When the Secret Service men secured help—probably in the form of some sort of four-wheel-drive vehicle—he didn't want to make the pursuit too easy. Once he and Drew were in the car, every mile they could put between themselves and the end of the path would widen the circle of possibilities the agents and police would have to consider and make it that much less likely that one of the roadblocks would snag them.

The final two pieces were easier to find than Gabe had expected. A small clearing ten feet off the path and twenty yards from the paved roadway would be the perfect place to leave the horses, and a partially overgrown rest area just thirty or forty yards to the north offered some concealment for the Chevy without having it appear too suspicious. Now, there was just the matter of getting the car to the rest area from where he had left it in Thurmond, putting a sign on the windshield that it was disabled and awaiting a tow truck, and walking back to the stables to do what he could to help the stable man get ready for the president's early evening ride.

First, though, it was time to let patient Grendel have his head. Gabe swung up into the saddle, whispered a few words of encouragement into the stallion's ear, and then prodded him with a gentle nudge from his new boots. The horse hesitated for a beat, then shot back down the trail toward home like a missile.

CHAPTER 59

Alison spotted the man parked half a block down from her apartment the moment the cabdriver from Richmond Taxi turned onto her street.

"Keep going!" she demanded, ducking down onto the floor.

She instructed the driver on a circuitous route around several blocks and watched to ensure they weren't followed. Then she had him pull over in front of an apartment on the next block. The man in front of her place was either Secret Service sent there by Gabe or, much less likely, someone put in place by Griswold as the result of a change of heart on Constanza's part. Either way, Alison wanted no part of him.

The driver took the hundred in cash they had agreed on for the trip and left the garden apartment complex by a different route. Alison had found the money—four hundred altogether—in the sock drawer of Gris-wold's bureau. As she had anticipated, when she made it upstairs from the basement Constanza and Beatriz were gone. Alison gave passing thought to a thorough search of the house but in the end decided that she had neither the strength nor the time for it. It sickened her even to touch his clothes. He had violated her in ways as vicious, dehumanizing, and unfeeling as rape, and somehow, soon, he was going to pay.