Free A Heartbeat Away by Michael Palmer

senator quickly descended the stairs and closed the door behind him. The darkness surrounding him was nearly total. He found the wall switch and located a dank, seven-foot-high tunnel, dimly lit by a series of unadorned, wall-mounted fixtures, running in an east-west direction from the base of the lift. Mackey followed it to where he knew it would split into two passageways.
    The longer of the two tunnels, tiled, better lit, and cleaner, would, after some distance, connect with a flight of stairs to a hallway linking the Rayburn House Building to the Capitol. A solid, wooden door opened only from that side. Mackey suspected that the Rayburn tunnel would be guarded at its entrance, as many in Congress used it to bypass the security lines in the visitors’ center. Instead, his plan took him into the darker tunnel, on the left.
    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