The room emptied quickly and silently. These were medical professionals—the best of the best. But every one of them was badly shaken.

Jennifer Lowe, thirty, and a veteran of half a dozen missions to villages in the Congo, bent over her patient. Lowe’s marriage to a physical therapist was just six months away. She was a sparkplug of a woman, the daughter and granddaughter of nurses.

“Be strong, baby,” she whispered. “We’re going to get through this. Just be strong.”

It was at that moment she felt an irritation—an itch—between the middle and ring fingers of her left hand. While she was at work, her modest engagement ring hung on a sturdy chain around her neck. She had eczema, but never bad and never in that particular spot.

Not all that concerned, she moved over to the sink and stripped off her latex gloves. The skin between the fingers was reddened and cracked.

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

Liberty is worth more than every pearl in the ocean, every ounce of gold ever mined. It is as precious to man as air, as necessary to survival as a beating heart.

—LANCASTER R. HILL, A Secret Worth Keeping, SAWYER RIVER BOOKS, 1937, P. 12

“Two-oh-six … two-oh-seven … two-oh-eight…”

“Come on, Big Lou. It hurts so good. Say it!”

“Okay, okay,” Lou Welcome groaned. “Two-oh-nine … It hurts so good … Two-ten … It hurts so good … Oh, it just frigging hurts! My … stomach’s … gonna … tear … open … Two-twelve…”

Lou was doing sit-ups on the carpet between the beds in room 177 of what had to be one of the bargain rooms at the venerable Chattahoochee Lodge. Cap Duncan, shirtless and already in his running shorts, was kneeling by Lou’s feet, holding down his ankles. Cap’s shaved pate was glistening. His grin, as usual, was like a star going nova. He had done three hundred crunches before Lou was even out of the sack, and looked like he could easily have ripped off three hundred more.

Every inch a man’s man.

Lou’s best friend, and for ten years his AA sponsor, was a fifty-two-year-old Bahamian, with a physique that looked like it had been chiseled by one of Michelangelo’s descendants. He had earned his nickname, Cap’n Crunch, from his days as a professional boxer, specifically from the sound noses made when he hit them.

It was April 14—a Thursday. Lou’s trip to Georgia had been ordered by Walter Filstrup, the bombastic head of the Washington, D.C., Physician Wellness Office (PWO), a position that made the psychiatrist Lou’s boss.

Filstrup’s sweet wife, Marjory, a polar opposite of her husband, was in the ICU of a Maryland hospital with an irregular heartbeat that had not responded to electrical cardioversion. But as one of two candidates for the presidency of the National Federation of Physician Health Programs, Filstrup was scheduled to address the annual meeting, being held this year at the lodge in the mountains north of Atlanta.