Michael Palmer - A Heartbeat Away

But before any of the people reached Griff, three ear-splitting bangs stopped the milling crowd and silenced the hall. Leland Gladstone was standing behind him. The still-smoking barrel of the gun he had fired into the air he now held against Griff’s temple.

Ellis’s aide quickly ripped the cooler from Griff’s hand and handed it to her. The Capitol Police surrounding the speaker moved away.

“This is yours, Madam Speaker,” Gladstone said. “You’ve worked too hard for it. We can’t stop now. We mustn’t stop now.”

Ellis took the cooler from her aide, and pulled out one of the sterilized jars. The chamber remained silent, all eyes fixed on the precious serum. Ellis faced the assembly while Gladstone, wild-eyed, continued to shift the gun toward anyone who moved.

“You have all been fooled,” Ellis cried out. “And you continue to be fooled. What is this?” She shook the bottle for emphasis. “You’re going to let this charlatan inject you with this when I have promised you the real treatment? You are going to trust this … this hermit, and not me? Haven’t I shown you the truth? The truth about Senator Mackay? The truth about the Senate Chamber? Haven’t I done my part to expose the lies of this president? And yet you still rush for this concoction? Either the content of this jar is useless, or it will quicken our deaths. But I can assure you of one thing—this is not a cure! Only Genesis has the cure. Only Genesis and the bill I’ve presented can save your lives, not this bottle of lies.”

Allaire, who had been ushered off the stage by the Secret Service, pushed himself through the cluster of bodies surrounding him.

“You need to stop this, Ursula,” he said in a calm voice. “What you have there cannot be replicated. Surely you want to save the lives of all these good people. You need to give the serum back and allow us to administer it. You must.”

“I must save these people from you!” Ellis cried out.

Gary Salitas, who had been on his cell phone, leaned over and whispered to the president. Allaire turned to the crowd.

“I have just been informed that the gang of terrorists calling itself Genesis has been captured. Several of them are dead. The rest are on their way to jail.” He shifted his attention back to Ellis. “They admitted that they were using you, Ursula. They have no serum.”

Some cheered, others continued to stare at the speaker.

Allaire’s announcement was the final straw for her.

“Lies!” she shrieked. “All lies.”

She raised the bottle above her head and hurled it into the crowd, where it shattered on the carpet. A second jar disintegrated against the head of a tall, balding man, sending a gruesome mix of blood and serum cascading over him.

Before anyone could move, she had thrown a third jar, this one smashing on the metal frame of a bed.

There was a gunshot, loud and echoing. Ellis’s head snapped back as the bullet tore through her, exploding out the back of her skull. Blood, brains, and bone splattered over the rostrum as she crumpled to the floor by the seat that had been hers for so long.

Gladstone, his eyes widening, still with the gun in his hand, took a shot in the center of his face, the bullet following a path almost identical to the one that had killed Ellis. He instantly fell lifeless across her body, his blood mixing with hers.

A short distance away, Sean O’Neil held his smoking pistol, preparing for the follow-up shot that would not be necessary.

Allaire rushed to Griff, his expression panicked.

“You said the serum couldn’t be replicated,” he said. “You said this was a one-time deal. Can you possibly stretch out what’s left? Can you make it be enough for all of us?”

Griff raised his hands to quiet the crowd. Then, as the cries and commotion settled down, he turned to the president and grinned.

“President Allaire,” Griff said into the microphone, “the antiviral treatment that I developed cannot be replicated. That is true.”

“No! Don’t let us die!” somebody shouted.

Others echoed the fear, and again the frightened, emotional crowd began to unravel.

“Please,” Griff called out to them. “You’ve all been through enough. Please listen.” An uneasy silence returned. “The serum cannot be replicated,” he continued, “so I could not trust myself to be the one to bring it here. Genesis had too many eyes and ears for me to believe they could not get to me, which is why the mixture I carried into the chamber was a ruse, not the antiviral treatment I developed.” He nodded toward the door to the Senate Wing and a solidly built man in a biocontainment suit stepped forward. “Let me introduce to all of you Sergeant Chad Stafford of the United States Army—the one person I knew we could all trust with our lives. The serum in his backpack is enough for every one of you.”

Applause and cheers started in the back of the crowd and rolled toward the soldier like thunder. In addition to his backpack, he held an assault weapon at the ready. People moved aside to allow him to pass as the cheering grew even more intense. All business as usual, Stafford climbed the rostrum stairs and stood next to Griff, who turned to the man and shook his hand.

“Glad you found the place okay,” he said.

The Inn at Coco Island, American Samoa, was unlike any vacation destination in the world. Built on stilts, ten feet above the vagaries of the South Pacific winds and tides, on the eastern end of the island, the inn was the only structure on the two-square-mile atoll, save for the home of innkeeper Jarvis H’malea, located on the far west end. The inn had only one suite—six rooms. It was owned by a consortium of Vegas casino heads and serviced by H’malea and his family. Rental was $50,000 a week, with a minimum stay of two weeks.

The closely guarded guest list at the Inn at Coco Island read like a who’s who in entertainment, business, and sports, and the ability to pay the tariff and sea plane fare did not guarantee an applicant a vacation there. The fine, white sand was legend, and the palms were reputed to produce the largest, sweetest coconuts to be found anywhere.

In the ten years H’malea had been the steward at the inn, he had successfully honored demands—dietary and otherwise—from some of the most eccentric, uncompromising men and women in the world. But the request from the two guests flying in now was unique—a king-sized mattress, placed in a grove of palms, on a small bluff facing east toward the sunrise.

The new E. S. Kluft Beyond Luxury Sublime mattress had been flown to Pago Pago from the Kluft factory in California, brought over to the inn by boat, and paid for, H’malea’s Vegas contact had told him, by some sort of special act of the United States Congress. At first, H’malea was sure the man was pulling his leg, but that was before the mattress, with a pricetag in the mid-forties, was off-loaded.

The seaplane materialized as a dot in the perfect late morning sky. H’malea, thumbs in the beltloops of his khakis, strode along the pier past indescribably blue water with visibility of over two hundred feet. His two guests had requested nothing more than peace and quiet, and, of course, the mattress, but they would have access to SCUBA equipment, kayaks, small sailboats, a hot tub, and a luxuriously stocked wine cellar and kitchen, with or without H’malea’s skill as a chef.

The drone of the engine could be heard now as the pilot banked smoothly into the light southerly breeze. H’malea knew of the events at the U.S. Capitol, and that the passengers had been central in keeping the death toll down and in saving the lives of the president and vice president, as well as close to seven hundred others. But he knew few of the details. Nor would he bother Angela Fletcher or Dr. Griffin Rhodes to fill him in.