The First Family

by Michael Palmer

  “Wait—wait a second here,” Lee said, clearly unnerved. “What fraud did Gleason commit?”

  Karen explained Gleason’s role—his substantial investment in ProNeural and the scheme to use bogus test data to increase sales and product interest.

  “No wonder Gleason tried to keep me at arm’s length. He knew I’d eventually figure out Cam was taking nootropics and worried it could jeopardize his scheme.”

  “The printout, the photograph. ‘I know what you are—I know what you do,’” Karen said to Cam. “You knew all along, didn’t you?”

  “Remember when I told you about doxxing?” Cam said.

  Karen gave a nod. “Yeah. You said it was harvesting information about individuals from the Internet.”

  “Right. Well, I did some serious harvesting on Dr. Gleason, including hacking into his work computer,” Cam said. “I was angry because he kept trying to send me to a shrink, you know? I just wanted to mess with him, instead I found out he was scamming all of us. So, I started sending him anonymous messages to get him to stop.”

  “Why didn’t you tell someone right away?” asked Lee.

  “He was worried what the scandal might do to his father,” Ellen said, placing her hand over Cam’s. “Fred and Geoffrey were close friends. He feared guilt by association, didn’t want to tarnish his father’s reputation, not to mention what it would do to his friend Taylor. They may be rivals, but Taylor’s also Cam’s closest friend.

  “Gleason must have somehow figured out Cam was onto him. We’re still trying to sort it out. There were e-mails in the draft folder of Duffy’s Gmail account—someone, we don’t know who, offering to take care of all of Duffy’s financial troubles in exchange for Cam’s life. The NSA is trying to track down the source.”

  Karen knew the technique well. The Secret Service had dealt with plenty of nutcases who used the draft folder and a shared e-mail password to collude without broadcasting their plans over the Internet.

  “My God,” Karen said, her color draining. “Gleason knew about Duffy’s financial troubles and he had motive to kill Cam to protect himself.”

  “That’s our working theory,” said Lapham, joining the conversation.

  “Either Duffy or Gleason hired the Dirt Bike Shooter, but my guess is Duffy,” Lapham said. “Hopefully, now we’ll be able to track that guy down.”

  Lee looked out of sorts. “That means Gleason didn’t hire the repairman to kill Susie,” he said. “His only target was Cam.”

  “We think so,” Lapham said.

  “How did we find out about Gleason in the first place?” Karen asked.

  “Because of Lee,” Ellen said.

  “Me?” Lee touched a finger to his chest.

  “After Yoshi died, you said something to Geoffrey that convinced him to check into Gleason—exhaustively.”

  Karen’s head was buzzing. “If Gleason was only after Cam, that means we still don’t know what’s the matter with Susie and the link between all of the TPI kids, Cam included,” she said.

  Just then came a sound of breaking glass, loud enough to cause everyone to jump. Ellen gasped. Lee rose from his chair in a flash. Karen gripped the edge of the table with force, terror in her eyes. Cam’s expression was a blank, his body oddly still—but his arms were twitching violently in all directions, just like Susie’s, and on the floor at his feet lay the shattered remnants of the water glass he’d been holding.

  CHAPTER 57

  SATURDAY, MAY 6

  Cam had been home for three days and the media could not get enough of him. Every major news outlet again had him as the lead story Where had he gone? What had he been doing? Why did he run away? The president and first lady had formed a united front. They insisted this was a personal, family matter, and no details would be shared with the press or public. Period. No exceptions.

  Lee was amazed at how well the secret had held. Ellen’s involvement somehow had been kept under wraps, and the team the president ordered to camp for the cleanup job had done remarkable work. There were no news reports anywhere of two dead guys from the same biker gang as Willie Caine. They disappeared. Vanished. Wiped clean from the face of the earth. Lee wondered if he’d ever learn their true identities. One would always be the repairman, and the other his lackey.

  The FBI charged Dr. Frederick Gleason with conspiracy to commit murder for the failed assassination attempt of Cam Hilliard. As everyone expected, Gleason’s lawyers had their bail request denied. However, the case against him remained circumstantial, though Lee felt confident investigators would soon find more evidence linking him to the sensational crime. The media continued their feeding frenzy, with everyone speculating about the location and identity of the elusive Dirt Bike Shooter.

  Since his return from camp, Lee had spent as much time with Tracy and the kids as possible. He closed his clinic, referred all patients to the MDC, and attended Paul’s memorial service. With his arm in a sling—an injury he explained as a strained shoulder from a fall—he gave a moving eulogy that praised Paul’s commitment to family medicine, to his community, his friends, and above all else, to his family. There might not have been a dry eye in the room, but Lee could hardly tell because his own vision was blurred with tears.

  As far as he knew, there were no connections that tied Cam’s and Susie’s sickness back to Yoshi, nothing to Gleason either. The nootropics seemed to be a dead end.

  The big concern now was for Susie and Cam. No doubt about it anymore. Those two were linked symptomatically. Before he was officially welcomed home, Cam was rushed to the MDC for evaluation. Only he was not given a typical checkup. He had been brought there under a false name (again), with Lee put in charge of his care and testing.

  CT scans were used to measure the size of Cam’s organs. Sure enough, the liver was enlarged: 12.5 centimeters. His prostate was abnormally sized as well. Lee no longer needed an EEG to prove Cam had been suffering from seizures all along.

  It was obvious now why Taylor began beating Cam at chess. Just as Susie had experienced, Cam’s seizures, his illness in general, made it difficult if not impossible to concentrate for extended periods of time. Regardless of the physiology, Cam would forget key chess moves and strategies the way Susie would sometimes forget how to read sheet music.

  The most startling find, though, was the last test Lee performed.

  After giving Cam eye drops, Lee used the ophthalmoscope to look into his eyes.

  “Focus on the light,” he said.

  And there it was, soon as the macula came into focus: the cherry-red spot. Lee blinked, thinking his eyes must be playing tricks on him, but no, it was there all right, bright and cherry red.

  “It’s unheard of,” Lee said to the president and first lady during a debriefing session held in one of MDC’s conference rooms. “Cam is very sick, and honestly I can’t tell you why. The red spot in his eye—it should have been there since birth. If this was a genetic disease, it should have been there when I checked him the last time.”

  “I don’t understand how the red spot would suddenly show up.” Ellen’s puzzled expression mimicked Lee’s.

  “I don’t know either,” he said. “All I can tell you is that whatever this disease is, it’s new to medicine, something nobody has ever seen before.”

  “What made you think to check again?” Ellen asked, massaging her fingers nervously.

  “Nothing about this case has ever been logical. So I guess I thought to do an illogical thing.”

  The one test Lee had not performed on Cam was the one Dr. Kaufmann was coming to the White House tomorrow to discuss.

  The results of her genetic testing were now complete.

  * * *

  THEY MET in Ellen’s office, at Dr. Kaufmann’s request. She had specifically asked to hold this initial meeting with the first lady alone, and not with the president. It was an odd request, extremely odd, thought Lee. But Ellen had agreed, and now they were in her spacious East Wing office, anxiously awaiting news. Sunlight stream
ed in through the tall bank of windows overlooking the emerald green South Lawn, but the glorious morning and resplendent views did little to counter the somber mood inside.

  Seated at the round conference table were Lee, Karen (whose rehire had been kept quiet), Ellen, and Dr. Kaufmann. Everyone wore grave expressions. Lee understood why Ellen had wanted him and Karen to attend. They were deeply involved, and she needed the support. But an important meeting about Cam without the president there? Nobody knew what to make of it, including Ellen, but all agreed to the conditions and trusted that Dr. Kaufmann had good reason for her unusual request.

  “I’ll get right to it,” Dr. Kaufmann said, slipping on her glasses to read from a report stapled inside a yellow folder. “The results of my testing, and I have copies to share with you all, do show a gene mutation in Susie and Cam that could explain their symptoms.”

  Tears sprouted in Ellen’s eyes. Lee’s shoulder throbbed angrily. He had misread all of the signs—he went down the rabbit hole, as Dr. Kauffman had said. But genetic diseases weren’t clustered! He felt baffled, lost in these uncharted waters.

  “This particular type of genetic mutation, though it’s a variant I’ve never seen before, is known to cause lysosomal storage diseases,” Dr. Kaufmann continued.

  “What are those?” asked Ellen, her voice shaky.

  “It’s a group of approximately fifty rare inherited metabolic disorders that result from defects in lysosomal function. Lysosomes are organelles in almost every cell. They hold various enzymes, but their main function is to break down things, digest food, or dispose of cells when they die. Problems with lysosomal function result in a variety of cell deficiencies that could explain Cam and Susie’s highly unusual symptoms, including why Cam had developed the red spot in his eyes so late in life.”

  Lee knew one did not cure genetic diseases; one lived with them, adapted to them.

  “It’s near impossible for me to map the specific deficiencies to a specific symptom, but suffice to say, if the system itself is in disarray then the entire metabolic process can be thrown off-kilter. I’m sorry, this is not the news I’m sure you were hoping to receive.”

  Ellen had gone into shock, as would any parent receiving such a devastating outcome, but she also seemed perplexed. Lee thought he knew why.

  “Dr. Kaufmann, thank you. I have a million questions to ask, but the most important question of all is why isn’t my husband here? He should know all of this. I followed your advice and didn’t even tell him we were meeting. You said this was related to me, that we needed to talk in private first, and you were insistent. Now, I demand to know why.”

  Dr. Kaufmann cleared her throat and eyed Lee with unsettled look. “Ellen, I can deliver this news to you in private, if you’d like.”

  Ellen turned fierce, panic eclipsing her face. “No! Tell me now!” Her breathing turned shallow, and Lee worried she might faint. “Tell me now,” she said in a softer voice.

  “I don’t know—I don’t know how to say this,” Dr. Kaufmann stammered, “so I guess I’ll just come right out and say it. According to the results of the biopsy and all of my genetic testing, you are Cam’s mother, but the president is not Cam’s biological father.”

  CHAPTER 58

  The Greater Washington Fertility Center, located on M Street NW, was a little over a mile from the White House, but D.C. traffic turned it into a twenty-minute trip. Woody Lapham did the driving, while Karen rode shotgun. Lee sat in the back with the first lady. Three other agents followed in a separate vehicle. Lee’s arm, still in a sling, throbbed steadily. The tension of the moment seemed to have elevated his pain.

  Ellen phoned the president while en route, informing him that the meeting with Dr. Kaufmann, on his schedule for tomorrow—the meeting he knew about—was being postponed. Further testing had to be done, she said. The president did not seem to press for details, maybe because he expected the process could be a long one. Ellen ended the call with four words: “I love you, too.”

  The cars pulled up to the front entrance of a six-story beige brick building with panes of tinted rectangular glass to give the structure a modern aesthetic. Dozens of medical-related businesses were housed in the complex, but the office they wanted was situated on the fourth floor, in suite 410. Ellen instructed Karen and Lapham to have the other agents wait for them in the car.

  She was first to enter the wide, marbled foyer. Since she was without a disguise, several people stopped to stare. At the elevators, Karen asked a group to wait for the next one so they could ride alone, and refused to let anybody get on with them when the elevator stopped on the second floor.

  The fertility center had a spacious reception area with a waiting room straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog. The anxious process of attempting to conceive a family through IVF was made a little less so through the homey décor. The company slogan, etched into the glass behind the curved reception station, read: Delivering Miracles Every Day.

  Karen flashed her badge at the receptionist seated behind the desk. “Dr. Hal Hewitt,” Karen said coolly. “Where is he?”

  The receptionist, noticing Ellen Hilliard, blanched. “He’s—he’s in his office. I’ll—I’ll tell him you’re here,” she said, stuttering.

  “No, you’ll buzz us in right now,” Ellen responded sharply, “and you won’t say a word.”

  Karen pointed to Woody Lapham, who understood his order was to enforce the first lady’s wishes.

  “Nobody is to come in,” Karen said to him.

  The door to the clinic area buzzed and Ellen ripped it open, quaking with fury. She stormed down the hall in long, purposeful strides, passing offices, exam rooms, and open lab areas, seeming to know exactly where she was headed. Employees and patients gawked, but said nothing as they passed.

  Lee and Karen followed closely behind, exchanging nervous glances. Less than an hour ago, Lee had no idea this was where Cam was conceived. Ellen came to a shuttered mahogany door with Hewitt’s name written on a brass plate. She threw open the door without knocking.

  Hal Hewitt, seated behind a glass-topped desk, jumped out of his chair when Ellen barged in. One of his sunspotted hands went to his chest. His heart had to be beating fast, though Lee was not sure he’d perform CPR if called upon.

  “My goodness, Ellen, you nearly scared me to death.”

  Hewitt stood. Everything about him was rumpled and out of sorts—from his wispy hair to his wrinkled yellow shirt and mismatched green tie. He seemed hapless and haphazard, but Lee knew better. He was cunning and perhaps responsible for everything, including Paul’s murder.

  “What have you done?” Ellen said, striding over to his desk. His office was spacious. Nice furniture. Good views outside. Again, the sort of place anxious would-be parents might feel a little more relaxed.

  Reflexively, Hewitt backed up a step, bumping into the wall behind him. “Ellen—I … I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I had a geneticist test my family. Geoffrey is not Cam’s father! Now, I demand an answer.”

  Hewitt’s mouth moved, but for a time no words came out. “That’s … wrong. It’s got to be wrong—the test—it’s flawed. That’s impossible.”

  Ellen was not buying it. “What did you do?” she asked, moving behind Hewitt’s desk, closing in on him.

  “I did nothing. I swear.”

  “No, that’s a lie,” said Lee. “Dr. Kaufmann is an expert in her field. She wouldn’t make this claim unless she was absolutely certain. The report is irrefutable. You owe us an explanation.”

  “It’s a mistake, I’m telling you,” Hewitt insisted.

  “There is no mistake. Now you tell me, dammit. Who is my son’s father?” Ellen said through clenched teeth. Her face turned crimson. “Who?”

  Hewitt held her gaze.

  “I am,” he said.

  Ellen got a faraway look in her eyes like she could not quite process what she had heard. A second later, she snapped back into herself.

  “T
hat’s not true,” she said. “You take it back.” Her face was now flushed with ripe anger. She took several steps toward Hewitt. Karen stepped forward, pushing back her blazer to reveal her service weapon, while simultaneously placing her hand on Ellen’s shoulder. She must not have liked her proximity to Hewitt.

  The next moment happened so fast Lee barely saw it happen at all. Ellen pushed Karen back with force at the same instant Hewitt lunged at Karen’s waist. One second Ellen was confronting Hewitt with an accusatory finger, and the next Hewitt was pointing Karen’s gun at the first lady’s head.

  Ellen staggered backwards with a fearful look.

  “I can’t let any of you tell,” Hewitt said in a voice as shaky as the hand holding the gun. “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry. My work is too important. Too important. I’m still experimenting, still working. I’ll change the world for the better.”

  “You can’t explain three murders,” Lee said. “This is the first lady of the United States!”

  “I’ll—I’ll figure something out.”

  But Lee could see it in Hewitt’s face, in his eyes: he had no plan. Still, he took an off-balance firing stance.

  Karen became a blur of motion. She launched herself into the air at the same instant Hewitt fired. The bullet struck Karen in the chest and she curled in a ball as she fell to the floor. Lee rushed at Karen, seeing Hewitt aim the gun at her. But before he could do anything, Karen, with stunning quickness, pulled a second gun from her ankle holster and fired four times at Hewitt.

  Each bullet found a home. Two sank into Hewitt’s fleshy stomach. Another vanished into his arm. But the last bullet shot struck him in the head, and put a stop to his cold, beating heart.

  CHAPTER 59

  ONE WEEK LATER …

  Karen arrived at Ellen’s office in the East Wing of the White House at the scheduled time of half past seven in the morning. She was dressed sharply in a blue suit. In a few hours she’d be facing the cameras, part of a team of people who would be giving a press conference to discuss the shocking events that had taken place inside Hal Hewitt’s office at the Greater Washington Fertility Center.