in this small hot room with sparse wooden furnishings, shadows black on the uneven floor. Low-watt bulb in a heavy brown shade. The air hardly moved, thick with humidity after the rain, Gilman turned at Jantor's voice and read bad news in his stance. He was looking at her too hard.

"What's wrong?"

"I'm sorry. Gilman, the crazy note you got...Your friend Sandy's dead. It's true. She died in Ibadan."

Gilman drew in her breath and sat down, staring at the chart in her hands. Jantor clasped her shoulders, steady hands. Always there, stabilizing her.

"How," she said. "Tell me please."

"An assassin, Masters says. That's what's going round in rumors."

"An assassin? Why would anyone kill Sandy?"

She wouldn't cry. It would be unfair to Jantor if she cried. Maybe her tears had all dried up, anyway. Maybe she'd seen too many deaths she couldn't stop, too much suffering she hadn't helped.

"Someone slipped a snake into Lindsey Kinner's bedroom, only she wasn't there. It took out Sandy. Big spitting cobra, sounds like the sacs were almost full. The antivenin must not have worked..."

"When did this all happen?"

"Couple days after you left her and Lindsey in Lagos to come back here."

"Christ fucking Jesus," Gilman said. "They couldn't use antivenin-Sandy's allergic to the stuff. It must have taken hours for her to die. Not hours. Days."

The tears she thought absent stung her eyes and she dropped the chart on her chair, hid her face in his flak jacket.

"It shouldn't have been Sandy," she said. What a fool thing to say.

"They found some bastard, Paul, the guy you traveled with to take the fall. That Biafran politico you took when you flew Wilton to Lindsey. He confessed."

She swallowed tears, trying to make sense of that.

"Oh," she said. "That idiot. God. That's why someone unloaded him on me for the trip? I can't believe he'd kill Sandy-he's got to have been after Lindsey."

She pushed free of Jantor, horrified.

"Paul. I helped him. Damn his rotten soul to hell. He used me for cover. So that's why Lindsey thinks it was me. The poor stupid bitch. She was already pissed at me.

"But she'll figure it out-don't you think she's gotta figure it out? Paul wouldn't tell them it's me who made him kill Sandy-it's only Lindsey's grief talking. I'll get a chance to settle with her after this is all over. We'll sort it out. Poor dear Sandy. Damn him, damn him."

After this is all over. She thought about the phrase later and wondered what she had meant by that.

Chapter 86: Gilman.

May 1969 On the Western Front, Biafra Gilman hated to see the rains. Everything would be more difficult, new fungal infections among the malnourished, fecal contamination of the water supplies and all the diseases that would result. Cholera, dysentery.

Clouds spread in torn sheets across the sky, releasing only fitful gleams of colorless light. Depressing. The rain pounded for hours, and all along the crumbling raw edges of the rivers the thick orange clods tumbled and melted into the thick milky fluid. Heavy with clay, the water twisted and gurgled in its courses like serpents writhing through the jungle. Maybe she could hope that floods would slow the Nigerian advance against Biafra.

Gilman, Allingham and Sister Catherine joined the medical unit with Jantor's troops. Neutrality-Gilman didn't dare think the word. Using the weather as cover, their unit picked its way through the mud westward to ambush the Nigerians.

Gilman felt grateful to be going along. She always imagined bad things when she waited at Uli for Tom's return. Sister Catherine came grumbling, but on leaving Uli behind, cheered up. Sometimes any change helped. Even Allingham irritated Gilman less than usual, maybe because he knew he shouldn't be following the Biafran troops and hoped no one would mention that.

In the evening Masters, Jantor, Gilman, Sister Catherine and Allingham sat in the low-slung shelter of the tent and drank the whiskey Masters had brought. It warmed them in the dank night while they listened to each other's boasting and the slow rhythms of the rain. Susie, a German expatriate and Masters' girlfriend, showed up halfway through the evening with a fresh jug.

"Hey, Doctor," Masters said to Gilman. "Did you get to talk with that pilot, Skip Turner?"

"No," she said in surprise. Why would she?

"Aw, hell. I told him you'd be interested. Had a drink with him and got all the news. Your crazy friend Wilton, poor bird, she's gone back Stateside."

"Good God!" Gilman sat up straight. "Is she okay?"

"Hell, I guess." Masters waved off all responsibility. "All I know's what I've been told."

Gilman leaned back. In the pleasant golden haze of whiskey, all things seemed possible. Masters's sources usually came up with the real goods. So Wilton had been cleared for a trip home. She met Sister Catherine's eyes across the room and shared a smile of glorious relief.

Allingham and Susie argued the politics of war with Sister Catherine, while Masters and Jantor exchanged combat stories. Gilman had the peculiar feeling that she retreated from it all, as if she viewed the revelers in the tent through the lens of a camera. In the lamp's glimmer her companions had the look of strangers, actors in their parts, and she fell silent and watched until Jantor pulled her against his side, challenging her into the talk with a question about concussions.

They joined forces with another unit and Jantor conferred with Masters and the new commander. Gilman couldn't eavesdrop, though she kept an eye on the trio, wondering what they were planning and why they laughed. This was Jantor's version of surgery and she had to stay out of it with her mouth shut. When he gave the order to move he grinned coming back to give her a kiss on the mouth before he walked off with his men.

Rumor came from the troops that they'd engaged the Federal Nigerian Army on the banks of one of the rivers. Gilman asked the aides, but since they all said Biafra was winning, she couldn't tell what to think. It seemed to her that the noise of battle came closer and closer, but was it her inexperience or fear talking? She busied herself with setting up operating rooms and wards in a set of buildings that had once been a secondary school. All over eastern Nigeria these schools had sprung up after Independence, little loaf shapes of buildings all alike, fueled by the insatiable greed for knowledge that the Igbos possessed. Now the schools served as battle prizes and shelters and hospitals.

"The fighting's at least an hour away," Allingham said.

How could he be so sure? After a while a trickle of wounded began. Maybe Allingham had it right-the wounds looked about an hour old. The arrivals became a steady stream. Man after man brought to her only to die under her hands from blood loss or the fragments of some exploded grenade in his guts.

"Gilman." Sister Catherine's voice cut through the fear and babble of voices. Gilman turned her head. The nun's face seemed set like a mask. Oh no, were they going to retreat? Moving patients was a nightmare. Gilman stared up from where she knelt over a dead Igbo on a stretcher, looking into the nun's unreadable eyes.

"Come, Gilman. Now."

"What?" Gilman straightened to her feet, stepping around the man who had bled over the stained white sheets of the stretcher and the crushed grass under it.

"He's over there," Sister Catherine said, gesturing.

For one insane moment, Gilman could not imagine what she meant. When the realization hit, Sister Catherine seemed to see it, winced and stepped out of Gilman's way.

She forced herself not to run, brushing past her aides, determinedly pushing through the heavy lamenting crowd. A doctor should never run. Never. Faces flashed by her, fresh wet wounds, pain-stretched eyes. None held her. She had no time.

The sight of white skin, whiter by contrast among the black sweating hands and arms, brought her to a trembling halt. The thought passed through her that she'd have to stop shaking like this if she had to operate on him.

"Tom?"

He did try to move his head, but the effort simply sent his head lolling more to one side. Her eyes searched, found the deep ragged crease of a bullet along the side of his throat. Her hands discovered the soft torn flesh of his back, a gaping exit wound. She eased him out of the clinging gentle hands of his commandos, letting him down on the red and slippery grass, turning his weighty body to see the extent of the violation, and cried out.

She closed her eyes tight, then steeled herself to look again, the clinical terms running loose in her head. Then for the first time, she turned her face down for a moment, wrung with an immense disbelief and protest that she couldn't speak. She settled Tom upon the earth and took his face in her smeared hands, wanting him to look at her, wanting that fading mouth to move in answer to her.

Still there was nothing. So alive, the gladness, the rich mockery of his mouth and eyes as she remembered them. Was he already gone? The corded forearms felt unresisting, slack and soft under her inquiring fingers. He was limp, the hazel eyes glazed with gray, pupils dilated. Too much blood. If there were a way, any way to piece the ruin back together.

She took hold of the broad shoulders, flinching when his head fell heavily back, loose lax jaw, the sight of his half-lidded eyes making her stomach twist. His hair was matted with both mud and blackening blood. She attempted to settle him and the eager black hands came back again, helping with a babble of condolence and pity.

She knelt for what seemed a long time with him, holding him as though it mattered. She felt the shudder of his death, but speechless, waited on. The eyes sunk half open in the cold face told her nothing, nor did the slack mouth. A hand upon her shoulder woke her.

"Doctor."