9:51 A.M., Thursday, February 21, 2002

The door to Senator Ashley Butler’s inner office burst open, and the senator emerged with his chief of staff in tow. He snapped up the paper proffered by his office manager, Dawn, who was seated at her desk.

“It’s your opening statement for your subcommittee hearing,” she called after the senator, who was already rounding the turn into the main corridor and heading toward the front door of his senate office. She was accustomed to being ignored and didn’t take it personally. Since she was the one who typed the senator’s daily schedule, she knew he was already behind. He was supposed to have been at the hearing already so it could begin at ten sharp.

Ashley merely grunted after he’d read the first few lines on the paper and handed the sheet behind him to Carol for her to take a peek. Carol was more than Ashley’s chief of staff who hired and fired personnel. When the two of them reached the waiting room for his office complex and he paused to say hello and shake hands with the half-dozen or so people waiting to see various staffers, Carol had to herd him toward the door, lest they be later than they already were.

Out in the Senate Office Building’s marbled hall, they picked up the pace. It was difficult for Ashley, whose stiffness had returned despite the medication prescribed by Doctor Whitman. Ashley had described the stiffness as a feeling like trying to walk through molasses.

“How does that opening statement look to you?” Ashley asked.

“Fine, as much as I’ve read,” Carol answered. “Do you think Rob had Phil take a look at it?”

“I should hope so,” Ashley snapped. They walked for a short distance in silence before Ashley added, “Who the hell is Rob?”

“He’s your relatively new head aide for the Health Policy Subcommittee,” Carol explained. “I’m sure you remember him. He literally sticks out in a crowd. He’s the tall redhead who came over from Kennedy’s staff.”

Ashley merely nodded. Although he prided himself on having a facility for remembering names, he could no longer keep up with all the names of the people who worked for him since his staff had ballooned to more than seventy people, and there was inevitable turnover. Phil, however, was a familiar name, since he’d been around almost as long as Carol. As Ashley’s chief political analyst, Phil was a key player, and it was important for everything that was going into a hearing transcript or the Congressional Record to be run by him.

“What about your medication?” Carol questioned. Her heels rang out like gunshots as they hit the marble floor.

“I took it,” Ashley clipped irritably. To be one hundred percent certain, his hand surreptitiously slipped into the side pocket of his jacket and felt around. As he suspected, the pill he’d put in earlier was no longer there, meaning he’d taken it just before leaving his private office. He wanted a good high level of the drug in his blood for the hearing. The last thing he wanted was for someone in the media to notice any symptoms, like his hand shaking during the proceedings, particularly not now that he had a plan to obviate the problem.

Rounding a turn in the corridor, they bumped into several particularly liberal senatorial colleagues heading in the opposite direction. Ashley paused and slipped easily back into his signature, syrupy, Southern drawl while complimenting his fellow politicians’ hairstyles, modish contemporary suits, and flamboyant ties. In a humorously self-deprecatory style, he compared their dapper attire with his own plain dark suit, dark nondescript tie, and ordinary white shirt. It was the same style of clothes he’d worn when he’d first arrived at the Senate back in 1972. Ashley was a man of habit. Not only did he still wear the same type of clothes, he still bought his entire wardrobe from the same conservative haberdashery back in his hometown.

After he and Carol continued on their way, she commented on the degree of Ashley’s cordiality.

“I’m just buttering them up.” Ashley sneered. “I need their votes on my bill coming up next week. You know I cannot abide such foppery, especially hair transplants.”

“Indeed I do,” Carol said. “That’s why I was taken aback.”

As they neared the side entrance to the hearing room, Ashley slowed. “Quickly review for me once again what you and the rest of the staff found out about this morning’s first witness. I’ve got a special plan brewing on my back burner that I definitely want to succeed.”

“His professional resume is what stands out in my mind,” Carol said. She closed her eyes for a moment to help mobilize her memory. “He’s been a science prodigy since middle school, and he breezed through both medical school and his Ph.D. studies. That’s impressive, to say the least! On top of that, he rapidly became one of the youngest department-head scientists at Merck before being actively recruited to a prestigious post at Harvard. The man must have an IQ in the stratosphere.”

“I remember the curriculum vitae. But that’s not what’s important now. Talk to me about Phil’s take on the man’s personality!”

“I remember Phil guessed he was self-centered and cocky because of the way he’s so dismissive of his fellow scientists’ work. I mean, most people, even if they feel that way, keep it to themselves. He’s got to be brash.”

“What else?”

They reached the door to the side room and hesitated. Farther down the hallway at the main entrance to the hearing room, a small crowd was milling about, and the babble of their voices drifted toward them.

Carol shrugged. “I can’t remember much else, but I have the dossier with me that the staff put together, which certainly incorporates Phil’s impressions. Do you want to take the time to read it over again before we begin the hearing?”

“I was hoping you’d talk to me about the man’s fear of failure,” Ashley said. “Is that something you remember?”

“Now that you mention it, yes, I believe that was one of Phil’s points.”

“Good!” Ashley said, with his eyes staring off into the distance. “And combining that with an apparent ego the size of a racehorse’s paddock gives me an opportunity to exert some significant leverage, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I suppose, but I’m not sure I’m following you. I do remember Dan thought that he had a fear of failure out of proportion to his accomplishments and his obvious intelligence. After all, he could probably be successful at anything he wanted to do, provided he put his mind to it. How does his fear of failure give you leverage, and leverage for what?”

“He might be able to do anything he sets his mind to, but apparently at this moment in time he wants to become a celebrity entrepreneur, a fact which he apparently shamelessly admitted in one of his interviews. And to do this, he’s made a rather large gamble career-wise and financially. He wants his newly founded company based on his patented procedure to succeed for very personal, if not superficial, reasons.”

“So what is it you want to do?” Carol asked. “Phil wants you on record favoring a ban on his procedure. It’s that simple.”

“Circumstances have made it a little more complicated than that. I want to make the good doctor do something he most assuredly wouldn’t want to do.”

Concern spread across Carol’s broad face. “Does Phil know about this?”

Ashley shook his head. He made a motion for Carol to give him back the prepared opening statement and took it when she held it out.

“What is it you want the doctor to do?”

“You and he will know tonight,” Ashley said, as his eyes began scanning the opening statement. “It would take too long to explain at the moment.”

“This is scaring me,” Carol admitted out loud. She looked up and down the hallway as Ashley read his speech. She shifted her weight uneasily. Carol’s ultimate goal and the reason she’d sacrificed so much of her own life to her current position was that she wanted to run for Ashley’s office when he retired, a situation that promised to occur sooner rather than later because of the Parkinson’s disease diagnosis. She was more than qualified, having served as a state senator prior to coming to Washington to run Ashley’s show, and at this late date with her goal in sight, she didn’t want him pulling some sort of stunt to do what Bill Clinton did to Al Gore. Ever since that fateful evening visit to Dr. Whitman, Ashley had been preoccupied and unpredictable. She cleared her throat to get her boss’s attention. “Exactly how are you planning on getting Dr. Lowell to do something he doesn’t want to do?”