Michael Palmer - The First Patient

Trying to envision where his room might be located, he entered the corridor of the fourth floor and felt the numbers on the first two rooms-430… 428. He took his electronic key from his pocket and crossed the hall. 425… 423… 421.

"One more," the man's voice said quietly and calmly, in a pronounced southern drawl. "Four-nineteen, that's what the registration girl said. Four-nineteen. Move naturally or you're dead. You know I'll do that, don't you."

"I do."

The soul of the man was as cold as death.

Blackthorn felt the muzzle of a gun press into his side. He felt stunned that he hadn't detected the man in some way when he opened the stairway door. It was as if he were made of ice.

"Slip the key in the lock, open the door, and go on in. Quickly now."

The man's smooth speech belied his power. Blackthorn sensed that unless he took action, he was not going to live through this encounter.

He set his briefcase down, widened his stance, and began nervously attempting to insert the key in its slot. The man was a professional; he felt certain of that. Not a professional thief-a professional killer.

"Please, please," Blackthorn whimpered as he positioned the key. "I don't have much money, but you can just take what I have. And… and my watch. Take my watch."

"The door, open it!"

Blackthorn knew that in the cluttered hotel room he would be totally at the gunman's mercy. Whatever he did had to be now, right here, in the corridor. He had taken years of martial arts-karate for a time, then aikido, the way of spiritual harmony. He had the skill to reverse the situation against most men, but this one, this man of ice, was different.

The only advantage he felt certain of was that the man with the slow, measured speech couldn't know Blackthorn had no intention of allowing them both to enter the room. Before he engaged the key, the psychologist stiffened his body. Then, as he felt the muzzle of the gun move slightly away from his side, he spun, swinging his overnight bag in a sharp, vicious arc against where he knew the gunman's hand and wrist had to be. The gun clattered against the wall, and Blackthorn sensed the man diving for it.

In one movement, Blackthorn jammed the key down into the lock, opened the door, and pulled it closed behind him. Two bullets snapped through the wood next to the door handle, but the bolt held.

"Hey, what's going on?" a man's voice called out from down the hallway. "Barbara, the guy's got a fucking gun! Get back inside and call the desk!"

Blackthorn crawled from the doorway into the bathroom and locked that door. If the killer blasted his way into the room, it might take a few more seconds for him to get into the bathroom. Otherwise there wasn't going to be much he could do.

But there were no more gunshots.

Blackthorn stayed where he was. A minute passed, then another. Finally, he heard a pounding on his door, and voices. He had just opened the bathroom door when two security men, both with guns drawn, burst in.

"You all right?"

"I'm fine. What about my briefcase?"

"Jesus, he's blind."

"My briefcase and my glasses," Blackthorn snapped.

"Your glasses are right here," one of the guards said, setting them against Blackthorn's hand, "but there's no briefcase."

"Damn."

"The police are on their way."

"What's he ever gonna be able to tell them?" the other asked. "He can't see a thing."

Five ten, maybe five eleven. Deep southern accent. I'd bet Alabama or Mississippi. It would seem that he followed us when we drove from the White House to the hotel."

Stunned, Gabe listened to Kyle Blackthorn's account of the assault in his hotel.

"A professional killer? How could he have known about you?"

"Somehow, I don't think that White House of yours is a bastion of safe secrets."

"I'm just glad you weren't hurt. And I'm sorry about your briefcase."

"They're not going to get much useful information from it. Besides, my memory is a lot better than my eyesight. I'll get back to you very soon with my conclusions, although you can start with what we spoke about."

"I'm really sorry, Kyle. Do you want to stay here tonight?"

"They've put me up in their VIP suite. And since the guy missed, it seems like a fair trade to me. I'll tell you, though, he's the coldest human being I've ever encountered who wasn't on a slab in the morgue. If you're up against him, you've got problems. Not me, though. First thing tomorrow, I'm off for Cheyenne."

"I wish I were going with you, Kyle. I really miss the plains. I haven't even fully unpacked and I already want to go home."

"You'll do fine. Just watch your topknot, Doc. Not much scares me, but this guy did."

"Count on it, Chief."

Gabe set the phone down and paced the apartment. The circle was wider than he could ever have imagined. Now there appeared to be a professional killer involved. Everybody seemed to know or sense that something was wrong with the president, but gratefully, to this point at least, no one had a handle on precisely what it was or how serious. Meanwhile, the POTUS himself seemed to be doing fine.

After dropping Kyle at the airport hotel, Gabe had driven back to the White House and stopped by the residence. Largely as a result of Drew's heroics at the Baltimore Convention Center, his poll numbers had crept upward for the first time in weeks. Stoddard himself was feeling fine, and Magnus Lattimore assured Gabe that the commander in chief had never been sharper.

Still, it seemed like wishful thinking to believe the episodes of altered thinking and bizarre behavior were finished or that there would continue to be ways to cover them up. Gabe needed answers and he needed them before the Twenty-fifth Amendment once again reared its massive head.

First things first… One day at a time… Accept the things you cannot change; change the things you can …

Funny how in difficult times the old AA slogans kept creeping into his mind. More and more lately. Maybe, he thought now, a couple of meetings wouldn't hurt.

He fixed some decaf and padded over to the dining room table where Ferendelli's nanotechnology library was spread out. A little studying would help take his mind off the attack on Blackthorn. Somehow, someone knew who he was and what he had been doing in D.C. It seemed like only a matter of time before rumor and speculation would turn into headlines.

He pulled a chair up and turned his attention to preparing for the woman who claimed to barely know a man who had a well-rendered sketch of her in the drawer of his desk. In the morning Gabe would be driving out to Lily Sexton's horse farm not far from Flint Hill and the Shenandoah National Park, eighty miles or so west of the city. If nothing else, she should help him understand Ferendelli's fascination with the science of atomic-size constructions and nanomachines.

The decaf he chose from LeMar Stoddard's stash was a Brazillian blend, so rich and aromatic that it was hard to believe it wasn't high-test. Probably, like everything else in this city, Gabe decided, the coffee was a sham-loaded with caffeine.

Nanotubes and fullerenes.

It took time for Gabe to shuck frightening thoughts of a professional killer and Blackthorn's attack from his consciousness enough to concentrate on the material before him, but finally he was able to begin taking notes and making some drawings.

Nano came from the Greek for "dwarf" and in scientific terms meant one-billionth, as in a billionth of a meter, 1/75,000th the diameter of a human hair. Nearly incomprehensible for a layman-even one with a background in science.

Nanotubes and fullerenes.

At the foundation of nanotechnology were carbon atoms, the basis of life, found ubiquitously in millions of different molecules-solids, liquids, and gasses. The building blocks of the nanomanufacturing process were carbon atoms bound together in submicroscopic tubes of varying lengths and thicknesses, and also in soccer ball-like molecules containing precisely sixty carbon atoms. These molecules, perfect spheres, were named fullerenes and nicknamed buckyballs after architect Buckminster Fuller, designer of the geodesic dome, which the fullerene resembled. Remarkable. Absolutely remarkable.