Her eyes widened as a very tall and very broad-shouldered man stepped quietly into the study, moving with the dangerous grace of a tiger. His curiously green eyes gleamed in the dim light cast by the lamp on Burke’s desk. For a moment she thought he was the same man described by Colonel Smith in his report on the aftermath of the Teller Institute disaster—the leader of the “terrorist” unit that had conducted the attack. Then she shook her head. That was impossible. The leader of that attack had been consumed by the nanophages released by the bombs that had shattered the Institute’s labs.
“This is Terce,” Hal Burke said brusquely. “He commands one of my TOCSIN action teams. His men were on guard outside. They’re the ones who spotted your covert surveillance guys prowling around this house.”
“Whoever’s out there isn’t connected to me,” Pierson said again, straining to put every ounce of conviction she could muster into her voice. Every FBI manual on the psychology of conspiracies stressed the inherent and overwhelming fears of those involved of betrayal from within. As head of the Bureau’s Counter-Terrorism Division, she had often made use of those fears—playing on them to break apart suspected cells, turning the would-be terrorists on one another like rats trapped in a pit. She bit down on her lower lip, tasting the salt tang of her own blood. Now the same forces of paranoia and suspicions were at work here, threatening her life.
“No dice, Kit,” Burke told her coldly. “I don’t believe in coincidences, so you’re either a liar—or a screwup. And this operation can’t afford either one.”
The big man named Terce said nothing at first. Instead, he reached down and scooped her pistol off the floor. He slid it into one of the pockets of his black windbreaker and then turned to the CIA officer. “Now, give me your own weapon, Mr. Burke,” he said gently. “If you please.”
The smaller man blinked in surprise, plainly caught off-guard by the request. “What?”
“Give me your weapon,” Terce repeated. He stepped closer to Burke, looming over the CIA officer. “It would be … safer … for us all.”
“Why?”
The green-eyed man nodded at the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam on the desk. “Because you have been drinking a bit more than is wise, Mr. Burke, and I do not fully trust either your judgment or your reflexes at this moment. You can rest easy. My men have the situation well in hand.”
More gunfire rattled in the distance, farther away now.
For the space of a heartbeat Burke sat staring up at the taller man. His eyes narrowed angrily. But then he did as he was asked, handing the Beretta to Terce with a sullen frown.
Kit Pierson felt some of the tension leave her shoulders. She breathed out. Whatever else he was, the leader of this TOCSIN action team was no fool. Disarming Burke so quickly was a sound move. It was also one that might help her defuse this ridiculous and incendiary situation. She leaned forward. “Look, let’s see what we can do to sort this mess out rationally,” she said coolly. “First, if anyone from the FBI did tail me here, they certainly did it without my knowledge or my consent—”
“Be silent, Ms. Pierson!” the green-eyed man said coldly. “I do not care how or why you were followed. Your motives and your competence, or lack of it, are immaterial.”
Kit Pierson stared back at him, suddenly aware that she was in as much danger from this man as she had been with Burke—and perhaps a great deal more.
Near Paris
Engines buzzing softly, the two UAVs flew on at three thousand feet. Below, forests, roads, and villages slid past and then vanished in the early morning haze behind them. The sun, rising east above the deep, undulating valleys of the Seine and the Marne, was a large ball of red fire outlined against the thin fading gray mist.
Closer to Paris, the landscape began changing, becoming more congested and crowded. Ancient villages surrounded by woods and farmland gave way to larger, more modern suburbs surrounded by intertwined motorways and rail lines. High-rise apartment buildings appeared ahead, stabbing up at irregular intervals in a great arc around the inner core of the city itself.
Long white contrails formed in the sky high above the two robot aircraft, vast trails of ice crystals floating in the clear, cold air, each marking the passage of a large passenger jet. The UAVs were nearing the flight paths to and from two airports—Le Bourget and Charles de Gaulle. Given their very small size, the odds of radar detection were very low, but those who controlled them saw no point in taking unnecessary risks. Responding to preprogrammed instructions, each drone dropped lower, descending to just five hundred feet and throttling back to maintain a near-constant airspeed of around one hundred miles per hour.
Field Experiment Operations Room, Inside the Center
The Center’s operations room was located deep within the complex, secure behind a number of locked doors accessible only to those with the very highest clearances. Inside the darkened chamber, several scientists and technicians sat in front of large consoles, constantly monitoring the pictures and data streaming in from Paris—both from the ground sensors planted at various points and those onboard the two UAVs. Updates of wind direction, speed, humidity, and barometric pressure were automatically fed into a sophisticated targeting program. Two large screens showed the terrain ahead and below the twin drones. Numbers in the lower right corner of each display—the range to target—counted down, flickering from time to time as the program made carefully calculated adjustments to each robot aircraft’s aim point. The control room personnel sat up straighter, watching with growing tension and excitement as those range numbers steadied up and began sliding ever more rapidly toward zero.
0.4 km, 0.3 km, 0.15 km … the command “Initiate” flashed in red on both screens. Instantly the targeting program transmitted an encrypted radio signal, relaying it through a communications satellite high above the Earth and then back down to the drones aloft just north of Paris.
La Courneuve
More and more people ventured out on the dingy, run-down streets around the slum housing complexes of La Courneuve. A few were heading for the nearest Metro station on their way to whatever menial jobs they had been able to find. More were women carrying baskets and bags—mothers, wives, and grandmothers sent out to shop for the day’s food. Some were families strolling toward the wooded spaces and parkland north of the suburb. Sunday morning was a rare opportunity for parents to give their children a taste of the open air away from the crime-ridden, graffiti-smeared streets and alleys, and the trash-heaped hallways of the Cité des Quatre Mille. The thieves, thugs, pushers, and drug addicts who preyed on them were mostly asleep, barricaded in the bare concrete apartments provided by the French welfare state.
Flying on parallel courses now, the two UAVs climbed again, rising to just over one thousand feet. Still moving at one hundred miles an hour, they crossed over a wide avenue and entered the airspace above La Courneuve. Aboard first one and then the other drone, control relays cycled, triggering the twin canisters slung below their wings. With a sinister hiss, each canister began spewing its contents in an invisible stream.
Hundreds of billions of Stage III nanophages fell across a huge swathe of La Courneuve, slowly raining down out of the sky in an undetected cloud of death and imminent slaughter. Vast numbers drifted among the thousands of unsuspecting people caught outside and were inhaled unnoticed—pulled into their lungs with every breath. Tens of billions more of the microscopic phages were drawn into the huge air ducts atop the slum high-rises and spread through ventilation shafts to apartments on every floor. Once the phages were inside, air currents wafted them through every room, settling unseen on those sleeping, drowsing in a drugged stupor, or mindlessly watching television.
Most of the phages stayed inert, conserving their limited power, silently spreading through the blood and tissues of those they had infected while waiting the go signal that would unleash them. Like the Stage II nanodevices used at the Teller Institute, however, roughly one out of every hundred thousand was a control phage—a larger sili
con sphere packed with a wide array of sophisticated biochemical sensors. Their power packs went active immediately. They scoured through their host bodies, seeking any trace of one of dozens of precoded conditions, illnesses, allergies, and syndromes. The first positive reading by any single sensor triggered an immediate burst of the messenger molecules that would send the smaller killer phages into a frenzy of destruction.
Several miles south and west of La Courneuve, the six-man surveillance team occupied the upper floor and attic of an old gray stone building in the heart of the Marais District of Paris. Microwave and radio antennae dotted the steep, sloping tiled roof above them—gathering every scrap of data beamed their way by the sensors and cameras set up around the nanophage target area. From there the data flowed down into banks of networked computers. There it would be stored and evaluated to eventually be relayed by coded signal and satellite to the distant Center. To conserve bandwidth and preserve operational security, only the most crucial information was passed on in real time.
The white-haired man named Linden stared over the shoulder of one of his men, watching the data pour into his machines. Linden was careful to avoid looking too closely at a TV monitor showing images captured from the streets surrounding the Cité des Quatre Mille. Let the scientists observe their own handiwork, he thought grimly. He had his own tasks to perform. Instead, he glanced at another screen, this one showing pictures relayed from the two UAVs. They had completed their orbits over La Courneuve and they were now flying east, roughly paralleling the course of the Canal de l’Ourcq.
He keyed the radio mike attached to his headset, reporting to Nones at the launch site near Meaux. “Field Experiment Three is proceeding. Data collection is nominal. Your drones are on their programmed course and speed. ETA is roughly twenty minutes.”
“Is there any sign of detection?” the third of the Horatii asked calmly.
Linden glanced at Vitor Abrantes. The young Portuguese was charged with monitoring all police, fire, ambulance, and air traffic control frequencies. Computers set to scan for certain key words aided him in this task. “Anything?” Linden asked.
The young man shook his head. “Nothing yet. The Parisian emergency operators have received several calls from the target area, but nothing they have so far been able to understand.”
Linden nodded. He and his team had received a cursory briefing on the effects of the Stage III nanophages—enough to know that the soft tissues of the mouth and tongue were among the first to dissolve. He clicked his mike again. “You are clear so far,” he told Nones. “The authorities are still asleep.”
Brown-eyed, brown-haired, still slender, and pretty, Nouria Besseghir gripped the hand of her five-year-old daughter, Tasa, tightly, urging the little girl across the street at a rapid pace. Her daughter, she knew, was both curious and easily distracted. Left to her own devices, Tasa was perfectly capable of standing still right in the middle of the road—caught up in the study of an interesting pattern in the cracked and potholed cement or of some intriguing bit of graffiti on a nearby building. True, there were not many cars on the streets of La Courneuve at this hour, but few drivers here paid much attention to traffic laws or to pedestrian safety. In this lawless neighborhood, part of what the French called the Zone, hit-and-runs were a fairly common occurrence, certainly far more common than any police investigation of such “accidents.”
Almost as important to Nouria was her desire to keep moving—to avoid drawing unwanted attention from any of the predatory men who loitered along these dingy streets or squatted in the shadowed alleys. Six months ago, her husband had returned to his native Algeria on what he had told her was “family business.” And now he was dead, killed in a clash between the Algerian security forces and the Islamic rebels who periodically challenged that nation’s authoritarian government. Word of his death had taken weeks to reach her, and she still did not know which of the two warring factions had murdered him.
That made Nouria Besseghir a widow—a widow whose French birth entitled her to a modest welfare allowance from the French government. In the eyes of the thieves, pimps, and rogues who essentially ran the affairs of the Cité des Quatre Mille, that small weekly stipend also made her a valuable commodity. Any one of them would be only too glad to offer her his dubious “protection”—at least in return for the chance to plunder her body and her money.
Her lip curled in disgust at the thought. Allah only knew that her dead husband, Hakkim, had been no great prize himself, but even so she would rather die than be fondled and then robbed by the human parasites she saw lurking all around her. And so Nouria walked quickly whenever and wherever she went outside her tiny apartment, and she always kept her gaze fixed firmly on the ground before her. Both she and her daughter also wore the hijab—the loose-fitting clothing, including head scarf, that marked them as Muslim females of decency and propriety.
“Mama, look!” Tasa exclaimed suddenly, pointing up into the blue sky above them. The little girl’s voice was excited and shrill and piercing. “A big bird! Look at that big bird flying up there! It’s enormous. Is it a condor? Or perhaps a roc? Like one from the stories? Oh, how Papa would have loved to have seen it!”
Annoyed, Nouria shushed her daughter sternly. The very last thing they needed to be right now was conspicuous. Still walking fast, she pulled on Tasa’s wrist, tugging her along the littered pavement. It was too late.
A drunk with a matted beard and acne-pitted skin reeled out from a nearby alley, blocking their path. Nouria gagged as a choking stench of sour liquor and unwashed flesh rolled over her. After her first appalled look at this shambling wreck, she lowered her gaze and tried to walk around the man.
He staggered closer, forcing her to step back. The drunk, with his eyes bulging, coughed and spat and then moaned—uttering a low, guttural groan that was more dog-like than human.
Disgusted, Nouria grimaced and stepped back farther, pulling Tasa with her. Part of her ached that her beautiful little girl was being exposed to so much filth and degradation and depravity. Why, this cochon was so intoxicated that he could not even speak! She averted her eyes from the sight, wondering what she should do to get away from this stinking brute. Should she scoop Tasa up in her arms and make a dash back across the street? Or would that only draw even more unwanted attention?
“Mama!” her daughter murmured. “Something awful is happening to him. See? He’s bleeding all over!”
Nouria looked up and saw with horror that Tasa was right. The drunk had collapsed in front of her, falling onto his hands and knees. Blood trickled onto the pavement, dripping from his mouth and from the terrible wounds spreading along the length of his arms and legs. Strips of flesh peeled away from his face and dropped to the ground, already turning into a reddish, translucent slime. He moaned again, quivering wildly as spasms of agony wracked his disintegrating body.
Stifling her own terrified screams, Nouria backed away from the dying man, putting her hand over her daughter’s eyes to shield her from the gruesome sight. Hearing more anguished howls behind her, she whirled round. Many of the other men, women, and children who had also been out along the street were on their knees or curled up in agony—screaming, groaning, and clawing at themselves in a mindless, twitching frenzy. Dozens were already affected. And even as she watched, more and more fell prey to the invisible horror stalking their neighborhood.
For several seemingly endless seconds Nouria only stared at the hellish scene around her in mounting dread, scarcely able to comprehend the magnitude of the slaughter happening right before her panicked eyes. Then she gathered Tasa in her arms and ran, scrambling toward the nearest doorway in a frantic effort to find shelter.
But it was already far too late.
Nouria Besseghir felt the first burning waves of pain rippling outward from her heaving lungs, spreading with every breath through the rest of her body. Shrieking aloud in fear, she stumbled and fell—trying vainly to cushion her daughter against the impact with arms that were already
disintegrating, shredding apart as skin and muscle tissue dissolved, pulling away from her bones.
More knives of fire stabbed at her eyes. Her vision blurred, dimmed, and then vanished. With the last traces of nerves remaining in what was left of her once-pretty face she felt something wet and soft sliding out of her eye sockets. She sank to the pavement, praying for oblivion, praying for a death that would stop the pain wracking every part of her flailing, shuddering body. She also prayed desperately for her daughter, hoping against hope that her little girl would be spared this same suffering.
But in the end, before the final darkness claimed her, she knew that even this last prayer had been denied.
“Mama,” she heard Tasa whimper. “Mama, it hurts … it hurts so much….”
Chapter
Thirty-Two
Rural Virginia
Terce leaned back against one dark-paneled wall of Burke’s small study. His posture was relaxed, almost casual, but his gaze was alert and focused. He still held the Beretta he had taken from the CIA officer. The 9mm pistol looked small in his large gloved right hand. He smiled coldly, sensing the growing unease of the two Americans sitting motionless under his watchful eye. Neither Hal Burke nor Kit Pierson was used to being wholly subject to the will of another. It amused Terce to keep these two senior intelligence officials so completely under his thumb.
He checked the small antique clock on Burke’s desk. The last burst of gunfire outside had died away several minutes ago. By now, the spies his men were hunting should be dead. No matter how good their training was, no pair of FBI agents could possibly be a match for his own force of ex-commandos.
A voice crackled through his radio headset. “This is Uchida. I have a situation report.”
Robert Ludlum's the Lazarus Vendetta Page 25
