Michael Palmer - A Heartbeat Away

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 place 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.

“Move it, Rhodes!”

As Griff stepped onto the packed dirt of the Florence federal prison exercise yard, guard Donald Spinelli forced him forward using the butt of his nightstick and a single, well-placed jab against his lower spine. Griff stumbled, but fierce winds from the whirling blades helped to keep him from going down. Dust shooting into his eyes stung like sandpaper.

In the months since Griff had last worn his favorite pair of blue jeans, they had gone from comfortably snug to barely staying over his hips. The rotor-driven winds plastered his plaid flannel cowboy shirt against his once wiry, now near-skeletal frame.

The twin-engine helicopter lifted off the yard, touched down again momentarily. It was clear to Griff the pilot was in a rush and not about to stop the rotors. During his virus-hunting days, he had chartered helicopters from time to time back in Africa, but those were ragged machines, better equipped for falling than flying. This aircraft, though, reminded him of images he had seen of Marine One, with its dark green body and white top, American flags emblazoned on the engine casings.

UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS was painted in white on the chopper’s tail. Griff’s gut had knotted as soon as he realized his removal from the so-called Alcatraz of the Rockies might be a military action. It had been just over nine months since he had last been the focus of another military operation—his final moments of freedom until now.

So many changes.

His beard, a tangled mess of black streaked with gray, immediately collected a fine coating of prison yard dust. He wondered if, in addition to his dark memories of nine months in solitary confinement, that dirt would be all he would ever take away from Florence. It had to be. No matter what lay ahead, he wasn’t going back. Nine months chopped out of a life that had been built around doing the right thing and accepting the consequences for his decisions, such as the Ebola infection. Nine months during which there had been no human contact other than with guards bent on causing him pain. Nine months of confusion about why he had been imprisoned, or what future, if any, he had in store. Nine months during which the only clue he had in that regard was the label Terrorist.