It's a long drive from Lancaster to Missy's house in Northridge, almost 50 miles, and as Audé listened to the growl of that old Chevy small block and the hum of his radials on the freeway, he had plenty of time to think.

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Things had been going so well for him lately -- he was on his third call back for a network series and had just done a pilot for another television show. Dude, Where's My Car? had done better at the box office and in the video stores than anyone had dared dream and that 15 seconds he was on screen in Van Wilder was probably going to get him a lot of attention once that opened. He was actually making a little bit of money.

Things had not been going so well for Missy, though. The company she had worked for went out of business, and now there was this thing with her mother, this liver disease.

She had gotten so mad at him a few weeks earlier when he had offered to give up part of his liver to save her mother's life.

"Erik, don't you know that you can't live without your liver," she had snapped.

"No" he stammered back, realizing that he probably looked like the world's biggest asshole in her eyes. "But I would do that for you."

Why didn't she get it? Why didn't Missy understand that he would do anything for her, that he'd been in love with her since they were in the second grade. In all that time, they had only kissed once, on New Year's Eve 1998, and that hardly counted. Everybody was kissing everybody. Missy probably didn't even remember it. But Audé did.

Maybe, he thought, it was time to bag the job with Rai and spend more time with Missy. Besides, Missy had never thought much of the job anyway. Audé knew that she saw right through him, that she somehow knew that he was spending most of his time overseas moping around seedy Internet cafes, sending e-mails because he was homesick and too proud to admit it.

Even when he first told her about the job, she had been skeptical. "It sounds too good to be true," she told him with the kind of common sense that comes to somebody who has spent their whole life dodging show business in a place saturated by it.

And he knew she never really bought his argument that L.A. was a place where things too good to be true happen all the time. How else could you explain the success of Dude, Where's My Car?

Actually, if he were honest with himself, he would have admitted that he had misgivings about this trip. There was a war on now. Even Rai seemed more nervous this time, so nervous in fact that he told Audé that on the return trip; he'd have to take a Greyhound bus back to L.A. from Vancouver to reduce the chances of running afoul of customs. The thought of spending eight hours bouncing along the highway in a bus stinking of Lysol and stale baby formula sucked some of the glamour from the trip.

But the worst part was the destination.

He was going to Pakistan.

Audé was no geographer, but he knew that Pakistan was a little too close for comfort to war-torn Afghanistan. He also knew that they didn't seem to like Americans much over there. Just a few weeks earlier, extremists kidnapped an American journalist named Daniel Pearl and had presumably murdered him.

By the time his Bel Air pulled off the freeway into Northridge, Audé had made up his mind. Although he had always had a difficult time keeping a secret, this time, he was going to hide his destination from his mother and from Missy. "I don't want them to worry," he murmured to himself.

He also made one other decision.

This was going to be his last trip.