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
