“Is this him?” she asks the monk. Phra Tanatika stares at Magnus’s picture, complete with crimson neck tie and crimson suspenders. What he sees there he dare not tell her.

“What do you think?” he asks her, “is it him or not?”

“I’m sure it is,” says Lalita.

“Then it is your karma, you cannot alter it.”

When she left that day the monk looked after her with a worried expression. He knew that we humans are in reality a spaghetti junction of intertwined influences, called samscaras, from previous life times. Some of the samscaras we bear date back to reptilian lifetimes and simply lie in wait indefinitely, like tics, for an opportunity to assert themselves, even in the most pure and gentle souls.

Bangkok, by the Chao Praya River, Tuesday, March 1st, 2005:-

Magnus watches while Tallboy and a dozen Thai men set up the giant plasma TV monitor in the warehouse in Bangkok’s Chinatown, near the river. Every now and then Tallboy receives a call from Columbia on his cell phone. Sometimes he’s the one to make the call to Columbia.

“How’s your link?” Tallboy asks, “everything in place?”

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