shooting is about.”
Burke raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Why try to pull the innocent act, Kit? It's too late for that. You're not an idiot. And neither am I, for that matter. Did you really think you could sneak an FBI surveillance team onto my property without my knowing?”
She shook her head, desperately now. “I don't know what you're talking about. Nobody came with me — or followed me. I was clean all the way out from D.C. to here!”
'Lying won't get you anywhere,“ he said coldly. His right eye twitched again, fluttering rapidly as the muscles contracted and then relaxed. ”In fact, it just pisses me off.'
The phone on his desk rang once. Without taking his eyes or his pistol off her, Burke reached out and grabbed it before it could ring again. “Yes?” he said tightly. He listened for a moment and then shook his head. “No, I have the situation here under control. You can come ahead. The door's unlocked.” He hung up.
“Who was that?” she asked.
The CIA officer smiled thinly, without any humor at all. “Someone who wants very much to meet you,” he said.
Bitterly regretting her earlier decision to confront Burke in person, Kit Pierson sat tensely in the armchair — rapidly considering various plans to extricate herself from this mess and then equally rapidly discarding them as impractical, suicidal, or both. She heard the front door open and then close.
Her eyes widened as a very tall and very broad-shouldered man stepped quietly into the study, moving with the dangerous grace of a tiger. His curiously green eyes gleamed in the dim light cast by the lamp on Burke's desk. For a moment she thought he was the same man described by Colonel Smith in his report on the aftermath of the Teller Institute disaster — the leader of the “terrorist” unit that had conducted the attack. Then she shook her head. That was impossible. The leader of that attack had been consumed by the nanophages released by the bombs that had shattered the Institute's labs.
“This is Terce,” Hal Burke said brusquely. “He commands one of my TOCSIN action teams. His men were on guard outside. They're the ones who spotted your covert surveillance guys prowling around this house.”
“Whoever's out there isn't connected to me,” Pierson said again, straining to put every ounce of conviction she could muster into her voice. Every FBI manual on the psychology of conspiracies stressed the inherent and overwhelming fears of those involved of betrayal from within. As head of the Bureau's Counter-Terrorism Division, she had often made use of those fears — playing on them to break apart suspected cells, turning the would-be terrorists on one another like rats trapped in a pit. She bit down on her lower lip, tasting the salt tang of her own blood. Now the same forces of paranoia and suspicions were at work here, threatening her life.
“No dice, Kit,” Burke told her coldly. “I don't believe in coincidences, so you're either a liar — or a screwup. And this operation can't afford either one.”
The big man named Terce said nothing at first. Instead, he reached down and scooped her pistol off the floor. He slid it into one of the pockets of his black windbreaker and then turned to the CIA officer. “Now, give me your own weapon, Mr. Burke,” he said gently. “If you please.”
The smaller man blinked in surprise, plainly caught off-guard b the request. “What?”
“Give me your weapon,” Terce repeated. He stepped closer to Burke, looming over the CIA officer. “It would be… safer… for us all.”
“Why?”
The green-eyed man nodded at the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam on the desk. “Because you have been drinking a bit more than is wise, Mr. Burke, and I do not fully trust either your judgment or your reflexes at this moment. You can rest easy. My men have the situation well in hand.”
More gunfire rattled in the distance, farther away now.
For the space of a heartbeat Burke sat staring up at the taller man. His eyes narrowed angrily. But then he did as he was asked, handing the Beretta to Terce with a sullen frown.
Kit Pierson felt some of the tension leave her shoulders. She breathed out. Whatever else he was, the leader of this TOCSIN action team was no fool. Disarming Burke so quickly was a sound move. It was also one that might help her defuse this ridiculous and incendiary situation. She leaned forward. “Look, let's see what we can do to sort this mess out rationally,” she said coolly. “First, if anyone from the FBI did tail me here, they certainly did it without my knowledge or my consent—”
“Be silent, Ms. Pierson!” the green-eyed man said coldly. “I do not care how or why you were followed. Your motives and your competence, or lack of it, are immaterial.”
Kit Pierson stared back at him, suddenly aware that she was in as much danger from this man as she had been with Burke — and perhaps a great deal more.
Engines buzzing softly, the two UAVs flew on at three thousand feet. Below, forests, roads, and villages slid past and then vanished in the early morning haze behind them. The sun, rising east above the deep, undulating valleys of the Seine and the Marne, was a large ball of red fire outlined against the thin fading gray mist.
Closer to Paris, the landscape began changing, becoming more congested and crowded. Ancient villages surrounded by woods and farmland gave way to larger, more modern suburbs surrounded by intertwined motorways and rail lines. High-rise apartment buildings appeared ahead, stabbing up at irregular intervals in a great arc around the inner core of the city itself.
Long white contrails formed in the sky high above the two robot aircraft, vast trails of ice crystals floating in the clear, cold air, each marking the passage of a large passenger jet. The UAVs were nearing the flight paths to and from two airports — Le Bourget and Charles de Gaulle. Given their very small size, the odds of radar detection were very low, but those who controlled them saw no point in taking unnecessary risks. Responding to preprogrammed instructions, each drone dropped lower, descending to just five hundred feet and throttling back to maintain a near-constant airspeed of around one hundred miles per hour.
Field Experiment Operations Room, Inside the Center
The Center's operations room was located deep within the complex, secure behind a number of locked doors accessible only to those with the very highest clearances. Inside the darkened chamber, several scientists and technicians sat in front of large consoles, constantly monitoring the pictures and data streaming in from Paris — both from the ground sensors planted at various points and those onboard the two UAVs. Updates of wind direction, speed, humidity, and barometric pressure were automatically fed into a sophisticated targeting program. Two large screens showed the terrain ahead and below the twin drones. Numbers in the lower right corner of each display — the range to target — counted down, flickering from time to time as the program made carefully calculated adjustments to each robot aircraft's aim point. The control room personnel sat up straighter, watching with growing tension and excitement as those range numbers steadied up and began sliding ever more rapidly toward zero.
0.4 km, 0.3 km, 0.15 km… the command “Initiate” flashed in red on both screens. Instantly the targeting program transmitted an encrypted radio signal, relaying it through a communications satellite high above the Earth and then back down to the drones aloft just north of Paris.
More and more people ventured out on the dingy, run-down streets around the slum housing complexes of La Courneuve. A few were heading for the nearest Metro station on their way to whatever menial jobs they had been able to find. More were women carrying baskets and bags — mothers, wives, and grandmothers sent out to shop for the day's food. Some were families strolling toward the wooded spaces and parkland north of the suburb. Sunday morning was a rare opportunity for parents to give their children a taste of the open air away from the crime-ridden, graffiti-smeared streets and alleys, and the trash-heaped hallways of the Cite des Quatre Milk. The thieves, thugs, pushers, and drug addicts who preyed on them were mostly asleep, barricaded in the bare concrete apartments provided by the French welfare state.
Flying on parallel courses now, the two UAVs climbed again, rising to just over one thousand feet. Still moving at one hundred miles an hour, they crossed over a wide avenue and entered the airspace above La Courneuve. Aboard first one and then the other drone, control relays cycled, triggering the twin canisters slung below their wings. With a sinister hiss, each canister began spewing its contents in an invisible stream.
Hundreds of billions of Stage III nanophages fell across a huge swathe of La Courneuve, slowly raining down out of the sky in an undetected cloud of death and imminent slaughter. Vast numbers drifted among the thousands of unsuspecting people caught outside and were inhaled unnoticed — pulled into their lungs with every breath. Tens of billions more of the microscopic phages were drawn into the huge air ducts atop the slum high-rises and spread
