Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (7 page)

“My, my, my, Dr. Parikh . . . you are a very observant fellow,”
the green-eyed man said carefully. He stepped closer and then, almost casually,
chopped down hard on the scientist's neck with the edge of his right hand.

Parikh crumpled to the floor.

Startled by the sudden noise, Brinker spun around. He stared down at his
assistant in shock. “Ravi?
What the — ”

Still moving, the big man pivoted and kicked out with tremendous force. His
heel slammed into the blond-haired researcher's chest, hurling him back against
his desk and computer monitor. Brinker's head snapped forward. He slid to the
floor and lay still.

■

Smith twisted a control knob on the captured radio set, running through as
many different frequencies as he could as fast as he could. He listened
attentively. Static hissed and popped. There were no voices. No orders he could
intercept and interpret.

With a frown, he yanked the receiver out of his ear and set the now-useless
radio gear aside. It was time to get moving. Sitting out here any longer meant
surrendering the initiative to the enemy. That would be dangerous enough
against amateurs. Against a trained force it was likely to be catastrophic.
Right now those fake Secret Service agents were methodically running through
some kind of very nasty scheme inside the

Teller Institute. But what was their game? he
wondered. Terrorism? Hostage taking?
High-risk industrial espionage? Sabotage?

He shook his head. There was no real way to know. Not yet. Still, whatever
the enemy was doing, this was the time to press them, before they could react.
He rose to one knee, checking the shadowed entrance to the Institute.

“Where are you going, Colonel?” Diaz whispered.

“Inside.”

The security guard's eyes widened in disbelief.
“That's crazy! Why not wait here for help? There are at least ten more of
those bastards in there.”

Smith risked a quick glance behind him, toward the perimeter fence and the
gate. The angry crowd down there was spiraling out of control — pushing and
shoving against the fence and hammering furiously on the hoods and roofs of the
stalled Secret Service convoy. Unwilling to provoke the enraged mob any
further, the real federal agents had retreated inside their locked vehicles.
And even if the Teller Institute security guards opened the gate to let them
in, the protesters would pour through at the same time. He swore softly.
“Take a look, Frank. I don't think the cavalry is coming. Not this
time.”

“Then let's hold here,” Diaz argued. He jerked a thumb at the SUVs
parked behind them. “That's their line of escape. Let's make 'em come
through us to get away.”

Smith shook his head. “Too risky. First, these
guys may be dead-enders who don't plan to leave. Second, they know we're out
here by now. These guys are pros. They must have alternate escape routes, and
there are just too many other ways for them to get away—maybe a helo landing on
that big flat roof up there, or more vehicles waiting outside the fence. Third,
these weapons”—he nodded at both the MP5 submachine gun he had captured
and Diaz's shotgun —“don't give us enough
firepower to stop a determined attack. If we let the bad guys run a set-piece
battle, they're going to roll right over us.”

“Ah, crap,” the Army veteran sighed, rechecking the loads for his
Remington. “I hate this John Wayne shit. They don't pay me enough to be a
hero.”

Smith bared his teeth in a tight, fierce grin. “Me,
neither. But we're it. So I suggest you shut up and soldier,
Sergeant.” He breathed out. “Are you ready?”

Grim-faced but determined, Diaz gave him a
thumbs-up.

Cradling the MP5, Smith sprinted for the right side of the Institute's huge
main doors. His stomach muscles tensed, expecting the sudden, tearing agony of
a bullet fired from inside the main lobby. There was only silence. Breathing
fast, he flattened himself against the sun-warmed adobe wall.

Diaz joined him a second later.

Smith rolled around the corner of the door, moving the submachine gun
through a steady, controlled arc as he sighted along the barrel. Nothing. The huge room appeared emptv. I Ialf-crouched, he
moved forward and took cover behind a stretch of waist-high marble railing.
Caught in a gentle breeze from the open doors, papers fluttered off the
Institute's registration and information desks and swirled lazily across the
tiled floor.

He started to poke his head over the railing.

“Get down!” Diaz roared.

Smith sensed a shape moving in the corridor off to his left. He threw
himself flat just as the gunman opened up—firing rapid aimed shots at him with
a 9mm pistol. Rounds hammered the marble right over his head, sending jagged
chips of shattered stone flying through the air. One sharp-edged fragment
sliced a thin red line across the back of his right hand.

Lying prone, with the stock of the MP5 braced against his shoulder, Jon
fired back, shooting in controlled three-round bursts. From the open doorway
Diaz began firing solid slugs from his twelve-gauge shotgun. Each slug tore
huge chunks out of the Institute's adobe walls.

Smith rolled out from behind the railing. A pistol bullet cracked right

past his head. Damn. He rolled faster and then
stopped himself suddenly, lying prone again—but this time with a clear view
right down the corridor.

Jon could see the gunman staring straight at him. They were less than fifty
feet apart. It was the sturdy, serious-looking man who had said his name was
Farrows. The supposed Secret Service agent was down on one knee, with a
SIG-Sauer pistol extended in a two-handed shooting grip, still firing steadily.
Another bullet punched into the floor close by Smith's head, spraying small
bits and pieces of broken tile across the side of his face.

He ignored the stinging impacts and breathed out. The MP5's forward sight
steadied on the gunman. He squeezed the trigger. The submachine gun stuttered
three times. Two rounds missed. The third hit Farrows in the face, blowing a hole right out the back of his skull.

Smith scrambled to his feet and raced to the foot of the U-shaped staircase
leading up to the Institute's second floor. Three of the enemy down so far, he
thought. But how many more to go?

Diaz sprinted through the lobby and went prone not far away, covering the
first flight of stairs with his shotgun. “Where to now, Colonel?” he
called softly.

That was a good question, Smith thought grimly. Much depended on what the
intruders intended. If they were set on holding the research staff as hostages,
most of them would be holed up in the Institute cafeteria— not far down the
corridor from where Farrows lay dead. But if this was a hostage situation,
charging in headlong was likely to get far too many innocent people killed.

Somehow, though, Smith doubted hostage taking was the goal here. This whole
operation was too elaborate and too precisely timed for something so simple and
low-tech. Coming in disguised as Secret Service agents
on a bomb sweep seemed aimed primarily at gaining unimpeded access to the labs.

He made his decision and pointed to the ceiling.

Diaz nodded.

Moving in alternate bounds, with one man always readv to provide covering
fire while the other went forward, Jon Smith and the Institute security guard
began climbing the central staircase.

■

“LAZARUS LIVES! NO TO NANOTECH! LAZARUS LIVES! NO TO DEATH MACHINES!
LAZARUS LIVES!”

Malachi MacNamara was jostled ever closer to the Institute's perimeter
fence, borne along by the shouting, chanting mob. He scowled. He was a man who
disdained displays of wild, unreasoning emotion —a man who felt far happier
alone in the wilderness than trapped like this in a
sea of his fellow humans. For now, though, he knew he could only move with this
maddened tide. If he tried to stand against the pressure for too long, he would
only be swept off his feet and trampled to death.

Still, he thought icily, that did not mean he had to play the utterly
passive puppet.

He swung his elbows through a series of short, vicious arcs, hammering at
the ribs of those closest to him. Frightened by his cold rage, they fell
back—giving him just enough room to risk a look back at the protest stage. It
was deserted. His pale eyes narrowed in sudden calculation. The Lazarus
Movement radicals who had whipped this mass of more than ten thousand
demonstrators into uncontrolled wrath had vanished.

Where were they?

Even this deep in the mob, the lean, weather-beaten Canadian was tall enough
to see past the outer fringes of the crowd. Two of the Secret Service vehicles
were edging slowly back down the access road. Dented hoods and car roofs,
crumpled fenders, and smashed w indshields testified to the fury of the human
storm through which they had passed. There were also small knots of
worried-looking New Mexico State Police troopers and Santa Fe County
sheriffs, most backing slowly away to avoid trig-

gering an all-out riot. Lured by the prospect of
shooting dramatic footage they could feed to the national and international
networks, several local TV crews were much closer to the stamping and shouting
protesters.

MacNamara turned his gaze away. His eyes hunted through the angry crowd for
a glimpse of the Movement activists he sought. They were nowhere to be found.
Curiouser and curiouser, he thought coolly. Rats deserting a sinking ship? Or predators slipping away to make a new kill somewhere else?

The pressure of the mob along the fence was growing. At places the barrier
bulged inward, stretching dangerously under the impact of so many bodies. The
gray-uniformed security guards behind the fence were already edging backward,
retreating toward the relative safety of the Institute's main building. The
Canadian nodded to himself. That was not terribly surprising. No one but a fool
would expect a small force of part-time policemen to face a rampaging crowd
often thousand out in the open. Doing so would be choosing a particularly
pathetic form of suicide.

He stiffened suddenly, spotting several men moving with grim, determined
purpose through the press of hate-filled faces, red and green banners and
placards, and upraised fists. They were the young toughs he had seen arriving
the day before, each carrying the same long duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

Shielded from police scrutiny by the crowd, the young men reached the fence.
Down went their duffels and out came long-handled bolt cutters. They started
slicing through metal link after metal link, cutting from top to bottom with
practiced speed and efficiency. Soon whole sections of the Institute's security
fence tore away and came crashing down. Hundreds and then thousands of
demonstrators poured through the gaps, loping across the open ground toward the
huge sand-colored science building.

“LAZARUS LIVES! LAZARUS LIVES! LAZARUS LIVES!” they clamored.
“NO TO NANOTECH! NO TO DEATH MACHINES!”

Unable to do anything else, the pale, blue-eyed man named Malachi MacNamara
ran wildly with them, howling like all the rest.

■

Smith advanced north along one side of the Teller Institute's second-floor
corridor with the MP5 submachine gun cradled against his shoulder, ready to
fire. Frank Diaz moved up the other side.

They came to a heavy metal door, one of several opening onto this broad
central hallway. The light above the adjacent security station glowed red. A
sign identified this as the lab assigned to VOSS LIFE SCIENCES—HUMAN GENOME
DIVISION. Diaz gestured at the door with his shotgun. He mouthed a question.
“Do we go in?”

Smith shook his head quickly. The
Institute was home to more than a dozen different technology R&D efforts,
all of them highly advanced and all of them enormously expensive and
potentially valuable. There was no way that he and Diaz could realistically
comb through every lab and office on this upper floor.

So Smith had decided to play a hunch. The president's scheduled trip to Santa Fe was intended to
highlight the nanotech research conducted by Harcourt, Nomura PharmaTech, and
an independent Institute-affiliated group. By disguising themselves as a Secret
Service advance unit, the intruders had guaranteed themselves access to those
same labs. All in all, Smith thought it was a pretty safe bet that whatever
they were up to involved the facilities in the North Wing.

Still gliding silently down the central corridor, he and Diaz came to a
T-shaped intersection at the far end of the building. Another staircase to the
ground floor lay straight ahead of them. Beyond the head of those stairs was a
stainless steel door leading into the laboratory leased by Nomura PharmaTech.
Turning right would take them to the suite occupied by the Institute's own
nanotech team. The Harcourt Biosciences Lab run by Phil Brinker and Ravi Parikh
was down the hallway to the left.

Smith hesitated briefly. Which way should they go now?

Suddenly, the warning light on the Nomura lab security station flashed from
red to green. “Down!” Jon hissed. He and
Diaz each dropped to one knee, waiting.

The door slid open. Three men stepped out into the hallway. Two of them, one
fair-haired, the other bald, wore blue technicians' coveralls. They were bowed
under the weight of the equipment cases slung over their shoulders. The third,
taller and prematurelv gray, wore a dark-colored jacket and khaki slacks. He carried
a small Uzi submachine gun.

Smith could feel his pulse accelerating. He and Diaz could cut these men
down with a couple of short bursts. No doubt that would be the safest and
simplest course of action. But if they were dead, they could not tell him what
was going on inside the Teller Institute. He sighed inside. Though it meant
taking added risks, he needed prisoners to interrogate a loi more than he
needed three silent corpses.

He rose to his feet, covering the intruders with his MP5. “Drop your
weapons!” he barked. “And then put your hands up!”