The next day, dressed as a garbageman and, Gabe assumed, acting like a garbageman, James managed to ride a waste disposal truck out of the prison and into the sunset. When Gabe was released at the end of his year, to the best of his knowledge Danny James had still not been caught.

The trick is to be bold and look like you know what you're doing.

Almost instinctively, ignoring his stocking feet, Gabe stopped preparing to run. Instead, he strode forward toward the first of the group, a gangling, stooped-shouldered professor with thick glasses and an unruly thatch of pure white hair that looked like the product of an electric shock.

"You all done in there with Dr. Rosenberg?" Gabe asked cheerfully.

The man, perhaps sixty, glanced at him momentarily, mumbled something about the session taking far too long, and walked past him, followed lemminglike by the others. It was not at all clear if he or any of the rest noticed that the man threatening to intrude on their thoughts and their concerns about the run-over session was wearing no shoes and had no identification badge hanging from his neck.

It was all Gabe could do to keep from continuing his spontaneous performance by marching into the conference room to question Dr. Rosenberg about his research and whether the brains were, in fact, human. But it seemed unlikely that any of the security team would be as self-absorbed as the scientists or as accepting that anyone in a lab coat had to be one of the good guys, shoes or no shoes.

The extensive underground laboratory, devoted at least in part to nanotechnology research and to neurobiology, made no sense yet, but certainly it had to be connected to the books he had taken from Jim Ferendelli's library. For days, questions had been piling up like autumn leaves. Now, in just a few hours, there would finally be answers—provided, of course, that he could get out.

Cautiously, he made his way to Corridor B and then to the swinging door back to Lily Pad Stables. As he passed Laboratory B-10, he could see Dr. K. Rawdon hunched over the oculars of the scanning tunneling microscope. On the wall above the scientist was an ornately painted sign, in a simple black lacquer frame, which Gabe had missed on his first pass by the lab.

THINK SMALL, the sign read in lowercase letters.

THINK SMALL.

CHAPTER 42

This is the pharmacist."

"Your name?" Alison asked.

"McCarthy. Duncan McCarthy."

Alison checked the list of qualified pharmacists pasted innocuously in the back of the White House clinic patient ledger. McCarthy's name was there.

"Please fill the full Alupent inhaler prescription that's on file for Alexander May."

May was the code name for a prescription that was going to the White House, and full meant seven identical inhalers.

"The name of the driver who will be picking it up?"

"Cromartie." Alison spelled the name. "Alison Cromartie. I'll present my ID when I come."