"What good is stealing this car if the police come check out that guy's alarm?" Rachel asked.

"The police won't know what was taken. They don't know this car was there. They'll have to track down the owner, and he's probably on a business trip to God knows where."

I made two quick turns and swung onto Kinsdale, headed east toward Interstate 40. Traffic was fairly heavy, and I was glad of it.

"Where are we going now?"

I reached into the backseat and grabbed Fielding's Ziploc-sealed letter from the box, then laid it on her lap. I pointed to the line, Lu Li and I are driving to the blue place on Saturday night.

"The blue place?"

Steering with my knee, I searched the Audi's console and found a ballpoint pen. Then I pulled the letter out of the Ziploc and wrote Nags Head/The Outer Banks beneath Fielding's cartoon White Rabbit.

"Why can't you tell me out loud?"

I scribbled, They could be listening.

She took the pen and wrote, HOW? WE JUST STOLE THIS CAR!

"Trust me," I whispered. "It's possible."

She shook her head, then wrote, Is there something at Nags Head? Evidence?

An image of Fielding's pocket watch came into my mind. I took the pen back and wrote, I hope so.

She wrote, Cell phone in my pocket. Try to call Presi¬dent?

I took the pen and wrote, It's not that simple now.

"Why not?"

There was no way to write all I needed to say. I pulled her close and whispered into her ear. "Once they heard Ewan McCaskell's message, they knew they could elimi¬nate me and tell the president whatever they wanted to explain my death. Yours, too."

"What kind of lie would explain that?"

"An easy one. By now the president has been told that my hallucinations have progressed to psychosis. Ravi Nara will write a formal diagnosis. He'll say I've become dangerously paranoid, that I believe Andrew Fielding was murdered when he clearly died of natural causes. Your own office records say I've been having hallucinations and may be schizophrenic. They'll be used to support Nara 's position." I took my eyes off the road and looked at her. "Do you think that would be a hard sell?"

She turned away.

"Not a very optimistic picture is it?"

"No. But you have to put it out of your mind for a few minutes. You're all over the road. If you insist on driving, you need to calm down."

"That's not what's getting to me right now."

"Then what is?"

By answering this honestly, I would be asking for trouble, but I didn't want to keep it to myself any longer. "I saw it."

"Saw what?"

"The guy who was going to kill you."

"Of course you did. You had to see him to shoot him."

I swung onto the I-40 ramp and merged with the traf¬fic headed toward the RTP and Raleigh. "That's not what I mean. I saw him walking up the street. Willow Street. Before he ever got to the house. He walked right up to the door."

"What do you mean?"

"I dreamed it, Rachel."

She stared at me. She had never been with me when I'd experienced one of my hallucinations. "How did you see him? Like your Jesus hallucinations? Like a movie? What?"

"I saw it the way you see what the criminal or the monster sees in B movies. I saw it through his eyes."

She sat back in her seat. "Tell me exactly what you saw."

"The houses on my street. My feet walking. A dog trotting by. I thought I was dreaming about myself. But when I got to my house and reached into my pocket for my key… I brought out a lockpick."

"Go on."

"I picked the lock and went inside. I heard you in the kitchen, and then I took out a gun."

Rachel stared through the windshield, but her mind was clearly elsewhere. "That doesn't mean anything," she said finally. "Dreams of someone invading the house or bedroom are almost universal in narcoleptic patients. Even if you weren't narcoleptic, that would be a typical dream, a distortion of reality caused by anxiety."

"No. The timing was too perfect. I saw a threat in my dream, and when I woke up, the threat was there in the real world. Just as I saw it."

She squeezed my shoulder. "Listen to me. You're accustomed to the sounds of your own house. You were already in an anxious state. You heard something unfa¬miliar, something that triggered your fear of a break-in. The front door opening. A window going up. A creaking board. In response to that stimulus, your mind generated a dream of a break-in. It frightened you enough to wake you. Your dream was a reaction to external stimuli, not the other way around."

I did remember a creaking board. But I was already awake when I'd heard that. "I saw his gun in the dream," I said doggedly. "An automatic. It had a silencer." I tapped the gun in my waistband. "Just like this one."

"Coincidence."

"I've never seen a gun with a silencer before."

"Of course you have. You've seen hundreds of them in films."

I thought about it. "You're right, but there's some¬thing else."

"What?"

"That's not the first dream I've had like that. Where I was someone else, someone from the present day. I had one the day Fielding died."

"Describe it for me."

A Durham police cruiser passed us in the westbound lanes. My heart clenched, but the cruiser didn't slow or blink its lights.

"Yesterday, when I was making my videotape-just before you came in-I dreamed I was Fielding just prior to and during his death. It was so real that I felt I'd actu¬ally died. I couldn't see… couldn't breathe. When I answered the door for you, I didn't know which way was up."

"But Fielding had already died that morning."

"So?"

She held up her hands as if to emphasize an obvious point. "Don't you see? Your Fielding dream didn't pre¬dict anything. It could easily have been a grief reaction. Have you had any more dreams like that?"

I looked back at the road. We had reached the Research Triangle Park. I-40 ran right through it. Less than a mile away, Geli Bauer was directing the hunt for me.

"David, have you had other dreams like that?"

"This isn't the time to discuss it."

"Will there be a better time? Why did you skip your last three appointments with me?"

I shook my head. "You already think I'm crazy."

"That's not a medical term."

"Descriptive, though."

She sighed and looked out the window at the perfect green turf on her side of the road.

"That's Trinity," I said. "Coming up over there."

The lab was set so far back from the road that little was visible.

"The sign says Argus Optical," she said.

"That's cover."

"Ah. Look… what's the point of keeping a halluci¬nation from me? What part of yourself do you think you're protecting?"

"We'll talk about it later." I could see that she didn't intend to drop it. "I need drugs, Rachel. I can't afford to be passing out five times a day while we're on the run."

"What have you been taking? Modafinil?"

Modafinil was a standard narcolepsy treatment. "Sometimes. Usually I take methamphetamine."

"David! We talked about the side effects of ampheta¬mines. They could be exaggerating your hallucinations."

"They're the only thing that can keep me awake. Ravi Nara used to get me Dexedrine."

She sighed. "I'll write you a prescription for some Adderall."

"A scrip isn't the problem. I could write that myself. The problem is that they know I need it. They'll be watching all the pharmacies."

"They can't possibly cover every pharmacy in the Triangle."

"They're the NSA, Rachel, and they know I need drugs. These are the people who recorded the cockpit chatter of the Russian pilots who shot down that Korean airliner over Sakhalin Island in 1983. That was twenty years ago, and it was a random incident. They are actively searching for us. You read 1984?"

"Twenty years ago."

"When I say NSA, think Big Brother. The NSA is the closest thing we have to it in America."