The other ends of the wires were implanted in brains-one in each cylinder, suspended by some sort of transparent Lucite frame. Each brain included not only the cerebrum and cerebellum but also the brain stem and eight inches of spinal cord.
Gosh, it's dark in here indeed!
Functioning, metabolizing brains! Living, thinking brains!
They could have been human, but Gabe's knee-jerk assessment was that if they were, they weren't the brains of fully grown humans. Before he could further assess their nature or any other aspect of the macabre setup, the woman stopped coughing and stepped back into her slot in the chorus line of white-coated scientists.
Now, go!
This time he began a slow, measured retreat back to the B corridor and out of the laboratory. There would be time to sort out what he had just seen and heard, but for now his focus had to be on getting out of the lab and back to D.C.
His attention still fixed on the conference room doorway, Gabe moved backward, checking over his shoulder with every step, anticipating the return of the security guards. Instead, the danger came from the room itself. With little more than a brief, perfunctory round of applause, the scientists turned and, without much conversation, filed out through the already open door and directly toward where he was standing, not more than twenty-five feet away.
Gabe had, at best, a few seconds to react. His instinct was simply to turn and run, but even if he made it back down the tunnel to Lily Sexton's, there was a good chance the armed security guards would catch up to him before he had gone too far. If he did manage to get away, there were bound to be repercussions when Lily learned what he had done.
Still, fleeing seemed like his only option, and he was set to do that when he flashed on his first cellmate at MCI Hagerstown, Danny James, a canny jewel thief, who had entered a mansion during a lavish party wearing a tuxedo, marched up to the master bedroom, located the family safe behind a mirror, cracked it, pocketed what jewels the hostess wasn't wearing, and then stayed for a round of hors d'oeuvres before strolling out to his car. He would have made an absolutely clean escape had he not taken the jewels from his pocket and set them on the passenger seat to admire only moments before being accidentally rear-ended by a police cruiser.
"Everyone with even half a life is always wrapped up in his own business," James said one evening after final lockdown. "The trick is to be bold and to look like you know what you're doing, so they can continue to think about their two favorite topics-themselves and their work."
The next day, dressed as a garbageman and, Gabe assumed, acting like a garbageman, James managed to ride a waste disposal truck out of the prison and into the sunset. When Gabe was released at the end of his year, to the best of his knowledge Danny James had still not been caught.
The trick is to be bold and look like you know what you're doing.
Almost instinctively, ignoring his stocking feet, Gabe stopped preparing to run. Instead, he strode forward toward the first of the group, a gangling, stooped-shouldered professor with thick glasses and an unruly thatch of pure white hair that looked like the product of an electric shock.
"You all done in there with Dr. Rosenberg?" Gabe asked cheerfully.
The man, perhaps sixty, glanced at him momentarily, mumbled something about the session taking far too long, and walked past him, followed lemminglike by the others. It was not at all clear if he or any of the rest noticed that the man threatening to intrude on their thoughts and their concerns about the run-over session was wearing no shoes and had no identification badge hanging from his neck.
It was all Gabe could do to keep from continuing his spontaneous performance by marching into the conference room to question Dr. Rosenberg about his research and whether the brains were, in fact, human. But it seemed unlikely that any of the security team would be as self-absorbed as the scientists or as accepting that anyone in a lab coat had to be one of the good guys, shoes or no shoes.
The extensive underground laboratory, devoted at least in part to nanotechnology research and to neurobiology, made no sense yet, but certainly it had to be connected to the books he had taken from Jim Ferendelli's library. For days, questions had been piling up like autumn leaves. Now, in just a few hours, there would finally be answers-provided, of course, that he could get out.
Cautiously, he made his way to Corridor B and then to the swinging door back to Lily Pad Stables. As he passed Laboratory B-10, he could see Dr. K. Rawdon hunched over the oculars of the scanning tunneling microscope. On the wall above the scientist was an ornately painted sign, in a simple black lacquer frame, which Gabe had missed on his first pass by the lab.
THINK SMALL, the sign read in lowercase letters.
THINK SMALL.
CHAPTER 42
This is the pharmacist."
"Your name?" Alison asked.
"McCarthy. Duncan McCarthy."
Alison checked the list of qualified pharmacists pasted innocuously in the back of the White House clinic patient ledger. McCarthy's name was there.
"Please fill the full Alupent inhaler prescription that's on file for Alexander May."
May was the code name for a prescription that was going to the White House, and full meant seven identical inhalers.
"The name of the driver who will be picking it up?"
"Cromartie." Alison spelled the name. "Alison Cromartie. I'll present my ID when I come."
"Time?"
"Tonight. No, no, wait. Tomorrow. I'll stop by the hospital to pick it up tomorrow morning."
"Very well," the pharmacist said. "I'll be here."
Alison set down the receiver on the examining room phone and entered the doctor's office-Gabe's office. It was nearing seven and there was no sign of him. She wished that somewhere along the line she had thought to get his cell phone number. There was much for them to talk about. Still, it might have been for the best that she hadn't called him yet. She had time now to think over how much she wanted to disclose-to him or to head of internal affairs Mark Fuller. She had evidence that Treat Griswold was probably involved in a perversion involving young girls-or at least one particular young girl. That in itself made him an easy mark for extortion.
In addition, she had hard evidence that Griswold had broken with unwritten White House law by repeatedly handling the president's medications-specifically his inhaler. Whether or not there was a connection between the inhaler and any psychiatric problems the president might be having would depend on what a sophisticated analysis of the contents revealed.
What she had at this point might have been enough to present to Fuller, but there was no way she was going to put her career on the line and go up against the most powerful and respected agent in the Secret Service without more than indirect evidence and speculation. She needed proof of his relationship to the girls on Beechtree Road, and she needed a positive analysis of the contents of the inhaler he had repeatedly given the president to use. Lester had done his job well, although according to him, his life may have been spared by a fortuitous call on Griswold's cell phone.
If she was to move at all against the president's number-one Secret Service man, she needed absolute proof of wrongdoing. Los Angeles had taught her that having unsubstantiated knowledge, good intentions, and the willingness to engage in a she said/he said confrontation simply wasn't enough to blow the whistle on anyone with clout.
Her plan was to have the contents of several Alupent inhalers analyzed, including the one Lester had taken from Griswold. But there was no way she could risk going through Mark Fuller or anyone else connected with the Secret Service to do so. It seemed Fuller had done a decent job of protecting her identity until now, but despite what he had told her, it was hard to believe no one except Fuller knew that she had been sent into the White House undercover. The Service was very closely knit, and with a man of Griswold's stature involved, sooner rather than later there were bound to be leaks.