Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (29 page)

Sunday, October 17 Rural Virginia

FBI Deputy Assistant Director Kit Pierson saw the weathered signpost caught
in the high beams of her green Volkswagen Passat. HARDSCRABBLE
HOLLOW— [A MILE. That was her next landmark. She
tapped the brakes, slowing down. She did not want to risk missing the turnoff
to Hal Burke's run-down farm.

The rolling Virginia
countryside was covered in almost total darkness. Only the quarter moon cast a
faint glow through the solid layer of clouds high overhead. There were a few
other farms and homes scattered through these low wooded hills, but it was
already past midnight and their inhabitants were long since asleep. With chores
and early morning Sunday church services awaiting them, most people in this
part of the state went to bed early.

The rutted gravel drive to her CIA counterpart's weekend retreat appeared
just ahead, and she slowed further. Before turning onto it, though,

she glanced again in the rearview mirror. Nothing. There were no other headlights in sight along this
desolate stretch of county road. She was still alone.

Partly reassured by that, Pierson turned her Passat onto the track and
followed it uphill to the house. The lights were on, spilling out onto the
weed-and bramble-choked hillside through partly drawn curtains. Burke was
expecting her.

She parked next to his car, an old Mercury Marquis, and walked quickly to
the front door. It opened before she could even knock. The stocky, square-jawed
CIA officer stood there in his shirtsleeves. He looked weary and rumpled, with
shadowed, bloodshot eyes.

Burke took one suspicious look around, making sure that she was by herself,
and then stepped back to let her come into the narrow front hall. “Did you
have any trouble?” he asked harshly.

Kit Pierson waited for him to close the door before replying. “On my way here? No,” she said coolly. “At my meeting with the director and his senior staff?
Yes.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“They weren't especially pleased to see me in D.C. instead of still out
in the field,” she said flatly. “In fact, there were several rather
pointed suggestions that my preliminary report was entirely too 'thin' to
justify coming back in person.”

The CIA officer shrugged. “That was your call, Kit,” he reminded
her. “We didn't need to meet here in person. We could have worked through
this problem on the phone if you'd just sat tight.”

“With Smith starting to breathe right down my neck?” she snapped
back. “Not likely, Hal.” She shook her head.
“I don't know how much he knows yet, but he's getting too close. Shutting
down the Santa Fe
police probe was a mistake. We should have just let the local cops go ahead and
try to identify your man's body.”

Burke shook his head. “Too risky.”

“Our files were scrubbed,” Pierson said stubbornly. "There's
no way

this Dolan character could have been linked to
either of us. Or even to the Agency or the Bureau as a whole."

“Still too risky,” he told her. “Other agencies have their
own databases—databases over which we have no control. The Army has its own
files, for that matter. Hell, Kit, you're the one who's so panicked about Smith
and his mysterious employers! You know as well as I do that anyone pegging
Dolan as an ex-Special Forces officer would be bound to start asking some
goddamned tough questions.”

Burke showed her into his study. The small dark-paneled room was crowded
with a desk, a monitor and keyboard, two chairs, several bookcases, a
television, and racks full of computer and communications equipment. An open
half-empty bottle of Jim Beam whiskey and a shot glass sat on the desk, right
next to the computer keyboard. A faint stale whiff of sweat, unwashed dishes,
mildew, and general neglect hung in the air.

Pierson wrinkled her nose in distaste. The man was disintegrating under the
pressure as TOCSIN collapsed around them, she thought coldly.

“Want a drink?” Burke growled, dropping heavily into the swivel
chair in front of his desk. He waved her into the other chair, a battered
armchair with lumpy, fraying upholstery.

She shook her head and then sat watching while he poured one for himself.
The whiskey sloshed over the rim and left a wet ring on his desk. He ignored
the spill, instead downing his drink in one swift gulp. He set the glass down
with a thump and looked up at her. “Okay, Kit, why exactly are you
here?”

“To persuade you to shut TOCSIN down,” she said without
hesitating.

One corner of the CIA officer's mouth turned down in an irritated frown.
“We've gone through this before. My answer is still the same.”

“But the situation is not the same, Hal!” Pierson said forcefully.
Her lips thinned. "And you know it. The Teller attack was supposed to
force President Castilla to act against the Lazarus Movement before it was too
late —to act as a relatively bloodless wake-up call. It wasn't supposed to

make Lazarus stronger. And it certainly wasn't
supposed to trigger a worldwide spree of bombings and murders we can't
stop!"

“Wars always have unintended consequences,” Burke said through
clenched teeth. “And we are in a war against the Movement. Maybe
you've forgotten what's at stake in this matter.”

She shook her head. “I haven't forgotten anything. But TOCSIN is only a
means to an end —not the end itself. The whole damned operation is unraveling
faster than you can stitch it back together. So I say we cut our losses while
we still can. Call off your action teams now. Tell them to abort any ongoing
missions and drop back into cover. Then, once that's done, we can plan our next
move.”

To buy himself some time before replying, Burke picked up the whiskey bottle
and poured another drink. But this time he left the glass untouched. He looked
closely at her. “You can't run from this one, Kit. It's gone too far for
that. Even if we shut TOCSIN down right now and pull in our horns, your little
friend Dr. Jonathan Smith is still going to be out there asking questions we do
not want answered.”

“I know that,” she said bitterly. “Trying to kill Smith was a
mistake. Failing to kill him was a disaster.”

“What's done is done,” Burke said, shrugging both shoulders.
“One of my security units is hunting the colonel. Once they pinpoint him,
they'll nail him.”

Pierson looked at him in exasperation. “Which means
you have absolutely no idea where he is right now.”

“He's gone to ground again,” Burke admitted. “I sent people
to the Santa Fe PD after you called to let me know Smith was snooping there,
but he disappeared before they arrived.”

“Wonderful.”

“The nosy bastard can't run far, Kit,” the CIA officer said
confidently. "I have agents watching the airport terminals in both Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
And I have a contact in Homeland Security running his name through every
commercial flight manifest. The moment he surfaces, we'll

know it. And when he does, our guys will close
in.“ He smiled thinly. ”Trust me on this, okay? For all practical purposes,
Smith is nothing but a dead man walking."

■

Along the county road below, the drivers of the two dark-colored automobiles
traveling slowly without any headlights turned off their ignitions and coasted
to a stop, pulling off to the side not far from the gravel track heading
uphill. Still wearing the U.S.
Army-issue AN/PVS 7 night-vision goggles he'd been using to drive without
lights, Jon Smith stiffly climbed out of the second car and walked forward to
the vehicle in front.

Peter Howell unrolled his window as Smith came up. Below his own set of
goggles, the Englishman's teeth flashed white in the near-total darkness.
“Rather an exciting ride, wasn't it, Jon?”

Smith nodded wryly. “Perfectly delightful.”
He rolled his neck and shoulders from side to side, hearing tense muscles and
joints crack and pop. The last fifteen minutes of driving had been
nerve-racking.

The night-vision equipment was top-of-the-line gear, but even so the images
these third-generation goggles produced were not perfect—they were
monochromatic, with a slight green tint, and they were a tiny bit grainy. You
could drive without lights while wearing them, but it took real effort and
serious concentration to avoid drifting off the road or colliding with the
vehicle ahead of you.

In contrast, following the government sedan taking Kit Pierson from the
FBI's Hoover Building to her own home in Upper Georgetown had been a piece of
cake. Even late on Saturday night, Washington's
streets were packed with cars, trucks, minivans, and taxis. It had been easy
enough to hang two or three car lengths back without being noticed.

Neither Jon nor Peter had been surprised when Pierson took off only minutes
later, this time using her own car. Both had been sure from the beginning that
this sudden briefing for her superiors was only a blind, a way to cover her
real reason for flying back so abruptly from New Mex-

ico. But again, the task of following her
discreetly was comparatively easy—at least at first. It had only gotten really
difficult once she turned off the highway onto a succession of smaller side roads
where traffic was sporadic at best. And Kit Pierson was no fool. She would have
been bound to grow suspicious if she saw the same two pairs of headlights
gleaming in her rearview mirror through mile after mile of darkened, nearly
empty countryside.

That was when both Smith and Peter Howell had been forced to slip on their
night-vision goggles and switch off their lights. Even so, they had been forced
to hang back farther from her Passat than they would have preferred—always
hoping they would not miss whichever tumoff or crossroads she finally took to
make her rendezvous.

Smith looked up the gravel track. He could just make out a small house on
the crest of a low hill. The lights were on, and he could see two cars parked
outside. This looked like it could be the place they were hunting.

“What do you think?” he asked Peter quietly.

The Englishman pointed to the U.S. Geological Survey l:20,000-scale
map open on the seat beside him. It was part of the set included in the
equipment left for them at Andrews Air Force Base. The IR illuminators on their
goggles allowed them to read the map. “This little drive doesn't go
anywhere else but that farm up there,” he said. “And I doubt very
seriously that our Ms. Pierson plans to take her sedan very far off-road.”

“So what's the plan?” Smith asked.

“I suggest we back up a quarter-mile or so,” Peter said. “I
noticed a small copse of trees there which we can use as cover for the cars.
Once we've got the rest of our gear on, we can make our way quietly up to that
farmhouse on foot.” He showed his teeth again. “I, for one, should
very much like to know who Ms. Pierson has chosen to visit so late at night.
And what exactly they are discussing.”

Smith nodded grimly. He was suddenly quite sure that some of the answers he
needed were locked away in that dimly lit house on the hill.

Near Meaux, East of Paris

The ruins of the Chateau de Montceaux, known as the Chateau of the Queens,
were hemmed in by the forest of Montceaux—a stretch of woods rising above the southern
bank of the undulating River Marne, roughly thirty miles east of Paris. First built in the
mid-1500s on the orders of the powerful, cunning, and crafty Queen Catherine de
Medici, the wife of one king of France
and the mother of three more, the elegant country palace and its vast park and
hunting preserve had at last been abandoned around 1650. Now, after centuries
of neglect, little remained—only the hollow shell of a grand stone entrance
pavilion, the oblong moat, and sections of crumbling wall lined with gaping
windows.

Strands of mist curled between the surrounding trees, slowly burning away as
the morning sun climbed higher. The bells of the Cathedral of St-Etienne in
Meaux, five miles away, rang out, summoning the faithful, few though they were
these days, to Sunday Mass. Other bells pealed across

the peaceful countryside as the smaller parish
churches in the nearby villages echoed the summons.

Two vans hauling a pair of trailers sat in a large clearing not far from the
ruins. Signs emblazoned on the vehicles identified them as part of an
organization called the Groupe d'Apergu Meteorologique, the
Meteorological Survey Group. Several technicians were busy near the rear of
each trailer, erecting two angled launch rails aimed almost due west. Each launch
rail included a pneumatic catapult system powered by compressed air. Other men
were fussing over a pair of propeller-driven unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs,
each roughly five feet long, with an eight-foot wingspan.

The tall auburn-haired man who called himself Nones stood close by, watching
his team complete their work. Periodic reports from the sentries posted in the
woods around the clearing crackled through his radio headset. There were no
signs of any unwanted observation by the local farmers.

One of the UAV technicians, a stoop-shouldered Asian man with thinning black
hair, rose slowly to his feet. He turned to the third of the Hor-atii with
a relieved expression on his lined and weary face. “The payloads are
secure. All engine, avionics, UHF, and autonomous control systems have been
tested and are online. All global positioning navigation way-points have been
configured and confirmed. Both craft are ready for flight.”

“Good,” Nones replied. “Then you may prepare for
launch.”

He stepped back out of the way as the technicians carefully lifted the UAVs,
which weighed roughly one hundred pounds apiece, and carried them over to the
twin launch rails. His bright green eyes followed them appreciatively. These
two unmanned aircraft were modeled on drones used by the U.S. Army for
short-range tactical reconnaissance, communications jamming, and airborne
nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons detection. Now he and his men would
pioneer an entirely new use for these robotic fliers.