A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [154]
The mood inside the House Chamber was an odd mix of bewilderment and buoyancy. Some in the vast room were hugging. Some were crying. And some were merely standing motionless, staring up at the strange tableaux.
Ellis stood frozen on the stage, her eyes looking furiously at Griff. Several of the Capitol Police force had moved in close to her, awaiting orders from their chief or from the president. Griff had helped the weakened vice president into the speaker’s chair. Then he opened the cooler and extracted a large jar of opaque serum and held it aloft for all to see.
But before he could speak, a man’s voice hollered out from somewhere near the middle of the crowd.
“Get in line! There might not be enough!”
Suddenly, driven by primal survival instincts, and in all likelihood by the effects of the virus as well, the crowd began to surge forward.
“Wait!” Griff cried into the microphone. “Everybody stop! There’s enough. There’s enough for each of you.”
But his words had no effect. People, some violently shoving, others already on the floor crawling, had reached the stairs to the rostrum. The police moved in and the Secret Service began to form ranks about the president and vice president.
But before any of the people reached Griff, three ear-splitting bangs stopped the milling crowd and silenced the hall. Leland Gladstone was standing behind him. The still-smoking barrel of the gun he had fired into the air he now held against Griff’s temple.
Ellis’s aide quickly ripped the cooler from Griff’s hand and handed it to her. The Capitol Police surrounding the speaker moved away.
“This is yours, Madam Speaker,” Gladstone said. “You’ve worked too hard for it. We can’t stop now. We mustn’t stop now.”
Ellis took the cooler from her aide, and pulled out one of the sterilized jars. The chamber remained silent, all eyes fixed on the precious serum. Ellis faced the assembly while Gladstone, wild-eyed, continued to shift the gun toward anyone who moved.
“You have all been fooled,” Ellis cried out. “And you continue to be fooled. What is this?” She shook the bottle for emphasis. “You’re going to let this charlatan inject you with this when I have promised you the real treatment? You are going to trust this … this hermit, and not me? Haven’t I shown you the truth? The truth about Senator Mackay? The truth about the Senate Chamber? Haven’t I done my part to expose the lies of this president? And yet you still rush for this concoction? Either the content of this jar is useless, or it will quicken our deaths. But I can assure you of one thing—this is not a cure! Only Genesis has the cure. Only Genesis and the bill I’ve presented can save your lives, not this bottle of lies.”
Allaire, who had been ushered off the stage by the Secret Service, pushed himself through the cluster of bodies surrounding him.
“You need to stop this, Ursula,” he said in a calm voice. “What you have there cannot be replicated. Surely you want to save the lives of all these good people. You need to give the serum back and allow us to administer it. You must.”
“I must save these people from you!” Ellis cried out.
Gary Salitas, who had been on his cell phone, leaned over and whispered to the president. Allaire turned to the crowd.
“I have just been informed that the gang of terrorists calling itself Genesis has been captured. Several of them are dead. The rest are on their way to jail.” He shifted his attention back to Ellis. “They admitted that they were using you, Ursula. They have no serum.”
Some cheered, others continued to stare at the speaker.
Allaire’s announcement was the final straw for her.
“Lies!” she shrieked. “All lies.”
She raised the bottle above her head and hurled it into the crowd, where it shattered on the carpet. A second jar disintegrated against the head of a tall, balding man, sending a gruesome mix of blood and serum cascading over him.
Before anyone could move, she had thrown a third jar, this one smashing on the metal frame of a bed.
There was a gunshot, loud and echoing. Ellis’s head snapped back as the bullet tore