Gabe had no quick response. Alison Cromartie sounded incredibly certain and confident of what she was saying and absolutely comfortable with the lies she had told to deal with the police. She was anything but the trim, professional nurse who had tiptoed up to tie his bow tie just seven hours ago.

"Wouldn't they at least have gotten a crime team to find and examine the bullet?" he finally managed. "It's got to be back there someplace."

Alison sighed.

"I'll tell you what," she said. "Trade cars with me for a day and I'll arrange to have the damage fixed on yours and the bullet checked out as well."

"Who are you?" Gabe asked, no longer willing to trust anyone in that city.

Alison drew a thin leather case from the pocket of her jeans and flipped it open for him. Gabe flashed on Lily Sexton and her elegant folder of business cards. But there were no business cards inside this case. There was a gold shield and a photo identification card.

CROMARTIE, Alison M.
United States Secret Service

"People were worried about you," she said.

CHAPTER 12

I'm sorry not to have told you who I was back in the office, but the higher-up who placed me in the clinic asked me not to."

Alison sounded sincere enough and Gabe wanted to believe her, but at that moment—nearly four in the morning—he really couldn't focus well enough to sort very much out.

A man, his face hidden in shadow, had driven up next to Gabe's car and taken a shot at him from almost point-blank range.

Four days in D.C. and in one evening he had been browbeaten by a Navy admiral, lied to big-time by the President of the United States, his wife, and his chief of staff, deceived by one of his office nurses, and now nearly assassinated by—by whom? Someone who was systematically killing White House docs? Why? A whacko random drive-by? That hypothesis made as much sense as any. It was simply a roll of the dice that a madman with the need to kill happened to reach the intersection of G and Twenty-second at the same moment Gabe did, and another roll that Alison Cromartie, with the instincts and reflexes of a Secret Service agent, just happened to be in the car behind his, following him.

"The Secret Service doesn't like things that don't make sense," Alison was saying, "and right now, Jim Ferendelli's disappearance makes no sense at all. I'm one of the few RNs in the service, so they plucked me off a backwater desk job in San Antonio and arranged for me to become part of the White House Medical Unit. My instructions were to keep my eyes and ears open for anything regarding Dr. Ferendelli and to keep an eye on whoever got brought in to succeed him. That's what I was doing tonight."