"Sometimes when the crazy talks, you got to listen."

"That sounds like something Lyda would say."

"It does, doesn't it? But here's the thing. When there's a real conspiracy, I am indeed h.e.l.l on wheels."

He groaned.

"You're a bright person, Rovil. I'd rate you a three on Intelligence, maybe even a three point five."

He blinked. "You're trying to insult me."

She showed him the pen. "You rated yourself a five. Really? That in itself is a sign of diminished intelligence."

"If you let me go now," Rovil said. "I promise not to tell anyone about this. You're not thinking clearly, and you need help. Look around-we're in a bas.e.m.e.nt in the suburbs of Santa Fe. You're not a secret agent anymore. You're not NSA, or Special Forces. You're a patient who is off her meds."

Ollie breathed out. "So you're not confessing then?"

"I can't confess to something that isn't-"

"I'll take that as a no."

She made her decision. Or rather, if Lyda was right, her brain decided for her. She also hoped that Lyda was right that there was no G.o.d to punish her.

From the backpack she took out a box of latex gloves and withdrew a pair.

"What are you doing?" he asked. His voice wavered-and not just for show. He was truly nervous now.

She wriggled into one glove, then the other. "Let me ask you a different question." She picked up the bottle again. "As a professional in the pharmaceutical industry, and the product owner of Stepladder..." She shook a dozen pills into her hand. "What's the dosage equivalent of what Lyda took in Chicago? Ten pills? Twenty? A hundred?"

His eyes widened.

"How many steps on the Stepladder?" she asked.

"You can't do this."

She placed an empty water bottle between her knees, then unscrewed one of the blue capsules and let the white grains drop into the bottle. "Forget the question-you'll only lie. I need to talk to someone who has a conscience."

He watched her as she emptied six, then ten, then fifteen capsules into the bottle. She found herself humming "Stairway to Heaven."

"What do you want to know?" he asked.

"The name of the cowboy. All contact info, too."

"I don't know this cowboy. I swear."

"See? Lying." She unscrewed another capsule. "I figure a hundred ought to do it."

"You'll kill me!"

"Nah," she said. "You may go insane, but Landon-Rousse's own studies put the fatal dose at well over a hundred pills. Or so I read this afternoon."

Rovil lunged forward. The water bottle was between her legs, and both her hands were occupied with the current capsule. His own hands, bound at the wrist, reached for her. She brought up her knees, but he threw himself over them and seized her throat. The chair tipped backward, and she slammed into the floor with Rovil on top of her.

She'd been expecting this move for some time; the only surprise was in how long he'd taken to try it. She made sure he'd committed to the throat; then she seized both thumbs, and twisted.

He screamed, tried to get off her. She opened her knees and circled her legs around his waist, holding him to her. He was tilted at an angle, head down, feet in the air, his thighs pressed to the lip of the chair. The ties around his ankles made it impossible for him to get leverage, and his tethered wrists made it impossible to attack her.

She twisted her hips and rolled him off the chair and onto his back. She squatted above him, still holding the good thumb. The Sig Sauer was now pressed to his forehead.

"I told you I would have to hurt you," she said.

"Please," Rovil said. "Don't turn me into one of them."

"The cowboy," she said.

He gulped air. "I don't know who you're talking about."

"Okay then," she said. "It's time to meet your G.o.d."

THE PARABLE OF.

the Man Who Sacrificed Himself Once, in a city by a lake, at the top of a high tower, a rich man held a party. Unbeknownst to him, one of the guests had invited G.o.d. The deity was smuggled into the party inside a champagne bottle.

Gilbert, IT expert and the fattest guest at the party, was the first to drink. He hoisted the bottle and took two great swigs before pa.s.sing it to the rich man, whose name was Edo. Edo drank a long pull, then pa.s.sed it to the neuroscientist, Lyda. She sipped it once before offering it to Rovil, the former rat wrangler. Rovil only pretended to drink, pressing the mouth of the bottle to his closed lips. He quickly wiped his mouth with his sleeve and smiled broadly. He thought he felt the tingle of the psychotropic on his skin, but told himself not to worry. Such brief skin contact, he knew from helping Mikala with her experiments, should affect him only mildly. "You too," he said to Mikala, and gave the bottle to her. She drank deeply and handed it back to him.

A moment later Gil stumbled backward, into the coffee table. His eyes had rolled back, and he began to speak in an unknown language. Mikala called out his name in alarm. He crashed to the floor, his arms and legs shaking as if electrified.

Edo gripped his head as if he'd been struck by a migraine. He dropped to his knees and looked up at the ceiling, moaning. Lyda was on her back, convulsing, her face making ugly grimaces.

Only Mikala and Rovil were still upright. She looked dazed. Slowly she realized that Rovil was watching her. "What did you do?" she asked him.

Oh, but she already knew. Even freshly dosed with the NME, she was the brightest of them.

She had trusted Rovil. He'd become her confidant, and when he accidently discovered her self-administering NME 110, he became the observer for her experiments, the keeper of the records. She'd asked him not to tell Lyda or the others, and he had obeyed her wishes. He was too interested in the outcome not to. She never permitted him to try the drug; the risk was to be hers alone. She began with a dose of 25 micrograms, far less than a grain of sand. Over the course of six weeks she ramped up to 50 micrograms, then 100, about the same as an average LSD blot.

He'd asked her to describe the effects for their records. "It feels like ... the numinous," she said. And that became its name in the notebooks.

It eventually became obvious to him that her interest had moved beyond the scientific. She was becoming an addict. Her personality was changing, the effects of the drug persisting well beyond what either of them predicted.

Still she wanted more, and more frequently. In those final weeks, they would spread out a yoga mat, and she would drink a vial of 100 milliliters of distilled water mixed with 300 micrograms of NME 110. He held her down while she bucked and kicked in epileptic ecstasy. The hallucinations became permanent. G.o.d, she said, was watching over her.

Sometime in those weeks Edo announced that he'd struck a deal to sell Little Sprout, and that Gil and Lyda had voted with him against Mikala. Rovil, with his paltry two-percent share of the company, was not even asked his opinion. He was nothing to them. Even Mikala, with her new G.o.d, was too enraptured with her own anger and sorrow to see that he was the one who'd been wronged. They were about to become millionaires, and he'd be left with perhaps enough to buy a new car. He pretended to be happy for them.

The night of the party, he had called Mikala from the restaurant and begged her to come to the afterparty in Edo's suite. It's over, he told her. You should forgive them. He came down and met her in the lobby of the Lake Point Tower and shepherded her into the elevator. Before the doors opened he handed her the bottle of very expensive champagne he had purchased. "We should celebrate together," he said.

The dosage had been tricky to figure out. There were so many variables he had to consider. The bottle was 750 milliliters. Alcohol tended to break down the structure of the NME over time, so he had to consider how long would pa.s.s between injecting the substance into the bottle and when it would be opened. Some would undoubtedly bubble out with the foam when they popped the cork, perhaps quite a lot. Then there was the possibility that not everyone would drink, or drink only a small amount.

In the end he figured he had better be safe than sorry. He loaded the syringe with a full gram dissolved in distilled water, the equivalent of about five thousand hits of LSD, and about three thousand times the maximum amount Mikala had taken at one time.

After they had all drunk, the bottle was still half-full and heavy in his hand, but everyone was reeling from the effects.

Everyone except Mikala. He should have accounted for her tolerance. A sudden dose would not put her down like the others; G.o.d had already burned into her brain, rewired it for His presence.

She stalked toward him, and he backed away. "Mikala, what's going on? What's happening? I feel so strange. We've got to call an ambulance."

"You will be judged for this," she said.

She went to Lyda and crouched by her side. Her wife was thrashing and babbling, speaking in tongues. "Don't be afraid," she said, and placed a hand on her forehead. "I'm here to help you through this." With her other hand she flicked on her phone, and tapped the digits with her thumb.

"h.e.l.lo? Yes. My name is Mikala Lamonier. I'm in Lake Point Tower. There's been an-"

He didn't know what she was going to say next. An accident? An attack? He struck her across the temple with the bottle, and she slumped onto the floor next to Lyda. He was surprised that the bottle had not broken.

He kneeled down and clicked off the phone. Mikala was still breathing, but shallowly. The blow had reshaped her face into something strange and leering.

He forced himself to do nothing for a full minute, until he knew exactly what to do. Then he went into the kitchen and retrieved a large, hefty knife. He would have to make this look like a crime of pa.s.sion, a crazy, unthinking attack. But what about the blood splatters? He removed Lyda's short jacket, slipped it over one arm, and set to work on Mikala's body. When he was done he wiped the knife handle with the sleeve of the jacket and placed the weapon in her hand. Then he took the smallest of sips from what remained in the champagne bottle and set it on its side between Lyda and Mikala.

Last, he lay down to wait for the police. Would they believe that Lyda had murdered her wife? Had he left behind some obvious bit of evidence that could implicate him? The minutes dragged on. He kept his eyes open to slits, watching the others moan and thrash, until finally they subsided. The room became quiet.

Gradually Rovil became aware of another presence in the room, standing just to the edge of his peripheral vision. He thought at first that it was a waiter, because he was dressed in bright red pants and vest. But then the figure turned, and he could see that the man's head was huge, and his nose was absurdly long. An elephant's trunk! He almost laughed. Ganesh was here. Deva of intellect. Remover of Obstacles.

Across the room, Gilbert pushed his fat body up. He looked around at the room, blinking in surprise. Then he saw Mikala, and the knife in Lyda's hand. He knelt down beside them, and began to weep, great aching sobs like a schoolboy who'd lost his dog. It was ridiculous, Rovil thought. The apartment intercom began to chime. Gilbert pushed himself up and waddled toward the door, out of Rovil's line of sight. The desk clerk on the other end of the intercom sounded quite worried. Gilbert answered his questions in a low voice, and then said, "Please come up. Someone's been murdered."

Gilbert walked back into the living room. Then something amazing happened. Later (when the drug wore off, and he "came to his senses"), Rovil would change his mind about this, but at the moment, in the sway of the drug, he was sure that Ganesh had made this happen. The G.o.d had removed the final obstacle to Rovil's plan.

Gilbert took the knife from Lyda's hand. He wrapped his hand around it, then pressed it into Mikala's b.l.o.o.d.y chest. Blood smeared Gilbert's sleeve. Then he stood, the knife still in his hand, and waited for the police to arrive.

Rovil, the shy young man who'd sacrificed so many animals, could not understand why this fat man would offer himself in place of Lyda. It was the most selfless act he'd ever seen, and the most senseless.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

"For years I could not understand why he did that," Rovil told Ollie. "I thought the drug had made him crazy." His voice was raspy. He'd been lying on the bas.e.m.e.nt floor, talking and weeping for hours. "Why would Gilbert do that? He wasn't the father of the child. What did he care?"

"Why does anyone get up on a cross?" Ollie said.

"Yes," Rovil said. "I understand that now. Finally." He began to cry again. He'd been crying a great deal since Ollie had administered the dosage. After the convulsions and glossolalia, after the wailing and laughing and calling out to unseen powers, Rovil had finally remembered where he was, and what he had done. The avalanche of remorse nearly buried him.

Ollie was getting tired of it. She tried to get him to focus, to answer her questions. At first he only wanted to tell her the Good News that had been revealed to him by Numinous: They were loved; every human was connected to everyone and everything else; they were all part of one organism; and on and on.

"Okay, I got it," she said. "But you have to tell me what you've done."

"Confess my sins," he said. He sat slumped in the loveseat, still tied at the wrists and ankles. His clothes were plastered to him with sweat. "There are just ... so many."

He began to speak. He told her not only about Mikala's murder, and the poisoning of everyone at Little Sprout, but all the transgressions he had committed before-and so many after. Over a decade at Landon-Rousse he had crafted a trail of evidence that allowed him to pa.s.s off NME 110 as his own work. It wouldn't stand up under investigation, but no one at the company was motivated to look their gift horse in its molecular structure.

"Then Lyda called," he said.

Somehow, impossibly, the drug was on the street. The lab a.n.a.lysis of the Logos sheet had removed all doubt. He suspected a leak inside Landon-Rousse. He'd made enemies within the company, he told her. The old Rovil of course suspected that his coworkers would steal from him.

"That's when you hired the cowboy?" Ollie asked.

"Oh no," he said. "I'd hired him long before that, for other work at LR. This was just the latest a.s.signment."

"What the f.u.c.k do you do for Landon-Rousse?"

He blinked at her through his tears. "Terrible things."

"Jesus Christ," she said. "You've out-conspiracy'd my own brain."

Rovil's theory about a leak at LR disappeared, he said, when Lyda told him about the church. No one with access to ready-made pills would do something so indirect as try to form a church and build printers. Lyda was right-it had to be Edo. But Rovil, even with his resources, could not get close to the man.

"I had no choice but to follow where you two led," Rovil said. "I needed to shut down the church, shut down Edo. No one could know the drug came from Little Sprout. It would ruin me." He winced and smiled. "I didn't care about the company, you see, just my position. My power."

He shook his head. "I don't even understand that person now. There was something wrong with me. I couldn't see it before, but now-now I'm a new person. I feel reborn." He took a breath. "I'm ready to make amends."

"See, that's the thing," Ollie said. "I don't want you to be redeemed." She took the pistol from her pocket. "I find it offensive that someone who's done so much evil should be chemically converted into a saint. I believe-and maybe this is old-fashioned of me, Lyda would think so-I believe that there is a you who is responsible. Not a corporation. Not a machine. One person. A soul."

"I agree with you," he said earnestly. "I know now that there's something bigger than this life. Something ... after."

"I do too," she said.

"If you believe in h.e.l.l," he said, "and even if you don't-don't do this. For your sake, don't do something that you'll regret."

"We're almost done," Ollie said. She thumbed the hammer, c.o.c.king the gun. "You know what I need to hear."

He nodded. "His name is Vincent."

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

I woke in a different room, a smaller s.p.a.ce but somehow less crowded. Fewer machines, I realized. So, out of the ICU, then? Rovil wasn't there, no nurses were in sight, and Dr. Gloria ...

A chill of panic moved through me. I was alone. For the first time in years, truly alone.

I could feel the emptiness where the doctor used to reside. Even when she was angry with me, staying out of sight, I had never felt this absence. I remembered talking to her during the height of the fever, the way she seemed to be slipping away into shadows, the way she leaned over me that final time.

You have been betrayed.