"We'd best prepare ourselves. I think we should all meet next week."

"Where?"

"At Bethesda."

The senator nodded again.

"Are you in town for long, Reverend?""

"No," Sanders replied.

"I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon. I only came up for the interview and... how should I put it?" He paused, thinking.

"To keep the holy coalition together."

Jenkins felt something cold skitter down his back.

"I don't understand."

Sanders looked straight at Stephen Jenkins.

"Nothing to worry about, Stephen," he said. "I'll take care of everything."

Several hours later Harvey Riker spotted Sara standing by herself near the bar. Finally, he thought, as something akin to relief drifted through him, a chance to speak with her alone. For the past fifteen minutes Harvey had watched Sara and Bradley Jenkins engage in what appeared to be a serious conversation.

They were interrupted by Bradley's father, who moved between them and pulled Bradley away. No surprise there. Harvey knew that Bradley confided in Sara. Senator Jenkins probably did too.

Sara was leaning against her cane, sipping lightly at her drink.

Harvey approached her.

"There you are," he began. " I've been looking for you all night.

Congratulations on the show."

She kissed his cheek.

"Thank you, Harvey. How are you doing?"

"Fine."

"And the clinic?"

Harvey shrugged.

"Okay."

"Did Michael speak with you yet?"

"About what?"

"About his stomach."

"No," he replied.

"What about it?"

Sara frowned.

"I'm going to kill him."

"What's wrong with his stomach?"

"He's been having terrible stomach pain for over a week now."

Harvey nodded, finally understanding.

"That explains his grimacing all night." "I can't believe him," Sara continued.

"He1 promised me he would speak to you."

"Don't blame him, Sara. I haven't been the most approachable company this evening. He probably thought it was a bad time."

"So what's wrong?"

"I need to talk to you about something important." Despite Harvey's earlier vow, he had gone well beyond that fourth martini.

He took yet another swish, enjoying the feel of the cool liquid circling in his mouth before he swallowed. He might have been a little tipsy earlier, but his mind became sober and alert now.

"It involves the clinic," he began slowly, weighing each word in his head before it passed his lips, "and I think it involves Bruce's death." He stopped.

He motioned with his hand.

"Let's take a walk." They moved through the French doors and out onto the broad expanse of landscaped grounds. Many guests were outside now, the party spilling from the crowded ballroom onto the lawn and formal gardens beyond. The two strolled in silence past the pool, the cabana, the tennis courts. Sara led Harvey down toward the barn where her father kept the horses. She opened the barn door, releasing the smell of hay and animals. They entered. A horse neighed.

"This is a beautiful estate," Harvey said.

"Yes, it is."

He stroked the broad forehead of a large grey horse.

"Do you do much riding?" he asked.

Sara shook her head.

"Cassandra's the rider in the family.

The doctors did not like the idea of me on a horse as a child so I never got into it."

"Oh."

"So why don't you tell me what's up?"

"You're going to think I'm crazy."

"Nothing new there."

Harvey chuckled and then scanned the area to make sure that no one was around.

"All right," he said slowly, "here goes. As you know, Bruce and I have been running the clinic for almost three years now, trying our best to keep all results secret and avoiding the press at all costs."

"I know," Sara replied," but I never understood why. Clinics and doctors usually crave media attention."

"Usually, yes. And I, for one, am never against seeing my smiling face on TV. But this is something different, Sara, something big. First, our treatment is experimental. In such cases even a rumor of success brings on expectations which probably cannot be met. Second, we are working with only forty patients, many of whom do not want their cases made public for obvious reasons. AIDS is still the evil plague in our society, one that inspires prejudice and discrimination of the highest order."

"I see."

"But a few new factors have entered the game."

"Such as?"

"Money," he stated flatly.

"We're running out of it and we need more badly. Without some public pressure on the federal government to extend our grant and without some outside donations, the clinic won't survive much longer, and..." He stopped.

"And there's something else," he said.

"Something you have to swear to keep to yourself."

"Go ahead."

"Swear."

She looked at him, puzzled.

"I swear." He sighed deeply.

"You've probably heard some of the rumors, Sara. No matter how hard we tried to keep things quiet, the word began to leak out. It started with the success of the drug on the isolated virus in the lab. Then we injected it in mice. Over time, the HIV was destroyed in virtually every instance. The same thing happened when we moved up to monkeys."

Sara swallowed.

"What are you trying to say?"

"You can't keep something like this a secret for very long," he continued, "and frankly speaking, we felt it was time to let the facts be known a little bit at a time, of course."

Her mouth dropped open. She had heard a vague rumor or two and dismissed them as wishful thinking.

"Do you mean...?"

He nodded.

"We have found a cure, or at the very least a strong treatment, for the AIDS virus."

"My God."

"It doesn't work all the time yet," he continued quickly, "and it is not a wonder cure in the classic sense. It is a long, often painful regimen, but in a number of cases we have had great success."

"But why would you want to keep that secret?"

He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed the sweat from his face. Sara had never seen Harvey look so tense and strained.

"A good question," he replied.

"HIV, the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is a very tricky bug.

It was hard to know for sure if we were truly blocking its effect or if the virus was just taking it easy on us for a little while. HIV is constantly changing, mutating, even hiding inside human cells. We didn't know about the true, long-term effects of what we were doing.

Imagine, Sara, if we came out claiming to have a cure for AIDS only to find out we were wrong."

"It would be catastrophic," she agreed.

"To put it mildly. Plus we have the HHS to contend with."

"The Department of Health and Human Services? What do they have to do with this?"

"Everything. They're a giant bureaucracy and bureaucrats have a way of slowing things down to a crawl. The Public Health Service hell, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health all that is under the goddamn control of the Department of HHS."

"Bureaucrats on top of bureaucrats."

"Exactly. That's one of the reasons we kept our safehouse out of the country, where no one from Health and Human Services could interfere whenever they got bored or somebody's ego was bent out of shape."

"I'm not following you."

"You know that I served as a medic in Vietnam, right?"

She nodded.

"Well, I spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia. It's a quiet society.

Mysterious. No one interferes with your business. Bruce and I decided to keep all our lab tests tissue specimens, blood samples, that kind of thing in Bangkok, where they would be not very accessible."

"To avoid some of the bureaucracy?"

He nodded.

"While their function is certainly justifiable, the PDA, for example, has a habit of testing drugs for years to make sure they're safe.