A Heartbeat Away

CHAPTER 68

One by one, at intervals of five minutes, three rented sedans pulled in through the rear garage doors of the S&S Trading Co. Five men, all in black, exited the garage through an inner door and entered the large storehouse on the street side.

Waiting anxiously around a makeshift biochemistry lab, complete with immunoelectrophoresis, mass spectrometry, and a chemist, were Roger Corum, Colin Whitehead, and Marguerite Prideaux.

The leader of the mercenaries withdrew five large glass jars from the cooler, each one carefully labeled and containing a slightly opaque straw-colored liquid. The group of them then joined two other men dressed in black, one of whom was operating an impressive pair of videoconferencing screens. On the screens, waiting at their desks in opulent offices, were Song Xi in Beijing, China, and Ibn al-Basarth in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The four men and Prideaux, each worth tens of millions, formed the secret international cartel which called itself Genesis. The group had been Corum’s brainchild, as was taking the names from the Old Testament. Their organization had one goal and one goal only: profit. After this operation was complete, and Paul Rappaport was sworn in as president, there would be no need for Genesis to continue to exist. The American people and their new leader would take care of the rest.

“So, any trouble?” Corum asked the head of the squad.

“Two casualties on their side is all,” the man replied matter-of-factly. “Unavoidable.”

“No problem. Is Rappaport okay?”

“Fine. He was just as clueless and frightened as the rest of them.”

“So,” Song Xi asked, in near-perfect English, “Secretary Rappaport still has no idea that Genesis is all about getting him and his policies put into the White House?”

“Not only him and his policies,” Prideaux replied, “but thanks to the work of Genesis, an American public ready to cooperate with them, and expand the country’s security system to the tune of billions of dollars.”

“Tens of billions,” Whitehead corrected, punctuating the words with a cough.

“And of course,” al-Basarth said, “who better to provide the new identification system, and surveillance cameras, and anti-alien barriers, and electronic monitoring, than our companies—already leaders in our fields.”

“I’ll bet my own government won’t be far behind,” Xi said. “I think the world is ready for a little isolationism. Paranoia equals profit. Who first said that?”

“I did,” Corum, Prideaux, and Whitehead answered in unison, and all of them laughed.

“How are we doing?” Corum asked the chemist, a man named Falicki.

Falicki had worked for him before. In fact, it was he who first put Corum in touch with the late Matt Fink. There would be no need to silence Falicki or any of the men. Their salaries would see to that.

“Almost there.”

The computer printer chimed, and soon began to spit out results from the mass spectrometer analysis, taken from the serum that Paul Rappaport had brought with him to Washington from Kalvesta.

His brow furrowed as Falicki studied the readout.

“Well?”

“It appears this is the authentic antiviral treatment,” the chemist announced. “The serum contains the properties we expected to find, as well as the adjuvant we knew the virologist had included. I would like to be certain that what is contained here is the precise drug that your Dr. Rhodes injected himself with, but this is as close as we are going to get. Insofar as I can determine, I believe this is the real deal, Roger. Congratulations.”

Corum flinched when he heard a loud pop behind him. He turned to see a now beaming Prideaux holding an open magnum of champagne with foam gushing out its mouth.

“Zees eez cause for celebration, non?” she said, purposely adding a dense French accent, when in truth she had very little.

Whitehead applauded and everyone in the warehouse joined in. There would be no last-second miracle cure for James Allaire and his administration. The doomsday survivor had been aptly chosen. The decision to get Rappaport, himself, to request the undesirable position by putting stress on his mentally ill daughter had been brilliant, Corum reflected. Absolutely brilliant.

“Xi, Ibn,” Corum said to the men watching the events via video, “if you have any celebratory drinks nearby, I suggest now is the time to pour them. Along with Mr. Whitehead and Mlle. Prideaux, we are soon to appear on lists of the wealthiest men—and women—in our countries.”

Prideaux handed over the magnum to the head of the mercenary force and passed out flutes she had purchased in the package store. Then she raised her glass toward the two grinning men half a world away. The group assembled in the old warehouse did the same, and Song and al-Basarth responded in kind.

“To the trade show in Las Vegas, and the evening when the visionary Roger Corum first brought us all together,” Prideaux said while hoisting her glass.

“To the trade show,” everyone sang out.

“Speech, Roger,” Whitehead demanded.

Corum stepped forward, glass raised once more.

“I think we owe Speaker of the House Ellis a few moments of grateful silence for being such a perfect foil, and for obviously not being aware of the folk tale of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox.”

“What is this folk tale?” Song asked.

“Well, Br’er Fox was about to eat Br’er Rabbit when the Rabbit started crying and carrying on that the Fox could do anything he wanted to, up to and including having the rabbit for dinner. ‘But please,’ the shrewd rabbit begged, ‘just don’t throw me in that there briar patch.’ Well, Br’er Rabbit had caused Br’er Fox so much grief over the years that Fox decided he could always catch another meal. But he could not always cause his nemesis such terrible and feared discomfort.”

“But, of course,” al-Barsarth said, “the patch was precisely where this Br’er Rabbit wanted to go.”

“In fact,” Corum said, “he had a lovely vacation home there. By presenting the foolish, off-the-charts left-wing bill I crafted, Speaker Ellis was in essence throwing us in the briar patch. If Genesis was for it, when Rappaport took office all the world would be against it.”

“To Br’er Rabbit,” Song said, raising his glass.

“Br’er Rabbit,” all the others echoed.

“Now,” Corum said, after the laughter had died down, “it is time we disposed of the contents of these jars.”

With the help of Prideaux he brought the serum to an industrial-sized double sink against one of the walls.

“Five jars,” the Frenchwoman said. “One for each of us. Xi, I’ll do the honors for you, and Roger will represent Ibn.”

So saying, she removed a label across the top that read: STERILIZED. Then she unceremoniously dumped the contents down the drain.

After a second pouring, Corum moved to the sink.

“Ibn, this is yours,” he said.

As the last of the golden liquid spilled from the bottle, something metallic dropped out of the bottom and fell, with a soft clink, into the steel sink. Corum reached down and picked up a dollar-sized, gold-colored disc, an eighth of an inch thick.

“Oh, holy shit! It’s a homing device. One of ours—”

Corum’s words were cut short by a series of loud explosions at the front of the warehouse. Pulverized concrete, debris, and large, deadly fragments of metal siding instantly penetrated the room as the front wall and part of the ceiling burst apart. The prolonged blast of powerful sonic waves that followed the explosions shattered all the glass in the room and knocked everybody within it to the floor. A rolling wall of dust engulfed them.

Some were coughing, some were dead, others were writhing in pain from gashes and broken bones. Then the soldiers stormed in.

Lights and lasers mounted atop assault weapons penetrated the dense cloud of dust and debris. Dozens of soldiers followed the winter wind into the warehouse, some pushing mobile spotlights.

“Hands behind your head!” General Frank Egan cried out, brandishing his pistol. “Get down, arms behind you, or we’ll shoot you dead! I swear we will! Get down!”

One mercenary whirled and got off an errant shot. The hailstorm of automatic weapon fire that slammed into his body sent him dancing off the floor like a marionette. After that, resistance vanished. Wrists and ankles were secured, and weapons were collected.

As the soldiers stepped back, Angie entered the warehouse and joined Egan at the center of the room. Monitoring the conversations from the surveillance van, she had sorted out that Corum was the leader of Genesis and that Paul Rappaport was an unwitting dupe, chosen because of his well-known reactionary politics.

The army information specialists provided her with brief, printed dossiers on Corum, his company, and every person whose name was mentioned during the celebration. They even managed file photos of him and Colin Whitehead.

Amazing.

Dazed, Corum tried to get up. He had been gashed in his back and one arm, and it looked as if the other arm was broken.

“Stay down, Corum,” Angie barked. “Stay the hell down or I’ll shoot you. You have no idea how much I want to, and I promise I will! My name is Angela Fletcher. I work for The Washington Post, and guess what? You’re gonna be in the papers.”

One of the dead men, lying near Corum, Angie recognized as Colin Whitehead. The dust had largely settled or been blown away by the wind. She nudged the soldier watching Corum.

“Turn him over, please,” she said.

The solider used the steel toe of his boot to lift against a spot between Corum’s ribs. The CEO let out a pained groan and rolled onto his back. Angie snapped a photo of him and then several of the room.

“This is my payment for services rendered,” she said to Corum. “I get to write all about you and your greedy cronies, and Griffin Rhodes is getting the satisfaction of knowing that the antiviral serum the president ordered Rappaport to bring east was a fake that Griff put together in his lab and topped off with the homing device you made for him to wear. It wasn’t easy. In fact, it took him almost as much time to concoct that fake serum as it did to make the real deal.”

“Fuck you,” the CEO rasped.

“You killed my friends. You killed dozens and dozens of good, innocent people. You terrorized the country. Who in the hell did you think you were? What gave you the right?”

Corum’s smile was nasty, showing blood-stained teeth.

“I’m just a man,” he said, coughing up a glob of blood. “A man with a dream.”

“A dream of causing death?”

“Even if I don’t benefit directly now,” Corum said, “my industry will. My heirs. My employees … It’s commerce. Commerce at its purest.”

“Paul Rappaport is not going to be the president,” Angie said. “He’ll be pleased that we have a recording of you talking about how you were using him—setting him up because of his conservative philosophy. Setting him and the American people up essentially to work for you and your gang of thugs.”

Corum tried to speak, but coughed more blood.

“It doesn’t matter now,” he finally managed. “Piles of money will go into the security industry regardless. That’s something of a legacy for me.”

“But it won’t go to you or to any of your companies. I’ll see to that.”

“Does that give you any satisfaction, Ms. Fletcher?”

“You know what, you pathetic creep,” Angie said. “It kind of does.”