"Mr. President, go ahead and take a couple of puffs from this," Gabe said. "In fact, make it three. Alison, as soon as you have the oxygen in place, please hook him up to the pulse oximeter. Tape it to the IV pole if you have to so that I can see the readings. Then get out the cortisone inhaler from the FAT kit. We have Alupent right here, so we won't need any more of that. Mr. President, you're doing fine. It's not too bad. Just take nice, slow breaths. Nice and slow."

"I . . . I couldn't catch my breath . . . for a moment there."

"You're moving air fine now," Gabe said with steady reassurance. "Probably just some mucus plugs in a couple of your bronchial tubes. Nothing to be worried about. I'm good at this."

"I'm . . . glad."

"All that prairie dust keeps people in Wyoming wheezing all the time. Alison, as soon as you can, let's give him a couple of puffs of the cortisone. Then wheel over that IV. We'll use—a twenty intracath. I'll put it in, so I'll need a tourniquet, Betadine, and some tape. If we can get him hydrated and bronchodilated quickly, this little attack should break in no time . . . Alison?"

"Huh? . . . Oh. Oh yes. . . . Sorry. Here's the cortisone inhaler. Check the security seal to make sure it's intact. And here's the IV pole and IV. Same thing with the seal on that. We have backups for everything if there are any questions. I'll get the intracath ready."

"Thank you," Gabe replied, surprised by her brief but striking lapse in focus. Considering who their patient was, it was hard to believe she would be even the least bit inattentive.

Well, he thought, at the moment he was attentive enough for both of them. He felt the familiar sensations of confronting a medical emergency. His vision and hearing seemed much sharper than usual, and he was processing information rapidly—correlating at beyond computer speed what he knew about asthma and about Drew Stoddard. Although Gabe was definitely keyed up, he suspected his pulse might actually have slowed.

From his very first days in medical school, this was the sort of situation he enjoyed the most. It was what all those countless hours of study and training and practice were all about. Now, if he could just keep the identity of his patient out of the equation, there shouldn't be any problems.

To his right, Magnus Lattimore had worked his way through the Secret Service agents and asked the big questions of Gabe with his eyes. "Mr. President," Gabe went on, speaking as much to the chief of staff as to the man himself, "what we're going to do is to try and break this asthma attack right here, right now. That would mean no ambulance and no trip to the hospital, although we're completely ready for both."