the Movement's former leadership, had been difficult and painful and full of risk. The Horatii, physically powerful, precisely trained in the arts of assassination, and infinitely cruel, had served him well in that effort.
For a moment a trace of sorrow crossed his face. He genuinely regretted the need to eliminate so many men and women he had once admired — people whose only fault had been a reluctance to see the need for sterner measures to accomplish their shared dreams. But then Lazarus shrugged. Personal regrets aside, events were proving the correctness of his vision. In the past twelve months, under his sole leadership, the Movement had accomplished more than in all the prior years of halfhearted conventional activism combined. Restoring the purity of the world required bold, decisive action, not dreary oratory and weak-kneed political protests.
In fact, as the name of the Movement suggested, it meant bringing new life out of death itself.
His computer chimed softly, signaling the arrival of another encrypted report relayed to him from the Center itself. Lazarus read through it in silence. Prime's death was an inconvenience, but the loss of one of his three Horatii was far outweighed by the results from the attack on the Teller Institute and the resulting slaughter of his own followers. Gulled by the information he had fed them, information that confirmed their own worst fears, officials in the American CIA and FBI and those of other allied intelligence services had trapped themselves in an act of mass murder. What must seem to those poor fools to have been a terrible error was, in fact, intended from the beginning. They were guilty and he would use their guilt against them for his own purposes.
Lazarus smiled coldly. With a single deadly stroke he had made it virtually impossible for the United States, or for any other Western government, to act decisively against the Movement. He had turned their own strength against them — just as would any master of jujitsu. Though his enemies did not yet realize it, he controlled the essential levers of power.
Any action they took against the Movement would only strengthen his grip and weaken them in the same moment.
Now it was time to begin the process of setting once-loyal allies at one another's throats. The world was already suspicious of America's military and scientific power and of Washington's motives. With the right prodding and media manipulation, the world would soon believe that America, the sole superpower, was tinkering with the building blocks of creation, creating new weapons on a nanoscale — all in pursuit of its own cruel and selfish aims. The globe would begin to divide between those who sided with Lazarus and those who did not. And governments, pressured by their own people, would increasingly turn against the United States.
The resulting confusion, chaos, and disorder would serve him well. It would buy the time he needed to bring his grand design to completion — a design that would transform the Earth forever.
Chapter Ten
Night was falling fast across the high desert country around Santa Fe. To the northwest, the highest peaks of the Jemez Mountains shone crimson, lit by the last rays of the setting sun. The lower lands to the east were already immersed in the gathering darkness. Just south of the city itself, tongues of fire still danced eerily amid the twisted and broken ruins of the Teller Institute, flickering orange and red and yellow as the flames fed on broken furniture and supporting beams, spilled chemicals, bomb-mangled equipment, and the bodies of those trapped inside. The rank, acrid smell of smoke hung heavy in the cool evening air.
Several fire engine companies were on the scene, but they were being held outside the area cordoned off by local police and the National Guard. There was no longer any real hope of finding any survivors inside the burning building, so no one wanted to risk exposing more men to the runaway nanomachines that had killed so many Lazarus Movement activists.
Jon Smith stood stiffly near the outside edge of the cordon, watching the fires burn out of control. His lean face was haggard and his shoulders
were slumped. Like many soldiers, he often experienced a feeling of melancholy in the aftermath of intense action. This time it was worse. He was not accustomed to losing. Between them, he and Frank Diaz must have killed or wounded half of the terrorists who had attacked the Teller Institute, but the bombs they had planted had still gone off. Nor could Smith forget the horror of seeing thousands of people reduced to slime and bone fragments.
The encrypted cell phone in his inner jacket pocket vibrated suddenly. He pulled the phone out and answered. “Smith.”
“I need you to brief me in more detail, Colonel,” Fred Klein said abruptly. “The president is still meeting with his national security team, but I expect another call from him in the not-too-distant future. I've already passed your preliminary report to him, but he'll want more. I need you to tell me exactly what you saw and exactly what you think happened there today.”
Smith closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted. “Understood,” he said dully.
“Were you injured, Jon?” the head of Covert-One asked, sounding concerned. “You didn't say anything earlier and I assumed — ”
Smith shook his head. The abrupt movement set every bruise and torn muscle on fire. “It's nothing serious,” he said, wincing. “A few cuts and scrapes, that's all.”
“I see.” Klein paused, plainly doubtful. “I suspect that means you are not actively bleeding at this moment.”
“Really, Fred, I'm all right,” Smith told him, irritated now. “I'm a doctor, remember?”
“Very well,” Klein said carefully. “We'll proceed. First, are you still convinced that the terrorists who hit the Institute were professionals?”
“No question about it,” Smith said. “These guys were smooth, Fred. They had Secret Service procedures, weapons, and ID all down cold. If the real Secret Service team hadn't shown up early, the bad guys could have been in and out without anyone batting an eye.”
“Right up to the moment the bombs went off,” Klein suggested.
“Until then,” Smith agreed grimly.
“Which brings us to the protesters who died,” the head of Covert-One said. “The common assumption seems to be that the explosions released something from one of the labs — either a toxic chemical substance or more likely a nanotech creation that went wild. You were assigned out there to review the labs and their research. What do you think happened?”
Smith frowned. Ever since the shooting and screaming had stopped, he had been racking his brains, trying to piece together a plausible answer to that question. What could possibly have killed so many demonstrators outside the Institute so quickly and so cruelly? He sighed. “Only one lab was working on anything directly connected to human tissues and organs.”
“Which one?”
“Harcourt Biosciences,” Smith said. Speaking rapidly, he sketched in the work Brinker and Parikh had been doing with their Mark II nanophages — including their last experiment, the one that had killed a perfectly healthy mouse. “And one of the major bomb blasts went off inside in the Harcourt lab,” he concluded. “Both Phil and Ravi are missing, and presumed dead.”
“That's it, then,” Klein said, sounding faintly relieved. “The bombs were set deliberately. But the deaths outside must have been unintended, basically a kind of high-tech industrial accident.”
“I don't buy it,” Smith said bluntly.
“Why not?”
“For one thing, the mouse I saw die showed no signs of cellular degeneration,” Smith answered, thinking it through. “There was nothing remotely resembling the wholesale disintegration I watched this afternoon.”
“Could that be the difference between the effects of these nanophages inside a mouse and inside human beings?” Klein asked carefully.
“That's highly unlikely,” Smith told him. “The whole reason for using lab mice for preliminary tests is their biological similarity to humans.” He sighed. “I can't swear to it, Fred, not without further study, anyway. But my gut feeling is that the Harcourt nanophages could not have been responsible for those deaths.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone for a long moment. “You realize what that would mean,” Klein said at last.
