Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta by Robert Ludlum Read Free Book Online Page A

for a
moment, enjoying the feel of the sun on his lean, tanned face. The air was
warming up and puffs of white cloud moved lazily across a brilliant azure sky.
It was a perfect autumn day.
    He took a deep breath, trying to wash the accumulated fatigue toxins out of
his system.
    “LET LAZARUS
LEAD! NO TO NANOTECH! LET LAZARUS LEAD! NO TO NANOTECH! LET LAZARUS LEAD!”
    Smith frowned. The rhythmic, singsong slogans hammered at his ears,
shattering the momentary illusion of peace. They were much louder and
    angrier than they had been the day before. He eyed
the mass of chanting protesters pressed up close against the perimeter fence.
There were a lot more of them here today, too. Maybe even as
many as ten thousand.
    A sea of bloodred and bright green banners and placards rose and fell in
time with each roar from the crowd. Protest organizers roamed back and forth on
a portable stage set up near the Institute security booth, shouting into
microphones—whipping the demonstrators into a frenzy.
    The main gate was closed. A small squad of gray-uniformed security guards
stood behind the gate, nervously facing the chanting throng. Outside, much
farther down the access road, Smith could see a few patrol cars—a couple in the
black-and-white markings of the New Mexico State Police, the rest in the white,
light blue, and gold stripes of the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office.
    “This is shaping up to be one hell of a mess, Colonel,” a familiar
voice said grimly from behind him.
    Frank Diaz came forward from his post by the door. Today the ex-Ranger
noncom was wearing a bulky bulletproof vest. He had a riot helmet dangling from
one hand and a twelve-gauge Remington pump-action shotgun slung over the other
shoulder. A bandolier held a mixed assortment of CS (tear gas) shells and solid
slugs for the shotgun.
    “What has these people so revved up?” Smith asked. “President
Castilla and the media aren't due here until the day after tomorrow. Why all the outrage now?”
    “Somebody offed a couple of Lazarus Movement-types last night,”
Diaz said. “The Santa Fe PD found two bodies stuffed into a Dumpster. Down behind that big outlet mall on Cerrillos Road. One was stabbed,
and the other had a broken neck.”
    Smith whistled softly. “Damn.”
    “No kidding.” The Army veteran hawked and spat. “And those fruitcakes
over there are blaming us.”
    Smith turned to look more closely at him. “Oh?”
    "Apparently the dead guys were planning to cut through our fence last
    night,“ Diaz explained. ”For
some big act of civil-fricking-disobedience. Naturally the radicals claim
we must have caught the two of them and slaughtered 'em. Which
is all bullshit, of course. . . ."
    “Of course,” Smith agreed absently. He ran his eyes over the
stretch of chain-link fence in sight. It seemed perfectly intact. “But
they're still dead, and you're the designated bad guys, right?”
    “Hell, Colonel,” the ex-Ranger noncom said. He sounded almost
aggrieved. “If I knocked off a couple of punk-ass, eco-freak infiltrators,
do you think I'd be stupid enough to just dump them in some trash bin behind a goddamned
shopping mall?”
    Smith shook his head. He could not stop a quick grin from flashing across
his face. “No, Staff Sergeant Diaz. I really do not believe you would be
that stupid.”
    “Damned straight.”
    “Which still leaves me wondering, who was that stupid?”
    ■
    Ravi Parikh kept his attention focused closely on the highly magnified image
on his monitor. The semiconducting sphere he was looking at seemed well within
its design specs. He zoomed in even closer, scanning the front half of the
nanophage. “I cannot find a problem with this sensor array, Phil,” he
told Brinker. “Everything is just where it should be.”
    Brinker nodded wearily. “Which makes ninety-nine out
of the last hundred.” He rubbed at his eyes. “And the one
flawed build we've found so far didn't form a sensor array at all, which means
the onboard