Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (30 page)

Nones switched frequencies, contacting the newly arrived surveillance

team he had stationed in Paris. “Are you receiving data from the
target area, Linden?”
he asked.

“We are,” the Dutchman confirmed. “All remote sensors and
cameras are operational.”

“And the weather conditions?”

“Temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind direction, and wind speed
arc all well within the preset mission parameters,” Linden reported. “The Center recommends
that you proceed when ready.”

“Acknowledged,” Nones said quietly. He swung round to the waiting
UAV technicians. “Don masks and gloves,” he
ordered.

They quickly obeyed, putting on the gas masks, respirators, and thick gloves
intended to give them enough time to escape the immediate area if one of their
aircraft crashed on launch. The third member of the Horatii did the
same, donning his own protective gear.

“Catapults pressurized and standing by,” the Asian technician told
him. The technician crouched at a control console set between the two angled
rails. His fingers hovered over a set of switches.

Nones smiled. “Continue.”

The technician nodded. He flicked two switches. “Engine and propeller
start.”

The twin-bladed propellers on both UAVs suddenly whirled into motion,
spinning with a low-pitched whir that was almost impossible to hear more than a
few yards away.

“Engines at full power.”

“Launch!” the tall green-eyed man commanded.

With a soft whoosh, the first pneumatic catapult fired —hurling the
UAV attached to it up the angled rail and into the air in a high, curving arc.
For an instant, at the end of this arc, the unmanned aircraft seemed ready to
fall back toward the ground, but then it climbed again—buoyed now by the lift
provided by its own wings and propeller. Still ascending, it cleared the trees
and headed west on its preprogrammed course.

Ten seconds later, the second unmanned flier followed its counterpart

into the air. Both drones, now almost invisible
from the ground and too small to register on most radars, climbed steadily
toward their cruising altitude of three thousand feet and flew toward Paris at roughly one
hundred miles per hour.

Rural Virginia

Staying low, Jon Smith followed Peter Howell west across a wide field choked
with tall weeds and thickets of jagged brambles. Their surroundings glowed
faintly green through their night-vision goggles. A couple of hundred yards off
to their left, the paved county road cut a straight line across the darkened
landscape. Ahead, the ground sloped up, rising gently above a stagnant
scum-covered pond on their right. The gravel access road Kit Pierson had turned
onto snaked back and forth as it climbed the low hill in front of them.

Something sharp snagged Smith's shoulder, stabbing right through the thick
cloth deep enough to draw blood. He gritted his teeth and went on. Peter was
doing his best to lead them through the worst of the tangled vegetation, but
there were places where they just had to bull through, ignoring the thorns and
briars tearing at their dark clothing and black leather gloves.

Halfway up the hill, the Englishman dropped to one knee. He scanned the
terrain around them carefully and then waved Smith forward to join him. The
lights were still on at the farmhouse up on the crest.

Both men were dressed and equipped for a night reconnaissance mission across
rough ground. Besides their AN/PVS 7 goggles, each wore a combat vest stuffed
with the surveillance gear—cameras and various types of listening devices—left
waiting for them at Andrews Air Force Base. Smith had a holster for his
SIG-Sauer pistol strapped to his thigh, while Peter had the same kind of rig
for the Browning Hi-Power he favored. For extra firepower in a real emergency,
each also carried a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun slung across his
back.

Peter shook off one of his gloves and then held up a wetted finger to test
the direction of the soft, cool night breeze whispering around them. He nodded,
pleased by the result. “Now there's a bit of good fortune. The wind is
from the west.”

Smith waited. The other man had spent decades in the field, first for the
SAS and then for MI6. Peter Howell had forgotten more about moving through
potentially hostile territory than Smith had ever learned.

“This wind won't carry our scent ahead of us,” Peter explained.
“If there are any dogs up there, they won't smell us coming.”

Peter slid his glove back on and led the way again. Both men crouched even
lower as they came out onto the top of the shallow rise. They were within yards
of an old, ruined barn—a hollowed-out, roofless wreck that was more a pile of
broken, rotting boards than a standing structure. Beyond that, they could make
out the shapes of two parked cars, the Volkswagen Passat belonging to Kit
Pierson, and another, this one an older American make. And there was enough
light leaking out through the mostly closed drapes of their target, a small
one-story farmhouse, to make it glow brightly in their night-vision gear.

Smith saw that whoever owned the place had gone to the trouble of whacking
away the tallest weeds and brambles in a rough circle around the building. He
followed Peter down onto his belly and wriggled through the low grass after
him, crossing the open space as quickly as possible to gain the cover provided
by the parked cars.

“Where to now?” he murmured.

Peter nodded toward a big picture window on this side of the house, not far
from the front door. “Over there, I should think,” he said softly.
“I thought I saw a shadow moving behind those drapes a moment ago. Worth a look anyhow.” He glanced at Smith. “Cover
me, will you, Jon?”

Smith tugged his SIG-Sauer out of the holster. “Whenever
you're ready.”

The other man nodded once. Then he crawled rapidly across the patch of
oil-stained concrete and disappeared into a patch of tall brush

growing right up against the side of the farmhouse.
Only the night-vision goggles he was wearing let Smith keep track of him. To
anyone watching with unaided eyes, Peter would have seemed nothing more than a
moving shadow, a shadow that simply vanished into blackness.

The Englishman raised himself up onto his knees, carefully examining the
window above him. Satisfied, he dropped flat and signaled Jon to come ahead.

Smith crawled over to join him as fast as he could, feeling terribly exposed
along every inch of the way. He wriggled the last few feet into the weeds and
lay still, breathing heavily.

Peter leaned close to his ear and motioned to the window. “Pierson is
definitely inside.”

Smith smiled tightly. “Glad to hear it. I'd sure hate to have just
wrecked my knees for nothing.” He rolled onto his side and tugged a
handheld laser surveillance kit out of one of the Velcro-sealed pouches on his
combat vest. He slipped on the attached headset, flipped a switch to activate
the low-powered IR laser, and carefully aimed the device at the window above
them.

If he could hold it steady enough, the laser beam would bounce back off the
glass and pick up the vibrations induced in it by anyone talking inside the room.
Then, assuming everything worked right, the electronics package should be able
to translate those vibrations back into understandable sounds through his
headphones.

Almost to his surprise, the system worked.

“Damn it, Kit,” he heard a man's voice growl angrily. “You
can't back out of this operation now. We're going ahead, whether you like it or
not. There are no other options. Either we destroy the Lazarus Movement—or it
destroys us!”

Lazarus' Private Office

The man called Lazarus sat calmly behind a solid, age-darkened teak desk in
his private office. The room was quiet, cool, and dimly lit. A ventilation
system hummed softly in the background, bringing in air rigorously scrubbed
clean of any trace of the outside world.

Much of the desk was taken up with a large computer-driven display. With the
gentle flick of a finger on his keyboard, Lazarus switched rapidly between
views relayed from cameras around the globe. One, apparently mounted aboard an
aircraft, showed the winding trace of a river unrolling two or three thousand
feet below. Villages, roads, bridges, and tracts of forest came into view and
then slid off-camera. Another camera showed a dingy street crowded with
stripped and vandalized automobiles. The street was lined with drab
concrete-block buildings. Their windows and doors were heavily barricaded with
steel bars.

Below the images on his display, three digital readouts showed the lo-

cal time, the time in Paris,
and the time along the eastern seaboard of the United States. A secure satellite
phone system sat next to the computer. Two blinking green lights indicated
pending connections to two of his special action teams.

Lazarus smiled, reveling in the exquisite sensation of watching a complex,
intricately crafted plan unfolding with absolutely perfect timing. With one
command, he had set in motion the last of his needed field experiments—the
tests so necessary to refine his chosen instruments of the planet's salvation.
With another, he would begin the series of actions intended to throw the CIA,
the FBI, and the British Secret Intelligence Service into self-destructive
chaos.

Soon, he thought coldly, very soon. As the sun rose higher today, a
horrified world would start to see its worst fears about the United States
confirmed. Alliances would shatter. Old wounds would reopen. Long-held
rivalries would burst again into open conflict. And by the time the full
magnitude of what was really happening became clear, it would be impossible for
anyone to stop him.

His internal phone chimed once. Lazarus tapped the speaker button.
“Yes?”

“Our drones are within fifty kilometers of the target,” reported
the voice of his senior technician. “Both are operating within the
expected norms.”

“Very good. Continue as planned,” Lazarus
ordered. He tapped the button, cutting the circuit. Another gentle flick of his
finger completed the satellite connection to one of his action teams.

“The Paris
operation is under way,” he told the man waiting patiently on the other
end. “Be ready to carry out your instructions on my next signal.”

Rural Virginia

Three big 4x4 trucks were parked just inside a patch of scrub pines growing
along the crest of a ridge several hundred yards west of Burke's ram-

shackle farm. Twelve men wearing black jackets and
sweaters and dark-colored jeans waited in the shelter of this clump of stunted
trees. Four of them were posted as sentries at different points around the
outside edge, keeping watch through British-made Simrad night-vision
binoculars. Seven squatted patiently on the sandy soil farther inside the
grove. They were busy making last-minute weapons checks on their assortment of
assault rifles, submachine guns, and pistols.

The twelfth, the tall green-eyed man named Terce, sat in the cab of one of
the 4x4s. “Understood,” he said into his secure cell phone. “We
are standing by.” He hung up and went back to monitoring a heated
conversation relayed through his radio set. An angry voice sounded in his
headset. “Either we destroy the Lazarus Movement—or it destroys us!”

“Melodrama doesn't suit you, Hal,” a woman's voice answered icily.
“I'm not suggesting that we surrender to the Movement. But TOCSIN itself
is no longer worth the price we're paying—or the risks we're running. And I
meant what I said over the phone earlier: If this lousy operation blows up in
my face, I don't plan to be the only one taking a fall.”

Listening to the transmission from a bug he had planted earlier that night,
the second member of the Horatii nodded to himself. The CIA officer was
quite right. FBI Deputy Assistant Director Katherine Pierson was no longer
reliable. Not that it mattered very much anymore, he thought with a trace of
grim amusement.

Automatically Terce checked the magazine on his Walther, screwed on the
silencer, and then slid the pistol back into his coat pocket. He glanced at the
luminous dial of his watch. There were only minutes at most remaining before he
would need to act.

A soft, insistent beep signaled a priority call from one of his
sentries. He switched channels. “Go ahead.”

“This is McRae. There's something moving up near the house,” the
lookout warned in a soft lowland Scots burr.

“I'm on my way,” Terce said. The big man slid out of the 4x4,
ducking his head to clear the frame, and hurried to the edge of the pine woods.
He

found McRae crouched behind a fallen tree trunk
overgrown with vines and moved low into position beside him.

“Take a look for yourself. In those bushes and tall grass close to the
front door,” the short, wiry Scot said, pointing. “I can't make out
anything now, mind you, but I saw movement there just a minute ago.”

The green-eyed man raised his own binoculars, slowly scanning the south side
of Burke's house. Two man-shaped blotches leaped immediately into focus, bright
white thermal blooms against the cooler gray of the dense vegetation in which
they lay hidden.

“You have very good eyes, McRae,” Terce said calmly. The night-vision gear used by his sentries worked by amplifying all
available ambient light. They turned night into eerie, green-tinted day,
but they could not see “heat” in the way his special equipment could.
Weighing over five pounds and with a price tag of nearly sixty thousand
dollars, his French-made “Sophie” thermal-imaging binoculars were
top-of-the-line in every way and far more effective. At night, under these
overcast skies, the best passive light intensifier systems had a maximum range
of three or four hundred yards, and often much less. In contrast, using thermal
imaging he could detect the heat signature made by a human being up to two
miles away—even through thick cover.