The First Patient

CHAPTER 51

Hatred.

There were no windows in Alison's prison, only the unadorned concrete walls, the scattered pieces of junk, and the bare bulb hanging directly over her head, making it unpleasant to open her eyes. After four sessions of Griswold's droning interrogation, each followed by a dose of the unbearable, muscle-tearing intravenous drug, he had left and not returned. Alison had discerned from her own sense of time and some remark he had casually dropped as he was heading off that it was morning.

Now, she guessed, it was evening again. Thirty-six hours-maybe more. She remained strapped on her back, drifting in and out of wakefulness. Her wrists and ankles were expertly secured by rope to the metal frame of her cot. She was helpless and in throbbing pain throughout her body. With her arms stretched above her head and barely able to move, her shoulders were especially uncomfortable. When-if-she finally did get to lower her arms, she wondered if they might simply fall off.

At some point during the endless hours, or perhaps during the actual torture that had preceded them, she had wet herself. Griswold, if he was aware of that fact, had made no attempt before he left to change her or to help her change.

Beside her, two plastic intravenous bottles, hooked in parallel, drained saline into her arm, one crystal drop at a time. Why would Griswold ever want her to dehydrate to death and deprive him of his sport?

During the time she was conscious, Alison was consumed by a hatred for Treat Griswold more powerful than any other emotion she had ever known. Being a quarter black, she had encountered racism from time to time, but never had it taken the form of overt hatred. In Los Angeles, there was no question as she watched her friend Janie's life be decimated that Alison hated the arrogant, self-serving surgeons who were masterminding the onslaught.

But never enough to kill them.

This time, she wasn't at all sure.

The president's number-one protector was a master at torture-at breaking his subject down until every statement, every revelation, was certain to be the truth. Clearly, he did not yet feel he had reached that point with her. The doses were progressively larger and more excruciating. By the end of the all-night session, the muscles throughout her body were no longer able to relax fully between injections. The persistent spasms of her jaws threatened to pulverize her teeth, her scalp muscles to crush her skull.

"Who else knows about this?"… "Why did you follow me?"… "Did someone specifically tell you to investigate me?"… "Tell me again about the inhaler. What was it I did that made you suspicious?"… "What did Con-stanza and Beatriz tell you?"… "Who else knows about this?"… "Who else knows about this?"

Even now, in the dense silence, his voice was salt on the raw, exposed wound of her mind.

And yet with each passing second, each agonizing minute, she felt her power to resist grow.

If, as it seemed now, she was going to die, she was going to die victorious, with her secret and her self-esteem intact. Maybe sometime after her death Lester would come forward and the FBI would find and thoroughly search her car… Maybe they would find the inhaler… Maybe they would test it and determine that there was something out of the ordinary about it… Maybe…

Alison smiled savagely at the notion that it was the very hatred Griswold had created in her that had kept her from disclosing what he wanted to know. It was the pain he caused that made her fight back. It was the knowledge that there was probably no way he could let her live that would keep her from ever telling him about Lester and what precious little she did know about the inhaler tucked beneath the driver's side seat of her car.

Still, she feared the pain.

When she needed to, she passed the hours by focusing her hatred on Griswold's visage-his basketball head, his balding pate, his pinched face, and his small, despicable eyes.

She tried lifting her head off the thin military pillow. The muscles in the back of her neck allowed the movement, but only at a painful price.

How could one human do this to another?

It was a stupid question. Humans had been torturing other humans for as long as there had been the means to do it.

And God made man in his own image… and God saw that it was good.

Not this time.

Mercifully, her eyes closed and sleep descended. As she was drifting off, she found herself focusing on why Griswold seemed so insistent on questioning her over and over regarding the inhaler. She had answered his questions not only plausibly but with the truth. Beyond the fact that Griswold had been handling the inhalers at all, she knew of nothing that he had done wrong. Now his persistence in not believing her had her wondering.

By the time she had been able to surrender and doze off, Alison had decided that no matter what she said about the inhaler, Griswold was unlikely to believe her. Sooner or later, regardless of what she divulged-truth or lie-he was going to kill her. By torturing her the way he had, he had more or less crossed the line and had left himself no other option. At the very least, she decided, with nothing to lose, she should do what she could to unsettle him-to drag things out and to make him wonder if she might not be the only one who knew about him.

When she opened her eyes again, the monster was there, staring down at her, still dressed in his shirt and tie and black Secret Service suit.

"Long day?" he asked.

"Go to hell."

"I don't know why, but for some reason I don't think you like me."

"Being a pervert pedophile and a sadist would be enough to accomplish that, but you're a traitor, too."

Nearly submerged beneath the fleshy folds of his brows, Griswold's eyes flashed.

"Why would you say that?"

"You know why."

"Tell me."

"Go to hell."

Griswold filled the large syringe with his torture drug.

"Tell me," he said sweetly, inserting the needle into the rubber port on the IV tubing.

"I've been workin' on the railroad," she sang as loudly as her stressed vocal cords could manage, "all the livelong day. I've been-"

Smiling in a most unsettling way, Griswold pulled the needle out and set the syringe aside.

"I've got a better idea," he said, suddenly looking very full of himself.

Theatrically he reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit coat and produced an Alupent inhaler.

The Alupent inhaler, Alison hoped edgily.

She pressed her lips together, testing how vigorously she was going to be able to resist.

"I think it's time," Griswold said, "that you and our fearless leader developed a common bond. I don't have the time or, frankly, the interest in explaining this little beauty to you, but it sure will be fun to see how you handle it-now and in the near future."

I knew it! Alison thought. The inhaler! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.

"You are really slime."

"Actually," Griswold said, "I sort of like the big guy. I voted for him, and I never would have agreed to go along with this if I hadn't been-"

"Threatened with exposure because of this little baby-love peccadillo you've got going on here. That was your biggest sin of all-leaving yourself open to blackmail and extortion. Griswold, you are just so stupid."

"That's why I'm standing here and you're lying there," he said, seeming a bit rattled.

"What goes around comes around. You'll get yours. Who's blackmailing you? What's in that inhaler?"

"Call it a high-tech time release capsule. Certain chemicals in here enter your bloodstream and settle in throughout your brain, where I can set them off with a push of any of these little buttons. Some of them will make you act loopy in any of a number of amusing ways; one of them will make you act wild; one pair will kill you dead."

He produced a stubby black remote transmitter and held it up for her to see. It reminded Alison of an ice-cream sandwich and had seven or eight cream-colored diamond-shaped control buttons lined up in two columns along one surface.

At last Griswold had done it. At last she knew for certain what was going on, even if she had no idea how the chemicals got to where they were intended, or who was blackmailing the man to administer them, or why. She searched desperately for some way-any way-she could get free, at least long enough to get word to Gabe about what was happening.

"Treat, give it up. Give it up and no one's the worse for what you've done. Give it up and I can tell people how you cooperated. You-"

"Okay, lady," he said, pinching her nostrils closed until they hurt, "I've heard enough. Big breaths, now."

He rested his massive hand against her chin, pried her mouth open, and jammed the business end of the inhaler between her teeth. Then he sealed the opening in place with his hand and waited until she breathed in to send a jet of mist into her throat and lungs.

Alison was in no condition to put up much resistance.

The first jolt of the stimulant tasted like rusty water, the second made her dizzy, and the third made her dizzier still. Griswold's grip tightened. Another spray, then another. Her heart was pounding, sending shock waves through her head. Acid jetted up into her throat and she struggled to swallow it again, rather than to aspirate it and have it scald the inside of her lungs.

Instead of opening up her bronchioles, the repeated dosing now seemed to send them into spasm, smothering her. Another dose and she knew her nervous system was going to explode into a full-blown, grand mal seizure. She managed one final glare at her nemesis, hoping that image of his face might stay with her into the hereafter. Then she closed her eyes tightly and waited to die.