No matter. When she was ready, she would find them. First, though, she needed to contact Gabe. The apartment phone was still working. Standing amid the wreckage, she took up the receiver and dialed the White House medical clinic.

CHAPTER 60

Rotors.

Just a couple of weeks had passed since the president had dropped in at his ranch for a visit. Gabe had been on horseback then, and he was on horseback now, helping Joe Rizzo, the stable master, and Joe's ten-year-old son, Pete, lead four horses from the stable to the rear entrance of Camp David for the president's early evening ride with his physician. The difference between this ride and the many others that various presidents had taken along this trail over the years since 1942, when Camp David—or Shangri-la, as it was called before President Eisenhower renamed it after his grandson—officially became a presidential retreat, was that this time the president would not be coming back.

In just an hour or so, President Andrew Stoddard, among the true visionaries who had ever held the office, would confirm those rumors that he was mentally unstable by escaping his Secret Service protectors.

Totally pleased with the horse, Gabe had asked permission to ride Grendel again. Pete, with whom Gabe instantly connected, especially after he taught the boy a couple of neat rope tricks with the lariat he had brought in the backpack, promised he could make that happen with a rub-down, a cooling sponge bath, and an extra helping of oats.

Joe Rizzo, too, clearly enjoyed having a man around who was both a doctor and a cowboy. When Gabe checked out the horses and suggested the president might like a ride on a dapple gray thoroughbred named Mr. Please, the stable master readily agreed. The horse, Gabe saw, was long in the neck and legs—a mover if ever there was one. It was good money that Grendel and Mr. Please could beat the Secret Service horses in a straight-up race, to say nothing of a contest where their three opponents were floating on clouds of Nembutal, ketamine, and fentanyl.

"They've landed!" Rizzo exclaimed in his charming accent, as the distant thrumming slowed, then stopped. "It should be a very beautiful ride, Dr. Gabe. A little breeze, not too many bugs."

"They wouldn't dare to bite the President of the United States anyway," Gabe said.

There was a hitching post near the rear gate to the compound. Gabe helped tie the horses up and then made preparations for what would be the daunting task of slipping drug-soaked gauze pads beneath the saddle blanket of each one without being seen and without having even the slightest bit of white showing.