"I wish I were going with you, Kyle. I really miss the plains. I haven't even fully unpacked and I already want to go home."

"You'll do fine. Just watch your topknot, Doc. Not much scares me, but this guy did."

"Count on it, Chief."

Gabe set the phone down and paced the apartment. The circle was wider than he could ever have imagined. Now there appeared to be a professional killer involved. Everybody seemed to know or sense that something was wrong with the president, but gratefully, to this point at least, no one had a handle on precisely what it was or how serious. Meanwhile, the POTUS himself seemed to be doing fine.

After dropping Kyle at the airport hotel, Gabe had driven back to the White House and stopped by the residence. Largely as a result of Drew's heroics at the Baltimore Convention Center, his poll numbers had crept upward for the first time in weeks. Stoddard himself was feeling fine, and Magnus Lattimore assured Gabe that the commander in chief had never been sharper.

Still, it seemed like wishful thinking to believe the episodes of altered thinking and bizarre behavior were finished or that there would continue to be ways to cover them up. Gabe needed answers and he needed them before the Twenty-fifth Amendment once again reared its massive head.

First things first. . . . One day at a time. . . . Accept the things you cannot change; change the things you can. . . .

Funny how in difficult times the old AA slogans kept creeping into his mind. More and more lately. Maybe, he thought now, a couple of meetings wouldn't hurt.

He fixed some decaf and padded over to the dining room table where Ferendelli's nanotechnology library was spread out. A little studying would help take his mind off the attack on Blackthorn. Somehow, someone knew who he was and what he had been doing in D.C. It seemed like only a matter of time before rumor and speculation would turn into headlines.

He pulled a chair up and turned his attention to preparing for the woman who claimed to barely know a man who had a well-rendered sketch of her in the drawer of his desk. In the morning Gabe would be driving out to Lily Sexton's horse farm not far from Flint Hill and the Shenandoah National Park, eighty miles or so west of the city. If nothing else, she should help him understand Ferendelli's fascination with the science of atomic-size constructions and nanomachines.

The decaf he chose from LeMar Stoddard's stash was a Brazillian blend, so rich and aromatic that it was hard to believe it wasn't high-test. Probably, like everything else in this city, Gabe decided, the coffee was a sham—loaded with caffeine.

Nanotubes and fullerenes.