the frosted glass panel beside the door, she could see a familiar outline of a tall man with light hair—Josh was here. Last night she hadn’t felt like doing anything but relaxing in a hot bath and trying to put recent events out of her mind. Today, she was ready to lay out the story in detail to see if her fears were reasonable or simply the product of an overactive imagination.
Rachel opened the door for Josh. “I’m glad to see you.”
“Me, too,” he said. Still standing in the open doorway, he enfolded her in an embrace that seemed to last forever. He bent down to kiss her, and without thinking she responded. When she realized what she was doing, she pulled back. I let myself get carried away at the airport. I’ve got to be careful—certainly until Josh knows the whole story.
She took Josh by the hand and they walked together into the living room.
“I don’t ever want you to be gone like that again,” Josh said.
“And I don’t want to experience anything like what I’ve been through.”
As though by common consent, they moved to the couch and sat side by side. “I’ve had an interesting and sort of unnerving conversation with Mr. Madison,” Josh said.
“Tell me about it.”
He hitched himself closer and put his arm around her. “He thinks someone is trying to kill him. It seems that, although he’s no longer in office, he wields a great deal of influence, both here and abroad. There are people who don’t want him to exercise that influence. And in the past several years he’s done things that made a number of people hate him—some apparently enough to try to kill him.”
Rachel coughed. “Excuse me.” She took a few deep breaths. “In other countries?”
Josh shook his head. “Not only in other countries.”
Rachel thought about that. “You mean—”
“Yes, there are people in the U.S., as well as throughout the world, who’d like to see David Madison out of the picture . . . totally.”
“That’s probably true of all former presidents,” Rachel said.
“I gather it’s truer of Mr. Madison than most of the previous ones,” Josh replied.
He went on to explain that Madison had learned of a couple of projected attempts on his life that had never come to fruition. “The latest was a plan to assassinate him while he was making a public appearance. The local police nipped that in the bud. There have also been rumored attempts to infect him with anthrax or something equally deadly. I think that’s why he feels so dependent on his personal physician.”
Rachel paused to cough again and clear her throat. “And since Dr. Lambert is dead, now that responsibility is yours.”
“I guess,” Josh said. “One more thing I probably should share with you. Madison thinks someone may have killed Dr. Lambert.”
“Josh, that man had a heart attack. He was in the bathroom just off the room at the church where we were eating lunch. We heard him fall. I helped give him CPR.”
“I’m going to have to do some research, but as I recall, there are drugs that can cause a death that’s clinically indistinguishable from a heart attack. And remember, Ben’s body disappeared from the airport.”
“What—”
“Normally an autopsy would confirm whether Ben died of natural causes,” Josh said. “But now, there’s no body. That means no autopsy.”
***
The waiter moved silently away, leaving Josh and Rachel alone in a quiet corner of the restaurant. Josh reached across the table and put his hand atop Rachel’s. He’d planned this evening since the time Rachel left. Now it was finally here.
After the limo had delivered Josh and Madison to the former president’s home, Lang asked another agent to drive the doctor back to Love Field for his car. By the time he’d made it to Rachel’s apartment and told her about his meeting with the former president, it was getting late. She’d offered—almost insisted—that she could make dinner for them, but Josh wouldn’t hear of it. “I want to take you out.” So now, they were sitting here in the back of the almost deserted restaurant.
“Your hand is shaking,” Josh said. “Is something wrong?”
“I . . . I need to tell you about something that happened on the trip.” Rachel coughed, then took a sip of water. “And it may fit in with what President Madison told you earlier this evening.”
Josh felt as though things were coming at him faster than he could process them, but he composed his features as best he could and said, “Sure, let’s hear it.”
Rachel picked up her water glass but put it down without drinking. “It was quite a thrill accompanying Mr. Madison on a trip like this. More than that, he actually seemed to value my opinion and that of the other medical people in the group. We talked about the location for the clinic he wanted to build—about the size of facilities, staffing, all the things you’d expect.”
“Was this in a primitive area?” Josh asked.
“Yes and no,” Rachel said. “It was a small town with perhaps seven hundred people in it and another two hundred or so living in the countryside around it, but the nearest medical facility was about fifty kilometers away.”
Josh automatically translated the distance: approximately thirty miles. “I’m assuming the Madison Foundation was going to fund this. Was there opposition?”
“No overt signs of any. But President Madison told us he’d heard rumblings. I asked him about details, but he didn’t want to go into them.”
“But the trip was going along okay—”
“I’ll give you an example. We were quartered in the homes of members of a local church. The women cooked our meals, and we ate them together at the church. One day Mr. Madison complained of stomach pains after a couple of bites. He left the table, and Dr. Lambert gave him some medication for his symptoms. At the time I figured it was just a bug, although no one else had any trouble.”
“That doesn’t mean much,” Josh said.
“One of the women serving us scraped the remains off all our plates into a bowl she left outside the kitchen door to feed some of the dogs that hung around the church.” She stifled a cough. “The next morning, someone in our group found one of the dogs about sixty yards away from the church . . . dead.”
“Okay, that’s troubling. What did Lang do?”
“Lang was concerned, but Mr. Madison dismissed it as coincidence, and I guess it could have been. The dogs were wild, and I take it they had a sketchy existence. Anyway, Madison didn’t want to make a fuss. But two days later, Dr. Lambert, Mr. Madison, and I were looking at a proposed site for the new clinic when a woman in a long dress with a scarf over her head and a cloth covering the lower half of her face ran into the room where we were. Mr. Madison asked her in Spanish if he could help her. Without a word, she drew what looked like a flask full of yellow liquid from the folds of her dress and showered us with the contents. Then, still without a word, she ran out.”
“Strange,
