Michael Palmer - The First Patient

At the spot on the trail, twenty-five minutes out, Gabe stopped Grendel, sharpened his hunting knife on a whetstone from his backpack, and marked several trees at horseman's eye level. They then proceeded at a careful walk, scanning along the left tree line for an opening. With luck, the next time he traveled over this portion of the trail, he and Drew Stoddard would be moving at a full gallop. He felt his mouth go dry at the prospect.

Is there any other way? he asked himself for the thousandth time. Is there any other way?

Now there were just three more pieces-a trail going off to the left toward the highway, a place to leave the horses where they would eventually be found, and finally a concealed spot just off Route 491 to leave the Impala. Gabe's best guess was that the car would have to remain undiscovered by the park rangers for at least two hours. If they found it and had it watched or towed, some trucker would have a hell of a tale to tell about the two guys he picked up hitchhiking.

The first piece, a trail to the left, was a narrow track that had some dried hoofprints but didn't look as if it were used much. It was just a few minutes from where Gabe hoped he and Stoddard would be leaving their posse-closer than he would have liked, but far enough to work, and perfect in every other respect. The tree marks here were critical in that he would have to see them at a gallop. He made a few cuts, then dismounted and built a subtle cairn of stones on the right side of the main trail, ten yards before the path.

When the Secret Service men secured help-probably in the form of some sort of four-wheel-drive vehicle-he didn't want to make the pursuit too easy. Once he and Drew were in the car, every mile they could put between themselves and the end of the path would widen the circle of possibilities the agents and police would have to consider and make it that much less likely that one of the roadblocks would snag them.

The final two pieces were easier to find than Gabe had expected. A small clearing ten feet off the path and twenty yards from the paved roadway would be the perfect place to leave the horses, and a partially overgrown rest area just thirty or forty yards to the north offered some concealment for the Chevy without having it appear too suspicious. Now, there was just the matter of getting the car to the rest area from where he had left it in Thurmond, putting a sign on the windshield that it was disabled and awaiting a tow truck, and walking back to the stables to do what he could to help the stable man get ready for the president's early evening ride.

First, though, it was time to let patient Grendel have his head. Gabe swung up into the saddle, whispered a few words of encouragement into the stallion's ear, and then prodded him with a gentle nudge from his new boots. The horse hesitated for a beat, then shot back down the trail toward home like a missile.

Alison spotted the man parked half a block down from her apartment the moment the cabdriver from Richmond Taxi turned onto her street.

"Keep going!" she demanded, ducking down onto the floor.

She instructed the driver on a circuitous route around several blocks and watched to ensure they weren't followed. Then she had him pull over in front of an apartment on the next block. The man in front of her place was either Secret Service sent there by Gabe or, much less likely, someone put in place by Griswold as the result of a change of heart on Constanza's part. Either way, Alison wanted no part of him.

The driver took the hundred in cash they had agreed on for the trip and left the garden apartment complex by a different route. Alison had found the money-four hundred altogether-in the sock drawer of Gris-wold's bureau. As she had anticipated, when she made it upstairs from the basement Constanza and Beatriz were gone. Alison gave passing thought to a thorough search of the house but in the end decided that she had neither the strength nor the time for it. It sickened her even to touch his clothes. He had violated her in ways as vicious, dehumanizing, and unfeeling as rape, and somehow, soon, he was going to pay.

There was one room she did opt to visit before calling for the cab-the attic space where the bulk of the training of Donald Greenfield's girls had taken place.

The room, straight out of the sixties, she imagined, was repulsive enough so that she could only last a few minutes there. Circular water bed… red satin sheets… ceiling mirror… dense psychedelic curtains… various mood lights and lamps… sound system… and a huge HDTV with a large collection of video pornography, most involving older men and girls. Surprisingly, there were no cameras-at least none that she could see. She thought about the person who was blackmailing Griswold. If there had been a camera at some point, it seemed possible, even likely, that the blackmailer had the film.

She couldn't bring herself to open any of the drawers. If, as she expected he would, Griswold burned the place to the ground, the world would be the better for it.

During the cab ride up to Arlington, she tried to piece together everything she knew about the man. Griswold seemed once to have been a devoted, effective public servant, who had fallen prey to his own perversity and to someone with the intelligence to document that perversity and to force him to violate his oath as a protector of the president. Perhaps, as his Porsche, second home, and other activities suggested, there was a payoff involved as well. At this point, there was no way to know.

Griswold's mandate appeared to be the administration of psychedelic drugs to the president by way of his Alupent inhaler. Remarkably, though, the drugs remained inactive until triggered by some sort of handheld transmitter, thus making the commander in chief a marionette, who could be caused to go insane by the push of a button, ironically by another marionette.

It was incredible technology-well beyond Griswold's ken, she thought, even though, almost certainly, it had been Griswold who had stolen the blood samples Gabe had placed in the clinic refrigerator.

Unanswered at the moment was how could she provide proof of what she knew to be true, and exactly who was the master puppeteer pulling Griswold's strings. What she knew with certainty was that she was not going to go up against a man with Griswold's reputation and clout without hard, no, impenetrable evidence.

She assumed her car was in the White House parking area where she had left it. The inhaler beneath her seat might get the ball rolling, provided it was still there and was found to be contaminated by drugs and marked by Griswold's fingerprints. But she needed more than that-if there were any lessons to be learned from her L.A. experience, probably much more.

Meanwhile, she also needed to protect herself from becoming a victim once again, this time in every sense of the word. Griswold was no less powerful and respected, and probably even more ruthless, than the Four Cs surgeons in L.A. If she was going to bring him down and uncover the identity of his puppeteer, she was going to need to move quickly and keep Griswold worried and off balance. She also needed help from someone she could trust, and the list of people she could safely approach in that regard was short-very short.

As soon as possible, she and Gabe had to talk.

Alison crossed between two units and carefully approached hers through the backyard. Then she used her elbow and punched in a window panel in her rear door, reached inside, and turned the lock. The neat little two-bedroom had been expertly ransacked. Every drawer had been emptied onto the floor. The rugs had been pulled up, the cupboards swept clean, the pillows on the living room sofa slashed open. Broken glass was everywhere, and what few personal items she had brought up from San Antonio had been destroyed.