lazarus vendetta | Page 9

a thin, grim line. "What that really means is that he doesn't want The Washington Post, I he Yew York limes, and Fox Yews calling him gutless."

"Would you?"

"No," Burke admitted.

"Then you have twenty-four hours, Hal," the CIA chief said. "1 need you and Kit Pierson to dig up something solid that I can take back to the

White House. Otherwise, Sam Castilla is flying to Santa Fe to confront those protesters head-on. You know what this president is like."

"He's one stubborn son of a bitch," Burke growled.

"Yes, he is."

"So be it," Burke said. He shrugged. "1 just hope it doesn't get him killed this time." Chapter Three

Teller Institute for Advanced Technology

Jon Smith took the wide, shallow steps to the Institute's upper floor two at a time. Running up and down its three main staircases was pretty much the only exercise he had time for now. The long days and occasional nights he spent in the various nanotechnology labs were cutting into his usual workout routine.

He reached the top and paused for a moment, pleased to note that both his breathing and his heart rate were perfectly normal. The sun slanting through the stairwell's narrow windows felt comfortably warm on his shoulders. Smith glanced at his watch. The senior researcher for Har-court Biosciences had promised him "one seriously cool demonstration" of their most recent advances in five minutes. Up here, the routine hum from below—phones ringing, keyboards clicking and clattering, and people talking—fell away to a cathedral-like hush. The Teller Institute kept its administrative offices, cafeteria, computer center, staff lounges, and science library on the first floor. The up-per level was reserved for the lab suites allotted to different research teams. Like its rivals from the Institute itself and Nomura PharmaTech, Harcourt had its facilities in the North Wing.

Smith turned right into a wide corridor that ran the whole length of the I-shaped building. Polished earth brown floor tiles blended comfortably with off-white adobe walls. At regular intervals, nichos, small niches with rounded tops, displayed paintings of famous scientists —Fermi, Newton, Feynman, Drexler, Einstein, and others—commissioned from local artists. Between the nichos stood tall ceramic vases filled with brilliant yellow chamisa and pale purple aster wildflowers. If you ignored the sheer size of this place, Smith thought, it looked just like the hall of a private Santa Fe home.

He came to the locked door outside the Harcourt lab and swiped his ID card through the adjacent security station. The light on top flashed from red to green and the lock clicked open. His card was one of the relatively few coded for access to all restricted areas. Rival scientists and technicians were not permitted to stray into one another's territory. While trespassers were not shot, they were issued immediate one-way tickets out of Santa Fe. The Institute took its obligation to protect intellectual property rights very seriously.

Smith stepped through the door and immediately entered a very different world. Here the polished wood and textured adobe of courtly old Santa Fe gave way to the gleaming metal and tough composite materials of the twenty-first century. The elegance of natural sunlight and recessed lighting surrendered to the glare of overhead fluorescent strip lights. These lights had a very high ultraviolet component—just to kill surface germs. A small breeze tugged at his shirt and whispered through his dark hair. The nanotech laboratory suites were kept under positive pressure to minimize the risk of any airborne contaminants from the public areas of the building. Ultra-efficient particulate air—or "ULPA" —filters fed in purified air at a constant temperature and humidity.

The Harcourt lab suite was arranged as a series of "clean rooms" of in-creasing rigor. This outer rim was an office area, crammed full of desks and workstations piled high with reference books, chemical and equipment catalogs, and paper printouts. Along the east wall, blinds were drawn across a floor-to-ceiling picture window, obscuring what would otherwise be a spectacular view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Farther inside the suite came a control and sample preparation area. Here were blacktopped lab benches, computer consoles, the awkward bulk of two scanning tunneling electron microscopes, and the other equipment needed to oversee nanotech design and production processes.

The true "holy of holies" was the inner core: visible only through sealed observation windows on the far wall. This was a chamber full of mirror-bright stainless steel tanks; mobile equipment skids loaded with pumps, valves, and sensor devices; vertically mounted disk frames for osmotic filters; and stacked Lucite cylinders packed with various grades of purification gels, all connected with looping lengths of clear, silastic tubing.

Smith knew that the core could be reached only through a succession of air locks and gowning roofhs. Anyone working inside the production chamber had to wear fully sterile coveralls, gloves and boots, and an air-displacement breather helmet. He smiled