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 baby steps back toward the door. Ellis stayed close to him. Then they turned to run, but Admiral Archibald Jakes had materialized in the center of the aisle and was blocking their only way out. He was a grotesquerie. His stained dress whites were ripped in many places. The rows of service ribbons over his left breast had gaps resembling a hockey player’s teeth. The sclerae of his eyes were bloodred. His cheeks were sunken and his lower jaw was in constant motion—a gnawing skull.
The admiral lifted his hands to prevent O’Neil and her from passing, and Ellis gasped.
His palms were a swirl of crimson, concentric circles, giving the appearance of having had the design branded on. On the surface of the swirls were hundreds of tiny, raised blisters, many of them broken and oozing.
“Home … please take me home…,” Jakes moaned.
His voice was a coarse whisper, and his breath was foul.
“Admiral, what’s going on in here?” O’Neil managed to ask. “What’s happening to you? Who’s helping you all?”
“Dying … we’re all dying.” Each word the admiral spoke emerged like a hiss of steam. “Why did you do this to me?”
“No, it wasn’t us,” O’Neil said. “It was Genesis. It’s some sort of virus.”
“You lie! You lie!”
Ellis sensed movement behind her and turned to see that others in the room were now gathering behind her like zombies, blocking their only retreat from Jakes. Some of them had been friends and colleagues of hers for many years. All of them were ill—terribly, terribly ill. It was also impossible not to see the bright red patterns on their palms.
“Admiral Jakes, please,” O’Neil pleaded, “let us by. We’ll get you help. I promise.”
The navy man’s eyes were wild.
“No help. You lie! You lie!”
Jakes drove forward with surprising quickness and wrapped his fingers around O’Neil’s throat. The Secret Service agent batted Jakes’s hands aside, but in an instant the admiral lunged again, clawing at his face, drawing blood.
“Stop!” O’Neil shouted.
“Die! Die like me!”
Jakes continued flailing at the much younger man. Blood from the angry gouges ran down O’Neil’s cheek, soaking his shirt collar.
Ellis screamed as the small crowd began folding in around them.
At that instant, the scene was frozen by a gunshot. Smoke rose from the pistol at O’Neil’s waist. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff dropped to his knees, then toppled in slow motion onto his back, staring sightlessly at the high, ornate ceiling. A scarlet stain instantly began expanding from the bullet hole in his jacket. The advancing crowd pulled back as the pistol in O’Neil’s hand smoked. The stench of gunpowder merged with the other odors in the room.
“Let’s go! Now!” he barked at Ellis.
Clutching her BlackBerry, the speaker grasped O’Neil’s coat sleeve and allowed herself to be dragged outside the Senate Chamber. The dying men and women were again moving in when O’Neil pushed the doors closed. Ellis looped the chain tightly through the handles and leaned against the doors with all her strength as O’Neil snapped the lock.
Then, gasping for air, exhausted, and rattled, the two of them slumped against the wall. The din and scratching from within had resumed, but with a difference. Somewhere amidst the mob on the other side of the door lay the body of the chief of the United States Navy.
Ellis checked her phone.
She had recorded everything.
CHAPTER 46
“Rhodes, can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear. Listen, Angie’s been hurt. Genesis somehow followed her to New York, and tried to kill her. I haven’t called the hospital where she is because I really don’t trust that this line is secure. It doesn’t seem like anything is down here. I want you to have the FBI find out where she is and send some people to watch out for her. I’m not giving you the details, but send some men over to the Riverside Nursing Home. They’ll know where she is and what name she’s been admitted under. But do it quick. And make sure she has the best doctors.”
“What in the hell is she doing in New York?”
“I’ll tell you soon. I don’t have time for this right now.”
“Okay, I’ll call you back.”
Twenty minutes later, the video conference was renewed.
“We’ve got her,” Allaire said. “She’s in the ICU. Subdural hematoma—that’s bleeding between the skull and the brain. I have people on the way over there now.”
“Surgery?”
“I don’t think yet. Some subdurals don’t ever require it. She’s in a good hospital for trauma, but I’ll get a neurosurgeon over there right away.”
“Thank you, sir. I really appreciate that. So, what’s going on there?”
“The situation is getting worse here by the minute,” Allaire said. “What have you got for us?”
“Unfortunately, I still have lots of questions and few answers. But we’re working around the clock.”
The high-definition video transmission put Allaire’s raddled appearance in sharp focus. Dark stubble on his characteristically clean-shaven face made his ashen complexion and gaunt expression all the more disconcerting. Griff’s own image, as it was shown to him in a small square at the screen’s top left corner, looked no less bleak than Allaire’s.
“What’s your status?” the president asked.
“As of this moment, Angie’s made more progress than I have—or you, for that matter.”
“What do you mean?”
“She figured out that Sylvia Chen might be in New York, and she was right. Only Genesis must have somehow picked up on where she was going. Don’t ask me how they knew. They seem to know everything. They sent a man after Angie and tried to kill her.”
“What about Chen? Did Angie actually find her?”
Griff nodded.
“I believe so, but she’s dead. I have no details yet as to how or when. The guy Genesis sent is dead, too. It seems as if Angie managed to take him down before she lost consciousness.”
“We need to ID that body ASAP.”
“I assume the New York police have it.”
“I’ll alert the FBI right away. It might be the break we’ve been looking for to figure out who’s behind all this. She was supposed to be there in Kansas, watching you. Why couldn’t you have let me get the FBI on this?”
Griff could feel himself beginning to boil.
