Though it was now embarrassingly clear to Dirk that only he and not his actual quarry was aboard the flight, that he had been thrown four thousand miles and a couple of thousand crucial pounds off course by a childishly simple ruse, he nevertheless determined to make one final check. He stationed himself right by the exit as everyone started to disembark at O’Hare Airport. He was watching so intently that he nearly missed hearing his own name being called over the aircraft’s PA, directing him to go to the airline’s information desk.

“Mr. Gently?” said the woman at the desk, brightly.

“Yes ...” said Dirk warily.

“May I see your passport, sir?”

He passed it over. He stayed poised on the balls of his feet, expecting trouble.

“Your ticket through to Albuquerque, sir.”

“My—?”

“Ticket through to Albuquerque, sir.”

“My ticket to—?”

“Albuquerque, sir.”

“Albuquerque?”

“Albuquerque, New Mexico, sir.”

Dirk looked at the proffered ticket folder as if it were a piece of trick rhubarb. “Where did this come from?” he demanded. He took it and peered at the flight details.

The woman gave him a huge airline smile and a huge airline shrug. “Out of this machine, I guess. Just prints those tickets out.”

“What does it say on your computer?”

“Just says prepaid ticket for Mr. Dirk Gently to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be collected. Were you not expecting to go to Albuquerque today, sir?”

“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.

“The client said you’d like it,” said Joe distantly from his driving coop as he quietly rolled the thing forward and out on to the airport exit road. Dirk looked around him at the scuffed and threadbare velveteen blue upholstery and the tinted plastic film peeling from the windows. The TV, when Dirk tried it, was tuned to nothing but noise, and the asthmatic air conditioning wheezed out a musty wind that was in no way preferable to the warm evening desert air through which they were moving.

The client was dead right.

“The client,” said Dirk, as the great rattling thing cruised out onto the dimly lit freeway through the city. “Who exactly is the client?”

“An Australian gentleman, he sounded like,” said Joe. His voice was rather high and whiny.

“Australian?” said Dirk, in surprise.

“Yes sir, Australian. Like you.”

Dirk frowned. “I’m from England,” he said.

“But Australian, right?”

“Why Australian, exactly?”

“Australian accent.”

“Well, not really.”

“Well, where’s that place?”

“What place?” asked Dirk.

“New Zealand,” said Joe. “Australia’s in New Zealand, right?”

“Well, not precisely, but I can see what you’re ... well, I was going to say I can see what you’re getting at, but I’m not sure I can.”

“What part of New Zealand you from, then?”

“Well, more sort of England, in fact.”

“Is that in New Zealand?”

“Only up to a point,” said Dirk.

The car headed north on the freeway in the direction of Santa Fe. Moonlight lay magically on the high desert. The evening air was crisp.

“You been to Santa Fe before?” Joe nasaled.

“No,” said Dirk. He had abandoned trying to engage him in any kind of intelligible conversation and began to wonder if he had been deliberately chosen for his shortcomings in this area. Dirk was trying hard to stay sunk in thought, but Joe kept yanking him back to the surface.

“Beautiful place,” said Joe. “Beautiful. If it doesn’t get ruined by all the Californians moving in. Californication they call it. Hur-hur. You know what they call it?”

“Californication?” hazarded Dirk.

“Fanta Se,” said Joe. “All the Hollywood types moving in from California. Ruining it. Especially since the earthquake. You heard about the earthquake?”

“Well, I did, as a matter of fact,” said Dirk. “It was on the news. Rather a lot.”

“Yeah, it was a big earthquake. And now all the Californians are moving out here instead. To Santa Fe. Ruining it. Californians. You know what they call it?”

Dirk could feel the whole conversation wheeling round and coming at him again. He tried to deflect it.

“Have you always lived in Santa Fe, then?” he said feebly.

“Oh yeah,” said Joe. “Well, nearly always. Over a year now. Feels like always.”

“So where did you live before?”

“California,” said Joe. “Moved out after my sister was hit in a drive-by shooting. You have drive-by shootings in New Zealand?”

“No,” said Dirk. “Not in New Zealand so far as I know. Nor even yet in London, which is where I live. Look, I’m sorry about your sister.”

“Yeah. Standing on a streetcorner down on Melrose, couple of guys drive by in a Mercedes, one of those new ones, you know, with the double glazing, and pow, they blew her away—500 SEL, I think it was. Midnight blue. Real smart. They musta jacked it. You have carjacking back in old England?”

“Carjacking?”

“People walk up to you, steal your car.”

“No, but thanks for asking. We have people who clean your windscreen against your will, but, er ...”

Joe barked with contempt.

“The thing is,” explained Dirk, “in London you could certainly walk up to someone and steal their car, but you wouldn’t be able to drive it away.”

“Some kinda fancy device?”

“No, just traffic,” said Dirk. “But, er ... your sister,” he asked nervously. “Was she okay?”

“Okay?” shouted Joe. “You shoot someone with a Kalashnikov and they’re okay, you’re gonna want your money back. Hur-hur.”

Dirk tried to make sympathetic noises, but they wouldn’t form properly in his throat. The car was slowing down, so he lowered the peeling window to look at the desert night.

A passing road sign flared briefly in the car’s headlights.

“Stop the car!” shouted Dirk suddenly.

He leant out of the car window, straining to look back as the car gradually wallowed to a halt. In the distance the dim shape of a road sign was silhouetted in the moonlight.

“Can you reverse back down the road?” said Dirk urgently.

“It’s a freeway,” protested Joe.

“Yes, yes,” said Dirk. “There’s no one behind us. The road’s empty. Only a few hundred yards.”

Grumbling to himself, Joe put the big barge into reverse, and slowly they weaved their way back down the freeway.

“This is what they do in New Zealand, isn’t it?” he whined.

“What?”

“Drive backwards.”

“No,” said Dirk. “But I know what you’re thinking of. Just like us British, they do drive on the other side of the road.”

“Suppose it’s safer that way,” said Joe, “if everyone’s driving backwards.”

“Yes,” said Dirk. “Much safer.” He leaped out of the car as soon as it drew to a halt.

Highlighted in the pool of the car’s lights, five thousand miles from Dirk’s ramshackle office in Clerkenwell, was a square yellow road sign that said, in large letters, GUSTY WINDS, and, in smaller letters underneath it, MAY EXIST. The moon hung high in the sky above it.

“Joe!” shouted Dirk to the driver. “Who put this here?”

“What?” said Joe.

“This sign!” said Dirk.

“You mean this sign?” said Joe.

“Yes!” shouted Dirk. “‘Gusty Winds May Exist.’”

“Well, I suppose,” said Joe, “the State Highway Authority.”

“What?” said Dirk, bewildered again.

“The State Highway Authority,” said Joe, a bit flummoxed. “You see ’em all over.”

“‘Gusty Winds May Exist’?” said Dirk. “You mean this is just a regular road sign?”

“Well, yeah,” said Joe. “Just means it’s a bit windy here. You know, wind comes across the desert. Can blow you around a bit. Especially in one of these.”

Dirk blinked. He suddenly felt rather foolish. He had been imagining, a little wildly, that someone had specially painted the name of a bisected cat on a signpost on a New Mexican road especially for his benefit. This was absurd. The cat in question had obviously been named after a perfectly commonplace American road sign. Paranoia, he reminded himself, was one of the normal by-products of jet lag and whisky.

Chastened, he walked back toward the car. Then he paused and thought for a second. He went up to Joe’s window and peered in.

“Joe,” he said. “You slowed the car down just as we were approaching the sign. Was that deliberately so that I would see it?” He hoped it wasn’t just the whisky and the jet lag talking.

“Oh no,” said Joe. “I was slowing down for the rhinoceros.”