“Oh?” Panov was startled. Alex Conklin had been a patient on and off for five years, until they both had agreed he’d adjusted as well as he was ever going to adjust--which was not a hell of a lot.

There were so many, and so little they can do for them. Whatever Conklin wanted had to be relatively serious for him to call Bethesda and not the office. “Where can I take this, Annie?”

“Room One,” said the nurse, pointing across the hall. “It’s empty. I’ll have the call transferred.”

Panov walked toward the door, an uneasy feeling spreading through him.

“I need some very fast answers, Mo,” said Conklin, his voice strained.

“I’m not very good at fast answers, Alex. Why not come in and see me this afternoon?”

“It’s not me. It’s someone else. Possibly.”

“No games, please. I thought we’d gone beyond that.”

“No games. This is a Four-Zero emergency, and I need help.”

“Four-Zero? Call in one of your staff men. I’ve never requested that kind of clearance.”

“I can’t. That’s how tight it is.”

“Then you’d better whisper to God.”

“Mo, please! I only have to confirm possibilities, the rest I can put together myself. And I don’t have five seconds to waste. A man may be running around ready to blow away ghosts, anyone he thinks is a ghost. He’s already killed very real, very important people and I’m not sure he knows it.

Help me, help him!”

“If I can. Go ahead.”

“A man is placed in a highly volatile, maximum stress situation for a long period of time, the entire period in deep cover. The cover itself is a decoy--very visible, very negative, constant pressure applied to maintain that visibility. The purpose is to draw out a target similar to the decoy by convincing the target that the decoy’s a threat, forcing the target into the open. ... Are you with me so far?”

“So far,” said Panov. “You say there’s been constant pressure on the decoy to maintain a negative, highly visible profile. What’s been his environment?”

“As brutal as you can imagine.”

“For how long a period of time?”

“Three years,”

“Good God,” said the psychiatrist “No breaks?”

“None at all. Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Three years.

Someone not himself.”

“When will you damn fools learn? Even prisoners in the worst camps could be themselves, talk to others who were themselves--“ Panov stopped, catching his own words and Conklin’s meaning.

“That’s your point, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure,” answered the intelligence officer. “It’s hazy, confusing, even contradictory. What I want to ask is this. Could such a man under these circumstances begin to ... believe he’s the decoy, assume the characteristics, absorb the mocked dossier to the point where he believes it’s him?”

“The answer to that’s so obvious I’m surprised you ask it. Of course he could. Probably would.

It’s an unendurably prolonged performance that can’t be sustained unless the belief becomes a part of his everyday reality. The actor never off the stage in a play that never ends. Day after day, night after night.” The doctor stopped again, then continued carefully. “But that’s not really your question, is it?”

“No,” replied Conklin. “I go one step further. Beyond the decoy. I have to; it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Wait a minute,” interrupted Panov sharply. “You’d better stop there, because I’m not confirming any blind diagnosis. Not for what you’re leading up to. No way, Charlie. That’s giving you a license I won’t be responsible for--with or without a consultation fee.”

“ ‘No way ... Charlie.’ Why did you say that, Mo?”

“What do you mean, why did I say it? It’s a phrase. I hear it all the time. Kids in dirty blue jeans on the corner; hookers in my favorite saloons.”

“How do you know what I’m leading up to?” said the CIA man.

“Because I had to read the books and you’re not very subtle. You’re about to describe a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia with multiple personalities. It’s not just your man assuming the role of the decoy, but the decoy himself transferring his identity to the one he’s after. The target. That’s what you’re driving at, Alex. You’re telling me your man is three people: himself, decoy and target.

And I repeat. No way, Charlie. I’m not confirming anything remotely like that without an extensive examination. That’s giving you rights you can’t have: three reasons for dispatch. No way!”

“I’m not asking you to confirm anything! I just want to know if it’s possible. For Christ’s sake, Mo, there’s a lethally experienced man running around with a gun, killing people he claims he didn’t know, but whom he worked with for three years. He denies being at a specific place at a specific time when his own fingerprints prove he was there. He says images come to him--faces he can’t place, names he’s heard but doesn’t know from where. He claims he was never the decoy; it was never him! But it was! It is! Is it possible? That’s all I want to know. Could the stress and time and the everyday pressures break him like this? Into three?”

Panov held his breath for a moment. “It’s possible,” he said softly. “If your facts are accurate, it’s possible. That’s all I’ll say, because there are too many other possibilities.”

“Thank you.” Conklin paused. “A last question. Say there was a date--a month and a day--that was significant to the mocked dossier-the decoy’s dossier.”

“You’d have to be more specific.”

“I will. It was the date when the man whose identity was taken for decoy was killed.”

“Then obviously not part of the working dossier, but known to your man. Am I following you?”

“Yes, he knew it. Let’s say he was there. Would he remember it?”

“Not as the decoy.”

“But as one of the other two?”

“Assuming the target was also aware of it, or that he’d communicated it through his transference, yes.”

“There’s also a place where the strategy was, conceived, where the decoy was created. If our man was in the vicinity of that place, and the date of death was close at hand, would he be drawn to it?

Would it surface and become important to him?”

“It would if it was associated with the original place of death. Because the decoy was born there; it’s possible. It would depend on who he was at the moment.”

“Suppose he was the target?”

“And knew the location?”

“Yes, because another part of him had to.”

“Then he’d be drawn to it. It would be a subconscious compulsion.”

“Why?”

“To kill the decoy. He’d kill everything in sight, but the main objective would be the decoy.

Himself.”

Alexander Conklin replaced the phone, his nonexistent foot throbbing, his thoughts so convoluted he had to close his eyes again to find a consistent strain. He had been wrong in Paris ...

in a cemetery outside of Paris. He had wanted to kill a man for the wrong reasons, the right ones beyond his comprehensions. He was dealing with a madman. Someone whose afflictions were not explained in twenty years of training, but were understandable if one thought about the pains and the losses, the unending waves of violence ... all ending in futility. No one knew anything really.

Nothing made sense. A Carlos was trapped, killed today, and another would take his place. Why did we do it ... David?

David. I say your name finally. We were friends once, David ... Delta. I knew your wife and your children. We drank together and had a few dinners together in far-off posts in Asia. You were the best foreign service officer in the Orient and everyone knew it. You were going to be the key to the new policy, the one that was around the corner. And then it happened. Death from the skies in the Mekong. You turned, David. We all lost, but only one of us became Delta. In Medusa. I did not know you that well--drinks and a dinner or two do not a close companion make—but few of us become animals. You did, Delta.