CHAPTER 1

The Envelope

Hi! Really nice to meet you. Can't stay for long, 'cause things are really busyat my end. Let me tell you how it all started just a few hectic days ago just as Iremember it.

The slightly short-sighted, deep-blue eyes of the president of the UnitedStates opened slowly and blinked twice. At first they sleepily focused on anelaborately embroidered, matching deep-blue silk pillow. With some effort,just in view over the top, the president could blurrily make out the right profileof a beautiful woman lying very quietly, her body covered up to her neck withtheir shared deep-blue silk bedsheet.

The room was chilly, almost cold, in the always overly air-conditionedmaster bedroom of the White House living quarters. Recollections of theecstasies of last night's erotic excesses were mingled lovingly and more maturelywith the joy of having so recently received this heavenly gift, now lying thereso artfully, so calmly, so comfortably.

Almost reflexively the president's hand reached across the pillow to strokeher slightly tanned forehead. Fingers touched her, only to be jerked away infright. The forehead was cold. Colder than the room. Colder than a corpse.

Tearing off the sheet, the president cried out in a smothered scream,"Sheryl! What's the matter?" Sheryl did not reply, but a blue envelope tapedsecurely to her otherwise naked stomach mutely shouted back at the now fullyawake president.

Grabbing the phone with one hand and ripping the envelope off with theother, the president started to punch in the code for White House security buthesitated, slowly replacing the phone into its charger. Better to investigate thecontents of the envelope first. Might this be a suicide note?

The envelope contained a single page with two typed lines on one sideand no signature. The president read the two obscure lines twice, in a panic,but couldn't understand them—not because of the panic but because theymade no sense at all.

Oops! Just got another call. Like I said, things are hopping. Have to fly now.I'll be back later, but in the meantime, I'll adjust the settings so you can followthe action in real time. Remember, this is all happening several days ago. Hold onjust a sec ... almost got it. Okay, here goes ...

Stumbling out of bed, the president not quite blindly reaches the bedroomdoor, throwing it open to find Steve, the six-foot-five, ever-vigilant, nocturnalSecret Service agent, slumped awkwardly in a straight-backed antique chairplaced discretely several yards down the hall.

Steve, wake up; get off your ass and get the Doc! Now!

Still somnolent, Steve starts and stutters, What? What was that, Mrs.President? The doctor? What's the matter?

Just get the goddamn doctor ... now!

The agent leaps from his seat and runs down the hall, not mentallyvisualizing until just before he bursts into the doctor's bedroom that thepresident had been completely naked. "Yup. Bare-ass naked ... and reallyfoxy for an old broad!" as Steve would injudiciously recount to one of his newcoworkers a few days later, now that he had been reassigned and was safelydistanced from "Her Majesty."

Fifty seconds after Steve burst into her bedroom shouting that somethingwas wrong with the "chief," Dr. Kristin Koo enters the president's bedroomsuite, a small medical bag in her left hand and a large question in the rightside of her brain. What's Meryl on about this time? Another nightmare?

Dr. Koo sees the president, now in her bathrobe, head down as if in deep,isolated thought, pacing slowly between the Louis XIV dresser and the tall,elegant sixteenth-century Villefranche pendulum clock on the other side of theroom. She's holding a piece of letter paper in her left hand and a drink in theother. Probably straight Scotch is the doctor's disapproving mental note.

This disapproving note vanishes when Dr. Koo sees a shape on the bedthat looks very much like somebody hiding under the sheet. Who does she thinkshe's hiding from?, muses Dr. Koo.

The president takes a long, steady pull from her glass, then for the firsttime seems to notice Dr. Koo's presence.

She's dead, whispers the president, responding to Dr. Koo's questioningnod toward the lump under the sheet.

Pardon me, Meryl, the doctor says. Then more loudly, Mrs. President. Thedoctor remembers she hadn't closed the door to the bedroom in her haste.Mrs. President, is this another one of your nightmares?

With an uncharacteristically flat and slow delivery, President Meryl M.Montessori mummers, It's my worst nightmare, Krissy. Somebody got throughsecurity and assassinated me. Only they killed the wrong woman. They killed theonly woman I've ever loved.

While these last four sentences pour slowly out past the president's...