The First Patient

CHAPTER 59

Alison spotted the man parked half a block down from her apartment the moment the cabdriver from Richmond Taxi turned onto her street.

"Keep going!" she demanded, ducking down onto the floor.

She instructed the driver on a circuitous route around several blocks and watched to ensure they weren't followed. Then she had him pull over in front of an apartment on the next block. The man in front of her place was either Secret Service sent there by Gabe or, much less likely, someone put in place by Griswold as the result of a change of heart on Constanza's part. Either way, Alison wanted no part of him.

The driver took the hundred in cash they had agreed on for the trip and left the garden apartment complex by a different route. Alison had found the money-four hundred altogether-in the sock drawer of Gris-wold's bureau. As she had anticipated, when she made it upstairs from the basement Constanza and Beatriz were gone. Alison gave passing thought to a thorough search of the house but in the end decided that she had neither the strength nor the time for it. It sickened her even to touch his clothes. He had violated her in ways as vicious, dehumanizing, and unfeeling as rape, and somehow, soon, he was going to pay.

There was one room she did opt to visit before calling for the cab-the attic space where the bulk of the training of Donald Greenfield's girls had taken place.

The room, straight out of the sixties, she imagined, was repulsive enough so that she could only last a few minutes there. Circular water bed… red satin sheets… ceiling mirror… dense psychedelic curtains… various mood lights and lamps… sound system… and a huge HDTV with a large collection of video pornography, most involving older men and girls. Surprisingly, there were no cameras-at least none that she could see. She thought about the person who was blackmailing Griswold. If there had been a camera at some point, it seemed possible, even likely, that the blackmailer had the film.

She couldn't bring herself to open any of the drawers. If, as she expected he would, Griswold burned the place to the ground, the world would be the better for it.

During the cab ride up to Arlington, she tried to piece together everything she knew about the man. Griswold seemed once to have been a devoted, effective public servant, who had fallen prey to his own perversity and to someone with the intelligence to document that perversity and to force him to violate his oath as a protector of the president. Perhaps, as his Porsche, second home, and other activities suggested, there was a payoff involved as well. At this point, there was no way to know.

Griswold's mandate appeared to be the administration of psychedelic drugs to the president by way of his Alupent inhaler. Remarkably, though, the drugs remained inactive until triggered by some sort of handheld transmitter, thus making the commander in chief a marionette, who could be caused to go insane by the push of a button, ironically by another marionette.

It was incredible technology-well beyond Griswold's ken, she thought, even though, almost certainly, it had been Griswold who had stolen the blood samples Gabe had placed in the clinic refrigerator.

Unanswered at the moment was how could she provide proof of what she knew to be true, and exactly who was the master puppeteer pulling Griswold's strings. What she knew with certainty was that she was not going to go up against a man with Griswold's reputation and clout without hard, no, impenetrable evidence.

She assumed her car was in the White House parking area where she had left it. The inhaler beneath her seat might get the ball rolling, provided it was still there and was found to be contaminated by drugs and marked by Griswold's fingerprints. But she needed more than that-if there were any lessons to be learned from her L.A. experience, probably much more.

Meanwhile, she also needed to protect herself from becoming a victim once again, this time in every sense of the word. Griswold was no less powerful and respected, and probably even more ruthless, than the Four Cs surgeons in L.A. If she was going to bring him down and uncover the identity of his puppeteer, she was going to need to move quickly and keep Griswold worried and off balance. She also needed help from someone she could trust, and the list of people she could safely approach in that regard was short-very short.

As soon as possible, she and Gabe had to talk.

Alison crossed between two units and carefully approached hers through the backyard. Then she used her elbow and punched in a window panel in her rear door, reached inside, and turned the lock. The neat little two-bedroom had been expertly ransacked. Every drawer had been emptied onto the floor. The rugs had been pulled up, the cupboards swept clean, the pillows on the living room sofa slashed open. Broken glass was everywhere, and what few personal items she had brought up from San Antonio had been destroyed.

Could Griswold possibly have figured out the switch she and Lester had pulled off, or was he just being thorough-looking for anything she might have uncovered?

At first, Alison battled back tears as if Griswold were watching and she didn't want to give him any satisfaction. Then, shuffling to the bathroom to shower, she finally allowed herself a thorough, cleansing cry. The condition of her place didn't matter, she decided as she toweled off. From now until her war with Treat Griswold was over, she would not be staying here-not for a minute.

She found a clean pair of jeans and a navy long-sleeved T. Then she set about looking for the only two things she needed from the place. The first, a spare set of keys to her car, she found on the kitchen floor beneath a bowl. The second was right where she had hidden it-a short, efficient, 9mm Glock 26, tucked neatly in front of a knee-length nylon in one of a pair of four-inch spiked heels that she never wore for fear of breaking her ankles. Tucked in the other shoe, also behind a rolled-up stocking, were two full magazines of ammunition.

Finally, she remembered that she was now in range and turned on her radio. The first voice she heard was one she was listening for.

"Attention, all posts," Griswold was saying, "this is Special Agent in Charge Griswold. Prepare for Maverick departure on Marine One. Wheels up in two hours. Repeat, two hours before departure."

Marine One.

Griswold had said nothing about their destination. Andrews Air Force Base? Camp David? A speech somewhere?

No matter. When she was ready, she would find them. First, though, she needed to contact Gabe. The apartment phone was still working. Standing amid the wreckage, she took up the receiver and dialed the White House medical clinic.