A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [151]
The man was Griffin Rhodes.
CHAPTER 68
DAY 10
1:30 A.M. (EST)
One by one, at intervals of five minutes, three rented sedans pulled in through the rear garage doors of the S&S Trading Co. Five men, all in black, exited the garage through an inner door and entered the large storehouse on the street side.
Waiting anxiously around a makeshift biochemistry lab, complete with immunoelectrophoresis, mass spectrometry, and a chemist, were Roger Corum, Colin Whitehead, and Marguerite Prideaux.
The leader of the mercenaries withdrew five large glass jars from the cooler, each one carefully labeled and containing a slightly opaque straw-colored liquid. The group of them then joined two other men dressed in black, one of whom was operating an impressive pair of videoconferencing screens. On the screens, waiting at their desks in opulent offices, were Song Xi in Beijing, China, and Ibn al-Basarth in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The four men and Prideaux, each worth tens of millions, formed the secret international cartel which called itself Genesis. The group had been Corum’s brainchild, as was taking the names from the Old Testament. Their organization had one goal and one goal only: profit. After this operation was complete, and Paul Rappaport was sworn in as president, there would be no need for Genesis to continue to exist. The American people and their new leader would take care of the rest.
“So, any trouble?” Corum asked the head of the squad.
“Two casualties on their side is all,” the man replied matter-of-factly. “Unavoidable.”
“No problem. Is Rappaport okay?”
“Fine. He was just as clueless and frightened as the rest of them.”
“So,” Song Xi asked, in near-perfect English, “Secretary Rappaport still has no idea that Genesis is all about getting him and his policies put into the White House?”
“Not only him and his policies,” Prideaux replied, “but thanks to the work of Genesis, an American public ready to cooperate with them, and expand the country’s security system to the tune of billions of dollars.”
“Tens of billions,” Whitehead corrected, punctuating the words with a cough.
“And of course,” al-Basarth said, “who better to provide the new identification system, and surveillance cameras, and anti-alien barriers, and electronic monitoring, than our companies—already leaders in our fields.”
“I’ll bet my own government won’t be far behind,” Xi said. “I think the world is ready for a little isolationism. Paranoia equals profit. Who first said that?”
“I did,” Corum, Prideaux, and Whitehead answered in unison, and all of them laughed.
“How are we doing?” Corum asked the chemist, a man named Falicki.
Falicki had worked for him before. In fact, it was he who first put Corum in touch with the late Matt Fink. There would be no need to silence Falicki or any of the men. Their salaries would see to that.
“Almost there.”
The computer printer chimed, and soon began to spit out results from the mass spectrometer analysis, taken from the serum that Paul Rappaport had brought with him to Washington from Kalvesta.
His brow furrowed as Falicki studied the readout.
“Well?”
“It appears this is the authentic antiviral treatment,” the chemist announced. “The serum contains the properties we expected to find, as well as the adjuvant we knew the virologist had included. I would like to be certain that what is contained here is the precise drug that your Dr. Rhodes injected himself with, but this is as close as we are going to get. Insofar as I can determine, I believe this is the real deal, Roger. Congratulations.”
Corum flinched when he heard a loud pop behind him. He turned to see a now beaming Prideaux holding an open magnum of champagne with foam gushing out its mouth.
“Zees eez cause for celebration, non?” she said, purposely adding a dense French accent, when in truth she had very little.
Whitehead applauded and everyone in the warehouse joined in. There would be no last-second miracle cure for James Allaire and his administration. The doomsday survivor had been aptly chosen. The decision to get Rappaport, himself, to