“Good,” Burke said, in a flat, clipped tone. There were sounds of traffic in the background. He must be calling on his car phone. “Because something’s fouled up in New Mexico, Kit. It’s bad, real bad. Worse than we expected. Turn on any one of the cable news stations. They practically have the pictures on continuous loop.”
Puzzled, Pierson leaned over her desk and hit the keys that would display TV signals on her computer monitor. For a long moment she stared in shocked silence as the live footage shot earlier outside the Teller Institute flickered across her high-resolution screen. Even as she watched, new explosions erupted inside the burning building. Thick columns of smoke stained the clear blue New Mexico sky. Outside the Institute itself, thousands of Lazarus Movement demonstrators fled in terror, trampling one another in their frenzy to escape. The camera zoomed in, showing nightmarish images of human beings melting like bloodstained wax.
She drew a short, sharp breath, fighting for composure. Then she gripped the phone tighter. “Good God, Hal. What happened?”
“It’s not clear, yet,” Burke told her. “First reports say the demonstrators broke through the fence and they were swarming the building when all hell broke loose inside—explosions, fires, you name it.”
“And the cause?”
“There’s speculation about some kind of toxic release from the nanotech labs,” Burke said. “A few sources are calling it a tragic accident. Others are blaming sabotage by as-yet-unidentified perps. The smart money is on sabotage.”
“But no confirmation either way?” she asked sharply. “No one’s been taken into custody?”
“No one so far. I don’t have contact with our people yet, but I expect to hear something soon. I’m heading out there myself, pronto. There’s an Air Force emergency flight taking off from Andrews in thirty minutes—and Langley wangled me a seat on the plane.”
Pierson shook her head in frustration. “This was not the plan, Hal. I thought we had this situation locked down tight.”
“Yeah, so did I,” Burke said. She could almost hear him shrug. “Something always goes wrong at some point in every operation, Kit. You know that.”
She frowned. “Not this wrong.”
“No,” agreed Burke coldly. “Not usually.” He cleared his throat. “But now we have to play the cards we’re dealt. Right?”
“Yes.” Pierson reached out and shut down the TV link on her computer. She did not need to see any more. Not now. She suspected those images would haunt her dreams for a very long time.
“Kit?”
“I’m here,” she said softly.
“You know what has to happen next?”
She nodded, forcing herself to focus on the immediate future. “Yes, I do. I have to lead the investigative team in Santa Fe.”
“Will that be a problem?” the CIA officer asked. “Arranging it with Zeller, I mean.”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m sure he’ll jump at the chance to assign the job to me,” Pierson said carefully, thinking it through out loud. “I’m the Bureau expert on the Lazarus Movement. The acting director understands that. And one thing is going to be very clear to everyone, from the White House all the way on down the chain of command. Somehow, somewhere, in some way, this atrocity must be linked to the Movement.”
“Right,” Burke said. “And in the meantime, I’ll keep pushing TOCSIN from my end.”
“Is that wise?” Pierson asked sharply. “Maybe we should pull the plug now.”
“It’s too late for that,” Burke told her bluntly. “Everything is already in motion, Kit. We either ride the wave, or we get pulled under.”
Chapter
Nine
The White House
The members of the president’s national security team who were gathered around the crowded conference table in the White House Situation Room were in a somber, depressed mood. As they damned well should be, thought Sam Castilla grimly. The first accounts of the Teller Institute disaster had been bad enough. Each new report was even worse.
He glanced at the nearest clock. It was much later than he had thought. In the confines of this small artificially lit underground room, the passage of time was often distorted. Several hours had already passed since Fred Klein first flashed him the news of the horror unfolding in Santa Fe.
Now the president looked around the table in disbelief. “You’re telling me that we still don’t have a firm estimate of casualties—either inside the Teller Institute itself, or outside among the demonstrators?”
“No, Mr. President. We don’t,” Bob Zeller, the acting director of the FBI, admitted. He sat miserably hunched over in his chair. “More than half of the Institute’s scientists and staff are listed as missing. Most of them are probably dead. But we can’t even send in search-and-rescue teams until the fires are out. As for the protesters …” Zeller’s voice trailed away.
“We may never know exactly how many of them were killed, Mr. President,” his national security adviser, Emily Powell-Hill, interrupted. “You’ve seen the pictures of what happened outside the labs. It could take months to identify what little is left of those people.”
“The major networks are saying there are at least two thousand dead,” said Charles Ouray, the White House chief of staff. “And they’re predicting the count could go even higher. Maybe as high as three or four thousand.”
“Based on what, Charlie?” the president snapped. “Spitballing and raw guesswork?”
“They’re going with claims made by Lazarus Movement spokesmen,” Ouray said quietly. “Those folks have more credibility with the press—and the general public—than they used to. More credibility than we do right now.”
Castilla nodded. That was true enough. The first terrifying TV footage had gone out live and unedited over several news network satellite feeds. Tens of millions of people in America and hundreds of millions around the world had seen the gruesome images with their own eyes. The networks were now showing more discretion, carefully blurring the more graphic scenes of terrified Lazarus Movement protesters being eaten alive. But it was too late. The damage was done.
All the wild, lurid claims made by the Lazarus Movement about the dangers posed by nanotechnology seemed vindicated. And now the Movement seemed determined to push an even more sinister and paranoid story. This theory was already showing up on their Web sites and on other major Internet discussion groups. It claimed that the Teller labs were developing secret nanotech war weapons for the U.S. military. Using eerily similar photos of the ravaged dead in both places, it connected the horror in Santa Fe to the earlier massacre at Kusasa in Zimbabwe. Those pushing the story were arguing that these pictures proved that “elements within the American government” had wiped out a peaceful village as a first test of those nanotech weapons.
Castilla grimaced. In the prevailing hysteria, no one was going to pay any attention to calm technical rebuttals by leading scientists. Or to reassuring speeches by politicians like him, the president reminded himself. Pressured by frightened constituents, many in Congress were already demanding an immediate federal ban on nanotech research. And God only knew how many other governments around the world were going to buy into the Movement’s wild-eyed claims about America’s secret “nanotech weapons program.”
Castilla turned to David Hanson, sitting at the far end of the table. “Anything to add, David?”
The CIA director shrugged. “Beyond the observation that what happened at the Teller Institute is almost certainly an act of coldly calculated terrorism? No, Mr. President, I do not.”
“Aren’t you jumping the gun just a bit?” Emily Powell-Hill asked curtly. There was no love lost between the former Army brigadier general and the Director of Central Intelligence. She thought Hanson was far too eager to apply extreme solutions to national security problems.
Privately, the president agreed with her assessment. But the uncomfortable truth was that Hanson’s wilder predictions often hit the mark, and most of the clandestine operations he pushed
forward were successful. And in this case, the CIA chief’s assertion tied in perfectly with what Castilla had already heard from Fred Klein at Covert-One.
“Am I speculating in advance of all the facts? Clearly, I am,” Hanson admitted. He peered condescendingly over the rims of his tortoiseshell glasses at the national security adviser. “But I don’t see that we need to waste much time on alternate theories, Emily. Not unless you honestly believe that the intruders who broke into the Teller Institute had nothing to do with the bombs that exploded less than an hour later. Frankly, that seems a bit naive to me.”
Emily Powell-Hill flushed bright red.
Castilla intervened before the dispute could get out of hand. “Let’s assume you’re right, David. Say this disaster is an act of terrorism. Then who are the terrorists?”
“The Lazarus Movement,” said the CIA director bluntly. “For precisely the reasons I outlined when we discussed the Joint Intelligence Threat Assessment, Mr. President. We wondered then what the ‘big event’ in Santa Fe was supposed to be.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Well, now we know.”
“Are you seriously suggesting the leaders of the Lazarus Movement arranged the deaths of more than two thousand of their own supporters?” Ouray asked. The chief of staff was openly skeptical.
“Deliberately?” Hanson shook his head. “I don’t know. And until we get a better sense of exactly what killed those people, we won’t know. But I am quite sure that the Lazarus Movement was involved in the terrorist attack itself.”
“How so?” Castilla asked.
“Consider the timing, Mr. President,” the CIA director suggested. He began making his points, ticking them off with the precision of a professor presenting a much-loved thesis to a particularly slow freshman class. “One: Who organized a mass demonstration outside the Teller Institute? The Lazarus Movement. Two: Why were the Institute’s security guards outside the building when the counterfeit Secret Service team arrived—and not able to intervene against them? Because they were pinned down by that same protest. Three: Who prevented the real Secret Service agents from entering the building? Those same Lazarus Movement demonstrators. And finally, four: Why couldn’t the Santa Fe police and sheriffs intercept the intruders as they left the Institute? Because they were tied down handling the chaos outside the Institute.”
Almost against his will, Castilla nodded. The case the CIA chief made was not airtight, but it was persuasive.
“Sir, we cannot go public with an unsupported allegation like that against the Lazarus Movement!” Ouray broke in. “It would be political suicide. The press would crucify us for even suggesting it!”
“Charlie’s absolutely right, Mr. President,” Emily Powell-Hill said. The national security adviser shot a quick glare at the head of the CIA before continuing. “Blaming the Movement for this would play straight into the hands of every conspiracy theorist around the world. We can’t afford to give them more ammunition. Not now.”
A gloomy silence fell around the Situation Room conference table.
“One thing is certain,” David Hanson said coldly, breaking the hush. “The Lazarus Movement is already profiting from the public martyrdom of so many of its followers. Around the world, hundreds of thousands of new volunteers have added their names to its e-mail lists. Millions more have made electronic donations to its public bank accounts.”
The CIA chief looked straight at Castilla. “I understand your reluctance to act against the Lazarus Movement without proof of its terrorist activities, Mr. President. I know the politics involved. And I earnestly hope that the FBI probe at the Teller Institute produces the evidence you require. But it is my duty to warn you that delay could have terrible consequences for this nation’s security. With every passing day, this Movement will grow stronger. And with every passing day, our ability to confront it successfully will diminish.”
Lazarus Mobile Command Center
The man called Lazarus sat alone in a small but elegantly furnished compartment. The window shades were pulled down, shutting out any glimpse of the larger world outside. Images flickered across the computer screen set before him, televised images of the carnage outside the Teller Institute.
He nodded to himself, coolly satisfied by what he saw. His plans, so carefully and patiently prepared over the course of several years, were at last coming to fruition. Much of the work, like that involved in selectively pruning the Movement’s former leadership, had been difficult and painful and full of risk. The Horatii, physically powerful, precisely trained in the arts of assassination, and infinitely cruel, had served him well in that effort.
For a moment a trace of sorrow crossed his face. He genuinely regretted the need to eliminate so many men and women he had once admired—people whose only fault had been a reluctance to see the need for sterner measures to accomplish their shared dreams. But then Lazarus shrugged. Personal regrets aside, events were proving the correctness of his vision. In the past twelve months, under his sole leadership, the Movement had accomplished more than in all the prior years of halfhearted conventional activism combined. Restoring the purity of the world required bold, decisive action, not dreary oratory and weak-kneed political protests.
In fact, as the name of the Movement suggested, it meant bringing new life out of death itself.
His computer chimed softly, signaling the arrival of another encrypted report relayed to him from the Center itself. Lazarus read through it in silence. Prime’s death was an inconvenience, but the loss of one of his three Horatii was far outweighed by the results from the attack on the Teller Institute and the resulting slaughter of his own followers. Gulled by the information he had fed them, information that confirmed their own worst fears, officials in the American CIA and FBI and those of other allied intelligence services had trapped themselves in an act of mass murder. What must seem to those poor fools to have been a terrible error was, in fact, intended from the beginning. They were guilty and he would use their guilt against them for his own purposes.
Lazarus smiled coldly. With a single deadly stroke he had made it virtually impossible for the United States, or for any other Western government, to act decisively against the Movement. He had turned their own strength against them—just as would any master of jujitsu. Though his enemies did not yet realize it, he controlled the essential levers of power. Any action they took against the Movement would only strengthen his grip and weaken them in the same moment.
Now it was time to begin the process of setting once-loyal allies at one another’s throats. The world was already suspicious of America’s military and scientific power and of Washington’s motives. With the right prodding and media manipulation, the world would soon believe that America, the sole superpower, was tinkering with the building blocks of creation, creating new weapons on a nanoscale—all in pursuit of its own cruel and selfish aims. The globe would begin to divide between those who sided with Lazarus and those who did not. And governments, pressured by their own people, would increasingly turn against the United States.
The resulting confusion, chaos, and disorder would serve him well. It would buy the time he needed to bring his grand design to completion—a design that would transform the Earth forever.
Chapter
Ten
Night was falling fast across the high desert country around Santa Fe. To the northwest, the highest peaks of the Jemez Mountains shone crimson, lit by the last rays of the setting sun. The lower lands to the east were already immersed in the gathering darkness. Just south of the city itself, tongues of fire still danced eerily amid the twisted and broken ruins of the Teller Institute, flickering orange and red and yellow as the flames fed on broken furniture and supporting beams, spilled chemicals, bomb-mangled equipment, and the bodies of those trapped inside. The rank, acrid smell of smoke hung heavy in the cool evening air.
Several fire engine companies were on the scene, but they were being held outside the area cordoned off by local police and the National Guard. There was no longe
r any real hope of finding any survivors inside the burning building, so no one wanted to risk exposing more men to the runaway nanomachines that had killed so many Lazarus Movement activists.
Jon Smith stood stiffly near the outside edge of the cordon, watching the fires burn out of control. His lean face was haggard and his shoulders were slumped. Like many soldiers, he often experienced a feeling of melancholy in the aftermath of intense action. This time it was worse. He was not accustomed to losing. Between them, he and Frank Diaz must have killed or wounded half of the terrorists who had attacked the Teller Institute, but the bombs they had planted had still gone off. Nor could Smith forget the horror of seeing thousands of people reduced to slime and bone fragments.
The encrypted cell phone in his inner jacket pocket vibrated suddenly. He pulled the phone out and answered. “Smith.”
“I need you to brief me in more detail, Colonel,” Fred Klein said abruptly. “The president is still meeting with his national security team, but I expect another call from him in the not-too-distant future. I’ve already passed your preliminary report to him, but he’ll want more. I need you to tell me exactly what you saw and exactly what you think happened there today.”
Smith closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted. “Understood,” he said dully.
“Were you injured, Jon?” the head of Covert-One asked, sounding concerned. “You didn’t say anything earlier and I assumed—”
Smith shook his head. The abrupt movement set every bruise and torn muscle on fire. “It’s nothing serious,” he said, wincing. “A few cuts and scrapes, that’s all.”
“I see.” Klein paused, plainly doubtful. “I suspect that means you are not actively bleeding at this moment.”
“Really, Fred, I’m all right,” Smith told him, irritated now. “I’m a doctor, remember?”