Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta Read Online Free PDF Page A

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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 black-topped 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