It honestly seemed to Lucien that he was losing his mind. At the office that afternoon, the screen-saver on his computer had become his latest enemy. It normally scrolled lines from Joan Crawford movies -- you'd be sitting in his office, and, in blood-red 36-point Copperplate Gothic, the computer would scream "Why did you adopt me!!!" -- originally uttered by Christina Crawford in "Mommie Dearest." But now every time he looked at the screen, all he saw were the words "You'll hear from me," Artemis's echoed threat. All afternoon, Lucien had found himself shaking his head, rubbing his eyes, and having difficulty concentrating on the millionth revise of the Cummings Footwear logo.

Later, stretched out on his bed at ten o'clock that evening -- staring up at the skylight, a glass panel reinforced with chicken wire on which noisy, dirty pigeons nested, disgustingly -- Lucien fantasized about how to stop Artemis from ruining his life. Which, in Lucien's mind, is exactly what revealing his past would do. And he was probably right. The life Lucien had so carefully constructed for himself following his change of identity would be shattered by his coworkers' knowledge that Lucien's past included a cowardly flight from a catastrophe that a more courageous individual might have faced.

Unbelievably -- even to himself -- Lucien was so freaked out that he found himself contemplating . . . murder. It was pure fantasy at first. But the more he thought about it, the less . . . criminal it seemed, and the more reasonable a solution to his dilemma.

The speed with which Lucien had crossed from panic and fear into amorality and revenge was frightening -- even to himself.

Get a grip! Hel-LO! How did we get sucked into a subplot that seems yanked from a psycho/sicko Ruth Rendell police procedural, when we thought we were reading a light satire? Ah, dear reader, the cyberseries world is not what you think it is ... nor are the goings-on in the world of Hillyer, Jones confined to office politics and tacky love affairs. Sometimes, there are matters of life and death at stake. Don't laugh.

Anyone watching Lucien get up from his bed with a look of fiendish purpose in his eyes, and walk toward the bookshelf at the far end of his loft would have said, This is a man about to come undone. Gladys Knight, Lucien's cat, peered at him from her usual precarious perch at the top of the ten-foot bookshelf -- Lucien had no idea how the cat got up there every night, and didn't want to know. Even the cat seemed to sense that Lucien was no longer . . . Lucien. She hissed as Lucien approached, jumped off the bookcase onto the bare wood floor, landed with a thump, and bounded into the kitchen.

Lucien began to thumb through the books, which were thrown haphazardly on their shelves, arranged in no particular order or pattern. Books from the remainder table Lucien had picked up on Saturdays at The Strand were tossed, cheek-by-jowl, next to dime-store mysteries, Penguin classics from college, coffee-table art volumes he'd never read, and dust-covered standbys like "Martha Stewart's Entertaining" and "The Silver Palate Cookbook." Very 1970s, Lucien thought, typically, as his eyes at last fell upon what he was looking for: the Organic Chemistry and Physiology textbooks he'd kept from college when -- for one miserable year before going to art school -- he'd actually considered pre-med.

Removing the books from the shelf and sitting cross-legged on the floor with them, he flipped through each book's index scanning the columns for the information he wanted. As he suspected, it was there: everything he needed to know to formulate the poison with which he would end Artemis's life before Artemis destroyed his own.

"I've lost it. I've really lost it," Lucien said aloud to himself. "What am I thinking?"

"If you'd fasten your seat belt, sir, we'll be on the ground and at the gate in about fifteen minutes. Thank you." The flight attendant with the brisk British accent continued down the aisle.

Jim Hillyer hated the Concorde. It was too damn fast. You never had the feeling of actually traveling to Europe, because it seemed that before you were airborne it was time to land. And it was so cramped.

Hillyer had long ago given up drinking on transatlantic flights -- two martinis aloft and you arrived feeling like you had the flu. But he'd been swilling Evian and popping honey-roasted cashews since they'd left JFK, and he was feeling bloated and slightly sick anyway.

This "thing" with Meg Townsend had gotten out of hand. What had started as an innocent flirtation on the photo shoot for Anson Cosmetics had turned into a yearlong affair. Hillyer could never figure out younger women like Meg Townsend. They seemed to be genuinely attracted to middle-aged men like himself -- but it was also clear to him that Meg Townsend was ambitious and willful, and that she expected Jim to be of help to her in her semi-stalled modeling career. As if any model who'd been in the swimsuit issue of "Sports Today" needed his help. Who did she think he was, anyway, Eileen Ford?

Plus, these trips to London were killing him. This was his sixth in a year -- three of them totally trumped up business junkets to the London office of Hillyer, Jones as excuses to see Meg.

Jim suspected that his wife knew something was going on, but she was way too classy to let on that it bothered her. Ironically, that only made Jim feel closer to her. As the plane touched down at Heathrow, these thoughts were flashing through Jim's mind at lightning speed; what he should have been worrying about, of course, was the final round of presentations to Cummings Footwear that had been pushed back two weeks, and on which the agency was working furiously on back in New York at that very moment.

Twenty minutes later, Jim was standing at the baggage carousel waiting for his single leather two-suiter to come barreling out of the chute. It was, as always, the last thing off the plane, and he picked it up and stopped briefly at the Bureau de Change to convert some dollars into pounds.

He'd passed up the car that Ian in the London office had, as usual, offered to arrange for him, and proceeded to the Underground. The traffic had gotten so horrendous in London in recent years that Jim insisted on taking the tube from Heathrow into town. The new train out to the airport was remarkably efficient. But he wasn't going to the Hillyer, Jones office on New Bond Street. He was headed straight to Meg Townsend's flat in Mayfair. As he figured it, he'd take the tube to the Green Park station, and be at her door within an hour.

Going Global. Wait a minute. We've got a New York thing going on, a parallel story developing in Hawaii, Bernadette DaCapo on a Rocky Mountain high, and now Jim Hillyer's in LONDON? "Is this wise?" our writer asks himself -- then answers in the affirmative. The emotional imperatives of our characters' lives know no geography -- other than that of the mind, and the heart. Plus the Frequent Flyer miles are adding up ...

It was 4 in the afternoon, London time, when Hillyer emerged from the Green Park tube stop into the fading late-afternoon Northern European sun. Walking three blocks in the darkening light down Piccadilly in the damp London air, he turned right, into Half Moon Street, his suitcase becoming suddenly heavy, and walked to the gleaming white Queen Anne-style apartment building that Meg Townsend called home.

Meg had long ago given Hillyer a key, which he didn't dare carry on his regular key ring for fear that his wife would ask what it was. He kept it tucked in his billfold, next to his driver's license. Setting down his bag in a shallow puddle on the granite stoop, he inserted the key into the lock, and an ominous -- but inexplicable -- feeling crept over him.