They took her to a local hospital ten miles away. It was small, clean, and efficient, and Daniel relayed all of Mike’s messages to them. The attending physician looked startled when Daniel suggested it might be a nerve agent, and what medications to administer. He looked it up on his computer and saw that her symptoms matched those of a possible nerve agent, and he administered the medications Robert had recommended. Within twenty minutes the symptoms had stopped, but the danger, if it was a nerve agent, was permanent nerve damage. They suspected that she’d had an infinitesimal dose, but enough to cause considerable disturbance. Any more would have had a much more severe reaction. A poison called Novichok was the most dangerous one, in which case she would be severely disabled or die. She needed bloodwork to determine if, in fact, she had been poisoned, and with what substance. The DGSE agent had taken over communicating with the doctor once they were in the hospital, and the doctor felt that she was well enough to be moved to the city, to a hospital where they could test her to find out what had been administered and how extensive the effects were.

They were getting ready to move her back to the ambulance when Daniel stumbled into the room and said he was feeling ill too. They examined him immediately and his symptoms were identical to hers. They waited another fifteen minutes and put him in the ambulance with her. The DGSE agent drove the car home for them, and they reached the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris forty-five minutes later, with the siren blaring, the lights flashing, and the DGSE agent driving right behind them.

Guy Thomas and one of his assistants were waiting for them there. He spoke briefly to Theo and reassured her that they would take good care of her. He got the keys to the château from her bodyguard and dispatched a forensics team within half an hour. Theo described where she had gone in the house and what she might have touched as best she could, and Daniel did the same. With the atropine, their symptoms had abated, and oximes had been administered as a precautionary antidote. Their bloodwork was on the way to the DGSE lab.

By midnight the first reports were back from the lab. They had been poisoned with a minute quantity of a new nerve agent that mimicked the much more dangerous Novichok nerve agent, and the weaker substance caused far less damage. Oximes were effective as an antidote, and Theo and Daniel were lucky it wasn’t worse.