Covert one 5 the lazar.., p.25
Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta, page 25
this direction in force very soon. I think we’d best break contact while we can. We need to find a place where we can safelv arrange new transport.”
Smith nodded. That made good sense. By now, their enemies were sure to have found the cars they had brought with them from Andrews Air Force Base. Trying to retrieve the two vehicles would only mean walking back into the trap they had just escaped.
He felt the dressing on his left arm, checking to make sure it had not yet soaked all the way through. It was still dry on the outside. He turned back to the Englishman. “Okay, lead on, Peter. I’ll keep an eye on the rear.”
The two men turned and trotted north, fading deeper into the darkened countryside—keeping to the shelter of the trees and tall brush whenever possible. Behind them, the harsh, echoing rattle of gunfire slowly died away.
Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta
Chapter Thirty-One
The first burst of automatic weapons fire outside the farmhouse brought Kit Pierson to her feet in a rush. Drawing her service pistol, a 9mm Smith & Wesson, the FBI agent moved rapidly to the window, peering out through the narrow slit between the drapes. She could not see anything, but the sound of gunfire continued, echoing loudly across the low, rolling hills of the Virginia countryside. Heart pounding, she crouched lower. Whatever was going on had all the hallmarks of a pitched battle being fought close by.
“Trouble, Kit?” she heard Hal Burke say with a nasty edge in his voice.
Pierson glanced over her shoulder at him. Her eyes widened. The square-jawed CIA officer had drawn his own weapon, a Beretta. And he held it aimed right at her.
“What kind of game are you playing, Hal?” she demanded, holding perfectly still—all too aware that, drunk or not, he could not miss at this range. Her mouth felt dry. She could see beads of sweat forming on Burke’s forehead. The muscles around his right eye twitched slightly.
“This is no game,” he snapped back. “As I’m sure you know.” He motioned with the muzzle of the Beretta. “Now I want you to put your weapon down on the floor—but carefully … very carefully. And then I want you to sit back down in your chair. With your hands where I can see them.”
“Take it easy, Hal,” Pierson said softly, trying hard to conceal her fear and her sudden conviction that Burke had lost his grip on reality. “I don’t know what you think I’ve done, but I promise you that—”
Her words were drowned by another burst of shooting from outside the house.
“Do what I say, damn it!” the CIA officer growled. His finger tightened dangerously on the trigger. “Move!”
Feeling ice-cold, Pierson slowly knelt and put her Smith & Wesson down on the floor, butt first.
“Now, kick it toward me—but do it gently!” Burke ordered.
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.
That made Nouria Besseghir a widow—a widow whose French birth entitled her to a modest welfare allowance from the French government. In the eyes of the thieves, pimps, and rogues who essentially ran the affairs of the Cite des Quatre Milk, that small weekly stipend also made her a valuable commodity. Any one of them would be only too glad to offer her his dubious “protection”—at least in return for the chance to plunder her body and her money.
Her lip curled in disgust at the thought. Allah only knew that her dead husband, Hakkim, had been no great prize himself, but even so she
would rather die than be fondled and then robbed by the human parasites she saw lurking all around her. And so Nouria walked quickly whenever and wherever she went outside her tiny apartment, and she always kept her gaze fixed firmly on the ground before her. Both she and her daughter also wore the hijab — the loose-fitting clothing, including head scarf, that marked them as Muslim females of decency and propriety.
“Mama, look!” Tasa exclaimed suddenly, pointing up into the blue sky above them. The little girl’s voice was excited and shrill and piercing. “A big bird! Look at that big bird flying up there! It’s enormous. Is it a condor? Or perhaps a roc? Like one from the stories? Oh, how Papa would have loved to have seen it!”
Annoyed, Nouria shushed her daughter sternly. The very last thing they needed to be right now was conspicuous. Still walking fast, she pulled on Tasa’s wrist, tugging her along the littered pavement. It was too late.
