A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [153]
As the soldiers stepped back, Angie entered the warehouse and joined Egan at the center of the room. Monitoring the conversations from the surveillance van, she had sorted out that Corum was the leader of Genesis and that Paul Rappaport was an unwitting dupe, chosen because of his well-known reactionary politics.
The army information specialists provided her with brief, printed dossiers on Corum, his company, and every person whose name was mentioned during the celebration. They even managed file photos of him and Colin Whitehead.
Amazing.
Dazed, Corum tried to get up. He had been gashed in his back and one arm, and it looked as if the other arm was broken.
“Stay down, Corum,” Angie barked. “Stay the hell down or I’ll shoot you. You have no idea how much I want to, and I promise I will! My name is Angela Fletcher. I work for The Washington Post, and guess what? You’re gonna be in the papers.”
One of the dead men, lying near Corum, Angie recognized as Colin Whitehead. The dust had largely settled or been blown away by the wind. She nudged the soldier watching Corum.
“Turn him over, please,” she said.
The solider used the steel toe of his boot to lift against a spot between Corum’s ribs. The CEO let out a pained groan and rolled onto his back. Angie snapped a photo of him and then several of the room.
“This is my payment for services rendered,” she said to Corum. “I get to write all about you and your greedy cronies, and Griffin Rhodes is getting the satisfaction of knowing that the antiviral serum the president ordered Rappaport to bring east was a fake that Griff put together in his lab and topped off with the homing device you made for him to wear. It wasn’t easy. In fact, it took him almost as much time to concoct that fake serum as it did to make the real deal.”
“Fuck you,” the CEO rasped.
“You killed my friends. You killed dozens and dozens of good, innocent people. You terrorized the country. Who in the hell did you think you were? What gave you the right?”
Corum’s smile was nasty, showing blood-stained teeth.
“I’m just a man,” he said, coughing up a glob of blood. “A man with a dream.”
“A dream of causing death?”
“Even if I don’t benefit directly now,” Corum said, “my industry will. My heirs. My employees … It’s commerce. Commerce at its purest.”
“Paul Rappaport is not going to be the president,” Angie said. “He’ll be pleased that we have a recording of you talking about how you were using him—setting him up because of his conservative philosophy. Setting him and the American people up essentially to work for you and your gang of thugs.”
Corum tried to speak, but coughed more blood.
“It doesn’t matter now,” he finally managed. “Piles of money will go into the security industry regardless. That’s something of a legacy for me.”
“But it won’t go to you or to any of your companies. I’ll see to that.”
“Does that give you any satisfaction, Ms. Fletcher?”
“You know what, you pathetic creep,” Angie said. “It kind of does.”
CHAPTER 69
DAY 10
2:00 A.M. (EST)
Griff stood at the rostrum, looking out over the nearly seven hundred survivors, all of them infected to one degree or another with the WRX virus. The moment in the lab when he saw the concentric red circles on his palm was among the most frightening, soul-crushing he had ever experienced, not only because his research had failed, and people were going to die, but because he had seen Angie for the last time. For nearly an hour he had sat there in his office, motionless, staring at the wall, and planning what he might do to end his life as soon as symptoms of the virus began to become manifest.
Then, suddenly, the miracle began to unfold.
Over another hour, the dreadful markings began to vanish, until finally, after nearly three hours, they were gone altogether. By then he had already contacted the president by fax through Angie, and had asked him to begin laying the trap that was going to confirm or disprove Paul Rappaport’s involvement