“No need to get upset, Oscar. I stand reprimanded. I’ll inform the President of your concern. But I doubt if he’ll change his mind.”

Lucas sighed. “We’ll do our best with the time left. But he must be made to understand that it’s imperative for him to cooperate with his security people.”

“What can I say? You know better than I do that all politicians think they’re immortal. To them power is more than an aphrodisiac — it’s a drug high and alcoholic haze combined. Nothing excites them or inflates their ego like a mob of people cheering and clamoring to shake their hand. That’s why they’re all vulnerable to a killer standing in the right place at the! right time.”

“Tell me about it,” said Lucas. “I’ve baby-sat four Presidents.”

“And you haven’t lost a one,” Fawcett added.

“I came close twice with Ford, once with Reagan.”

“You can’t predict behavior patterns accurately.”

“Maybe not. But after all these years in the protection racket you develop a gut reaction. That’s why I feel uneasy about this boat cruise.”

Fawcett stiffened. “You think someone is out to kill him?”

“Someone is always out to kill him. We investigate twenty possible crazies a day and carry an active caseload of two thousand persons we consider dangerous or capable of assassination.”

Fawcett put his hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, Oscar. Friday’s excursion won’t be given to the press until the last minute. I promise you that much.”

“I appreciate that, Dan.”

“Besides, what can happen out on the Potomac?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe the unexpected,” Lucas answered, a strange vacancy in his voice. “It’s the unexpected that gives me nightmares.”

Megan Blair, the President’s secretary, noticed Dan Fawcett standing in the doorway of her cubbyhole office and nodded at him over her typewriter. “Hi, Dan. I didn’t see you.”

“How’s the Chief this morning?” he asked, his daily ritual of testing the water before entering the Oval Office.

“Tired,” she answered. “The reception honoring the movie industry ran past one A.M.”

Megan was a handsome woman in her early forties, with a bright small-town friendliness. She wore her black hair cropped short and was ten pounds on the skinny side. She was a dynamo who loved her job and her boss like nothing else in her life. She arrived early, left late and worked weekends. Unmarried, with only two casual affairs behind her, she relished her independent single life. Fawcett was always amazed that she could carry on a conversation and type at the same time.

“I’ll tread lightly, and keep his appointments to a minimum so he can take it easy.”

“You’re too late. He’s already in conference with Admiral Sandecker.”

“Who?”

“Admiral James Sandecker. Director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency.”

A look of annoyance crossed Fawcett’s face. He look his role as the guardian of the President’s time seriously and resented any intrusion on his territory. Any penetration of his protective ring was a threat to his power base. How in hell had Sandecker sneaked around him? he wondered.

Megan read his mood. “The President sent for the admiral,” she explained. “I think he’s expecting you to sit in on the meeting.”

Pacified to a small degree, Fawcett nodded and walked into the Oval Office. The President was seated on a sofa studying several papers strewn on a large coffee table. A short, thin man with red hair and a matching Vandyke beard sat across from him.

The President looked up. “Dan, I’m glad you’re here. You know Admiral Sandecker?”

“Yes.”

Sandecker rose and shook his hand. The admiral’s grip was firm and brief. He nodded wordlessly to Fawcett, curtly acknowledging his presence. It was not rudeness on Sandecker’s part. He came across as a man who played straight ball, encasing himself in a cold, tensile shell, bowing to no one. He was hated and envied in Washington, but universally respected because he never chose sides and always delivered what was asked of him.

The President motioned Fawcett to the sofa, patting a cushion next to him. “Sit down, Dan. I’ve asked the admiral to brief me on a crisis that’s developed in the waters off Alaska.”

“I haven’t heard of it.”

“I’m not surprised,” said the President. “The report only came to my attention an hour ago.” He paused and pointed the tip of a pencil at an area circled in red on a large nautical chart. “Here, a hundred and eighty miles southwest of Anchorage in the Cook Inlet region, an undetermined poison is killing everything in the sea.”

“Sounds like you’re talking oil spill?”

“Far worse,” replied Sandecker, leaning back on the couch. “What we have here is an unknown agent that causes death in humans and sea life less than one minute after contact.”

“How is that possible?”

“Most poisonous compounds gain access to the body by ingestion or inhalation,” Sandecker explained. “The stuff we’re dealing with kills by skin absorption.”

“It must be highly concentrated in a small area to be so potent.”

“If you call a thousand square miles of open water small.”

The President looked puzzled. “I can’t imagine a substance with such awesome potency.”

Fawcett looked at the admiral. “What kind of statistics are we facing?”

“A Coast Guard cutter found a Kodiak fishing boat drifting with the crew dead. Two investigators and a doctor were sent on board and died too. A team of geophysicists on an island thirty miles away were found dead by a bush pilot flying in supplies. He died while sending out a distress signal. A few hours later a Japanese fishing trawler reported seeing a school of nearly a hundred gray whales suddenly turn belly up. The trawler then disappeared. No trace was found. Crab beds, seal colonies — wiped out. That’s only the beginning. There may be many more fatalities that we don’t have word on yet.”

“If the spread continues unchecked, what’s the worst we can expect?”

“The virtual extinction of all marine life in the Gulf of Alaska. And if it enters the Japan Current and is carried south, it could poison every man, fish, animal and bird it touched along the West Coast as far south as Mexico. The human death toll could conceivably reach into the hundreds of thousands. Fishermen, swimmers, anyone who walked along a contaminated shoreline, anybody who ate contaminated fish — it’s like a chain reaction. I don’t even want to think what might happen if it evaporates into the atmosphere and falls with the rain over the inland states!”

Fawcett found it almost impossible to grasp the enormity of it. “Christ, what in hell is it?”

“Too early to tell,” Sandecker replied. “The Environmental Protection Agency has a computerized mass data storage and retrieval system that contains detailed information on two hundred relevant characteristics of some eleven hundred chemical compounds. Within a few seconds they can determine the effects a hazardous substance can have when spilled, its trade name, formula, major producers, mode of transportation and threat to the environment. The Alaskan contamination doesn’t fit any of the data in their computer files.”

“Surely they must have some idea?”

“No, sir. They don’t. There is one slim possibility— but without autopsy reports it’s strictly conjecture.”

“I’d like to hear it,” the President said.

Sandecker took a deep breath. “The three worst poisonous substances known to man are plutonium, Dioxin and a chemical warfare system. The first two don’t fit the pattern. The third — at least in my mind—1 is a prime suspect.”

The President stared at Sandecker, realization and shock on his face. “Nerve Agent S?” he said slowly.

Sandecker nodded silently.

“That’s why the EPA wouldn’t have a handle on it,”! the President mused. “The formula is ultrasecret.”