Michael Palmer - A Heartbeat Away

“Mr. President,” Rappaport began, “is everything okay? Media speculation is that there was some sort of terrorist attack using a biological weapon.”

The president gave Rappaport a full briefing. No half-truths. No withheld information. Afterward, there was only silence from the man. Allaire wondered if their connection had dropped.

“You still with me?” he asked.

“I am, Mr. President. I’m at your disposal and ready to do whatever is necessary.” There was a force behind his words, a confidence that was actually startling to Allaire. “What’s next?”

The president cleared his throat.

“Dr. Townsend will devise a test to evaluate my mental function—to assess if my will or intellect have in any way become compromised.”

“How long?”

“Given my level of exposure, two weeks. Maybe more, maybe less.”

“What are you suggesting we do, sir?”

“After the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One. When it’s time, we’ll send transportation out to bring you to the White House.”

“When it’s time?”

“When my physician says so, and assuming no one ahead of you is in shape to succeed me, you will take the presidential oath of office.”

“My God. That is quite a lot to absorb, Mr. President.”

“A man does what he must—in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures—and that is the basis of all human morality.”

“John F. Kennedy.”

“Very good, my friend. Let’s hope your moment doesn’t come, but if it does, I trust you to do what is right and just.”

“Thank you for your confidence.”

“What’s your security situation there, Paul?”

“I have two Secret Service agents with me and my family. That’s all.”

“Not good enough,” Allaire said. “You have twenty-four hours to get your family settled and safe. By then I want your home secured as if it were the White House. Biometric scanners. Infrared perimeter alarms. Video surveillance, the works. I’ll get Gary Salitas to work on that for you. We’ll send a detachment of Secret Service agents out there ASAP.”

“No need for the security measures, Mr. President,” Rappaport said. “Except for the Secret Service protection. Through my office of Homeland Security I have access to the best systems professionals in the world. I’ll phone Roger Corum. He’s the CEO of Staghorn Security and has connections to all the major players in the industry. He’s already an approved vendor, and he’s done a lot of work for us.”

“Very well. Good luck, Paul. We’ll be back in touch soon.”

“Yes, Mr. President. And sir?”

“Yes?”

“If the time does come, I promise I’ll be a great president.”

The VH-60N banked smoothly to the right and eased toward the ground. Griff sat motionless in a plush leather seat, staring out at the granite buildings of D.C. This helicopter, though the same type that had lifted him to freedom hours earlier, had a fully finished interior, and was clearly used for transporting high-profile passengers. He was on the last leg of a journey from solitary confinement in a maximum-security penitentiary to a meeting with the president of the United States.

Just another typical day.

Griff had made the trip east, from Tinker Air Force base to Bolling, in an eerily empty C-22B transport plane. Flight time took less than three and a half hours from takeoff to landing with different military teams escorting him at each step of the two-thousand-mile, three-stop journey. Now, with the beginning just ahead, he pressed his forehead against the small portal window, and allowed images of people and places to flow through his mind.

From the earliest days of his remembered life, he had one and only one guiding force—the desire not to be normal. His parents were gray, conservative, hard-working Midwesterners, both of whom died early—his mother of cancer, and his father in a construction accident that left Griff and his older sister Louisa set financially. He was a rebel in school—a wiseass many called him—well coordinated but disinterested in sports; brilliant, but with a history of underachievement that was well on the far side of arrogance. The boys respected and feared him because of his reckless disregard for danger and his body. The girls, with few exceptions, kept their distance. The cops only saw him as a troublemaker—a brawler who, as often as not, would end up in the ER pummeled by someone twice his size.

Then Louisa died.

Meningitis, they told Griff. Meningicoccal meningitis. Within one hour of her first symptom, a headache, she was in a coma. Less than thirty-six hours later, without ever regaining consciousness, she was dead. She was twenty-four at the time. He was seventeen.

Griff watched the ripples sent across the Reflecting Pool by the powerful rotors. Escorted by several military aircraft, the chopper had passed unhindered through restricted airspace, touching down atop a cordoned-off area of frozen lawn between East Capitol Street and Capitol Driveway. Griff had studied maps of the Capitol complex en route, and knew they had landed near the entrance to the recently constructed visitor center.

Emerging from the belly of the chopper, his legs felt stiff, his muscles ached, and his temples were beginning to throb. Fatigue? Dehydration? Stress? Perhaps just the transition to freedom from twenty-three hours a day for nine months isolated in an eight-by-eight concrete cell.

He wondered what symptoms the seven hundred or so inside the Capitol were experiencing. Certainly there would already be some coughing. A good percentage of Sylvia Chen’s monkeys who had been dosed with WRX3883 by aerosol had rapidly developed a dry, hacking cough, accompanied by an outpouring of mucus. Several of the animals had died even before the virus could have taken hold in their nervous systems, probably from sudden airway obstruction, but possibly from some sort of allergic reaction to the germs themselves.

Several times, Griff had called the vet working for Chen, and insisted she treat the animals. But the woman, surly and arrogant, admitted that although she was a D.V.M., she was a specialist in pathology, paid more to autopsy the subjects than to keep them going.

Giant mobile spotlights illuminated the predawn darkness with enough wattage to turn midnight into noon. A camouflage field jacket, supplied to Griff earlier, protected him against the crisp morning air. He rubbed at his eyes and reflexively tugged at his tangled beard. Hours earlier, the flight crew on the C-22B had handed him a heavy scissors, a package of Gillette disposable razors, and a can of shaving cream, but he declined their offer.

The president needs to see the man he’s made .

Shielding himself against the wind from the rotors, Griff took in his new surroundings with interest and awe. A mishmash of barriers—concrete blocks, low steel gates, wooden sawhorses, and barrels—formed a secure perimeter along all the roadways bordering the Capitol that he could see. Uniformed soldiers, police officers, FBI agents, and combat-ready personnel from SWAT patrolled the makeshift perimeter, their guns ready. At periodic intervals, there were sharpshooters standing beside the tripods that bore their long-range rifles.

Well behind the soldiers and police, the curious lined the perimeter, in places standing five or even ten deep. Griff estimated the crowd to be a thousand or more, with people still arriving, the vapor from their frozen breath swirling in the rotors’ wash. Some had impressive cameras and appeared to be from the media, others were using cell phones and camcorders to capture whatever might be transpiring.