Michael Palmer - A Heartbeat Away

“But, of course,” al-Barsarth said, “the patch was precisely where this Br’er Rabbit wanted to go.”

“In fact,” Corum said, “he had a lovely vacation home there. By presenting the foolish, off-the-charts left-wing bill I crafted, Speaker Ellis was in essence throwing us in the briar patch. If Genesis was for it, when Rappaport took office all the world would be against it.”

“To Br’er Rabbit,” Song said, raising his glass.

“Br’er Rabbit,” all the others echoed.

“Now,” Corum said, after the laughter had died down, “it is time we disposed of the contents of these jars.”

With the help of Prideaux he brought the serum to an industrial-sized double sink against one of the walls.

“Five jars,” the Frenchwoman said. “One for each of us. Xi, I’ll do the honors for you, and Roger will represent Ibn.”

So saying, she removed a label across the top that read: STERILIZED. Then she unceremoniously dumped the contents down the drain.

After a second pouring, Corum moved to the sink.

“Ibn, this is yours,” he said.

As the last of the golden liquid spilled from the bottle, something metallic dropped out of the bottom and fell, with a soft clink, into the steel sink. Corum reached down and picked up a dollar-sized, gold-colored disc, an eighth of an inch thick.

“Oh, holy shit! It’s a homing device. One of ours—”

Corum’s words were cut short by a series of loud explosions at the front of the warehouse. Pulverized concrete, debris, and large, deadly fragments of metal siding instantly penetrated the room as the front wall and part of the ceiling burst apart. The prolonged blast of powerful sonic waves that followed the explosions shattered all the glass in the room and knocked everybody within it to the floor. A rolling wall of dust engulfed them.

Some were coughing, some were dead, others were writhing in pain from gashes and broken bones. Then the soldiers stormed in.

Lights and lasers mounted atop assault weapons penetrated the dense cloud of dust and debris. Dozens of soldiers followed the winter wind into the warehouse, some pushing mobile spotlights.

“Hands behind your head!” General Frank Egan cried out, brandishing his pistol. “Get down, arms behind you, or we’ll shoot you dead! I swear we will! Get down!”

One mercenary whirled and got off an errant shot. The hailstorm of automatic weapon fire that slammed into his body sent him dancing off the floor like a marionette. After that, resistance vanished. Wrists and ankles were secured, and weapons were collected.

As the soldiers stepped back, Angie entered the warehouse and joined Egan at the center of the room. Monitoring the conversations from the surveillance van, she had sorted out that Corum was the leader of Genesis and that Paul Rappaport was an unwitting dupe, chosen because of his well-known reactionary politics.

The army information specialists provided her with brief, printed dossiers on Corum, his company, and every person whose name was mentioned during the celebration. They even managed file photos of him and Colin Whitehead.

Amazing.

Dazed, Corum tried to get up. He had been gashed in his back and one arm, and it looked as if the other arm was broken.

“Stay down, Corum,” Angie barked. “Stay the hell down or I’ll shoot you. You have no idea how much I want to, and I promise I will! My name is Angela Fletcher. I work for The Washington Post, and guess what? You’re gonna be in the papers.”

One of the dead men, lying near Corum, Angie recognized as Colin Whitehead. The dust had largely settled or been blown away by the wind. She nudged the soldier watching Corum.

“Turn him over, please,” she said.

The solider used the steel toe of his boot to lift against a spot between Corum’s ribs. The CEO let out a pained groan and rolled onto his back. Angie snapped a photo of him and then several of the room.

“This is my payment for services rendered,” she said to Corum. “I get to write all about you and your greedy cronies, and Griffin Rhodes is getting the satisfaction of knowing that the antiviral serum the president ordered Rappaport to bring east was a fake that Griff put together in his lab and topped off with the homing device you made for him to wear. It wasn’t easy. In fact, it took him almost as much time to concoct that fake serum as it did to make the real deal.”

“Fuck you,” the CEO rasped.

“You killed my friends. You killed dozens and dozens of good, innocent people. You terrorized the country. Who in the hell did you think you were? What gave you the right?”

Corum’s smile was nasty, showing blood-stained teeth.

“I’m just a man,” he said, coughing up a glob of blood. “A man with a dream.”

“A dream of causing death?”

“Even if I don’t benefit directly now,” Corum said, “my industry will. My heirs. My employees … It’s commerce. Commerce at its purest.”

“Paul Rappaport is not going to be the president,” Angie said. “He’ll be pleased that we have a recording of you talking about how you were using him—setting him up because of his conservative philosophy. Setting him and the American people up essentially to work for you and your gang of thugs.”

Corum tried to speak, but coughed more blood.

“It doesn’t matter now,” he finally managed. “Piles of money will go into the security industry regardless. That’s something of a legacy for me.”

“But it won’t go to you or to any of your companies. I’ll see to that.”

“Does that give you any satisfaction, Ms. Fletcher?”

“You know what, you pathetic creep,” Angie said. “It kind of does.”

Griff stood at the rostrum, looking out over the nearly seven hundred survivors, all of them infected to one degree or another with the WRX virus. The moment in the lab when he saw the concentric red circles on his palm was among the most frightening, soul-crushing he had ever experienced, not only because his research had failed, and people were going to die, but because he had seen Angie for the last time. For nearly an hour he had sat there in his office, motionless, staring at the wall, and planning what he might do to end his life as soon as symptoms of the virus began to become manifest.

Then, suddenly, the miracle began to unfold.

Over another hour, the dreadful markings began to vanish, until finally, after nearly three hours, they were gone altogether. By then he had already contacted the president by fax through Angie, and had asked him to begin laying the trap that was going to confirm or disprove Paul Rappaport’s involvement with Genesis.

The mood inside the House Chamber was an odd mix of bewilderment and buoyancy. Some in the vast room were hugging. Some were crying. And some were merely standing motionless, staring up at the strange tableaux.

Ellis stood frozen on the stage, her eyes looking furiously at Griff. Several of the Capitol Police force had moved in close to her, awaiting orders from their chief or from the president. Griff had helped the weakened vice president into the speaker’s chair. Then he opened the cooler and extracted a large jar of opaque serum and held it aloft for all to see.

But before he could speak, a man’s voice hollered out from somewhere near the middle of the crowd.

“Get in line! There might not be enough!”

Suddenly, driven by primal survival instincts, and in all likelihood by the effects of the virus as well, the crowd began to surge forward.

“Wait!” Griff cried into the microphone. “Everybody stop! There’s enough. There’s enough for each of you.”

But his words had no effect. People, some violently shoving, others already on the floor crawling, had reached the stairs to the rostrum. The police moved in and the Secret Service began to form ranks about the president and vice president.