A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [99]
“And I guess one other huge unanswered question,” Forbush added. “Where did she do the work?”
CHAPTER 45
DAY 6
2:30 A.M. (EST)
Ellis checked that Gladstone’s BlackBerrry was powered on and set to capture video. She was keyed up and tense in all the best sense of the words. Jim Allaire had kept her in the dark long enough. It was time she documented what was really going on, and just how much they all had to fear from this virus.
Beside her, O’Neil looked as if his legs were about to betray him. His complexion mirrored the white of the marble floor.
Inches away, the clamor and the scraping sound on the other side of the door continued.
The Secret Service agent uncoiled the length of chain securing the Senate Chamber doors. The steel links slid through his hands and clattered into a heap at his feet. Ellis cupped her ear and listened against the door.
“Nothing,” she said. “I have no idea what that sound could have been, but it’s gone now.”
“I think you’re crazy to go in there.”
“We, dearest. We are going in there. And we’re going to be quick about it, too. In and out with a little video in between. That will be all I need. Judging from Dr. Townsend’s containment suit over there, these people are infected with something pretty horrible.”
“Whatever it is, we’ve been exposed, too.”
“But I’m betting that whatever it is, these poor souls got a mega dose. It’s time to see just how much your boss has been holding out on us all. Don’t you want to know? I mean, it is your life, too.”
“I … don’t know.”
“O’Neil, I promise you. If we stay only a minute, just enough time to let me gather the video I need, we’ll both be fine—especially if we hold our breath. Now, let’s go.”
O’Neil sighed, and pulled the door open.
The first thing Ellis noticed as she stepped forward into the main aisle of the Senate Chamber was the smell. It was a foul stench of blood, bodily waste, and vomit, unlike anything she had experienced before. Her throat immediately tightened as her gag reflex kicked in. She wondered if the standing fans installed throughout the room were somehow keeping the powerful odor from escaping through the door cracks. The room lights were on full, and what Ellis saw as she fumbled for her camera made her cry out in fright.
The golden damask above the marbled wainscot was stained with blood and fecal matter. White marble busts of past Senate presidents, normally set in bowl niches in the gallery level, were either smashed, missing, or lying on the floor. But even more disturbing was that the one hundred mahogany senators’ desks had been ripped from their footings and thrown aside, replaced by a number of cots—at least twenty or twenty-five of them, mostly occupied, and many by people she knew, now barely recognizable to her.
Some of those in the chamber wore the comfortable clothing that had been delivered to the Capitol. But there were a few others—the most debilitated—who were still wearing what remained of their tuxedoes and designer gowns. They were lying listlessly, or vomiting congealing blood into blue plastic buckets wired to the bedframes. Some were writhing in pain. Others were propped on one elbow, moaning piteously.
For half a minute, Ellis stood transfixed, the purpose of her mission forgotten.
She heard a terrible shriek and turned in that direction. The senior senator from Missouri, a genteel, dignified man in his seventies, was pressing his hands on either side of his head, groaning for the pain to stop. Blood, from a nosebleed or perhaps his stomach, stained the sheet beneath him. He screamed again, and slapped at his expansive abdomen, as though trying to put out a fire burning inside. Then, suddenly, he turned his head and vomited into the bucket—black blood, thick as oil.
Ellis managed to raise her camera and pan the scene. This was not the flu. Nor was it any other virus she could imagine.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said, her voice barely able to form the words.
O’Neil was rooted. Many of these dignitaries were also people he knew well. Finally, he managed a few