"Did he hurt someone?"

"He killed old Gordon. Just like that. Shot him like he was nothing."

"Damn. I'm sorry, Santiago."

"Frank saved you, I think."

"I heard him. That was quick thinking—by all of you."

"You were always good to us in the clinic."

"I need to go, Santiago. Thank you for sheltering me. I'm so sorry about Gordon. Thank Frank and the others for me, too."

"We wish you well, Doctor."

Still on all fours, Ferendelli crawled cautiously to the tunnel entrance, then ran as best he could down the deep swale toward the next road.

CHAPTER 6

Gabe stood near the doorway leading from the stylish Red Room to the glittering State Dining Room. To his right, a string quartet was playing what might have been Mozart. To his left, popular Vice President Tom Cooper III and his wife were chatting with the Secretary of State. Scattered throughout the room were leaders of both parties as well as members of Drew's cabinet. Calvyn Berriman, the President of Botswana, was across the room, shaking hands with a steady stream of dignitaries and simultaneously nodding politely at any number of passersby.

Gabe was unable to suppress a sardonic smile. He strongly suspected that only he of all those present at the formal dinner was thinking about Ricky "The Shiv" Gentille or Razor Tufts, or any of the other inmates who had once joined him shuffling along in the food line at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown. The interminable lines, the dehumanizing inspections, the payoffs, the gangs, the smuggling, the egos, the violence, the ignorance, even the scattered acts of heroism—he hated every second of the year he spent at MCI, every single second he spent trying to avoid eye contact, to keep his back to a wall, and to remain invisible. Thirty-six hundred seconds an hour, eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds a day. They were numbers burned into his consciousness like death camp tattoos.

Still, although even he had to acknowledge he had come far since his days in an orange prison jumpsuit, it was possible that, in some ways, he felt more at ease among the murderers and other felons than he did right now. He had voiced his concern to the president and the White House social secretary, begging to be left off the guest list for the dinner altogether, let alone the two-man list of those being introduced to the Washington glitterati. But the dinner was already scheduled and there was still a great deal of restlessness in D.C. surrounding the disappearance of Jim Ferendelli. The president wanted to assure the politicians and the voters that he was in good hands medically.

"You're handling yourself well, Doctor."