The Lazarus Vendetta Page 6

  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 prematurely 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 lot 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 t
iny 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 sabotagé; 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 easy 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 Uki
ta, 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.