He took another sip of his drink. “Anyway, at least it will look like the IRB bomb attack was in the works for months,” he muttered. “That should help persuade Castilla that the Teller Massacre was a Lazarus put-up job, from start to finish. That it was a go code for these bastards — a way to radicalize their base of support and tie us down politically at the same time. With luck, the president will finally designate the whole Movement as a terrorist organization.”
The second of the Horatii smiled dubiously. “Perhaps.”
Burke gritted his teeth. The old scar on the side of his neck turned white as his face tightened. “We have another, more immediate problem,” he said. “Out in Santa Fe.”
“A problem?” Terce asked.
“Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Smith, M.D.,” the CIA officer told him. “He's rattling cages and asking some very inconvenient questions.”
“We still have a security element in New Mexico,” Terce said carefully.
“Good,” Burke downed the last of his rum-and-Coke. He stood up. “Let me know when they're ready to move. And make it soon. I want Smith dead before anyone higher up the chain of command starts paying attention to him.”
Chapter Nineteen
The early-morning sun was slanting through the windows of his hotel suite when Jon Smith's cell phone buzzed. He set his coffee cup down on the kitchen counter. “Yes?”
“Check the news,” Fred Klein suggested.
Smith pushed the plate with his half-eaten breakfast Danish on it out of the way, spun his laptop around, and tapped into the Internet. He read through the headlines scrolling across the screen in growing disbelief. The story was the lead on every major news organization's Web site. FBI MASSACRE PROBE NAILS LAZARUS! blared One. LAZARUS ACTIVIST BOUGHT getaway suvs! shouted another.
Every article was pretty much the same. Top-level sources within the FBI investigation of the Teller Massacre confirmed that a longtime Lazarus Movement activist from Albuquerque had purchased the vehicles used by the phony Secret Service agents — using roughly one hundred thousand dollars in cash. Then, only a few hours after the Institute was attacked, Andrew Costanzo was seen by his neighbors driving away from his home with a suitcase in the back of his car. File pictures of Costanzo and his description were being circulated to every federal, state, and local law-enforcement agency.
“Interesting, isn't it?” the head of Covert-One said in Smith's ear.
“That's one word for it,” Smith told him wryly. “At least yours is printable.”
“I assume then this is the first you've heard about this remarkable break in the case?” Klein murmured.
“You assume correctly,” Smith said, frowning. He thought back to the FBI briefings he had attended. Neither Pierson nor her closest aides had mentioned anything so potentially incendiary. “Is this a real leak or some reporter's fantasy?”
“It appears to be genuine,” Klein told him. “The Bureau isn't even bothering to deny the story.”
“Any word on the source? Was it someone out here in Santa Fe? Or back in D.C.?” Smith asked.
“No idea,” the head of Covert-One said. He hesitated briefly. “I will say that no one here in Washington seems especially sorry to see this development go public.”
“I'll bet.” Judging by Kit Pierson's eagerness to ignore his disquieting questions yesterday, Smith knew how pleased the FBI must be to come up with hard evidence that linked the destruction of the Teller Institute to the Lazarus Movement. That would be even truer after the overnight terrorist attacks in California and Chicago. Finding out about this guy Costanzo must have seemed like manna raining down from heaven.
“What do you think, Colonel?” Klein asked.
“I don't buy it,” Smith said, shaking his head. 'At least, not completely. It's just too darned convenient. Besides, nothing in this Costanzo story explains how the Movement could get its hands on nanophages designed to kill — or why it would deliberately release them, especially on its own supporters.'
“No, it doesn't,” Klein agreed.
Smith fell silent for a moment, reading through one of the most recent articles. This piece paid more attention to what the Lazarus Movement representative, a woman named Heather Donovan, had to say about Andrew Costanzo. Smith considered her claims carefully. If even half of what she said was true, the FBI could be haring off down a false trail, one deliberately laid as a distraction. He nodded to himself. It was worth checking out.
“I'm going to try talking to this Movement spokeswoman,” he told Klein. 'But I'll need a temporary cover of some kind, probably as a journalist. With some fake ID that'll stand up to scrutiny. No one from the Lazarus organization is going to talk freely to an Army officer or a scientist.'
“When will you need it by?” Klein asked.
Smith thought about that. His day was already booked solid. Late last night, some members of the FBI investigative team had finally risked working without their heavy protective gear. They were still alive. As a result, medical teams from the local hospitals and Nomura PharmaTech were beginning to retrieve bodies and parts of bodies from the site. He wanted to sit in on some of the pathology work they were planning— hoping he might learn the answers to some of the questions that still troubled him.
“Sometime this evening,” he decided. “I'll try to arrange a meeting at a downtown restaurant or bar. The panic's mostly over out here now and folks are coining back to town.”
“Tell this Ms. Donovan that you're a freelance journalist,” Klein suggested. “An American stringer for he Monde and a few other smaller European papers, most of them shading to the left.”
“Sounds good,” Smith said. He knew Paris very well, and Le Monde and its European counterparts were generally viewed as being sympathetic to the environmental, anti-technology, and anti-globalization line pushed by the Lazarus Movement.
“I'll have a courier deliver a package with a Le Monde press card in your name to the hotel by this afternoon,” Klein promised.
FBI Deputy Assistant Director Kit Pierson sat at the folding table that served as her desk, paging through the “eyes-only” CIA file faxed to her by Hal Burke. Langley had only a little more information on this Jonathan Smith than did the Bureau. But there were occasional and cryptic references to him in mission reports or cables from the Agency's case officers — usually in connection with some developing crisis or existing hot spot.
Her eyes narrowed as she ran through the long and worrying list. Moscow. Paris. Shanghai. And now here he was in Santa Fe. Oh, there was always some plausible excuse for Smith's sudden appearance on the scene, whether it was checking up on an injured friend, attending a routine medical conference, or simply doing the work he was trained for. On the surface, he was just what he claimed to be — a military scientist and doctor who occasionally wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Pierson shook her head. There were entirely too many “coincidental” meetings, too many plausible excuses, for her to swallow. What she saw was a pattern, and it was a pattern she did not like at all. Although USAMRIID cut Smith's paycheck, he seemed to have extraordinary latitude in his duty assignments and in his ability to take personal leaves of absence. She was sure now that he was a clandestine operator, one who worked at a very high level. But what worried her most was that she still could not pin down his real employer. Every serious inquiry about him through official channels vanished into a bureaucratic never-never land. It was as though someone very high up somewhere had stamped a big NO TRESPASSING sign across the full life and career of Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Smith, M.D.
And that made her nervous — very nervous. That was why she had a two-man team keeping a close eye on him. The minute the good doctor stepped across the lines she had laid out, she planned to run him right out of the investigation, tarred, feathered, and on a rail if necessary.
She slid the CIA file into a portable shredder and watched the tiny crosscut strips of paper rain down into a wastebasket marked Burn Material. The secure phone on her desk beeped before they stopped falling.
