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to do much more than contain the blaze.

"Was she in there?" Doug asked the fire marshal, who stood beside one of the engines in full protective gear, issuing the occasional order from his walkie-talkie.

"Her dogs seem to think so," he said, at which point Doug realized the sound he'd been hearing all along was their howling. "Curtis," the marshal called to a police officer, "get those animals in a squad car, would you? They're driving me crazy."

"Do you know what caused it?"

The man shrugged. "These old places burn fast, but not this fast. My guess is we'll find some kind of accelerant."

Up on the road, traffic had clogged as passersby stopped to marvel at the sight.

"Did you know the woman?"

"Yeah," Doug said. "A bit."

"Anything unusual lately? Anything we should know about?"

Before Doug could answer, a voice from the dispatch squawked an indecipherable bit of news over the marshal's radio and he moved off toward a group of firefighters standing closer to the blaze.

Doug remained there for some time, standing beside the truck, watching as the flames crested and then slowly diminished, the house turning to ash and scattering into the dry air.

This, then, was her moment. Less public than the monk immolating himself on the street in Saigon, but a protest nonetheless. He didn't feel pity. His neighbor had never sought that. A lone soldier against an army. That's how she'd described herself to him. And a professional one, it turned out, choosing a battleground grave over the dishonor of retreat.

He stayed until after most of the trucks had left, leaving behind them only a few charred posts and the crooked, blackened tower of the chimney.

OF ALL THE NEWS he watched in the weeks that followed, of UN weapons inspectors and the sniper menacing the suburbs of the capital and the rise in housing prices and criminals being released onto the streets of Baghdad, the story Doug couldn't get out of his mind was the one about the pilotless drones flying over the Empty Quarter, a vast swath of western Yemen, off whose shores the Vincennes had once sailed. Intelligence services wanted to know if the operatives of various radical networks had secreted themselves among the nomadic tribes, who were the only people to traverse that portion of the Arabian desert. Cable news made only a few mentions of it but on the Web he found more and lying in bed or on the couch downstairs he watched over and over the various clips of aerial footage that people had posted.

In that nowhere place, so appealing in its way, mountains of sand razor-backed by the wind enclosed barren valley floors covered with hundreds of identical hillocks each swept to a point. Shots from higher elevations revealed a broader pattern: lunar white pockmarks spread over the flats between the sand ridges which stretched across the landscape like the wrinkled hide of some beast too large for the human eye to see, its skin slowly ulcerating in the sun.

Finally, the time for him to leave town arrived. The night before he left he took a drive, setting out along the golf course and then down a bit past the Hollands' and beyond them the Gammonds' old place, continuing on through the village past the green and the Congregational Church and the shops with their painted signs, turning at the intersection onto Elm and heading out to the state route.

There, uninterrupted woods ran either side of the highway for the first three or four miles until he reached the liquor store that still stood on the far side of the traffic light across from the muffler shop. It had begun to rain and the red of the traffic signal slid down his windshield in rivulets quickly cleared by the wipers, only to blur again as the signal turned green and he crossed the line back into Alden.

He glided through one light after the next, by the glowing signs for discount meals in the parking lots of the fast-food chains and passed the cinder-block furniture warehouses and the box-store plazas that they had knocked down the old malls to build, until eventually he reached Foley Avenue and turned off the strip. Half a mile down at the intersection with Main darkened storefronts stretched from one end of the block to the next: an insurance office, an empty showroom with a for rent sign in the door, a beauty salon whose faded posters advertised hair styles of the eighties. Across the street a convenience-store awning