A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [25]
“Wait,” he cried out. “Wait. It’s me, Senator Harlan Mackay, from Ken—”
At that instant, he was punched in the center of his forehead—or at least that was what it felt like for a split second. During the rest of the second, the punch became a searing pain. From somewhere out in the night he heard the crack of a gunshot. At nearly the same instant, he flew backward, his head snapping into the metal door. He was neurologically dead by the time his knees buckled, although his heart was still beating as he slumped to the frigid pavement.
By the time an approaching team of three soldiers stopped thirty yards away, Senator Harlan Mackey was dead by virtually every criterion.
One of the soldiers aimed the nozzle of his M2A1-7 portable flamethrower.
“I know we’re not supposed to question orders,” he said to the sharpshooter next to him, “but I sure hope those guys have a damn good reason for what they’re doing.”
Without waiting for a response, he adjusted his goggles and hit the trigger. A prolonged, brilliant spear of burning napalm sliced through the night into the inert body of the man they had just killed. The corpse’s clothes vanished immediately, and the skin beneath them boiled and bubbled, and then charred. The stench of burning flesh mixed with the powerful odor of the napalm. For five seconds, ten, fifteen, the stream of incendiary remained fixed on the blackening body.
The corpse of their victim was now ash. Wearing a gas mask, the third soldier approached the smoldering mound and waited for it to cool enough. Then, using a tapered shovel and a metal broom, he swept up the 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