Michael Palmer - The First Patient

On the way in, the team had noted a place to turn around, and after loading Lily in the back of the ambulance and again praising Gabe's thoughtful work, they backed up toward the spot, with one of the Flint Hill cruisers following.

Not surprisingly, there was nothing in the woods or on the road beyond to suggest the identity of the shooter, although there may have been a few cracked branches in the area where Gabe thought the man had been standing. Gabe felt obligated to disclose to the policemen the nature of his connection to the president but chose to say nothing to them about the previous attempt on his life. He would contact Alison as soon as he got back to D.C. Then, unless she had strong objections, he would speak with Magnus Lattimore and probably with the president himself. With two attempts on Gabe's life in less than a week, it seemed like time for him to get some Secret Service protection of his own.

First, though, he had some business to attend to-a search of Lily Sexton's home. She had left the house open. If her housekeeper was gone, as it seemed she would be, he would have some time to search for any information regarding Jim Ferendelli and then head for the hospital to check on Lily.

Gabe led Lily's horse back to where the stable man was waiting. Then, after muttering something about picking his briefcase up from the den, he returned to the house and let himself in.

He began at the master suite, a massive carpeted bedroom and elegant bath located at the rear of the house. There was a small desk but no papers of interest on top of it or in the drawers. The closets, however, were more interesting. There were two of them, one a walk-in, the other much smaller. The walk-in was filled with the gowns and casual clothes of a woman who took pains to dress well. The smaller closet was taken up with clothing belonging to a man-a man who dressed as tastefully as did the mistress of the manor. Business suits, several tuxedoes, worn work clothes, riding attire, and casual shirts and slacks. Thirty-three waist, thirty-two leg, sixteen-thirty-three shirts. The man, Gabe estimated, was about five eleven, one hundred and seventy pounds, and in shape. Gabe had no idea if these were Jim Ferendelli's clothes, but he wouldn't be the least surprised later on to find that they were.

What amounted to the back staircase led down to three guest bedrooms, each comfortably apportioned with its own bath. With his enthusiasm for finding anything else of significance waning rapidly, Gabe did a walk-through of the guest rooms, pulling out a drawer here and there and checking the closets, all of which were empty but ready for guests, with extra blankets and towels.

He was about to head upstairs to retrieve his briefcase when he stopped in the center of the guest room farthest from the back staircase and directly under the den. Behind the antique oak bureau and tall mirror was a door in the wall, visible from either side of the bureau but only at an acute angle. Gingerly Gabe slid the bureau aside. A typed half page was sealed in plastic and tacked to the door, which rose no more than five feet from the floor.

LILY PAD FARM AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

The construction of the central house of Lily Pad Stables took place between 1835 and 1837. Sheep rancher Thaddeus Boxley and his sons were the first owners. It is unclear whether the family died out or moved away. By the mid-1840s, the farm became the property of Abolitionist James Sugarman. It also became an important cog in the Underground Railroad-a series of way stations for slaves trying to make their way from bondage to freedom in the cities of the North and in Canada. The small room behind this door often held as many as ten men, women, and children for as long as a day. Feel free to look inside, but please touch nothing.

The low, narrow door, constructed of three skillfully conjoined planks, slid into the wall on a pair of tracks. Gabe wondered if the bureau had been there from the beginning. It made sense, especially given that there was barely room for the furniture in any other arrangement. The concealment of the door wouldn't survive anything more than a cursory exam, but he could imagine situations where it might have been overlooked.

Gabe opened the drapes to let in more light and switched on the bedside lamp. Then, with extreme care, he hooked two fingers into a north-south groove that had been carved into the right-hand margin of the door and pulled. The door slid across into the wall with surprising ease, revealing a dark, somewhat dusty space, about eight feet square, with a packed red clay floor. There were three rough-hewn benches against the walls, an old straw broom, a wooden water bucket and ladle, and a second, larger bucket with a cover, which Gabe surmised was to aid in the disposal of bodily waste.

There was no source of light, but if someone stood back from the doorway, enough flowed in from the guest room to illuminate most of the space. Three of the four walls were constructed of the same packed red clay as the floor. The fourth, to Gabe's left, was some sort of rough-hewn wood panel. That was all there was to it-a way station for slaves, virtually unchanged for over 160 years.

Frustrated, Gabe turned to leave, then turned back to be certain he hadn't left any telltale footprints. The heels of his boots had, in fact, made several gouges in the earthen floor. The rest of the floor had been brushed smooth, possibly with the old broom.

Careful not to track clay back into the small guest room, he pulled his boots off and set them aside. Then he got down on his knees and was smoothing out the defects when he noticed small bits of loose clay around the bases of the legs of the bench leaning against the paneled wall. It appeared as if the bench had been dragged forward and then pushed back again.

He crawled cautiously to the bench and pulled it toward him. It was fixed to the wall, with just enough space at one end to admit his fingers. A stronger pull and an invisible low doorway opened on almost invisible hinges, revealing a tunnel, similar to the room itself, supported every ten yards or so by upright railroad ties and a crossbeam. The tunnel was quite dark but was faintly lit from somewhere in the distance. Electing not to put on his boots, Gabe crossed the small chamber with one step and entered the tunnel with the next.

In total silence, his senses keyed up, he moved through the deep gloom toward the faint glow in the distance. He had traveled perhaps a hundred yards when he began to hear the thrum of machinery. The faint light, he now realized, was coming from beneath a heavy drape of some kind. Cautiously, he eased the drape aside a few inches. Just beyond it, a brushed-steel door, with glass in the upper half, separated him from a gleaming, tiled, brightly lit corridor. Along the corridor on the right-hand side were five doors identical to the one before him. Each was identified by a letter and number painted just above the glass. In addition, there were name plaques in brass just below several of the panes.

Gabe inhaled, held his breath, opened the door, and slipped inside. The steady, mechanical humming was coming from the far end of the corridor. Otherwise, there was neither sound nor movement. He angled himself to be able to see through the glass of the first door, labeled B-10. Below the glass, a bronze plate read: DR. K. RAWDON.

The room, gleaming beneath white fluorescent lights, was clearly a lab of some sort, devoid, at the moment, of people. There were several computer terminals set alongside a complex apparatus that was a tangled arrangement of thick and thin highly polished metal tubes, connected by numerous rivets and bolts and constructed around a series of lenses and eyepieces. The effect was as if he were looking at the inner workings of a nuclear submarine.

But Gabe knew better.