Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta by Robert Ludlum

thing is going to be very clear to everyone, from the
    White House all the way on down the chain of command.
Somehow, somewhere, in some way, this atrocity must be linked to the
Movement."
    “Right,” Burke said. “And in the meantime, I'll keep pushing
TOCSIN from my end.”
    “Is that wise?” Pierson asked sharply. “Maybe we should pull
the plug now.”
    “It's too late for that,” Burke told her bluntly. “Everything
is already in motion, Kit. We either ride the wave, or we get pulled
under.”

Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta

Chapter Nine
    The White House
    The members of the president's national security team who were gathered
around the crowded conference table in the White House Situation Room were in a
somber, depressed mood. As they damned well should be, thought Sam Castilla
grimly. The first accounts of the Teller Institute disaster had been bad
enough. Each new report was even worse.
    He glanced at the nearest clock. It was much later than he had thought. In
the confines of this small artificially lit underground room, the passage of
time was often distorted. Several hours had already passed since Fred Klein
first flashed him the news of the horror unfolding in Santa Fe.
    Now the president looked around the table in disbelief. “You're telling
me that we still don't have a firm estimate of casualties—either inside the
Teller Institute itself, or outside among the demonstrators?”
    “No, Mr. President. We don't,” Bob Zeller, the acting director of
the FBI, admitted. He sat miserably hunched over in his chair. "More than
    half of the Institute's scientists and staff are
listed as missing. Most of them are probably dead. But we can't even send in
search-and-rescue teams until the fires are out. As for the protesters. .
." Zeller's voice trailed away.
    “We may never know exactly how many of them were killed, Mr.
President,” his national security adviser, Emily Powell-Hill, interrupted.
“You've seen the pictures of what happened outside the labs. It could take
months to identify what little is left of those people.”
    “The major networks are saying there are at least two thousand
dead,” said Charles Ouray, the White House chief of staff. “And
they're predicting the count could go even higher. Maybe as high as three or
four thousand.”
    “Based on what, Charlie?” the president snapped. “Spitballing and raw guesswork?”
    “They're going with claims made by Lazarus Movement spokesmen,”
Ouray said quietly. “Those folks have more credibility with the press— and
the general public —than they used to. More credibility than we do right
now.”
    Castilla nodded. That was true enough. The first terrifying TV footage had
gone out live and unedited over several news network satellite feeds. Tens of
millions of people in America
and hundreds of millions around the world had seen the gruesome images with
their own eyes. The networks were now showing more discretion, carefully blurring
the more graphic scenes of terrified Lazarus Movement protesters being eaten
alive. But it was too late. The damage was done.
    All the wild, lurid claims made by the Lazarus Movement about the dangers
posed by nanoteclmology seemed vindicated. And now the Movement seemed
determined to push an even more sinister and paranoid story. This theory was
already showing up on their Web sites and on other major Internet discussion
groups. It claimed that the Teller labs were developing secret nanotech war weapons
for the U.S.
military. Using eerily similar photos of the ravaged dead in both places, it
connected the horror in Santa Fe to the earlier
massacre at Kusasa in Zimbabwe.
Those
    pushing the story were arguing that these pictures
proved that “elements within the American government” had wiped out a
peaceful village as a first test of those nanotech weapons.
    Castilla grimaced. In the prevailing hysteria, no one was going to pay any
attention to calm technical rebuttals by leading scientists. Or to