The First Patient

by Michael Palmer

  It was all Gabe could do to keep from continuing his spontaneous performance by marching into the conference room to question Dr. Rosenberg about his research and whether the brains were, in fact, human. But it seemed unlikely that any of the security team would be as self-absorbed as the scientists or as accepting that anyone in a lab coat had to be one of the good guys, shoes or no shoes.

  The extensive underground laboratory, devoted at least in part to nanotechnology research and to neurobiology, made no sense yet, but certainly it had to be connected to the books he had taken from Jim Ferendelli's library. For days, questions had been piling up like autumn leaves. Now, in just a few hours, there would finally be answers—provided, of course, that he could get out.

  Cautiously, he made his way to Corridor B and then to the swinging door back to Lily Pad Stables. As he passed Laboratory B-10, he could see Dr. K. Rawdon hunched over the oculars of the scanning tunneling microscope. On the wall above the scientist was an ornately painted sign, in a simple black lacquer frame, which Gabe had missed on his first pass by the lab.

  THINK SMALL, the sign read in lowercase letters.

  THINK SMALL.

  CHAPTER 42

  This is the pharmacist."

  "Your name?" Alison asked.

  "McCarthy. Duncan McCarthy."

  Alison checked the list of qualified pharmacists pasted innocuously in the back of the White House clinic patient ledger. McCarthy's name was there.

  "Please fill the full Alupent inhaler prescription that's on file for Alexander May."

  May was the code name for a prescription that was going to the White House, and full meant seven identical inhalers.

  "The name of the driver who will be picking it up?"

  "Cromartie." Alison spelled the name. "Alison Cromartie. I'll present my ID when I come."

  "Time?"

  "Tonight. No, no, wait. Tomorrow. I'll stop by the hospital to pick it up tomorrow morning."

  "Very well," the pharmacist said. "I'll be here."

  Alison set down the receiver on the examining room phone and entered the doctor's office—Gabe's office. It was nearing seven and there was no sign of him. She wished that somewhere along the line she had thought to get his cell phone number. There was much for them to talk about. Still, it might have been for the best that she hadn't called him yet. She had time now to think over how much she wanted to disclose—to him or to head of internal affairs Mark Fuller. She had evidence that Treat Griswold was probably involved in a perversion involving young girls—or at least one particular young girl. That in itself made him an easy mark for extortion.

  In addition, she had hard evidence that Griswold had broken with unwritten White House law by repeatedly handling the president's medications—specifically his inhaler. Whether or not there was a connection between the inhaler and any psychiatric problems the president might be having would depend on what a sophisticated analysis of the contents revealed.

  What she had at this point might have been enough to present to Fuller, but there was no way she was going to put her career on the line and go up against the most powerful and respected agent in the Secret Service without more than indirect evidence and speculation. She needed proof of his relationship to the girls on Beechtree Road, and she needed a positive analysis of the contents of the inhaler he had repeatedly given the president to use. Lester had done his job well, although according to him, his life may have been spared by a fortuitous call on Griswold's cell phone.

  If she was to move at all against the president's number-one Secret Service man, she needed absolute proof of wrongdoing. Los Angeles had taught her that having unsubstantiated knowledge, good intentions, and the willingness to engage in a she said/he said confrontation simply wasn't enough to blow the whistle on anyone with clout.

  Her plan was to have the contents of several Alupent inhalers analyzed, including the one Lester had taken from Griswold. But there was no way she could risk going through Mark Fuller or anyone else connected with the Secret Service to do so. It seemed Fuller had done a decent job of protecting her identity until now, but despite what he had told her, it was hard to believe no one except Fuller knew that she had been sent into the White House undercover. The Service was very closely knit, and with a man of Griswold's stature involved, sooner rather than later there were bound to be leaks.

  Lester had guarded his words closely when they first spoke. If he was actual FBI, would she be giving him up by asking him to come forward and speak to Fuller? Using an FBI operative to trap a Secret Service agent wasn't going to sit well no matter what. Was there any way around doing that?

  At the moment, the inhaler was wedged beneath the seat of her car. Was there any lab outside of the government with sophisticated analytical capabilities that she could trust for both reliability and discretion? The answer was most certainly yes, but she had no idea how to locate such a lab or how to approach the people working there.

  The Internet? she wondered.

  Possibly. She could probably get some idea of the reliability of a place from a phone call to whoever was in charge, but with so much at stake and only one sample, she wanted to know that whatever place she chose was the best.

  A better idea would be Gabe.

  It was time she trusted someone, and he was the obvious choice. She had already blown her cover to him. Sharing her concerns about Griswold would probably be safe, and with luck Gabe would have had experience in his practice with just the sort of blood chemistry lab she needed.

  She took an envelope and a sheet of Gabe's stationery from the desk.

  Important stuff to talk about, big fella. Please call me. Anytime, day or night.

  A.

  She added her home and cell numbers, sealed it, wrote his name and title on the envelope, and set it carefully on the corner of his desk blotter. At that moment, she heard the door to the reception area softly open and close.

  "Gabe?" she called out.

  Nothing.

  Alison checked the placement of the envelope one more time and took several steps toward the outer room. Through the doorway, the room looked empty. Had she really heard something? She felt her pulse accelerate.

  "Gabe? . . . Is somebody out there?"

  She stepped through the office doorway into the reception area. Directly across from her, the door to the outside corridor was closed. At that instant she sensed movement from her right. She started to turn, but far too late. A thick, powerful arm locked across her throat, tightening with dizzying force, cutting off her breathing and making it impossible to scream. A cloth saturated with some sort of liquid was pressed over her mouth. The arm across her neck loosened just enough for her to inhale.

  "Griswold!" she tried to say, thrashing against his cinder-block body and ineffectually pounding backward at him with her fists and feet. "Griswold, no!"

  "What do you think of this stuff, Cromartie, huh?" Griswold asked in a coarse whisper. "State-of-the-art liquid inhaled anesthesia—tasteless, odorless, rapid onset, long acting. Invented by our own people just for us field operatives. If you could get it over a water buffalo's mouth and nose, he'd be on the ground in half a minute. You don't know about it? Oh, sorry. I guess they don't tell snitch nurses, just the real agents. We're kept up on every new drug. As you'll see."

  Quickly Alison's terror gave way to impotence and then to a strange detachment. She tried to hold her breath, to continue kicking backward against Griswold's shin. She drove her elbows against his barrel chest. She attempted to bite the hand that was forcing the cloth even tighter against her mouth, crushing her lips against her teeth.

  Waves of dizziness and nausea made it impossible to continue struggling. She was going to throw up . . . throw up and aspirate and choke to death. She was . . .

  The fear, helplessness, and intense nausea gave way to a giddy light-headedness and ennui, then, moments later, to blackness. The last things she heard, from the lips beside her ear, were Griswold's grunting breathing and guttural spe
ech.

  "They gave you up, Alison. . . . All I had to do was make one phone call and they gave you up. How's that for respect?"

  CHAPTER 43

  So, enter the hero."

  The President of the United States, wearing a white terry-cloth robe and matching flip-flops, greeted Gabe in the living room of the White House residence. Even though it was only ten in the evening, two or three hours before Stoddard's bedtime, the weariness enveloping his eyes seemed even more pronounced than usual.

  "Hero?" Gabe asked.

  "Evon Mayo, Lily Sexton's assistant, called and told us what happened. She said the doctors told her your treatment in the woods might well have saved Lily's life. Apparently, in addition to her broken shoulder, she punctured a lung and was in danger of bleeding to death."

  "There really wasn't that much I could do out there, but I make it a policy never to dissuade people from thinking I'm a hero."

  "For some reason, I don't think I believe either part of that statement," Stoddard said.

  "I stayed at Fauquier Hospital in Warrenton with her until they had inserted a chest tube, given her a unit of blood, and she was stabilized. For a small place—or even a big place for that matter—that hospital's really quite terrific. Reminds me of ours back home. If you could send out a presidential something or other to them, I know they'd appreciate it."

  "Done," the president said without even writing a memo.

  And Gabe had no doubt it would be.

  "Good hospital or not," he said, "Lily wants university people to take care of her shoulder, and they have a helipad right next to the ER, so tomorrow morning if she's ready to travel, she'll be flown to Georgetown."

  "So, what happened out there? Lily's a hell of an experienced rider. I've been out on those trails with her myself, and she's come riding with me and Carol from the stables near Camp David a couple of times as well. Makes me look like a tenderfoot."

  Gabe had been preparing for this moment throughout the drive from Warrenton back to the capital. It was time Drew learned some of what was swirling around him. Not all yet, but some.

  "A man shot at us from the woods. A rifle. Black ski mask, black clothes. Wasn't much of a marksman—certainly not by Wyoming standards. From the distance separating us and him, he should have at least hit one of the horses, but he hit nothing except a tree trunk eight or so feet from us. Lily's horse reared and threw her. I suppose mine was already worn-out from lugging me up the trail. He just stayed put."

  "Black ski mask, black clothes, out there in the woods where you two just happened to be . . . doesn't sound like a whacko to me."

  "I don't think he was."

  "So, was he trying to kill Lily?"

  "Me," Gabe said simply.

  Stoddard's look of surprise was fleeting.

  "You sounded sure it was a he," he said. "I had the feeling you had more to tell me."

  Gabe paused as he prepared to pull his finger from the dike. To say his onetime roommate had more than enough on his plate was a gross understatement, but now it was time to pour on a little more.

  "This is the second time since I arrived here that someone has tried to kill me," Gabe said finally. "I think they were the same guy."

  Eyes narrowed, Stoddard listened impassively as Gabe reviewed the botched shooting on G Street. He saved his questions until Gabe was done.

  "You said this man would have killed you if you hadn't been rear-ended at that exact moment?"

  "That's correct. Assuming it's the same man, after watching him with a rifle I don't think he's any kind of a professional hit man. But even he couldn't have missed me from five feet."

  "And the collision was a fortuitous accident?"

  Stoddard, as usual, was right on top of things. Gabe was prepared for the question. First Alison, then the call from Ferendelli, and finally the bizarre finding off the lower level of Lily Sexton's home. He was beginning to buckle under the weight of the secrets he was keeping from the man who had brought him to Washington. During the ride back from the hospital in Warrenton, he had worked out what he was going to share with the president and where he was going to draw the line—at least until he had more information.

  "The person who banged into me and probably saved my life was following me purposefully," he said. "Tailing me."

  "To hurt you?"

  "No. I think to protect me."

  "Do you want to tell me who that was?"

  "I don't, Drew. I sort of promised to think carefully before I told anyone. But I'm prepared to now."

  Again, Gabe could see Stoddard's intellect rapidly processing the information as it had been presented so far.

  "Whoever this is was tailing you from the White House at two in the morning?"

  "Yes."

  "Secret Service?"

  Gabe wasn't surprised at how quickly the president put things together. This was a man who, after the accident at Fairhaven, had gone from being a middle-of-the-pack student at Annapolis to first in his class, to a governorship, and finally, to the presidency.

  "Working undercover," Gabe replied.

  "To what end? At whose order?"

  "I can answer the second question, but I'm not so certain about the first. The head of internal affairs sent the agent in. I think the goal was to learn how much truth there was to—"

  "To the rumors that I was going nuts," Stoddard said.

  "Yes, sir, plus maybe to search for information that might shed some light on what happened to Jim Ferendelli."

  Again, Gabe could almost feel the president working through the facts, reasoning out the possibilities.

  "It's that woman, isn't it," he said suddenly, "that nurse my pal Mike Posnick in California called me about, asking me to set her up in the Secret Service."

  "Alison Cromartie. Yes, Mr. President, it is."

  "And she was in Baltimore with us, right? I thought I knew her from someplace else. I'd only met her once, maybe a couple of years ago. Interesting looking."

  "I have to agree."

  Stoddard glanced over at Gabe with something of a glint. He grinned momentarily. Then just as quickly his expression darkened.

  "They're closing in, Gabe," he said. "Like goddamn hyenas smelling the rot, they're closing in."

  He took a computer printout from the floor next to him and passed it over. It was a nationally syndicated column from the Montgomery Mirror, based on the latest Gallup Poll numbers, which indicated a drop in the Democrats' lead from 12 to 8 percent—the smallest gap since shortly after the Republican Convention.

  WHERE THERE'S SCHMUCK, THERE'S FIRE

  Question: What chief executive risked his health and the leadership of this country in a grandstand play at a Baltimore meeting of big-bucks liberal supporters? You see, the chief executive in question was in the midst of an asthma attack severe enough to cause him to break off his speech in the middle. And we all know how severe that must have been. Was it the behavior of a rational man to return to the podium after just a few minutes of treatment?

  I think not.

  Perhaps the rumors swirling about the nation's capital have some truth to them—maybe a lot of truth. The rumors are telling us that a good deal of the time the man in the golden chair, with the golden boy looks and the liberal, suck-gold-from-the-workingman philosophy, is showing an irrationality that can only be called Nixonesque. That's right, that's right, Tricky Dick was a Republican and here I am bashing him in a way most foul—by lumping him in with he who should not be named.

  Well, crazy is nondenominational and apolitical, and if our chief executive, the man with his pointer finger on the BIG BUTTON, is losing it, I don't care what party he is. So, Prez, I say be afraid of these latest poll numbers. Be very afraid. The American public is getting concerned about what I have known all along—namely, that you are not all there. You're not the first chief exec to try and keep big secrets from us law-abiding wage earners, and you undoubtedly won't be the last. I suspect that by the time your poll numbers and Brad Dunleavy's
cross for the final time, we'll know the truth.

  Gabe set the printout down and exhaled audibly.

  "Hyenas is the word," he said.

  "We've got to get to the bottom of this before it blows up in our face."

  "I'm working on it, Drew; I really am."

  "And?"

  "I need another day; then we'll talk."

  "Have you heard from your psychologist friend?"

  Gabe stiffened at the question. Among the many things he had decided to keep from Drew, at least for the time being, was the attack on Blackthorn at the airport hotel, and especially the missing briefcase. Hopefully, as Blackthorn had promised, there was no accessible information in there.

  "I haven't spoken to him since he returned to Tyler," Gabe said, "but his initial impression was that somehow a toxic chemical was intermittently entering your body."

  "Like poison?"

  "Not necessarily. There are other explanations. Drew, you're the boss here, but I really would rather get some more data before telling you what I've been able to learn."

  "You're the doc. But make it quick, Gabe. You read that column."

  "I understand; believe me, I do."

  "Just tell me a couple of things. Do you think the guy who tried to kill you killed Jim?"

  Tomorrow, Gabe had decided. Tomorrow after he and Ferendelli had spoken, he would bring Drew up to speed on the situation. For the moment, as Ferendelli had requested, he would tell no one.

  "It's possible," he said. "But if he was as inept at Jim's assassination as he was with mine, there's a good chance Jim's still alive."

  "And the woman, Alison?"

  "I'm hoping to speak to her tonight or tomorrow. As far as I know, she hasn't uncovered anything."

  "But she's sharp?"

  "I think very sharp."

  "You falling for her?"

  "Too early to tell."