Gabe, please. Please don't let anything happen to my boy."

With LeMar Stoddard's oddly compelling display of vulnerability still reverberating in his mind, Gabe entered the White House through the West Wing checkpoint and headed directly to the clinic. The president and First Lady had promised him they would spend the day at home, leaving the residence only for a luncheon meeting with his campaign advisors in the small White House dining room, and after that a carefully orchestrated press conference in the press-briefing room, which Gabe was to attend.

By and large, the polls were holding between an eight- and eleven-point lead for Drew and Tom Cooper over Bradford Dunleavy and Charlie Christman, a four-term representative from Texas, whose politics were clearly and purposefully further to the right than those of Dunleavy, a self-proclaimed moderate conservative.

Eight to eleven points—certainly not a landslide, but an encouraging margin at this stage of the campaign. Still, Lattimore had reminded Gabe just a few hours ago, even an eleven-point lead was unlikely to survive any credible evidence that the chief executive was undergoing diagnostic evaluation or, even more damaging, treatment for mental illness of any sort. Rumors of treatment for depression had been enough to start the Dukakis campaign spinning out of orbit. There had been other errors by the Democratic strategists in that election, Lattimore admitted, but a Dukakis twelve-point lead after the convention had turned into a ten-point deficit with jackrabbit quickness.

Of passing interest to Gabe was a poll reported in that morning's Post that he had read during the car ride from Aphrodite to the White House. In it, Thomas Cooper III held a fourteen-point lead over Charlie Christ-man if the two of them were running against one another for the top spot. Experience and public trust were the two main issues to those voters who were polled. Nowhere did the poll pit the vice president against Bradford Dunleavy, but the analyst of the survey did opine that Cooper might win that race as well.

"Tom Cooper is a Brutus."

The small waiting area in the physician's office was empty save for Heather Estee, the young, ultra-efficient office manager cum receptionist. By her account, over the three-plus years she and Jim Ferendelli had worked together they had become quite close, and she was devastated not only by his disappearance but by his daughter's as well.

"Jennifer and I had lunch together several times," Heather had told Gabe, "and once we even went clothes shopping. She's a brilliant, talented, wonderful person. I can't believe she's missing. I pray every day that she's all right."

As Gabe entered the modest space, Heather, on the phone, glanced up from the notes she was taking, smiled, and waved. Gabe motioned to the partially opened door to the physicians' office, and she waved him to knock, that the covering doc was in.