Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (10 page)

Understood.“ Terce, the man with the
binoculars, shrugged his shoulders. ”Prime has made a regrettable
error."

His driver reacted improperly," murmured the sniper beside him.

“The driver will be disciplined,” the man agreed. “But Prime
knew the mission requirements. This fight is pointless. He should have left
when given the chance, but he is allowing his lusts to override his better
judgment. He may kill this man he hunts, but he is unlikely to escape.” He
made a decision. “So be it. Mark him.”

“And the other, too?” the sniper asked.

“Yes.”

The sniper nodded. He looked through the scope, adjusting his aim one last
time. “Target acquired.” He pulled the trigger. The odd-looking rifle
coughed quietly. “Target marked.”

■

Smith ducked under another deadly slash from the green-eyed man's knife. He
backpedaled again, knowing that he was running out of time and maneuvering
room. Sooner or later, this maniac would nail him.

Suddenly the auburn-haired man slapped irritably at his neck — almost as if
he were crushing a wasp. He took another step forward and then stopped, staring
down at his hand with a look of absolute horror. His mouth fell
open and he half-turned —looking back over his shoulder at the silent woods
behind him.

And then, while Smith watched in growing terror, the tall green-eyed man
began to come apart. A web of red cracks snaked rapidly across his face and
hands, growing ever wider. In seconds, his skin fell away, dissolving into
translucent red-tinged ooze. His green eyes melted and slid down his face. The
big man shrieked aloud in inhuman agony. Screaming and writhing, the giant
toppled to the ground—clawing wildly at what little was left of his body in a
futile effort to fight off whatever was eating him alive.

Jon could not bear to see any more. He turned, stumbled, and fell to his
knees, retching uncontrollably. In that moment, something hissed past his ear
and buried itself in the earth in front of him.

Instinct taking over. Smith threw himself sideways
and then he crawled rapidly toward the nearest cover.

In the grove of trees, the sniper slowly lowered his odd-looking rifle.
“The second target has gone to ground. I have no shot.”

“It does not matter,” the man with the binoculars said coldly.
“One man more or less is of no real consequence.” He turned to the
signaler. “Contact the Center. Inform them that Field Two is under way and
seems to be proceeding according to plan.”

“Yes, Terce.”

“What about Prime?” the sniper asked quietly. “How will you
report his death?”

For a moment, the man with binoculars sat still, pondering the question.
Then he asked, “Do you know the legend of the Horatii?”

The sniper shook his head.

“It is an old, old story,” Terce told him. “From
the days of the Romans, long before their empire. Three identical
brothers, the Horatii, were sent to duel against the three champions of
a neighboring city. Two fought Bravely, but they were
killed. The third of the Horatii triumphed —not through sheer force of
arms alone but through stealth and cunning.”

The sniper said nothing.

The man with the binoculars turned his head and smiled coldlv. A stray shaft
of sunlight fell on his auburn hair and lit his strikingly green eyes.
“Like Prime, I am one of the Horatii. But unlike Prime, I plan to
survive and to win the reward I have been promised.”

PART TWO

The Hoover Building,
Washington, D.C.

FBI Deputy Assistant Director Katherine (“Kit”) Pierson stood at
the window of her fifth-floor office, frowning down at the rain-slick surface
of Pennsylvania Avenue.
There were just a few cars waiting at the nearest traffic lights and only a
small scattering of tourists scurrying along the avenue's broad sidewalks
beneath bobbing umbrellas. The usual evening mass exodus of the city's federal
workforce was still a couple of hours away.

She resisted the urge to check the time again. Waiting for others to act had
never been one of her strengths.

Kit Pierson glanced up from the street and caught a faint glimpse of her
reflection in the tinted glass. For a brief instant she studied herself
dispassionately, wondering again why the slate gray eyes gazing back at her so
often seemed those of a stranger. Even at forty-five, her ivory white skin was
still smooth, and her short dark brown hair framed a face that she knew most
men considered attractive.

Not that she gave them many chances to tell her so, she thought coolly.

A failed early marriage and a bitter divorce had proved to her that she
could not successfully mix romance with her career in the FBI. The national
interests of the Bureau and the United
States always came first-even those
interests her superiors were sometimes too afraid to recognize.

Pierson was aware that the agents and analysts under her command called her
the Winter Queen behind her back. She shrugged that off. She drove herself much
harder than she ever drove them. And it was better to be thought a bit cold and
distant than to be seen as weak or inefficient. The FBI's Counter-Terrorism
Division was no place for clock-punching nine-to-fivers whose eyes were fixed
on their pensions rather than on the nation's ever-more dangerous enemies.

Enemies like the Lazarus Movement.

For several months now she and Hal Burke over at the CIA had warned their
superiors that the Lazarus Movement was becoming a direct threat to the vital
interests of the United
States and those of its allies. They had
zeroed in on all the signs that the Movement was escalating its rhetoric and
moving toward violent action. They had presented policy papers and analysis and
every scrap of evidence they could lay their hands on.

But no one higher up the ladder had been willing to act forcefully enough
against the growing threat. Burke's boss, CIA Director David Hanson, talked a
good game, but even he fell short in the end. Many of the politicians were
worse. They looked at Lazarus and saw only the surface camouflage, the
do-gooder environmental organization. It was what lay beneath that camouflage
that Kit Pierson feared.

“Imagine a terrorist group like al-Qaeda, but run instead by Americans
and Europeans and Asians—by people who look just like you or me or those nice
neighbors down Maple Lane,”
she often reminded her staff. “What kind of profiling can we run against a
threat like that?”

Hanson, for one, understood that the Lazarus Movement was a clear and
present danger. But the CIA director insisted on fighting this battle within
the law and within the bounds set down by politics. In contrast, Pierson and
Burke and others around the world knew that it was too late

to play by “the rules.” They were
committed to destroying the Movement by aggressive action —using whatever means
were necessary.

The phone on her desk rang. She turned away from the window and crossed her
office in four long, graceful strides to pick it up on the second ring. “Pierson.”

“Burke here.” It was the call she had
been expecting, but her stocky, square-jawed CIA counterpart sounded
uncharacteristically edgy. “Is your line secure?” he asked.

She toggled a switch on the phone, running a quick check for any sign of
electronic surveillance. The FBI spent a lot of time and taxpayer money making
sure its communications networks were untapped. An indicator light glowed green.
She nodded. “We're clear.”

“Good,” Burke said, in a flat, clipped tone. There were sounds of
traffic in the background. He must be calling on his car phone. “Because something's fouled up in New Mexico, Kit. It's bad, real bad. Worse than we expected. Turn on any one of the cable news
stations. They practically have the pictures on continuous loop.”

Puzzled, Pierson leaned over her desk and hit the keys that would display TV
signals on her computer monitor. For a long moment she stared in shocked silence
as the live footage shot earlier outside the Teller Institute flickered across
her high-resolution screen. Even as she watched, new explosions erupted inside
the burning building. Thick columns of smoke stained the clear blue New Mexico sky. Outside
the Institute itself, thousands of Lazarus Movement demonstrators fled in
terror, trampling one another in their frenzy to escape. The camera zoomed in,
showing nightmarish images of human beings melting like bloodstained wax.

She drew a short, sharp breath, fighting for composure. Then she gripped the
phone tighter. “Good God, Hal. What happened?”

“It's not clear, yet,” Burke told her. “First reports say the
demonstrators broke through the fence and they were swarming the building when
all hell broke loose inside —explosions, fires, you name it.”

“And the cause?”

“There's speculation about some kind of toxic release from the
nano-tech labs,” Burke said. “A few sources are calling it a tragic
accident. Others are blaming sabotage by as-yet-unidentified perps. The smart
money is on sabotage.”

“But no confirmation either way?” she asked sharply. “No
one's been taken into custody?”

“No one so far. I don't have contact with our
people yet, but I expect to hear something soon. I'm heading out there myself,
pronto. There's an Air Force emergency flight taking off from Andrews in thirty
minutes—and Langley
wangled me a seat on the plane.”

Pierson shook her head in frustration. “This was not the plan, Hal. I
thought we had this situation locked down tight.”

“Yeah, so did I,” Burke said. She could almost hear him shrug.
“Something always goes wrong at some point in every operation, Kit. You
know that.”

She frowned. “Not this wrong.”

“No,” agreed Burke coldly. “Not usually.” He cleared his
throat. “But now we have to play the cards we're dealt. Right?”

“Yes.” Pierson reached out and shut down the TV link on her
computer. She did not need to see any more. Not now. She suspected those images
would haunt her dreams for a very long time.

“Kit?”

“I'm here,” she said softly.

“You know what has to happen next?”

She nodded, forcing herself to focus on the immediate future. “Yes, I
do. I have to lead the investigative team in Santa Fe.”

“Will that be a problem?” the CIA officer asked. “Arranging
it with Zeller, I mean.”

“No, I don't think so. I'm sure he'll jump at the chance to assign the
job to me,” Pierson said carefully, thinking it through out loud.
"I'm the Bureau expert on the Lazarus Movement. The acting director
understands that. And one thing is going to be very clear to everyone, from the

White House all the way on down the chain of command.
Somehow, somewhere, in some way, this atrocity must be linked to the
Movement."

“Right,” Burke said. “And in the meantime, I'll keep pushing
TOCSIN from my end.”

“Is that wise?” Pierson asked sharply. “Maybe we should pull
the plug now.”

“It's too late for that,” Burke told her bluntly. “Everything
is already in motion, Kit. We either ride the wave, or we get pulled
under.”

The White House

The members of the president's national security team who were gathered
around the crowded conference table in the White House Situation Room were in a
somber, depressed mood. As they damned well should be, thought Sam Castilla
grimly. The first accounts of the Teller Institute disaster had been bad
enough. Each new report was even worse.

He glanced at the nearest clock. It was much later than he had thought. In
the confines of this small artificially lit underground room, the passage of
time was often distorted. Several hours had already passed since Fred Klein
first flashed him the news of the horror unfolding in Santa Fe.

Now the president looked around the table in disbelief. “You're telling
me that we still don't have a firm estimate of casualties—either inside the
Teller Institute itself, or outside among the demonstrators?”

“No, Mr. President. We don't,” Bob Zeller, the acting director of
the FBI, admitted. He sat miserably hunched over in his chair. "More than

half of the Institute's scientists and staff are
listed as missing. Most of them are probably dead. But we can't even send in
search-and-rescue teams until the fires are out. As for the protesters. .
." Zeller's voice trailed away.

“We may never know exactly how many of them were killed, Mr.
President,” his national security adviser, Emily Powell-Hill, interrupted.
“You've seen the pictures of what happened outside the labs. It could take
months to identify what little is left of those people.”

“The major networks are saying there are at least two thousand
dead,” said Charles Ouray, the White House chief of staff. “And
they're predicting the count could go even higher. Maybe as high as three or
four thousand.”

“Based on what, Charlie?” the president snapped. “Spitballing and raw guesswork?”

“They're going with claims made by Lazarus Movement spokesmen,”
Ouray said quietly. “Those folks have more credibility with the press— and
the general public —than they used to. More credibility than we do right
now.”

Castilla nodded. That was true enough. The first terrifying TV footage had
gone out live and unedited over several news network satellite feeds. Tens of
millions of people in America
and hundreds of millions around the world had seen the gruesome images with
their own eyes. The networks were now showing more discretion, carefully blurring
the more graphic scenes of terrified Lazarus Movement protesters being eaten
alive. But it was too late. The damage was done.

All the wild, lurid claims made by the Lazarus Movement about the dangers
posed by nanoteclmology seemed vindicated. And now the Movement seemed
determined to push an even more sinister and paranoid story. This theory was
already showing up on their Web sites and on other major Internet discussion
groups. It claimed that the Teller labs were developing secret nanotech war weapons
for the U.S.
military. Using eerily similar photos of the ravaged dead in both places, it
connected the horror in Santa Fe to the earlier
massacre at Kusasa in Zimbabwe.
Those