With time, her vision was able to make use of a small amount of light slipping beneath a door. She was in a cluttered room—a storeroom of some kind, it seemed. The air, which she had to work to draw in through her nose into her lungs, was cool and slightly musty. Across from her, she could discern the distinctive outline of a harp . . . then of a hat rack . . . and finally, behind them, a large sign that read: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR. PRESIDENT.

She was still in the White House—a prisoner in a storage room in the basement or even the subbasement if there was one, held there by the number-one guardian of the president.

Being uncomfortably bound and having to strain for each breath were distracting enough to keep her from being as frightened as she might have been, even with the rats. She should have written more in the note to Gabe, she chastised herself now—at least mentioned that there were problems with Treat Griswold. She had been too paranoid to do so.

One by one, she tested her restraints. No chance. Even the tape over her mouth had been wrapped tightly around her head and then reinforced in front with something firm to keep her from biting through. At the moment only two things were clear—she was absolutely helpless, and she wasn't dead.

She wondered how Griswold could have caught on to her. The answer was elusive. What was clear, though, was that unless Griswold was satisfied that she had told him everything she knew and why she had been prying into his life, in all likelihood she was going to get a lesson as to how much pain she could endure.

Would Griswold risk holding her here in the White House? However unlikely, it had to be unpredictable when someone might happen to need something from this room. There was a light outside the door. That meant her prison wasn't all that isolated.

An hour or so later, her questions were answered. With a soft click, the door opened, flooding the room with light from a concrete corridor outside. Treat Griswold slipped inside, flicked on the single bare overhead bulb, and eased the door closed behind him.

"Time to hit the road, lady," he rasped, his lips beside her ear. "But first, a little something to keep you from getting carsick."

Without another word, he stepped around behind her, buried a needle to the hilt at the base of her neck, and injected the contents of a syringe into her muscle. After just a minute, the room began to spin viciously.

CHAPTER 45