Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (8 page)

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.

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.