surroundings. With luck, he might now answer questions that he would certainly have refused earlier. “Why don't you tell me about the nanophages, Vitor?” he suggested carefully. “What is their real purpose?”
“Once our tests are complete, they will cleanse the world,” the dying man said, coughing. Bubbles of blood flecked the side of his mouth. But his eyes held a fanatical gleam. With an effort, he spoke again. “They will make all things new again. They will rid the Earth of a contagion. They will save it from the plague of untamed humanity.”
Smith felt a shiver of horror run through him as the full impact of just what Abrantes was talking about hit home. The massacres at Teller and La Courneuve had only been trial runs. And that, in turn, meant the deaths of tens of thousands had been planned right from the start as field experiments — as tests to evaluate and further refine the effectiveness of these murderous nanophages outside the sterile confines of a laboratory.
He stared blindly at the images repeating over and over on the screen. The nanophages were more than just another weapon of war or terrorism. I hey had been designed as instruments of genocide — genocide planned on a scale unmatched in history.
Jon felt enormous anger welling up inside him. The thought of anyone rejoicing in the kind of cruel, inhuman butchery he had seen outside the Teller Institute triggered a feeling of fury beyond anything he had felt
in years. But to extract the information they needed it was vital that this young Portuguese hear the voice of a friend — of someone who shared his warped beliefs. With that in mind, Jon fought to regain control over his rampaging emotions.
“Who will control this cleansing, Vitor?” he heard himself ask gently. “Who will remake the world?”
“Lazarus,” Abrantes said simply. “Lazarus will bring life out of death.”
Smith sat back. A terrible and frightening image was taking shape in his mind. It was an image of a faceless puppeteer coolly staging a drama of his own maniacal creation. In one moment, Lazarus denounced nan- otechnology as a danger to mankind. In the next, he perverted that same technology for his own vicious purposes — using it to slaughter even his own most devoted followers as though they were laboratory mice. With one hand, he manipulated officials of the CIA, FBI, and MI6 into conducting a covert war against the Movement he controlled. With the other, he turned that same illegal war against them, rendering his enemies blind, deaf, and dumb at the critical moment.
“And where is this man you call Lazarus?” he asked.
Abrantes said nothing. He drew in a single short breath and then began coughing uncontrollably, retching, unable to clear his lungs. He was literally drowning in his own blood, Smith knew.
Quickly he turned the young man's head to the side, momentarily clearing a passage for the air he needed. Scarlet rivulets of blood spattered from Abrantes' twitching mouth. The coughing fit eased.
“Vitor! Where is Lazarus?” Smith repeated urgently. Randi left the computer she had been examining and came back to his side. She stood listening closely.
“Os Agores,” Abrantes whispered. He coughed once more and spat more blood onto the floor. He drew in another short, shallow breath. “O console do sol. Santa Maria.” This time the effort was too great. He jerked and spasmed suddenly, convulsed by another long, wracking paroxysm. When it passed, he was dead.
“Was that a prayer?” Randi asked.
Smith frowned. “If it was, I doubt he'll get any credit for it.” He looked down at the twisted body on the floor and then shook his head. “But I think he was trying to answer the question I asked him.”
Forty feet away, Peter stooped beside the corpse of the gunman Randi had shot. He rifled through the dead man's pockets, collecting a wallet and a passport. Quickly he flipped through the passport, mentally noting the most recent entry stamps — Zimbabwe, the United States, and France, in that order, and all within the last four weeks. His pale blue eyes narrowed in calculation. Most revealing, he thought coldly.
He pocketed the documents and moved on to inspect a bulky pack he had noticed earlier. The plain green cloth satchel stood off on its own in the nearest corner. And now that he thought back, it was identical in appearance to two other packs he had seen dumped in other parts of the room.
Peter drew aside the flap and peered inside.
He sucked in his breath, staring down at two foot-long blocks of plastic explosive wrapped together. They were wired to a detonator and a digital watch. Czech-made Semtex or American-manufactured C4, he decided, with an improvised timer. Either way, he knew that was enough plastic explosive to make one devil of a bang when it went off. And now he saw that the numbers on the watch were blinking rhythmically, steadily falling toward zero.
Chapter Forty-Four
“Ambassador Nichols is on the phone, sir,” the White House waiter said deferentially. “The secure line.”
“Thank you, John,” said President Sam Castilla, pushing away his plate of untouched food. With his wife away and the Lazarus crisis growing worse with every passing hour, he was taking his meals alone, usually, like tonight, on a tray in the Oval Office. He picked up the phone. “What's up, Owen?”
Owen Nichols, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, was one of Castilla's closest political allies. They had been friends since college. Neither man felt any need to stand on ceremony with the other. And neither believed in sugarcoating bad news. “The Security Council is moving toward a final vote on the nanotech resolution, Sam,” he said. “I expect it within the hour.”
“That fast?” Castilla asked in surprise. The UN almost never acted quickly. The organization preferred consensus and lengthy, almost interminable discussion. He had thought it would take the Council another day or two to bring the nanotech resolution up for a vote.
“That fast,” Nichols confirmed. “The debate's been strictly pro forma. Everybody knows the votes are there to pass this damned thing unanimously — unless we veto it.”
“What about the UK?” Castilla asked, shocked.
“Their ambassador, Martin Rees, says they can't afford to buck the international consensus on this issue, not after the revelations that MI6 was tied into this secret war against Lazarus. They have to go against us on this one. He says the PM's job is hanging by a thread as it is.”
“Damn,” Castilla muttered.
“I only wish that were the worst news I had,” Nichols said quietly.
The president tightened his grip on the phone. “Go on.”
“Rees wanted me to pass on something else he picked up from the British Foreign Office. France and Germany and some of the other European countries have been working on another nasty surprise for us, behind the scenes. After we veto the Security Council resolution, they plan to demand our immediate suspension from all NATO military and political roles — on the grounds that we might otherwise use NATO resources as part of our illegal war on Lazarus.”
Castilla breathed out, trying to control the anger he felt boiling up inside. “The vultures are circling, I guess.”
“Yes, they are, Sam,” Nichols said tiredly. “Between the massacres in Zimbabwe, Santa Fe, and Paris and now these stories about CIA-sponsored murders, our good name overseas is completely shot. So this is the perfect time for our so-called friends to cut us down to size.”
After he finished speaking with Nichols and hung up, Castilla sat for a moment longer, his head bowed under the weight of events that were moving beyond his ability to control. He glanced tiredly at the elegant grandfather clock along one curved wall. Fred Klein had said he thought
Colonel Smith was on the trail of something significant in Paris. The corners of his month turned down. Whatever Smith was chasing had better pan out — and quickly.
For a fraction of a second longer, Peter stared down at the activated demolition charge, unwillingly admiring the sheer thoroughness of the opposition. When it came to covering their tracks, he thought, these fellows never stopped at half-measures. After all, why be satisfied with killing a few potential witnesses when you could blow apart the whole building as well? The timer flickered through another second, still inexorably counting down toward
