in Thai, because Bean had picked up the language quite readily, and the soldiers weren't as comfortable in Common.
"He may not like it," said one soldier, "but it's making him grow."
"Soon he'll be as tall as you," said the other.
"How tall do Greeks get?" asked the first.
Bean froze.
So did Suriyawong.
The two soldiers looked at them with some alarm. "What, did you see something?"
"How did you know he was Greek?" asked Suriyawong.
The soldiers glanced at each other and then suppressed their smiles.
"I guess they're not stupid," said Bean.
"We saw all the vids on the Bugger War, we saw your face, you think you're not famous? Don't you know?"
"But you never said anything," said Bean.
"That would have been rude."
Bean wondered how many people made him in Araraquara and Greensboro, but were too polite to say anything.
It was three in the morning when they got to the airport. The plane was due in about six. Bean was too keyed up to sleep. He assigned himself to keep watch, and let the soldiers and Suriyawong doze.
So it was Bean who noticed when a flurry of activity began around the podium about forty-five minutes before the flight was supposed to arrive. He got up and went to ask what was going on.
"Please wait, we'll make an announcement," said the ticket agent. "Where are your parents? Are they here?"
Bean sighed. So much for fame. Suriyawong, at least, should have been recognized. Then again, everyone here had been on duty all night and probably hadn't heard any of the news about the assassination attempt, so they wouldn't have seen Suriyawong's face flashed in the vids again and again. He went back to waken one of the soldiers so he could find out, adult to adult, what was going on.
His uniform probably got him information that a civilian wouldn't have been told. He came back looking grim. "The plane went down," he said.
Bean felt his heart plummet. Achilles? Had he found a way to get to Sister Carlotta?
It couldn't be. How could he know? He couldn't be monitoring every airplane flight in the world.
The message Bean had sent via the computer in the barracks. The Chakri might have seen it. If he hadn't been arrested by then. He might have had time to relay the information to Achilles, or whatever intermediary they used. How else could Achilles have known that Carlotta would be coming?
"It's not him this time," said Suriyawong, when Bean told him what he was thinking. "There are plenty of reasons a plane can drop out of radar."
"She didn't say it disappeared," said the soldier. "She said it went down."
Suriyawong looked genuinely stricken. "Borommakot, I'm sorry." Then Suriyawong went to a telephone and contacted the Prime Minister's office. Being Thailand's pride and joy, who had just survived an assassination attempt, had its benefits. In a very few minutes they were escorted into the meeting room at the airport where officials from the government and the military were conferring, linked to aviation authorities and investigating agencies worldwide.
The plane had gone down over southern China. It was an Air Shanghai flight, and China was treating it as an internal matter, refusing to allow outside investigators to come to the crash site. But air traffic satellites had the storythere was an explosion, a big one, and the plane was in small fragments before any part of it reached the ground. No chance of survivors.
Only one faint hope remained. Maybe she hadn't made a connection somewhere. Maybe she wasn't on board.
But she was.
I could have stopped her, thought Bean. When I agreed to trust the Prime Minister without waiting for Carlotta to arrive, I could have sent word at once to have her go home. But instead he waited around and watched the vids and then went out for a night on the town. Because he wanted to see her. Because he had been frightened and he needed to have her with him.
Because he was too selfish even to think of the danger he was exposing her to. She flew under her own name-she had never done that when they were together. Was that his fault?
Yes. Because he had summoned her with such urgency that she didn't have time to do things covertly. She just had the Vatican arrange her flights, and that was it. The end of her life.
The end of her ministry, that's how she'd think about it. The jobs left undone. The work that someone else would have to do.