Greg Bear - Quantico

‘Sick,’ Fouad said.

‘Stock up on Pepto. You’re going to see worse. But since the UN threatened to bring war crimes charges against us, we have strict limits on what we can do. You will not be called upon to actually interrogate someone. You may, however, witness such interrogations. Understand this. We would stop torture if we could, because the information we get from tortured detainees is so difficult to filter and reconstruct. But our Muslim allies, especially those at the General Directorate, they seem to believe agony is good for the soul. They keep handing us bullshit they’ve proudly extracted through the application of extreme duress.’

Fouad was confused. ‘How am I supposed to act when I see such things being done?’

‘We need fresh detainees. We need them unspoiled. If, in your opinion, a detainee might have information of use, you will work to get him-or her-rendered before torture begins. We will interrogate them ourselves. We use techniques that produce remarkable results without much pain. If you can’t accomplish that, you will report in exact detail who is being tortured and by whom. So, your first assignment is unpleasant but very important. You will travel with a small team to Egypt and to Jordan, and to some camps in Kuwait, to observe rendition prospects and make reports. Are you up to it?’

‘I will be saving them from torture?’ Fouad asked.

‘Only if they’re useful. The rest, I’m afraid, will have to rely on Allah.’

Fouad’s face grew dark. ‘This American, Brown or Bedford, he is real?’ Fouad asked.

‘Sounds like hooey to me, but some people in Baghdad used anthrax on a few Shiite Muslims. Their leader might be a man called Al-Hitti.’ Anger fixed his stare on Fouad. ‘That’s all we’re cleared to know, for the time being.’

‘You will use your techniques on this man?’

‘No,’ Anger said, shaking his head in disgust. ‘They filled him full of crude drugs in Egypt. He’s a wreck. If we do what we do best, we’d kill him.’

That afternoon, Fouad moved into a motel room near the Marine base and less than eight miles from the Academy. All the other rooms were filled with agents from Diplomatic Security, Homeland Security, the FBI, and the CIA, and all had been instructed not to talk to each other.

BuDark indeed.

He had yet to learn the real name.

Temecula

Sam-he had many names now, but to Tommy, he was just Sam-sat on the porch listening to the soughing of the mourning doves. Dawn was a hint of striated light in the east, like a flaw in his vision breaking up the perfect darkness. The land around Tommy’s house was quiet but for the doves and a few songbirds tuning up for the morning battle of the bands.

Sam spread his bare toes on the splintery wood and sniffed the cool, sweet air. All he could see other than that blemish of dawn was a hard, rough road finally arriving, however long it might take, at failure. There were so many details to get perfect, so many pitfalls to avoid, and he felt sure that somebody would soon be on to him.

The disaster of the truck and the patrol car. And the glove. He could not remember what he had done with the glove after pulling it off with his teeth. He might have jammed it in his pants pocket. It might be near the burned-out cruiser, in which case it was in the hands of the police and probably the FBI. It might have fallen out on the long walk before he was picked up and given his ride. Good cops might work those miles of highway and find it. Either way, he had screwed up. Compounding that, his weakness: the woman in the green van, Charlene.

It was hard to remember what he had actually told her.

Sam wanted a cigarette and he hadn’t smoked in fifteen years.

They would get skin cells out of the glove. They would have the skin cells and the DNA from the blood, and oddly, they would not precisely match, and that would tell them there had been two assailants at the scene. Brothers, perhaps.

That might slow them down.

Everything about him came in pairs, including his moods-back-to-back despair and supernal confidence with nothing in between but little warning flashes, anxious sparks of light he could almost see.

Morning was the hardest for Sam.

Walking through the kitchen and the back door and down a flagstone path between overgrown lawn and what now looked like pasture, Sam used Tommy’s ring of keys to open the first warehouse. He passed between the stainless steel tanks rising from the concrete floor like the heads of giant tin-men with protruding steel mouths.

At the end of the warehouse a flight of plain wooden steps descended to the cellars-three concrete tunnels that stretched off for a hundred feet beyond the warehouse foundation. Sam switched on the ceiling lights. His soft-soled shoes padded silently down an aisle flanked by stacked casks of old French oak and cheaper young American oak. Here, sleeping in quiet darkness, the wine had been meant to age and acquire flavors from the wood-a hint of vanilla mostly-and soften its sharp edges in preparation for the bottling that had never come.

Tommy’s parents had died before they could enjoy the results of their final vintage.

Last year Sam had used a glass funnel-a wine thief-to sample some of the casks through their rubber-stoppered bungholes. The wine had turned lifeless and flat and no wonder. The floor under the casks was stained purple, sticky and slick. The barrels had leaked.

The vaults echoed and the cool still air smelled of moldering oak and dead wine.

At the end of the longest tunnel, during the winery’s construction phase, Tommy’s father had left a room twenty feet square open for Tommy’s use. The room had been plumbed with hot and cold water, two large steel sinks, and a floor drain. A small high window could be poled open for ventilation. There, he had trained his son in basic biology and wine lab techniques-yeast culture and fermentation.

Perhaps that had been only way they could connect emotionally. Sam tried to imagine the father’s satisfaction at his son’s native ability.

The rest Tommy had figured out for himself or researched on the Internet, a cornucopia of odd knowledge. According to Tommy both his mother and his father had been thrilled that Tommy was finally revealing his talents. Still they had never bothered to check up on what he was actually doing. Toward the end, they had had their own troubles. Tommy had been kept busy and out of their hair. Whatever scientific equipment he had asked for, in their guilt they had bought, despite the cost-and he had asked for some unusual things.

Sam opened the metal door and switched on the sunwhite lights. The lab glowed. In pristine silence, he looked across tables crammed with a centrifuge and incubators, stirring platforms, small hot boxes-sealed Plexiglas cubes with glove holes, neat arrays of pipettes on white plastic cutting boards, a shelf covered with antiseptic spray cans and wipe dispensers, glass beakers and test tubes mounted on wall racks, small packets of French wine yeast.

Near the back stood a much larger box made of sheet steel and half-inch Lexan: eight feet tall, twelve feet wide, three feet deep. The seams had been caulked with thick beads of silicone putty and the whole was now mothballed-wrapped in multiple layers of translucent Visqueen and strips of duct tape and blue masking tape. This had been the first of Tommy’s amateur production facilities. He had built it at the age of fifteen. At that time, he had been convinced his parents were out to kill him-the first of his major delusions. And so he had set about cultivating Clostridium botulinum -while contemplating the contents of a small vial he had been unfortunate enough to find at his high school.