"Why did you come to Pakistan?"

It was a routine question from the granite-faced police officer who was combing through Audé's suitcases at the Islamabad airport but Audé was in no mood to be grilled. He was sick, he was tired and he wanted with all his heart to go home.

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"I'm here to pick up leather samples," he replied curtly.

"Are you carrying drugs?"

Here it comes, Audé thought. "Stockholm II, The Return of the Drug Dog."

He had been through this sort of ordeal once before in Stockholm when a drug dog caught a whiff of something on one of the suitcases he was carrying for Rai. Customs officers over there had gone through every stitch of leather, and found nothing. They let him go and he spent the rest of the afternoon in downtown Stockholm, cruising the Internet and sucking down the sour licorice he had come to love.

Truth be told, it hadn't been such a bad experience. If he had ever harbored any secret doubts that Rai might have been using him to shuttle something more illicit than leather, getting the stamp of approval from Swedish customs agents put his mind at ease. And besides, "they were cool about it."

"Are you carrying drugs?"

"Look again," Audé snapped.

The police officer didn't wait for Audé's permission. With one fluid motion, he dumped the contents of Audé's bags on the floor and sharply ordered him to wait in a tiny nearby waiting room.

Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Then two more officers entered the room and began picking at the carefully sewn lining on the suitcase that Joseph had just given him as Audé sulked nearby. "Are you guys going to buy me a new suitcase?" he asked.

Just then, one of the searchers tore away a piece of fabric and grabbed a small pinch of golden tar. "What's this?"

"I don't know...part of the suitcase?"

"It's opium," the cop says. "We're going to hang you this evening."

It's all a blur after that, Audé says. "I figured if I'm going to die, I'm going to die like a man, and so I told them everything, about the trips, I even gave them Rai's number. I didn't have Joseph's number or I would have given them that too."

He tried to convince them that he had been set up, that he had no idea that he was carrying opium and that he didn't even know what opium looked like until the Pakistani cop pulled it out of his suitcase and showed it to him.

So a couple of DEA agents were dispatched from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, a matter of professional courtesy between the government of Pakistan and the U.S.

"You don't have to talk to us," they told him.

"You're damned right I'm gonna talk," Audé began, and for 40 minutes, he filled them in on every detail he could think of about Rai and Joseph and his trips to Turkey and finally his journey to Islamabad.

But Audé could tell from the looks they gave and the questions that they asked that they didn't believe him, and they had no real interest in finding out whether he was telling the truth.

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