Covert one 5 the lazar.., p.22
Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta, page 22
“They’re pulling out, boss,” Max’s voice said in her ear.
Randi watched closely while the three men in overalls folded their ladder, shoved it into the back of their van, and drove away. Moments later, two cars, a dark blue BMW and a smaller Ford Escort, pulled onto the darkened avenue and followed the van. “Did you jot down the license plates on those vehicles?” she asked.
“Yeah, I got ‘em,” Max replied. “They were all local numbers.”
“Good, we’ll run them through the computer once we’re finished here. Maybe that’ll give us some idea of which jackasses just kicked us in the teeth,” she said grimly.
Randi lay motionless for a while longer, now focusing her binoculars
on the small gray boxes fixed to a number of lampposts up and down the avenue and on the nearby side streets. The more she studied the boxes, the odder they seemed. They looked very much like containers for a variety of sensors, she decided—complete with several apertures for cameras, intakes for air sampling devices, and short, stubby data relay antennae on top.
Weird, she thought. Very weird. Why would anyone waste money setting up a whole network of expensive scientific instruments in a crime-ridden slum like La Courneuve? The boxes were reasonably unobtrusive, but they weren’t invisible. Once the locals noticed them, their life span and that of the equipment they contained would be measured in minutes at most. So why kill ben-Belbouk just because he was starting to raise a fuss? She shook her head in frustration. Without more of the pieces to this puzzle, nothing she had seen tonight made much sense.
“You know, Max, I think we ought to take a closer look at what those guys were installing,” she told her subordinate. “But we’re going to have to come back with a ladder to do it.”
“Not tonight, we’re not,” the other man warned. “The crazies, druggies, and jihad boys are due out on the streets any minute now, boss lady. We need to git while the gittin’ is good.”
“Yeah,” Randi agreed. She tucked her binoculars away and slithered gracefully backward out from under the charred Renault. Her mind was still working fast. The more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed that killing ben-Belbouk had been the primary aim of the men installing those strange sensor arrays. Maybe his murder was just a piece of unintended collateral damage. Then who were they, she wondered, and what were they really up to?
Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sunday, October 17 Rural Virginia
FBI Deputy Assistant Director Kit Pierson saw the weathered signpost caught in the high beams of her green Volkswagen Passat. HARDSCRABBLE HOLLOW— [A MILE. That was her next landmark. She tapped the brakes, slowing down. She did not want to risk missing the turnoff to Hal Burke’s run-down farm.
The rolling Virginia countryside was covered in almost total darkness. Only the quarter moon cast a faint glow through the solid layer of clouds high overhead. There were a few other farms and homes scattered through these low wooded hills, but it was already past midnight and their inhabitants were long since asleep. With chores and early morning Sunday church services awaiting them, most people in this part of the state went to bed early.
The rutted gravel drive to her CIA counterpart’s weekend retreat appeared just ahead, and she slowed further. Before turning onto it, though,
she glanced again in the rearview mirror. Nothing. There were no other headlights in sight along this desolate stretch of county road. She was still alone.
Partly reassured by that, Pierson turned her Passat onto the track and followed it uphill to the house. The lights were on, spilling out onto the weed-and bramble-choked hillside through partly drawn curtains. Burke was expecting her.
She parked next to his car, an old Mercury Marquis, and walked quickly to the front door. It opened before she could even knock. The stocky, square-jawed CIA officer stood there in his shirtsleeves. He looked weary and rumpled, with shadowed, bloodshot eyes.
Burke took one suspicious look around, making sure that she was by herself, and then stepped back to let her come into the narrow front hall. “Did you have any trouble?” he asked harshly.
Kit Pierson waited for him to close the door before replying. “On my way here? No,” she said coolly. “At my meeting with the director and his senior staff? Yes.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“They weren’t especially pleased to see me in D.C. instead of still out in the field,” she said flatly. “In fact, there were several rather pointed suggestions that my preliminary report was entirely too ‘thin’ to justify coming back in person.”
The CIA officer shrugged. “That was your call, Kit,” he reminded her. “We didn’t need to meet here in person. We could have worked through this problem on the phone if you’d just sat tight.”
“With Smith starting to breathe right down my neck?” she snapped back. “Not likely, Hal.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how much he knows yet, but he’s getting too close. Shutting down the Santa Fe police probe was a mistake. We should have just let the local cops go ahead and try to identify your man’s body.”
Burke shook his head. “Too risky.”
“Our files were scrubbed,” Pierson said stubbornly. “There’s no way
this Dolan character could have been linked to either of us. Or even to the Agency or the Bureau as a whole.”
“Still too risky,” he told her. “Other agencies have their own databases—databases over which we have no control. The Army has its own files, for that matter. Hell, Kit, you’re the one who’s so panicked about Smith and his mysterious employers! You know as well as I do that anyone pegging Dolan as an ex-Special Forces officer would be bound to start asking some goddamned tough questions.”
Burke showed her into his study. The small dark-paneled room was crowded with a desk, a monitor and keyboard, two chairs, several bookcases, a television, and racks full of computer and communications equipment. An open half-empty bottle of Jim Beam whiskey and a shot glass sat on the desk, right next to the computer keyboard. A faint stale whiff of sweat, unwashed dishes, mildew, and general neglect hung in the air.
Pierson wrinkled her nose in distaste. The man was disintegrating under the pressure as TOCSIN collapsed around them, she thought coldly.
“Want a drink?” Burke growled, dropping heavily into the swivel chair in front of his desk. He waved her into the other chair, a battered armchair with lumpy, fraying upholstery.
She shook her head and then sat watching while he poured one for himself. The whiskey sloshed over the rim and left a wet ring on his desk. He ignored the spill, instead downing his drink in one swift gulp. He set the glass down with a thump and looked up at her. “Okay, Kit, why exactly are you here?”
“To persuade you to shut TOCSIN down,” she said without hesitating.
One corner of the CIA officer’s mouth turned down in an irritated frown. “We’ve gone through this before. My answer is still the same.”
“But the situation is not the same, Hal!” Pierson said forcefully. Her lips thinned. “And you know it. The Teller attack was supposed to force President Castilla to act against the Lazarus Movement before it was too late —to act as a relatively bloodless wake-up call. It wasn’t supposed to
make Lazarus stronger. And it certainly wasn’t supposed to trigger a worldwide spree of bombings and murders we can’t stop!”
“Wars always have unintended consequences,” Burke said through clenched teeth. “And we are in a war against the Movement. Maybe you’ve forgotten what’s at stake in this matter.”
She shook her head. “I haven’t forgotten anything. But TOCSIN is only a means to an end —not the end itself. The whole damned operation is unraveling faster than you can stitch it back together. So I say we cut our losses while we still can. Call off your action teams now. Tell them to abort any ongoing missions and drop back into cover. Then, once that’s done, we can plan our next move.”
To buy himself some time before replying, Burke picked up the whiskey bottle and poured another drink. But this time he left the glass untouched. He looked closely at her. “You can’t run from this one, Kit. It’s gone too far for that. Even if we shut TOCSIN down right now and pull in our horns, your little friend Dr. Jonathan Smith is still going to be out there asking questions we do not want answered.”
“I know that,” she said bitterly. “Trying to kill Smith was a mistake. Failing to kill him was a disaster.”
“What’s done is done,” Burke said, shrugging both shoulders. “One of my security units is hunting the colonel. Once they pinpoint him, they’ll nail him.”
Pierson looked at him in exasperation. “Which means you have absolutely no idea where he is right now.”
“He’s gone to ground again,” Burke admitted. “I sent people to the Santa Fe PD after you called to let me know Smith was snooping there, but he disappeared before they arrived.”
“Wonderful.”
“The nosy bastard can’t run far, Kit,” the CIA officer said confidently. “I have agents watching the airport terminals in both Santa Fe and Albuquerque. And I have a contact in Homeland Security running his name through every commercial flight manifest. The moment he surfaces, we’ll
know it. And when he does, our guys will close in.” He smiled thinly. “Trust me on this, okay? For all practical purposes, Smith is nothing but a dead man walking.”
#
Along the county road below, the drivers of the two dark-colored automobiles traveling slowly without any headlights turned off their ignitions and coasted to a stop, pulling off to the side not far from the gravel track heading uphill. Still wearing the U.S. Army-issue AN/PVS 7 night-vision goggles he’d been using to drive without lights, Jon Smith stiffly climbed out of the second car and walked forward to the vehicle in front.
Peter Howell unrolled his window as Smith came up. Below his own set of goggles, the Englishman’s teeth flashed white in the near-total darkness. “Rather an exciting ride, wasn’t it, Jon?”
Smith nodded wryly. “Perfectly delightful.” He rolled his neck and shoulders from side to side, hearing tense muscles and joints crack and pop. The last fifteen minutes of driving had been nerve-racking.
The night-vision equipment was top-of-the-line gear, but even so the images these third-generation goggles produced were not perfect—they were monochromatic, with a slight green tint, and they were a tiny bit grainy. You could drive without lights while wearing them, but it took real effort and serious concentration to avoid drifting off the road or colliding with the vehicle ahead of you.
In contrast, following the government sedan taking Kit Pierson from the FBI’s Hoover Building to her own home in Upper Georgetown had been a piece of cake. Even late on Saturday night, Washington’s streets were packed with cars, trucks, minivans, and taxis. It had been easy enough to hang two or three car lengths back without being noticed.
Neither Jon nor Peter had been surprised when Pierson took off only minutes later, this time using her own car. Both had been sure from the beginning that this sudden briefing for her superiors was only a blind, a way to cover her real reason for flying back so abruptly from New Mex—
ico. But again, the task of following her discreetly was comparatively easy—at least at first. It had only gotten really difficult once she turned off the highway onto a succession of smaller side roads where traffic was sporadic at best. And Kit Pierson was no fool. She would have been bound to grow suspicious if she saw the same two pairs of headlights gleaming in her rearview mirror through mile after mile of darkened, nearly empty countryside.
That was when both Smith and Peter Howell had been forced to slip on their night-vision goggles and switch off their lights. Even so, they had been forced to hang back farther from her Passat than they would have preferred—always hoping they would not miss whichever tumoff or crossroads she finally took to make her rendezvous.
Smith looked up the gravel track. He could just make out a small house on the crest of a low hill. The lights were on, and he could see two cars parked outside. This looked like it could be the place they were hunting.
“What do you think?” he asked Peter quietly.
The Englishman pointed to the U.S. Geological Survey l:20,000-scale map open on the seat beside him. It was part of the set included in the equipment left for them at Andrews Air Force Base. The IR illuminators on their goggles allowed them to read the map. “This little drive doesn’t go anywhere else but that farm up there,” he said. “And I doubt very seriously that our Ms. Pierson plans to take her sedan very far off-road.”
“So what’s the plan?” Smith asked.
“I suggest we back up a quarter-mile or so,” Peter said. “I noticed a small copse of trees there which we can use as cover for the cars. Once we’ve got the rest of our gear on, we can make our way quietly up to that farmhouse on foot.” He showed his teeth again. “I, for one, should very much like to know who Ms. Pierson has chosen to visit so late at night. And what exactly they are discussing.”
Smith nodded grimly. He was suddenly quite sure that some of the answers he needed were locked away in that dimly lit house on the hill.
Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Near Meaux, East of Paris
The ruins of the Chateau de Montceaux, known as the Chateau of the Queens, were hemmed in by the forest of Montceaux—a stretch of woods rising above the southern bank of the undulating River Marne, roughly thirty miles east of Paris. First built in the mid-1500s on the orders of the powerful, cunning, and crafty Queen Catherine de Medici, the wife of one king of France and the mother of three more, the elegant country palace and its vast park and hunting preserve had at last been abandoned around 1650. Now, after centuries of neglect, little remained—only the hollow shell of a grand stone entrance pavilion, the oblong moat, and sections of crumbling wall lined with gaping windows.
Strands of mist curled between the surrounding trees, slowly burning away as the morning sun climbed higher. The bells of the Cathedral of St-Etienne in Meaux, five miles away, rang out, summoning the faithful, few though they were these days, to Sunday Mass. Other bells pealed across
the peaceful countryside as the smaller parish churches in the nearby villages echoed the summons.
Two vans hauling a pair of trailers sat in a large clearing not far from the ruins. Signs emblazoned on the vehicles identified them as part of an organization called the Groupe d’Apergu Meteorologique, the Meteorological Survey Group. Several technicians were busy near the rear of each trailer, erecting two angled launch rails aimed almost due west. Each launch rail included a pneumatic catapult system powered by compressed air. Other men were fussing over a pair of propeller-driven unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, each roughly five feet long, with an eight-foot wingspan.
The tall auburn-haired man who called himself Nones stood close by, watching his team complete their work. Periodic reports from the sentries posted in the woods around the clearing crackled through his radio headset. There were no signs of any unwanted observation by the local farmers.
One of the UAV technicians, a stoop-shouldered Asian man with thinning black hair, rose slowly to his feet. He turned to the third of the Horatii with a relieved expression on his lined and weary face. “The payloads are secure. All engine, avionics, UHF, and autonomous control systems have been tested and are online. All global positioning navigation way-points have been configured and confirmed. Both craft are ready for flight.”
“Good,” Nones replied. “Then you may prepare for launch.”
He stepped back out of the way as the technicians carefully lifted the UAVs, which weighed roughly one hundred pounds apiece, and carried them over to the twin launch rails. His bright green eyes followed them appreciatively. These two unmanned aircraft were modeled on drones used by the U.S. Army for short-range tactical reconnaissance, communications jamming, and airborne nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons detection. Now he and his men would pioneer an entirely new use for these robotic fliers.
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.
