Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (33 page)

She complied, sliding the pistol toward him across the stained hardwood
floor.

“Sit!”

Angry now, both at the other man and with herself
for being so afraid of him, Pierson obeyed, slowly lowering herself into the
lumpy, frayed armchair. She held her hands up, palms outward, so that he could
see that she was not an immediate threat. “I'd still like to know what I'm
supposed to have done, Hal—and what all that shooting is about.”

Burke raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Why try to pull the innocent act,
Kit? It's too late for that. You're not an idiot. And neither am I, for that
matter. Did you really think you could sneak an FBI surveillance team onto my
property without my knowing?”

She shook her head, desperately now. “I don't know what you're talking
about. Nobody came with me —or followed me. I was clean all the way out from
D.C. to here!”

'Lying won't get you anywhere,“ he said coldly. His right eye twitched
again, fluttering rapidly as the muscles contracted and then relaxed. ”In
fact, it just pisses me off."

The phone on his desk rang once. Without taking his eyes or his pistol off
her, Burke reached out and grabbed it before it could ring again.
“Yes?” he said tightly. He listened for a moment and then shook his
head. “No, I have the situation here under control. You can come ahead.
The door's unlocked.” He hung up.

“Who was that?” she asked.

The CIA officer smiled thinly, without any humor at all. “Someone who
wants very much to meet you,” he said.

Bitterly regretting her earlier decision to confront Burke in person, Kit
Pierson sat tensely in the armchair—rapidly considering various plans to
extricate herself from this mess and then equally rapidly discarding them as
impractical, suicidal, or both. She heard the front door open and then close.

Her eyes widened as a very tall and very broad-shouldered man stepped
quietly into the study, moving with the dangerous grace of a tiger. His
curiously green eyes gleamed in the dim light cast by the lamp on Burke's desk.
For a moment she thought he was the same man described by Colonel Smith in his
report on the aftermath of the Teller Institute disaster—the leader of the
“terrorist” unit that had conducted the attack. Then she shook her
head. That was impossible. The leader of that attack had been consumed by the
nanophages released by the bombs that had shattered the Institute's labs.

“This is Terce,” Hal Burke said brusquely. “He commands one
of my TOCSIN action teams. His men were on guard outside. They're the ones who
spotted your covert surveillance guys prowling around this house.”

“Whoever's out there isn't connected to me,” Pierson said again,
straining to put every ounce of conviction she could muster into her voice.
Every FBI manual on the psychology of conspiracies stressed the inherent and
overwhelming fears of those involved of betrayal from within. As head of the
Bureau's Counter-Terrorism Division, she had often made use of those
fears—playing on them to break apart suspected cells, turning the would-be
terrorists on one another like rats trapped in a pit. She bit down

on her lower lip, tasting the salt tang of her own
blood. Now the same forces of paranoia and suspicions were at work here,
threatening her life.

“No dice, Kit,” Burke told her coldly. “I don't believe in
coincidences, so you're either a liar—or a screwup. And this operation can't
afford either one.”

The big man named Terce said nothing at first. Instead, he reached down and
scooped her pistol off the floor. He slid it into one of the pockets of his
black windbreaker and then turned to the CIA officer. “Now, give me your
own weapon, Mr. Burke,” he said gently. “If you
please.”

The smaller man blinked in surprise, plainly caught off-guard b\ the
request. “What?”

“Give me your weapon,” Terce repeated. He stepped closer to Burke,
looming over the CIA officer. “It would be . . . safer... for us
all.”

“Why?”

The green-eyed man nodded at the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam on the desk.
“Because you have been drinking a bit more than is wise, Mr. Burke, and I
do not fully trust either your judgment or your reflexes at this moment. You
can rest easy. My men have the situation well in hand.”

More gunfire rattled in the distance, farther away now.

For the space of a heartbeat Burke sat staring up at the taller man. His
eyes narrowed angrily. But then he did as he was asked, handing the Beretta to
Terce with a sullen frown.

Kit Pierson felt some of the tension leave her shoulders. She breathed out.
Whatever else he was, the leader of this TOCSIN action team was no fool.
Disarming Burke so quickly was a sound move. It was also one that might help
her defuse this ridiculous and incendiary situation. She leaned forward.
“Look, let's see what we can do to sort this mess out rationally,”
she said coolly. “First, if anyone from the FBI did tail me here, they
certainly did it without my knowledge or my consent—”

“Be silent, Ms. Pierson!” the green-eyed man said coldly. “I
do not care how or why you were followed. Your motives and your competence, or
lack of it, are immaterial.”

Kit Pierson stared back at him, suddenly aware that she was in as much
danger from this man as she had been with Burke—and perhaps a great deal more.

Near Paris

Engines buzzing softly, the two UAVs flew on at three thousand feet. Below,
forests, roads, and villages slid past and then vanished in the early morning
haze behind them. The sun, rising east above the deep, undulating valleys of
the Seine and the Marne, was a large ball of red fire outlined against the thin
fading gray mist.

Closer to Paris,
the landscape began changing, becoming more congested and crowded. Ancient
villages surrounded by woods and farmland gave way to larger, more modern
suburbs surrounded by intertwined motorways and rail lines. High-rise apartment
buildings appeared ahead, stabbing up at irregular intervals in a great arc
around the inner core of the city itself.

Long white contrails formed in the sky high above the two robot aircraft,
vast trails of ice crystals floating in the clear, cold air, each marking the
passage of a large passenger jet. The UAVs were nearing the flight paths to and
from two airports—Le Bourget and Charles de Gaulle. Given their very small
size, the odds of radar detection were very low, but those who controlled them
saw no point in taking unnecessary risks. Responding to preprogrammed
instructions, each drone dropped lower, descending to just five hundred feet
and throttling back to maintain a near-constant airspeed of around one hundred
miles per hour.

Field Experiment Operations Room, Inside the Center

The Center's operations room was located deep within the complex, secure
behind a number of locked doors accessible only to those with the very highest
clearances. Inside the darkened chamber, several scientists

and technicians sat in front of large consoles,
constantly monitoring the pictures and data streaming in from Paris—both from the ground sensors planted at
various points and those onboard the two UAVs. Updates of wind direction,
speed, humidity, and barometric pressure were automatically fed into a
sophisticated targeting program. Two large screens showed the terrain ahead and
below the twin drones. Numbers in the lower right corner of each display—the
range to target—counted down, flickering from time to time as the program made
carefully calculated adjustments to each robot aircraft's aim point. The
control room personnel sat up straighter, watching with growing tension and
excitement as those range numbers steadied up and began sliding ever more
rapidly toward zero.

0.4 km, 0.3 km, 0.15 km . . . the command “Initiate” flashed in
red on both screens. Instantly the targeting program transmitted an encrypted
radio signal, relaying it through a communications satellite high above the
Earth and then back down to the drones aloft just north of Paris.

La Courneuve

More and more people ventured out on the dingy, run-down streets around the
slum housing complexes of La Courneuve. A few were heading for the nearest
Metro station on their way to whatever menial jobs they had been able to find.
More were women carrying baskets and bags — mothers, wives, and grandmothers
sent out to shop for the day's food. Some were families strolling toward the
wooded spaces and parkland north of the suburb. Sunday morning was a rare
opportunity for parents to give their children a taste of the open air away
from the crime-ridden, graffiti-smeared streets and alleys, and the
trash-heaped hallways of the Cite des Quatre Milk. The thieves, thugs,
pushers, and drug addicts who preyed on them were mostly asleep, barricaded in
the bare concrete apartments provided by the French welfare state.

Flying on parallel courses now, the two UAVs climbed again, rising to just
over one thousand feet. Still moving at one hundred miles an hour, they crossed
over a wide avenue and entered the airspace above La Courneuve. Aboard first
one and then the other drone, control relays cycled, triggering the twin
canisters slung below their wings. With a sinister hiss, each canister began
spewing its contents in an invisible stream.

Hundreds of billions of Stage III nanophages fell across a huge swathe of La
Courneuve, slowly raining down out of the sky in an undetected cloud of death
and imminent slaughter. Vast numbers drifted among the thousands of
unsuspecting people caught outside and were inhaled unnoticed—pulled into their
lungs with every breath. Tens of billions more of the microscopic phages were
drawn into the huge air ducts atop the slum high-rises and spread through
ventilation shafts to apartments on every floor. Once the phages were inside,
air currents wafted them through every room, settling unseen on those sleeping,
drowsing in a drugged stupor, or mindlessly watching television.

Most of the phages stayed inert, conserving their limited power, silently
spreading through the blood and tissues of those they had infected while
waiting the go signal that would unleash them. Like the Stage II nanodevices
used at the Teller Institute, however, roughly one out of every hundred
thousand was a control phage —a larger silicon sphere packed with a wide array
of sophisticated biochemical sensors. Their power packs went active
immediately. They scoured through their host bodies, seeking any trace of one
of dozens of precoded conditions, illnesses, allergies, and syndromes. The
first positive reading by any single sensor triggered an immediate burst of the
messenger molecules that would send the smaller killer phages into a frenzy of
destruction.

Several miles south and west of La Courneuve, the six-man surveillance team
occupied the upper floor and attic of an old gray stone building in the heart
of the Marais District of Paris. Microwave and radio antennae dotted the steep,
sloping tiled roof above them—gathering every

scrap of data beamed their way by the sensors and
cameras set up around the nanophage target area. From there the data flowed
down into banks of networked computers. There it would be stored and evaluated
to eventu-ally be relayed by coded signal and satellite to the distant Center.
To conserve bandwidth and preserve operational security, only the most crucial
information was passed on in real time.

The white-haired man named Linden
stared over the shoulder of one of his men, watching the data pour into his
machines. Linden
was careful to avoid looking too closely at a TV monitor showing images
captured from the streets surrounding the Cite des Quatre Milk. Let the
scientists observe their own handiwork, he thought grimly. He had his own tasks
to perform. Instead, he glanced at another screen, this one showing pictures
relayed from the two UAVs. They had completed their orbits over La Courneuve
and they were now flying east, roughly paralleling the course of the Canal de
l'Ourcq.

He keyed the radio mike attached to his headset, reporting to Nones at the
launch site near Meaux. “Field Experiment Three is proceeding. Data
collection is nominal. Your drones are on their programmed course and speed.
ETA is roughly twenty minutes.”

“Is there any sign of detection?” the third of the Horatii asked
calmly.

Linden
glanced at Vitor Abrantes. The young Portuguese was charged witli monitoring
all police, fire, ambulance, and air traffic control frequencies. Computers set
to scan for certain key words aided him in this task. “Anything?”
Linden asked.

The young man shook his head. “Nothing yet. The
Parisian emergency operators have received several calls from the target area,
but nothing they have so far been able to understand.”

Linden
nodded. He and his team had received a cursory briefing on the effects of the
Stage III nanophages—enough to know that the soft tissues of the mouth and
tongue were among the first to dissolve. He clicked his mike again. “You
are clear so far,” he told Nones. “The authorities are still
asleep.”

Brown-eyed, brown-haired, still slender, and pretty, Nouria Besseghir
gripped the hand of her five-year-old daughter, Tasa, tightly, urging the
little girl across the street at a rapid pace. Her daughter, she knew, was both
curious and easily distracted. Left to her own
devices, Tasa was perfectly capable of standing still right in the middle of
the road—caught up in the study of an interesting pattern in the cracked and
potholed cement or of some intriguing bit of graffiti on a nearby building.
True, there were not many cars on the streets of La Courneuve at this hour, but
few drivers here paid much attention to traffic laws or to pedestrian safety.
In this lawless neighborhood, part of what the French called the Zone,
hit-and-runs were a fairly common occurrence, certainly far more common than
any police investigation of such “accidents.”

Almost as important to Nouria was her desire to keep moving—to avoid drawing
unwanted attention from any of the predatory men who loitered along these dingy
streets or squatted in the shadowed alleys. Six months ago, her husband had
returned to his native Algeria
on what he had told her was “family business.” And now he was dead,
killed in a clash between the Algerian security forces and the Islamic rebels
who periodically challenged that nation's authoritarian government. Word of his
death had taken weeks to reach her, and she still did not know which of the two
warring factions had murdered him.