A Heartbeat Away

by Michael Palmer

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Gary, I need you to help me make two calls.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “First get me Paul Rappaport in Minnesota.”

  “No problem. And the other?”

  “I need the warden at the supermaximum federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.”

  CHAPTER 10

  DAY 2

  12:15 A.M. (CST)

  The guard’s riot stick, slamming against his cell door, intruded into Griffin Rhodes’s nightmare, but failed to drive it completely away.

  The recurring dream was especially vivid this time, intense sounds and colors … and pain, like daggers thrusting through his eyes.

  The dreadful ache was in his abdomen, too—a powerful cramping as if his intestines were strangulating. Griff felt his bowels let go, and knew the gush beneath him was blood.

  Marburg virus! I … have … Marburg virus. Let me die! Please just let me die.

  He tried to cry out the words, but there was no sound—only the terrible cramping.

  Griff pounded impotently on the wall by his head.

  “Dr. Rhodes.… Can you hear me?… Dr. Rhodes?”

  The voice in the dream was a woman’s—a Kenyan physician named Marielle—Dr. Marielle. She had been incredibly kind to him.

  How long had it been? How many days? How many weeks?

  More of the slamming against the steel cell door. It was one of the guards’ favorite ways of tormenting him.

  He was standing in front of his bathroom mirror now, supporting himself on the edge of his rusted sink, staring at the expanding bruises on his face and at his eyes. It was Marburg. His horribly bloodred sclerae told him so. He had feared becoming infected from the day his fascination with deadly viruses began. Now, it was happening. Marburg—most likely the Ebola variant. Hemorrhagic fever. Sweats. Unimaginable muscle aches. Blood spewing from the nose and GI tract. Blood in the tendons and the skin. Blood on the brain.

  Eighty percent death rate.

  Blood.

  For years he had been fearing this encounter, waiting for this attack, or something like it. For years he had anticipated the moment when his precautions would not be enough, when living on the edge would prove disastrous—when he would go from being the hunter to being the victim.

  Finally, because of a stupid miscalculation outside of a jungle cave not far from Kisimu on the eastern rim of Lake Victoria, he was going to die, and die viciously. The best he could hope for before he was gone was to have the cave sealed, and to have Level 4 precautions instituted at all the surrounding hospitals … provided he survived long enough to do so.

  The devastating cramps intensified. Now he was on his hands and knees in a field. Blood was pouring in two steady streams from his nostrils, falling to the parched ground in thick, angry drops. In the distance he could see the outline of his lab, a sprawling, cinder-block monolith, cutting a broad, rectangular chunk from the azure African sky.

  Overhead, airplane-sized vultures circled. One of them glided to the ground, landing awkwardly and waddling across toward him, intent on pecking at his flesh.

  Not yet, dammit! Not yet!

  Once again, his eyes began to throb. Griff had always wondered what Ebola infection would feel like. Now he knew. His imagination had hardly done the virus justice. Praying for death was about the best he could do.

  “Dr. Rhodes … Dr. Rhodes, can you hear me?… It is Dr. Marielle.… I swear he opened his eyes.… Did you see that?…”

  The clanging on his steel door resumed, echoing through the cinder-block hell of his solitary confinement cell.

  Which was worse, the nightmare or his reality?

  The vulture was joined by another, then another—huge black shadows with fiery eyes, drifting down to gnaw on him. Each bite brought pain—pain and more blood. Griff thrashed on his cot and tried to bat them away.

  Help!… Help me!

  The vultures were unrelenting now, tearing away huge chunks of his flesh, challenging him to wake up.

  Facedown on the blood-soaked ground, Griff continued flailing at the mammoth birds.

  The sudden clang of his cell door finally caused the nightmare to loosen its grip. Reluctantly, the lurid images receded.

  “Rhodes … Rhodes … Hey, asshole, wake up!…”

  Donald Spinelli, the huge, heavy-lidded guard, stood across the room, by the naked toilet bowl, impatiently smacking his riot stick against his own thigh.

  Griff rubbed his eyes, turned away from the unadorned cinder-block wall, and peered briefly across at the man. Then he rolled back onto his side, again facing the wall, utterly drained. The nightmares arising from his battle against Ebola weren’t an every night thing, but even after a decade, they still occurred frequently enough, and as vivid and inexorable as ever.

  The guard moved to the side of Griff’s institutional cot and slapped him with force on the bare sole of his foot.

  Unwilling to give the brute the satisfaction of hearing him cry out, Griff clenched his teeth against the stinging and gripped his heavy beard. He had practice dealing with pain. It would take more than a smack on the foot to get a reaction from him. Much more. Over the nearly nine months he had been in solitary confinement, all of the prison guards had been abusive to one extent or another. But Spinelli had been the worst. If physically possible, there was no way he would give the sadist any satisfaction. Still, it wasn’t worth provoking him.

  “What do you want, Spinelli?”

  “Put on your Sunday best, Rhodes. You’re leaving.”

  “What?”

  “Just what I said. You’re out of here.”

  “Nine months in this cell with an hour a day walking in the yard alone, and all of a sudden, just like that, I’m out of here? This your idea of funny?”

  “I wish. It’s real. Straight from the warden.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I got no idea. When you get out there—” he motioned to the small barred window overlooking the exercise yard, “why don’t you ask the guys in that chopper?”

  CHAPTER 11

  DAY 2

  1:20 A.M. (EST)

  Senator Harlan Mackey had seen enough. Fear and chaos were erupting around him like Mount Vesuvius. People rushing for the exits were being forcibly turned back. And exactly where was America’s leader now? Gone. Vanished into a back room with his disgracefully inept Cabinet, looking like the reincarnation of Boss Tweed.

  The Kentucky senator and majority whip would not tolerate Hiliard’s gross mishandling of this situation one second longer. Mackey’s well-known motto—No way, no how!—applied to this crisis the same as it did to any legislation he worked to defeat. And how dare Allaire violate the sanctity of the House Chamber—firing off a gun as though he were Wyatt Earp taking over some lawless Western town. People were ill, and from what Mackey could tell, they were only getting sicker. They did not need Jim Allaire. They needed medical care.

  At least Mackey could feel grateful that his son’s math teacher had refused to reschedule an exam. Because of the man’s inflexibility, Jack and his mother had passed up their pilgrimage to D.C. for the State of the Union Address. Lucky them.

  Many people had begun grudgingly to return to their seats, although a number of others were still milling around the aisles and shoving toward the doorways, demanding with escalating vehemence to be let out. Mackey wondered how long it would be before somebody got hurt—really hurt—by one of Allaire’s Capitol Police goons.

  And what, exactly, had they been exposed to? Was Genesis really responsible? Did they really pose a threat worthy of Allaire holding the Congress and so many others hostage? If so, why didn’t they just quarantine the coughing people and let everybody else go? The closest puff of smoke was many rows away from where he was sitting, and Mackey had yet to feel any symptom at all. God knew at least a third of the chamber had that hacking cough now. If Mackey were in charge, that’s exactly what he would have done. Keep the sick away
from the healthy.

  Goddamn Allaire.

  Did the man think they were all stupid? Of course he did. Allaire’s arrogance defied all boundaries. Well, if he thought Harlan Mackey would be a good little solider and sit tight inside a potential death trap, then he grossly underestimated this senator’s resolve.

  People continued to mill around Mackey, who decided then and there that he would escape this nightmare.

  “Senator Mackey! Senator Mackey!”

  People continuing to converge into the center aisle, yelling at the security guards, coughing, and crying, made it hard for Mackey to spot Frost Keaton, a junior staff assistant from his office, waving his arms and calling his name. Poor Frost. For his exemplary job performance, Mackey had awarded Keaton Jack’s much sought-after SOU ticket. Keaton pushed his way through the crowd and, typically, seemed more concerned for his boss than he did for himself. Dumb kid.

  “What’s going on, Senator?” Keaton asked. “Is it true that Genesis is behind this?”

  “I don’t know, son. Like you, I’m waiting for the president to return. I’m sure we’ll all know something soon enough.”

  “Well, I had some new ideas for our highway bill. I guess I’ll just work on those while we’re waiting.”

  Mackey felt a brief pang for the twenty-two-year-old American University grad and his endless supply of optimistic energy.

  “Are you worried?” Keaton said.

  “Me? No. Son, it takes a lot more than all this to worry this old farmer.”

  Mackey flashed on the idea of taking Keaton with him. But just then, the boy coughed.

  Are there more people coughing now? the senator wondered. If so, he would have to move even faster.

  “Look, son, you stay here. I’m going to see if I can learn what’s going on. I’ll let you know what I find out. For now, just sit tight and wait for me to come back.”

  The young aide stifled another cough.

  “Thank you, sir,” he managed.

  Mackey served as one of ten on the Capitol Complex Appropriations Board. The committee handled everything from human resources for the Capitol’s extensive operational staff to routine maintenance issues. Few knew all the secrets of the Capitol complex. Thanks to that committee, Mackey knew nearly every one of them. Every way in, and most important, every way out. At least now those insipid hours spent haggling on that wart of a committee might prove to be worthwhile.

  The speaker of the house, Ursula Ellis, had left her seat and was making her way around their party’s half of the hall. She was an incredibly capable woman, and given another month or so, she just might have won. Now, hopefully, she was mobilizing people to take a stand against Allaire, regardless of what position he took.

  Nobody was standing near the podium, and the crush of people was moving in the opposite direction. Perfect.

  Mackey walked past the rostrum to a spot in the corridor twenty feet beyond. The trapdoor beneath the carpeting was nearly invisible. It had been constructed to reach a maintenance area on the next level down, which housed the workings of the lift that provided wheelchair access to the tribune.

  Nobody noticed as the senator quickly descended the stairs and closed the door behind him. The darkness surrounding him was nearly total. He found the wall switch and located a dank, seven-foot-high tunnel, dimly lit by a series of unadorned, wall-mounted fixtures, running in an east-west direction from the base of the lift. Mackey followed it to where he knew it would split into two passageways.

  The longer of the two tunnels, tiled, better lit, and cleaner, would, after some distance, connect with a flight of stairs to a hallway linking the Rayburn House Building to the Capitol. A solid, wooden door opened only from that side. Mackey suspected that the Rayburn tunnel would be guarded at its entrance, as many in Congress used it to bypass the security lines in the visitors’ center. Instead, his plan took him into the darker tunnel, on the left.

  Moving slowly, after five minutes, he came to the door of an unmarked exit, which he knew was only a hundred yards or so from the Capitol’s First Street entrance. The architect of the Capitol, Jordan Lamar, had at one point requested funds to upgrade the tunnel and the door, but Mackey’s committee had tabled the petition and never gotten back to it.

  Cautiously, the senior senator from Kentucky pushed the door open. The night was cloudless. The air was cold, but manageable, even without an overcoat. He would hurry up Delaware for a block or two and take a cab to his condo in Georgetown. There he would pour a tumbler of Jim Beam and watch Allaire embarrass himself in high-definition.

  He allowed the door to ease closed. The hardware echoed in the still air as it locked. He hesitated, then took two tentative steps across the shadowed alcove. Nothing.

  Had he turned and looked upward at the window one floor above, running along the Rayburn hallway, he would have seen a shadow silhouetted against the darkness. But his concentration was fixed ahead.

  Another two steps.

  Still good.

  Suddenly, from somewhere across Constitution Avenue, a powerful spotlight hit him squarely in the face.

  “Turn back and reenter the Capitol at once,” an amplified voice called out. “We will not ask a second time.”

  Squinting against the intense glare, Mackey reached behind him. But he knew the heavy door was locked. He turned back and took a single step toward the light, his hands raised to shield his eyes.

  “Wait,” he cried out. “Wait. It’s me, Senator Harlan Mackay, from Ken—”

  At that instant, he was punched in the center of his forehead—or at least that was what it felt like for a split second. During the rest of the second, the punch became a searing pain. From somewhere out in the night he heard the crack of a gunshot. At nearly the same instant, he flew backward, his head snapping into the metal door. He was neurologically dead by the time his knees buckled, although his heart was still beating as he slumped to the frigid pavement.

  By the time an approaching team of three soldiers stopped thirty yards away, Senator Harlan Mackey was dead by virtually every criterion.

  One of the soldiers aimed the nozzle of his M2A1-7 portable flamethrower.

  “I know we’re not supposed to question orders,” he said to the sharpshooter next to him, “but I sure hope those guys have a damn good reason for what they’re doing.”

  Without waiting for a response, he adjusted his goggles and hit the trigger. A prolonged, brilliant spear of burning napalm sliced through the night into the inert body of the man they had just killed. The corpse’s clothes vanished immediately, and the skin beneath them boiled and bubbled, and then charred. The stench of burning flesh mixed with the powerful odor of the napalm. For five seconds, ten, fifteen, the stream of incendiary remained fixed on the blackening body.

  The corpse of their victim was now ash. Wearing a gas mask, the third soldier approached the smoldering mound and waited for it to cool enough. Then, using a tapered shovel and a metal broom, he swept up the senator’s remains and dropped them into a biocontainment canister. Another team would arrive shortly to complete the disposal.

  Without looking back, the three men retreated and resumed their positions. In less than three minutes, the containment vehicle had come and gone, and all was as it had been.

  * * *

  URSULA ELLIS’S aide, Leland Gladstone, was no longer able to hold back the bile. He whirled to one side, dropped to his hands and knees, and vomited onto the cement floor. He was a suburban prep-schooler with a degree from Yale, and had never even seen a dead person, let alone watched one be murdered in such a gruesome manner.

  Ursula had known something big was about to happen. She had noticed Harlan Mackey vanish behind the speaker’s podium.

  “Do you still have your BlackBerry, dear Leland? Or did Allaire’s robots take it from you?” Ellis had asked.

  “I still have it.”

  Gladstone patted his back, where he had concealed the device underneath his white dress shirt and secured it in pl
ace using his belt.

  “Can it record video?”

  “It can. Better than most camcorders too.”

  “Follow Mackey. See where he goes. I don’t know what Allaire meant by extreme measures, and O’Neil didn’t come back with anything useful. All O’Neil told me is that Russians or Chinese may be behind the attack, and that they’re preparing us for an extended stay. Supposedly whatever we’ve been exposed to is some type of flu virus. Not that lethal, but presumably very contagious.”

  “That sounds like useful information,” Gladstone had said.

  “Perhaps. But O’Neil wasn’t the last to leave the debrief and my instincts tell me there’s more Allaire’s hiding than he’s sharing.”

  Gladstone, who knew the myriad tunnels of the Capitol nearly as well as did Ellis, chose to follow the passageway one story above the one Mackey had taken. There was only one place the senator could be going. Camera poised, Gladstone knelt by the sill of the window and watched the heavy metal door swing open beneath him. The well-known, distinguished man’s death, incineration, and removal had happened so quickly, and with such organization, that the events had barely registered in Gladstone’s mind while he was recording them.

  Now, the aide stumbled back from the mess he had made and used the wall to push himself upward. The military had murdered Harlan Mackey, almost certainly on orders from the president.

  Gladstone wondered if Ellis had known her colleague and loyal campaign supporter was in peril. Did she sacrifice him to satisfy her own curiosity about Allaire’s true intentions? he wondered. Regardless, Gladstone’s video was all the motivation he’d ever need to maintain his devoted support of Ellis. And the speaker of the house would certainly know what to do with this new information … and the video.