Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (17 page)

The head of Harcourt Biosciences shoved his chair back, pushed him-

self heavily to his feet, and went over to stare
moodily out the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office. “And that little
stunt by Nomura just revved up the public and political pressure on the rest of
us. We're already catching enough hell over that mess out in Santa Fe. Now it's going to get worse.”

“We could buy some relief by going along with PharmaTech's self-imposed
moratorium,” his aide suggested cautiously. “Just until we can prove
our Teller lab wasn't at fault for the disaster.”

Severin snorted. “How long will that take? Months?
A year? Two years? You really think we can afford to
keep a bunch of bright-eyed scientists sitting around twiddling their thumbs
for that long?” He leaned forward against the thick glass. Far below, the
waters of Boston Harbor were a frigid-looking green-gray.
“Don't forget that a lot of people in Congress and in the press would
claim we were practically admitting fault by suspending our other nanotech
projects.”

His aide said nothing.

Severin swung away from the windows. He clasped his hands behind his back.
“No. We're not going to play Nomura's game. We're going to tough it out.
Get out a press release right away. Say that Harcourt Biosciences flatly
rejects the demands made by the Lazarus Movement. We will not give in to
threats made by a secretive and extremist organization. And let's arrange some
special media tours of our other nanotech labs. We need to show people that we
have absolutely nothing to hide—and they have nothing to fear.”

The Teller Institute

Wearing a thick plastic protective suit, gloves, a sealed hood with its own
oxygen supply, and a blue hard hat, Jon Smith stepped cautiously through the
shattered ruins of the Institute's first floor. He ducked sideways under a
large charred beam hanging down from the torn ceiling, taking care to avoid
ripping his suit on any of the nails protruding from the blackened wood. No one
knew if the nanomachines that had butchered thousands of protesters were still
active. So far no one had tried to find out the hard way. Small fragments of
crumbled adobe and shards of broken glass crunched under his thick-soled boots.

He came out into a more open area that had once been the employee cafeteria.
This room was mostly intact, but there were signs of bomb damage along two of
the four walls, and chalked outlines on the broken tile floor showed
where bodies had been removed.

The FBI task force investigating the disaster was using the cafeteria as a
rallying point and on-site tactical command center. Two
portable com-

puters were up and running on tables near the
middle of the room, though it was clear that the agents trying to use them were
having trouble entering data in their thick gloves.

Smith made his way over to where a man wearing a black hard hat was bent
over one of the salvaged dining tables, studying a set of blueprints. The tag
on the agent's protective suit read LATIMER, C.

The agent looked up at his approach. “Who are you?” he asked. The
protective hood muffled his voice.

“Dr. Jonathan Smith. I'm with the Pentagon.” Smith lightly tapped
his blue hard hat for emphasis. Blue was the color assigned to observers and
outside consultants. “I have a watching brief—with orders to provide
whatever help I can.”

“Special Agent Charles Latimer,” the other man introduced himself.
He was slender, fair-haired, and had a strong Southern accent. He was openly
curious now. “Just what kind of help can you offer us, Doctor?”

“I have a decent working knowledge of nanotechnology,” Smith said
carefully. “And I know the layout of the labs pretty well. I was stationed
here on a temporary assignment when the terrorists hit this place.”

Latimer stared hard at him. “That makes you a witness, Doctor—not an
observer.”

“Last night and earlier this morning I was a witness,” Smith said
with a wry grin. “Since then I've been promoted to independent
consultant.” He shrugged. “I know that's not exactly by the
book.”

'No, it's not,“ the FBI agent
agreed. ”Look, have you cleared this with my boss?"

I'm sure all the necessary authorizations and clearances are somewhere on
Deputy Assistant Director Pierson's desk right now," Smith said mildly.
The last thing he wanted to do was start out by barging in at the top of the
FBI's chain of command. He had not met Kit Pierson before, but he strongly
suspected she was not going to be pleased to find someone outside her control
hovering around her investigation.

Meaning, no, you haven't talked this over with her," Latimer said. He

shook his head in disbelief. Then he shrugged.
“Swell. Well, nothing else in this screwy place is running by the
book.”

“It's a tough site to work in,” Smith agreed.

“Now there's an understatement,” said the FBI agent with a
lopsided smile of his own. “Trying to hunt through all
this bomb and fire damage is hard enough. Having to shield ourselves
against these nanophages, or whatever they are, makes the job almost
impossible.”

He pointed to the protective clothing they both wore. “Between the
limited oxygen supply and avoiding heat prostration, we only get three hours of
wear out of these moon suits. And we have to waste a whole half hour of that in
decontamination. So our work is moving at a crawl, right at a time when Washington is screaming
for fast results. Plus, we face a classic catch-22 on every piece of evidence
we gather.”

Smith nodded sympathetically. “Let me guess: You can't take anything
out of the building for lab analysis until it's been decontaminated. And if you
decontaminate it, there's probably nothing left to analyze.”

“Peachy, isn't it?” Latimer said acidly.

“The risk of contamination may not be that high,” Smith pointed
out. “Most nanodevices are designed for very specific environments. They
should start to break down fairly rapidly after being exposed to atmosphere,
pressure, or temperature conditions outside their parameters. We might be
perfectly safe right now.”

“Sounds like a nice theory, Doctor,” the FBI agent said. “You volunteering to be the first one to take a good deep
breath in here?”

Smith grinned. “I'm a medical man, not a lab rat. But ask me again in
about twenty-four hours and I just might try it.”

He looked down at the set of blueprints the other man had been inspecting.
They showed the layout of the Institute's first and second floors. Red circles
of varying sizes dotted the blueprints. Most were clustered in and around the
nanotech lab suites in the North Wing, but others were scattered throughout the
building. “Bomb detonation points?” he asked the other man.

Latimer nodded. “Those we've identified so far.”

Smith examined the blueprints carefully. What he saw there confirmed his
earlier impressions of the remarkable precision used by the terrorists in
making their attack. Several explosive charges had completely smashed the
security office, wiping out all the archived images from the external and
internal security cameras. Another bomb had disabled the fire suppression
system. Other demolition charges had been set in the computer center—destroying
everything from personnel files to the records of equipment and materials
deliveries made to scientists working at the Institute.

At first glance, the bombs placed inside the nanotech labs seemed to show
the same determination to inflict maximum damage. Concentric circles covered
the floor plans for the Nomura and Institute complexes. He nodded to himself.
Those charges were clearly set to obliterate every single piece of major
equipment in both labs, all the way from the biochemical vats in their inner
cores to their desktop computers. But something about the detonation patterns
he observed in the Harcourt lab bothered him.

Smith bent forward over the table. So what was wrong? He traced the array of
circles with one gloved forefinger. The explosives rigged around the lab's
inner core were far less likely to have caused as much damage. They seemed set
to blow holes in the containment around the Harcourt nanophage-manufacturing
tanks—not to completely destroy the tanks themselves. Was that an error? he wondered. Or was it deliberate?

He glanced up to ask Latimer whether he had noticed the same pattern. But
the FBI agent was looking away, listening closely to someone talking over his
radio headset.

Understood,“ Latimer said crisply into his mike. ”Yes,
ma'am. I'll make sure he gets the message and complies. Out.“ The fair-haired man turned back to Smith.
”That was Pierson. It seems your paperwork finally caught her attention.
She wants to see you at the primary command center outside."

As in immediately?" Smith guessed.

Latimer nodded. “Even sooner than that, if possible,” he said with
a twisted smile. “And I'd be lying if I said you were going to get a warm
welcome.”

“How truly wonderful,” Jon said drily.

The FBI agent shrugged his shoulders. “Just watch your step when you
talk to her, Dr. Smith. The Winter Queen is damned good at her job, but she's
not exactly what you might call a people person. If she thinks you're going to
screw up this investigation in any way, she's liable to find a hole somewhere
and drop you into it for the duration. Oh, she might call it 'preventive
detention' or 'protective custody,' but it still won't be real comfortable ...
or very easy to get out of.”

Smith studied Latimer's face, sure that he must be exaggerating for effect.
To his dismay, the other man seemed perfectly serious.

■

The safe house sat high on the crest of a rise overlooking the southern
reaches of Santa Fe.
From the outside, it appeared to be a classic Pueblo-style adobe built around a
shaded courtyard. Inside, the decor and furnishings were absolutely modern, a
study in gleaming chrome, blacks, and whites. Small satellite dishes were
mounted discreetly in one corner of the building's flat roof.

Several of the home's west-facing windows had a direct line of sight to the
Teller Institute, about two miles away. The rooms behind these windows were now
filled with an array of radio and microwave receivers, video and still cameras
fitted with powerful telephoto, infrared (IR), and thermal-imaging lenses, a
bank of networked computers, and secure satellite communications gear.

A six-man surveillance team ran all this equipment, monitoring the comings
and goings inside the cordoned-off area outside the Institute. One of them,
young and olive-skinned with sad brown eyes, sat perched on a chair at one of
the computer workstations, humming tunelessly while listening to a pair of
headphones plugged into the various receivers.

Suddenly the young man sat up straighter. “I have a signal tone,”
he reported calmly while simultaneously entering a series of commands on his
keyboard. The monitor in front of him lit up and began filling with scrolling
data—a complex and bewildering montage of numbers, graphs, scanned photographs,
and text.

His team leader, much older, with short-cropped white hair, studied the
monitor for several seconds. He nodded in satisfaction. “Excellent
work, Vitor.” He turned to one of his other men. “Contact
Terce. Inform him that Field Two appears complete and that we now have
access to all of the investigative data being gathered. Report also that we are
relaying this information to the Center.”

■

Sweating inside his protective suit now, Jon Smith submitted himself to the
rigorous decontamination procedures required for anyone leaving the cordoned-off
area around the Institute. Doing so meant entering one end of a chain of
connected trailers and moving through a series of high-pressure chemical
showers, electrically charged aerosol sprays, and high-powered vacuum suction
systems. The equipment, borrowed from Air Force and Homeland Security WMD
defense units, was designed to treat nuclear, chemical, and biological
contamination. No one was really sure that it would neutralize the nanomachines
that everyone now feared. But it was the best system anyone had been able to
come up with in the limited time available. And since no one had died yet,
Smith was willing to bet that either the decon procedures worked—or there were
no active nanomachines left inside the cordon.

If nothing else, the painstaking process gave him plenty of time to think
about what he had seen inside the Teller Institute. And that, in turn, gave him
time to formulate a very ugly hypothesis about what had happened—one that might
just knock the stuffing out of a lot of the pet theories floating around inside
the FBI and the CIA.

I finished at last, Smith stripped off the heavy gear, dumped it in a

sealed hazardous materials bin, and put his own
clothes back on. He retrieved his shoulder holster and SIG-Sauer pistol from
the worried-looking National Guard corporal manning a final checkpoint and
stepped outside.

It was the middle of the afternoon. The wind was kicking up a bit, blowing
down out of the forested mountains to the east. Jon took a deep breath of the
pine-scented air, clearing the last lingering reek of harsh chemicals out of
his nose and lungs.

A trim, efficient-looking young man in a conservatively cut charcoal-gray
suit came straight up to him. He had the wooden, expressionless demeanor so prized
by recent FBI Academy graduates. “Dr.
Smith?”

Jon nodded pleasantly. “That's right.”

“Deputy Assistant Director Pierson is waiting for you at the command
center,” the young man said. “I'll be happy to escort you
there.”

Smith hid a wry grin. Clearly, the woman he had heard called the Winter
Queen had decided not to take any chances with him. He was not going to be
allowed to bunk off without hearing what the FBI thought of having another
government agency, the Pentagon in his case, meddling in its patch.