The Corrections

law-enforcement vehicle. Jonas and Aidaris listened to Metallica in the front seat while Gitanas pressed buttons on his cell phone in the forlorn hope that Transbaltic Wireless, of which he was still nominally the controlling shareholder, had managed to restore power to its transceiver station in the midst of a national blackout and the mobilization of Lithuania’s armed forces.
    “This is a calamity for Vitkunas,” Gitanas said. “Mobilizing just makes him look more Soviet. Troops in the street and no electricity: this will not endear your government to the Lithuanian people.”
    “Is anybody actually shooting at people?” Chip asked.
    “No, it’s mostly posturing. A tragedy rewritten as a farce.”
    Toward midnight the Stomper rounded a sharp curve near Lazdijai, the last sizable town before the Polish frontier, and passed a three-Jeep convoy heading in the opposite direction. Jonas accelerated on the corduroy road and conferred with Gitanas in Lithuanian. The glacial moraine in this region was rolling but unforested. It was possible to look back and see that two of the Jeeps had turned around and commenced pursuit of the Stomper. It was likewise possible, if you were in the Jeeps, to see Jonas making a sharp left onto a gravel road and speeding alongside the whiteness of a frozen lake.
    “We’ll outrun ’em,” Gitanas assured Chip approximately two seconds before Jonas, encountering an elbow curve, rolled the Stomper off the road.
    We’re having an accident , Chip thought while the vehicle was airborne. He experienced huge retroactive affection for good traction, low centers of gravity, and non-angular varieties of momentum. There was time for quiet reflection and gritting of teeth and then no time at all, just blow after blow, noise upon noise. The Stomper tried out several versions of the vertical—ninety, two-seventy, three-sixty, one-eighty—and finally came to rest on its left side with its engine dead and its lights still burning.
    Chip’s hips and chest felt seriously bruised by his lap and shoulder belts. Otherwise he seemed to be in one piece, as did Jonas and Aidaris.
    Gitanas had been thrown around and bludgeoned by loose luggage. He was bleeding from wounds on his chin and forehead. He spoke to Jonas urgently, apparently telling him to cut the lights, but it was too late. There was a sound of great downshifting on the road behind them. The pursuing Jeeps pulled up at the elbow curve, and uniformed men in ski masks piled out.
    “Police in ski masks,” Chip said. “I’m struggling to put a positive construction on this.”
    The Stomper had crashed in a frozen-over marsh. In the intersecting high beams of two Jeeps, eight or ten masked “officers” surrounded it and ordered everybody out. Chip, pushing open the door above him, felt like a Jack emerging from its box.
    Jonas and Aidaris were relieved of their weapons. The contents of the vehicle were methodically dumped on the crusty snow and broken reeds that covered the ground. A “policeman” pressed the muzzle of a rifle into Chip’s cheek, and Chip received a one-word order that Gitanas translated: “He’s inviting you to take your clothes off.”
    Death, that overseas relation, that foul-breathed remittance man, had suddenly appeared in the immediate neighborhood. Chip was quite afraid of the gun. His hands shook and lost feeling; it took the entire sum of his will to apply them to the task of unzipping and unbuttoning himself. Apparently he’d been singled out for this humiliation because of the quality of the leather goods he was wearing. Nobody seemed to care about Gitanas’s red motocross jacket or Jonas’s denim. But ski-masked “policemen” gathered round and fingered the fine grain of Chip’s pants and coat. Puffing frost through O-shaped mouth holes with their weirdly decontextualized lips, they tested the flexure of his left boot’s sole.
    A cry went up when a wad of U.S. currency fell from the boot. Again the gun muzzle was in Chip’s cheek. Chilly fingers discovered the big envelope of cash under his T-shirt. The “police” examined his wallet as well but didn’t steal his litai or his credit cards. Dollars were all they wanted.
    Gitanas, with blood congealing on several quadrants of his head, lodged a protest with the captain of the “police.” The ensuing argument, in which Gitanas and the captain repeatedly gestured at Chip and used the words “dollars”and “American,” ended when the captain