The Gulfstream touched down at Reagan National Airport. In a still much-bewildered state, I shuffled down the aisle, filing out. Beside the exit door, in front of the pilot’s cabin, stood the flight attendant, smiling politely and saying goodbye to each of the passengers disembarking. I saw her in a boxy blue uniform again—had for the last thirty minutes, ever since she’d finished distributing the last round of drinks. No one had spoken to me for the same amount of time, though I’d joked aloud to the entire cabin about drinking some bad coconut juice in Thailand.

I counted back in time to the year I lost my sanity . . . Twenty-two years had gone by. Twenty-two years without doubting my own eyes. Or ever really doubting my own mind. I felt the urge to resume a habit I’d kicked twenty-two years earlier: the reassuring habit of reciting a litany of facts about myself and my life, just to prove to myself I still knew what they were. I used to recite the litany aloud—anywhere, anytime—when feeling acutely stressed. This time I managed to do it mentally.

My name is Argus Ward. I’m 44 years old. I have a wife. Her name is Sarah. I have a daughter. Her name is Ellie. Short for Eleanor. We have another child on the way. We have an Irish Setter, Duke. I don’t know the housekeeper’s name, but we have a revolving door in that department. I am the president and CEO of Argus Ward, Incorporated. My firm provides security consulting and services to individuals and to commercial interests. Threat assessment. Personal protection. Investigations. Counter measures against industrial spying.

I ceased my mental litany at the exit door. I gave to the flight attendant an empty, parting nod in exchange for her plastic smile and sterile “Goodbye.”

On the steel ladder leading to the tarmac, the mellow gold rays of the waning sun blinded my descent. I felt regret at having been—not many minutes earlier—too gentlemanly to goose what I’d taken to be a woman’s bare bottom, regret at not allowing my sense of touch to weigh in on my grasp of reality.

But before I hit the tarmac, I realized I’d probably end up telling my wife everything that had just happened on that plane, and my regret over not goosing the flight attendant instantly evaporated. Sarah is the jealous kind.

Tucked inside the Freon-cooled cocoon of my gray BMW, I rolled past the airport terminal and a bronze statue of Ronald Reagan—who, I noted, was not naked, but still in a suit and tie.

I merged into heavy, rush hour traffic on the George Washington Parkway, and I switched on some bluegrass, one of my favorite MP3 downloads. Those zippy fiddles always pick me up.

Well, not that time. I couldn’t quite put out of my mind that everything I’d worked for in this life—and everyone I loved in it—was now suddenly at risk.

Twenty minutes later, I arrived home in Georgetown, parking in the driveway beside the house. Next door, Stuart Carr and his eight year-old son, Jason, were spread out on their front lawn, playing catch with a baseball and mitts.

“That reminds me,” I called to Stuart. “We need to take in another Orioles game.”

Stuart gave me a nod during his wind-up. “Red Sox are visiting in three weeks.” He’d gone to Harvard as an undergrad, when he’d switched allegiances from his native Seattle Mariners to the storied Boston team. “With the Orioles in the cellar, it shouldn’t be hard to get tickets.”

“Works for me. You pick a date, and buy the tickets.”

“Day game, or night?”

“Night,” I said. It would be late June by then, and I was thinking about the heat.

“Okay, buddy.”

I waved and headed inside. In the five years since I’d moved to the neighborhood, Stuart Carr had gradually become my closest friend. But it never crossed my mind to share with even him what had happened to me on that plane.

In the hallway on the ground floor of our townhouse, I passed by the new maid—what’s her name—as she dusted picture frames. She was white, this one, and weathered, with rheumy eyes telling of too many bad decisions. She flashed me a smile, her crooked teeth like a group portrait of a family that doesn’t get along.

In the kitchen, I slugged down a tall glass of water and peered through the window over the sink. Ellie was running with Duke around our little, fenced-in back lawn, playing keep-away with a squeaky toy. Sarah sat on the edge of the open porch, lost in her prenatal yoga. Along with her old drawstring yoga pants, she wore a pink cut-off Tee shirt, her swollen, second trimester belly exposed and celebrated with hand-painted swirls of vivid color I recognized as Ellie’s art.

Nearby, our Japanese gardener was sculpting a shrub. Now his name I knew. Hideo Mori. He’d been doing our yard for years. He rarely spoke to me, and when he did, I rarely understood his meaning. Sarah, on the other hand, seemed to know all about him. Thought him profound. Said he had an old soul. (Hard to check her story though. She has a knack that way.)

Something in my chest squeezed as I looked at my ladies unobserved. I took the stairs up to the master bedroom. In the bathroom, I opened the mirrored cupboard above the sink and grabbed a bottle of pills sitting on the top shelf. I spilled the entire contents onto the countertop. Then I began counting . . . So many little white pills . . .

If I were John Helms, I thought, I wouldn’t have to count. John had a high-tech medicine cupboard that I’d seen once when redesigning the security system for his estate. Every time he opened it up, a recorded voice would play through a speaker to remind him if he needed to take a pill. Somehow, his computer-assisted cupboard even knew whether he did what he was told.

My count, as I recall, ended at fifty-three pills. I checked the pill bottle for the date of purchase and the number of pills it had originally contained. Then I did the math . . .

No, I hadn’t been forgetting. Hadn’t skipped a single day. In fact, I was a pill short—as if I’d taken two pills one day by accident. Probably a math error. The important thing was I’d been taking my medication. Just as I’d thought. The first thing I would do in the morning was pee and then I’d take my Risperdal.

You’re probably wondering by now, if you’re having trouble recalling the news accounts from last year, during the peak of my infamy, “Just what exactly, Sir, is wrong with you?”

Clinically speaking, I’m a paranoid schizophrenic. I’m not, however, a typical case. I count myself very lucky to be what Doctor Shields—that’s my psychiatrist—calls a “high-functioning” paranoid schizophrenic. There are doctors and lawyers and even psychiatrists who are too.

But enough about my disease for now as I’m sure you’re wondering how I ever managed to sneak myself into the security business in the first place. I’ll tell you this much. Until recently, I was able—with some luck and some cunning—to hide my disease from all public knowledge.

Why I ever chose to become a security consultant—and before that, a United States Secret Service agent—I never considered seriously until Doctor Shields insisted.

Excitement, challenge, the satisfaction of public service—I came up with those reasons on my own. Doctor Shields came up with my having an unconscious desire for a socially acceptable way to express my paranoid tendencies. And I’m sure he’s right too. Think about it. I’d chosen a career in which I got paid to worry, basically. The perfect career for me. (Almost.)

So there I was in my bathroom, scooping pills back into the bottle. Risperdal is a common anti-psychotic medication. I could not—and I cannot—keep the madness at bay without it. With it, the mystery of the naked flight attendant remained.

What’s happening to me? I wondered on my way downstairs. Usually, if it was time to adjust my medication, I’d go a few days feeling agitated for no reason, or fuzzy-headed, and maybe Sarah would point out that I was brooding, or avoiding eye contact with her, or claiming that someone had it in for me somehow, and then I’d know enough to head for the psychiatrist’s office straight away. But I hadn’t been agitated or fuzzyheaded. And Sarah hadn’t given me any warning signals. And I hadn’t been suspecting others of any dark, sinister plans. Though I had to admit I didn’t like the looks of that new maid, what’s her name.

“Were you aroused?” Sarah asked me in the kitchen after hearing my bizarre story. She was freshly showered and puttering in a white maternity dress, checking on the overcooked-smelling stew and dinner rolls, not looking at me.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, squirming on my stool by the butcher block table. “She was stark naked, and very close to me at times. All I lacked was a roll of dollar bills.”

“I mean,” she said, stopping, staring, “were you aroused before you saw her in the nude?”

“No,” I said. “I was preoccupied with work. I might’ve noticed she was attractive, that’s it.”

“Uh-huh.”

Her tone let me know she thought I wasn’t being entirely truthful. Which I wasn’t.

“The important thing, Sarah, is that my meds don’t seem to be working. I’d better go see Doctor—”

“What did she look like?”

I sighed. We’d been together long enough for me to now guess with clairvoyant accuracy what her next six or seven questions would be, and what my own answers would be too. But there is no skipping ahead in a marriage, is there? Husbands and wives have litanies of their own. I sipped my chardonnay.

“She was average height,” I said at last. “Slender. About your age, I guess. Dirty blonde hair. Nice complexion. Pretty face. Kind of heart-shaped.”

“Tits?”

I shrugged. “Maybe your size, when you were about fifteen years old.”

“Ass?”

“Same answer.”

“Shit head.” Sarah can’t help cursing a lot. She’s native to Southern California, where beauty is to be seen and not heard. Or so it seems.

“Daddy!” Ellie barreled in from outside, holding a baggie full of dog shit. “Look, I scooped the poop!” She held the baggie up for my inspection. It was soiled some on the outside.

“Good job.” I tousled her hair. “But try to get it all inside the bag next time.”

“Okay.”

I took hold of the baggie—at arm’s length. “Now go wash your hands.”

“Yes, Daddy.” Ellie skipped off toward the downstairs bathroom. I followed her bounce until she was out of sight.

“Was it selfish,” I said, “bringing her into the world? I mean, given the genetic risk—”

“That again? Now? With another on the way?”

“I’ve got to see Doctor Shields as soon as possible.”

“You said it would be alright,” she said as I headed for the trash can in the garage. “You said the odds the kids would get it were what? Six to one against—”

The kitchen phone rang. Sarah answered. It wasn’t for me, but the ring had startled me into realizing that I’d forgotten all about calling my billionaire client back.

Yet there was dinner ahead, and Ellie’s bedtime after that, and so I didn’t phone John Helms until the next morning. What’s the wealthiest person in America when compared to the most important person on Earth?

Next Chapter: Chapter Three