"Are you all right?"

The voice was familiar.

It took a moment for Gabe's vision to clear.

Standing there, looking down at him with undisguised concern, was Alison Cromartie.

CHAPTER 11

Is he all right?" a motorist called out from across the street. "Do you want me to call an ambulance?"

"Do you?" Alison asked Gabe.

Still stunned, he managed to shake his head.

"No, he's fine," Alison called out. "Just a little fender bender."

The motorist, the only one around, hesitated and then drove off.

"A guy in that car next to mine tried to kill me," Gabe said, fumbling for the words. "He… he shot at me from… Jesus, I can't believe this. I… I don't know if it was some sort of random drive-by or… or-"

"Easy, Doctor, easy. Are you sure you're not hurt? Can you stand up?"

"I think so. I… I froze. All I could see was the muzzle of that gun, and… and all I could think was, 'This is it.' I don't even know what happened next."

"I hit you from behind. That's what happened next," she said. "I saw what was about to happen and I rammed you. It was the only thing I could think of to do."

Gabe glanced back at the shattered rear window of the Buick.

"Nice move," he said.

Slowly, with help, he managed to stand and brace himself against the roof of his car. Alison, wearing black jeans and a black tank top, kept a supportive arm around his waist until it was clear he could manage on his own. As before, he became instantly engrossed in her closeness and the scent of her.

"Uh-oh," she said.

A D.C. black-and-white pulled up and stopped directly over the burnt rubber from the assassin's car. The strobes flicked on, and the cop in the passenger's seat, a lean black man, lowered his window.

"What's the deal here?" he asked.

"Oh, am I glad to-"

"Nothing big," Alison said, pointedly cutting Gabe off. "He did the right thing and stopped for a light, and I did the wrong thing and bumped into him. I'm guilty as charged."

They could see the policeman eyeing the rear window, clearly trying to put the odd damage together with a rear-end collision.

"You all right?" he asked Gabe.

Unseen by the cops, Alison's expression was strongly cautionary.

"I… I'm a little shaken up. That's all."

"And that window?"

"Two days ago, while it was parked, vandals probably. I'm getting it fixed tomorrow."

"Want us to call an ambulance? Sometimes the adrenaline from an accident can mask serious injury."

Again the look from her warning Gabe to say nothing about the shooting. What in the hell was going on?

"No, no ambulance," he heard himself say.

"Listen, guys," Alison said to the cops, "do whatever you have to do, but I really do intend to take full responsibility for this, and I really do have to get home. I just finished doing three hours of overtime in the ER at D.C. General and I have to be back for the day shift in just a little while."

"You a doc?"

"Nurse. I know way too much ER medicine to be a doc."

"You got that right," the cop said, and exchanged approving glances with his partner.

Just then the radio in the cruiser crackled out something that sounded urgent. Alison watched benignly as the officer behind the wheel took the call, but Gabe, bewildered as much at her handling the situation as he was at the situation itself, saw the keenness in her eyes and sensed that she was on top of the action, if not well ahead of it.

"Another second and they're gone," she whispered before the conversation was complete.

"Listen," the cop closest to them said. "We gotta go. You sure you're okay, fella?"

"I'm fine… fine," Gabe replied. "If you don't have to, there's no need to write this up."

"Okay. Suit yourself. You got an ER nurse there just in case you have any delayed reaction."

"That I do," Gabe said as the cruiser squealed away.

He watched until the taillights had vanished up Twenty-second Street, and then looked down at Alison.

"What? What?" she asked. "The license plate on the killer's three- or four-year-old dark blue Taurus was covered, and with that baseball cap, there was no way whatsoever for me to get a look at his face. And staring down the barrel of a gun, I would strongly doubt that you got any kind of a look at him, either. By the time the police got the story straight from you and made their calls for backup help, the odds that the shooter's still driving around out there would be slim to none. What good would telling them do? There would be hours of interrogation and paperwork, and piles of unwanted publicity-especially given Dr. Ferendelli's disappearance."

Gabe had no quick response. Alison Cromartie sounded incredibly certain and confident of what she was saying and absolutely comfortable with the lies she had told to deal with the police. She was anything but the trim, professional nurse who had tiptoed up to tie his bow tie just seven hours ago.

"Wouldn't they at least have gotten a crime team to find and examine the bullet?" he finally managed. "It's got to be back there someplace."

Alison sighed.

"I'll tell you what," she said. "Trade cars with me for a day and I'll arrange to have the damage fixed on yours and the bullet checked out as well."

"Who are you?" Gabe asked, no longer willing to trust anyone in that city.

Alison drew a thin leather case from the pocket of her jeans and flipped it open for him. Gabe flashed on Lily Sexton and her elegant folder of business cards. But there were no business cards inside this case. There was a gold shield and a photo identification card.

CROMARTIE, Alison M.

United States Secret Service

"People were worried about you," she said.

CHAPTER 12

I'm sorry not to have told you who I was back in the office, but the higher-up who placed me in the clinic asked me not to."

Alison sounded sincere enough and Gabe wanted to believe her, but at that moment-nearly four in the morning-he really couldn't focus well enough to sort very much out.

A man, his face hidden in shadow, had driven up next to Gabe's car and taken a shot at him from almost point-blank range.

Four days in D.C. and in one evening he had been browbeaten by a Navy admiral, lied to big-time by the President of the United States, his wife, and his chief of staff, deceived by one of his office nurses, and now nearly assassinated by-by whom? Someone who was systematically killing White House docs? Why? A whacko random drive-by? That hypothesis made as much sense as any. It was simply a roll of the dice that a madman with the need to kill happened to reach the intersection of G and Twenty-second at the same moment Gabe did, and another roll that Alison Cromartie, with the instincts and reflexes of a Secret Service agent, just happened to be in the car behind his, following him.

"The Secret Service doesn't like things that don't make sense," Alison was saying, "and right now, Jim Ferendelli's disappearance makes no sense at all. I'm one of the few RNs in the service, so they plucked me off a backwater desk job in San Antonio and arranged for me to become part of the White House Medical Unit. My instructions were to keep my eyes and ears open for anything regarding Dr. Ferendelli and to keep an eye on whoever got brought in to succeed him. That's what I was doing tonight."

Gabe rubbed at the grit in his eyes and tried to focus on what Alison had just said-that she had been placed in the White House medical office after Ferendelli's disappearance. Hadn't she told him earlier in the day that she had started working there before Ferendelli vanished? Gabe tried, through the deepening fog of fatigue, to re-create the exchange between them but sensed he might not be recalling it exactly. Why would she bother lying to him about when she started working at the White House? Then again, why would anyone have been lying to him about anything?