Too many for comfort nowadays when casual sex had stopped being a recreational sport and metamorphosed into serious business, grim business, requiring research and background checks, especially with someone with such a busy and enthusiastically varied history as Cassie Trainor.

He hated that something so basic and so wonderful as sex had become a source of paranoia and anxiety, a new religious sect with purification rites and latex Eucharists.

What a world. What a goddamn screwed-up world.

Casual sex was all he had the heart for these days, and casual sex was like Russian roulette. No time or heart to invest in a lasting relationship, and no desire to pursue one, not after what had happened to his marriage.

What had happened to him since the divorce? Where had his passion for life gone? He'd withdrawn from all his old friends. Not consciously.

He hadn't even realized what was happening until it was done. He spent a lot of time alone now, but that didn't seem to bother him. He didn't know this preoccupied, isolated man he had become.

Maybe Lisa hadn't been an aberration. Maybe it ran in the family.

Whatever the reason, he realized he'd become a man who feared intimacy more than solitude.

But at least today he could tell Cassie the truth.

"I'd love to, Cassie, but I'm meeting my son for dinner." '"Too bad.

How old is he now? ' "Twenty-one last month." Lisa would have been 23 last spring, already graduated a year. "Starting his senior year in college. We're trying that new Italian restaurant in Georgetown. " "Giardia? " Duncan laughed. "Not funny." Giardinello. I'd ask you along but we're going to talk about the flare."

"I getcha. Okay.

Maybe next time"

"Definitely." She glided away and he watched the white fabric of her uniform slide back and forth over her buttocks, an urge rose within and he almost changed his mind, almost called her back. Instead he looked at his watch. He'd have to pick Brad up soon at the house.

The house . . .

Used to be his house too. Now it was just Diana's. He wondered how she could live there, walk through that foyer where . . .

Duncan rubbed his eyes and rose from the chair. When things finally fell apart, he didn't contest the divorce action. So while it wasn't exactly an amicable dichotomy, it never got vicious. He let Diana have what she wanted, agreed to generous alimony payments, and, of course, he'd seen to it that Brad had whatever he needed. He loved his son, wanted to stay close to him, and most of all, wanted to spare him the spectacle of his parents hissing and clawing at each other.

And Duncan got . . . what?

What did I get besides out?

He and Diana still were on speaking terms, but only on neutral, practical matters, never anything personal. And he would never set foot in that house again.

He tended to heal slowly, sometimes not at all. He had no implant full of beta-3 for the soul.

Which was why he had been on the west portico of the Capitol yesterday morning. Trying to heal himself by balancing the scales, by closing the circle, by imposing a symmetry on the chaos his life had become.

Only then would this cancerous rage cease its relentless metastasis and allow him to get on with his life.

He barked a laugh in the empty room. His life? What life?

Marge poked her head in. "Dr. Duncan . . . you all right? " "Fine, Marge. Just fine." That's a laugh, he thought, waving her off.

Nothing at all is fine.

Yesterday morning . . . another failure. Why wasn't anything ever simple? Why couldn't things go the way he planned?

Neither of the other two had gone the way he'd intended either.

Lane and Schulz, both dead, one in a car, the other in a twenty-story swan dive.

And yesterday . . . Allard was supposed to crack up in front of the cameras, not crack his skull on the Capitol steps. Duncan hadn't wanted him physically hurt. Hell, any hired thug could do that. He'd come prepared to see Allard mortally embarrassed, terminally humiliated, politically ruined, he'd wanted his credibility bloodied, not his head. Damn! All the planning, the exquisite timing, wasted. Now Allard was just a victim of a bad fall, pitied, pathetic, an object of sympathy instead of ridicule.

Duncan wondered at his own coldheartedness, but only briefly. He had plenty of warm emotions left, but they were already spoken for. No leftovers for the likes of Congressman Allard.

Allard, at least, was still alive.

Next time . . . next time he'd get it right.

Duncan rubbed his eyes. He'd started this for a payback in kind, not to kill or maim. Merely devastate their careers, their marriages, their reputations, and let them live among the ruins. A living death.

Li/ee 7nine.

Although not his intent, the fatalities didn't particularly bother him.

After all, Lisa was dead because of them, and she was worth ten, twenty, a hundred of them.

Gin's presence yesterday had been another complication, one of those perverse coincidences that might one day trip him up and expose what he'd been doing.

Slim as it was, the possibility of exposure knotted his gut.

Indictment for murder, a circus of a trial, then jail. The scandal .

. . what would it do to Brad? His son was one of the few things left in his life that mattered to him.

He'd do anything to avoid that. Anything.

But where W'dS the risk, really? He had a virtually untraceable toxin, and an all-but-invisible means of delivery. The only one who might put it together would be Oliver, but his preoccupied brother tended to take little notice of events outside his lab. The only other real risk was someone like Gin. Someone who knew the patients, knew about the implants, and was bright enough to put all the pieces together.

Remote as it was, he grimaced at the possibility. What a frightful quandary that would be. What would he do if Gin stumbled onto him?

He'd have to find a way to neutralize her. He couldn't allow her to .

. .

He shook off the grim train of thought. It wouldn't happen. Vincent would be the next to last. One more after him and then Duncan would close this chapter of his life.

But the last one would be the big one. The biggest.

MARTHA GINA DELAYED HER RETURN TO THE APARTMENT. SHE didn't want to hear any bad news. And no news was bad news as far as the Hill was concerned. The capper would be a message from Gerry telling her he had to call off their dinner plans, or worse yet, no call from Gerry at all.

Gimme a break, she thought. Something's got to go right this week.

So she got off the Metro at the zoo and did a slow walk along Calvert Street across the Duke Ellington Bridge into her neighborhood.

Adams Morgan was sometimes described as funky, sometimes eclectic, but most times just plain weird. Gin loved the area. A big triangle on the hill sloping down toward Dupont Circle, roughly bordered by Calvert Street and Florida and Connecticut avenues, where you could find ethnic jewelry, folk art, and cutting-edge music while breathing the exotic aromas of an array of cuisines that could rival the entire United Nations for diversity. Where else in the District could you find an Argentine cafe flanked by a top-notch French restaurant and a Caribbean bistro? Even Ethiopian restaurants. Who'd ever heard of an Ethiopian restaurant? Yet there were three in her neighborhood.

Gin browsed an African bookstore, did touchy-feely with some Guatemalan fabric, tried on some Turkish shoes, then decided she'd delayed the inevitable long enough. She walked to her building, an old brick row house on Kalorama between Columbia and Eighteenth, it had a tower on its downhill side and was painted sky blue. She let herself into her third-floor apartment.

The rental agency had listed it as "furnished." Gin thought "not unfurnished'' would have been more in line with most truth-in-advertising laws. The rickety furniture had been varnished so many times that the type of wood underlying all those coats was a mystery. - Sometimes she suspected the varnish was the only thing holding some of the pieces together. But it was clean, and she loved her front bay window high over the street. She'd had a new mattress delivered and added a few of her own touches, a bright yellow throw rug and her three posters of Monet's Le J Nyrntheas. She kept meaning to brighten up the place, maybe with some new curtains. As soon as she had the time She went straight to her bedroom where the answering machine crouched on the nightstand. The message light was blinking. A good start.