The Lazarus Vendetta

Chapter One

Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan (“Jon”) Smith, M.D., turned off Old Agua Fria Road and drove up to the Institute's main gate. He narrowed his eyes against the early-morning glare. Off on his left, sunlight was just spilling over the dazzling snowcapped peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range. It lit steep slopes carpeted with gold-leafed aspens, towering firs, ponderosa pines, and oaks. Farther down, at the foot of the mountains, the shorter pinon pines, junipers, and clumps of sagebrush surrounding the Institute's thick sand-colored adobe walls were still cloaked in shadow.

Some of the protesters camped out along the road crawled out of their sleeping bags to watch his car go by. A handful waved handmade signs demanding STOP KILLER SCIENCE, NO TO NANOTECH, or LET LAZARUS LEAD. Most stayed put, unwilling to face the chilly October dawn. Santa Fe was at seven thousand feet and the nights were growing cold.

Smith felt a momentary twinge of sympathy for them. Even with the heater in his rental car going, he could feel the cold through his brown leather bomber jacket and sharply creased khakis.

At the gate, a gray-uniformed security guard waved him to a stop. Jon rolled down his window and handed over his U.S. Army ID for inspection. The photo on his identity card showed a fit man in his early forties — a man whose high cheekbones and smooth, dark hair gave him the look of a haughty Spanish cavalier. In person, the twinkle in Smith's dark blue eyes shattered the illusion of arrogance.

“Good morning, Colonel,” said the guard, an ex-Army Ranger staff sergeant named Frank Diaz. After scrutinizing the ID, he leaned forward, peering through the car windows to make sure that Smith was alone. His right hand hovered warily near the 9mm Beretta pistol holstered at his side. The flap on the holster was unsnapped — freeing the Beretta for a quick draw if necessary.

Smith raised an eyebrow at that. Security at the Teller Institute was usually more relaxed, certainly not up to the level of the top-secret nuclear labs at nearby Los Alamos. But the president of the United States, Samuel Adams Castilla, was scheduled to visit the Institute in three days. And now a huge anti-technology protest rally had been organized to coincide with his speech. The demonstrators outside the gate this morning were just the first wave of thousands more who were expected to pour in from all over the world. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Are you catching flak from those people, Frank?”

“Not much so far,” Diaz admitted. He shrugged. “But we're keeping a close eye on them anyway. This rally has the folks in Admin spooked. The FBI says there are some real hard-core troublemakers heading this way — the kind who get their kicks tossing Molotov cocktails and breaking windows.”

Smith frowned. Mass protests were a lure for anarchists with a taste for violence and property destruction. Genoa, Seattle, Cancun, and half a dozen other cities around the world had already seen their streets turned into battlegrounds between masked rioters and the police.

Chewing that over, he sketched a rough salute to Diaz and drove toward the parking lot. The prospect of being caught in a riot was not especially appealing. Not when he was in New Mexico on what was supposed to be a vacation.

Strike that, Smith told himself with a lopsided grin. Make that a working vacation. As a military medical doctor and expert in molecular biology, he spent most of his time assigned to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. His affiliation with the Teller Institute was only temporary.

The Pentagon's Office of Science and Technology had sent him to Santa Fe to observe and report on the work being done in the Institute's three nanoteclmology labs. Researchers around the world were locked in a fierce competition to develop practical and profitable nanotech applications. Some of the best were right here at Teller, including teams from the Institute itself, Harcourt Biosciences, and Nomura PharmaTech. Basically, Smith thought with satisfaction, the Defense Department had given him an all-expenses-paid ringside seat to scope out the century's most promising new technologies.

The work here was right up his alley. The word nanotech carried an incredibly wide range of meanings. At its most basic, it meant the creation of artificial devices on the smallest of imaginable scales. A nanometer was just one-billionth of a meter, about ten times the size of an atom. Make something ten nanometers across and you were still looking at a construct that was only one ten-thousandth of the diameter of a single human hair. Nanoteclmology was engineering on the molecular level, engineering that involved quantum physics, chemistry, biology, and supercomputing.

Popular science writers painted glowing word-pictures of robots only a few atoms across prowling through the human body — curing diseases and repairing internal injuries. Others asked their readers to imagine information storage units one-millionth the size of a grain of salt yet able to hold all human knowledge. Or dust motes that were actually hypercapable atmosphere miners, drifting silently through polluted skies while scrubbing them clean.

Smith had seen enough during his weeks at the Teller Institute to know that a few of those seemingly impossible imaginings were already hovering right on the edge of reality. He squeezed his car into a parking space between two behemoth SUVs. Their windshields were covered in frost, evidence that the scientists or technicians who owned them had been in the labs all night. He nodded appreciatively. These were the guys who were working the real miracles, all on a diet of strong black coffee, caffeinated soda, and sugar-laced vending machine snacks.

He got out of the rental car, zipping his jacket up against the brisk morning air. Then he took a deep breath, catching the faint smell of cooking fires and cannabis on the wind wafting across from the protest camp. More minivans, Volvo station wagons, chartered buses, and hybrid gas-electric cars were arriving in a steady stream, turning off Interstate 25 and heading up the access road toward the Institute. He frowned. The promised multitudes were assembling.

Unfortunately, it was the potential dark side of nanotechnology that fed the terrified imaginations of the activists and Lazarus Movement zealots gathering outside the chain-link fence. They were horrified by the idea of machines so small they could freely penetrate human cells and so powerful that they could reshape atomic structures. Radical civil libertarians warned about the dangers of “spy molecules” hovering unseen in every public and private space. Crazed conspiracy theorists filled Internet chat rooms with rumors of secret miniaturized killing machines. Others were afraid that runaway nanomachines would endlessly replicate themselves, dancing across the world like an endless parade of Sorceror's Apprentice enchanted brooms — finally devouring the Earth and everything on it.

Jon Smith shrugged his shoulders. You could not match wild hyperbole with anything but tangible results. Once most people got a good close look at the honest-to-God benefits of nanotechnology, their irrational fears should begin to subside. Or so he hoped. He spun sharply on his heel and strode toward the Institute's main entrance, eager to see what new wonders the men and women inside had cooked up overnight.

Two hundred meters outside the chain-link fence, Malachi Mac-Namara sat cross-legged on a colorful Indian blanket laid out in the shade of a juniper tree. His pale blue eyes were open, but he sat calmly, without moving. The Lazarus Movement followers camped close by were convinced that the lean, weather-beaten Canadian was meditating — restoring his mental and physical energies for the crucial struggle ahead. The retired Forest Service biologist from British Columbia had already won their admiration by forcefully demanding “immediate action” to achieve the Movement's goals.

“The Earth is dying,” he told them grimly. “She is drowning, crushed beneath a deluge of toxic pesticides and pollution. Science will not save her. Technology will not save her. They are her enemies, the true source of horror and contagion. And we must act against them. Now. Not later. Now! While there is still time…”

MacNamara hid a small smile, remembering the sight of the glowing faces fired by his rhetoric. He had more talent as an orator or an evangelist than he ever would have imagined.

He observed the activity around him. He had carefully chosen this vantage point. It overlooked the large green canvas tent set up as a command center by the Lazarus Movement. A dozen of its top national and international activists were busy inside that tent — manning computers linked to its worldwide Web sites, registering new arrivals, making banners and signs, and coordinating plans for the upcoming rally. Other groups in the TechStock coalition, the Sierra Club, Earth First! and the like, had their own headquarters scattered throughout the sprawling camp, but MacNamara knew he was in precisely the right place at precisely the right time.

The Movement was the real force behind this protest. The other environmental and anti-technology organizations were only along for the ride, trying desperately to stem a steady decline in their numbers and influence. More and more of their most committed members were abandoning them to join Lazarus, drawn by the clarity of the Movement's vision and by its courage in confronting the world's most powerful corporations and governments. Even the recent slaughter of its followers in Zimbabwe was acting as a rallying cry for Lazarus. Pictures of the massacre at Kusasa were being offered as proof of just how much the “global corporate rulers” and their puppet governments feared the Movement and its message.

The craggy-faced Canadian sat up just a bit straighten

Several tough-looking young men were heading toward the drab green tent, making their way purposefully through the milling crowds. Each carried a long duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Each moved with the wary grace of a predator.

One by one, they arrived at the tent and ducked inside.

“Well, well, well,” Malachi MacNamara murmured to himself. His pale eyes gleamed. “How very interesting.”

Chapter Two

The elegant eighteenth-century clock along one curved wall of the Oval Office softly chimed twelve o'clock noon. Outside, ice-cold rain fell in sheets from a dark gray sky, spattering against the tall windows overlooking the South Lawn. Whatever the calendar said, the first portents of winter were closing in on the nation's capital.

Overhead lights glinted off President Samuel Adams Castilla's titanium-frame reading glasses as he paged through the top-secret Joint Intelligence Threat Assessment he had just been handed. His face darkened. He looked across the big ranch-style pine table that served him as a desk. His voice was dangerously calm. “Let me make sure I understand you gentlemen correctly. Are you seriously proposing that I cancel my speech at the Teller Institute? Just three days before I'm scheduled to deliver it?”

“That is correct, Mr. President. To put it bluntly, the risks involved in your Santa Fe trip are unacceptably high,” David Hanson, the newly confirmed Director of Central Intelligence, said coolly. He was echoed a moment later by Robert Zeller, the acting director of the FBI.

Castilla eyed both men briefly, but he kept his attention focused on Hanson. The head of the CIA was the tougher and more formidable of the pair — despite the fact that he looked more like a bantam-weight mild-mannered college professor from the 1950s, complete with the obligatory bow tie, than he did a fire-breathing advocate of clandestine action and special operations.

Although his counterpart, the FBI's Bob Zeller, was a decent man, he was way out of his depth in Washington's sea of swirling political intrigue. Tall and broad-shouldered, Zeller looked good on television, but he should never have been moved up from his post as the senior U.S. attorney in Atlanta. Not even on a temporary basis while the White House staff looked for a permanent replacement. At least the ex-Navy linebacker and longtime federal prosecutor knew his own weaknesses. He mostly kept his mouth shut in meetings and usually wound up backing whoever he thought carried the most clout.

Hanson was a completely different case. If anything, the Agency veteran was too adept at playing power politics. During his long tenure as chief of the CIA's Operations Directorate, he had built a firm base of support among the members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. A great many influential congressmen and senators believed that David Hanson walked on water. That gave him a lot of maneuvering room, even room to buck the president who had just promoted him to run the whole CIA.

Castilla tapped the Threat Assessment with one blunt forefinger. “I see a whole lot of speculation in this document. What I do not see are hard facts.” He read one sentence aloud. “ 'Communications intercepts of a nonspecific but significant nature indicate that radical elements among the demonstrators at Santa Fe may be planning violent action — either against the Teller Institute or against the president himself.'”

He took off his reading glasses and looked up. “Care to put that in plain English, David?”

“We're picking up increased chatter, both over the Internet and in monitored phone conversations. A number of troubling phrases crop up again and again, all in reference to the planned rally. There's constant talk about 'the big event' or 'the action at Teller,'” the CIA chief said. “My people have heard it overseas. So has the NSA. And the FBI is picking up the same undercurrents here at home. Correct, Bob?”

Zeller nodded gravely.

“That's what has your analysts in such a lather?” Castilla shook his head, plainly unimpressed. “People e-mailing each other about a political protest?” He snorted. “Good God, any rally that might draw thirty or forty thousand people all the way out to Santa Fe is a pretty damned big event! New Mexico is my home turf and I doubt half that many ever showed up for any speech I ever made.”

“When members of the Sierra Club or the Wilderness Federation talk that way, I don't worry,” Hanson told him softly. “But even the simplest words can have very different meanings when they are used by certain dangerous groups and individuals. Deadly meanings.”

“You're talking about these so-called 'radical elements'?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And just who are these dangerous folks?”

“Most are allied in one way or another with the Lazarus Movement, Mr. President,” Hanson said carefully.

Castilla frowned. “This is an old, old song of yours, David.”

The other man shrugged. “I'm aware of that, sir. But the truth doesn't become any less true just because it's unpalatable. When viewed as a whole, our recent intelligence on the Lazarus Movement is extremely alarming. The Movement is metastasizing and what was once a relatively peaceful political and environmental alliance is rapidly altering itself into something far more secretive, dangerous, and deadly.” He looked across firmed Director of Central Intelligence, said coolly. He was echoed a moment later by Robert Zeller, the acting director of the FBI.

Castilla eyed both men briefly, but he kept his attention focused on Hanson. The head of the CIA was the tougher and more formidable of the pair — despite the fact that he looked more like a bantam-weight mild-mannered college professor from the 1950s, complete with the obligatory bow tie, than he did a fire-breathing advocate of clandestine action and special operations.

Although his counterpart, the FBI's Bob Zeller, was a decent man, he was way out of his depth in Washington's sea of swirling political intrigue. Tall and broad-shouldered, Zeller looked good on television, but he should never have been moved up from his post as the senior U.S. attorney in Atlanta. Not even on a temporary basis while the White House staff looked for a permanent replacement. At least the ex-Navy linebacker and longtime federal prosecutor knew his own weaknesses. He mostly kept his mouth shut in meetings and usually wound up backing whoever he thought carried the most clout.

Hanson was a completely different case. If anything, the Agency veteran was too adept at playing power politics. During his long tenure as chief of the CIA's Operations Directorate, he had built a firm base of support among the members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. A great many influential congressmen and senators believed that David Hanson walked on water. That gave him a lot of maneuvering room, even room to buck the president who had just promoted him to run the whole CIA.

Castilla tapped the Threat Assessment with one blunt forefinger. “I see a whole lot of speculation in this document. What I do not see are hard facts.” He read one sentence aloud. “'Communications intercepts of a nonspecific but significant nature indicate that radical elements among the demonstrators at Santa Fe may be planning violent action — either against the Teller Institute or against the president himself.'”

He took off his reading glasses and looked up. “Care to put that in plain English, David?”

“We're picking up increased charter, both over the Internet and in monitored phone conversations. A number of troubling phrases crop up again and again, all in reference to the planned rally. There's constant talk about 'the big event' or 'the action at Teller,'” the CIA chief said. “My people have heard it overseas. So has the NSA. And the FBI is picking up the same undercurrents here at home. Correct, Bob?”

Zeller nodded gravely.

“That's what has your analysts in such a lather?” Castilla shook his head, plainly unimpressed. “People e-mailing each other about a political protest?” He snorted. “Good God, any rally that might draw thirty or forty thousand people all the way out to Santa Fe is a pretty damned big event! New Mexico is my home turf and I doubt half that many ever showed up for any speech I ever made.”

“When members of the Sierra Club or the Wilderness Federation talk that way, I don't worry,” Hanson told him softly. “But even the simplest words can have very different meanings when they are used by certain dangerous groups and individuals. Deadly meanings.”

“You're talking about these so-called 'radical elements'?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And just who are these dangerous folks?”

“Most are allied in one way or another with the Lazarus Movement, Mr. President,” Hanson said carefully.

Castilla frowned. “This is an old, old song of yours, David.”

The other man shrugged. “I'm aware of that, sir. But the truth doesn't become any less true just because it's unpalatable. When viewed as a whole, our recent intelligence on the Lazarus Movement is extremely alarming. The Movement is metastasizing and what was once a relatively peaceful political and environmental alliance is rapidly altering itself into something far more secretive, dangerous, and deadly.” He looked across the table at the president. “I know you've seen the relevant surveillance and communications intercept reports. And our analysis of them.”

Castilla nodded slowly. The FBI, CIA, and other federal intelligence agencies kept tabs on a host of groups and individuals. With the rise of global terrorism and the spread of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons technology, no one in Washington wanted to take any more chances on being blindsided by a previously unrecognized enemy.

“Then let me speak bluntly, sir,” Hanson went on. “Our judgment is that the Lazarus Movement has now decided to attain its objectives through violence and terrorism. Its rhetoric is increasingly vicious, paranoid, and full of hatred aimed at those whom it considers enemies.” The CIA chief slid another piece of paper across the pine table. “This is just one example.”

Castilla put his glasses back on and read it in silence. His mouth curved down in disgust. The sheet was a glossy printout of a page from a Movement Web site, complete with grotesque thumbnail photos of mangled and mutilated corpses. The banner headline across the top screamed: iwockms BUTCHKRED AT KUSASA. The text between the pictures blamed the massacre of an entire village in Zimbabwe on either corporate-funded “death squads” or “mercenaries armed bv the U.S. government.” It claimed the killings were part of a secret plan to destroy the Lazarus Movement's efforts to revitalize organic African farming — lest they threaten the American monopoly on genetically modified crops and pesticides. The page ended by calling for the destruction of those who would “destroy the Earth and all who love her.”

The president dropped it back on the table. “What a load of horseshit.”

“True.” Hanson retrieved the printout and slid it back into his briefcase. “It is, however, highly effective horseshit — at least for its target audience.”

“Have you sent a team into Zimbabwe to find out what really happened at this Kusasa place?” Castilla asked.

The director of the CIA shook his head. "That would be extremely difficult, Mr. President. Without permission from the government there, which is hostile to us, we'll have to go in covertly. Even then, I doubt we'll find much. Zimbabwe is a total basket case. Those villagers could have been murdered by anyone — all the way from government troops on down to rampaging bandits."

“Hell,” Castilla muttered. “And if our people get caught snooping there without permission, everyone will assume we were involved in this massacre and that we're only trying to cover our tracks.”

“That is the problem, sir,” Hanson agreed quietly. “But whatever really took place at Kusasa, one thing is quite clear: The leadership of the Lazarus Movement is using this incident to radicalize its followers, to prepare them for more direct and violent action against our allies and us.”

“Damn, I hate to see this happening,” Castilla grow led. 1 le leaned forward in his chair. “Don't forget, I knew many of the men and women who founded Lazarus. They were respected environmental activists, scientists, writers… even a couple of politicians. They wanted to save the Earth, to bring it back to life. I disagreed with most of their agenda, but they were good people. Honorable people.”

“And where are they now, sir?” the head of the CIA asked quietly. “There were nine original founders of the Lazarus Movement. Six of them are dead, either from natural causes or in suspiciously convenient accidents. The other three have vanished without a trace.” He looked carefully at Castilla. “Including Jinjiro Nomura.”

“Yes,” the president said flatly.

He glanced at one of the photographs clustered on a corner of his desk. Taken during his first term as governor of New Mexico, it showed him exchanging bows with a shorter and older Japanese man, Jinjiro Nomura. Nomura had been a prominent member of the Diet, Japan's parliament. Their friendship, founded on a shared taste for single-malt Scotch and straight talk, had survived Nomura's retirement from politics and his turn toward more strident environmental advocacy.

Twelve months ago, Jinjiro Nomura had disappeared while traveling to a Lazarus-sponsored rally in Thailand. His son, Hideo, the chairman and chief executive officer of Nomura PharmaTech, had begged for American help in finding his father. And Castilla had reacted quickly. For weeks a special task force of CIA field officers had combed the streets and back alleys of Bangkok. The president had even pressed the NSA's ultra-secret spy satellites into service in the hunt for his old friend. But nothing had ever turned up. No ransom demand. No dead body. Nothing. The last of the original founders of the Lazarus Movement had vanished without a trace.

The photo stayed on Castilla's desk as a reminder of the limits of his power.

Castilla sighed and turned his gaze back to the two somber men seated in front of him. “Okay, you've made your point. The leaders I knew and trusted either are dead or have dropped off the face of the earth.”

“Precisely, Mr. President.”

“Which brings us again to the issue of just who is running the Lazarus Movement no\\\” Castilla said grimly. “Let's cut to the chase here, David. After Jinjiro disappeared, 1 approved your special interagency task force on the Movement — despite my own misgivings. Are your people any closer to identifying the current leadership?”

“Not much closer,” Hanson admitted reluctantly. “Noi even after months of intense work.” He spread his hands. “We're fairly certain that ultimate power is vested in one man, a man who calls himself Lazarus— but we don't know his real name or what he looks like or where he operates from.”

“That's not exactly satisfying,” Castilla commented drily. “Maybe you should stop telling me what you don't know and stick to what you do know.” I le looked the shorter man in the eye. “It might take less time.”

I Ianson smiled dutifully. The smile stopped well short of his eyes. “We've devoted a huge amount of resources, both human and satellite, to the effort. So have M16, the French DOSF, and several other Western intelligence agencies, but over the past year the Lazarus Movement has deliberately reconfigured itself to defeat our surveillance.”

“Go on,” Castilla said.

“The Movement has organized itself as a set of ever-tighter and more secure concentric circles,” Hanson told him. “Most of its supporters fall into the outer ring. They operate out in the open — attending meetings, organizing demonstrations, publishing newsletters, and working for various Movement-sponsored projects around the world. They staff the various Movement offices around the world. But each level above that is smaller and more secretive. Few members of the upper echelons know one another's real names, or meet in person. Leadership communications are handled almost exclusively through the Internet, either by encrypted instant messaging… or by communiques posted on any one of the several Lazarus Web sites.”

“In other words, a classic cell structure.” Castilla said. “Orders move freely down the chain, but no one outside the group can easily penetrate to the inner core.”

Hanson nodded. “Correct. It's also the same structure adopted by any number of very nasty terrorist groups over the years. Al-Oaeda. Islamic Jihad. Italy's Red Brigades. Japan's Red Army. Just to name a few.”

“And you haven't had any luck in gaining access to the top echelons7” Castilla asked.

The CIA chief shook his head. “No, sir. Nor have the Brits or the French or anyone else. We've all tried, without success. And one by one, we've lost our best existing sources inside Lazarus. Some have resigned. Others have been expelled. A few have simplv vanished and are presumed dead.”

Castilla frowned. “People seem to have a habit ol disappearing around this bunch.”

“Yes, sir. A great many.” The CIA director left that uncomfortable truth hanging in the air.

Fifteen minutes later, the Director of Central Intelligence strode briskly out of the White House and down the steps of the South Portico to

a waiting black limousine. He slid into the rear seat, waited while a uniformed Secret Sen ice officer closed the car door behind him, and then punched the intercom. “Take me back to Langley,” he told his driver.

Hanson leaned back against the plush leather as the limousine accelerated smoothly down the drive and turned left onto Seventeenth Street. He looked at the stocky, square-jawed man sitting in the rear-facing jump seat across from him. “You're very quiet this afternoon. I lal.”

“You pay me to catch or kill terrorists,” Hal Burke said. “Not to play courtier.”

Amusement flickered briefly in the CIA chief's eyes. Burke was a senior officer on the Agency's counterterrorism staff. Right now he was assigned to lead the special task force on the Lazarus Movement. Twenty years of clandestine fieldwork had left him with a bullet scar down the right side ot his neck and a permanently cynical view of human nature. It was a view Hanson shared.

“Any luck?” Burke asked finally.

“None.”

“Slut.” Burke stared moodily out the limousine's rain-streaked windows. “Kit Pierson's going to throw a fit.”

Hanson nodded. Katherine Pierson was Burke's FBI counterpart. The pair had worked closely together to prepare the intelligence assessment he and Zeller had just shown the president. “Castilla wants us to push our investigation of the Movement as hard as possible, but he will not cancel his trip to the Teller Institute. Not without clearer evidence of a serious threat.”

Burke looked away from the window. His mouth was set in a thin, grim line. “What that really means is that he doesn't want The Washington Post, I he Yew York limes, and Fox Yews calling him gutless.”

“Would you?”

“No,” Burke admitted.

“Then you have twenty-four hours, Hal,” the CIA chief said. "1 need you and Kit Pierson to dig up something solid that I can take back to the

White House. Otherwise, Sam Castilla is flying to Santa Fe to confront those protesters head-on. You know what this president is like."

“He's one stubborn son of a bitch,” Burke growled.

“Yes, he is.”

“So be it,” Burke said. He shrugged. “1 just hope it doesn't get him killed this time.”

Chapter Three

Jon Smith took the wide, shallow steps to the Institute's upper floor two at a time. Running up and down its three main staircases was pretty much the only exercise he had time for now. The long days and occasional nights he spent in the various nanotechnology labs were cutting into his usual workout routine.

He reached the top and paused for a moment, pleased to note that both his breathing and his heart rate were perfectly normal. The sun slanting through the stairwell's narrow windows felt comfortably warm on his shoulders. Smith glanced at his watch. The senior researcher for Har-court Biosciences had promised him “one seriously cool demonstration” of their most recent advances in five minutes.

Up here, the routine hum from below — phones ringing, keyboards clicking and clattering, and people talking — fell away to a cathedral-like hush. The Teller Institute kept its administrative offices, cafeteria, computer center, staff lounges, and science library on the first floor. The upper level was reserved for the lab suites allotted to different research teams. Like its rivals from the Institute itself and Nomura PharmaTech, Harcourt had its facilities in the North Wing.

Smith turned right into a wide corridor that ran the whole length of the I-shaped building. Polished earth brown floor tiles blended comfortably with off-white adobe walls. At regular intervals, nichos, small niches with rounded tops, displayed paintings of famous scientists — Fermi, Newton, Feynman, Drexler, Einstein, and others — commissioned from local artists. Between the nichos stood tall ceramic vases filled with brilliant yellow chamisa and pale purple aster wildflowers. If you ignored the sheer size of this place, Smith thought, it looked just like the hall of a private Santa Fe home.

He came to the locked door outside the Harcourt lab and swiped his ID card through the adjacent security station. The light on top flashed from red to green and the lock clicked open. His card was one of the relatively few coded for access to all restricted areas. Rival scientists and technicians were not permitted to stray into one another's territory. While trespassers were not shot, they were issued immediate one-way tickets out of Santa Fe. The Institute took its obligation to protect intellectual property rights very seriously.

Smith stepped through the door and immediately entered a very different world. Here the polished wood and textured adobe of courtly old Santa Fe gave way to the gleaming metal and tough composite materials of the twenty-first century. The elegance of natural sunlight and recessed lighting surrendered to the glare of overhead fluorescent strip lights. These lights had a very high ultraviolet component — just to kill surface germs. A small breeze tugged at his shirt and whispered through his dark hair. The nanotech laboratory suites were kept under positive pressure to minimize the risk of any airborne contaminants from the public areas of the building. Ultra-efficient particulate air — or “ULPA” — filters fed in purified air at a constant temperature and humidity.

The Harcourt lab suite was arranged as a series of “clean rooms” of increasing rigor. This outer rim was an office area, crammed full of desks and workstations piled high with reference books, chemical and equipment catalogs, and paper printouts. Along the east wall, blinds were drawn across a floor-to-ceiling picture window, obscuring what would otherwise be a spectacular view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Farther inside the suite came a control and sample preparation area. Here were black-topped lab benches, computer consoles, the awkward bulk of two scanning tunneling electron microscopes, and the other equipment needed to oversee nanotech design and production processes.

The true “holy of holies” was the inner core: visible only through sealed observation windows on the far wall. This was a chamber full of mirror-bright stainless steel tanks; mobile equipment skids loaded with pumps, valves, and sensor devices; vertically mounted disk frames for osmotic filters; and stacked Lucite cylinders packed with various grades of purification gels, all connected with looping lengths of clear, silastic tubing.

Smith knew that the core could be reached only through a succession of air locks and gowning roofhs. Anyone working inside the production chamber had to wear fully sterile coveralls, gloves and boots, and an air-displacement breather helmet. He smiled wryly. If the Lazarus Movement activists camped outside ever saw anyone wearing that alien-looking getup, it would confirm all their worst fears about mad scientists toying with deadly toxins.

In truth, of course, the real situation was exactly the reverse. In the world of nanotechnology, humans were the source of danger and contamination. A falling flake of skin, a hair follicle, the wafted particles of moisture breathed out in casual conversation, and the shotgun blast of a sneeze all could wreak havoc on the nanoscale, releasing oils, acids, alka-lines, and enzymes that could poison the manufacturing process. Humans were also a rich source of bacteria: fast-growing organisms that would consume production broths, clog filters, and even attack the developing nanodevices themselves.

Fortunately, most of the necessary work could be done remotely from outside the core and the control and sample preparation chambers. Robotic manipulators, computer-controlled motorized equipment skids, and other innovations greatly reduced the need for humans to enter the “clean rooms.” The incredible level of automation in its lab suites was one of the Teller Institute's most popular innovations, since it gave scientists and technicians far more freedom of movement than at other facilities.

Smith threaded through the maze of desks in the outer room, making his way toward Dr. Philip Brinker, the senior scientist for Harcourt Bio-sciences. The tall, pale, rail-thin researcher had his back to the entrance, so intently studying the image relayed from a scanning electron microscope that he didn't catch Jon's cat-quiet approach.

Brinker's chief assistant, Dr. Ravi Parikh, was more alert. The shorter, darker molecular biologist looked up suddenly. He opened his mouth to warn his boss, then closed it with a shy smile when Smith winked at him and motioned for silence.

Jon stopped just two feet behind the two researchers and stood at ease.

“Damn, that looks nice, Ravi,” Brinker said, still peering at the image on the screen in front of him. “Man, I bet our favorite DoD spook is gonna bow down before us when he sees this.”

This time Smith did not bother hiding his grin. Brinker always called him a spook — a spy. The Harcourt scientist meant it as a joke, a kind of running gag about Smith's role as an observer for the Pentagon, but Brinker had no clue as to just how close that was to the truth.

The fact was that Jon was more than just an Army officer and scientist. From time to time he took on missions for Covert-One, a top-secret intelligence outfit reporting directly to the president. Covert-One worked in the shadows, so far back in the shadows that no one in Congress or the of-' ficial military-intelligence bureaucracy even knew it existed. Fortunately, Jon's work here at the Institute was purely scientific in nature.

Smith leaned forward, looking right over the senior Harcourt scientist's shoulder. “So what is it exactly that's going to make me worship the ground you walk on, Phil?”

Startled, Brinker jumped six inches in the air. “Jesus Christ!” He spun round. “Colonel, you pull that ghost act on me just one more time and I swear to God I'm gonna drop dead right in front of you! Then how would you feel?”

Smith laughed. “Sorry, I guess.”

“Sure you would,” Brinker grumbled. Then he brightened. “But since I'm not dead, despite your best efforts, you can take a look at what Ravi and I have cooked up today. Feast your eyes on the not-yet-patented Mark Two Brinker-Parikh nanophage, guaranteed to zap cancer cells, dangerous bacteria, and other internal nasties… most of the time, anyway.”

Smith moved closer and studied the hugely magnified black-and-white image on the monitor. It showed a spherical semiconductor shell packed with an assortment of complex molecular structures. A scale indicator on one side of the screen told him he was looking at an assembly that was just two hundred nanometers in diameter.

Smith was already familiar with the Harcourt research team's general concept. Brinker and Parikh and the others were focused on creating medical nanodevices — their “nanophages” — that would hunt down and kill cancer cells and disease-causing bacteria. The interior of the sphere he was examining should be loaded with the biochemical substances — phosphatidylserine and other costimulator molecules, for example — needed either to trick the target cells into committing suicide or to mark them for elimination by the body's own immune system.

Their Mark I design had failed in early animal testing because the nanophages themselves were destroyed by the immune system before they could do their work. Since then Jon knew the Harcourt scientists had been evaluating different shell configurations and materials, trying hard to find a combination that would be effectively invisible to the body's natural defenses. And for months the magic formula had eluded them.

He glanced up at Brinker. “This looks almost identical to your Mark One configuration. So what have you changed?”

“Take a closer look at the shell coating,” the blond-haired Harcourt scientist suggested.

Smith nodded and took over the microscope controls. He tapped the keypad gently, slowly zooming in on a section of the outer shell. “Okay,” he said. “It's bumpy, not smooth. There's a thin molecular coating of some kind.” He frowned. “The structure of that coating looks hauntinglv familiar… but where have I seen it before?”

“The basic idea came to Ravi here in a flash,” the tall, blond-haired researcher explained. “And like all great ideas it's incredibly simple and freaking obvious… at least after the fact.” He shrugged. “Think about one particularly bad little mother of a bacterium — resistant staphylococcus aureus. How does it hide from the immune system?”

“It coats its cell membranes in polysaccharides,” Smith said promptly. He looked at the screen again. “Oh, for Pete's sake…”

Parikh nodded complacently. “Our Mark Twos are essentially sugar-coated. Just like all the best medicines.”

Smith whistled softly. “That is brilliant, guys. Absolutely brilliant!”

“With all due modesty, you are right about that,” Brinker admitted. He laid one hand on the monitor. “That beautiful Mark Two you see here should do the trick. In theory, anyway.”

“And in practice?” Smith asked.

Ravi Parikh pointed toward another high-resolution display — this one the size of a wide-screen television. It showed a double-walled glass box secured to a lab table in an adjoining clean room. “That is just what we are about to find out, Colonel. We have been working almost nonstop for the past thirty-six hours to produce enough of the new design nanophages for this test.”

Smith nodded. Nanodevices were not built one at a time with microscopic tweezers and drops of subatomic glue. Instead, they were manufactured by the tens of millions or hundreds of millions or even billions, using biochemical and enzymatic processes precisely controlled by means of pH, temperature, and pressure. Different elements grew in different chemical solutions under different conditions. You started in one tank, formed the basic structure, washed away the excess, and then moved your materials to a new chemical bath to grow the next part of the assembly. It required constant monitoring and absolutely precise timing.

The three men moved closer to the monitor. A dozen white mice occupied the clear double-walled container. Half of the mice were lethargic, riddled with lab-induced tumors and cancers. The other six, a healthy control group, scampered here and there, looking for a way out. Numbered and color-coded tags identified each mouse. Video cameras and a variety of other sensors surrounded the box, ready to record every event once the experiment began.

Brinker pointed to a small metal canister attached to one end of the test chamber. “There they are, Jon. Fifty million Mark Two nanophages all set to go, plus or minus five million either way.” He turned to one of the lab techs hovering close by. “Have our little furry friends had their shots, Mike?”

The technician nodded. “Sure thing, Dr. Brinker. I did it myself just ten minutes ago. One good jab for each of them.”

“The nanophages go in inert,” Brinker explained. “Their internal ATP power cell only lasts so long, so we surround that section with a protective sheath.”

Smith understood the reason for that. ATP, adenosine triphosphate, was a molecule that provided energy for most metabolic processes. But ATP would begin releasing its energy as soon at it came in contact with liquid. And all living creatures were mostly liquid. “So the injection is a kick start?” he asked.

“That's right,” Brinker confirmed. “We inject a unique chemical signal into each test subject. Once a passive sensor on the nanophage detects that signal, the sheath opens, and the surrounding liquid activates the ATP. Our little machines light up and off they go on the hunt.”

“Then your sheath also acts as a fail-safe,” Smith realized. “Just in case any of the Mark Twos wind up where they aren't supposed to be — say inside one of you, for example.”

“Exactly,” Brinker agreed. “No unique chemical signature… no nanophage activation.”

Parikh was less certain about that.

“There is a small risk,” the shorter molecular biologist warned. “There is always a certain error rate in the nanophage build process.”

“Which means sometimes the sheath doesn't form properly? Or the sensor is missing or set to receive the wrong signal? Or maybe you wind up with the wrong biochemical substances stored inside the phage shell?”

“Stuff like that,” Brinker said. “But the error percentage is very small. Ridiculously tiny. Heck, almost nil.” He shrugged. “Besides, these things are programmed to kill cancer cells and nasty bacteria. Who really cares if a few strays go wandering around inside the wrong target for a couple of minutes?”

Smith raised a skeptical eyebrow. Was Brinker serious? Low risk or not, the senior Harcourt scientist's attitude seemed just a bit too cavalier. Good science was the art of taking infinite pains. It did not mean writing off potential safety hazards, no matter how small.

The other man saw his expression and laughed. “Don't sweat it, Jon. I'm not crazy. Well, not completely, anyway. We keep our nanophages on a damned tight leash. They're well and truly contained. Besides, I've got Ravi here to keep me on the straight and narrow. Okay?”

Smith nodded. “Just checking, Phil. Chalk it up to my suspicious spook-like nature.”

Brinker shot him a quick, wry smile. Then he glanced at the technicians standing by at various consoles and monitors. “Everybody set?”

One by one, they each gave him a thumbs-up.

“Right,” Brinker said. His eyes were bright and excited. “Mark Two nanophage live subject trial numero uno. On my mark… three, two, one… now!”

The metal canister hissed.

“Nanophages released,” one of the technicians murmured, watching a readout from the canister.

For several minutes nothing seemed to happen. The healthy mice moved here and there, seemingly at random. The sick mice stayed put.

“ATP power cycle complete,” another technician announced at last. “Nanophage life span complete. Live subject trial complete.”

Brinker breathed out. He glanced up at Smith in triumph. “There we go, Colonel. Now we'll anesthetize our furry friends, open them up, and see what percentage of their various cancers we just nailed. Me, I'm betting we're talking close to one hundred percent.”

Ravi Parikh was still watching the mice. He frowned. “I think we may have a runaway, Phil,” he said quietly. “Take a look at test subject five.”

Smith bent down to get a closer view. Mouse Five was one of the healthy ones, a member of the control group. It was moving erratically, repeatedly stumbling headlong into its fellows, mouth opening and closing rapidly. Suddenly it fell on its side, writhed in apparent agony for a few seconds — and then lay still.

“Crap,” Brinker said, staring blankly at the dead mouse. “That's sure as hell not supposed to happen.”

Jon Smith frowned, suddenly resolving to recheck Harcourt Bio-science's containment and safety procedures. They had better be as thorough as Parikh and Brinker claimed, so that whatever had just killed a perfectly healthy mouse stayed locked away inside this lab.

It was nearly midnight.

A mile to the north, the lights of Santa Fe cast a warm yellow glow into the clear, cold night sky. Ahead, the upper-floor windows of the Teller Institute glowed behind drawn blinds. Arc lights mounted on the roof cast long black shadows across the Institute's grounds. Along the northern

edge of the perimeter fence, small stands of pine and juniper trees were wholly submerged in darkness.

Paolo Ponti slithered closer to the fence through the tall, dry grass. He hugged the dirt, careful to stay in the shadows where his black sweatshirt and dark jeans made him almost invisible. The Italian was twenty-four, slender, and athletic. Six months ago, tired of his life as a part-time university student on the dole, he had joined the Lazarus Movement.

The Movement offered his life meaning, a sense of purpose and excitement beyond anything else he had ever imagined. At first, the secret oaths he had sworn to protect Mother Earth and to destroy her enemies had seemed melodramatic and silly. Since then, however, Ponti had embraced the tenets and creeds of Lazarus with a zeal that surprised everyone who knew him, even himself.

Paolo glanced over his shoulder, seeing the faint shape wriggling along in his wake. He had met Audrey Karavites at a Lazarus rally in Stuttgart the month before. The twenh-one-year-old American woman had been traveling through Europe, a college graduation gift from her parents. Bored by museums and churches, she had gone to the rally on a whim. That whim had changed her whole life when Paolo swept her right off her feet, into his bed, and into the Movement.

The Italian turned back, still smiling smugly to himself. Audrey was not beautiful, but she had curves where a woman should. More important, her rich, naive parents gave her a generous allowance — an allowance that had bought her and Paolo's plane tickets to Santa Fe to join this protest against nanotechnology and corrupt American capitalism.

Paolo crawled cautiously right up to the fence, so close his fingertips brushed lightly against the cold metal. He looked through the mesh. The cacti, clumps of sagebrush, and native wildflowers planted there as drought-resistant landscaping should provide good cover. He checked the luminous dial of his watch. The next patrol by the Institute's security guards should not pass this point for more than an hour. Perfect.

The Italian activist touched the fence again, this time curling his fingers around its metal links to test their strength. He nodded, pleased by what he found. The bolt cutters he had brought along would do the trick quite easily.

There was a loud crack behind him — a dry, sharp sound like that of a thick twig being snapped by strong hands. Ponti frowned. Sometimes Audrey moved with all the grace of an arthritic hippo. He looked back over his shoulder, planning to reprimand her with an angry glare.

Audrey Karavites lay curled on her side in the tall weeds. Her head flopped at a sickening angle. Her eyes were wide open, forever frozen in a look of horror. Her neck had been broken. She was dead.

Stunned, Paolo Ponti sat up, unable at first to comprehend what he saw. He opened his mouth to cry out… and an enormous hand gripped his face, shoving it back, muffling his screams. The last thing the young Italian felt was the terrible pain as an ice-cold blade plunged deep into his exposed throat.

The tall auburn-haired man tugged his fighting knife out of the dead man's neck, then wiped it clean on a fold of Ponti's black sweatshirt. His green eyes shone brightly.

He looked over to where the girl he had murdered lay sprawled. Two black-clad shapes were busy rummaging through the duffel bag she had been dragging behind her. “Well?”

“What you expected, Prime,” the hoarse whisper came back. “Climbing gear. Cans of fluorescent spray paint. And a Lazarus Movement banner.”

The green-eyed man shook his head, amused. “Amateurs.”

Another of his men dropped to one knee beside him. “Your orders?”

The giant shrugged. “Sanitize this site. Then dump the bodies somewhere else. Somewhere they will be found.”

“Do you want them found sooner? Or later?” the man asked calmly.

The big man bared his teeth in the darkness. “Tomorrow morning will be soon enough.”

Chapter Four

“Preliminary analysis shows no contamination in the first four chemical baths. Temperature and pH readouts were also all well within the expected norms….”

Jon Smith sat back, rereading what he had just typed. His eyes felt gritty. He had spent half of last night reviewing biochemical formulas and nanophage build procedures with Phil Brinker, Ravi Parikh, and the rest of their team. So far the error that had wrecked the first Mark II nanophage trial had eluded them. The Harcourt Biosciences researchers were probably still hard at it, he knew, poring over reams of computer printouts and test data. With the president of the United States scheduled to laud their work — and that of the other Teller Institute labs — in a little less than forty-eight hours, the pressure was on. No one at Harcourt's corporate headquarters was going to want the media to show pictures of their “lifesaving” new technology killing mice.

“Sir?”

Jon Smith swung away from his computer monitor, fighting down a sudden surge of irritation at being interrupted. “Yes?”

A sturdy, serious-looking man wearing a dark gray suit, button-down shirt, and pale red tie stood in the open door to his small office. He checked a photocopied list. “Are you Dr. Jonathan Smith?”

“That's me,” Smith said. He sat up straighter, noticing the faint bulge of a shoulder holster under the other man's suit coat. That was odd. Only uniformed security personnel were licensed to carry firearms on Institute grounds. “And you are?”

“Special Agent Mark Farrows, sir. U.S. Secret Service.”

Well, that explained the concealed weapon. Smith relaxed a bit. “What can I do for you, Agent Farrows?”

“I'm afraid I have to ask you to leave your office for a short time, Doctor.” Farrows smiled warily, anticipating his next question. “And no, sir, you are not under arrest. I'm with the Protective Division. We're here to conduct an advance security sweep.”

Smith sighed. Scientific institutions prized presidential visits because they often meant a higher national profile and added congressional funding. But there was no getting around the fact that they were also highly inconvenient. Security checks like this one, presumably scouting for explosive devices, potential hiding places for would-be assassins, and other dangers, always disrupted any lab's normal routine.

On the other hand, Smith knew that it was the responsibility of the Secret Service to protect the president's life. For the agents involved, shepherding the nation's chief executive safely through a massive facility crammed full of toxic chemicals, pressurized high-temperature vats, and enough high-voltage electricity to run a small city would be a waking nightmare.

The word had already come down from the Institute's hierarchy to expect a thorough inspection by the Secret Service. The betting had been that it would happen tomorrow — closer to the president's arrival. The growing army of protesters outside must have prodded the Secret Service into acting earlier.

Smith stood up, took his jacket off the back of his chair, and followed Farrows into the hallway. Dozens of scientists, technicians, and administrative staff were streaming past, most of them carrying files or laptops to work on until the Secret Service unit gave them permission to return to their labs and offices.

“We're asking Institute personnel to wait in the cafeteria, Doctor,” Farrows said politely, indicating the direction. “Our sweep really shouldn't take long. Not more than an hour, we hope.”

It was nearly eleven in the morning. Somehow the prospect of sitting jammed in the cafeteria with the others was not very appealing to Smith. He had already been stuck inside for far too long, and one could only breathe recycled air and drink stale coffee for so many hours without going crazy. He turned to the agent. “If it's all the same to you, I want to grab some fresh air instead.”

The Secret Service agent put out a hand to stop him. “I'm sorry, sir, but it's not the same to me. My orders are very clear. All Institute employees report to the cafeteria.”

Smith eyed him coolly. He did not mind letting the Secret Service men do their job, but he would be damned if he would let them ride roughshod over him for no good reason. He stood still, waiting until the other man let go of the sleeve of his leather jacket. “Then your orders don't apply to me, Agent Farrows,” he said calmly. “I'm not a Teller Institute employee.” He flipped open his wallet to show his military ID.

Farrows scanned it quickly. One eyebrow lifted. “You're an Army light colonel? I thought you were one of these scientist-types.”

“I'm both,” Smith told him. “I'm here on detached duty from the Pentagon.” He nodded at the list the other man still held. “Frankly, I'm surprised that little piece of information isn't on your roster.”

The Secret Service agent shrugged. "Looks like somebody in D.C. fouled up. It happens.“ He tapped the radio receiver in his ear. ”Just let me clear this with my SAIC, okay?"

Smith nodded. Each Secret Service detail was commanded by a SAIC — a special-agent-in-charge. He waited patiently while Farrows explained the situation to his superior.

At last, the other man waved him through. “You're good to go, Colonel. But don't stray too far. Those Lazarus Movement goofballs out there are in a really bad mood right now.”

Smith walked past him and came out into the Institute's large front lobby. To his left, one of the building's three staircases led up to the second floor. Doors on either side led to various administrative offices. Across the lobby, a waist-high marble railing enclosed the visitors' registration and information desks. To the right, two enormous wood-paneled doors stood open to the outside.

From there a shallow set of wide sand-colored steps led down to a broad driveway. Two big black SUVs with U.S. government license plates were parked along the edge of the drive, right at the foot of those steps. A second plainclothes Secret Service agent stood in the doorway, keeping an eye on both the lobby and the vehicles parked outside. He wore sunglasses and cradled a deadly-looking 9mm Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. His head swiveled briefly to watch Smith walk past him, but then he turned back to his sentry duty.

Outside, Smith stopped at the top of the steps and stood quietly for a moment, enjoying the feel of the sun on his lean, tanned face. The air was warming up and puffs of white cloud moved lazily across a brilliant azure sky. It was a perfect autumn day.

He took a deep breath, trying to wash the accumulated fatigue toxins out of his system.

“LET LAZARUS LEAD! NO TO NANOTECH! LET LAZARUS LEAD! NO TO NANOTECH! LET LAZARUS LEAD!”

Smith frowned. The rhythmic, singsong slogans hammered at his ears, shattering the momentary illusion of peace. They were much louder and

angrier than they had been the day before. He eyed the mass of chanting protesters pressed up close against the perimeter fence. There were a lot more of them here today, too. Maybe even as many as ten thousand.

A sea of bloodred and bright green banners and placards rose and fell in time with each roar from the crowd. Protest organizers roamed back and forth on a portable stage set up near the Institute security booth, shouting into microphones — whipping the demonstrators into a frenzy.

The main gate was closed. A small squad of gray-uniformed security guards stood behind the gate, nervously facing the chanting throng. Outside, much farther down the access road, Smith could see a few patrol cars — a couple in the black-and-white markings of the New Mexico State Police, the rest in the white, light blue, and gold stripes of the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office.

“This is shaping up to be one hell of a mess, Colonel,” a familiar voice said grimly from behind him.

Frank Diaz came forward from his post by the door. Today the ex-Ranger noncom was wearing a bulky bulletproof vest. He had a riot helmet dangling from one hand and a twelve-gauge Remington pump-action shotgun slung over the other shoulder. A bandolier held a mixed assortment of CS (tear gas) shells and solid slugs for the shotgun.

“What has these people so revved up?” Smith asked. “President Castilla and the media aren't due here until the day after tomorrow. Why all the outrage now?”

“Somebody offed a couple of Lazarus Movement-types last night,” Diaz said. “The Santa Fe PD found two bodies stuffed into a Dumpster. Down behind that big outlet mall on Cerrillos Road. One was stabbed, and the other had a broken neck.”

Smith whistled softly. “Damn.”

“No kidding.” The Army veteran hawked and spat. “And those fruitcakes over there are blaming us.”

Smith turned to look more closely at him. “Oh?”

"Apparently the dead guys were planning to cut through our fence last

night,“ Diaz explained. ”For some big act of civil-fricking-disobedience. Naturally the radicals claim we must have caught the two of them and slaughtered 'em. Which is all bullshit, of course…."

“Of course,” Smith agreed absently. He ran his eyes over the stretch of chain-link fence in sight. It seemed perfectly intact. “But they're still dead, and you're the designated bad guys, right?”

“Hell, Colonel,” the ex-Ranger noncom said. He sounded almost aggrieved. “If I knocked off a couple of punk-ass, eco-freak infiltrators, do you think I'd be stupid enough to just dump them in some trash bin behind a goddamned shopping mall?”

Smith shook his head. He could not stop a quick grin from flashing across his face. “No, Staff Sergeant Diaz. I really do not believe you would be that stupid.”

“Damned straight.”

“Which still leaves me wondering, who was that stupid?”

Ravi Parikh kept his attention focused closely on the highly magnified image on his monitor. The semiconducting sphere he was looking at seemed well within its design specs. He zoomed in even closer, scanning the front half of the nanophage. “I cannot find a problem with this sensor array, Phil,” he told Brinker. “Everything is just where it should be.”

Brinker nodded wearily. “Which makes ninety-nine out of the last hundred.” He rubbed at his eyes. “And the one flawed build we've found so far didn't form a sensor array at all, which means the onboard power source would never have gone active.”

Parikh frowned thoughtfully. “That is a nonfatal error.”

“Yeah, for the host, at least.” Brinker stared into the monitor gloomily. “But whatever ran wild in Mouse Five was pretty damned fatal.” He fought off a yawn. “Man, Ravi, this gig is like looking for a single needle in a haystack the size of Jupiter.”

“Perhaps we will get lucky?” Parikh suggested.

“Yeah, well, we've got… oh, say… forty-seven hours and thirty-two minutes to do it in.”

Brinker swiveled around in his chair. Not far away stood the head of the Secret Service team assigned to secure their lab ahead of the president's visit. He was a big man, well over six-foot-six and probably weighing 250 pounds, most of it in muscle. Right now he was busy watching two members of his unit carefully place what they called “anti-bugging” and “hazard detection” devices at various points in the lab.

The scientist snapped his fingers, trying to remember the agent's name. Fitzgerald? O'Connor? Something Irish anyhow. “Uh, Agent Kennedy?”

The tall auburn-haired man turned his head. “The name is O'Neill, Dr. Brinker.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.” Brinker shrugged. “Well, I just wanted to thank you again for letting Ravi and me stay here while your guys do their stuff.”

O'Neill smiled back. The smile did not reach his bright green eyes. “No thanks are necessary, Dr. Brinker. None at all.”

“LET LAZARUS LEAD! NO TO DEATH! NO TO NANOTECH! LET LAZARUS LEAD!”

Malachi MacNamara stood close to the speakers' platform, near the very heart of the angry, shouting throng. Like those around him, he rhythmically jabbed his fist in the air in rage. Like those around him, he joined each deafening chant. But all the while his pale blue eyes were busy scanning the crowd.

Now Lazarus Movement volunteers were moving through the mass of protesters, handing out new signs and posters. Eager hands grabbed at them. MacNamara pushed and shoved his way through the jostling, agitated mob to get one for himself. It carried a much-enlarged and hurriedly color-copied photo of Paolo Ponti and Audrey Karavites — a picture that must have been taken very recently indeed, because they stood silhouetted against the white peaks of the Sangre de Crista Mountains. Scrawled above their young, smiling faces in bold red letters were the words: THEY WERE MURDERED! BUT LAZARUS LIVES!

Still chanting, the pale-eyed man nodded to himself. Clever, he thought coldly. Quite clever.

“Jesus Christ, Colonel,” Diaz murmured, listening to the sound of raw hatred spreading through the mob outside. “It's like feeding time at the goddamned zoo!”

Smith nodded, tight-lipped. For a moment he wished he was armed. Then he shook the thought away. If things turned ugly, fifteen 9mm rounds in a Beretta clip were not going to save his life. Nor had he joined the U.S. Army to shoot unarmed rioters.

The sight of flashing lights out on the access road attracted his attention. A small convoy of black SUVs and sedans was moving slowly up the access road, steadily forcing its way through the swelling crowds. Even at this distance, Jon could see angry fists being shaken at the vehicles. He looked over at Diaz. “You expecting reinforcements, Frank?”

The security guard shook his head. “Not really. Hell, barring the National Guard, we've already got every unit available within fifty miles.” He peered closely at the oncoming vehicles. The lead car had just pulled up outside the gate. “And that sure ain't the National Guard out there.”

The Army veteran's tactical radio squawked suddenly, loud enough for Smith to hear it.

“Sarge?” a voice said. “This is Battaglia, at the gate.”

“Go ahead,” Diaz snapped. “Make your report.”

“I've got some more Feds here. But I think there's something really-screwy going on….”

“Like what?”

“Well, like these guys say they're the Secret Service advance team. The only one,” the other guard stammered. "And there's a Special Agent

O'Neill down here who's madder than spit because I won't open the gate for him."

Diaz lowered his radio slowly. He stared at Smith in utter confusion. “Two Secret Service teams? How the hell can there be two goddamned Secret Service teams?”

A shiver ran down Jon's spine. “There can't.”

He fumbled through the inner pocket of his leather jacket and tugged out his cell phone. It was a special model, and all transmissions to and from the phone were highly encrypted. He punched a single button, triggering an auto-dial emergency sequence.

The phone on the other end rang once — just once. “Klein here,” a quiet voice said calmly. The voice belonged to Nathaniel Frederick Klein, the reclusive head of Covert-One. “What can I do for you, Jon?”

“Can your people patch into the Secret Service's internal communications system?” Smith demanded.

There was a brief pause. “Yes,” Klein replied. “We can.”

“Then do it now!” Smith said urgently. “I need to know the exact location of the presidential advance team for the Teller Institute!”

“Wait one.”

Smith cradled the phone between his shoulder and his ear, temporar-ilv freeing both of his hands. He looked at Frank Diaz, who was watching him with a strange expression of disbelief. “Did your boss give that first Secret Service unit your tactical radio frequencies?”

“Yeah. Naturally.”

“Well, then, Staff Sergeant,” Smith said coolly, “I'm going to need a weapon.”

The former noncom nodded slowly. “Sure thing, Colonel.” He handed over his Beretta. He saw Smith check the pistol's magazine, slap it back in, pull back its slide to chamber a round, and then flip the decocking lever to safely lower the hammer, all in a series of smooth, fast motions. Both Diaz's eyebrows went up. “I guess I should have figured out that you were more than just a doctor.”

Fred Klein came back. “The advance team headed by SAIC Thomas O'Neill is presently just outside the Institute's main gate. They report that the security personnel there have refused to admit them.” The head of Covert-One hesitated. “What precisely is happening out there, Jon?”

“I don't have time to explain in detail,” Smith told him. “But we're looking at a Trojan Horse situation. And the damned Greeks are already inside the gates.”

Then suddenly he and Diaz had even less time than he had imagined.

The fake Secret Service agent he had seen guarding the main doors was moving out into the open. And he was already swinging the muzzle of his submachine gun toward them.

Smith reacted instantly, diving to one side. He landed flat on the steps with the Beretta already extended in both hands and on-target. Diaz threw himself the other way.

For a split second the gunman hesitated, trying to pick out the biggest threat. Then he swung the MP5 toward the uniformed guard.

Big mistake, Smith thought coldly. He flipped the safety catch off and squeezed the trigger. The Beretta bucked upward in his hands. He forced the pistol back online and fired again.

Both 9mm rounds slammed home, tearing flesh and shattering bone. Hit twice in the chest, the gunman went down in a heap. His submachine gun clattered to the pavement and a widening rivulet of blood trickled down the steps.

Smith heard a car door open behind him. He looked back.

Another dark-suited man had climbed out of one of the two black SUVs parked along the drive. This man had his SIG-Sauer pistol out and it was aimed squarely at Jon's head.

Smith swung round in a frantic attempt to bring his own weapon to bear, knowing that it was no use. He was too slow, too far out of position, and the dark-suited man's finger was already tightening on the trigger….

Frank Diaz fired his shotgun at point-blank range. The blunt-tipped CS gas round struck the second gunman right under the chin and ripped his head off. Tumbling now, the tear gas shell bounced off the SUV and exploded high in the air — sending a puff of gray mist drifting east, away from the building.

“Shit,” Diaz murmured. “Nonlethal ammunition, my ass.” The ex-Ranger noncom quickly reloaded his shotgun, this time with solid slugs. “Now what, Colonel?”

Smith lay flat for several seconds longer, scanning the Institute's wide doorway for more enemies. There were no signs of movement. “Cover me.”

Diaz nodded. He knelt, aiming at the door.

Smith belly-crawled up the steps to where the first dead gunman lay. His nose twitched at the hot, coppery smell of blood and the uglier stench of voided bowels. Ignore it, he told himself grimly. Win first. Regret taking life later. He put the Beretta on safety and shoved it into his belt, at the small of his back. Moving fast, he scooped up the MP5.

The sentry's surveillance radio gear caught his eye. It would be very useful to know what the bad guys were up to, he decided. He stripped the lightweight radio set off the other man's belt and fitted the tiny receiver into his own ear.

“Delta One? Delta Two? Reply, over,” a harsh voice said.

Smith held his breath. This was the sound of the enemy. But who the hell were these people?

“Delta Section? Reply, over,” the voice repeated. Then it spoke again, issuing an order. “This is Prime. Delta One and Two are off-line. All sections. ComSec enable. Mark. Mark. Now—”

Abruptly the voice vanished, replaced by static. Smith knew what had just happened. Once they realized their communications were compromised, the intruders inside the building had switched to a new channel, following a preset plan and rendering this radio useless to him.

Smith whistled softly to himself. Whatever the hell was going on here, one thing was absolutely clear: He and Diaz were up against a force of stone-cold professionals.

Chapter Five

Inside the quiet, clean confines of the Harcourt Biosciences Lab, the tall, auburn-haired man frowned. The early arrival of the real Secret Service advance unit was a possibility he had anticipated in his mission plan. Losing the two men he had left guarding the Institute's main entrance was a somewhat more serious complication. He spoke quietly into the small radio mike attached to his suit coat lapel. “Sierra One, this is Prime. Cover the stairs. Now.”

He turned to the men under his direct command. “How much longer?”

The senior technician, short and stocky, with pronounced Slavic features, looked up from the large metal cylinder he was wiring into a remote-control circuit. He had clamped the cylinder to a desk next to the lab's floor-to-ceiling picture window. “Two more minutes, Prime.” He murmured into his own mike and listened intently. “Our sections in the other labs confirm they, too, are almost finished,” he reported.

“Is there a problem, Agent O'Neill?”

The green-eyed man swung round to find Dr. Ravi Parikh staring at him. His colleague Brinker was still engrossed in his analysis of the failed nanophage trial, but the Indian molecular biologist looked suspicious now.

The big man donned a reassuring smile. “There's no problem, Doctor. You can go on with your work.”

Parikh hesitated. “What is that piece of equipment?” he asked at last, pointing to the bulky cylinder beside which the technician crouched. “It does not look much like a 'hazardous materials detector' or whatever else you have said you are placing in our lab.”

“My, my, my, Dr. Parikh… you are a very observant fellow,” the green-eyed man said carefully. He stepped closer and then, almost casually, chopped down hard on the scientist's neck with the edge of his right hand.

Parikh crumpled to the floor.

Startled by the sudden noise, Brinker spun around. He stared down at his assistant in shock. “Ravi? What the — ”

Still moving, the big man pivoted and kicked out with tremendous force. His heel slammed into the blond-haired researcher's chest, hurling him back against his desk and computer monitor. Brinker's head snapped forward. He slid to the floor and lay still.

Smith twisted a control knob on the captured radio set, running through as many different frequencies as he could as fast as he could. He listened attentively. Static hissed and popped. There were no voices. No orders he could intercept and interpret.

With a frown, he yanked the receiver out of his ear and set the now-useless radio gear aside. It was time to get moving. Sitting out here any longer meant surrendering the initiative to the enemy. That would be dangerous enough against amateurs. Against a trained force it was likely to be catastrophic. Right now those fake Secret Service agents were methodically running through some kind of very nasty scheme inside the

Teller Institute. But what was their game? he wondered. Terrorism? Hostage taking? High-risk industrial espionage? Sabotage?

He shook his head. There was no real way to know. Not yet. Still, whatever the enemy was doing, this was the time to press them, before they could react. He rose to one knee, checking the shadowed entrance to the Institute.

“Where are you going, Colonel?” Diaz whispered.

“Inside.”

The security guard's eyes widened in disbelief. “That's crazy! Why not wait here for help? There are at least ten more of those bastards in there.”

Smith risked a quick glance behind him, toward the perimeter fence and the gate. The angry crowd down there was spiraling out of control — pushing and shoving against the fence and hammering furiously on the hoods and roofs of the stalled Secret Service convoy. Unwilling to provoke the enraged mob any further, the real federal agents had retreated inside their locked vehicles. And even if the Teller Institute security guards opened the gate to let them in, the protesters would pour through at the same time. He swore softly. “Take a look, Frank. I don't think the cavalry is coming. Not this time.”

“Then let's hold here,” Diaz argued. He jerked a thumb at the SUVs parked behind them. “That's their line of escape. Let's make 'em come through us to get away.”

Smith shook his head. “Too risky. First, these guys may be dead-enders who don't plan to leave. Second, they know we're out here by now. These guys are pros. They must have alternate escape routes, and there are just too many other ways for them to get away — maybe a helo landing on that big flat roof up there, or more vehicles waiting outside the fence. Third, these weapons”—he nodded at both the MP5 submachine gun he had captured and Diaz's shotgun — “don't give us enough firepower to stop a determined attack. If we let the bad guys run a set-piece battle, they're going to roll right over us.”

“Ah, crap,” the Army veteran sighed, rechecking the loads for his Remington. “I hate this John Wayne shit. They don't pay me enough to be a hero.”

Smith bared his teeth in a tight, fierce grin. “Me, neither. But we're it. So I suggest you shut up and soldier, Sergeant.” He breathed out. “Are you ready?”

Grim-faced but determined, Diaz gave him a thumbs-up.

Cradling the MP5, Smith sprinted for the right side of the Institute's huge main doors. His stomach muscles tensed, expecting the sudden, tearing agony of a bullet fired from inside the main lobby. There was only silence. Breathing fast, he flattened himself against the sun-warmed adobe wall.

Diaz joined him a second later.

Smith rolled around the corner of the door, moving the submachine gun through a steady, controlled arc as he sighted along the barrel. Nothing. The huge room appeared emptv. I Ialf-crouched, he moved forward and took cover behind a stretch of waist-high marble railing. Caught in a gentle breeze from the open doors, papers fluttered off the Institute's registration and information desks and swirled lazily across the tiled floor.

He started to poke his head over the railing.

“Get down!” Diaz roared.

Smith sensed a shape moving in the corridor off to his left. He threw himself flat just as the gunman opened up — firing rapid aimed shots at him with a 9mm pistol. Rounds hammered the marble right over his head, sending jagged chips of shattered stone flying through the air. One sharp-edged fragment sliced a thin red line across the back of his right hand.

Lying prone, with the stock of the MP5 braced against his shoulder, Jon fired back, shooting in controlled three-round bursts. From the open doorway Diaz began firing solid slugs from his twelve-gauge shotgun. Each slug tore huge chunks out of the Institute's adobe walls.

Smith rolled out from behind the railing. A pistol bullet cracked right past his head. Damn. He rolled faster and then stopped himself suddenly, lying prone again — but this time with a clear view right down the corridor.

Jon could see the gunman staring straight at him. They were less than fifty feet apart. It was the sturdy, serious-looking man who had said his name was Farrows. The supposed Secret Service agent was down on one knee, with a SIG-Sauer pistol extended in a two-handed shooting grip, still firing steadily. Another bullet punched into the floor close by Smith's head, spraying small bits and pieces of broken tile across the side of his face.

He ignored the stinging impacts and breathed out. The MP5's forward sight steadied on the gunman. He squeezed the trigger. The submachine gun stuttered three times. Two rounds missed. The third hit Farrows in the face, blowing a hole right out the back of his skull.

Smith scrambled to his feet and raced to the foot of the U-shaped staircase leading up to the Institute's second floor. Three of the enemy down so far, he thought. But how many more to go?

Diaz sprinted through the lobby and went prone not far away, covering the first flight of stairs with his shotgun. “Where to now, Colonel?” he called softly.

That was a good question, Smith thought grimly. Much depended on what the intruders intended. If they were set on holding the research staff as hostages, most of them would be holed up in the Institute cafeteria— not far down the corridor from where Farrows lay dead. But if this was a hostage situation, charging in headlong was likely to get far too many innocent people killed.

Somehow, though, Smith doubted hostage taking was the goal here. This whole operation was too elaborate and too precisely timed for something so simple and low-tech. Coming in disguised as Secret Service agents on a bomb sweep seemed aimed primarily at gaining unimpeded access to the labs.

He made his decision and pointed to the ceiling.

Diaz nodded.

Moving in alternate bounds, with one man always readv to provide covering fire while the other went forward, Jon Smith and the Institute security guard began climbing the central staircase.

“LAZARUS LIVES! NO TO NANOTECH! LAZARUS LIVES! NO TO DEATH MACHINES! LAZARUS LIVES!”

Malachi MacNamara was jostled ever closer to the Institute's perimeter fence, borne along by the shouting, chanting mob. He scowled. He was a man who disdained displays of wild, unreasoning emotion — a man who felt far happier alone in the wilderness than trapped like this in a sea of his fellow humans. For now, though, he knew he could only move with this maddened tide. If he tried to stand against the pressure for too long, he would only be swept off his feet and trampled to death.

Still, he thought icily, that did not mean he had to play the utterly passive puppet.

He swung his elbows through a series of short, vicious arcs, hammering at the ribs of those closest to him. Frightened by his cold rage, they fell back — giving him just enough room to risk a look back at the protest stage. It was deserted. His pale eyes narrowed in sudden calculation. The Lazarus Movement radicals who had whipped this mass of more than ten thousand demonstrators into uncontrolled wrath had vanished.

Where were they?

Even this deep in the mob, the lean, weather-beaten Canadian was tall enough to see past the outer fringes of the crowd. Two of the Secret Service vehicles were edging slowly back down the access road. Dented hoods and car roofs, crumpled fenders, and smashed w indshields testified to the fury of the human storm through which they had passed. There were also small knots of worried-looking New Mexico State Police troopers and Santa Fe County sheriffs, most backing slowly away to avoid triggering an all-out riot. Lured by the prospect of shooting dramatic footage they could feed to the national and international networks, several local TV crews were much closer to the stamping and shouting protesters.

MacNamara turned his gaze away. His eyes hunted through the angry crowd for a glimpse of the Movement activists he sought. They were nowhere to be found. Curiouser and curiouser, he thought coolly. Rats deserting a sinking ship? Or predators slipping away to make a new kill somewhere else?

The pressure of the mob along the fence was growing. At places the barrier bulged inward, stretching dangerously under the impact of so many bodies. The gray-uniformed security guards behind the fence were already edging backward, retreating toward the relative safety of the Institute's main building. The Canadian nodded to himself. That was not terribly surprising. No one but a fool would expect a small force of part-time policemen to face a rampaging crowd often thousand out in the open. Doing so would be choosing a particularly pathetic form of suicide.

He stiffened suddenly, spotting several men moving with grim, determined purpose through the press of hate-filled faces, red and green banners and placards, and upraised fists. They were the young toughs he had seen arriving the day before, each carrying the same long duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

Shielded from police scrutiny by the crowd, the young men reached the fence. Down went their duffels and out came long-handled bolt cutters. They started slicing through metal link after metal link, cutting from top to bottom with practiced speed and efficiency. Soon whole sections of the Institute's security fence tore away and came crashing down. Hundreds and then thousands of demonstrators poured through the gaps, loping across the open ground toward the huge sand-colored science building.

“LAZARUS LIVES! LAZARUS LIVES! LAZARUS LIVES!” they clamored. “NO TO NANOTECH! NO TO DEATH MACHINES!”

Unable to do anything else, the pale, blue-eyed man named Malachi MacNamara ran wildly with them, howling like all the rest.

Smith advanced north along one side of the Teller Institute's second-floor corridor with the MP5 submachine gun cradled against his shoulder, ready to fire. Frank Diaz moved up the other side.

They came to a heavy metal door, one of several opening onto this broad central hallway. The light above the adjacent security station glowed red. A sign identified this as the lab assigned to VOSS LIFE SCIENCES — HUMAN GENOME DIVISION. Diaz gestured at the door with his shotgun. He mouthed a question. “Do we go in?”

Smith shook his head quickly. The Institute was home to more than a dozen different technology R&D efforts, all of them highly advanced and all of them enormously expensive and potentially valuable. There was no way that he and Diaz could realistically comb through every lab and office on this upper floor.

So Smith had decided to play a hunch. The president's scheduled trip to Santa Fe was intended to highlight the nanotech research conducted by Harcourt, Nomura PharmaTech, and an independent Institute-affiliated group. By disguising themselves as a Secret Service advance unit, the intruders had guaranteed themselves access to those same labs. All in all, Smith thought it was a pretty safe bet that whatever they were up to involved the facilities in the North Wing.

Still gliding silently down the central corridor, he and Diaz came to a T-shaped intersection at the far end of the building. Another staircase to the ground floor lay straight ahead of them. Beyond the head of those stairs was a stainless steel door leading into the laboratory leased by Nomura PharmaTech. Turning right would take them to the suite occupied by the Institute's own nanotech team. The Harcourt Biosciences Lab run by Phil Brinker and Ravi Parikh was down the hallway to the left.

Smith hesitated briefly. Which way should they go now?

Suddenly, the warning light on the Nomura lab security station flashed from red to green. “Down!” Jon hissed. He and Diaz each dropped to one knee, waiting.

The door slid open. Three men stepped out into the hallway. Two of them, one fair-haired, the other bald, wore blue technicians' coveralls. They were bowed under the weight of the equipment cases slung over their shoulders. The third, taller and prematurelv gray, wore a dark-colored jacket and khaki slacks. He carried a small Uzi submachine gun.

Smith could feel his pulse accelerating. He and Diaz could cut these men down with a couple of short bursts. No doubt that would be the safest and simplest course of action. But if they were dead, they could not tell him what was going on inside the Teller Institute. He sighed inside. Though it meant taking added risks, he needed prisoners to interrogate a loi more than he needed three silent corpses.

He rose to his feet, covering the intruders with his MP5. “Drop your weapons!” he barked. “And then put your hands up!”

Caught completely by surprise, they froze.

“Do what the man says,” Frank Diaz told them calmly, sighting down the barrel of his pump-action shotgun. “Before I splatter you all over that nice shiny door.”

Still visibly stunned by this sudden reversal of fortune, the two men in coveralls carefully lowered their equipment cases and raised their hands. Scowling, the Uzi-armed man also obeyed. His weapon clattered onto the tiles.

“Now come here,” Smith said. “Slowly. One at a time. You first!” he said, jabbing the muzzle of the MP5 at the one he suspected was their leader, the taller, gray-haired man. The intruder hesitated.

Intending to hurry him along, Jon stepped out into the intersecting corridor. There was a tiny flicker of movement off to his left. He swung round, his finger already starting to squeeze the trigger. But there was no one to shoot. Instead he saw a small olive-drab metal sphere arcing toward him through the air. It bounced off the nearest wall and rolled back out into the intersection. For a frozen moment of time Smith could not believe what he was seeing. But then years of training, combat-tested reflexes, and raw animal fear kicked in.

“Grenade!” he roared in warning. He hit the floor, curled up, and buried his head in his arms.

The grenade went off.

The thunderous blast tore at his clothes and sent him skittering across the floor. White-hot fragments hissed overhead — smashing jagged holes in the adobe walls and shattering lights.

Nearly deafened by the explosion, with his ears still ringing, Smith uncurled and slowly sat up, amazed to find himself unhurt. His submachine gun lay close by. He grabbed it. There were raw gouges along the plastic-stock and hand guard, but it seemed otherwise undamaged.

His ears were clearing. He could hear high-pitched screams now. They were coming from across the corridor, by the door to the Nomura lab. Flayed by dozens of razor-edged steel splinters, the two men wearing coveralls writhed in agony — smearing blood across the tiled floor. The third man, luckier or blessed with quicker reactions, was unwounded. And he was reaching for the Uzi he had dropped.

Smith shot him three times. The gray-haired man fell forward onto his face and lay still.

Then Jon looked over at Diaz. He was dead. The bulletproof vest he was wearing had stopped most of the grenade fragments — but not the one jagged shard that had torn open his throat. Smith swore softly, angry with himself for dragging the other man into this fight and angry at the fates.

Another grenade bounced across the corridor and rolled toward the head of the stairs. This one did not explode. Instead it hissed and sputtered, spewing thick, coiling tendrils of red smoke into the air. In seconds, the two intersecting corridors were blanketed in billowing smoke.

Smith peered down the barrel of his MP5, looking for any sign of movement in the smoke. Firing blind would only give away his position. He needed a target.

From somewhere ahead, deep in that red, roiling cloud, two Uzis stuttered on full automatic, spraying a hail of bullets down the hall. Copper-jacketed 9mm rounds punched new holes in walls or ricocheted off steel doors. Ceramic vases shattered. Shredded pieces of yellow and purple wildflowers swirled madly in the bullet-torn air. Smith fell prone, desperately hugging the floor while the Uzi rounds ripped right over his head.

The shooting stopped abruptly, leaving only an eerie silence in its wake.

He waited a moment longer, listening. Now he thought he could hear feet clattering down the smoke-filled staircase, growing ever fainter. He grimaced. The bad guys were falling back. That fusillade of submachine-gun fire had been meant to keep his head down while they escaped. Worst of all, it had worked.

Smith scrambled upright and went forward into the blinding red cloud. He strained to see what was ahead of him. His feet sent spent shell casings tinkling across the tile floor and crunched on powdered bits of adobe. The top of the stairs loomed up out of the smoke.

He crouched, peering down the stairwell. If the intruders had left someone behind to guard their retreat, those stairs would be a death trap. But he did not have time to run all the way back to the central staircase. He had to either chance it — or stay here and cower.

With his submachine gun held ready, he started down the wide, shallow steps. Behind him, blinding white light suddenly flared across the corridor. The whole stairwell swayed violently from side to side, rocked by a series of powerful explosions rippling through the Nomura PharmaTech and Institute nanotech labs.

Reacting instinctively, Smith threw himself down the stairs, rolling and tumbling head over heels while the building above him erupted in flame.

Chapter Six

Dr. Ravi Parikh swam slowly upward through darkness, blearily trying to regain full consciousness. His eyes fluttered open. He was lying with his face pressed against the floor. The cool brown tiles bucked and jolted beneath him — shuddering as carefully placed demolition charges systematically smashed the other North Wing lab complexes into splintered, flaming ruins. The molecular biologist groaned, fighting down a stomach-churning wave of nausea and pain.

Sweating with the effort, he forced himself up onto his hands and knees. He raised his head slowly. He was looking at the floor-to-ceiling picture window that ran the whole length of the Harcourt lab's outer-office area. The blinds, usually drawn tight, were wide open.

Close to his head, the strange metal cylinder he had wondered about was still clamped to a desk facing the window. A blinking digital readout attached to one end of the cylinder flickered through a series of numbers, counting down: 10…9…8…7…6…5…

Small shaped charges attached to the picture window detonated in a rapid-fire succession of orange and red flashes. Instantly the glass shattered into thousands of tiny shards and blew outward. The sudden change in pressure sucked dozens of scraps of loose paper into the air. They were wafted out through the jagged opening.

Still dazed and sick, Parikh stared after them in utter, uncomprehending bewilderment. He drew a single deep, shuddering breath.

3… 2… 1. The blinking digital readout went dead. A relay valve clicked and cycled inside the cylinder. And then, with a quiet, snake-like hiss, the nanophage canister began releasing its highly compressed and deadly contents into the outside world.

The cloud of Stage II nanophages drifted silently and invisibly through the shattered window. There were tens of billions of them, each still inert — each still waiting for the signal that would bring it to life. Pushed outward by the Harcourt lab's own air pressure system, the vast mass of microscopic phages gradually dispersed and then slowly, ever so slowly, slid downward through the air.

Still spreading, this unseen mist settled onto the thousands of stunned Lazarus Movement protesters watching in horror as explosions ripped through the upper floor of the Teller Institute. Millions of nanophages were drawn with each breath and carried down into their lungs. Millions more entered through the porous membranes of their noses or filtered through the soft tissues around their eyes.

For several seconds these nanophages stayed inactive, spreading outward through blood vessels and cell walls by natural processes. But one out of every hundred thousand or so, larger and of a more sophisticated design than its companions, went active immediately. These control phages prowled the host body under their own power, hunting for one of the various biochemical signatures that their sensor arrays were able to recognize. Any positive reading triggered the immediate release of coded streams of unique messenger molecules.

The nanophages themselves, still floating silently through the body, carried only a single sensor of their own, a sensor able to detect those coded molecules, even when they were diluted to the level of a few parts per billion. Its creators coldly referred to this aspect of their nanophage design as the “shark receptor,” since it mimicked the uncanny ability of great white sharks to sniff out even the tiniest drop of blood drifting amid the vast depths of the sea. But the comparison was cruelly apt in yet another way. Each nanophage reacted to this faint whiff of the messenger molecule exactly as though it were a shark scenting fresh blood in the water.

Trapped in the middle of the mob, the lean, weather-beaten man was the first to recognize the true horror descending on them. Like all the rest, he had stopped chanting and now stood in grim silence, watching the bombs going off one after another. Most were detonating on the Teller Institute's north and west sides — sending huge pillars of flame and debris soaring high into the air. But Malachi could also hear other, smaller charges exploding deep inside the massive building.

The woman pressed next to him, a young hard-faced blonde wearing a surplus army-issue jacket with the sleeves rolled up, suddenly groaned. She fell to her knees and began retching, quietly at first and then uncontrollably. MacNamara glanced down at her, noting the needle tracks scarring her arms. Those higher up were livid, still raw.

A heroin addict, he realized, feeling a mixture of pity and disgust. Probably lured to the Lazarus Movement rally by the promise of thrills and the chance to take part in something bigger and more important than her drab everyday life. Was the young fool overdosing here and now? He sighed and knelt down to see if there was anything he could do to help her.

Then he saw the grotesque web of red-rimmed fissures spreading swiftly across her terrified face and her needle-scarred arms, and he knew that this was something infinitely more terrible. She moaned again, sounding more like an animal than a human being. The fissures widened. Her skin was sloughing away, rapidly dissolving into a kind of translucent slime.

To his own horror, MacNamara saw that the connective tissues beneath her skin — the muscles, tendons, and ligaments — were dissolving, too. Her eyes liquefied and slid dripping out of their sockets. Bright red blood welled up within those terrible wounds. Beneath the mask of blood that was now her face he could see the pale white of bone.

Blind now, the young woman reached out desperately with clawed hands. More red-tinged slime poured out of the shapeless cavity that had once been her mouth. Sickened and ashamed of his own fear, he backed away. Her hands and fingers dissolved, falling apart in a welter of disconnected bones. She fell forward and lay twitching on the ground. Even as he watched, her fatigue jacket and jeans sagged inward, stained dark by the blood and other fluids pouring out of her disintegrating body.

For what seemed an eternity, MacNamara stared at her in unbelieving dread, unable to look away. It was as though this woman were being eaten alive from within. At last, she lay still, already more a jumble of bones and slime-soaked clothing than an identifiable human corpse.

He scrambled upright, now hearing a gruesome chorus of tormented howls and groans and wailing rising from the tightly packed crowd around him. Hundreds of other protesters were reeling now, clawing and clutching at themselves as their flesh was consumed from the inside out.

For a long-drawn-out moment, the thousands of Lazarus Movement activists still unaffected stayed motionless, rooted to the ground by shock and sheer mind-numbing fear. But then they broke and fled, scattering in all directions — trampling the dead and dying in a mad, panicked rush to escape whatever new plague had escaped from the explosion-shattered labs of the Teller Institute.

And again Malachi MacNamara ran with them, this time with his pulse hammering in his ears as he wondered just how much longer he might have to live.

Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith lay in a tangled heap at the foot of the North Wing staircase. For a few tortured seconds he could not force himself to move. Every bone and muscle in his body felt twisted, bruised, or scraped in some painful and unnatural way.

The Teller Institute swayed, rocked by yet another enormous explosion somewhere on its upper floor. A hail of dust and broken bits of adobe pattered down the stairs. Scraps of paper set alight by the blast spun lazily through the air, each a tiny flaring torch drifting downward.

Time to go, Smith told himself. It was either that or stay and get crushed when the bomb-damaged building finally collapsed in on itself. Gingerly he uncurled himself and stood up. He winced. The first fifteen feet of his rolling, tumbling dive down the stairs had been the easy part, he thought wryly. Everything after that had been one long, bone-jarring nightmare.

He eyed his surroundings. The last wisps of red mist from the smoke grenade were dissipating, but clouds of thicker, darker smoke were beginning to roll through the ground-floor corridors. There were fires raging throughout the building. He glanced up at the ceiling. The sprinkler heads there were bone-dry, meaning that the Institute's fire suppression system must have been knocked out by one of the bomb blasts.

Smith pursed his lips, frowning. He was willing to bet that was deliberate. This was not a case of industrial espionage gone wrong or of simple sabotage; this was cold-blooded, ruthless terrorism.

He limped over to where his submachine gun lay. By some miracle the weapon hadn't gone off accidentally when it tumbled with him down the stairs, but the curved thirty-round ammo magazine was twisted and bent at an awkward angle. He hit the release catch and tugged hard on the damaged magazine. It was jammed tight.

He laid the submachine gun down and drew the 9mm Beretta. The pistol seemed unharmed, but the pain he felt made Smith sure he was going to have a Beretta-shaped bruise on the small of his back the next morning.

If you live to see the next morning, he reminded himself coldly.

Holding the pistol ready, he set off to make his way out through the burning, bomb-damaged building. It was easv enough to follow the path taken by the retreating intruders. They had left a trail of corpses behind them.

Smith passed a number of bodies huddled in the smoke-filled corridor. Most were people he knew, at least by sight, and some were men or women he knew well, among them Takashi Ukita, the chief scientist for Nomura PharmaTech's lab. He had been shot twice in the head. Jon shook his head in regret.

Dick Pfaff and Bill Corimond lay dead not far away in that same hallway. Both of them had been shot multiple times at point-blank range. They had been the senior researchers in the Institute's own nanotech group. Their work had been aimed at developing small self-replicating devices that would consume oil spills without further damage to the environment.

The farther he walked, the more coldly furious Smith became. Parikh, Brinker, Pfaff, Corimond, Ukita, and the others had all been dedicated scientists and truth seekers. Their research would have yielded enormous benefits for the whole world. So now some terrorist sons of bitches had killed them and destroyed years of hard work? Well, then, he decided icily, he would do his damnedest to make sure those same terrorists paid dearly for their crimes.

He picked up the pace — trotting now. His eyes were narrow slits. Somewhere ahead there were men he needed to kill or capture.

He passed more corpses. The smoke was thicker now. The acrid stench stung his eyes and left his throat raw. He could feel the glowing heat from the uncontrolled fires raging in offices on both sides of the corridor. Some of the wood doors were starting to smolder. Smith ran faster.

At last he came to a side door that had been left propped half-open. He knelt quickly, checking for any tripwires that could trigger a booby trap. Seeing none, he eased through the doorway and stepped out into the open air.

Before him lay a scene that might have been one of the grotesque paintings of hell and devils and damnation so favored by medieval Christians. Thousands of terrified Lazarus Movement activists were streaming away from the Institute, scrambling wildly through its rock gardens of cactus, sagebrush, and wildflowers. Some staggered, reeled, and then dropped to their knees with loud, despairing wails. One by one they folded in on themselves. Smith stared at them in utter horror, appalled by what he saw happening before his very eyes. Hundreds of people were literally falling apart, dissolving into a reddish liquid sludge. Hundreds more had already been reduced to sad heaps of stained clothing and scraps of whitened bone.

For a moment he fought against an almost overpowering urge to turn and flee himself. There was something so awful, so inhuman, in what he saw happening to those people that it stirred every primitive fear he had thought long buried by training, discipline, and willpower. No one should die like that, he thought desperately. No man should have to watch himself rotting away while still alive.

With an effort, Smith tore his eyes away from the rotting flesh and mangled corpses strewn outside the Teller Institute. Pistol in hand, he scanned the panicked mob fleeing toward the perimeter fence, trying to pick out those who showed no fear — those whose movements were disciplined and sure. He spotted a group of six men walking steadily toward the fence. They were more than a hundred meters ahead of him. Four were clad in blue coveralls and lugged heavy equipment cases. Smith nodded to himself. Those had to be the specialists who had planted the bombs inside the Institute. The two remaining men, striding a few yards behind the others, wore identical charcoal gray suits. Each was armed with a short-nosed Uzi submachine gun. The shorter of the two was about Jon's own height, with short-cropped black hair. But the one who really caught his attention, the powerfully built auburn-haired man who seemed to be giving the orders, was at least a head taller than his comrades.

Smith started running again. He loped across the open ground, dodging the pathetic remains scattered here and there, closing rapidly on the retreating terrorists. He was within fifty meters or so when their chief, turning his head for a last satisfied look at the bomb-gutted and burning Teller Institute, saw him coming.

“Action! Rear!” the giant shouted, warning his men. He was already swinging to face Smith with his submachine gun gripped in both hands. He opened fire instantly, walking short bursts across the sand and scrub toward the running American.

Jon threw himself to the right, rolling on his shoulder. He came back up on one knee with the Beretta aimed in the right general direction. Without waiting for the sights to settle on his target, he squeezed off two shots. Neither came that close, but at least they forced the big man to drop behind a clump of sagebrush.

Another Uzi burst pulverized the ground right behind Smith, kicking up huge dirt clods. He swiveled. The black-haired gunman was coming up on his flank, firing as he ran.

Jon swung the Beretta through a wide arc, leading the other man by just a hair. He breathed out calmly and fired three times. His first shot missed. The second and third shattered the terrorist's leg and smashed his right shoulder.

Screaming in pain, the black-haired man stumbled and went down. Two of the men in coveralls dropped their equipment cases and ran to help him. Immediately the tall auburn-haired man popped up from behind the sagebrush and began shooting again.

Smith felt an Uzi round punch through the lining of his leather bomber jacket. The superheated air trailing the near miss tore a searing line of fire across his ribs. He rolled again, trying frantically to throw off the big man's aim. More bullets clipped the sand and dry vegetation all around him. Expecting to get hit any second, he fired back with the Beretta while rolling, snapping off several unaimed shots in a desperate bid to force the other man back into cover.

Still rolling, Smith landed behind a large rock half-buried in a patch of tall wheatgrass. He went prone. Submachine-gun fire hammered the small boulder.

The noise of a powerful engine roared above the sound of gunfire. Warily Jon raised his head for a quick look. He saw a mammoth dark green Ford Excursion accelerating through one of the gaps in the fence. The SUV veered left, heading straight for the skirmish. Hundreds of panicked protesters ducked out of its path as it bounced over the broken ground at high speed.

Brakes squealing, the vehicle slewed round and skidded to a stop next to the small band of terrorists. The cloud of dust thrown by its tires hung low in the air, drifting slowly downwind. Protected by the SUV's bulk, the four explosives experts tossed their equipment cases into the back, shoved the wounded gunman into one of the rear seats, and scrambled inside themselves. Still firing short aimed bursts in Smith's direction, the auburn-haired giant backed away slowly toward the getaway vehicle. He was smiling now, his eyes alight with pleasure.

That murderous son of a bitch! Jon's cold fury suddenly flared into white-hot rage, erasing any instinct for self-preservation. Without stopping to think more clearly, he stood straight up, bracing the Beretta in a target shooter's grip.

Surprised by his boldness, the tall man stopped shooting controlled bursts and went to full auto. The Uzi chattered wildly, climbing higher with every round it fired.

Smith felt bullets ripping the air close to his head. He ignored them, choosing instead to focus entirely on his target. Fifty meters was near the outside edge of his effective pistol range, so concentration was vital. The Beretta's sights slid down on the big man's massive chest and stayed there.

He squeezed the trigger rapidly, firing as many shots as quickly as he could without spoiling his aim. His first bullet punched a hole in the front passenger side door, just inches from the auburn-haired giant's hip. The second smashed the window next to his elbow.

Jon frowned. The Beretta was pulling to the left. He shifted his aim slightly and fired again. This 9mm round smashed the Uzi out of the terrorist leader's hands, sending it flying into the scrub far out of his reach. The bullet ricocheted off the SUV's hood in a shower of sparks.

Unnerved by the gunfire hammering his vehicle, the getaway driver stomped down hard on the accelerator. The Excursion's tires spun futilely for a second and then found some traction. The dark green SUV peeled out, skidded through another tight turn, and roared away toward the fence, leaving the tall auburn-haired man behind in a drifting spray of sand and dust.

For a moment the giant stood motionless, with his head cocked to watch his comrades abandon him. Then, to Smith's astonishment, he simply shrugged his massive shoulders and turned back to face the American. His face was now utterly devoid of any expression.

Jon moved closer, still aiming the Beretta at him. “Get your hands up!”

The other man just stood there, waiting.

“I said get your hands up!” Smith snapped. He kept walking, closing the range. He stopped about fifteen meters away, well inside the zone where he knew he could put even 9mm round exactly where he wanted it.

The auburn-haired giant said nothing. His bright green eyes narrowed. The look in them reminded Jon of one he had seen in a caged tiger padding back and forth past human prey it could not reach.

“And what will you do if I refuse? Kill me?” the tall man said at last.

His voice was softer than Smith expected and his English was perfect, utterly without trace of an accent.

Smith nodded coldly. “If I have to.”

“Then do it,” the other man told him. Without waiting any longer, he took a long stride forward, moving with a predator's lithe grace. His right hand darted inside his coat and came out gripping a razor-edged fighting knife.

Smith squeezed the Beretta's trigger. It bucked upward, and recoil slammed the slide back, ejecting the spent shell casing. But this time the slide locked to the rear. He swore under his breath. He had just fired the last of the fifteen rounds in the pistol's magazine.

The 9mm bullet hit the auburn-haired giant high up on his left side. For a brief instant the impact rocked him back. He looked down at the small red-rimmed hole in his coat. Blood pulsed in the wound, spilling slowly out across the dark fabric. Then he flexed the fingers of his left hand and waggled the fighting knife in his right. His lips twisted into a cruel grin. He shook his head in mock pity. “Not good enough. As you see, I still live.”

Still grinning, the green-eyed man slowly moved in for the kill, sweeping his knife back and forth in a sinuous, almost hypnotic, arc. The deadly-looking blade glinted in the sun.

Desperately Smith hurled the now-useless Beretta at him.

The big man ducked under it and attacked. He struck with unbelievable speed, aiming for the American's throat.

Smith jerked aside. The knife blade flashed past less than an inch from his face. He backed away fast, breathing hard.

The green-eyed man came after him. He lunged again, this time lower.

Jon spun to one side and chopped down hard, trying to break the other man's right wrist. It was like hitting a piece of high-quality steel. His hand went numb. He fell back again, shaking his fingers, trying frantically to work some life back into them. What the hell was he fighting?

The big man came prowling after him a third time, grinning even wider now, plainly enjoying himself. This time he feinted with the knife in his right hand and then punched Smith in the ribs with his left-striking with pile-driving force.

The massive jolt knocked the air out of Jon's lungs. He stumbled backward, gasping, panting — fighting now just to stay on his feet and conscious.

“Perhaps you should have saved that last bullet for yourself,” the green-eyed man suggested politely. He held up the fighting knife. “It would have been quicker and less painful than this will be.”

Smith kept backing away, looking for something, anything, he could use as a weapon. There was nothing, just sand and hard-packed soil. He felt himself starting to panic. Hold it together, Jon, he told himself. If you freeze in front of this bastard, you are as good as dead. Hell, you may be dead anyway, but at least you can make a fight of it.

Somewhere off in the distance, he thought he could hear the sound of police sirens — sirens drawing nearer. But still the green-eyed man stalked after him, eager to make his kill.

Chapter Seven

Two hundred meters away, on the edge of a small thicket of piflon pines and juniper trees, three men lay concealed in the tall, dry grass. One of them, much bigger than his companions, focused a pair of high-powered binoculars on the corpse-littered grounds of the Institute, watching the hand-to-hand combat between the lean dark-haired American and his taller, far more powerful opponent. He frowned, weighing his options. Beside him, a sniper kept one eye glued to the telescopic sight of an odd-looking rifle, slowly and steadily adjusting his aim.

The third man, a signals expert, lay in a tangle of sophisticated communications gear. He listened intently to the urgent, static-riddled voices in his headphones. 'The authorities are starting to respond more effectively, Terce,“ he said flatly. ”Additional police, ambulance, and fire units are all converging rapidly on this location."

Understood.“ Terce, the man with the binoculars, shrugged his shoulders. ”Prime has made a regrettable error."

His driver reacted improperly," murmured the sniper beside him.

“The driver will be disciplined,” the man agreed. “But Prime knew the mission requirements. This fight is pointless. He should have left when given the chance, but he is allowing his lusts to override his better judgment. He may kill this man he hunts, but he is unlikely to escape.” He made a decision. “So be it. Mark him.”

“And the other, too?” the sniper asked.

“Yes.”

The sniper nodded. He looked through the scope, adjusting his aim one last time. “Target acquired.” He pulled the trigger. The odd-looking rifle coughed quietly. “Target marked.”

Smith ducked under another deadly slash from the green-eyed man's knife. He backpedaled again, knowing that he was running out of time and maneuvering room. Sooner or later, this maniac would nail him.

Suddenly the auburn-haired man slapped irritably at his neck — almost as if he were crushing a wasp. He took another step forward and then stopped, staring down at his hand with a look of absolute horror. His mouth fell open and he half-turned — looking back over his shoulder at the silent woods behind him.

And then, while Smith watched in growing terror, the tall green-eyed man began to come apart. A web of red cracks snaked rapidly across his face and hands, growing ever wider. In seconds, his skin fell away, dissolving into translucent red-tinged ooze. His green eyes melted and slid down his face. The big man shrieked aloud in inhuman agony. Screaming and writhing, the giant toppled to the ground — clawing wildly at what little was left of his body in a futile effort to fight off whatever was eating him alive.

Jon could not bear to see any more. He turned, stumbled, and fell to his knees, retching uncontrollably. In that moment, something hissed past his ear and buried itself in the earth in front of him.

Instinct taking over. Smith threw himself sideways and then he crawled rapidly toward the nearest cover.

In the grove of trees, the sniper slowly lowered his odd-looking rifle. “The second target has gone to ground. I have no shot.”

“It does not matter,” the man with the binoculars said coldly. “One man more or less is of no real consequence.” He turned to the signaler. “Contact the Center. Inform them that Field Two is under way and seems to be proceeding according to plan.”

“Yes, Terce.”

“What about Prime?” the sniper asked quietly. “How will you report his death?”

For a moment, the man with binoculars sat still, pondering the question. Then he asked, “Do you know the legend of the Horatii?”

The sniper shook his head.

“It is an old, old story,” Terce told him. “From the days of the Romans, long before their empire. Three identical brothers, the Horatii, were sent to duel against the three champions of a neighboring city. Two fought Bravely, but they were killed. The third of the Horatii triumphed — not through sheer force of arms alone but through stealth and cunning.”

The sniper said nothing.

The man with the binoculars turned his head and smiled coldlv. A stray shaft of sunlight fell on his auburn hair and lit his strikingly green eyes. “Like Prime, I am one of the Horatii. But unlike Prime, I plan to survive and to win the reward I have been promised.”