HIS THOUGHTS WERE blood red and black. He felt as though he were in some permanent void, surrounded by a velvet curtain of black space, his hands forever searching for the seam through which to escape but never finding it. He saw the faces of Graciela Rivers and Raymond as distant images receding into the darkness.

Suddenly, he felt a cold hand on his neck and he jumped, a shriek escaping from his throat like a prisoner going over the wall. He sat up. It was Winston. His reaction had scared her as much as she had scared him.

“Terry? Are you okay?”

“Yes. I mean, no. It’s him. Noone is the Code Killer. He killed all of them. The last three for me. He did it until he got it right. He killed Gloria Torres for her heart. For me. So that I would live and be the testament to his glory.”

The coincidence of the name and Noone’s purpose suddenly struck McCaleb.

“Wait a minute,” Winston said. “Slow down. What are you talking about?”

“It’s him. It’s all here. Check the files, the computer. He killed those others. He then decided to save me. To kill for me.”

He pointed to the computer screen, where the message to McCaleb was still displayed. He waited while she read it but finally couldn’t contain himself.

“All the pieces, they were right there. All the time.”

“What pieces?”

“The code. It was so simple. He used every digit but the number one. No one. Get it? I am no one. That’s all he was saying.”

“Terry, let’s talk about this later. Tell me how you got here? How did you know it was Noone?”

“The tape. The session we did with him.”

“The hypnosis? What about it?”

“Remember how I told you not to speak so the subject would not be confused?”

“Right. You said only you should ask questions to Noone. Anything between us should be signals or written down.”

“But at the end, when I knew it was all going to shit, I got frustrated. I said to you, ‘Anything else?’ and you shook your head no. I asked, ‘Are you sure?’ and you shook your head again. I broke my own rule by speaking to you. The thing is, I asked those questions to you out loud. So Noone should have answered me. If he was in a true hypnotic trance, he should have answered because he would not have known those questions were directed at you. But he didn’t answer. It shows cognizance of the situation. He knew, either by the direction of my voice or its inflection, that I was talking to you instead of him. He shouldn’t have known that. Not in a true trance. He should have answered every question spoken in that room unless it was specifically addressed to someone else. I never used your name.”

“He was faking.”

“Right. And if he was faking it, then his answers were bogus. It meant he was part of the setup. I had the videos compared before I came here. There are hard copies in my car. James Noone and the Good Samaritan are the same guy. The shooter.”

Winston shook her head as if to signal brain overload. Her eyes scanned the room for a place to sit down. There was only the cot.

“You want to sit here,” McCaleb said, standing up.

“I want to sit down but not in here. We have to back out of here, Terry. I need to call Captain Hitchens and then the others, LAPD and the bureau. I better put out a pickup on Noone, too.”

McCaleb was amazed that she still didn’t have all the pieces together.

“Aren’t you listening? There is no Noone. He doesn’t exist.”

“What do you mean?”

“The name. It goes with everything else, Noone. Break it down and you get no one. I am no one. The pieces were there all the time…”

He shook his head and dropped back into the chair. He put his face in his hands.

“How am I… I can’t live with this.”

Again Winston put her hand on his neck but this time he didn’t startle.

“Come on, Terry, let’s not think about that. Let’s go out to the car and wait. I have to get a crime scene crew in here, maybe get some prints so we can ID this guy.”

McCaleb stood up and walked around the desk and out toward the door. He spoke without looking back at her.

“He never left a print anywhere else before. I doubt he started now.”

Two hours later McCaleb was sitting in the Taurus, parked out on Atoll behind the yellow police lines that had been strung between the rows of garage warehouses. A hundred yards down the drive he could see the cluster of activity in and around Noone’s brightly lit garage. There were several detectives-some McCaleb recognized from the Code Killer task force, technicians, videographers from at least two of the agencies involved, and a half dozen uniformed officers standing by.

Moths to the flame, he thought. He watched it all with a strange detachment. His thoughts were on other things. Graciela and Raymond. And Noone. He couldn’t stop thinking about the man who called himself Noone. He had been in the same room with him. He had been that close.

He needed a drink, wanted the burning taste of whiskey in his throat, but he knew to take that taste would be the same as putting a gun to his head. He knew that despite the pain cutting through him, he would not give Noone, or whoever he was, that satisfaction. He decided in the darkness of the car that he would live. Despite it all he would live.

He didn’t notice the men walking down the drive toward him until they were almost to the Taurus. He flicked on the lights and identified them as Nevins and Uhlig and Arrango. He turned the lights off and waited. They opened the doors of the car and got in, Nevins in the front, the other two in the back, with Arrango directly behind McCaleb.

“Got any heat in this thing?” Nevins asked. “It’s getting cold out here.”

McCaleb started the car but waited to turn the heater on until the engine got warm. He looked in the rearview mirror at Arrango. It was too dark to see if he had a toothpick in his mouth.

“Where’s Walters?”

“Busy.”

“Okay,” Nevins said. “Uh, we came down to tell you it looks like we were wrong about you, McCaleb. I’m sorry. We’re sorry. Looks like Noone is the guy. You did good work.”

McCaleb only nodded. It was a half-assed apology but he didn’t care about that. What he had found out in order to clear his name would be harder to live with than if he had been publicly accused of the murders. Apologies meant nothing to him.

“We know it’s been a long night for you and we want to get you on your way. I was thinking we could just kind of get your rundown on how all of this shakes out and then maybe tomorrow you come in and give a formal statement. What do you think?”

“Fine. As far as the formal statement goes, I’ll give it to Winston. Not you guys.”

“Fair enough. I can understand that. But for now, why don’t you tell us how, in your view, how this whole thing works. Can you do that?”

McCaleb leaned forward and switched on the heater. He composed his thoughts for a few moments before beginning.

“I’ll call him Noone because that’s all we have and maybe all we’ll ever have. It begins with the Code Killer. That was Noone. At that time I was the bureau’s point man on the task force. By agreement with the LAPD, I became the media spokesman on the case. I led the briefings, requests for interviews went to me. For ten months my face became synonymous on TV with the Code Killer. And so Noone fixated on me. As we got closer to him he fixated on me. He sent letters to me. In his mind, I was the nemesis. I was the embodiment of the task force that was hunting him.”

“Aren’t you taking a lot of the credit for yourself?” Arrango asked. “I mean, you weren’t the only-”

“Shut up and listen, Arrango. You might learn something.”

McCaleb stared at him in the rearview and Arrango stared back. McCaleb saw Nevins hold a hand up in a calming motion directed at Arrango.