Your Heart Belongs To Me

ONE

Ryan Perry did not know that something in him was broken. At thirty-four, he appeared to be more physically fit than he had been at twenty-four. His home gym was well equipped. A personal trainer came to his house three times a week.

On that Wednesday morning in September, in his bedroom, when he drew open the draperies and saw blue sky as polished as a plate, and the sea blue with the celestial reflection, he wanted surf and sand more than he wanted breakfast.

He went on-line, consulted a surfcast site, and called Samantha.

She must have glanced at the caller-ID readout, because she said, “Good morning, Winky.”

She occasionally called him Winky because on the afternoon that she met him, thirteen months previously, he had been afflicted with a stubborn case of myokymia, uncontrollable twitching of an eyelid.

Sometimes, when Ryan became so obsessed with writing software that he went thirty-six hours without sleep, a sudden-onset tic in his right eye forced him to leave the keyboard and made him appear to be blinking out a frantic distress signal in Morse code.

In that myokymic moment, Samantha had come to his office to interview him for an article that she had been writing for Vanity Fair. For a moment, she had thought he was flirting with her-and flirting clumsily.

During that first meeting, Ryan wanted to ask for a date, but he perceived in her a seriousness of purpose that would cause her to reject him as long as she was writing about him. He called her only after he knew that she had delivered the article.

“When Vanity Fair appears, what if I’ve savaged you?” she had asked.

“You haven’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t deserve to be savaged, and you’re a fair person.”

“You don’t know me well enough to be sure of that.”

“From your interviewing style,” he said, “I know you’re smart, clear-thinking, free of political dogma, and without envy. If I’m not safe with you, then I’m safe nowhere except alone in a room.”

He had not sought to flatter her. He merely spoke his mind.

Having an ear for deception, Samantha recognized his sincerity.

Of the qualities that draw a bright woman to a man, truthfulness is equaled only by kindness, courage, and a sense of humor. She had accepted his invitation to dinner, and the months since then had been the happiest of his life.

Now, on this Wednesday morning, he said, “Pumping six-footers, glassy and epic, sunshine that feels its way deep into your bones.”

“I’ve got a deadline to meet.”

“You’re too young for all this talk about death.”

“Are you riding another train of manic insomnia?”

“Slept like a baby. And I don’t mean in a wet diaper.”

“When you’re sleep-deprived, you’re treacherous on a board.”

“I may be radical, but never treacherous.”

“Totally insane, like with the shark.”

“That again. That was nothing.”

“Just a great white.”

“Well, the bastard bit a huge chunk out of my board.”

“And-what?-you were determined to get it back?”

“I wiped out,” Ryan said, “I’m under the wave, in the murk, grabbin’ for air, my hand closes around what I think is the skeg.”

The skeg, a fixed fin on the bottom of a surfboard, holds the stern of the board in the wave and allows the rider to steer.

What Ryan actually grabbed was the shark’s dorsal fin.

Samantha said, “What kind of kamikaze rides a shark?”

“I wasn’t riding. I was taken for a ride.”

“He surfaced, tried to shake you off, you rode him back down.”

“Afraid to let go. Anyway, it lasted like only twenty seconds.”

“Insomnia makes most people sluggish. It makes you hyper.”

“I hibernated last night. I’m as rested as a bear in spring.”

She said, “In a circus once, I saw a bear riding a tricycle.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It was funnier than watching an idiot ride a shark.”

“I’m Pooh Bear. I’m rested and cuddly. If a shark knocked on the door right now, asked me to go for a ride, I’d say no.”

“I had nightmares about you wrestling that shark.”

“Not wrestling. It was more like ballet. Meet you at the place?”

“I’ll never finish writing this book.”

“Leave the computer on when you go to bed each night. The elves will finish it for you. At the place?”

She sighed in happy resignation. “Half an hour.”

“Wear the red one,” he said, and hung up.

The water would be warm, the day warmer. He wouldn’t need a wet suit.

He pulled on a pair of baggies with a palm-tree motif.

His collection included a pair with a shark pattern. If he wore them, she would kick his ass. Figuratively speaking.

For later, he took a change of clothes on a hanger, and a pair of loafers.

Of the five vehicles in his garage, the customized ’51 Ford Woodie Wagon-anthracite-black with bird’s-eye maple panels-seemed to be best suited to the day. Already stowed in the back, his board protruded past the lifted tailgate windows, skeg up.

At the end of the cobblestone driveway, as he turned left into the street, he paused to look back at the house: gracefully sloping roofs of red barrel tile, limestone-clad walls, bronze windows with panes of beveled glass refracting the sun as if they were jewels.

A maid in a crisp white uniform opened a pair of second-floor balcony doors to air the master bedroom.

One of the landscapers trimmed the jasmine vines that were espaliered on the walls flanking the carved-limestone surround at the main entrance.

In less than a decade, Ryan had gone from a cramped apartment in Anaheim to the hills of Newport Coast, high above the Pacific.

Samantha could take the day off on a whim because she was a writer who, though struggling, could set her own hours. Ryan could take it off because he was rich.

Quick wits and hard work had brought him from nothing to the pinnacle. Sometimes when he considered his origins from his current perch, the distance dizzied him.

As he drove out of the gate-guarded community and descended the hills toward Newport Harbor, where thousands of pleasure boats were docked and moored in the glimmering sun-gilded water, he placed a few business calls.

A year previously, he had stepped down as the chief executive officer of Be2Do, which he had built into the most successful social-networking site on the Internet. As the principal stockholder, he remained on the board of directors but declined to be the chairman.

These days, he devoted himself largely to creative development, envisioning and designing new services to be provided by the company. And he tried to persuade Samantha to marry him.

He knew that she loved him, yet something constrained her from committing to marriage. He suspected pride.

The shadow of his wealth was deep, and she did not want to be lost in it. Although she had not expressed this concern, he knew that she hoped to be able to count herself a success as a writer, as a novelist, so that she could enter the marriage as a creative-if not a financial-equal.

Ryan was patient. And persistent.

Phone calls completed, he transitioned from Pacific Coast Highway by bridge to Balboa Peninsula, which separated the harbor from the sea. Cruising toward the peninsula point, he listened to classic doo-wop, music younger than the Woodie Wagon but a quarter of a century older than he was.

He parked on a tree-lined street of charming homes and carried his board half a block to Newport ’s main beach.

The sea poured rhythmic thunder onto the shore.

She waited at “the place,” which was where they had first surfed together, midway between the harbor entrance and the pier.

Her above-garage apartment was a three-minute walk from here. She had come with her board, a beach towel, and a small cooler.

Although he had asked her to wear the red bikini, Samantha wore yellow. He had hoped for the yellow, but if he had asked for it, she would have worn red or blue, or green.

She was as perfect as a mirage, blond hair and golden form, a quiver of light, an alluring oasis on the wide slope of sun-seared sand.

“What’re those sandals?” she asked.

“Stylin’, huh?”

“Are they made from old tires?”

“Yeah. But they’re premium gear.”

“Did you also buy a hat made from a hubcap?”

“You don’t like these?”

“If you have a blowout, does the auto club bring you a new shoe?”

Kicking off the sandals, he said, “Well, I like them.”

“How often do they need to be aligned and balanced?”

Soft and hot, the sand shifted underfoot, but then was compacted and cool where the purling surf worked it like a screed.

As they waded into the sea, he said, “I’ll ditch the sandals if next time you’ll wear the red bikini.”

“You actually wanted this yellow one.”

He repressed his surprise at her perspicacity. “Then why would I ask for the red?”

“Because you only think you can read me.”

“But I’m an open book, huh?”

“Winky, compared to you, Dr. Seuss’s simplest tale is as complex as Dostoyevsky.”

They launched their boards and, prone upon them, paddled out toward the break.

Raising his voice above the swash of the surf, he called to her: “Was that Seuss thing an insult?”

Her silvery laughter stirred in Ryan memories of mermaid tales awash with the mysteries of the deep.

She said, “Not an insult, sweetie. That was a thirteen-word kiss.”

Ryan did not bother to recall and count her words from Winky to Dostoyevsky. Samantha noticed everything, forgot nothing, and was able to recall entire conversations that had occurred months previously.

Sometimes he found her as daunting as she was appealing, which seemed to be a good thing. Samantha would never be predictable or boring.

The consistently spaced waves came like boxcars, four or five at a time. Between these sets were periods of relative calm.

While the sea was slacking, Ryan and Samantha paddled out to the lineup. There, they straddled their boards and watched the first swell of a new set roll toward the break.

From this more intimate perspective, the sea was not as placid and blue as it had appeared from his house in the hills, but as dark as jade and challenging. The approaching swell might have been the arching back of some scaly leviathan, larger than a thousand sharks, born in the deep but rising now to feed upon the sunlit world.

Sam looked at Ryan and grinned. The sun searched her eyes and revealed in them the blue of sky, the green of sea, the delight of being in harmony with millions of tons of water pushed shoreward by storms three thousand miles away and by the moon now looming on the dark side of the earth.

Sam caught the second swell: on two knees, one knee, now standing, swift and clean, away. She rode the crest, then did a floater off the curling lip.

As she slid out of view, down the face of the wave, Ryan thought that the breaker-much bigger than anything in previous sets-had the size and the energy to hollow out and put her in a tube. Good as it gets, Sam would ride it out as smoothly as oil surging through a pipeline.

Ryan looked seaward, timing the next swell, eager to rise and walk the board.

Something happened to his heart. Already quick with anticipation of the ride, the beat suddenly accelerated and began to pound with a force more suited to a moment of high terror than to one of pleasant excitement.

He could feel his pulse throbbing in his ankles, wrists, throat, temples. The tide of blood within his arteries seemed to crescendo in sympathy with the sea that swelled toward him, under him.

The sibilant voice of the water became insistent, sinister.

Clutching the board, abandoning the attempt to rise and ride, Ryan saw the day dim, losing brightness at the periphery. Along the horizon, the sky remained clear yet faded to gray.

Inky clouds spread through the jade sea, as though the Pacific would soon be as black in the morning light as it was on any moonless night.

He was breathing fast and shallow. The very atmosphere seemed to be changing, as if half the oxygen content had been bled out of it, perhaps explaining the graying of the sky.

Never previously had he been afraid of the sea. He was afraid of it now.

The water rose as though with conscious intention, with malice. Clinging to his board, Ryan slid down the hunchbacked swell into the wide trough between waves.

Irrationally, he worried that the trough would become a trench, the trench a vortex. He feared that he would be whirled down into drowning depths.

The board wallowed, bobbed, and Ryan almost rolled off. His strength had left him. His grip had grown weak, as tremulous as that of an old man.

Something bristled in the water, alarming him.

When he realized that those spiky forms were neither shark fins nor grasping tentacles, but were the conceptacles of a knotted mass of seaweed, he was not relieved. If a shark were to appear now, Ryan would be at the mercy of it, unable to evade it or resist.

TWO

As suddenly as the attack came, it passed. Ryan’s storming heart quieted. Blue reclaimed the graying sky. The encroaching darkness in the water receded. His strength returned to him.

He did not realize how long the episode had lasted until he saw that Samantha had ridden her wave to shore and, in the relative calm between sets, had paddled out to him once more.

As she came closer, the concern that creased her brow was also evident in her voice: “Ryan?”

“Just enjoying the moment,” he lied, remaining prone on his board. “I’ll catch one in the next set.”

“Since when are you a mallard?” she asked, by which she meant that he was floating around in the lineup like a duck, like one of those gutless wannabes who soaked all day in the swells just beyond the break point and called it surfing.

“The last two in that set were bigger,” he said. “I have a hunch the next batch might be double overhead, worth waiting for.”

Sam straddled her board and looked out to sea, scanning for the first swell of the new set.

If Ryan read her correctly, she sensed that he was shining her on, and she wondered why.

With his heart steady and his strength recovered, he stopped hugging the board, straddled it, getting ready.

Waiting for the next wave train, he told himself that he had not experienced a physical seizure, but instead merely an anxiety attack. At self-deception, he was as skilled as anyone.

He had no reason to be anxious. His life was sweet, buttered, and sliced for easy consumption.

Focused on far water, Samantha said, “Winky.”

“I see it.”

The sea rose to the morning sun, dark jade and silver, a great shoulder of water shrugging up and rolling smoothly toward the break.

Ryan smelled brine, smelled the iodine of bleeding seaweed, and tasted salt.

“Epic,” Sam called out, sizing the swell.

“Monster,” he agreed.

Instead of rising into a control position, she left the wave to him, her butt on the board, her feet in the water, bait for sharks.

A squadron of gulls streaked landward, shrieking as if to warn those on shore that a behemoth was coming to smash sand castles and swamp picnic hampers.

As the moment of commitment neared, apprehension rose in Ryan, concern that the thrill of the ride might trigger another…episode.

He paddled to catch the wave, got to his feet on the pivot point, arms reaching for balance, fingers spread, palms down, and he caught the break, a perfect peeler that didn’t section on him but instead poured pavement as slick as ice. The moving wave displaced air, and a cool wind rose up the curved wall, pressing against his flattened palms.

Then he was in a tube, a glasshouse, behind the curtain of the breaking wave, shooting the curl, and his apprehension burst like a bubble and was no more.

Using every trick to goose momentum, he emerged from the tube before it collapsed, into the sparkle of sun on water filigreed with foam. The day was so real, so right. He admonished himself, No fear, which was the only way to live.

All morning, into the afternoon, the swells were monoliths. The offshore breeze strengthened, blowing liquid smoke off the lips of the waves.

The beach blanket was not a place to tan. It was for rehab, for massaging the quivers out of overtaxed muscles, for draining sinuses flooded with seawater, for combing bits of kelp and crusted salt out of your hair, for psyching each other into the next session.

Usually, Ryan would want to stay until late afternoon, when the offshore breeze died and the waves stopped hollowing out, when the yearning for eternity-which the ocean represented-became a yearning for burritos and tacos.

By two-thirty, however, during a retreat to the blanket, a pleasant weariness, the kind that follows work well done, overcame him. There was something delicious about this fatigue, a sweetness that made him want to close his eyes and let the sun melt him into sleep…

As he was swimming effortlessly in an abyss vaguely illuminated by clouds of luminescent plankton, a voice spoke to him out of the deep: “Ryan?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Were you asleep?”

He felt as though he were still asleep when he opened his eyes and saw her face looming over him: beauty of a degree that seemed mythological, radiant eyes the precise shade of a green sea patinaed by the blue of a summer sky, golden hair crowned with a corona of sunlight, goddess on a holiday from Olympus.

“You were asleep,” Samantha said.

“Too much big surf. I’m quashed.”

“You? When have you ever been quashed?”

Sitting up on the blanket, he said, “Had to be a first time.”

“You really want to pack out?”

“I skipped breakfast. We surfed through lunch.”

“There’s chocolate-cherry granola bars in the cooler.”

“Nothing but a slab of beef will revive me.”

They carried the cooler, the blanket, and their boards to the station wagon, stowed everything in back.

Still sodden with sunshine and loose-limbed from being so long in the water, Ryan almost asked Samantha to drive.

More than once, however, she glanced at him speculatively, as if she sensed that his brief nap on the beach blanket was related to the episode at the beginning of the day, when he floated like a mallard in the lineup, his heart exploding. He didn‘t want to worry her. Besides, there was no reason to worry.

Earlier, he’d had an anxiety attack. But if truth were known, most people probably had them these days, considering the events and the pessimistic predictions that constituted the evening news.

Instead of passing the car keys to Sam, Ryan drove the two blocks to her apartment.

Samantha showered first while Ryan brewed a pitcher of fresh iced tea and sliced two lemons to marinate in it.

Her cozy kitchen had a single large window beyond which stood a massive California pepper tree. The elegant limbs, festooned with weeping fernlike leaves divided into many glossy leaflets, appeared to fill the entire world, creating the illusion that her apartment was a tree house.

The pleasant weariness that had flooded through Ryan on the beach now drained away, and a new vitality welled in him.

He began to think of making love to Samantha. Once the urge arose, it swelled into full-blooded desire.

Hair toweled but damp, she returned to the kitchen, wearing turquoise slacks, a crisp white blouse, and white tennies.

If she had been in the mood, she would have been barefoot, wearing only a silk robe.

For weeks at a time, her libido matched his, and she wanted him frequently. He had noticed that her desire was greater during those periods when she was busiest with her writing and the least inclined to consider his proposal of marriage.

A sudden spell of virtuous restraint was a sign that she was brooding about accepting the engagement ring, as though the prospect of matrimony required that sex be regarded as something too serious, perhaps too sacred, to be indulged in lightly.

Ryan happily accepted each turn toward abstinence when it seemed to indicate that she was on the brink of making a commitment to him. At twenty-eight, she was six years younger than he was, and they had a life of lovemaking ahead.

He poured a glass of iced tea for her, and then he went to take a shower. He started with water nearly as cold as the tea.

In the westering sun, the strawberry trees shed elongated leaf shadows on the flagstone floor of the restaurant patio.

Ryan and Samantha shared a caprese salad and lingered over their first glasses of wine, not in a hurry to order entrees.

The smooth peeling bark of the trees was red, especially so in the condensed light of the slowly declining sun.

“Teresa loved the flowers,” Sam said, referring to her sister.

“What flowers?”

“On these trees. They get panicles of little urn-shaped flowers in the late spring.”

“White and pink,” Ryan remembered.

“Teresa said they look like cascades of tiny bells, wind chimes hung out by fairies.”

Six years previously, Teresa had suffered serious head trauma in a traffic accident. Eventually she had died.

Samantha seldom mentioned her sister. When she spoke of Teresa, she tended to turn inward before much had been said, mummifying her memories in long windings of silence.

Now, as she gazed into the overhanging tree, the expression in her eyes was reminiscent of that look of longing when, straddling her surfboard in the lineup, she studied far water for the first sign of a new set of swells.

Ryan was comfortable with Sam’s occasional silences, which he suspected were always related to thoughts of her sister, even when she had not mentioned Teresa.

They had been identical twins.

To better understand Sam, Ryan had read about twins who had been separated by tragedy. Apparently the survivor’s grief was often mixed with unjustified guilt.

Some said the intense bond between identicals, especially between sisters, could not be broken even by death. A few insisted they still felt the presence of the other, akin to how an amputee often feels sensations in his phantom leg.

Samantha’s contemplative silence gave Ryan an opportunity to study and admire her with a forthrightness that was not possible when she was aware of his stare.

Watching her, he was nailed motionless by admiration, unable to lift his wineglass, or at least disinterested in it, his eyes alone in motion, traveling the contours of her face and the graceful line of her throat.

His life was a pursuit of perfection, of which perhaps the world held none.

Sometimes he imagined that he came close to it when writing lines of code for software. An exquisite digital creation, however, was as cold as a mathematical equation. The most fastidious software architecture was an object of mere precision, not of perfection, for it could not evoke an intense emotional response.

In Samantha Reach, he’d found a beauty so close to perfection that he could convince himself this was his quest fulfilled.

Gazing into the tree but focused on something far beyond the red geometry of those branches, Sam said, “After the accident, she was in a coma for a month. When she came out of it…she wasn’t the same.”

Ryan was kept silent by the smoothness of her skin. This was the first he had heard of Teresa’s coma. Yet the radiance of Sam’s face, in the caress of the late sun, rendered him incapable of comment.

“She still had to be fed through a tube in her stomach.”

The only leaf shadows that touched Samantha’s face were braided across her golden hair and brow, as though she wore the wreath of Nature’s approval.

“The doctors said she was in a permanent vegetative state.”

Her gaze lowered through the branches and fixed on a cruciform of sunlight that, shimmering on the table, was projected by a beam passing through her wineglass.

“I never believed the doctors,” she said. “Teresa was still complete inside her body, trapped but still Teresa. I didn’t want them to take out the feeding tube.”

She raised her eyes to meet his, and he had to make of this a conversation.

“But they took it out anyway?” he asked.

“And starved her to death. They said she wouldn’t feel anything. Supposedly the brain damage assured that she’d have no pain.”

“But you think she suffered.”

“I know she did. During the last day, the last night, I sat with her, holding her hand, and I could feel her looking at me even though she never opened her eyes.”

He did not know what to say to that.

Samantha picked up her glass of wine, causing the cross of light to morph into an arrow that briefly quivered like a compass needle seeking true north in Ryan’s eyes.

“I’ve forgiven my mother for a lot of things, but I’ll never forgive her for what she did to Teresa.”

As Samantha took a sip of wine, Ryan said, “But I thought…your mother was in the same accident.”

“She was.”

“I was under the impression she died in the crash, too. Rebecca. Was that her name?”

“She is dead. To me. Rebecca’s buried in an apartment in Las Vegas. She walks and talks and breathes, but she’s dead all right.”

Samantha’s father had abandoned the family before the twins were two. She had no memory of him.

Feeling that Sam should hold fast to what little family she had, Ryan almost encouraged her to give her mother a chance to earn redemption. But he kept silent on the issue, because Sam had his sympathy and his understanding.

His grandparents and hers-all long dead-were of the generation that defeated Hitler and won the Cold War. Their fortitude and their rectitude had been passed along, if at all, in a diluted form to the next generation.

Ryan’s parents, no less than Sam’s, were of that portion of the post-war generation that rejected the responsibilities of tradition and embraced entitlement. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was the parent, that his mother and father were the children.

Regardless of the consequences of their behavior and decisions, they would see no need for redemption. Giving them the chance to earn it would only offend them. Sam’s mother was most likely of that same mind-set.

Samantha put down her glass, but the sun made nothing of it this time.

After a hesitation, as Ryan poured more wine for both of them, he said, “Funny how something as lovely as strawberry-tree flowers can peel the scab off a bad memory.”

“Sorry.”

“No need to be.”

“Such a nice day. I didn’t mean to bring it down. Are you as ferociously hungry as I am?”

“Bring me the whole steer,” he said.

In fact, they ordered just the filet mignon, no horns or hooves.

As the descending sun set fire to the western sky, strings of miniature white lights came on in the strawberry trees. On all the tables were candles in amber cups of faceted glass, and busboys lit them.

The ordinary patio had become a magical place, and Samantha was the centerpiece of the enchantment.

By the time the waiter served the steaks, Sam had found the lighter mood that had characterized the rest of the day, and Ryan joined her there.

After the first bite of beef, she raised her wineglass in a toast. “Hey, Dotcom, this one’s to you.”

Dotcom was another nickname that she had for him, used mostly when she wanted to poke fun at his public image as a business genius and tech wizard.

“Why to me?” he asked.

“Today you finally stepped down from the pantheon and revealed that you’re at best a demigod.”

Pretending indignation, he said, “I haven’t done any such thing. I’m still turning the wheel that makes the sun rise in the morning and the moon at night.”

“You used to take the waves until they surrendered and turned mushy. Today you’re beached on a blanket by two-thirty.”

“Did you consider that it might have been boredom, that the swells just weren’t challenging enough for me?”

“I considered it for like two seconds, but you were snoring as if you’d been plenty challenged.”

“I wasn’t sleeping. I was meditating.”

“You and Rip Van Winkle.” After they had assured the attentive waiter that their steaks were excellent, Samantha said, “Seriously, you were okay out there today, weren’t you?”

“I’m thirty-four, Sam. I guess I can’t always thrash the waves like a kid anymore.”

“It’s just-you looked a little gray there.”

He raised a hand to his hair. “Gray where?”

“Your pretty face.”

He grinned. “You think it’s pretty?”

“You can’t keep pulling those thirty-six-hour sessions at the keyboard and then go right out and rip the ocean like you’re the Big Kahuna.”

“I’m not dying, Sam. I’m just aging gracefully.”

He woke in absolute darkness, with the undulant motion of the sea beneath him. Disoriented, he thought for a moment that he was lying faceup on a surfboard, beyond the break, under a sky in which every star had been extinguished.

The hard rapid knocking of his heart alarmed him.

When Ryan felt the surface under him, he realized that it was a bed, not a board. The undulations were not real, merely perceived, a yawing dizziness.

“Sam,” he said, but then remembered that she was not with him, that he was home, alone in his bedroom.

He tried to reach the lamp on the nightstand…but could not lift his arm.

When he tried to sit up, pain bloomed in his chest.

THREE

Ryan felt as though concrete blocks were stacked on his chest. Although mild, the pain frightened him. His heart raced so fast that the beats could not be counted.

He counseled himself to remain calm, to be still, to let the seizure pass, as it had passed when he had been floating on his surfboard.

The difference between then and now was the pain. The racing heart, the weakness, and the dizziness were as disturbing as before, but the added element of pain denied him the delusion that this was nothing more than an anxiety attack.

Even as a small child, Ryan had not been afraid of the dark. Now darkness itself seemed to be the weight on his chest. The black infinity of the universe, the thick atmosphere of the earthly night, the blinding gloom in the bedroom pressed each upon the next, and all upon him, relentlessly bending his breastbone inward until his heart knocked against it as if seeking to be let out of him and into eternity.

He grew desperate for light.

When he tried to sit up, he could not. The pressure held him down.

He discovered that he could push against the mattress with his heels and elbows, gradually hitching backward, three feather pillows compacting into a ramp that elevated his head and shoulders. His skull rapped against the headboard.

The weight on his chest forced him to take shallow inhalations. Each time he exhaled, a sound thinner than a whimper also escaped him, offending the black room like a nail drawn down a chalkboard.

After he had hitched into a reclining position, not sitting up but more than halfway there, some strength returned to him. He could lift his arms.

With his left hand, he reached blindly for the bedside lamp. He located the bronze base, and his fingers slid along a cast-bronze column with a bamboo motif.

Before he found the switch, the ache in his chest intensified and swiftly spread to his throat, as if the agony were ink and his flesh an absorbent blotter.

The pain seemed to be something that he had swallowed or was regurgitating intact. It blocked his airway, restricted breathing, and pinched his cry of shock into a half note followed by a hiss.

He fell from bed. He did not know how it happened. The bed became the floor, leaving him with no awareness of the fall, with only a recognition that mattress had been replaced by carpet.

He was not alone in the house; but he might as well have been. At this hour, Lee and Kay Ting, the couple who managed the estate, were asleep in their quarters, on the lowest of the three floors, in the wing of the house farthest from the one that contained Ryan’s third-floor master suite.

In the same way that he had fallen unawares from bed, he came to the realization that he was dragging himself across the floor, his torso raised on his forearms, legs twitching as feebly as the broken appendages of a half-crushed beetle.

Rapidly intensifying, the pain had spread from his throat into his jaw. He seemed to have bitten on a nail so hard that the point had penetrated between two teeth and into the mandible.

Suddenly he remembered that the house intercom was part of the telephone system. He could buzz Lee and Kay by pressing 1-1-1. They could be here in a minute or two.

He did not know in which direction lay the bed, the nightstand, the phone. He had become disoriented.

The room was large but not vast. He should have been able to find his way in the dark.

But pain seared, vertigo spun, weakness drained, fear twisted his thoughts until he had no capacity for calculation. Although the fall from bed to floor was only a couple of feet, he seemed to have been cast down from a great height, all grace pulverized on impact, and all hope.

His eyes were stung by hot tears, and his throat burned with refluxed stomach acid, and the balefire in his jaw would surely consume the bone and collapse his face.

The darkness spun and tilted. He could not crawl farther, but could only clutch the carpet as though gravity might be repealed and he might be whirled away, weightless, into a void.

His heart hammered faster than he could count its blows, at least two hundred a minute.

Pain spread from his throat into his left arm, radiated across his shoulder and down his back.

A prince of the Internet, richer than most kings, he lay now as prostrate as any commoner abashed in the presence of royalty, at the mercy of his body, mere clay.

The black ocean swelled under him, and he had nothing to which he could hold, neither a surfboard nor the dorsal fin of a shark. The sea was infinite, and he was as insignificant as a tracery of foam on a single wave. A great mass of water shouldered up, and he slid down its back into a trough, and the trough became an abyss, the abyss a vortex that swallowed him.

FOUR

The alarm-clock feature on the TV had been set for seven in the morning. The volume remained low, and Ryan woke slowly to murmuring voices, to music scored for drama.

The glow from the screen did not fully relieve the darkness. As the value of light changed in a scene and as figures moved, phantoms throbbed and flickered through the bedroom.

Ryan lay on the floor, in the fetal position, facing the screen. William Holden, many years after Sunset Boulevard, was in an intense conversation with a lovely young woman.

In thirty-four years, Ryan had experienced only two hangovers, but he seemed to be suffering a third. Headache. Eyes crusted shut, vision blurry. Dry, sour mouth.

Initially he could not recall the events of the previous evening or remember what possessed him to go to sleep on the floor.

Curiously, the mystery of his circumstances intrigued him less than the events on the television: the older man, the younger woman, worried talk of war…

The once-sharp edges of his mind were worn, his thoughts a shapeless stream of quicksilver. Even when his vision cleared, he couldn’t follow the movie or grasp the character relationships.

Yet he felt compelled to watch, haunted by the feeling that he had awakened to this movie not by accident but by the design of Fate. Here to be deciphered was a warning about his future that he must understand if he were to save himself.

This extraordinary conviction grew until he was impelled to rise to his knees, to his feet. He moved closer to the large TV.

As the fine hairs prickled on the nape of his neck, his heart quickened. The thudding in his breast knocked into memory the much more furious pounding to which he had awakened in the night, and abruptly he recalled every detail of the terrifying seizure.

He turned away from the TV, switched on a lamp. He stared at his trembling hands, closed them into fists, opened them once more, half expecting some degree of paralysis, but finding none.

In his bathroom, black granite, gold onyx, and stainless steel were reflected in a wilderness of mirrors. An infinite line of Ryan Perrys faced him, all of them gray and haggard and grim with dread.

As never before, he was aware of the skull beneath the skin, each curve and plane and hollow of bone, the perpetual death’s-head grin concealed behind every expression that his face assumed.

Shaved, showered, and dressed, Ryan found his estate manager, Lee Ting, in the garage.

This large subterranean space provided eighteen parking stalls. The ceiling was ten feet high, to accommodate delivery trucks and-if he should ever want one-a motor home.

Golden ceramic tile, a kind used in automobile showrooms, paved the floor. Glossy white tile covered the walls. The brightwork on the Woodie and other classic vehicles sparkled in the beams of pin spots.

Ryan had always before thought the garage was beautiful, even elegant. Now the cold tile reminded him of a mausoleum.

In the corner workshop, Lee Ting was polishing a custom-made license-plate frame for one of the cars.

He was a small man but strong. He appeared to be cast from bronze not yet patinaed, and prominent veins swelled in his hands.

At fifty, his life was defined by parenthood denied, his hope of family thwarted. Kay Ting twice conceived, but a subsequent uterine infection left her sterile.

Their first child had been a daughter. At the age of two, she died of influenza. Their second, a son, was also gone.

The sight of certain young children elicited from them the most tender smiles, even as their eyes glistened with the memory of loss.

When the power buffer clicked off, Ryan said, “Lee, do you have a staff meeting this morning or appointments with anyone?”

Surprised, Lee turned. His face brightened, his chin lifted, and a cheerful expectation came into him, as though nothing pleased him more than the opportunity to be of good service.

Ryan suspected this was in fact the case. All the strivings and the particular satisfactions of raising a family, denied to Lee, were now expressed in his job.

Putting aside the license-plate frame, Lee said, “Good morning, Mr. Perry. I have nothing scheduled that Kay can’t cover for me. What do you need?”

“I was hoping you could drive me to a doctor’s appointment.”

Concern diminished the arc of Lee’s smile. “Is something wrong, sir?”

“Nothing much. I just feel off, a little nauseous. I’d prefer not to drive myself.”

Most men of Ryan’s wealth employed a chauffeur. He loved cars too much to delegate his driving.

Lee Ting clearly knew this need for a driver was proof of more than mild nausea. He at once snared a key from the key safe and went with Ryan to the Mercedes S605.

A tenderness in Lee’s manner and a wounded expression in his eyes suggested that he regarded his boss as more than an employer. He was, after all, just old enough to have been Ryan’s father.

The twelve-cylinder Mercedes seemed to float on a cushion of air, and little road noise reached them. Although the sedan rode like a dream, Ryan knew that it carried him toward a nightmare.

FIVE

Ryan’s internist had a concierge practice limited to three hundred patients. He guaranteed an appointment within one day of a request, but he saw Ryan only three hours after receiving his call.

From an examination room on the fourteenth floor, Ryan could see Newport Harbor, the Pacific Ocean, distant ships bound for unknown shores.

His doctor, Forest Stafford, had already examined him, and a med tech had administered an electrocardiogram. Then Ryan had gone down to a medical imaging company on the third floor, where they had conducted an echocardiogram.

At the fourteenth-floor window, he waited now for Dr. Stafford to return with an interpretation of the tests.

An armada of large white clouds sailed slowly north, but their shadows were iron-black upon the sea, pressing the surf flat.

The door opened behind Ryan. Feeling as weightless as a cloud, and half afraid that in an angled light he would cast no shadow, he turned away from the window.

Forest Stafford’s powerful square body was in contrast to his rectangular countenance, in which his features were elongated, as if affected by a face-specific gravity that had not distorted the rest of him. Because he was a sensitive man, the deforming force, at work for years, might have been the pain of his patients.

Leaning against the counter that contained the hand sink, the physician said, “I imagine you want me to cut to the chase.”

Ryan made no move to a chair, but stood with his back to the window and to the sea that he loved. “You know me, Forry.”

“It wasn’t a heart attack.”

“Nothing that simple,” Ryan guessed.

“Your heart is hypertrophic. Enlarged.”

Ryan at once argued his case, as if Forry were a judge who, properly persuaded, could declare him healthy. “But…I’ve always kept fit, eaten right.”

“A vitamin B₁> deficiency can sometimes be involved, but in your case I doubt this is related to diet or exercise.”

“Then what?”

“Could be a congenital condition only now expressing itself. Or excessive alcohol consumption, but that’s not you.”

The room had not suddenly gone cold, nor had the temperature plunged in the day beyond the window. Nevertheless, a set of chills rose at the back of Ryan’s neck and broke along the shoals of his spine.

The physician counted off possible causes: “Scarring of the endocardium, amyloidosis, poisoning, abnormal cell metabolism-”

“Poisoning? Who would want to poison me?”

“No one. It’s not poisoning. But to get an accurate diagnosis, I want you to have a myocardial biopsy.”

“That doesn’t sound like fun.”

“It’s uncomfortable but not painful. I’ve spoken with Samar Gupta, an excellent cardiologist. He can see you for a preliminary exam this afternoon-and perform the biopsy in the morning.”

“That doesn’t give me much time to think,” Ryan said.

“What is there to think about?”

“Life…death…I don’t know.”

“We can’t decide on treatment without a definitive diagnosis.”

Ryan hesitated. Then: “Is it treatable?”

“It may be,” said Forry.

“I wish you’d just said yes.”

“Believe me, Dotcom, I wish I could just say it.”

Before Forest Stafford was Ryan’s internist, they had met at a classic-car rally and had struck up a friendship. Jane Stafford, Forry’s wife, bonded to Samantha as if she were a daughter; and Dotcom had since been more widely used.

“Samantha,” Ryan whispered.

Only upon speaking her name did he realize that the preliminary diagnosis had pinned his thoughts entirely on the pivot point of this twist of fate, on just the sharp fact of his mortality.

Now his mind slipped loose of the pin. His thoughts raced.

The prospect of impending death had at first been an abstraction that inspired an icy anxiety. But when he thought of what he would lose with his life, when he considered the specific losses-Samantha, the sea, the blush of dawn, the purple twilight-anxiety quickened into dread.

Ryan said, “Don’t tell Sam.”

“Of course not.”

“Or even Jane. I know she wouldn’t mean to tell Sam. But Sam would sense something wrong, and get it out of her.”

Like wax retreating from a flame, the mournful lines of Forry Stafford’s face softened into sorrow. “When will you tell her?”

“After the biopsy. When I have all the facts.”

With a sigh, Forry said, “Some days I wish I’d gone into dentistry.”

“Tooth decay is seldom fatal.”

“Or even gingivitis.”

Forry sat down on the wheeled stool, where he usually perched to listen to a patient’s complaints and to make notes in his files.

Ryan settled into the only chair. After a while he said, “You made a decision on the ’40 Mercury convertible?”

“Yeah. Just now. I’m gonna buy it.”

“Edelbrock two-carb manifold? That right?”

“Yeah. You should hear it.”

“What’s it stand on?” Ryan asked.

“Nineteen-sixty Imperials. Fifteen-inch.”

“Chopped?”

“Four inches.”

“That must give it a cool windshield profile.”

“Very cool,” Forry confirmed.

“You gonna work on it?”

“I’ve got some ideas.”

“I think I’d like to have a ’32 deuce coupe,” Ryan said.

“Five-window?”

“Maybe a three-window highboy.”

“I’ll help you find it. We’ll scout some shows.”

“I’d like that.”

“Me too.”

They sat in silence for a moment.

The examination room had a white acoustic-tile ceiling, pale-blue walls, a gray vinyl-tile floor.

On one wall hung a print of a painting by Childe Hassam. Titled The White Dory, Gloucester, it was dated 1895.

On pale water, in a white boat sat a fair woman. She wore a long white skirt, a pleated and ruffled pink blouse, and a straw boater.

Delicate, desirable, she would have been a handsome wife in those days when marriages lasted a lifetime. Ryan was overcome with a strange yearning to have known her, to have heard her voice, to have tasted her kiss, but she was lost somewhere in time, as he might soon be, as well.

“Shit,” he said.

Forry said, “Ditto.”

SIX

Dr. Samar Gupta had a round brown face and eyes the color of molasses. His voice was lilting, his diction precise, his slender hands impeccably manicured.

After reviewing the echocardiogram and examining Ryan, Gupta explained how a myocardial biopsy was performed. He made use of a large poster of the cardiovascular system.

Confronted with a colorful depiction of the interior of the human heart, Ryan found his mind escaping to the painting of the woman in the white dory, in Forry Stafford’s examination room.

Dr. Gupta seemed unnaturally calm, every movement efficient, every gesture economical. His resting pulse was probably a measured fifty beats per minute. Ryan envied the physician’s serenity and his health.

“Please be at the hospital admissions desk at six o’clock tomorrow morning,” the cardiologist said. “Do not eat or drink anything after midnight.”

Ryan said, “I don’t like sedation, the loss of control.”

“You’ll be given a mild sedative to relax you, but you’ll remain awake to follow instructions during the procedure.”

“The risks…”

“Are as I explained. But none of my biopsies has ever involved…complications.”

Ryan was surprised to hear himself say, “I trust your skill, Dr. Gupta, but I’m still afraid.”

In business, Ryan had never expressed uncertainty, let alone fear. He allowed no one to see any weakness in him.

“From the day we’re born, Ryan, we should all be afraid, but not of dying.”

In the plush backseat of the Mercedes S608, on the way home, Ryan realized that he did not understand the cardiologist’s last comment.

From the day we’re born, Ryan, we should all be afraid, but not of dying.

In the office, in the moment, the words had seemed wise and appropriate. But Ryan’s fear and his desire to quell it had led him to hear that statement as a reassurance, when in fact it was not.

Now the physician’s words seemed mysterious, even cryptic, and disturbing.

Behind the wheel of the sedan, Lee Ting glanced repeatedly at the rearview mirror. Ryan pretended not to notice his houseman’s concern.

Lee could not know which of the many physicians Ryan had visited in Dr. Gupta’s building, and he remained too discreet to ask. Yet he was an acutely perceptive man who sensed his employer’s solemnity.

In the west, the phoenix palms and the rooftops were gilded with sunlight. The attenuated shadows of those trees and buildings, of lampposts and pedestrians, reached eastward, as if the entire coast yearned for nightfall.

On those rare occasions when Lee previously served as chauffeur, he had driven sedately, as if he were decades older than his years and part of some royal procession. This time, he exceeded speed limits with the rest of the traffic and crossed intersections on the yellow light.

He seemed to know that his employer needed the comfort of home, refuge.

SEVEN

En route from Dr. Gupta’s office, Ryan called Kay Ting and placed an order for dinner that would require her to go to his favorite restaurant to get takeout.

Later, using the elevator, the Tings brought a dining-service cart to the third-floor sitting room that was part of the master suite. They put up the leaves to expand the cart into a table and smoothed out the white tablecloth.

Presented for Ryan’s pleasure were three dishes of homemade ice cream-dark chocolate, black cherry, and limoncello-each nestled in a larger bowl of cracked ice. There were also servings of flourless chocolate cake, a lemon tart, a peanut-butter tart, strawberries in sour cream with a pot of brown sugar, a selection of exotic cookies, and bottles of root beer in an ice bucket.

Because Ryan allowed himself dessert only once or twice a week, the Tings were curious about this uncharacteristic indulgence.

He pretended to be celebrating the conclusion of a particularly rewarding business deal, but he knew they did not believe him. The arrayed sweets suggested the last meal of a condemned man who, though thirty-four, had never finished growing up.

Eating alone, sitting at the wheeled table, Ryan sampled a series of old movies on the big-screen plasma TV. He sought comedies, but none of them struck him as funny.

Calories no longer mattered, or cholesterol, and at first this indulgence without guilt was so novel that he enjoyed himself. Soon, however, the adolescent smorgasbord grew cloying, too rich.

To thumb his nose at Death, he ate more than he wanted. The root beer began to seem like syrup.

He wheeled the cart out of the master suite, left it in the hall, and used the intercom to tell Kay that he had finished.

Earlier, the Tings turned down the bed and plumped the pillows.

When Ryan put on pajamas and slipped between the sheets, insomnia tormented him. If fear of death had not kept him awake, the tides of sugar in his blood would have made him restless.

Barefoot, hoping to walk off his anxiety, he went roaming through the house.

Beyond the large windows lay the luminous panorama of Orange County ’s many cities on the vast flats below. The ambient glow was sufficient to allow him to navigate the house without switching on a lamp.

Shortly before midnight, lights in a back hall led him to the large butler’s pantry, where china and glassware were stored in mahogany cabinets. He heard voices in the adjacent kitchen.

Although additional members of the household staff were at work during the day, the Tings were the only live-ins. Yet Ryan could not at once identify the speakers as Lee and Kay, because they conversed quietly, almost whispering.

Usually, the Tings would be in bed at this hour. Their workday began at eight o’clock in the morning.

Although throughout his life Ryan had not once been troubled by superstition, he was now overcome by a sense of the uncanny. He felt suddenly that his house hid secrets, that within these rooms were realms unknown, and that for his well-being, he must learn all that was being concealed from him.

Putting his left ear to the crack between the jamb and the swinging door, he strained to hear what was being said.

The spacious kitchen had been designed to function for caterers when large parties required the preparation of elaborate buffets. The low voices softly reverberated off the extensive granite countertops and off the many stainless-steel appliances.

Risking discovery, he eased the door open an inch. The voices did not become recognizable, nor did the murmurs and whispers resolve from sibilant sounds into words.

Ryan did, however, additionally hear the quiet clink and ping of dishes, which seemed curious. Lee and Kay would have washed the dinnerware hours ago, and if they had wanted a late snack, they would have prepared it in the kitchenette that was part of their private suite.

He heard also a peculiar grinding noise, soft and rhythmic. This was not an everyday sound, but vaguely familiar and-for reasons he could not define-sinister.

Gradually his eavesdropping began to seem foolish. The only thing sinister in his house was his imagination, which had been dizzied and led into dark byways by the specter of his mortality.

Nevertheless, when he thought to press the swinging door inward and learn the identity of those in the kitchen, fear swelled in him. His heart abruptly clopped as hard as hooves on stone, and so fast that all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse might have been approaching.

He eased the door shut, backed away from it.

With his right hand over his heart and his left hand against a cabinet to steady himself, he waited for another seizure to sweep his legs out from under him and leave him helpless on the floor.

The butler’s pantry went dark around him.

Ryan might have thought he’d gone blind, except for the lights in the hallway, beyond the open door by which he had entered.

Past the closed swinging door, lights had been extinguished in the kitchen. A wall switch in that room also controlled the pantry.

Now the hallway fell into darkness.

The windowless pantry could not have been blacker if it had been a padded silk-lined clamshell of mortuary bronze.

Able to hear nothing above the noise of his treacherous heart, Ryan became convinced that someone approached, someone whose vision was as keen in this perfect gloom as was the vision of a cat prowling in moonlight. He waited for a hand to be laid on his shoulder, or for a stranger’s cold fingers to be pressed against his lips.

The weight of his heart insisted that he sit on the floor. His knees buckled, and he slid down the face of a cabinet, the drawer pulls gouging his back.

Minutes passed during which the riot in his breast failed to accelerate into full-blown anarchy, and in fact gradually a normal beat was reestablished, a measured rhythm.

His weakness abated, and with the return of his strength, his fear soured into humiliation.

The drawer pulls became handholds by which Ryan drew himself to his feet. He felt his way through the clinging darkness to the swinging door.

There he listened to the kitchen. No murmurs, no whispers, no clink or ping, no soft but ominous grinding noise.

He passed through the door, eased it shut, and stood with his back to it.

To his right, above the primary sinks and the flanking counters, were windows facing west. The glow of the Newport Beach lowlands and the moon above the sea defined the panes.

He dared the light switch and found that he was alone.

In addition to the door to the pantry, the big kitchen had three other exits: the first to a patio, the second to the breakfast room, and the last to the back hall. The breakfast room also offered a door to the patio and another to the hallway.

Surely, the voices had been those of Lee and Kay. They had been engaged on some mundane task, unaware that he was in the butler’s pantry.

But with Ryan supposedly asleep in his bedroom one floor above and at the farther end of the big house, why had the Tings been whispering?

At each end of the kitchen, as at other points throughout the house, Crestron panels were embedded in the wall. He touched one, and the screen brightened. From this, he could control the lighting, the through-house audio, the heating and cooling, and other systems.

He selected the security display and saw that according to established routine, the Tings had engaged the perimeter alarm. No intruders could have entered the house without triggering a siren and a recorded voice identifying the breach point.

Twenty exterior cameras provided views of the grounds. He cycled through them. Although the night-vision technology offered different clarity from camera to camera, depending on ambient light conditions, he saw no prowlers on his property, no motion other than the darting paleness of an occasional moth.

He returned to the master suite, but not to bed. In an alcove, off the sitting room where he had taken dinner, stood an amboina-wood Art Deco desk, circa 1928. He sat there, but not to work.

Lee and Kay Ting had been employed here two years. They were talented, dedicated, and reliable.

Their backgrounds had been thoroughly investigated by Wilson Mott, a former homicide detective, now a security consultant, to whom Ryan turned for all matters that were not directly related to his company, Be2Do.

Yet Forry Stafford had said something that replayed in memory: Scarring of the endocardium, amyloidosis, poisoning…

With every repetition, Forry’s remembered voice seemed to place a more ominous emphasis on the word poisoning, even though he had not considered it a possibility in Ryan’s case.

For a man who had been healthy all his life, not just healthy but vigorous, sudden serious heart disease seemed to require an explanation beyond the genetic disposition or the malfunctioning of his body. A life of struggle and arduous competition had taught him that in this world were people whose motives were suspect and whose methods were unscrupulous.

Poison.

A soft paradiddle drew his attention to the west window. The noise ceased the moment that he turned his head to seek the source.

The steely light of the scimitar moon failed to reveal what had tapped the glass. Most likely the visitor had been only a moth or some other nocturnal insect.

He turned his attention to his hands, which were fisted on the desk. Earlier, during the seizure, his heart had felt as if it were tightly held in a cruel fist.

Again, a noise arose at the window, less a sound of something tapping, more the soft insistent rapping of knuckles sheathed in a lambskin glove.

He was on the third floor. No balcony lay beyond this window, nothing but a sheer fall to the lawn. No one could be at those moonlit panes, seeking his attention.

The condition of his heart had affected his mind, rattling his usual confidence. Even something as harmless as a moth could set a quiet fear fluttering through him.

He refused to look again at the window, for to do so seemed to invite a thousand fears to follow. His resistance was rewarded, and the faint tap turned feeble, faded into a persistent silence.

Poison.

His thoughts turned from imagined threats to real ones, to those people he had known, in business, whose greed and envy and ambition had led them to embrace immoral methods.

Ryan had earned his fortune without sharp practice, honestly. Nevertheless, he had made enemies. Some people did not like to lose, even if they lost by their own faults and miscalculations.

After much thought, he made a list of five names.

Among the phone numbers he had for Wilson Mott was a special cell to which the detective responded personally, regardless of the day or hour. Only two or three of Mott’s wealthiest clients possessed the number. Ryan had never abused it.

He hesitated to place the call. But intuition told him that he was snared in an extraordinary web of deceit, and that he needed more help than physicians could supply. He keyed in the seven digits.

When Mott answered, sounding as crisp and alert as he did at any more reasonable hour of the day, Ryan identified himself but neither mentioned the five names on his list nor suggested further background research on the Tings, as he had intended. Instead, he said something that so surprised him, he rendered himself speechless after the first sentence that he spoke.

“I want you to find a woman named Rebecca Reach.”

EIGHT

Rebecca Reach. Samantha’s mother.

Ryan had learned only the previous evening, at dinner with Sam, that her mother was alive. For a year, she had allowed him to think that Rebecca had died.

No, that was unfair. Samantha had not misled him. He had assumed Rebecca was dead merely from what little Samantha said of her.

Evidently mother and daughter were so estranged that they did not speak and likely never would. She is dead. To me, Samantha had said.

He could understand why, after Rebecca had pulled the plug on disabled Teresa, Samantha had wanted to close a door on the memories of her lost twin sister and on her mother, whom she felt had betrayed them.

“Do you have anything besides the name?” asked Wilson Mott.

“ Las Vegas,” Ryan said. “Rebecca Reach apparently lives in an apartment in Las Vegas.”

“Is that R-e-a-c-h?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the context, Mr. Perry?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“What discovery might you be hoping for?”

“I’m hoping for nothing. Just a general background on the woman. And an address. A phone number.”

“I assume you do not want us to speak to her directly.”

“That’s right. Discretion, please.”

“Perhaps by five o’clock tomorrow,” Mott said.

“Five o’clock will be fine. I’m busy in the morning and early afternoon, anyway.”

Ryan hung up, not sure if what he had done was intuitively brilliant or stupid. He did not know what he expected to learn that would have any application to his current crisis.

All he knew was that he had acted now as often he had done in business, trusting in hunches based on reason. His instincts had made him rich.

If Samantha learned of this, she might think he was unacceptably suspicious, even faithless. With luck, she would never have to know what he had done.

Ryan returned to bed. He tuned the TV to a classic film, Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, then switched off the bedside lamp.

Reclining against a pile of feather pillows, he watched the movie without seeing it.

He had never asked Wilson Mott to run a background check on Samantha. Generally, he reserved such investigations for potential employees.

Besides, she had come to him on assignment for a major magazine, a writer of experience and some critical reputation. He had seen no reason to vet her further when her bona fides proved to be in order and when she had been likely to spend no more than a few hours with him.

Over the years, he had dealt with uncountable people in the media. They were mostly harmless, occasionally armed but then with nothing more dangerous than a bias that justified, in their minds, misquoting him.

If something about Rebecca Reach eventually raised suspicions, however, Mott might have to conduct a deep background investigation on Samantha.

Ryan was disappointed-not in Sam, for there was yet no reason to reconsider her, but in himself. He loved being with her. He loved her. He did not want to believe that his judgment in this instance had been poor, that he had failed to see she was someone other than who she appeared to be.

Worse, he was dismayed by how quickly his fear led him to doubt her. Until this day, the only crises with which he had dealt were business problems-capital shortfalls, delayed product roll-outs, hostile-takeover bids. Now he faced an existential threat, and his justifiable fear of incapacitation and death had coiled into a viper-eyed paranoia that looked less to the weakness of his flesh than to the possibility of enemies with agendas.

Disconcerted if not embarrassed to be so enthralled by fear, he considered calling Wilson Mott to cancel the background workup on Rebecca Reach.

But Forry Stafford had raised the possibility of poisoning. If that was a potential cause of Ryan’s condition, prudence required him to consider it.

He did not touch the phone.

After a while, he switched off the TV.

He could not sleep. In a few hours, the cardiologist, Samar Gupta, would pluck three tiny pieces of tissue from Ryan’s heart. His life depended on what those samples revealed. If the diagnosis was not good, he would have plenty of time to sleep; he would have eternity.

Out of the darkness and morbid silence issued a faint tapping at a new window, muffled by draperies; this window or that-he could not tell which.

When he raised his head to listen, the insistent moth or the flying beetle, or the hand in the lambskin glove, ceased to rap.

Each time he returned his head to the pillow, silence ensued but was not sustained. Sooner or later came a bump and a bump and a bump-bump-bump: muffled, toneless, dull, dead, and flat.

He could have gone to the windows, one at a time, and pulled open the draperies to catch the noisemaker in the act. Instead, he told himself that the muted tapping was imagined, and he turned his mind away from it, toward the more intimate and troubling rhythms of his heart.

He recognized a certain cowardice in this denial. He sensed that on some level he knew who tapped for his attention, and knew that to pull back the draperies and confront this visitor would be the end of him.

NINE

The moon was down, the sky still dark that Friday morning when Ryan set out for the hospital. The urban glow obscured many stars, but to the west, the sea and shore were one and black and vast.

In spite of the fact that he might have a seizure while behind the wheel, he risked driving. He preferred that Lee Ting not know he was undergoing a myocardial biopsy.

He told himself that he didn’t want people who worked for him or who were otherwise close to him to worry. But in fact he did not want to give an enemy, if one existed, the satisfaction-and advantage-of knowing that he was weakened and vulnerable.

As he walked alone through the hospital parking garage, where the sorcerous-sour yellow light polished the carapaces of the cars into iridescent beetle shells, he had the eerie feeling that he was home and sleeping, that this place and the test to come were all moments of a dream within a dream.

From the out-patient admitting desk, an orderly showed him the way to the cardiac diagnostics laboratory.

The head cardiology nurse, Kyra Whipset, could not have been more lean if she had eaten nothing whatsoever but celery and had run half a marathon every day. She had so little body fat that even in high-buoyancy saltwater, she would sink like a dropped anchor.

After ascertaining that Ryan had eaten nothing after midnight, Nurse Whipset provided a sedative and water in a small paper cup.

“This won’t put you to sleep,” she said. “It’ll just relax you.”

A second nurse, Ismay Clemm-an older, pleasantly plump black woman-had green eyes in which the striations were like the bevels in a pair of intricately cut emeralds. Those eyes would have been striking in any face; they were especially arresting because of the contrast with her smooth dark skin.

While Nurse Whipset sat at a corner desk to make an entry in Ryan’s file, Ismay watched him take the sedative. “You okay, child?”

“Not really,” he said, crushing the empty paper cup in his fist.

“This is nothin’,” she assured him as he dropped the cup in a waste can. “I’m here. I’m watchin’ over you. You’ll be just fine.”

By contrast with Nurse Whipset’s ascetic tautness, Ismay’s abundance, which included a musical voice that conveyed caring as effortlessly as it would a tune, comforted Ryan.

“Well, you are taking three pieces of my heart,” he said.

“Tiny pieces, honey. I suspect you’ve taken far bigger pieces from the tender hearts of a few sweet girls. And they’re all still livin’, aren’t they?”

In an adjacent prep room, he stripped to his undershorts, stepped into a pair of disposable slippers, and wrapped himself in a thin, pale-green, collarless robe with short sleeves.

Back in the diagnostics laboratory, Dr. Gupta had arrived, as had the radiologist.

The examination table was more comfortable than Ryan expected. Samar Gupta explained that comfort was necessary because during this procedure, a patient must lie on his back, very still, for at least an hour, in some cases perhaps for two hours or more.

Suspended over the table, a fluoroscope would instantly project moving x-ray images on a fluorescent screen.

As the cardiologist, assisted by Nurse Whipset, prepared for the procedure, Ismay Clemm monitored Ryan’s pulse. “You’re doing fine, child.”

The sedative began to take effect, and he felt calmer, although wide awake.

Kyra Whipset scrubbed Ryan’s neck and painted a portion of it with iodine.

After applying a topical anesthetic to steal the sting from the needle, Dr. Gupta administered a local anesthetic by injection to the same area.

Soon Ryan could feel nothing when the physician tested the nerve response in his neck.

He closed his eyes while something with an astringent smell was swabbed on his numb flesh.

Describing his actions aloud, Dr. Gupta made a small incision in Ryan’s jugular vein and introduced a thin, highly flexible catheter.

Ryan opened his eyes and watched the fluoroscope as it followed the tedious progress of the catheter, which the cardiologist threaded carefully into his heart, guided by the image on the screen.

He wondered what would happen if in the midst of this procedure he suffered a seizure as he had on the surfboard, his heart abruptly hammering two or three hundred beats a minute. He decided not to ask.

“How are you doing?” Dr. Gupta inquired.

“Fine. I don’t feel anything.”

“Just relax. We’re making excellent progress.”

Ryan realized that Ismay Clemm was quietly reporting on his heart rhythm, which evidently had become slightly unstable upon the introduction of the catheter.

Maybe this was normal, maybe not, but the instability passed.

And the beat goes on.

Once the primary catheter was in place, Dr. Gupta inserted into it a second catheter, a bioptome, with tiny jaws at its tip.

Ryan had lost all sense of time. He might have been on the table a few minutes or an hour.

His legs ached. In spite of the sedative, the muscles in his calves were tense. His right hand had tightened into a fist; he opened it, as if hoping to receive another’s hand, a gift.

Long he lay there, wondering, fearing.

The jaws of the bioptome bit.

Inhaling with a hiss through clenched teeth, Ryan didn’t think that he imagined the quick painful pinch, but perhaps he was reacting to the brief frantic stutter of his heart on the fluorescent screen.

Dr. Gupta retrieved the first sample of Ryan’s cardiac muscle.

Nurse Clemm said, “Don’t hold your breath, honey.”

Exhaling, Ryan realized that he expected to die during the procedure.

TEN

In just seventy minutes the biopsy had been completed and the incision repaired with stitches.

The power of the sedative was at its peak, and because Ryan had endured a sleepless night, the drug affected him more strongly than anticipated. Dr. Gupta encouraged Ryan to lie on the narrow bed in the prep room and rest awhile, until he felt fully alert and capable of driving.

The room was windowless. The overhead fluorescent panels were off, and only a fixture in a soffit above the small sink provided light.

The dark ceiling and shadow-hung walls inspired claustrophobia. Thoughts of caskets and the conqueror worm oppressed him, but the phobic moment quickly passed.

Relief that the procedure had gone well and exhaustion were tranquilizing. Ryan did not expect to sleep, but he slept.

To a discordant melody, he walked a dream road along a valley toward a palace high on a slope. Through the red-litten windows he could see vast forms that moved fantastically, and his heart began to pound, to boom, until it beat away that vision and harried in another.

A wild lake, bound all around with black rocks and tall pines, was lovely in its loneliness. Then the inky water rose in a series of small waves that lapped the shore where he stood, and he knew the lake was a pool of poison. Its gulf would be his grave.

Between these brief dreams and others, he half woke and always found Ismay Clemm at his bedside in the dimly lighted room, once taking his pulse, once with her hand to his forehead, sometimes just watching him, her dark face so shadowed that her oddly lit green eyes seemed to be disembodied.

A few times she spoke to him, and on the first occasion, she murmured, “You hear him, don’t you, child?”

Ryan had insufficient strength to ask of whom she spoke.

The nurse answered her own question: “Yes, you hear him.”

Later, between dreams, she said, “You must not listen, child.”

And later still: “If you hear the iron bells, you come to me.”

When he woke more than an hour after lying down, Ryan was alone.

The one light, the many shadows, and the sparely appointed prep room seemed less real to him than either the palace with windows full of red light or the black lake, or the other places in his dreams.

To confirm that he was awake and that the memory of the biopsy was real, he raised one hand to the small bandage on his neck, which covered the jugular wound, the stitches.

He rose, took off the robe, and dressed in his street clothes.

When Ryan entered the adjacent diagnostics lab, Ismay Clemm was nowhere to be seen. Dr. Gupta and the radiologist had gone, as well.

Nurse Whipset asked if he was all right.

He felt unreal, weightless and drifting, as if he were a ghost, an apparition that she mistook for flesh and blood.

Of course, she wasn’t asking if he felt emotionally sound, only if the sedative had worn off. He answered in the affirmative.

She informed him that the analysis of the biopsy specimens would be expedited. In the interest of greater accuracy and the collection of more precise information, however, Dr. Gupta had ordered the most detailed analysis; he didn’t expect to have the report until Tuesday.

Initially, Ryan intended to ask where he could find Ismay Clemm. He had wanted to ask her what she meant by the strange things she said to him during the brief periods when he had been half-awake.

Now, in the sterile brightness of the diagnostics lab, he was not certain that she had actually spoken to him. She might as easily have been merely a presence in his dreams.

He retrieved his Mercedes from the garage and drove home.

The clear sky presented more birds, more often, than seemed normal. Flocks were strung out in strange formations, a calligraphy of crows in which some meaning might be read if only he knew the language in which it was composed.

At a red traffic light, when he glanced at the silver Lexus in the adjacent lane, he discovered the driver staring at him: a fortysomething man, face hard and expressionless. They locked eyes, and the stranger’s intensity caused Ryan to look away first.

Two blocks later, at another red light, a young man behind the wheel of a chopped and customized Ford pickup was talking on a hands-free cell phone. Fitted to the guy’s ear, the phone stirred in Ryan a memory from an old science-fiction movie: an alien parasite, riding and controlling its human host.

The pickup driver glanced at Ryan, looked immediately away, but a moment later glanced furtively at him once more; and his lips moved faster, as if Ryan were the subject of his phone conversation.

Miles farther, when Ryan turned off Pacific Coast Highway onto Newport Coast Road, he glanced repeatedly in the rearview mirror, looking for the silver Lexus and the chopped Ford pickup.

At home, staircase to hallway to room after room, Ryan did not encounter Lee or Kay Ting, or Lee’s assistant, Donnie, or Kay’s assistant, Renata.

He heard fading footsteps on a limestone floor, a door close in another room. A distant voice and a single response were both unintelligible.

In the kitchen, he swiftly prepared an early lunch. He avoided fresh foods and containers that were already open, in favor of items in vacuum-sealed cans and jars.

A salad of button mushrooms, artichoke hearts, yellow beets, garbanzo beans, and white asparagus was enlivened with Italian dressing from a previously untapped bottle and by grated Parmesan from a new can that he opened after inspecting it for tampering.

He put the salad on a tray with a sealed package of imported panettone and utensils. After a hesitation, he added a wineglass and a half bottle of Far Niente Chardonnay.

As he carried the tray to his office in the west wing of the main floor, he saw no one, though a vacuum cleaner started in a far chamber.

None of the rooms featured security cameras, but the hallways had them. A video record of hallway traffic was stored on DVDs to be reviewed only in the event that the house was invaded by burglars or victimized by a sneak thief.

No one monitored the hallway cameras in real time. Nevertheless, Ryan felt watched.

ELEVEN

In his home office, Ryan ate at his desk, gazing out of the big windows at the swimming pool in the foreground, at the sea in the distance.

The phone rang: his most private line, a number possessed by a handful of people. The caller-ID window told him it was Samantha.

“Hey, Winky, you still aging gracefully?”

“Well, I haven’t grown any hair in my ears yet.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“And I haven’t developed man breasts.”

“You paint an irresistible portrait of yourself. Listen, I’m sorry about Wednesday night.”

“What about Wednesday night?”

“I brought the whole evening down, talking about Teresa, pulling her feeding tube, the starvation thing.”

“You never bring me down, Sam.”

“You’re sweet. But I want to make it up to you. Come over for dinner tonight. I’ll make saltimbocca alla romana.”

“I love your saltimbocca.”

“With polenta.”

“This is a lot of work.”

“Caponata to start.”

He had no reason to distrust her.

“Why don’t we eat out?” he suggested. “Then there’s no cleanup.”

“I’ll do the cleaning up.”

He loved her. She loved him. She was a good cook. He was succumbing to irrational fear.

“It’s so much work,” he said. “I heard about this great new restaurant.”

“What’s the name?”

The great new restaurant was a lie. He would have to find one. He said, “I want to surprise you.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m just in a going-out mood. I want to try this new place.”

They talked about what she should wear, what time he would pick her up.

“Love you,” she said.

“Love you,” he echoed, and disconnected.

He had eaten no more than a third of his lunch, but he had lost his appetite.

With a glass of Far Niente, he went outside, crossed the patio, and stood watching satiny ribbons of sunlight shimmer through the variegated-blue Italian-glass tiles that lined the swimming pool.

He became aware that he was fingering the bandage on his neck.

As Gypsies read tea leaves and palms, some shaman would read those tissue samples and tell him his fate.

The mental image of a Gypsy by candlelight led him to think of stories in which a lock of a man’s hair was used by a practitioner of black magic to cast a curse upon him.

In the hands of a voodooist, three moist pieces of a man’s heart-more intimate and therefore more powerful than a few strands of hair-might be used to destroy him in ways singularly horrific.

When a centipedal chill climbed his spine, when his heart accelerated, when a thin sweat prickled along his hairline, Ryan chastised himself for surrendering to unreason. A warrantless suspicion about Sam had metastasized into superstitious nonsense.

He went back into his office and phoned Samantha. “On second thought, I’d rather have your saltimbocca.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I don’t want to share you with a gaggle of envious men.”

“What gaggle?”

“The waiter, the busboy, and every man in the restaurant who would be lucky enough to lay eyes on you.”

“Sometimes, Winky, you walk a thin line between being a true romantic and a bullshit artist.”

“I’m only speaking from the heart.”

“Well, sweetie, if you’re going to do more of that this evening, bring a shovel. I don’t have one.”

She hung up, and before Ryan could lower the handset from his ear, he heard what might have been a brief, stifled laugh.

Although Sam had disconnected, the dial tone did not return. Ryan listened to the faint hollow hiss of an open line.

“Who’s there?” he asked.

No one answered.

The house phone was a digital hybrid system with ten lines, plus intercom and doorbell functions. None of the phone lines was shared, and no other phones in the house could eavesdrop on a line that was in use.

He waited for another telltale sound, like guarded breathing or a background noise in the room where the listener sat, but he was not rewarded. He had nothing more than an impression of someone out there in the ether, a hostile presence that might or might not be real.

At last he returned the handset to the cradle.

By four o’clock Friday afternoon, sooner than promised, Wilson Mott provided by e-mail a background report on Samantha’s mother.

As soon as Ryan had a printout, he sent the e-mail to trash, and at once deleted it from trash to ensure no one could retrieve it. He sat on a lounge chair by the pool to read Mott’s findings.

Rebecca Lorraine Reach, fifty-six, lived in a Las Vegas apartment complex called the Oasis. She was employed as a blackjack dealer at one of the classier casinos.

By means most likely questionable, Mott had obtained the current photo of Rebecca on file with the Nevada Gaming Control Board. She looked no older than forty-and remarkably like her daughter.

She owned a white Ford Explorer. Her driving record was clean.

She had never been a party to a criminal or civil action in Nevada. Her credit report indicated a responsible borrowing history.

According to a neighbor, Amy Crocker, Rebecca rarely socialized with other tenants at the Oasis, had a “my-poop-don’t-smell attitude,” never spoke of having a daughter, either dead or alive, and was in a romantic relationship with a man named Spencer Barghest.

Mott reported that Barghest had been indicted twice for murder, in Texas, and twice had been judged innocent. As a noted right-to-die activist, he had been present at scores of assisted suicides. There was reason to believe that some of those whom he had assisted were not terminally-or even chronically-ill, and that the signatures on their requests for surcease from suffering were forged.

Ryan had no idea how an assisted suicide was effectuated. Maybe Barghest supplied an overdose of sedatives, which would be a painless poison but a kind of poison nonetheless.

Mott’s report included a photo of Spencer Barghest. He had an ideal face for a stand-up comic: agreeable but rubbery features, a knowing yet ingratiating grin, and a shock of white hair cut in a punkish bristle that looked amusing on a fiftysomething guy.

Because he might be critically ill, Ryan was troubled to find only three degrees of separation between himself and a man who would be pleased to grant him eternal peace whether he wanted it or not.

This, however, did not confirm his intuitive sense that Sam’s mother-and perhaps Samantha herself-was linked to his sudden health problems.

Life was often marked by synchronicities, surprising connections that seemed to be meaningful. But coincidence was only coincidence.

Barghest might be a nasty piece of work, but there was nothing sinister in his relationship with Rebecca, nothing relating to Ryan.

In his current state of mind, he had to guard against a tendency toward paranoia. Such a regrettable inclination had already led him to order Mott’s report on Samantha’s mother.

Rebecca had turned out to be an ordinary person leading an unremarkable existence. Ryan’s suspicion had been irrational.

Now that he thought about it, the presence of Spencer Barghest in Rebecca Reach’s life was not surprising. It didn’t even qualify as a coincidence, let alone a suspicious one.

Six years ago, she had made the difficult decision to remove a feeding tube from her brain-damaged daughter. A weight of guilt might have settled on her-especially when Samantha strenuously disagreed with her decision.

To assuage the guilt, Rebecca might have pored through right-to-die literature, seeking philosophical justification for what she had done. She might even have joined an activist organization, and at one of its meetings might have encountered Spencer Barghest.

Because Samantha had been estranged from her mother since Teresa’s death, she probably didn’t even know that Barghest and Rebecca were an item.

Ashamed that he had entertained any doubts about Sam, Ryan got up from the poolside lounge chair and returned to his study.

He sat at his desk and switched on the paper shredder. For a long moment, he listened to its motor purring, its blades scissoring.

Finally he switched off the shredder. He put the report in a wall safe behind a sliding panel in the back of a built-in cabinet.

Fear had gotten its teeth so firmly into him that he could not easily pry it loose.

TWELVE

Over the years, the immense pepper tree had conformed around the second-story deck. Consequently, the feeling of being in a tree house was even greater here than when you looked out of the apartment windows.

Samantha had draped a red-checkered cloth over the patio table and had set out white dishes, flatware, and a red bowl of white roses.

Filtered through the tree, late golden sunlight showered her with a wealth of bright coins as she poured for Ryan a Cabernet Sauvignon that was beyond her budget, while he lied to her about the reason for the bandage on his neck.

Following a crimson sunset and purple twilight, she lit red candles in clear cups and served dinner as the stars came out, with a Connie Dover CD of Celtic music turned low.

Having allowed fear to raise doubts about Sam, having ordered a background report on her mother, Ryan initially expected to feel awkward in her company. In a sense, he had betrayed her trust.

He was at once, however, at ease with her. Her singular beauty did more to improve his mood than did the wine, and a dinner superbly prepared was less nourishing than the faultless golden smoothness of her skin.

After dinner, after they stacked the dishes in the sink, and over the last of the wine, she said, “Let’s go to bed, Winky.”

Suddenly Ryan was concerned that impotence might prove to be a symptom of his illness. He need not have worried.

In bed, in motion, he wondered briefly if lovemaking would stress his heart and trigger a seizure. He survived.

Cuddling afterward, his arm around Samantha and her head upon his chest, he said, “I’m such an idiot.”

She sighed. “Surely you didn’t just arrive at this realization.”

“No. The thought has occurred to me before.”

“So what happened recently to remind you?”

If he confessed his absurd suspicions, he would be forced to disclose his health concerns. He did not want to worry her until he had Dr. Gupta’s report and knew the full extent of his problem.

Instead, he said, “I threw out those sandals.”

“The pair recycled from old tires?”

“I was suckered by the planet-friendly name of the company-Green Footwear.”

“You’re gorgeous, Dotcom, but you’re still a geek.”

For a long while, they talked about nothing important, which sometimes can be the best kind of conversation.

Samantha drifted into sleep, a golden vision in the lamplight, and Ryan soon traded the soothing sight of her for dreams.

Dream changed fluidly into dream, until he was in a city in the sea, at the bottom of an abyss. Shrines and palaces and towers were lit by eerie light streaming up domes, up spires, up kingly halls, up fanes, up Babylon-like walls. He drifted through flooded streets, drowned in deep-sea silence…until he heard a bass throbbing full of melancholy menace. Although he knew the source of the sound, he dared not name it, for to name it would be to embrace it.

He woke in low light. The dread that weighed him down was not of an imminent threat but of some monumental peril he sensed coming in the weeks and months ahead, not the failure of his body but some worse and nameless jeopardy. His heart did not race, but each beat was like a heavy piston stroke in some great slow machine.

Although Samantha’s alluring scent clung to the sheets, she had risen from the bed while Ryan slept. He was alone in the room.

The digital clock on the nightstand read 11:24 P.M. He had been asleep less than an hour.

The light that came through the half-open door called to mind the strange glow in the submerged city of his dream.

He pulled on his khakis and, barefoot, went in search of Sam.

In the combination dining room and living room, beside an armchair, a bronze floorlamp with a beaded-glass shade provided a brandy-colored light, dappling the floor with bead gleam and bead shadow.

The kitchen was an extension of the main room, and there the door stood open to the deck on which they had sat for dinner.

The candles were extinguished. Only faint moonlight glazed the air, and the branches of the old tree were tentacular in the gloom.

The mild air was slightly scented by the nearby sea, more generously by night-blooming jasmine.

Samantha was not on the deck. Stairs descended to the courtyard between the garage and the house.

Murmuring voices rose from below, leading Ryan away from the stairs to a railing. Looking down, he saw Samantha because a shaft of moonlight devalued her hair from gold to silver and caressed her pearl-white silk robe.

The second person stood in shadows, but from the timbre of the voice, Ryan knew this was a man.

He could not hear their words, and he could not discern their mood from the rhythms of their conversation.

As in the butler’s pantry the previous night, when he tried unsuccessfully to eavesdrop on a whispered discussion in the kitchen, he was overcome by a creeping unease, by a tantalizing suggestion of hidden dimensions and secret meanings in things that had heretofore seemed simple, clear, and fully understood.

From a tonal change in the voices, Ryan inferred that the pair below had reached the end of their discussion. Indeed, the man turned away from Samantha.

As the stranger moved, shadows at first clung to him, but then relented. The lunar glow was illuminating yet at the same time misty and mystifying, veiling as much as it revealed.

Tall, slim, moving with athletic confidence, the man crossed the moonshadow-mottled lawn toward the alleyway behind the garage, his hair white and punk-cut, as though he wore a jagged crown of ice.

Spencer Barghest, reputed lover of Rebecca Reach, compassionate and eager guide to the suicidal, was visible for only a brief moment. Moonlight shrank from him, and shadows took him in; the intervening limbs and leaves of the California pepper blocked him from further view.

Below, Samantha turned toward the steps.

THIRTEEN

Ryan backed barefoot off the deck and through the open door. He turned and hurried out of the kitchen, across the front room.

In the bedroom, he stripped off his khakis. He draped them over the arm of a chair, as they had been, and returned to bed.

Under the covers, he realized that he had not thought through this retreat, but had instinctively chosen to avoid confrontation. In retrospect, he was not sure that he had taken the wisest course.

Feigning sleep, he heard Samantha enter the bedroom, and heard the silken rustle of her robe discarded.

Under the covers once more, she said softly, “Ryan?” When he did not reply, she repeated his name.

If she believed that he was faking sleep, she might suspect that he had seen or heard something of the assignation under the pepper tree. Therefore, he said sleepily, “Hmmmm?”

She slid against him and took hold of what she wanted.

Under the circumstances, he did not believe that he could rise to the occasion. He was surprised-and dismayed-to discover desire trumped his concern that she was guilty of dissimulation if not duplicity.

The qualities he found most erotic in a woman were intelligence, wit, affection, and tenderness. Sam had all four and could not fake the first two, though Ryan now worried that her intelligence was of a kind that facilitated manipulation and fostered cunning. He wondered if in fact she loved him and wanted the best for him, or had all along been disingenuous.

Never before had he made love when his heart was a cauldron of such wretched feelings, when physical passion was detached from all of the gentler emotions. In fact, love might have had nothing to do with it.

When the moment had passed, Samantha kissed his brow, his chin, his throat. She whispered, “Good night, Winky,” and turned away from him, onto her side.

Soon her open-mouthed breathing indicated that she slept. Or pretended to sleep.

Ryan pressed two fingers to his throat to time his pulse. He marveled at the slow steady throb, which seemed to be yet another deception, the most intimate one so far: his body pretending to be in good health when actually it was in the process of failing him.

For an hour, he stared at the ceiling but in fact examined, with memory’s eye, a year of loving Samantha. He sought to recall any incident that, from his new perspective, suggested she had darker intentions than those he had attributed to her at the time.

Initially, none of her actions through the months seemed in the least deceitful. When Ryan considered those same moments a second time, however, shadows fell where shadows had not been before, and every memory was infused with an impression of hidden motives and of secret conspirators lurking just offstage.

No specific deceit occurred to him, no example of her possible duplicity prior to the last few days, yet a cold current of suspicion crawled along his nerves.

The tendency to paranoia that infected contemporary culture had always disquieted him. He was ashamed to be indulging in the self-delusion that troubled him in others. He had a few disturbing facts; but he was trying to manufacture others out of fevered fantasies.

Ryan rose quietly from bed, and Samantha did not stir.

A window invited moonlight, which fell so lightly in this space that he could not have perceived the positions of the furniture if he had not been familiar with the room.

More than half blind, but with a blind man’s intuition, he found his clothes, dressed, and silently navigated the bedroom. Without a sound, he closed the door behind him.

Familiarity with the floor plan and dark-adapted eyes allowed him to reach the kitchen without a misstep or collision. He switched on the light above the sink.

On the notepad by the telephone, he left her a message: Sam, manic insomnia strikes again. Too jittery to lie still. Call you tomorrow. Love, Winky.

He drove home, where he packed a suitcase.

The great house was as silent as the vacuum between planets. Although he made only a few small noises, each seemed as loud as thunder.

He drove to a hotel, where no one on his house staff or in his private life would think to look for him.

In an anonymous room, on a too-soft bed, he slept so soundly for six hours that he did not dream. When he woke Saturday morning, he was in the fetal position in which he had gone to sleep.

His hands ached. Evidently, he had closed them into fists through most of the night.

Before ordering a room-service breakfast, Ryan made two phone calls. The first was to Wilson Mott, the detective. The second was to arrange to have one of Be2Do’s corporate jets fly him to Las Vegas.

FOURTEEN

Flensing knives of desert sun stripped the air to the bone, and the shimmers of heat rising off the airport Tarmac were as dry as the breath of a dead sea.

The Learjet and crew would stand by to return Ryan to southern California the following morning.

A black Mercedes sedan and chauffeur awaited him at the private-plane terminal. The driver introduced himself as George Zane, an employee of Wilson Mott’s security firm.

He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. Instead of shoes, he wore boots, and the blunt toes looked as though they might be reinforced with steel caps.

Two knots of pale scar tissue marked his shaved head at the brink of his brow. Tall, muscular, with a thick neck, with wide nostrils and intense eyes as purple-black as plum skins, Zane looked as though his lineage included bull blood, suggesting that the scars on his skull resulted from the surgical removal of horns.

He was not only a driver but also a bodyguard, and more. After Zane stowed Ryan’s suitcase in the trunk, he opened a rear door of the sedan for him and presented him with a disposable cell phone.

“While you’re here,” Zane said, “make any calls with this. They can never be traced to you.”

Like a limousine, this customized sedan was equipped with a motorized privacy panel between the front seat and the back.

Through the tinted windows, Ryan gazed at the barren desert mountains in the distance until a maze of soaring hotels and casinos blocked the natural world from view.

At the hotel where Ryan would stay, Zane parked in a VIP zone. While Ryan waited in the car, the driver carried the suitcase inside.

When Zane returned, he opened a back door to give an electronic-key card to Ryan. “Room eleven hundred. It’s a suite. It’s registered to me. Your name appears nowhere, sir.”

As they pulled away from the hotel, the disposable cell phone rang, and Ryan answered it.

A woman said, “Are you ready to see Rebecca’s apartment?”

Rebecca Reach. Samantha’s mother.

“Yes,” said Ryan.

“It’s number thirty-four, on the second floor. I’m already inside.”

She terminated the call.

Away from the fabled Strip, Vegas was a parched suburban sprawl. Pale stucco houses reflected the bloodless Mojave sun, and many landscape schemes employed pebbles, rocks, cactuses, and succulents.

The palm fronds looked brittle. The olive trees appeared more gray than green.

Ribbons of heat, rising from vast parking lots, caused shopping malls to shimmer and shift shape like the underwater city in his troubling dream.

Sand, dry weeds, and litter choked tracts of undeveloped land.

The Oasis, an upscale two-story apartment complex, was a cream-colored structure with a roof of turquoise tiles. The privacy wall that concealed its large courtyard was inlaid with a caravan of ceramic Art Deco camels that matched the color of the roof.

Behind the apartments stood garages, as well as guest parking shaded by horizontal trellises festooned with purple bougainvillea.

Zane put down the privacy panel and both front windows before switching off the engine. “You best walk in alone. Be casual.”

After stepping out of the car, Ryan considered returning at once to it and calling off this questionable operation.

The memory of Spencer Barghest standing under the pepper tree with Samantha, his thatch of hair whiter than white in the moonlight, reminded Ryan of what he needed to know and why he needed to know it.

Beyond the back gate lay a covered walkway to the courtyard, but the gate could be opened only with a tenant’s key. He had to walk around to the public entrance.

The wrought-iron front gate featured a palm-tree motif and had been finished to resemble the green patina of weathered copper.

At the center of the courtyard lay a large pool and spa with turquoise-tile coping. Faint fumes of chlorine trembled in the scorched air and seemed to vibrate in Ryan’s nostrils.

Sun-browned and oiled, a few residents lay on lounge chairs, courting melanoma. None looked toward him.

The deep deck that served the second-floor apartments formed the roof of a continuous veranda benefiting the first-floor units. Lush landscaping included queen palms of various heights, which did much to screen the three wings of the building from one another.

He climbed exterior stairs and found Apartment 34. The door stood ajar, and it opened wider as he approached.

Waiting for him in the foyer was an attractive brunette with a honeymoon mouth and funereal eyes the gray of gravestone granite.

She worked for Wilson Mott. Although entirely feminine, she gave the impression that she could protect whatever virtue she might still possess, and could leave any would-be assailant with impressions of her shoe heels in his face.

Closing the door behind Ryan, she said, “Rebecca is a day-shift dealer. She’s at the casino for hours yet.”

“Have you found anything unusual?”

“I haven’t looked, sir. I don’t know what you’re after. I’m just here to guard the door and get you out quickly in a pinch.”

“What’s your name?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be the truth.”

“Why not?”

“What we’re doing here’s illegal. I prefer anonymity.”

From her manner, he inferred that she did not approve of this mission or of him. Of course, his life, not hers, was in jeopardy.

In Rebecca Reach’s absence, the air conditioner was set at seventy degrees, which suggested she did not live on a tight budget.

Ryan started his search in the kitchen, half expecting to find an array of poisons in the pantry.

FIFTEEN

Initially, roaming Rebecca Reach’s apartment, Ryan felt like a burglar, although he had no intention of stealing anything. A flush burned in his face and guilt increased the tempo of his heart.

By the time he finished with the kitchen, the dining area, and the living room, he decided he couldn’t afford shame or any strong emotion that might precipitate a seizure. He proceeded with clinical detachment.

From the decor, he deduced that Rebecca cared little for the pleasures of hearth and home. The minimal furnishings were in drab shades of beige and gray. Only one piece of art-an abstract nothing-hung in the living room, none in the dining area.

The lack of a single keepsake or souvenir implied that she was not a sentimental woman.

By the lack of dust, by the alphabetical arrangement of spices in the kitchen, by the precise placement of six accent pillows on the sofa, Ryan determined that Rebecca valued neatness and order. The evidence suggested she was a solemn person with an austere heart.

As Ryan stepped into the study, the disposable cell phone rang. No caller ID appeared on the screen.

When he said hello, no one replied, but after he said hello a second time, a woman began softly to hum a tune. He did not recognize the song, but her crooning was sweet, melodic.

“Who is this?” he asked.

The soft voice became softer, faded, faint but still felicitous, and faded further until it receded into silence.

With his free hand, he fingered the bandage on his neck, where a day previous the catheter had been inserted into his jugular.

Although the singer had not sung a word, perhaps subconsciously Ryan recognized the voice-or imagined that he did-because into his mind unbidden came the emerald-green eyes and the smooth dark face of Ismay Clemm, the nurse from the cardiac-diagnostics lab at the hospital.

After he had waited nearly a minute for the singer to find her voice again, he pressed END and returned the phone to a pants pocket.

In memory, he heard what Ismay had said to him as he had dozed on and off, recovering from the sedative: You hear him, don’t you, child? Yes, you hear him. You must not listen, child.

A deep misgiving overcame Ryan, and for a moment he almost fled the apartment. He did not belong there.

Inhaling deeply, exhaling slowly, he strove to steady his nerves.

He had come to Las Vegas to seek the truth of the threat against him, to determine if he had only nature to fear or, instead, a web of conspirators. His survival might depend on completing his inquiries.

Rebecca’s study proved to be as blandly furnished and impersonal as the other rooms. The top of her desk was bare.

About a hundred hardcover books filled a set of shelves. They were all nonfiction, concerned with self-improvement and investing.

Closer consideration revealed that none of the books offered a serious program for either self-assessment or wise money management. They were about the mystical power of positive thinking, about wishing your way to success, about one arcane secret or another that guaranteed to revolutionize your finances and your life.

In essence, they were get-rich-quick books. They promised great prosperity with little work.

That Rebecca collected so many volumes of this nature suggested that she had drifted through the years on dreams of wealth. By now, at the age of fifty-six, disappointment and frustration might have left her bitter-and impatient.

None of these volumes would suggest that you marry your daughter off to a wealthy man and poison him to gain control of his fortune. Any illiterate person could conceive such a plan, without need for the inspiration of a book.

At once, Ryan regretted leaping to such an unkind conclusion. By suspecting Rebecca of such villainy, he was being unfair to Samantha.

Months ago, he proposed to Sam. If she were involved in a scheme to murder him for his money, she would have accepted his proposal on the spot. By now they would be husband and wife.

In one of the desk drawers, Ryan found eight magazines. On top of the stack was the issue of Vanity Fair that contained Samantha’s profile of him.

Each of the other seven magazines, published over a period of two years, contained an article by Samantha.

Sam might be estranged from her mother, but Rebecca apparently followed her daughter’s career with interest.

He paged through all the publications, searching for a letter, a note, a Post-it, anything that might prove that Sam had sent the magazines to her mother. His search was fruitless.

In the well-appointed bathroom and the large bedroom, he found nothing of interest. As regarded Rebecca if not her daughter, Ryan had already discovered enough to sharpen his distrust into mistrust.

Wilson Mott’s nameless operative waited in the foyer. After setting the door to latch behind them, she left the apartment with Ryan.

She surprised him by taking his hand and smiling as if they were lovers setting off for lunch and an afternoon adventure. Perhaps on the theory that no one would suspect them if they called attention to themselves, she chattered brightly about a movie she’d recently seen.

As they followed the public balcony that served the second floor and descended the open stairs to the courtyard, Ryan twice muttered a response. Both times she laughed with delight, as though he were the wittiest of conversationalists.

Both her voice and her laugh were musical, her eyes sparkling with an elfin sense of fun.

When they stepped through the copper-green front gate, out of the courtyard onto the public sidewalk in front of the Oasis, her voice lost all its music. The arc of humor in her ripe mouth went flatline, and her eyes were gravestone-gray once more.

She let go of him and blotted her palm on her skirt.

With chagrin, Ryan realized that his hand had been damp with sweat when she had taken hold of it.

“I’m parked in the next block,” she said. “George will take you back to your hotel.”

“What about Spencer Barghest?”

“He’s at home right now. We have reason to believe he’s going out tonight. We’ll take you into his place then.”

As Ryan watched her walk away from him, he wondered who she was when she wasn’t on the job for Wilson Mott. Might the cold gray gaze be most indicative of the real woman-or might the musical laugh and elfin eyes be the truth of her?

He was no longer confident that he could discover the essential truth of anyone.

He returned to the Mercedes sedan, where George Zane waited.

On the way back to the hotel, seen through the tinted windows, the world seemed to change subtly but continuously before Ryan’s weary eyes-flattened by sunlight, bent by shadow, every surface harder than he remembered it, every edge sharper-until it seemed that this was not the Earth to which he had been born.

SIXTEEN

From the hotel, using his cell rather than the disposable phone, Ryan Perry called Samantha because he had promised to do so in the few lines he had written on her kitchen notepad the previous night.

He was relieved to get her voice mail. He claimed to have flown to Denver on unexpected business and said he would be home Tuesday.

He also said he loved her, and it sounded like the truth to him.

Although he rarely drank wine before dinner, he ordered a half bottle of Lancaster Cabernet Sauvignon with his room-service lunch.

He had intended to visit the casino where Rebecca Reach worked as a blackjack dealer. He wanted to get a look at her in the flesh.

Although he hadn’t intended to play at her table, it now seemed unwise even to observe her from a distance. If she had read her daughter’s article in Vanity Fair, she had seen photos of Ryan.

Perhaps Rebecca remained in contact with her daughter, contrary to what Samantha had said, in which case she must not catch a glimpse of Ryan here when he claimed to be in Denver.

After lunch, he hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. Relaxed by the wine, he stretched out fully clothed on the bed.

Hard desert light pressed at the edges of the closed draperies, but the room was cool, shadowy, narcoleptic.

He dreamed of the city under the sea. Lurid light streamed through the abyss, projecting tormented shadows across shrines, towers, palaces, up bowers of sculptured ivy and stone flowers.

Drifting along strangely lit yet dark streets, he moved less like a swimmer than like a ghost. Soon he realized he was following a spectral figure, a pale something or someone.

When his quarry glanced back, she was Ismay Clemm; the paleness was her nurse’s uniform. Ryan had an urgent question, though he could not remember it. Throughout his dream, he never drew close enough to Ismay for his voice to carry to her through the drowned streets.

Daylight was waning beyond the draperies when he woke. In a lake of darkness, the suite’s furniture loomed like gray islands.

Whether or not the soft insistent rapping had awakened him, Ryan heard it now. The disorientation that accompanied the sudden disembarkation from a dream slowly ebbed, until he identified the adjoining chamber as the source of the sound.

In the living room, he switched on a lamp, and the rapping drew him to the door. He put one eye to the lens that gave him a wide view of the public corridor, but no one stood out there.

Now that Ryan was fully awake, the tap-tap-tap seemed to come from a living-room window that offered an expansive view of the Las Vegas Strip.

At the horizon, the blood-drop sun pressed on jagged mountains, swelled, burst, and streamed red across the western heavens.

Here on the eleventh floor, nothing cast itself against the window except the blinking lights and throbbing neon of the casinos that, with nightfall, used luminous titillation and sham glamour to lure the moneyed herd in the street toward penury.

Turning from the window, Ryan heard the soft knock coming from a different direction. He followed it to the bathroom door, which he had left closed.

The door could only be latched from the inside. No one would be in there, knocking to be let out.

Hesitantly, with an increasing sense that he was in jeopardy, he stepped into the bathroom, switched on the light, and blinked in the dazzle of bright reflections.

A new hollow, sonorous quality to the sound suggested that it might be issuing from a drainpipe. After he opened the shower door and then bent to each of the two sinks, he still could not identify the source.

Drawn back into the bedroom, Ryan now thought the tap-tap-tap came from the big plasma-screen TV, although he had never switched it on.

You must not listen, child.

The sudden deterioration of his health had left him emotionally vulnerable. He began to wonder about his mental stability.

On the nightstand, the disposable cell phone rang.

When Ryan answered it, George Zane said, “The way is clear for your second visit. I’ll be out front in half an hour with the car.”

Ryan pressed END, put down the phone, and waited for the rapping sound to begin again.

The persistent silence didn’t quell his unfocused anxiety. He had not let anyone into the suite, yet he felt that he was no longer alone.

Resisting the irrational urge to search every corner and closet, he took a quick shower. When steam clouded the glass door, he wiped it away to maintain a clear view of the bathroom.

Dressed and ready for the night, he felt neither refreshed nor less concerned about the possible presence of another in the suite. Surrendering to paranoia, he searched closets, behind furniture.

He tried the sliding door to the balcony. Locked. No one was out there anyway.

In the spacious foyer, he glanced at his reflection in the mirror above the console. Although he half expected someone to appear in the suite behind him, no one did.

SEVENTEEN

Spencer Barghest, indicted twice for murder in Texas and twice found innocent, lived in a middle-class neighborhood of single-story ranch houses.

After George Zane drove past the address to park half a block away and across the street from the Barghest residence, Ryan walked back to the house.

The warm night air was so dry that it would not support the fragrances of trees and flowering shrubs, only the generic alkaline scent of the desert upon which the city had encroached but over which it had not triumphed.

Landscape spotlights, fixed high in lacy melaleucas, cast on the front walkway leaf shadows so crisp they ought to have crunched underfoot.

Light glowed behind the curtained windows, and the nameless brunette with the soft mouth and the stony eyes greeted him before he could ring the bell.

Inside, as the woman closed the door behind them, Ryan said, “How long do I have?”

“Three or four hours at least. He’s out to dinner with Rebecca Reach.”

“They take that long for dinner?”

“Dinner and horizontal dancing at her place. According to our sources, Barghest is a Viagra cowboy. There’s not a day he doesn’t take a dose and ride.”

“Dr. Death is a Don Juan?”

“You’re giving him too much credit. He’s a slut.”

“What if they come back here?”

“They won’t. Maybe a few nut-case women find this decor arousing, but most don’t. Rebecca’s one who doesn’t.”

In the living room, she showed him what she meant. In addition to the expected furniture, there were two dead men, one dead woman, all naked.

Having read a newspaper story about exhibitions of cadaver art touring fine museums and galleries and universities nationwide, Ryan knew at once that these were not sculptures, not mere representations of dead people. They were painstakingly preserved corpses.

These dead had been treated with antibacterial solutions, drying agents, and numerous preservatives. Thereafter they were submerged in polyurethane, which sealed them in an airtight glaze that prevented decomposition, and were strapped to armatures supporting them in various postures.

One of the men apparently had died of a wasting disease; he was emaciated. His narrow lips were pinched tight. One eye closed, the other open, he appeared to have lacked the courage to turn his full gaze on approaching Death.

The second man looked healthy; the cause of his death was not evident. He seemed to be alive, except that the polyurethane made him glisten head to foot like a well-basted holiday turkey.

Evidently the middle-aged woman had died soon after a single mastectomy, because the lurid scars had not yet healed before she passed. As was true also of the men, her head had been shaved.

Her blue eyes fixed Ryan with a look of mortification and horror, as though she were aware of the atrocities to which she had been subjected after death.

When he could speak, Ryan asked: “The authorities know he has these?”

“Each…person in the collection either signed over his body to Barghest before death-or the family did so. He’s displayed them at various events.”

“Health hazard?”

“The experts say no, none.”

“Certainly isn’t good for anyone’s mental health.”

“It’s all been adjudicated. Courts believe it’s legitimate art, a political statement, cultural anthropology, educational, hip, cool, fun.”

Squeamish not because he stood in the company of the dead but because he felt that their exploitation was an affront to human dignity, Ryan looked away from the three specimens.

“When do we start feeding Christians to the lions?” he wondered.

“Tickets go on sale next Wednesday.”

She returned to the foyer to allow him to tour the house alone.

A hallway led off the living room, and a fourth glistening cadaver stood at the end, bathed in light from an art spot.

This man must have perished in an accident or possibly as the consequence of a brutal beating. The left eye was swollen shut in his battered face, and the right was red with blood. A cheekbone had been crushed. The frontal bone of his skull had fractured into two plates, and one had slightly dislocated from the other.

Ryan wondered if the brain remained in the skull or if it had been removed. Likewise, the internal organs. He didn’t know every step taken in the preservation process.

Already, he had begun to adjust to this barbaric “art,” finding it no less offensive than before, but nevertheless letting curiosity and a kind of dark wonder armor him against pity and outrage.

He told himself that his response to these abominations was not apathy, not even indifference, but necessary stoicism. If he did not repress his sympathy for these men and women and his disgust at what had been done to their remains, he would not be able to continue with the necessary search that he had come here to conduct.

In the bedroom, an armature supported a dead woman in a seated position. Her suggestive posture and the intensity of her dead stare so disturbed Ryan that he made only the most cursory inspection of the room and the adjacent closet.

Barghest’s home office contained the sole significant discovery related to Ryan’s personal situation.

On a bookshelf, among more ordinary volumes, were two ring binders of high-quality eight-by-ten color photographs. Faces.

Every face was expressionless, and not a single pair of eyes regarded the camera or appeared to be focused on anything. These were the faces of dead people.

A clear-plastic sleeve protected each photo. Affixed to each sleeve, a small label offered what might have been a file number neatly printed by hand.

Ryan assumed that these people had requested Barghest-or their families had requested him-to assist their departure from this world by suicide or, in the case of the mentally incapacitated, by the administration of some lethal but untraceable substance.

The absence of names and dates of death suggested that Barghest thought the photographs might be incriminating in spite of society’s current tolerance for the kind of compassion that he so enjoyed administering.

Relieved that the room lacked an observing cadaver, Ryan sat at the desk with both ring binders. He did not know why he should force himself to study so many faces of corpses, but intuition suggested that this ordeal would reward him.

Barghest’s trophies were of both sexes, young and old, and of all races. The word trophies surprised Ryan when it occurred to him, but after a dozen faces, no other term seemed as accurate.

In some instances, the subjects’ eyes appeared to have frozen open at the moment of death. Sometimes, however, small pieces of Scotch tape fixed the eyelids to the brows.

Ryan tried not to consider why open eyes were so important to Barghest. In a moment of uncanny perception, however, he knew the euthanasia activist savored each dead gaze with the insistence of a rapist compelling his victim to meet his stare, that every photo had a quasi-pornographic purpose.

The album suddenly felt greasy, and he put it down.

He rolled the office chair back from the desk, leaned forward, and hung his head. Breathing through his mouth, he struggled to quell a rush of nausea.

His heart did not race, but each beat felt like a wave, a great swell breaking in his chest. The floor seemed to rise and fall, as if he were afloat, and a thin scree sounded like gulls crying in the distance, although he realized that he was listening to the faint whistle of his pinched breathing.

The internal waves rose in sets, in the way that real waves formed upon the sea, some larger than others, with pauses between. He knew that strokes of uneven force and the loss of rhythm could be a prelude to cardiac arrest.

He placed one hand on his chest, as though he could press calm upon his heart.

If Ryan died in this place, Wilson Mott’s agents might leave his body behind rather than risk explaining why he and they had been here. Found by Dr. Death, he might wind up as one more exhibit in the gallery of cadavers. Stripped naked, preserved, and glazed after being bent into a humiliating posture, he would ornament a currently vacant corner of the house, thereafter subject to Spencer Barghest’s attention and unholy touch.

EIGHTEEN

Whether by an act of sheer will or by the grace of Fate, Ryan survived the episode and, after a couple of minutes, felt his heart reestablish rhythmic beats and measured force.

The dry, cool air in Barghest’s house was odorless but had a faint metallic taste. Counseling himself not to contemplate the source of that flavor, Ryan stopped breathing through his mouth.

He sat up straight in the office chair and rolled it to the desk once more. After a hesitation, he opened the first ring binder to the photograph that he’d been studying when nausea had overcome him.

Still operating on a hunch, he paged with grim determination through the first book of photos. His patience was at last rewarded when he saw the third face in the second binder.

Samantha. Her eyes were taped open, her full lips slightly parted, as if she had let out a sigh of satisfaction as the shutter of the camera caught her.

This was not Samantha, of course, but Teresa, her identical twin. Prior to death, she lingered in a vegetative state, abed for months following the auto accident, and the experience diminished her beauty. So pale, Teresa nevertheless remained lovely, and in fact her suffering gave her the ethereal radiance, the fragile otherworldly beauty of a martyr ascending to sainthood in an old-master painting.

Evidently, Barghest had known Rebecca six years ago. He must have been present at Teresa’s death.

By her own account, Samantha also had been at her sister’s bedside during those final hours. Yet she never mentioned Barghest.

She rarely spoke of her lost twin. But that was understandable and in no way suspicious. Surely the loss still hurt.

She had revealed the length of Teresa’s ordeal only a few nights earlier, under the strawberry trees. Previously she had allowed Ryan to think that her sister died either in the accident or shortly thereafter.

Again, Sam’s reticence was proof of nothing more than the pain that Teresa’s death still caused her.

In the photo, the dead woman’s head rested on a pillow. With care that suggested tenderness, her golden hair had been brushed and arranged flatteringly around her face.

In contrast to the hair, the tape holding open the sightless eyes was an affront, even a violation.

As loud and irregular as Ryan’s heart had been recently, so now it was to a similar degree quiet and steady, and the house was also quiet, and the night beyond the house, as if every soul in Las Vegas in the same instant fell into a deep sleep or turned to dust, as if every wheel stopped rotating and every noisy machine lost power, as if nocturnal birds could not use their wings or find their songs, as if all crawling things were seized by paralysis between creep and slither, and an absolute stillness befell the air, allowing no breeze or draft or eddy. Time froze in tickless clocks.

Whether the hush was real or imagined, so extraordinary was the moment that Ryan had the urge to shout and shatter the silence before the world permanently petrified.

He did not cry out, however, because he sensed meaning in this unmitigated muffle, a truth insisting on discovery.

The silence seemed to well from the photo in front of Ryan, to pool up from it and flood the world, as though dead Teresa’s face had the power to still Creation and to compel Ryan’s attention. His subconscious commanded: Observe, see, discover. In this image was something of terrible importance to him, a shocking revelation that he had thus far overlooked and that might save him.

He studied her dead stare, wondering if the twists of light and shadow reflected on her eyes would reveal the room in which she had died and the people in attendance at her passing, or something else that would explain his current, mortal circumstances.

Those reflections were too small. No amount of squinting could force them to resolve into intelligible images.

His gaze traveled down her lovely cheeks, along the exquisite slopes and curves of her nose, to her generous and perfectly formed mouth.

Her parted lips issued no breath, only silence, but he half expected to hear, with his mind’s ear, a few words that would explain his hypertrophic heart and reveal his future.

At the periphery of Ryan’s vision, movement startled him.

He looked up, expecting that one of the glazed cadavers had pulled free of its armature and had come for him.

The nameless brunette stepped into the study from the hallway, and her voice broke the spell of silence. “I don’t get creeped-out easily, but this place is getting to me.”

“Me too,” he said.

He slipped Teresa’s photo out of the plastic sleeve, set it aside, and closed the ring binder.

“He’ll miss it,” the brunette warned.

“Maybe he will. I don’t care. Let him wonder.”

Ryan returned both ring binders to the bookshelf where he had found them.

In the doorway, leaning against the jamb, arms folded across her breasts, she said, “We have a tail on them. They finished dinner. Now they’re back at her apartment.”

She must have been between thirty and thirty-five, but she had the air of someone older. She radiated a self-confidence that seemed to be wisdom more than pride.

“Would you let him?” Ryan wondered.

“Let him what?”

“Touch you.”

Her eyes were not gravestone granite, after all, but castle ramparts, and only a fool would try to storm her.

She said, “I’d shoot off his pecker.”

“I believe you would.”

“It’d be a service to humanity.”

Ryan wondered, “Why does Rebecca let him?”

“Something’s wrong with her.”

“What?”

“And not just her. Half the world is in love with death.”

“Not me.”

As if in quiet accusation, the brunette glanced at the photo of Teresa on the desk.

Ryan said, “That’s just evidence.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Earlier, he had searched the desk. He returned to the drawer that contained stationery and selected a nine-by-twelve envelope, into which he slipped the photograph.

“I’m done here,” he said.

They walked the house together, turning off lights, pretending not to listen for the footfalls of corpses in their wake.

In the foyer, at the security-system panel, she said, “The alarm was engaged when I got here. I have to reset it.”

As she keyed in a code that she had somehow learned, Ryan asked, “How did you disarm it without setting it off?”

“A few small tools and years of practice.”

The tools were evidently sufficiently compact to fit in her purse, for she carried no other bag.

Outside, she said, “Stay with me,” and after passing under the weeping boughs of the melaleucas, she headed south on the public sidewalk. “I’m parked a block and a half away.”

He knew that she didn’t need him at her side for protection any more than did the hulking George Zane.

In the absence of streetlamps and in the weakness of the moon, they cast no shadows.

Here, miles from the flash of the casinos, the sky offered a desolation of stars.

Like all Mojave settlements, regardless of size and history, this one seemed to have a tenuous existence. An ancient ocean had withdrawn millennia ago, leaving a vast sea of sand, but the desert was no more eternal than the waters before it, and the city markedly more ephemeral than the desert.

“Whatever’s wrong in your life,” she said, “it’s none of my business.”

Ryan did not disagree.

“The way Wilson Mott runs his operation, I’d be fired for saying one word more than I’ve just said.”

Curious about where this might be leading, Ryan assured her, “I’ve no reason to tell him anything you say.”

After a silence, she said, “You’re a haunted man.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“I’m not surprised by that.”

Across the street, Zane sat behind the wheel of the Mercedes. They passed him and kept going.

She said, “Not ghosts. You’re haunted by your own death.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, you’re waiting for the ax to fall.”

“If I were paranoid,” he said, “I’d wonder if Wilson Mott has been investigating me.”

“I’m just good at reading people.”

With a thrum, a presence passed overhead. Looking up at broad pale wings, Ryan thought it might have been an owl.

“The way I read you,” she continued, “you can’t figure out who.”

“Who what?”

“Who’s going to kill you.”

Across the night, the monotonous song of cicadas sounded like razor blades stropping razor blades.

As they walked, she said, “When you’re trying to figure out who…you’ve got to keep in mind the roots of violence.”

He wondered if she had been a cop before she had gone to work for Mott.

“There are only five,” she said. “Lust, envy, anger, avarice, and vengeance.”

“Motives, you mean.”

Arriving at her car, she said, “It’s best to think of them as failings, not motives.”

Parking lights and the lazy engine noise of a coasting car rose behind them.

“More important than the roots,” she said, “is the taproot.”

She opened the driver’s door of the Honda and turned to stare solemnly at him.

“The taproot,” she said, “is always the killer’s ultimate and truest motivation.”

Among the numerous strange moments of the past four days, this conversation had begun to seem the strangest.

“And what is the taproot of violence?” Ryan asked.

“The hatred of truth.”

The coasting car behind them proved to be the Mercedes sedan. George Zane brought it to a stop in the street, parallel to but slightly forward of the Honda, leaving Ryan and the woman in moon haze and shadows.

She said, “In case you ever need to talk, I’m…Cathy Sienna.” She spelled the surname.

“Just this morning, you said you’d never tell me your true name.”

“I was wrong. One more thing, Mr. Perry…”

He waited.

“The hatred of truth is a vice,” she said. “From it comes pride and an enthusiasm for disorder.”

The moonlight made silver coins of her gray eyes.

She said, “Moments ago, we were in the house of a man who has a fierce enthusiasm for disorder. Be careful. It can be contagious.”

Although Cathy reached for his hand, she did not shake it, but pressed it in both of her hands, more the affectionate gesture of a friend than the good-bye of a business associate.

Before he could think of anything to say, she got into her car, closed the door, and started the engine.

Ryan stood in the street, watching her drive away. Then he got into the backseat of the Mercedes.

“Return to the hotel, sir?” Zane asked.

“Yes, please.”

In Ryan’s hands was the manila envelope that contained the photo of Teresa Reach, which he suspected might hold a clue that would save him.

To further study the photo, he needed to have it scanned at high resolution and examine it with the best image-enhancement software. He could do nothing more with it this night.

During the ride, Ryan’s thoughts repeatedly returned to Cathy Sienna, to the question of whether her concern was genuine.

In light of recent events, he wondered if her advice and further counsel would have been offered if he had not been a wealthy man.

NINETEEN

In the Mercedes, Ryan made a few phone calls. By the time he reached his hotel, he felt comfortable about trusting the manila envelope to George Zane.

Although Wilson Mott’s primary offices were in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle, he had relationships with security firms in other cities, including Las Vegas. He had been able to arrange for the digital processing of Teresa’s photograph by reliable locals and for the acquisition of the software and hardware that would allow Ryan to study it better.

By 6:30 in the morning, when the corporate Learjet flew Ryan out of Vegas, Mott’s people would have delivered the Teresa package to his hotel suite in Denver.

Having told Samantha that he had been called to Denver on business, he now intended to go there. He did not know why.

This trip would not atone for the lie that he had told her or even make it less of a lie. And at this point, he had no intention of revealing his investigation of her mother and of Spencer Barghest, which was an omission-a calculated concealment-that counted as a far greater betrayal than the lie about his destination.

Returning to his home in Newport Coast well in advance of his appointment with Dr. Samar Gupta on Tuesday was not an option. Following Lee and Kay Ting’s whispering in the kitchen, he had felt-and still would feel-under surveillance in his own house.

Las Vegas offered him nothing more than games of chance. Already he was in a game with the highest possible stakes, and neither craps nor blackjack, nor baccarat, could distract him from the knowledge that his life was on the line.

So Denver in the early morning.

As he had taken lunch in his hotel room, so he took dinner. He had no appetite, but he ate.

Not surprisingly, that night he dreamed. He might have expected cadavers, preserved or not, in his dreams, but they did not appear.

His nightmares were not of people or other bogeymen, but of landscapes and architecture, including but not limited to that city in the sea.

He walked a valley road toward a palace on a slope. The valley had once been green. Now seared grass, withered flowers, and blighted trees flanked a river in which flowed a turgid mass of black water, ashes, and debris. Palace windows once filled with golden light were strangely red, alive with capering shadows, and the closer he drew to the open door, the more terrified he became of what hideous throng might rush out of it and fall upon him.

After the valley, he appeared on the shore of a wild lake bound with black rock and trees that towered all around. The grinning moon in the black sky was a snarling moon on the black water. Poisonous waves lapped at the stones on which he stood, and something rose in the center of the lake, some behemoth beyond measuring, from which sloughed the inky water and with it the wriggling moon.

In the morning, while he showered, while he breakfasted, while he flew to Denver in the corporate jet, images from the nightmares rose frequently in his mind. He felt as though these were places he had visited years before, not in sleep but when awake, for they were too real to be figments of a dream, too detailed, too evocative, too intimately felt.

He wondered again if not only his body was failing him but also his mind. Perhaps the inadequate function of his heart resulted in diminished circulation, with detrimental consequences to the brain.

TWENTY

The hotel rated five stars. The windows of the presidential suite-the only accommodations available on short notice-looked out across a serrated skyline of glass-and-steel towers.

In the west, great forested mountains thrust toward greater clouds: Andes of cumulus congestus, on which ascended Himalayas of cumulonimbus, so the weight of the celestial architecture, if it should collapse, appeared great enough to sunder the earth below.

Waiting for Ryan in the suite’s cozy library were a computer and sufficient linked equipment to allow him to conduct an exhaustive study of the photo of dead Teresa. Beside the keyboard stood a box of cookies from Denver ’s best bakery. Wilson Mott always delivered.

The photographic-analysis software included a well-executed tutorial. Although Ryan had made a fortune from the Internet and had a gift for both software comprehension and design, he experimented most of the morning before he was comfortable with the program.

By noon, he needed a break. Having feasted on cookies, he wanted no lunch. But a pleasure drive appealed to him, and he wished he had his Ford Woodie Wagon or one of his other customized classics.

Perhaps his heart condition warranted a chauffeur, but he wanted to cruise alone. En route from Vegas, his pilot had called ahead to have the hotel book for Ryan a rental SUV to be available 24/7.

The black Cadillac Escalade had every comfort and convenience. He could cruise randomly through the city and not worry about getting hopelessly lost, because when he was ready to return to the hotel, the vehicle’s navigation system would tell him the way.

Although he had been to Denver twice before, he never ventured farther than the convention center and immediate environs. Now he wanted to see more of the city.

Sunday traffic was light. Within half an hour, he came upon a small park that occupied two or three acres at the most. It lay adjacent to an old brick church.

What inspired him to curb the Escalade and go exploring on foot were the aspens-or so he thought. In their autumn dress, the trees were a golden spectacle made more flamboyant by their contrast with the mantled sky.

The park offered no playground or war memorial, only winding brick paths strewn with fallen leaves and an occasional bench on which to sit and contemplate the glory of nature.

On this mild afternoon, the first snowfall seemed still weeks away.

While galleons of clouds sailed eastward at high altitude, the world was becalmed at ground level. Yet even in this stillness, the aspens trembled, as they always did.

Walking, he paused frequently to listen to the whisper of the trees, a sound he had always loved. The aspens were so sensitive to air movement because their leafstalks were only narrow ribbons and were set at right angles to the hanging leaf-blades.

As he rested on a bench, he realized that he could not recall when he had ever before heard aspens whispering or how he knew the design of their leafstalks was what gave them an unceasing voice.

His initial sight of the park had strummed a sympathetic chord in him. Upon first walking among the trees, he had felt an affection for them that was entirely familiar.

Now, on this bench under a canopy of shiny yellow leaves, the affection ripened into a more intense sentiment, into a tender-hearted yearning that was nostalgic in character. Inexplicably, though he had never been here before, he felt that he had sat beneath these very trees many times, in all seasons and weather.

Wood warblers, soon to migrate south, sang in the whispering trees, sweet high clear notes: swee-swee-swee-ti-ti-ti-swee.

Ryan did not know where he had learned these birds were wood warblers, but suddenly their song moved him from a curious nostalgic yearning to full-blown deja vu. Today was not his first experience of this park.

The certainty that he had been here before, not just once but often, became so electrifying that it brought him off the bench, to his feet, so pierced by a sense of unnatural forces at work that his scalp prickled and the hairs quivered on the nape of his neck, and a chill traced the contours of his spinal column with the specificity of a diligent physiology professor using a laser pointer.

Although the church had interested him only as backdrop, Ryan turned toward it with the conviction that, on some occasion now forgotten, he had been inside of the place. Earlier, he had not been near enough to the church to see its name, but somehow he knew that the denomination was Roman Catholic.

The day remained mild, yet he grew steadily colder. He slipped his hands into his jacket pockets as he crossed the park to the church.

Because they had been swept clean for the morning services, the concrete steps of St. Gemma’s were brightened by only a few aspen leaves. The last Mass of the day had been offered, and the church stood quiet now.

Hesitating at the bottom of the steps, Ryan knew the crucifix above the altar would be of carved wood, that the crown of thorns on Christ’s head would be gilded, likewise the nails in His hands and feet. Behind the cross, a gilded oval. And radiating from the oval, carved and gilded rays of holy light.

He climbed the steps.

At the door, he almost turned away.

Shadows gathered in the narthex, fewer in the nave, where daylight pressed colorfully through the stained-glass windows and where some altar lights remained aglow.

In every detail, the impressive crucifix proved to be as he had foreseen it.

Alone in the church, he stood in the center aisle, transfixed, trembling like the quaking aspens in the park.

Ryan remained certain that he had never been here before, and he was not a Catholic. Yet he was overcome by the sense of comfort that one feels in well-loved places.

This comfort did not warm him, however, and did not calm him, but compelled him to retreat.

Outside, on the steps, he needed a minute to regain control of his ragged breathing.

In the park once more, on a bench to which his wobbly legs had barely carried him, he used his cell phone to call Wilson Mott’s most private number.

After speaking with Mott, he expected to sit there for a while, because he was not yet calm or fit to drive. But the brilliance of the aspens, the black iron lampposts with crackle-glass panes, the wrought-iron bench painted glossy black, and the herringbone brick walkway filled him with yearning for a past he could not recall, indeed for a past that he had never lived.

The weirdness of it all became too much for him, and he left the park at something less than a run but more than a walk.

After Ryan entered the name of his hotel in the Escalade’s navigator, the mellifluous voice of a patient young woman guided him successfully through Denver in spite of a few missed turns.

TWENTY-ONE

In the library of the presidential suite, high above Denver, Ryan Perry worked obsessively on the digitized photo of dead Teresa.

The photographic-analysis package provided numerous tools with which he could enhance the cadaver’s eyes, enlarging and clarifying the scene reflected in those glassy surfaces. Some of the techniques could be used in combination. And when the zone of interest was so enlarged that it lost resolution, the computer was able to clone the pixels until density and definition had been restored to the image.

Nevertheless, by 7:05 Sunday evening, when Wilson Mott’s agent arrived, Ryan had not been able to make anything of the patterns of light and shadow in those optic reflections.

Earlier, just before leaving the park, when he had called Mott to request the services of a trusted and discreet phlebotomist, he had been told that the nearest such medical technician that could be tapped for the job was George Zane, who had not yet returned from Las Vegas to the security company’s offices in Los Angeles. Before signing on with Mott, Zane had been a U.S. Army Medical Corpsman, administering first aid on the battlefields of Iraq.

Now, Ryan stretched out on a bed in the master bedroom, with a towel under his arm, while Zane performed a venesection and drew 40 milliliters of blood into eight 5-milliliter vials.

“I want to be tested for every known poison,” Ryan said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Not just those that are known to cause cardiac hypertrophy.”

“We’ve located a cooperative lab right here in Denver and two blood specialists who’ll work through the night on it. You don’t want to know their fee.”

“I don’t care about their fee,” Ryan assured Zane.

One of the best things about having serious wealth was that if you knew the right service providers-like Wilson Mott-you could get what you wanted, when you wanted it. And no matter how eccentric the request, no one raised an eyebrow, and everyone treated you with the utmost respect, at least to your face.

“I want to be tested for drugs, too. Including-no, especially-for hallucinogenics and for drugs that might cause hallucinations or delusions as a side effect.”

“Yes, sir,” said Zane, setting aside the fourth vial, “Mr. Mott has informed me of all that.”

With the knots of scar tissue on his bald head, with his intense purple-black eyes, with his wide nostrils flaring wider as though the scent of blood excited him, George Zane should have been a disturbing figure. Instead, he was a calming presence.

“You’re very good with the needle, George.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Didn’t sting at all. And you have a good bedside manner.”

“Because of the army.”

“I didn’t realize they taught bedside manner in the army.”

“The battlefield teaches it. The suffering you see. You want to be gentle.”

“I never served in the military.”

“Well, in the military or not, we all go to war every day. Two more syringes, sir.”

As Zane removed the blood-filled barrel from the cannula and attached an empty one, Ryan said, “You probably think I’m some kind of paranoid.”

“No, sir. There’s evil in the world, all right. Being aware of it makes you a realist, not a paranoid.”

“The idea that someone’s poisoning me or drugging me…”

“You wouldn’t be the first. The enemy isn’t always on the other end of a gun or a bomb. Sometimes he’s very close. Sometimes he looks like us, which makes him almost invisible, and that’s when he’s most dangerous.”

Ryan had also instructed Wilson Mott to obtain a prescription sleeping drug and send it along with Zane. He wanted a medication of sufficient strength not merely to prevent the wide-eyed, twitchy-legged, mind-racing, fully-wired insomnia that made him manic enough to try to ride a shark, but one also potent enough to submerge him so deep in sleep that he would not dream.

After Zane left with the blood, Ryan ordered a room-service dinner so heavy that the consumption of it should have sedated him as effectively as a cocktail of barbiturates.

Following dinner, he consulted the dosage instructions on the pill bottle, took two capsules instead of the one recommended, and washed them down with a glass of milk.

In bed, he used the remote to surf the ocean of entertainment options offered by the satellite-TV service to which the hotel subscribed. On a classic-movie channel, he found a women-in-prison movie so magnificently tedious that perhaps he would not have needed the prescription sedative.

He slept.

A silent dark, a vague awareness of a tangled sheet, and then a quiet dark, only the rhythmic interior sounds of heart contractions and arterial rush, as black as a moonless lake, as a raven’s wings, darkness there and nothing more, merely this and nothing more…

And then a flickering dream framed in a rectangle, surrounded by blackness.

A man and woman spoke, the male voice familiar, and there was music and a sense of urgency, and gunfire.

The dream flickered because Ryan blinked his eyes, and it was framed in a rectangle because it was not a dream, not the women-in-prison movie, either, but whatever the classic-movie channel deemed classic at this hour.

Glowing numerals on the bedside clock read 2:36. He had been asleep four hours, maybe five.

He wanted more, needed more, fumbled for the remote, found it, extinguished the rectangle of colorful images, silenced the guns, silenced the music, silenced the woman, silenced William Holden.

As the remote slipped out of his slackening hand, as he sank into the solace of oblivion, he realized that the movie he had just switched off was the same one to which he had regained consciousness on Thursday morning, after the terrible attack Wednesday night that had driven him to his internist, Forry Stafford.

Waking Thursday morning on his bedroom floor, curled in the fetal position, eyes crusted shut, mouth dry and sour, he had become convinced that the unknown William Holden film on the TV had special meaning for him, that in it was a message to be deciphered, a warning about his future.

That feeling had passed as he came fully awake and recalled the seizures and the spike-sharp pain that had racked him in the night.

But now, almost four days later, the sense of pending revelation swelled once more, and Ryan thought he should struggle against the gravity that pulled him down into sleep, should rise, switch on the TV, identify the film and wring its scenes to squeeze from the story any bitter omen that it might contain.

A heavy dinner, a powerful drug, a weight of exhaustion, and a kind of cowardice influenced him, instead, to let the remaining sand grains of consciousness sift through his grasp.

He slept over ten hours and woke Monday morning with a headache that a drunk might have earned after a three-day bender.

In the shower, water pelted his skull as if every drop were a hailstone. Even low light stung his eyes, and every odor offended.

He fought this hangover with pots of coffee. He drank the first pot black, the second with cream but without sugar.

Later he ordered dry toast. Later still, a buttered English muffin. In the afternoon, he wanted a dish of vanilla ice cream.

Room service brought him one thing at a time, as he asked for it, as though he were an ill child making requests of a doting mother.

Without surcease, he worked on the computer, striving to enhance the reflections on Teresa Reach’s dead eyes and discover the meaning that he thought he would find in them. Hours after he knew that no meaning existed to be identified, he labored on those twin images.

Without this task to occupy him, he might have called the valet to have the Escalade brought from the hotel garage, and he might have driven again to the park with the aspens, if he could find it. Once in the park, he would not be able to resist St. Gemma’s, and he worried that a second visit to the church might contribute not to any resolution of this mystery, not even to any degree of clarification, but only to greater disorientation.

The many strangenesses of the past few days had initially led to bewilderment that stoked his curiosity. Bewilderment had given way to a muddy confusion that, in its persistence, was mentally and emotionally debilitating.

Monday afternoon, he finally acknowledged that nothing in Teresa’s eyes would enlighten him either as to the identity of the people who might be conspiring against him or as to their motives.

Nevertheless, he continued to feel that something about this last photograph of her was important. Spencer Barghest had no doubt held the camera; therefore, Barghest had assisted Rebecca Reach in ending Teresa’s life.

Samantha claimed to be estranged from her mother.

She is dead. To me. Rebecca’s buried in an apartment in Las Vegas. She walks and talks and breathes, but she’s dead all right.

Yet on Friday night, hardly more than forty-eight hours after making that angry declaration, she had slipped out of her apartment while Ryan napped, to meet with Barghest under the moonlit pepper tree.

Spencer Barghest was part of this, and because he seemed to be at best disturbed and at worst depraved, he was not involved because he was concerned for Ryan’s welfare. Barghest terminated Teresa, and he might be part of a scheme to terminate Ryan, which argued that Ryan’s intuitive reaction to the photograph-that it contained a key to unlocking this mystery-should not be lightly dismissed.

If the answer was not in her eyes, it might be found in another part of the photo.

His attention turned next to her mouth, which hung open. Her full lips were parted, as if the breath of life had pressed them apart to escape her.

The darkness past her lips, within her mouth, was not uniform in shade and texture, as it appeared upon a cursory look. He saw now that Teresa seemed to have something lodged in her mouth, an object just beyond her teeth, a subtle shadowy shape too geometric to be her tongue.

He enlarged her lips to fill the screen. He cloned pixels to restore definition at the greater scale.

The woman’s shapely mouth seemed to cry out to him, but the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token of the final words she may have spoken as Barghest had finished her by whatever means.

Ryan bent to this new work as obsessively as he had studied the reflections in her eyes.

At 8:40 Monday evening, as Ryan ate a Stilton-cheese sandwich with cornichons and worked at the computer, George Zane called with the results of the blood tests.

In an exhaustive analysis, the two blood specialists and their lab assistants had discovered no traces of poisons, drugs, or other problematic chemicals in the 40 milliliters that Zane had drawn from Ryan.

“They could have missed it,” Ryan said. “No one’s so good, they don’t screw up now and then.”

“Do you want me to take additional samples,” Zane asked, “and find someone new to analyze them?”

“No. Whatever it is, it’s too subtle to be detected by the standard tests. You could drain me of every drop, employ a thousand hematologists, and I’d learn nothing more than I know now.”

Ryan flushed the sedatives down the toilet and ordered a pot of coffee from room service.

He felt that time was running out for him, and not primarily because his appointment with Dr. Samar Gupta, to receive the results of the myocardial biopsy, was little more than eighteen hours away.

As the evening waned and then on past midnight, the contours of Teresa Reach’s lips and teeth and oral cavity became his universe, so seductive and all-consuming that he never went to bed, but fell asleep in the office chair, in front of the computer, sometime after three o’clock in the morning, his search for truth still unrewarded.

From Denver to John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, cosseted in the corporate Learjet, Ryan from time to time studied the photograph without benefit of computer enhancement, wondering if the clue that he sought might be hidden in Teresa’s hair, in the delicate shell of her one revealed ear, or even in the folds of the pillow that was visible to one side of her face…

The plane touched down and taxied to the terminal less than an hour before Ryan’s appointment with the cardiologist.

Rather than compromise his secrets by having Lee Ting meet him at the airport with a car, Ryan had arranged for a limousine company to provide transport. They sent a superstretch white Cadillac and a courteous driver who did not feel that conversation was part of his job description.

In the limo, all the way to Dr. Gupta’s office, Ryan stared at Teresa’s dead face.

He had slid into a state of mind that was not characteristic of him. The confusion that had overcome him in Denver had thickened to such a degree that he was no longer merely confused but confounded, his mental faculties overwhelmed by what he had learned, by what he had experienced, and by his failure to make sense of any of it.

Being confounded for the first time in his life would have been sufficient to sap his spirit, but he felt as well a quiet resignation building in him, which was worse because he had not thought himself capable of any form or degree of surrender.

His parents’ selfishness and their indifference to him had only inspired him to achieve, not only later in life but also as a child, when he had determined never to be like them.

In business, he had seen every setback as an opportunity, had viewed every triumph as a challenge to achieve even more. He never surrendered, never capitulated, never so much as yielded except when he ceded his position on one issue in order to gain a much greater advantage on another.

He would have liked to believe that this growing resignation harbored in it an element of fortitude that would stave off despair. But fortitude was endurance animated by courage, and with every turn of the limousine’s wheels, he felt more isolated from his previous sources of strength and less able to summon courage.

He began to wonder if his every act these past five days-the entire investigation into Rebecca Reach and Barghest, all of it-had been only a desperate attempt to distract himself from considering the news that he was likely to receive at the appointment with the cardiologist this afternoon. Loath to accept a mortal diagnosis about which he could do nothing, perhaps he had busied himself seeking a bogeyman whom he could more readily engage in battle.

When they arrived at the medical building in which Dr. Gupta had his offices, the limo curbed in a no-parking zone.

Ryan slid Teresa’s photograph into the manila envelope.

The chauffeur got out from behind the wheel and stepped to the rear of the car to open Ryan’s door.

In the grip of unreason, Ryan took the dead woman’s photograph with him, not to show it to the cardiologist, merely to be able to hold it, as if it were a talisman, the power of which might prevent him from descending the final steep step between resignation and despair.

TWENTY-TWO

Cardiomyopathy,” said Dr. Gupta.

He sat with Ryan not in an examination room but in his private office, as though he felt the need to deliver this news in a less clinical, more reassuring environment.

On a shelf behind the desk, in silver frames, were photos of the physician’s family. His wife was lovely. They had two daughters and a son, all good-looking kids, and a golden retriever.

Also on the shelf stood a model of a sailboat, and two photos of the Gupta family-dog included-taken aboard the real vessel.

Listening to his diagnosis, Ryan Perry envied the cardiologist for his family and for the evident richness of his life, which was a blessing quite different from-and superior to-riches.

“A disease of the heart muscle,” said Samar Gupta. “It causes a reduction in the force of contractions, a decrease in the efficiency of circulation.”

Ryan wanted to ask about cause, the possibility of poisoning that Forry Stafford had mentioned, but he waited.

Dr. Gupta’s diction was as precise as ever, but the musicality of his voice was tempered now by a compassion that imposed on him a measured solemnity: “Cardiomyopathies fall into three main groups-restrictive cardiomyopathy, dilated, and hypertrophic.”

“Hypertrophic. That’s the kind I’ve got.”

“Yes. An abnormality of heart-muscle fibers. The heart cells themselves do not function properly.”

“And the cause?”

“Usually it’s an inherited disorder.”

“My parents don’t have it.”

“Perhaps a grandparent. Sometimes there are no symptoms, just sudden death, and it’s simply labeled a heart attack.”

Ryan’s paternal grandfather had died of a sudden heart attack at forty-six.

“What’s the treatment?”

The cardiologist seemed embarrassed to say, “It is incurable,” as if medical science’s failure to identify a cure was his personal failure.

Ryan focused on the golden retriever in the family portrait. He had long wanted a dog. He’d been too busy to make room for one in his life. There had always seemed to be plenty of time for a dog in the years to come.

“We can only treat the symptoms with diuretic drugs to control heart failure,” said Dr. Gupta, “and antiarrhythmic drugs to control abnormal rhythms.”

“I surf. I lead a fairly vigorous life. What restrictions are there going to be, how will things change?”

The cardiologist’s hesitation caused Ryan to look away from the golden retriever.

“The primary issue,” said Dr. Gupta, “is not how restricted your life will be…but how long.”

In the physician’s gentle eyes, as in a fortuneteller’s sphere, Ryan saw his future.

“Your condition is not static, Ryan. The symptoms…they can be ameliorated, but the underlying disease is not arrestable. Heart function will steadily deteriorate.”

“How long?”

Dr. Gupta looked away from Ryan, at another photo of his family that stood on his desk. “I think…no more than a year.”

Wednesday night, writhing in pain on the floor of his bedroom, Ryan had expected to die right there, right then. In the days since, he had anticipated being felled at any moment.

A year should, therefore, have seemed like a gift, but instead the prognosis was a psychic guillotine that cut through him, and his anguish was so intense that he could not speak.

“I could tell you about advances in adult stem-cell research,” said Dr. Gupta, “but there’s nothing coming within a year, perhaps nothing ever, and you aren’t a man who would take comfort in such wishful thinking. So there is only a transplant.”

Ryan looked up from the envelope containing Teresa’s photograph, which he gripped with both hands, as if it were a buoy keeping him afloat. “Heart transplant?”

“We’ll register you with UNOS immediately.”

“UNOS?”

“The United Network for Organ Sharing. They ensure equitable allocation of organs.”

“Then…there’s a chance.”

“Frequently the results of a heart transplant are quite good. I have a patient who has lived the fullest life for fifteen years with a new heart, and she’s still going strong.”

Instead of ameliorating Ryan’s anguish, the possibility that he might escape death through a transplant rendered him even more emotional.

He did not want to be reduced to tears in front of Samar Gupta, and in searching for something to say that would help him stave off that embarrassment, he returned to the central theme of the past few days: “Could I have been poisoned?”

Dr. Gupta frowned. “Surely not.”

“Dr. Stafford did mention it as a possible cause of an enlarged heart. Though he also did…dismiss it.”

“But in studying the biopsied tissue,” the cardiologist said, “I feel quite sure your case is familial.”

“Familial?”

“Inherited. The cell characteristics are classic for a familial attribution.”

“You’re quite sure,” Ryan said, “but not certain?”

“Perhaps nothing in life is certain, Ryan.”

Having successfully repressed his tears, Ryan smiled thinly and said, “Except death and taxes.”

Dr. Gupta received Ryan’s smile with gratitude, and smiled himself. “Although at least the IRS will give you your day in court.”

TWENTY-THREE

In the days following his appointment with Dr. Gupta, Ryan surrendered to fits of denial during which he spent hours obsessively searching medical sites on the Internet for the latest developments in the treatment of cardiomyopathy.

When he found no scientific news dramatic enough to lift his spirits, he switched to alternative-medicine sites. Eagerly he sought stories about patients cured with the bark of an exotic Brazilian tree or with a tea brewed from the leaves of a plant found only deep in the jungles of Thailand.

Again and again, he read a thick packet of material about heart transplants, provided by Dr. Gupta. On each reading, his admiration for the skill of contemporary surgeons gave way to frustration over the imbalance between the number of patients in need of transplants and the number of organ donors, and to impatience with the system established by the health-care bureaucracy that was authorized to address that imbalance.

As he struggled to adjust to his radically altered future-or lack of one-Ryan avoided Samantha by pretending still to be in Denver on business.

Before seeing her, he wanted to live with his diagnosis long enough to begin to accept it. He intended to be in control of himself when he shared the news with her, because regardless of what happened between them, the meeting would be perhaps the most important of his life. He needed to be sufficiently composed to remain alert to every nuance of what she said, to every subtlety of her expressions and her body language.

The photo of Teresa continued to intrigue Ryan.

On the flight home from Colorado, he had brought the photo-analysis workstation that Wilson Mott established for him in the Denver hotel. It now stood on the desk in the retreat off the master bedroom.

When he could not ascertain if in fact a foreign object was lodged in the dead woman’s mouth, he next divided the photograph into eighty one-inch squares, enhanced them one by one, and analyzed them exhaustively. Some revelatory item might be snagged in her lustrous golden hair or half folded in a pillow crease. Or perhaps in a way impossible to fully imagine, a faint mark on her face might provide a clue that linked Teresa’s death to Ryan’s current crisis.

After he had studied twenty squares over two days, however, he began to feel that he was engaged in a foolish quest, that the photo had electrified him solely because Teresa was Samantha’s twin, which made seeing her in this condition seem like a clairvoyant glimpse of Sam’s death, therefore a profound shock.

Eventually he switched off the computer, intending to abandon his analysis of the portrait.

Although the digitized photo on the monitor no longer held any fascination for him, though he was weary of it, the original eight-by-ten glossy still riveted him when he extracted it once more from the manila envelope. He was pierced again, as he had been pierced in Spencer Barghest’s study, by the conviction that with this photograph he was trembling on the brink of a discovery that would do more than explain all of the recent weirdness, that would also and literally save him.

In business, over the years, every hunch proved worth pursuing. But his recent moments of irrational speculation, his newly developed tendency to paranoia, might be the consequences of the compromised efficiency of his heart, the diminished oxygenation of his blood. In that case, his intuition could no longer be trusted, nor could he be sure that his thinking would always remain as clear as it had once been.

He did not for a moment dwell on the unfairness of receiving a death sentence at thirty-four. In this case, as with any negative turn in life, you could whine or you could act. Action offered the only hope.

Unlike in business, where courses of action in an emergency were constrained only by the sharpness of your wits and your willingness to work hard, options in a health crisis were more limited. But Ryan refused to be a victim. If a way existed to escape the grim prognosis that bound him, he would discover how to slip the knot and cast off the ropes.

While he adjusted to his condition and rapidly educated himself about organ-sharing protocols and transplant-surgery techniques, he expected to be felled momentarily by another sudden seizure, but he wasn’t stricken. Dr. Gupta had prescribed three medications that apparently, for the time being, were repressing the symptoms that had recently plagued him.

Through Thursday, he remained in the master suite and did not once venture elsewhere in the house. He didn’t want to see anyone, because he worried that during even innocent conversation, he might imply-or someone might infer-that he had a serious health problem. He did not want a hint of his condition to reach Samantha before he was ready to break the news to her.

On Kay Ting’s voice mail, he recited a list of meals and snacks that he would prefer and the times at which he would like to receive them. These deliveries were made by food-service cart and left in the elevator alcove outside the master suite.

Sometimes, when he fell into a hypercreative flow state while writing a piece of software, Ryan passed days like a hermit, living in his pajamas and shaving only when his beard stubble began to itch. Therefore, this regimen would not strike the household staff as peculiar.

He didn’t worry much that what he ate and drank might be laced with poison or with hallucinogenic drugs. Since suspicion had led him to Rebecca Reach and then to Spencer Barghest in the house of the modern-day mummies, the Tings and other household employees seemed to be the least likely of the people in his life to be conspiring against him.

Besides, the damage to his heart had already been done. The poisoner, if one existed, would achieve nothing by administering superfluous doses but would risk revealing his identity.

The dreams of sunken cities, lonely lakes, and demon-populated palaces no longer troubled Ryan’s sleep. He heard no unexplainable tapping, no moth or bird or gloved hand rapping at any window, wall, or chamber door.

Perhaps receiving a precise diagnosis and a sobering prognosis had focused him so entirely on a real threat that his mind no longer needed to expend nervous energy on imaginary menaces, and in fact could not afford to do so if he were to concentrate on surviving until a heart became available for transplantation.

By Friday, he was prepared to share his dire news with Samantha. He called her to say that he was home from Denver, and that he hoped to see her for dinner.

“What if we try that new restaurant you were so hot about last week,” she suggested.

“These have been a busy few days, Sam. I’d rather we had a quiet evening, just us. Is your place okay?”

“I’m all cooked out, Dotcom. You bring deli, and it’s a deal.”

“See you at five-thirty,” he said, and hung up.

He considered bringing as well the death photo of Teresa, in case the evening took a turn that required cold questions and hard answers.

After looking once more at the dead woman’s portrait, Ryan decided that even if reason arose to be more suspicious of Samantha than he had yet allowed himself to be, using this picture to shake her confidence would constitute a cruelty of which he was not capable.

He returned the photo to the envelope, which he stowed in a desk drawer.

TWENTY-FOUR

In silk slippers and a blue-and-gold kimono, Samantha was so much lovelier than Ryan remembered her that he felt at once disarmed, and knifed by desire.

He had recently spent so much time staring at her lost twin, whose looks were weathered by suffering, that his memory of her exceptional face had been clouded.

As soon as Ryan put the deli bags on the kitchen counter, Sam came into his arms. She would have kissed him straightaway into the bedroom; and he almost allowed himself to be led there.

Crazily, in memory, he heard the voice of the young woman who spoke for the navigation system in the Cadillac Escalade, leading him back to his Denver hotel and away from the park full of aspens. This bizarre association lowered the flame of his desire, and he regained control of himself.

“I’m starving,” he said.

“You’re kidding.”

“Totally starving.”

“You must be.”

“Look,” he said, “corned beef sandwiches.”

“I really thought this kimono made me irresistible.”

“With that cheese you like and the special mustard.”

“Next time I’ll wear corned beef and cheese.”

“And the special mustard,” he said.

“With pickles for earrings.”

“That’s one fashion risk too many. Look, pepper slaw and potato salad and that three-bean-and-peppers-and-celery dish, whatever they call it.”

“Pepper slaw would have been enough. What’s this-custard cake?”

“And then, here, those fabulous cookies.”

“What’re you fattening me up for?”

“I just can’t control myself in that deli. I shouldn’t be allowed to go in there without a chaperone.”

They transferred everything from bags and plastic containers to dishes and bowls, and then carried the feast to the table on the deck.

“I’m surprised you didn’t bring a keg of beer,” she said.

“You don’t drink beer.”

“I don’t eat eight pounds of deli at one sitting, either, but that didn’t stop you.”

“I brought wine,” he said, pointing to the bottle that he had left on the table on arrival, before he’d gone into the kitchen. “An excellent Meritage.”

“I’ll get glasses.”

After he poured, before they sat at the table, they clinked wine-glasses, and a note as sweet as that from a silver bell rang through the surrounding pepper tree.

They sipped, they kissed, they sat, and Ryan was so instantly comfortable with her that he knew, whether this Sam was a lie or not, he loved her, and he would continue to love her even if there was another Sam who was a conniving bitch.

“It’s been a whole week,” she said.

If it turned out that he had been diagnosed with a bad ticker and this night discovered he was in love with Ms. Jekyll in spite of Ms. Hyde, it would perhaps be the most eventful week of his life.

A web of shadows and late sunshine seemed not to overlay them but instead to entwine them, as if they were embedded in it and it in them, a matrix of light and dark, known and unknown, a warp and woof of mystery from which their future would take shape.

“Why did we let a whole week go by?” she wondered.

He said, “The novel’s going especially well, isn’t it?”

“Good. I’ve had several good days in a row. How did you know?”

Ryan had no intention of telling her that when she was swept up in her writing, she thought less about his proposal of marriage, and that when marriage was not on her mind, she was less chaste than when it was.

Instead, he said, “Your eyes are shining with excitement, and your voice is full of delight.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re here.”

“No. If you were that glad to see me, you’d be wearing corned beef and cheese.”

“Okay, the book. Hard to explain. But text and subtext are coming together in ways I never could have anticipated.”

“That is exciting.”

“Well, it is for me.”

“How are you doing with the past participles?”

“I’ve got them under control.”

“And the semicolons, the gerunds, the whole who-whom thing?”

“If this wine weren’t so good, I’d pour it over your head.”

“Which is why I buy only the best. Self-defense.”

Quick footsteps ascended the stairs from the courtyard.

Ryan turned in time to see the ice-crown of white hair that, in the moonlight one week previous, had identified the tall man in the yard, conferring with Samantha, as Spencer Barghest.

Without the moon, the identification did not hold. This man was Barghest’s body type, but he was a decade younger than Dr. Death, in his forties, and he lacked the rubbery facial features of a stand-up comic behind which Barghest hid.

“Oh,” he said upon seeing them at the table, halting one step below the deck. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt.”

“Kevin,” she said, “please join us. I’ll get another glass.”

“No, no. Really. I only have a moment anyway. I’ve got to be off to the hospital, evening visiting hours.”

As Ryan rose from his chair, Samantha said, “Have you guys met?”

When Ryan regretted that they had not, Samantha introduced him to Kevin Spurlock, the son of Miriam Spurlock, who owned the house that came with the garage above which Sam lived.

“How is your mom?” Samantha asked.

“She’s doing well. Really well.”

For Ryan’s benefit, Samantha said, “Miriam had a very bad attack of angina a week ago-in fact a week ago this evening.”

“She was in a restaurant,” Kevin said. “Paramedics rushed her to a hospital. The worst for her was making a scene in a public place. She was mortified.”

“Heart attack?” Ryan asked.

“No, thank God. But tests revealed blocked arteries.”

“Critically blocked,” Samantha said. “The next morning, she had a quadruple bypass.”

“She loved your flowers,” Kevin told Samantha. “Calla lilies-they’re her favorite.”

“I’ll fill her bedroom with them when she gets home.”

After Kevin had gone, Samantha told a few stories about Miriam, one of which Ryan had heard before. The landlady was something of an eccentric, although unfailingly sweet and kind.

A week earlier, when Ryan thought he’d caught Samantha in a furtive conversation with Spencer Barghest, she evidently had been receiving the news about Miriam Spurlock’s hospitalization.

Seeing a light in the apartment, Kevin must have come to the door. The knock failed to stir Ryan from a postcoital nap. To avoid waking him, Sam had gone outside to talk with her landlady’s son.

Inspired by a paranoid interpretation of this innocent meeting, Ryan had flown to Las Vegas the following morning, seeking proof of a nonexistent conspiracy.

Now Rebecca Reach’s get-rich-quick books seemed to be evidence of nothing worse than her gullibility and wishful thinking.

The collection of magazines containing articles by Sam proved only that, estranged from her daughter, Rebecca nonetheless remained proud of her.

Spencer Barghest might be perverse, even depraved, and Rebecca might be a terrible judge of men, less than intellectually keen, and morally adrift-but neither she nor her corpse-infatuated lover was scheming against Ryan.

Samantha had never mentioned either that she had met Barghest or that he had been present when her sister, Teresa, had been forced on from this world.

In retrospect, however, her silence on the subject most likely indicated only embarrassment. No one would be quick to reveal that her mother slept with a creepy nihilist who lived with cadavers that he claimed were art.

Following the episode on the surfboard and then the terrifying seizure that same night, which had sent him to Forry Stafford, Ryan had obsessed on one word uttered by the internist-poisoning-to avoid confronting the truth that his body was failing him. He needed instead to identify an external enemy that would be easier to defeat than a disease or a genetic abnormality.

In his desperation, he had retreated from the logic with which he had previously coped with every problem of business and of life. He abandoned reason for unreason.

Forced by Kevin Spurlock’s visit to acknowledge his weakness and his error, Ryan was mortified. Hopeful that the wine would smooth the edges off his humiliation, he poured a second glass.

He was grateful for the pepper-tree patterns of fading sunlight and swelling shadow because they partially masked him. He hoped that at least this once, Sam might find his face more difficult to read than Dr. Seuss.

After a third little story about Miriam, Samantha fetched four votive candles from the kitchen. She arranged them on the table.

As her face brightened in the glow of the butane match and her gaze traveled wick to wick, Ryan said, “I love you,” and felt like a weasel, although like a weasel in rehab.

TWENTY-FIVE

With the moon still tethered to the eastern horizon but straining higher, with the giant pepper tree occluding most of the eternally receding stars, the time to talk of death had come.

After dinner, with the table clear except for wine and candles, Ryan held Samantha’s left hand and said, “I’ve been happy every moment we’ve been together.”

“Sounds like the next word is going to be but, in which case these slippers aren’t adequate ass-kicking shoes.”

He would not mention his delusional adventure, his fear that he had been poisoned. If he died within a year, he wanted Sam to remember him as a better man than he actually had been.

Because Sam took life the same way that she took the sea when surfing-on her terms but with respect for its unpredictable nature, boldly and without fear-Ryan explained his situation succinctly and directly. He neither made a tragic opera of his news nor pretended that it was a light opera certain to end in flags and flourishes and sparkling arpeggios of harp strings.

Her hand tightened around his, as if she would hold him to this world. Tears pooled in her eyes, shimmered with her effort to retain them, and the shimmering caused the candle flames to quiver more in reflection than they did in the cut-glass cups that held them.

She understood that delivering this news was as hard for him as hearing it was devastating to her. Two things they admired in each other were self-sufficiency and a clear-eyed recognition that life was a struggle requiring optimism and confidence.

Grateful that she did not lose control and weep, pleased that she remained attentive instead of interrupting him with questions, Ryan was also moved by Samantha’s effort to repress her tears and to stay strong.

The intensity of her heart’s response could not be mistaken, for her pulse so strengthened that it grew visible in her slender throat, and quickened. The kimono did not conceal the tremors that shook her body, but instead, even in candlelight, the bells of the sleeves and every slack fold of the lustrous silk made visible her shivering as clearly as the air conveyed his voice.

When Ryan finished, Sam breathed deeply twice, shifted her gaze from his eyes to their entwined hands, and chose to confront the essence of the terror with her first question.

“What’s the likelihood you’ll get a new heart?”

“Four thousand Americans a year need a transplant. Only about two thousand donor hearts become available.”

“Fifty-fifty then,” she said.

“Not that good. The donor’s heart has to be compatible with my immune system. There has to be a match to minimize the chance my body will reject it.”

“What’s the likelihood of a match?”

“I have the most common blood type. That’s good. But there are other criteria. And even if they’re all met, the heart will go to someone higher on the waiting list if he’s a match as well.”

“Are you already on the list?”

“Provisionally. Next week I’ll undergo psychological testing. It all depends on that.”

“Why?”

“They try to detect social and behavioral factors that would interfere with recovery.”

“You mean…like alcoholism?”

“Alcoholism, smoking, attitudinal problems that would make me less likely than some other patient to comply with medications and make lifestyle changes.”

Looking up from their hands, avoiding his eyes, Sam stared at the four candles as if the future might be read in the configurations of their flames. “Intelligence must be something they’re looking for. A smart patient should be a better patient.”

“Maybe.”

“That’s in your favor. What else? What’s the bright side?”

“I’m young and otherwise in good health. If I had multiple organ problems, if I had diabetes, I wouldn’t be an ideal candidate.”

Drawing one candle close, Samantha first gave the flame a breath to grow on, then blew it out. “What else? I want more bright side.”

“I don’t need insurance-company approval. I can pay out of pocket.”

As a pale ribbon of smoke unraveled from the briefly sputtering black wick, Samantha drew a second candle close to her and breathed darkness upon it, as well.

Ryan said, “Sometimes there’s a distance problem. Once a donor is certified brain-dead and surgeons remove his heart, they can keep it cooled to forty degrees in saline solution-but only six hours.”

“So the surgical team-what?-looks for a recipient within a certain radius?”

“In my case, they don’t have to bring it to me. I can go to them by Learjet, while they keep the donor alive on machines.”

She dipped a thumb and forefinger in the last of her wine and pinched out the flame on the third candle.

“The five-year-survival rate for a transplant is slowly but surely creeping toward seventy percent,” he said.

Without wetting her fingers again, Sam extinguished the final flame with a pinch, and hissed as if she felt its heat, but also as if she wanted to feel it.

The kitchen door was closed, and the curtained window poured no light onto the deck.

“If I make five years, then my chances of making five more are good. And so much is happening in medicine. Each year. So much.”

Although the night was not absolutely black, it should have given cover to Samantha. Yet on her face, the quiet grief that she could no longer repress glistered faintly, as though her tears contained a phosphoric salt.

Pushing her chair back from the table, rising, still holding his hand, she said, “Come lie in bed with me.”

He got to his feet.

“Just lie with me,” she said, “and hold me.”

TWENTY-SIX

In bed, lying clothed atop the covers, Samantha rested her head on Ryan’s chest, cuddled into him, his right arm around her.

Exhaustion nearly immobilized him. He felt weighed down and wrung out.

They had endured a rite of passage in their relationship, the acknowledgment that even as young as they were, Death was a presence at their dance, their life together finite.

Like him, she probably had much she wanted to say but no energy to say it and, at the moment, possessed no words adequate to express her thoughts.

They dozed but did not sleep deeply, changed positions but held fast to each other.

When at last she spoke again, Samantha’s voice was small and lacked her usual spirit. “I’m afraid.”

“Me too. That’s okay. They’ll match me to a donor. I’ll get a heart.”

“I know you will,” she said.

“I will.”

“You will if anyone will. But you’ve got to be careful, Ryan.”

“I’ll do everything the doctors say.”

“You especially. You, being you, have to be careful.”

“I won’t try riding any sharks.”

“You’ve got to let it happen however it will.”

“It’ll happen.”

“I’m afraid.”

“I won’t just fade away,” he said. “That’s not me. You know that’s not me.”

“I’m afraid for you,” she said.

“I’ll handle it, Sam.”

“Don’t handle it. Just let it develop.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m not afraid.”

“Sometimes it’s good to be afraid,” she said. “It keeps you clear and squared away.”

Much later, he said, “Marry me.” She did not reply, but he was sure that she was awake. “I know you’re there.”

“Yeah. I’m here.”

“So marry me.”

“It’ll look like I married you because you’re dying.”

“I’m not going to die.”

“Everyone’ll think I married you for your money.”

“I don’t care what they think. I never have. Why should I now?”

“I love you. I’ll stay with you through this if you just let it happen. Every step of the way through all of it, but you have to do what Dr. Gupta says.”

“He’s my doctor. Of course I’ll do what he says.”

“I know you. I know you so well. I so much want you to be right…to be all right at the end of this.”

“Then marry me.”

“I’ll marry you when it’s over, when everything is right.”

“After the transplant, you’ll marry me?”

“If you relax. Just relax and accept and let this thing happen like it should.”

“Then you’re my reward,” he said.

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

He said, “You’re all I want, Sam.”

“It’s got to be right.”

“We are right. We’re perfect together.”

“We are, we really are, day to day,” she agreed.

“So there you go.”

“So if you’ll just let this happen the way it will, just relax and go with it the way it wants to happen, then I’ll know we’ll also be right not just day to day, but year after year.”

“Okay. I can chill out. Is that what you want?”

“You’ve got to be so careful, Dotcom.”

“Just watch me chill.”

“So very careful. I’ll be there all the way, but you have to listen to me.”

“Yes, dear.”

“I’m serious. You listen to me.”

“I will.”

“You listen to me.”

“I’m listening.”

Clinging tightly to him, Samantha said, “Oh, God, I’m so afraid.”

Dozing, they eased apart. Parting, they woke. Waking, they clung again to each other. That was the rhythm of their night.

At dawn, she woke once more to a separation, but felt for him and found him with an urgency that suggested she expected him to be gone. Stirred from sleep by her search and her touch, he held her close, but closeness was no longer quite enough.

Their lovemaking was different from any Ryan had known, rich with desire for a perfect union, yet without lust, giving without taking, receiving without wanting. Tender, selfless, almost innocent, this was a sweet celebration of life, but more than a celebration, it was a commemoration of all they had been to each other to this point in time, to this fulcrum of their lives, and it was a solemnization of a commitment to be two in one henceforth, to be as one, always one, one forever.

Even after Ryan had received a virtual death sentence from his cardiologist, such a moment of beauty and joy was possible, which not only gave him hope but also stropped a sharper edge on his determination to live.

This consummation at dawn was his high tide, his lifetime-best surf, a perfect set of double overhead swells, and it was not in his nature to imagine that what came thereafter would be not more of the same and soon a new life with a new healthy heart, but instead error, disorder, terror, anguish, and loss.

The storm.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Ryan sailed through the psychological testing and was added to the heart-recipient list of the United Network for Organ Sharing.

Following the diagnosis of cardiomyopathy and his revelation of his condition to Samantha, he was spared the dreams that had plagued him for a week. The city in the sea, the lake of black water, and the haunted palace had been deleted from his nightly itinerary.

No other dreams arose to trouble him. He slept well each night and woke rested or at least rested enough.

In lonely moments, he no longer heard the curious rapping that-at windows, at doors, in bathroom plumbing, and from a plasma TV-had insisted upon his attention.

His sense of being watched, of being the object of a sinister conspiracy, blew away with the dreams and with the phantom knocker. A fresh air came into his life, and cleared from his head the stale miasma of unreason as if he had merely been suffering from a pollen allergy.

He experienced no further episodes of deja vu. Indeed, he suspected that if he returned to Denver and located the small park with the aspens, that place-and the church adjacent to it-would not affect him as it had before.

As for knowing, before he saw it, what the crucifix would look like above the altar at St. Gemma’s…

Over the years, he had been inside a few Catholic churches, attending weddings and funerals. He didn’t remember any of those altars, but he assumed that perhaps a crucifix in one Roman church was much like that in another. Uniformity might even be required. He must have known what he would find in St. Gemma’s only because he had seen the identical crucifix-or one nearly like it-at one of those weddings or funerals.

He attributed the calm and clarity that purged his paranoia to the medications that Dr. Gupta prescribed, including a diuretic to control heart failure and an antiarrhythmic drug to correct abnormal heart rhythms. His blood was better oxygenated now than it had been, and toxins once dangerously retained were being flushed from his system more efficiently.

Irrationally, he had feared that a scheming poisoner, a modern-day Medici, might be among his household employees. Ironically, the only poisoner had been the very heart within his breast, which by its diminished function had clouded his mind and fostered his delusions, or so he concluded.

Through October and November, Ryan’s greatest problem proved to be impatience. As others awaiting transplants received their hearts or perished, he moved up the list, but not fast enough.

He remained acutely aware that Samar Gupta had given him at most one year to live. A sixth of that year had passed.

When he saw TV news stories about traffic accidents involving fatalities, he wondered if the deceased had signed organ-donor cards when getting their driver’s licenses. Sometimes the knowledge that most people did not donate would inspire an angry rant. This was not fair to those against whom he railed, because during all the years that he’d been in good health, he never signed such a card, either.

Now enlightened, through his attorney he arranged to donate what organs, if any, might be of use to others after his body succumbed to the ravages of cardiomyopathy or, alternately, if he received a transplant but died anyway.

By December, Dr. Gupta had to adjust Ryan’s drugs and add two more medications to his regimen in order to prevent the return of the frightening and debilitating symptoms.

The cardiologist used arcane medical terminology to avoid words like deterioration. But Ryan had no doubt that his condition was deteriorating.

He did not feel much different from the way he had felt in September, except that he tired more easily now, and he slept longer than he had in those days.

When he looked in a mirror, he noticed only small changes. A slight bloat. Sometimes a persistent unhealthy flush in his cheeks, at other times a gray-blue paleness of the skin under his eyes.

He became impatient not only with his progress up the waiting list but also with Samantha. Sometimes she tested his forbearance.

For one thing, he felt that she had too much confidence in the organization that compiled the list and selected the recipients.

If Ryan had managed his business with the kind of unwarranted assumptions and the tolerance for bureaucratic inertia that he saw in this particular medical community, he would not have become a wealthy man. Since lives were at stake here, he argued that these gatekeepers should be more-not less-efficient than he had been while building a social-networking empire on the Internet.

She would listen to little complaining on the subject before reminding him that he had promised to weather this waiting period with a relaxed attitude. He had pledged not to try to handle what in truth he could not control, but to let it unfold as it would.

“Dotcom, you worry me,” she told him now. “This restlessness, these spells of anger. This isn’t good. It doesn’t help you. You’re wound too tight.”

Week by week, Ryan developed more exotic strategies to survive, investigating all manner of alternative-medicine treatments that might supplement what any cardiologist could do for him, everything from rare substances obtained from the spores of rain-forest ferns to psychic healing.

With sympathy, reason, and humor, Samantha provided a reality check to each treatment scheme that he considered adopting. Although he knew she was right, sometimes her acerbic humor seemed to be cold sarcasm, her reason mere pessimism, and her sweet sympathy insincere.

Ryan suspected that his sour moods and his frequent spells of restlessness and agitation were caused by his medications. A review of the side effects listed for each drug confirmed his suspicion.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” he told her more than once. “It’s these damn drugs. I’m not myself. Next thing, I’ll be growing hair on my palms and howling at the moon.”

He knew that he was exhausting her, that her work on the novel had come almost to a halt. He began to give her more time to herself, though she protested that she would be there for him all day, every day, until he was restored to full health, with a new heart.

On December 12, they had dinner in a restaurant where white tablecloths, Limoges china, crystal, and waiters in white jackets set both a mood and a standard.

This wasn’t one of those Newport Beach high-end meat markets that layered on the style but catered to upscale singles who chose their dinner companions from the opportunities at the bar. Here the clientele was older, quieter, with at least a veneer of class, often with that old-money charm and grace that made even true class seem somewhat tacky by comparison.

Between the appetizers and the entrees, Ryan told Samantha about Dr. Dougal Hobb, a prominent cardiologist and cardiovascular surgeon with offices in Beverly Hills.

“I think I might switch to him,” he said.

Surprised, she asked, “What’s wrong with Dr. Gupta?”

“Nothing. He’s fine. He’s all right. But Dr. Hobb is so highly regarded. He’s really at the top of his profession.”

“Will it affect your position on the waiting list?”

“No. Not at all.”

“What does Forry Stafford say?”

“I haven’t discussed it with him.”

“Why not? He recommended Dr. Gupta.”

In any restaurant, he and Samantha usually preferred a table in a corner, to allow them greater privacy, but on this occasion they sat at the center of the establishment. The elegant room sparkled, a treat for the eyes, and it lay all around them.

“I will call Forry,” Ryan said. “I just haven’t yet.”

“Dotcom, is this just change for the sake of change, just more restlessness?”

“No. I’ve given this a lot of thought.”

Assisted by a busboy, their waiter arrived with the entrees and presented each dish with sufficient flourishes to confirm the excellence of the service without descending to showiness.

As they began to eat, Ryan changed the subject. “You’re so lovely tonight. Everyone is taken with you, the center of attention.”

“Well, we are at the center of the room, you’ll notice. And I suspect most of these people know who you are, which makes me very much the supporting act.”

She let him lead her down conversational byways, but in time she returned to Hobb. “Before you leave Dr. Gupta, talk to Forry.”

“I will. But they don’t get better than Dougal Hobb. I even had a complete background done on him.”

“Background?”

“By an extremely dependable security firm. To see if he’s had any malpractice suits filed against him, personal problems of any kind.”

Her blue-green eyes did not darken, but her mood underwent a tidal change. “You had a private detective scope him out?”

“It’s my life on the line, Sam. I want to be sure I’m in the best possible hands.”

“Forry is your friend. He sent you to the best. He wants the best for you.”

“Dr. Hobb has never had a complaint lodged against him, let alone a legal action.”

“Has Dr. Gupta?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sure he hasn’t.”

“I don’t know. But listen, Dr. Hobb’s private life is without a stain, his finances are in perfect order, his marriage is rock-solid, his-”

Putting down her knife and fork, she said, “You’re scaring me.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Why?”

“Can’t you hear yourself? You’re trying to handle this, take charge, but it’s fundamentally not yours to take charge of.”

He answered her concern with a sheepish look. “Be to do. It’s not just the cute name of a company. It’s a life philosophy. Taking control is a hard habit to break.”

“And trusting people is a difficult habit to establish, Ryan, not least of all for people like you and me, considering where we come from.”

“You’re right. All right. I know.”

“We can shape our fates,” she said, “but we can’t control them. You can’t control death. You need a team here. You need to make these decisions only after consultation.”

“I’m consulting with you right now.”

She neither broke eye contact nor replied.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re right. I won’t do anything until I’ve talked to Forry and Dr. Gupta. And to you.”

She drank some of the Cabernet. She put down the wineglass. She surveyed the glittering room, requiring other diners to look away from her.

Her attention on Ryan once more, she said, “Sweetie, trust the people who care for you. Trust me especially because I understand you so well, so very well, so entirely-and I love you.”

Moved, he said, “I love you, too.”

“If you knew me as completely as I know you,” she said, “you might not love me.”

“Impossible. What a thing to say.”

“No, it’s true. Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it’s a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him. Or her. I don’t need dessert. Do you?”

She had so riveted him that her change of subject did not at first compute, and he stared at her as though she had switched from English to some obscure Russian dialect.

Then: “Oh. No. I don’t need dessert.”

“Maybe after the wine, a double espresso.”

“That sounds good.”

She said no more about Dr. Hobb or about the knotted, desperate nature of humanity, but spoke of happier things.

Over the espresso, she favored Ryan with an affectionate smile that gladdened him, and as chandelier light danced in her eyes, she said, “See, Winky, you could have taken me to the farthest corner of the room, and even in that privacy, I wouldn’t have scalped you or even boxed your ears.”

Little more than one day later, on December 14, at home alone, as he awaited the sleep that for hours had eluded him, comforted by the glow of a bedside lamp that he was loath to turn off these days, Ryan suffered a sudden breathing problem.

He inhaled without relief, as if the air he took in were going elsewhere than to his lungs, although his belief that he was drawing full breaths might have been a misperception. An immediate sense of suffocation overcame him, a choking anxiety, and he could not stave off panic.

When he pushed up from the mattress, he was whirled into such a dizziness that the bed seemed to be on a carousel, and he fell back onto his pillows, gasping, soaked in a copious and instant hot sweat.

In that moment, a light-year was defined as the distance between him and the telephone on the adjacent nightstand. He could see it but did not have enough knowledge of Einsteinian physics to be able to make the epic voyage.

The paroxysms lasted only a couple of minutes. But when he could again draw breath easily, air had never tasted sweeter.

For a while, he was reluctant to move, afraid that movement would trigger another event, the same or worse. When at last he sat up, swung his legs off the bed, and stood, he discovered that his ankles were badly swollen.

Although he took his medications faithfully and punctually, he was retaining water.

Standing beside the bed, for the first time in months he heard a tapping, someone gently rapping, rapping at a window or a door.

Panic had subsided, but fear remained. The sweat that sheathed him had gone cold.

Turning, he searched for the source of the sound, cocked his head toward the insistent metronomic tap. He took a few steps in one direction, but then took a few in another, pausing repeatedly to listen.

He moved from the bedroom into the sitting room, into the bedroom once more, and then into the black granite and the gold onyx and the stainless steel and the mirrored walls of his bathroom. In that maze of reflections, the rapping continued, as loud there as everywhere else.

For a moment Ryan believed that the sound came from underfoot, that its ubiquitous nature-always the same volume, the same timbre in room after room-indicated a source beneath the floorboards, one that, incredibly, was mobile and tracking him.

But then he recalled that the floors were lightweight concrete, which had been specified for the very purpose of sound suppression. No floorboards existed to be torn up. No hollow space lay underfoot, through which the source of the sound could pursue him.

He looked at the ceiling, the only other plane universal to these third-floor rooms, and he thought of the attic overhead. He entertained the possibly lunatic, certainly antic image of a stalker above him, some phantom who had traded opera-house cellars for higher haunting grounds, electronically monitoring Ryan’s position for the purpose of tormenting him with the rapping, the soft rapping, the soft rap-rap-rapping, only this and nothing more.

That absurd speculation lasted mere seconds, for abruptly Ryan realized that the sound arose from within him. Although it was not the classic lub-dub of the blood pump, it was associated with those rhythms. It was an ominous throb born of his heart’s malfunction, not a gloved knuckle against a door, not a fat moth against a windowpane, but a blood-and-muscle sound, and if it failed to fade away this time, as it had faded before, if the rapping kept on long enough, it would be answered, not by Ryan, but by Death.

He took a shower, as hot as he could endure, hoping to chase the cold from his bones. The quiet rap came and went and came again, but he did not wipe the steam from the glass door in expectation of an intruder’s grinning face.

In his closet, which was as large as a room, as he dressed, the rapping might have come from behind any cabinet door, from within any drawer, from behind any pane of the three-sided mirror, but Ryan no longer needed to search for the source.

The scheduled superstretch from the limousine service arrived at eight o’clock. The driver called himself Naraka, though Ryan didn’t know if that was his first name or his last.

As they pulled away from the house, the internal knocking fell silent and never once resumed all the way from Newport Coast into distant Beverly Hills.

Two days previously, prior to dinner with Samantha, Ryan had secured an emergency appointment with Dr. Dougal Hobb. Following Sam’s disapproval, he considered canceling it, but left the final decision for the last minute, for this morning.

Considering the frightening problem with his breathing in the night and the belated realization that the occasional knocking was a muffled internal sound, he believed that a conversation with Hobb would be prudent.

Ryan did not inform Dr. Gupta or Forry Stafford of his decision. He did not even tell Samantha.

His only consultation was with his instinct for survival, which told him that meeting Hobb was not merely advisable but as essential to the preservation of his life as a flame-free stairway would be indispensable to a man trapped in the inferno of a burning high-rise.

Dr. Dougal Hobb did not maintain his offices in one of the gleaming skyscrapers that lined Wilshire Boulevard, as did many other physicians. His practice occupied an entire three-story building on a quiet street on the edge of the Beverly Hills business district.

This elegant neoclassic structure-white with a black slate roof, embraced by old magnolia trees that fanned their giant spade-leaf shadows onto its walls-looked more like a private residence than like a place of business. Only a discreet brass plaque beside the front door identified the premises: D. HOBB, M.D.

Three doors opened off the foyer, and the one on the right was labeled APPOINTMENTS.

This proved to be a waiting room with a Santos mahogany floor on which floated an antique Persian carpet, a nineteenth-century Tabriz, which glowed as if woven from gold. The comfortable chairs and stylish end tables suggested that patients here were treated like guests.

Ryan could not identify the classical music that played at low volume, but he found it soothing.

The receptionist, an attractive woman in her forties, was not wearing the surgical scrubs or the shapeless exercise suits that were all but standard in most medical offices these days, but a beige knit suit of designer quality.

Both the receptionist and the nurse, Laura, who took Ryan’s preliminary medical history in a small conference room, were well-spoken, professional, efficient, and warm in their manner.

Ryan felt that he had sailed out of a storm into a sunny harbor.

Laura, in her twenties, wore an oval locket suspended from an intricately braided gold chain. The enameled medallion on the front of the locket featured a stylized gold-and-red bird with spread wings, rising.

When Ryan complimented her on the beauty of the locket, the nurse said, “It’s a phoenix. Early nineteenth century. Dr. Hobb gave it to me for my third anniversary.” She registered his surprise, and her fair cheeks pinked as she quickly corrected the impression that she had given him. “The doctor is my father-in-law. And Andrea-Mrs. Barnett, the receptionist-she’s his sister.”

“You don’t think of a medical practice as a family business,” Ryan said.

“They’re a close family,” she said, “and quite wonderful. Blake, my husband, graduated Harvard Medical.”

“Cardiology?”

“Cardiovascular surgery. When he finishes his residency, he’ll join Dougal-Dr. Hobb-in the practice.”

Given the indifference to the idea of family and tradition that characterized both of Ryan’s parents, he envied the Hobb clan.

Instead of taking Ryan directly to an examination room, Laura led him first to Dougal Hobb’s study. “He’ll be with you in just a minute, Mr. Perry.”

Again, he felt as if he were in a private home rather than in a medical office, even though on one wall were displayed the surgeon’s medical degrees and numerous honors.

Because Wilson Mott had provided a thorough file on the surgeon, Ryan did not bother to review the framed items on the wall.

Instead, when Dr. Hobb entered, Ryan stood admiring the cherry-veneer Biedermeier desk with ebony inlays.

Under six feet tall, fit and trim but not pumped, dressed in black loafers, gray wool slacks, a cranberry-red cardigan, and a white shirt without tie, Hobb did not cultivate a power look, yet Ryan felt that a force of nature had entered the study.

Although he had a clear baritone voice, Hobb spoke softly, with the trace of an ingratiating accent that might have been Carolinian. He had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, but not a leonine silver mane; his brown eyes were direct, though not striking; his features were pleasant, though not handsome. Yet he seemed to fill the room with his presence.

They sat in armchairs that faced each other across a Biedermeier pedestal table with magnificently figured walnut veneer, in order to, as Dr. Hobb put it, “get to know each other.”

Within a few minutes, Ryan understood that Dr. Hobb made such a powerful impression because he seemed, from the first encounter, to be self-effacing, even humble, although his great surgical skills and his success prepared you to expect a fulsome pride if not arrogance, and because he seemed genuinely to care about you, to be motivated by compassion that he could convey without ever sounding either as if he were selling himself or coddling his patient.

“These past three months,” Ryan said, “have been frightening, of course, and dispiriting, but it’s not just the fear and the bouts of depression that leave me increasingly unable to cope. It’s the strangeness of these months, the downright weirdness, the sense that something’s terribly wrong in my life other than just my illness. I keep thinking that someone’s manipulating me, that I’m not in control of my own life anymore, that the medical care I’m being given isn’t the care I should have. I understand that for a guy my age, it’s easy to succumb to paranoia when you’re hit with a diagnosis like this, because it’s so unexpected. I mean, I’m just thirty-four years old, and I can’t get my head around the idea that I’m going to die.”

“We won’t let that happen,” said Dr. Hobb, leaning forward in his chair. “We simply will not let it happen.”

Considering how the odds were stacked against Ryan, he did not think such a confident declaration as the one Hobb had made could be taken seriously, yet that was how he took it. He believed that Dougal Hobb would not let him die, and he was filled with such relief and overcome with such gratitude that his vision blurred, and for a moment he could not speak.

TWENTY-EIGHT

That day, devoting himself almost exclusively to Ryan, Dr. Hobb conducted numerous tests, though he did not put his patient through another myocardial biopsy. He made the reasonable assumption that the lab had properly analyzed the tissue samples that Dr. Gupta submitted.

As a backup procedure, he ordered a recently devised high-tech analysis of Ryan’s blood, looking for the expression of key genes that would confirm abnormal cardiac-muscle function consistent with inherited cardiomyopathy. He found them.

Ryan had no illusions that Dr. Gupta’s diagnosis would be overturned. What he wanted from Dougal Hobb was the hope that came with knowing he was in the care of a brilliant physician who was as committed to the aggressive practice of his specialty as Ryan had been committed to aggressively building Be2Do.

Dr. Hobb prescribed two of the four medications that were part of Ryan’s current drug regimen, dropped two others, and added three.

At seven o’clock in the evening, in his study once more, before sending Ryan back to Newport Coast, the surgeon provided him with a slim medic-alert phone. By pressing only a single button, twice, Ryan would be connected by satellite uplink with an emergency service.

“Keep it on you at all times,” Hobb advised. “Make a habit of charging it on your nightstand every night. But take it out of the charger and with you when you go to the bathroom, in case anything incapacitating should happen to you there.”

He gave Ryan a list of physiological crises-such as the episode of breathing difficulty-in the event of which the medic-alert phone should be used without hesitation.

“And if I’m notified that your waiting is over, that a match has been found for you,” Hobb said, “I’ll contact you through the same medic-alert service. Time is of the essence in these matters. I don’t like to trust to ordinary phones. Unthinkingly, patients turn them off, set them to voice mail. As long as this device is charged, it’s in service. There’s no OFF switch. So keep it charged and keep it with you. The day may come.”

After a two-hour ride in the chartered limousine with Naraka silent and solemn behind the wheel, Ryan returned home.

He had been served a light boxed lunch at Dr. Hobb’s facility, but he’d had no dinner. He searched the refrigerator and put together a meal of sorts.

Lee and Kay Ting were off duty now, and were in their private quarters-doing what, he did not care. He didn’t suspect them of conspiracy any longer.

Or if he did suspect them just a little, he did not worry that they could harm him further. He had taken control of his fate, and no one in his usual circles knew that he had done so.

Although Dr. Hobb might think his new patient eccentric or worse, he had agreed to honor a request not to inform Samar Gupta that Ryan was now under the care of a new cardiologist.

For seven years, Ryan had self-insured because he loathed the insurance-company and government bureaucracies, as well as the endless paperwork, of the health-care system. A $100,000 check, written as a retainer to Dougal Hobb against all future costs, had bought some relaxation of the usual protocols between physicians.

He intended to continue to keep his periodic appointments with Dr. Gupta, though he would not follow any advice given or take any medications provided by that physician.

Although Ryan didn’t suspect Gupta any more than he did Lee and Kay Ting, if Gupta knew of Hobb’s involvement, he would pass the news along to Forry Stafford, and Forry-or his wife, Jane-would tell Sam.

He believed that Forry was a friend. But friendships failed all the time. Brother turned against brother, since the time of Cain and Abel, and even more frequently, more savagely, in this barbarous age.

Although his heart had reached the unshakable conclusion that Samantha was faithful to him and could never betray him, and though his mind was largely in agreement with his heart, he remembered well what she had said so recently at dinner.

If you knew me as completely as I know you, you might not love me.

He loved her as he had never loved another, and he trusted her as he had allowed himself to trust no one else. But by the nature of the world, those who loved and trusted were uniquely vulnerable.

Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it’s a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him.

Perhaps that had been the most honest, the most self-revealing, and the most loving thing that anyone had ever said to him.

But in his present distress, which so easily could spiral into despair, he could not entirely dismiss the possibility that her words might have constituted a consummate act of manipulation.

He didn’t like himself much right now. He might not like himself much for a long time. But he liked himself enough to want to live.

Sitting on a stool at the smaller of the two kitchen islands, preferring to dine by only the light in the cooktop hood, he ate halloumi cheese on zaatar crackers, black olives, slices of soujouk, and cold asparagus. He finished with a fresh pear and a handful of shelled pistachios.

He suspected that in the weeks and months ahead, he would be taking more meals alone than he might wish.

After consulting the labels on each of the five bottles of drugs supplied by Dr. Hobb, he took the medications as prescribed.

Upstairs, in his bedroom, he inserted the medic-alert phone in the charger and stood the charger on his nightstand, so close to his bed that he should be able to reach it regardless of his condition. As he had done the past few nights, he would go to sleep comforted by the light of a lamp. Recently, waking in darkness had felt like coming awake in a sealed casket after being prematurely buried, with too little air to long sustain him.

Lying in bed, with the TV tuned to an old Western-John Wayne in The Searchers-Ryan reviewed the decisions he had made this day, and he felt good about them.

He had tremendous confidence in his new cardiologist, although even Hobb had been stumped by one thing. The doctor had not been able to explain adequately the soft insistent knocking that now and then rose within Ryan, although the physician firmly ruled out the notion that it could be some kind of blood-and-muscle problem related to the cardiomyopathy.

Hobb suggested that the sound instead might indicate a hearing problem, a malady of one ear or the other. Eventually, Ryan pretended to consider that possibility, but remained certain that the rapping had originated not in the nautilus turns of either ear, but within his chest.

Less than half his attention was with John Wayne in the post-Civil War West, because he lay waiting for the rap-rap-rapping to resume.

Eventually, as the movie drew toward an end, as wave after wave of weariness washed Ryan toward needed sleep, he thought that perhaps the knocking would not come again because he had already answered it, had opened the door.

He did not know what he meant by that. It was the kind of muddy thought that eddied through a mind half submerged in sleep’s river.

And so he slept.

During the night, a landscape materialized around him, and for the first time in months, a dream returned him to one of the places that had disturbed his sleep in September.

In the beginning there was only an impression of depth. Waste and void, bottomless and terrifying.

Then the void became water, invisible without light, silent without currents, neither warm nor cold, sensed rather than felt.

A wind blew across the water, a mystic wind murmuring without melody, and in the wind was light, the pale luminosity of the moon carried like dust, which silvered every ripple, although the body of the lake remained black.

The wind breathed once, then perished, and the earth formed around the perimeter of the lake, not fertile soil but bleak rocks, and out of the rocks grew trees as colorless as shadows.

He found himself standing on the rocks, as before, but one thing had changed. He was no longer the sole visitor to the lake.

On the farther shore stood a figure. Although dark, this Other could be discerned because the landscape behind it was so much darker that contrast was achieved.

As the Other began slowly to navigate the rocks, coming around the lake, Ryan knew that it must be Samantha, though he could see nothing of her face and little of her form.

She would have called to him, as he would have called to her. But this place had no air to carry their voices.

He began to move to meet her as she circled toward him, but he took only a few steps across the treacherous rocks before a hand on his shoulder halted him. Even in the gloom, he recognized William Holden at his side.

The long-dead actor-star of Sabrina and The Bridge on the River Kwai and so many more films, winner of the Oscar for his performance in Stalag 17-said, “It isn’t her, pal.”

Ryan was not surprised that Holden could speak in this airless realm. The rules by which others lived never applied to movie stars.

Suffering lined the actor’s handsome face, as had been the case by the time that he starred in The Wild Bunch and Network.

“Listen, pal, I had a drinking problem. In Europe once, I was driving drunk, had an accident, killed a bystander.”

Even if there had been air to allow speech, Ryan would not have known how to reply to the actor’s non sequitur.

Still at a distance, the Other nevertheless steadily approached along the shore.

“Don’t be a dope, Dotcom. That isn’t her. You come with me.”

Ryan followed Holden away from the relentless Other. Through the long and exhausting night, they circled the black lake together, as in movies they might have sought to avoid Indian warriors or German soldiers, and Ryan thought he should compliment the actor on his performance in Sunset Boulevard or ask for an autograph, but he said nothing, and Holden never spoke again.

TWENTY-NINE

With the holidays approaching, and then with the holidays upon them, Ryan found reasons to minimize the number of evenings he spent with Samantha, passing just enough time in her company to avoid raising in her the suspicion that avoidance was his intention.

Loving her more passionately than he had once thought he could love anyone, he wanted to be with her. Because she could read him so well, however, he worried that she would infer accurately from his most innocent statement or expression that he had secretly changed physicians from Gupta to Hobb.

He did not want to argue with her, but the prospect of argument dismayed him less than did the certainty of her disappointment in him if she learned what he had done. He needed her approval as the rose needs the rain.

In light of his condition, Ryan could take refuge in not only the usual seasonal excuse of prior obligations but also in complaints about reactions to his medications-nausea, headaches, insomnia, mood swings-that were even occasionally real.

And when they were together, he tried to charm, to engage, to entertain, to be Winky less than Dotcom, always with no hint of the effort behind his performance. With her, he found this easier than he would have with anyone else, because by her nature she always drew from him the best of who he was and of what he had to offer. He had always wanted to please her even before he had anything to hide from her.

Since his diagnosis in September, his disease had taken a toll from Samantha perhaps not equal to the psychological price that Ryan had paid, but serious enough that it had robbed her of the time and passion that she needed for her writing. Her novel had lost momentum. She was not blocked, but she stood high on a dry bank, far above any hope of a creative flow state.

Now, because Ryan was less often with her, she could spend more time at her work. As she became engaged with her storytelling once more, Sam’s enthusiasm for the novel served Ryan’s deception. When long writing sessions went well, she was exhilarated and less likely to consider how much of the time they were apart.

Every week or ten days, Ryan traveled by limo to Beverly Hills to be examined by Dr. Hobb, who insisted on monitoring closely the condition of his heart. With every visit, he became more convinced that he had made the right decision when he turned to this dedicated man.

A few unfortunate side effects of the medications gave Ryan moments of discomfort, but he suffered none of the painful seizures, spells of arrhythmia, or breathing problems that previously plagued him. This argued for the superiority of Dr. Hobb’s care, but it also suggested that Ryan had been prudent when he took control of his treatment in such a way as to foil anyone who secretly might have wished him ill.

At five o’clock in the morning, on January 14, the call came. A heart match had been found.

Of all the lists on which Ryan had appeared-Forbes magazine’s top one hundred Internet entrepreneurs, Wired magazine’s top twenty most creative lords of the Web, People magazine’s one hundred most eligible bachelors-he had risen to the top of the only list that mattered.

After all the months of waiting, now came the call for action, and time was of the essence to a degree that Ryan had never known before.

Having been declared brain-dead, the donor’s body would remain on life support until Ryan arrived at that hospital and was prepared for surgery. If the heart did not have to be stored for several hours in a forty-degree saline solution, if no risks had to be taken with its transport, if it could be removed from the donor by the same surgical team that without delay transplanted it into the recipient, the chances of success would be significantly increased.

Things could still go wrong. Depending on the injuries or the illness that had led to his brain death, the donor might still suffer a heart attack, severely damaging cardiac muscle and rendering his heart useless for transplant. An undetected infection of the kidneys or the liver or another internal organ, secondary to the donor’s cause of death and not immediately recognized, might lead to toxemia, or in an extreme case to septic shock and widespread tissue damage. The life-support equipment could malfunction. The hospital’s power supply could fail.

Ryan preferred not to dwell on what might go wrong. Considering his condition, the worst thing he could do was psych himself into high anxiety. He had lived hardly a third of the year that Dr. Gupta had predicted, but a full year had not been a guarantee, only an estimate. His heart might deal him a deathblow at any time, whereupon he would no longer be an organ recipient but a donor, his corneas and his lungs and his liver and his kidneys carved out of him for the benefit of others.

Immediately after receiving the 5:00 A.M. notification, Ryan called Samantha, desperate that she not answer the phone. He did not want to talk to her directly, to have to answer her questions, to hear the sense of disappointment in her voice or the fear for him that she would surely express.

As she labored on the final chapters of her novel, Sam often worked late into the evening and went to bed after midnight. At this hour, Ryan hoped she would have switched off the phone and that he would get her voice mail-which he did.

Even her flat sorry-I’m-not-available-to-take-your-call speech pierced him, mundane and poignant at the same time. He wondered if he would hear her voice again, or see her.

“Sam, I love you, I love you more than I can say. Listen, the call just came. A heart match. I’m flying out. I arranged with Dr. Hobb and his team to do the surgery. I didn’t tell you because you would think I’m paranoid, but I don’t think I am, Sam, I think what I did was what I had to do. Maybe I didn’t handle the diagnosis well, maybe it made me a little crazy, and maybe paranoia is a side effect of these medications, but I don’t think so. Anyway, I’ll sort all that out when I’m well, when I get back, if I make it. Sam, Sam, my God, Sam, I want you with me, I wish you could be, but not if I die, and I might, it is a possibility. So it’s best you stay here. What I want for you, no matter what, is that you finish the novel, that it’s a huge success for you, and that you are always as happy as you so very much deserve to be. Maybe you could dedicate the book to me. No, scratch that. It’s not right for me to ask. Dedicate it to anybody you want, to some idiot who doesn’t deserve it, if that’s what you want. But if the book is at all about love, Sam, and knowing you I think it has to be, if it’s at all about love, maybe you can tell them you learned at least a little bit about the subject from me. I learned everything about it from you. Call you soon. See you soon. Sam. Precious Sam.”

THIRTY

Ryan’s suitcase had been packed for weeks. At 5:45, he rode with it in the elevator down to the main floor and carried it through the grand, silent rooms to the front door.

This was his dream house. He had devoted much time and thought to the design and the construction of every element. He loved this house. But he did not say good-bye to it or waste a moment admiring it one last time. In the end, the house didn’t matter.

At this hour, neither the domestic staff nor the landscaping staff was in evidence. Outside in the predawn dark, the neighborhood lay quiet except for the hollow hoot of an owl and the idling engine of the ambulance in the driveway.

Dr. Hobb had ordered the van-style ambulance. Using Ryan’s security password, he had phoned the guard gate to ensure that the vehicle would be admitted to the community.

One of the paramedics waited at the front door. He insisted on carrying the suitcase for Ryan.

After putting the bag in the back of the van and assisting Ryan inside, the paramedic said, “Would you like me to ride back here with you or up front with my partner?”

“I’ll be fine here alone,” Ryan assured him. “I’m not in any imminent danger.”

He lay on his back on the wheeled stretcher for the trip to the airport.

Around him were storage cabinets, a bag resuscitator, a suction machine, two oxygen cylinders, and other equipment: reminders that for a while to come, his world would shrink to the dimensions of a hospital.

Not long from now, Dr. Hobb would saw through Ryan’s breastbone, open his chest, remove his diseased heart while a machine maintained his circulation, and transplant into him the heart of a caring stranger.

Instead of escalating, his fear diminished. For so long, he had felt helpless, at the mercy of Fate. Now something positive could be done. We are not born to wait. We are born to do.

The driver used the array of rotating beacons on the roof to advise traffic to yield. At this hour, the freeways should not be clogged, and a siren might not be necessary.

As a driver, Ryan had a need for speed, and as a passenger, he had never before gone as fast as this-especially not while flat on his back. He liked the loud swash of the tires, which reminded him of breaking surf, and the whistle of the wind, which the ambulance created as it knifed through the early morning, a whistling that was to him neither a banshee shriek nor the keening of an alarm, but almost a lullaby.

They were nearing the airport when he realized that he had not called either his mother or his father. He had half intended to phone them.

He had never told them about his diagnosis. Bringing them up to speed would be tedious, especially at this early hour, when his mother would be set on CRANKY and his father would be set on STUPID, and neither of them would have the desire or the capacity to switch to a different mode.

Anyway, they had nothing to give him that he needed and much to give that he did not want.

If the worst happened, he had taken care of them generously in his will. They would be able to cruise through the rest of their lives with even greater self-indulgence than they had displayed to this point.

He felt no animosity toward them. They had never loved him, but they had never hit him, either. Although they were not capable of love, they were capable of hitting, so they deserved credit for their restraint in that regard. What they had done to themselves was worse than anything they had done to him.

If he wanted to take the time for a good-bye, he would receive far less emotional satisfaction from saying good-bye to his parents than he would have received if he had delayed to say good-bye to his house.

Their destination was Long Beach Airport. Arranging an emergency flight out of LAX would have been too time-consuming and frustrating.

In the early light, standing on the Tarmac, the Medijet loomed larger than the corporate Learjet that Ryan had intended to use. Dr. Hobb preferred to charter this aircraft to accommodate both his team and a contingent of the patient’s friends and family. In this case, Ryan’s contingent consisted of the image of Samantha that he carried in his mind, which sustained him.

Furthermore, the Medijet came with medical equipment that might be required en route, and it had the capability of handling patients who were not ambulatory or otherwise had special needs.

Three ambulances, which had ferried Dr. Hobb and his team from different points in the Los Angeles area, were lined up near the jet. The last of their suitcases and other baggage was being transferred to the aircraft.

While a paramedic took his suitcase to the Medijet steward, Ryan stood for a moment, peering east, savoring the pink and turquoise and peach celebration of the risen sun.

Then he boarded the jet to fly to his rebirth or to his death.

THIRTY-ONE

Ryan walked in yellow radiance, and yellow crunched under his shoes, and the melting yellow warmth of an autumn sun buttered his skin.

In the yellow distance, someone called his name, and though the voice was faint, he thought he recognized it. He could not identify who summoned him, but the voice made him happy.

He seemed to walk for a long time out of yellow into yellow, untroubled by the sameness or by his lack of a destination, and then he lay supine on a black bench that he found comfortable in spite of it being iron. Overhead hung a canopy of yellow and all around him spread a yellow carpet.

When he breathed in, he discovered what yellow smelled like, and when he breathed out, he regretted expelling the yellow that he had inhaled.

Gradually he became aware that someone stood over him, holding his right wrist, timing his pulse.

Dazzling yellow sun pierced the canopy of yellow aspen leaves at a thousand points, yellow burnishing yellow into a more intense and brighter yellowness, backlighting the person who attended to him and simultaneously enveloping that presence in a misty yellow aurora through which Ryan could see no features that would allow him to identify his caregiver.

He assumed that the one taking his pulse must be the one who had called to him out of the brilliant yellow, and for a while he remained happy, for he knew this presence loved him.

Later, when he tried to express his gratitude, he discovered that he was mute, and his inability to speak reminded him of when he had been unable to reply to William Holden on the shore of the black lake.

Suddenly the looming pulse-taker seemed not to be glorified by the yellow aurora but to be hiding within the radiance, cunning and calculating, not a loving presence after all, but in fact the dark figure that had circled the shore of the lake, into the arms of whom Ryan would have delivered himself had it not been for Mr. Holden’s admonition.

The thumb and two fingers on his wrist, seeking his pulse, were cold, although they had not been cold a moment ago, were icy, and were squeezing harder than before, were pinching, and the shape of a head descended toward him through the yellow aurora, a face, a face, but a face constituted entirely of a wide and hungry maw-

With a throttled cry, grasping at the safety railing, Ryan sat up in a hospital bed, in a shadowy room redolent of an astringent pine-scented cleaning solution.

The sheets smelled of bleach and fabric softener. They crackled and felt crisp, as if starched.

In a lamplit corner, putting aside the book that he had been reading, a man dressed in white slacks and a white shirt rose from an armchair.

The lamp base and shade gleamed, stainless steel or polished nickel. The vinyl upholstery on the armchair glistered like the flesh of an avocado drizzled with olive oil.

Everything in the room appeared to have a coat of lacquer or to be wet. The polished white-tile floor, the shiny blue top on the nightstand, the wall paint glimmering with a crushed-pearl glaze.

Even the shadows had a hard gloss, as if they were layers of smoky glass, and Ryan understood that this universal sheen was less real than it was an effect caused by the sedative that he had been given.

He felt that he had come fully awake, his wits sharp and his perceptions clearer and more penetrating than ever in his life, but the witchy luster of everything led him to the realization that he was narcotized. Sleep would take him again the moment he returned his head to the pillow.

He felt helpless and at risk.

At the windows pressed the murky and unwelcoming chrome-yellow darkness of any large city at night.

“Bad dream?” asked the male nurse.

Wally. Wally Dunnaman. A member of Dr. Hobb’s team of eight. Earlier he had shaved Ryan’s chest and abdomen.

“My throat’s dry,” Ryan said.

“Doctor doesn’t want you having much to drink before surgery in the morning. But I can give you a few chips of ice to let melt in your mouth.”

“All right.”

At the nightstand, Wally removed the stopper from an insulated carafe. With a long-handled spoon, such a shiny spoon, he fished out a piece of ice, glimmering ice, and fed it to Ryan.

After allowing his patient three chips of ice, he stoppered the carafe and put down the spoon.

Studying his wristwatch, Wally Dunnaman timed Ryan’s pulse.

In the yellow dream, neither the loving presence nor the hateful one had been this man. Nothing in this room, in this hospital, had inspired the dream.

Releasing Ryan’s wrist, Wally said, “You need to sleep.”

In some way that Ryan could not explain, the reality of the dream equaled the reality of this room, neither superior to the other. He knew the truth of that in his bones, although he did not understand it.

“Sleep now,” Wally urged.

If sleep was a little death, as some poet had once written, this sleep would be more of a death than any other to which Ryan had given himself. He must resist it.

Yet he lowered his head again to the pillow, and he could not lift it.

Helpless and at risk.

He had made a mistake. He didn’t know the nature of the mistake, but he felt the weight of it, holding him down.

As he strained to keep his eyes open, every surface with a sheen became a surface with a shine, every shine a glare, every glossiness a blinding brilliance.

Bells. The bells foretold, and now the bells.

Tolling, tolling, tolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, a solemn monody of bells shook Ryan out of sleep.

He first thought they were dream bells, but the clamor persisted as he strove to find the strength to pull himself upright, both hands gripping the bed railing.

Darkness still owned the world beyond the window, and the male nurse stood on this side of the glass, looking out, gazing down, into waves of rising sound.

Huge heavy bells shook the night, as though they meant to shake it down, such melancholy menace in their tone.

Ryan spoke more than once before Wally Dunnaman heard him and glanced toward the bed, raising his voice to say, “There’s a church across the street.”

When first conducted to the room, Ryan had seen that house of worship in the next block. The bell tower rose above this fourth-floor window.

“They shouldn’t be ringing at this hour,” Wally said. “And not this much. No lights in the place.”

The strangely glossy shadows seemed to shiver with the tolling, such a moaning and a groaning, a hard insistent rolling.

The window-rattling, wall-strumming, bone-shivering clangor frightened Ryan, rang thickly in his blood, and made his heart pound like a hammer coming down. This swollen heart was still his own, so weak and so diseased, and he feared it might be tested to destruction by these thunderous peals.

He recalled his thought upon waking: Bells. The bells foretold, and now the bells.

Foretold when, by whom, and with what meaning?

If not for the sedative that fouled his blood and muddied his mind, he thought he would know the answer to at least two parts of that question.

But the drug not only lacquered every surface in the room, not only buffed a shine on every shadow, but also afflicted him with synesthesia, so he smelled the sound as well as heard it. The reek of ferric hydroxide, ferric oxide, call it rust, washed in bitter waves across the bed.

Interminable tolling, bells and bells and still more bells, knocked from Ryan all sense of time, and it seemed to him that soon it would knock sanity from him, as well.

Eventually raising his voice above the clangor, Wally Dunnaman said, “A police car down below. Ah, and another!”

Under the weight of the booming bells, Ryan fell back, his head once more upon the pillow.

He was helpless and at risk, risk, risk.

With a kind of fractured desperation that he could not focus to his benefit, he sorted through his broken thoughts, trying to piece them together like fragments of crockery. Something very wrong had happened that he still had time to rectify, if only he were able to understand what needed to be put right.

The bells began to toll less aggressively, their rage subsiding to anger, anger to sullenness, and sullenness to one final protracted groan that sounded like a great heavy door moaning closed on rusted hinges.

In the silence of the bells, as once more the sedative slowly drew over him its velvet thrall, Ryan felt tears on his cheeks and licked at the salt in the corner of his mouth. He did not have the strength to lift his hands and blot his face, and as he quietly wept his way into sleep, he no longer had the presence of mind either to be embarrassed by his tears or to wonder at them.

Shortly after dawn, when they rolled him on a gurney into the surgery, Ryan was alert, afraid, but resigned to the course that he had chosen.

The operating room, white porcelain tile and stainless steel, was drenched in light.

From the scrub room, Dr. Hobb arrived with his team, lacking only Wally Dunnaman, who had no role in the cutting. Besides Dougal Hobb, there were an anesthesiologist, three cardiology nurses, an assistant surgeon, and two others whose specialties and functions Ryan could not recall.

He had met them on the Medijet, and he had liked them all, so far as it was possible to like anyone who was going to saw you open and handle your internal organs as blithely as though they were the giblets in a Thanksgiving turkey. There was bound to be some social distance between the cutters and he who must be cut.

Except for Hobb, Ryan was not easily able to tell who was who in their hair-restraining caps, behind their masks, in their green scrubs. They might have all been ringers, the B team inserted after the A team had been approved and paid for.

As the anesthesiologist found a vein in Ryan’s right arm and inserted a cannula, Dr. Hobb told him that the donor’s heart had been successfully removed moments ago and waited now in a chilled saline solution.

Ryan had learned on the Medijet that he was to receive a woman’s heart, which only briefly surprised him. She had been twenty-six, a schoolteacher who had suffered massive head trauma in an automobile accident.

Her heart had been deemed of suitable size for Ryan. And every criterion of an immune-system match had been met, greatly increasing the chances that all would go well not merely during surgery but also afterward, when his body would be less likely to aggressively reject the new organ.

Nevertheless, to prevent rejection and other complications, he would be taking a battery of twenty-eight drugs for a significant length of time following surgery, some for the rest of his life.

As they readied Ryan, Dr. Hobb explained to him the purpose of each procedure, but Ryan did not need to be gentled toward the moment. He could not turn back now. The wanted heart was free, the donor dead, and a single path to the future lay before him.

He closed his eyes, tuned out the murmured conversations of the members of the team, and pictured Samantha Reach. Throughout his adolescence and adult life, he had sought perfection, and had found it only once-in her.

He hoped that she could be perfectly forgiving, too, although he knew he should start conceiving now his opening line for his first phone call to her, when he was strong and clearheaded enough to speak.

Closing his eyes, he saw her on the beach, blond hair and golden form, a quiver of light, an alluring oasis on the wide slope of sun-seared sand.

As the induced sleep came over him, he drifted down as if into a sea, and the darkness darkled into something darker than mere dark.