FaceOff by Dennis Lehane, James Rollins, Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly, R. L. Stine, Heather Graham, Jeffery Deaver, Peter James, Steve Martini, Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Joseph Finder, Lee Child, Raymond Khoury, Linwood Barclay, Steve Berry, John Sandford, M. J. Rose, Lisa Gardner, F. Paul Wilson, T. Jefferson Parker, John Lescroart, Linda Fairstein Page A

perfect the memory insertion procedure. You can imagine the results of programming the wrong memories. So I arranged to have indigent people, drug addicts, the homeless, secretly transferred up to my clinic from New York City hospitals.”
    “Those are the gaunt patients I saw around me.”
    “Yes.”
    “People nobody would miss.”
    “That is correct.”
    “And how did I get there?”
    “Ah. What a lot of trouble you were. It seems that, as part of some case you were working on, you became suspicious of Stony Mountain. You managed to check yourself into Bellevue, posing as a homeless tubercular, and you were duly transferred up here. But there was an accident, a miscommunication, and your clothes ended up being transferred with you. Those were not the clothes of a homeless drifter. I became suspicious, made inquiries, and ultimately learned who you really were. I couldn’t just kill you—as you pointed out, killing a federal agent is never the best solution. Much better would be to reprogram you with new memories. To gaslight you, as it were: erase from your memory the real reasons for your coming here, and to add new memories that would, in the end, convince your superiors and loved ones that you had become mentally ill. After that, no one listens to a crazy person. No matter what you said, it would be chalked up to your illness.”
    “Diogenes and Helen were not real.”
    “No. They were phantoms, reconstructed out of your memoryby manipulating Npas4.” Grundman paused. “It appears my research into Helen could have been a little more thorough.”
    “And the dummy?” Pendergast asked.
    “Ah. The dummy. I call him Dr. Augustine. He’s a crucial part of the treatment. He doesn’t exist, either. The dummy isn’t real. He’s the conduit, the vehicle—the Trojan Horse, as it were—which I first insinuate into the patient’s mind. If I can plant Dr. Augustine in your mind, I can use him to leverage any other memory I wish to insert.”
    There was a long silence, interrupted by the calling of the loons. The full moon cast a buttery light over the water. Pendergast said nothing.
    The doctor stirred nervously in his seat. “I assume that, since you haven’t killed me, you accept my story?”
    Pendergast did not answer directly. Instead, he said: “Step out of the car.”
    “You’re going to leave me here?”
    “It’s a lovely summer evening for a walk. The main road is about ten miles back. The local police will probably pick you up before you have to trek the whole distance.” He waved the doctor’s cell phone meaningfully. “You’ll miss the SWAT team raid on your clinic, of course . . . lucky you.”
    Grundman opened the door and stepped out into the night. Pendergast slid over to the driver’s seat, turned the car around, and headed slowly back down the dirt road. Behind him he could see Grundman, standing at the verge of the lake, silhouetted in the moonlit water.
    With Grundman’s phone in his hand, he began to dial the number of the New York field office of the FBI—the first step toward raiding and shutting down Stony Mountain. But he didn’t complete the call. Slowly, he let the phone drop into his lap.
    He knew who he was—knew without a shred of doubt. He was Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast of the FBI. This episode at Stony Mountain had been a nightmare, a waking delusion. But now it was over. Dr. Grundman’s treatment had been fiendishly effective—but it had failed in the end, as it must. His mind, his memories, were simply too strong to erase or manipulate for long. Now he knew, with utter conviction, who he really was. He knew his true history—it was coming back to him at last. He could put all this behind him, get on with his life. His real life.
    And yet—
    He looked down at the phone in his lap. As he did so, he glimpsed something in the rearview mirror—something he unaccountably had not noticed before.
    There, sitting in the backseat of the car, staring back at him