The First Patient

CHAPTER 54

Gabe had first seen the muddy four-wheel all-terrain vehicle parked outside the barn at Lily Pad Stables. It would be perfect for negotiating the rutted dirt roads up Flat Top Mountain to The Aerie, where it could then be easily concealed in the forest. But first it had to be trucked from Flint Hill to the mountain, fifty or so miles away.

Now, after an explanation that included the assurance that lending Gabe the ATV was what Lily Sexton would have wanted, he was in his newly purchased Impala, leading Lily's stable man, William, up I-81 toward the West Virginia border. Tied down in the back of William's Ford pickup was the ATV-a Honda quite similar to the one Gabe used on his ranch.

If things worked out tomorrow the way he and Drew planned, they would go from horseback to the Chevy and, after an hour's drive, leave the car concealed at the base of the mountain and head up to the castle on the ATV. At the least, as soon as word got out that the president was missing, the sky would be dotted with helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft and the roads jammed with cruisers. Sooner or later, some bright investigator might come across mention of The Aerie someplace and contact LeMar Stoddard, but by then, hopefully, Drew would be ready to come back out into the open.

Their best bet, Drew suggested, would be to stay off the roads as much as possible-even the tangle of dead ends and other dirt roads that his grandfather had built around The Aerie. Drew had owned off-road motorcycles and later ATVs from the time he was a child, and even though he hadn't been up to the castle since before his election, he still felt confident that he could negotiate the narrow hiking paths winding up through the forest and concealed from overhead by the dense canopy of foliage.

William, a laconic septuagenarian, had been born and raised in the Shenandoah Valley and had been working at Lily Pad Stables when Lily took it over nearly ten years before. He had no idea what, if anything, he should charge Gabe for the ATV, which Gabe promised to return when his use for it was done. In the end, the stable man settled for a thousand dollars, which he said he would send along to his niece in Harrisonburg. Gabe added an additional two hundred of the president's money after William promised to keep that amount for himself.

Just past Winchester, they crossed from Virginia into West Virginia. Now Gabe began using his trip odometer and consulting the map Stoddard had drawn. Somewhere off to the left, on a high hill named Flat Top Mountain, was The Aerie. Gabe slowed and took Exit Thirteen. William followed. At 1.2 miles, the narrow two-lane road curved off to the right. To the left, barely visible, a rutted dirt road cut off into the forest.

"Fifty or a hundred feet in on the right," Stoddard had said, "is one of those dead-end roads I told you about that my grandfather built. That's where we'll leave the ATV, covered with branches. Later, we'll leave your car there and put the branches on it."

Saying nothing to William of his intentions, Gabe stopped before reaching the dead-end spur. Together they unloaded the ATV. Gabe started it up, and with William squeezed in behind him, they made a quarter-mile test run down the paved road and then back. The machine seemed a bit sluggish at first but then rallied. Depending on the steepness of the paths up to The Aerie, Gabe decided, he and Drew ought to have a decent shot at making it.

After again expressing his regrets over Lily's sudden and tragic death, and having William refuse his offer of another hundred dollars, Gabe stood by the ATV and watched as the truck rattled back down the road toward Virginia. Then, amid lengthening shadows, he used the seven-inch blade of a newly acquired hunting knife to cut down the branches that would conceal the Impala tonight and again tomorrow. Finally, a bit winded from the effort, he leaned against the trunk of a mature hickory and listened to the noisy quiet of the West Virginia woods. It was time to familiarize himself with The Aerie.

Tomorrow he would buy a pair of western boots and then arrange for a messenger service to pick up the package from Ellen Williams at the Watergate and deliver it to him at their office. He would avoid the White House and his condo. Then the next time he would surface would be at Camp David in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, fifty-five miles from where he was standing now.

Through the gathering night, Gabe clutched Drew's map to the handlebars as the ATV jounced upward over rutted dirt tracks that were just wide enough for a car. The woods on either side of the road were truly the Forest Primeval of poets and songwriters, as dense as any he could remember, with the panoply of leaves overhead blocking what little daylight remained.

His love of fishing had led to a solid knowledge of the outdoors and in particular of trees. As he rumbled along, Gabe picked out cedar and black oak, white ash, beech, and cherry, basswood, aspen, and birch. Twice the surroundings and atmosphere overwhelmed his impatience to reach the summit, and he shut off the engine to stand by the roadside and listen, breathing in the cool, sweet air.

Tomorrow Drew would guide them to The Aerie not on these roads but along rooty paths through the thick foliage and undergrowth-a cinch, Gabe suspected, compared to floating a $20-million jet onto the deck of a pitching carrier. He accelerated and leaned into the sharp turns, getting more and more connected with the rhythm of riding the four-wheel stallion.

The forest began to thin as the summit neared. Rock formations grew larger and more spectacular. Suddenly the vegetation fell away completely, and as if born from the ground itself, The Aerie appeared-a massive brooding Gothic fortress of gray stone, rising to a height well above the surrounding trees. The footprint of the castle was nearly square, with towers at each corner and battlements running the length of the walls. The entire structure was surrounded by a ten-foot-wide moat, crossed by a drawbridge leading to a huge portcullis.

Eccentric, indeed!

Gabe left the ATV near the tree line and crossed the drawbridge. Through one of the narrow windows, he could see light. As the president had promised, the power was on and the lights on timers. Gabe used Drew's key and entered a musty, massive great hall supported by exposed post-and-beam trusses. The walls were lined with moth-eaten flags and mannequins in tarnished suits of armor, one of them sitting astride a sixteen- or seventeen-hand-high model horse, also in full armor, adorned by dense cobwebs. If, as Drew had said, a caretaker came in every month or so, the cycle had to be at its end.

Gabe made a brief tour of the place using a flashlight he located in the kitchen. Where he could easily locate a light switch, he used it. He inspected the ancient pipe organ in the great hall and then moved into the expansive dining room, with a long, dust-covered table that once might have seated twenty. Out the far side of that room, up a short flight of stairs, was an empty pool, hewn out of rock and at least ten feet deep. Moss was growing along the insides.

Each of Gabe's bootsteps echoed eerily off the stone and concrete walls.

Skipping a lot of exploring, he went down a dark staircase to the underground levels. In the basement was a security room with monitor screens, none of which seemed operational. There was also an intensely creepy hall containing seven or eight medieval machines of torture, many of them festooned with cobwebs.

But it was on the level beneath that one that he found what he had come down there to see-the bunker that he planned would be home to the president for as long as they needed it to be.

It was a room, twelve-by-twelve, that had only a minimal layer of dust and few cobwebs. There were two rustic single beds and a bookshelf containing several hundred volumes, a built-in television, dozens of movies, mostly old videotapes but some DVDs, and a stereo console. Along the base of the walls were large bottles of water and, in a small pantry, enough canned goods to keep a family going for weeks. The refrigerator was plugged in but empty, and the roomy bathroom was tiled and surprisingly homey.

Gabe found the switch for the air conditioner and turned it on as Drew had suggested.

"Reinforced walls, six feet thick," he had said, "with filtered air. Built originally by Bedard Stoddard himself and modernized by LeMar in the eighties. We've been told that anyone inside here during a nuclear blast will survive as long as the generators keep going, even if the warhead hit as close as Washington."

Gabe spent twenty minutes wiping down the space. Drew groused about having it be his room but in the end agreed that his safety was what their mission was all about.

Before he headed back upstairs, Gabe made one final survey of the quarters, three stories below the ground, surrounded by solid granite and six feet of reinforced concrete. His knee-jerk reaction was that despite serious efforts to make it comfortable and inviting, the space gave him claustrophobic jitters. Still, he acknowledged, it would be the perfect sanctuary for the president… or the perfect coffin.