Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (13 page)

The CIA officer nodded, staring up at the bigger man. Which one of the
strange trio who called themselves the Horatii was this? he wondered uneasily. The three big men were not brothers by
birth. Instead, their identical appearance, enormous strength and agility, and
wide range of skills were said to be the result of years of painstaking
surgery, elaborate physical conditioning, and intensive training. Burke had
selected them as section leaders for TOCSIN at their creator's urging but could
not entirely suppress a feeling of mingled fear and awe whenever he saw one of
the Horatii. Nor could he tell them apart.

“I had every reason to hurry, Prime,” he replied, guessing at
last.

The green-eyed man shook his head. “I am Terce. Unfortunately, Prime is
dead.”

“Dead? How?”
Burke asked sharply.

“He was killed in the operation,” Terce told him calmly. He
stepped aside, ushering Burke into the chalet. Carpeted stairs led up to the
second floor. A long stone-flagged hall paneled in dark pine led deeper into
the house. Bright light spilled out through an open door at the back. “In
fact, you have arrived just in time to help us decide a small matter connected
with Prime's death.”

The CIA officer followed the big man through the open door and into a large
glass-enclosed porch running the width of the house. The gently sloping
concrete floor, a metal drain in the middle, and the racks on the

walls told him this room was normally used as a
storage and drying room for snow-encrusted outdoor gear—heavy boots,
cross-country skis, and snowshoes. Now, though, the chalet's new owners were
using it as a holding cell.

A small stoop-shouldered man with olive skin and a neatly trimmed mustache
perched uneasily on a stool set squarely in the middle of the room —right above
the drain. He was gagged and his hands were tied behind him. His feet were
bound to the legs of the stool. Above the gag, a pair of dark
brown eyes were wide open, staring frantically at the two men who had
just entered.

Burke turned his head toward Terce. He raised a single eyebrow in an
unspoken question.

“Our friend there, Antonio, was the assault team's backup driver,”
the bigger man said quietly. “Unfortunately, he panicked during the
extraction phase. He abandoned Prime.”

“Then you were forced to eliminate Prime?” Burke asked. “To prevent his capture?”

“Not quite. Prime was . . . consumed,” Terce told him. He
shook his head grimly. “You should have warned us about the plague our
bombs would release, Mr. Burke. I earnestly hope your failure to do so was only
an oversight—and not intentional.”

The CIA officer frowned, hearing the implicit threat in the other man's
voice. “No one knew how dangerous those damned nanomachines really
were!” he said quickly. “Nothing in the classified reports I studied
from Harcourt, Nomura, or the Institute suggested anything like that could
happen!”

Terce studied him for a few moments. Then he nodded. “Very
well. I accept your assurances. For now.”
The second of the Horatii shrugged. “But the mission has backfired.
The Lazarus Movement will be stronger now, not weaker. Given that, do you wish
to proceed further? Or should we fold our tents and steal
away while there is still time?”

Burke scowled. He was in too far to back out now. If anything, it was more
imperative than ever to arrange the destruction of the Movement. He shook his
head decisively. “We keep going. Is your team ready to activate the cover
plan?”

“We are.”

“Good,” the CIA officer said flatly. “Then we still have a
fighting chance to pin what happened at the Institute on Lazarus. Trigger the
cover—tonight.”

“It will be done,” Terce agreed quietly. He indicated the bound
man. “In the meantime, we need to resolve this disciplinary problem. What
do you suggest we do with Antonio here?”

Burke eyed him closely. “Isn't the answer obvious?” he said.
“If this man broke once under pressure, the odds are that he will break
again. We can't afford that. TOCSIN is already risky enough. Just finish him
and dump the body where it won't be found for a few weeks.”

The driver moaned softly behind his gag. His shoulders slumped.

Terce nodded. “Your reasoning is impeccable, Mr. Burke.” His green
eyes were amused. “But since it is your reasoning and your verdict,
I think you should carry out the sentence yourself.” He offered the CIA
officer a long-bladed fighting knife, pommel first.

This was a test, Burke realized angrily. The big man wanted to see how far
he would go in binding himself to the dirty work he ordered. Well, riding herd
on a group of black ops mercenaries was never easy, and he had killed men
before to prove himself on other operations —murders he had carefully concealed
from his deskbound superiors. Hiding his distaste, the CIA officer shrugged out
of his jacket and hung it over one of the ski clamps. Then he rolled up his
shirtsleeves and took the dagger.

Without pausing for further reflection, Burke stepped behind the stool,
yanked the bound driver's head back, and drew the blade of the fighting knife
hard across his throat. Blood sprayed through the air, scarlet under the bright
bulb of the overhead light.

The dying man thrashed wildly, kicking and tugging at the ropes holding him
down. He toppled over, still tied to the stool, and lay twitching, bleeding his
life away onto the concrete floor.

Burke turned back to Terce. “Satisfied?” he snapped. “Or do
you want me to dig his grave, too?”

“That will not be necessary,” the other man said calmly. He nodded
toward a large roll of canvas in the far corner of the porch. “We already
have a grave for poor Joachim over there. Antonio can share it with him.”

The CIA officer suddenly realized he was looking at another corpse, this one
rolled up in a tarp.

“Joachim was wounded while retreating from the Institute,” Terce
explained. “He was hit in the shoulder and leg. His injuries were not
immediately life-threatening, but they would soon have required significant
medical attention. I did what was necessary.”

Burke nodded slowly, understanding. The tall green-eyed man and his comrades
would not risk their own security by seeking medical treatment for anyone hurt
too badly to keep up. The TOCSIN action team would kill anyone who threatened
its mission, even its own members.

Thursday, October 14 The White House

It was after midnight and the heavy red-and-yellow Navajo drapes were drawn
tight, sealing off the Oval Office from any prying eyes. No one outside the
White House West Wing needed to know that the president of the United States
was still hard at work—or with whom he was meeting.

Sam Castilla sat at his big pine table in his shirtsleeves, steadily reading
through a sheaf of hastily drafted emergency executive orders. The heavy brass
reading lamp on one corner of his desk cast a circular pool of light across his
paperwork. From time to time, he jotted rough notes in the margin or crossed
out a poorly worded phrase.

At last, with a quick stroke of his pen, he slashed his signature across me
bottom of the several different marked-up orders. He could sign clean copies
for the national archives later. Right now the important thing was to get the
ponderous wheels of government turning somewhat faster. He glanced up.

Charles Ouray, his chief of staff, and Emily Powell-Hill, his national
security adviser, sat slumped in the two big leather chairs drawn up in front
of his desk. They looked weary, worn down by long hours spent shuttling back
and forth between the White House complex and the various cabinet offices to
get those orders ready for his signature. Trying to broker agreements among
half-a-dozen different executive branch departments, each with its own
competing views and pet agendas, was never easy.

“Is there anything else I need to know now?” Castilla asked them.

Ouray spoke up first. “We're getting our first look at the morning
papers from Europe, Mr. President.” His
mouth turned down.

“Let me guess,” Castilla said sourly. “We're getting
hammered?”

Emily Powell-Hill nodded. Her eyes were worried. “By
most of the major dailies in every European nation —France,
Germany, Italy, the UK,
Spain,
and all the others. The general consensus seems to be that no matter
what went wrong inside the Teller Institute, the carnage outside is
largely our responsibility.”

“On what grounds?” the president asked.

“There's a lot of wild speculation about some kind of secret nanotech
weapons program gone awry,” Ouray told him quietly. “The European
press is playing that angle hard, with all the sensational claims front and
center and our official denials buried way down near the end.”

Castilla grimaced. “What are they doing? Running Lazarus Movement press
releases verbatim?”

“For all practical purposes,” Powell-Hill said bluntly. She
shrugged. “Their story has all the plot elements Europeans love: a big,
bad, secretive, and blundering America
running roughshod over a peaceful, plucky, Mother Earth-loving band of
truth-telling activists. And, as you can imagine, every foreign policy mistake
we've made over the past fifty years is being raked up all over again.”

“What's the political fallout likely to be?” the president asked
her.

“Not good,” she told him. "Of course, some of our 'friends'
in Paris and Berlin are always looking for a chance to
stick it to us. But even our

real European friends and allies will have to play
this one very carefully. Siding with the world's sole superpower is never very
popular and a lot of those governments are shaky right now. It wouldn't take
much of a swing in public opinion to bring them down."

Ouray nodded. “Emily's right, Mr. President.
I've talked to the folks over at the State Department. They're getting very
worried back-channel questions from Europe,
and from the Japanese, too. Our friends want some firm assurances that these
stories are false—and just as important, that we can prove that they're
false.”

“Proving a negative?” Castilla shook his head in frustration.
“That's not an easy thing to do.”

“No, sir,” Emily Powell-Hill agreed. “But we're going to have
to do our best. Either that, or watch our alliances begin crumbling, and see Europe pull even further away from us.”

■

For several minutes after his two closest advisers left, Castilla sat behind
his desk mulling over different ways to reassure European public and elite
opinion. His face darkened. Unfortunately, his options were very limited. No
matter how many of its federal labs and military bases the U.S. opened to
public inspection, it could never hope to completely calm the tempest of
Internet-fed hysteria. Crackpot rumors, damning exaggerations, doctored photos,
and outright lies could circle the globe with the speed of light, far outpacing
the truth.

He looked up at the sound of a light tap on his open door. “Yes?”

His executive secretary poked her head in. “The Secret Service just
called, Mr. President. Mr. Nomura has arrived. They're bringing him in
now.”

“Discreetly, I hope, Estelle,” Castilla reminded her.

The faint trace of a smile crossed her normally prim and proper face.
“They're coming through the kitchens, sir. I trust that is discreet
enough.”

Castilla chuckled. "Should be. Well, let's
just hope none of the night-

shift press corps folks are foraging there for a
midnight snack." He stood up, straightened his tie, and pulled on his suit
coat. Being ushered into the White House past the kitchen trash cans was a far
cry from the impressive ceremony that usually accompanied a visit to the
American president, so the least he could do was greet Hideo Nomura with as
much formality as possible.

His secretary, Mrs. Pike, opened the door for the head of Nomura PharmaTech
just a minute or two later. Castilla advanced to meet him, smiling broadly. The
two men exchanged quick, polite bows in the Japanese manner and then shook
hands.

The president showed his guest to the big leather couch set squarely in the
middle of the room. “I'm very grateful you could come at such short
notice, Hideo. You flew in from Europe this
evening, I hear?”

Nomura smiled back civilly. “It was no great trouble, Mr. President. The benefits of owning a fast corporate jet. In fact, it is
I who should express my thanks. If your staff had not contacted me, I would be
the one begging for a meeting.”

“Because of the catastrophe out at the Teller
Institute?”

The younger Japanese man nodded. His black eyes flashed. “My company
will not soon forget this cruel act of terrorism.”

Castilla understood his anger. The Nomura PharmaTech Lab inside the
Institute had been completely destroyed and the immediate financial loss to the
Tokyo-based multinational company was staggering, close to $100 million. That
didn't include the cost to replicate the years of research wiped out along with
the lab, and the human cost was even higher. Fifteen of the eighteen highly
skilled scientists and technicians working in the Nomura section were missing
and presumed dead.

“We're going to find and punish those responsible for this
attack,” Castilla promised the other man. “I've ordered our national
law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to make it their top priority.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. President,” Nomura said quietly. “And
I am here to offer what little help I can.” The Japanese industrialist
shrugged. "Not

in the hunt for the terrorists, of course. My
company lacks the necessary expertise. But we can provide other assistance that
might prove useful."

Castilla raised a single eyebrow. “Oh?”

“As you know, my company maintains a rather substantial medical
emergency response force,” Nomura reminded him. “I can have aircraft
en route to New Mexico
in a matter of hours.”