Depending on the therapist you talked to, or the paper that you read, SRA was either a mass delusion or something less probable, but even worse—an epidemic set in motion by a demonic underground whose perversions centered upon, and were ignited by, the ritual murder of children.

The elevator doors opened, and Duran stepped into the lobby. Looking neither left nor right, but concentrating on the monologue inside his head, he took the revolving doors to the outside and strode briskly toward the mailbox on the corner. It was one of those cool and windy days that made it seem as if the whole world was air-conditioned. Overhead, the branches of trees rocked in the gusting air, even as the windows of store-fronts rattled up and down the avenue.

He thought about the feminists—who had become entangled in the Satanic Ritual Abuse controversy. Many of them believed that denying the reality of SRA was the first step in disavowing more pedestrian forms of sexual abuse. Which made every skeptic an “enabler,” or even worse, a collaborator in the sexual destruction of innocent women and children.

And yet…

If there really was a Satanic underground whose sacraments included human sacrifice, cannibalism, and pedophilia—where was the evidence? Where were the bodies, the bloodstains, the bones?

This had always seemed like a good question to Duran, but there were consequences to asking it aloud. For many, it was the sexual equivalent of denying the reality of the Holocaust. And, in fact, SRA was a kind of latterday holocaust—or so it was claimed.

He looked up at the wide-open sky and for a moment, thought that he was going to faint. The words in his head—bloodstains, bones—seemed disconnected.

Nico, he reminded himself. You are thinking about Nico. No matter what she told him, Duran kept a lid on his own feelings. No shock, no doubt. Just his own, helpful neutrality, his informed sympathy and concern. Something had happened to her, he told himself, and this story, this fable—if it was a fable—was her way of dealing with her own dysfunction, her own dissociation. She’d plucked it out of the culture, out of the air, and fixed on it as an explanation for her problems. Somehow, it helped her to function, and his job as her therapist—was to…

But he’d arrived at the mailbox. He slid the JetPak into the mail slot and turned around and began to walk home. At least he told himself to walk—just walk—but after a few steps, and almost imperceptibly, his pace began to increase so that, by the time he got back to the Towers, he was practically running. The security guard—today it was the kid with the Buddy Holly glasses—gave him a funny look as he came crashing into the lobby, but then the kid recognized him and lost interest. Duran managed a smile. A nonchalant salute. And then the elevator took him back to his sanctuary.

For a guy who didn’t get out much, Jeff Duran was in very good shape. This was owing, in part, to his determination to stay in shape, and in part to the fact that he lived in a building with a health club on the top floor. Since membership in the “club” came with residence in the Towers, the facility was undersized and not quite state-of-the-art. But it had all the basics, the treadmills and Nautilus, Stairmasters and free weights, and in addition boasted a terrific view of Georgetown and the National Cathedral.

Duran was there every morning at six-thirty. His body was well-muscled and flexible, and he kept it that way with a demanding regimen of stretches, cycling, jogging, and weights. His midsection was flat and hard, the result of a punishing routine of sit-ups and crunches. Five days a week, he ran six miles on one of the treadmills that stood in front of the windows, looking out across the city. From that vantage point, he could see Georgetown University’s spires and, beyond it, the curling band of light that was the Potomac.

He always did the first mile at an eight-minute pace, warming up to the next five, which he covered in thirty-seven minutes. It was always the same. When he was done with his run, forty-five minutes had transpired (give or take a minute, here and there).

He could have run faster, but there were two reasons that he didn’t. First, he’d reached the point of diminishing returns: neither his VO-max nor his pulse rate would benefit from speeding up.

Second… Well, the second reason was idiosyncratic. It was, simply, that when the treadmill exceeded eight and a half miles an hour, it gave out a high-pitched whine that most people couldn’t hear, but which Duran found extremely disagreeable. So he took it a little slower than he might have.

Today was like any other. He arrived at the club a little after dawn, stretched, jogged, and lifted without saying much of anything to anyone. Then he returned to his apartment, showered and shaved.

Standing before the mirror, drying his hair with a towel, he caught a glimpse of himself, and remembered Nico’s remark of the day before: You oughta get out more, Doc. You’re pale as a ghost.

And so he was. And so he would be—unless he overcame the peculiar phobia that was keeping him indoors. You need a shrink, Duran told himself, chuckling silently, but not with much conviction. He was pale. Not sickly looking, but white—like a vampire in his prime, he joked to himself.

Returning to his bedroom, Duran strapped his watch onto his wrist, and noticed the time. It was 8:35, which meant that he had less than half an hour to prepare for his meeting with the day’s first client, Henrik de Groot. Dressing hurriedly, he strode into his office, sat down at the desk and turned on the computer.

Once the machine had booted up, he went into the caseload folder, and opened the file on the Dutchman.

At twenty-eight, de Groot was a successful and sophisticated businessman, commuting between the U.S. and Europe. His firm, one of the world’s largest in the field, designed and installed fire suppression systems for hotels and office buildings, specializing, as de Groot put it, in “human occupied facilities.” The company had pioneered a method of retrofitting halon-based systems in a way that minimized costs. (“Halon,” de Groot explained, “is being phased out in the same way as freon and for the same reason: it’s destroying the ozone.”) Although Duran had not asked, the Dutchman had explained how “his” fire suppression system worked. When triggered by smoke or heat, a series of nozzles emitted inert gases which lowered the level of oxygen to a point where combustion became impossible—but not to the point that human beings suffocated.

Recently, de Groot’s firm had signed a contract with a major hotel chain in the mid-Atlantic region. This was why Duran had the Dutchman as a client—de Groot had relocated to Washington so that he could oversee the work.

Handsome and powerfully built, Duran’s client spoke four languages fluently and claimed to be “conversant” in Portuguese and Thai, as well. Duran didn’t doubt him.

When de Groot wasn’t working or visiting his therapist, he had one other passion: “trance music.” When asked, the Dutchman described this with a disciple’s enthusiasm. “It’s synthesized stuff, you know—upbeat, fast 4/4 beat. It energizes you, you get lost in the sound, you dance and you go into another dimension. Your mind… kind of explodes.” The Dutchman, jerking and spinning, had launched into an amazing imitation of a synthesizer playing a weird techno version of “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.”

“Wow.”

De Groot had smiled. “It’s great! You ought to try it, Doc.” He’d named a couple of D.C. clubs. Duran had said he wasn’t much of a dancer and then he’d warned de Groot against using any of the drugs common to the club scene. (Given the medications de Groot was on, recreational drug use would be a big mistake.)