K idnapper had a glove compartment of sorts hollowed into the back of 
its neck. As he was riding across the causeway, Hackworth opened it up because 
he wanted to see whether it was large enough to contain his bowler without 
folding, bending, spindling, or mutilating the exquisite hyperboloid of its 
brim. The answer was that it was just a wee bit too small. But Dr. X had 
been thoughtful enough to toss in some snacks: a handful of fortune cookies, 
three of them to be exact. They looked good. Hackworth picked one and snapped 
it open. The strip of paper bore some kind of gaudily animated geometric 
pattern, long strands of something tumbling end over end and bouncing against 
one another. It looked vaguely familiar: These were supposed to be yarrow 
stalks, which Taoists used for divination. But instead of forming a hexagram of 
the I Ching, they began falling into place, one after another, in 
such a way as to form letters in the pseudo-Chinese typeface used in the logos 
of one-star Chinese restaurants. When the last one had bounced into place, the 
fortune read: