gray windbreaker, green Polo shirt, and khakis. "While I'm here, I'm just plain Dr. Smith . . . and I don't talk to journalists. Not ever."
"That's not good enough," she replied adamantly.
"It will have to be," Jon told her quietly. He would bend a bit to placate Kit Pierson's natural irritation at finding an outsider poaching in her province, but he would not shirk his duty. "Look," he said. "If you want to complain to Washington, that's fine. In the meantime, though, you're stuck with me ... so why not take me up on my offer to help?"
Her eyes narrowed dangerously. For a second Smith wondered whether he was heading for that "preventive detention" hole Agent Latimer had warned him about. Then she shrugged. The gesture was so slight that he almost missed it. "All right, Dr. Smith," she said coolly. "We'll play this your way, for the moment. But the instant I get permission to sling you out of here, off you go."
He nodded. "Fair enough."
"Then, if that's all, I'm sure you can find your own way out," she suggested, pointedly checking her watch. "I have work to do."
Smith decided to push her just a bit further. "I need to ask just a couple of questions first."
"If you must," Pierson said levelly.
"What do your people think about the odd way the demolition charges were set inside the Harcourt lab?" he asked.
She raised a single perfect eyebrow. "Go on." She listened carefully to his conjecture that the bombs there were only intended to breach the lab's containment - not to wreck it completely. When he finished, she shook her head in icy amusement. "So you're an explosives expert, too, Doctor?"
"I've seen them used," he admitted. "But no, I'm not an expert."
"Well, let's assume your hunch is correct," Pierson said. "You're suggesting the slaughter outside was deliberate - that the terrorists planned all along to release these Harcourt nanophages on anyone in reach. Which means the Lazarus Movement came here intending to make its own martyrs."
"Not quite," Smith corrected her. "I'm suggesting the people who
pulled this off wanted to make it seem that way." He shook his head. "But I've been thinking hard about this, and there's no way that the nanode-vices Brinker and Parikh created were responsible for what happened. No way at all. It's completely impossible."
Pierson's face froze. "You'll have to explain that to me," she said stiffly. "Impossible, how?"
"Each Harcourt nanophage carried biochemical substances intended to eliminate specific cancerous cells, not to break down all living tissues," Smith said. "Plus, each individual phage was infmitesimally small. It would take millions of them, maybe tens of millions, to inflict the kind of damage I saw on any single human being. Multiply that by the number of people killed, and you're talking about billions of nanophages, possibly even tens of billions. That's far beyond the number the Harcourt folks could possibly have manufactured with their equipment. Don't forget, they were focused entirely on the design, engineering, and testing of what they hoped would be a medical miracle. They were not set up for mass production."
"Can you prove that?" Pierson asked. Her face was still an unreadable mask.
"Without the computer records?" Smith shook his head. "Maybe not solidly enough to suit a court of law, I guess. But I was in that lab almost every day and I know what I saw - and what I didn't see." He looked curiously at the pale, dark-haired woman to see whether or not she would arrive at the same damning conclusion he had.
Instead, she said nothing. Her mouth was a tight, thin line. Her gray eyes seemed fixed on a distant point somewhere far beyond the narrow confines of her tent.
"You understand what that means, don't you?" Smith said urgently. "It means these terrorists came to Teller with their own nanodevices already prepared - nanodevices that were engineered from the start to butcher thousands. Whoever those people were, they sure as hell weren't part of
the Lazarus Movement, not unless you think the Movement maintains its own sophisticated nanotech labs!"
At last, Pierson swung her gaze back toward him. A muscle on the right side of her face twitched. She frowned. "If your suppositions are correct, that may well be true, Doctor." Then she shook her head. "But that is a very big if, and I'm not yet prepared to overlook all the other evidence of Lazarus Movement involvement."
"What other evidence?" Smith asked sharply. "Do you have solid IDs for those terrorists Sergeant