My red-eye landed at Reagan National Airport early the next morning. I stumbled off the plane amid a small, exotic herd of clothes-wrinkled halitosis-bearers.

One of my favorite employees met me at the terminal. Keisha Fallon was ex-Secret Service too. We’d guarded President Cooper together. Now she supervised the John Helms protection detail. She was dressed in a navy blue skirted suit with a white blouse and a red silk Ascot. US flag colors. The neckwear was too loud to be part of a protection detail uniform, but John Helms had insisted on it, as well as on blue suits and white shirts and red ties for his male bodyguards. I guess when you rake in billions annually in federal contracts it’s hard not to be patriotic.

Keisha handed me a cardboard-girdled paper cup, funneling a long rope of steam. “Morning, boss. Black coffee, black limo, and Black chauffeur at your service.”

“Shit, Keisha, we can’t have that. We’ll get zapped through a time-warp back to the nineteen thirties. I’m driving.”

I took the George Washington Parkway, heading toward the Helms compound north of Georgetown. Traffic was thick. National Public Radio seeped through the stereo speakers, the announcer’s velvety tones like an antidote to road rage.

Keisha dug for notes hiding in her briefcase. “Rebecca Helms and the kid were out of town.”

“I’m glad. They’re away a lot, aren’t they?”

“You know Rebecca. Friends on every continent but Antarctica. Anyway, last night, John had some of his top brass, and about a dozen Congress members, over for dinner. There’s a big vote coming up in the House next week. Major telecom bill.”

“I follow you. Lobby effort.”

“It was a cool evening, for a change,” Keisha said, “real pleasant, so they took their chow outside, on the back patio, everybody seated at one long table. The dinner was catered by Treviso’s. That’s a four-star Italian restaurant in Georgetown.”

“I’ve heard of it. So what happened?”

“Wasn’t there myself,” Keisha said, “but I’ve debriefed the team on duty. We had Billy Campbell and Jake Dunbar flanking the protectee throughout the dinner. It was Campbell who noticed her first. The waitress, I mean, the assailant.”

“Why’d he notice her?”

“She seemed agitated. Kept mumbling to herself. And her eyes kept throwing daggers at John. So Campbell notified Dunbar, and they’d just positioned themselves a step closer to the table when the assailant struck. She’d swiped a knife from the veal tray at some point earlier. Dunbar stopped it. Broke her wrist mid-thrust. John told his guests he’d actually felt the tip of the blade nudge his chest.”

Along the Potomac River, running parallel to our right, a crew team sliced its way through fog and water, shouldering their oars in rhythm. My own left shoulder had begun to ache. It’s the spot where I’d taken a bullet years before.

“The Helms family use Treviso’s a lot?” I said.

“For parties? Yeah. Five times in the past year.”

“Tell me about our assailant.”

“Her name is Sally Anne Bilchik. Caucasian. About five foot three inches tall, and a hundred and twenty pounds. Thirty-four years of age. Lives with her moms in Friendship Heights, near the metro stop on Wisconsin Ave. Treviso’s hired her ten weeks ago.”

“Had Sally been to the Helms residence before?”

“Once before. Charity event, about six weeks ago.”

“Nothing odd about her behavior that day?”

“Nothing noted,” Keisha said.

“Cops searched her home and automobile, right?”

“Yeah. There was a big photograph of John Helms in the glove box of her car, and up in her room, they found a few newspaper and magazine clippings about him, and a personal diary, or journal, that makes mention of him half a dozen times.”

“A real under-achiever, as stalkers go. The obsession must not be very old. What else do we know about Sally Anne Bilchik?”

“When the cops executed their search warrant in Friendship Heights last night, I tagged along, and I spoke, briefly, to the mother, and she wasn’t exactly surprised by this turn of events in her daughter’s life. Sally’s a mess. High school drop-out. Multiple substance abuser. Married three times, divorced three times—”

“Hey, now! Watch it!”

“Watch what?” she said.

“Watch what you insinuate about divorced people.” I’m one myself, twice over. “Maybe she’s just been unlucky in love, like certain others—”

“Ha! You unlucky, Argus? No, you’re just a born first husband is all.”

I should mention that one night, ten years earlier, high up in a hotel room in Miami, during the worst of President Cooper’s re-election campaign, when I was between wives, and hadn’t yet met Sarah, and we’d both had a few drinks and—well, our friendship had survived that pleasant evening somehow.

“Go on with your report,” I said through clenched teeth.

Keisha grinned at me, toying with her licorice-like braids, before checking her notes. “Let’s see now . . . Plenty of scrapes with the law over the years, including four convictions. One for domestic assault, two for writing bad checks, and one for possessing met amphetamine.”

“So she’s done time?”

“You bet. Three trips to the big house. Once for having her parole revoked. Oh, and her mother says she’s been in and out of mental institutions since she was nineteen years old.”

“What’s the clinical diagnosis?”

“Paranoid schizophrenia.”

This revelation did not strike me as a coincidence, or unusual. As I would soon explain to John Helms in person, the mentally ill are common celebrity hounders, harassers, attackers.

John, you should know if you don’t, was more than just a computer industry icon. He was also a symbol of wealth, of globalization, of America, of the future. He averaged two death threats a month. Yet not until Sally Anne Bilchik had anyone carried out an actual attempt on John’s life. So I wasn’t surprised to find him looking wan and pale at the breakfast table.

“Argus, do you think it was just this woman involved? My assailant, I guess you’d say? Or could there be more to it?”

“Relax, John. There isn’t any conspiracy or plot to take your life. We already know this attack was the work of one lone, deranged individual.”

“Okay, good.” John pushed back from the table and stood. He lacked his usual, imposing air, and seemed, in his black Armani suit, like a sheep in wolves’ clothing.

I stepped in front of him. “Don’t worry about your safety, John. I do all the worrying for my clients. I never stop. See all this prematurely gray hair? And my pubes are hardly better.”

John smiled. “I’ll take your word for it.” He gave an affectionate pat to my bad shoulder and stepped to the windows of the pantry. In the backyard, a pair of Presa Canario fighting dogs pranced on the lawn, both leashed to the dog walker, getting their morning exercise. “Why did she do that, Argus? Why did that woman try to kill me?”

I studied John’s burdened profile, thinking, A close brush with death makes pensive philosophers of us all. Luckily, the effect rarely lasted long. “This had nothing to do with you. Your attacker, Sally Anne Bilchik, is mentally ill.”

“Sally Anne Bilchik,” John said, slowly, as if saying her name would help him understand. “What’s wrong with her?”

I grew a tad uncomfortable. “She’s schizophrenic, John. Paranoid schizophrenic, to be precise. I’ve, uh, I’ve had more than a bit of experience dealing with her like. A good number of celebrity stalkers are schizophrenic.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Schizophrenia is an organic brain disorder. The first symptoms usually don’t appear until late adolescence or early adulthood. With paranoid schizophrenia, with people like Sally, the common symptoms are delusions and hallucinations and unfounded feelings of persecution.”

Outside, the Presa Canario fighting dogs neared. Their ugly heads were huge and thick, war helmet-like, mythological Greek monster-like. John turned his gaze from them to me.

“Delusions? Hallucinations? Shouldn’t people like her be locked up somewhere?”

“They are,” I said. “Whenever it’s necessary.”

“When wouldn’t it be?”

“Thanks to modern medicine, and modern therapy, John, some schizophrenics are able to lead normal lives. At least for long stretches of time. The psychotic episodes—the delusions and hallucinations and so on—might not recur for years at a time. These are the lucky ones, stable enough, long enough, to prosper, to succeed personally and professionally, to get married and raise a family, to become whatever they wish to be. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, you name it.

“But, sadly, many more schizophrenics end up like Sally Anne Bilchik. With her, the medicine, and the therapy, simply delay the next psychotic episode. She’s in and out of jail and mental institutions. Can’t hold a job, or a lover. She decompensates with booze and pills. She may eventually end up on the streets. Worst of all is the madness itself.

“Why did she try to kill you? Perhaps a voice in Sally’s head told her that John Helms had to die, to save America, let’s say, or to bring back Jesus. Or perhaps she’d come to believe you two were married, and yet you seemed to be ignoring her, spurning her, pretending not to know her, and so she’d flown at you in a rage. All we know for certain at this point is that she’d recently become obsessed with you.”

“Obsessed with me?”

“Yes,” I said. “Based on what the police found inside her car and in her home.”

John turned back to the window. Ten seconds ticked by silently before he said, “How could anything be more frightening, Argus? Than never being sure of what’s real and what’s not?”

You understand, I thought. You understand.

For the ride to his office at Helms Technology, I put him in the backseat of a black Lincoln Town Car fitted with armor-plating, run-flat tires, and bullet-proof tinted glass able to withstand military ball ammunition. It was the safest vehicle in the fleet, protective overkill, a five thousand pound security blanket. He knew about the features, but he didn’t appear comforted.

I remained behind at the Helms compound, using my laptop computer to compose a statement for the news media about the attack—just in case the story leaked right away.

I was still working on the statement when my cell phone rang. It was an unexpected call from my old boss, Nathan Pitt. He was the current director of the United States Secret Service. I’d worked directly under him for three years, back when Pitt had been Special Agent in Charge of the Washington Field Office. In recent years, we’d become neighbors in Georgetown and socialized some. But this wasn’t a social call.

“I heard about what happened last night,” he said.

“Heard about what?”

“About John Helms. Paul Trent gave me a buzz.” United States Senator Paul Trent. Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. He’d been at the dinner and witnessed the attack. Nathan Pitt and Paul Trent had known each other since college. They were both Skull and Bones Yalies.

“Close one,” I said.

“Too close. John Helms means more to national security than you may know, Argus.”

“Is that right?” I knew that John’s first major contract award, twenty years earlier, had been with the CIA—or the United States Central Intelligence Agency—and that, over the years, his company had done work for virtually all of the major intelligence branches, as well as the US military, but still I was surprised by Nathan Pitt’s concern.

“So what went down, exactly?” he said.

“It’s nothing. The usual story. One lone nut. History of mental illness. Now in custody in a secure psychiatric ward.”

“You sure that’s all there is to it?”

“Positive.”

“Because I can lend you some manpower, if you’d like.”

Again Pitt surprised me. I knew that taking him up on that offer would require authorization from the president himself, Eliot Ames.

“Won’t be necessary, but thanks.”

“Standing offer, by the way.”

“I’ll remember,” I said.

“How’s that golden shoulder doing?”

He liked to needle me about the injury I’d sustained on the job ten years earlier before leaving the Secret Service. Saving President Cooper’s life had made me instantly famous, and it was slowly making me rich—and Pitt jealous. We did a little BS-ing before hanging up. I went back to writing my press release.

Meanwhile, I was informed that John’s wife, Rebecca, had cut her trip to Bermuda short, due to the attack. When her helicopter descended upon the back lawn around noon, I was standing ten yards beyond its lime-traced helipad circle, where the whirring blades frightened the grass and gave my tie the notion to strangle me.

The pilot emerged first. With his helping hand, Rebecca Helms alighted, followed by her five year-old son, John Junior.

Rebecca wore a conservative black silk suit with a pleated skirt and short jacket. But the dying windstorm’s lecherous grip offered a liberal view of her shapely figure. Her black hair hid beneath a pink silk scarf. The egg-shaped lenses of her white plastic designer sunglasses could do little to hide her distraught mood. My search for just the right words of reassurance derailed when she greeted me with a vicious slap across my face.

Then she took her boy in hand and continued on toward the main house. If only her slap had awakened me to what had begun.

Next Chapter: Chapter Five