"Done. You want one, too?"
"Only if he's on a horse. In that case it'll be to Dr. Ellen K. and Gilbert F. Williams. Gilbert hates being left out. The middle initials'll make sure people know it ain't just any ol' Ellen and Gilbert Williams."
"Done."
"So, you mentioned your call has something to do with your patient. Now, pardon me for saying it, but that's intriguing. What can an ol' veterinary sawbones do for you and our esteemed president?"
"I need you to put a potion together for me and ship it out here so that I have it in my hands by noon tomorrow. Any later will probably be N.G."
"Exactly what's this potion supposed to do?"
Watching Big Al Kagan pace about his otherwise deserted sales lot, Gabe went over the details of his requirements. Seventeen hundred miles to the west, Dr. Ellen K. Williams listened intently.
"That's it," he said. "That's all I need."
"That's it, huh? Well, Doc, let me ask you something. What would you say to me if I called you long-distance and asked if you could do this to a bunch of humans?"
Gabe felt himself sink. He had been so immersed in the logistics and potential of his plan that he did not think for a moment that Ellen Williams, whom he had known professionally and socially for years and who was on the board of Lariat, would be morally unwilling to go along with a scheme that might end up killing horses.
Desperately, he searched his mind for alternatives. The best he could come up with on the spot was finding a large-animal specialist locally and opening one of the wallets full of cash he was carrying. He knew that there was no way a bribe of any size would work on Williams.
"You're right, Ellen," he said finally. "If I were even going to consider such a request, I'd want to know details—details and exactly what was at stake. Well, unfortunately, I can't tell you all the details. But I can say that the life of the man I am caring for may be at stake, and I am desperate enough to beg, but not desperate enough to ask you to compromise your professionalism and love of animals. As a physician, I completely understand why you would have misgivings."
A long silence followed.
"You'll be careful?"
"I promise. You've been out to my place. We've even ridden together. You know how I feel about horses."
"Okay, Gabe," she said finally. "I'll do the compounding myself and see to it that the mixture is at your D.C. address by noon. It will be a blend of ketamine, Nembutal, and maybe some fentanyl, although I'm not sure yet how much of each. I'll have to make my best guess as to when each drug will do what it does, and how they will work together. There's a couple of rescued animals here I might be able to try various combinations on. They could use some rest."
"I owe you, Doc," Gabe said, "and I think the country owes you as well."
He gave her the address of the Watergate, slipped the cell phone into the jeans Stoddard had lent him, and turned his attention back to Big Al, feeling not that pleased about what he had just coerced a very wonderful doctor into doing.
"Listen, B.A.," he said, "I'm going to run home and pick up my old plate. Then I'll be back. I'm glad I didn't throw it out."
"Me, too," Big Al called out as Gabe was leaving the lot.
When he reached the street, Gabe glanced about casually. Then he began the evasive action he had started the moment he left the White House. The lesson learned in Anacostia was an indescribably painful one, but it was a lesson nevertheless.
Except for what he had seen in the movies and read in some thrillers, he was a rank amateur in the cloak-and-dagger business. But he was logical and, in most circumstances, he wasn't dumb. Down uncrowded sidewalks; through stores and restaurants with back exits; into one cab, then another. With each move he fought against complacency and against allowing the pressure of time to make him careless. As things stood, with what he knew he might be as much a target as Drew.
Now, leaving Big Al's, he moved thoughtfully, ducking into a doorway from time to time and flagging down a cab for a zigzag five-minute ride to no place in particular. After a two-block walk, he stopped in a hardware store, emerging from the alley entrance with both slotted and Phillips head screwdrivers. Parked against one of the walls in the alley, looking as if it might not have been driven for a while, was an old Chevrolet—hardly a perfect match for the car he was about to buy, but a match of sorts nonetheless. He ducked behind the junker and in just a minute emerged with its plate.
If nothing else, he had just made Big Al's day.
Finally, after returning to the lot, screwing the plate on the Impala, paying Al off, and freeing the balloon, it was time to use some more of the president's hard-earned cash to brighten up someone else's day—this time, it would be Lily Sexton's stable man, William.
CHAPTER 54
Gabe had first seen the muddy four-wheel all-terrain vehicle parked outside the barn at Lily Pad Stables. It would be perfect for negotiating the rutted dirt roads up Flat Top Mountain to The Aerie, where it could then be easily concealed in the forest. But first it had to be trucked from Flint Hill to the mountain, fifty or so miles away.
Now, after an explanation that included the assurance that lending Gabe the ATV was what Lily Sexton would have wanted, he was in his newly purchased Impala, leading Lily's stable man, William, up I-81 toward the West Virginia border. Tied down in the back of William's Ford pickup was the ATV—a Honda quite similar to the one Gabe used on his ranch.
If things worked out tomorrow the way he and Drew planned, they would go from horseback to the Chevy and, after an hour's drive, leave the car concealed at the base of the mountain and head up to the castle on the ATV. At the least, as soon as word got out that the president was missing, the sky would be dotted with helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft and the roads jammed with cruisers. Sooner or later, some bright investigator might come across mention of The Aerie someplace and contact LeMar Stoddard, but by then, hopefully, Drew would be ready to come back out into the open.
Their best bet, Drew suggested, would be to stay off the roads as much as possible—even the tangle of dead ends and other dirt roads that his grandfather had built around The Aerie. Drew had owned off-road motorcycles and later ATVs from the time he was a child, and even though he hadn't been up to the castle since before his election, he still felt confident that he could negotiate the narrow hiking paths winding up through the forest and concealed from overhead by the dense canopy of foliage.
William, a laconic septuagenarian, had been born and raised in the Shenandoah Valley and had been working at Lily Pad Stables when Lily took it over nearly ten years before. He had no idea what, if anything, he should charge Gabe for the ATV, which Gabe promised to return when his use for it was done. In the end, the stable man settled for a thousand dollars, which he said he would send along to his niece in Harrisonburg. Gabe added an additional two hundred of the president's money after William promised to keep that amount for himself.
Just past Winchester, they crossed from Virginia into West Virginia. Now Gabe began using his trip odometer and consulting the map Stoddard had drawn. Somewhere off to the left, on a high hill named Flat Top Mountain, was The Aerie. Gabe slowed and took Exit Thirteen. William followed. At 1.2 miles, the narrow two-lane road curved off to the right. To the left, barely visible, a rutted dirt road cut off into the forest.
"Fifty or a hundred feet in on the right," Stoddard had said, "is one of those dead-end roads I told you about that my grandfather built. That's where we'll leave the ATV, covered with branches. Later, we'll leave your car there and put the branches on it."
Saying nothing to William of his intentions, Gabe stopped before reaching the dead-end spur. Together they unloaded the ATV. Gabe started it up, and with William squeezed in behind him, they made a quarter-mile test run down the paved road and then back. The machine seemed a bit sluggish at first but then rallied. Depending on the steepness of the paths up to The Aerie, Gabe decided, he and Drew ought to have a decent shot at making it.
After again expressi
ng his regrets over Lily's sudden and tragic death, and having William refuse his offer of another hundred dollars, Gabe stood by the ATV and watched as the truck rattled back down the road toward Virginia. Then, amid lengthening shadows, he used the seven-inch blade of a newly acquired hunting knife to cut down the branches that would conceal the Impala tonight and again tomorrow. Finally, a bit winded from the effort, he leaned against the trunk of a mature hickory and listened to the noisy quiet of the West Virginia woods. It was time to familiarize himself with The Aerie.
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.
CHAPTER 55
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?"
"Because then he will kill me. Sooner or later, he plans to kill me anyway."
"I can't believe that about Donald."
"Constanza, please, please listen to me. You must listen and help me. Help me or I will die. Donald works for the government."
"No, he is a businessman."
"Does this look like something a businessman would do?"
"Who are you? I remember you from the nail shop. What is your name?"
"Please. I won't last much longer. My name is Alison. I work for the government, too—just like Donald."
"I'm sorry he had to do this to you."
Alison studied the woman's face but could see no sign that she was lying—that she had been sent down by Griswold to accomplish what his muscle-tearing chemical and the Alupent overdose could not.
"He didn't have to do this to me, Constanza; he wanted to. Please untie me. I am in so much pain."
"Donald is sending us away," the beauty said, pointedly ignoring Alison's pleas.
"You and Beatriz?"
"Yes. There is a woman in Mexico City he knows. We are to leave to go there in just a few minutes, and wait until he sends for us. We are all packed. We have money. He is sending a car to take us to the airport."
Don't bother coming back to this house, Alison was thinking. It's not going to be here. Soon—maybe as soon as tonight—your Donald is going to see to it that this place mysteriously burns to the ground. That is what people like him are expert at—covering up and then counterattacking. It was one thing to blow the whistle and bring charges against such highly connected people. It was another to come up with the evidence to make them stick.
"What time is it now?" she asked.
"Almost nine in the morning. Donald has gone to work."
"Constanza, listen to me, please. Don't leave me like this. I know Donald has been good to you, but he has hurt me. He has hurt me badly. And he's not done. He will continue to hurt me until he is convinced I have told him all I know; then he will kill me."
The First Patient Page 29