He has no doubt that the researchers were intentionally burned alive—incinerated, nothing but bones left, if even that—to deny the coroner evidence. Although they might have died anyway, in days or weeks, the profound cruelty of the incineration of the staff shocks Lee and leaves him so weak in the legs that he needs to sit on the edge of the bed.

He had abandoned those people to their fate, yes, but Dorian had decided their fate for them. There are degrees of evil, and Lee Shacket takes refuge in the thought that what he’s done pales when compared to what his boss has done.

Surely Dorian Purcell has secretly authorized this extreme measure, his idea of a fail-safe. Dorian fancies himself a visionary, as does nearly everyone in the press who writes about him, and a true visionary knows that progress requires sacrifices, that what matters is not the short-term cost in lives and treasure, but the great benefit to humanity that will be achieved in the long term. To justify murdering tens of millions, Stalin is reputed to have said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” By comparison, ninety-two deaths might be, to Dorian, nothing more than a mere footnote to the great enterprise that has been undertaken at Refine’s Springville laboratories and will be relaunched elsewhere a year from now.

On the TV, a news anchor solemnly reports that the research being conducted at the facility involved seeking a revolutionary cure for cancer. This is a ridiculous lie, but the newsreader no doubt believes it. Cancer research isn’t so dangerous as to require that it be conducted in a walled, isolated compound a mile from the last residences on the outskirts of a Provo, Utah, suburb. However, in an age when news departments operate on tight budgets, many in the media tend to believe whatever they’re told by any source they trust, reserving investigative journalism solely for those they find dishonorable or suspicious. In public, at least, Dorian Purcell holds all the right positions on issues that matter to the opinion makers and is all but universally seen as one of the good guys.

The preliminary official explanation for the fire is that the facility maintains its own dedicated power plant to minimize outages that would affect research projects, that the plant is fueled by natural gas, and that perhaps a leak under the foundation went undetected until the building was basically perched on a bomb.

“Yeah, right,” says Lee, switching off the TV.

Later, having become a new brown-haired brown-eyed clean-shaven man, he goes out to dinner. Never a snob about food, he has happily eaten his share of Holiday Inn fare and the equivalent over the years, although on this occasion, nothing tastes appealing. The salad greens are bitter. The vegetables are vaguely metallic. The potatoes have no flavor. He is able to eat the chicken, but it isn’t as savory as it ought to be.

He craves something else but doesn’t know what might satisfy. Nothing on the menu holds any appeal for him.

In his room again, he mixes spiced rum with Coca-Cola and drinks until he can sleep.

At three thirty in the morning, screaming, slick with cold sweat, he wakes from a nightmare of which he can remember not a single detail.

The disorientation that is characteristic of dreams remains with him. At the windows, an otherworldly cobalt-blue light leaks around the edges of the draperies, as though in the world beyond these walls, a silent catastrophe is emitting lethal radiation. He is sober, but the small room feels vast, the bed adrift on a sea of undulant shadows. When Lee throws back the covers and sits on the edge of the mattress, the floor crawls under his bare feet, as though carpeted by an insect horde. He fumbles with the nightstand lamp and finds the switch. Sudden low light beaches the floating bed and reveals no insects. Yet the place is almost as shadowy as—and no less eerie than—it had been in the dark.

After rising from the bed, he stands in indecision, certain that coiled within the nightmare had been an urgent presentiment of an onrushing evil that isn’t merely a sleeper’s fantasy, that is instead a truth on which he needs to act to save himself. But still he has no memory of the dream.

He settles in a chair, gripping the upholstered arms with both hands, rocking back and forth even though the chair isn’t a rocker and doesn’t move in sympathy with him. He can’t seem to be still. He needs to move, as if to prove to himself that he’s alive.

In the nightmare . . . He recalls something now. He’d been trapped, paralyzed, wrapped tightly, as though cocooned, a white translucent material across his eyes; formless shadows swelling and receding; sounds rising and fading around him.

With a shudder, he wonders if the spectrum of genetic material with which his cells have been contaminated might include that of some worm that dies only to be born anew from a cocoon.

He was helpless in the dream, and lonely. He rocks ceaselessly in the unmoving armchair. He has immediate getaway money and an elegant residence in Costa Rica and $100 million where no authorities can find it, but a profound loneliness makes him vulnerable, with no meaningful purpose.

He feels powerless, as when he’d been a child under the iron rule of a violent alcoholic father and a mentally disturbed mother.

He can’t endure being powerless. He cannot tolerate it.

In addition to the scientists at Springville, twenty-two hundred Refine employees had answered to him. Now he has authority over no one. He had power, position, respect, twenty Tom Ford suits that he wore with colorful sneakers. All that is gone. He is alone.