Michael Palmer - The First Patient

Tomorrow he would buy a pair of western boots and then arrange for a messenger service to pick up the package from Ellen Williams at the Watergate and deliver it to him at their office. He would avoid the White House and his condo. Then the next time he would surface would be at Camp David in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, fifty-five miles from where he was standing now.

Through the gathering night, Gabe clutched Drew's map to the handlebars as the ATV jounced upward over rutted dirt tracks that were just wide enough for a car. The woods on either side of the road were truly the Forest Primeval of poets and songwriters, as dense as any he could remember, with the panoply of leaves overhead blocking what little daylight remained.

His love of fishing had led to a solid knowledge of the outdoors and in particular of trees. As he rumbled along, Gabe picked out cedar and black oak, white ash, beech, and cherry, basswood, aspen, and birch. Twice the surroundings and atmosphere overwhelmed his impatience to reach the summit, and he shut off the engine to stand by the roadside and listen, breathing in the cool, sweet air.

Tomorrow Drew would guide them to The Aerie not on these roads but along rooty paths through the thick foliage and undergrowth-a cinch, Gabe suspected, compared to floating a $20-million jet onto the deck of a pitching carrier. He accelerated and leaned into the sharp turns, getting more and more connected with the rhythm of riding the four-wheel stallion.

The forest began to thin as the summit neared. Rock formations grew larger and more spectacular. Suddenly the vegetation fell away completely, and as if born from the ground itself, The Aerie appeared-a massive brooding Gothic fortress of gray stone, rising to a height well above the surrounding trees. The footprint of the castle was nearly square, with towers at each corner and battlements running the length of the walls. The entire structure was surrounded by a ten-foot-wide moat, crossed by a drawbridge leading to a huge portcullis.

Eccentric, indeed!

Gabe left the ATV near the tree line and crossed the drawbridge. Through one of the narrow windows, he could see light. As the president had promised, the power was on and the lights on timers. Gabe used Drew's key and entered a musty, massive great hall supported by exposed post-and-beam trusses. The walls were lined with moth-eaten flags and mannequins in tarnished suits of armor, one of them sitting astride a sixteen- or seventeen-hand-high model horse, also in full armor, adorned by dense cobwebs. If, as Drew had said, a caretaker came in every month or so, the cycle had to be at its end.

Gabe made a brief tour of the place using a flashlight he located in the kitchen. Where he could easily locate a light switch, he used it. He inspected the ancient pipe organ in the great hall and then moved into the expansive dining room, with a long, dust-covered table that once might have seated twenty. Out the far side of that room, up a short flight of stairs, was an empty pool, hewn out of rock and at least ten feet deep. Moss was growing along the insides.

Each of Gabe's bootsteps echoed eerily off the stone and concrete walls.

Skipping a lot of exploring, he went down a dark staircase to the underground levels. In the basement was a security room with monitor screens, none of which seemed operational. There was also an intensely creepy hall containing seven or eight medieval machines of torture, many of them festooned with cobwebs.

But it was on the level beneath that one that he found what he had come down there to see-the bunker that he planned would be home to the president for as long as they needed it to be.

It was a room, twelve-by-twelve, that had only a minimal layer of dust and few cobwebs. There were two rustic single beds and a bookshelf containing several hundred volumes, a built-in television, dozens of movies, mostly old videotapes but some DVDs, and a stereo console. Along the base of the walls were large bottles of water and, in a small pantry, enough canned goods to keep a family going for weeks. The refrigerator was plugged in but empty, and the roomy bathroom was tiled and surprisingly homey.

Gabe found the switch for the air conditioner and turned it on as Drew had suggested.

"Reinforced walls, six feet thick," he had said, "with filtered air. Built originally by Bedard Stoddard himself and modernized by LeMar in the eighties. We've been told that anyone inside here during a nuclear blast will survive as long as the generators keep going, even if the warhead hit as close as Washington."

Gabe spent twenty minutes wiping down the space. Drew groused about having it be his room but in the end agreed that his safety was what their mission was all about.

Before he headed back upstairs, Gabe made one final survey of the quarters, three stories below the ground, surrounded by solid granite and six feet of reinforced concrete. His knee-jerk reaction was that despite serious efforts to make it comfortable and inviting, the space gave him claustrophobic jitters. Still, he acknowledged, it would be the perfect sanctuary for the president… or the perfect coffin.

The noise, from the stairway behind Alison, was faint-the opening of the door. A footstep on the top stair.

The sound was significant. It meant, in all likelihood, that she wasn't dead.

She had no idea how many hours it had taken for her cardiac, respiratory, and nervous systems to recover from having been overdosed with metaproteranol-the pharmacoactive drug in Alupent. She still felt jittery, sick to her stomach although she hadn't eaten for thirty-six hours or more, and profoundly ill at ease.

Her muscles ached terribly, even though she could not recall having been injected after the inhaler overdose. It was doubtful that Griswold had any idea of what dosage of metaproteranol a person could survive. More likely was that he had simply kept forcing the medication into her lungs and bloodstream until the apparatus had run dry. It was a miracle her body hadn't simply given in-her lungs exploding, her heart ceasing to beat, her brain shutting off altogether.

She had to find a way out-to cause Griswold to make a mistake of some sort.

The footsteps continued down the stairs.

The monster was back for another session. She had beaten him this far-even gotten him to boast that there were, in fact, various drugs adulterating the president's Alupent-and somehow, she vowed, she would beat him again.

Or die.

Softly she began to hum, singing the words in her mind, preparing herself for whatever was to come.

"This world ain't always tasty like candy… That's what my mama once told me…"

Another step… then another. Alison tightened her eyes shut and clenched her fists.

"Sometimes it'll shake and bend you…"

The footsteps ended on the concrete floor. Then she heard a woman gasp.

"¡Ay, Dios mío!"

Constanza came into Alison's sight.

"I can't believe he let you down here," Alison rasped through parched, split lips.

Constanza lifted the back of Alison's head and gave her a sip from a bottle of spring water. The jeans and black beaded sweater she wore looked elegant on her, but her gentle, exotic face was dark with anguish and concern.

"Donald doesn't know I am down here," she said. "He has forbidden it, but I know where the key is. I have lived here in this house for ten years. There is little I don't know. Beatriz and I heard you screaming last night and the night before from upstairs, even though this room is below the basement. It was very frightening."

"He has caused me terrible pain," Alison replied. "And he plans to continue torturing me until he is convinced I have told him all that he wants to know."

"And why won't you tell him?"