This morning, when the phone began ringing in his Watergate apartment, Gabe was enmeshed in a bizarre and bloody dream involving being trapped inside a slaughterhouse. The woman trapped beside him might have been his ex, or Alison, or possibly even Lily Sexton. It was impossible to tell. The desperate bellowing of doomed and dying cattle was terrifying and totally vivid and yielded only reluctantly to the telephone, so that it might have been the third or fourth ring before his fumbling fingers located the receiver.

The LED on the bedside alarm read 5:00—maybe two and a half hours since he finally walked away from his nanotechnology notes.

"Dr. Singleton, it's Magnus Lattimore. I hope I didn't wake you."

At the sound of the man's voice, Gabe went cold. All he could think was that he had screwed up big-time in letting Lattimore and the Stoddards talk him out of initiating the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Why else a call at five in the morning?

"Is Drew in trouble?"

He doused the frog in his voice with water from the half-filled glass on his bedside table.

"No, no," the chief of staff replied quickly. "Everything's fine. Great. I guess I should have said that right away. Sorry. The president is doing fine. Fine. In fact, he just finished a forty-five-minute workout with his trainer."

"Terrific."

Gabe felt the tsunami of adrenaline begin to ebb. He remembered that at the Academy, Drew, like a number of the others—most of them private school kids with advanced study habits—often chose to wake up at two or three in the morning to do his work while distractions were at a minimum. Gabe also found himself wondering, in some corner of his mind, exactly what in the hell the slaughtered-cattle dream was all about.

"Believe me, Doc, you're doing a great job," Lattimore was saying.

"If he's okay, everything else is secondary," Gabe said, pointedly ignoring the praise.

"You've got that right, my friend. Well, I'm calling on his behalf with a request."

"Go on."

"There's a large meeting at the Baltimore Convention Center later this morning which the president was supposed to address. Some major political allies and donors are running the show, and one of them called quite upset that the Secretary of the Treasury had been written in to take the POTUS's place. You see, after the gastroenteritis attack the other night, you said we should stick close to home, and so we—"

"I know what I said, Magnus. Go on."

"Yes. . . . Well, although we still have a decent lead over Dunleavy, there has been a significant slippage in a couple of the important polls. The president is feeling great, and he thinks he should go speak to these people in person. It can be a very brief address."

"And what do you think?"

"I think we have made a deal with you and we are going to keep that deal."

"But you want him to go and make this speech."