Michael Palmer - The First Patient

He turned onto Lunt Street and immediately spotted a man with a pry bar, trying to open the lock on the empty right-hand side of his garage. The man, not impressively built, looked like a derelict, with sneakers, shabby pants, a worn tan windbreaker, and a nondescript blue baseball cap.

Over the years, the government had treated Griswold to a variety of courses and refresher courses in defensive and offensive driving, most given in conjunction with firearms training at a reconditioned racetrack in rural Virginia, informally referred to as Crash and Bang.

He had practiced the maneuver he reflexively chose a dozen times, and accelerated into it without hesitation. Engine roaring, he barreled directly toward the man, who stood as if transfixed, staring wide-eyed at the fast-approaching grille. At the last possible moment, Griswold slammed on the brake and spun the steering wheel hard to the right. If he handled the maneuver correctly, the rear end of the Jeep would spin around and the thief would be virtually pinned to the garage door. If he missed, even a little, the man's lower body and the heavy wooden door would become one.

The spin was perfect. Tires screeching and smoking, the Cherokee spun just over 180 degrees, tapping gently to a stop against the garage and cutting off the derelict from any escape except to his left. That route vanished before the man could react as Griswold, pistol in hand, leapt from the Jeep, raced around to where the grimy intruder still stood, grabbed him by the front of the jacket, and slammed him against the garage door. The pry bar clattered to the pavement.

The look in the man's eyes was unmistakable panic. He smelled densely and unpleasantly of alcohol and hard times.

"P-please don't hurt me."

"What in the fuck are you doing?"

"Everything all right?" a woman's voice called from somewhere down the street. "Do you want me to call the police? I saw everything."

"No!" Griswold snapped over his shoulder. "I can handle this… Well?"

"I… I was just lookin' for somethin' I could sell," the man managed, his speech thick and clumsy. "These are hard times, you know."

Griswold jammed the barrel of his pistol up under the intruder's ribs.

"You lying to me? You lie to me and I swear I'll blow you away. Why'd you pick this place?"

"I… I couldn't get into the one over there. I was just workin' the street. Honest, mister. I was just workin' the street."

At that instant, Griswold's cell phone began ringing. With his gun still pressed firmly against the man's gut, Griswold released the wind-breaker, checked the caller ID, and set the phone against his ear.

"Griswold here."

"Griz, it's Harper at the lab. I think we've found a match for those prints on the nail-polish bottle."

"Can you hold on for a minute?"

"Sure, but hurry up. I think you're going to want to hear this."

"Just hang on."

Griswold turned his attention back to the thief, who now was beginning to cry.

"P-please. I'm living on the fucking street. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. It won't happen a-"

"If I see you around here again, you're dead. Got that? Dead!"

Griswold stepped back, opening a way out for the man. Tentatively, the derelict moved forward a few steps. Then, in an awkward, stumbling gait, he headed down the street, waiting until he was around the corner before cracking a smile.

"Okay," Griswold said, again pressing the phone to his ear. "What gives?"

"What gives," the crime lab specialist said, "is that the prints match a Fed."

"A what?"

"A Fed. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, she's Secret Service. Just like you."

Astonished and bewildered by what he had discovered, Gabe stood beside the recessed doorway to Lab B-10 willing his pulse to slow and his sense of what was smart to take over.

Get back to the house… Get back and regroup!

He was alone in the brightly lit corridor of an underground laboratory that had at least one tunneling scanning microscope-the pricey, highly technical, sine qua non centerpiece of nanotechnology research. The facility, carved into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from the Shenandoah Valley, was reached from one direction through a little-used hidden entrance in the guest wing of Lily Sexton's opulent country home. There had to be one or more other entrances as well, but how far they were from this one was anybody's guess.

Go back!

Two things were all too clear at this point. The brilliant, elegant, beguiling Ms. Sexton had far more than a passing interest in nanotechnology-one of the sciences she was slated to try to place under government control should she become the country's first Secretary of Science and Technology. In addition, she quite probably had more than the passing acquaintance she claimed to have had with Dr. Jim Ferendelli.

Gabe was equidistant between the door back to Lily Sexton's house and the next doorway on the corridor, which he could see was B-9. His best approach would be to head back and, as soon as possible, check some real estate ledgers and maps involving the area. But the part of him that had always caused trouble was urging him on-at least to the next room.

This is dumb and risky , he warned himself, as he inched along the wall toward B-9.

Risky and dumb .

He felt the adrenaline rush that had long ago stopped being a significant part of his life but had led him to any number of dangerous decisions along the way. The last thing he needed, just seven hours before he was scheduled to meet Ferendelli, was to get caught down here.

He moved ahead several more feet.

The recessed B-9 doorway was identical in every respect to B-10-brushed steel and high-tech, with thick glass filling the top half. He peered into the brightly lit room, which was another deserted lab, featuring another research apparatus he recognized from his studies of nanotechnology-a scanning electron microscope. The SEM was capable of creating remarkably well-defined images of invisibly tiny nanotubes and fullerenes by bombarding them with a stream of electrons.

The brass plaque beneath the glass read simply: ELECTRON MICROSCOPY. No nameplate. Gabe speculated that Dr. K. Rawdon of the tunneling microscope lab was probably the head of this unit as well.

Distracted, Gabe was a step slower than he might have been in reacting to the voices and footsteps echoing down the hallway from someplace ahead and to the right. He held his breath and flattened himself within the recessed doorway of B-9 just as two men in security guard uniforms emerged from a corridor, chatting and laughing. They each wore sidearms.

"Did you understand a word they were saying in there?" one asked.

"No, but that's why they're eggheads and earning the big bucks and we aren't."

"I did love the stuff Dr. Rosenberg was showing, though. Real, living brains without bodies. Could you believe that? I heard he was keeping them in his lab on A Wing, but that's the first time I actually saw them."

"Yeah, I wonder what they're thinking. Maybe something like 'Gosh, it's dark in here.' "

"Yeah, and 'Hey, I can't hear a damn thing, either. Where in the hell is everybody?' "

Both men laughed roundly. If either of them had turned to his left, he would have been looking directly at Gabe, who was just thirty feet away and unable to conceal himself fully in the recessed doorway. Instead, they turned to their right, away from him, and exited Corridor B through a pair of swinging steel doors.

Gabe's desperate need for answers again began doing battle with his common sense.

The silence that followed the guards' departure was not complete. Gabe could still hear the low, machinelike hum and also some voices.

Real living brains without bodies .