Chapter 4: A Presidential Dinner Doused in Poisoned Wine

When the White House invitation arrives, Eleanor has just used the gold she's made from cotton futures to buy out a Northern Army transport. The stamped envelope contained, in addition to the dinner invitation, a half-dozen bloody lipstick prints-an exact match to the remnants of a Lincoln love letter she'd found in Dr. Voss's lab.

"Mom, this human named the President has a risk factor of 89%." CSA-01 scans the invisible ink on the invitation, "Plan B recommended: blow up Pennsylvania Avenue."

Eleanor, however, sews the cyanide capsule into a lace glove and turns to the black maid, "Mary, if I told you that in twenty years your great-grandson would be a Nobel Prize winner..." she wipes off the burn scar on the maid's face, "would you now be willing to prepare my the gown to die in?"

On the night of the banquet, Lincoln's hand, which was cutting the cake, trembled slightly when Eleanor entered wearing a diamond skirt sewn from a futures contract. Mary Todd stared dead at the sapphire necklace at her collarbone-the love token Lincoln had given his first love.

"You should try this." Eleanor held the champagne glass against the President's lips, the rim glinting with the blue light of cyanide, "This poison, purified from the new California mines, has a more...Union-unified flavor than arsenic."

Lincoln suddenly grabbed her wrist and licked the poison off the rim of the cup in full view, "I'll take fifty cups of traitor's blessing a day." His hot breath brushed the side of her neck as he whispered, "But you're the only one who puts poison on the pages of the Bible."

Suddenly, Mary Todd screams and falls to the ground in convulsions.Eleanor's sapphire necklace, which had been worn around the First Lady's neck at some point, is now oozing a ghostly blue poisonous mist. The moment Lincoln draws his gun to her temple, CSA-02 leaps from the chandelier, detonating all the gas lamps in the ballroom.

In the confusion, Eleanor rips open Lincoln's bowtie and discovers the mechanical code CSA-01 embroidered on the inside. Three hundred miles away, her journal is automatically writing a new prophecy, "When the rose at the president's bedside wilts for the seventh time, you will receive a funeral invitation from the future-your own."