It was no longer the accusation that had begun each of their more and more acrimonious clashes, until the moment he had walked out the door of her apartment, bleeding from ten thousand cuts, feeling flayed to the bone, aching where she had clocked him. It was simply a question; one he wasn’t prepared to answer.

“To this day you can’t speak its name.”

“And nor should you,” she said. “But that’s beside the point. Answer me, Whit. I begged you not to take me, but you insisted. ‘It will be our little secret,’ you said. And you took me. It was a form of violation, an abduction. And now we both carry with us the burden of what happened there.”

“That wasn’t supposed to—”

“Oh, but it was, Whit. Down there your eyes were alight with a kind of demonic energy.”

“Let’s not get melodramatic, Charlie.”

“Oh, don’t even,” she warned him. “I’d never seen that kind of energy in you before.”

“There’s only one kind of energy, Charlie.”

“No, there isn’t. This was a dark energy; a sorcerer’s energy.”

He recalled Cutler saying almost the same thing to him.

“I hope to Christ I never see it again,” Charlie said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. You just don’t want to admit it, even to yourself.” She shook her head. “You’re so pathetic, Whit. That place had you hooked heart and soul. That’s why you took me there. You wanted me to be a part of that … that horror. That secret had made its home in your belly. Like a tapeworm it was taking you piece by piece from me.”

He looked away from her, toward the next rise of hills beyond which Seiran el-Habib slept in the central keep of his fortress-villa, surrounded by his well-armed cadre.

“The truly dreadful part, Whit, was that you couldn’t see it, let alone admit what a hold the place had on you.”

“It was called the Well,” he said with more force than he had intended. “The Well.”

*   *   *

Valerie was waiting in the parking lot across from the DARPA building when Lindstrom exited at noon. He looked agitated, shaken even, an observation that was borne out when he almost walked past her car. She slid down the window, called softly to him. He was leaning forward as if pressing into a frightful headwind, though, in fact, there was barely a breeze. He looked at her with the eyes of a deer caught in a vehicle’s headlights. She called his name again, more urgently this time, and his vision cleared. He blinked heavily, then a smile broke out across his face.

“Oh, hullo.”

“Get in, Paulus.”

Leaning across, she opened the passenger’s side door. He nodded, and like an obedient boy, trudged around the front of the car and slid in beside her.