Greg Bear - Quantico

‘We’ll figure out another timetable, won’t we?’

‘I doubt we’ll even have to worry about that.’

‘Good.’ Tommy sighed dramatically. ‘Well then, that’s over.’ He opened the door and got out. Sam pushed the button on the remote clipped to the visor. The garage door swung up with a creaking song of coil springs, revealing a bright red Dodge truck and a double-wide horse trailer.

Sam remained in the El Camino with the engine running, considering how close to failure they actually were. He watched Tommy walk around the side of the house and up the step to the front door. The man-boy’s shoulders were slumped but he was doing much better. He was lost in thought.

It was, after all, a nutty idea, from start to finish-the kind of idea a disappointed man might dream about, tossing and winding up sheets in the dark of the night. The kind of plan a grieving man might consider when his life seemed pointless and the hours dragged on, and then got lost-time that simply vanished in large chunks, day after day, irretrievable.

Tommy was not the only one who could go Dipsy-Down.

Sam took his foot off the brake, slipped the El Camino in gear, and slowly pulled forward to the right of the horse trailer. The garage door closed and he sat in the dim orange light of the opener’s single low-watt bulb.

He could not shake the memory of the cone-shaped explosion of blood and the officer spinning to the side of the road.

People had paid a severe price. The gears were turning. This wasn’t just about Sam and Tommy.

‘They have to listen to God,’ Sam murmured as he opened the door to the house. ‘They have to forget their hate and listen.’

Near the end of his other life, five years ago, Sam had first met Tommy. He had driven out to the house and knocked on the front door and announced that he wanted Tommy’s help.

Tommy had been desperate for company. The time for confession, it seemed, had arrived. Tommy had wanted to explain himself and all that he had done and why.

Sam had accepted Tommy’s offer of a tour of the winery. It could have been the biggest break of Sam’s career. Tommy had been pitifully vulnerable, telling his story with hyperactive enthusiasm…and then, without warning, as they drank orange juice in the big kitchen, Tommy had crashed and burned.

Utterly terrified by what he had revealed to a stranger, Tommy had fled and hidden under a blanket in his smelly, crowded bedroom. Sam had followed the man-boy, had seen the walls covered with bookshelves, posters, and magazine pictures of Jennifer Lopez-J-Lo, the queen of Tommy’s inner sanctum.

Around his twin bed, Tommy had piled stacks of texts and magazines, their edges bursting with color-coded Post-it notes.

Sam had watched the man-boy cower and a switch had turned on in his head. He had followed the path between the bedroom stacks and put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder. ‘What a brave, brave man,’ he had soothed. ‘Do I ever understand. A brilliant guy like you. They all want a piece of you, don’t they? Let’s go back to the living room. Let’s talk. I bet that together, you and I can work this out.’

Tommy had pulled back the covers and peered out at Sam like some pink, wet-faced gargoyle. ‘Not really,’ he had said.

‘Really,’ Sam had said.

Tommy had sat up. ‘You believe me?’

‘What’s not to believe?’

‘You want to see more?’ Tommy had asked, wiping away the slicks of moisture below his eyes and nose.

Sam had realized he had the power. Tommy was his. This was the find of a career-something that could change everything for him.

Or it was the find of a lifetime. Something that could change everything, for everybody.

‘Show me as much as you like,’ Sam had said. ‘I’d like to see it all.’

Quantico

‘They’re going down.’

William hunched and rubbed his jaw to keep it from aching. There was little enough to see on the screen-blurry images from the two helmet cams, people sitting in the back of the bomb squad truck. And little enough to hear-bombnet had fallen mostly silent back in Eglin and Redstone and Washington, DC.

The students were transfixed. This is what some of them would end up doing unless they made some serious decisions right now. But William could tell. They were into it. They were as focused and intent as if they were on the actual scene, offering helpless murmurs of advice to their onscreen counterparts. They were already thinking like agents. William was scared as hell. That was his father in there, once again risking his life, unconcerned about family or friends-duty was all.

Duty came first every single goddamned time, no matter how much it might cost.

That had made William angry when he was a boy. Now, he didn’t know which side to come down on. Because he was sure that his father was having another big damned adventure. Another day in the life of a hero. Jack Armstrong, all-seeing, all-knowing G-Man, Jimmy Stewart with a biker’s build.

‘I will stand,’ Fouad said, getting up. ‘You will sit.’

‘Thanks,’ William said. His legs were shaky. He replaced Fouad in the chair. Fouad stood beside him, arms crossed.

‘I hate the suspense,’ Fouad said. ‘I am here for it, but I hate it.’

‘Thanks,’ William said again, but he wasn’t paying much attention.

The pictures from the helmet cams had brightened and the experts at Eglin were talking again, speculating on the wires and posts outside the barn, the fryers, the long stretch of tape, and why Griff was still going after a little girl.

Washington State

Griff took a deep breath. He was starting to feel the old claustrophobia-unable to catch a deep breath, the sensation that first his nostrils and then his throat would close up and he would suffocate. Bomb suits always had that effect on him-the warmth, his stale breath bouncing back from the faceplate, the squeezing closeness of all the armor and the weight, more and more overbearing.

Andrews was suddenly in his ear. The volume seemed to have gone up. Griff was sensitive to all sounds. ‘I’m patching through George Schell from Eglin.’

Schell had gone with Griff through EOD school at Redstone. He was a short whippet-wire guy with thinning hair and sharp gray eyes and a quick temper that miraculously vanished when he worked around ordnance.

‘Griff, we’ve been discussing this in the room here,’ Schell said, ‘and we’ve come up with a crazy idea. Have you ever heard of Alfvén waves?’

‘No,’ Griff said, annoyed. ‘I don’t pay much attention to hairstyles.’

‘This is physics,’ Schell said. ‘Listen up. We’re going through a major solar storm. They can trigger electrical currents in power grids. Alfvén waves. I don’t see how a few acres of strung wire can pull in much of a current, but then, it might not take much, right? Do you see anything like a spark gap, something that could be a low-amp, high-voltage fuse?’

‘No,’ Griff said. Then, to be polite-and because, frankly, the idea made his stomach churn-he added, ‘Not yet.’

‘I knew it,’ Watson said, under her breath. ‘Like Rose said. He was watching the skies.’

‘Hush,’ Griff said. ‘George, explain this dumb idea to me.’ Clever people. Just shoot them all.

‘Let’s say we get a big pulse from space,’ Schell said. ‘The wires on the posts could pick up a current and feed it into the barn. The current could be strong enough to set off a fuse or trigger something else.’

Andrews added, ‘I’m standing outside the truck. It’s completely dark and I can see the aurora, Griff. It’s spectacular. There’s a big pink and orange corona overhead. It’s like staring up at God’s eye. Maybe it’s just me, but He looks unhappy.’