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,
