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."

She was on a creaky metal military cot, with her wrists and ankles uncomfortably bound to the frame. The thin, sheetless mattress reeked of mold. The room-clearly for storage-was brightly lit from a bare overhead bulb and was less cluttered than the one in the White House. At some point, she had been dressed in light blue surgical scrubs, possibly taken from the clinic. Her clothes were neatly folded nearby with her bra and panties carefully laid on top-Griswold's not so subtle reminder of her helplessness. Almost certainly, she had decided, the two of them were in the basement of the house on Beechtree Road in Richmond-Donald Greenfield's house.

This would be the third injection Griswold had administered to her over what might have been two hours… or two days. The thought of having to endure the spasms and the pain again brought bile percolating into her throat. He had told her the name of the chemical in the syringe, but it was not one she recognized. In fact, he had mentioned that it was still somewhat experimental, developed by friends of his in the CIA.

After she was allowed to awaken from whatever anesthetic he had given her in the White House, Griswold listed the questions he was going to ask her, and then, without waiting for answers, he injected what he called a "quarter-strength" amount of the drug into the rubber port of the tubing draining intravenous fluid into her arm. In less than a minute, the muscles in Alison's body began to twitch. Then, suddenly, they cramped, every one of them, as brutal as any cramps she had ever experienced.

With her movement restricted, there was no position she could get to that would make the spasms go away. Her quadriceps muscles tightened into rock-hard balls. Her hamstrings pulled just as viciously in the opposite direction. The contractions in her abdominals were especially merciless. Her jaw was clenched so firmly, she was unable to open her mouth to scream.

It was possible-likely, even-that not long after the second injection she had passed out from the unremitting pain. She awoke, chilled from evaporating sweat, feeling as if she had been beaten with a two-by-four. Now Griswold was about to dose her for a third time.

"Griswold, Treat, listen. Dammit, please listen," she pleaded, her speech rapid and forced. "I was placed in the White House because Mark Fuller in Internal Affairs wanted to know what might have happened to Dr. Ferendelli. He also asked me to see if the rumors they had heard about the president's mental problems had any element of truth. Also, I was to keep my eyes open and follow up on anything unusual that I encountered. Fuller never mentioned any Secret Service agent specifically-certainly not you. Now, please, don't use that stuff on me again. I'm begging you."

"Why did you follow me?"

"I already told you. You were the only one I've encountered who did anything even the slightest bit unusual."

"Carrying the inhaler against regulations."

"Exactly. It may or may not be a specifically written rule, but in the clinic we all know that no one except us and the president himself is supposed to handle his meds, and certainly you've been around long enough to know the same thing, too."

Alison had said nothing about the pickpocket, Lester, or about having successfully switched inhalers. If Griswold got even the slightest scent of that one and if there was, in fact, anything unusual about the inhaler he had been carrying, she was in for more pain than she could possibly endure.

She stared up at his massive head, framed by the aurora of the overhead light, and at the deep fold in his truncated neck, and she hated him more, even, than she had come to hate the surgeons in L.A. Silently, she chastised herself for being too cautious and scarred from her prior experiences not to say something about the legendary agent to Gabe or even to Fuller himself.

For a time, neither of them spoke. Griswold just stood there, looking down at her with no particular emotion. Alison felt a glimmer of hope. It seemed to her as if he might be considering her responses.

Please, she thought. Please, please don't do it again.

She tried, unsuccessfully, to get a better read on his intentions. In her life, she had shown some courage and some pain tolerance but not, she guessed, much more than average.

Please, please… don't.

Finally, Griswold shook his massive head and shrugged his buffalo shoulders.

"I don't know why, Nurse Alison, but try as I may, I just can't shake the notion that you're holding out on me."

He lifted up the IV tubing and gazed at the rubber injection port as if it were some sort of precious, delicate blossom. Then he sighed and quickly emptied the contents of the syringe into Alison's body.

At the first sight of his thumb tightening on the plunger, Alison began to scream.

CHAPTER 47

Ketamine… psilocybin… LSD… methamphetamine… DIPT… atropine… mescaline… PCP.

Jim Ferendelli's chemist had found traces of eight different mind-altering drugs in the blood of President Andrew Stoddard.

Eight!

"Zeke likes to say that performing analytical chemistry is similar to doing a differential diagnosis on a patient," Ferendelli said. "If you don't look for it, you'll never find it."

"I totally agree with that," Gabe replied. "Presumptions and assumptions are as dangerous in a physician as arrogance and ignorance."

"Well, Zeke took things one step further. Once he started getting positive results, he anticipated the obvious question as to how these drugs could have gotten into the president's blood in such minute concentrations. He decided that the amounts administered would be far too small to have any neurological effect unless they were delivered to precisely the part of the brain where they were the most effective. The best he could come up with was a theory summarized in several articles he gave me."

"Nanotechnology," Gabe said, almost breathless at the way the pieces were at last dropping into place. "I didn't find any articles, but I found your books on the subject while I was searching through your place for clues about what might have happened to you, and I've been studying them. I'm still an amateur on the subject, but I'm a lot more knowledgeable than I was when I started."

For the first time, Ferendelli managed a smile. He reached out and patted Gabe approvingly on the shoulder.

"I would bet you are an excellent physician," he said.

"I feel the same way about you. Initially you went to see Lily Sexton to learn about nanotechnology, didn't you?"

This time, at least, mention of the woman's name didn't provoke as much agitation.