"I already told you. You were the only one I've encountered who did anything even the slightest bit unusual."

"Carrying the inhaler against regulations."

"Exactly. It may or may not be a specifically written rule, but in the clinic we all know that no one except us and the president himself is supposed to handle his meds, and certainly you've been around long enough to know the same thing, too."

Alison had said nothing about the pickpocket, Lester, or about having successfully switched inhalers. If Griswold got even the slightest scent of that one and if there was, in fact, anything unusual about the inhaler he had been carrying, she was in for more pain than she could possibly endure.

She stared up at his massive head, framed by the aurora of the overhead light, and at the deep fold in his truncated neck, and she hated him more, even, than she had come to hate the surgeons in L.A. Silently, she chastised herself for being too cautious and scarred from her prior experiences not to say something about the legendary agent to Gabe or even to Fuller himself.

For a time, neither of them spoke. Griswold just stood there, looking down at her with no particular emotion. Alison felt a glimmer of hope. It seemed to her as if he might be considering her responses.

Please, she thought. Please, please don't do it again.

She tried, unsuccessfully, to get a better read on his intentions. In her life, she had shown some courage and some pain tolerance but not, she guessed, much more than average.

Please, please . . . don't.

Finally, Griswold shook his massive head and shrugged his buffalo shoulders.

"I don't know why, Nurse Alison, but try as I may, I just can't shake the notion that you're holding out on me."

He lifted up the IV tubing and gazed at the rubber injection port as if it were some sort of precious, delicate blossom. Then he sighed and quickly emptied the contents of the syringe into Alison's body.

At the first sight of his thumb tightening on the plunger, Alison began to scream.

CHAPTER 47

Ketamine . . . psilocybin . . . LSD . . . methamphetamine . . . DIPT . . . atropine . . . mescaline . . . PCP.

Jim Ferendelli's chemist had found traces of eight different mind-altering drugs in the blood of President Andrew Stoddard.

Eight!

"Zeke likes to say that performing analytical chemistry is similar to doing a differential diagnosis on a patient," Ferendelli said. "If you don't look for it, you'll never find it."

"I totally agree with that," Gabe replied. "Presumptions and assumptions are as dangerous in a physician as arrogance and ignorance."