Free A Heartbeat Away by Michael Palmer Page A

senator’s remains and dropped them into a biocontainment canister. Another team would arrive shortly to complete the disposal.
    Without looking back, the three men retreated and resumed their positions. In less than three minutes, the containment vehicle had come and gone, and all was as it had been.
    * * *

    URSULA ELLIS ’ S aide, Leland Gladstone, was no longer able to hold back the bile. He whirled to one side, dropped to his hands and knees, and vomited onto the cement floor. He was a suburban prep-schooler with a degree from Yale, and had never even seen a dead person, let alone watched one be murdered in such a gruesome manner.
    Ursula had known something big was about to happen. She had noticed Harlan Mackey vanish behind the speaker’s podium.
    “Do you still have your BlackBerry, dear Leland? Or did Allaire’s robots take it from you?” Ellis had asked.
    “I still have it.”
    Gladstone patted his back, where he had concealed the device underneath his white dress shirt and secured it in place using his belt.
    “Can it record video?”
    “It can. Better than most camcorders too.”
    “Follow Mackey. See where he goes. I don’t know what Allaire meant by extreme measures, and O’Neil didn’t come back with anything useful. All O’Neil told me is that Russians or Chinese may be behind the attack, and that they’re preparing us for an extended stay. Supposedly whatever we’ve been exposed to is some type of flu virus. Not that lethal, but presumably very contagious.”
    “That sounds like useful information,” Gladstone had said.
    “Perhaps. But O’Neil wasn’t the last to leave the debrief and my instincts tell me there’s more Allaire’s hiding than he’s sharing.”
    Gladstone, who knew the myriad tunnels of the Capitol nearly as well as did Ellis, chose to follow the passageway one story above the one Mackey had taken. There was only one place the senator could be going. Camera poised, Gladstone knelt by the sill of the window and watched the heavy metal door swing open beneath him. The well-known, distinguished man’s death, incineration, and removal had happened so quickly, and with such organization, that the events had barely registered in Gladstone’s mind while he was recording them.
    Now, the aide stumbled back from the mess he had made and used the wall to push himself upward. The military had murdered Harlan Mackey, almost certainly on orders from the president.
    Gladstone wondered if Ellis had known her colleague and loyal campaign supporter was in peril. Did she sacrifice him to satisfy her own curiosity about Allaire’s true intentions? he wondered. Regardless, Gladstone’s video was all the motivation he’d ever need to maintain his devoted support of Ellis. And the speaker of the house would certainly know what to do with this new information … and the video.

CHAPTER 12

    DAY 2
12:45 A.M. (CST)
    “Move it, Rhodes!”
    As Griff stepped onto the packed dirt of the Florence federal prison exercise yard, guard Donald Spinelli forced him forward using the butt of his nightstick and a single, well-placed jab against his lower spine. Griff stumbled, but fierce winds from the whirling blades helped to keep him from going down. Dust shooting into his eyes stung like sandpaper.
    In the months since Griff had last worn his favorite pair of blue jeans, they had gone from comfortably snug to barely staying over his hips. The rotor-driven winds plastered his plaid flannel cowboy shirt against his once wiry, now near-skeletal frame.
    The twin-engine helicopter lifted off the yard, touched down again momentarily. It was clear to Griff the pilot was in a rush and not about to stop the rotors. During his virus-hunting days, he had chartered helicopters from time to time back in Africa, but those were ragged machines, better equipped for falling than flying. This aircraft, though, reminded him of images he had seen of Marine One, with its dark green body and white top, American flags