Michael Palmer: The First Patient

Every four years, as the world descended on Washington for the inauguration of a new or returning American president, police would swoop down and roust the denizens of the Levalee underpass and other such places from their fetid homes, at times even putting the makeshift villages to the torch. But within a short while, like a forest recovering from a volcano, the space would begin to fill with life once again until soon it was indistinguishable from the village that had preceded it. With a presidential election just a few months away, it would not be long before the cycle commenced once more. But at the moment, no one in the Levalee underpass was concerned with anything but the intruder.

Aware of the dozens of eyes following him, Porter pinned his pistol and flashlight beneath his arm and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. Steve Crackowski, a security chief for some sort of company-Porter didn't particularly care which one-had hired him to find and eliminate a man named Ferendelli. Now Crackowski had gotten a tip that the mark, a doctor, was hiding out with the down-and-outers he had once taken care of in a nearby free clinic. This was the second hobo village Porter had visited. He strongly sensed this might be the one.

Certain the denizens of the tunnel had gotten a good look at the gun, Porter replaced it in his belt and took a five-by-seven photo of Ferendelli from his jacket. Then he made his way purposefully down the squalid gauntlet, panning the beam from one side to the other, pausing each time the light struck a face to ask about the photo.

"A hundred bucks," Porter was saying to one of the men, loudly enough for everyone to hear. "Tell me where this here man is and a hundred is yours. Don't tell me, and one of you is gonna get hurt real bad."

Over the years, Porter had taken great pains to keep his heavy Mississippi drawl intact. There had been times when his dense accent had actually fed into a mark's southern stereotype and put them at ease. Their mistake.

"White man, five ten, dark hair, fifty-five, thin body, narrow face. Speak up now. I'm losin' my patience, and believe me, you don't want that to happen."

Nothing.

Porter inched ahead, shifting his focus from one side of the tunnel to the other. The eerie, intense silence was broken only by staccato coughing and the clearing of inflamed throats. The killer stopped now and again to kick the soles of tattered shoes to get their owners to look up into the light.

"You there, you seen this man?… A hundred bucks is a pile a money."

The gnarled, wizened man, kneeling placidly beside his refrigerator carton home, stared at Porter with vacant, rheumy eyes and shook his head. Then he coughed up a dense wad of phlegm and spit it in Porter's direction.

Without a moment's hesitation, Porter pulled out his pistol and from less than ten feet away shot the old man through the eye.

Silence.

"I'm gonna wait one minute. If I don't hear something, I'm going to pay a visit to another one of you… Last chance."

"He's gone!" someone called out.

Porter whirled to the voice and fixed the intense beam on the man it belonged to. The hobo blocked the brightness with his hands.

"When?" Porter demanded.

"J-just now when you got here. Out-out that way."

"Fuck you, Frank," someone called out. "The doc was good to us."

"Here, Frank," Porter said, throwing a bill at him. "Go nuts."

Porter raced to the end of the tunnel and scanned the area beyond it. Then he put the flash back in his belt and took a device from his jacket pocket-a remote of some kind. He aimed it down the rows of the cardboard village and depressed a button on it several times.

Nothing.

Finally, without a glance back at the old man he had just killed, Carl Eric Porter disappeared up the embankment.

For ten minutes beneath the Levalee overpass the only sounds were the rasping breathing of forty men and women, the clearing of inflamed throats, and the occasional lighting of a cigarette. Then, from deep within a makeshift duct-taped cardboard home at the end of the tunnel farthest from where the killer had left, Jim Ferendelli, physician to the president, worked his way out from where he had been hiding, huddled beneath a damp, mildewed Harry Potter sleeping bag, and crawled to the opening of the box. Drawn and filthy, Ferendelli looked no different from any of the others in the hobo village.

"What do you think, Santiago?" he asked of the cachectic man sitting on the dirt outside the opening.

"I think he is gone," the man said with a heavy Spanish accent, "but I also think he might come back."

"Did he hurt someone?"

"He killed old Gordon. Just like that. Shot him like he was nothing."

"Damn. I'm sorry, Santiago."

"Frank saved you, I think."

"I heard him. That was quick thinking-by all of you."

"You were always good to us in the clinic."

"I need to go, Santiago. Thank you for sheltering me. I'm so sorry about Gordon. Thank Frank and the others for me, too."

"We wish you well, Doctor."

Still on all fours, Ferendelli crawled cautiously to the tunnel entrance, then ran as best he could down the deep swale toward the next road.

Gabe stood near the doorway leading from the stylish Red Room to the glittering State Dining Room. To his right, a string quartet was playing what might have been Mozart. To his left, popular Vice President Tom Cooper III and his wife were chatting with the Secretary of State. Scattered throughout the room were leaders of both parties as well as members of Drew's cabinet. Calvyn Berriman, the President of Botswana, was across the room, shaking hands with a steady stream of dignitaries and simultaneously nodding politely at any number of passersby.

Gabe was unable to suppress a sardonic smile. He strongly suspected that only he of all those present at the formal dinner was thinking about Ricky "The Shiv" Gentille or Razor Tufts, or any of the other inmates who had once joined him shuffling along in the food line at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown. The interminable lines, the dehumanizing inspections, the payoffs, the gangs, the smuggling, the egos, the violence, the ignorance, even the scattered acts of heroism-he hated every second of the year he spent at MCI, every single second he spent trying to avoid eye contact, to keep his back to a wall, and to remain invisible. Thirty-six hundred seconds an hour, eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds a day. They were numbers burned into his consciousness like death camp tattoos.

Still, although even he had to acknowledge he had come far since his days in an orange prison jumpsuit, it was possible that, in some ways, he felt more at ease among the murderers and other felons than he did right now. He had voiced his concern to the president and the White House social secretary, begging to be left off the guest list for the dinner altogether, let alone the two-man list of those being introduced to the Washington glitterati. But the dinner was already scheduled and there was still a great deal of restlessness in D.C. surrounding the disappearance of Jim Ferendelli. The president wanted to assure the politicians and the voters that he was in good hands medically.

"You're handling yourself well, Doctor."

Chief of Staff Magnus Lattimore had materialized at Gabe's elbow. He was a slightly built, kinetic man with a boyish face, carrot hair, and the vestiges of a brogue. Of all the president's men, Gabe had learned the most about him-Scottish immigrant, Harvard grad, tireless, smart in many senses of the word, decisive, meticulous, not the least afraid of stepping on toes, and blessed with a rapier wit that at times could be devastating. He was also, it was clear to Gabe, absolutely devoted to Andrew Stoddard, his presidency, and his reelection.