She was on a creaky metal military cot, with her wrists and ankles uncomfortably bound to the frame. The thin, sheetless mattress reeked of mold. The room—clearly for storage—was brightly lit from a bare overhead bulb and was less cluttered than the one in the White House. At some point, she had been dressed in light blue surgical scrubs, possibly taken from the clinic. Her clothes were neatly folded nearby with her bra and panties carefully laid on top—Griswold's not so subtle reminder of her helplessness. Almost certainly, she had decided, the two of them were in the basement of the house on Beechtree Road in Richmond—Donald Greenfield's house.
This would be the third injection Griswold had administered to her over what might have been two hours . . . or two days. The thought of having to endure the spasms and the pain again brought bile percolating into her throat. He had told her the name of the chemical in the syringe, but it was not one she recognized. In fact, he had mentioned that it was still somewhat experimental, developed by friends of his in the CIA.
After she was allowed to awaken from whatever anesthetic he had given her in the White House, Griswold listed the questions he was going to ask her, and then, without waiting for answers, he injected what he called a "quarter-strength" amount of the drug into the rubber port of the tubing draining intravenous fluid into her arm. In less than a minute, the muscles in Alison's body began to twitch. Then, suddenly, they cramped, every one of them, as brutal as any cramps she had ever experienced.
With her movement restricted, there was no position she could get to that would make the spasms go away. Her quadriceps muscles tightened into rock-hard balls. Her hamstrings pulled just as viciously in the opposite direction. The contractions in her abdominals were especially merciless. Her jaw was clenched so firmly, she was unable to open her mouth to scream.
It was possible—likely, even—that not long after the second injection she had passed out from the unremitting pain. She awoke, chilled from evaporating sweat, feeling as if she had been beaten with a two-by-four. Now Griswold was about to dose her for a third time.
"Griswold, Treat, listen. Dammit, please listen," she pleaded, her speech rapid and forced. "I was placed in the White House because Mark Fuller in Internal Affairs wanted to know what might have happened to Dr. Ferendelli. He also asked me to see if the rumors they had heard about the president's mental problems had any element of truth. Also, I was to keep my eyes open and follow up on anything unusual that I encountered. Fuller never mentioned any Secret Service agent specifically—certainly not you. Now, please, don't use that stuff on me again. I'm begging you."
"Why did you follow me?"
"I already told you. You were the only one I've encountered who did anything even the slightest bit unusual."
"Carrying the inhaler against regulations."
"Exactly. It may or may not be a specifically written rule, but in the clinic we all know that no one except us and the president himself is supposed to handle his meds, and certainly you've been around long enough to know the same thing, too."
Alison had said nothing about the pickpocket, Lester, or about having successfully switched inhalers. If Griswold got even the slightest scent of that one and if there was, in fact, anything unusual about the inhaler he had been carrying, she was in for more pain than she could possibly endure.
She stared up at his massive head, framed by the aurora of the overhead light, and at the deep fold in his truncated neck, and she hated him more, even, than she had come to hate the surgeons in L.A. Silently, she chastised herself for being too cautious and scarred from her prior experiences not to say something about the legendary agent to Gabe or even to Fuller himself.
For a time, neither of them spoke. Griswold just stood there, looking down at her with no particular emotion. Alison felt a glimmer of hope. It seemed to her as if he might be considering her responses.
Please, she thought. Please, please don't do it again.
She tried, unsuccessfully, to get a better read on his intentions. In her life, she had shown some courage and some pain tolerance but not, she guessed, much more than average.
Please, please . . . don't.
Finally, Griswold shook his massive head and shrugged his buffalo shoulders.
"I don't know why, Nurse Alison, but try as I may, I just can't shake the notion that you're holding out on me."
He lifted up the IV tubing and gazed at the rubber injection port as if it were some sort of precious, delicate blossom. Then he sighed and quickly emptied the contents of the syringe into Alison's body.
At the first sight of his thumb tightening on the plunger, Alison began to scream.
CHAPTER 47
Ketamine . . . psilocybin . . . LSD . . . methamphetamine . . . DIPT . . . atropine . . . mescaline . . . PCP.
Jim Ferendelli's chemist had found traces of eight different mind-altering drugs in the blood of President Andrew Stoddard.
Eight!
"Zeke likes to say that performing analytical chemistry is similar to doing a differential diagnosis on a patient," Ferendelli said. "If you don't look for it, you'll never find it."
"I totally agree with that," Gabe replied. "Presumptions and assumptions are as dangerous in a physician as arrogance and ignorance."
"Well, Zeke took things one step further. Once he started getting positive results, he anticipated the obvious question as to how these drugs could have gotten into the president's blood in such minute concentrations. He decided that the amounts administered would be far too small to have any neurological effect unless they were delivered to precisely the part of the brain where they were the most effective. The best he could come up with was a theory summarized in several articles he gave me."
"Nanotechnology," Gabe said, almost breathless at the way the pieces were at last dropping into place. "I didn't find any articles, but I found your books on the subject while I was searching through your place for clues about what might have happened to you, and I've been studying them. I'm still an amateur on the subject, but I'm a lot more knowledgeable than I was when I started."
For the first time, Ferendelli managed a smile. He reached out and patted Gabe approvingly on the shoulder.
"I would bet you are an excellent physician," he said.
"I feel the same way about you. Initially you went to see Lily Sexton to learn about nanotechnology, didn't you?"
This time, at least, mention of the woman's name didn't provoke as much agitation.
"From what I read," Ferendelli said, "it seemed as if using molecular-size nanobots to deliver drugs directly to cancers or to specific sites in the body was still very much on the drawing boards and in the minds of futurists. I went to her to see if there was something I didn't know about the status of the field. I also needed to develop some sort of possible explanation—a hypothesis—to answer the question: If the president was being dosed with micro-amounts of psychoactive drugs, how were the chemicals being introduced into his body? How were the drugs able to seek out the area of his brain where they would be most effective? And perhaps most urgent and frightening, how could their release be triggered on cue?"
It's not in the future! Gabe wanted to shout, flashing back to the disembodied brains in Dr. Rosenberg's glass cylinders and the immunofluorescent deposits on his slides. It's here—right now! But first Gabe needed to learn how his predecessor—and Drew—had come to be in such danger.
Already it was clear to Gabe what a hero Jim Ferendelli was. In an incredibly short time, he had accumulated an astounding amount of information in trying to save the presidency of his patient and longtime friend. In the process, Jim had placed his own life in jeopardy. At this point, the man should be standing on a golden pedestal in front of Congress and the American people, awaiting the highest honors this country could bestow, not skulking in the shadows here amid the beer bottle shards and fetid odors, emaciated, unkempt, and fearful.
"What happened, Jim?" Gabe asked softly, picturing the lovingly drawn portrait in the man's desk. "What
happened with Lily Sexton?"
"When I contacted Lily about picking her brain regarding nanotechnology, she invited me out to her stables for a ride. In fact, I went out there several times. It was difficult, because I had to speak to Lily in generalities, and not mention the president in any way, even though I suspected she had quickly put two and two together. We both know that my only patients are the president and his family. There have been a growing number of rumors over recent months regarding the state of Drew's mental health, and Lily's a very perceptive person."
"You'll get no argument from me there," Gabe said.
"Well, she didn't have that much to add to what I already knew about the field of nanotechnology. It's advancing at an incredible pace, and the high rollers are beginning to speculate, throwing incredible sums of money at the possibilities. But the field is still much more theoretical and potential than actual. Lily arranged for me to visit a research and manufacturing site in New Jersey and to speak with several of the scientists and even two major investors."
"Manufacturing?"
"It's a company that manufactures nanotubes of various diameters and lengths, and several different sizes of fullerenes. There's a huge demand for them right now in industries and laboratories all over the world. The people in New Jersey sell them by weight, like bananas."
"You're doing great, Jim. Can you go on?"
Ferendelli stepped out of the shadow of the bridge and scanned furtively through the gloom.
"They can kill me, Dr. Singleton," he said, a note of shrillness returning to his voice. "With the push of a button, they can kill me almost anytime they want. And they can kill the president, too. Anytime they want to they can kill him, just like that."
Gabe reached out and gently guided Ferendelli back into the darkness.
"Who are they?" he asked.
"I have some theories, but they are no more than that. I . . . I continued to visit Lily at her place. We never saw one another in D.C., only at Lily Pad Stables."
Gabe knew what was coming next.
"You fell in love with her, didn't you?" he said.
"I feel so stupid."
"Nonsense. I don't know if I've ever met a woman more interesting and attractive."
"Nothing ever happened between us—sexually, I mean. She kept encouraging me to visit her and ride with her, but each time I tried to advance our relationship, she alluded to being in a relationship that needed resolving before she could move on to another. Meanwhile, I kept doing research, speaking with experts, and secretly running tests on Drew's blood. I refused to believe that my relationship with Lily had no future, and she still wanted to see me. Now I know she was the one who was pumping me for information, not the other way around."
"I'm sorry, Jim," Gabe said. "I'm so sorry."
"I was a fool not to see the truth long before I did. My judgment and my ethics were warped by the feelings I had for her. I had been so lonely since my wife passed away . . . I . . ."
Gabe put his hands on the man's shoulders.
"It's okay, Jim. You did what was best for your patient. No one could ever fault you for that."
"Well, finally, in a last-ditch effort to win her over, I decided to take her into my confidence. I mean she was a friend of Drew's, and he was going to nominate her to be in his cabinet. So I told her what I had learned and what I was theorizing, and what I planned to do about it."
Again Ferendelli crossed to the edge of the bridge shadow and peered at the scene he had photographed so sensitively. The white noise and vibrations from traffic speeding overhead were in sharp contrast with the emptiness of the field and the stillness of the river. Feeling the connection between them strengthening, Gabe moved forward and stood shoulder to shoulder with his predecessor, the two of them silhouetted in the strobes of passing headlights.
"How did she respond to that?" he asked.
Ferendelli glanced over at him, his fear and sorrow nearly palpable.
"She told me I would be doing nothing of the sort—that I'd be doing exactly what she told me to do, nothing more, nothing less. She said it was in the tea she served each time before we went riding. Now it was in me—locked in place in my brain."
Gabe felt himself go numb. The tea. Lily had been so proud of her tea—so excited when he wanted another cup.
"What do you mean, it?" he asked, barely able to get the words out.
"Fullerenes—hollow nanoball molecules carrying drugs. She told me her tea was laced with just enough narcotic to make me love it, relax, and want to drink more."
"Oh, God," Gabe murmured, almost inaudibly.
"So that's how she got the fullerenes into my body. I don't know how she did it with Drew, and I don't know how the fullerenes with their microdoses of drugs end up exactly where they would have the most devastating effect."
"I'm afraid I can answer that one," Gabe said, not bothering at this point to recount his experience with the scientists in Lily's nanotech laboratory. "The fullerenes are coated with antibodies specific to neuroproteins or neurotransmitters—maybe those in the thalamus, the basal ganglia, and the caudate nucleus. Maybe other places in the brain as well. The fullerenes float through the bloodstream until they encounter those specific proteins; then they just latch on until some signal or other tells them to open up by breaking the chemical bonds that had kept them perfectly round."
"But the state of the science isn't remotely close to that level of sophisticated biotechnology," Ferendelli said.
"It is. Trust me. It is. Jim, listen, do you have any idea how the fullerenes are commanded to open?"
"Sound. They have a transmitter of some sort that must send out a specific frequency—the signal for the fullerenes to open up. Perhaps the transmitters send out different frequencies for different drugs. Lily said that chemicals had been placed in my brain stem over time and also the president's brain stem as well that could stop our heart or our breathing, or both, with just the press of a button from a transmitter. Like opening a garage door or—or changing a television channel. She actually showed one to me. Then she said I should just go about my business and nobody would be hurt—especially not the president."
"But you didn't buy that."
"Once I began to sense what she wanted, I couldn't believe the president wasn't going to be harmed anymore. So I took off. At the very least I knew what she had done. I didn't think Lily and her people would do anything to harm the president as long as I was on the loose and hadn't said anything to anyone about her."
"What did she want you to do?"
"I don't know for certain, but from pieces of what she said, I had the feeling that at some time in the near future they were going to ask me to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment and spearhead the movement to replace Drew because of his mental illness."
"Oh, man. But why? Do you think Bradford Dunleavy could be behind this?"
"Possible, I suppose."
"How about Tom Cooper?"
"I don't know. He seems sincere enough, and he's been a loyal vice president, but I also know he's very ambitious, and we're talking about the presidency of the United States."
"Very folksy, but very smart. I agree. A couple of days ago he came by the office and pumped me for information on Drew's mental health."
"Did you tell him anything?"
"No, no, I certainly didn't. Jim, why did you stay around D.C.?"
"I've been waiting."
"For what?"
"For you—for this meeting. I don't trust anyone, Dr. Singleton—anyone, that is, besides you."
"Explain."
"Someone close to the president is involved in this. I mean someone very close—closer to him than Lily. I have no reason to believe Drew has been having tea with her—certainly not enough to account for all the attacks he has had. According to Lily, the chemicals have to be delivered over time—multiple doses. That means somebody has been dosing Drew continuously with the drug-loaded fullerenes, and also has been causing them to break open and deliver their
payload, probably on cue. Someone has to trigger the transmitter to do that."
Gabe couldn't bring himself to tell the man that there was every reason to believe that, like Ferendelli and the president, he was now a walking time bomb, too, at least to the extent that a couple of cups of Lily's tea could deliver.
"What people are you talking about? Who might be in a position to do this to Drew?" he asked.
"The list is an imposing one. The president's wife and children, the twenty-five or so people in the kitchen, the chief of staff and his office, the staff secretary and her office, the cabinet, the Military Office."
"That would be my pal Ellis Wright."
"Ah, yes, the admiral," Ferendelli said. "I hope your relationship with him is cheerier than mine."
"No chance," Gabe said. "He clearly can't abide anyone he can't control. This list of yours is getting quite long."
"Oh, I'm just getting started. There are thirty or so in the medical office, and think of the dozens of housekeepers and other servants—people who just come and go virtually unnoticed."
"And the Secret Service."
"I don't know any exact numbers for them, but probably a few hundred have direct access to the president at one time or another."
"And of all these people you just listed, it only takes one."
"It only takes one," Ferendelli echoed sadly. "And I think he or she has got to be pretty close for the transmitter to work."
"How do you know that?"
"A man has been after me—a professional hit man."
Gabe felt a chill.
"How do you know he's a professional?"
"He uses a silencer. A week or ten days ago, I stopped by my place in Georgetown for some papers. I hadn't been there for twenty minutes when I heard him opening the front door with a damn key. Probably one Lily had made. I managed to get out the basement and down to the Potomac, where I hid along the bank. Then, just a couple of days ago, he showed up at a hobo village where I was hiding while I figured out how to contact you. He killed one of the guys there. Shot him in the face just like that. Again I got out before he found me. Later, I went back. The guys told me he used a transmitter. I couldn't have been more than fifty or seventy-five yards away when he did, but nothing happened."
The First Patient Page 25
