A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [36]
“Who is that, the Unibomber?”
“Is there anyone else coming out of there?… Nope, he’s it.… He’s it?”
“Maybe he’s the prime minister of someplace.”
“I can’t believe they’re going to let him in there without giving him a bath.”
“Looks like the ghost of Howard Hughes.”
Griff battled back the urge to stop and tell the growing crowd that if they knew what was going on inside, none of them would want to be within five miles of the place. Instead, he pulled up the hood of his field jacket and trudged ahead, flanked by a cordon of soldiers, all wearing similar military camouflage.
Behind him, the rotors slashed to a stop. Ahead, a tall, ramrod-straight man, bareheaded with a gray flattop, emerged from the visitors’ pavilion. He was dressed like the other soldiers, but Griff could tell right away he was brass.
“Dr. Rhodes, I’m General Frank Egan, head of the U.S. Northern Command,” the man said, extending his gloved hand. His steely gaze remained fixed on Griff’s face, clearly taking measure of him. “I am under orders from the president to get you inside the Capitol complex and to escort you to the House Chamber as quickly as possible.”
“Well, then, escort away,” Griff said.
“We’ve had our best people here for a few hours now. There’s a staging tent set up over there for you and the others who will be changing into field biological gear. They are Racal spacesuits, positive-pressurized, HEPA superfiltered air supply, with redundant battery power. There are more on the way. I believe that’s what you requested.”
Griff nodded grimly and smiled inwardly at the fact that the highly technical descriptions were like something from a child’s primer to him now. No one who had been around him during the weeks following his sister’s death would have ever predicted the transformation that was about to occur.
As his sullenness and oppositional behavior had intensified, the powers in his high school met with his aunt and uncle—his only remaining relatives. They in turn brought in their minister, and after that, the police community relations officer, who had done his best but failed to reach the brooding, disenfranchised teen. Throughout the meetings, Griff had sat stoically, staring at the wall or out the window, saying little. Then, after a three-week absence from school, spent sleeping on the basement couches of friends, or in abandoned buildings that for years had been his haunts, he suddenly marched into class and aced an exam in a chemistry course he had never attended.
“Is this the team who will be escorting me in?” Griff asked Egan, pointing to the six soldiers who stood confidently at ease behind the general.
“Yes, they are.”
“I’m guessing they aren’t biocontainment experts.”
“You are guessing right.”
“They armed?”
“Does it matter?”
“Allaire wants me to save the day, but he doesn’t trust me, is that it?”
“I have my orders, Dr. Rhodes. These soldiers are prepared to sacrifice their lives for this mission. They will suit up and accompany you every step of the way.”
Griff just nodded. The general surprised him though, when his hard eyes suddenly softened.
“Dr. Rhodes,” he said, “I don’t know what in the hell is going on inside, but it’s an understatement for me to say that your being flown here as you have been is of the utmost importance to the people in there and to our country. The president has shared with me some of where you’ve been for the past nine months and why. All I can say is please do your best to help him and those people with him.”
“I will do that, General,” Griff said, his mouth unpleasantly dry.
Egan studied him.
“I believe you will,” he said finally.
“General, one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“I hate to be a pessimist here, but you need to prepare yourself for the worst.”
Griff flashed on his work with Project Veritas, specifically on his computer models, which he had been working on for years in his efforts to steer clear of experimenting on animals. His latest programs rendered flawless CGI animations of various combinations of the ribonucleic acid (RNA) pattern of the WRX3883