tonight. Somewhere discreet and unobserved.”
“Oh, my God,” said a small voice from behind them.
Both men turned. Heather Donovan was standing there, staring down in horror at the dead man at their feet.
“Do you know him?” Smith asked gently.
She nodded unwillingly. “Not personally. I don't even know his name. But I've seen him around the Movement camp and at the rally.”
“And in the Lazarus command tent,” Peter said sternly. “As you well know.”
The slender woman blushed. “Yes,” she admitted. “He was part of a band of activists our top organizers brought in… for what they said were 'special tasks.'”
“Like cutting through the Teller Institute's fence when the rally turned ugly,” Peter reminded her.
“Yes, that's true.” Her shoulders slumped. “But I never imagined they were carrying guns. Or that they would try to kill anyone.” She looked at them with eyes that were haunted and full of shame. “Nothing was supposed to happen this way!”
“I rather suspect there are a number of things about the Lazarus Movement you never imagined, Ms. Donovan,” the gray-haired Englishman told her. “And I think you've had a very narrow and very lucky escape.”
“She can't go back to the Movement camp, Peter,” Smith realized. “It would be too dangerous.”
“Perhaps it might,” the older man agreed. “Our gun-toting friends have run off for now, but there may well be others who would not be happy to see Ms. Donovan looking so hale and hearty.”
Her face whitened.
“Do you have somewhere you can stay out of sight for a while, with family or friends? With people who aren't in the Lazarus Movement?” Smith asked. “Preferably somewhere far away?”
She nodded slowly. “I have an aunt in Baltimore.”
“Good,” said Smith. “I think you should fly out there straightaway. Tonight, if possible.”
“Leave this to me, Jon,” Peter told him. “Your face and name are rather too well known to these people now. If you arrive at the airport with Ms. Donovan, you might as well paint a target on her back.”
Smith nodded.
“You were at the rally, too!” she suddenly said, looking more closely at Peter Howell's face. “But you said your name was Malachi. Malachi MacNamara!”
He nodded with a slight smile creasing his deeply lined face. “A nom de guerre, Ms. Donovan. A regrettable deception, perhaps, but a necessary one.”
“Then who are you people really?” she asked. She looked from the lean, weather-beaten Englishman to Smith and then back again. “CIA? FBI? Someone else?”
“Ask us no more questions and we'll tell you no more lies,” Peter said. His pale blue eyes twinkled. “But we are your friends. Of that you may be sure.” His expression darkened. “Which is far more than I can say for some of your former comrades in the Movement.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Shortly after midnight, Director of Central Intelligence David Hanson walked briskly into his gray-carpeted seventh-floor office suite. Despite the rigors of what had become an eighteen-hour workday, he was still immaculately dressed in a well-tailored suit, with a crisp, clean shirt and a perfectly knotted bow tie. He turned his careful gaze on the rumpled, tired-looking man waiting for him.
“We need to talk, Hal,” he said tightly. “Privately.”
Hal Burke, head of the CIA's Lazarus Movement task force, nodded. “Yes, we do.”
The CIA director led the way into his inner office and tossed his briefcase onto one of the two comfortably upholstered chairs in front of his desk. He waved Burke into the other. Then Hanson folded his hands together and rested his elbows on the bare surface of his large desk. He studied his subordinate over the tips of his fingers. 'I've just come from the
White House. As you can imagine, the president is not especially happy with us or with the FBI right now.'
“We warned him about what would happen if the Lazarus Movement ran wild,” Burke said bluntly. “The Teller Institute, the Telos lab out in California, and this bomb blast in Chicago were just the opening rounds. We've got to stop pussyfooting around. We have to hit the Movement hard now, before it digs in any deeper. Some of its mid-level activists are still out in the open. If we can haul those people in and break them open, we still have a shot at penetrating to the inner core. That's our best hope for pulling Lazarus apart from the inside out.”
“I've made that point very strongly,” Hanson told him. “And I'm not the only one. Castilla is getting an earful from senior Senate and House leaders — from both parties.”
Burke nodded. The word inside the CIA was that Hanson had been making the rounds on Capitol Hill for most of the day, privately meeting with the heads of the Senate and House intelligence committees and with the majority and minority leaders in both chambers. As a result, his powerful congressional allies were demanding that President Castilla officially designate the Lazarus Movement as a terrorist organization. Once that happened, the gloves could come off and federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies would be free to act forcefully against the Movement — going after its leaders, bank accounts, and public communications channels.
By making an end run around the president to Congress, however, Hanson was playing with fire. CIA directors were not supposed to use politics to manipulate the policies of the president they served. But Hanson had always been willing to take chances when the stakes were high, and he obviously thought his support in the House and Senate was strong enough to protect him from Castilla's anger.
“Any luck?” Burke asked.
Hanson shook his head. “Not so far.”
Burke scowled. “Why the hell not?”
“Ever since the Teller Massacre, Lazarus and his followers have been riding a huge wave of public sympathy and support. Especially in Europe and Asia,” the CIA director reminded him. He shrugged. “These latest acts of violence might dent that a bit, but too many people are going to buy the Lazarus line that the Telos and Chicago attacks were faked to discredit their cause. So governments around the world are putting serious diplomatic pressure on us to back off the Movement. They're telling the president that aggressive action against Lazarus could trigger violent anti-American unrest in their own countries.”
Burke snorted in disgust. “Are you telling me that Castilla is willing to let Paris or Berlin or some other two- bit foreign power hold a veto over our counterterrorism policy?”
“Not a veto precisely,” Hanson said. “But he won't move openly — not until we produce rock-solid evidence that the Lazarus Movement is pulling the strings on these terrorist acts.”
For several seconds Burke sat silently staring back at his superior. Then he nodded. “That can be arranged.”
“Genuine evidence, Hal,” the head of the CIA warned. “Facts that will stand up to the closest scrutiny. Do you understand me?”
Again, Burke nodded. Oh, I understand you, David, he thought — and maybe better than you do yourself. Inside his mind he was working furiously on new ways to retrieve the situation that had begun spiraling out of his control at the Teller Institute.
Rural Virginia, Outside the Beltway
Three hours before dawn, bands of cold rain swept in succession across the Virginia countryside, drenching the already-sodden fields and woods below. Autumn was usually a time of drier weather, especially after the humid, tropical thunderstorms of the summer months, but the weather patterns were off-kilter this year.
Roughly forty miles southwest of Washington, D.C., a small farmhouse sat on a low rise overlooking a few sparse stands of trees, a stagnant pond, and forty acres of patchy grassland now mostly choked with weeds and dense thickets of brambles. The roofless, blackened ruins of an old barn stood close to the house. The remnants of
