Greg Bear - Quantico

Tommy began laughing. His laughter turned into a bray. ‘Yeah, right. At least I don’t scratch my butt when I get out of a car.’

‘I never do that,’ Sam said, indignant.

Tommy danced around the kitchen, plucking his pants bottom. ‘Wedgy, wedgy!’

Seattle, Washington

William looked through the window into the surgical unit. He could not see his father, not clearly-just a lump covered with blue and green sheets, here and there a spot of what looked like ground red meat showing through, where people in full-out surgical suits, with their own air tubes trailing after them, probed with shining, curved tools and murmured to each other. He could hear the whine and whir of drills and saws and pumps.

One of the surgeons looked up and gave a muffled laugh to someone’s joke. The OR head nurse had told William they had been working for three hours.

William’s knees turned shaky. He sat on the chair. Special Agent Dole from the Seattle Field Office, barely older than William, slender and blond and wearing a brown pants suit, handed him a bottle of water. He drank and watched. All night agents had come in and out, clapping William on the shoulder, saying little, watching the surgery for a few minutes and grimacing as if at some weird object lesson.

Someone named Cap Benson arrived and told Agent Dole she could take a break. He had bandages on his face and around the back of his neck. ‘I was with your dad, up until the last…the barn,’ he said, his words muffled by a swollen jaw. Benson sat on a plastic chair beside William. ‘He’s going to make it.’

William nodded. It did not look good. The OR nurse said surgery could go on for another three or four hours. They were pulling Griff’s face forward and setting shims. The shattered bone was being debrided and they were picking out the chips, soaking them in saline and ReViv, and arranging the best of them back on strips of mesh like mosaics. As they set and repaired Griff’s shattered legs, they were also borrowing pieces of bone from his hip and femur to transplant to his skull.

Jesus Christ, Dad.

The observation room had pale blue walls and scuffed linoleum tile and smelled warm and clean. Benson smelled rank, as if he had not showered in a few days. To tell the truth, he looked more than tired-he looked a little crazy.

‘Griff’s one tough son of a bitch,’ Benson said.

William nodded like a clockwork. All his life he had reacted to his father in one way or another-as authority, something to be rebelled against, something to be loved or feared or even despised. He could not remember ever thinking of Griff as a friend. That raw-meat lump in the OR had guided William’s entire existence by example or counter-example, seldom by encouragement, most often by a scowl or gruff warning, several memorable times by the belt.

‘Your dad’s a hard man, isn’t he?’ Benson said.

‘Yeah,’ William said.

‘Tough as nails. And lucky, goddammit.’

Maryland

‘The whole world loves to beat up brown men,’ the prisoner said as he sat, with great care, on the old wooden chair. His face gave evidence of that: both eyes swollen almost shut, one cheek bruised and puffy, lip split and stitched in three places, neck marked by fading Taser jolts. No doubt he had similar burns around his genitals and rectum. Cingulated bruises and abrasions caused by hanging from handcuffs formed yellow and green half-moons on his inner wrists and needle marks crawled up his arms.

Fouad Al-Husam stood in a corner, out of the light. An agent who had been introduced to Fouad as John Q. Anger paced around the central table and the seated man. It was a scene as old as time; a small room, shadows, and a man whose life had value only so long as he could give useful answers.

He had been rendered . Shipped secretly from one country to another; in this case, from Egypt to the United States. As Fouad well knew, the reverse was usually true. Fouad was here as a trainee and an observer. Already, his stomach was being tested.

‘We’re not going to beat you,’ Anger told the seated man. ‘We don’t do that here.’

‘I’m grateful,’ the man said. He had a broad face with a hawk nose and a good black head of hair and his face was squat and his neck was long. Hands and wrists stuck out of too-short orange sleeves. ‘Will you send me back?’

‘Back to where?’

‘I do not know where I was,’ the man admitted with a shrug. ‘I could not see where they took me. I was blinded by my own blood.’

‘Do you know a man named Al-Hitti?’

‘I know a few men by that name. It is a common name in Egypt.’

‘The Iraqis tell us a man named Al-Hitti paid to have people killed. We found them in a house in Sadr City. They died painful deaths.’

‘I am unhappy to hear this,’ the man said. ‘If I knew such a man, I would tell you.’

‘You know him.’

The man on the chair shook his head weakly.

Anger leaned over and with some gentleness pulled his head back by the hair. ‘Nobody here tolerates disrespect. You will respect me. It’s part of our fucking culture. You will sit up straight.’

‘I am sitting straight.’

Anger pressed the man’s back with one hand. ‘Straighter. You have also met a white man named John Brown or John Bedford. He’s either an American or a Brit. We don’t believe he’s Canadian, despite what some Iraqis have told us.’

The man in the center of the room looked around through his bruised eyes and then stared down at the table. ‘Bedford,’ he said. ‘That is in Massachusetts.’

Anger turned his back on the man in the chair and faced Fouad. ‘Talk to him.’

Fouad took a step forward. He spoke in Arabic. ‘Has your treatment been better since you were brought here?’

‘They let me sleep,’ the man replied. ‘I still can’t eat. I think they ruined my stomach.’

‘They tell me you were born in Jordan.’

‘Yes.’

Anger moved swiftly and grabbed the man’s chin. ‘What do you know about anthrax?’

Fouad was startled by the intrusion. The captive took it as a matter of course. ‘A disease of cattle and people,’ he said. ‘Someone in America sent letters. That is all I know.’

‘Anthrax refers to the black lesions caused by the germ,’ Anger said. He waved his hand at Fouad as he paced. ‘Translate this for me. Like coal. Shiny and black and painful. These victims were kidnapped off the streets of Baghdad, taken to Sadr City, and there they were forced to inhale anthrax powder.’

Fouad translated.

‘You are telling me too much,’ the man protested to Fouad in Arabic. He pleaded with his eyes, one brown man to another. ‘I do not wish to know these things.’

‘Does this knowledge disturb you?’ Anger asked. Fouad translated, feeling sick.

‘It is having the knowledge that is dangerous,’ the man said, this time in English. ‘When you are done with me and give me back, and the Egyptians ask questions, they will see that I know some of which they are asking, and they will assume I know more. Do not tell me any more. It will kill me.’

‘Did you introduce Mr. Brown to Al-Hitti?’

The man in the chair bowed his head. ‘So many planes and trucks and rooms,’ he said.

‘We’re done,’ said Anger. ‘Send him back,’ he instructed the guards. ‘Let the Egyptians finish him.’

‘No, do not send me back. I do not know Al-Hitti. I have not met him!’

Anger took Fouad’s elbow. They walked out of the room together. The door closed softly, muffling the captive’s pleas for mercy. In the green hall outside, Anger kept pacing, finger to chin. ‘How does that make you feel?’