Michael Palmer - The First Patient

"That would be fine," he replied, matching her tone.

"And Gabe?"

"Yes?"

"I'm sorry we seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot."

"Me, too," he replied as much to himself as to her. "Me, too."

The house had a wonderful feel-heavy, rough-hewn beams and fireplaces in both the kitchen and the living room, dark, rich wainscoting in the dining room, leaded glass in many of the windows. There was so much money in the world concentrated with so few, Gabe mused as he made his way up the ornate staircase. In one day, he had been aboard Aphrodite at the Potomac Basin yacht club, in the Watergate condominium residences, and now here.

So much money.

He thought about his small place in the desert on the outskirts of Tyler. Unlike his best friend and roommate at the Academy, he was never cut out for the life of brownstones and yachts. Even if the accident at Fairhaven had never happened, he would have eventually found his way to someplace like the ranch.

The Ferendelli master bedroom had two tall mullioned windows that overlooked the tops of shade trees and beyond them the Potomac. Spectacular. Set up beside the window was a professional-grade artist's easel with the rough sketching on an eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch canvas for an oil painting and evidence that someone-Jim Ferendelli, he supposed-had begun painting the piece. Gabe expected it to be a rendering of the view he was seeing, and in fact it was a landscape. But instead of the scene outside the window, it was one of vast, rolling hills surrounding, in the distance, some sort of structures, perhaps the house, barn, and other outbuildings of a farm.

Physician, inventor, artist. Gabe had always felt that the term Renaissance man was overused, but it certainly seemed that in his predecessor he had found one.

Not the least bit certain what he was searching for, Gabe flipped through the clothes hanging in the two closets, checked the floor beneath them, and scanned the contents of the bureau and the bathroom medicine cabinet. There were the usual salves and over-the-counter analgesics, but no prescriptions. A healthy Renaissance man at that.

In no particular rush, Gabe checked the two smaller bedrooms on the second floor, then entered the exquisitely appointed office and library. The room, perhaps a thirteen-foot square, featured a mahogany desk, oxblood high-backed leather chair, and matching love seat. Finely framed prints, both Renoirs, graced two of the walls.

The drawers of the desk held nothing of interest except three portrait sketches that confirmed Ferendelli's skill as an artist. Two of them, both rendered in charcoal, were of a lovely younger woman with a narrow, intelligent face and large, widely set eyes-Ferendelli's daughter, Jennifer, perhaps.

A third portrait, again in charcoal, again neck-up, was of a somewhat older woman, also quite attractive, with short hair and eyes that seemed almost luminescent even when done in char-

Gabe stared intently at the work. Then he carried the sketch over to the room's only window. The early summer evening light was quite enough to confirm his initial impression that the subject of the drawing had to be Lily Sexton, the woman destined in the event of a Stoddard/Cooper victory in November to be the first Secretary of Science and Technology.

The wall across from the desk and the window was the library-neatly aligned volumes, nearly all of them hardcover and many leather bound-ten feet across and extending up nine feet to the ceiling, the collection was impressive. There were classics: Chaucer, Dickens, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald; coffee-table art books: French Impressionists, Picasso, Winslow Homer, and a number of others; plus several volumes dealing with WW II.

In addition, there were groupings of American and European history, world history, philosophy, and politics-mostly conservative. Gabe opened several volumes, but there were no bookplates and no other indication as to whether the books belonged to the owner of the brownstone or to Renaissance man Dr. Jim Ferendelli.

Having learned more than he had expected to about his predecessor and having found one surprise-the portrait of Lily Sexton that the FBI and Secret Service may have missed-Gabe was about to head downstairs when his attention was drawn to book spines at the far right end of the very lowest shelf. A set of six or seven volumes, all paperbacks with colorful covers. He pulled out the largest, thickest of the volumes: Nanomedicine , by Robert A. Freitas, Jr. Volume 1: Basic Capabilities . It was a highly technical treatise, 507 pages long, with an extensive table of contents and vast index. Meticulously block-printed at the top of the inside front cover was the single word FERENDELLI.

Gabe set the tome on the desk and brought out the others. Understanding Nanotechnology, Nanotechnology for Dummies, Nanotechnology: Science, Innovation, and Opportunity, Nanotechnology: A Gentle Introduction to the Next Big Idea . Each of the volumes had Ferendelli's name carefully printed inside the front cover.

Gabe reflected on the neatly folded underwear and carefully arranged socks in the bedroom bureau and added "meticulous" to the characteristics he had already attributed to the man. Then he took a few minutes to flip though the volumes expounding on this latest aspect of Ferendelli-a fascination with nanoscience, the study and manipulation of atomic and molecular-size particles, and nanotechnology, the construction of useful chemicals and machines built from individual atoms and molecules.

Nanotechnology . What Gabe read in just three minutes of flipping pages was already way more than he knew about the subject.

But, he decided, that would not be the case for long.

He brought a heavy garbage bag up from the kitchen and set the books inside. When Alison asked what he was doing, he was ready.

"There are a couple of up-to-date medical specialty texts in the library that I could use at the clinic," he lied. "I'm sure the doc won't mind."

"Terrific. Find anything of interest up there?"

"Nothing," he lied again. "Truth is, I really didn't expect we would."

Piece of cake , he thought as they headed back to the Buick. Once you got the hang of lying, there really wasn't much to it.

Taking a good medical history was much harder.

Midnight .

It had been years-decades, actually-since Gabe had studied uninterrupted with such intensity. Perhaps back then it was a test in med school, maybe his internal-medicine boards. Whatever the exam, given where his life had taken him after Fairhaven, he always welcomed the chance to study where some sort of goal was involved. Tonight that goal was learning as much as he could about nanoscience and nanotechnology.

He had gotten himself up and running with the perusal of a few articles on the Internet and then chosen the most basic of Ferendelli's texts-an overview of the field in a small volume put together by the editors of Scientific American .

Next came Nanotechnology for Dummies .

Now he was approaching the other books by topic, rather than trying to scan each from cover to cover. Nanotechnology in your world… Pathways to molecular manufacturing… Building big by building small… Making molecules into motors… The fantastic voyage into the human body. It was possible, even likely, that Jim Ferendelli's study of nanoscience and technology had nothing to do with his disappearance, but it was fact that at the moment Gabe had precious little in the way of ideas, and it was also fact that less than twenty-four hours ago a man-a legitimate assassin or part of an ingenious charade-had tried to kill him.

Alison had offered to take a cab or the Metro home from Ferendelli's brownstone, and Gabe, anxious to start reading and not wanting to screen every word she said for underlying intent, had come close to agreeing. In the end, though, he acknowledged his ambivalence toward her and his reluctance to end their evening together and made the drive to her place, although in near silence.