are developing real-world applications. This is a race PharmaTech can't win.”
“Yeah,” Severin growled. “We know that. And our friend Hideo there knows it. But who else is going to see what he's up to? Not the press, that's for sure.” He frowned. “So he gets to pull the plug on failing projects that have been costing his company an arm and a leg while masquerading as a selfless corporate white knight! Sweet, isn't it?”
The head of Harcourt Biosciences shoved his chair back, pushed himself heavily to his feet, and went over to stare moodily out the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office. “And that little stunt by Nomura just revved up the public and political pressure on the rest of us. We're already catching enough hell over that mess out in Santa Fe. Now it's going to get worse.”
“We could buy some relief by going along with PharmaTech's self-imposed moratorium,” his aide suggested cautiously. “Just until we can prove our Teller lab wasn't at fault for the disaster.”
Severin snorted. “How long will that take? Months? A year? Two years? You really think we can afford to keep a bunch of bright-eyed scientists sitting around twiddling their thumbs for that long?” He leaned forward against the thick glass. Far below, the waters of Boston Harbor were a frigid-looking green-gray. “Don't forget that a lot of people in Congress and in the press would claim we were practically admitting fault by suspending our other nanotech projects.”
His aide said nothing.
Severin swung away from the windows. He clasped his hands behind his back. “No. We're not going to play Nomura's game. We're going to tough it out. Get out a press release right away. Say that Harcourt Biosciences flatly rejects the demands made by the Lazarus Movement. We will not give in to threats made by a secretive and extremist organization. And let's arrange some special media tours of our other nanotech labs. We need to show people that we have absolutely nothing to hide — and they have nothing to fear.”
Chapter Sixteen
Wearing a thick plastic protective suit, gloves, a sealed hood with its own oxygen supply, and a blue hard hat, Jon Smith stepped cautiously through the shattered ruins of the Institute's first floor. He ducked sideways under a large charred beam hanging down from the torn ceiling, taking care to avoid ripping his suit on any of the nails protruding from the blackened wood. No one knew if the nanomachines that had butchered thousands of protesters were still active. So far no one had tried to find out the hard way. Small fragments of crumbled adobe and shards of broken glass crunched under his thick-soled boots.
He came out into a more open area that had once been the employee cafeteria. This room was mostly intact, but there were signs of bomb damage along two of the four walls, and chalked outlines on the broken tile floor showed where bodies had been removed.
The FBI task force investigating the disaster was using the cafeteria as a rallying point and on-site tactical command center. Two portable computers were up and running on tables near the middle of the room, though it was clear that the agents trying to use them were having trouble entering data in their thick gloves.
Smith made his way over to where a man wearing a black hard hat was bent over one of the salvaged dining tables, studying a set of blueprints. The tag on the agent's protective suit read LATIMER, C.
The agent looked up at his approach. “Who are you?” he asked. The protective hood muffled his voice.
“Dr. Jonathan Smith. I'm with the Pentagon.” Smith lightly tapped his blue hard hat for emphasis. Blue was the color assigned to observers and outside consultants. “I have a watching brief — with orders to provide whatever help I can.”
“Special Agent Charles Latimer,” the other man introduced himself. He was slender, fair-haired, and had a strong Southern accent. He was openly curious now. “Just what kind of help can you offer us, Doctor?”
“I have a decent working knowledge of nanotechnology,” Smith said carefully. “And I know the layout of the labs pretty well. I was stationed here on a temporary assignment when the terrorists hit this place.”
Latimer stared hard at him. “That makes you a witness, Doctor — not an observer.”
“Last night and earlier this morning I was a witness,” Smith said with a wry grin. “Since then I've been promoted to independent consultant.” He shrugged. “I know that's not exactly by the book.”
'No, it's not,“ the FBI agent agreed. ”Look, have you cleared this with my boss?'
I'm sure all the necessary authorizations and clearances are somewhere on Deputy Assistant Director Pierson's desk right now,' Smith said mildly. The last thing he wanted to do was start out by barging in at the top of the FBI's chain of command. He had not met Kit Pierson before, but he strongly suspected she was not going to be pleased to find someone outside her control hovering around her investigation.
Meaning, no, you haven't talked this over with her,' Latimer said. He shook his head in disbelief. Then he shrugged. “Swell. Well, nothing else in this screwy place is running by the book.”
“It's a tough site to work in,” Smith agreed.
“Now there's an understatement,” said the FBI agent with a lopsided smile of his own. “Trying to hunt through all this bomb and fire damage is hard enough. Having to shield ourselves against these nanophages, or whatever they are, makes the job almost impossible.”
He pointed to the protective clothing they both wore. “Between the limited oxygen supply and avoiding heat prostration, we only get three hours of wear out of these moon suits. And we have to waste a whole half hour of that in decontamination. So our work is moving at a crawl, right at a time when Washington is screaming for fast results. Plus, we face a classic catch-22 on every piece of evidence we gather.”
Smith nodded sympathetically. “Let me guess: You can't take anything out of the building for lab analysis until it's been decontaminated. And if you decontaminate it, there's probably nothing left to analyze.”
“Peachy, isn't it?” Latimer said acidly.
“The risk of contamination may not be that high,” Smith pointed out. “Most nanodevices are designed for very specific environments. They should start to break down fairly rapidly after being exposed to atmosphere, pressure, or temperature conditions outside their parameters. We might be perfectly safe right now.”
“Sounds like a nice theory, Doctor,” the FBI agent said. “You volunteering to be the first one to take a good deep breath in here?”
Smith grinned. “I'm a medical man, not a lab rat. But ask me again in about twenty-four hours and I just might try it.”
He looked down at the set of blueprints the other man had been inspecting. They showed the layout of the Institute's first and second floors. Red circles of varying sizes dotted the blueprints. Most were clustered in and around the nanotech lab suites in the North Wing, but others were scattered throughout the building. “Bomb detonation points?” he asked the other man.
Latimer nodded. “Those we've identified so far.”
Smith examined the blueprints carefully. What he saw there confirmed his earlier impressions of the remarkable precision used by the terrorists in making their attack. Several explosive charges had completely smashed the security office, wiping out all the archived images from the external and internal security cameras. Another bomb had disabled the fire suppression system. Other demolition charges had been set in the computer center — destroying everything from personnel files to the records of equipment and materials deliveries made to scientists working at the Institute.
At first glance, the bombs placed inside the nanotech labs seemed to show the same determination to inflict maximum damage. Concentric circles covered the floor plans for the Nomura and Institute complexes. He nodded to himself. Those charges were clearly set to obliterate every single piece of major equipment in both labs, all the way from the biochemical vats in their inner cores to their desktop computers. But something about the detonation patterns he observed in the Harcourt lab bothered him.
Smith bent forward over the table. So what was wrong? He traced the array of circles with one gloved forefinger. The explosives rigged around the lab's inner core were far less likely to have caused as much damage. They seemed set to blow holes in the containment around the Harcourt nanophage-manufacturing tanks — not to completely destroy the tanks themselves. Was that an error? he wondered. Or was it deliberate?
He glanced up to ask Latimer whether he had noticed the same pattern. But the FBI agent was looking
