"You need to drive. I may go under."

She sat up. "Okay."

I got out and walked around to her side of the car. Rachel climbed over the console and slid behind the wheel. Before getting back in, I looked up and down the highway. Traffic was moderate but steady, and no driv¬ers showed any interest in me.

She studied me closely. "Are you all right, David?"

"A little shaky."

She reached over and fastened my safety belt. "Is it an episode?"

The humming had descended to my back teeth. "Yes."

"Close your eyes. I've got the wheel."

"Just keep going east. Our destination is about"-I held up three fingers-"hours away." In the glove com¬partment was a map of the Carolinas. I located Highway 64 and pointed to Plymouth, near where the Roanoke River ran into Albemarle Sound. "If I don't wake up by the time we reach here, wake me up."

Rachel put the Audi in gear and began accelerating along the shoulder. When she reached fifty, she pulled onto the highway and goosed the pedal.

"Is it getting worse?" she asked.

In my mind I said, I'm fine, but some part of my brain realized that my lips had not moved. I was about to go under. My palms were tingling, and my face felt hot. Rachel laid a hand on my forehead.

"You're burning up. Does that always happen?"

I tried to answer, but I felt as I had as a boy in the Oak Ridge swimming pool, trying to talk to my friends underwater. We yelled as loud as we could, but we couldn't make our words understood. Rachel's hand seemed to be melting into my forehead. That pleased me somehow. I wanted to check the visor mirror and see if her hand really was melting, but I couldn't move. A woman was calling my name from far away. Before I could answer, the deep blue swell of a wave broke over me and I went under, rolling and tumbling into darkness.

I'm sitting outdoors in a circle of sleeping men, leaning against a wall. Banked embers glow at the center of the circle. The sky is on fire with stars. A robed man named Peter sits beside me. He seems upset.

"Why do you want to do this?" he whispered. "If you go, you'll suffer all manner of indignities. Even if the peo¬ple listen, you'll be rejected by the priests and elders. And what of the Romans? I fear you will be killed."

Though he does not name the place, I know he's speaking of Jerusalem. "Go away," I tell him. "You value what the dog values. Your body, your next meal, your life."

He takes hold of my arm and shakes it. "You don't drive me off so easily! I've seen it in a dream. If you go, you will be executed."

"Whoever will save his life shall lose it," I reply.

Peter shakes his head, his eyes filled with confusion.

The scene changes suddenly. I'm on a high mountain, looking out over a plain. Three men sit with me.

"When you go into the towns," I ask, "who do you say that I am?"

"We say you are the anointed one."

I shake my head. "Do not say this of me. Speak from your hearts of what you have seen. No more."

"Yes, Master," answers a man named John, whose eyes are large and brown like a woman's. He looks at Peter, then speaks cautiously to me. "I'm told you mean to go to Jerusalem."

"Yes."

John shakes his head. "If you do this, the priests will not know what to do with you. They will fear you, and they'll condemn you to death."

"This cup has been passed to me. I must drink."

The men fall silent. As I contemplate the plain below, fear simmers in the pit of my belly. To know the gift of this life, this body, and then to give it up…

I snapped awake and grabbed the dashboard, my eyes on the rear of a tractor-trailer ahead. Rachel grabbed my knee.

"It's all right, David! I'm here."

My hands were shaking, the fear of the dream still palpable. "How long have we been on the road?"

"An hour and twenty minutes. We just passed Plymouth."

"I told you to wake me up!"

"You were sleeping so hard, I hated to do it."

"Have you seen anything suspicious?"

"We passed a state trooper a half hour ago, and a couple of Plymouth cops, but none of them looked twice at us. I think we're okay."

Rachel looked anything but okay. And once our immediate goal of escape was accomplished, her compo¬sure would crack. I was no different. My reaction to killing Geli Bauer's assassin had been blunted by a flood of neurochemicals evolved for my survival. Images from my dream returned in flashes of color and light, but the fear was fading, and in its wake I felt a strange sort of relief. After months of vagueness and mystery, the dreams were finally localizing to a specific place. Jerusalem. Logically this made no sense. I had never been to Israel, and I knew little about it beyond the bloody conflict I'd seen for decades on the evening news. But where had logic led me so far?

"David?" Rachel said. "Maybe we can hole up for a while at the-"

I clapped my hand over her mouth. "Don't. I'm sorry, but I warned you already."

She nodded, and I took my hand away. "If the NSA is so all powerful," she whispered, "what were you doing making that videotape in your own living room? Wouldn't they hear that?"

I reached into the backseat, lifted Fielding's box of homemade electronic toys, and set it on my lap. From it I withdrew a metallic wand about ten inches long. "Fielding showed me where their bugs were. In tiny holes in the Sheetrock."

"What was he doing with equipment like that? Don't you think that's a little suspicious?"

"I can see how it would look that way. You had to know him."

Even as I said that, I wondered if I really had known the eccentric Englishman. I poked through his box, look¬ing for signs of a secret agenda. Most of the home-built devices looked like the projects of a teenager who spent his weekends at RadioShack. One resembled the old View-Master toy of my youth, a plastic frame with tubu¬lar eyepieces and a switch on the right side. I held the makeshift goggles up to my face, aimed them at Rachel, and flipped the switch. An amber haze fell across my field of vision, but beyond that, nothing happened.

"What are those?" Rachel asked.

"I'm not sure." I turned the goggles toward the wind¬shield and looked out over the road.

My heart turned to ice. A thin, green beam of coher¬ent light-a laser-was hitting the Audi's front wind¬shield at an angle almost perpendicular to the ground. I'd seen many such beams in physics labs at MIT. The only other places I had seen them was in films, on laser-gun sights. Someone was aiming a laser at us from the air! I wanted to scream a warning to Rachel, but my throat was glued shut. Shoving my foot across the floor, I hit the brake, throwing the Audi into a skid.

Rachel screamed and tried to control the spinning car. I turned the goggles and searched for the laser. It was about forty yards away, tracking back toward the car like the hand of God. The Audi shuddered to a stop on the grassy shoulder.

"Why the hell did you do that?" Rachel yelled.

Our nearest cover was a line of trees fifty yards from the shoulder. Someone with an automatic weapon could easily cut us down before we reached the tree line. I held the goggles up to Rachel's eyes.

"Someone's going to shoot at us! Get under the dash. As far as you can."

As she tried to fold herself under the steering column, I reacquired the laser beam. I expected it to move onto me, but instead it froze on the windshield glass. The beam didn't penetrate the glass; it terminated at the windshield's surface. By extending the beam in my mind, I realized it would not intersect with either me or Rachel, but the dashboard.

"If they wanted to shoot us," I thought aloud, "they could have done it before I ever turned on the goggles."

"What?"

"It's not a gun sight."

"What are you talking about?"

The laser could be a bomb designator, but not even panic would drive the NSA to drop a smart bomb on the shoulder of an American highway. They had too many other options. Suddenly I understood. The laser was a surveillance device. By bouncing the beam off the wind¬shield and measuring the vibration of the glass, eaves¬droppers in a plane or helicopter could hear every word we said inside.