Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (23 page)

“Then who — ”

Peter Howell's return cut short her question. “They've done a
bunk,” he said irritably. His gaze fell on the shaven-headed man Smith had
shot. He nodded in satisfaction. “But at least they had to leave this one
behind.”

He knelt down and rolled the body over. Then he shook his head. “Poor
fellow's deader than Judas Iscariot,” Peter announced coolly. “You
hit him twice. Fairly good marksmanship for a simple country doctor, I'd
say.”

He rummaged through the dead man's pockets, looking for a wallet or papers
that might help identify him.

“Anything?” Smith asked.

Peter shook his head. “Not so much as a matchbook.” He looked up
at the American. “Whoever hired this poor sod made sure he was clean
before sending him off to kill you.”

Jon nodded. The would-be assassin had been stripped of anything that could
link him to those who had issued his orders. “That's too bad,” he
said, frowning.

“It is a pity when the opposition thinks ahead,” Peter agreed.
“But all is not yet lost.”

The former SAS officer pulled a small camera out of one of his coat pockets
and snapped several close-up photos of the dead man's face. He was using
super-high-speed film, so there was no flash. Then he tucked the camera away
and tugged out another small gadget—this one about the size of a paperback
book. It had a flat clear screen and several control buttons on the side. He
noticed Smith staring at it in fascination.

“It's a digital fingerprint scanner,” Peter explained. “Does the trick with nice clean electrons, instead of all that
messy old ink.” His teeth gleamed white in the darkness.
“Whatever will the boffins dream up next, eh?”

Working quickly, he pressed the dead man's hands to the surface of the
scanner, first the right and then the left. It flashed, hummed, and whirred
—storing the images of all ten fingerprints in its memory card.

“Collecting mementos for your old age, are you?” Smith asked
pointedly, knowing full well that his friend must be working for London again. Ostensibly
retired, Peter was periodically pressed back into service, usually by MI6, the
British secret intelligence service. He was a maverick who preferred working
alone, a throwback to the eccentric, sometimes piratical, English adventurers
who had long ago helped build an empire.

Peter only smiled.

“I don't mean to rush you,” Smith said. “But shouldn't we be
making tracks ourselves? Unless you really want to try explaining
all this to the Santa Fe
police, that is.” He waved a hand at the body on the ground and the
bullet-pocked trees.

The Englishman eyed him carefully. “Curious thing, that,” he said,
rising to his feet. He tapped the tiny radio receiver in his ear. “This is
set to the police frequency. And I can tell you that the local constabulary has
been very busy over these past several minutes—responding to emergency calls in
all directions . . . and always on the very farthest outskirts of the city. The
nearest patrol car is still at least ten minutes away.”

Smith shook his head in disbelief. “Good grief! These people don't mess
around, do they?”

“No, Jon,” Peter said quietly. “They do not. Which is why I strongly suggest you find a new place to stay
tonight. Somewhere discreet and unobserved.”

“Oh, my God,” said a small voice from behind them.

Both men turned. Heather Donovan was standing there, staring down in horror
at the dead man at their feet.

“Do you know him?” Smith asked gently.

She nodded unwillingly. “Not personally. I don't even know his name.
But I've seen him around the Movement camp and at the rally.”

“And in the Lazarus command tent,” Peter said sternly. “As you well know.”

The slender woman blushed. “Yes,” she admitted. “He was part
of a band of activists our top organizers brought in . . . for what they said
were 'special tasks.'”

“Like cutting through the Teller Institute's fence when the rally
turned ugly,” Peter reminded her.

“Yes, that's true.” Her shoulders slumped. “But I never
imagined they were carrying guns. Or that they would try to kill anyone.”
She looked at them with eyes that were haunted and full of shame. “Nothing
was supposed to happen this way!”

“I rather suspect there are a number of things about the Lazarus
Movement you never imagined, Ms. Donovan,” the gray-haired Englishman told
her. “And I think you've had a very narrow and very lucky escape.”

“She can't go back to the Movement camp, Peter,” Smith realized.
“It would be too dangerous.”

“Perhaps it might,” the older man agreed. “Our gun-toting
friends have run off for now, but there may well be others who would not be
happy to see Ms. Donovan looking so hale and hearty.”

Her face whitened.

“Do you have somewhere you can stay out of sight for a while, with
family or friends? With people who aren't in the Lazarus
Movement?” Smith asked. “Preferably
somewhere far away?”

She nodded slowly. “I have an aunt in Baltimore.”

“Good,” said Smith. “I think you should fly out there
straightaway. Tonight, if possible.”

“Leave this to me, Jon,” Peter told him. “Your face and name
are rather too well known to these people now. If you arrive at the airport
with Ms. Donovan, you might as well paint a target on her back.”

Smith nodded.

“You were at the rally, too!” she suddenly said, looking more closely
at Peter Howell's face. “But you said your name was Malachi. Malachi MacNamara!”

He nodded with a slight smile creasing his deeply lined face. “A nom de guerre, Ms. Donovan. A regrettable deception, perhaps, but a necessary one.”

“Then who are you people really?” she asked. She looked from the
lean, weather-beaten Englishman to Smith and then back again. “CIA? FBI? Someone
else?”

“Ask us no more questions and we'll tell you no more lies,” Peter
said. His pale blue eyes twinkled. “But we are your friends. Of
that you may be sure.” His expression darkened. “Which
is far more than I can say for some of your former comrades in the Movement.”

Saturday, October 16

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Shortly after midnight, Director of Central Intelligence David Hanson walked
briskly into his gray-carpeted seventh-floor office suite. Despite the rigors
of what had become an eighteen-hour workday, he was still immaculately dressed
in a well-tailored suit, with a crisp, clean shirt and a perfectly knotted bow
tie. He turned his careful gaze on the rumpled, tired-looking man waiting for
him.

“We need to talk, Hal,” he said tightly. “Privately.”

Hal Burke, head of the CIA's Lazarus Movement task force, nodded. “Yes,
we do.”

The CIA director led the way into his inner office and tossed his briefcase
onto one of the two comfortably upholstered chairs in front of his desk. He
waved Burke into the other. Then Hanson folded his hands together and rested
his elbows on the bare surface of his large desk. He studied his subordinate
over the tips of his fingers. "I've just come from the

White House. As you can imagine, the president is
not especially happy with us or with the FBI right now."

“We warned him about what would happen if the Lazarus Movement ran
wild,” Burke said bluntly. “The Teller Institute, the Telos lab out
in California, and this bomb blast in Chicago were just the
opening rounds. We've got to stop pussyfooting around. We have to hit the
Movement hard now, before it digs in any deeper. Some of its mid-level
activists are still out in the open. If we can haul those people in and break
them open, we still have a shot at penetrating to the inner core. That's our
best hope for pulling Lazarus apart from the inside out.”

“I've made that point very strongly,” Hanson told him. “And
I'm not the only one. Castilla is getting an earful from senior Senate and
House leaders—from both parties.”

Burke nodded. The word inside the CIA was that Hanson had been making the
rounds on Capitol Hill for most of the day, privately meeting with the heads of
the Senate and House intelligence committees and with the majority and minority
leaders in both chambers. As a result, his powerful congressional allies were
demanding that President Castilla officially designate the Lazarus Movement as
a terrorist organization. Once that happened, the gloves could come off and
federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies would be free to act
forcefully against the Movement—going after its leaders, bank accounts, and
public communications channels.

By making an end run around the president to Congress, however, Hanson was
playing with fire. CIA directors were not supposed to use politics to
manipulate the policies of the president they served. But Hanson had always
been willing to take chances when the stakes were high, and he obviously
thought his support in the House and Senate was strong enough to protect him
from Castilla's anger.

“Any luck?” Burke asked.

Hanson shook his head. “Not so far.”

Burke scowled. “Why the hell not?”

“Ever since the Teller Massacre, Lazarus and his
followers have been riding a huge wave of public sympathy and support.
Especially in Europe and Asia,” the CIA
director reminded him. He shrugged. “These latest acts of violence might
dent that a bit, but too many people are going to buy the Lazarus line that the
Telos and Chicago attacks were faked to discredit their cause. So governments
around the world are putting serious diplomatic pressure on us to back off the
Movement. They're telling the president that aggressive action against Lazarus
could trigger violent anti-American unrest in their own countries.”

Burke snorted in disgust. “Are you telling me that Castilla is willing
to let Paris or Berlin or some other two-bit foreign power
hold a veto over our counterterrorism policy?”

“Not a veto precisely,” Hanson said. “But he won't move
openly—not until we produce rock-solid evidence that the Lazarus Movement is
pulling the strings on these terrorist acts.”

For several seconds Burke sat silently staring back at his superior. Then he
nodded. “That can be arranged.”

“Genuine evidence, Hal,” the head of the CIA warned. “Facts that will stand up to the closest scrutiny. Do
you understand me?”

Again, Burke nodded. Oh, I understand you, David, he thought—and maybe
better than you do yourself. Inside his mind he was working furiously on new
ways to retrieve the situation that had begun spiraling out of his control at
the Teller Institute.

Rural Virginia,
Outside the Beltway

Three hours before dawn, bands of cold rain swept in succession across the Virginia countryside,
drenching the already-sodden fields and woods below. Autumn was usually a time
of drier weather, especially after the humid, tropical thunderstorms of the
summer months, but the weather patterns were off-kilter this year.

Roughly forty miles southwest of Washington,
D.C., a small farm-

house sat on a low rise overlooking a few sparse
stands of trees, a stagnant pond, and forty acres of patchy grassland now
mostly choked with weeds and dense thickets of brambles. The roofless,
blackened ruins of an old barn stood close to the house. The remnants of a
fence surrounded the farm's empty, overgrown fields, but most of the wooden
fence rails and posts either were split or lay rotting in the tall grass,
briars, and weeds. A rutted gravel track ran up the rise from the paved county
road paralleling the fence. It ended at an oil-stained concrete slab just
outside the front door of the farmhouse.

At first glance, the small satellite dish on the roof and a microwave relay
tower on a nearby hill were the only pieces of evidence that this tumbledown
farm had any ties whatever to the modern age. In reality, a state-of-the-art
alarm system secured the farmhouse, which was furnished inside with the latest
in CIA high-tech computer and electronics gear.

Hal Burke sat at the desk in his study, listening to the rain beat down on
the roof of what he sardonically termed his “occasional weekend country
retreat.” One of his great-uncles had farmed this piss-poor patch of land
for decades before the constant toil and frustration finally killed him. After
his death, it had passed through the hands of several slow-witted cousins
before it landed in the CIA officer's lap ten years ago as partial repayment of
an old family debt.

He had neither the money nor the time to put in any crops, but he valued the
seclusion the farm offered. No uninvited guests ever came knocking on his door
out here—not even the local Jehovah's Witnesses. It was so far off the beaten
track that even the fast-growing tentacles of the northern Virginia suburbs had passed it bv. When the weather was clear, Burke could walk outside at
night and see the sickly orange glow made by the lights of Washington, D.C.,
and its sprawling bedroom communities. They stained the sky in a vast arc to
the north, northeast, and east, a constant reminder of the hive culture and the
bogged-down bureaucracy he so despised.

Over the poor backcountry roads and traffic-clogged highways, travel

to and from Langley was often long and torturous, but an array of secure
communications equipment—installed at federal expense—allowed him to work from
the farm should any sudden crisis arise. The gear functioned well enough for
official CIA use. More advanced pieces of hardware and software, supplied by
others, made it possible for him to control the far-flung elements of TOCSIN in
greater security. He had come straight here after his midnight meeting with
Hanson. Events were moving fast now and he needed to stay in close touch with
his agents.

His computer chimed, signaling the arrival of an encrypted situation report
from the security unit working in New
Mexico. He frowned. They were late.

Burke rubbed at his eyes and typed in his password. The jumble of seemingly
random characters, letters, and numbers instantly changed shape, forming
coherent words and then whole sentences as the decoding program did its job. He
read through the message with increasing alarm.