Chapter 1

Of this much, at least, I’m sure:  My story begins more than a year ago now, aboard a gold-plated Gulfstream corporate jet I’d borrowed for a quick business trip to Thailand.  The Gulfstream belonged to Helms Technology, or HT, the computer software giant.  It’d been lent to me by the company’s founder, president, and CEO, John Helms.  That’s right—the wealthiest person in America.  John was a client of mine.  I protected him.  Life and limb.

That is to say, my security firm did.  And my trip to Thailand had been to do the advance work for John’s own upcoming visit.  He was to meet with regional business leaders as well as speak at a computer science symposium sponsored by Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

The country had a large Muslim population, a number of Islamic extremists, and growing trouble with terrorism.  John’s fame and wealth and nationality would make him a tempting target to those at war with the so-called decadent West.  But Thailand wasn’t at all on John’s mind when he phoned me during my return trip, while the jet sat refueling in Austin, Texas.

“I’m disappointed,” John said in his nasal twang.  “Mighty disappointed.  You hear me, son?”

Son.  That’s what he called me.  We were born the same year.  “What’s the matter, John?”

“I’ve got spies under my own roof is what’s the matter!”

“Now hold on.  Are you sure?”  My firm was on retainer to prevent industrial spying.  We also conducted the background checks on potential new hires.

“Yes, I’m sure.  Damn sure.”

“Then why don’t you start from the beginning.”

John proceeded to tell me, at length, and in hardcore computer Geek-speak—which I understand nearly as well as three year-olds understand their native tongue—about a backdoor he’d discovered hidden in a new software program that HT had recently custom developed for a Wall Street consortium.

A backdoor is an unauthorized, undocumented way to gain access to a computer program, an online service, or an entire computer system.  It’s usually written by one of the computer programmers who write the software code.  But all the programmers on the project had denied creating it.

“What do I pay you for?” John said in conclusion.  The plane had by now refueled, three local HT executives had come aboard for the final flight leg, and the jet had begun its runway taxi.

“I’ll get to the bottom of this, John.”

“But I pay you to prevent shit like this from happening in the first place.”

The pilot called for all electronic equipment to be switched off.  Outside, the engines screamed, and I could feel the plane gathering speed on the runway.  To the scolding flight attendant, hovering over me, I held up a forefinger—as if to say, “I’ll hang up in a second” or “I’m a major asshole,” take your pick.

I sure felt like a major asshole, but John Helms was my biggest client and—you could sooner forget eggplant growing out of his nose—the Forbes certified WPIA!  What else could I do?

“Let’s not get too excited,” I said.  “Might be nothing.”

“I don’t see how.  You even listening to me, son?”

“I’m tired, John.  I’m on my way back from Bangkok, from setting up that trip for you.”

“Bangkok?  Oh, right.  That thing.”

The flight attendant’s frown—and the angle I viewed it from—brought back ancient memories of grade school teachers.  “Like I said, John, I’m on a plane right now—your plane—and we’re about—”

“Now you listen to me, Argus, I don’t want to hear there isn’t any problem.”

“We’re on the runway, just about to take off—”

“Because I know there is.”

“Honest to God, John, the flight attendant’s ready to stamp on my cell phone like a cigarette butt.”

“What?  Oh, hell.  Call me back.”

“Will do, John, but don’t you worry—”

John hung up.  I tucked my phone away, apologizing to the flight attendant’s trim backside as she rushed off.  But I didn’t think she heard me.  The engines were screaming real loud by now, louder than you’d expect from such a small aircraft.

If the Gulfstream had been a commercial jet, it would’ve held fifty passengers or more, but the opulent design of the interior limited the maximum seating capacity to ten.  The aft cabin, at the plane’s rear, which was not being used, contained a small conference table and four chairs, along with a fold-out beige leather sofa for sleeping.  The forward cabin contained four beige leather armchairs, each with a small, mahogany writing desk.  The lavatory included a full shower.

The plane was airborne and nearly horizontal again when I closed my eyes and exhaled deeply, ridding myself of a little mental pollution, a bit of the long flight’s accumulated stress.

What does John Helms really have to worry about? I asked myself.  Ever?  Give me sixty billion dollars—or even a little less, say Malaysia’s GNP—and I’d be the sweetest, mellowest son of a bitch since Mister Rodgers.

“Madre de Dios!” said the Hispanic guy across the aisle from me, crossing himself during a bit of turbulence.  Mother of God!

“Don’t worry,” I told him.  “Statistically speaking, you could take this flight once a day for almost ten thousand years before you could expect to be involved in a crash.”

He turned to me and smiled.  He had shiny, straight from a swim-like jet black hair and teeth I remembered from Seabiscuit.  He wore a medium brown suit with a white shirt and a bolo tie.

“Thanks.  I hate flying.  I’m Rob, by the way.  Rob Ramos.”

“Argus.  Argus Ward.”

“You from headquarters?”

“Not exactly.”  I explained who I was.

“Interesting,” he said.  “How’d you get into that line?”

“I started out in the Secret Service.”

For a moment his eyes fit the size of his teeth.  “You don’t say.  So what’s John Helms really like?”

I shook my head.  “There’s a rule in my business, Rob.  Never gossip about the protectee.”

He smiled so wide I nearly had to squint.  Then he changed the subject.  He told me he was a new marketing executive and on his way to a three-day training conference at Helms Technology’s world headquarters, outside Washington, DC, our destination.

The turbulence died away, like our small talk, and I soon drifted off to sleep in my comfortable chair, waking more than an hour later when the flight attendant emerged from the galley that separated our cabin from the cockpit to take drink orders.

She’d been on board when I’d been picked up in Bangkok, but hadn’t spoken to me—her only passenger for more than three thousand miles—except in a professional capacity.  Her smile, which had always been pleasant, now seemed to strain her—as if her skin had become a quick-hardening clay.  It made me worry about engine trouble with the plane.  I’m like that.

Her face was almost heart-shaped, thanks to prominent cheek bones—high and wide and rouged—and a delicate, pointed chin.  Her hair—straight and thick and dirty blonde—was very cute, styled after the Dutch boy on the paint cans.  And she had doll-like oval blue eyes.  I put her age at thirty-two or so.  Yet she was teenage slender.  Which made it hard to see her curves in that boxy, dark blue uniform.

“Drink?” she asked me after taking orders from the other three passengers.  Her doll eyes—watery, darting—left little doubt that she was nervous about something.  I hoped it wasn’t me—the major asshole.  I ordered scotch on the rocks with a twist of lemon.  It’d been a long flight.

Before the drinks arrived, I stretched in my seat a bit and peeked at the two new passengers who hadn’t bothered to introduce themselves to anyone.  Cattle trotting through a chute are more intimate than people on planes.  Intimate planes included.

The woman who sat in front of Rob Ramos, madly keying away on her laptop, wore a sweeping, ankle-length cotton skirt of the kind favored by women from the South.  She was in her forties somewhere, a little plump, but curvaceous, with Texas-size big hair of the brightest auburn, a great burning bush.  Of the man seated directly in front of me, all I could see was the back of his head, tinseled thinly with silver.

Remembering some paperwork I had yet to do, I switched on my overhead light.  I was reaching down for my briefcase when I noticed the flight attendant emerge from the galley.  I noticed because she’d left her boxy uniform behind.  Her underwear too.  The woman was totally nude and carrying a full drink tray.

My mouth dropped open, as you might imagine.  I gasped, I gawked, I blinked hard, I shook my head.  Then I found I couldn’t take my eyes off her bushy triangle of mocha brown pubic hair.

Finally, I did.  I could see she was smiling—though nervously, clearly nervously—as she delivered a soft drink to the big-haired lady.

I thought, I’ve undressed women with my eyes before, but this is ridiculous!

“Hey, Rob,” I said in a half-whisper.  “You see that?”

He glanced up from a computer magazine and half-whispered back.  “See what?”  I jerked my head at the flight attendant just as she approached the silver-haired gentleman.  Rob studied her, then stared back at me.  “So?”  He shrugged.  “What about her?”

“She’s a bit underdressed, don’t you think?”

“Huh?  In that ugly uniform?”

I whipped my head around for another look at the flight attendant.  Less than two yards ahead of me, she was leaning across the gentleman with the silver hair, dropping off a Bloody Mary with a celery stalk in it.  My head whipped back to Rob.

“Uniform?  What uniform?  She’s bare-ass naked.”

He cracked another huge, Seabiscuit smile.  “Is this . . . some kind of joke?”

“No!” I whisper-screamed.  “Of course not!”

My eyes rushed around the cabin.  The big-haired lady had stopped clattering away on her keyboard, and she was calling for the naked flight attendant.

“Miss!  Over here, Sugar!  Clumsy me had a little accident with the Diet Coke.  Could you get me cleaned up?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said the flight attendant, who scurried her milky white bottom back inside the galley.

I addressed the entire cabin in my full voice.  In fact, I nearly shouted.  “Will somebody please tell me why our flight attendant is naked?”

Rob stared open-mouthed at me.  So did the big-haired lady.  Then the face of the silver-haired man popped into view beside the seat in front of me.  His wrinkled skin was chalky and saggy and sunspot peppered.

“There’s nothing unusual about our flight attendant,” he said with the certainty of a college professor.  “There’s nothing strange going on here, Sir.  Nothing at all.”

He gave a crisp and confident nod—as if he’d just given me the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem—and withdrew.

When the flight attendant appeared again she was still nude, still balancing the undelivered drinks on her tray.  With a small cloth in her free hand, she mopped up the big-haired lady’s mess, then moved on to Rob, who received a bottle of Corona beer with a lime quarter wedged in the mouth and a napkin and bar glass.

Then she approached me.  I noted her nervous smile, her sharp tan lines, her B-cup breasts, and her pinkish nipples, small and erect.  She’s cold, I thought.  The cabin temperature feels about sixty-eight degrees, tops.

A short-lived blast of air turbulence unsteadied her balance.  Her breasts jiggled.  For the first time, her nudity excited a stir in me.  She leaned over me with her serving tray.  Her pubic hair loomed near enough to my head to share its musty scent and fire off invisible pheromones deep into the primitive part of my brain.  It wasn’t my seat that I sprung into the upright position.

She dropped a napkin down on the mahogany table by my armchair, followed by my glass of scotch on the rocks.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” I asked her, a little surprised by the deepness of my own voice.

“What?” she said.

I took a quick look around the cabin and found I doubted my own sanity.  “Twist of lemon,” I said.

Chapter 2

The Gulfstream touched down at Reagan National Airport.  In a still much-bewildered state, I shuffled down the aisle, filing out.  Beside the exit door, in front of the pilot’s cabin, stood the flight attendant, smiling politely and saying goodbye to each of the passengers disembarking.  I saw her in a boxy blue uniform again—had for the last thirty minutes, ever since she’d finished distributing the last round of drinks.  No one had spoken to me for the same amount of time, though I’d joked aloud to the entire cabin about drinking some bad coconut juice in Thailand.

I counted back in time to the year I lost my sanity . . . Twenty-two years had gone by.  Twenty-two years without doubting my own eyes.  Or ever really doubting my own mind.  I felt the urge to resume a habit I’d kicked twenty-two years earlier: the reassuring habit of reciting a litany of facts about myself and my life, just to prove to myself I still knew what they were.  I used to recite the litany aloud—anywhere, anytime—when feeling acutely stressed.  This time I managed to do it mentally.

My name is Argus Ward.  I’m 44 years old.  I have a wife.  Her name is Sarah.  I have a daughter.  Her name is Ellie.  Short for Eleanor.  We have another child on the way.  We have an Irish Setter, Duke.  I don’t know the housekeeper’s name, but that’s not my fault.  We have a revolving door in that department.  I am the president and CEO of Argus Ward, Incorporated.  My firm provides security consulting and services to individuals and to commercial interests.  Threat assessment.  Personal protection.  Investigations.  Counter measures against industrial spying.

I ceased my mental litany at the exit door.  I gave to the flight attendant an empty, parting nod in exchange for her plastic smile and sterile “Goodbye.”

On the steel ladder leading to the tarmac, the mellow gold rays of the waning sun blinded my descent.  I felt regret at having been—not many minutes earlier—too gentlemanly to goose what I’d taken to be a woman’s bare bottom, regret at not allowing my sense of touch to weigh in on my grasp of reality.

But before I hit the tarmac, I realized I’d probably end up telling my wife everything that had just happened on that plane, and my regret over not goosing the flight attendant instantly evaporated.  Sarah is the jealous kind.

Tucked inside the Freon-cooled cocoon of my gray BMW, I rolled past the airport terminal and a bronze statue of Ronald Reagan—who, I noted, was not naked, but still in a suit and tie.

I merged into heavy, rush hour traffic on the George Washington Parkway, and I slipped in a bluegrass CD.  Those zippy fiddles always pick me up.

Well, not that time.  I couldn’t quite put out of my mind that everything I’d worked for in this life—and everyone I loved in it—was now suddenly at risk.

Twenty minutes later, I arrived home in Georgetown, parking in the driveway beside the house.  Next door, Stuart Carr and his eight year-old son, Jason, were spread out on their front lawn, playing catch with a baseball and mitts.

“That reminds me,” I called to Stuart.  “We need to take in another Orioles game.”

Stuart gave me a nod during his wind-up.  “Red Sox are visiting in three weeks.”  He’d gone to Harvard as an undergrad, when he’d switched allegiances from his native Seattle Mariners to the storied Boston team.  “With the Orioles in the cellar, it shouldn’t be hard to get tickets.”

“Works for me.  You pick a date, and buy the tickets.”

“Day game, or night?”

“Night,” I said.  It would be late June by then, and I was thinking about the heat.

“Okay, buddy.”

I waved and headed inside.  In the five years since I’d moved to the neighborhood, Stuart Carr had gradually become my closest friend.  But it never crossed my mind to share with even him what had happened to me on that plane.

In the center hallway on the ground floor of our townhouse, I passed by the new maid—what’s her name—as she dusted picture frames.  She was white, this one, and weathered, with rheumy eyes telling of too many bad decisions.  She flashed me a smile, her teeth stained and crooked, avoiding each other, like a family that doesn’t get along while posing for a group portrait.

In the kitchen, I slugged down a tall glass of water while peering through the window over the sink.  Ellie was running with Duke around our little, fenced-in back lawn, playing keep-away with a squeaky toy.  Sarah sat on the edge of the open porch, lost in her prenatal yoga.  Along with her old drawstring yoga pants, she wore a pink cut-off Tee shirt, her swollen, second trimester belly exposed and celebrated with hand-painted swirls of vivid color I recognized as Ellie’s art.  Nearby, our Japanese gardener was sculpting a shrub.

Now his name I knew.  Hideo Mori.  He’d been doing our yard for years.  He rarely spoke to me, and when he did, I rarely understood his meaning.  Sarah, on the other hand, seemed to know all about him.  Thought him profound.  Said he had an old soul. (Hard to check her story though.  She has a knack that way.)

Something in my chest squeezed as I looked at my ladies unobserved.  I took the stairs up to the master bedroom.

In the bathroom, I opened the mirrored cupboard above the sink and grabbed a bottle of pills sitting on the top shelf.  I spilled the entire contents onto the countertop.  Then I began counting . . . So many little white pills . . . If I were John Helms, I thought, I wouldn’t have to do this pill counting.  John had a high-tech medicine cupboard I’d seen once when redesigning the security system for his estate.  Every time he opened it up, a recorded voice would play through a small speaker to remind him if he needed to take a pill.  Somehow, his computer-assisted cupboard even knew whether he did what he was told.

My count, as I recall, ended at fifty-three pills.  I checked the pill bottle for the date of purchase and the number of pills it had originally contained.  Then I did the math . . .

No, I hadn’t been forgetting.  Hadn’t skipped a single day.  In fact, I was a pill short—as if I’d taken two pills one day by accident.  Probably a math error.  The important thing was I’d been taking my medication.  Just as I’d thought.  The first thing I would do in the morning was pee and then I’d take my Risperdal.

You’re probably wondering by now, if you’re having trouble recalling the news accounts from last year, during the peak of my infamy, “Just what exactly, Mister Ward, is wrong with you?”

Clinically speaking, I’m a paranoid schizophrenic.  I’m not, however, a typical case.  I count myself very lucky to be what Doctor Shields—that’s my psychiatrist—calls a high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic.  But enough about my disease for now as I’m sure you must be wondering how I ever managed to sneak myself into the security business in the first place.  I’ll tell you this much.  Until recently, I was able—with some luck and some cunning—to hide my disease from all public knowledge.

Why I ever chose to become a security consultant—and before that, a United States Secret Service agent—I never considered seriously until Doctor Shields insisted.

Excitement, challenge, the satisfaction of public service—I came up with those reasons on my own.  Doctor Shields came up with my having an unconscious desire for a socially acceptable way to express my paranoid tendencies.  And I’m sure he’s right too.  Think about it.  I’d chosen a career in which I got paid to worry, basically.  The perfect career for me. (Almost.)

So there I was in my bathroom, scooping pills back into the bottle.  Risperdal is a common anti-psychotic medication.  I could not—and I cannot—keep the madness at bay without it.  With it, the mystery of the naked flight attendant remained.

What’s happening to me? I wondered.  Usually, if it was time to adjust my medication, I’d go a few days feeling agitated for no reason, or fuzzy-headed, and maybe Sarah would point out that I was brooding, or avoiding eye contact with her, or claiming that someone had it in for me somehow, and then I’d know enough to head for the psychiatrist’s office straight away.

But I hadn’t been agitated or fuzzyheaded.  And Sarah hadn’t given me any warning signals.  And I hadn’t been suspecting others of any dark, sinister plans.  Though I had to admit I didn’t like the looks of that new maid, what’s her name.

“Were you aroused?” Sarah asked me in the kitchen after hearing my bizarre story.  She was freshly showered and puttering in her white maternity dress, checking on the overcooked-smelling stew and dinner rolls, not looking at me.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, squirming on my stool by the butcher block table.  “She was stark naked, and very close to me at times.  All I lacked was a roll of dollar bills.”

“I mean,” she said, stopping, staring, “were you aroused before you saw her with her clothes off?”

“No,” I said.  “I was preoccupied with John Helms.  I might’ve noticed she was attractive, that’s it.”

“Uh-huh.”

Her tone let me know she thought I wasn’t being entirely truthful.  Which I wasn’t.

“The important thing, Sarah, is that my meds don’t seem to be working.  I’d better go see Doctor—”

“What did she look like?”

I sighed.  We’d been together long enough for me to now guess with clairvoyant accuracy what her next six or seven questions would be, and what my own answers would be too.  But there is no skipping ahead in a marriage, is there?  Husbands and wives have litanies of their own.  I sipped my chardonnay.

“She was average height,” I said at last.  “Slender.  About your age, I guess.  Dirty blonde hair.  Nice complexion.  Pretty face.  Kind of heart-shaped.”

“Tits?”

I shrugged.  “Maybe your size, when you were about fifteen years old, I imagine.”

“Ass?”

“Same answer.”

“Shit head.”  Sarah can’t help cursing a lot.  Not only is she married to me, but she’s also native to Southern California, where beauty is to be seen and not heard.  Or so it seems.

“Daddy!”  Ellie barreled in from outside, holding a baggie full of dog shit.  “Look, I scooped the poop!”  She held the baggie up for my inspection.  It was soiled some on the outside.

“Good job.”  I tousled her hair.  “But try to get it all inside the bag next time.”

“Okay.”

I took hold of the baggie with a thumb and a fingertip and a dainty wrist.  “Now go wash your hands.”

“Yes, Daddy.”  Ellie skipped off toward the downstairs bathroom.  I followed her bounce until she was out of sight.

“Was it selfish,” I said to Sarah, “bringing her into the world?  I mean, given the genetic risk—”

“That again?  Now?  With another on the way?”

“I’ve got to see Doctor Shields as soon as possible.”

“You said it would be alright,” she said as I headed for the trash can in the garage.  “You said the odds the kids would get it were what?  Six to one against—”

The kitchen phone rang.  Sarah answered.  I turned to see if the call was for me.  It wasn’t, but the sound of the ring had startled me into realizing that I’d forgotten all about calling my billionaire client back.

Yet there was dinner just ahead, and Ellie’s bedtime soon after that, and so I didn’t phone John Helms until the following morning.  What was the wealthiest person in America when compared to the most important person on Earth?

Chapter 3

My overdue phone call to John Helms the next morning resumed our discussion of an alleged spy who’d built a backdoor into some software.  He was a good deal more upset than usual about a potential security breach.  I promised to put an investigator on the case right away.

“I want those programmers grilled,” he said.  “I want them investigated.  Followed, if need be.  One of them’s lying.  One of them’s up to something.  And I won’t allow anything—anything at all—to go wrong with this project.”

“What’s so important about this project?”

“The client—a Wall Street consortium—will be using our software to query an extremely large database containing highly sensitive information of a personal nature.  We can’t be too careful with data like that.”

After hanging up with John, I assigned the investigator, Dale Robo Robinski, a new hire and recently discharged US Army veteran with about a dozen years of investigations experience for the military police.  Next, I phoned my psychiatrist’s office.  My regular, monthly appointment wasn’t for another fifteen days, but I managed to reschedule for the following week.  Then my life returned to normal, so to speak, until the middle of a business trip to the west coast.

At the time, my firm was nearly ten years old and prospering.  In regard to our personal protection unit—a kind of Secret Service for the rich and famous—we’d developed a sizable clientele, more than one hundred accounts.  Half of these clients lived in Hollywood.  One I’ll call Peggy Van Horne.  I can’t tell you her real name, but she’s a legendary singer and an Oscar-winning film star with a couple of television Emmys to boot.

She rarely sang live anymore.  She rarely left the house anymore, I’d been told, a recluse, at least by show-biz standards.  Her long-time business manager had let me know she hadn’t been the same since the death of John Lennon.  Stage fright and crowds had haunted her ever since.  But once or twice a year, she’d perform at a charity event for one of her pet causes.  On this business trip of mine it was an Aids benefit in Los Angeles.  She was a new client and, walking backstage at the Universal Amphitheatre before the show, I was looking forward to meeting her in person, even though I’d been warned her nerves were on edge.

“It’s just performance jitters, Mister Ward,” said her personal assistant, Malcolm, breathless from the pace he set us.  “We’ve been through this before.  Before you were hired, I mean.  So just humor her.  ‘The show must go on!’ ”

“By the way, what exactly is a diva?”

Malcolm sighed and shook his head.  “After today, Mister Ward, I’d say diva’s just a four-letter word for a five-letter word.  Here we are.”  He halted us in front of a star-emblazoned dressing room door and knocked.

“Come!”  With one word, one syllable, I recognized the voice calling to us from the other side of the door, famous the world over, a soaring, sighing, sultry voice, a ménage à trois partner inside millions of bedrooms.

“Remember,” said Malcolm, whispering as he opened the door, “don’t make eye contact.”

“I’ll try to remember,” I whispered back.  “But it would help if she’s wearing something low-cut.”

Inside, we were greeted by an eerie shimmer.  But it wasn’t simply all the sequined costumes.  The entire dressing room, it seemed, had been Saran-wrapped.  The fruit tray, the deli tray, the vegetable tray, the juice pitchers, the unopened bottles of Evian drinking water, the Diet Coke cans, the Cristal champagne chilling in a stainless steel ice bucket.  The furniture too—the two sofas facing off, and the leather-padded rocking chair and its matching footstool.  All of it draped or sealed in plastic.

The great singer, wearing a pink terry cloth bathrobe, sat before a brightly lit make-up table, her hair dresser on one side, her make-up artist on the other, both men working on her with flying fingers.  Saran-wrap that must’ve until recently covered the make-up table sat on the floor nearby, a crumpled pile the size of a large pillow.  A small TV on a high, narrow stand had been wheeled directly behind Peggy’s head, so that she could view it through the mirror.  There was an old movie on, men-wearing-hats old, in black and white.  From the forties, I thought.  I heard an actor saying, “You’ll do as I say, see.”

Malcolm made the introductions.  “Peggy, this is Argus Ward, of Argus Ward, Incorporated.  It’s his firm protecting you now.”

Before I remembered to look away, I saw her using the mirror to assess me.  I stared at a row of gaudy wigs, capping mannequin heads, and thought, Not many women her age look pretty facing a ring of 500 watt bulbs.  It’s good the men with the flying fingers have another three hours before the concert starts.

“Pleasure to finally meet you,” I said to the wigs.

Ignoring me completely, she said to her make-up man, “That’s ghastly, Tony.  I’ll look like a glow-stick out there.”

“You’re right, Hun,” Tony said.  “We’ll try something else.”

A rap at the door.  “Come!” Peggy said.

Sandy Mannheim barged in, the stage manager I’d met only minutes earlier.  “Peggy, one moment.”

While they conferred—Sandy staring down at a clipboard, never Peggy—I paced in front of the dressing room’s plastic-covered sofas, aching to sit down, but a little worried I’d be scolded, or bashed over the head and mummified in Saran-wrap.

The Saran-wrap, along with the two plug-in air purifiers, humming in opposite corners, told me that Peggy had a thing about germs.  I saw nutty behavior like this all the time, working for the rich and famous.  Called it the Just So Syndrome.

Everyone had it to some extent.  The more control people exerted over their environment, the more everything was Just So, the calmer and happier they felt.

But it could be a mighty expensive habit.  A lot of people drew the line at a grande cup of Starbucks iced mocha coffee, easy ice, half and half instead of milk, no whip cream.  People like Peggy Van Horne, on the other hand, might go through football fields of plastic wrap every day, or order a custom Rolls Royce convertible in their favorite shade of gummi bear.

“I think I’m coming down with something,” Peggy said soon after she dismissed the stage manager.  “I think I’m catching a cold.  Does my voice sound scratchy?  Any of you?”

“Well, uh . . .” Tony said.

“Um . . .” Henry said.

“You’re fine,” Malcolm said, sampling cheese from the deli tray.  “There’s a little dust in the air.  Give the purifiers a chance to work.”

“You think?” she said.  “I’m really not feeling so hot.  My chest feels congested.  Definitely.  Definitely, I’m congested.”

I cleared my throat.  “Uh, Ms. Van Horne?”

“Oh, yes, you,” she said.  “How long have you been working for me, Mister Ward?  Ouch!  Henry!  Not the tweezers, not now.”

“Three months,” I said.  On the TV, someone was calling someone else a stool pigeon.

“Three months?  That’s all?  Well then I guess I ought to give you one more chance.”

“One more chance?”

“To catch the trespasser, of course!”

“Um, about that trespasser—”

“He came back last night, you know.  I heard him right below my bedroom window this time.  Trying to jimmy the outside door, I’m sure of it.  I slept in the panic room.  I was terrified.”

“But Ms. Van Horne,” I said, stepping in her direction, then quickly stepping back, settling my eyes on Malcolm for no other reason than it wasn’t forbidden.  “The alarm was never tripped, and the guard on duty told me he didn’t see, or hear, any intruder, and the surveillance cameras didn’t—”

“Are you calling me a liar?”  The Brooklyn girl she used to be was sneaking into her voice now.

“No,” I said, “no, that’s not—”

“Why can’t you protect me?”

“But, but I am—”

She waved me off.  “Not now, dammit.  I can’t . . . I can’t seem to catch my breath.  Malcolm.  Get the doctor.”  Malcolm dropped his cheese and raced out of the dressing room.  “Give me space,” she said, “give me space, for God’s sake.”  Tony and Henry stepped back.  “I can’t go on.  Not like this.  It’s impossible.  Cancel.  Do you hear me?  I can’t possibly perf—”

I gripped her swivel chair and whipped it around a hundred and eighty degrees, until she was facing me.  Her color was off, her respiration too rapid.  She couldn’t even hurl the angry words she’d picked out for me.

“She’s hyperventilating,” I said.  “We need a paper bag she can breathe into.”

“Paper?” Tony said, searching.  “Now plastic we can do.”

“No plastic,” I said.  “I don’t want to kill her.”

“Oh, really,” Tony said, sounding a bit disappointed.

Somehow, Peggy Van Horne found her voice.  “How dare you stare at me, sir!  And you, Tony, you—”

I gripped her head, cupping her mouth, jamming a thumb deep into her left nostril.  “Don’t fight me,” I said, but she beat at my forearms anyway.  “I’m forcing you to breathe out of one nostril.  In a minute or two, your carbon dioxide level will return to normal, and you’ll breathe easy again.”

She tried biting my hand, but I just pressed harder until she stopped.  “Take slow, deep breaths,” I said.  “I want you to feel your lungs filling up as you inhale, and at the same time, I want you to imagine trying to fill your belly with air too.  It’s called belly breathing.  It’ll expedite the whole process.”

She relaxed, finally.  Tony and Henry, on the other hand, still seemed to be bracing for a train wreck.

“Good,” I said to her.  “I know you don’t perform live very much anymore, Ms. Van Horne, so it’s perfectly natural to be nervous tonight.  But nothing’s going to hurt you here, I promise.  I’ve brought metal detectors, I’ve brought bomb-sniffing dogs, I’ve put a crack team of security staff at every access point.  Many of my men have served in the same elite Marine battalion that provides security at US embassies around the world . . .

“Now, I’m going to let go, and when I do, Ms. Van Horne, you keep your mouth pursed, and keep one nostril closed tight.  Press it shut with your index finger . . . That’s it.  Good.”

When she felt fine enough to also feel embarrassed, I walked over to the wigs and pretended to study them.  “I’ve even got a closed circuit TV system sweeping the crowd tonight, and something we call ‘face recognition software,’ which allows a computer to identify any members of the audience we’ve deemed as potential threats to you, on the slim chance any show up, and just in case we somehow miss them at the door.

“We’re prepared for absolutely every contingency.  So there’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all.  You’ve paid me good money for peace of mind, Ms. Van Horne, so don’t cheat yourself.  All you have to do tonight is sing.  Just sing.”

From the wigged head of a mannequin, I stole a twinkling silver tiara and crowned myself.  Tony and Henry gasped in unison.  Malcolm and the doctor burst into the dressing room.  I showed Peggy Van Horne my new look.  “What do you think?”

She laughed.  From the belly, she laughed.  “You’re aces with me, kid.”

On the TV behind me, a single pistol shot rang out.  She watched a lot of old movies, I’d heard.  A lot of film noir.  Worlds where men weren’t lackeys, to say the least.  I thought, That’s the attraction, isn’t it, Peggy Van Horne?

My cell phone rang.  I turned from Peggy’s adoring gaze, leaving her to Malcolm and the doctor’s needless ministrations.

Before sitting down to take my call, I threw off the sofa plastic like a real he-man.  “Yes?”

It was Mike McKenna, calling from headquarters in Washington.  “Argus, we’ve got a problem.”

“Only one?  We’re doing well tonight.”

“No, no, this is a big problem!  Back here in DC!  It’s about John Helms!  We had a scare!”

“One moment, Mike.”  Henry the hairdresser had wandered over.  I asked him what he wanted.  Henry pointed to my head.

“We need that tiara for the My Fair Lady number.”  I handed it over, and Henry let me be.

“Okay, Mike, what happened?”

“Near lethal attack on John—lone actor—no injuries, but—”

“Where?”

“At his compound near Georgetown.  During a dinner party.  The assailant was on the catering staff.  Female.  Used a knife.”

I turned my back to Peggy Van Horne and the others and whispered into the phone.  “Close call?”

“Very.  John’s shaken up, to say the least.”

“Put me on the red-eye.”

Chapter 4

My red-eye landed at Reagan National Airport early the next morning.  I stumbled off the plane amid a small, exotic herd of clothes-wrinkled halitosis-bearers.  One of my favorite employees met me at the terminal.  Keisha Fallon was ex-Secret Service too.  We’d guarded President Cooper together.  Now she supervised the John Helms protection detail.  She was dressed in a navy blue skirted suit with a white blouse and a red silk Ascot.  US flag colors.  The neckwear was too loud to be part of a protection detail uniform, but John Helms had insisted on it, as well as on blue suits and white shirts and red ties for his male bodyguards.  I guess when you rake in billions annually in federal contracts it’s hard not to be patriotic.

Keisha handed me a cardboard-girdled paper cup, funneling a long rope of steam.  “Morning, boss.  Black coffee, black limo, and Black chauffeur at your service.”

“Shit, Keisha, we can’t have that.  We’ll get zapped through a time-warp back to the nineteen thirties.”

She laughed, shaking alive her slender braids.  “There were no female chauffeurs back in those days, Argus.”

“I’m driving.  Just in case.”

She laughed again.  “Lord!  You must worry about everything it’s possible to worry about.”

“If only I could be sure . . .”

I took the George Washington Parkway, heading toward the Helms compound north of Georgetown.  Traffic was thick.  National Public Radio seeped through the stereo speakers, the announcer’s velvety tones like an antidote to road rage.

Keisha dug for notes hiding in her briefcase.  “Rebecca Helms and the kid were out of town.”

“I'm glad.  They're away a lot, aren’t they?”

“You know Rebecca.  Friends on every continent but Antarctica.  Anyway, last night, John had some of his top brass, and about a dozen Congress members, over for dinner.  There’s a big vote coming up in the House next week.  Major telecom bill.”

“I follow you.  Lobby effort.”

“It was a cool evening, for a change,” Keisha said, “real pleasant, so they took their chow outside, on the back patio, everybody seated at one long table.  The dinner was catered by Treviso’s.  That’s a five-star Italian restaurant in Georgetown.”

“I’ve heard of it.  So what happened?”

“Wasn’t there myself,” Keisha said, “but I’ve debriefed the team on duty.  We had Billy Campbell and Jake Dunbar flanking the protectee throughout the dinner.  It was Campbell who noticed her first.  The waitress, I mean, the assailant.”

“Why’d he notice her?”

“She seemed agitated.  Kept mumbling to herself.  The other servers were avoiding her too.  And her eyes kept throwing daggers at John.  So Campbell notified Dunbar, and they’d just positioned themselves a step closer to the table when the assailant struck.  She’d swiped a knife from the veal tray at some point earlier.  Dunbar stopped it.  Broke her wrist mid-thrust.  John told his guests he’d actually felt the tip of the blade nudge his chest.”

Along the Potomac River, running parallel to our right, a crew team sliced its way through fog and water, shouldering their oars in rhythm.  My own left shoulder had begun to ache.  It always does when I hear bad news.  It’s the spot where I’d taken a bullet years before.

“The Helms family use Treviso’s a lot?” I said.

“For parties?  Yeah.  Five times in the past year.”

“Tell me about our assailant.”

“Her name is Sally Anne Bilchik.  Caucasian.  About five foot three inches tall, and a hundred and twenty pounds.  Thirty-four years of age.  Lives with her mama in Friendship Heights, near the metro stop on Wisconsin Ave.  Treviso’s hired her ten weeks ago.”

“Had Sally been to the Helms residence before?”

“Once before, yes.  Charity event, about six weeks ago.”

“Nothing odd about her behavior that day?”

“Nothing noted,” Keisha said.

“Cops searched her home and automobile, right?”

“Yeah.  There was a big photograph of John Helms in the glove box of her car, and up in her room, they found a few newspaper and magazine clippings about him, and a personal diary, or journal, that makes mention of him half a dozen times.”

“A real under-achiever, as stalkers go.  The obsession must not be very old.  What else do we know about Sally Anne Bilchik?”

“When the cops executed their search warrant in Friendship Heights last night, I tagged along, and I spoke, briefly, to the mother, and she wasn’t exactly surprised by this turn of events in her daughter’s life.  Sally’s a mess.  A loser from any angle.  High school drop-out.  Multiple substance abuser.  Botched suicide attempt.  Married three times, divorced three times—”

“Hey, now!  Watch it!”

“Watch what?” she said.

“Watch what you insinuate about divorced people.”  I’m one myself, you see.  Twice over.  “Maybe she’s just been unlucky in love, like certain others—”

“Ha!  You unlucky, Argus?  No, you’re just a born first husband is all.  Why you think I steered so clear of you—you and your handsome self—all these years?”

I didn’t mention there had been that one night, ten plus years earlier, high up in a hotel room in Miami, during the worst of President Cooper’s re-election campaign, when I was between wives, and hadn’t yet met Sarah, and we’d both had a few drinks and—well, our friendship survived that pleasant evening somehow.

“Go on,” I said through clenched teeth.

Keisha grinned at me, toying with her licorice-like braids, before checking her notes.  “Let’s see now . . . Plenty of scrapes with the law over the years, including four convictions.  One for domestic assault, two for writing bad checks, and one for possessing met amphetamine.”

“So she’s done time?”

“You bet.  Three separate trips to the big house.  Once for having her parole revoked.  Oh, and her mother says she’s been in and out of mental institutions since she was nineteen years old.”

“What’s the clinical diagnosis?”

“Paranoid schizophrenic.”

This revelation did not strike me as a coincidence, or even as unusual.  As I would soon explain to John Helms in person, the mentally ill are common celebrity hounders, harassers, attackers.

John Helms, you should know if you don’t, was more than just a computer industry icon.  He was also a symbol of wealth, of globalization, of America, of the future.  He averaged two death threats a month.

Yet not until Sally Anne Bilchik had anyone carried out an actual attempt on John’s life.  So I wasn’t surprised to find him looking wan and pale at the breakfast table.

“Argus, do you think it was just this woman involved?  My assailant, I guess you’d say?  Or could there be more to it?”

“Relax, John.  There isn’t any conspiracy or plot to take your life.  We already know this attack was the work of one lone, deranged individual.”

“Good, good.”  John pushed back from the table and stood.  Lacking his usual color and imposing air, he seemed, in his black Armani suit, like a sheep in wolves’ clothing.

I stepped in front of him.  “Don’t worry about your safety, John.  I do all the worrying for my clients.  I never stop.  See all this prematurely gray hair?  And my pubes are hardly better.”

John smiled.  “I’ll take your word for it.”  He gave an affectionate pat to my bad shoulder before stepping to the windows of the pantry.  In the backyard, a pair of Presa Canario fighting dogs pranced on the lawn, both leashed to the dog walker, getting their morning exercise.  “Why did she do that, Argus?  Why did that woman try to kill me?”

I studied John’s burdened profile, thinking, A close brush with death makes pensive philosophers of us all.  Luckily, the effect rarely lasted for long.  “This had nothing to do with you.  Your attacker, Sally Anne Bilchik, is mentally ill.”

“Sally Anne Bilchik,” John said, slowly, as if saying her name would help him understand.  “What’s wrong with her?”

I grew a tad uncomfortable.  “She’s schizophrenic, John.  Paranoid schizophrenic, to be precise.  I’ve, uh, I’ve had more than a bit of experience dealing with her like.  A good number of celebrity stalkers are schizophrenic.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Schizophrenia is an organic brain disorder.  The first symptoms usually don’t appear until late adolescence or early adulthood.  With paranoid schizophrenia, with people like Sally, the most common symptoms are delusions and hallucinations and unfounded feelings of persecution.”

Outside, the Presa Canario fighting dogs neared.  Their ugly heads were huge and thick, war helmet-like, mythological Greek monster-like.  John turned his gaze from them to me.

“Delusions?  Hallucinations?  Shouldn’t such people be locked up somewhere?”

“They are,” I said.  “Whenever it’s necessary.”

“When wouldn’t it be?”

“Thanks to modern medicine, and modern therapy, John, some schizophrenics are able to lead relatively normal lives.  At least for long stretches of time.  The psychotic episodes—the delusions and hallucinations and so on—might not recur for years at a time.  These are the lucky ones, stable enough, long enough, to prosper, to succeed personally and professionally, to get married and raise a family, to become whatever they want to be.  Accountants and lawyers and doctors, even psychiatrists.

“But, sadly, many more schizophrenics end up like Sally Anne Bilchik.  With her, the medicine, and the therapy, simply delay the next psychotic episode.  She’s in and out of jail and mental institutions.  Can’t hold a job, or a lover.  She decompensates with booze and pills.  She may eventually end up on the streets.  Worst of all is the madness itself.

“Why did she try to kill you?  Perhaps a voice in Sally’s head told her that John Helms had to die, to save America, let’s say, or to bring back Jesus.  Or perhaps she’d come to believe you two were married, and yet you seemed to be ignoring her, spurning her, pretending not to know her, and so she’d flown at you in a rage.  Or she may’ve decided you were Osama Bin Laden in disguise.  All we know for certain at this point is that she’d recently become obsessed with you.”

“Obsessed with me?”

“Yes,” I said.  “Based on what the police found inside her car and in her home.”

John turned back to the window.  Ten seconds ticked by silently before he said, “How could anything be more frightening, Argus?  Than never being sure of what’s real and what’s not?”

You understand, I thought.  You understand.

When he was ready for the ride to his office at Helms Technology I put him in the backseat of a black Lincoln Town Car fitted with armor-plating, run-flat tires, and bullet-proof tinted glass able to withstand military ball ammunition.  It was the safest vehicle in the entire fleet, protective overkill, a five thousand pound security blanket.  He knew about the features, but he didn’t appear comforted.

I remained behind at the Helms compound, using my laptop computer to compose a statement for the news media about the previous night’s attack—just in case the story leaked right away.

I was still working on the statement when my cell phone rang.  It was an unexpected call from my old boss, Nathan Pitt.  He was the current director of the United States Secret Service.  I’d worked directly under him for three years, back when Pitt had been Special Agent in Charge of the Washington Field Office.  In recent years, we’d been neighbors in Georgetown, and socialized some.  But this wasn’t a social call.

“I heard about what happened last night,” he said.

“Heard about what?”

“About John Helms.  Paul Trent gave me a buzz.”  United States Senator Paul Trent.  Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.  He’d been at the dinner.  Witnessed the attack.  Nathan Pitt and Paul Trent had known each other since college.  They were both Skull and Bones Yalies.

“Close one,” I said.

“Too close.  John Helms means more to national security than you may know, Argus.”

“Is that right?”  I knew that John’s first major contract award, twenty years earlier, had been with the CIA—or the United States Central Intelligence Agency—and that, over the years, his company had done work for virtually all of the major intelligence branches, as well as the US military, but still I was surprised by Nathan Pitt’s concern.

“So what went down, exactly?” he said.

“It’s nothing.  The usual story.  One lone nut.  History of mental illness.  Now in custody in a secure psychiatric ward.”

“You sure that’s all there is to it?”

“Positive.”

“Because I can lend you some manpower, if you’d like.”

Again Pitt surprised me.  I knew that taking him up on an offer like that would require authorization from the US president himself, Eliot Ames.

“Won’t be necessary, but thanks.”

“Standing offer, by the way.”

“I’ll remember,” I said.

“How’s that golden shoulder doing?”

He liked to needle me about the injury I’d sustained on the job ten years earlier before leaving the Secret Service.  Saving President Cooper’s life had made me instantly famous, and it was slowly making me rich—and Pitt jealous.  We did a little BS-ing before hanging up.  I went back to writing my press release.

Meanwhile, I was informed that John’s wife, Rebecca, had cut her trip to Bermuda short, due to the attack.

When her helicopter descended upon the back lawn around noon, I was standing ten yards beyond its lime-traced helipad circle, where the whirring blades frightened the grass and gave my tie the notion to strangle me.

The pilot emerged first.  With his helping hand, Rebecca Helms alighted, followed by her five year-old son, John Junior.

Rebecca wore a conservative black silk suit with a pleated skirt and short jacket.  But the dying windstorm’s lecherous grip offered a liberal view of her shapely figure.  Her black hair hid beneath a pink silk scarf.  The egg-shaped lenses of her white plastic designer sunglasses did little to hide her distraught mood.  My search for just the right words of reassurance derailed when she greeted me with a vicious slap across my face.

Then she took her boy in hand and continued on toward the main house.  If only her slap had awakened me to what had begun.

Chapter 5

The following morning, I left my office in Georgetown and drove down the Dulles high tech corridor to the world headquarters of Helms Technology in Vienna, Virginia.  John’s state of mind still concerned me.  I should’ve been more concerned with my own.

On the surface, the multinational corporation that John founded a quarter century ago is nothing like the high tech firms of the movies, or the whackier outposts of Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco—lands of facial hair and ponytails and Hawaiian shirt-clad CEOs with popcorn machines and nerf basketball hoops in their offices.  At HT, people carry on like adults.

Geeky adults.  I can recall, for example, one of John’s top marketing executives bragging that his business suits had metal fiber woven into them to stave off electro-magnetic pollution.

“Have a seat, I’ll be right back,” John said, after greeting me in his corner office.  He disappeared inside the alcove leading to his private bathroom.

His office bordered on the palatial, with floor-to-ceiling windows ushering in the urban skyline.  There was a definite art deco vibe to the place: black matte walls and walnut millwork and a unique, chrome and glass office desk, where a chrome-encased laptop computer sat on top, open and always running.  I sat down in a red leather camelback sofa with brass nailhead trim.

The spot offered a good view of John’s prodigious ego gallery: framed and frequently autographed photos of himself posing with other famous people.  There he was at Sun Valley with fellow computer industry giants Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.  At Camden Yards with iron man Cal Ripken.  Dining with basketball’s Michael Jordan.  And shaking hands or hugging shoulders with every American president going back to Ronald Reagan.

On the cushion beside me lay a strange bit of head gear.  I picked it up.  Lightweight and made of chrome and black-colored plastic, it looked like a pair of music headphones wedded to a fancy bicycle helmet’s rear-view mirror and stem.

“It’s called a wearable computer,” John said, returning.  He seized it from me and strapped it on his head.  He reminded me of one of the Borg from Star Trek Next Generation.  “Got it from the MIT lab in Boston last month.  Experimental model.  The circular piece hanging in front of my left eye is the monitor.  It’s so small there’s no problem seeing past it.  You lose binocularity in only a seven or eight degree wedge, which is nothing at all.”

I said, “What do you use it for?”

“Instant access to information, mostly.  I do email with it too, and instant messaging, using voice commands.  But the best is yet to come.  I’m designing some special software for it.  Not too many people know about it, but I guess I can tell you, Argus.  You keep secrets for a living.  It’s lie detector software.”

I stood.  “Come again?”

“Lie detector software.  While wearing this thing, I’ll be able to test people for truthfulness without them ever knowing.  It’s my pet project, you might say.  Been working on the software for two years now.  I’ve put a whole development team in place.”

“Why?” I said.

“Edge, Argus, edge.  The secret to success.  And just think of what kind of edge I’ll have when I know when the people I deal with on a daily basis are being deceptive.  My suppliers, my competitors, my contractors, and my employees.  My wife—if I ever decide to divorce her.  One lie can be worth millions, you know.”

I felt contaminated somehow.  “But how could you possibly design software able to catch human lies?”

“It’s based on neurological studies of receptive aphasics.  Stroke victims and people with other brain injuries, who can’t understand human speech, or face real challenges trying to.  What the neurologists discovered was that aphasics share a remarkable gift for detecting falsehoods.  They pick up on nuances of facial expression—momentary and very minute emotional flashes that the rest of us usually miss because we understand human speech just fine, we’re busy attending to the words.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.

He smiled, pleased, I think, by my strong reaction.  “Put a group of aphasics in front of a television set while a politician is giving a speech and you’ll hear more laughing than inside a comedy club.  They understand not a word, typically, but they find all the fibbing hysterical.”

“So the computer takes photos then?”

“Video,” John said.  “In the back of the monitor is a pinhole camera lens.  It records whomever the wearer happens to be looking at.  The facial images are instantly run through the software program, checking for these nuances noted only by the aphasics, these shutter speed-swift leaks of emotion.”

“And the results appear on the monitor?”

He nodded.  “In about a second.  But I’m still not happy with the accuracy rate.  Another year of development, I think, and then I’ll be satisfied.”

He took off his wearable computer, placed it on his desktop, and fixed his hair.  I remembered why I’d come.

“You doing okay, John?”

“Sure, sure.  Why do you ask?”

“You’re not obsessing about the other day, are you?”

“No, no.  You told me there’s nothing to worry about, and I believe you.  One lone mental case, right?”

“Right,” I said.  I had to admit John did seem like he’d snapped back, like he belonged in his Armani suits again.

“But I’m glad you stopped by, Argus.  I was going to call you.  What’ve you turned up about that unexplained backdoor we found in the new software?”

“My investigator’s still interviewing the programmers and running background checks.  I’ll keep you posted.”

“Every day, if you would.”

“Sure.”

“Also, something new’s come up.”

“What is it?”

“Jeremy Crane, my chief technology officer, he’s missing.”

The name was vaguely familiar.  “Missing how?”

“Absent from work.  He hasn’t shown up for two days straight, no calls, not a word.  Can’t reach him on his cell phone, or his home phone, or his Palm Pilot, or—”

“What about family?  Did you—”

“He lives alone.”

“Maybe it’s just a misunderstanding, John.  Maybe he thought he had some time off and went out of town.”

“No, no, son, it’s not like that.  You see, I know Jeremy Crane well.  He’s inner circle.  Been here nine, ten years now, at least.  And it’s not like this man to be out of touch, ever.  He’s dedicated, he’s loyal, he’s anal-retentive.  You know, the perfect employee.”

“Until now.”

“Until now,” John said.  “I’m worried about him, Argus, I really am.  Could you handle this for me?  Personally?”

Did I mention John was demanding? (I don't think I have to mention he was also eccentric to the point of being scary.) I agreed to find the missing geek myself.

But once I’d returned to my own headquarters in Georgetown I assigned a junior investigator to do the initial legwork.  I had to attend the weekly staff meeting with my principals and managing associates early that afternoon.

The headquarters of my firm were conveniently located within half a mile of my townhouse in a converted brick warehouse down by the Potomac River.  A boardwalk, just outside the window of our conference room on the first floor, connected us to a cluster of restaurants and other office buildings.  Five or ten minutes into the meeting, I noticed from my seat a man on the boardwalk peering in at us.

He stood alone, leaning a bit against the railing that faced the water.  He was tall and stood out sharply, dressed, not in a business suit, or touristy apparel, but in denim overalls, his thumbs hooked beneath the shoulder straps.  His cotton shirt was checkered red and white, and his black cowboy hat was mashed on top, comically misshapen.

He’s a farmer, I guessed.  But why is he here?  And why is he staring in at us?  And so intently?

I was about to point him out to the others when I sensed something familiar about him—though it wasn’t the farmer's face, half hidden by hat shade.

Suddenly, I put it all together: the man’s build, his clothes, his hat—Especially that hat!—even his stance.  I’d seen it all before, in an old photograph of my father.  Of which there weren’t many.  For my father had disappeared decades earlier.

I found myself rising from my seat and rapidly circling our horseshoe-shaped conference table, the group discussion wading by my ears without meaning.  I was consumed with chasing a ghost.

I raced outside to the boardwalk.  The ghost fled, in a most conventional way, on foot, at a brisk walk, but I aimed to chase it down.  I aimed to until I heard a familiar voice barking at me from somewhere nearby, calling my name over and over again.

My eyes located Henry Mercer, the vice president of my firm, standing at a newly opened window inside our conference room.  The others in the staff meeting were on their feet too, pressed to the glass, staring at me in wonder.

Chapter 6

For a long time, I just stood there, frozen on the boardwalk, with a dozen pairs of eyes gawking at me through the window, with the farmer—or ghost of my father—receding, receding.  I felt foolish.  I began to wonder how to explain my odd behavior once back inside.  And the moment began to feel much too like the first throes of my first psychosis, twenty-two years earlier, in the days before I’d stopped bothering to explain my odd behavior to others, before I’d stopped believing my odd behavior odd.

I went back inside the building and told my employees that I’d seen the farmer groping a female passerby and that I’d raced outside to run him off.  I told myself a different falsehood—as it soon turned out—that a poor night’s sleep, mixed with anxiety over the attempted murder of one of my clients, had temporarily thrown my judgement out the window, so to speak.

I did briefly consider phoning my psychiatrist, Doctor Shields.  And if I had, perhaps the worst of my story would never have happened.  But my recently rescheduled appointment with him was for the very next day anyway, so I simply went about my business . . .

Jeremy Crane lived within a short commute of Helms Technology in Reston, Virginia.  I’d lived in Reston myself years earlier, back when I was still new to the Secret Service.  During winters, I’d often take my dates—including my first two wives—to an outdoor skating rink in the center of town, then thaw out in a cozy bar overlooking the ice.

Minutes before sunset, I turned onto Jeremy’s cul-de-sac, locating his post-modern brick colonial by the presence of a Reston police cruiser parked in the driveway.  The pony-tailed cop sitting inside, idling her engine for air-conditioning, hopped out to greet me once I pulled to a stop behind her.

“Nice wheels,” she said, shaking hands.  Her name—I had to look it up—was Pam Huntington, and she turned out to be a gear head and spent ten minutes admiring my Beemer.  I even had to pop the hood for her.  Meanwhile, it was muggy enough outside to make a flagpole go limp.  She whistled when I told her the sticker price and then said, “Okay, let’s break into the house.”

At the front door, the officer bent down on one knee to slip her locksmithing tools into place.  “You’re ex-Secret Service, they tell me.  The one who took the bullet for President Cooper?”

“Yup.  End of one career, start of another.”  I shrugged the cartilage loose in my bad shoulder.

“I hear you’re doing alright.”  Officer Huntington used her straight pick to raise the lock’s tumbler pins, keeping the pins open with her tension tool.  “First thing I did,” she said, “while waiting on you, was peek through the garage door windows.  There’s a dark blue BMW sedan in there—cheaper model than yours, and earlier, late 90's—but another car’s missing, based on DMV records, not to mention the oil drops on the floor.”

“A black 2006 Ferrari Maranello F550.”

“Correct.”  She whistled again.  “Sweet machine.”

“You ring the doorbell a few times?”

She nodded.  “For ten minutes, on and off.  Got no answer.  Didn’t hear a thing inside the house either, or see anything.  The curtains are all drawn.  Upstairs too.”

“All of them?”

“All of them.”  A minute later, I heard a click announcing the door was unlocked.  She stood.  “You carrying?”

“No.”

“Stay here, then.  Let me clear it.”

With her gun holstered, Officer Huntington twisted open the front door and stepped inside, calling out, “Police!”

From the front steps, I felt air conditioning gush through the open doorway.  I heard Huntington announcing herself repeatedly from various parts of the house.  Soon she was back.

“All clear,” Officer Huntington said.

“No body, I guess?”

“Not out in the open, anyway.”

“What’s it like in there?”

“A little underfurnished, you ask me.  But no obvious sign of a struggle, or an accident.  C’mon, let’s take a closer look.”

The drawn curtains made the atmosphere inside dismal.  We threw them open and flicked lots of light switches as we moved counter-clockwise through the ground floor rooms.

The living room furniture was casual and contemporary, yet the space as a whole felt cold and austere.  There were too few pieces of furniture, too few pictures on the walls, and not a dust bunny in captivity.

“He just move in?” Huntington said.

“Company records say he’s lived here for two years.”

“Who is this guy, anyway?”

“Chief Technology Officer for Helms Technology.  Holds a doctorate from MIT in applied math and theoretical physics.  Does research in computer science and software engineering.”

“Nerd, huh?”

I shrugged.  In a framed photo on the mantelpiece, I recognized Jeremy.  By now I recollected meeting the missing man, once, the year before at Helms Technology.  Jeremy had consulted with me and my staff on a new, biometric iris reading device.

Jeremy was a short, round man with dark, Victorian era mutton chops and narrow eyeglasses of rectangular steel.  The woman seated beside him in the photograph, a redhead with sharp, bird-like features, had to be his ex-wife, Vanessa, for in Jeremy’s lap sat a chubby little girl in a puffy pink dress, surely their daughter, Pamela.  It’d been three plus years since the Cranes’ divorce decree, I’d learned, yet here stood this photo of the family intact.

The kitchen proved an abrupt change from the other rooms.  Neither austere, nor orderly, it was fully loaded with plates and silverware and cooking utensils and so on, and the contents of all the drawers had, strangely, been dumped onto the countertops.  Among the ladles and spoons and spatulas, I recognized several tools that only a cooking aficionado would purchase.  An apple corer, an egg piercer, a potato ricer.

“What’s this?” I said, holding up a black, J-shaped blade with ragged edges and a long handle.

“Corn grater,” she said, sifting nearby.  “Hardcore toys we’ve got here.  Bet this guy beats off to Julia Child re-runs.”

“What’s all this stuff doing on the countertops?”

“He seems meticulous.  Maybe he was doing inventory.”

“When he was suddenly called away?”

She shrugged.  “Maybe.”

Just inside the walk-in food pantry, I found hanging on a wall hook a set of keys with BMW auto insignia.  I snatched them.

A side door led from the kitchen into the garage.  “Without a warrant,” Huntington said, “we can only search the trunk.”

I nodded.  “Where his body might fit.”

The trunk turned up empty.  We turned to the garage itself, which was clean and uncluttered.  Not a storage box in sight.

In a back corner was a strange piece of machinery resting on two sawhorses.  Its length and width matched the bed of a small pick-up truck.  A conveyor belt ran down the middle, and in the center was a boxy steel chamber with a hazardous materials warning label on the side.  Etched into the steel was the name of the machine: the JS1960 Food Irradiator.  There was a dial to control temperature and another to control levels of—.

“Gamma radiation!” said Huntington, reading along with me.  “What the hell is this?”

“He must put his groceries in there, to kill the bacteria that spoils food prematurely, or makes you sick.  Like E-Coli.”

“May need a license for that.  I’ll have to look this up.”

“Never heard of an individual owning one of these before.”

“What do they cost?” she said.

“Don’t know.  But more than his Ferrari, I’d wager.”

We found Jeremy’s combination fax/telephone/answering machine on a small oak table in the den, beside his Lazyboy recliner.  Six new messages awaited him.  The most recent message was from me, asking him to call my cell phone number as soon as he got home.  The other five were all “Where are you?” calls from various members of Helms Technology, including one from John Helms himself.  They all had problems for Jeremy to solve.

Four old phone messages were stored in the machine’s memory.  One was from Jeremy’s ex-wife, I guessed, informing Jeremy in a bitchy way that he’d forgotten his daughter’s birthday.  Two other calls were from electronic-voiced phone solicitors, selling what—I don't remember.  The last call was anybody’s guess.

“What are you waiting for, Jeremy?” said an unidentified caller, a male with a tinny, accusing voice.  “You know what has to happen.  Do it!  Just do it!  Get it over with!”  Click.

“Could be something there,” Huntington said.  “Play it again.”  This time, she transcribed the call in her notepad.

Upstairs, we found Jeremy’s home office.  We were both staring at a white flat-screen computer monitor when Huntington said, “Can't.  Need a warrant first.”  On the desktop by the monitor sat a little tin full of gray pumice stones.  “Look at those,” she said, pointing.  “That’s kind of queer.”

“Not at all.  Computer jocks spend so much time at their keyboards, they get calluses on their fingertips, which slows up their keying, so they use pumice to sand them down.”

Inside the master bedroom, I told the officer I had to use the toilet.  But my true purpose was to peek inside Jeremy’s medicine cabinet without waiting for the cops to obtain a warrant.  Any health problems, I was thinking, might help explain Jeremy’s sudden disappearance.  Quietly, I opened the mirrored door to Jeremy’s medicine cabinet.  There was a stack of Nexium pill packages, which meant that Jeremy had a stomach problem, acid reflux, and I thought maybe a weak stomach had spurred his interest in cooking and food irradiation.

I picked up a medium-size bottle of tablets.  It was prescription medicine called Olanzapine.  I knew that to be the brand name for the drug, Zxprexa, and I knew all about the drug’s medical uses, and this knowledge left me feeling suspicious and uneasy all evening and once again questioning my own sanity.

I had dinner that night at Sally Anne Bilchik’s former place of employment, Treviso’s Italian restaurant in Georgetown.  I arrived to find Keisha Fallon waiting for me in a secluded booth near the back wall.  She was nibbling at a plate of antipasto and drinking from a carafe of rosé.  The alcohol meant that Keisha had completed her interviews with Sally Anne’s co-workers.

The interviews were standard procedure.  I studied the disturbed individuals who threatened my clients.  Over the years, I’d collected thousands of their written letters, the contents of their mailed packages, photographs and videos of their various crimes and obsessions, and records of the bizarre things they’d said or done.  It was all shipped to a warehouse in Rockville, Maryland, sorted in file cabinets, put on display shelves, hung on the walls, and analyzed.  I’d taken Sarah there one day.  She’d suggested I rent the space out for Halloween parties.

I ordered the meat lasagna, as I recall.  After Keisha ordered and the waiter left, I summarized my search for Jeremy Crane, finishing with the medicine cabinet’s contents.

“The drug I found is used to treat a range of psychotic mental disorders, so we can’t be sure that Jeremy is schizophrenic, but most people who take Olanzapine are.”

Keisha nibbled on a breadstick.  “Strange coincidence, huh?  First Sally, now Jeremy.”  She didn’t know about me, of course, or the possibility a man with a feverish mind had beheld nothing more in Jeremy Crane’s medicine cabinet than a bottle of aspirin.

“It’s nothing, Keisha.  One in every hundred people is schizophrenic.  That’s a lot, if you think about it.  If you live in a city, you pass by them every day, on the street, though you probably don’t know it.  If you work for a large company, you’ll have co-workers who are schizophrenic.  Take a crowded commercial jetliner, there will be schizophrenics aboard.  Take a train, or a subway, and every second or third time, at least, you’re sharing the compartment with a schizophrenic.”

“Guess you’re right,” she said, toothpicking an olive.

“Of course I am.  But it doesn’t matter.  Anytime some coincidence twists my intestines into balloon animals, I’ve got to check into it.  Tomorrow, I’m going to see Sally Anne Bilchik.  Now tell me what you’ve just learned about her.”

Chapter 7

That evening, on my drive home, I obsessed over my new habit of confronting fellow schizophrenics.  Again, I tried telling myself it was all merely coincidence.  But I couldn’t help considering whether I’d slipped free of my sanity altogether, whether in fact I’d been committed to some mental institution some time ago, my plight, my world, nothing but unbroken delirium, a waking dream.  It wasn’t until I arrived home and kissed Sarah and swept Ellie up into my arms and felt Duke’s jealous paw scratching my crotch that I was cured of such morbid thinking.

The next morning, I phoned a staff physician at the District of Columbia’s Maximum-Security Psychiatric Unit, who informed me that Sally Anne Bilchik was in no condition to receive visitors, and wouldn’t be for another day or two.

By early afternoon I was in Charlottesville, my hometown.  Normally, I would fly out there twice a month to visit my mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.  The city is also where my psychiatrist back then was located.  An out-of-town shrink was an added—yes, paranoid—precaution for keeping my illness a secret.

“Got a little broth in my beard,” Doctor Shields said to me faster than most people could think it.  The man’s words always went off like a string of Chinese firecrackers.  “Just had soup at my desk for lunch, Campbells chicken vegetable, have a seat, I’ll be right back, you look good, have a mint.”

I knew that nerdism wasn’t a clinical term for the doctor’s own condition.  I wondered what was—and whether Shields knew he suffered from it—as I sank into one end of an over-stuffed sofa, beside his cherrywood rocking chair.

The office didn’t fit the man.  It was more like his grandmother’s parlor, all potted plants and flowers in vases.  Embroidered artwork hung on the walls.  Ceramic knick-knacks of cute animals, including penguins and bear cubs, populated the window sills.  The window curtains, thick as tapestry, sported daffodils and tassels.  The smell of potpourri was strong.

The doc, I’d decided, had read in some scholarly journal that such an environment put people at ease.  Maybe it did, but it also made me hungry for milk and cookies.  I thought I might even sew a stitch, given a pair of needles and some yarn.

“Now,” he said, returning, wiping his chin with a paper towel, taking his seat.  “What’s the emergency?  Why is it I had to see you right away?  Something about a naked stewardess?”

“They’re called, ‘flight attendants’ now.”

“Oh, yes, quite right.”  He put his rocking chair in motion.  He rocked as fast as he talked.

I began telling him about the plane flight, moment by moment.  Doctor Shields listened intently and with a steady curtain fire of nods.  He was dressed in a tan linen suit, but it wasn’t custom fitted.  The collar was too big.  His scrawny neck looked as thin as a well-sucked candy cane.  I kept wishing the doctor would stop tapping his teeth with his fingernail.

“Unusual,” he said when I was through.  “Highly unusual.”  Tap, tap, tap.  “That episode should’ve been preceded by milder symptoms—yes, yes, yes—especially given your personal history with schizophrenia.  Tell me, are you hearing any voices?”

“I hear yours.  And mine.”

“No strange or unidentified voices inside your head?”

“No.”

“No voices coming from unusual places?  Your toaster, for example?  Or your microwave oven?”

“No, in fact, all my household appliances have been mum.  And, don’t bother asking, I’m not getting any telepathic messages either.  Just the usual phone calls, faxes, letters, and email.”

“Besides the naked stewardess, ur, flight attendant, has anything else fantastic happened to you recently?  Meet a ghost?  Uncover a plot to assassinate the president?”

I flashed back to the boardwalk outside my office, only one day before.  No ghosts, I told myself, just some farmer.

“You’re hesitating,” Dr. Shields said.

“Just thinking.  Something else fantastic?  Well, last week, my scratch and play card at McDonalds won me a free soda.”

Doctor Shields reared his head back and laughed.  “Argh, argh, argh, argh, argh.”  With the slightest spark of mirth, the doctor’s top front teeth would jut out, quivering like a beaver’s.  Yet he’d turn serious in a flash.  “So what you’re telling me is it’s just this naked flight attendant . . . ”

“That’s right.”  It was the only thing I felt certain had been truly out-of-this-world.

With a quick nod, he said, “First thing we’ll do is take a CAT-scan of your brain—yes, yes—hoping to rule out all the organic brain syndromes which might cause sudden visual hallucinations.”

“Yes, let’s,” I said, my pulse spiking at a fresh worry.

“And we’ll up your daily Risperdal dosage by two milligrams.”

“I’ll need a new prescription.  The pills I have now—”

“Are five milligrams each, I know.”  Tap, tap, tap on the teeth.  “Argus, I want you to go back into psychotherapy, as a precaution, I have someone in mind for you.”

I started shaking my head before the doctor finished.  “I don’t have time for that.  I never got a lot out of it, anyway.”

“No time, no time, no time.  Hmm, hmm, hmm.”  The doctor’s hands and fingers formed a church steeple that he soon lodged under his chin.  “We haven’t discussed your workload in quite awhile.  How’s business?”

“Booming,” I said.

“Longer hours than usual?”

“I’m not stressed out, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“How many hours a week?”

“I never count.”

“Try.”

“Okay, let’s see . . . twelve hours a day times five days a week is what, sixty?  Plus another four hours or so on Saturdays, let's say, on average.  So the answer's sixty-four, I guess.”

Doctor Shields stopped rocking.  “Listen to me carefully, Argus, carefully.  On the one hand, I’m damn proud of you.  To say that you’re a high functioning paranoid schizophrenic would almost be an understatement.  You haven’t suffered a major relapse in two decades, and—”

“Twenty-two years.”

“Yes, yes, precisely so, and in the meantime, you’ve built a successful career, and a lasting marriage—finally, on your third try—and started your own family, but on the other hand, I’m very worried about you, very worried.  I’m sure you’re aware—I’m sure you are—that there’s something in the nature of schizophrenia making it easy for those who suffer from it to periodically deny they have the disease.”

“So I’ve heard, but—”

“Yes, yes, many schizophrenics come to believe they’re cured, or believe they never really had a problem to begin with, and they go off their medication.”

“But I’ve never gone off mine, Doctor, not ever.”

“True, I suppose, but in your case, there appears to be a related type of denial in play, you seem to think that by taking your meds each morning you become a normal person for the day’s remainder.  The truth is, Argus, that stress is particularly dangerous to a paranoid schizophrenic—Oh, yes, yes, yes!—and whether you take your pills or not, stress can lead to a relapse.  So I would take this airplane incident as a warning signal—Yes, indeed!—a warning that you’re taking on far too much, grinding too hard, you’ve got to cut back, cut back, ease up, ease up.”

“I’ll consider it.”

“You’ll do it.”  Doctor Shields began rocking again.  “And you’ll make time for psychotherapy to boot, I’ve an excellent clinical psychologist in mind for you, her name is Miranda Meade and she’s located in DC, so that’ll be convenient—”

“I can’t right now.”

Again, Doctor Shields put a halt to his rocking.  He rubbed the bridge of his long nose with a thumb and forefinger, as if to relieve pain.  “Can’t,” he repeated.

“I just can’t.  I’ve got too much on my plate.  Maybe in another three or four months.”

“Need I remind you that what you build in this life, personally or professionally, is in the end little more than a house of cards?  It can all come crashing down on a moment’s notice.  You can do everything right—cut back on work, take your pills, do your psychotherapy—and still it can all come crashing down.  And it wouldn’t be all that unusual—even after all this time, after all the success you’ve enjoyed these past twenty odd years—for the disease to grow stronger than you and me put together, Argus, you and me put together.”

On the plane ride back to DC, I decided that my Doctor Shields had that God complex so many doctors have, physicians of every stripe.  That's why, I told myself, he hadn’t listened to me when I’d insisted that my work was not a problem.  How could it be when I love my work?  Sometimes the patient knows best, after all.  Don’t they teach that in medical school?

My plane was a fifteen seater, one of those tiny twin engines that are closer kin to birds than to commercial jets.  The ride was bumpy, but at least the flight attendant kept her clothes on.  I recognized my seatmate, who I knew only as a fellow frequent passenger between Charlottesville and Washington.

He was about fifty, his salt and pepper hair still heavy on the pepper, and quite hawk-nosed—at least if some hawks drink enough alcohol to forge rivers of red capillaries on their beaks.  He always dressed in a business suit, often pin-striped, as on this particular day.  He preferred sports chit-chat, or else no chit-chat, depending on his mood, and he often smelled of cigars, fine cigars, I imagined, for my own nose wasn’t trained to make such discretions.

“We see each other all the time,” I said to him.  “What is your name, anyway?”

The man gave me a startled look.  “Ned,” he said, with some reluctance.  “Ned Pelletier.  Yours?”

“Argus Ward.”

“Indeed.”  Ned’s gaze returned to his newspaper.  “Reading about the Orioles.  Pathetic, aren’t they?”

“Indeed,” I said.

The sky was turning purple, the plane skimming atop dark clouds.  I shut my eyes and damned Doctor Shields all to hell.  Cutting back my work schedule seemed unthinkable at the time, for I suffered under the delusion—common among non-paranoids too—that my every contribution was indispensable as well as irreplaceable.

When the plane had begun its descent, I broke an airline rule by turning my cell phone back on.  I was expecting a call, not from anyone in particular, but simply because my phone was always ringing.  After a most unsettling visit with Doctor Shields, Argus Ward was more than ready to lose himself in the familiar problems of Argus Ward, Incorporated.  I picked up on the phone’s first ring.

“You’ve got Argus,” I said.  But there was only silence on the other end of the line.  “Hello?  Anybody there?”

“Argus,” said a man’s voice, an old man’s.  “Argus, this is your . . . this is your father speaking.”

“Who?”

“Your father.  It’s good to hear your voice, son.”

I suddenly couldn’t speak.  But I could see that farmer on the boardwalk again.  I tried to recall ancient memories of my father’s voice.  Yet couldn’t.

“Is this a joke?” I said at last.

“No, son, this is no joke.  You have to be warned.”

“Warned?  About what?”

“John Helms plans to kill you.  You must kill him first.”

“This is a joke,” I said.  “And not a very good one.  Who is this?  Danny?  Chris?  Nate?  I give up, who?”

“Listen to me, son,” said the caller.  My father?  “Kill John Helms.”  Then he hung up.

“ ‘Kill John Helms,’ ” I repeated stupidly.

Beside me, the man I now knew as Ned Pelletier gave me another startled look.

Chapter 8

My plane, which I now half-suspected flew through airspace in the Twilight Zone, touched down in Washington late in the afternoon.  Motoring past the airport terminal, I picked up the car phone to call my wife.  I was thinking, as the phone rang, that the lie I was about to tell her would be for her own good.

“It’s me,” I said when she answered.

“How’d it go with Doctor Shields?”

I coughed.  “Fine.  I’ll tell you more when I see you.  But I’m not sure when that will be.”

“What is it this time?”

“I, uh, got an unexpected call.  From the actor, Jack Nicholson.  He’s here in DC, about to testify before Congress tomorrow on digital piracy, and he wants to discuss coming aboard as a client.  We agreed to have dinner at the Jockey Club.”

“Jack!” she said.  “Wow!”

“I don’t know how late I’ll be.”

“Oh, sign him up, honey, sign him up!  I want to meet him!”

As I hung up, Sarah was doing both speaking parts in that scene of Jack’s with Faye Dunaway near the end of the movie, Chinatown.  “My sister!  My daughter!”  Slapping herself silly.

Instead of turning north toward my home in Georgetown, I headed south on the George Washington Parkway.  I didn’t know where to go, only where not to go.  Some instinct soon drove me toward Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, and then toward Randolph House, an 18th century brick colonial mansion, long ago converted into a small, exquisite hotel.  I’d stayed there years before.  The first time I'd ever slept with Sarah had been in a canopied mahogany four-poster bed in the Betsy Ross Room at Randolph House.  My ending up there that day, I recognize now, was my way of being with Sarah when I couldn’t be.

As I stood at the front desk, checking in, it’d been seven or eight years since I’d stood there last, yet everything appeared just the same.  Authentic Federal period reproductions everywhere.  Big Baccarat crystal chandelier overhead.

The desk clerk, while making an imprint of my credit card, picked his nose.  I scowled, thinking the clerk should know better.  He’s not some college kid, some part-timer earning minimum wage at a fleabag highway motel, but a middle-aged man representing a four star hotel.  Representing Randolph House!

“Here you are, sir,” said the clerk, using his nose-picking hand to return my credit card.  The same hand slid a room key at me.  “The Betsy Ross Room, as requested.”

He slouches too, I noticed, taking the key, turning away.  I considered reporting the clerk to management, but blew it off and headed for the elevator.

I remained agitated.  More agitated than I had cause to be.  Even the muscles in my face felt twitchy.

“Why do I feel this way?” I asked myself aloud, and then quickly answered myself back.  “Because it’s time to adjust your medication, you dumb fuck!”

Yes, that was it, I tried telling myself, and that it meant good news too.  If I can blame all these strange happenings on my disease, it means that soon, now that I have a new prescription in hand, my life will return to normal.

Assuming the pills haven’t stopped working, as Doctor Shields has suggested might happen some day.  Assuming that a certain gnawing, gut feeling I have is wrong.  The feeling that I’m not the problem.  That someone is going to elaborate lengths to convince me I’m losing my mind.

Paranoid, Argus Ward!  Plain paranoid!

I laughed out loud at myself—even though by this time I was riding on the elevator with two other hotel guests.  The funniest thing of all was, I still believed my gut!

I didn’t have any luggage, so the first thing I did inside my room was kick off my stiff new Bruno Magli shoes.  Through room service, I ordered dinner—a rare tenderloin with bordelaise sauce, as I recall—and then I opened the mini-bar.  I’m not supposed to drink a lot at one time, because alcohol interacts with my anti-psychotic medication in funny—and not so funny—ways, so I focused on a row of tiny liquor bottles sitting atop the refrigerator.  One or two bottles, I decided, would be just right for me.  I grabbed the Kahlua bottle, gave it a hard twist open, and slugged down the contents in one or two gulps.

Then I threw open a window to let the stuffiness out.  My room overlooked the Potomac River and a fleet of yachts anchored near the boardwalk.  The wind was kicking up outside.  My skin tingled with wicked pleasure as I realized that not a soul in the world—not a soul I knew, anyway—knew of my own whereabouts.

An instant later, though, the tingle was gone.  Another thought had chased it away.  I was less than a thirty minute drive from my home in Georgetown, yet Sarah and Ellie and Duke might as well have been on planet Jupiter.

I turned from the window and stared inside the room.  That big mahogany four poster bed was draped in red and gold canopy, as always.  I thought, I can’t go home again until—or unless—I can trust myself.  Because what if I’m really losing it?

What if that disembodied Darth Vader-like voice I used to hear coming from the ceiling, or a drainpipe, suddenly returned?  Spouting all those dire—yet lavishly senseless—warnings it somehow sold me every time?

I wrenched my body to face the river once more.  I had to squint in the face of a sudden gust of wind.  My body shuddered, head to toe.  I couldn’t bear the thought of what I might do upon hearing that Darth Vader-like voice tell me Sarah’s cooking was poisoning me, slowly poisoning me.  Or that my four year-old was plotting to poke my eyes out with the kitchen scissors.

Tears seeped from my tightly closed eyelids.  Some cry struggled to come out, but I pressed it down inside me, pressed it down, pressed it down, grimacing from the strain.

“Don’t lose control!” I told myself.  “Don’t!  Figure out what’s going on.  And for God’s sake, figure out what to do!”

Chapter 9

On the Old Town boardwalk after dark I strolled alone along the waterfront, hands in my pockets, eyes at my feet, or following the lights aboard slow-moving ships on the Potomac River—all the while remembering my father.  The man’s behavior had always been erratic, even from a loving child’s point of view.

My father would disappear for days at a time.  And he’d usually return disheveled, reeking of body odor and booze, warning us that the communists were coming, or warning of other strange and fearful things.  One day he'd disappeared altogether.

It wasn’t until years later, after my own diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, that I finally understood him.  The disease had gripped my father too.  It'd seized me through him.

When a child’s parent has schizophrenia that child has a fifteen percent chance of suffering from the same disease.  Children who don’t have a schizophrenic parent have only a one percent chance.  And that disparity in odds was the main reason why I’d become a dad at a relatively old age.  It’d been a tough decision making Ellie.  And her sibling to be.

My father must be dead, I thought.  He surely must be dead by now.  Or institutionalized somewhere.

I felt ashamed that I hadn’t found out, one way or another, long ago, what had become of my old man.  I’d always been afraid of what I might find, afraid to learn what my own fate might be.

If my father is alive, I reasoned, then the old man just might’ve seen me on television, seen some old interview I did about the assassination attempt on President Cooper—the History Channel shows a documentary every year—and then, somehow, some way, he might’ve learned enough about me to make that phone call.

Perhaps.  But if my father is so addle-brained as to suggest that his son kill John Helms, then how did he manage to obtain my private cell phone number?

Given my own psychiatric history, and the remarkable week I’d been having, I knew it was far more likely that the phone call—and the warning I’d received—had originated in my own, sickening mind.  Yet I strained my cerebrum for alternative explanations.

Could some strange person—sane or insane—have made the call?  Claiming to be my long-lost father?

If sane, why?

If insane, why not?

I was still debating whether I’d really talked to my father—or a man claiming to be him—when a new idea panicked me.

Maybe it was someone else entirely who’d called me on that plane today—Wasn’t Keisha supposed to call?—and I’d simply imagined it to be my father, imagined the entire conversation!

My steps halted.  My chest heaved as if zapped by cardiac paddles.  I don’t know what’s real anymore!  And what’s not!

I’ve got to call Keisha!

I whipped out my cell phone, pushed her speed dial button, and listened to the ringing on the other end of the phone line, recalling for the first time in over two decades how tremendously exhausting it is to keep one’s grip on reality when it’s fast slipping away . . .

“Keisha,” I said when she answered.  “What’s new?”

“Argus!” she said.  “Say, Mister President and CEO, what’s the big idea turning your cell phone off?”

“Got a problem,” I said.  “It’s personal.”

“Called your house.  Jack Nicholson?”

“Never mind about that, Keisha.  Let me ask you a question.  Did we . . . this’ll sound strange, but did we talk on the phone earlier this evening?  About six PM?”

“What?  What kind of question is that?  No, we didn’t talk.  Or else I’d already have all my questions answered concerning the Bangkok trip.  I’ve got to do the staffing soon and—”

“Spare me, Keisha, spare me.  Like I said, I’ve got a personal problem.  I’m going to be . . . I'm going to be incommunicado for the rest of the week.”

“Rest of the week!”

“Maybe longer.”

“Argus, you can’t!  Not now!”

“Spread the word around.  Have Frannie reschedule my appointments.  I’ll try to be back in the office by Monday.”

“Hey, Argus,” she said after a long pause, her voice suddenly low and mellow.  “You okay?”

“I don’t know, Keisha.  I honestly don’t know.”

“You want to talk about it?  Over a drink?”

“Sorry, can’t.”

“You worry me, Argus.  You don’t sound like yourself.”

“Bye, Keisha.”  I hung up.

Moments later, I realized it could’ve been any one of a number of people who’d called me besides Keisha.  I really hadn’t learned a thing.  I started back toward my hotel room.

At the entrance to the lobby I halted briefly to allow a crowd of people in formal dress to pass by me on their way out.  One in this group, or at least straggling behind it, was a matronly, cigarette swinging lady in a gold evening gown, who whispered in my ear as she passed by.

“Don’t call Doctor Shields, honey, he’ll lock you up.”

I froze.  Then I swiveled around.  She was walking away as if she hadn’t said a thing to me.  “Ma’am!” I said.  “Ma’am!”

Her high heels came to a sudden stop.  She peered coldly over her shoulder.  “Do I know you?”

“I’ve never seen you before in my life.  But you whispered to me just now . . .”

“I did?”  Amused, she faced me.  “What did I say?”

“Something . . . something you couldn’t possibly have said.”

“Sounds like me, all right!”  She cackled a few times, like she was drowning in phlegm.  “But you’ve got me mixed up with someone else, honey.”  She winked, turned, and strode away.

I watched her go, puffing warped circles of smoke into the night air.  I saw her veer off from the large group, heading toward Mount Vernon Avenue alone.  The woman certainly showed a lot of bare back for a sixty year-old.

I found myself spurred by this strange encounter to proceed directly to the hotel piano bar.  On my way, I ran through the entire incident with that woman, from the beginning . . .

I didn’t mix her up with anyone else, did I?  No.  That voice!  I can still hear her throaty whisper in my ear.  “Don’t call Doctor Shields, honey, he’ll lock you up.”  How could she have said that to me?  How in the world?

I decided I must’ve misinterpreted some words.  Yeah, that’s it.  The ear can play tricks.  That woman, who’d seemed a little tipsy, come to think of it, had probably let something slip out in a whisper—something risqué, no doubt, something that, on second thought, she had not wished to repeat, especially not aloud.  And whatever it was, I’d heard it wrong.  I’d heard it all wrong.  The ear can play tricks.

Sitting down on a barstool near the piano, I recalled being in Shanghai, China on a business trip three years earlier and overhearing a short gentleman on a cell phone speaking loudly in Chinese.  I don’t know a word of that language, it all sounds like gibberish to me, but suddenly and inexplicably a string of his Chinese words struck my ear as English words.  I thought I heard the man say: “You have to see my hot ass!”

It’d been kind of difficult explaining to my Chinese hosts why I’d begun laughing so hard.  This I recollected with a new laugh as a barn door-size bartender approached to take my order.

“Scotch on the rocks,” I said.  “Twist of lemon.”

Then I drank.  In fact, I drank and drank.

“Okay, okay,” I said to the bartender some hours later.  “Maybe you’re right, maybe I’ve had . . . enough.”  The bartender was serious about cutting me off this time, anyway.  He had my bar tab in his hand.  I signed the Pope’s name to it.

He crossed it out, crossed himself, and insisted that I sign my own name and indicate my own room number.  I complied.

He left me.  I sucked on ice I’d swallowed from the bottom of my glass.  My tongue felt too big.  Felt like a damn beaver tail.  I thought if I kept sucking on the ice it would shrink back to normal size.

I knew it was getting late, but I wasn’t really tired.  Which was strange.  The medication I took made me extremely drowsy when I drank too much.  At least it usually did.  And, boy had I had too too much.  I checked my watch.

How the hell did it get to be almost midnight?  It’s almost midnight and I still didn’t know what to do about . . . me.

There was only one other customer left in the bar, and he’d been sneaking peeks at me, sneaking peeks every other minute or so.  Either that, I thought, or it’s just my imagination.

The man got up to leave.  He came by my stool on his way out, peeking at me again.  Then staring.

Absolutely staring!

I stared back.  The man was middle-aged, in his mid to late fifties.  He wore a dark gray flannel suit.  He was short—about five foot five or six—with a husky build and a large Roman nose.  A real honker.  Which was red now.

I heard a tapping noise, and when I’d located the source, thought to myself, Well, la-dee-dah, he’s got himself a fancy walking cane . . . Oh, oh, oh, that’s because he limps.

The man halted right in front of me, took a quick glance at the bartender, who was drying shot glasses over by the sink, then stared at me again.  Stared me right in the face.  Leaned in a little.  A little too much.  Violating my personal space.

“Save yourself,” he whispered.  “Kill John Helms.”

I could only whisper back.  “What did you say?”

“Kill John Helms,” he repeated.  Then he was off, his cane poking the wooden floor again, and I couldn’t believe I’d just heard that.  But this time I knew I had.  No tricks of the ear this time.  I knew—I absolutely knew!—what I’d heard.

I bolted off my stool.  I tapped the man on the shoulder from behind.  The man stopped.  I didn’t wait for him to turn, I spun him around until we were standing face to face.  I held the man by the lapels of his suit jacket.  Pulled him close.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Please, sir!” said the man.  “Let me go!”

“I heard what you said, mister.  I heard you loud and clear.  You told me to kill John Helms.”

“I did no such thing!  You’re drunk!”

“You’re lying!”

I reached around behind him, grabbing an ass cheek in each hand, searching for the man’s wallet.  It wasn’t back there.  I dipped a hand inside the man’s suit jacket.  Found it.  Snatched it.  Opened it.

“What do you think you’re doing!” said the man.  “Bartender!  Oh, Bartender!  Help me!”

I read aloud from a Maryland driver’s license.  “ ‘Bernard Alan Simpson.’ ”  The man’s attempts to retrieve the wallet I fended off with my forearm.  “ ‘15 Warfield Road, Columbia, Maryland.’ ”  I handed back the wallet.  “Never heard of you.  What are you doing down here in Alexandria, Virginia at this late hour, Bernard Alan Simpson?  It’s a good hour’s drive home.  Who sent you here to screw with my mind?”

Bernard was frightened, I realized, just as a hand clamped down on my right shoulder.  Hard.  Then it was my turn to be spun around.  I found myself staring at the bartender’s neck: a tree trunk with a black bow tie at its base.

“Alright, buddy, come along with me.”  The bartender gripped me roughly, just above the elbow, and jerked me toward the hotel’s elevator.  “Time to sleep this off, up in your room.”

“If only I could,” I said.  “If only I could.”

Chapter 10

“John Helms does not want me dead,” I said aloud, though alone in my hotel room.  “He’s been my client for—How many years now?—five years.  For more than five years now, he’s trusted me with his own life.  Literally.  We’ve golfed together, sailed together, dined together.  We exchange Christmas cards.  He’s not my enemy, and I’m not his.  There can be no denying that.”

Or could there be?  It was as if a second voice living inside me and normally silent had spoken up.  Or could there be?

“Okay,” I said, pacing my room, “Let’s say John Helms is trying to kill me.  Let’s just say that.  As a thought experiment.  Anything’s possible, right?  Right.  And if he truly does want to kill me—murder me, ice me, end me, erase me—then I guess it could happen anywhere, at anytime . . . Why, it could happen at this very moment, right here in my hotel room, at—What does my watch say?—four in the morning.  That’s a good time to assassinate someone, actually.  Target would be asleep.”

Only I wasn’t asleep.  There were too many thoughts racing circles in my head for that.  I noticed all the little empty liquor bottles I’d strewn all over the carpet.  Bailey’s Irish Cream, Frangelica, Tia Maria, Kahlua, Grand Marnier.  They formed some kind of a pattern, the way they were scattered, but I wasn’t sure what the pattern was supposed to be, maybe a constellation from some far off galaxy . . .

“Maybe I can’t sleep for a reason,” I reasoned.  “A good reason.  Maybe there’s a damn good reason for everything that’s been happening to me.  There usually is, after all . . .

“And maybe the strangers who keep giving me warnings about John Helms don’t know they are—they’re being controlled somehow, by some force.  The same force keeping me awake.  Maybe someone is tinkering with people’s brains . . .

“Yeah, could be.  Microwave technology’s a possibility.  Big advancements lately.  Pentagon’s working on that, I’m fairly sure.  But who would use microwaves to protect me?  The Pentagon?  And why doesn’t the Pentagon—or whoever it is—just turn the machine on John Helms and make him not want to kill me?”

Back and forth I paced on the carpet, now and then kicking the tiny liquor bottles inadvertently.  “Maybe the microwaves don’t work on John Helms.  Because he isn’t human.  Have you ever thought of that, Argus?  Maybe John’s some kind of bio-mechanical android.  From the future . . .

“That would explain how John got so rich.  He could’ve landed his spaceship one day, found a nickel on the street the next, and made his first million overnight, knowing the future and all.  To start with, he could flip that coin and predict heads or tails correctly every time.  Scam people real good with that one . . .

“What am I thinking?” I said.  “Android?  From the future?  That’s ridiculous!  Ridiculous!  Get real, Argus, get real . . .”

I went into the bathroom, wet a hand towel with cold water, and washed my face with it.  I felt like I was burning up.

“Middle of the night’s a good time to kill someone, alright.  That’s not ridiculous!  No, sir!  Hard to argue with that!”

I tossed my wet towel on the floor, left the bathroom, and resumed my pacing at near frenetic speed.  “And who’s to say I’m not being kept awake for a reason?  I’m never up like this.  I’m usually out cold before Letterman sits down.  Better keep an eye on the door.  Windows too.  Anyone can climb a ladder . . .”

I halted near the foot of the bed and turned my trunk in different directions, searching for a makeshift weapon.  But I couldn’t seem to find anything.

“What did they teach you at West Point, Argus?  You remember.  Best weapon in the world is the element of surprise!”

But how, I wondered, could I surprise them?  Them.  By them I meant whoever and however many John Helms sent to kill me.

I’d surprise them, alright.  First thing I’d do, I’d fix it so I could hear them coming.  I’d soak the carpet outside my door in the hallway.  Hell, I’d soak the hallway end to end, so I could hear their footsteps squishing a mile off.

“Better start the tub running,” I said to myself and dashed back inside the bathroom.

* * *

The hotel manager slid an itemized bill in front of me and said, “We had to estimate the damage to the carpet and hallway floor.  It’s a conservative estimate.  We’ll contact you with the final, adjusted figure as soon as possible.”

I raised the bill to my eyes and scanned it quickly.  The total charge for my overnight stay was: seven thousand four hundred thirty-nine dollars and forty-three cents.

I slipped my credit card from my wallet and gave it to the manager.  “Better safe than sorry.”

“I’m not sure I follow . . .”

He kept saying that, the manager did, every time I tried to explain something, anything, everything.

“Never mind,” I said.

I leaned against the front desk, resting upper body weight on my elbows, feeling weary.  I’d been up all night.

The hotel manager checked my ID before swiping the credit card through the scanner.  I watched his mustache twitching as he waited for authorization.  When it came, the manager had me sign my credit card slip with a pen.  I handed the pen back.

“Are we done?”

“I wish you wouldn’t leave just yet, Mister Ward.”

“Why not?”

“May I say, sir, you don’t appear well, and we have a physician on staff—”

“Physician?” I said.  “Doctor Shields?”

“No, sir, Doctor McClure.”

“He may know Doctor Shields.”  I snatched my receipt and rushed toward the exit.  I had to get out of there fast.

“Sir!  Mister Ward!  Wait!  Please wait!”

I ignored the hotel manager.  The man didn’t understand.  Doctor McClure could alert Doctor Shields to my whereabouts.  And Doctor Shields, I knew, was trying to lock me up.  Because I’d gotten the message the night before.  From that lady in the gold dress.  I couldn’t be locked up!  I’d be a sitting duck!

* * *

“How do you know he wants to kill you?” asked Darth Vader.  Or James Earl Jones.  Or whoever’s voice was coming through the air conditioning vent in my car.  “Tell me!  How do you know?”

“I guess I really don’t know for sure.  But people keep trying to convince me.”

“Why you?” said Darth.  “Why would John Helms bother with a little shit stain like you?”

“You’ve been gone awhile, pal,” I said.  “I’m a national hero now.  I saved the president’s life.  I own my own security consulting firm too.  And this car is a Beemer.”

“Shut up!” Darth said.  “Just shut up, and go find out the truth, you little shit stain!”

Some people can’t help living in the past, I thought, bitterly.  Some voices too.  But Darth was right about what I had to do.  So I turned off the George Washington Parkway at the Pentagon City exit and caught the 395 freeway toward Virginia.

Passing the Navy Annex, my engine began to sputter.  I didn’t know what was wrong until I looked down at my gauges.

“I’m out of gas!”

“He’s out of gas,” Darth said.

“I don’t believe this!  I never run out of gas!”

“He can’t believe it.  He never runs out of gas.”

“No, not that game!” I said to Darth.  “Please!”

“He’s begging not to play the game.”

“Stop with the fucking play-by-play!” I said, giving the dashboard a good bang.

“ ‘Stop with the fucking play-by-play!’ he says.  And he pounds his dashboard with great anger.”

* * *

We walked back to Pentagon City.  It was over half a mile, and so very hot, and soon I could see my nipples through my soaking white linen shirt.  Darth kept up the play-by-play the whole march.  He kept it up as I cooled off with a soda at a table inside the mall.  Once Darth got going, I remembered now, he’d keep it up for hours, days even.  He’d only stop if he found a distraction, a topic he found interesting.  It took me awhile, but I thought of one.

“We don’t tell him we’re coming,” I said.  “We just show up unannounced!”

“Why?” Darth said.

“Element of surprise.  Best weapon there is!”

“But how would this weapon work, precisely?”

Some little tike in a powder blue jumpsuit tottered near, trying to listen in on our conversation.  I gave him a loud roar.  The tike wobbled back over to his mother, bawling.  “How will it work?” I said to Darth.  “By watching his face.  The instant John sees me, he’ll give himself away, I just know it!”

“Hmm,” Darth said.  “Not bad.  Not bad.”

* * *

We rode the metro subway.  It was crowded.  I found a seat next to a student from Georgetown University.  Her Tee shirt announced so, anyway.  She was reading an Algebra book.

I wished she wasn’t so creamy white and delicate.  She made me think of things that didn’t exist, like Spring corn.

“He peeks at the student some more,” Darth said.  He was broadcasting from the ceiling now, one of his favorite spots.

I shut my eyes and dropped my chin to my chest, thinking, If I could just nod off for a minute or two, I’d be so happy.

“He’s trying to sleep,” Darth said.  I pretended to ignore him.  “He’s still trying to sleep.”  I gave up, opened my eyes.

Oh, how can I stand anymore of this?

“He wonders how he can stand anymore.”

“Stop reading my thoughts,” I said.  “It’s not polite.”

“Are you talking to me?” said the student.

“No.  Darth Vader.”

The student got off at the very next stop—in some kind of hurry, it seemed.  I tried to sleep again, but again had no luck.  Somehow, I missed my own stop.

“Why didn’t you warn me to get off?” I said to Darth.

But Darth didn’t answer.  Suddenly, he was gone.  He never announced his departures.

I got off one metro station late at the Courthouse station.  I took the escalator to the street, looking for a taxi.  Walking by a gift shop, I caught a young clerk behind the counter staring at me—just for a second or so, but I’d definitely caught him.

Was that clerk working for John Helms?  As a sentry, maybe?  Keeping an eye out for me?  Was that possible?

Of course, it was possible.  But what were the odds?  I scratched my head, pondering.  A moment later, I felt sure, though I couldn’t say why, that the odds were at least fifty-fifty.  The clerk was no more than high school age with short blond hair and a fresh, freckled face.  Kind of stupid-looking, really.  But that would be the perfect cover, wouldn’t it?

I decided I’d better throw the clerk off my scent.  Inside the gift shop, I grabbed an American flag tee shirt, then another one, different size.  I picked out three kitchen magnets.  One depicted the Jefferson Memorial, one the Lincoln Memorial, and one the Washington Monument.  I selected a coffee table book on the art exhibits of the National Gallery.

I snatched up a pair of red-trimmed white boxer shorts with the University of Maryland’s terrapin—or turtle—mascot on one side, and the words, Slow and Steady, on the other.  An ashtray.  A bottle opener.  A pen.  A painting.  Stationery.

“You must have a large family,” said the clerk at check-out.

“Yes,” I said.  “Yes, I do.  I’m from Minnesota.  We all have large families there.”

“Uh-huh.”  The clerk smacked his bubble gum.

“I’m just passing through, I’m not really even stopping in Washington.  In case you’re wondering.”

“Uh-huh.”

I left the store smiling.  I was just about sure the clerk had bought my story.

* * *

“Get this thing settled!” Darth said.  “Once and for all!”  He was inside one of the paper bags containing all the gifts I’d bought.  The bags were near me on the floor of the cab.

I rolled the windows in the back seat all the way down, letting the air swoosh in, so the cabbie couldn’t eavesdrop.  Not easily, anyway.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said to the middle bag.  “Why in the world would John Helms want to kill me?”

“He have any secrets you know about?” Darth said.

“Yes!” I cried.  “That’s it!  That’s it!  That’s it!  I know things!  I know some of his secrets!”

The cabbie’s eyes peeked at me through his rear view mirror.  I pretended that I’d only been singing—by starting to sing.

“Country roads!  Take me home!  To the place, I belongggg!  West Virginia!  Mountain momma . . .”

The cabbie stopped peeking at me in the middle of Barry Manilow’s I Write the Songs.  I stopped singing, slouched down in my seat, and whispered into the gift bag.  “That’s it, you know.  I know things.  I know who he’s trying to dump from his corporate board.  I know he hates the Japanese.  And I probably know more, if I think about it.”

“You stupid shit stain!  It’s a wonder you’re still alive!”

“You really think so?  I’ve always liked John.  I almost consider him a friend.”

“We’ll wait,” Darth said.  “We’ll wait and see what his reaction is when he sees you.  But now I have a strong feeling you’ll have to kill him.”

“You really think so?”

“Yes!”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Stop whining!” Darth said.  “You’re a West Point man!”

“Not exactly,” I said.  “They kicked me out.  Remember?  Because of you.”

“Point is you know how to kill with your bare hands!”

I studied my hands.  Flexed them.

* * *

Our cab zipped along Canal Road, north of Georgetown, atop the green palisades overlooking the Potomac River, then snaked through a shady suburb of upscale, eclectic homes before braking to a stop at the front gate to the Helms compound on Foxhall Road, near the old Nelson Rockefeller estate.  The security guard, a former green beret and one of my newer employees—What the hell was his name, anyway?—hopped out of the guard shack and came to a stop outside my window at the rear of the cab.

I rolled my window down.  “Here to see John."  The guard recognized me instantly.  His sports jacket wasn't buttoned as it should've been, to hide the shoulder holster.  The Helms compound was a fortress, but John didn’t want it appearing that way.

“Mr. Ward?” said the green beret.  “That you?”

“Button that jacket," I said, "then open the God damn gate.  But don’t announce me.  Surprise inspection.”

“Oh, oh.  Yes, sir, yes, sir.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” said the cabbie to the green beret.  “You work for this guy?”

He heaved his thumb toward me in the back seat.  I couldn’t understand why the cabbie was so incredulous.  The green beret seemed puzzled too, shrugging his shoulders once before trotting inside his shack to handle the gate.

The cabbie shook his head a few times as he slipped the taxi into first gear and hit the gas.  The cab laid its dirty rubber tires down upon block after block of the shiny white Carrara marble that formed the driveway, braking to a stop in front of the main house a half minute later.

“Don’t forget your bags,” said the cabbie, his engine idling as I stepped out of the vehicle.  I reached inside and took my belongings, wondering if Darth was gone or not.  The taxi cab pulled away fast, with a little screech of tires.

“Find him!” Darth said.  “Find John Helms!  Now!”

Chapter 11

“Promise to behave?” said the male orderly.  He was tall and broad-shouldered and well-muscled and young and yet he eyed me like a wild African lion.

Some lion, I thought.  I felt like asking who’d stuck the tranquilizer dart in my reincarnated ass.  It was a struggle merely to keep my eyelids at half mast and to say, “Restraint is allowed only if necessary, it’s the law.”  My words, dredged up from old memories, had sounded thick and slurred, but the orderly had understood, and been swayed, and was soon tussling with my leather restraints, freeing first my ankles, then my wrists.

The instant he was done, he stepped back smartly, which caused me to suspect that he’d been on duty whenever it was that they’d brought me in.  It was either that or else he’d simply heard the story.

I’ll bet it’s a doozie, I thought, smirking.  I stretched my limbs far and wide—not because I felt stiff—my body was, in fact, numb all over—but simply because I could.  I noticed that my skin had been chafed red at all four spots where I’d been bound.  Yep, I’ll bet that story’s a doozie.

Not that I was in any hurry to hear it.  The first thing to do was to come alive again.  I felt more like inorganic than organic matter, less a lion and more a large rock or a slab of timber.  That, I knew from experience, was what a potent cocktail of sedatives and anti-psychotics could do to a person.

“I want to sit up,” I said.  I wuh ztup.

With the bed control, the orderly very gradually raised me into a sitting up position.  Then he volunteered to fetch my lunch and, without an okay from me, rushed from the room.

The door to my private, windowless cell, probably known euphemistically as a ‘seclusion room,’ locked with a soft electronic buzz.  The orderly returned so incredibly fast with a plate of hot food that the only explanation possible was that I'd dozed off sitting up.  My molded plastic tray had turkey slices in gravy with mashed potatoes and a mix of peas and carrots.  Yet the steamy sight of food failed to stimulate my appetite, and my sense of smell was still too deadened to appreciate the aroma.

The orderly cajoled me into eating a bite of turkey, then departed.  I forked a hot glob of mashed potatoes into my mouth.

The next thing I knew, I was waking from slumber again, still sitting up in bed, with my mouth hanging open in mid chew.  The glob of mashed potatoes on my tongue had turned ice cold, and it tasted revolting.  I spit it out, onto my food tray, just as the orderly returned.

Behind the orderly came a graying Black woman in a maroon pant suit, the jacket splaying over a pair of pillow-size hips.  She had the detached air of someone who’d just happened to wander into the room.  Some doctors are like that.

“Hello,” she said.  “I’m Doctor Woods.  And your name is?”

“Argus Ward.”

She slipped on a pair of reading glasses she kept in her hair and checked her clipboard, as if to see if I really knew my own name.  It occurred to me that she couldn’t hang those glasses on a chain around her neck.  For safety reasons.

“I’m a security consultant,” I said for extra points.

“That’s right,” she said, raising her head.  “Tell me, Mister Ward, do you know where you are?”

“Not precisely,” I said.  “Does my wife?”

She consulted her clipboard again.  “Now just who is your wife, Mister Ward?”

“Sarah,” I said.

The doctor gave a nod at her clipboard, agreeing with me.  Then she dropped it to her side, resting it against one of her amply padded hips, and studied me with the same cold intensity my daughter reserves for ants.

“Yes,” Doctor Woods said, “your wife knows you’re here.  In the Maximum-Security Psychiatric Unit of the District of Columbia Correctional Complex.  Last night, the District police took you into custody and placed you under arrest.  The court remanded you here for the purpose of psychiatric assistance and evaluation.”

“Why was I arrested?”

“You’ve been charged with murder.”

I didn’t say anything, didn’t move, didn’t blink.  I felt more inorganic than ever.  Yet I was not without thoughts.  The most certain being that John Helms was dead.

Chapter 12

My old life was now gone, gone suddenly, and gone forever, any neutral observer had to conclude.  But I wasn’t neutral, and I didn’t believe it.  Not at first.  Who I’d been so recently and through so many years—my self-identity, I guess—seemed to remain a part of me, like an amputee’s phantom limb.  And so I doubted my own guilt in murder.  And so I mourned John Helms and not myself.  But this would all begin to change on the day I was cleared to receive visitors from beyond the psychiatric ward and Keisha Fallon happened to show up first.

She greeted me with an icy glare, which I appreciated.  She might’ve greeted me with one of those big, brave, fake smiles—the kind you give someone newly diagnosed with cancer.

“So do you know who I am?” she said, tight-jawed, insulting, the way she spoke to her staff when they'd fucked up.

“Yes, yes, the old Argus is back now.  I think.”

Keisha wore a black pant suit with a gold vest, which matched her purse.  I wore blue hospital pajamas and white paper slippers.  I felt ridiculous.

She hugged me, briefly, stiffly, her braided locks cutting the air with jasmine.  Standing so close together seemed to melt her a little.  She gave my face a slow inspection.  She has a tender side, but it’s not part of her own self-identity.

“Sorry about the jammies,” I said.  “They smell a little rank this late in the afternoon, don’t they?”

“Is it true?” she said.  “You’re a paranoid schizophrenic?”

“Yes, it’s true.”  With a gallant sweep of my hand, I invited her to join me at a little orange plastic table, a circular table surrounded by many others just like it in what was currently a crowded visitors room.  But Keisha didn't budge.

“How long have you known, Argus?  How long?”

“Not too long.  Roughly a quarter century.”

She shook her head.  “You self-centered ass.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I can see you’re hurt.  I should’ve shared that with you.”

“You should’ve shared that with your clients, don’t you think?  Or how about back in the day with President Cooper?”

I sighed.  “They would’ve canned me from the Service.”

“So?” she said doing that vertebrae-defying, Black female thing with her neck, which always makes me want to pop mine.

“Don’t you think I thought long and hard about that?  It wasn’t an easy decision.”

“They had a right to know.”

“And I had a right to privacy, I felt.”

“But this disease—”

“I had it under control.”

“Look around, Argus.  Tell me what you have under control.”

I heard my name spoken nearby, and I searched for the source, wincing from stab-like neck pain as I did so, the result of a minor injury—one of many—I’d sustained while being taken into custody.  I found four people seated at the table to my immediate left—three visitors, one inmate—all darting their eyes away from my direction.

“Apparently, I’ve made the headlines.”  I turned back to Keisha, wincing again.

“You’re hurt,” she said.  “You okay?”

“Yeah.  Except for my neck.  And my back.  And my right quadriceps, and my left ankle.  And both groin muscles.”

“Both groin muscles?”

“If you ever go berserk, Keisha, remember to stretch first.”

“I’ll make a note.  Why don’t we sit down.”

We sat, me lowering myself gingerly.  Two men in sharp business suits could be seen standing in the hallway, outside the entrance to the visitor’s room.

Are they watching me? I wondered.  Then I told myself to forget about the pair.  It was probably nothing, just a little residual paranoia on my part.

“So how are we handling this?” I said to Keisha.

“Handling what?”

“This!  The . . . incident.”

“What can we do, Argus?  Our clients are outraged.  We’ve lost a quarter—maybe a third of them—already, with the rest threatening to leave.”

“That . . . can’t be.”  I’d worked ten years to build that firm.  Now it was suddenly on the verge of collapse.

She topped my hand with her own.  “I didn’t come here as your employee, Argus.  I came here as your friend.”

I stared down at her slender, dark hand, into the cheap twinkle of her gaudy rings.  She was a sharp lady, and always honest with me, yet I refused to believe her news about my firm.  I’m hearing what a paranoid hears, I thought, I’m not well yet, best to ignore, best to ignore.  I changed the subject.  “I don’t remember doing it.”

“Killing him, you mean?”  I gave her a nod.  My eyes were tearing suddenly.  Keisha began to pat my hand.  “What exactly do you remember, Argus?”

“Seeing John Helms dead.  On the floor of his office.  His face—”  I shook my head from revulsion.  “Just a bloody pulp.”

“What else do you remember?”

“A good deal,” I said.  “Though that’s not as helpful as it sounds, Keisha.  It’s hard for me to distinguish between what really happened that day and my own, twisted interpretation of events.  But either way—in fact or fantasy—I don’t remember killing him.”

She sighed.  “I don’t know if I should be telling you this—”

“Tell me.  Everything you know.  Please.”

Keisha mulled over my request before saying, “There were two eyewitness.  To the assault, I mean.  Two of our own bodyguards.”

I was flabbergasted.  “You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!  Last time I checked, we both trusted our own peeps!”

I stared into the palms of my hands.  They seemed alien to me somehow, the flesh too lively and too red.  “I couldn’t have!  I just couldn’t have!”

My alien hands clenched my face in a death grip.  My shoulders quaked.  Keisha was patting me again, this time my head.  Slow moans soon turned to short, jabbing sobs.  I rocked in place.  I cried out.

“Easy, Argus, easy.”  Two orderlies approached our table, but Keisha waved them off.

“I never really believed,” I said.  “Until now.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I sprang from the table and paced, paced up and down between two rows of orange tables, the muscles in my body taut, burning, frenetic.  Meanwhile, Keisha stood, waiting close by our table, clutching her purse, watching me.  I went to her.

“Am I hearing you right, Keisha?  Or is it just another paranoid fantasy of mine?  Are you really suggesting to me that I killed John Helms?  Beyond doubt?  No doubt whatsoever?  Because there’s a pair of eyewitnesses?  Two reliable—”

“Yes,” she said, firmly.

I paced some more.  I paced, I paced, I paced.  I didn’t know what to think, what to believe . . .  And then, suddenly, it came to me.  Oh, yes.  Oh, yes.

I walked back to Keisha, still standing by our table.  “Do me a favor, Keisha.  Unbutton your vest.”

“Pardon?”

“Take off your vest, and then unbutton your blouse.”

“Why?”

“Just humor me, okay.”

“I don’t think so.”

I lunged at her and, in two quick motions, tore open her gold vest and then her white blouse.  Buttons ricocheted madly off the tile floor.  Keisha screamed.  She fought me.  I seized the straps of her flimsy black bra and yanked down hard.

Her vest, her blouse, her bra—it all fell waist-high, pinning her thin arms tightly against her sides.  Her big bronze tits popped free.

“Where is it?” I said, now patting down her waistline.

“Where is what!” she cried.

“You know.  The hidden microphone.  C’mon, where is it?”

“Hidden microphone?  Oh my God . . .”

The orderlies had me suddenly, and they were carting me off.  People cheered, sick people, I thought.

Keisha cupped her breasts and cried.  But she had it coming, I told myself.  The bitch had it coming.

“There is no eyewitness!” I shouted.  “Because I wasn’t the one who killed John Helms!  You know that!  But you want to trap me into a confession, don’t you, Keisha!  You’re working for the cops, you traitor!  Oh, yes!  That’s right!  I know!  Ha-ha!  I know!  You’re a traitor!  And I’ll get you, Keisha!  You hear me?  You conniving bitch!  I’ll get you for this!”

Chapter 13

My keepers isolated me again while my sanity solidified, for lack of a better term, while the gargoyles of my mind returned to their perches and stiffened back into stone.  Meanwhile, that false feeling I’d had that my old life hadn’t left me vanished.

The psychic birth of my new life proceeded, wracking and writhing me, mind and body, blurring my vision with tears, burning my tonsils with screams.  For in this new life, I’d killed a man.  An innocent man.  A man I’d been charged to protect.  I lost all interest in living.

But I won’t say more about that.  The rest stays between myself and God.  My story picks up again at the point where I decided I had to go on living, at least until I’d determined which would be better for my daughter, Ellie, and my unborn child: a father imprisoned for murder, or a father who’d taken his own life as a penance for murder.

“It’s a court-ordered psychiatric assessment,” Doctor Woods said to me one day as we sat on opposite sides of the metal desk in her office.  “It's to help the judge classify you as competent or incompetent to stand trial.”

“I understand,” I said.

“I’ll be asking you a series of questions.  Please answer thoughtfully and truthfully.”

“Uh-huh.”  I was in no mood for questions, of course, or anything but nothingness, empty, black and numb—a sedative-laced, dreamless sleep.

Doctor Woods locked eyes with me.  A tiny image of myself appeared in her pupils, and I felt her repulsion.  She said, “Do you know the difference between right and wrong?”

“No.”

“No?”  She scribbled on her clipboard.

“I know what I personally think is right and wrong, and I know what society officially thinks is right and wrong, but neither my notion nor society’s should be taken as the last word on the subject.  For example, many great philosophers throughout history have presented their own, sometimes radical, notions of right and wrong—Nietzsche, for example, or Kierkegaard—and today’s post modern philosophers would, I think, say that what is now considered right or wrong is the result of those in power exerting their will on the rest of us, and that, in fact, what is truly right or wrong is unknowable in absolute terms.”

The scowl on Doctor Woods reached into her retinas.  Clearly, I hadn’t forgotten how to jack with shrinks who ask condescending questions.  It’s like riding a bicycle.

A timid rap at the door broke a long silence.  “Enter!” Doctor Woods said.  A young Hispanic woman in a white lab coat and dark slacks appeared.

“The blood work you wanted,” she said to the doctor, handing off a computer print-out.  The woman departed.

“It’s your blood work,” Doctor Woods said, “from the night you arrived here.”  She scrutinized the results only briefly before looking up at me.  “Mister Ward, I thought you’d told me you’d been taking your Risperdal.”

“That’s right,” I said.  “Religiously.  Until the very day of . . . of the incident with John Helms.”

“There isn’t a trace of it in your system,” she said, shaking the print-out at me.  “You hadn’t been taking it.  Not at all.  Not for weeks at least.”

“That’s impossible!” I said, snatching the print-out from her hand to see for myself.  “Impossible!”

“Mister Ward,” she said.  “Do you know the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie?”

Chapter 14

“I’m sorry,” I said to Sarah.  An involuntary gulp forced me to pause.  “Sorry to put you—”  She hushed me, kissed me.  Her lips planted on my own felt life-giving, something like emotional CPR, and I felt too the psychic power granted me every so often—not by madness, but by deep and abiding intimacy—to read my wife’s thoughts.  I’d worried that she would see a stranger in me this day—a vile murderer, in fact—but she saw only the same old me, the man she loved, and who loved her, it mattered not what the future would bring, all worries cast aside for now. (Okay, that last part might've been my own wishful thinking.)

Our kissing continued.  People in the visitor’s room teased us with a chorus of “Wooo!” until we stopped.

We took adjacent seats on the bench at our round orange table.  We held hands and gazed at each other.  Sarah was dressing her age in a button down lavender blouse with a string of white pearls, her honey-blonde hair pulled back in a bun.  Somehow, the makeup merely highlighted the ebbing of her youth.  I could see new lines embedded in her pretty baby face, wrinkles that looked as if they’d been there for years, not days.  I thought, I could be Rip Van Psycho.  She could be about to tell me Ellie just graduated from Yale.  Instead, she said, “We’re going to get through this, Argus.”

“Of course we are.”  Suicide was a mad notion to me by now.  Ever since my blood test results.  Now I had the Prozac a mission in life provides—or the rankling desire for revenge.

We moved to another table to get closer to a television, perched high in a corner of the visitor’s room, and showing CNN’s live coverage of the funeral of John Helms.

John had been proud of his lengthy American roots, which traced back almost four centuries, so I wasn’t surprised that he’d elected to be buried near his family’s ancestral home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Among the famous mourners in attendance was the vice president of the United States, James Sinclair, standing in for the president, who, the broadcaster whispered, was overseas at an international summit meeting.  I caught glimpses of Sinclair’s Secret Service team, but didn’t recognize any of them.

I’d left the Service ten years earlier, and not many agents last a full decade on protection detail.  It’s the stress of being hyper-alert all day, listening to the constant flow of worry in your earpiece, eyes forever moving, scanning the high vantage points, sweeping endless faces in crowds, fretting about hands in pockets or the sight of a bulky overcoat on a mild autumn day.  It’s the unspoken fear of dying.

I estimated with my crowd-practiced eye that about two hundred guests were at the funeral.  Along with the vice president and other high-ranking government officials stood business titans from around the globe and scores of John’s relatives, friends, and employees.  The media came from all over too, quarantined in the distance behind a rope barrier, their cameras whirring, steady as the cicadas.  At the sight of the casket, I thanked God that I couldn’t remember my horrible deed, or the moments surrounding it, except in scrambled shards of bloody phantasmagoria.

Sarah squeezed my hand while I prayed for John’s forgiveness and for peace within his soul.  As the casket lowered into the ground, I couldn’t help but think, We’re all wealthier than John Helms now.  We all have breath.

I turned to Sarah.  I asked about Ellie, then the baby in her belly, then Duke, my mother, her parents in California.  Sarah’s reports weren’t comforting, yet no one was any worse than could be expected, we agreed, and so then I finally told her what I’d just been bursting to tell her.  “This is not my fault.”

“Course not,” Sarah said.  “It’s my fault as much as yours.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on now, Argus, we’ve been playing a game.  All these years.  A dangerous game.  No more games, huh?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re a sick man, Argus.  You always have been since I've known you.  You never would believe it, though, and I didn’t want to either.  I’m ashamed of how little I knew about your sickness until now.  I’ve been like . . . like co-dependent.”

“Who’ve you been talking to?”

“Doctor Shields, of course.  And now this Doctor Woods.”  Her eyes began wetting.  She dug in her purse for a Kleenex.

“Did Doctor Woods tell you about my blood test?”

“Oh, I had so many excuses, Argus, right from the start.  You were older, you were smarter—”

“Would you listen?”

“And it was your disease, after all, and you should know what you could do, I told myself.  And I could see what you’d already accomplished in your life.  I just buried my head in the sand.  Because I was so in love with you, man!  And I wanted a baby so bad and . . .”  Sarah cried into her Kleenex.

“My blood test,” I said.  “Do you know about my blood test?”

Sarah nodded, blew her nose.  “You stopped taking your pills weeks ago, Doctor Woods says.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“She says it’s a common thing with paranoid schizophrenics.”

“You don’t understand.”

“You had a relapse.  The crazy side of you took over, and crazy Argus didn’t think he had a problem anymore, so there was no need to take the pills.  Something like that.”

“But I was taking my pills!  I was!”

Surprise mixed with Sarah’s grief.  “Are you sure?”

She rarely saw me take my Risperdal pill in the mornings, I realized.  Weekdays, she and Ellie would awaken an hour after I did, just in time to see me off in their nightgowns.  And on weekends, my daughter and I would digest breakfast before Sarah ever stirred beneath her blankets.

“Absolutely sure,” I said.

“Every day?”

“Yes,” I said.  “Every day.”

“You’re really absolutely sure?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Shit fucking god damn son of a bitch sure?”

“Yes,” I said.  “That sure.”

“This isn’t the disease talking?”

“No,” I said.  “And there’s a way to prove it.”

After a brief look of confusion, Sarah gave me a nod.  At the same time, she whipped out a cell phone from her purse, the pink one with a dangling pair of dice-size, clear plastic squares—phone earrings, she calls them—that blink light whenever a call comes in and she has the ringer off, because she’s in a quiet restaurant somewhere.  Certainly not the library.

“I’ll call Darla,” she said, punching in a number.

“Who’s Darla?”

“Duh!” she said.  “The new housekeeper!  We need someone to check your pill bottle in the medicine cupboard, right?”

I could hear the telephone at our home in Georgetown start to ring.  “No, hang up.”

“Why?” she said, but hung up.

“You have to do this yourself.  Get in your car and go check the pill bottle yourself.  Now.  Please.”

“Why?”

“This is too important to trust to anyone else.”

“Oh, I get it,” Sarah said, nodding to herself.  “What you really mean is you can’t trust in anyone else.  You’re still a little paranoid.  Doctor Woods warned me about this.”

Then she laughed.  The woman has a husky, hearty laugh that, when aimed my way, makes me feel like I’ve just been caught trying on her panties.  Seeing my embarrassment, she said, “I’m not laughing at you, honey, honest.  I’m laughing at myself.  You really had me going there for awhile.”

“But Sarah,” I said, “don’t you see what this means?”

“Only too clearly.”

“We know it’s not the case that my pills stopped working, like Doctor Shields says might happen one day.  Because there wasn’t a trace of Risperdal in my system when they brought me in here.  Either I stopped taking my pills voluntarily—which flatly contradicts my own memory, and my own history—Flatly!—or I’ve been taking dummy pills!  Placebos!  Whatever you call them!”

“Dummy pills?” Sarah said.  “That looked just like your real pills, I suppose?”

“Yes!” I said.  “I think I’ve been set up!”

“But Argus, who on Earth—”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, but I do know we have a state-of-the-art security system protecting our home, which means the new housekeeper is our prime suspect.  She’d have the easiest opportunity of anyone to switch my real pills for the dummies.”

“What about Ellie?” Sarah said, smirking.  “Or Duke?  You know, you really can’t trust those Irish setters.”

“This is no laughing matter!”

“Relax, Argus,” Sarah said.  “You’re going to be okay.  Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Listen to me, Sarah!  Please!  You’ve got to listen to me!”

“I’m listening.”

“But you’re convinced I’m still paranoid!”

She nodded, smiling sweetly.

“Stupid little shit stain."  It was Darth whispering in my ear suddenly.  “Tell her just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“What?” Sarah said.

“N-n-nothing, never mind.”  At least Darth’s voice was growing weak and infrequent.

“How’s he doing?”  The question for my wife came from Keisha Fallon as she sat down at our table.  “I won’t bother to ask the man himself.”  Her sneering glance stabbed at my heart.

“Oh, Keisha!” I burst up out of my seat to hug her, but she put a traffic cop-type hand in my face, freezing me in a hunched, mid tackle position.

“No more touchy-feely from you, mister.”

“I’m sorry.  So sorry.  I—”

“Oh, Keisha!” Sarah said, rising, wrapping her arms around the other woman without meeting resistance.  “They told me what he did.  I’m so sorry.  So, so sorry.”  For a moment, the two women sneered at me together.  I dropped back down in my seat.

“He’s better now,” Sarah said, patting Keisha’s shoulder.

“He better be,” Keisha said, throwing me her coldest stare.

Sarah complimented Keisha on her outfit—embroidered blue jeans with a hot pink top that Sarah was correct in saying did go well with Keisha’s beautiful bronze skin.

“Why weren’t you at the funeral?” I asked my employee.

“Rebecca Helms fired us yesterday.”  Oops.  Ex-employee.

“Oh, Keisha!” Sarah said.  More hugging and patting and squeezing ensued, myself once more excluded.  “You poor thing!”

“Poor is right!” Keisha said.  “No job now, but I’ve still got all my bills.  House payment, car payment, food and gas, water and electricity.  And no man to help out.”

She turned teary-eyed.  Sarah too, in sympathy.  My wife turned to me.  “Argus you have to do something.”

“Oh!” Keisha said, sniffles mixing now with more sneers in my direction.  “Wish I’d never left the Service.  ‘Big future,’ the man said.  ‘Big money.’ Oh!”

“Argus,” Sarah said, “you have to find a place for Keisha.  Of all people.”

“If we have any accounts left,” I told her and turned to Keisha.  “What about Helms Technology?”

With a haughty head tilt and downcast eyes, Keisha said, “We still have the account.  For now.”

“Let me make some calls, and I’ll see if I can find you a place out there.  For now.”

“Thank you.”  Big sniffle.  “And by the way, we found their missing man for them, that Jeremy Crane . . .”

Keisha’s anger at me dissipated as she related her story.  Two nights before, the North Carolina state police had discovered Jeremy Crane’s black Ferrari Maranello, abandoned in a restaurant parking lot in Kitty Hawk.  They’d located him shortly after dawn the next morning, about five miles away, wandering an otherwise deserted beach on a slender peninsula no wider than a freeway.

“He was dehydrated,” Keisha continued, “disoriented, and wearing nothing but his pale ass birthday suit.  Not only that, but—get this—he'd shaven his head bald, he’d shaven off all his body hair, and he'd applied a shiny coat of silver metallic paint to his skin.  Every pore, head to toe.  Doctor says he might’ve asphyxiated himself if the beach sand hadn’t ground away the paint on the soles of his feet.”

Keisha produced a small photograph and held it up for my inspection.  It was a digital copy of Jeremy’s booking photo.  In it, he was still painted.  His bald, shimmery silver cranium was bulldog-like.  His rapt eyes glistened.  He saw terror.

I snorted at the image.  “So that’s Doctor Jeremy Crane.  What’s he charged with?”

“Just indecent exposure.”

“What the hell was he doing like that?”

“Don’t know yet,” Keisha said.  “He didn’t talk to the cops, they terrified him.  He shit in the backseat of their cruiser.”

“Has he been evaluated?”

“There’s a preliminary diagnosis, but it’s confidential.  Privacy issue, or something.”

I didn’t really need to hear the diagnosis after hearing of Jeremy Crane’s strange adventures.  I was now certain I hadn’t imagined that bottle of anti-psychotic medication in the man’s bathroom cupboard.  But I was still too unwell, as well as too obsessed by now with my own enormous personal and professional problems, to care much about yet another paranoid schizophrenic slipping out of orbit around John Helms.  It would be some time before I grasped the significance.

Chapter 15

“Diabolically clever,” Detective Mona Strecker said to me as soon as I’d finished telling her my dummy pill theory.  “Like something you see in the movies, or read in some shitty novel.”

She was the lead Homicide investigator on the John Helms murder case.  She’d come to my seclusion room—along with her partner, Gary Fellows—at my own insistence.  She hadn’t bothered to Mirandize me due to my patient status in the psychiatric ward.  Anything I had to say could easily be rendered inadmissible at my murder trial.

“Someone deliberately drove me insane,” I said, seated on the end of my bed in my jammies, gazing up at her as she stood by the steel door.  “Who, or why, I have no idea.  But I suspect this unknown enemy of mine succeeded beyond all expectations.  Because there wasn’t any way to predict that I’d become obsessed with John Helms the way I did and . . . and murder him.”

Her eyes widened with true interest for a change.  “Now just how did that obsession begin, Mister Ward?”

“I suppose the same way a hard day can inform your dreams later that night, Detective.  As my psychosis grew, an attempt was made on John’s life by a psychologically disturbed restaurant caterer.  Thoughts of John Helms and assassination attempts got all scrambled up in my own sickening mind, until I’d settled on the notion that John wanted to kill me, and that I might have to do him first, in self-defense.  Now, about my dummy pill theory, I want you to investigate.  Prove I’m right.”

“Are you sure you’re right, sir?”  Her syrupy voice whispered of the deep South.  Her blazer shouted, Big breasts!

“Don’t believe me then,” I said.  “Check the pills for yourself.  Run a lab test on them.  And run a background check on my prime suspect, the housemaid.  I’m not saying it’s definitely her.  It could be that someone broke into our townhouse when we were away.  We have a summer place near Annapolis we go to on weekends this time of year.  So check for signs of forced entry.  Tool marks around the windows or doors, or—”

“We know what signs to look for,” she said.

The first time that we’d met—according to her later testimony, not my own recollection—had been at the Helms compound, shortly after John’s murder, while I was sitting handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser wearing a bloody white dress shirt and taupe trousers I’d stained with my urine, crotch to knees, after being stun-gunned into submission.

“What’s the maid’s name?”  Gary Fellows was the junior partner by as much as a decade—age thirty-two or so.  He had fair skin, a reddish crew cut, and so many thick cords in his neck you could almost believe he'd been decapitated once and had taken precautions to prevent it from happening again.

“Dana," I said.  "Or Daphne.  I’m not sure.  Ask my wife.”

Detective Strecker stepped closer, hovering over me with a rigid stare.  My hands clasped together instinctively over my fly hole.  Her facial complexion was like that of so many women I’d met in law enforcement: weathered, lined, and leathery, long ruined by too much stress, too much decompensating with alcohol and coffee and tobacco, too many sudden jolts of adrenaline, and over-exposure to high levels of male testosterone.

“You sure you have a maid, Mister Ward?”

Our little meeting did not end well.  I got somewhat indignant at that point, I guess, and even more indignant when Detective Fellows whipped out another stun gun.

The orderlies burst in just about then and made him put it away.  The next day I finally passed one of those psychiatric assessments administered by Doctor Woods.  My reward seemed more like a punishment.

“ ‘You have the right to remain silent,’ ” said a uniformed officer from the DC Police, reading me my Miranda rights from a tiny yellow card while another officer cuffed me, hands in front.  “ ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.  You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning.  If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.’ ”

I said to the Miranda reader, “Must be hell for you, singing the national anthem.  Or do you have a card for that too?”

“Wise-ass,” the Miranda reader said, tucking his card away in a breast pocket.  “We have to read from the card, so your defense attorney can’t say you didn’t hear it right.”  He slung my charcoal gray suit jacket over the handcuffs to hide them.

The door to my seclusion room buzzed open.  The officers flanked me.  One gripped me by the elbow and nudged me forward.  We shared the elevator with an old black janitor and his dust broom.  He stared sideways at the officers, floor after floor, never taking his rheumy eyes off them, except to glance at me for about a millisecond.  Bad memories age better than Ray Charles records, I thought.  I tried to think about anything but jail.

“Hey, Missuh Ward?” said the officer to my left, not the Miranda reader, but the other one.  “You ’member me biny chance?  From befuh?”  His rural accent—rural North Carolina, maybe—was so thick that if he’d been the one reading me my Miranda warning off a little yellow card it wouldn’t have counted anyway.

I looked him up and down.  Raft, his name tag said.  Tall, broad-shouldered, and big-tummied.  His narrow-set, button green eyes belonged on a smaller man.  His dumb gaze fit perfectly.

“No,” I said.  “Don’t remember you.”

“Well ah shore ’member you,” he said.  His leather equipment belt squeaked and jangled as he laughed.  “From the fust time you come t’our jail.  Threeve our boys still on medical leave!  An use wearin’ flex cuffs!  Behind yo back!”

“Sorry,” I said after a short, deciphering delay.  “I wasn’t in my right mind.  I mistook you boys for Mormon missionaries.  Armed missionaries, who weren’t taking no for an answer.”

“Ah see,” Raft said, nodding thoughtfully.  “So thaz why use kep yellin’ out, ‘Thur’s only two testaments!  Thur’s only two, ah tell ya!’  Where the hell you learn a kick luck that, boy?”

“West Point,” I said.

“Wez Point,” he said.  “Sheeee-it.”

On the ground floor, we passed through a corridor of glass panes with a view of an outdoor courtyard.  The Miranda reader checked his reflection in the window glass, tilting his black cap just so.  I soon learned why.

Through the story-tall windows of the lobby, I saw a press mob milling on the steps outside.  The officers took me through the front doors—Had they never heard of a back alleyway?—and under the scorching afternoon sun.

Microphones sprouted above the heads of the mob like wheat in a field, swaying in the breeze.  Flashbulbs blinked like a storm of mutant fireflies with faulty circadian rhythms.  Shouts rang in my ears like one loud, incoherent voice.  I hadn’t seen a press mob this size since one of my Rock star clients got arraigned for bestiality with a rooster.  I felt shame—red hot, face flushing shame—though I didn’t know exactly why, and I felt the urge to cover my face with my suit jacket, but resisted.  Off and on, I could hear Officer Raft singing.  It was the Bad Boys theme song from that TV show, Cops.

“Why did you kill him?” shouted some wild-eyed, red-haired reporter, her mouth inches from my right ear.  It was a blessing that I couldn’t make out more of what was being said—because too much at once was being said—as I waded through the mob toward a police cruiser parked at the curb.

“Are you a murderer?” shouted a deep, stentorian male voice.

I couldn’t help but search for the owner of that voice—it reminded me too much of Darth Vader’s.  Not finding him anywhere, I considered the individual faces of the media.

How the hell, I wondered, do they manage to look rabid and bored at the same time?

“Do you have a statement?” shouted several voices nearly at once—or else the same voice over and over again rapidly.

I realized I didn’t know what to say to the world at large, but felt I ought to say something.  “John Helms was a great American,” I said into a microphone thrust in front of my face.  Deputy Raft opened one of the cruiser’s rear doors then pressed a meaty hand down on the top of my head, as if I didn’t really want to climb inside the vehicle.

The hell I didn’t!

On the ride to jail, I thought about what I’d said to the media . . .  No, I didn’t actually believe that John Helms had been a great American.  The scene had overwhelmed me.  I’d been caught up in the drama.

But I always had liked John—a bastard, yes, but a magnetic bastard, and charming when he chose to be.  I smiled remembering John . . . until I recalled the day he’d died . . . In my mentally diseased state, I’d placed magical significance on seeing John’s first reaction to my own surprise appearance.  His reaction would reveal to me whether John really meant to kill me.

But he’d been standing at the top of a staircase—and I at the very bottom—when we’d first encountered each other that fateful day.  I couldn’t read his initial reaction one way or another.  Then John had bounded down the stairs, greeting me with a smile, and offered his hand.  He asked me why I’d come.

I insisted on a private conversation, behind closed doors.  We had ours in John’s oak-paneled study.  He asked about the bags I carried—the ones filled with the touristy trinkets I’d bought at the gift shop near the metro station.

“They’re for you,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Well what do you know,” John said, pulling the items out of the bags one by one.  An ashtray, a bottle opener, an American flag Tee shirt, a Lincoln Memorial kitchen magnet, University of Maryland boxer shorts, and so on.  “The perfect gift for the man who has everything . . . worthless crap.”

That had been when John’s smile had disappeared, and he’d studied me intently, told me I looked odd, smelled odd, asked me what was wrong.  That was the moment Darth spoke up . . .

Officer Raft stayed with me through my booking procedure at the jail.  I remember the sound of my cell door clamoring shut behind me.  My cell mate I found to be a pale senior citizen with thinning silver hair and gold-rimmed eyeglasses.  The man sat on a slender cot, his back to the wall, hugging his two shins.

“Who are you?” I said.

“I’m Reverend Sam Rutherford.  But I’d prefer it if you’d just call me, ‘Sam.’ ”  Loose skin beneath his jaw quivered like a turkey’s neck as he spoke.

“You’re a minister?”

“Presbyterian.”

I fell onto my own cot against the opposite wall.  To my sore body, it felt like an oversized place mat.  “My name’s, ‘Argus.’  ‘Argus Ward.’ ”

“I know,” he said, "you put three deputies in the hospital.”

“I believe so.”

“They say you’re crazy.”

“From time to time.”

“They put us together on purpose.  They want you to beat me up.  The deputies, I mean.”

“Why?”

“Because they can’t get away with it themselves.”

I sat up.  “What are you in for, Reverend Sam?”

“Just ‘Sam,’ please.  I won’t be a reverend much longer anyway.  Now that they’ve turned the boys against me.”

My breath snagged on a sudden realization.  I felt a queasy stir in my stomach, and I thought, It’s not bad enough being trapped in this sewer, I have to be leashed to the king rat!

“Don’t talk to me,” I told the pedophile, my voice low and guttural.  “Don’t talk to me ever again.  Don’t step within arm’s length of my bunk, and when you shit, your ass better be hovering three inches above the toilet seat.  Otherwise, I promise you, I’ll make the deputies very happy.”

Hugging his shins all the tighter, Reverend Rat peeked over at an exposed, stainless steel toilet against the back wall of the cell, midway between our two bunks.  I dropped back down on my mattress, stretched out, and stared up at the cement ceiling.  Then I contemplated, not for the first time, who had destroyed my life—my flawed, but sweet and only half-completed little life.

I knew I wasn’t paranoid anymore when I eliminated all the silly suspicions that had crossed my mind back in the psychiatric ward and yet couldn’t come up with a single authentic candidate.

Chapter 16

“Ward!” said the deputy standing in front of the door to my cell as it slid open.  “Your liar’s here.”  That’s what it sounded like, anyway, but it only took a moment to realize the deputy was actually saying my lawyer, Harry Talbot, had arrived.

Harry was my personal attorney as well as a fellow member of the Washington Golf and Country Club.  His girth and lack of conditioning always left him wheezy out on the links, but his Duke-educated brain never ran out of oxygen.  He’d agreed to lead my search for a criminal defense team.  I stood and stretched.

I checked my appearance in the murky stainless steel mirror over the toilet, the one that couldn’t be broken into shards in case I ever felt like slitting my wrists or slicing a deputy or my cellmate, Reverend Sam, to ribbons.  The jailhouse shampoo had left my half-gray and half-brown hair the color of a used Brillo pad.  My orange jumpsuit was baggy, and my winter complexion wasn’t at all flattered by it.

I left the cell without glancing at my cellmate.  Reverend Sam hadn’t dared to speak since I’d first threatened him silent.

“This is the man I was telling you about,” Harry said after greeting me inside one of the meeting rooms for defense attorneys and their jailed clients.  He indicated a short, slight man with well-tamed waves of bright red hair, a mustache, and freckle-paved skin.  The pointy tips of a pair of cowboy boots poked out from the bottom of his off-white linen suit.  His left hand gripped a black leather briefcase.  His right he extended to me.

“Lester Cravey.  Call me ‘Les.’ ”

“The Texan,” I said, shaking hands.  Nearly everyone in DC is from someplace else.

“Born and raised,” Les said.  “Sorry you weren’t.”

“Because?”

“Just showing my Texas pride,” Les said with a wink.

Actually, Les didn’t strike me as very Texany.  His twang was barely noticeable.  His tie was standard K Street.  And how much barbecued brisket or five alarm chili could the man possibly eat with a build like a vegetarian marathon runner?

“Shall we?” Harry said, motioning toward the table in the center of the room.

We sat down, me on one side, the lawyers on the other—as if orange jumpsuits were contagious.  Through a glass pane, I could see a sheriff’s deputy with his back to the door, standing guard.

Over the phone the night before, I’d been told all about Les Cravey.  “You come highly recommended,” I said to him, “but—”

“But when buying a horse,” Les said, “always check the teeth yourself.”  He winked at me—for the second time already.  I have never liked men winking at me.  Women, sexy.  Men, squirrelly.

“What I was going to say,” I said, “is that, now that I’ve had time to reflect, I’ve decided I won’t be needing your brand of legal expertise after all.”

“Argus!” Harry said.  “What are you saying?  We’ve been over this.  You have no choice but to plead insanity.  You need Les.”

“I don’t see it that way anymore.  I just finished reading the insanity statute for myself.”

Harry sighed.  “I’ll remind you, the prosecution has overwhelming physical evidence against you, plus two of your own bodyguards for eyewitnesses.  Both decorated war veterans.  And—”

“Eyewitnesses?  That’s not true, not exactly.”

Harry sighed harder.  “The bodyguards agree they heard an altercation, burst into the room, and found you—a martial arts expert, by the way—standing over the twitching body of John Helms, spattered in the dying man’s blood.  John died a minute later of suffocation from a crushed larynx—the result of a single, expert blow—while you fought with your own guards, preventing them from conducting an emergency tracheotomy.  I repeat:  You have to plead insanity.  You need Les.”

“It’ll never work,” I said.  “Look what happened to that Christian mother from Houston who murdered her own children.  How sane was she?  But it didn’t matter in the end, hearing voices and seeing demons, and so on.  She still got life behind bars.”

Harry peered over the top of his skinny spectacles.  “At least . . . she avoided . . . the death penalty.”

“Some consolation prize.”

“You might do better than her,” Harry said.

I shook my head.  “I doubt it.  The legal definition of insanity in that statute is extremely narrow.  Hell, it’s worse than that.  It’s ignorant, it’s backward, it’s barbaric.”

“That’s correct,” Les said.  “That statute belongs in the nineteenth century, just like my lizard-skin boots.  But Harry’s right.  It’s all you’ve got.”  He didn’t wink.

I sighed.  “Let me ask you a question, Les.  Say I could prove that I wasn’t responsible for my own loss of sanity.  That someone had switched my meds with dummy pills—placebos identical to my own pills—and that’s why I lost my mind and went on to slay John Helms.  How would that change my situation?”

Les blinked, rather than winked.  “Well I . . .”

“Argus,” Harry said, “not that again.”

“Just answer my question,” I said.

“It wouldn’t change a thing,” Les said.  “Not at trial.  But at sentencing.  It would be considered a mitigating factor.  One that might reduce your sentence, that’s all.  That’s it.”

I remember leaning back in my chair at that moment, exhaling deeply, and thinking, I am totally fucked.  My next thought, very nearly, was that I had nothing left to lose.  In other words, I became very dangerous again.

Chapter 17

“No,” Sarah said to me through the smelly jailhouse phone I had pressed to my ear.  “I haven’t checked.  On second thought, I just don’t think it’s a good idea to feed your paranoia.  It’s for your own good, Argus.”

“You promised me,” I said.  “You promised.”

“But—”

“You promised!”

“Oh, alright!  Hold on.”

Because of what this meant if I were right—or if I were wrong—tiny rivulets of adrenalin coursed through my body as I waited.  Waited and wondered.  Is Doctor Woods right?  That I hadn’t been taking my pills?  And that my belief in dummy pills is only a sign of lingering sickness?  Residual paranoia?  Or, deeper still, a defense mechanism?  My way of refusing to believe myself capable of murder?  Or is it me who’s right after all?

Hell, I just know I’m right!

I could easily visualize myself counting the pills in the bathroom that day.  I was still in pretty good mental shape that day, clear-headed, not counting a few minutes up in the sky when I’d seen the flight attendant naked.  I could see the big pill bottle again, resting on the top shelf of my medicine cabinet.  It’d been half empty.  It’d felt half empty in my hand.  I’d poured the pills onto the counter top.  Counted carefully . . .

Fifty something pills.  I’d counted fifty-three pills, to be precise.  Yes, that was the number.  Which told me I hadn’t been skipping, I’d been taking my pills every day.

Every.  Damn.  Day.

My rib cage took a sudden, sharp poke.  I turned.

“You done or what?” said the man standing behind me, the shaggy jail inmate next in line for the phone.  My five allotted minutes weren’t nearly up yet.

“Hey, Fu Manchu,” I said, in reference to the man’s facial hair, “ask the deputies here if it’s a good idea to keep poking me.”  I turned my back to him.  Waited for Sarah . . .

If I’m right, I thought, and I will be—I will be!—I’ll have that half-bottle of pills tested.  They’ll turn out to be dummies.  They’d have to be.  Not a trace of Risperdal in my system, Doctor Woods said.  Not a trace.  Which means someone deliberately drove me crazy.  Can you believe it?  Someone’s trying to destroy me!

But who?  But who?

“Got it,” Sarah said.  “I’m holding the bottle in my hand.  It looks full.”

“What did you say?”

“The pill bottle,” Sarah said.  “It looks full to me.”

“That’s not possible,” I said.  “It should be half empty.”

“Here,” Sarah said, “I’ll open it up.”

“When you say full—”

“I mean full,” Sarah said.  “You might be able to squeeze three or four more pills in the bottle, tops.”

“No!  No!  No!” I said.  “That can’t be!”

“Honey, calm down.”

“She refilled it!” I said.  “She refilled the bottle!”

“Who?”

“What’s her name!”

“Darla?”

“Yes, Darla!” I said.  “And I’ll bet she put the real pills back in the bottle too.  If we tested them, it probably wouldn’t do any good.  But test them, we shall.  Just in case.  Maybe she left one of the dummies inside by accident.”

“Honey—”

“Sarah, lock those pills in the safe in my study.  Now!  And for God’s sake, fire that maid!  Understand?”

I waited for an answer . . . Didn’t get one.

“Did you hear me?  Sarah?”

“Argus,” she said.  “When are you going before the judge?”

“Tomorrow morning,” I said.  “Around 10:30.  Les is confident he can get me out on bail.  Harry doesn’t seem to share his confidence, though.”

“I hate to say this,” Sarah said.  “It really fuckin’ hurts to say this . . .”

“What’s the matter?” I said, thinking I might’ve heard her stifling a cry.

“If you make bail tomorrow, Argus . . .”  She was crying.  Her voice had turned all quavery too.

“Yes?” I said.

“If you make bail, I want you to f-f-find somewhere else to l-l-live for awhile.”

“Somewhere else to live?”

“I don’t think you’re ready to come home!”  Sarah let go with a loud wail.  Then another.

“Please, Sarah.”

“I don’t think it’s safe!  For Ellie and myself and the baby, I mean!  Not to mention Darla!  Or even Duke!”

Unable to speak, I listened to Sarah’s crying and sniffling for a long, long time . . . until I took another sharp poke in my ribs.  I turned.  Fu Manchu was glaring at me again.

“Get off the phone, asshole.”

My eyes swept the room.  One deputy in sight.  Thirty feet away.  With his back turned.

As fast and hard and sudden as I could, I swung my elbow at a particular spot near Fu Manchu’s left temple.  Fu crumpled to the floor, where he lay as I’d intended, still and insentient.

I glared at the inmate in line behind Fu Manchu, as if to say, “You’re next if you say a word.”

“I’m sorry, Argus!” Sarah said in my ear.  “I’m so sorry it has to be like this!”

At last I found my voice.  “Et tu, Sarah?  Et tu?”  I slammed the phone down in its receiver, stepped over the flesh heap on the floor, and walked away, not even caring as I realized that Sarah probably hadn’t caught my allusion.

I couldn’t go home no matter what happened in court the next day.  Now the whole world was a jail.

Chapter 18

My arraignment filled the courtroom’s gallery.  It felt strange being the focus of the crowd’s attention, rather than vice versa.  It felt unjust too.  Before the proceedings began, I had to fight an urge to stand up and shout to the courtroom that I’d been set up—deliberately driven mad.

Insanity expert Les Cravey represented me.  The key part of my arraignment happened near the end, when Les raised the subject of bail with the judge, Robert Smithers.

The district attorney, Millard T. Barnes—the T stands for Tenacious, he’ll say in front of the cameras, but it’s actually for Theobold—verbosely declared himself, as well as the District of Columbia, opposed to the idea.

Millard T. told the judge that if released, I’d pose an imminent danger to society because I was a paranoid schizophrenic who’d recently demonstrated an inability to take my anti-psychotic medication.  He presented to the judge a copy of my blood work from the psychiatric unit, along with a statement from Doctor Woods.

“My client,” Les said, “disputes the allegation.”

“On what grounds?” asked the judge.

“We’re, uh, currently investigating the possibility that his pills were somehow . . . rendered defective.”

Millard T.’s red-hued glare bypassed Les in favor of myself.  “Sounds like paranoid talk to me.  Have you stopped taking your pills again, Mister Ward?  Have you?”

“Mister Barnes,” said the judge.  “You’ll direct your comments to the bench.”

“Yes, your honor,” Millard T. said.

“Your honor,” Les said, “it’s well-established that most paranoid schizophrenics are not violent, whether they take their medication or not.  If it were otherwise—”

“Most!” Millard T. said.  “Most paranoid schizophrenics!  But the District has ample reason to believe Mister Ward an exception.  Furthermore . . .”  He searched his table top, locating a few sheets of paper stapled together, and waved them at Les.  “I have an article here, written by a Doctor Geoffrey Van Heusen, an eminent psychiatrist from Johns Hopkins University, arguing that when violent themes—Violent themes!—enter into the delusions of paranoid schizophrenics, they become very dangerous indeed!”

“Let me see that too,” said the judge.  Millard T. made another delivery to the bench, his arms and legs pumping with a strange, robotic grace, his big belly jiggling.  A gnat could ski jump off his tie.

“Your honor,” Les said.  “Is this really necessary?  For decades, my client amassed an unblemished record for being a peaceful and upstanding resident of the state of Virginia and the District of Columbia.  So clearly, when Mister Ward takes his medication, he poses no threat to society.  Why not release him, your honor, but require weekly blood tests?”

The judge lifted his bushy-browed eyes from the article he’d just been handed.  “Mister Barnes?”

“Too risky, your honor.  It’s beyond dispute, within the mainstream psychiatric profession, at least, that schizophrenics will often refuse to believe they are in fact schizophrenics, particularly during periods of relapse.  So we can hardly expect that Mister Ward, under his current condition, would abide by the terms suggested by defense counsel.  We must wonder whether he would even show up for his blood tests, much less remember to take his pills every day.  And therefore, we must conclude that releasing him back into the community would pose a great danger not only to himself, but to the rest of us.”

“Your honor,” Les said.  “The district attorney is clearly exaggerating the—”

“I’ve heard enough,” Judge Smithers said and cleared his throat.  “Mister Ward’s recent, documented failure to take any medication for his paranoid schizophrenia, when considered in light of the grave charge against him, makes my decision an easy one.  Request for bail is denied.  The court orders that the accused shall remain in the custody of the District Jail pending his trial for murder.”  Bang went the gavel.

I took apologies from Les and a peck on the cheek from my tearful, yet obviously relieved spouse, and soon I was flat on my back on my bunk in my cell, a stunned, open-mouthed, docked fish.  My cellmate, for the first time in days, dared to speak.

“I’m a good listener, Argus.  A trained listener, with loads of experience too.”

My eyes found Reverend Sam sitting bench-warmer style on his bunk, staring down at me.  “I told you never to speak with me, or else.  I won’t warn you again, Perv.”

“I’m not a monster,” Reverend Sam said.

“I’ll sure as hell make you look like one.”  Sitting up, swinging my feet to the floor, I found anger a splendid relief.

“I’m not even a hypocrite, like they all say.  I’ve failed my God, to be sure, but I’ve also served him with a true heart, served him often that way, and nothing can ever change that.”

I stood.  Rather than cower, the reverend stood with me, toe to toe.  But not to fight.  With his arms held limp at his sides, the reverend waited on his beating like a martyr, like the patron saint of all degenerates.  He smelled like sour oatmeal.

“I really don’t want to touch you,” I said.

“You’re not a monster either, Argus.  You’re just a man, whom God loves unconditionally, like any other.”

“Just a man,” I said.  “Not a monster.”

I’d always wanted to believe that.  Yet I’d never fully done so, despite what I’d tell myself, and the idea now had never seemed more like a delusion.

“And God loves you,” Reverend Sam said.

My bottom lip trembled.  Then more of me trembled, and I wept, and I fought weeping, my hands balling into fists.

I was a mere instant away from lashing out violently when, with pathetic gratitude, I accepted a hug from someone who buggered little boys.

Chapter 19

The next day, more desperate than ever for a single ally, now that I was stuck in jail, I phoned my psychiatrist, Doctor Shields, in Charlottesville, Virginia, planning to use up all of my daily-allotted minutes with him.

“Say you were trying to drive me insane, Doctor.  The first thing you’d do is interfere with my meds, isn’t that right?”

“Whoa, Argus, whoa now, whoa.”

“You could break into my home, if you had to, and switch my pills for look-alike placebos.”

“Placebos.  Oh, my soul!  Oh, oh, oh!”

“It would work, wouldn’t it?  I’d go insane, right?”

“What’s this all about, Argus?”

“Please, Doc, just answer the question.  They only give me five minutes a day on the phone in here.”

The doctor cleared his throat.  “Using layman’s terminology for ‘insane,’ it’s very likely, given time.  A few days, possibly.  More likely, weeks.  For some, it could be months, even a year.”

“That’s what happened to me, Doctor.  Someone switched my pills on me.  You’ve got to believe me!  You’ve got to help me!”

“I’m here to help, Argus.”  But like all the rest, he didn’t believe me.  He suggested that my recovery wasn’t yet complete, that all the memories I had of taking my pills each morning were a fabrication, caused by residual paranoia.  “Who, after all, would be out to ruin you, Argus?”

“I don’t know.  I have no idea, in fact, but shouldn’t that tell you something?  If I was still paranoid, I’d have loads and loads of suspects, right?”

He sighed.  “It tells me you’re quick, Argus, and quite intelligent, and that you’ve had enough sessions with me over the years to sometimes understand my questioning.  It tells me you’re trying to manipulate me with your responses.  But I’ve heard that one before.  Now let me ask you, how do you feel about—”

I hung up on Doctor Shields.  Gave up on him, in fact.  Gave up on finding any allies at all.

Why did I feel so sure of my own convictions?  In the face of total disbelief from others?  Even my loved ones?  One factor, I can admit now, was fear.

For more than two decades, I’d lived with the fear that one day I would end up a kind of mental invalid, relying totally on others for my survival.  So it was very important to me to believe I could still trust my own mind.

Another factor, and the most significant, was that I hoped to share the blame for the murder I’d been charged with, to wash away some of John’s blood from my own hands.  Exactly how much of the blame remained mine alone—if my theory proved correct—I hadn’t worked out yet, much as I tried.

“Sure, I’m able to kill,” I said to Reverend Sam while going through the lunch line the next day, “in self-defense, or in the defense of others, but plain murder is not an easy thing for me to admit I could do, not under any conditions.”  With our plastic lunch trays full, we took seats across from each other at one end of a crowded cafeteria table.

“Sane or insane,” Reverend Sam said, “you’re completely capable of murder, Argus.  So’s everyone born since Cain.  Though few living outside these walls will admit it.”

Quickly, we found ourselves shunned by the inmates we’d joined.  One by one, the others inched down the benches in the same direction until a full Teamster’s butt-width had opened to my left and to Sam’s right.  It was the pedophile thing, of course.  Even criminals had their moral standards, be they drug dealers, thieves, pimps, rapists, or murderers.

Me, I wasn’t sure whether I’d set my own standards aside or raised them to new heights, but I did know that I’d developed a vested interest in seeing a human dimension to Reverend Sam.

“What’s truly hard for me to admit,” I said, “is that I’ve been guilty all these years of underestimating my own disease.  Because that changes everything.”

“How so?”

“I may have to conclude that I never should’ve married, never should’ve had any children, never should’ve gone into the Secret Service, or started up my own security firm.  In short, I may have no right being me.”

“But that’s not all, is it?  If you’d faced up to your disease, Argus, then John Helms would still be alive.”

“Possibly,” I said.  “If I’d been in therapy, I might never have slipped so badly that I ended up in John’s home with all those crazy notions.  But I’m not the only one to blame—if indeed I share any of the blame—for his death.  Because, you see, someone replaced my anti-psychotic medication with dummy pills, placebos.  Someone deliberately drove me insane.”

Reverend Sam’s fork slipped from his hand, ending up buried in his instant mashed potatoes.  “That sounds mighty farfetched.”

“I know,” I said.  “But it’s the only explanation.”

“Then prove it.  Have the pills tested.”

“I am.  My lawyer shipped them to a lab in Rockville.  No results yet, but I’m not holding my breath.  Whoever was clever enough to switch the pills in the first place would be clever enough to switch them back.”

“Who would want to drive you insane, Argus?”

“I don’t know.”

“Perhaps the answer is you’re still not well yet.”

“Not you too.  I’m fine.  I’m perfectly—”

A moment later I was staring bug-eyed at my inner left forearm and screaming at the very top of my lungs and flopping off the end of the cafeteria bench on my way to the floor.

“Worms!” I shouted.  “Under my skin!  Worms!  Help!  Somebody get them out of me!  Quick!  Worms!  Under my skin!”

Above my own yelling and the yelling of others all around me, I could hear Reverend Sam’s voice calling my name.  I kicked the legs of the inmates who surrounded me as I rolled and thrashed on the floor.  “Help me!  Worms!  They’re eating me!”

I heard the jangle of jogging deputies approaching.  “Stand back!” shouted one of them.

“Stand back!” shouted another.

I studied a fleshy spot of forearm where there were no tendons beneath, much less worms.  I planned to bite there, deep and hard, but with only a desperate plan to drive me, not true terror, I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.

“Get them out!” I said.  “Get the worms out!”

It was only when I tapped into my store of self-loathing that my teeth clamped down, and my skin ripped open, and a warm, coppery wetness filled my mouth.

Chapter 20

Doctor Woods held a cork-bottomed circular tray with a glass of water in the center and a colorful array of pills lined up neatly for me.  I took the glass and, one by one, began swallowing the pills, taking small sips of water.  If she identified me as a faker, I knew, I’d be on the very next bus back to jail.  My best chance, I decided on the spot, was to keep her off balance.

“I never saw any worms,” I said between pills.  “Not under my skin, not anywhere.”  My reward was that inter-species sign of mild surprise and curiosity.  Her head went tilt.

“Then why did you bite yourself?”

“What’s this?”  I held up the last pill, sulphur yellow.

“Codeine,” she said, “for the pain.”

“Thought so.”  This time I hid the pill, clamping it beneath my tongue before swallowing water.  I made sure I gulped.

“Mister Ward,” Doctor Woods said, ”that’s a savage bite on your arm.  Eighteen stitches, I hear.  Why did you do it?”

Rolling the pill to the tip of my tongue, I sauntered over to the doctor’s office window.  With my back to her, I stuck out my tongue, dropped the pill into my cupped left hand and, with my right, quickly jammed it into the webbing between two fingers.

“Tell me why,” said Doctor Woods.

The window overlooked the recreation yard and the employee parking lot.  Beyond the recreation yard, a new inmate housing facility was under construction.  I could hear hammering.  In the distance a smokestack puffed and a warehouse sagged and leaned.  Off to the left stood some of the broken down row houses found all over broken down southeast Washington, DC.

“Why?” I said.  “I like the accommodations here better than the jail.  But you don’t accept cash or credit cards—only crazy.”

“What’s the attraction?”

“The truth is I came to see you.”  I turned from the window.  “I had to see you again, to convince you I’m not responsible for what happened to John Helms.  You’re the only one smart enough to believe me, if you’ll only just listen to me, really listen.”

“You might’ve telephoned me.”

“I had to see you face to face.  Make you listen.”

She sighed, dropped into her chair, and motioned toward the one in front of her desk.  “Sit, Argus, I’m listening.”

“Point one, Doc,” I said, taking my seat, “you have to admit that most of the time, I’m perfectly sane.  So I know what it’s like.  I’m sane right now, in fact—I’m certain of it!—just as I’m certain I was taking my anti-psychotic medication—at least what I thought was my medication—during the weeks when your lab tests say I’d stopped cold turkey.  Because I was sane then too.”

“You may believe so.”

“No, I know so, because I checked.  On the very day my hallucinations began, I went to the medicine cupboard and—”

“Please,” Doctor Woods said, rubbing her temples, “don’t take me through the counting of the pills again.”

“But I—”

“Because it’s simply a delusion.  Much of what you remember never really happened.”

“But it did!”

“I once had a patient who thought he was a space alien.  He described to me in vivid terms having sexual intercourse with himself.  And giving birth to twin clones.  Now what do you think are the chances that his beliefs and memories were accurate?”

I stood.  “How should I know?  I’ve never met him.”  I strolled back to the window.

“Are you implying he could be right?” she said.

I left her to wonder.  Meanwhile, I canvassed the grounds.  Less than two days later, I made my move.

The codeine pills that I’d been storing up in secret I took all at once—all seven of them—during lunch, shortly before my assigned hour in the recreation yard.  The time came.

The midday sun was bright and hot, the sky cloudless, the air sticky.  I felt as wet as a newborn foal.  The wind, when there was any, was blocked by the brick walls enclosing the yard.

The walls were ten feet high, topped by chain link fencing trimmed with thick strands of barbed wire and razor wire.  Watch towers—one of them manned—stood at two of the corners.

About two dozen inmates, including myself, wandered the yard in light blue hospital pajamas.  I knew the codeine was kicking in when I began feeling light-headed and a little dizzy.

I spied the wiry inmate who had propositioned me in the yard the day before, a thin-haired blond man with a booze hound’s ruddy face and the permanently pinched look of a man being cursed and damned by a crowd.  I approached him.

“Changed my mind,” I said.  “I’ll take that blowjob now.”

“Wait five minutes,” he said, “then meet me in the toilet.”  With a peek up at the watch tower, and then another at an armed guard stationed inside the yard, my would-be sex partner headed straight for the john.

It was a plastic green portable pottie near the rear wall of the yard.  With all the construction going on, it was a good bet the psychiatric facility was overcrowded, and with rules and regulations for things like toilets per capita, I hadn’t been surprised to find portable potties on the grounds.

I killed the allotted time by stretching my major muscle groups.  When it was time, I walked casually over to the toilet and swung the door open.  It struck the blond man waiting inside.  I squeezed in next to him and closed the door.

It was a tight fit, two full-grown men inside there.  The toilet was clogged with human waste.  The stench reminded me of the back streets of Beijing.

“Whip it out,” whispered the blond man.

What I whipped out was not my genitalia, but my right hand.  I jammed two tensed fingers into the man’s windpipe.  The man gagged, bowing his head reflexively.  I drove my elbow into my victim’s left temple.  The man dropped.

I picked him up and draped his torso across the toilet seat.  The man wasn’t moving, yet I found it awkward stripping him of his light blue pajamas.  The job was only half complete when another inmate opened the door from outside.

“Busy!” I said.

“Fuckin’ faggots,” said the intruder, closing the door.

When I’d at last pulled the pajamas completely off him, I removed his paper shoes too, leaving the man in only his skivvies.  I tied the legs of his pajamas around my waist, leaving the rest of the garment draped at my back.  I tucked his paper shoes into my waistband.  I took a deep, unpleasant breath.  Then I exited the stall, closing the door.

I braced my hands on a ridge above the door to the portable pottie and then pushed with all my might.  Grunting and sweating, I got nowhere, absolutely nowhere.  An icy spike of fear-driven adrenalin stabbed me in the center of my chest and spread like a paper fire.  At last I managed to lift the front of the portable pottie off the ground, about an inch.

I managed another inch.  Another.  The pottie tilted back more.  More, more, more . . .  Finally, it tipped over!

The brick wall directly behind the portable outhouse caught the top of it, so that the structure came to rest at a forty-five degree slant.  I heard sloshing inside and a muffled human groan.  Outside, I heard shouting from the other inmates, followed by the piercing mechanical whistle of a guard.

I took a few steps back, then raced up the front of the portable pottie and jumped.  My outstretched hands buried fingers into the base of the chain link fencing above the brick wall.  I swung a leg up, hauled myself to the top of the brick wall, and then climbed the chain link, digging the tips of my paper shoes into air holes, swinging my arms up high in orangutan motions.

I halted where my eyes were level with the strands of barbed and razor wire that jutted away from the top of the chain link fencing at a sharp angle.  This point in my climb I’d anticipated would be the most problematic.  More problematic still was the warning shot the guard in the watch tower now fired into the air.

With one hand, I untied the pajamas around my waist and flung the garment flat across the flesh-hungry wires.  Then I took my own paper shoes and slipped them inside the pair I’d tucked into my waistband, then slipped both pairs over my hands.

Slowly, I crawled atop the overalls, the shoes acting like poorly protective mittens.  Yet my hands, I realized immediately, were still being cut up with every motion.  I could feel my wrists being cut up too, along with my knees.

And despite all the codeine in my system, I screamed.  I screamed until I found myself bawling.

I swung my feet over the wire’s edge first, followed by the rest of my body, ending up dangling by my shoe-covered hands.

I tried to swing myself, hand over hand, back to the chain link fencing and climb down, but my paper mittens weren’t too dexterous, and the shots fired from the guard tower weren’t at all ignorable.  I lost concentration, then my grip, and fell.

Twenty feet or so.  Landing on pavement.  Rolling.  Stopping.  Standing.  Running.  I rounded the corner, escaping the aim of the guard in the tower as soon as possible.  Pain radiated from my left ankle.  I’d twisted it upon landing.

Thirty yards ahead I saw the bulldozer I’d been hearing since breakfast.  It was busy flattening mounds of earth near the housing facility under construction.  I limped toward it.

A siren peeled from loudspeakers on buildings and telephone poles.  The driver of the bulldozer slowed his vehicle to an idling stop and craned his neck in every direction until he saw me coming at him from ten yards away.  I jerked my thumb at him like a baseball umpire calling a runner out.

The bulldozer driver obliged me by climbing down off the bulldozer, but not fast enough, not nearly, for the man was a small planet.  I gripped the back of his shirt collar and yanked, throwing him into the dirt, plunging his micro cosmos into chaos.

I climbed into the driver’s seat.  It took almost half a minute of experimentation before I mastered the gear shift well enough to drive off.  I headed straight for the perimeter fence.

The fence was brick, topped with barbed and razor wire.  I had my seatbelt on and my head down and my arms hugging the steering wheel when the plow punched into it.

The jolt knocked my breath away.  My neck strained from whiplash.  The machine came to a halt, still idling.  I caught my breath again and looked up.  Maybe two tenths of the brick wall had toppled in front of my plow.

There was plenty of loose brick, though.  I climbed down.  My bleeding hands found the loosest rectangles, and I flung them away from the wall, one after another.

I could hear the whistle of a guard growing louder and louder in my ears—and running footsteps approaching—but I kept digging.  I soon dug myself a ragged hole in the wall, beneath the barbed wire, and I scraped and slithered my way through it, falling onto a paved sidewalk, where the free people roamed.

Mainly free African-Americans.  White, bleeding, barefoot, and jammied, I could hardly be more conspicuous.  I raced across the street, slicing my toe on a broken bottle, testing the brakes and shocks of an old Honda Civic trying not to run me down.

I limped down a slender, granite-paved alleyway between rows of dilapidated old row houses.  My lungs were soon pounding as fast as my heart.  I stopped to rest along an oak-shrouded side street near the Washington Navy Yard.

Stooped over, bleeding hands braced on bleeding knees, and gasping for air, I heard sirens wailing from all directions, or so it seemed.  I raised my head and found a homeless Black man with a great gray beard sitting on the sidewalk, his back propped against the wall of a row house.

He was far too overdressed for such humid weather.  I approached thinking he must be too drunk, or strung out, to notice the heat.  But he noticed me right away.

I stopped short when I smelled his stench and saw his bloodshot look of fear and the pus rimming the jaundiced whites of his hopeless, haggard eyes.

He wore a floppy denim hat, a long, dusty coat, a red scarf, dark slacks with holes visible at the knees, and military boots that might’ve been worn in Viet Nam.  I coveted them all.

“Trade you,” I said to him, slipping off my 18-carat gold wedding ring, streaked now with my own blood.  I tossed it to him.  He caught it, but didn’t seem to understand.

“That ring for what you’re wearing,” I said.  “Shirt, pants, shoes, coat, scarf, hat.  Agreed?”

Graybeard bit into the ring’s soft metal, not without difficulty, having to line up a rare remaining top tooth with a rare remaining bottom tooth.  Then he shook his head and tossed the ring back into my palm.  The nearing sirens bothered him as much as myself.

“C’mon,” I said.  “Please.  Those sirens are for me.  I paid four grand for this ring.”

Graybeard said, “Forget it, Cracker.  I got da bed-bugs anyways.  Go on now.”

So I roughed up a homeless man for his clothes—hardly my finest hour.  I did leave the ring behind, along with my own bloodied and torn hospital pajamas.  He had to wear something.

Chapter 21

I limped down a busy sidewalk by a car-crowded street.  All eyes averted me or swept by me rapidly, unseeing.  I was invisible now, it seemed, though dressed for December on a muggy June day, dripping with sweat, leaking blood, missing a boot heel.

The stink from my new rags assaulted me in waves, like nausea, fifteen or twenty seconds apart.  But the stiffness of the fabric irritated me constantly.  A raunchy veneer of filth and sweat in the lining scraped at my wounds, and I often shuddered imagining colonies of germs plunging into my body, water slide fast, through every nick and cut and scrape and gash.

Skirting a small park, I stopped to sip at a water fountain and to rinse my hand wounds.  Nearby, a Y-Generation rollerblader in black neoprene bike shorts occupied a shady bench.  When I sat down on one end for a short rest, the rollerblader quickly stood and wheeled away.  I’m not simply invisible, I thought, I repel objects too, like some gravitational force.

I felt no resentment, though.  Instead, I wondered if this was how it had been, or how it was, for my long-lost father.  I wondered if my old man had ever felt the same odd attraction that I now felt toward my newfound powers.

Worse could happen, it seemed to me, than to live on the streets.  I could disappear.  Simply disappear.  Stay in my filthy new rags and live on hand-outs.  Or learn to dumpster dive.  Repel people who reminded me of my old world.  Spare my family anymore shame.  Oh, yes, I thought, worse could happen.

By late afternoon I’d trudged all the way to Dupont Circle.  My feet ached with blisters, unaccustomed to six mile hikes or to Graybeard’s worn, ill-fitting boots.  My injured left ankle had slowed me down a lot.  By now, the swelling joint felt like it had the size and heft of a cannonball.

I came to a five-foot tall brick fence encircling the grounds of a small, gated community I knew.  Keisha Fallon’s community.  There weren’t many people in the world I cared to trust under the circumstances.  Keisha was one of the few and lived closest to where I’d escaped from.  I scaled the wall by climbing a nearby oak tree and dropping down from a thick branch.  I stood facing a complex of three-story brick condominiums.

Keisha would still be at work, I reasoned, as I’d just arranged a temporary position for her out at Helms Technology.  I circled around to the rear of the complex.

The garden was empty.  The entire complex, for all I knew, was empty, Washingtonians being such double-income workaholics.

Standing behind some tall fern hedges, I punched my fist through one of Keisha’s ground floor window panes, reached inside and unlocked the window, and then threw the sash up.  Gripping the window sill with both hands, I jumped up and down on my one good leg half a dozen times before finally managing to scramble through the opening.

The first thing I did inside—after ditching my filthy overcoat and cranking the A/C—was to rip the side panel off a small, cardboard box stuffed with hip-hop music—Keisha’s CDs—and duct tape it over the hole I’d punched in the window.  That way any residents using the white gravel walkway outside would assume it was an old hole they’d spotted, one being attended to by the occupants, and not evidence of a fresh burglary.

Then I searched room to room for a firearm.  If I knew Keisha—and I certainly did—then I knew she’d have at least a couple pieces hidden in the house somewhere, and I didn’t want any arguments from her later about lending me one.

I found a carton of nine millimeter hollow point ammunition in a kitchen drawer, along with gun cleaning material—oil, bore brushes, cotton patches—but no weapon.  I searched through the front hall closet and all the cubbyholes in the dining and living rooms without any luck, then tried the master bedroom.

I found Keisha’s underwear drawer a distraction.  Searching for cold steel, I ran my hand through a pile of silk panties—some of them Frederick’s of Hollywood-worthy—which unleashed a torrent of images from that long ago night in a Miami hotel room.

Inside an over-stuffed walk-in closet, I found—side by side and neatly folded on hangers—a man-size striped rugby shirt along with an old pair of men’s blue jeans.  Their owner’s identity I guessed at for two minutes, driven by a foolish stir of jealousy.

It was in the cupboard beneath the sink in the master bathroom that I found a nine millimeter Glock, unloaded, but with a carton of hollow points for companionship.  I took the weapon and bullets with me into the bedroom and sat down on the side of Keisha’s queen-size canopy bed to load.

Using the remote I found on the nightstand, I turned on the TV and surfed until I’d located CNN.  I was on by now.

I listened to Larry King describe the “massive manhunt” to find me, glancing up at the screen now and then as I slid ammo into place.  I glimpsed videotape of myself escorting movie stars to premieres, taking that famous bullet for the president.  I saw my own booking photo for the first time, watched myself being led toward a waiting squad car in handcuffs.

Finished loading the weapon, I placed it on the bed beside me and began to remove my boots.  I got the right one off, but the left boot was stuck, due to my swollen ankle.  I was tugging at it, gently, when—from down the hall—I heard the front door to the condo open with a grunt, then slam shut.

I switched off the TV, stood, grabbed my gun, and hobbled toward the door.  I heard footsteps padding the carpet in the hallway.  A moment later, Keisha Fallon stepped into her bedroom in a summery yellow print dress, a big department store shopping bag swaying in her hand.  I’d raised an index finger to my lips so she wouldn’t scream at the unexpected sight of me, but at first glance she saw only my strange hat, my strange attire, and maybe my lacerated finger, and shrieked.  Loud as any car alarm.

Gently, I cupped her mouth with my hand and gripped her by the waist.  “Ssh!” I said.  “It’s me.”  Then she hurt me.  Bad.  The lady has skills, let me tell you.  A flying elbow scored a direct hit in my solar plexus.  A spiked heel nearly perforated my foot.  We were both shrieking by then.

I got behind Keisha, mashing my hand over her mouth.  It was a mistake, I think, allowing the gun barrel’s cold steel to brush her cheek as I wrestled her over toward the bed, for she bit me on the palm of my hand.  I winced as I threw us both onto the bed.  I lay on top of her, my hand still muffling her screams.

When her bloating, fear-choked eyes recognized my face for the first time, her hysteria ceased, then very quickly resumed, even louder than before—her fear of me apparently greater than that of any armed, homeless burglar and potential rapist.  But in all fairness, there had been that unfortunate scene recently in the psychiatric ward’s visitor’s room.

“I won’t harm you,” I said.  “I promise, Keisha, I promise.”  Several times more I repeated my promise before she settled down.

She didn’t scream when I finally took my hand from her mouth.  I sat up.  She propped herself up on her elbows.

“You look like a madman,” she said, her eyes angry slits.

“I’m not, Keisha.”

“And you reek.  You absolutely reek.”

“That reminds me.  I’d like to shower.”

“Take that ridiculous hat off.”

I did.  I flung it straight into a bedside waste basket.

“Whatever do you think you’re doing, Argus?”

“Whatever I have to do.  Someone’s trying to destroy me, Keisha, someone very clever.  But I’m turning the tables, is what I'm doing.  I'm out to get that fucker instead.”

“I knew it!”  Keisha flopped on her back.  “I knew it!  You’re still nuts!”

“I need your help.”

She stared at me, incredulous.  “No!  N-O!  No!  Nothing doing!  Out of the question!  You’re sick, Argus!  Sick in the head!  Just listen to yourself!”

I sighed.  Sudden change of plans.  “I’m going to have to tie you up now.”  That startled her, but only for a moment, then she slowly shook her head, resigned.  “Got any string, or rope?”

“Oh, Argus.”  Rather than answer, Keisha shook her head some more.  I searched the walk-in closet.  I searched the dresser.

“If only you were into S&M,” I said, “I’d at least have a pair of handcuffs.  Why didn’t you go to work at HT today?”

“I don’t start until tomorrow.”

“Oh.”  I got an idea.  I gripped Keisha by the wrist and tugged her off the bed.  “Come with me,” I said before leading her down the hall and into the kitchen, where I grabbed a long, serrated carving knife.  Keisha’s big eyes grew even bigger.

“Argus, what do you want with that?”

“You’ll see.”  I led Keisha back to the bedroom, where she sat on the edge of the bed, every curve she had, it seemed, now aimed at me: legs crossed, shoulders back, breasts thrusting out.

“You don’t have to tie me up, Argus.  We could just shower together, like old times, remember?”  She eyed the knife again.  Eyed me.  “We could do all the old times.”

That hurt.  “You really are afraid of me, aren’t you?”  She didn’t answer, but only sniffled.  I stepped to a window, eyeing the Venetian blinds.  “Don’t worry, Keisha, I’d never harm you.”

“You harmed John Helms, though, didn’t you.”

“That wasn’t my fault.”  Near the top of the window frame I severed the cord from the blinds.

“Bullshit, Argus.”

Tears greeted me when I turned back around.  “Sorry it has to be this way.  I really am.  Now lie on your back and lift your arms up to the headboard, like this.”

The cord was thin but strong.  I cut it into three strips.  Two I used to bind her wrists to wooden slats in the headboard.

“It hurts,” she said.

“It’s got to hurt a little, Keisha.”

“It hurts too much.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, assessing my slipknots.

The last strip of cord I used to bind her feet together at the ankles.  I turned the TV on for Keisha while I showered.  I rubbed off all the dried blood and lathered soap into my wounds, yelping from the sting a few times.  Where Keisha had bit me needed stitches, I thought, but I had to settle for band-aids.

Hunger, which hadn’t howled all day, suddenly began to, louder than an ACLU lawyer.  I micro-waved a can of chicken soup and slurped it up in a bowl sitting on the edge of the bed with just a towel wrapped around my waist.  I offered Keisha some, but she wasn’t hungry.

Finished, I dropped the soup bowl on the nightstand and, seizing the men’s clothing I’d noticed hanging in the closet, the blue jeans and rugby shirt, began to dress.  The clothing’s owner I estimated to be two inches taller and wider than myself.  I had to roll up the legs of the jeans and borrow Keisha’s terrycloth bathrobe belt to keep them from falling down.  The striped rugby shirt was unseasonably thick.

“Whose duds are these?” I asked.

“Those?” she said.  “Oh, he’s long gone.  Been meaning to throw those out.”

For footwear, I borrowed a pair of Keisha’s white running socks and black jogging shoes too.  She’s my height if she’s wearing two-inch heels, with fairly big feet for a woman, so her sneakers, though more than snug-fitting, felt almost exquisite in comparison to homeless Graybeard’s ancient military boots.

When I was fully dressed, Keisha said, “You going?”

I gave a nod.  “Just out to the pharmacy for now, to get me some Risperdal, my anti-psychotic medication.”  I jammed the Glock into my waistband and concealed it beneath my shirt tail.  “Unfortunately, I don’t have a prescription.”

“No, Argus, no!  Don’t do it!”

I noticed a Washington Redskins cap hanging on a wall peg and snatched it.  “I don’t want to, Keisha, I hate to do it, but what choice do I have?”

“Oh, Argus.”  Her eyes, moist with pity, turned away.

I went to the kitchen for the roll of duct tape.  From the top drawer of Keisha’s bedroom dresser, I grabbed a pair of red, crotch-less panties.  I rolled them up into a ball and tried to stick them inside Keisha’s mouth, but she fought me.

“Please, Argus, not those!  What if you get shot during your stick-up—or arrested—and I’m found here with those in my mouth!”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.  To jam the gag inside, I cupped my hand beneath her chin and squeezed her cheeks on both sides, the way I’d done with farm animals as a boy when they wouldn’t take their medicine.  Her ruby lips popped open, forming an oval.  I stuffed the panties inside and secured the gag by wrapping a wide strand of duct tape around her head.  The gag upset Keisha.  She whined.  Then she tried to speak, but only mumbling came out.

“Relax,” I said.  “I won’t be long.  Maybe an hour.”

Downstairs, I found Keisha’s purse on a table near the front door and rummaged inside for her car keys, her apartment keys, and her cell phone.  Then I left, locking the door behind me.

I breathed easier as nighttime fell.  It was the same for fugitives everywhere, I supposed, switching on the headlights to Keisha Fallon’s candy apple red Ford T-Bird convertible.

I kept the stereo speakers silent as I drove through Friendship Heights with the top up.  I turned onto a narrow residential street of brick colonials and two-story townhouses.  I parked curbside in front of a darkened home.

The other homes were lit up, but the sidewalks were deserted, save for a woman pushing a baby stroller.  I cracked open my door to the roar and honk of traffic from the commercial district around the corner on Connecticut Avenue.  I took three deep breaths, settling my nerves, then hopped out.

I slammed the door shut and limped around the corner and down the street.  With every other step, pain set upon my bad ankle, like stabs from a well-equipped Lilliputian field army.  Turning into a CVS drugstore, I tugged Keisha’s Redskins cap down low.  Then lower still.  The store was uncrowded, quiet.  A middle-aged Hispanic woman in a UPS uniform studied the pantyhose display.  A skinny high school boy in a varsity letter jacket flipped through pages in front of the magazine rack.  I limped without haste toward the pharmacy at the back of the store.

It was the kind sitting on a small, raised platform with a tall wooden counter in front, blocking the pharmacists and their medicines from easy view, adding a touch of the secrecy and majesty of village witch doctors, I’ve always thought.  There were no customers at the pharmacy window.

I stood below the counter, pretending to assess the display of Dr. Scholls foot care options, wishing the good doctor had designed something to ward off the bayoneting at my ankles.  Nervously, I patted the gun beneath my rugby shirt.  My palms began to sweat, and I wiped them on my blue jeans.  When I’d assured myself that only one head was bobbing behind the counter, I wiped my palms one more time, set my mind and my jaw firm, and blitzed through a little swinging door.

It led up a mini-flight of stairs to the platform behind the counter, where I came face-to-face with the pharmacist on duty.

Wouldn’t you just know it, I thought at the instant I discovered the pharmacist was a granny.  A frail, blue-haired bingo player.  Her black plastic eyeglass frames were enormous, with paperweight-thick lenses.  And her magnified eyes seemed to take better stock of me than the store camera above her head.

“Dear Lord,” she said.

Chapter 22

“I couldn’t go through with it!” I said to Keisha as soon as I returned to her bedroom.  “I got all the way behind the pharmacy desk, and it was a little old lady, you know?  Somebody’s granny.  And all I could do was ask her, ‘Which way is the men’s room?’ ”

From beneath my rugby shirt, I took the Glock out of my pants and dropped it on top of the dresser.  I reached for the ring finger of my left hand, intending to twist the thick band of gold that Sarah had slipped on me six years earlier—a nervous habit—but the ring wasn’t there.  I’d given it away in a forced trade to a homeless man.  The trade felt like a betrayal.

“I got scared, Keisha.  No, petrified.  Petrified of my own self.  I just stared at that little old lady, wondering, where do I draw the line?  But now I’m wondering if I really have any chalk to draw lines with.  I’m a paranoid schizophrenic who protected the president, withheld his disease from his clients, fathered children, skipped psychotherapy, stole clothes off the back of a homeless man, kidnapped his very good friend, and . . . well, I could say a lot more.  I feel like there’s no bottom to me, Keisha, know what I mean?  No bottom!”

I heard Keisha moaning loudly behind her gag.  She’d been moaning that way for some time now, I realized, once my ears had engaged that strange replay mechanism everyone has.  I pounced on the bed, ripped the duct tape off her, and pulled the crotch-less panties out of her mouth.

“I’ve got to pee!” she said.

I tracked down the kitchen knife and cut her loose.  She bolted for the bathroom.  I stood outside the door, talking over her tinkle and my own sudden tears.

“I don’t know how it came to this, Keisha.  I’m rudderless, really, like all the other self-obsessed assholes in this town.  Sometimes, I wish I’d never left Charlottesville, never turned my back on that Baptist brimstone my mother and father raised me up on.  I go years without feeling the shame I'm feeling tonight.  Years!”  I paused, hoping Keisha would say something comforting.  She said nothing.

“I’m too educated now, that’s my problem."  But that notion was just the first random, stupid thought that came into my head when I needed some instant bullshit to believe, rather than face the truth that I had no clue why I was me.  "To understand is to forgive, don’t you think?  To forgive ourselves, especially.  Any wrong thing I do I absolve myself with insight.  Psychological, biological, evolutionary—it doesn’t matter—whatever works.  I tell myself:  Who am I to fight my own nature?  That’s what I say.  That and more.  Much more.  But it’s all so lame.  All of it—every bit of it—inexcusably lame.”

She didn’t answer, so I kept on talking, only now I wasn't bullshitting myself anymore.  “I think I killed John Helms.  I do, Keisha.  I really do.  I know I’m capable.  I’m a sinner.  I’m a human being, so I’m a sinner.  Yes, I murdered John.  You were right.  Everybody’s right about that.  Okay?  Okay?”

Still, I got no answer.  I slumped my tired forehead against the door’s cool wood.

“But I was pushed!” I said.  “Pushed, you understand!  You’ve got to believe me, Keisha.  Someone found out about me, about my disease, and—I’m telling you!—that someone deliberately drove me insane!  Why, I don’t know.  Trying to destroy me, I guess.  But I think I can prove I was set up.  I think I know how.  Only I can’t tell you how, because you’ll tell the cops, and they’ll know where to find me, but I swear to you—I swear to you, Keisha!—I’m right about this!  And don’t think it’s just my disease talking, either, because I’m fine.  Really.  I’ve been on my medication again for over two weeks now.  And—”

Keisha opened the bathroom door.  “Let me go!”

“Sure,” I said, wiping my runny nose.  “Of course.”  I handed back her cell phone.  “Here.  I took out the batteries, so I have time to get away before you call the cops.  And for the same reason, I hid the cord to the phone in the kitchen.  Oh, and one more thing . . .”  I dangled her car keys.  “Here.”

She snatched them.  Then she walloped my face with an unexpected left cross.  “Now get out!”

Chapter 23

I felt guilty about many things that night, including about what I'd done to Keisha, but I was only willing to atone so much.  I'd kept the cash I'd taken out of her purse, everything she had, though it was only fifty-seven dollars.  I used fifteen of it on a cab ride, exiting by a pay garage on New Jersey Avenue.  From there I limped two blocks to Georgetown University Law Center.

“Excuse me,” I said to the security guard at the front desk.  “Stuart Carr teaching class tonight?”

The guard ran his index finger vertically down a schedule on his blotter.  “Yes, he’s teaching.  Right now, in fact.”

“What time does class get out?”

“Eight fifty-five.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I’ll catch him later.”

I limped to Union Station, where I ate a gyro at a table in the fast food area down in the basement.  I was only a few blocks from the Capitol, where I knew many senators and representatives, whom I’d advised over the years on their personal safety, or on matters of security-related policy—but if any of them were in the building, I calculated, they would be upstairs in the posh stores and restaurants, so I didn't worry much about being spotted, though I kept my cap on just in case.

Back at the law center, I sat down on the limestone steps outside the front entrance, just beyond the reach of the exterior lighting.  A light drizzle began, which soon turned to pelting rain.  I tried waiting inside the lobby, but the security guard demanded that I sign-in on a sign-in sheet and show some ID.

“Forgot my wallet,” I said, retreating into the storm.

Night school students began exiting the building.  Some scrutinized me—an umbrella-less man sitting in the open under a downpour—but none bothered to approach me.  There stood a men’s homeless shelter next door, and I thought it likely the students mistook me for a resident, maybe one lucky enough to have been given a decent set of second-hand clothes.

The stream of exiting students dried up.  Minutes later, Stuart emerged.  He was conservatively suit-ed and tie-yoked, toting a leather briefcase, pumping open an umbrella.  I stood.  Stuart didn’t notice me at all as he took the stairs with a lithe, cat-like grace most people lose with their pimples.

“Stuart!” I called.

He froze on the sidewalk.  Turned.  “Yes?”

I approached.  Stuart’s jaw dropped, along with his briefcase.  “Don’t worry, Stuart, I’m not psychotic, not anymore.  Or should I say, not yet.”

“Argus Ward!”  Stuart’s head pivoted in jerky, staccato motions, as if searching for more surprises.  I picked up the briefcase and handed it to him.

“I want to talk, Stuart.”

“Talk?  Talk about what?”

“C’mon,” I said, gently spinning my best friend around so we faced the same direction, “let’s go for a walk.”  I took hold of the umbrella, centering it above us so we could share it’s cover.  Stuart kept his eyes fixed to the sidewalk, dodging the puddles.

“You’re a fugitive now, Argus.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re putting me in a very uncomfortable situation here.”

“I know.”

“I’m a law professor, for crying out loud.”

“I know.”

Stuart halted us beneath a lamppost near the street corner.  He stared at me through his foggy designer eyewear.  “What exactly do you want with me?”

“Why, I’m doing fine, buddy, thanks for asking.”

“We could be seen any minute, Argus.  And if we are, I’m going to have to—”

“I want you to hear my story first,” I said.  “Just listen.”

“Go ahead.  Quickly.”

“You, uh, you may find what I’m about to tell you hard to believe, but here goes.  Stuart, I’m not solely responsible for the death of John Helms . . .”

I told him about the blood test, about my dummy pill theory, that I was certain someone unknown to me had deliberately driven me mad, deliberately destroyed my life.

“You’re frightening me, Argus.”

I sighed.  “Don’t believe me, then.  Just help me out.”

“Help you out how?”

“I need money, to start with.”

“Do you know what you’re asking?”

“I’m desperate, Stuart.  Totally fucking desperate.  If there were any other way—”

“Got any change?”  A raggedy man with a quick step and a servile hunch had intercepted us.  He’d shot from the shelter.  He was holding out his hand, palm upwards.

“Go away,” I told him.

“Please.  Something?  A quarter, maybe?”

“Fine,” I said, “fine, if you’ll just go away.  Stuart, have you got any loose—”

The single beep of a car alarm sounded nearby.  I turned to find Stuart dashing inside his Audi sedan, parked only steps away at a meter.  I rushed the car, yanking on the driver’s side door handle, but I was too late.  Stuart had locked himself inside.

“Stuart!” I cried, swatting the window hard with the palm of my hand.  Then, using my elbow, the hardest bone in the human body, I smashed the window to pieces in a single motion, bathing Stuart in shards.  Stuart screamed, but cranked the ignition.  I had him by the throat as the car’s engine roared to life, but lost my grip when the vehicle peeled away from the curb.

I watched the Audi’s tail lights recede.  The wheels of a passing SUV splashed my trousers with muddy water.  My elbow throbbed with pain, and I held it as I limped away, into the dark, wet night, wondering how many other delusions, besides my best friend, Stuart, I lived with when sane.

Half an hour later, traveling by cab again, I crossed the Potomac River into Virginia.  I wasn’t about to contact anymore friends for aid, nor any of my most trusted employees, some of whom were also friends.  Keisha and Stuart, not my illness, I told myself, had driven me paranoid.

Neither a three-foot tall perimeter fence, nor a mild case of the heebie-jeebies prevented me from reaching the soft, green lawn of Arlington National Cemetery.  I soon settled down to sleep in a soft rain, beneath an oak tree’s huge, tattered umbrella, beside a rare limestone block—the grave marker for one Robert Todd Lincoln.  Abraham’s son, I think.

Robert Todd proved to be a sound sleeper, but I had trouble nodding off until I thought to fold my soggy rugby shirt into a tiny pillow and until I appeased my not untroubled conscience with a firm vow to surrender myself to the police—no matter what I hadn’t yet accomplished—as soon as my first delusion or hallucination struck.  It wouldn’t do to murder someone else, after all, or to do anymore harm to others, myself, my family, or even my riddled reputation.  I’d only just fallen asleep when the sounds of a military patrol awakened me.

But the sweeping flashlights missed me, me and Robert Todd, never coming within forty square rows of crosses.  As the patrol receded down a long slope, I followed their dimming, fluttering lights until my eyelids extinguished all . . .

Chapter 24

I awoke with the dawn.  The rain had ceased.  The sky was silver blue and nearly cloudless.  I sat in my damp clothing on a park bench, adjacent to the cemetery, near the famous Iwo Jima Memorial and the much less famous Swiss Carillon, a gift from the King of Switzerland.  A battleship gray tower, it boasted an organ-like instrument at the top, which played enormous bells that would peal for miles.  The bells were silent that day.

The first day I ever came to Washington, I came to the Carillon.  A boy of ten.  It’d been the fourth of July.  In 1972.

While my father boozed it up on a blanket on the sloping lawn below—my mother tending him—me and my brother, Chuck, had climbed all the stairs up to the bells of the Carillon and its observation deck to watch the fireworks.

The park sat on a hill, overlooking the Potomac River.  The Capitol dome and the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson too were all visible from the Carillon’s deck.  The bells had rung in my ears—and long, long afterwards—as bold patterns of fiery color burst high above the water, sprinkling all those famous, shiny white monuments with God’s very own grace and glory.  Or so it’d seemed to me.

It’d been easy to be awed by Washington then, easy for most Americans, not just little boys.  I hadn’t known it that fourth of July in 1972, but a mere two weeks earlier, a gang of business suit-clad burglars had been captured inside the Watergate hotel.

As I dried out on the park bench, I smiled as I wondered if the Watergate too was visible from the deck of the Carillon.  It was possible.  It would be fitting.  If not for my swollen ankle and sore, Keisha-pierced foot, I might’ve climbed the stairs again just to find out.  Instead, I hobbled toward the Rosslyn district, a towering canyon of glass and steel, only blocks away.  I entered a Burger King about two blocks from the metro station.

The manager kicked out a homeless panhandler but didn’t eye me with any suspicion.  My unwashed, unkempt hair was largely hidden beneath my Redskins cap, and my clothing, though wrinkled and ill-fitting, was clean, and when my bad breath knocked back the clerk who took my order, the manager didn’t see it.

With Keisha Fallon’s fast-dwindling cash, I paid and took my food tray to an isolated corner table.  I ate two egg, cheese, and sausage biscuits, sipping black coffee.

I badly needed help, but trusted no one in DC now, save my own wife—but only if I could just talk to her face to face first.  Yet I trusted my younger brother completely.  Utterly.  The problem was getting through to him.  Chuck was all the way out in Charlottesville.

And, I thought, Chuck’s phone would be tapped by now, wouldn’t it?  Just like the phone to my own residence would be, right?  The line to Sarah?

Out of desperation, I suppose, I thought of the secret language code my father had taught his boys, and only his boys, decades earlier, before he’d disappeared into the folds of his own paranoia, when the old man used to obsess about a Soviet military invasion of the United States.

We would practice the code by arranging clandestine meetings and by making drops, taping things to the underside of public toilets and other strange places for pick-up and delivery.

I thought of phoning Chuck and, disguising my own voice, arranging a meeting using the ancient, secret, lunatic code our father had invented for the three of us.  Chuck probably hadn’t heard the code in a quarter century, but I had faith he still knew it by heart.  Because I still did.  And because of what used to happen whenever we forgot a word of it.

No, I thought, bad plan.  Too risky, too foolish.  The cops would simply put a tail on Chuck.  Bust us both together.

Thanks for nothing, Dad, wherever you are, you crazy, sadistic bastard.

I would have to get to Sarah for help.  I didn’t see I had another choice.  Somehow, I would have to evade the stake-out I felt certain the cops had already set up around my home in Georgetown.  But how?

Morning rush hour car traffic clogged the Key Bridge, yet along its sidewalks I was the only pedestrian crossing.  No breeze awoke the Potomac River.  Its surface had a jade-like sheen.  Near the center point of the bridge, I began to feel exposed.  I slowed my steps to make a torso-twisting sweep with my eyes in every direction.

I found no sign of a SWAT team ahead in Georgetown, or behind in Rosslyn, no police cruisers lurking, no helicopters approaching from the sky, or boats approaching from below, and no one anywhere staring at me through a pair of binoculars.

It was alright.  Everything would be alright.  I had a plan by now that I was still working out.  A way to reach my wife.  It was a bold, risky plan, but brilliant, I felt.  A way I could steal into my own home under the very nose of the cops.

Then I would talk to Sarah.  Make her understand.  Because without her faith, it seemed, all was lost.

Chapter 25

Carefully avoiding the vicinity of my own residential block, I limped up and down the hilly, cobblestone sidewalks of Georgetown for nearly an hour before finding the object of my search: a ding-blemished white van with Mori Garden and Lawn painted on the side.  It was parked deep in the driveway of a two-story Tudor with its double set of back doors open wide.  More conveniently still, the van’s owner, Hideo Mori, was out of sight, working in the backyard, I assumed.  I approached the vehicle.

I didn’t know how to hotwire an automobile, but I could start one by rolling it down a hill, and Georgetown hardly lacked for downward slopes.  The Tudor’s own downward sloping driveway would be sufficient, I thought, to turn over the engine.  At least it would get me coasting in the right direction.

And once I’d popped the clutch and chugged the engine to life, I planned to drive the vehicle straight to a supply store and leave it idling while I spent the last of Keisha Fallon’s cash buying myself a cheap work uniform, with a matching cap, if I could afford it.

Then my plan was to drive the van right up to my own house and park in my own driveway, as if I was the gardener.  I’d step into the backyard with a pair of hedge trimmers, and from there, sneak inside the house through the back door and find Sarah and—.

I froze.  I’d just rounded one of the van’s open rear doors and found Hideo Mori sitting on the back bumper in his blue work overalls, sipping hot green tea from a porcelain cup.

“Mister Argus!”

“You!”  Hideo stood and bowed.  He’s not too startled, I noted, and certainly not afraid.  Maybe he doesn’t know about me.  Maybe he can’t read English, being a Japanese immigrant and all.  Maybe he doesn’t watch much TV.  “I need your help, Hideo.”

Hideo grunted.  Or chuckled.  “Yes, I think so.  Police looking for you.  They say you kill a man.  Say you crazy.  Tea?”  He handed me an empty cup and began pouring.

I considered hog-tying Hideo in the back of the van long enough to execute my original plan.  But kidnapping?  Again?  Kidnapping a little man pouring me tea?  I held my cup steady.

“I’m not crazy, Hideo.  Not now.”

“Not now?”

“And I didn’t kill anyone.  Not . . . not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“Yes, I did.  No, I didn’t.”

“You sound like Buddhist.”

“I can explain, Hideo, but not now.  Now, I need your help.  Please.  I’ve got to . . . I’ve got to slip into my house without the cops seeing me, and speak to my wife.  It’s urgent.”

“Not possible.  I just leave your house.  Note say your wife gone to Annapolis.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, instantly dizzy.

Hideo Mori weaved his van through traffic along Wisconsin Avenue.  “Your wife, she cry these days, very, very much.”

Missing her, needing her, feeling for her, my own eyes watered, but I didn’t break down crying.  I couldn’t afford to.  I had to think, plan, stay one step ahead of the cops, find the enemy who’d ruined me, destroyed me.  And, even more immediately, I had to decide whether I could really trust my little gardener.  For all I knew, he was only biding his time until he could turn on me with maximum impact, kiss the bumper of the first cop car that crossed our path, or something like that.

Hideo was no more than five feet six inches tall.  He looked to be in his early sixties.  Through Sarah, I knew him to be a widower, who’d emigrated from Japan to live with a grown daughter and a grandchild.  I hadn’t had many conversations with Hideo over the years, but Sarah was fond of him, thought him unusually kind and wise, and she enjoyed his oriental take on things—as well as his gossip about other people’s horticulture.

“Are you doing this for Sarah?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Fair enough,” I said.  Not that I entirely believed him.  “But thank you for helping me, just the same.”  Hideo grunted.

Then I told him my story.  The gardener’s shaky English and the cultural barriers between us complicated the telling as much as the tale itself.  By the time I’d finished, two hours had passed, and we’d driven by a dozen police cruisers uneventfully.

“We must eat,” Hideo said, parking in front of a sushi bar somewhere in Silver Spring, Maryland.  He wasn’t offering me any choice on where we’d eat.  I took my Glock with me inside the restaurant, hiding it in my waistband, rugby shirt tucked out.

“You stay with me,” Hideo said when we were eating, lifting his wrinkled, box-square face from a bowl of hot noodle soup he slurped deliriously, like a vampire at the scene of mass genocide.  “Not hotel room.  Too dangerous.  Too lonely too.”

“Thank you,” I said.  “I’d like that.”

I almost felt sure Hideo had bought my story.  I almost thought I could trust this man too, like Sarah obviously did.

“So who wish to harm you so bad, huh?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “But it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.  Whoever it is who would go to the trouble of stealing my meds, and replacing them with dummy pills, and then switching them back again, must hate me, don’t you think?”

Hideo grunted.  “Very, very much.”

“And I ask you—how many people could there be who hate me?”

“Hmm.”  Hideo’s eyes swayed from side to side with intense concentration, like he was multiplying by the tenth power.

“Not that many!”

“If you say so.”

“I’d like to use your cell phone now, if you don’t mind.”

“In truck.”  Hideo tossed me the keys.

From the passenger seat of the van, I was able to keep my eye on Hideo through a large restaurant window.  But his head never raised from his bowl, except to sip tea.  And he didn’t hail the waitress for a furtive conversation or take out a pen and scribble down any desperate messages on his napkin.

Without much trouble, I obtained the K Street office number for my defense attorney, Lester Cravey.  He was in.

“Surprised and delighted!” Les said.  “You’ve got to turn yourself in, Argus!  Right this minute!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Your life is on the line here, boy, and this can’t do anything but hurt your case.”

“We’ll see.  What about the pills?  Did the results come back yet from the lab?”

“I was just going to mention that.  They came back today.  Interesting result.”

“How so?”

“The bottle of pills is indeed filled with Risperdal.  Every last pill.  But a few of the pills contained microscopic traces of an unknown substance, traces too small, in fact, to test, until the lab technician thought of testing the residue inside the plastic pill bottle itself.”

“And?”

“She identified glucophage.”

“Gluco what?” I said.

“It’s a medication for diabetics.  At some point earlier in time, it appears, your pill bottle had contained glucophage.”

“Counselor, I’m not diabetic.  There’s no one in my family who is diabetic.”

“I know,” Les said.  “I telephoned your wife.”

“Wouldn’t taking that kind of medication harm me?”

“No,” Les said.  “I asked.  Glucophage is unique in that it won’t harm a non-diabetic if swallowed by accident.”

“This was no accident.”

“I believe you,” Les said.  “I believe you now.  Truly.  The lab technician says your pills and the glucophage pills are nearly identical to the naked eye.  In addition, they’re approximately the same weight, and they both have a similar, metallic-like taste to them.  It’s no wonder—”

“And Sarah?  Does my wife believe me now too?”

“That’s how I’d interpret her blubbering, yes.”

Pressurized euphoria expanded my chest.  “What about the district attorney?  Have you spoken to—”

“I left a message with Millard to call me.  But I can tell you right now, Argus, he won’t buy your theory.  Not a chance.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll say it doesn’t prove a thing.  The switch could’ve happened at the pharmacy, for example, when someone failed to pick up a glucophage prescription, and no one rinsed the bottle clean before filling it with your prescription.  Another possibility he might mention is that your wife did this, to try and free you from the murder rap.  And that’s just off the top of my head.”

“Someone’s trying to destroy me, Les.”

“I know, I know.  It’s diabolical, that’s what it is, Argus, absolutely diabolical.  But you can’t—”

“I’m not coming in until I catch the bastard who did this to me.  Or until I start losing my mind again.  And that’s final.”

“But if you lose your mind, how will you know—”

I hung up.  Returning to the sushi bar by sidewalk, I crossed paths with a briefcase-bearing Black man in a gray suit.  The man skirted wide of me, for I was scowling, scowling like a lone, determined T-cell in a village of virus.

Anger foamed my blood, indignation stiffened my sinew, and with a stirring sense of vindication, I punched the air with my fist.  I punched one more time for Darth, now silent Darth, who had once told me, Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Chapter 26

“You little shit stain!” Darth said.  His voice was coming from the air duct in the ceiling of my Georgetown office.  It so terrified me to suddenly hear Darth’s voice again that I awoke from my dream already launching a sit-up in bed.

My heart pounded as if it wanted to see the outside world.  Beads of sweat strung every line in my forehead.  The back of my neck was soaked.  I didn’t know where I was.

I looked around, finding myself on the floor of a small, boxy room on a ridiculously narrow, thin mattress.  Within arm’s length was an identical mattress, where a slumbering person snored, not gently and not quietly.  With the help of the dawn’s early weak light, seeping in around the edges of a curtained window, I recognized the snoring person as Hideo Mori.

Oh, right.  I felt oriented in the world again.  I was in Hideo’s bedroom.  Inside Hideo’s apartment.  A garage apartment in the home of Hideo’s daughter.  I was geographically located in Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of the District of Columbia.

I tried recalling my dream—or rather, my nightmare—but all I could remember was being at work in my old office by the Potomac River, reading some financial report, when Darth’s voice had taken me by surprise.

“You little shit stain!”

Why did that sound so familiar?  Because, I soon realized, I’d heard Darth say that exact phrase many times before.  It was a pet phrase of Darth’s, an old one, which always made me feel small and insignificant, especially when I’d been a young man in my first battle with psychosis.

More recently, I remembered hearing that pet phrase coming from inside the air conditioning vent of my Beemer, back when I’d first told Darth about the warnings—from my father, from that stranger at Randolph House—that my client and friend, John Helms, was plotting to kill me.

“Why you?” Darth had said.  “You little shit stain!”

For a sad and silly moment in the dark, I pondered my own insignificance in the eyes of the world—at least in comparison to the wealthiest person in America, a flamboyant business legend.

But it was only because I did ponder—it was only because of Darth—that I suddenly realized I had it all backwards.

I threw off my blanket and, in gray darkness, tiptoed across the room in my BVDs, guided by the barely glimmering brass knob of the door.  I stubbed my bare toe on a table leg and cursed out loud, which stirred Hideo.

“What is it?” he said.

I knelt down beside his puny futon, my knees cracking loud complaints.  “No one’s out to get me, Hideo.  I’m just the patsy.  The fall guy.  It’s John Helms with the enemy.  It’s the famous billionaire someone wanted dead.”

“Go back to sleep,” Hideo said, shutting his eyes.

“Not on your life,” I said.

I limped out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, flicking on a bank of fluorescent lights overhead.  In a low cupboard near the telephone, I found a stash of phone books.  I began thumbing through the one with yellow page listings for the nearby city of Bethesda, Maryland.

The last request that John Helms would ever make to me had been to find a missing employee, his chief technology officer, Jeremy Crane.  And my firm had found him.  Keisha Fallon had told me so in the visitor’s room of my psychiatric ward on the day of John’s funeral.  Keisha had told me all about how Jeremy had been found—wandering naked on a beach, shaved head to toe, covered in silver paint—and where the man was recuperating too—in a private psychiatric clinic in Bethesda.  I had to see Jeremy right away.

I found the clinic listed, The Wellness Institute, its address and phone number, and immediately phoned for the staff physician on duty.  Impersonating DC Homicide detective Gary Fellows—Mona Strecker’s junior partner—I received permission to interview Jeremy that afternoon as a witness in what I vaguely termed an “official investigation.”

While Hideo prepared breakfast, I walked to a drugstore around the corner to buy some hair dye and a cheap pair of black, plastic-rimmed reading glasses, the weakest prescription I could find, because I see fine.  Shortly after breakfast, I emerged from Hideo’s bathroom a four-eyed platinum blond.

“What do you think?” I said.

Hideo grunted.  “You not you anymore.  Very good.”

I borrowed two hundred dollars in cash from my benefactor and had him drop me off at the Silver Spring metro station on his way to work in Georgetown.  I rode to the Wheaton stop, where I knew of a discount store and bought me a police detective’s outfit: blue blazer, khaki pants, polyester tie, and plastic-looking black shoes.  I bought a notepad and pen too.  All I lacked was a badge.

But two hours later in Bethesda I made it through check-in at the front desk without being asked for a badge.  As a security expert, I know how to get by security.  Simply comporting yourself with authority can do the trick.  It also helps to act bored.  And there are many other little tricks too.  For example, seconds before I’d approached the front desk, I’d shut my eyes tight for a few seconds to make my pupils smaller, which makes a person appear less anxious on a subconscious level.

Jeremy’s private room had a small sitting area beside the bed, two upholstered chairs and a coffee table.  Jeremy was a bit short, about five foot seven, with playful blue eyes.  His bald scalp was dotted with black bristle points by now, and he’d begun re-growing his goatee and mutton chops too.  So rotund was the man’s middle, and so spindly his legs and arms, that in his light green hospital pajamas he looked like a huge Granny Smith apple.

“Nice to meet you, Detective,” Jeremy said, shaking hands with a firm grip.  He seemed entirely unembarrassed by his circumstances.  “Have a seat.”  We plopped down across the table from each other.  I thought, with a start, that I saw recognition on his face—as we’d met once before, a year earlier—but the moment passed.  “Coffee?” he said.  “It’s Jamaica Blue Mountain.  I had it shipped in.”

“Thanks.  Black.”

He poured my cup.  “What’s this all about?”

“Don’t ask me to explain, Jeremy, not yet.  I don’t want to influence your responses.  I’ll tell you what I can later.  Tell me about your disease.  How long have you known about it?”

He poured himself coffee.  “Well, I’ve known since my first psychotic breakdown at the age of nineteen.  I was a sophomore at MIT back then.  That would be seventeen years ago now.  It was the first and the last time I lost my grip on reality, so to speak, that is, until recent events.”

The gourmet coffee was superb.  “Did you ever discuss your disease with anyone at work?”

Jeremy smiled sadly.  “No one.  There’s still a stigma attached to mental illness, don’t you know.”

“You’re sure you told no one?”

“No one outside my family.”

“I’d like the names and addresses of all your psychiatrists.  Everyone you’ve seen since MIT.”  I took out a small pad and pen to write the information down.

“Why?”

“Please, Jeremy.  It could be important.”

He sighed.  “I’ve had only two psychiatrists, I believe.  Yes, that’s right.  When I lived in Boston, I used to see Doctor Thomas Thigpen.  His office was in the Back Bay.  I don’t recall the exact address.  Since moving to the Washington, DC area, nine years ago, I’ve been seeing Doctor Barbara Rosenbaum.  Her office is in Chevy Chase, at 11145 Connecticut Avenue, suite number 710.  I’m sure she’s in the phone book.  I expect Doctor Thigpen is retired by now.”

“What about counseling?”

“My record is spotty in that department,” he said.  “I’m always so busy.”  But then he provided me a few names.

“Now,” I said, “about your recent psychotic episode.  Your first in seventeen years.  Any idea what set it off?”

“According to my blood tests, I hadn’t been taking my medication for some time, at least two weeks, I’m told.  Which contradicts my own memory, for what that’s worth, which is probably nothing.  I was really out there by the time I was taken into custody.”

“I saw the booking photo.”

Jeremy laughed.  “So have I, sir, so have I.  And I’m sure you’re curious as to what was going through my mind, so I’ll tell you.  Somewhere along the madness trail, I became convinced that I was telegraphing my thoughts.  Every thought I was thinking, in other words, others could overhear, or interpret, or so I came to believe.  Which bothered me no end at first, and caused me to be highly suspicious of anyone who came too near.  But then I began to appreciate my extraordinary power.  I decided to broadcast my thoughts into outer space.”

“Outer space?”

“My aim was to contact intelligent life on other planets.”

“I see.”

“You shouldn’t be so skeptical.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’ve got to be out there somewhere, Detective.  Planetary systems are common in the universe, we know that now, and we already know of one hundred million stars similar enough in composition to the Earth’s sun to support life.  All it takes, say the exobiologists, is a planet that’s the right distance from its sun, with a stable orbit, with sufficient planetary mass to hold an atmosphere, with the proper spin axis, and a climate conducive to liquid water, along with carbon dioxide—for photosynthesis—and a few other volatile compounds to—”

“That’s fascinating, Jeremy, but—”

“But what was I doing bare ass naked on the beach at dawn?  Shaved from head to toe?  And dipped in silver paint?  Just what I’ve been saying.  Thought broadcasting.  Somehow, Detective Fellows, I came up with the idea that if I could just make myself more electro-magnetically conductive, then I could amplify my thought waves, and send them further into space.  Being naked and shaving myself and applying a metallic paint and walking on sand, which is loaded with quartz and other types of silica, were all attempts to make myself more conductive.  I went out at dawn assuming there would be less emission interference from cell phones and wireless computers, and so forth.  Insane, I know, but that’s why I’m here, after all.”

“Let’s get back to why I’m here.  Do you know a waitress by the name of Sally Anne Bilchik?”

“A waitress, you say?  I don’t know any, except for the ones who serve me in restaurants, and I rarely remember their names.”

“This one worked for Treviso’s Italian Restaurant in Georgetown.  Ever eaten there?”

“Sure, it’s a fine establishment.  But then I’ve eaten in many fine establishments, all over the DC area.  More coffee?”

“Another half cup, thanks.  You might’ve met her at John’s.  Treviso’s catered parties for him, now and then.”

Jeremy’s pour was sloppy, my saucer catching coffee.  “Oh, what a tragedy,” he said.  “What a horrid tragedy.  But there was just no way to predict that man’s behavior.  Argus Ward’s, I mean.  Of all people, I should understand that.”

“Think carefully, Jeremy.  Were you at any of John’s parties catered by Treviso’s?”

“I’m not really the party type.  More the intimate dinner for two, or four, type.  I never went to those things.  Never.”

“What about Argus Ward?  Know him?”

“I think I met him once.  I’m not sure.”  He averted his eyes, then blew his nose with a Kleenex.  “I’m sorry, Detective, but this line of questioning disturbs me greatly, as you might imagine.  I had a strong affection for John, and the way he died, well, that could’ve been me.  I could’ve been the killer.”

“Why?  Because you were also paranoid schizophrenic, also suffering a psychotic break?”

“That and my delusions.  You see, before I’d become obsessed with my thought broadcasting, I’d been obsessed with John Helms.  I kept receiving these dire warnings—or so I believed—that John was planning to kill me, and that I had better kill him first to save my own skin.”

My pulse quickened.  I’d collected some useful information already, I felt, but here was a real potential breakthrough.  I threw my pad and pen on the coffee table.

“Can you check your home telephone messages by remote?  Not the new ones, but the ones stored in memory?”

“Of course,” Jeremy said.

“Would you do so please?”

“Sure, but why?”  He picked up his cell phone.

“You’ll see.”

When Jeremy accessed his machine, I had him skip ahead through the messages until he came to the right one, then I had him listen to the whole thing.  I strained to listen himself.

“What are you waiting for, Jeremy?” said an unidentified caller, a male with a tinny, accusing voice.  “You know what has to happen.  Do it!  Just do it!  Get it over with!”  Click.

Jeremy shut off the phone.  He looked perfectly dumbfounded.  “How can that be?”

“The caller wanted you to murder John, right?”

He gave a nod.  “But I imagined all that.  Didn’t I?”

Chapter 27

So I had no hidden enemy after all.  All along I’d been a mere pawn in a well-disguised and well-executed assassination plot.  I’d been one of three pawns.  Three that I knew about.  Three paranoid schizophrenics.  Jeremy Crane, Sally Anne Bilchik, and myself.  All driven insane suddenly, somehow, by somebody.  All set in motion to murder the same man.

But why three?  Or possibly more?

It didn’t take me long to settle on an answer.  I gave my answer to Keisha Fallon that night from a pay phone inside the Pentagon City Mall, after I’d already stunned her with my lab test results and with my three paranoids murder conspiracy theory as well as my visit with Jeremy Crane.

“Driving a paranoid schizophrenic into full psychosis with dummy pills,” I said, “and then leveraging the resulting madness in such a way as to coerce that paranoid schizophrenic to murder someone, some particular one, is—”

“Brilliant,” Keisha said.  “If it’s true.”

“Uh-huh.  In a fiendish kind of way.  And I think you’ll agree it would deflect suspicion away from the guilty party, or a murder conspiracy in general.  But the weak link in the approach is the paranoia itself.”

“How so?”

“The puppet master—or masters—behind the murder of John Helms—had to use multiple assassins because it was too risky to rely totally on one mad person to get the job done.  The approach called for back-up.  Duplication of effort.  With Jeremy Crane, for example, things didn’t take.  However he’d been manipulated, after being driven insane, he never settled on John Helms as his one biggest problem.  When he went mad, he found something else to obsess about, and ended up naked on a beach in North Carolina, covered in metallic silver paint, communing with the stars.”

“Too bad the same thing didn’t happen to you.”

“Yeah, too bad.  A chance happening here or there and I might’ve ended up on a bus to Tierra del Fuego, running from the CIA, or on a row boat off Cape Cod, trying to catch a magic fish who could grant me a bigger penis.”

“You could’ve used one.”

“Skip the ethnic jokes, Keisha, and help me figure out why someone would’ve wanted John Helms dead.”

“But you’re a fugitive, Argus.  You know I can’t—”

“I know I’m putting you in a difficult position, but I’m not crazy—not now, at any rate—and you can verify everything I’ve just told you, if you wish to.  Besides, all I want you to do is go through the records we have on the movements of John Helms over the last six months.  Match that against records of his business dealings at Helms Technology during the same period.”

“Word is we’re about to be axed by them too.”

“So get on it right away.”

“What am I looking for?”

“I don’t know.  Anything odd or surprising.  You knew the man, Keisha.  Better than anyone in our firm.  You were his shadow for the last four years of his life.”

“Hey, you said no ethnic jokes.”

“But whatever you do, Keisha, don’t tell the cops what I’ve just told you.  They know about my blood work, but probably don’t trust the results—like the DA—and I strongly doubt they suspect any murder conspiracy.  After Sally Anne Bilchik made the first assassination attempt, they wrote off my second, successful attempt as being influenced by Sally’s, given my proximity to John Helms and my own insanity.  The cops know absolutely nothing about Jeremy Crane, and I want to keep it that way for now.  For now I want to be the only one out here on the murder conspiracy trail.  Take things as far as I can on my own.”

Keisha agreed, though I had to work on her some more.  It made me feel bad to beg a friend and employee to aid and abet a fugitive from justice.  But I’d do worse things soon enough.

Before we hung up, Keisha changed the subject.  “It’s over, you know.  Argus Ward, Incorporated.”

“I can’t exactly say I’m surprised.”

“Most of us have been sacked already, and anyone lucky enough to still be working has resumes out.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “Obviously, it’s all my fault.”  I would care deeply one day about the demise of an enterprise I’d spent ten years of my life building, but at that point in time, I wouldn’t let myself care.

“What were you thinking, Argus?  Keeping a secret like that?  For all these years?”

“I was thinking . . . I’m not a monster.”

“Huh?”

“I gotta go, Keisha.”

That night, Darth haunted my dreams again.  I awoke just before sunrise and found myself unable to go back to sleep, due in part to Hideo’s loud snoring.  As I lay on my puny futon mattress, my tailbone aching, I hashed over the murder plot I’d uncovered.  Many questions remained unanswered.

How did anyone ever find out about my illness? I wondered.  I’d guarded that secret closer than I’d guarded the nuclear codes when the president traveled.

And what about the other two?  How could any one person have learned about all three of us?  Identified all the paranoid schizophrenics who came into regular contact with John Helms?  A waitress, a computer scientist, and a security consultant?

I had no answers.  The feat, in fact, seemed damn near impossible.  Psychiatric records, I knew, were supposed to be held strictly confidential.  I was fairly certain, moreover, that each of the three paranoid patients involved saw a different psychiatrist.  At least I knew that to be the case between Jeremy Crane and myself.  My thoughts turned to the targeting of John Helms.  How would one try to convince a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic that a particular individual needed murdering?

There had to be regular contact, I concluded, a series of events like Jeremy Crane’s phone message—repeated verbal and/or visual contact made with each of the paranoids, including me, of course—in order to spark a murderous obsession with John Helms.

So I searched through all the memories of my recent past, starting with the not-so-murky days when I first began to lose my mind.  But I never got as far as my full-blown psychosis.

With a burst of euphoric energy, I threw off my cotton blanket and, with the aid of the new dawn, tip-toed out of the bedroom without stubbing my toe again, or waking Hideo.  In the kitchen, I went through Hideo’s stash of phone books again, but found that none would do this time.  None included the right city.  With a small flashlight that I located in a drawer, I returned to Hideo’s bedroom.  While my host snored on, I booted up a computer in the corner, a pre-millennium Hewlett-Packard, but with a high-speed cable internet connection.

In under two minutes I located a search engine for public telephone numbers throughout the United States.  In the search field, I typed in the name, Bernard Alan Simpson, followed by the city of Columbia, Maryland.  Then I hit the enter key.

Moments later, an address popped up on the screen, an address that I had only seen once before, and only briefly, on a driver’s license in the piano bar at Randolph House in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia.  I memorized it, shut down the computer, and woke Hideo.

We drove north in Hideo’s van, through light patches of early morning traffic on Interstate 95.  Thirty minutes later, we took the Broken Land Parkway exit, then the exit for Highway 32, which brought us into Columbia, Maryland.

Columbia, you may know, is famous for being one of the first planned cities in America.  But it feels more like a suburb.  The land is loaded with greenery: woods and hills and fields long ago designated permanent open space to prevent urban sprawl.  And the city’s residents congregate in nine self-contained villages, where schools, shopping, recreation, and virtually all other amenities cluster within easy reach, if not walking distance.

Hideo followed the directions I provided him by reading off a folding map of his that hated folding.  Soon we reached the village known as King’s Contrivance, winding by tall pines and townhouses and sizable single family homes.

Luxury cars and SUVs, like an army of metal dinosaurs, rumbled by us on their daily commutes south to Washington, or else north to Baltimore.  From Hideo’s thermos, I kept pouring hot green tea into my porcelain cup and drinking it and wishing like hell I was drinking hot black coffee.

“What do we know for a fact, Hideo?”

“Only one thing,” he said, his gravelly voice more grating than usual at this early hour.  “Someone switch your medicine, to make you lose your mind.”

“Correct,” I said.  “But why?”

“Most obvious answer, to harm you.”

“But we don’t know that for a fact.  Let’s assume it was to harm John Helms.  Let’s assume someone wished to murder him and—to avoid suspicion—weaponized my illness.  Had me do the job.”

“Very well,” Hideo said after a long silence, “I assume such evil person exist.  This evil one would know about your mental illness.  Also would know you work for John Helms.”

“The evil one would enter my home,” I said, “steal my pills, and replace them with dummies, then watch me carefully, monitor my behavior, wait until my sanity begins to slip away, and then point me toward John Helms like a heat-seeking cruise missile.”

“You mean try to convince you to kill billionaire?”

“Precisely,” I said.  “Just like this man we’re going to see tried to do, just like Bernard Alan Simpson.”

“But we don’t know that for fact,” Hideo said.  “Could be that day you already completely crazy.”

“ ‘Insane,’ Hideo.  Insane’s a better term.  Or better yet, ‘reality challenged.’ ”

Bernard Alan Simpson, we found, lived in a cul-de-sac crowded with mock colonial homes.  His was a bone-white, two-story garrison colonial with green shutters.  Planted alongside the shrubs was one of those rectangular security patrol signs to ward off burglars.

“How much do you think it’s worth?” I said to Hideo.  We were watching the house while parked on the street curb in front of a neighboring house, slouching low in our seats.

Hideo grumbled.  “Real estate here just like Tokyo.  Reality challenged.  Half million US dollars easy.”

Bernard Alan Simpson’s garage door opened.  A dark green Mercedes-Benz sedan—an older, 90’s model—rolled out of the garage in reverse gear and slowly backed down a slanting, concrete driveway.  The vehicle was in mint condition and recently waxed.

I caught the profile of the driver, the lone occupant.  He had a huge nose, a real honker.  It was Bernard himself, no doubt about it.  I hopped out of Hideo’s van and ran up to the driver’s side of the Mercedes, just as Bernard slowed the car to a near stop at the end of the driveway so the muffler wouldn’t scrape against the pavement as it entered the cul-de-sac.

Funny, I thought, how automobile drivers almost never lock their own doors.  I flung Bernard’s open and stepped on his brake with a good deal of pressure—never mind that I had to step on Bernard’s polished black shoe to do it.

“Good morning, Bernard Alan Simpson.  Remember me?”  I whipped off my glasses to help him recall.

Bernard was wearing the same gray flannel suit he’d worn at the hotel in Alexandria, or else one much like it.  His walking cane lay on the passenger seat.  He stared up at me.  His mouth dropped open.  UFO-spotting open.

“C’mon, Bernard, you remember,” I said.  “The piano bar at Randolph House?  You told me I should kill John Helms?”  Bernard suddenly forgot how to breathe.  But not how to gasp.  A vehicle door shut behind me.  Hideo was coming.  “Argus Ward is the name.  Did you read about my murder arraignment in the newspapers?”

“Don’t hurt me!” Bernard said.  “Please!”

“Shut up!”

I realized I’d begun shivering, from head to toe, and breathing hard.  Baring my teeth.  Hideo appeared at my side.

“Please don’t hurt me,” Bernard whispered, frantic-eyed.  “It wasn’t my idea.  I didn’t want to do it.  It took four stiff drinks before I could go through with it.”

Chapter 28

I walked silently behind Hideo, who followed Bernard’s limping, three-legged gait toward the house.  It was no accident Hideo had placed himself in the middle.  My shivering, hyperventilating, bared teeth rage raged on.  If only! I thought, I could just flail upon the person of Bernard Alan Simpson for ten seconds!

“My wife is out walking,” Bernard said, entering his house through the front door with a key.  “In the neighborhood.”

“We know,” Hideo said, crossing the threshold.

“She’ll be back soon,” Bernard said.

He cringed hearing his front door bash against the inside wall of his home.  I’d kicked it in myself, entering.  “My wife thinks I’m a killer, Bernard!”

“I-I-I’m sorry,” Bernard said.

“Get on with it, Bernard!” I said, glaring at him over the top of Hideo’s flat head.  “Who the fuck are you?”

“Shut the door, please.”  I slammed it shut, and I took pleasure sliding the deadbolt into place with a loud clank, before spinning back around and staring into Bernard’s worried eyes.  “I’m just a furniture store owner, Mister Ward.  Nothing more.  Before all this started, I didn’t know you from Adam.”

“Why did you set me up?” I said.

“I was blackmailed.”

“By who?”

Bernard hesitated, opening and shutting his mouth twice without producing any sound.  Finally, he said, “I’ll show you.”

The furniture man led a single file procession toward the rear of his house.  Through a bay window in the living room, I noted a Jacuzzi sunken into the backyard patio.  Down a hallway, we entered into an airy study, paneled in pine.  Bernard pointed to an old strawberry red iMAC computer atop his desk.

“That’s the culprit,” Bernard said.  “That damn computer.”

I stared at Bernard’s computer, confused, half-expecting the machine to sprout legs and arms, or to at least swivel toward me of its own accord, maybe with sinister digital eyebrows arching across the top of its monitor.  But it didn’t sprout anything, and it didn’t budge.  It just sat there, like any other old iMac I’d ever seen, garish and silly-shaped, distant cousin of the Volkswagen bug.

“This is the culprit?” I said.  “I don’t follow.”

“One night,” Bernard said, “about a month ago, I was sitting there at my desk, doing my taxes on a spreadsheet, when . . . when I lost control of my computer.”

“What do you mean, ‘lost control?’ ”

“All of a sudden, my spreadsheet disappeared, and the screen turned black.  I thought the computer had crashed, but then, just a second or two later, white lines of type started appearing across my screen, letter by letter.  It was a message.  To me.  Specifically, to me. I remember it word for word: ‘Good evening, Mister Simpson.  Don’t be alarmed.  And don’t turn off your computer.  Or you will regret it.’ ”

“So what did you do?” I said.

“I turned off the computer,” Bernard said.  “I don’t mind saying, I was scared shitless.  Like now.”

“Then what happen?” Hideo said.

“I regretted turning off the computer,” Bernard said.  “Just like the computer said I would.  Because before I’d even got up out of my seat, the computer turned itself right back on.  Like it had a mind of its own.  And a photo appeared . . .”  The eyes in Bernard’s fear-sickened face watered.  He lowered his head.  “This is really quite embarrassing.”

“Not as embarrassing as a murder charge!” I said.  “Go on!”

Bernard directed his gaze toward a window overlooking his backyard barbecue pit.  “There’s a place I go.  In a rather seedy area of Baltimore.  To meet . . . to meet . . . young men for . . .”

“I get the picture,” I said.  “Your wife doesn’t know you’re a switch hitter.”  Bernard nodded, still facing the window.

“Switch hitter?” Hideo whispered to me.

“I’ll explain later,” I whispered back.

Bernard turned to face us, wet-cheeked now and tremulous.  “My wife, she’ll be back any minute.”

“Go on,” I said.

“I was terrified,” Bernard said.  “But also angry.  I felt violated.  I had been violated.  I yanked the plug to the computer out of the wall socket.”

“Then what happened?”

“I went to the liquor cabinet, and I got good and drunk.  Clearly, I’d become the target of a very clever blackmailer.  But on the positive side, I felt proud of myself.  Proud that I’d had the gumption to pull the plug to the computer.  I thought maybe I’d called his bluff, you know?”

“His?” I said.  “How did you know—”

“Him, her, they,” Bernard said, waving a dismissive hand in the air.  “I had no idea.  I still have no idea.”  He removed a white silk handkerchief from his breast pocket to dab his tears.

“But you not call bluff?” Hideo said to Bernard.

“No,” Bernard said.  “I stayed off my computer until the next evening, when I told myself it would be safe to use, that is, so long as I stayed off the internet.  I went back to doing my taxes.  About half an hour later, I left the room to use the bathroom at the other end of the hall.  When I came back, my printer was printing.  Of it’s own accord.  Spewing out page after page.  Already, there was a huge pile scattered on the floor . . .”  Bernard stared at a barren spot on the floor below his printer, transfixed.

“What was written on the pages?” I said.

“Three words,” Bernard said.  “The same three words on every page.  Centered.  In big, black type.  The biggest font there is, I think.  I suppose you want to know—”  I nodded.  Bernard sighed, paused.  Meanwhile, his face turned every red shade of maple leaf in autumn.  Then he said, “ ‘Bernard sucks cock.’ ”

Hideo was puzzled again.  “Suck what?”

“Later,” I whispered.  The furniture man’s pain had dissipated my anger some by now.  Yet I wasn’t so kind as to wait until the flush left Bernard’s complexion before saying, “You were contacted again?”

“Yes,” Bernard said.  “Immediately.  The printer was still churning out pages when that blasted photograph reappeared on my monitor.  This time there was a type-written message super-imposed at the bottom.  It said—I don’t recall exactly—but, something like, ‘This photo has just been forwarded to your wife’s email address.  If you wish to have it removed before she sees it, Bernard, you will start to do as you’re told.’ ”  Somewhere at the other end of the house, a door slammed shut.  “That’s my wife!”

“We’re not leaving,” I said.  “We’ve just begun with you.”

“Please!” Bernard said.  “Please!”  His wild eyes raced back and forth between my stern face and a spot only his mind could see, somewhere beyond the solid walls of his study, but inside the house, where his wife was fast approaching.  That sexual secret he kept from her had to be thirty years old.

“I repeat,” I said, “we’re not leaving.”

“We can talk later,” Bernard said.  “This afternoon.  At my store.  I’ll tell you everything, I promise!”

I shook my head, so Bernard changed course.  “Okay, okay, alright.  Now.  We’ll finish our business now.  But please!  Please pretend to be someone normal in front of my wife, the both of you!  Please, please, please!”

“ ‘Normal,’ ” I repeated.  “That may be difficult.”

“Bernnnie!” called a woman in a sing-song voice.  Her soft steps padded down the hall.  Bernard’s pleading eyes unmoved me.  Mrs. Simpson entered the study, wearing a Christmas red jogging suit and brand new, bulky white sneakers, high-tops that appeared to be a by-product of NASA research, and they came to a quick stop when she saw visitors.

“Oh!” she said.  “I didn’t know . . .”

Hideo bowed to her.  “Hello, Mrs. Simpson.”

“And who might you be?” she said.

“Hideo Mori.  I am gardener.”

“Yes!” Bernard said.  “That’s right.”

Mrs. Simpson looked to me, and I said,  “I’m, uh . . .”

“Chet!” Bernard said.  “He’s Chet.  Mister Mori’s assistant.  Darling, you won’t believe this, but I’d forgotten all about the appointment I’d made for this morning with Mister Mori.  As you know, dear, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of putting in a Japanese garden.”

“No, I don’t know,” Mrs. Simpson said, stepping in front of her husband.  “You haven’t discussed that with me, not once.”

“Haven’t I?”

“Bernie, really!  You’re going absolutely senile!”

The four of us left the study through a pair of diamond-paned double doors.  From the look on Bernard’s face, he hadn’t counted on his wife joining us in the backyard.

We crossed a wide, newly mowed lawn, walking in pairs.  I stayed with slow-moving Bernard and his cane.  I wasn’t sure who limped more—him or me.  Mrs. Simpson, whose first name turned out to be Patricia, linked elbows with Hideo and led the way.

Patricia was no more than sixty, but one hundred percent white-haired.  That was one thing, at least, that wouldn’t change if she ever learned about her husband’s secret carnal visits to Baltimore.  I wondered if the carefree demeanor would survive.

I overheard her say, “ ‘Neewah?’ ” to Hideo, trying to repeat a Japanese word he’d uttered.

“Yes,” Hideo said.  “ ‘Niwa’ is Japanese word for ‘garden.’  Means ‘pure place.’ ”  He halted us in the center of the yard and then pointed to a small patch of purple orchids near the edge of a small fish pond.  “No good.  Must go.”

Patricia clutched her chest.  “My beautiful orchids?”

“Flowers must go,” Hideo said.  “Should be no bright colors.  Japanese garden is place for quiet reflection.”

“Quiet reflection,” Patricia said, nodding.  “Well, we certainly don’t have enough of that.”

Hideo pointed to his own feet.  “Winding path start here.  Path made of flat stone.  Path and new trees I plant provide meigakure.”  He noted Patricia’s confusion.  “May-gah-koor-ay,” he said.  “Translation difficult.  Things in garden must be hidden from view at first.  Imitates life.  Represents life’s mysteries.  Nothing is seen clearly at first.  Sometimes not for long time.”

“How true,” Patricia said.  “How true.”  I gave Bernard a meaningful glance.  Bernard avoided my eyes.

I said, “Mister Mori, what do you think about one of those stone bridges stretching across their little pond?  You know what I mean, don’t you, Bernard?  The kind with a severe arch the shape of a cat’s spine when it’s cornered?”

“Yes,” Bernard said, meekly.

“Hmm,” Hideo said, contemplating, stepping toward the pond.

Patricia trailed him.  “I like it!  I like it!”

I considered ending the charade, commencing the Simpson marriage meltdown, just to have it over with.  But a glance at Patricia prevented me.  I felt she should learn the truth, but that truth, I also felt, should be delivered in the most humane way possible.  From her own husband.

It will come from her own husband, I thought.  In time.  Because I’ll see to it.  I whispered into Bernard’s ear.

“Your store.  One hour.”

After my follow-up meeting with Bernard, behind a closed office door in the back of his downtown Baltimore furniture store, Hideo drove us back to Washington.  It was late morning by now, and well past the time when Hideo should have taken up his normal, caretaker responsibilities with the lawns and gardens of Georgetown.  But he was on his way to work now and would drop me off, I’d arranged, at the Rosslyn metro station in Virginia, just across the Key bridge from Georgetown.  During the drive, my mind replayed bits and pieces of Bernard’s strange tale.

“One night,” Bernard had said, “around nine PM, I received a strange phone call at home.  At first I thought it was just one of those irritating, electronic-voiced telemarketers, and I was about to hang up when the electronic-voice spoke my name, and called me ‘queer,’ and asked me why I’d stopped driving my Mercedes-Benz to the street corner where I . . . where I . . .”

“Used to go,” I said impatiently, “to find nameless, faceless, sex partners to give you head and so forth.  Get on with it, Bernard.”

“That was the night we met,” he said.  “You and I, Mister Ward.  The electronic-voice told me where to go—to Randolph House, of course—and what to say, and who to say it to—you, I mean.  I was provided a thorough description, including what you were wearing, down to the last detail, even the design of your necktie, and then I was ordered to embark upon my journey without delay—Immediately!—or else.  Or else, specifically, a large stone would come crashing through our living room window at that very moment, with a copy of a certain photograph scrolled up and tied to the rock with a red ribbon.  My wife was knitting in the living room, you understand.”

“What did you tell your wife?”

“I said the alarm company that protects this furniture store had called, reporting a system error, and that they needed my building key to reset the alarm.  She bought it.  Always does.  She never doubts me.  It’d break my heart if she started to.”  He tossed a loud bugle note into his handkerchief.  “I told her not to wait up, and I went out, and when I stumbled home drunk, hours later, after giving you the message—that horrible message—she was fast asleep.”

“Don’t you know blackmail never ends?” I said.

“Don’t say that!”

“You were promised it would end, though, weren’t you?”

“Yes.  If I did this thing right—this one thing—I’d never be bothered by that photograph again.”

“And were you?”

“No.  I received an email, though, the next morning, asking me how things had gone at Randolph house, if I’d succeeded, how you’d seemed, how you’d responded.”

“And you answered?”

“Immediately,” Bernard said.  “Completely, thoroughly.  And I haven’t been bothered since.”

“What about the woman?”

“What woman?”

“At Randolph House,” I said.  “She was in her early sixties?  Wearing a gold dress?  She had a raspy voice?”

“Oh, dear me,” Bernard had responded.  “There was another?”

Oh, yes, there had been another.  “Don’t call Doctor Shields,” she’d told me.  “He’ll lock you up.”

Her job—whoever she was—had been to alienate me from the psychiatric help I’d so desperately needed at the time, to keep my budding paranoia blooming.

Hideo dropped me off at a curb outside the Rosslyn metro stop.  I had a fresh notion to investigate, but I didn’t share it with Hideo, or reveal what I’d planned for the afternoon, other than to say I was “playing a hunch.”

It wasn’t that I still worried about trusting Hideo.  It was just that my fresh notion sounded foolish even to myself.  But I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Chapter 29

My first, and only previous, psychotic break had come as a young man of twenty-one.  I’d been a mere six months shy of graduation from West Point Military Academy.  I remember very clearly how it all began.  With an auditory hallucination.  A low whisper out of nowhere in the street.

“Starlight.”

I’d been in town late one afternoon to buy medicine for a mild head cold.  Gripping my purchase, I’d been walking alone down a shoveled sidewalk, a light snow falling languidly in fat flakes, when the whisper startled me.

“Starlight.”

I’d stopped cold.  I’d turned.  Turned in a complete circle.  Only to find myself alone—separated from other pedestrians by forty paces or more in either direction.

I’d found no one hiding beneath the awning in the well of the stoop a few paces from me, and no car coasting by me with a passenger leaning out the window, whispering, “Starlight.”  Then I heard it again—and again—and by the time I’d walked back to my dormitory, what had begun as the soft whisper of one voice, one male’s voice, I believed, had become a whispering chorus.

“Starlight.  Starlight.  Starlight.”

And the whispers delivered themselves faster and faster.  “Starlight, starlight, starlight, starlight, starlight . . .”

And the voices grew louder until they were not whispers at all, but booming chants.  “Starlight!  Starlight!  Starlight!”

The chanting grew deeper in tone and more ominous, reminding me at one point of those spell-bound guards from The Wizard of Oz, the ones protecting the witch’s castle.  Powerful, sinister voices.  “Starlight!  Starlight!  Starlight!”

The voices, they were trying to frighten me, I decided.  Then I thought, No, I’m wrong!  They’re sending me a message of some kind!  A coded message!  Some vital signal or warning!

“Starlight!”  What could it mean?  What could it mean?

I locked myself in my room, and I threw myself on my bunkbed, and I held my head in my hands, and I tried to decode this simple, cryptic message.  But I got nowhere.

“Give me more clues!” I shouted.

But all I kept hearing was, “Starlight!”

The chorus grew louder, then louder still, ear-bleeding loud, and the chanting rushed at me quicker and quicker, and the sound grated on me and grated on me and grated until at last it lost its last touch of humanity, or mammal kinship, and that word, that awful, fucking word—“Starlight!”—sprung as if from the collision of machinery metal, as if from two flat planes of steel, spinning at the speed of planets, colliding again and again and again.

“Starlight!  Starlight!  Starlight!”  I had to scream a mighty scream to make it stop.  But it did stop.  It finally did.

Yet the very next day, “Starlight!” came roaring back.  Right during the middle of my Trigonometry class.

The visual hallucinations arrived much later, weeks later, shortly after I’d been expelled from West Point for misconduct and insubordination, or about a month before my diagnosis.

That’s the typical pattern among paranoid schizophrenics, I’d learned from my own shrink, Doctor Shields.  The auditory hallucinations come first.

And yet my more recent bout of mental illness had begun with a visual hallucination.  Which was why, I assured myself, I wasn’t out of my mind for pulling up behind the woman I’d been searching for so arduously—with the aid of Keisha Fallon’s fast detective work—inside Reagan National Airport, a slender blonde flight attendant, fresh off a plane from Philadelphia, pulling a tote bag on wheels behind her through the concourse.

I followed her outside the airport, into overcast, muggy weather, and onto a crowded metro train.  She found a seat in the way pretty women attained such things, with little or no effort, thanks to the aid of instant admirers.

I stood three feet away, pressed into a rugby scrum, it seemed, gripping the chrome rail overhead and sneaking peeks at the flight attendant’s heart-shaped face, her Dutch boy haircut, and her big, blue eyes, which were downcast and work-weary and telling of the toll exacted on the body from a long hurl through the sky.  When I closed my eyes, if only for a second, I could see her supple, nude form again.  Her flesh was—and still is—ingrained in my mind in the way terrifying memories usually are.

We rode the metro for a few stops, changed trains at Rosslyn station, and rode the orange line, disembarking at the Courthouse metro stop.  I fell in behind her on the escalator leading to the surface, one empty steel step between us.

For the first time, I noticed her wedding ring.  It was a nice rock, and I wondered what her husband did for a living.  I toyed, anxiously, with my own, ring-less wedding finger.

The escalator spit us out on a sidewalk in view of the Arlington County jail.  The street was full of sheriff’s cruisers.  Deputies on foot traveled between the jail and the courthouse and the local eateries.  At the base of a canyon of high-rise buildings stood a movie theater and an eclectic group of restaurants and small shops.  The flight attendant disappeared into a mini-market.  I waited outside, seated along the edge of a pink granite fountain.  Every time a deputy walked by, I lowered the brim of my Redskins cap a bit more.

The flight attendant zipped away from the mini-market and climbed the outdoor stairs behind the fountain that led inside a towering condo.  I approached her at a fast clip.  She stuck a key card into a slot to unlock the entrance door.  I had to lunge to catch the door before it locked behind her.

The lobby was ornate: crystal chandeliers and gilt-edged mirrors and a marble and limestone checkerboard floor.  Passing the front desk, I scurried so as to place the flight attendant between myself and the security guard.  She, like the guard, was oblivious to me.

We rode a slow elevator together, along with six or seven other people.  I was the only one dressed in casual attire, the only one not work worn, not lugging something.  She stepped off the elevator on the twenty-seventh floor, and I followed.

We were alone now, in a thick-carpeted corridor, decorated in ersatz antique mahogany.  The wallpaper’s muted blue patterns on a white background reminded me of antique china.  The smell of Indian cooking behind one of the closed doors was savory.

I padded silently behind the flight attendant and her wheeled tote bag.  She stopped in front of the door marked, 2710, and fished for her keys.  I pulled up behind her.

“You’ve got a great ass, honey.”

She whirled toward me.  “I beg your pardon!”

“Believe me, I know.  I had myself a wonderful look on that flight from Bangkok last month.”

Her mouth dropped open, but she closed it quickly, so quickly I wondered if I’d imagined it.  “What on earth are you talking about?  Who are you?  What do you—”

The door to 2710 swung open.  A huge slab of husband—as it turned out—filled up the doorway.  He wore a West Side Story-era crew-cut, filthy blue jeans, and a gut-flaunting white tee shirt, soiled with dirt and grease and pizza-size pit stains.  He gripped a tall-boy can of Miller beer.

“What’s going on out here?  Who’s this?”

“No idea,” she said.  “But I think he’s a stalker.  I think he followed me home from the airport.  Get rid of him, Ned.”

She slipped behind her man and disappeared into the apartment.  Ned scowled at me with a bully’s pleasure.

“You heard her.  Get lost, you creep.  Or else, I’m gonna—”

“Ned, I’m going to have to insist—”

Ned’s free hand reached out to shove me.  I reacted with a Judo move, known as a Falling Drop, which landed Ned—though not his beer—gently on the floor.  Suds soaked into the hall carpet.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Ned.”

From his sitting position on the floor, Ned scrambled to his feet and exploded at me, attempting a mid-waist tackle.  I broke his momentum—and his nose too, I think—with a karate chop.

Ned fell to the floor.  I stepped into the apartment.  The flight attendant I found lifting an infant from a play pen in the living room.  She saw me, yelped in panic, and raced with the baby toward a telephone on the kitchen wall.

She was cradling the receiver atop her free shoulder and punching in numbers when I ripped the phone out of the wall and smashed it against the floor.  The noise sent the infant wailing.

“Sit down,” I said.  “In there.”  I pointed to the living room.  Without hesitation, she obeyed.  I followed behind.

Ned stumbled in through the front door, holding his nose with both hands.  His well-soiled tee shirt, with the added blood and beer, had turned into some kind of Rorschach nightmare.

“Close the door, Ned,” I said, “and take a seat.”

“You broke my nose,” he said, sounding whiny and congested as he too obeyed me.  He sat beside his wife and child on a creamy leather sofa in front of the picture window.

“Be right back,” I said.  In the kitchen, wetting a towel for Ned, I noticed a large, blue work shirt draped over the back of a chair.  The breast pocket insignia advertised an auto repair shop: Pro Tech Auto Center.  I found that curious.  Who would’ve expected an auto mechanic and a flight attendant to be inhabiting such an upscale condo?

“He broke my nose,” Ned said from the other room.  “Broke my fucking nose like fucking Jackie Chan.  I need a hospital.”

“Sssh,” said the flight attendant.  “Be calm.”

I found her rubbing and patting both of her babies upon my return.  At least the little one wasn’t whining anymore.

I handed Ned the wet towel.  Ned resented it when his wife tried to help clean him up, swatting her forearm.

“Relax,” I said, “both of you.  All I want is answers to a few questions.  Straight answers.  Understood?”  The two adults gave me a nod back in unison.  “Good.  Now, as I’d indicated in the hallway, Ma’am, we’ve met before.”

“I don’t recall.”

“Wait,” I said, “we haven’t been introduced yet.  Before we go any further, my name is Argus Ward.”

“And I’m Elizabeth Hardtack.”  That I knew by now, thanks to Keisha.  “And this is my husband, Ned.  Oh, and this is Daphne.”

Mrs. Hardtack held her infant aloft a good while, as if banking on its cuteness to ward off any further violence.  I petted Daphne on the head.  She grabbed my finger.

“That’s a Southeast Airlines uniform you’re wearing,” I said to the flight attendant.  “You work for them full-time, but you also have your name in a pool, offering to work corporate jets in a pinch.”  This I knew from Keisha’s digging inside HT.

“That’s right,” she said.  “How did you—”

“Helms Technology has a small, full-time staff of flight attendants, but sometimes they get too busy and have to draw on that pool at Reagan National.  That’s how you got work aboard HT’s Gulfstream jet last month on that flight to Bangkok.”

“Bangkok?” she said.  “Yes, I’ve been to Bangkok before.  Was it last month?  With HT?  I don’t recall.”

“I remember,” Ned said, lifting the bloody towel from his nose to speak to his wife.  “You told me HT pays top dollar.  You switched days off with Diane Spencer so you could work it.”

“Oh, yes,” she said to me, “I remember now.”

She studied my face intently.  I helped to jog her memory by removing my Redskins cap as well as my cosmetic reading glasses.  But there was nothing I could do about my hair’s new color.

“Why,” I asked, “during the final leg of the flight, Mrs. Hardtack, did you remove your uniform—indeed, every stitch of clothing you had on—while serving drinks to your passengers?”

She gasped.  “That’s absurd!”

“Isn’t it, though,” I said.  “But I was there.”

“Hey, hey, hey!” Ned said, rising from his seat.  “What’s wrong with you, pal?”  I shoved him back down.

“You!” she said to me.  “It’s you!”

“Who?” Ned said.  He studied me.  “Shit, you’re right, Lizzie!  It’s him!  That crazy guy we saw on TV!  Only he’s blond now.  The guy everybody’s looking for!  The guy who—”

“Stay out of this, Ned,” I said.

Ned’s hairline, receding in a V-shape, pointed at me accusingly, and his eyes glared, but a new quiver in his voice betrayed rising concern.  “You’re insane.  There’s no talking to you.  You murder people.  You see naked flight attendants.  Go on your way now, you sick bastard, and forget all these nutty ideas about my wife.”

I turned back to the wife.  “Is that where you know me from?  From the television?  Or is it from the plane?”

The flight attendant’s eyes averted mine.  They followed the bloody trail running from Ned’s feet to the front door.

“Please, Mrs. Hardtack, I have to know the truth.  I think you can imagine how high the stakes are here, and not only for me personally.  This whole affair concerns the death of a famous business leader, a multi-billionaire.  We could both be involved in a conspiracy of major proportions.”

Slowly, Elizabeth Hardtack raised her eyes to me.  “You’re a sick man, Mister Ward.  Please do us all a favor and seek help.”

“Are you being straight with me?” I said.

“She is,” Ned said.  “Now get out.”

I paced back and forth in front of the Hardtacks, inwardly seething.  I didn’t know what to believe.  I didn’t know how to verify the woman’s story or blow holes in it.  And I didn’t trust myself to say another calm word, one that wouldn’t send the real infant screaming.  I donned my disguise and headed for the door.

Half-way there, the flight attendant’s nude form popped into my mind again, and an idea struck me.  I turned back to face the Hardtacks, whose bodies seemed glued to the sofa.

“Ned,” I said, “you’re a lucky man, really you are, making love to a woman with such a fine figure.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Ned said.

“But she’s modest, isn’t she, Ned?  Modest enough to wear one-piece bathing suits, even with a body like that.”  Ned swallowed his latest curse-filled sentiment.  “How would I know that?  The same way I know she delivered Daphne, here, via Caesarean section.  The same way I know your wife’s nipples are pinkish and small—each about the size of a dime—and that she’s a natural blonde.”

Ned jumped to his feet.  “What the . . .”

“And your wife has a tiny white scar, doesn’t she, Ned?  It’s about the size and circumference of a cigarette burn, and it’s located on her left buttock, down low, and so close to the crack in her ass it could almost crawl inside.”

Ned looked down at his wife, and so did I.  She was bouncing Daphne on her knee.  Meanwhile, tears streamed down her cheeks, moving thick gobs of mascara.

Chapter 30

Hideo’s kitchen table was laden with hot Japanese dishes I didn’t recognize, save for a porcelain bowl of white sticky rice.  But I wasn’t hungry anyway.  Between polite pecks at the food with my chopsticks, and sips of bitter Bali tea, I described my visit with the naked flight attendant and her family.

“Her name is Elizabeth Hardtack,” I said.  “Her husband is an auto mechanic, named Ned.  Complete strangers to me, until—”

“Try octopus sashimi,” Hideo said, pointing to it.  “Use soy sauce.  Very, very good.”

The octopus was raw, I found, and I nearly gagged forcing it down.  “Delicious, Hideo.  Where was I?  Anyway, this whole thing started when Elizabeth, the flight attendant, was contacted through her Southeast Airlines email account, by a person named Harlan Grazer, who claimed to be a big-shot administrator with Reagan National airport.”

“You know him?” Hideo said.

“Never heard of him before.  Anyway, Harlan told Elizabeth he got her name from the list of local flight attendants who’d made themselves available for work on corporate jets, and that he wanted her help in playing a practical joke on an old friend from the Army.  Me, supposedly.  But he didn’t mention my name.  He told her only that he could get her the work assignment on the day his old Army buddy would be flying aboard HT’s corporate jet, and that he’d arranged for all the other passengers who would be aboard that day—it turned out there were only three others—to be in on the joke.”

“What joke?” Hideo said into his noodle bowl.

“This Harlan Grazer paid Elizabeth to take off all her clothes in mid-flight.  Meanwhile, everyone else in the cabin pretended she still had her uniform on, and told me I was crazy.”

Hideo grunted.  “Good joke.”

“Terrific, yeah.  The reason Elizabeth went along with the gag was because she got paid.  Handsomely.”

“How much?”

“His initial offer was five thousand dollars, but Elizabeth negotiated.  She got him all the way up to eighteen thousand dollars.  This Harlan Grazer—whoever he is—has deep pockets.”

“Eighteen thousand?” Hideo said.  “For stripper?”

“Yeah.  The moment she disclosed the amount, I saw Ned, her husband, jerk his head toward a baby grand piano in the living room, a Steinway.  That’s where a good chunk of the money went, I soon learned, after Ned called her a whore, and the two of them started bickering.  The rest of the money went to paying off her quite sizable credit card debt.”

“Eighteen thousand,” Hideo said again.

“Elizabeth Hardtack likes the finer things in life, that’s all too clear from seeing her condominium.  But it can’t be easy living large when you, yourself, are a flight attendant, and your husband fixes cars for a living.  I think Harlan Grazer knew that, somehow.  He knew her weakness.  Capitalized on it.  Kind of like with the furniture man.  Like with Bernard Alan Simpson.”

Another grunt from Hideo.  “She know Mister Bernard?”

“Never heard of him.”

“What about passengers on plane?”

“They were all HT executives.  One I spoke with, and he was based in Texas, which is where they all came aboard.  Elizabeth says she didn’t know any of the other passengers, and from what I can recall, they didn’t seem to know her.  Or each other.”

“They all paid too?”

“Possibly.  But how expensive.  Unless . . . the passengers were all part of this conspiracy to have me kill John Helms.”

“Hard to believe,” Hideo said.  “Too many people.”

“Maybe you’re right.  Yes, I think it’s far more likely they were paid off too.  One way or another.”

“Why do this?” Hideo said.  “Why silly joke on airplane?  Your pills already switched.”

“I don’t know yet.  Perhaps it was only to speed along the disintegration of my mind.”

Hideo put his chopsticks down on the table, the eating tips resting atop their holder, which was a sliver of gray porcelain like a flat, polished stone.  He lit a cigarette.

“Mister Argus, I so sorry, but I think maybe your time is running out now.  I think maybe your disease is back.  You imagine things that not really happen.”

“What are you saying, Hideo?  You think I simply imagined my conversation with the flight attendant and her husband?”

“I think so.  Or you remember wrong.”

“But you know about the lab tests, the dummy pills.”

“What you told me before, I believe.”

“What about Bernard Alan Simpson?  You met him, you heard him with your own ears.”

“Yes, that too I believe.  But now, I think, you under too much strain.  You—How you say?—‘breaking up.’ ”

“ ‘Cracking up?’  No, I’m not.  Not yet.”

“How you know?  Dreamers not know they dream until morning.”

“I’m fine, I tell you, fine.  I’ve only gone three days without my meds.  Three days, Hideo.  This really happened.  All of it.”  With a tight fist, I pounded once on the table, wobbling all the little porcelain bowls.

Hideo shrugged.  “More tea?”

I nudged my cup and saucer forward.  Hideo’s face couldn’t have been less expressive if he’d been wearing a surgical mask.

What secret thoughts does he keep? I wondered.  Can I still trust him?  Why did I ever trust him?  What is his game, anyway?  And what should I do about him now?

At this point in my story, I recognize only in retrospect, paranoia had indeed begun its creep back inside my un-medicated mind.  When, exactly, this process had begun is hard to pinpoint.  You see, paranoia begins like a gain of five pounds on a man who favors elastic waistbands.  You don’t notice it at first.

Early the next morning, Hideo dropped me off in front of the Rosslyn metro stop.  It bustled with rain-drenched commuters.  I slithered through a fast-moving maze of umbrellas and wet slickers until I reached the row of pay phones by the escalators.

With a quarter, I dialed my home phone number, and when the answering machine kicked on, I waited, wondering if someone would pick up, and listening with a strange fascination to my own voice, recorded in a much, much happier time.

I needed to speak to Sarah desperately, to hear her voice live, to tell her something of what I’d learned, and not to worry too much.  I knew the phone would be tapped and I wasn’t sure how long it would take the cops to pinpoint the physical location of my own telephone.  But I didn’t care.  I had to risk it.

No one picked up.  Are they still gone, Sarah and Ellie?  Still in Annapolis?  Or staying with relatives now?  Ditching the media circus I’ve caused them to suffer?  The cruelty of cold shoulders in the neighborhood?  Or is Sarah simply not answering the telephone?

I hung up and dialed Sarah’s cell phone number.  No answer there either.  So I dialed home again and left a brief message after the tone, telling my wife and daughter that I was okay and that I loved them very much.  Then I left the metro station.

I hailed a cab and rode to Foggy Bottom, where I waited for a store I knew called Spy Supply to open its doors for business.  The store carried an odd assortment of espionage-related items, including the nanny-cam I’d purchased the year before to monitor Ellie’s babysitters in secret.

Hiding from the rain beneath a green storefront awning, I stood a couple yards away from a row of newspaper display stands and was pleased to find myself no longer headline news.

When the store opened, I hurried to the back, passing up the chance to purchase night-vision goggles, lead-filled gloves, bullet-proof umbrellas, parabolic microphones, and spray cans that turned envelopes briefly transparent.  I paid cash for a palm-size, digital voice recorder.

Then I hopped on the metro.  I rode the trains to Reagan National Airport, proceeding to the Southeast Airlines terminal.  I dropped, still drenching, into a seat near a gift shop and waited for the first returning flight from Philadelphia to arrive.  I pulled out my new voice recorder, hit the record button, and spoke into it.

“It’s 10:55 AM, Thursday, June 22nd, and this is Argus Ward speaking.  That’s right, I’m you, Argus, and I’m not paranoid yet, though I’ll be damned if I know how to prove that to you.  Maybe you’ll be able to tell by the sound of my voice, or by remembering when you recorded this.  Anyway, everything I’m about to say is true, absolutely true.  So listen very closely . . .”

I proceeded with a detailed chronology of recent events, the ones which had so swiftly destroyed my life forever, beginning with the naked flight attendant and moving forward to the current hour.  I laid out what I knew for sure, what I thought I knew, what I suspected, and what I’d ruled out.  I told myself who to trust—and how much—and who not to trust.

I did this because I knew that paranoia and mental confusion would arrive before the hallucinations started, which was when I planned to surrender myself.  This record would be useful to me then.  Later, when no longer a fugitive, and mentally well again, I intended for the recording to help me distinguish between the truth of things and any paranoid fantasies.  And I could share the recording with the cops too.  By then they would have reason to listen to me.

The plane returning from Philadelphia landed on time.  When the flight crew emerged, I dropped the voice recorder into my breast pocket—leaving it on Record—and approached the slender, blonde woman I’d been waiting for.  “The next voice you hear,” I whispered into the machine, “will be that of Elizabeth Hardtack, the naked flight attendant.  Play this for Hideo as well as the cops.  Then they’ll believe you.”

Elizabeth eyed me approaching and, with a quick word, broke away from a fellow flight attendant.  Her self-assured bearing, I noticed, had survived a coal-black shiner and a cut and swollen upper lip.

“Your poor face,” I said.  “I’ll have a talk with Ned.”

“Just stay out of my life, would you please.”

She wouldn’t stop for me, or even slow her gait, so I pulled up beside her and, shoulder to shoulder, we strode through the busy terminal at a busy clip.

“How much were you paid to strip naked on the airplane?”

“I told you already.  Eighteen thousand.”

“So you did.  Did you talk to Harlan Grazer?”
“Yes,” she said.  “By telephone.  He’s a real person, a real executive.  He’s been with Reagan National for years.  He’d never heard of me.  Didn’t know anything about any practical joke.”

“Do you believe him?”

“How should I know?”

“How were you paid off?”

“The money was wired into my checking account.  Half before, half afterward.”

“So that money could’ve come from almost anywhere,” I said.  “What about the emails?  Were they all from the same address?”

“Yes, I think so.  Harlan’s corporate email address.”

“Someone took control of his computer,” I said.  “Remotely, probably.  And then bounced email through his account.  Why didn’t you at least phone this Harlan before signing on for something so—”

“I thought about it,” she said, “but then the first payment arrived on time.”

I left Elizabeth Hardtack wanting to know who inside Helms Technology had assigned her to work the Bangkok flight, wanting to find and interrogate the passenger who’d introduced himself to me as Rob Ramos, and do the same with the two other HT executives who’d boarded the corporate jet in Austin, Texas.  But I couldn’t do it myself, and Keisha working alone would take far too long.  I was a fugitive, after all, with a clock ticking on my sanity.

It was then I decided to bring the police into play, to put their manpower to good use by sharing what I’d learned since my escape.  In the meantime, I planned to remain a fugitive, to continue with my own investigation while the cops began theirs.  I thought I was being prudent, later that same day, contacting the police through my defense attorney.

“You’re un-medicated,” Les Cravey said to me over the telephone.  “Aren’t you, Argus?”

That was all he had to say to me after hearing all about my three paranoids murder conspiracy theory as well as Bernard Alan Simpson.  I hadn’t even mentioned Elizabeth Hardtack yet—or all the suspect passengers on Flight Bump and Grind.

“If you don’t believe me,” I said, “give Bernard a call.  Here’s his number at the furniture store, he doesn’t want to be contacted at home . . .”

I provided the number, then repeated it.  I spoke loudly because my pay phone connection gave off static and there was a high volume of buzzing from the steady stream of passersby licking at my back where I stood in a hall, just inside the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum.

Les said, “You’ve got to turn yourself in, Argus.  Before it’s too late.  Before you end up doing something else—”

“Tell the police to contact Bernard at his furniture store too, not at home.  That’s important.”

“Whatever you say.”

I noticed a pair of uniformed Capitol Policemen approaching in bright yellow slickers, for it was still raining outside.  I turned my head away from them, only to find another pair of cops approaching from the opposite direction along the corridor.  The second pair suddenly began jogging toward me.

“You still there?” Les said.

“You bastard,” I said, then hung up.  I took two steps toward the elevators and pressed the up and down buttons both.

The up elevator opened immediately.  The compartment was empty.  As soon as I stepped inside, I pressed the button to close the doors.  A blur of slicker yellow appeared behind the doors the instant before slamming shut.  The compartment rose.

Damn that Les Cravey! I thought.  Les had informed the cops of my phoning him earlier to get the lab results on my blood work, knowing the cops would tap his own phone lines.  Which was how the cops had just pinpointed my location.

I can’t trust my own defense attorney! I thought.  Fine thing for a paranoid schizophrenic!  The doors to my elevator opened on the second floor.  I raced through the exhibits, searching for a stairwell leading back down to the ground floor or the basement.

But just as I found a stairwell, two cops bound up toward me from out of there.  I reversed direction, only to find another pair of cops emerging from the elevators.  Luckily, a buzzing hive of kindergartners allowed me to dodge the cops and race on.

I reached the walkway ringing the second floor of the rotunda, where a circular railing shielded people from the gaping hole overlooking the first floor below and the great, stuffed woolly mammoth who greets visitors at the front entrance to the building.  There my progress was cut off by two security guards and another Capitol policeman.

Within seconds, I was surrounded.  The cops all shouted at the tourists to back away from the railing, where I had frozen in a tense, motionless crouch.

A motorcycle cop, who barked loudest of all, ordered me to place my hands on the railing.  I did so.  And then I scrambled atop the railing and cliff-dived off . . .

Chapter 31

I cushioned my landing on the broad back of the woolly mammoth.  The wind leapt from my lungs and the force of my weight toppled the great beast.  I lay motionless upon the hairy, crumpled giant, gasping for air and peering through a dusty cloud of taxidermy stuffing, while tourists shielded their children or ran for cover.  As soon as I found breath, I stumbled off the stage.

None of my pursuers from the second floor had imitated my dive, but new pursuers were closing in fast, judging by the rising cacophony of police sirens.  Through the glass doors, I saw two police cruisers braking to a stop at careless angles outside the front entrance, so I made for the rear exit.  But another cruiser was just arriving on that side of the building, so I raced down an exhibit corridor, past dinosaur bones and a hideous giant squid, past a plastic-looking volcano.

I took a sharp corner, where a tiny female security guard jumped out from amid a herd of Mongolian reindeer and sprayed me with mace, stinging my eyes.  Semi-blinded and off-balance and dodging the mace, I mingled among the reindeer.  The figures felt like they were made of cast iron, and I tipped one over, warding off the guard, and with wet, stinging, squinty eyes, I raced on.

I was plan-less now, clueless too, searching for an exit from the building out of sheer instinct.

Damn you, Les Cravey! I thought.  Damn you to hell!

Reaching a Neanderthal exhibit, I encountered more cops, three at once.  I broke to a stop.

From a wax-figured hunter, I snatched a five-foot tall spear and swung it at my foes and poked with it.  But that turned out to be a huge mistake, for it only gave the cops an excuse to reach beneath their slickers for their weapons.

I raced for a nearby stairwell.  Inside, I slammed shut its heavy metal doors and slipped the spear into the door handles.

The cops bashed into the doors, but the spear held.  They were blocked out.  I scrambled down a flight of stairs.

It led to the loading dock area, where all the heavy lifters loading an 18-wheeler had taken a break to watch the excitement outside, the screaming cruisers with their flashing lights converging.  One of the workers turned, blowing out cigarette smoke, and saw me opening the driver’s side door to the cab.

“Hey, you!  Get out of there!”

Finding no keys in the ignition, I slammed the door shut and jogged outside, onto the sidewalk.  My injured ankle had begun to ache.  Rain beat upon my shoulders and my ball cap.  From the left, a helmeted cop on a motorcycle approached, racing down the street toward the museum entrance.  I stepped behind a red minivan and, as the cop passed, tackled him.

The motorcycle flew out from beneath us.  We rolled and tussled on the pavement.  I tensed two fingers and stabbed at the cop’s windpipe.  His hands instinctively reached for his throat.  I stripped him of his gun and stood.

The cop stared up at me, frightened now, hands raised in surrender.  His motorcycle lay twenty yards off, resting on its side, having smashed into a parked car.  It wasn’t idling.

I tucked the gun in my front waistband and ran to the vehicle.  I tried standing it up, but couldn’t.  It had to weigh a thousand pounds.  I tried again.  Failed again.

I had to point the gun at the cop, briefly, to keep him from getting up off the ground.  On my third try, as the men of the loading dock approached me in a horde, I finally got the vehicle upright, hopped on, turned the ignition, revved the motor, and took off.  I nearly tipped over crossing the wet, grassy mall, but soon had the motorcycle under control.  Glancing back, I saw that I’d put two hundred yards or so between myself and the flashing lights of the parked police cruisers outside the museum.  Yet one of the cruisers began to give chase.

I weaved through traffic on Constitution Avenue.  The wind blew my cap off.  The rest of my disguise—the reading glasses—had fallen off during my wrestling match with the motorcycle cop.

When Union Station loomed ahead of me, I decided it was the perfect place to abandon the motorcycle.  I parked at the side of the building, beside an escalator leading down to the DC metro and to all the Amtrak trains heading out of the city.

But instead of going down the escalator, instead of taking a train, I stepped to the front of the building and hailed one of the dozens of yellow taxi cabs waiting in line for customers.

“Silver Spring,” I said to my cabbie, a bearded young Black man in a skullcap stocking.  He pulled away.  Slowly.  Sirens wailed all around us.

“Got all wet, did ya?” said the cabbie.

“Forgot my umbrella.”

A cruiser with flashing lights crossed our path, siren wailing.  The cabbie hit his brakes hard.  “Hell’s going on?” he said.  “Why all these cops be stressin’ like this?”

“Don’t know,” I said.  “But can we move it?  I’m running a little behind schedule.”

Chapter 32

I found some cheap transportation at a ramshackle motorcycle shop in Southeast DC.  It was a skinny Honda dual sport, ten years old, with off-road tires and high ground clearance—a bike designed for play on trails, not the highway.  I managed to afford it by taking it out for a test drive and never going back.  But I paid just the same.  I needed a back brace by the time I reached Baltimore.

The rain that day was unrelenting.  I spent the afternoon seated on a covered city bus stop bench, across the street from Bernard Alan Simpson’s furniture store.  Wearing only my rugby shirt and blue jeans, I was soaked to the skin after my long ride, and I found myself drenched anew every so often by the tire spray of passing trucks.

It wasn’t until nearly 5 PM when I spotted them entering the store—the ones I knew would be coming sooner or later, and I’d been banking on sooner.  They both wore khaki trench coats with business suits underneath and black umbrellas overhead.  They took determined steps, wore determined faces.

The woman was a tall brunette in her late thirties or early forties.  Her burly male companion was a full decade younger.  He had buzz-cut red hair, a steel pipe spine, and a roving gaze that screamed law enforcement.  Twice before the pair entered the store, I had to duck my head behind a soggy, opened newspaper to avoid that gaze.

I’d met them both before, at the Helms compound shortly after the death of John Helms, and in my private seclusion room at the psychiatric ward.  They were DC homicide detectives, partners Mona Strecker and Gary Fellows.

I rose from my bench and stepped into the rain.  Through the storefront window, I watched a store clerk escort the pair behind the showroom and into the office area.

I faced the street, hunting for a vehicle likely to belong to homicide detectives.  I found no candidates there, nor behind the store, where Bernard’s old Mercedes-Benz was parked.

Fifteen minutes later, on the second floor of a parking garage around the corner, I took a peek inside a dark blue Chevy Impala and found a police radio and a mounted shotgun under the dashboard.  I waited there, sitting on the cold cement floor, leaning my sore, motorcycle-jarred back against an SUV’s front tire, and tried to ignore the spreading spasms.

An hour or more later, the detectives emerged from the elevator.  I sprang to my feet and cut them off steps from their own vehicle, my Glock waving back and forth between the two.

“Hands up!” I said.  “Away from your weapons!  Don’t make me shoot!”  Together, and without haste, they dropped their folded umbrellas and showed their palms to me.

“Hello again, Mister Ward,” said Mona Strecker, her eyes more like a hunter’s than prey.

“Glad you found us,” said Gary Fellows.  “We need to talk.”

“Arms higher,” I said.  They complied.  I stepped toward the man.  “I’m going to frisk you now, and take your weapons.”

Fellows said, “Knock yourself out.”  I took his gun.  I didn’t find any hidden back-up piece.  I moved on to the woman.

“You’ll find a fully loaded Sig Sauer 225 in my shoulder holster,” she said, “and an extra magazine clipped to my belt.  Do you know what day it is today, Mister Ward?”

I removed the offending items, keeping Fellows in full view, and checked Strecker for other weapons.  “Why do you ask?”

“Do you at least know what year it is?”

“Of course I do.  You don’t show much respect to a man who’s doing your job for you.”  I took her keys to the Impala, stuffing them in my rear pants pocket.

Strecker said, “It’s not your job to do, Mister Ward.  Your job is to submit yourself to the law, to the District and its criminal justice system.  Why don’t you take this opportunity to turn yourself in?”

“When you don’t need my help anymore, I will.”  I seized Strecker’s cell phone too and stashed it in my back pocket.

“You’ll only get yourself into deeper and deeper trouble out here,” she said, “and without your medication, it’s only a matter of time before you lose your—”

“Shut up,” I said.  I placed the handguns I’d taken on the floor and kicked them both beneath a white Lexus convertible.

Fellows said, “Your story’s checking out, Mister Ward.”

“You bet it is.”

“We have the pill results, of course, and we’ve already interviewed the two other paranoids who you believe were driven insane in the same manner as you, and coerced into targeting John Helms for a dirt nap.  And now—”

“How did you interview them so fast?”

“Jeremy Crane phoned me the other day,” he said, “saying he’d remembered something he’d forgotten to tell me before, only we’d never spoken before.  Someone with blond hair, just like yours, had been impersonating me.  That’s a felony, by the way.”

“So you believe me?” I said.

Strecker said, “We’ll be checking into every aspect of your conspiracy theory, but it seems to have real merit.  Tell us, who do you think did this to you?”

“No idea,” I said.  “You?”  They shook their heads in unison.  I back-stepped to the Impala, facing them now from an equidistant spot about three yards away.  “So what do you think of Bernard?”

“He picked the wrong trousers this morning,” Fellows said.  “A light taupe doesn’t hide urine stains real well.”

I glared at him.  “You worked him over?  Threatened him?”

“We had to,” he said.  “That was some story he gave.”

I sighed.  “So do you believe him now?”

He shrugged.  “We’ll be checking into it.”

The wind gusted.  The storm spit diagonal rain all along the edges of the garage floor.

“There’s more,” I said.  “More people like Bernard.  More strange, bizarre events too.  I tried to give you the information earlier today, through my defense attorney, Les Cravey, but my phone call was interrupted.  I guess you know why.”

“That elephant’s gonna cost you,” Strecker said and let out a long, one-note whistle.

“What else do you know?” Fellows said to me.

I turned to Mona Strecker.  “Detective, get that pad and pen out of your suit pocket and write this down . . .”

I provided her with Elizabeth Hardtack’s name, address and phone number.  Then I discussed my corporate jet ride, focusing on the last leg, from Austin, Texas to DC.  I was in the middle of describing exactly what the flight attendant looked like naked when the detective halted her note-taking.

“You’ve been off your meds too long already, sir.  I’m not writing this down.”

“Do it,” I said.

Then, briefly—and breathlessly, I suppose—I explained the significance of the flight attendant’s nude form.  I described her reluctant confessions to me too, and my suspicions concerning the other passengers.

The detective shook her head writing it all down.  As soon as I’d finished, she put her pad away, saying to her partner, “He’s already psycho, Gary!  He’s got to be!”

With the keys I’d taken, I popped open the trunk of the Impala.  “Inside.  Both of you.”  Neither moved immediately, so I rushed Strecker, pointing the gun inches from her left temple.  “Do you hear that, Mona?  The voices?  Telling me to splatter your brains all over this cement?  Unless you cooperate?”

“Do like he wants,” Fellows urged.

Strecker climbed inside.  I motioned for her partner to approach the car.  Leaning over the trunk, he said, “Two can’t fit inside there.”

The elevator doors opened, and a giggling quartet of high school girls emerged, all holding large shopping bags.  Detective Fellows barely glanced at them.  He couldn’t bring civilians into harm’s way, I knew.  It went against code.

I hid my handgun from sight and used my body to block any view of the trunk’s interior.  The girls paid us little heed before turning into another row of parked automobiles and receding from view, if not earshot.

I motioned for the detective to join his partner inside the trunk.  It did prove a tight fit.  A thin film of sweat glistened each of their foreheads.  Whether it was a sign of fear or the strain of squeezing into such tight quarters, I couldn’t tell.

“What will you do with us?” Strecker said to me.

“I’ll call in your location in twenty minutes.  You’ll be out in less than half an hour.  I want you to visit Elizabeth Hardtack before the night is over, and start tracking down those airplane passengers.  We’ll talk again soon.”

I slammed the trunk shut.  Instantly, I heard Detective Strecker’s muffled cry.  “Mister Ward!  Wait!”

“What is it?”

“You’re not on any medication, are you, sir?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s very worrisome.  Wouldn’t you agree?  Next time we meet, you really could be hearing voices, isn’t that correct?”

“The first time I hear voices, that’s it, game over,” I said as I dropped to a squat, hiding the car keys atop the vehicle’s left rear tire.  “I’ll turn myself in, I promise.”

“I’m begging you, Mister Ward, turn yourself in now!  Before it’s too late, before you do something—”

“You’re wasting oxygen, Detective!”

I slipped my gun beneath my soaking wet rugby shirt, hustled down the stairs, and jogged into the rain-soaked street.

The relentless rain and the rush hour and three crumpled metal hulks from a recent car accident brought traffic on I-95 to a stop.  I took the outlaw joy of slithering my motorcycle between stalled automobiles.  I made Silver Spring in less than an hour, parking by the train station, and hailed a cab.  I gave the cabbie the name of an intersection a mile away.  It stood at the end of Hideo Mori’s block.

The trip would allow me to scan Hideo’s house from the outside before committing myself to return there.  Now that Hideo had begun doubting me, I had found I could no longer completely trust him.  Just like that female detective, Hideo hadn’t believed a word about the naked flight attendant.

“Turn here,” I said.  The cab pulled onto Hideo’s street.

Through a foggy side window, I saw Hideo’s van parked in the driveway.  There was a light on up in Hideo’s garage apartment.

No sign of a police stake-out, I thought.  But that’s the idea, isn’t it?  How would I really know?

For a moment, I felt paranoid and foolish.  Hideo himself would be in trouble with the law if he’d called the police.

But Hideo would do it, I decided, if he thought it was the right thing to do.  He’s peculiar that way.

Beyond Hideo’s place, the cab neared the intersection I’d provided as my destination, and the cabbie asked where to pull over.  I told him, “Drive on.  I, uh, I just realized, I forgot to lock up at the office.  Take me back to the train station.”

I slithered my motorcycle through the soggy streets of Washington, driving aimlessly, my face stung by the rain, my thoughts all broken into little shards, pieces I couldn’t quite assemble, until I passed the Georgetown Law Center and recalled the men’s homeless shelter located on the other side.  I couldn’t afford a motel.  Not even in southeast DC.  I’d gone through all but four dollars and fifty-five cents of Hideo’s borrowed money.  I made a quick U-turn and bee-lined it for the shelter.

Where else can I dry off? I thought.  Or lay my head down upon a pillow?  I can’t go back to Hideo’s now.  It’s out of the question.  Can’t trust him anymore.  Can’t risk it.

In the barracks-like basement, a dozen homeless men lounged on cots or dozed.  One emerged from a shower in a clean linen robe.  Another three played cards at a wooden table.  It was hard to ignore a putrid odor I associated with moldy dog cereal.

A volunteer walked the aisles distributing thin cotton blankets.  Another was busy collecting sharp objects from a new arrival—fingernail clippers, keys, a paring knife—and dropping the items inside a large, manila envelope for safe-keeping.

I scanned the basement for Graybeard, the homeless man who had so recently helped me—against his will—to complete my escape from the psychiatric ward.  The man no longer possessed my wedding ring—that was almost certain—but he could point out the pawnshop where he’d hocked the ring, assuming his brain wasn’t too terribly fried.

I didn’t spot him, but one of the volunteers spotted me and approached.  She was thirty or so, vegan thin, and dressed in drab eco-colors.  Her hair was a mousy brown and her black tortoise shell eyeglasses were narrow and rectangular.

“Welcome, sir,” she said.  “My name is Jane.  I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.”  I stared back silently.  Her eyes made me uneasy.  “No matter,” she said.  “Would you like a good, hot shower?  Or something to eat?”

“No thanks,” I said.

I turned and headed for the door, realizing now that I couldn’t stay.  It was risky here too.  The room was too bright.  I could be recognized.  Maybe by this Jane.  I would have to spend the night elsewhere.  Someplace safe, absolutely safe.

Under a tree, perhaps, in Arlington National Cemetery, beside my old friend, Robert Todd Lincoln.  So what if it got a little wet, Robert Todd wouldn’t complain.

At the front door, another homeless drifter stepped in off the street, his face shrouded by a dripping, floppy hat and wet scarves that reached up to his earlobes.  He passed wide, watching me with fear and distrust in his eyes.

The eyes of my father, I thought, and for a fleeting moment, I wished I had a mirror.

Chapter 33

The rain had ceased hours earlier, but my clothing was still drenched when I emerged from another night spent in Arlington National Cemetery, and blades of wet grass clung to me, head to foot.  In the adjacent park, beneath the towering Swiss Carillon, I sprawled out on a bench to dry in the sun.

When I felt dry enough, I brushed off the desiccating lawn lint from my clothing and hair and ducked into the restroom of the Burger King near the Rosslyn metro stop, where I drank some tap water from cupped hands and combed my hair with my fingers.  The hair still appeared matted after I was through.  My patchy beard seemed flecked with more gray than ever before.

Graybeard II.

I skipped breakfast, having money enough for only one more fast food meal.  But it was desperation, more than hunger, nagging me as I crossed the Potomac River by way of the Key Bridge.  I had absolutely no idea what to do next.

I recalled something Hideo Mori had told me only a few days earlier.  “Buddha say, ‘Trotting dog find bone somewhere.’ ”

That’s me, I told himself, a trotting dog.  I’ll just keep moving, and I’ll find my bone.  Find it soon too.  For Hideo had also said, and rightly so, “ ‘Crazy dog soon gets shot.’ ”

From the bridge, I climbed the cobblestone sidewalks of a neighborhood on a hill.  At the top was Georgetown University.

I trailed a few summer school-enrolled undergrads into the main library just as it was opening for the day.  From a top floor window, seated in a wooden cubicle behind a stack of books, I located the roof of my own townhouse a quarter mile away.

I imagined my Sarah and my Ellie going about their day beneath that roof.  Duke too.  I didn’t dare come any closer to them, because of the police stake-out, but thought being this near to my dear ones might inspire me about what to do next.

But instead of inspiration came salty, dripping eye dew.  I wept for the future of my family, for my own, irretrievable life, and for a lost delusion, the sane delusion that I’d been fit for the life I’d led.  My tears I kept shirt-sleeving off my cheeks as I descended the stairwell.  Trotting dog find bone somewhere.

Outside, I found the sky still clear and the sun turned punishing and the summer air already gaining its muggy, midday water weight.  No longer able to ignore the rumble in my belly, I left the campus and strolled downhill toward M street.

I debated whether to spend the last of my money on food or panhandle or dumpster dive from behind one of the many restaurants below.  The latter option repulsed and revolted me, as you might imagine, but after a brief, intense argument with myself I settled on it, because it was the safest option.  I was, after all, mere blocks from my own residence.

I missed Sarah so much.  I felt an overpowering urge to hear her voice and to speak to her, and to say some of the things I had to say to her, though I didn’t actually know if she were at home.  I had a suspicion she might be staying with her parents in California, trying to avoid the media glare, especially for Ellie’s sake.  But I would call California if I had to.

I took out the cell phone I’d swiped from that female detective the other day in a Baltimore parking garage and turned it on.  I just had to talk to my wife.

But all I got, dialing my home number, was the answering machine.  I left a message for Sarah, saying simply that I loved her, and disconnected.

I suddenly remembered—as I’d begun having trouble keeping things straight by now—that I was supposed to call Keisha Fallon.  I’d asked her to do something for me.  I sat down in the shade, squatting on the stoop of someone’s brownstone, and punched in her cell phone number.

“They still haven’t fired us,” Keisha said of Helms Technology, “and so I was able to do what you asked me to do.”

“So what’ve you got?”

“A few question marks is all.  The biggest one is that, since mid November of last year, John Helms had been attending regular, bi-monthly meetings at the Pentagon.  The meetings were hosted by DARPA.”  That’s the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, by the way, the Pentagon’s research arm.  “The strange thing is, Helms Technology didn’t have any current contracts with DARPA.  They did in the past, but—”

“Who else was at these meetings?”

“According to our bodyguards, who were never allowed inside the meetings, but waited outside in the corridor, they were also attended by agency directors and deputy directors from the CIA, the FBI, and the Secret Service.  What do you make of it, Argus?”

“I have no idea.  Who else from Helms Technology attended?”

“No one else.”

“Somebody over there must know something.”

“No doubt,” she said.  “But I’ll be damned if I know how to make them talk to me.  Or you.”

“It could be nothing.  John might’ve been trying to sell the entire US intelligence community on some new database software.  Something they could all use.”

“No chance,” Keisha said.  “I’ve contacted everyone who’d ever worked on John’s protection detail.  John was all about the technology.  None of us ever saw him make a sales pitch in his life.  In fact, he used to say, ‘That’s for the non-geniuses.’ ”

I thanked Keisha and hung up.  Before my thumb had time to cut the power, the phone rang.  I answered reflexively.  “Hello?”

“Ah, Mister Ward!  Detective Strecker here.”

My heart leapt against its bony cage.  I’d just made a huge rookie fugitive mistake—or the mistake of a fast disintegrating mind.  I’d forgotten all about the possibility the police were waiting to track my geographic location through the signal from Detective Strecker’s stolen phone.

“You there, sir?” she said with a delighted chuckle.

I cleared my throat.  Tried to sound calm.  “I’m here.”

Chapter 34

“We’ve been talking to your naked flight attendant,” Strecker continued.  “Ms. Elizabeth Hardtack.  And your fellow passengers on that corporate jet from Austin, Texas to Washington, DC.”

“You don’t say.  Tell me about it.”

“C’mon into the station, and I’ll tell you.”

“Sorry.  Not just yet.”  Trotting dog broke into a run.

“Then I guess I can’t tell you anything.”

“You owe me,” I said.

“True, but I don’t always pay my debts on time.  Are you okay, sir?  Sounds like you’re breathing kind of hard.”

“I’m going to hang up now.”  Her main purpose in calling me, we both knew, was to keep the phone signaling to the GPS satellite circling above the sky, pinning me down to within a yard of Earth’s vast real estate.

“Alrighty, you win,” she said, “I’ll tell you what you want to hear.  But only if you’ll tell me what you make of it.”

“Fine.”  Quickly lathered in sweat, I scrambled down a woodsy slope, along a footpath.  Sirens pealed in the distance.

“There were three other passengers on that flight, as you know, and you were right about them.  We’ve got confessions across the board, thanks to some deputies from the Travis County Sheriffs department.  They were all in on the gag.”

I said, “Tell me something I don’t know already.”

“They’re a strange bunch, considering the circumstances.  For starters, they don’t know each other, and they don’t actually work for Helms Technology.  None of them.  They were mailed fake ID badges to get aboard, and someone put their names and their flight itineraries into the corporate computer system so the IDs would work and the jet would stop in Austin to pick them up.”

“Who did that?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“The IDs.  Where were they mailed from?”

“From here,” she said.  “The District.”

“These passengers—who are they, if they’re not HT execs?”

“I’ll start with the silver-haired, older gentleman, who sat directly in front of you, he says.  He’s a retired architect from Austin.  Name’s Carl Withers.  The woman’s from Round Rock—that’s an Austin suburb.  Her name’s Tracy McCandless, and she works as an accountant for Dell computers.  And the Hispanic guy you talked to, who told you his name was Rob Ramos, is actually Jose Cardenas, and he’s a self-employed plumber from Flatonia.  That’s a little, hick town about an hour’s drive from Austin.  How the hell do they connect to you, Mister Ward?”

“They don’t.  I don’t know a soul in the entire state of Texas.  I don’t know any plumbers either—not even my own—and no architects.  What did they have to say?”

“Not much at first.  Usually, we had to destroy their alibis before they’d talk.”

“Alibis?”

“You know.  They’d say they really were HT execs.  Well, where did they work?  What building?  Who inside the company knew them?  And what did they do, exactly?  Their stories didn’t check out.  Plus, we discovered that two of the passengers—Jose and Tracy—had reserved separate commercial flights straight back to Austin.  They hadn’t left themselves time enough to leave Reagan National Airport, much less do anything else in DC.”

I reached the base of the slope, emerging where a busy, two-lane road ran parallel to the Potomac River.  “Why’d they get on that plane with me?”

“They all gave different reasons for getting on, sometimes more than one reason.  Bribed, blackmailed, threatened or conned.  Whoever did this had secrets on all of them.  Juicy secrets.”

“How’s that possible?” I said.  “You said they didn’t know each other.”

“We were hoping you’d tell us.”

“No such luck.  How were they contacted?”

“Jose Cardenas, by telephone, Tracy McCandless, by email, and Carl Withers, in person.”

“In person?”

“Yep.  Seems Carl gambles, and right now he’s in a bad situation, financially speaking, the kind where his bones could get broken, know what I mean?  And some flashy young White guy posing as a TV producer bumped into him on the street and told Carl he’d be just the guy to help pull off a stunt for reality TV.  Well, Carl gets a free jet ride, but the gag never gets revealed, and he never gets paid.”

The squealing sirens grew louder and more numerous.  Eighty or ninety yards ahead of me stood a boathouse.  Briskly, I walked toward it.  “What did the TV producer look like?”

“C’mon in and take a look at our sketch.”

“No thanks.  What about the telephone caller’s voice?”

“Male,” she said.  “Jose described it as tinny, with a foreign accent.  That’s all he’d say, ‘foreign.’  Now, Carl, on the other hand, swears the TV producer was a home grown Texan.”

“I’ve got to go now.”

“Wait!  Wait!  One thing more, Mister Ward, please.  Help me figure out who we’re dealing with here.  Who could’ve known about your disease?  Your martial arts skills?  Who might’ve also known about Jeremy Crane’s disease and Sally Anne Bilchik’s?  And who could’ve also brought the corporate jet passengers together?  How could anyone know such a diverse, geographically dispersed group of individuals?  Know their weaknesses, their desires, their innermost secrets?  Well enough to manipulate them?  How does any one person do that?  Unless he’s the devil himself?”

“Let me think about that,” I said.

I disconnected the call, but left the phone on.  A second later, I flung it into the bed of a commercial roofing truck as it passed by me on the road.

The boathouse I found filled with Georgetown University students.  A clutch of them—perhaps a crew team—were busy cleaning equipment, while two lanky male undergrads prepared to launch a fiberglass sculling double.

Nylon book-bags lay in a single heap on the cement floor.  I swept one up and ducked behind a clothesline jammed with drying life preservers to sift through its contents.

I found a woman’s purse inside and removed all the cash.  Around fifty dollars.  I offered the pair of male undergrads with the sculling double twenty dollars each to row me a mile upstream to the Jefferson Memorial.  The one with the scraggly goatee and the off-center grin asked, “Why?”

“Traffic is murder right now,” I said, “and I’m late for an appointment.”  The pair exchanged shrugs, then agreed.  I paid them in advance, and we shoved off.

I sat oar-less in the center of the vessel, which was longer than a Cadillac, but slimmer than a car seat, an anorexic water craft.  My undergraduate oarsmen stroked and grunted in rhythm through the placid river, seemingly unfazed by the heat or by the light cross-headwinds, heaving us forward at a smart and steady clip.  From the middle of the Potomac River, we passed beneath the Key Bridge.

Above, on the Virginia end of the bridge, I spotted two police cruisers forming a makeshift road blockade, and along the Georgetown bank, beyond the other end of the bridge, I could see the traffic along M street at a total standstill.  Despite the sirens, my two undergrads never once glanced up, or looked around, their rowing form perfect, controlled, mechanical.

My oarsmen beached their blade-like craft in a marshy area near a stand of reeds by the Jefferson Memorial.  I got my shoes wet and muddy alighting onto land.  I waved the undergrads goodbye.  Tourists eyed me with curiosity as I hailed a cab.

“The White House,” I told the cabbie, following an urge to disappear into the heart of the city.  The air conditioning felt like vaporized mercy.  As the cab blended into traffic,  I threw my head back, shut my eyes, and exhaled profoundly.

From inside the cab, strange music erupted, loud and harsh and discordant.  Woodwind instruments and bagpipes and violins played in short, staccato bursts.  Cymbals crashed like silvery thunder, and a high-pitched male chorus trilled a Zulu war chant.  My eyelids retracted like runaway window shades.

“Turn that infernal music down, would you!”

“What music?” said the cabbie.  “Radio’s broke.”

My heart bashed at its bony cage again.  The cab swerved making a sharp turn.  “Never mind,” I said.

The otherworldly music entombed me in dread and despair.  Time had run out for me.  Too soon.

Chapter 35

I haunted the White House for hours, thinking my situation over carefully, traipsing the broad, tourist-infested sidewalks at the building’s perimeter, peering through the black, wrought iron security fencing, spotting Secret Service personnel for sport, and recalling random events from the years that I myself had spent protecting the president and first family.  All the while, my mad, mind-manufactured music played on.  Now and then, I’d stop in my tracks and fight the urge to scream.

But the music wasn’t all that plagued me.  I’d promised myself, in the cemetery, that first night of my big escape from incarceration, that I’d turn myself over to the police once the hallucinations, or delusions, began.  I’d promised.  And it was time now.  And the right thing to do.  Soon I’d be a threat to others and to my own self.  I had to keep my word.

“Can’t somebody stop this infernal music!” I shouted.  The tourists scattered from my path like startled pigeons.

Near the northwest gate of the White House I sat down on the edge of a concrete traffic barricade disguised as a gigantic flower pot.  Hell’s orchestra played on, inside my head, so loudly now that I could think of little else.  The piano player was an angry great ape, I decided, jumping up and down on the keys.  The violinist used an electric lathe for a bow, sawing strings of steel bridge cables.  The percussion section’s deafening blasts went off with erratic regularity, like battlefield ordnance.  At times I’d have to shudder or wince or cover my ears in vain.

It took a primal urge to divert my attention from the pounding noise inside my head.  Hunger pangs sent me four blocks away, to a favorite seafood restaurant of mine along Pennsylvania Avenue, called Kinkead’s.  Hell’s orchestra followed.

The dinner crowd had begun arriving.  Two dozen patrons were already seated, a mix of federal bureaucrats and Italian-shoed lobbyists and lawyers, the kind of people who—along with the wait staff—just might know me well enough to recognize me.  But I was beyond caring about that now.

One last, decent meal—which I knew I couldn’t pay for—and then I’d turn myself over to the authorities, just as I’d promised myself—swore to myself—I would do, when it was time, when the madness arrived.  And now it had.  Clearly so.

“I’ll start off with a Sam Adams!” I yelled at the waiter, who stepped back smartly, pulling his pad to his scrawny chest.

“No need to shout, sir.”

“Sorry,” I said, lowering my voice, realizing with some embarrassment that I’d been shouting above a din the waiter couldn’t hear.

The waiter left my table.  I studied the menu.  I decided to go with the soft shell crab plate.  Then, whimsically, I thought of demanding from the police a few conditional terms of surrender, including the right to bring a doggy bag into jail with me.

The restaurant chatter mixed with the jarring music in my head.  I put the menu down and immediately sensed a pair of eyes staring at me from across the room.  They belonged to a tall man planted beneath a wooden archway leading into the bar.  The man had to be the only patron besides myself lacking a business suit.  He wore denim overalls, his thumbs hooking the shoulder straps.  His cotton shirt was checkered red and white.  His black cowboy hat was mashed on top.  He held the same stance I remembered from long ago, in an old photograph, and from more recently on the boardwalk outside the conference room of my firm.

“Pa,” I said and remained open-mouthed, gripping the ends of my arm rests.  But it can’t be! I thought.  It can’t be!

How was it possible, after all, that my long-lost, schizophrenic father had suddenly materialized a quarter century after disappearing without a trace?  Here?  In this restaurant?  Where no one knew to find me?

It wasn’t possible, of course.  I was sick, and I knew it, sick like my old man.

The tall figure—the hallucination, a troubled mind’s mirage—broke from its stance and approached.  I gripped my chair tighter—until I glimpsed the first details of the figure’s face.

For it wasn’t the face I’d been expecting.  It belonged to a complete stranger.  The stranger halted by my table.

“No, Mister Ward, I’m not your father, as you can plainly see by now.  Mind if I sit down?”

Chapter 36

The impersonator sat down, directly across from me, tossing his mushy black hat to the end of the table.  He looked to be in his late thirties, or roughly my father’s age—Alfred Ward’s age—on the day he’d gone missing more than two decades prior.  His strawberry blond hair—short, straight, and baby-fine—perfectly matched my father’s hair from that earlier time.  But the angular face, witnessed up close, did not especially resemble my father’s.  Most wrong of all were the eyes—hazel, not blue, too narrow, too deep-set, too calm, much too assured.

“Who are you?”  I said.  “How did you find me?”

The response came in a steely, clipped cadence, like that of  a Kennedy, but without the Boston accent.  “You don’t need to know who I am, Mister Ward.  Nor whom I represent.  As to how we found you, we picked up your trail days ago.  In Baltimore.  We’ve been on you ever since.”

“Baltimore?”

“We’d been tailing the local constabulary from DC, that pair of Homicide detectives you caught up with there in the parking garage, Strecker and Fellows.  They’re getting close to the truth now, thanks to you.”

“So you admit it then?” I said, suddenly almost lock-jawed with anger.  “You admit it all?  You and-and your people—whoever they are—have been behind this whole thing?  You’re the ones who switched my meds for dummy pills, and made me see and hear strange things—like naked flight attendants, like ghosts out the past—all to drive me insane?  And then coerced me into killing John Helms?  Ending his life and ruining mine?”

“Yes, sir.  We’re the ones behind it all.”

“Why?”

The impersonator leaned forward, his jaw hovering an inch above the table’s centerpiece, a little spray of yellow flowers in a vase.  “I’m going to tell you what you want to know,” he said at a lower volume.  “When you hear the answer, you may wonder why I’m being so frank, but I’ll get to that soon enough.”

“Why?” I repeated.

“This will come as a shock, Mister Ward, but John Helms was just a warm-up.  Yes, we wanted him eliminated, badly, but he was not our ultimate target.  His killing was required, but it was also done as a kind of test.  You were part of that test—you and the other paranoid schizophrenics we manipulated.  Part of a dry run.”  His thin, bloodless lips formed a jagged slash I took as a smile.  “Or a wet dry run, considering the fate of Mister Helms.”

I shook my head in disbelief.  “You mean to tell me this was ultimately some kind of rehearsal?  Rehearsal for what?”

“Our ultimate goal has always been—and continues to be—to assassinate the president.  The sitting president of these United States.”  The impersonator paused until a tipsy patron in the aisle had completely stumbled by.  “But we want the bastard taken out in such a way as to avoid any suspicions of conspiracy.  We want it to look like another John Hinckley.”

“Ah,” I said, recalling the quarter century-old attack on President Reagan, carried out by a mentally deranged young man trying to impress a movie star.  “John Hinckley, only successful.  Hinckley didn’t kill Reagan.”

“Reagan came within an inch of his life.  Most people don’t know that.”

“But why John Helms?  What the hell does he have to do with the president?  Why did he have to die?”

“I can’t get into that completely.  I can tell you that one of the reasons he was targeted was because we wanted to practice on someone with well-trained bodyguards.  But we didn’t want to target anyone being protected by the Secret Service, such as the president’s own family members, or the VP, or certain members of Congress, or a Supreme Court justice who’s currently receiving death threats from an anti-abortionist.  That would, first of all, put the president’s personal security detail on high alert, especially for the mentally ill.  And secondly, if two major political figures were to be slain in quick succession at the hands of the mentally ill, then the talk might not just be of coincidence, but of conspiracy too.

“So we turned to the private sector.  We chose John Helms as our practice target because he had to be taken out anyway and because, after a careful study, we’d determined that he was the single best-protected private citizen in America.  Which was no accident.  Deep pockets means deep protection, if you spend your money wisely, and the man who John Helms hired to design and supervise his personal protection is former Secret Service.  The best in the business.”

“Gee, I’m flattered,” I said.

“You should be.”

“Why kill President Ames?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“If only that were still true, you son of a bitch.  How did your people find out I was paranoid schizophrenic?  And what about the others?  Jeremy Crane and Sally Anne Bilchik?”

“Also none of your business.”  The impersonator leaned back in his chair as my waiter stopped by the table holding a glass pot of coffee in each hand.

“Coffee?” said the waiter.  “Caff or decaff?”  My visitor shook his head.  I stood my overturned cup upright in its saucer, asking for caffeinated.  The waiter poured, then departed.

I took a sip.  “I think I know how you found out about my father and came up with that get-up you’re wearing.  My mother?”

The impersonator’s lips formed another jagged smile.  “That’s right.  A couple months ago, we sent a two-woman team down to Charlottesville and knocked on the door to her nursing home, posing as ‘social historians.’  Your mom was fairly coherent that day.  Happy to tell us all her old stories, show us all her old photos, including the few surviving shots of your missing father.  I’m afraid we stole one of them.  I guess you know which one.”

I took another sip of coffee.  The music in my sickening head had quieted to the level of elevator background Musak for a time, but was now volubly on the rise.  Soon I would be trapped in the orchestra pit again, where conversation would be near impossible.  “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”

“Sure.  I’m here to make you an offer.  An excellent one, considering your plight.”

“What about my plight?”

“You won’t be able to prove you were set up, and no one’s going to care, anyway, at your murder trial.  It’ll be immaterial until the sentencing phase.  No matter what happens from here on out, you’ll soon be on death row, or spending the rest of your days on Earth incarcerated.  Surely, you’re smart enough to have figured that out for yourself already.”

I gave the impersonator a look I intended to be murderous.  “Thanks.  I owe you one.”

“Now, now, Mister Ward.  Let’s be civil.  Let’s be practical.  This is Washington DC, after all, so let’s think of your fate as a legislative bill that’s going to be passed.  You’re a congressman and you don’t want it passed, you’re opposed, but the writing’s on the wall, so now it’s time for you to consider switching sides, to at least see what you could get out of the deal, to see what your disingenuous, belated support of the bill will buy you.”

“And what will it buy me?”

“Security and protection for your family.”

My hard look and hoarse whisper won not a flash of fear from the impersonator.  “You threatening my wife and children?”

“No, no, Mister Ward, just the opposite.  We want to safeguard them.  See to it they’re provided for.  Because you—the sole bread earner—won’t be able to provide for them anymore.  As it stands, your total assets are somewhere in the neighborhood of two and a half million dollars, but after attorney’s fees, well, there won’t be much left.  Not nearly enough for your family to live in the style they’ve become accustomed to, am I right?”

“You’re offering me money?”

“That and more.  We’re offering you five million dollars in cash.  But we’re also offering our considerable influence in keeping you off death row and out of prison.  We’ll get you into a mental hospital for the rest of your days—the same, cushy environment Hinckley got.”

“Nobody has that kind of power.”

“We do.  All you have to do is cooperate, and you’ll see.”

“What do I have to do?” I said.

“Assassinate the president.”

The rising music in my head distracted me so much by now that I thought I hadn’t heard right.  “What did you say?”

“You heard me right.  We want you to be the man.”

“Why me?”

“Because our plans have to change now.  What you told those Homicide detectives put them hot on our trail.  They’re getting close—so close we expect we’ll have to shut down our entire operation and start over again later.  Unless you come through for us.  You’d be perfect.  You’ve already killed once in a psychotic state.  You’re nearly psychotic now.”

“I won’t do it,” I said.

“We’ve been watching you.  We know your mind has begun disintegrating again without your medication.  You were hearing things outside the gates of the White House earlier today, for example, whatever the hell you were doing out there all that time.  You may be hearing things now, for all I know.  So you should strike soon, before you go completely mad, to increase the probability of success.”

“I won’t do it,” I repeated.

“Kind of ironic, I know.  You being former Secret Service, after all, and having once taken a bullet for another president.  But you’ll get over it.”

“You think you know me, but you don’t.”

“We’ll help you.  We’ll get you a gun.  A rifle, if you’d prefer.  We’ll give you the president’s schedule.  We’ll even tell you where the Secret Service will be dispersed at special events.  There’s a good opportunity tomorrow, by the way, right here in DC.  An afternoon visit to a local homeless shelter.”

I leaned forward.  “Maybe strangling you now is all the revenge I’ll ever need.”

The impersonator gulped and his steely expression melted into fear, but then swiftly reforged.  “Think of your family, Ward, if death row or forty years of prison won’t faze you.  I’ll be in touch.”  He rose, snatching his misshapen black hat, and fled the restaurant.

Chapter 37

I forgot about turning myself over to the authorities until I’d already raced from the restaurant—skipping out on the tab, of course—and into the street in search of the impersonator, hoping to tail him.  But he was nowhere to be found.  He’d vanished—into a waiting limousine, I imagined.

The surrender of my freedom I decided to put off until I’d digested all that I’d just been told, and so I meandered in the general direction of the National Mall.

Near the intersection of 23rd Street and Constitution Avenue, I left the sidewalk in favor of a small, secluded garden on the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences.  There I encountered Albert Einstein—a bronze statue of him, three times larger than life, seated on some granite steps and daydreaming about the cosmos in a casual sweater.

He was alone.  I sat in his lap.  I would remain there until after dark, thinking, crying, cursing the mad music pounding in my head, and talking with Albert.

“I can’t take the offer,” I told him at one point.

“Yah,” he said with a slight foreign accent.  “To assassinate zee president would morally nullify your entire life’s verk.”

“Besides, these are the people who destroyed my life!”

“Never appease evil,” Albert said.  “You must fight it.  No matter what the cost.  This we Germans have learnt.”

Focus! I told myself.  Ignore Albert Einstein!  Ignore the music!  Only pay attention to what is real!

Figure out who you’re dealing with here, Argus.  Who are these guys?  These puppet masters of the sane and paranoid alike.  And what are they really up to?

I had no doubt they wanted me to murder the president for them.  But why?  What was the link between John Helms, the wealthiest individual in America, and Eliot Ames, America’s most powerful man?

“Of course!” I shouted when the answer came to me.

“Of course!” Albert repeated.  “E equals MC squared!”

But his comment was a total non sequitur as far as I was concerned.  For I was at that moment recalling my recent phone conversation with Keisha Fallon, when she’d described the dead billionaire’s unaccounted for, secretive meetings with DARPA at the Pentagon, which he’d attended regularly in the months prior to his demise.  That had to be the link.  John Helms had been involved with some kind of government project reaching right into the White House and the Oval Office itself.

I felt absolutely certain of my new theory when I thought back to the day after Sally Anne Bilchik’s thwarted attempt on John’s life.  My old boss, Nathan Pitt, the current director of the United States Secret Service, had phoned me on that day, concerned about the incident.  He’d even volunteered to provide extra manpower to protect John.  He’d said that John Helms was more important to national security than I might imagine.

I left Albert Einstein with a new resolve.  I felt sure that if I could learn all about the top secret project linking John Helms to the highest reaches of government, then I could identify the impersonator’s clandestine organization with its vaunted powers, and at the same time convince my old colleagues in the Secret Service of all that I’d learned, before another madman—my replacement—assassinated the president of the United States.

For among those in attendance at those DARPA-hosted meetings at the Pentagon had been a number of big shots from the US Intelligence community, and one I knew personally.  Nathan Pitt.

I started off for Pitt’s home in Georgetown.  He was a recent widower and lived alone about a mile from my townhouse in a brick colonial once owned by Washington socialite and salon doyenne Pamela Harriman.  The walk was about two miles or so.

Along the way, I stopped at a hobby shop just as it was about to close its doors for the night and spent my last few dollars on a vial of graphite powder and a tiny application brush.  From an all-night drugstore I shoplifted an ordinary roll of adhesive tape.

By the time I arrived at Pitt’s house, the mad music in my head had finally and blessedly ceased and no more statues or other inanimate objects had conversed with me.  But there was no telling how long my relative lucidity would last.

I jumped the black wrought iron fence encircling Pitt’s spacious grounds and, beneath the floodlights that illuminated the front stoop of the house, I dusted the door for fingerprints with my graphite and brush.  In a jiffy, I picked up an image of a thumbprint with my adhesive tape and pressed the tape against an Identix Bio-Touch fingerprint reader that I knew would be there on the wall from previous visits.  Tricked into believing I was Pitt, the biometric device unlocked the front door to the house. (I was still a security expert, after all.)

I found Pitt behind his desk in his study or home office.  As you might imagine, he jumped out of his chair.

“Jimminy Christmas!” he said. (That’s not really what he said.  It was much worse than that.) “Argus Ward!”  He stammered out a question about how I’d gained entry, and I explained, which caused him to curse a good deal more, and then he studied me and said, “You don’t look well, son.”

“Get up, Nathan.  Please.  Away from your desk.  Hands where I can see them.”  I was worried the old man had a weapon in one of the drawers, or an emergency button of some kind to push.  He wasn’t about to take me on in hand-to-hand combat.

“You smell bad,” he said when he’d come face to face with me.  “What is this all about, Argus?”

“I need to know why John Helms was murdered.”

“Shouldn’t you be asking yourself that?”

“Turn around.  I want to pat you down.”

He complied.  “You’re in deep shit, son.”

“So are you.”

I finished patting him down.  He spun back around.  “Is that a threat?  Are you threatening me?  A brother—”

“It’s a warning.  Your top protectee is in jeopardy.”

“Potus?”  The President Of The United States?

“That’s right,” I said, “but I think I can help you, if I can just figure out who killed John Helms.”

“You killed John Helms, Argus!  You!”

“I was just the modus operandi.”

“What?  You’re talking nonsense, son.  Get your butt into a mental hospital.  Do you hear me?  Before you do something more to disgrace the agency, as well as your own—”

“I’m not going anywhere, Pitt, until you tell me all about the meetings you’d been attending every other week since mid March at the Pentagon with John Helms and most other leading members of the US intelligence community.”

“How did you find out about—”

“I’m in a hurry, Pitt.”

He sighed.  “They say never argue with a paranoid.”

“That’s right.”

“John Helms was a patriot,” Pitt said.  He began to pace in front of his office window overlooking a rectangular pool, lit by underwater flood lights as well as bronze oil lamps dangling from spear-like poles at the corners.  His hair had turned from gray to white in the time I’d known him, but it was still thick, and still combed in a preacher-style pompadour.

I sat down in a Chippendale armchair.  “Some would say John was more than a patriot.  A jingoist.  What’s your point?”

“He was doing us a favor.  On a project of his.”

“Who’s us?”

“FBI, CIA, and Secret Service.”

A soft, steady hum pervaded Pitt’s 18th century-style home office.  It was from a white noise generator, busy drowning out any bugs and wiretaps.  The windows, he’d once told me, had been tinted to bar snooping from infrared spy satellites.  The worst dangers lurked below the surface of things.  I heard their hum everywhere I’d go now.

“And DARPA?” I said.

“They were lending one kind of expertise, John another.”

“What project are we talking about?  What kind of favor?”

“The best, Argus.  Beyond what you could imagine.”  Pitt sat down in the matching armchair facing me.  “You see, we in the US intelligence community have ourselves a new trade secret.  One that changes everything.”

Chapter 38

Now it wasn’t merely the wavy pompadour lending Nathan Pitt the look of a preacher.  Now the Secret Service director’s deep-set, smoke-gray eyes smoldered with fervor.  He inched his Chippendale armchair closer to me before leaning forward.

“Do you recall the brouhaha over DARPA’s Total Information Awareness project?  It was a few years ago now.  Tons of press.  All the privacy rights groups crying, ‘Big Brother.’ ”

“Vaguely, I recall.  Weren’t the Democrats in Congress trying to kill the project?”

“They succeeded.  What do you know about the project itself?”

“Not much.  Some sort of massive domestic surveillance system.  To fight terrorism.”

“That’s the official story.  For political reasons, DARPA never mentioned the system’s potential to address other national security issues besides terrorism, as well as domestic crime.”

“But the ACLU,” I said, “and the civil libertarians saw the potential anyway, right?”

“They saw what they always see, the potential for abuse.  In this case, abusive government spying on private citizens.  But for once they couldn’t do us any harm, as it turned out.”

“No?  I thought you said Congress quashed the project?”

“It did, it did.  But what Congress failed to halt was the private sector’s own, parallel project.  Its own massive domestic surveillance system.”

“What are you talking about?”

Pitt smiled.  “It all started years ago, when the private sector began collecting immense amounts of raw data on American citizens.  But they couldn’t do much with it until recently, until the costs of computer disk storage and computer processing power had dropped dramatically.”

“What kind of data have they been collecting?”

“Oh, you name it!”  Pitt threw up his hands and leaned way back in his Chippendale as if about to be swamped by a tidal wave of record-keepings.  “It’s all for sale these days.  Personal data from off your driver’s license or marriage certificate.  Financial records of all kinds—everything from your ATM withdrawals to your credit card purchases, to your brokerage account balance—and all your insurance policies, and pension and disability records, and your utilities records too—your monthly telephone, electricity, gas, and cable TV charges.  Your real estate info, and what you buy from the grocery store, if you use a club card.  What groups or organizations you belong to, based on membership rosters.

“What videos you rent at Blockbuster.  Your own academic background, your personal employment history, any court records, any criminal history.  The number of traffic fines and parking tickets.  If you go online—and half the country does now—then where you go and what you do gets recorded in log files or via ad company ‘cookies,’ because every click of the mouse is a digital gesture, revealing your habits, preferences, and tendencies.  I could go on and on.  But in sum, the daily compiling and transfer of consumer information is staggering in quantity.  There are companies devoted entirely to its collection.  One company claims to have data on 98 percent of all households in America.”

“So what do they do with it all?”

“They mine it.  For gold.  They call it, ‘data mining,’ in fact.  They feed their mountains of data to their super computers, and the computers spit out the gold.  It boggles the imagination, Argus, the computer power we possess today.  Take, for example, IBM’s latest model, Blue Streak.  Did you know that it would take one person with a hand-held calculator seventeen million years of labor, working day and night, to complete the calculations Blue Streak can do in one second?  One second!”

“Seventeen million years, working day and night?  I’ve had jobs like that.”

Pitt smiled.  “Haven’t we all?”  He slapped me on my bad shoulder.  It hurt.

“Tell me about the gold.”

“The gold in the Information Age is knowledge.”  Pitt left his chair to pace his Persian carpet.  “Data mining digs up hidden knowledge—subtle relationships and patterns previously undetected, buried, if you will, within these immense, staggering mountains of information.  Knowledge of complex, multifactor dependencies.  Knowledge the feeble human brain could never find on its own.  And knowledge sufficient to make uncannily accurate predictions about what individual consumers will purchase, or would purchase, under various hypothetical scenarios.”

I sat up straighter.  A cold whisp of fear fluttered in my belly now, my paranoia-powered early warning system activated.

Pitt noticed the change.  “What is it?”

“I’m not sure yet.  Go on.”

“Right.  Well, these hidden patterns and relationships are often quite surprising, even counter-intuitive.  For example, one of the earliest commercial adopters of data mining was a company called, Skymall.  You find their mail-order catalog stuffed inside the pockets of airplane seats on several major carriers.  If you wish to buy an item, you visit their website or phone their call center.  Either way, once the initial purchase is made, the credit card number is used as a unique identifier to access all available information on the purchaser from the data warehouse.  Then their data mining software—often known as ‘predictive analytics,’ by the way—crunches that data and spits out a customized recommendation for the purchaser to make another, follow-up purchase.

“The first time Skymall used its new software, they thought it was haywire.  A gentleman phoned to order a twenty-eight dollar cloth shirt.  The predictive analytics told the clerk taking the call to suggest to this gentleman that he also consider purchasing a very expensive cigar humidor—even though there was no data hinting that the man even smoked.  None at all.  And guess what?”

“He bought the humidor?” I said.

“He did indeed.”

Pitt halted by his antique writing table, veneered in rosewood, with brass ornaments.  He perched his fanny on a front corner.  “Skymall had less than a dozen data points on the buyer.  His age.  His zip code.  His marital status.  His home-owner status.  His previous purchase of a certain set of blue bathroom towels, and a handful of other seemingly benign bits of information, none having anything remotely to do with cigars.”

“There was no guarantee the man would buy the humidor—”

“Of course not, Argus, of course not.  Yet data mining had revealed that he was likely to, because he shared a previously unrecognized cluster of characteristics with those customers who had bought humidors from Skymall in the past.  Do you know what a ‘doppelganger’ is, Argus?”

“Sure.  It’s an old superstition that says, for every one of us alive today, there’s a duplicate somewhere, living in another part of the world.  A non-relative, but a twin just the same.”

“It’s not a superstition, Argus, not really.  None of us are nearly as unique as we’d like to believe.  We value freedom and individuality in large measure because in truth we’re not so free, and not so individual either.  We’re all predictable, Argus, and we all have doppelgangers.  Not one, but many—an army of them—now that planet Earth has grown to six billion people.”

“If that’s true, I’m not sure I’d like to meet any of mine.”

Pitt laughed.  “Nor I, nor I.”  He resumed his rug pacing.  “Anyway, for obvious reasons, big business is jumping on this new technology in a big way.  The banks, for example, are using it to detect money laundering and to screen credit card transactions for fraud.  The insurance companies use it to screen out individuals who pose bad risks.  Drug companies use it to devise marketing campaigns that will encourage physicians to prescribe more drugs.  There’s a major retailer now using it to develop ‘psycho-graphic profiles’ of its customers, to identify . . .

“You don’t like the sound of this, Argus, that’s plain to see.  But I understand.  It is kind of eerie, as a matter of fact, and the eeriest thing to me, personally, is that, every time the data mining machine discovers some new pattern or relationship in the data, we humans more often than not still fail to understand it.  Why would a man’s preference in bath towels be linked to his desire for a cigar humidor?  It’s a mystery.  But luckily one we know how to exploit.”

Paranoia, you should recognize, is a survival skill—when it’s not getting out of hand.  It sharpens your instincts when disease isn’t dulling them.  I now followed its lead.  “Tell me about the project.  The one with John Helms and the meetings at DARPA in the Pentagon.”

“It was John’s project,” Pitt said, “at the start.  Not ours, not the FBI’s, not the CIA’s, not DARPA’s.  John came to us with it six months ago, not long after his company had been hired to develop some customized software for a newly-created private US database firm called, ‘Financial Datacorp International.’  The firm’s investors read like a Wall Street Who’s Who list.  Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, American Express, etcetera.  Some of the other founders are major foreign concerns, like Deutsche bank.”

“Why was this firm created?”

“Ostensibly, it serves as the financial industry’s response to the anti-terrorism regulations, the Patriot Act, and so forth.  These regulations require banks, for example, to conduct in-depth background checks on new and existing financial clients.  But in truth the database is being used for multiple purposes.”

“Including data mining?” I said.

“Correct.  The database is enormous.  It consists of risk relevant information from more than fifteen thousand public sources around the world.”

I whistled.  “Fifteen thousand.  What do you mean by, ‘risk relevant’ information?”

“As a practical matter, any information.”

“Really?” I said.  “Orwell warned us about Big Brother, but not Big Business.”

“With data mining, the one thing you can’t predict is what type of data will prove key.  So this database has it all.  We’re talking thick, rich dossiers on millions of Americans.  But the public doesn’t know that.  More importantly, it hasn’t any right to know, under current law.”

I shot up from my seat.  I gaped at Pitt.  “I get it now, I get it.  John Helms was a patriot, you said.  He supported the anti-terrorism fight.  And he knew all about data mining, knew what DARPA was trying to do for the US intelligence community with the Total Information Awareness project.  But Congress was a roadblock.  So when Financial Datacorp came along, when it hired his company to design its database software, John saw a way around Congress, a way to complete what DARPA couldn’t.”

Pitt smiled.  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Now it was me pacing the carpet.  “John Helms saw that what DARPA wanted to create—but Congress wouldn’t allow—already existed in the data warehouse belonging to Wall Street, or should I say, Financial Datacorp International.”

“Very nearly, yes.”

“And Financial Datacorp International planned to sell access to its database.”

“Thanks to the Patriot Act, government agencies have legal access to all commercial databases.”

I pointed an accusing finger at Pitt.  “So John Helms came to you—the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA—with a plan to develop database software for Financial Datacorp that would simultaneously suit the purposes of American espionage and intelligence.”

“Exactly.  He was designing a system that would allow us to lay our own, confidential government records systems on top of Financial Datacorp’s collected mass of public records, and create a kind of uber-database from which to do our data mining.”

“Holy shit.”

“Just think of it, Argus.  It’s a god damn miracle, that’s what it is!  The CIA can root out any and all Islamic terrorists who happen to worm their way into our own country.  The FBI can hunt down even the most completely unsuspected serial killers—and all their sick doppelgangers.  And don’t forget us, the Secret Service.  Don’t forget about us.

“From here on out, in every city or town the president or the VP ever visits, we’ll know who to watch out for, who to surveil, whether they’ve ever entered the justice system or not.  Because we’ll know Lee Harvey Oswald’s own doppelgangers, and Squeaky Fromme’s, and John Hinckley’s, and—”

“Pitt—”

“C’mon, Argus, get with it!  You haven’t been gone that long.  You and I both know, it was only a matter of time before we lived through another day in Dallas, circa 1963!  But now that doesn’t have to be!  Doesn’t ever have to be!”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Wait’ll you see—”

“Someone hacked into your precious database, Pitt.  Used it to slay John Helms, to frame me.”

“What?  What the hell are you talking about?”

I stared out the window through the small crook of space between Pitt’s head and left shoulder.  I’d spied my very own doppelganger skimming the pool for leaves with a ten-foot pool net—an identical twin of mine, right down to the clothes on my back.  I closed my eyes and shook my head vigorously in an effort to make him go away.

Chapter 39

Nathan Pitt listened to me in wild-eyed silence, as if rendered mute by hare-brained chatter.  Three paranoid schizophrenics.  A naked flight attendant.  A deadly cult of puppet masters.  Hell bubbling up out of a deep, dark data mine . . .

When I’d finished, the Secret Service director broke his silence, not to ridicule me, but to summon an analyst from the agency’s Office of Protective Research by telephone.  The Treasury Building, where the analyst was on duty in the bowels of Secret Service headquarters, was only three miles away.  We met the analyst at Pitt’s front door less than twenty minutes later.

“Dan Chase,” Pitt said to me by way of introducing a mole-eyed young man in a JC Penney blue suit with a twitchy mustache and a narrow head tilted to one side, as if submissively exposing throat to his pack leader.  “Dan is one our data miners.  Trained him at Carnegie-Mellon.  Dan, I want you to listen closely to Argus, and tell me whether his notions are technically feasible.”

“Yes, sir,” Dan said.  “As you wish, sir.”  He offered his throat to me.  Then recognition crossed his face.  “Argus?  Argus Ward, you mean?”

“That’s right,” I said.  “Any weapons on you?”

“No, sir.”

“Call me paranoid, but I’m going to frisk you anyway.”  I patted him down.  He was clean.  Pitt led the way back to his office.  Dan couldn’t take his eyes off me.

“I’ve seen the tape,” he said.  “We’ve all seen the tape.  Of you and President Cooper, I mean.  In real time, in slow motion, backwards, forwards, frame by frame.  But I still don’t get it.  How did you know?  The assailant hadn’t blinked an eyelash when you took your initial step forward to blanket the president.”

“I tripped,” I said.  “Thus are legends born.”  It was a stock response, built for laughs, though no one laughed this time.  The truth—involving my disease—wasn’t easy to explain.

“Let’s get on with this,” Pitt said.

“A few questions first,” I said to Dan.  We all remained standing on the Persian carpet.  “How many millions of Americans would I find represented in the agency’s data mine, combined with that private data mine belonging to Wall Street?  Because I know you’re able to query the two as if they were one, thanks to that dead patriot John Helms and his firm’s customized software.”

“Argus!” Pitt said, like a warning shot against sarcasm.

“It’s how you dodge all the congressional constraints,” I continued.  Dan’s face registered surprise, Pitt’s anger.

“I told you,” Pitt said, “it’s all perfectly legal.”

“It’s a loophole.  And you well know, Mister Director, that if Congress ever finds out about it, they’ll seal it shut fast.”

“Just ask your question,” Pitt told me.

“Just answer my question,” I told Dan.

“Uh . . . well, sir, we have data—at least some data—on every citizen in the country.  Roughly two hundred and seventy million people.  But how much data we have per individual varies greatly, ranging from—”

“How much data on known criminals?”

“Plenty, sir.  We have a complete criminal history for every American citizen born after eighteen sixty.  Arrests, convictions, dispositions.  We have FBI intelligence on—”

“And what do you know—or what could you unearth—about the multitudes of people who’ve never been convicted, or arrested, but are, in any event, guilty of a crime, or susceptible to committing one?  By virtue of a predisposition, I mean.  Or a desire.  Follow me?”

He nodded.  “We could identify them, sir.  We are, in fact, identifying individuals predisposed to attempts at political assassination.  I’m working on that project team myself.”

“But you could, in theory, develop a method for identifying potential perpetrators of any crime, am I right?”

“Well . . . Yes, sir.”

Recalling flight attendant Elizabeth Hardtack and her unseeing plane passengers, as well as Baltimore furniture store owner, Bernard Simpson, I said, “And finally, Dan, what about the people who are, let’s say ‘inordinately susceptible’ to breaking the law as a result of blackmail, other forms of coercion, or simply being conned?”

Dan blinked as if blinded by harsh light, or startled by a lurid, never-before-seen color.  He cleared his vulnerable throat before saying, “We could identify them too, I think.”

“You think?”

“Forgive me, sir, but it would be easier on me if you could, uh, provide a concrete example.”

“Surely.  Let’s say I wanted—it doesn’t matter why—to see a woman committing indecent exposure.  A flight attendant stripping naked on an airplane, let’s say.  I’d be willing to pay her.”

Dan’s mustache snickered.  “Okay.”

“So find me a candidate.”  I waited with crossed arms as the data miner, training his mole eyes on the vast complexities of Persian carpet, dug through his own data banks.  Pitt stepped away to his expansive window view.  I didn’t dare look outside again.  The omnipresent hum of the white noise generator broke once with a crackle, as if an electronic bug had been zapped.

“Most peculiar,” Dan muttered to himself more than once before looking up and saying, “Well, I can think of quite a number of potential approaches.”  Pitt abandoned his window.  “But since you’re offering payment for the striptease, I’d start by focusing on the population of female flight attendants in heavy financial debt.  If it’s a large one, we could, if we wish, include only those women who’d recently filed for bankruptcy, or developed the most severe patterns of delinquent payment.”

“By the way,” I said, “I want the striptease to take place on a corporate jet.  So our population would include only the corporation’s full-time staff, plus all the commercial flight attendants who’ve voluntarily put their names on a list to work the overflow.”

“Ah,” Dan said.  “Now the population is shrinking fast.  Quite fast indeed.”

“But the tricky part remains, doesn’t it?  Which of our financially strapped flight attendants would actually stoop to such a vulgar, embarrassing, some would say ‘sinful’ stunt?  For any amount of money?”

To his task Dan now warmed, beady eyes glimmering darkly.  “What I suggest we do is create what is known as a ‘psycho-graphic profile.’  In this case, a profile of the kind of woman who, in the face of heavy financial pressure, breaks the law and/or engages in anti-social behavior.  Commits bank fraud, or sells illicit drugs, or works in a strip club, etcetera.  We’d search through our data set for all the women in recent history who’ve actually done this kind of thing, following the onset of financial stress.

“Then we’d identify what they all share in common.  Data mining theory and practice informs us that we’d eventually find a unique cluster of characteristics and behaviors that predict with high precision which of the financially troubled flight attendants in our population pool would be the most willing to take her clothes off on the plane for money.”  Dan smiled for the first time, pleased with himself, or perhaps imagining his own naked flight attendant.

“Right,” I said, nodding to myself while recalling Pitt’s recent seminar.  “A cluster of qualities no human being would ever predict, or even entirely understand once the computer spits out its answer.  Some weird mix of factors.  Like parking tickets and pets and sibling order and lipstick color and a yen for rum raisin ice cream and Barbara Streisand CDs.”

“Something like that,” Dan said.  “The types of factors that end up being included in any predictive algorithm are often rather varied and non-intuitive, if not altogether surprising.”

I imagined the impersonator and his blank-faced cohorts building algorithms together, using this new science to narrow the search for a stripper down to two or three flight attendants or so, and then vetting the finalists further somehow—personally, perhaps—before settling on Elizabeth Hardtack.

“One more question, Dan.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that, given the unparalleled data access that you and the others in your shop enjoy—not to mention your access to the fabulous data crunching power of the agency’s super computers—that you could use your data mining skills to find anyone’s weakness, if you wanted to.  Anyone’s every weakness.”

“Well, sir,” Dan said, “the science isn’t perfect, nor the data, so mistakes are inevitable, but by and large, I should have to agree with you.”

“So much for the Fourth Amendment,” I said, unmasking my revulsion.  “So much for our constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

“Now, Argus—” Pitt said.

“You’re searching souls here, Pitt.  And without a warrant.”

“The dark part of the soul, yes.”

“What the hell gives you the right to learn more about people than they know about themselves?”

Pitt said to Dan, “Go to the bathroom, or something.”

But Dan couldn’t exit with me—my eyes not straying from Pitt’s—suddenly gripping him by the tie knot.  “God damn it, Pitt!  Can’t you see you’re out of line!  It’s for the public to decide how it is they want to balance their privacy rights versus their security needs!  Going behind their backs makes you and your partners in the rest of the intelligence community just a bunch of Peeping Toms with X-ray machines!”

“Enough!” Pitt said.

“Enough for now.”  I pulled Dan close—any closer and we’d be French kissing.  “Someone is data mining to commit crimes, Dan, not prevent them.  Sifting for the worst faults and weaknesses in people and then exploiting them.  Whoever it is has already arranged the murder of John Helms, and now threatens to have the president of these United States assassinated.”  Dan’s throat squeaked.  “What’s to say you’re not the bastard behind it all?”

“Oh, no, sir.  Oh, God, no.”  Squeak.

“Now that I’ve told you this, you’ll have to be the first to be investigated, Dan, held indefinitely while Pitt has your office tossed, your home.”

“It’s not me, sir!  I swear!”  Squeak.

“It’s got to be someone in your shop.  Or else in one of your sister shops in the FBI or CIA.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Pitt told me.  “We could be dealing with an outsider.  A hacker, maybe.”

Over Pitt’s shoulder, I spotted my doppelganger again.  He was still skimming leaves with his long pool net.  Only now he was also sneaking anxious peeks at the darkness all around him.  My poor doppelganger!  He was paranoid too!

I released Dan.  “That true?  About hackers?”

Dan readjusted his tie.  “No, it’s impossible.”

“Why?” Pitt said.

“Our data warehouse isn’t online,” Dan said.  “The data we obtain from FDI—that’s Financial Datacorp International, the Wall Street consortium—gets taken down off the internet and put on a fully encrypted network that is only accessible from designated secure rooms in the Treasury building.”

“So it’s got to be an insider we’re after,” I said.

Dan shook his head.  “Not necessarily.  You see, FDI’s network is linked to the internet.  So are several local law enforcement networks.  Meaning they can be hacked.  So in theory, at least, all that data from those sites could be combined into one repository.  In which case, our nefarious data miner wouldn’t need any of the data we have—or the FBI has, or the CIA—to uh, wreak whatever havoc has been wreaked.”

“But who,” Pitt said, “would have that kind of skill?”

“Oh, thousands, sir.  Contrary to popular belief, it’s not difficult to break into even the most secure internet sites.  It’s the nature of our electronic infrastructure, which the computer industry designed without much thought for security.  It’s also the increasing complexity of software code.  The programmers now write millions of lines of code for a single program, making flaws and misconfigurations inevitable.”

I’d learned just enough from computer security experts over the years to add, “There isn’t a corporate or government network that isn’t broken into half a dozen times a year or more.”

“That’s right,” Dan said.  “And the break-in rates keep going up and up.  Even the script kiddies can do it now.”

“ ‘Script kiddies?’ ” Pitt said.

“Unskilled hackers,” I said, “who run automated programs they download off the internet to poke and prod at computer networks all over the world, searching for vulnerabilities.  Skilled hackers look down on them.”

My doppelganger had dropped his pool net and rushed to the window.  He pounded away now on the glass.  I retreated a step.

“What?” Pitt said to me.  “What is it?”

I pointed at my doppelganger, his (my) face fear-contorted, darting left and right with bird-quick glances, as if the nearby darkness cloaked some unworldly monster army ready to spring.  All the while, his hands (my hands) kept pounding on the glass.  He froze suddenly, staring me in the eyes (with my eyes) and let out a terrified scream.  I screamed back.

“I don’t see anything,” Pitt said, and I myself didn’t see—or hear—Pitt after that, nor Dan the data miner.

My doppelganger’s open-palmed pounding on the window grew louder and harder and the glass cracked and I thought it might at any moment shatter.  He called to me—in my own voice.  “Run away!  Run away!  Run away!”

I ran away.  I bolted from Pitt’s house through the front door, scaled the fence in one, adrenalin-fueled hop, and sprinted off down the street at full tilt, my miserable life hanging in the balance, I had no doubt.

Chapter 40

I know now that I spent the next five days wandering the streets of Washington, DC psychotic.  I ate from trash cans, when I wasn’t feeling proud, and from dumpsters in back alleys, when I was.  I slept in city parks—or not at all.  I ran from stampeding spiders, a thousand or more at once, and from a single, hollow-eyed zombie child who smelled of rotting flesh.  I chased, but never could quite catch, a mischievous, blue-haired dwarf, who would lather green slime on park benches and hand railings and other places that I touched.  I lined my underwear with discarded aluminum foil to prevent spy satellites from tracking me.

And yet I found myself being tracked, followed by men dressed in dark suits and sunglasses, like Secret Service agents.  I believed them to be—felt I knew them to be—members of the impersonator’s secret cabal.  They would never get too close to me, so sometimes I would shout at them:  “I know how you did it!”

What I knew—and what I whispered into my tape recorder—was how they’d conspired to murder John Helms: with that new science called data mining, with its intrusive revelations and uncanny predictions about human beings.  It was how I’d originally been identified as a paranoid schizophrenic, I was fairly sure.  And I was fairly sure the cabal knew everything there was to know about me—more even than I knew about myself.

But who are they? I’d wonder—whenever I managed to focus on the problem, for my disease-shortened attention span shrank day by day.  Meanwhile, new distractions abounded.

One night, while I was sleeping in Rock Creek Park, someone stole the shoes and socks off my feet.  Another homeless creature had stolen them, no doubt, but at the time I couldn’t decide whether to blame forces from another dimension or the blue-haired dwarf.  The pavement proved quite hot on my feet during the day.

Another night I found myself being hounded by a black helicopter, flying without lights, its silhouette barely visible in the sky until it buzzed me like an angry giant wasp.  I took cover beneath the front archway of the Lincoln Memorial, watching it circle above the reflecting pond, or sometimes the Washington monument.  Breathlessly, I spoke into my trusty tape recorder, describing the incident like a reporter under fire in a war zone.

Somewhere along the way, I’d begun recording all my cares, worries, and suspicions.  So it became quite a chore to play back the parts relating to my chief nemesis, the cabal.  I’d have to keep fast-forwarding over the irrelevant parts and then rewinding when I’d skipped too far ahead.

“What if the president’s evil too?  Just as evil as the impersonator’s cabal?” I heard myself say one day while playing back an old voice recording, although I can’t find this dialog on my machine now.  In actuality, I must’ve been ignoring whatever words I’d actually been speaking while hallucinating the message.  “It’s the president’s own administration behind the data mining, after all.  Suppose the president wants secrets on everybody.  On all his enemies.  All his minions too.  Wants to know who he can get to do things.  Think of the power, Argus!  Think of it!”

I did think of it—in my sorely addled way—as I trekked barefoot toward Keisha Fallon’s condo in Dupont Circle.  She’d always been a good sounding board for me, and I felt an intense need at that moment to run my latest notions by her.

It happened then to be some black, silent hour creeping toward dawn.  I’d been awake all night with my evolving—and revolving—worries, way too amped for sleep.  I halted beneath a sulphur-hued streetlight along Massachusetts Avenue when I felt something odd, a subtle tingling from the neck down.  I found my rugby shirt and blue jeans both vibrating visibly.  An instant later, my outer garments began to fade away before my eyes, their once solid textures bleaching into transparency, threatening to disappear altogether, just as my shoes and socks had done.

“It’s those damned forces from another dimension!” I cried.  “The blue-haired dwarf is innocent!”

I danced in circles beneath the light in a herky-jerky, spasmodic Charleston, trying to prevent the forces from another dimension from latching on to my clothing’s precise geographical coordinates.  It seemed to work, so I kept it up, breaking into my dance steps anew every ninety seconds or so along my journey.  It was either that, I figured, or walk around in nothing but my aluminum foil-lined underpants, which were really chafing me by the time I reached Keisha’s place on account of all the dancing.

She hadn’t yet repaired the window pane I’d busted out during my last break-in.  So all I had to do was punch out the square of cardboard that I’d taped over the hole myself to get to the window latch.

It was pitch black inside Keisha’s bedroom, the window shades all down.  The steady rumble of light snoring helped to guide my steps.  I sat down, sidesaddle, on the edge of the bed.  On the nightstand in front of me I could make out the silhouette of a tall, shaded lamp.  I switched its light on.

Keisha lay on her back.  Her hair, the way it spilled upon the pillow, seemed to float about her face.  Angelic peacefulness pervaded her expression.  Anything but a gentle buss upon her two plump lips would’ve been a cruel awakening, I remember thinking as I kissed her.  Her eyes opened even before I’d withdrawn, and she screamed.

“Sssh!” I said, jumping to my feet.  “It’s okay, it’s okay, Keisha, it’s just me!  Me, Argus!  Sssh!”

My clothes began to vibrate again, so I broke into my dance routine.  By now I’d begun mixing things up a bit, trying to stay a step ahead of my invisible foes, throwing in some country line dance kicks now and then.

“Argus Ward,” Keisha said.  With a loud grunt, she sat up, clutching the top bed sheet tightly to her chest as if she were nude or wearing a flimsy negligee instead of an oversized Tee shirt.  “Argus Ward, you scared the holy Jesus out of me.  Again.  What are you doing here?  What . . . what are you doing?”

“Forces from another dimension trying to steal my clothes,” I gasped, never slowing my furious feet.  “They’ve already swiped my shoes.  You wouldn’t happen to know the Macarena, would you?”

“Say what?”

“No, not your style.  But you could teach me how to dance hip-hop, right?  I’ve got to keep mixing things up, or they’ll lock on to my coordinates, sure as hell.”

“Huh?  You’re not making sense.  Not a lick.”

“Never mind, I’ll explain later.  Got much more important things to tell you.”  I halted my gyrations for the time being and brought her up to date.  I told Keisha about the confessions of Bernard Alan Simpson and Elizabeth Hardtack and the corporate jet passengers.  Then I described my visit with Nathan Pitt and summarized what he’d told me about the data mining.  And I’d just brought up the impersonator and his secret cabal when it was time to dance again.  But I didn’t let that interrupt my story.

“They want to assassinate the president, Keisha, that’s what they’re really after.  John Helms was just a warm-up.”

For a brief moment, Keisha stared at the ceiling.  “Please, God, let this be a bad dream.”  She dropped her gaze to me.  “Now what are you doing?”

“ ‘The Twist.’  You know.  Chubby Checker?”

She groaned.  “I can’t take much more of this.”

“Now hear me out, Keisha, hear me out.  That’s what I came here for—to run this all by you.  Here’s what I think.  And when you hear this—Ha, ha!—I just know you’ll be a believer.  Oh, yes.  I think the cabal wants President Ames dead because he’s the one behind the data mining project.  That’s right!  The president himself is secretly working—”—here I made the mistake of trying to do the splits—“—Ouch, ouch.  Pain.  To create a secretly transparent society he can bend at his will.  Twist at his whim.  And the cabal, they want the power all to themselves!”

Keisha dropped her chin to her chest and then slowly shook her head—a clear sign she agreed with me, I felt.

“I know,” I said, scrambling to my feet again for a little Irish river dancing.  “I know just how you feel, Keisha.  It’s sad.  It’s sickening.  Rat bastards everywhere you turn.  The president.  The cabal.  The Wall Street consortium.  Evil fucking rat bastards at the highest pinnacles of power.  How did America ever come to this?”  In short order I’d become so pissed off by my own rhetoric that I found it hard to dance.  So I turned to my black belt repertoire of karate chops and kicks.

“Argus, stop,” Keisha said, “please stop.  Whatever it is you’re doing.”

But I didn’t.  I couldn’t.  The flap and flurry of my martial arts moves continued.  “Problem is they’ve got me, Keisha.  The cabal, I mean.  Trapped in their spider web.  I may have to do something.  Something I really don’t want to—”

I halted abruptly—my speech and body both—not from being tired or winded, but because Keisha had begun staring at me strangely, as if she’d never seen me before, as if she’d never seen anything like me before.  Because I sensed her fear.

“What?” I said.

“Promise me something,” she said.

“Promise what?”

She threw back the bed covers and swung her feet to the floor, her Tee shirt hiked up, muscular legs like dark-stained wood sculpture.  I caught a flash of pink panties as she slid off the mattress.  She came face to face with me.

“Promise you’ll believe what I’m about to tell you, Boo.”  Boo was her term of affection for me.  “Because it’ll be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.”

“Promise to believe you?  Keisha, if these last few weeks have taught me anything, it’s that a man’s got to make up his own mind about what to believe or not believe.”

“Believe this, Argus.  You awe me.  You’re amazing.  That murder plot against John took genius to invent, and to pull off so invisibly.  True evil genius.  Only it wasn’t invisible to one person.  To you.  You with half your wits missing, time to time, and half the cops in DC hunting you down meanwhile.  I should’ve known better.  Should’ve listened to you earlier.  But now you have got to listen to me, Argus, you have got to.”  She gripped my shoulders tightly.  “It’s finally happened.  You’ve lost your mind.  You’re insane.  Psychotic.  Completely bonkers.”

I laughed.  “Quite the madman, am I?  Seems like you’ve told me that before.”

“This time’s different.  A child of five would know I’m right this time.  You need medical attention.  Before you do any harm.  To yourself.  To others.  To me.”

A thought darkened my mind so thoroughly that my vision briefly dimmed.  I studied Keisha carefully.  “How do I know they haven’t gotten to you somehow?”

“Who?”

“The cabal.  They could easily have something on you.  They probably have something on everybody.”

Keisha sighed.  “That’s not the case.”

“How would I really know?”

“Have I ever lied to you before?”

I didn’t have to ruminate long.  “Yes.  I think so.”

Her jaw unhinged.  “When?”

“Ten years ago.  The morning after that one beautiful night we spent together in a Miami hotel room.  You said—”

“Oh, God, Argus!  Don’t—”

“You said—”

“I know what I said.”  She scowled at me.  “I said I didn’t want to get involved with a co-worker.”

“That was a lie.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Then it wasn’t the complete truth,” I said.  “Because the whole truth would’ve factored in my skin color.  Right, Keisha?”

She palmed the top of her head as if it had a lid that wouldn’t stay down.  “Oh, Boo, all these years . . . you’ve carried that around?”

“So you admit it?”

She let go of her head.  Sighed.  Nodded.  Spoke into the carpet.  “You don’t know how it is.  How it was.  I still lived in the hood in those days, and a brother, he could get away with it some, but not a sister.  ‘Sleeping with the enemy’ is what they called it.”  She studied me with moist eyes.  “I’m sorry, Argus.  It was stupid of me.  Cowardly.  I know that now.”

“Don’t cry, Keisha.  I still love you.”

She threw her arms around my neck and hugged me.  “I love you too, Argus.  Don’t . . . don’t ever forget that, okay?”

“Why would I?”

That’s about the last thing I clearly remember saying before waking up sprawled on my side in a fairly dark place with slivers of light slanting down on my face through horizontal slats, my wrists bound behind my back, my skull throbbing in pain, and my ears ringing.  I strained to sit up and then I peered through an opening in the slats, which my nose identified as wooden.

My gaze fell upon Keisha’s bare brown legs, pacing back and forth beside a wet spot in the carpet, where some cut tulips lay, along with several broken shards of blue porcelain.  She’d conked me on the head with a flower vase, I would later learn.  I could hear her speaking loudly.  It didn’t take long for me to realize she was speaking to a 911 emergency operator.

“Where are the cops!” she said.  “I don’t hear them coming yet . . . Well, can’t they get here any quicker?”

Betrayed! I thought.  It was an easy leap to make, especially in my condition.  I nearly dislocated both shoulders while slithering my arms beneath my buttocks as fast as possible.  Then I curled into a ball while my bound wrists passed beneath my feet and over my toes to the front of my body.

One lick of the binding and I recognized the material.  Nylon stockings.  It would be easy to free myself once out on the street, I decided.  I could shred the nylon simply by rubbing the material up against the corner of some brick building.

I stood up inside Keisha’s closet and rammed my shoulder against the door as hard as I could.  Keisha screamed.

The door gave way—hinges and all—on my second attempt.  As I stumbled into sight, Keisha aimed a gun at me.  But she didn’t fire it as I ran out of the bedroom, though she did chase after me down the hall and call to me as I flew out the front door and into a siren-pierced dawn.

I got away without much trouble, though, and those forces from another dimension soon gave up trying to steal my clothes.

Late that morning, a few miles from Keisha’s place, I spotted one of the suit-and-sunglasses men tailing me again.  He was inside a Starbucks, sitting alone at a table beside a big storefront window with a cup of coffee and a bagel, pretending to read the newspaper.  I ran inside to confront him.  But he got up and left through another door, waved down a black limousine, and sped away before I could reach him.  I went back inside to see if he’d left anything behind by accident.  He had.  The newspaper.

But it was no accident.  He’d left a message for me.  The bottom half of the front page of his Washington Post had been left facing up on the table, and the headline to an article titled, 4th of July Gala to Be Bigger Than Ever, had been circled by the wet stain of a coffee cup rim.  I read the article, and at once I knew what was expected of me.

Two days hence, in front of half a million people—and many millions more watching live on television—I was to assassinate the sitting president of the United States on the National Mall during the annual 4th of July festivities.

What happened during the next forty-eight hours I would prefer to blame on my disease alone.  But I don’t know if that’s entirely fair.  Perhaps another factor, some underlying fault of mine, made all the difference—an insufficient love for humanity, or some flaw of character, or weakness of will.

What I do know is that on the morning of the 4th of July, I made a terrible decision for the sake—or so I believed—of my dear loved ones.  For the sake of five million dollars—enough money to secure my young family’s financial future—and a Hinckley verdict, I prepared to defile my entire life’s work.  I planned to grieve a nation—my nation—with my own assassin’s arrow.  The blood I would spill would not be that of an innocent man’s, but my nation would never know that, I felt fairly sure.

That Independence Day, I walked to the National Mall from beneath the 14th Street Bridge, where I’d spent the night, and as I passed by the Holocaust Museum, I caught my image in the tall window glass and froze, hardly recognizing myself.

Dirt had deepened the lines of my sunburned face.  My cheeks had hollowed, and I had an odd mix of blond, untamed hair with a thick black and gray beard.  Most disturbing of all were my eyes. The eyes of my father.

Chapter 41

Humanity swarmed the Mall.  Patriotic multitudes converged from north, south, east, and west, and they seeped out of the Earth from underground metro stops, like ant colonies on the move.  I wandered among them, losing myself, yet somehow, the cabal found me.  Quickly.  And they let me know it too.  On such a hot, steamy holiday, they stood out prominently in their dark business suits.  I counted four of them at various distances from me.

I’ll bet they never lost me, I thought.  There’s got to be a microchip planted on me somewhere.

But what does it matter now?  I strode along a wide path of crushed sandstone at the outer edge of the Mall in front of the Smithsonian museums, dodging street vendors, helium balloons, slow walkers, and racing, sticky-faced children.  I was headed for the Capitol building to see how close I could get to the performance stage erected there on the steps, where President Eliot Ames would speak in just under two hours, where the crowd was thickest and a marching band marched in place making the sounds of John Phillips Souza.

I caught glimpses of the blue-haired dwarf, weaving through the crowd ten yards ahead of me, sliming the ground where I might step, no doubt, as well as the nearby temporary fence erected for the day by the National Park Service.  I kept away from the fence and stepped carefully, like a farm hand cautious of cow patties.

The ground turned thick with little slime blobs.  I stepped in one.  Damn!  And in my bare feet too!

The cops on horseback and riding bicycles and patrolling on foot seemed more numerous than blades of grass on the Mall.  At least they were easier to spot than grass blades by now with so many thousands of people treading ground.

Below the performance stage and over by Constitution Avenue, two television trucks were setting up—hydraulic masts unfolding, satellite dishes rotating, technicians unrolling cable—and parked between the pair I recognized one of those three-ton government Suburbans used to transport Secret Service agents and sometimes their protectees.

It meant the first wave had arrived for the event, the sharpshooters, Secret Service men and women who would fan out as sentries high in buildings or on rooftops, monitoring the canyons of windows with their telescopic sights for random movements at high vantage points, for the flash of sun on glass, for would-be long distance assassins aiming rifles.  The second wave wouldn’t be far behind.  It would include the canine unit, used to clear buildings and sniff for bombs.  The third wave would include the protectee.  The president.  My heart felt heavy.

I’d already brought great shame to the men and women of the Secret Service.  Soon, that shame would increase a thousand-fold.

From out of the crowd in front of me the impersonator appeared abruptly.  He came to a stop face-to-face with me.  His attire hadn’t changed.  He was still in my father’s old farming get-up, ensuring that I’d recognize him.

“Follow me,” he said and sped away, crossing the Mall in the direction of the National Gallery of Art.  It wasn’t easy keeping pace with him, especially with my aluminum foil-lined underwear chafing me again.  I fell behind.

He disappeared inside the National Gallery’s East Building.  For some reason, the dwarf wouldn’t follow, lingering at the edge of the Mall, watching me intently.  I went inside.

I stood in the atrium, searching for the impersonator.  A voice from an intercom announced the museum would be closing in thirty minutes.  The building was still packed with visitors.  I found the impersonator a few floors above me on a glass-encased walkway, staring down at me.

Behind me a security guard’s radio squawked.  “Stupid little shit stain!”  I spun around.  Again the radio squawked.  “What do you think you’re doing!”

Oh, great, I thought.  Darth Vader’s back.  I raised my eyes to the walkway again.  The impersonator had moved on.  I stepped into a crowded elevator compartment going up.

Darth began to broadcast from the elevator’s ceiling.  “He’s in search of his father.”

“No, I’m not,” I said.  “The man’s an impostor.”

“He’s going to betray everything he’s ever stood for.”

“You don’t understand,” I said.

“Why doesn’t he just kill himself?”

“You know why I can’t do that,” I said.  “I’ve got a wife and kids to think about.  Now shut up.”

“Kill them too.  That’ll end their pain.”

“Go away!  I’m not listening to your stupid, sick ideas anymore, you hear me!”

Everyone else had departed by the time I reached the top floor.  My floor.  For I had no doubt the impersonator was leading me to my assassin’s perch.

The Tower Level, as it’s called, contains only one small exhibition space.  A handful of visitors meandered admiring the current collection.  The rest of the floor houses administrative offices and an academic study center.  I could see book stacks through a set of interior windows, but no one at work inside, due to the holiday, I assumed.  The intercom broke through the air again, announcing the building would be closing in ten minutes.

I caught up with the impersonator as he stood in front of the door to the stairwell.  “In here,” he whispered.

“Kill him,” Darth said.  “Kill that son of a bitch.”

“Ssh!” I said.

We stood just inside the stairwell.  The concrete chasm was brightly lit.  I noticed steps leading up.

“They go to the roof,” said the impersonator.  “There are two Secret Service agents stationed up there now.  Once the building clears we’ll move across the hall, into one of the administrative offices.  You’ll be using your own Vaime Mk2.”

It was a favorite souvenir of mine, a sniper rifle from my early days in the Service, when I’d spent a year as one of the sharpshooters stationed on rooftops.  I kept it locked in a closet at home.  I could only assume the cabal had burglarized my townhouse for it.

“My own ammo?”

The impersonator nodded.  “NATO 7.62 millimeter.  You know how to use glass cutters, don’t you?  The windows don’t open in this building.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be back,” he said and left, the heavy door clanging shut behind him.  I sat down on the cool cement floor, my back to a cool cement wall.  My heart was beating fast.  I would have to still it some or it would disturb my aim.  I felt exposed waiting there.  I guessed it wouldn’t be for long.

“You should’ve broken his neck,” Darth said.

“Shut up,” I said.

He did for awhile.  But I knew it wouldn’t last.  “Wait until he brings you the rifle,” he said.  “Then you’ll have him.”

“Have him?  What do you mean?”

“Take the rifle.  Take control.”

“Huh?”

“Take the rifle, take control.”

I stared up at the ceiling, suddenly feeling the presence of my brethren on the roof.  “What do you have in mind, exactly?”

“Point the rifle at plowboy,” Darth said, “as soon as he hands it over to you.  Then all you have to do is stick it in his back, and march him up the stairs.”

“To the roof?” I said.

“To the roof!”

“To the agents?  Why would I want to do that?”

“Plowboy will talk.  To save his own ass.  You’ll find out who he’s with!”

“Who the cabal is, you mean?”

“Of course!  You stupid dumb-ass!”

“But I made a deal with the cabal.  They’re going to help me and my family.”

“Wrong!  Wrong!  Wrong!  They’ll never lift a finger for you!  They’re just using you again!”

Darth’s strange power of suggestion had begun working on me again.  “My God, you’re right!”

The stairwell door flew open.  The impersonator rushed inside, holding the rifle.  My rifle.  He aimed it at my torso.

“You and your friend thinking about double-crossing us, are you?  I don’t think so, Mister Ward.  Now move it.”  He swung the barrel of the rifle toward the door, pointing with it.

I got myself up off the floor and stepped forward.  As I turned to exit, Darth shouted, “Take him!”

So I sprang toward the impersonator, feet first, aiming one of my bare heels at his jaw.  But he ducked and I missed him clean, crashing into the wall.  I rolled on my back, then jumped into a defensive crouch, but found myself inexplicably alone.  No impersonator.  No rifle.  He’d disappeared.  Disintegrated.

“He wasn’t real,” Darth said after awhile.

I nodded.  “But he was once.”  My mind replayed the phone call from my supposed father, and then that day soon after on the boardwalk outside my office.  “I think.”

I sat down on the bottom steps leading to the rooftop and bawled.  Up until a few moments earlier, I’d been keen on killing another innocent man—or so I thought I’d better presume in my muddled state.  And this time it’d been the president of the United States of America.  Yet my tears were tears of self-pity as well as shame, I’ll admit.

Now I had no cabal to help me or my family, and on the other hand, I couldn’t prove anything about the cabal in the hope of transferring some of the blame for the death of John Helms.  I couldn’t even decide if there had ever really been a cabal.

Darth said, “Pull yourself together.”

But I couldn’t.  I felt hopeless, helpless, clueless.  And then, suddenly, I felt nothing but panic.

“What if there really is a cabal?” I said.  “That would mean they’ve given up on me and found themselves another assassin!”

I jumped to my feet and raced up the stairs, where I found the door to the rooftop locked.  I banged hard on that door—and for a long time too—and screamed for help at the top of my lungs.

Meanwhile, I thought about the weather.  Bullets fly the straightest through cold, dense air without any wind—true air, it’s called—so the conditions for rifle fire aren’t optimal today.  It’s scorching outside and there’s a hot breeze too, and probably thermals rising up off the concrete, which means the sharpshooters are going to focus on buildings within about a seven hundred foot radius of POTUS.  Which means, given the building’s vantage point and the sight clearance, that there has got to be agents on this rooftop!  Damn it, open the hell up!

When at last a Secret Service agent opened the door from the other side—pointing a rifle at my midsection—I said to him:

“I’m Argus Ward.  I’m here to save the president.”

Chapter 42

A judge returned me to DC’s maximum security psychiatric ward, where I fell under the care of Doctor Woods again.  She and the rest of the staff—the guards, in particular—paid me the extra attention a former escapee deserves, but at first I couldn’t help concocting sinister reasons for their stares and whispers.

Meanwhile, I ignored Darth as much as I could, though we did fall into a long, nasty spat one afternoon—all afternoon, actually, during lunch in the cafeteria, during rec time in the yard, and even during one of my counseling sessions with Doctor Woods—when he kept speaking gibberish to me and claiming it to be Greek, or Tagalog, or Swahili, and so on, and when I’d insist that it was only gibberish, he’d berate me for my ignorance of foreign languages and cultures, or invent some twisted native custom or ritual to sicken me with.

In ten day’s time, though, Darth was gone—gone forever, I hope, without denying some odd, mixed emotions about that son of a bitch—gone with all the rest of my unnatural cares and suspicions.  Once again, pills and therapy had demystified my world, made it safe again, predictable again, gloriously tedious.

I came to fear only the future.  My future.  My family’s future especially.

Meanwhile, I began sorting out the recent past.  It wasn’t long before I’d made up my mind about the impersonator.  He’d been real once, when he—or perhaps another, older man—phoned me to feed and focus my paranoia, when he’d pretended to be my missing father and warned me about John Helms.

He’d been real too, most probably, that day when he’d appeared on the boardwalk outside my offices, staring in at me, spurring me down the path of mental disintegration.

But when he next returned, weeks later, in the seafood restaurant, revealing himself as not my father, sharing his aims of presidential assassination—his and his powerful cabal’s—I’d spoken with a man who was not flesh and blood, but merely my own hallucination.  And so he’d remained from then on . . .

Eventually, I replayed all the events since my ordeal had begun with the naked flight attendant, separating fact from fantasy, sense from nonsense.  I had help this time, thankfully.

My first visitor was not Keisha Fallon this time, nor my wife, but Secret Service Director Nathan Pitt.  We talked seated at one of the circular orange tables in the visitors area.

He confirmed for me that we’d truly met recently in his home—after I’d defeated his security system, surprised him in his study—and that what I remembered him telling me was all true too.  The marriage of massive databases.  The new science of predictive analytics.  Data miners unearthing secrets of the heart and mind, if not the soul, calculating propensities for future behavior.

“Is choice just an illusion?” I asked him.  “Is there only predestiny?  Or is there really such a thing as free will?”

Pitt, I think, took my philosophical concerns as a sign of ongoing recovery.  He changed the subject.

“We’ve very nearly completed our internal reviews—and so has the FBI, and the CIA—and it looks like I was right.  This was no inside job, Argus.  We’re not dealing with any rogue element within the federal intelligence community.  Because none of our secure intelligence databases were ever breached or misused.  Only the feeder from outside.”

“The Wall Street consortium’s?”

He nodded.  “Financial Datacorp’s.  It’s online, so it’s not nearly as secure.  It gets hacked all the time.”

“You’re telling me the one database alone would be enormous enough for our unsub to do the required data mining?”  Unsub, by the way, stands for unknown subject, i.e., an unknown suspect.

“No question, Argus.  We found proof.  You know what ‘log files’ are, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.  They’re automatically generated activity reports for network system administrators.  They report on every user connected to an online computer system—who they are, how long they remain, what they do.  “You found a trail?”

“A vapor trail, you might say.  Because every time our unsub would hack into Financial Datacorp’s system to run his data mining algorithms, he’d erase the web logs before leaving, removing every trace of his activities.  But one time he forgot.”

“Forgot?  Altogether?”

Pitt nodded.  “Happened nearly five months ago, back when our unsub was still searching for the names of paranoid schizophrenics living in the DC area.  Your name popped up during that session, by the way.  Yours and about two dozen others.”

“I’ll be damned.  Why didn’t the network administrator notify somebody about it?”

“Web logs don’t get scrutinized until and unless there’s a problem, and Financial Datacorp doesn’t really consider hackers a problem.  More like an unavoidable irritation.”

“So what about our unsub?  The puppet master.  Our high tech Satan.  The motherfucker who destroyed my life.  Were you able to track him down?  His computer, at least?”

“Not yet.  He used some anonymizing trick to disguise his computer’s identity and location.  The techies haven’t given up yet on tracing his digital footprints, but they tell us our best chance of catching him is online, so we’ve got the FBI monitoring Financial Datacorp round the clock now.”

“Return to the scene of the crime, huh?”

“Unsub hasn’t been back since the day you got arrested for the Helms murder—or so the techies think—but we just have to be patient.  The vile mind we’re dealing with—Or is it minds?—will find the power of that data too tempting to pass up for long.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Quantico thinks it’s one guy,” he said, referring to the FBI’s behavioral analysts by their location just across the Potomac in Virginia.  “One puppet master, as you say.  And that he isn’t done manipulating.  Or killing.”

“Can I see the profile?”

He shook his pompadour from side to side.  “They’re still working it up.”  After a brief, repelled glance at some other patients sitting at nearby tables, he finally got around to asking me the only question he’d really come to ask.  “Could we keep the local constabulary out of this, Argus?”

In other words, he was asking me to keep secret everything I knew about Financial Datacorp’s data mining link to US intelligence, to say not a word about what we both knew to be the modus operandi in the assassination of John Helms.  I refused.

He tried changing my mind.  “The conspiracy is out there now, Argus.  Known.  Verifiable.  It’ll come out at your trial without you tracing things back to Financial Datacorp.”

“I’m not concerned about any leniency from the courts.”

“What is it, then?  Revenge?  Whoever did this, we’ll get them for you—I promise!—just give us some time.  But you’ve got to do what’s right here.  For the country.  For national security.  For the Service.”

He didn’t understand my motives at all.  “You know, Pitt, I may have been psychotic when you first told me about the data mining project, but I was right to be appalled by it.”

“Argus—”

“Never before, in world history, has a government known or recorded so much about the smallest, most intimate details of its citizens’ lives.  Not in Mao’s China, Stalin's Soviet Union, or Hitler’s Germany . . .”

So we had ourselves a heated, spittle-swapping disagreement.  We wrapped it up by calling each other un-American, and we both meant it, and Pitt left mad.  That is to say, angry.

I phoned Homicide detective Mona Strecker and spilled my guts about the data mining.  Strecker believed me right away this time, even though Doctor Woods still hadn’t signed the papers declaring me mentally fit enough to be shipped back to jail.

Five days later, though, Doctor Woods signed.  Yipee!  The night before my transfer, Strecker and her partner, Gary Fellows, came to my seclusion room.  They thanked me—stiffly, formally, but sincerely enough—for my contributions to their murder case.

“Any closer to finding the asshole—or multiple assholes—who did this to me?” I asked them.

But they weren’t.  Their spadework—or traditional detective work—had reached a dead end.

The telephone calls placed by the unsub to Bernard Simpson and to one of the corporate jet passengers had been made on throw-away cell phones purchased anonymously.  Based on records from cell phone towers, the calls had been made from locations scattered throughout the Washington, DC area.

The detectives hadn’t had any better luck with the email contacts.  In theory, a sender can be tracked through the email header, which shows the route the message takes from the sender’s computer to the receiver’s.  But a trace revealed that unsub had used a chainer in Belgium, a service that strips out a real email return address, inserts a fake one, and then sends the message on its way.  Chainers only stay in business because they never share a sender’s true address, not even with the police, and they shred their data too fast to make a search warrant useful.

The detectives carried bad news from the Feds too.  After an exhaustive, massive search made by the best computer forensics specialists in the government, unsub’s digital footprints leading out of the Wall Street consortium’s database had also dead-ended.

“What do you think of the widow?” Strecker said to me.

“Rebecca Helms?  Why?”

“We like her.”

“As the unsub, you mean?”

Strecker nodded.  “It wasn’t a perfect marriage, was it?”

“You should talk to Keisha Fallon.”

“We did.  She told us the two of them spent lots of time apart.  More and more toward the end.  And did you know Rebecca had signed a brutal prenup?”

“How brutal?”

“Enough to give her motive.  Now consider the murder itself.  If things had gone just a little better for the true killer, for the unsub, I mean—if Sally Anne Bilchik hadn’t failed, or if you hadn’t been so quick to catch on to things after your escape from jail—then the murder would’ve been hung on one poor, paranoid schizophrenic patsy or another—you or Sally—and there would be no suspicions surrounding Rebecca Helms at all.”

“Or anyone else,” I added.

“Whereas,” she said, “if John Helms had been bumped off in the usual way, then—”

“Rebecca’s a suspect,” I agreed.

“Right,” she said.  “Especially if the hit had the markings of a professional hire.  And even if Rebecca beats the rap, there would always be talk.  Whispers in high society about her possible role in the killing.  And who wants to live with a reputation like that?  Certainly not this woman, don’t you think?  ‘No black marks, but upon the royal ermine, I say.’ ”

“Pretty good British accent,” I said.  “Pretty good thinking too.  I hadn’t considered the reputation angle.”

“It does explain the elaborate modus operandi,” she said, “the subversion of three paranoid schizophrenics.”

I thought back to that slap I’d received from Rebecca Helms by the helicopter the day after the Sally Anne Bilchik attack.  Distraught wife or disappointed murderess?

“But if she’s good for this,” Strecker said, “then how’d she pull it off?  She’s no computer geek herself.  We’re thinking she hired someone.  Someone she knew at Helms Technology.  Because it would take someone with a computer science background, and some computer hacking skills—”

“As well as someone who knew about Financial Datacorp’s data mining capacities,” I said, excited.  “And, as we all know by now, Helms Technology custom-developed their software for that.”

Detective Fellows stared at me intently.  “Who might she have hired, Mister Ward?  Any ideas?”

“Not off the top of my head.  What did Keisha Fallon say?  She’d know better than me.”

“She gave us a couple possibilities, but I don’t want to prejudice your thinking.”

After some serious consideration, I said, “I’m not coming up with any names.  Rebecca Helms never seemed all that involved with her husband’s business or employees.”

“Ms. Fallon shared the same general impression,” Strecker said.  “In fact, she insists Rebecca wasn’t involved in her husband’s murder.  Says the woman may come off as a stone cold bitch, but she’s not.”

I pondered that slap again.  “But nevertheless, you still like her for this?”  My eyes shifted between detectives.

Fellows shrugged.  “She’s all we got to like, so far, and we’re looking at her.  That’s it.”

I promised the detectives, as they left me, that I’d ruminate on who Rebecca Helms might know inside Helms Technology.  That’s what I was still doing the following night, my first back in jail, when I came up with a name.

Only it wasn’t the name of any co-conspirator.  I saw in a flash that Rebecca Helms was entirely innocent of any involvement in her husband’s death.

I had the name of the unsub.  And I knew his motive.  The puppet master was mine.

Chapter 43

At the first opportunity, I used my daily allotted phone time to contact the District police department.  In a meeting room at the jail, I gave Homicide detectives Strecker and Fellows the unsub’s identity.  The name took them by surprise, to say the least.

Questions cascaded out of both of them, answers out of me.  An hour later, the pair rushed off to dig, like detectives do.  When we met again, seven or eight days later, in the same meeting room, they greeted me with fat grins and exuberant handshakes and kudos of all kinds.  I even got an apology.

“We’re very sorry, Mister Ward,” Fellows said, “for not listening to you from the start.  Problem is, Sir, we deal with lunatics all the time, and we’d go loony ourselves if, in every case, we took all the wild bullshit we hear seriously.”

“Understandable,” I think I managed to say.  Mostly, I remember triumph and relief trembling my body.  We sat down.

“Now for the bad news,” Strecker said and proceeded to steady my trembling with amazing swiftness.  “We believe you fingered the right guy not so much because of what we found, but what we found destroyed.  We’ve got no direct evidence—it’s all gone, or wiped clean—and the circumstantial is spotty at best, with little hope of further discovery.  Bottom line—we don’t have enough to make an arrest, much less convict.  We’re going to need a confession, Mister Ward.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope,” she said.

“Sounds like a longshot.”

“It usually is.”

For reasons that will soon become clear, the detectives had concluded that my own, unique knowledge of the unsub might very well help to elicit a confession.  So they filled me in on what they’d learned investigating during the previous week, and then we spent hours hatching a plan together to obtain the confession.

The next morning, Detective Fellows met me in my jail cell carrying a garment bag filled with some of my old clothes: a navy blue Brooks Brothers suit, a white pressed shirt, a striped tie, dark socks, and a shiny pair of black leather Bruno Magli shoes.  I gladly swapped my orange jumpsuit and white Reeboks for them.

The jail administrators processed me into temporary police custody with a warning to Fellows—as well as a joke or two—about my martial arts skills, my history of altercations with deputies, and my prior escape from the psych ward.  Yet I wore no handcuffs as we met Strecker in the lobby and walked out of the building.

The weather was sunny and steamy, but I felt invigorated dressed in my own clothes and returned once again—if only for a brief time—to non-institutional surroundings.  I took in the big blue sky overhead, cloudless, marred only by planes coming and going out of Reagan National airport—planes with fully-dressed flight attendants aboard them—and long, wispy trails of white jet exhaust.  I rode in the back seat of the very same blue Chevy Impala in which I’d recently stuffed Strecker and Fellows into the trunk.  Our route took us across the Potomac River and into Virginia, ending thirty minutes later in suburban Vienna, at the world headquarters of Helms Technology.

It was a Saturday, yet the parking garage beneath the main building was half full.  The company’s workaholic work ethic would outlive the founder who’d instilled it.

As expected, we located Chief Technology Officer Jeremy Crane on the top floor, working alone in his cluttered office with the door open.  He was dressed down in blue denim.  He was three hundred pounds of blueberry snow cone melting in a chair.

He didn’t notice us at first, keystroking at warp speed with a pair of music headphones on.  Mona Strecker leaned across his huge, L-shaped desk, which supported three slender, yet full-size computer monitors, and waved a hand in front of his face.

“Oh!”  He quit keystroking, dropped the headphones around his neck, and rocked back in his swivel chair until it groaned.  Van Halen music dribbled out of his tiny speakers.  “Visitors!”

The volume control to Jeremy’s voice box needed lowering.  It was as if he’d spent so much time in front of a computer he’d become more acclimated to two dimensions than three.

Strecker said, “You remember me, don’t you, Jeremy?”

“Yes, of course.  Detective . . .”

“Strecker.”  She motioned to her partner, who’d already swung around the side of the big desk, planting himself in front of Jeremy’s personal espresso maker and demitasse set.  From there Fellows could monitor all of Jeremy’s body movements, head to toe, from a step away.  “And how about Detective Fellows?”

“Yes, of course,” Jeremy said, exchanging nods with him.

I came shoulder to shoulder with Strecker in front of the desk.  “And do you recognize me, Jeremy?”

He studied me, and I him.  Blue-black rings rimmed the lower halves of his eyes.  Dandruff flaked his lumpy shoulders, and his body odor—I can’t help recalling—was a retched mix of burnt rubber, sweaty horse blankets, and stale pizza.  He’d pulled an all-nighter in his office.  But his eyes—puffy as they were—were fully alert.  Alert and wary.  He’d recognized me, alright.

“Uh, no,” Jeremy said.

“No, what?” Strecker said.

“No, I don’t recognize him,” he said, pointing at me.

“Recognize who?” Strecker said, pretending not to see me as she glanced where Jeremy had pointed.

I locked eyes with Jeremy.  “You know I’m Argus Ward.”

Strecker said, “Are you feeling alright, Mister Crane?”

“I, uh . . . think so.  What is this?”

“They can’t see me,” I told Jeremy.  “Or hear me.  I’m just a vision of yours.  An hallucination.”

I watched Jeremy’s black pupils and muddy brown irises being cast adrift suddenly in great seas of white.  It was a pleasure.

“We’re here,” Strecker said to Jeremy, “because we’d like to ask you a few more questions.  But before I do, I’m going to read you your Miranda rights.”

Jeremy bounded to his feet.  “What is going on here?”

Gary Fellows put a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder.  “Why all the fuss, Jeremy?  You got something to hide?”

“Uh . . . no.  But—”

“Then why don’t you just sit back down and relax.”

After some brief hesitation, Jeremy complied.  By now he couldn’t take his eyes off me for long.  “This is all some kind of gag, am I right?”

“Gag?” Fellows said.  “This ain’t no gag, buddy.  This is official police business.”

After Strecker had finished Mirandizing Jeremy, I said to him, “People take you for perfectly sane, but you’re not, and haven’t been for awhile.”

“Now, Mister Crane,” Strecker said, “my first question concerns the food irradiator we found in your garage.”

Jeremy looked at her.  “My food irradiator?”  He looked at me.  “Wasn’t . . . wasn’t Argus Ward arrested?”

“Of course he was,” Fellows said.  “For the murder of John Helms.  He’s rotting in jail as we speak.”

Jeremy’s eyes bulged again.  I said to him, “You’ve been sick for some time.  For the last six or nine months, I’d wager.”

“What are you talking about?” he said to me, but it was Fellows who responded next.

“What are you talking about?”

Jeremy shot frustrated looks all around as Strecker said to him, “We searched your home one day recently when you weren’t there.  We discovered an item not typically found in the home.  A food irradiator.”

“You searched my home?” he said.

“We obtained what is known as a ‘surreptitious search warrant.’ ”  From a pocket of her blazer, Strecker removed some typed pages and tossed them on the desk.  “Here’s your notice.”

“What’s with the food irradiator?” Fellows said.

Jeremy shrugged.  “I use it to kill the bacteria and the fungi that can spoil food, or make a person ill.  I have a weak stomach, you see.”

Strecker said, “How else do you use it?”

“How else?”

“I ask,” she said, “because inside your food irradiator we found what our forensics lab has identified as numerous strands of human hair.  Some of it pubic.”

I told Jeremy, “They think you’ve been crawling in there nude and irradiating yourself.”

“We think,” Strecker said, “you’ve been irradiating yourself in the nude, Mister Crane.”

“Preposterous!” Jeremy said.

“Paranoid!” I said.

Strecker said, “Are they your hairs, Mister Crane?”

He hesitated.  “You people have no right . . .”

“Not talking?  No matter.”  From her blazer, she produced more typed pages and tossed them on the desk.  “It’s a warrant to obtain a hair sample from you.  Detective Fellows?”  Her partner, using tweezers, plucked a hair by the root from Jeremy’s scalp.

“Ouch,” Jeremy said, rubbing the top of his head.

Fellows placed the hair inside a small plastic bag.  “We interviewed your co-workers, Mister Crane.  The people working on this floor, and on your project teams.  According to them, you haven’t exactly been yourself lately.”

“What do you mean?” Jeremy said.

“In recent months, you’ve taken a number of sick days, which is unusual for you.  And around the office here, you’ve appeared fatigued, and complained of nausea frequently.  Odd skin burns have been noted, and your hair is thinning, some say.  These are all symptoms in keeping with radiation poisoning.”

Jeremy sighed.  “Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that I’ve been doing what you say.  What do you care?”

“We tested those hairs,” Fellows said, “and they show no trace elements indicating that the owner was using anti-psychotic medications of any kind when they fell out.”

Strecker leaned forward, her fists on the desktop.  “Which means, Mister Crane, that if we match you to those hairs, then we’ll know that you—a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic—have been off your meds for some time now.  Which goes to motive.”

“Yeah, motive,” Fellows said, twirling a forefinger around one ear, the near-universal sign for crazy.

Jeremy shot up again, his massive folds all jiggling at once.  “Out with it!  What, pray tell, am I being accused of?”

I answered myself, rapidly, for the sake of the hoax.  “You and I both know from personal experience, Jeremy, that sanity and insanity are no dichotomy.  It’s a continuum they form.  Some months ago, you went off your medication voluntarily—just as many schizophrenics do—but instead of falling into full-fledged psychosis, you got stuck between the poles of that continuum.  Half sane, half insane.  Sick enough—and at the same time, well enough—to mastermind a fantastic murder conspiracy worthy of Agatha Christie.”

Jeremy swallowed hard.  “I want a lawyer.”

Strecker threw up her hands.  “But I haven’t even told you yet what we think you did.”

“Stop it!” he said.  “Just stop it!  I’ve had enough of your stupid, stupid game!”

Strecker leaned on her fists again and shouted.  “You’re the one who’s truly to blame—And in my opinion, solely to blame!—for the unnatural death of John Helms, Mister Crane!  Argus Ward was just the murder weapon!  Your modus operandi!  Isn’t that right!”

“They know,” I said to Jeremy.  I had fake blood pouches, one in each of my front pants pockets, that I’d crushed with my fists a few moments earlier, and I held my wet, dripping, painted palms up for Jeremy to see.  I felt like the gory ghost of Banquo from Macbeth.  “They know what you made me do.”

Jeremy shrieked.  At the same time, he stumbled backwards, toppling into his chair, then tipping over in it, and crashing to the floor.  His black sneakers dangled in the air.  Fellows and Strecker and I soon hovered over him.  No one helped him up.  He didn’t try to get up.  He only stared at me—my face or my hands.  The shouting, or the crash, drew two co-workers of Jeremy’s to the door.  Strecker shooed them away with a flash of her badge.

Fellows smirked.  “Something the matter, Mister Crane?”

Jeremy labored for breath.  “This can’t be . . . can’t be happening.  It’s not . . . not possible.”

“The database project was the key for you,” Strecker said, casting her steely eyes downwards.  “We know all about that.  We know you knew all about the project from the beginning—including what John Helms was trying to do for US intelligence through the software design.  You knew, Jeremy, because you were on the original project team for a month, before being reassigned.”

“Don’t know,” Jeremy gasped, “what you’re talking about.”

Strecker ignored him.  “And as a computer scientist, and a very bright man, with a PhD from MIT, you would have no problem in grasping the science of predictive analytics—or ‘data mining’ as it’s often known—and what’s more, you would have no trouble in applying that science.  Expertly.”

“I said . . . I want a lawyer.”

Fellows kicked Jeremy in the ribs—or at least in the flab concealing them.  “Hey, we asking you any questions?  No!”

Strecker continued.  “Hacking into FDI’s database wouldn’t be a problem for you either, Mister Crane.  Even without the backdoor you built into the software, and that alarmed John Helms so much during the last days of his life.  You’re a hacker from way back.  As a freshman undergrad, you got yourself—along with a few buddies of yours—suspended for an entire semester for hacking into the dean’s office and changing grades.”

“Leave me alone,” he said.  “All of you.”

Instead, Strecker dropped into a catcher’s squat.  “We know you worked from home, not here.  I suppose the company intranet and back-up tapes made destroying evidence too problematic.  But it’s more than a bit suspicious—Wouldn’t you say, Jeremy?--doing all that digital shredding on your home computer shortly after Argus Ward’s arrest.  No, don’t answer that.  You want a lawyer.”

“You going to arrest me?” Jeremy said, his breathing improved.  No one spoke right away, so he added, “I thought not.  So get out.  Or I’ll call security.  You’re trespassing.”

“As I was saying,” Strecker said, “you did it all from home, and all by yourself too.  Running your fancy algorithms.  Sifting through the souls of millions.  Literally millions.  Just to identify a handful of specific individuals with weaknesses you could exploit.  To carry off the assassination.”

“Help!” Jeremy cried.  “Security!”

“We know about the flight attendant you hired to strip—Ms. Elizabeth Hardtack—and we’ve interviewed all the passengers you sent aboard that corporate jet, and they’ve confessed.  We know about Mister Bernard Simpson too, not to mention that woman in the gold dress you sent to Randolph House in Alexandria to warn Argus Ward against contacting his psychiatrist.  And we know about the man you had posing as Mister Ward’s long-lost father, to encourage Mister Ward’s mental breakdown, and to instill in him a violent obsession with John Helms.”

Jeremy struggled to get off his back.  Strecker stood and grabbed him by the arm.  Fellows took hold of the other one, and together they hoisted the heavy man to his feet.

“But there were even more,” Strecker said.  “Behind the scenes players you manipulated.  Some burglar, maybe, to break into houses and switch pills.  Someone to research your two potential assassins, Argus Ward and Sally Anne Bilchik.  Someone to tail them—monitor their mental disintegration.  Someone to leave that message on your own answering machine to support your ruse as victim.  There must be at least a dozen people in all.  You preyed on each of them, Mister Crane, preyed on their secrets and their failings like a digital age Satan, you did.”

Jeremy was on the telephone by now, standing by his desk, handset to his ear.  “Security, get up here.  I’ve got intruders in my office.  Trespassers.  And they won’t leave.  Hurry.”  He hung up and turned to us triumphantly.  I felt my first twinge of doubt that Jeremy was going to be shocked into a confession.

Strecker jumped back in his face.  “You wanted John Helms dead, no doubt, but apparently not enough to murder him yourself.  So I guess you’re aware of what happens to schizophrenics who murder, aware of what’s going to happen inevitably to Argus Ward.  They take the needle, like everyone else.  Or else spend the rest of their natural lives cooped up behind bars.”

Jeremy glanced at me.  His eyes, at least when trained in my direction, I thought, remained wary.

Fellows crowded Jeremy too.  “We know you faked complete psychosis down in North Carolina.  Why—I’ll give you two good reasons.  Maybe you set yourself up as the third assassin because you were willing to do the wet work yourself if the other two failed.  Or maybe it was only to help disguise your leading role in the assassination plot by playing victim.  Maybe it was both.  I think it was both.  But—“

“What’s going on in here?”  In the open doorway stood a trim, middle-aged man in a blue and white paramilitary uniform, a security guard from Helms Technology’s private security force.  He wore a badge.  He holstered a gun.

“We were just leaving,” Strecker said to him and immediately headed for the door.

Fellows followed on her heels, saying to Jeremy, “We’ll be in touch, Genius.”

I stayed put beside the overturned swivel chair.  Jeremy stared at me impatiently.

“Him too,” Jeremy said to the security guard, who had stepped inside and away from the door to allow Strecker and Fellows passage.

“Beg your pardon?” said the guard.

“He goes too.”  Jeremy pointed at me.

The guard looked straight at me.  “Who?”

“Him!”  Jeremy pointed now with a fully outstretched arm.

“I don’t understand,” said the guard.  “There’s no one there, where you’re pointing.  There’s only you and me in this room now.  Are you . . . are you alright, Sir?”

The guard’s name was Sam Dundy.  I know because he worked for me.  The wheels of a huge conglomerate sometimes turn slowly, and it would be another two weeks before Helms Technology would replace my soon-to-be-defunct firm’s security force with that of another, a competitor’s.  But with all the turmoil, Jeremy had failed to make the connection.  The color drained from his face.  He didn’t answer Sam.  He simply stared at me, and for a second time, fear—and fear alone—lit the lamps behind his eyes.

Sam said, “I’m—I’m . . . going for the doctor” and shut the door tight. (You were beautiful, Sam!)

Jeremy approached me, halting on the opposite side of his overturned chair.  He shut his eyes tightly and held them shut for a count of three, then opened them, only to be disappointed to still be seeing me.

I said to him, “I’m the one who figured it all out, you know.  Me, Argus Ward.  It all came together when I realized that you’d always intended for your murder plot to be discovered.  But you never counted on you being discovered as the party behind it all, that’s for sure.”

Jeremy sighed.  “Guess I need my little pills after all.”

“Two paranoid schizophrenics with designs on murdering the same person—that could be written off as coincidence.  Or, as it turned out in my case, as one mad person influencing another.  But three paranoid schizophrenics wanting the same man’s blood at the same time?  That’s another story entirely.  All you had to do to expose your own plot was to let the police know there was a third potential mad assassin.  You.

“That’s why, Jeremy, soon after I impersonated Detective Fellows while visiting you at the psychiatric institute in Bethesda—And you recognized me, don’t say you didn’t!—you took the opportunity to let the cops know about you—potential psycho assassin number three—by phoning DC Homicide and asking to speak to the real Detective Fellows.”

“You can’t tell me anything I don’t already know,” Jeremy said, “and if you do, it’s all made up nonsense.  So why don’t you just go away?  Just make yourself go, poof, or whatever.  You bore me now.”

I bitch-slapped Jeremy, leaving his cheeks smeared by my reddened palms, his expression dumbfounded.

“Ouch!” he said.  “That really hurt.”

“I know it’s the data mining project you hate, Jeremy—how it’s being used, by big business, by US Intelligence.  If you ever came to hate John Helms it was only for facilitating its development.  You’re counting on your fantastic murder to bring public pressure on Congress to halt the data mining.  You’ve sacrificed John—you’ve sacrificed me—in the service of what you perceive to be a larger good, isn’t that right?”

“ ‘Perceive,’ ” he spat, holding a sore cheek.  “There’s nothing perceived about it.  It’s a genuine, Big Brother-ish nightmare I’m ending.  No one—certainly not our government—should have the power to make such intrusive personal revelations, such uncanny predictions, about individual human beings, about any of hundreds of millions of American citizens.  We flesh and blood people need our privacy, oh, foul figment of my imagination, for without our little secrets and our personal mysteries, there is no freedom for us.  There is only the tyranny of the one in the know.  To predict is to control, to coerce, to corrupt.  Now off with you.  Poof!”

“Strecker,” I said directly into the microphone beneath my shirt, taped to my bare chest.  “Fellows.  Get in here fast.  Before I kill someone in a more or less sane state.”

Jeremy didn’t react, and he suddenly wasn’t looking at me anymore.  Having lifted his hand from his cheek, he’d taken to examining his wet, red fingers.  He sniffed them.  He tasted them.  Then he looked at me again as his right arm, shaking and hesitant, led a stubby forefinger into the center of my chest.

“You’re real,” he whispered.

I smiled.  “Mystery solved.”  The detectives crashed into the room.  Fellows spread-eagled and searched Jeremy up against the window.  Strecker applied handcuffs behind the back.  Jeremy turned crimson-faced in the places where the fake blood hadn’t done the job already.  All the while, he didn’t utter a word.

“Jeremy Crane,” Strecker said, turning him toward the door, nudging him forward, “you are now under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder in the death of John Helms.”

Chapter 44

You know what happened next.  Jeremy Crane got exactly what he’d wanted, though not at all in the way he’d wanted it.

With his arraignment on murder conspiracy charges, his sensational assassination plot resulted in a sensational media blitz, followed by sensational public outrage—directed at Wall Street, at American Intelligence, at data mining, at John Helms too.  Televised hearings on Capitol Hill soon followed.  All the data mining projects—private sector and public—were shut down and new laws and regulations written on the collection, dissemination and disclosure of personal data.

My old boss, Nathan Pitt, stepped down as Secret Service Director and settled into retirement on the Eastern Maryland shore.  Others weren’t so lucky.  Heads rolled in the corridors of all the various US Intelligence branches.

Not a single head rolled on Wall Street, however, and the consortium issued only a dry apology emphasizing the legality of its morally empty behavior.  But I take pleasure in knowing that it'll take decades for their legions of Gucci-soled lobbyists to chip away at all the new government regulations.

As for me, I was still on the hook for the murder of John Helms—thanks to the District Attorney, Millard T.—for Tenacious—Barnes.  It was explained to me by my lawyers—I eventually had a whole, star-studded team of them, which was only possible because lawyers work cheap with cameras present—that I was taking a big risk by pleading not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.  In real life—as opposed to TV or the movies—the insanity defense is rarely tried, because it rarely works.

In the District of Columbia, as in most states across America, the legal definition of insanity is still based on the old M'Naughten rule from English law.  M'Naughten was a paranoid schizophrenic who, in 1843, murdered the British prime minister's secretary during a failed attempt to murder the prime minister himself.  M'Naughten’s celebrated case—at Queen Victoria's insistence—resulted in the world's first legal test of mental competence: if the defendant cannot tell the difference between right and wrong, then—and only then—the defendant is legally insane.  In Great Britain, the test has evolved over the last one hundred and sixty years to reflect what psychology and psychiatry have learned about the human mind.  But not so here in America.

Here, if you know it's wrong to kill another human being, but, due to mental disease, can't control yourself—or believe, however implausibly, that you're acting in self defense, or in defense of another, or that you're slaying Hitler's clone—then you are guilty of murder under the law.

To be found not guilty by reason of insanity has become an even more unlikely outcome since the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, which Congress passed into law in the wake of public outrage over the John Hinckley verdict.  It shifted the burden of proof from the prosecution to the defense, which must now prove with clear and convincing evidence that the defendant was legally insane at the time of the crime.  The reform act even limits the scope of expert psychiatric testimony to be allowed at trial.  It's no wonder that, in my own case, there was a mistrial, when the jury deadlocked on a verdict.

In the meantime, Jeremy Crane was tried, found legally sane, and subsequently convicted of murder conspiracy.  Rightly or wrongly, he’ll be spending the next ten to twenty-five years inside Lorton State Prison in suburban Virginia.

Around the same time, my wife, Sarah, initiated divorce proceedings.  At first she’d stuck by my side, appearing in court every day during my mistrial.  But she finds herself unable—especially after delivering our son, Dexter, she says—to forget that I’m a killer.  A taker of the most precious gift of all.

Maybe that’s all there is to it with her.  But just maybe the stress of the trial and all the public attention eventually got to Sarah, or the realization of what it really means to be married to a paranoid schizophrenic.  I don't know.  I do know that I'd always believed—always, always—that my wife would stand by me, whatever hell might come.  So chalk that one up as another of my sane delusions, right?

Getting back to me, I was tried for murder a second time and, following days and days of jury deliberation, found legally sane during the time of the murder and subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

That was a tough day, as you might imagine, and there was no Sarah in the courtroom either—though my brother, Chuck, was there for support, and Keisha Fallon, of course, and Hideo Mori, and Detectives Mona Strecker and Gary Fellows, and even Nathan Pitt.

As you may know by now, I spent less than three months behind bars.  It’s traditional for a sitting US president who is about to leave office to grant criminal pardons, a virtually unlimited power explicitly set forth in the US Constitution.  And so as the term of President Eliot Ames wound down, he granted me a pardon for the killing of John Helms.  He cited as his reasons the “extraordinary psychological and physiological coercion” that I’d undergone, “service to country in exposing a vast, insidious menace,” as well as my “past gallantry in the line of duty while protecting the life of former President Wallace Cooper,” who’d personally requested my pardon.

So I’m a free man now.  Yet there’s no escaping the fact that I killed an innocent human being, that my hands are stained red forevermore, and that however much I’d like to believe I took the life of John Helms under highly unusual circumstances, from the perspective of a diseased mind, at least, the circumstances weren’t unusual at all.

THE END

Excerpt from THE PROPHET MOTIVE by Eric Christopherson

Chapter 1

Over the plastic pitter-patter of her own computer keystrokes, Maggie heard a phone receiver slam into its cradle.  She stopped typing and turned to her office mate.  Esperanza, her hand still gripped to the receiver, was staring off fearful-eyed, beyond their walls, as if focused on the trailing backside of a bogey monster.

“What’s wrong, honey?  Who was that?”

“Uh . . . obscene phone call.”

“You’re kidding.”

Esperanza let go of the phone, fanned her face with an empty manila file folder.  Maggie laughed at that, and Esperanza laughed too. A moment later, Lydia Grant popped her frosty gray head in their doorway.

“Time to lace ’em up, ladies.”

Lydia continued down the hall to alert Pam Macy.  The four paralegals shared a weight loss pact, which included circling a few blocks together during their unofficial afternoon break.

Maggie reached beneath her desk to retrieve a pair of bright red, Rockport walking sneakers she’d bought in Union Square over the weekend.  “So what did the pervert say?”

Esperanza’s gaze fell to her desktop.  “Can’t repeat it.”

“You’re no fun.”  Maggie slipped out of her heels and began lacing up.  “Think you know who it was?”

“No.  No idea.”

Maggie finished tying her sneakers and stood.  “Aren’t you coming?”

“No, not today.”

Maggie’s hands found her hipbones and she sighed.  Esperanza wasn’t shaking off her X-rated call lightly after all.  Even her coffee skin seemed a little milkier.

“You gonna be okay, honey?”  A weak nod.  “You sure?”  A weak smile.  Poor thing, Maggie thought.  “He calls back, give him my number.  I’ll make his thing-ie fall off.”

She caught up with Lydia and Pam in the foyer, waiting for the antique elevator, the compartment creaking near, its wrought iron door slipping into view.

“Esperanza won’t be joining us today,” Maggie said.

“Why not?” Lydia asked.

Maggie was about to answer when a scream disturbed the dignified confines of Fenno, Holmes and Shaw.  A panicky scream.  A woman’s.  It went on and on.  Maggie’s initial thought was that some overworked lawyer was about to go postal on them all, and the next sound would be gunfire.  But no shots came.

Maggie lit off down the hall the moment she feared she’d recognized the screaming voice.  She found Esperanza sprawled on the carpet midway between their two desks.  The stricken young woman lay on her back, gripping her head with both hands, her frilly yellow summer dress bunched in the shape of a pressed flower.  Her tormented wail continued even as Maggie crouched down next to her and stroked her forehead and shushed her.

This wasn’t like Esperanza.  This wasn’t like anybody.

Abruptly—and oh so mercifully—Esperanza ceased her shrieking.  She lay motionless, but for a heaving chest, eyes vacant, a fish-like part to her lips.

“What’s wrong?” Maggie asked.  But Esperanza offered no response.  “Can you hear me?  Can you hear me, Esperanza?”

Lydia burst inside, gasped, and when she couldn’t get Esperanza to respond either announced:  “I’m calling Nine-One-One.”  She picked up the black telephone handset dangling by its cord over one side of Esperanza’s desk and emanating a loud busy signal.

“No—no—wait.”  Esperanza grunted and sat up.  She cupped both hands to her forehead.

“Don’t try to move yet,” Maggie said.

“I’m alright,” Esperanza said.

“My God, girl!” Lydia said, dropping the handset back in its cradle.  “What on Earth happened?”

“Headache.  Bad headache.”

Maggie and Lydia exchanged baffled shrugs.  They shooed away a mob of office rubberneckers peering in from the doorway.

“Uh-oh,” Esperanza said.  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

In one motion, Maggie snatched a metal wastebasket and clunked it down in front of stricken woman, who started gagging as soon as she positioned her head above the cylinder.

“I’ll bet it’s a migraine,” Maggie was saying to Lydia as Esperanza vomited.  “My cousin has them.  Says they can be excruciating.  And they always make her nauseous.”

Lydia nodded.  “Our poor girl’s probably never had one before, and it scared her.”

When Esperanza finished throwing up, she struggled to her feet and promptly collapsed into her chair.  Lydia left to fetch a glass of water.  Maggie used a Kleenex to wipe away some crud from the corner of Esperanza’s mouth.

Brrrrnng!  The telephone rang on Esperanza’s desk.  Maggie reached to answer it, but Esperanza beat her to it.

“Yes?” she answered, her voice shaky.  Maggie strained to listen, hoping the obscene caller hadn’t called back, but could hear only a gender-less mumble on the other end of the line.

Esperanza glanced at Maggie before speaking into the phone piece in a blasé tone.  “I’m afraid I’m not interested.  Please don’t bother to call back.”

The receiver slipped from her hand, smacking the desktop an instant before Esperanza’s shrieking resumed.  With both hands gripping her head, she jumped up and darted aimlessly about the tiny room, changing directions every few steps, as if trying to dodge the terrible pain in her skull.  Maggie backpedaled against the wall, speechless, horrified.

Esperanza dropped to her knees and looked heavenward.  “Our Father,” she began, but stopped her prayer to scream.  “Our Father,” she repeated.  Tears mixed with mascara, tread-marking her cheeks.  “Who art—”  She stopped again.  To scream again.

Maggie burst forth from the wall, leaned down next to Esperanza, and placed an arm around her shoulder, meant to comfort and calm.  It did neither.

“Ayúdeme, Dios Mio!” Esperanza cried.  Help me, Lord!  Her voice was already raspy from strain.  “Sálveme, Jesús!”  Save me, Jesus!  Suddenly, she jumped up off her knees, knocking Maggie on her fanny, and burst out the door shrieking.  Maggie scrambled to her feet and gave chase.

In the hallway, Esperanza kicked free of her pumps, then bumped into Lydia and the glass of water she’d fetched.  Its contents splashed across the trousers of Derek Simms, an attorney in a gray Armani suit.

“Stop her!” Maggie called.  But the others—all the heads poking out of doorways—failed to budge.  They let Esperanza pass, too dumbfounded—or maybe too frightened—to intervene.

Into the foyer Esperanza raced.  She bypassed the elevator compartment, threw open the stairwell door, and disappeared inside.  Maggie followed.

Screams boomed and echoed off the brick and tile walls.  Maggie heard footsteps too, somewhere overhead, and began climbing.  Slowly, she gained on the hysterical woman, catching sight of Esperanza just in time to see her fling open the door to the rooftop.

The two women streaked across the bright rooftop veranda, between rows of empty, white-clothed cafe tables.  Maggie closed to within three steps.  Two.

Puffing hard, she called out:  “It’s alright, honey . . . Just tell me . . . what’s wrong!”

Esperanza didn’t so much as glance over her shoulder.  She just kept on running and screaming.  She screamed as she placed her hands on top of a four-foot high brick parapet at the roof’s perimeter and vaulted over the side of the building.  She screamed up to the very moment she hit the street below.

Excerpt from FRAME-UP by Eric Christopherson and Brad Schoenfeld

Chapter 1

“You want me to frame myself for murder?” Will Pruett stood with his back to a tall arched window overlooking the entire 50-block sweep of Central Park.

“Capital murder, actually.” Zeeva Morgenstern un-parked from the edge of her desk and approached, silk skirt fluttering, a feline roll to her boyish hips. “I want you facing death.”

Twenty minutes earlier, he’d been planted in his office cubicle, two stories below, sneaking in a little RuneScape—his latest favorite online game—because the background research for the new magazine piece had got a little boring. A phone call from Zeeva’s personal secretary had summoned him to the top floor, to a rare private audience with the publisher. He’d spent a ten-minute wait in her antechamber worried that a new, keystroke computer program had revealed his on-the-job gaming habit. But that hadn’t turned out to be the case.

“I should mention,” she’d begun, as soon as they’d been seated, “that I’ve just finished re-reading that death row piece you wrote for last November’s issue.”

He peered across her massive white oak desk. “Yes?”

“For the most part,” she said, “it was a well-balanced piece—an excellent piece—yet its tone and attitude seem to announce a firm opposition to the death penalty.”

“It’s true, I am opposed.”

“And you feel strongly about that?”

“I do.” Gripping his armrests for leverage, Will sat up a little straighter. “The death penalty is racist in that most of the people we end up executing are minorities. It punishes the poor, who can’t afford adequate defense counsel. It condemns the innocent to die, as we’ve learned through modern DNA testing. It’s clearly not a deterrent to violent crime, while it clearly is unconstitutional for being ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ It’s…it’s barbaric.”

Moisture filmed his eyes by now, the old man in his thoughts. He broke eye contact, blinked a couple of times to squeegee away the fluid.

“I’m in complete agreement,” she said softly, before resuming her normal, strident tone. “On a political note, New Jersey recently abolished its death penalty, as I’m sure you know. The first time that’s happened in over thirty years. And it looks as though New York may follow suit. Last month Governor Nowland appointed a blue ribbon commission to review the state’s capital punishment laws.”

Will nodded. “Just as Nowland promised he’d do during his election campaign. But the pro death penalty forces…”

“That’s right. They’re formidable, and you can bet they’ll go all-out to prevent that second domino from falling. What are you working on these days?”

“Right now, a book review for the September issue. Bob Woodward’s latest, on Obama. And I’ve got an investigative piece in the pipeline. You know the one. Missing Matisse sketch? The one the Nazis stole during the war? Turned up rather mysteriously in a Brooklyn warehouse after sixty-seven years?”

“Right, you pitched that during the last editorial meeting. I thought we’d killed it.”

“I talked Fran into letting me run with it some more.” He didn’t mention that he’d threatened to take a leave of absence to pursue the story, freelance it, be his own boss for a change. Maybe even write his first book on the subject. “It really could turn into something special. There’s this art historian who—”

“Never mind about that now. I have another assignment for you instead.”

“Oh?” he said.

Her rapt gaze, for which she was famous, seemed incapable of a simple eye blink. “You can turn it down, if you’d prefer, because it’s…well, hazardous duty. And more than a little unorthodox.”

“Hazardous duty? You make it sound as if I’m heading for the Middle East.”

“No, I don’t mean that kind of hazard.”

“What then?”

She rocked back in her swivel chair, head cocked to one side, eyeballing Will like some objet d'art. She was forty-five, but still fit and would forever be striking with that bone structure.

Her investment banker husband, Sheldon Cohn, had bought Manhattanite magazine as a trophy asset seven or eight years earlier and installed his largely untested trophy wife at its helm. No one had predicted the awards and circulation increases to follow.

Zeeva leaned forward again, fingers interlocking beneath the mild swell of her bosom. “I have an investigative piece in mind for you. A controversial piece, in the same way that it was controversial for the New York Times to expose one of our nation’s war secrets—the National Security Agency’s perfectly legal practice of conducting warrant-less eavesdropping on the phone calls of those inside America suspected of terrorist links. Or controversial in the way it was for those Daily News reporters to test airport security checkpoints by boarding commercial aircraft concealing contraband box cutters and razor knives.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Test our criminal justice system.”

“I don’t follow.”

Zeeva’s open laptop beeped with a new email message or IM. She tapped a few keys and returned her attention to him.

“Will, I’m talking about making the ultimate anti-death penalty statement here. We show the world how easy it is for a completely innocent man to be charged and convicted of homicide and sentenced to death, based on little more than a coincidence or two. We expose the prejudices of the cops and the prosecutors, the self-righteous ‘gut instinct’ or selfish careerism that takes over, and sweeps away such niceties as hard evidence. We expose—”

Her desk phone rang. “Yes?” she answered. Palming the mouthpiece with her free hand, she whispered to Will, “I need to take this.”

And so Will had left his seat and strayed to the window in the corner, overlooking Central Park. By the time Zeeva had hung up on her caller, he’d come to understand her intentions. Now she stood before him by the window, silently asking him to speak.

“What an extraordinary idea,” he said. “Mad, certainly, but also extraordinary. How could it possibly work?”

“Leave that to me. Me and J. Brewster Finch. I’ve already retained him to advise us.”

Will knew the name, of course. Finch was a renowned defense attorney with a rich and famous clientele, known for his courtroom eloquence, dapper style, and ever-changing arm candy.

“But how?” Will insisted.

Zeeva’s eyes were humid with excitement. “We wait for the right case to come along. There are three murders in this city every day, on average, so we won’t have to wait long. Although I do want to hold out for capital murder.”

“Oh, hell, let’s hold out for mass murder too.”

She grinned for the time it took to cross her arms. “We choose a case in which we’re sure the cops don’t have much in the way of leads or evidence, and then we make our move. Maybe there was an eyewitness who’d seen a potential suspect in a tweed sports coat, walking a dachshund down the sidewalk around the time of the murder. So we buy you the same type of sports coat, the same kind of dog too, and put you on the same sidewalk, and have you pass right beneath the nose of that eyewitness. In other words, we create our own circumstantial evidence. If we’re clever enough about it, sooner or later, the cops will show up on your doorstep.”

“Good God,” Will said after resisting an urge to say, Fo’ rizzy? Sticking to his slang-less, office-speak wasn’t easy in shock. “Isn’t that illegal? ‘Obstructing justice,’ or some horrible turn of phrase like that?”

“It’s not against the law for you to buy a sports coat, Will. Or a dachshund. Or to walk in a particular neighborhood.” She swirled and stepped away, re-parking her bottom on the edge of her desk and crossing her legs. “But it’s true you’ll have to be careful about what you say and do. Which is why I’ve retained J. Brewster, despite his outlandish rate. You can’t, for example, make false statements to the police, but you can certainly refuse to answer questions, and that always sounds incriminating to them.”

Will’s right palm flew to his forehead, an act of comfort to his reeling brain. “So…so I get myself charged with a murder I had absolutely nothing to do with, and then—”

“Convicted.”

He sighed. “Of course. And how do I do that?”

“The old-fashioned way. Through inept representation. We’ll get you a kid, some recent, bottom-tier law school graduate, or else an old, broken down alcoholic.”

“Thanks.” He felt miles away from his little cubicle now, from his safe, sanitized world of online research and phone calls, of keying in text and kicking monster butt throughout the realm of Gielinor.

“Now, remember, you’ll be chronicling everything that happens for your investigative piece, the whole wild ride. So I think it makes sense, for the sake of drama, and to provide some first-person insights, if we have you spend at least a few weeks on death row, before I come forward and bail you out.”

“Oh, goody,” Will said. “You won’t forget?”

She laughed. It sounded like rapid-fire hiccups. “No.”

“And just how are you going to bail me out?”

“We’ll have our own evidence, naturally. The receipt for that tweed sports coat you’d bought the day after the murder. Not to mention the dog’s. An affidavit from me, of course, and evidence of your true whereabouts at the time of the murder. We’ll compile a complete and overwhelming package.”

Will took a step in Zeeva’s direction. “And then what? I can’t believe the cops and the prosecutors won’t come after us, after making them look like fools. We’ll be guilty of something, surely. Like maybe helping the true murderer escape justice.”

Zeeva sighed and stood. “We listen to J. Brewster Finch and we’ll be fine, you better believe it. But there’s something else you should know, Will. No one charged those New York Times reporters with high treason for breaking the NSA eavesdropping story, though they were clearly guilty of it. No one charged those Daily News reporters for their box cutters either. And do you know why? Because we’re the fourth estate, that’s why. We work in the public’s interest. And the public—at least the thinking public—will appreciate what we’ve done for them.

“Yes, at the end of the day, we may accidentally help some sleazeball get away with a heinous crime, and leave a grieving family with unanswered questions, but we’ll be serving a larger good here. As educators and activists. We’ll be part of a movement to repeal the death penalty, and that, Will, affects oh so many lives. Remember what you wrote in your death row piece. ‘America is the only fully developed and democratic nation on Earth still perpetuating this medievalism.’ ”

“ ‘In the Western hemisphere,’ ” Will corrected. “There’s Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in the Eastern.”

He retreated to the window. Forty stories below, automobiles and pedestrians streamed by the statues on Columbus Circle. He pressed his hands against the glass, its surface surprisingly cold for July.

Was it madness or genius, this plan of hers? To arrange a simple coincidence or two and show beyond dispute how it could cost an innocent man his neck?

“I’ll need some time to think about it.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“Why?” He heard steps padding up from behind. A moment later he smelled her perfume, Chanel No. 5, the olfactory equivalent of a Mercedes S-Class. Probably saved her Bentley for social galas.

“I’ve got our crime beat reporter on top of this thing already, and he—”

“Jerry Bucholz?”

“Of course. That was him on the phone earlier. He has an excellent contact inside the Ninth precinct. They have a fresh DOA as of thirty minutes ago, and Jerry just got confirmation the vic is an NYPD uniformed cop. Homicide’s just now heading out to the scene. Jerry thinks this could be the one for us.”

“Aren’t we being premature? What if there’s an eyewitness? Incriminating fingerprints? A confession?”

“Then we go with a different homicide. All I know is, every time a good candidate comes along, I want you showing up at the murder scene. Let the neighbors see you, the police too. It’ll look suspicious in retrospect, once you become a suspect.”

Will sighed. He thought of his mother. How would she take hearing her son had been charged with a cop’s murder? Or convicted of the crime? When she couldn’t even stand his being a journalist? When he had a father who—.

“Will,” Zeeva said, draping a hand on his shoulder. “You know what this means, if we pull it off, don’t you? Television appearances. Lecture fees. Book contracts. Quite possibly a Pulitzer. A golden opportunity to make a name for yourself, to catapult yourself up into the top ranks of your profession overnight. The potential upside is huge.”

Startled pigeons atop the battleship Maine monument flew off in a starburst. “But what about the potential downside?” he said. “Like if a killer remained free because of me? My personal and/or professional reputation being tarnished? New criminal charges being brought once our little hoax came to light? Last, but not least, what about the risk of lethal injection?

“The poison needle. The big bee sting. Stainless steel sleep. Liquid parole. No one, not even J. Brewster Finch, can guarantee I won’t get stuck by that nasty syringe in the end.” Her Chanel No. 5 titillated his nostrils, his brainstem. He turned to face her. “I’m more than a little terrified to tell you, ‘Yes.’ ”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I may even be a little terrified of you.”

“It’s happened before.”

“You think I’ll do this because my father’s on death row?”

“No, no. Not solely—”

“And for God’s sake, Zeeva, I’m a black man.”

She smiled. “Well, you have to admit, your skin color is a definite plus for this caper.”

“Too big a plus is what worries me.”

Excerpt from ORIGIN by JA Konrath

PRESENT DAY

“You have reached Worldwide Translation Services. For English, press one. Por Espanol...”

BEEP.

“Welcome to WTS, the company for your every translation and interpretation need. Our skilled staff of linguists can converse in over two dozen languages, and we specialize in escort, telephone, consecutive, simultaneous, conference, sight, and written translations. For a list of languages we're able to interpret, press one. For Andrew Dennison, press two. For a...”

BEEP.

The business phone rang. Andy glanced at the clock next to the bed. Coming up on 3am Chicago time. But elsewhere in the world they were eating lunch.

If he didn’t pick up, it would be forwarded to voice mail.

Unfortunately, voice mail didn’t pay his bills.

“WTS, this is Andrew Dennison.”

“Mr. Dennison, this is the President of the United States. Your country needs you.”

Andy hung up. He remembered being a kid, sleeping over at a friend’s house, making prank calls. It seemed so funny back then.

He closed his eyes and tried to return to the dream he’d been having. Something to do with Susan, his ex-girlfriend, begging for him to come back. She’d told him that would only happen in his dreams, and she’d proven herself right.

The phone rang again.

“Look, kid. I’ve got your number on the caller ID, so I know you’re calling from...”

He squinted at the words WHITE HOUSE on the phone display.

“Mr. Dennison, In exactly five seconds two members of the Secret Service will knock on your door.”

There was a knock at the door.

Andy jack-knifed to a sitting position.

“Those are agents Smith and Jones. They're to escort you to a limousine waiting downstairs.”

Andy took the cordless over to his front door, squinted through the peephole. Standing in the hallway were two men in black suits.

“Look, Mister—uh—President, if this is some kind of tax thing...”

“Your particular skills are required in a matter of national security, Mr. Dennison. I'll brief you in New Mexico.”

“This is a translation job?”

“I can't speak any more about it at this time, but you must leave immediately. You'll be paid three times your normal rate, plus expenses. My agents can explain in further detail. We'll talk when you arrive.”

The connection ended.  Andy peered through his peephole again. The men looked like secret service. They had the blank stare dead-to-rights.

“Do you guys have ID?” he asked through the door.

They held up their ID.

Andy swallowed, and swallowed again. He considered his options, and realized he really didn’t have any.

He opened the door.

“As soon as you're dressed, Mr. Dennison, we can take you to the airport.”

“How many days should I pack for?”

“No need to pack, sir. Your things will be forwarded to you.”

“Do you know what language I'm going to be using? I've got books, computer programs...”

“Your things will be forwarded.”

Andy had more questions, but he didn’t think asking them would result in answers. He dressed in silence.

The limo, while plush, wasn't accessorized with luxuries. No wet bar. No television. No phone. And the buttons for the windows didn't work.

Andy wore his best suit, Brooks Brothers gray wool, his Harvard tie, and a pair of leather shoes from some Italian designer that cost three hundred dollars and pinched his toes.

“So where in New Mexico am I going?” Andy asked the agents, both of whom rode in the front seat.

They didn't reply.

“Are we going to O'Hare or Midway?”

No answer.

“Can you guys turn on the radio?”

The radio came on. Oldies. Andy slouched back in his seat as Mick Jagger crooned.

Chicago whipped by him on both sides, the streets full of people even at this late hour. Summer in the city was around the clock. The car stopped at a light and three college age girls, drunk and giggling, knocked on his one way window and tried to peer inside. They were at least a decade too young for him.

Their destination turned out to be Midway, the smaller of Chicago’s two airports. Rather than enter the terminal, they were cleared through the perimeter fence and pulled directly out onto the runway. They parked in front of a solitary hanger, far from the jumbo jets. Andy was freed from the limo and led silently to a Lear jet. He boarded without enthusiasm. He'd been on many jets, to many places more exotic than New Mexico.

Andy was bursting with curiosity for his current situation, but sleep was invading his head. It would probably turn out to be some silly little international embarrassment, like a Pakistani Ambassador who hit someone while drunk driving. What was the Hindko word for intoxication? He couldn't remember, and since they didn’t let him take his books, he had no way to look it up.

At a little past four AM the pilot boarded and introduced himself with a strong handshake, but didn’t offer his name. He had no answers for Andy either.

Andy slept poorly, on an off, for the next few hours.

He awoke during the landing, the jolt nudging him alert when the wheels hit the tarmac. After the plane came to a stop, the pilot announced they’d arrived at their destination, Las Cruces International Airport. Andy rubbed some grit from his eyes and stretched in his seat, waiting for the pilot to open the hatch.

The climate was hot and dry, appropriate for the desert. The pilot informed Andy to remain on the runway and then walked off to the terminal.

Andy waited in the powerful sun, the only human being in sight, his rumpled suit soon clinging to him like a close family. A minute passed. Two. A golden eagle rode a thermal in the distance, circling slowly. Andy wondered when his ride would arrive. He wondered why this town was called The Crosses. He wondered what the hell was so important that the leader of the free world woke him up at 3AM and flew him out here.

From the opposite end of the runway an Army Humvee approached. Andy noticed the tags, Fort Bliss. The driver offered him a thermos of coffee and then refused further conversation.

They drove west on Interstate 10 and turned onto highway 549, heading into the desert. Traffic went from infrequent to non-existent, and after they passed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant; a large complex fenced off with barbed wire, they turned off road and followed some dirt trail that Andy could barely make out.

The Florida Mountains loomed in the distance. Sagebrush and tumbleweeds dotted the landscape. Andy even saw the skull of a steer resting on some rocks. This was the authentic West, the West of Geronimo and Billy the Kid. He'd been to several deserts in his travels; the Gobi in China, the Rub al-Khalia in Saudi Arabia, the Kalahari in South Africa... but this was his first visit to the Chihuahuan Desert. It left him as the others had—detached. Travel meant work, and Andy never had a chance to enjoy any of the places he’d visited around the world.

The Humvee stopped abruptly and Andy lurched in his seat.

“We're here,” the driver said.

Andy craned his neck and looked around. Three hundred and sixty degrees of desert, not a building nor a soul in sight.

“You're kidding.”

“Please get out of the Humvee, sir. I'm supposed to leave you here.”

“Leave me here? In the desert?”

“Those are my orders.”

Andy squinted. There was nothing but sand and rock for miles and miles.

“This is ridiculous. I'll die out here.”

“Sir, please get out of the Humvee.”

“You can't leave me in the middle of the desert. It's insane.”

The driver drew his pistol.

“Jesus!”

“These are my orders, sir. If you don't get out of the Humvee, I've been instructed to shoot you in the leg and drag you out. One...”

“I don't believe this.”

“Two...”

“This is murder. You're murdering me here.”

“Three.”

The driver cocked the gun and aimed it at Andy's leg. Andy threw up his hands. “Fine! I'm out!”

Andy stepped out of the Humvee. He could feel the heat of the sand through the soles of his shoes.

The driver holstered his weapon, hit the gas, and swung the Humvee around. It sped off in the direction it had come. Andy watched until it shrank down to nothing.

He turned in a complete circle, feeling the knot growing in his belly. The only thing around him was scrub brush and cacti.

“This is not happening.”

Andy searched the sky for any helicopters that might be flying in to pick him up. The sky was empty, except for a fat desert sun that hurt his eyes.  Andy couldn’t be sure, but the air seemed to be getting hotter. By noon it would be scorching.

He looked at his watch and wondered how long he could go without water. The very idea of it made his tongue feel thick. A day, maybe two at most. It would take at least two days to walk back to the airport. He decided to follow the truck tracks.

“Andrew Dennison?”

Andy spun around, startled. Standing twenty yards away was a man. He wore loose fitting jeans and a blue polo shirt, and he approached Andy in an unhurried gait. As the figure came into sharper focus, Andy noticed several things at once. The man was old, maybe seventy, with age spots dotting his bald dome and deep wrinkles set in a square face. But he carried himself like a much younger man, and though his broad shoulders were stooped with age, he projected an apparent strength. Military, Andy guessed, and upper echelon as well.

Andy walked to meet the figure, trying not to appear surprised that he'd just materialized out of nowhere. The thoughts of vultures and thirst were replaced by several dozen questions.

“I'm General Regis Murdoch. Call me Race. Welcome to Project Samhain.”

Race offered a thick and hairy hand, which Andy nervously shook. It felt like shaking a two-by-four.

“General Race, I appreciate the welcome, but I think I've been left out of the loop. I don't know...”

“All in good time. The President wants to fill you in, and you're to meet the group.”

“Where?” Andy asked, looking around.

The General beamed. “Almost a hundred years old, and still the best hidden secret in the United States. Right this way.”

Andy followed Race up to a pile of rocks next to a bush. Close inspection revealed that they'd been glued, or maybe soldered, to a large metal plate which spun on a hinge. The plate swivelled open, revealing a murky stairwell leading into the earth.

“Cutting edge stuff in 1906, now kind of dated.” Race smiled. “But sometimes the old tricks are still the best.”

Race prompted Andy down the sandy iron staircase and followed after closing the lid above them. The walls were concrete, old and crumbling. Light came from bare bulbs hanging overhead every fifteen steps.

Only a few hours ago I was asleep in my bed, Andy thought.

“Don't worry,” Race said. “It gets better.”

After almost two hundred steps down they came to a large metal door with a wheel in the center, like a submarine hatch. Race stopped in front of the door and cleared his throat. He leaned closer to Andy, locking eyes with him.

“Three hundred million Americans have lived during the last century, and you are only the forty-third to ever enter this compound. During your time here and for the rest of your life afterwards, you're going to be sworn to absolute secrecy. Failure to keep this secret will lead to your trial and inevitable execution for treason.”

“Execution,” Andy repeated.

“The Rosenbergs were numbers twenty-two and twenty-three. You didn't buy that crap about selling nuclear secrets, did you?”

Andy blinked. “I'm in an episode of the X-files.”

“That old TV show? They wish they had what we do.”

Race opened the door and bade Andy to enter. They'd stepped into a modern hospital. Or at least, that's what it looked like. Everything was white, from the tiled floors and painted walls to the fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling. A disinfectant smell wafted through the air, cooled by air conditioning. They walked down a hallway, the clicking of Andy's expensive shoes amplified to an almost comic echo. It could have been a hundred other buildings Andy had been in before, except this one was several hundred feet underground and harbored some kind of government secret.

Andy asked, “This was built in 1906?”

“Well, it's been improved upon as the years have gone by. Didn't get fluorescent lights till 1938. In '49 we added the Orange Arm and the Purple Arm. We're always replacing, updating. Just got a Jacuzzi in '99, but it's on the fritz.”

“How big is this place?”

“About 75,000 square feet. Took two years to dig it all out. God gets most of the credit, though. Most of this space is a series of natural caves. Not nearly the size of the Carlsbad Caverns two hundred miles to the east, but enough for our purpose.”

“Speaking of purpose...”

“We're getting to that.”

The hallway curved gradually to the right and Andy noted that the doors were all numbered in yellow paint with the word YELLOW stenciled above them. Andy guessed correctly that they were in the Yellow Arm of the complex, and was happy that at least one thing made sense.

“What's that smell?” Andy asked, noting that the pleasant scent of lemon and pine had been overtaken by a distinct farm-like odor.

“The sheep, over in Orange 12. They just came in last week, and they stink like, well, sheep. We think we can solve the problem with Hepa filters, but it will take some time.”

“Sheep,” Andy said. He wondered, idly, if he'd been brought here to interpret their bleating.

The hallway they were taking ended at a doorway, and Race ushered Andy through it and into a large round room that had six doors along its walls. Each door was a different color.

“Center of the complex. The head of the Octopus, so to speak. I believe you've got a call waiting for you.”

In the middle of the room was a large round table, circled with leather executive-type office chairs. Computer monitors, electronic gizmos, and a mess of cords and papers haphazardly covered the table top as if they'd been dropped there from a great height.

Race sat Andy down in front of a screen and tapped a few commands on a keyboard. The President's head and shoulders appeared on the flat-screen monitor, and he nodded at Andy as if they were in the same room.

“Video phone, got it in '04.” Race winked.

“Mr. Dennison, thank you for coming. You've done your country a great service.”

The President looked and sounded like he always did, fit, commanding, and sincere. Obviously he'd had a chance to sleep.

“Where do I talk?” Andy asked Race.

“Right at the screen. There's a mike and a camera housed in the monitor.”

Andy leaned forward.

“Mr. President, I'd really like to know what's going on and what I'm supposed to be doing here.”

“You were chosen, Andy, because you met all of the criteria on a very long list. We need a translator, one with experience in ancient languages. You've always had a gift for language. My sources say you were fluent in Spanish by age three, and by six years old you could also speak French, German, and some Russian. In grade school you were studying the eastern tongues, and you could speak Chinese by junior high.”

Only Mandarin, Andy thought. He couldn't speak Cantonese until a few years later.

“You graduated high school in three years and were accepted to Harvard on scholarship. You spent four years at Harvard, and wrote and published your thesis on giving enunciation to cuneiform, at age nineteen.

“When you left school in 1986 you lived on money left to you by your parents, who died in a fire three years before. After the money ran out you got a job at the United Nations in New York. You were there less than a year before being fired. During a Middle East peace talk you insulted the Iraqi ambassador.”

“He was a pervert who liked little girls.”

“Iraq was our ally at the time.”

“What does that have to do with—”

The President held up a hand, as he was so accustomed to doing with reporters.

“I'm not sitting in a seat of judgment, Andy. But you're entitled to know why you were chosen. After the UN fired you, you started your own freelance translation service, WTS. You've been making an average living, one that allows you to be your own boss. But business has been slow lately, I assume because of the Internet.”

Andy frowned. In the beginning, the World Wide Web had opened up a wealth of information for a translator, giving him instant access to the greatest libraries in the world. But, of course, it gave everyone else access to those libraries too. Along with computer programs that could translate both the written and the spoken word.

“So you know I'm good at my job, and you know I could use the money.”

“More than that, Andy. You're single, and you aren't currently seeing anyone. You don't have any relatives. Business is going poorly and you're behind on your Visa and your Discover Card payments, and you've just gotten your second warning from the electric company. Your unique mind, so active and curious years ago, hasn't had a challenge since college.

“You didn't talk to the media after the incident at the UN, even though reporters offered you money for the story. That's important, because it shows you can keep your mouth shut. In short, by bringing you in on this project, you don't have anything to lose, but everything to gain.”

“Why aren't I comforted that the government knows so much about me?”

“Not the government, Andy. Me. No one else in Washington is aware of you, or of Project Samhain. Only the incumbent President knows what goes on there in New Mexico. It was passed on to me by my predecessor, and I'll pass it on to my successor when I leave office. This is the way it's been since President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned construction of this facility in 1906.”

Andy didn’t like this at all. His curiosity was being overtaken by a creepy feeling.

“This is all very interesting, but I don’t think I’m your man.”

“I also know about Myra Thackett and Chris Simmons.”

Andy’s mouth became a thin line. Thackett and Simmons were two fictitious employees that Andy pretended to have under salary at WTS. Having phantom people on the payroll reduced income tax, and was the only way he’d been able to keep his business afloat.

“So this is a tax thing after all.”

“Again, only I know about it Andy. Not the IRS. Not the FBI. Just me. And I can promise you that Ms. Thackett and Mr. Simmons will never come back to haunt you if you help us here.”

“What exactly,” Andy chose his words carefully, “do you want from me?”

“First you must swear, as a citizen of the United States, to never divulge anything you see, hear, or learn at Project Samhain, under penalty of execution. Not to a friend. Not even to a wife. My own wife doesn't even know about this.”

Not seeing an alternative, Andy held up his right hand, as if he were testifying in court.

“Fine. I swear.”

“General Murdoch will provide the details, he knows them better than I. Suffice to say, this may be the single most important project this country, maybe even the world, has ever been involved with. I wish you luck, and God bless.”

The screen went blank.

“It's aliens, isn't it?” Andy turned to Race. “You've got aliens here.”

“Well, no. But back in '47 we had a hermit who lived in the mountains, he found our secret entrance and got himself a good look inside. Before we could shut him up he was blabbing to everyone within earshot. So we faked a UFO landing two hundred miles away in Roswell to divert attention.”

Andy rubbed his temples.

“You want some aspirin?” Race asked. “Or breakfast, maybe?”

“What I want, after swearing under the penalty of execution, is to know what the hell I'm doing here.”

“They say an image is worth a thousand words. Follow me.”

Race headed to the Red Door and Andy loped behind. The Red Arm hallway looked exactly like the Yellow Arm; white and sterile with numbered doors, this time with the word RED stenciled on them. But after a few dozen yards Andy noted a big difference. Race had to stop at a barrier that blocked the hallway. It resembled a prison door, with thick vertical steel bars set in a heavy frame.

“Titanium,” Race said as he pressed some numbers on a keypad embedded in the wall. “They could stop a charging rhino.”

There was a beep and a metallic sound as the door unlocked. The door swung inward, and Race held it open for Andy, then closed it behind him with loud clang. It made Andy feel trapped. They came up on another set of bars fifty yards further up.

“Why two sets?” Andy asked. “You have a rhino problem here?”

“Well, it's got horns, that's for sure.”

Race opened the second gate and the Red Arm came to an abrupt end at doors Red 13 and Red 14.

“He was found in Panama in 1906, by a team digging the canal,” Race said. “For the past hundred years he's been in some kind of deep sleep, like a coma. Up until last week. Last week he woke up.”

“He?”

“We call him Bub. He's trying to communicate, but we don't know what he's saying.”

Andy's apprehension increased with every breath. He had an irrational urge to turn around and run. Or maybe it wasn't so irrational.

“Is Bub human?” Andy asked.

“Nope,” Race grinned. The General was clearly enjoying himself. Didn't have visitors too often, Andy guessed.

“So what is he?”

“See for yourself.”

Race opened door Red 14, and Andy almost gagged on the animal stench. This wasn't a farm smell. This was a musky, sickly, sweet and sour, big carnivore smell.

Forcing himself to move, Andy took two steps into the room. It was large, the size of a gymnasium, the front half filled with medical equipment. The back half had been partitioned off with a massive translucent barrier, glass or plastic. Behind the glass was...

“Jesus Christ,” Andy said.

Andy’s mind couldn’t process what he was seeing. The teeth. The eyes. The claws.

This thing wasn’t supposed to exist in real life.

“Biix a beel,” Bub said.

Andy flew past Race, heading for the hallway.

“I promise not to tell anyone.”

“Mr. Dennison...”

Andy met up with the titanium bars and used some of his favorite curses from several different languages. His palms were soaked with sweat, and he’d begun to hyperventilate.

Race caught up, placing a hand on his shoulder.

“I apologize for not preparing you, but I'm an old man with so little pleasure in my life, and it's such a hoot watching people see Bub for the first time.”

Andy braced the older man.

“Bub. Beelzebub. You've got Satan in there.”

“Possibly. Father Thrist thinks it's a lower level demon like Moloch or Rahab, but Rabbi Shotzen concedes it may be Mastema.”

“I'd like to leave,” Andy said, attempting to sound calm. “Right now.”

“Don't worry. He's not violent. I've even been in the dwelling with him. He's just scary looking, is all. And that Plexiglas barrier is rated to eight tons. It's as safe as visiting the monkey house at the zoo.”

Andy tried to find the words.

“You're a lunatic,” he decided.

“Look, Andy, I've been watching after Bub for over forty years. We've had the best of the best in the world here—doctors, scientists, holy men, you name it. We've found out so much, but the rest is just theory. Bub's awake now, and trying to communicate. You're the key to that. Don't you see how important this is?”

“I'm...” Andy began, searching his mind for a way to put it.

Race finished the thought for him. “Afraid. Of course you're afraid. Any damn fool would be, seeing Bub. We've been taught to fear him since we were born. But if I can paraphrase Samuel Butler, we don't know the Devil's side of the story, because God wrote all the books. Just think about what we can learn here.”

“You're military,” Andy accused. “I'm sure the weapons implications of controlling the Prince of Darkness aren't lost on you.”

Race lost his friendly demeanor, his eyes narrowing.

“We have an opportunity here, Mr. Dennison. An opportunity that we haven't had since Christ walked the earth. In that room is a legendary creature, and the things that he could teach us about the world, the universe, and creation itself staggers the imagination. You've been chosen to help us, to work with our team in getting some answers. Many would kill for the chance.”

Andy folded his arms. “You expect me to believe not only that the devil is harmless and just wants to have a chat, but that the biggest government conspiracy in the history of the world has only good intentions?”

Race's face remained impassive for a few seconds longer, and then he broke out laughing.

“Damn, that does sound hard to swallow, don't it?”

Andy couldn't help but warm a bit at the man's attitude. “General Murdoch...”

“Race. Call me Race. And I understand. I've been part of the Project so long the whole thing is the norm to me. You need to eat, rest, think about things. We'll grab some food and I'll show you your room.”

“And if I want to leave?”

“This isn't a prison, son. I'm sure you weren't the only guy on the President's list. You're free to go whenever you please, so long as you never mention this to anyone.”

Andy took a deep, calming breath and the effects of the adrenaline in his system began to wear off. Race opened the gate and they began their trek back down the hallway.

“The world really is going to hell, isn't it?” Andy said.

Race grinned. “Sure is. And we've got a front row seat.”