There was one room she did opt to visit before calling for the cab—the attic space where the bulk of the training of Donald Greenfield's girls had taken place.

The room, straight out of the sixties, she imagined, was repulsive enough so that she could only last a few minutes there. Circular water bed . . . red satin sheets . . . ceiling mirror . . . dense psychedelic curtains . . . various mood lights and lamps . . . sound system . . . and a huge HDTV with a large collection of video pornography, most involving older men and girls. Surprisingly, there were no cameras—at least none that she could see. She thought about the person who was blackmailing Griswold. If there had been a camera at some point, it seemed possible, even likely, that the blackmailer had the film.

She couldn't bring herself to open any of the drawers. If, as she expected he would, Griswold burned the place to the ground, the world would be the better for it.

During the cab ride up to Arlington, she tried to piece together everything she knew about the man. Griswold seemed once to have been a devoted, effective public servant, who had fallen prey to his own perversity and to someone with the intelligence to document that perversity and to force him to violate his oath as a protector of the president. Perhaps, as his Porsche, second home, and other activities suggested, there was a payoff involved as well. At this point, there was no way to know.

Griswold's mandate appeared to be the administration of psychedelic drugs to the president by way of his Alupent inhaler. Remarkably, though, the drugs remained inactive until triggered by some sort of handheld transmitter, thus making the commander in chief a marionette, who could be caused to go insane by the push of a button, ironically by another marionette.

It was incredible technology—well beyond Griswold's ken, she thought, even though, almost certainly, it had been Griswold who had stolen the blood samples Gabe had placed in the clinic refrigerator.

Unanswered at the moment was how could she provide proof of what she knew to be true, and exactly who was the master puppeteer pulling Griswold's strings. What she knew with certainty was that she was not going to go up against a man with Griswold's reputation and clout without hard, no, impenetrable evidence.

She assumed her car was in the White House parking area where she had left it. The inhaler beneath her seat might get the ball rolling, provided it was still there and was found to be contaminated by drugs and marked by Griswold's fingerprints. But she needed more than that—if there were any lessons to be learned from her L.A. experience, probably much more.