A Heartbeat Away Read online

  Jordan Lamar appeared even more confused.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President. I don’t see how that helps us.”

  Allaire turned his back again and walked over to a three-foot-high black metal filing cabinet. He opened the cabinet, which was stocked with just-in-case office supplies.

  “It helps, Jordan,” Allaire said, reaching inside the cabinet, “because it means that the attack speaks for itself. It happened. That’s the given, just like an attorney can argue that the patient entered the operating room for a toe operation and left with one leg missing.” Allaire stood up, still with his back turned to the room. “Tell me,” he said, “what did Genesis do that speaks for itself?”

  Allaire turned around, and though he had reached for something inside the cabinet, he held nothing in his hands. He waited for somebody to speak.

  Bethany Townsend finally responded.

  “Genesis placed the vials of WRX3883 inside the bags of select persons attending the State of the Union Address,” she said.

  “Exactly, Doctor,” the president replied. He stood in the center of the room, his arms folded across his chest. “That’s precisely what they did. The thing speaks for itself.”

  With that, Allaire lowered his crossed arms. A wooden ruler, measuring one foot in length, slid out from where he had hid it up the sleeve of his suit jacket. The ruler clattered noisily on the wooden table before settling with the inch markers up.

  There was no triumph in Allaire’s expression.

  “Hank, I want a full accounting of your security personnel. I am sure you’ll find that one of them is missing.”

  Tomlinson still looked puzzled. “What are you suggesting, sir?” he asked.

  Allaire was patient.

  “Somebody working our security checkpoint wasn’t looking for contraband being brought into the Capitol,” he said. “He was using his post as a means of bringing the vials inside and inserting them into the bags as he was searching them.”

  Tomlinson lit up as the new realization took hold.

  “On it right away, Mr. President,” he said.

  Quickly, the room emptied out. Griff was the last to leave.

  “Nice going,” he said, turning back at the doorway. “I would have every inch of this place swept for cameras. These people have been preparing for this for a long time.”

  “Dr. Rhodes, how do you think I should handle the Mackey situation?”

  “You sure you want the opinion of a terrorist?”

  “Doctor, you and I are up against it enough without clawing at one another like this. We need to call some sort of a truce.”

  Griff studied the man, who seemed to have aged years in just a few hours.

  “In that case,” Griff said, “I would consider separating what you know from the customary rules of politics. Hard as it may be, that means no more lying.”

  Allaire held his gaze.

  “I’ll consider it,” he said finally.

  CHAPTER 22

  DAY 3

  1:00 A.M. (EST)

  Despite his smoldering anger at being denied due process following his arrest in Kalvesta, Griff grudgingly had to admit admiration for James Allaire’s ability to remain composed in the face of monumental decisions.

  Some years ago, Griff had reviewed a journal article analyzing the nervous systems of professional tennis players. The hypothesis of the paper was that given the normal rate of nerve conduction, and the speed of a tennis serve, the serve would have been in the screen behind the receiver before he could react and return it. And yet, return serve they did—again and again. The conclusion of the researchers was that the speed of nerve conduction in the top players was some sort of anomaly—a mutation, perhaps.

  Watching Allaire operate, wondering about the often historic consequences of his actions and decisions, Griff found himself speculating if the man’s nervous system functioned differently than the physiologic “normals” of the world. While those with normal decision-making processes were deciding what to do, the president of the United States had already done it.

  At Allaire’s order, a quiet but thorough search of the Capitol had been conducted. The sweep disclosed cameras concealed in every room—at least two dozen units in all.

  But none in the Hard Room.

  Allaire’s counterattack began with architect Jordan Lamar’s casual brush past Griff. It took several seconds for Griff to realize a note had been pressed into the palm of his glove.

  All correspondence from me will come through Lamar. J.A.

  One by one, each of the president’s team received instructions. The Hard Room would be the only safe area for communications, but that space was to be used only for emergencies. Cameras would either be dismantled or left on as decoys.

  Doc, one of the early notes read, we must assume Genesis knows who you are and why we’ve brought you here. YOU ARE NOW A CONSTANT THREAT TO THEM … stay away from the House subway line until we tell you. That’s going to be your way out of here and back to your lab. J.A.

  Griff felt his stomach drop. He had entered the Capitol complex fearing and not trusting the president. Now, it appeared, he was the target of Genesis as well.

  Not safe, he wrote back. No decon zone. Risk outside exposure.

  Help us make it safe. Many lives at stake. Military will help. J.A.

  A team headed by Salitas discovered six cameras expertly concealed inside smoke detectors in the hallway outside the subway. The state-of-the-art video equipment was providing a window into the supply delivery route running from the underground entrance into the Capitol complex.

  Allaire ordered half of the cameras inactivated and the rest redirected and left in place. None of them was to be in a position to record any unusual increase in activity.

  The cameras were not the only discovery made during the next few hours. Hank Tomlinson had been unable to locate one of his officers, a five-year veteran of the Capitol Police force named Peter Tannen. Tannen had been assigned security detail at the breached checkpoint and was now assumed to be a part of Genesis. The FBI was dissecting the man’s life with the intensity of their 9/11 investigation. Suspicion already was that he might no longer be among the living.

  Griff and Angie slipped into the subway tunnel. Their mission was to get out of the Capitol and back to the lab at Kalvesta. Griff glanced over at a nearby wall-mounted clock and made a mental note of the time following the initial exposure.

  Twenty-eight hours.

  In another forty-eight, the first fatalities might be reported. He did not need a clock to tell him that the deaths would continue until there was nobody left in the Capitol to die.

  The military team with him was Special Forces, trained to be first responders following a bioterrorist attack. Before the operation got under way, Griff briefed the group on the dangers of WRX3883.

  “We’re used to working with anthrax,” one of the operatives said at the conclusion of Griff’s brief presentation. “This shouldn’t be that different.”

  “If you get infected with WRX3883, you’ll wish it were anthrax. Be careful, but work as rapidly as you can.”

  Two hours later, the team leader for the Special Ops unit approached Griff in her blue biocontainment suit. He could see through her visor that, like himself, she was drenched in sweat.

  “We’re ready for your inspection,” she said. “Whoever that Angie is, she’s a hell of a worker.”

  “I know.”

  They were well ahead of the timetable.

  “Good enough,” he said, nodding his approval of what was really impressive work.

  In amazingly little time, the Special Ops team had created a reasonably safe, fully functional decontamination zone between the House side of the Capitol and the subway line connecting the complex to nearby office buildings. He overheard one of the soldiers say that they had just built a doorway between life and death.

  Time to head for Kalvesta, he wrote to Allaire.

  A lot of people are counting on you, the pr
esident’s return note read. Don’t let us down.

  Angie materialized beside him.

  “How’d we do?” she asked.

  “The Special Ops people want to adopt you.”

  “Thanks. They were ready to walk through fire for you. More and more you’re reminding me of that cowboy in Kenya that I took such a shine to.”

  Her eyes seemed to light up the space behind her visor.

  “Are you ready to decontaminate?” he asked.

  “Are we ready to go?”

  “As soon as Allaire says we are.”

  “Lead the way.”

  “Simple,” Griff said. “First, we’re going to take an ultraviolet bath.”

  He pointed to an area that contained several large saucer lights mounted on tall metal stands. The lights were plugged into a running generator.

  “What will they do?” Angie asked.

  “Kill any virus still clinging to our suit. From there, we’ll shuffle into the portable airlock.” Griff gestured toward the clear plastic cube erected beside the entranceway separating the Capitol from the subway line.

  “Won’t bad air get out when we go in?”

  “The airlock is negative pressurized,” Griff said, “so that poisoned air from the Capitol won’t leak out into the tunnel.”

  “And who’s gonna drive the train?”

  “The system here uses a driverless car to shuttle members of Congress and their guests between the Capitol and the Rayburn building,” Griff said. “One less person to decontaminate.”

  “Are you going to be the first through?”

  “No, you are,” Griff said.

  “Why me?”

  “Well, all the women are going first.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “After the light bath you’re going to take a chemical shower. Then you’ll need to strip naked. There will be a change of clothes waiting for you on the train. You’ll put your biocontainment suit in the red toxic waste bags provided and leave them on the Capitol side of the airlock.”

  “You couldn’t set up a divider, huh?” Angie said.

  “I told the team that to save time we’d just turn our backs.”

  “Anything for our country.”

  Angie squeezed his hand and left to join a group of three women at the ultraviolet bath station.

  CHAPTER 23

  DAY 3

  5:00 A.M. (EST)

  Griff was the last person to pass through the airlock. He came through naked, but rather than feel self-conscious, his thoughts were keyed on the seven hundred people imprisoned in the building he was leaving. This was already hell for many of them.

  It was going to get much worse.

  He reflected on the remorselessness of Genesis, whoever they were. Death at power stations in New York. Death in a museum in San Diego. Death in a public garden in D.C. And now, death on a truly grand scale. His own passions ran deep in many areas, but none were even close to being intense enough to kill for. He could intellectualize terrorism, but he had never really been able to understand it.

  And now, he had been placed squarely in the path of the extremists to whom cause was everything and killing was nothing. Even if he somehow managed to survive, even if it all came together for him in Kalvesta, Genesis might be damaged, but their hatred and their cause would endure. They would come up with something else. Some new demonstration of their commitment and resolve to accomplish—to accomplish what?

  And along the way, more people would die.

  The best he could hope for was to stay alive and try to disrupt their plan … this time.

  Griff stepped onto the waiting train and Angie, facing away, handed him a towel and a set of hospital scrubs.

  “We’re going to have to get some meat back on those bones, Doc.”

  “You peeked. Well, I did yoga and calisthenics almost every day while I was locked up in solitary, but I guess my equation for staying in shape was missing useful nutrition.”

  “When we get to Kansas, I’ll handle the cooking. For the past few years I’ve been on a Chinese kick. You’ll love it. There’s more calories in those bean sprouts than you think.”

  “There were times when I considered chowing down on one of the guards.”

  “Ugh!” She made room for him on the bench next to her, and instantly he felt stirred by her closeness. “Griff, tell me something,” she said. “Given the status of your research when they arrested you, do you think you can do this?”

  “I was getting pretty close to something useful. That may be why they came after me. But at best, what we’re facing is a long shot. I’ve been running through some hypothetical figures while I was waiting for the shower. I came up with a two percent chance of solving the design problems that were there when the militia came and hauled me away.”

  “Two percent doesn’t sound like much.”

  “Okay, make it three. I’ll be restarting cultures from the blood samples in those containers. In addition, Allaire said he was having a line of the virus flown up from the CDC, where they have it in storage.”

  “When you come up with something, I’m going to have one hell of a story.”

  “When you get started beefing me up with your cooking, be sure to stir in some of your optimism.”

  The team was relieved to be free from the biocontainment suits—especially, it appeared to Griff, those who finally got to cradle their assault weapons in ungloved hands.

  “We’re ready to roll,” Sergeant Stafford radioed in.

  Moments later, the fiber-optic backbone controlling the Automatic Vehicle Operation engaged, and the fully enclosed trolley moved silently ahead. The car came to a gentle stop at the Rayburn building subway station, and the doors swooshed open.

  “I’ve never been to Kansas,” Angie said.

  “Just imagine Lake Victoria in Kenya, and the lush jungle surrounding it, and the cries of countless wild beasts, and then flip the scene over to the reverse side.”

  Stafford and the other soldiers surrounded Griff and Angie and led them through a maze of corridors and stairwells on their way to the surface. Once outside, Griff took a grateful breath of the cool, early morning air, and held it until he needed to exhale.

  The Capitol was to the north of them now. Even from a distance, Griff could tell that the crowd levels outside the barriers had increased substantially, as had the military presence maintaining some semblance of order. There were three ten-person vans waiting with their engines running. The vans had black tinted windows and Griff assumed they were bulletproof, too.

  “How many are coming with us?” Griff asked Stafford.

  “Eight.”

  “That’s a lot of vans for eight people.”

  “Two are decoys. Let’s go. Move it.”

  The side doors to one of the vans slid open and Griff and Angie were the first inside. One of the soldiers carelessly swung Griff one of the refrigerated cases containing the blood samples.

  “Easy with that!” Griff admonished the man. “Unless you want to be responsible for finding out just how dangerous these bugs really are.”

  The solider just grunted and continued loading gear into the van. There was heat in the van, but not enough to enable Griff and Angie to remove their camouflage field jackets. Angie slid in beside Griff and pressed her body against his. He took hold of her hand. She glanced at him curiously, but made no attempt to pull away.

  “I heard Allaire mention something about a second team working in tandem,” she said. “Is that true?”

  “We’re not exactly working in an atmosphere of mutual trust, as the guardians, here, will attest. There’s a Bio Level Four facility in Alaska someplace. Allaire has enlisted my assistant, Mel Forbush, to set up a data-sharing network between us. As long as they don’t slow me down, it won’t be an issue.”

  “Thank you for asking them to send me with you.”

  “I don’t trust Allaire to keep his word, and he doesn’t trust me not to bolt. You’re like the proctor.”
/>   The last soldier stepped inside and the van door slammed shut. Stafford sat in the front passenger seat, his radio pressed to his lips.

  “We’re moving,” Stafford said. “Launch the birds.”

  He lifted a pair of high-powered night-vision binoculars to his face.

  Griff felt suddenly edgy.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Angie seemed to sense it too. Her grip on his hand tightened.

  Stafford passed the binoculars back.

  “What am I looking for?” Angie asked.

  “The doctor’s decoy,” Stafford said.

  “My what?”

  “Griff, he’s right,” Angie said, as she fiddled with the focus. “There’s a man, thin, bearded. I can just make him out getting into a helicopter.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The driver shifted the van into gear and the quick acceleration pushed Griff back into his seat. They were headed toward Canal Street. The two other vans split off and headed in opposite directions on C Street. Griff stiffened. He did not need binoculars to see the black silhouette of the chopper, rising above the treetops after takeoff.

  “Stafford, what in the hell is going on?”

  “President’s order,” Stafford said. “We use this protocol or something like it to protect him. Now it’s been instituted to protect you. When it comes to saving the country we don’t leave things to chance.”

  Barely able to breathe, Griff kept his gaze locked on the helicopter as it grew smaller on the horizon. Suddenly, a trail of fire burst into view, seemingly from out of nowhere, and began to chase the climbing chopper.

  “God, no!” Griff whispered. “No!!”

  He screamed the word.