Robert Ludlum's the Lazarus Vendetta

by Robert Ludlum

  Smith made his way over to where a man wearing a black hard hat was bent over one of the salvaged dining tables, studying a set of blueprints. The tag on the agent’s protective suit read LATIMER, C.

  The agent looked up at his approach. “Who are you?” he asked. The protective hood muffled his voice.

  “Dr. Jonathan Smith. I’m with the Pentagon.” Smith lightly tapped his blue hard hat for emphasis. Blue was the color assigned to observers and outside consultants. “I have a watching brief—with orders to provide whatever help I can.”

  “Special Agent Charles Latimer,” the other man introduced himself. He was slender, fair-haired, and had a strong Southern accent. He was openly curious now. “Just what kind of help can you offer us, Doctor?”

  “I have a decent working knowledge of nanotechnology,” Smith said carefully. “And I know the layout of the labs pretty well. I was stationed here on a temporary assignment when the terrorists hit this place.”

  Latimer stared hard at him. “That makes you a witness, Doctor—not an observer.”

  “Last night and earlier this morning I was a witness,” Smith said with a wry grin. “Since then I’ve been promoted to independent consultant.” He shrugged. “I know that’s not exactly by the book.”

  “No, it’s not,” the FBI agent agreed. “Look, have you cleared this with my boss?”

  “I’m sure all the necessary authorizations and clearances are somewhere on Deputy Assistant Director Pierson’s desk right now,” Smith said mildly. The last thing he wanted to do was start out by barging in at the top of the FBI’s chain of command. He had not met Kit Pierson before, but he strongly suspected she was not going to be pleased to find someone outside her control hovering around her investigation.

  “Meaning, no, you haven’t talked this over with her,” Latimer said. He shook his head in disbelief. Then he shrugged. “Swell. Well, nothing else in this screwy place is running by the book.”

  “It’s a tough site to work in,” Smith agreed.

  “Now there’s an understatement,” said the FBI agent with a lopsided smile of his own. “Trying to hunt through all this bomb and fire damage is hard enough. Having to shield ourselves against these nanophages, or whatever they are, makes the job almost impossible.”

  He pointed to the protective clothing they both wore. “Between the limited oxygen supply and avoiding heat prostration, we only get three hours of wear out of these moon suits. And we have to waste a whole half hour of that in decontamination. So our work is moving at a crawl, right at a time when Washington is screaming for fast results. Plus, we face a classic catch-22 on every piece of evidence we gather.”

  Smith nodded sympathetically. “Let me guess: You can’t take anything out of the building for lab analysis until it’s been decontaminated. And if you decontaminate it, there’s probably nothing left to analyze.”

  “Peachy, isn’t it?” Latimer said acidly.

  “The risk of contamination may not be that high,” Smith pointed out. “Most nanodevices are designed for very specific environments. They should start to break down fairly rapidly after being exposed to atmosphere, pressure, or temperature conditions outside their parameters. We might be perfectly safe right now.”

  “Sounds like a nice theory, Doctor,” the FBI agent said. “You volunteering to be the first one to take a good deep breath in here?”

  Smith grinned. “I’m a medical man, not a lab rat. But ask me again in about twenty-four hours and I just might try it.”

  He looked down at the set of blueprints the other man had been inspecting. They showed the layout of the Institute’s first and second floors. Red circles of varying sizes dotted the blueprints. Most were clustered in and around the nanotech lab suites in the North Wing, but others were scattered throughout the building. “Bomb detonation points?” he asked the other man.

  Latimer nodded. “Those we’ve identified so far.”

  Smith examined the blueprints carefully. What he saw there confirmed his earlier impressions of the remarkable precision used by the terrorists in making their attack. Several explosive charges had completely smashed the security office, wiping out all the archived images from the external and internal security cameras. Another bomb had disabled the fire suppression system. Other demolition charges had been set in the computer center—destroying everything from personnel files to the records of equipment and materials deliveries made to scientists working at the Institute.

  At first glance, the bombs placed inside the nanotech labs seemed to show the same determination to inflict maximum damage. Concentric circles covered the floor plans for the Nomura and Institute complexes. He nodded to himself. Those charges were clearly set to obliterate every single piece of major equipment in both labs, all the way from the biochemical vats in their inner cores to their desktop computers. But something about the detonation patterns he observed in the Harcourt lab bothered him.

  Smith bent forward over the table. So what was wrong? He traced the array of circles with one gloved forefinger. The explosives rigged around the lab’s inner core were far less likely to have caused as much damage. They seemed set to blow holes in the containment around the Harcourt nanophage-manufacturing tanks—not to completely destroy the tanks themselves. Was that an error? he wondered. Or was it deliberate?

  He glanced up to ask Latimer whether he had noticed the same pattern. But the FBI agent was looking away, listening closely to someone talking over his radio headset.

  “Understood,” Latimer said crisply into his mike. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll make sure he gets the message and complies. Out.” The fair-haired man turned back to Smith. “That was Pierson. It seems your paperwork finally caught her attention. She wants to see you at the primary command center outside.”

  “As in immediately?” Smith guessed.

  Latimer nodded. “Even sooner than that, if possible,” he said with a twisted smile. “And I’d be lying if I said you were going to get a warm welcome.”

  “How truly wonderful,” Jon said drily.

  The FBI agent shrugged his shoulders. “Just watch your step when you talk to her, Dr. Smith. The Winter Queen is damned good at her job, but she’s not exactly what you might call a people person. If she thinks you’re going to screw up this investigation in any way, she’s liable to find a hole somewhere and drop you into it for the duration. Oh, she might call it ‘preventive detention’ or ‘protective custody,’ but it still won’t be real comfortable … or very easy to get out of.”

  Smith studied Latimer’s face, sure that he must be exaggerating for effect. To his dismay, the other man seemed perfectly serious.

  The safe house sat high on the crest of a rise overlooking the southern reaches of Santa Fe. From the outside, it appeared to be a classic Pueblo-style adobe built around a shaded courtyard. Inside, the decor and furnishings were absolutely modern, a study in gleaming chrome, blacks, and whites. Small satellite dishes were mounted discreetly in one corner of the building’s flat roof.

  Several of the home’s west-facing windows had a direct line of sight to the Teller Institute, about two miles away. The rooms behind these windows were now filled with an array of radio and microwave receivers, video and still cameras fitted with powerful telephoto, infrared (IR), and thermal-imaging lenses, a bank of networked computers, and secure satellite communications gear.

  A six-man surveillance team ran all this equipment, monitoring the comings and goings inside the cordoned-off area outside the Institute. One of them, young and olive-skinned with sad brown eyes, sat perched on a chair at one of the computer workstations, humming tunelessly while listening to a pair of headphones plugged into the various receivers.

  Suddenly the young man sat up straighter. “I have a signal tone,” he reported calmly while simultaneously entering a series of commands on his keyboard. The monitor in front of him lit up and began filling with scrolling data—a complex and bewildering montage of numbers, graphs, scanned photographs, and text.

 
; His team leader, much older, with short-cropped white hair, studied the monitor for several seconds. He nodded in satisfaction. “Excellent work, Vitor.” He turned to one of his other men. “Contact Terce. Inform him that Field Two appears complete and that we now have access to all of the investigative data being gathered. Report also that we are relaying this information to the Center.”

  Sweating inside his protective suit now, Jon Smith submitted himself to the rigorous decontamination procedures required for anyone leaving the cordoned-off area around the Institute. Doing so meant entering one end of a chain of connected trailers and moving through a series of high-pressure chemical showers, electrically charged aerosol sprays, and high-powered vacuum suction systems. The equipment, borrowed from Air Force and Homeland Security WMD defense units, was designed to treat nuclear, chemical, and biological contamination. No one was really sure that it would neutralize the nanomachines that everyone now feared. But it was the best system anyone had been able to come up with in the limited time available. And since no one had died yet, Smith was willing to bet that either the decon procedures worked—or there were no active nanomachines left inside the cordon.

  If nothing else, the painstaking process gave him plenty of time to think about what he had seen inside the Teller Institute. And that, in turn, gave him time to formulate a very ugly hypothesis about what had happened—one that might just knock the stuffing out of a lot of the pet theories floating around inside the FBI and the CIA.

  Finished at last, Smith stripped off the heavy gear, dumped it in a sealed hazardous materials bin, and put his own clothes back on. He retrieved his shoulder holster and SIG-Sauer pistol from the worried-looking National Guard corporal manning a final checkpoint and stepped outside.

  It was the middle of the afternoon. The wind was kicking up a bit, blowing down out of the forested mountains to the east. Jon took a deep breath of the pine-scented air, clearing the last lingering reek of harsh chemicals out of his nose and lungs.

  A trim, efficient-looking young man in a conservatively cut charcoal-gray suit came straight up to him. He had the wooden, expressionless demeanor so prized by recent FBI Academy graduates. “Dr. Smith?”

  Jon nodded pleasantly. “That’s right.”

  “Deputy Assistant Director Pierson is waiting for you at the command center,” the young man said. “I’ll be happy to escort you there.”

  Smith hid a wry grin. Clearly, the woman he had heard called the Winter Queen had decided not to take any chances with him. He was not going to be allowed to bunk off without hearing what the FBI thought of having another government agency, the Pentagon in his case, meddling in its patch.

  Remembering Fred Klein’s admonition to act discreetly, he followed the other man without kicking up a fuss. They crossed through a growing assembly of trailers and large tents. Power and fiber-optic cables connected the temporary working quarters. Satellite dishes and microwave relays were set up around the outside. Portable generators hummed close by, supplying auxiliary and backup power.

  Smith was impressed despite himself. This command center was nearly as big as some of the divisional HQs he had seen in Desert Storm and running a lot more smoothly. Kit Pierson might not score high marks in the warmth and charm department, but she obviously knew how to organize an efficient operation.

  She had her own work area in a small tent near the outer rim. It was sparsely furnished with a table and a single chair, power for her personal laptop, a secure phone, an electric lantern, and a folding cot.

  Smith hastily suppressed his surprise when he registered that last item. Was she really serious?

  “Yes, Dr. Smith,” said Pierson drily, noticing the almost imperceptible flicker of his eyes. “I do plan to sleep here.” A thin, humorless smile crossed a pale face that he might have found appealing if it had a bit more life in it. “It may be Spartan, but it is also absolutely inaccessible to the press—which I count as a blessing of the first magnitude.”

  She spoke over his shoulder to the young agent hovering near the open tent flap. “That will be all, Agent Nash. Lieutenant Colonel Smith and I will have our little chat in private.”

  Here we go, Jon realized, noting her deliberate shift to his military rank. He decided to try preempting her objections to his presence at the site. “First of all, I want you to know that I’m not here to horn in on your investigation.”

  “Really?” Pierson asked. Her gray eyes were ice-cold. “That seems unlikely … unless you’re here as some kind of a military tourist. In which case your presence is equally unwelcome.”

  So much for the pleasantries, Smith thought, gritting his teeth. This sounded like it was going to be more a duel than a discussion. “You’ve read my orders, and my clearances, ma’am. I’m here simply to observe and assist.”

  “With all due respect, I don’t need help from the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Army Intelligence—or whoever really issued your orders,” Pierson told him bluntly. “Frankly, I can’t think of anyone more likely to cause trouble I do not need.”

  Smith reined in his temper, but only by the narrowest of margins. “Really? In what way?”

  “Just by existing,” she said. “Maybe you’ve missed it, but the Internet and the tabloids are crammed full of rumors that Teller was the center of a secret military program to create nanotech-based weapons.”

  “And those rumors are crap,” Smith said forcefully.

  “Are they?”

  Smith nodded. “I saw all the research here myself. No one at Teller was working on anything that could possibly have had any immediate military application.”

  “Your presence at the Institute is precisely my problem, Colonel Smith,” Pierson said coldly. “How do you propose that we explain your assignment to monitor these nanotech projects?”

  Smith shrugged. “Easy. I’m a doctor and a molecular biologist. My interests here in New Mexico were purely medical and scientific.”

  “Purely medical and scientific? Don’t forget that I’ve read both your witness statement and your Bureau file,” she shot back. “For a doctor, you certainly know how to kill easily and efficiently. Weapons training and unarmed combat skills are a little out of the usual medical school curriculum, aren’t they?”

  Smith kept his mouth shut, wondering just how much Kit Pierson really knew about his career. Everything he had ever done for Covert-One was buried beyond her reach, but his Army Intelligence work would have left some traces she could sniff out. So had the part he had played in resolving the Hades Factor crisis.

  “More to the point,” she continued, “maybe one out of every three people in this country will be bright enough to understand your medical connection. Everybody else, especially the crazies, will only see that nice little Army uniform jacket you keep in the closet—the one with the silver oak leaves on its shoulder straps.”

  Pierson tapped him on the chest with one long finger. “And that, Colonel Smith, is why I don’t want you anywhere near this investigation. If just one nosy reporter zeroes in on you, we’re going to have real trouble on our hands. This case is tricky enough,” she said. “I don’t intend to provoke another Lazarus riot on top of everything else.”

  “Neither do I,” Smith assured her. “Which is why I plan to keep a low profile.” He indicated his civilian clothes, a lightweight gray windbreaker, green Polo shirt, and khakis. “While I’m here, I’m just plain Dr. Smith … and I don’t talk to journalists. Not ever.”

  “That’s not good enough,” she replied adamantly.

  “It will have to be,” Jon told her quietly. He would bend a bit to placate Kit Pierson’s natural irritation at finding an outsider poaching in her province, but he would not shirk his duty. “Look,” he said. “If you want to complain to Washington, that’s fine. In the meantime, though, you’re stuck with me … so why not take me up on my offer to help?”

  Her eyes narrowed dangerously. For a second Smith wondered whether he was heading for that “preventive detention” hole Agent Lat
imer had warned him about. Then she shrugged. The gesture was so slight that he almost missed it. “All right, Dr. Smith,” she said coolly. “We’ll play this your way, for the moment. But the instant I get permission to sling you out of here, off you go.”

  He nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “Then, if that’s all, I’m sure you can find your own way out,” she suggested, pointedly checking her watch. “I have work to do.”

  Smith decided to push her just a bit further. “I need to ask just a couple of questions first.”

  “If you must,” Pierson said levelly.

  “What do your people think about the odd way the demolition charges were set inside the Harcourt lab?” he asked.

  She raised a single perfect eyebrow. “Go on.” She listened carefully to his conjecture that the bombs there were only intended to breach the lab’s containment—not to wreck it completely. When he finished, she shook her head in icy amusement. “So you’re an explosives expert, too, Doctor?”

  “I’ve seen them used,” he admitted. “But no, I’m not an expert.”

  “Well, let’s assume your hunch is correct,” Pierson said. “You’re suggesting the slaughter outside was deliberate—that the terrorists planned all along to release these Harcourt nanophages on anyone in reach. Which means the Lazarus Movement came here intending to make its own martyrs.”

  “Not quite,” Smith corrected her. “I’m suggesting the people who pulled this off wanted to make it seem that way.” He shook his head. “But I’ve been thinking hard about this, and there’s no way that the nanodevices Brinker and Parikh created were responsible for what happened. No way at all. It’s completely impossible.”

  Pierson’s face froze. “You’ll have to explain that to me,” she said stiffly. “Impossible, how?”

  “Each Harcourt nanophage carried biochemical substances intended to eliminate specific cancerous cells, not to break down all living tissues,” Smith said. “Plus, each individual phage was infinitesimally small. It would take millions of them, maybe tens of millions, to inflict the kind of damage I saw on any single human being. Multiply that by the number of people killed, and you’re talking about billions of nanophages, possibly even tens of billions. That’s far beyond the number the Harcourt folks could possibly have manufactured with their equipment. Don’t forget, they were focused entirely on the design, engineering, and testing of what they hoped would be a medical miracle. They were not set up for mass production.”