The First Patient

by Michael Palmer

  Stoddard's expression grew steely.

  "Just remember who you're working for, okay? I have to know that I come first."

  "You come first, my friend," Gabe said. "Now, I have a question."

  "Go ahead."

  "Is there anything of importance that you're holding back from me? Anything at all?"

  Stoddard momentarily looked at him somewhat queerly, then shook his head.

  "What's that all about?" he asked.

  "Kyle Blackthorn told me he has like a sixth sense about people—whether they're being totally on the level or not. He wondered if you might be holding something back or maybe not telling the whole truth about something. I mean, when we first talked in Wyoming, you did manage to hold something rather big from me."

  Again the flicker of that odd look.

  "Well, not this time," Stoddard said. "If I know something of any importance, you'll know it. Now, keep me posted, and if you need resources that are at my disposal, just say the word and they'll be at yours."

  "The closer to the vest we play this, the better," Gabe replied.

  "I'll see you tomorrow, then."

  The friends stood and shook hands.

  "Tomorrow," Gabe said, before heading to the office to prepare for his rendezvous with Ferendelli.

  On the ride down in the small elevator, he acknowledged two things. One was that it was very unlikely that he had any heightened or additional senses as did Blackthorn. But the other was that almost certainly, despite Stoddard's protestation to the contrary, the president was either holding something back from him or lying outright.

  CHAPTER 44

  Important stuff to talk about, big fella. Please call me. Anytime, day or night.

  A.

  There was something wrong.

  With Alison's note propped up against his desk lamp, Gabe dialed her home and cell phone numbers again. Nothing.

  How long ago had she been in the clinic? What sort of important stuff did she mean? Big fella made it sound as if she was enthused and in a good space. Why couldn't he reach her now?

  It was nearing eleven fifteen. An hour and forty-five minutes before, hopefully, the mystery of Jim Ferendelli's disappearance and his relationship to Lily Sexton would be unraveled for Gabe.

  Between the events earlier in the day at Lily Pad Stables and now his strong feeling that the president was either lying to him or holding something back, this had already been a hell of a trying day. Now Alison wasn't answering either of her phones.

  Where in the hell was she at this time of night?

  As often happened in stressful situations, Gabe's temples were beginning to throb—one howitzer shell burst for each heartbeat. What possible sanguine explanation could there be for Alison leaving the note she did, then not being available on her home phone or cell? It had to be something simple like a low battery or other malfunction of her damn phone. Back in Wyoming, he carried a cell phone because every doc on the hospital staff was expected to. But he didn't trust them—not in Tyler and not here. That had to be it, he tried to convince himself—her cell phone.

  His jaws clenched against the frustration and concern.

  Without any rummaging in his desk drawer that he was aware of, suddenly the vial of various pills was in his hand. It was like a number of patients with weight problems had told him over the years—the sad, recurrent tale of finding themselves standing in front of the open refrigerator and having absolutely no recollection of how they got there.

  What in the hell was he, a supposedly sober alcoholic, doing with pills in his hand every time the going got difficult for him? He needed to face the fact that just as some people were functional active alcoholics, managing to hold down a job and maybe keep a marriage going despite their drinking, he was functioning despite the smoldering depression that had stunted his spirit for decades, since the nightmare of Fairhaven and the inestimable horror of having taken the lives of a woman and her unborn child.

  One Valium. Five milligrams would take the edge off. It wasn't really that much. The manufacturer made a damn ten milligram.

  He dialed both of Alison's numbers for a third time, leaving a concerned message with each. It was right there beside where he was sitting that she had tied his tie—right there where she had stood on her tiptoes, kissed him softly, and pleaded to let there be time for them. Now she was missing and he was preparing to respond to the crisis by taking yet another pill.

  She deserved better. She deserved better, and so did he.

  He took his secret stash into the bathroom, poured the pills into the toilet, and flushed them away.

  Darkness . . . duct tape . . . and rats . . .

  For some time after she regained consciousness, all Alison was aware of was the duct tape pulled tightly across her mouth and binding her wrists, elbows, ankles, and legs to some sort of heavy chair. Then, as the fog lifted from her senses, she became aware of the feet, scurrying from one side of the space she was in to another, and at least twice, she felt certain, brushing against her.

  With time, her vision was able to make use of a small amount of light slipping beneath a door. She was in a cluttered room—a storeroom of some kind, it seemed. The air, which she had to work to draw in through her nose into her lungs, was cool and slightly musty. Across from her, she could discern the distinctive outline of a harp . . . then of a hat rack . . . and finally, behind them, a large sign that read: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR. PRESIDENT.

  She was still in the White House—a prisoner in a storage room in the basement or even the subbasement if there was one, held there by the number-one guardian of the president.

  Being uncomfortably bound and having to strain for each breath were distracting enough to keep her from being as frightened as she might have been, even with the rats. She should have written more in the note to Gabe, she chastised herself now—at least mentioned that there were problems with Treat Griswold. She had been too paranoid to do so.

  One by one, she tested her restraints. No chance. Even the tape over her mouth had been wrapped tightly around her head and then reinforced in front with something firm to keep her from biting through. At the moment only two things were clear—she was absolutely helpless, and she wasn't dead.

  She wondered how Griswold could have caught on to her. The answer was elusive. What was clear, though, was that unless Griswold was satisfied that she had told him everything she knew and why she had been prying into his life, in all likelihood she was going to get a lesson as to how much pain she could endure.

  Would Griswold risk holding her here in the White House? However unlikely, it had to be unpredictable when someone might happen to need something from this room. There was a light outside the door. That meant her prison wasn't all that isolated.

  An hour or so later, her questions were answered. With a soft click, the door opened, flooding the room with light from a concrete corridor outside. Treat Griswold slipped inside, flicked on the single bare overhead bulb, and eased the door closed behind him.

  "Time to hit the road, lady," he rasped, his lips beside her ear. "But first, a little something to keep you from getting carsick."

  Without another word, he stepped around behind her, buried a needle to the hilt at the base of her neck, and injected the contents of a syringe into her muscle. After just a minute, the room began to spin viciously.

  CHAPTER 45

  On the way into D.C. from the hospital in Warrenton, Gabe had taken a half an hour detour and driven into Anacostia for a second time, then across the Benning Street Bridge. Once a sought-after middle-class section of the city, according to sources on Google and, of course, Wikipedia, Anacostia began its evolution from 90 percent white to over 90 percent black in the mid-1950s. Even though parts of the area had seen much better days, certain blocks still featured neatly maintained homes and yards and a distinct turn-of-the-twentieth-century charm.

  Dr. John Torrence, a black major in the Army and part of the White House medical team, had grown up in Anacostia and st
ill had family there.

  "White or black," he told Gabe, "walking around Anacostia after midnight isn't something I'd recommend doing on a regular basis. But if for any reason I absolutely had to, I would. Like most inner cities, there are some gangs and drug crazies, but mostly, there are very good people there."

  The evening was moonless and unseasonably cool. On his earlier reconnaissance, Gabe had identified a place to park that was as close as possible to the area beneath the Benning Street Bridge. He arrived at the spot twenty minutes before one. It was a narrow street running alongside the Anacostia Reservation, a broad field that just a few hours ago was alive with picnickers, softball and touch football games, soaring kites and Frisbees. The lighting around the park was far from optimal and may have been at least one of the reasons Ferendelli chose the place to meet.

  Ten minutes.

  Gabe lowered the window of the Buick. There was almost no one about. Twice he heard voices, and once he saw the shadows of three or four people—boys, he thought—making their way across the field. Up on the bridge itself, there was a steady rumble of traffic.

  As his eyes adjusted, he could easily make out the river, a tributary of the Potomac and the centerpiece for what was to be a rejuvenation of this part of the city. Just a mile or so to the south, East Capitol Street crossed the river, its westbound lanes headed into Capitol Hill, the Mall, and, of course, the White House.

  Just a mile.

  Gabe managed a thin smile at the irony. A meeting was about to take place in these hardscrabble surroundings that could affect the world as much as any that had been held in those staid and hoary buildings. It wouldn't be long now.

  For a time, the attack on Blackthorn nagged at him. How could the killer have known where Blackthorn was staying? At the psychologist's urging, Gabe had asked Treat Griswold to have his condo checked over for listening devices. Reportedly, none had been found.

  Two minutes.

  The field remained deserted. There was no movement that Gabe could discern anywhere underneath the bridge. He wondered what he would do if Ferendelli failed to show. Perhaps he would pay a visit to Lily Sexton and offer to set her broken shoulder without anesthesia should she hold out on him anymore.

  It seemed as if Ferendelli had carefully chosen the photograph in the medical office to ensure that Gabe would know with certainty that the meeting was with him. Still, Gabe was regrettably learning not to trust anything or anybody when it came to the president.

  Careful to keep the interior light from going on and wondering if he had been unwise not to bring along a blunt weapon of some sort, Gabe locked the Buick, left it, and headed across the field toward the blackness beneath the bridge. Overhead, the whoosh of passing cars grew louder as he approached. Headlights flashed by. From his left, the scent of the river grew stronger.

  As he neared the bridge, he suddenly found himself picturing the desert, and Condor at a full gallop, bearing him effortlessly across the parched ground, toward a burnt orange setting sun.

  Soon, he thought. Soon it will be over.

  The field itself seemed to be in excellent shape and reasonably free of debris, but the underside of the Benning Street Bridge smelled of stale beer, river muck, and urine. Broken glass crunched beneath his boots. Gabe stepped into the dense shadow just under the edge of the bridge. Then he turned toward the field and waited for the man he had succeeded in the White House—the Renaissance man who many felt was dead.

  "I have a gun," a soft, cultured voice said from behind him. "Lift your hands where I can see them. Don't turn around. What's your name?"

  "Singleton. Dr. Gabe Singleton."

  "How do you get up to the residence from the office?"

  "The elevator across the hall."

  "Could you have been followed?"

  "I didn't see anyone, but I didn't take any special evasive precautions, either."

  "You should have."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Walk over there to that support. Keep your hands up."

  Gabe did as he was ordered.

  "Turn around slowly with your hands up."

  Again, Gabe did as he was asked. The gaunt, unshaven man confronting him carried no gun. Instead, he extended his bony hand and gripped Gabe's with surprising force. His hair was unkempt, and at that moment he looked considerably older than fifty-six—the age Gabe had read in his personnel file. What Gabe could discern of his expression was grim. He was jittery and badly in need of a shower. His tension was nearly palpable.

  "I can't tell you how relieved I am to find that you are alive, Dr. Ferendelli," he said.

  "We are in a crisis of immense proportions, Dr. Singleton. Our president is under attack. His life is in danger every day."

  "Then his psychiatric breaks are—"

  "If by psychiatric you mean a disease of some sort—a spontaneous malfunction in his brain—his problems are not psychiatric at all."

  "But—"

  Even through the gloom, Gabe could see the intensity glowing in Ferendelli's eyes.

  "President Stoddard is not insane," Ferendelli said. "He's being poisoned, dosed with a psychoactive drug—no, no, make that a number of psychoactive drugs."

  "I wondered about that when I witnessed one of his episodes," Gabe said, "so I drew some blood for analysis. But the tubes were stolen from the refrigerator in our office."

  "Stolen? Do you know by whom?"

  "No. Do you?"

  "I have some ideas."

  "Dr. Ferendelli—Jim—are you all right right now? I mean are you ill?"

  "I have not slept for more than two hours at a time in weeks. I'm in as much danger as the president is. They could kill me just as they could kill him, with . . . with the push of a button." Ferendelli looked furtively about. "Are you sure you weren't followed?"

  Something about the question was bothersome to Gabe, but he could not discern precisely what.

  "No, I'm not sure that I wasn't followed," he said. "I told you that. Listen, I have a car right over there. Let me take you to a hospital or . . . or to my place."

  "Just talk to me," Ferendelli said. "Talk to me and listen to me. They've poisoned me, Doctor. Just like the president, they've poisoned me. I haven't come in because I don't know precisely who they are, and I haven't run because I owe it to my president and the country not to."

  "Is your daughter all right?"

  "Yes. She's fine as far as I know. When all of this began to happen, I feared they might use her to get at me, so I had her go away to stay with friends. So long as she stays where she is, no one will find her. Now please, listen to me."

  "I'll listen, Dr. Ferendelli, but try to stay focused. Who're they? Is one of them Lily Sexton?"

  Mention of the woman's name hit Ferendelli like a sucker punch. For some time he said nothing. When he finally did speak, there was a noticeable tremor in his voice.

  "I pray, sir, that you have had no contact with that woman."

  "I'll tell you of my connection with her when you finish. Please, Jim, please. From the beginning?"

  "Oh, this is bad," Ferendelli said. "Very bad. You've seen her, haven't you—been with her?"

  "I have. But please, compose yourself and tell me what's been going on."

  Inventor, physician, artist, intellectual. The Renaissance man Gabe had heard so much about was a nervous shell.

  As if reading Gabe's thoughts, Ferendelli took a calming breath.

  "I have a friend named Wysocki," he said, "Zeke Wysocki. He's an analytical chemist and owns a small lab just outside of Durham. He's a loner, with not one whit of social skills, but he is a wizard of a chemist, and a hell of a poker player. That's how we met—playing poker at a small, private game. He liked to talk about some of the contract work cases he did for the police and the FBI—cases that no regular labs could handle. So, on a lark, when the analysis of the president's blood came back negative, I sent one of the split samples I had kept to Wysocki."

  "He found something."

  "A
number of things, actually. I drew bloods after two of the president's attacks. There were traces of several different hallucinogens in each sample, only not the same ones."

  "Go on, Jim. You're doing great."

  Ferendelli was again becoming jittery. He pulled a small bottle of spring water from his jacket pocket and managed a shaky, prolonged swallow. Gabe wondered if the bottle might contain vodka but didn't ask. Ferendelli wasn't intoxicated, just frightened—frightened and totally spent.

  "You sure you weren't followed? I've been getting bad vibes about this place since you arrived."

  Gabe glanced out at the empty field.

  "I don't see how, but if you want to go someplace else, or maybe just drive and talk, we can do that."

  "I . . . I guess we can stay here."

  "Go on, Jim. Tell me what your friend found. This is all beginning to come together for me. We're going to get to the bottom of things. I promise you we are. And whatever you and the president need to be okay, we're going to get it for you. I've got a friend in the Secret Service we can trust."

  If we can find her.

  "I . . . hope so."

  "You did the right thing to contact me, Jim. You're safe now, and I assure you, you are not alone. Now please, go on."

  "I'm not alone," Ferendelli said, marginally more calm. "I like the sound of that."

  A block away, a nondescript white van, lights off, rolled down the street, the antenna on its roof rotating slowly.

  CHAPTER 46

  Alison knew the pain was coming but was helpless to stop it. She lay on her back, her gaze transfixed on the syringe in Treat Griswold's hand. In horror, she watched as once again he slid the needle attached to it into the rubber port on the IV tubing.

  "I know you're not particularly fond of this stuff, Nurse Alison," Griswold said, "but I really have to know what's going on, and frankly, to this point, I haven't been all that satisfied with your answers."

  "What I told you was everything," she pleaded, aware of the sudden wash of perspiration beneath her arms and across her upper lip. "Everything. Please, I have nothing else to tell. Please don't do that again."