In spite of his long-standing friendship with the president, and the secrets he knew about Drew's mental imbalance and attacks of irrationality, throughout the ride from the White House to the Baltimore Convention Center, Gabe could not help but bask in the true greatness of the man.

Maverick.

Gabe knew the moniker had been chosen because Drew had been a stellar pilot. But now Gabe found himself thinking about the original meaning of the word—the meaning everyone from Wyoming understood: a range animal, usually a calf or steer, who had left the herd and would belong to the first person who could manage to capture and brand it. Over time, the meaning had been expanded to include people—specifically, a dissenter, who refused to abide by the dictates of a group.

It was an awesome privilege to watch and listen as Drew and his writer sculpted a speech that would be delivered to only two hundred or so well-heeled supporters but would be heard, instantly, around the world. The main focus this day was foreign relations, but over the course of the thirty-minute presentation Drew would touch on a number of the accomplishments of his first term in office, the progress that was being made in his Vision for America program, and several failures of the Dunleavy administration, which had preceded his. He would even manage somewhere along the line to comment on the evolving miracle of the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals, local teams still leading their respective divisions in baseball and possibly headed to a million-to-one long-shot World Series match-up.

By the time the motorcade turned off Route 395 and headed into Baltimore, Gabe felt more committed than ever to get to the bottom of Drew's bizarre breaks with reality and to keep him in office if at all possible. A good deal of Gabe's resolve still depended on the findings and conclusions of Kyle Blackthorn, but as things stood, invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment and effectively elevating Tom Cooper from running mate to presidential candidate was not a move he was going to make.

It wasn't as if the vice president had made that terrible an impression on him, although it did seem a bit naïve for a man of his stature to expect the president's doctor to share any information about his patient's medical condition. It was more that Cooper was just . . . eager. That was the most descriptive word Gabe could think of at the moment. Eager.