and drew the blade of the fighting knife hard across his throat. Blood sprayed through the air, scarlet under the bright bulb of the overhead light.
The dying man thrashed wildly, kicking and tugging at the ropes holding him down. He toppled over, still tied to the stool, and lay twitching, bleeding his life away onto the concrete floor.
Burke turned back to Terce. "Satisfied?" he snapped. "Or do you want me to dig his grave, too?"
"That will not be necessary," the other man said calmly. He nodded toward a large roll of canvas in the far corner of the porch. "We already have a grave for poor Joachim over there. Antonio can share it with him."
The CIA officer suddenly realized he was looking at another corpse, this one rolled up in a tarp.
"Joachim was wounded while retreating from the Institute," Terce explained. "He was hit in the shoulder and leg. His injuries were not immediately life-threatening, but they would soon have required significant medical attention. I did what was necessary."
Burke nodded slowly, understanding. The tall green-eyed man and his comrades would not risk their own security by seeking medical treatment for anyone hurt too badly to keep up. The TOCSIN action team would kill anyone who threatened its mission, even its own members.
Chapter Twelve
Thursday, October 14 The White House
It was after midnight and the heavy red-and-yellow Navajo drapes were drawn tight, sealing off the Oval Office from any prying eyes. No one outside the White House West Wing needed to know that the president of the United States was still hard at work - or with whom he was meeting.
Sam Castilla sat at his big pine table in his shirtsleeves, steadily reading through a sheaf of hastily drafted emergency executive orders. The heavy brass reading lamp on one corner of his desk cast a circular pool of light across his paperwork. From time to time, he jotted rough notes in the margin or crossed out a poorly worded phrase.
At last, with a quick stroke of his pen, he slashed his signature across me bottom of the several different marked-up orders. He could sign clean copies for the national archives later. Right now the important thing was to get the ponderous wheels of government turning somewhat faster. He glanced up.
Charles Ouray, his chief of staff, and Emily Powell-Hill, his national security adviser, sat slumped in the two big leather chairs drawn up in front of his desk. They looked weary, worn down by long hours spent shuttling back and forth between the White House complex and the various cabinet offices to get those orders ready for his signature. Trying to broker agreements among half-a-dozen different executive branch departments, each with its own competing views and pet agendas, was never easy.
"Is there anything else I need to know now?" Castilla asked them.
Ouray spoke up first. "We're getting our first look at the morning papers from Europe, Mr. President." His mouth turned down.
"Let me guess," Castilla said sourly. "We're getting hammered?"
Emily Powell-Hill nodded. Her eyes were worried. "By most of the major dailies in every European nation - France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Spain, and all the others. The general consensus seems to be that no matter what went wrong inside the Teller Institute, the carnage outside is largely our responsibility."
"On what grounds?" the president asked.
"There's a lot of wild speculation about some kind of secret nanotech weapons program gone awry," Ouray told him quietly. "The European press is playing that angle hard, with all the sensational claims front and center and our official denials buried way down near the end."
Castilla grimaced. "What are they doing? Running Lazarus Movement press releases verbatim?"
"For all practical purposes," Powell-Hill said bluntly. She shrugged. "Their story has all the plot elements Europeans love: a big, bad, secretive, and blundering America running roughshod over a peaceful, plucky, Mother Earth-loving band of truth-telling activists. And, as you can imagine, every foreign policy mistake we've made over the past fifty years is being raked up all over again."
"What's the political fallout likely to be?" the president asked her.
"Not good," she told him. "Of course, some of our 'friends' in Paris and Berlin are always looking for a chance to stick it to us. But even our
real European friends and allies will have to play this one very carefully. Siding with the world's sole superpower is never very popular and a lot of those governments are shaky right now. It wouldn't take much of a swing in public opinion to bring