I didn't blame her. At the request of the NSA, I'd made my first appoint¬ment with her under a false name. But ten seconds after we shook hands, she recognized my face from the jacket photo of my book. She assumed my ruse was the para¬noia of a medical celebrity, and I did nothing to disabuse her of that notion. But after a few weeks, my refusal to divulge anything about my work-and my obsession with "protecting" her-had pushed her to suspect that I might be schizophrenic.

What Rachel didn't know was that I had only been allowed to see her after winning a brutal argument with John Skow, the director of Project Trinity. My nar¬colepsy had developed as a result of my work at Trinity, and I wanted professional help to try to understand the accompanying dreams.

First the NSA flew in a shrink from Fort Meade, a pharmacological psychiatrist whose main patient base was technicians trying to cope with chronic stress or depression. He wanted to fill me up with happy pills and find out how to become an internationally published physician like me. Next they brought in a woman, an expert in dealing with the neuroses that develop when people are forced to work for long periods in secrecy. Her knowledge of dream symbolism was limited to "a little historical reading" during her residency. Like her colleague, she wanted to start me on a regimen of anti-depressants and antipsychotics. What I needed was a psychoanalyst experienced in dream analysis, and the NSA didn't have one.

I called some friends at the UVA Medical School and discovered that Rachel Weiss, the country's preeminent Jungian analyst, was based at the Duke University Medical School, less than fifteen miles from the Trinity building. Skow tried to stop me from seeing her, but in the end I told him he'd have to arrest me to do it, and before he tried that, he'd better call the president, who had appointed me to the project.

"Something's happened," Rachel said. "What is it? Have the hallucinations changed again?"