Avi drives Randy over the San Andreas Fault to his place in Pacifica, which is where Randy stores his car while he’s overseas. Avi’s wife Devorah is in at the doctor’s for a routine prenatal and all the kids are either at school or being hustled around the neighborhood by their tag-team duo of tough Israeli nannies. Avi’s nannies have the souls of war-hardened Soviet paratroopers in the bodies of nubile eighteen-year-old girls. The house has been utterly abandoned to kid-raising. The formal dining room has been converted to a nanny-barracks with bunk beds hammered together from unfinished two-by-fours, the parlor filled with cribs and changing-tables, and every square centimeter of cheap shag carpet in the place has been infused with a few dozen flakes of glitter, in various festive colors, which if they even cared about getting rid of it could only be removed through direct microsurgical extraction, one flake at a time. Avi plies Randy with a sandwich of turkey bologna and ketchup on generic Wonderoid bread. It is still too early in Manila for Randy to call Amy and make amends for whatever he did wrong. Down below them, in Avi’s basement office, a fax machine shrieks and rustles like a bird in a coffee can. A laminated CIA map of Sierra Leone is spread out on the table, peeking out here and there through numerous overlying strata of dirty dishes, newspapers, coloring books, and drafts of the Epiphyte(2) Business Plan. Post-it notes are stuck to the map from place to place. Written on each note, in Avi’s distinctive triple-ought Rapidograph drafting-pen hand, is a latitude and longitude with lots of significant digits, and some kind of precis of what happened there: "5 women, 2 men, 4 children, with machetes—photos:" and then serial numbers from Avi’s database.