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.
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 easv 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 Ukita, the chief scientist for Nomura
