A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [24]
“Are you worried?” Keaton said.
“Me? No. Son, it takes a lot more than all this to worry this old farmer.”
Mackey flashed on the idea of taking Keaton with him. But just then, the boy coughed.
Are there more people coughing now? the senator wondered. If so, he would have to move even faster.
“Look, son, you stay here. I’m going to see if I can learn what’s going on. I’ll let you know what I find out. For now, just sit tight and wait for me to come back.”
The young aide stifled another cough.
“Thank you, sir,” he managed.
Mackey served as one of ten on the Capitol Complex Appropriations Board. The committee handled everything from human resources for the Capitol’s extensive operational staff to routine maintenance issues. Few knew all the secrets of the Capitol complex. Thanks to that committee, Mackey knew nearly every one of them. Every way in, and most important, every way out. At least now those insipid hours spent haggling on that wart of a committee might prove to be worthwhile.
The speaker of the house, Ursula Ellis, had left her seat and was making her way around their party’s half of the hall. She was an incredibly capable woman, and given another month or so, she just might have won. Now, hopefully, she was mobilizing people to take a stand against Allaire, regardless of what position he took.
Nobody was standing near the podium, and the crush of people was moving in the opposite direction. Perfect.
Mackey walked past the rostrum to a spot in the corridor twenty feet beyond. The trapdoor beneath the carpeting was nearly invisible. It had been constructed to reach a maintenance area on the next level down, which housed the workings of the lift that provided wheelchair access to the tribune.
Nobody noticed as the 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