The silver Buick Riviera Gabe was driving was, like his furnished four-room suite in the Watergate Apartments, an open-ended loan from LeMar Stoddard. The First Father wouldn't have it any other way. From the day Drew and Gabe came together at the Academy, the senior Stoddard had embraced Gabe and his parents as family, inviting them to his North Carolina estate as well as to his Virginia hunting lodge. Even though the accident and Gabe's subsequent expulsion from school and imprisonment proved more than Buzz Singleton could handle, LeMar had remained a dependable friend and supporter, providing him with a top-notch defense team and visiting him more than once at MCI. Years later, LeMar even pulled some strings to make sure Gabe's past didn't keep him from being accepted into medical school.

Gabe started the Buick and for a few minutes simply sat behind the wheel, letting the air-conditioning get up to speed and continuing the process of sorting out his thoughts and feelings. Over the years, when faced with a medical puzzle, he tried to keep all diagnostic possibilities in play until they were weeded out by either a negative lab test, a positive lab test, or a new physical finding. But always he had an early suspicion as to where the answer lay. The trick was not to be ruled or even influenced by that suspicion until the weeding out had left little, or better still no, choice.

"He's a very special man. . . . We should do what we can to keep him around."

With Griswold's words reverberating in his head, Gabe pulled out of the White House compound onto Sixteenth Street and then made his way to G Street for the mile-long drive to the Watergate Complex. The night was thickly overcast, warm, and humid, even for August in D.C. Essentially lost in thoughts about the evening just past, Gabe rolled along with the languid early morning traffic. As he stopped at a red light at Twenty-second Street, the dark sedan that had been following him since he left the compound pulled into the empty lane to his left and drew up precisely even with him.

What happened then was nothing but a blur.

Aware only of slight movement in the car next to him, Gabe turned his head to the left. The driver of the other car, his face obscured by a baseball cap pulled low, and by dense shadow, had opened his passenger window and had raised a large handgun, pointing the menacing barrel straight at Gabe's face from a distance of no more than five or six feet. An instant before the killer fired, Gabe's car was struck firmly from behind, sending it forward several feet.