Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (14 page)

The president nodded. Nomura PharmaTech spent huge sums annually on
charitable medical work around the world. His old friend Jinjiro began the
practice when he founded the company back in the 1960s. After he retired and
entered the political world, his son had continued and even expanded its
efforts. Nomura money now funded everything from mass vaccination and malaria
control programs in Africa to water sanitation projects in the Middle East and Asia. But the company's disaster relief work was what
really caught the public eye and generated headlines.

Nomura PharmaTech owned a fleet of Soviet-made An-124 Condor cargo aircraft.
Bigger than the mammoth C-5 transports flown by the U.S. Air Force, each Condor
could carry up to 150 metric tons of cargo. Operating from a central base
located in the Azores
Islands, they were used
by Nomura to ferry mobile hospitals—complete with operating rooms and
diagnostics labs—to wherever emergency medical care was needed. The company
boasted that its hospitals could be up and running in twenty-four hours at the
scene of any major earthquake, typhoon, disease outbreak, wildfire, or flood,
anywhere in the world.

“That's a generous offer,” Castilla said slowly. “But I'm
afraid there were no injured survivors outside the Institute. These
nanomachines killed everyone they attacked. There's no one left alive for your
medical personnel to treat.”

“There are other ways in which my people could assist,” Nomura
said delicately. “We do possess two mobile DNA analysis labs. Perhaps
their use might speed the sad work of— ”

“Identifying the dead,” Castilla finished for him. He thought
about that. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was estimat-

ing it could take months to put names to the
thousands of partial human remains left outside the ruined Teller Institute.
Anything that could accelerate that slow, mournful effort was worth trying, no
matter how many-legal and political complications it might add. He nodded.
“You're absolutely right, Hideo. Any help along those lines would be most
welcome.”

Then he sighed. “Look, it's late and I'm tired, and it's been a rotten
couple of days. Frankly, I could use a good stiff drink. Can I get you
one?”

“Please,” Nomura replied. “That would be most welcome.”

The president moved to a sideboard near the door to his private study.
Earlier, Mrs. Pike had set a tray holding a selection of glasses and bottles
there. He picked up one of the bottles. It was full of a rich amber liquid.
“Scotch all right with you? This is the twenty-year-old Caol Ila, a single malt from Islay.
It was one of your father's favorites.”

Nomura lowered his eyes, apparently embarrassed by the emotions stirred by
this offer. He inclined his head in a quick bow. “You honor me.”

While Castilla poured, he carefully eyed the son of his old friend, noting
the changes since they had last seen each other. Though Hideo Nomura was nearly
fifty, his short-cropped hair was still pitch-black. He was tall for a Japanese
man of his generation, so tall that he could easily look most Americans and
Europeans squarely in the face. His jaw was firm and there were just a few tiny
furrows around the edges of his eyes and mouth. From a distance, Nomura might
easily pass for a man fully ten or fifteen years younger. It was only up close
that one could discern the wearing effects of time and hidden grief and
suppressed rage.

Castilla handed one of the glasses to Nomura and then sat down and sipped at
his own. The sweet, smoky liquid rolled warmly over his tongue, carrying with
it just a bare hint of oak and salt. He noticed that the younger man tasted his
without any evident sense of enjoyment. The son is not the father, he reminded
himself sadh.

“I had another reason for asking you here tonight,” Castilla said
at last, breaking the awkward silence. "Though I think it may be related
in some

way to the tragedy at the Institute.“ He chose
his words carefully. ”I need to ask you about Jinjiro . . . and about
Lazarus."

Nomura sat up straighter. “About my father? And the Lazarus Movement? Ah, I see,” he murmured. He
set his glass to one side. It was almost full. “Of
course. I will tell you whatever I can.”

“You opposed your father's involvement in the Movement, didn't
you?” Castilla asked, again treading cautiously.

The younger Japanese nodded. “Yes.” He looked straight at the
president. “My father and I were never enemies. Nor did I hide my views
from him.”

“Which were?” Castilla wondered.

“That the goals of the Lazarus Movement were lofty, even noble,”
Nomura said softly. “Who would not want to see a planet purified, free of
pollution, and at peace? But its proposals?” He
shrugged. “Hopelessly unrealistic at best. Deadly lunacy at worst. The world is balanced on a
knife-edge, with mass starvation, chaos, and barbarism on one side and
potential Utopia on the other. Technology maintains this delicate balance.
Strip away our advanced technologies, as the Movement demands, and you will
surely hurl the entire planet into a nightmare of death and destruction —a
nightmare from which it might never awaken.”

Castilla nodded. The younger man's beliefs paralleled his own. “And
what did Jinjiro say to all of that?”

“My father agreed with me at first. At least in part,” Nomura
said. “But he thought the pace of technological change was too fast. The
rise of cloning, genetic manipulation, and nanotechnology troubled him. He
feared the speed of these advances, believing that they offered imperfect men
too much power over themselves and over nature. Still, when he helped found
Lazarus, he hoped to use the Movement as a means of slowing scientific
progress—not of ending it altogether.”

“But that changed?” Castilla asked.

Nomura frowned. “Yes, it did,” he admitted. He picked up his
glass, stared into the smoky amber liquid for a moment, and then set it down

again. “The Movement began to change him. His
beliefs grew more radical. His words became more strident.”

The president stayed silent, listening intently.

“As the other founders of the Movement died or disappeared, my father's
thoughts grew darker still,” Nomura continued. “He began to claim
that Lazarus was under attack . . . that it had become the target of a secret
war.”

“A war?” Castilla said sharply. “Who
did he say was waging this secret war?”

“Corporations. Certain
governments. Or elements of their intelligence services.
Perhaps even some of the men in your own CIA,” the younger Japanese said
softly.

“Good God.”

Nomura nodded sadly. "At the time, I thought these paranoid fears were
only more evidence of my father's failing mental health. I begged him to seek
help. He refused. His rhetoric became ever more violent, ever more deranged.

“Then he vanished on the way to Thailand.” His face was
somber. “He vanished without any word or trace. I do not know whether he
was abducted, or whether he disappeared of his own free will. I do not know
whether he is alive or dead.”

Nomura looked up at Castilla. “Now, however, after seeing those
peaceful protesters murdered outside the Teller Institute, I have another
concern.” He lowered his voice. “My father talked of a covert war
being waged against the Lazarus Movement. And I laughed at him. But what if he
was right?”

■

Later, once Hideo Nomura had gone, Sam Castilla walked to the door of his
private study, knocked once, and went into the dimly lit room.

A pale, long-nosed man in a rumpled dark gray suit sat calmly in a
high-backed chair placed right next to the door. Bright, highly intelligent

eyes gleamed behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.
“Good morning, Sam,” said Fred Klein, the head of Covert-One.

“You heard all that?” the president asked.

Klein nodded. “Most of it.” He held up a
sheaf of papers. “And I've read through the transcript of last evening's
NSC meeting.”

“Well?” Castilla asked. “What do you think?”

Klein sat back in his chair and ran his hands through his rapidly thinning
hair while he considered his old friend's question. Every
year it seemed as though his hairline receded another inch. It was the
price of the stress involved in running the most secret operation in the whole U.S. government.
“David Hanson is no fool,” he said finally. “You know his record as well as I do. He has a nose for trouble and he's
bright and pushy enough to follow that nose wherever it leads him.”

“I know that, Fred,” said the president. “Hell, that's why I
nominated him as DCI in the first place —over Emily Powell-Hill's vigorous and
often-expressed objections, I might add. But I'm asking you for your opinion of
his latest brainstorm: Do you think this mess in Santa Fe is really the work of the Lazarus
Movement itself?”

Klein shrugged. “He makes a fairly strong case. But you don't need me
to tell you that.”

“No, I don't.” Castilla walked over heavily and dropped into
another chair, this one next to a fireplace. “But how does the CIA's
theory track with what you've learned from Colonel Smith?”

“Not perfectly,” the head of Covert-One admitted. “Smith was
very clear. Whoever these attackers were, they were professionals—well-trained,
well-equipped, and well-briefed professionals.” He fiddled with the
briarwood pipe tucked in his coat pocket and fought off the temptation to light
up. The whole White House was a no-smoking area these days. “Frankly, that
does not seem to square with what little we know about the Lazarus Movement. .
.” Go on,“ the president said. But it's not impossible,” Klein
finished. "The Movement has money.

Maybe it hired the pros it needed. God knows that there are enough special
ops-trained mercenaries kicking around idle these days. These people could have
been ex-Stasi from the old East Germany,
or ex-KGB or Spetsnaz-types from Russia. Or they might be from other
commando units in the old Warsaw Pact, the Balkans, or the Middle
East."

He shrugged. “The real kicker is Smith's claim that none of the
nan-otechnology being developed at the Institute could have killed those
protesters. If he's right, then Hanson's theory goes right out the window. Of
course, so does every other reasonable alternative.”

The president sat staring into the empty fireplace for a long moment. Then
he shook himself and growled, “It feels a bit too damned convenient, Fred,
especially when you consider what Hideo Nomura just told me. I just don't like
the way both the CIA and the FBI are zeroing in on one particular theory of
what took place in Santa Fe,
to the exclusion of every other possibility.”

“That's understandable,” Klein said. He tapped the NSC transcript.
“And I'll admit I have the same qualms. The worst sin in intelligence
analysis comes when you start pounding square facts into round holes just to
fit a favorite hypothesis. Well, when I read this, I can hear both the Bureau
and the Agency banging away on pegs—whatever their shape.”

The president nodded slowly. “That's exactly the problem.” He
looked across the shadowed room at Klein. “You're familiar with the
A-Team/ B-Team approach to analysis, aren't you?”

The head of Covert-One shot him a lopsided grin. “I'd better be. After
all, that's one of the justifications for my whole outfit.” He shrugged.
“Back in 1976, the then-DCI, George Bush Sr., later one of your illustrious
predecessors, wasn't completely satisfied with the in-house CIA analysis of
Soviet intentions he was getting. So he commissioned an outside group —the
B-Team—made up of sharp-eyed academics, retired generals, and outside Soviet
experts to conduct its own independent study of the same questions.”

“That's right,” Castilla said. "Well, starting right now, I
want you to

form your very own B-Team to sort through this
mess, Fred. Don't get in the way of the CIA or the FBI unless you have to, but
I want somebody I can trust implicitly checking the shape of those pegs they're
hammering."

Klein nodded slowly. “That can be arranged.” He tapped the unlit
pipe on his knee for a few seconds, thinking. Then he looked up. “Colonel
Smith is the obvious candidate. He's already on the scene and he knows a great
deal about nanotechnology.”

“Good.” Castilla nodded. “Brief him now, Fred. Figure out
what authorizations he'll need to do this, and I'll make sure they land on the
right desks first thing in the morning.”

In the Cerrillos Hills, Southwest of Santa Fe

An old, often-dented red Honda Civic drove south along County Road 57,
trailing a long cloud of dust. Unbroken darkness stretched for miles in every
direction. Only a faint glow cast by the sliver of the moon lit the rugged
hills and steep-sided gulches and arroyos east of the unpaved dirt-and-gravel
road. Inside the cramped, junk-filled car, Andrew Costanzo sat hunched over the
steering wheel. He glanced down at the odometer periodically, lips moving as he
tried to figure out just how far he had come since leaving Interstate 25. The
instructions he had been given were precise.

Few people who knew him would have recognized the strange look of mingled
exhilaration and dread on his pallid, fleshy face.

Ordinarily, Costanzo seethed with frustration and accumulated resentments.
He was plump, forty-one years old, unmarried, and trapped in a society that did
not value either his intellect or his ideals. He had worked

hard to earn an advanced degree in environmental
law and American consumerism. His doctorate should have opened doors for him
into the academic elite. For years he had dreamed of working for a Washington,
D.C.-based think tank, single-handedly drafting the blueprints for essential
social and environmental reforms. Instead he was just a part-time clerk in a
chain bookstore, a crummy dead-end job that barely paid his share of the rent
on a shabby, run-down ranch house in one of Albuquerque's poorest neighborhoods.