Greg Bear - Quantico

That had been the turning point in Tommy’s life: someone’s simple if egregious oversight, a monumental mistake made for reasons no one would ever understand by a man unknown, perhaps dead.

Tommy had spent much of his free time in the high school’s science storage room arranging supplies and cleaning glassware. He had found a wax-sealed vial wrapped in cotton in a taped-up cardboard box, pushed back on a high shelf behind jars of chemicals. He did not know how long the box and vial had been there: perhaps since 1984, just after the school had been built.

He had immediately recognized the name penciled on the vial’s red and white paper label: B. anthracis.

Tommy had no idea where the vial had originally come from but Sam could hazard a guess. It might have been purloined by a teacher who had once worked in bio-weapons research. Perhaps he had smuggled it out of some lab as a souvenir or a trophy.

Perhaps he had dreamed of being allowed to teach a course on the glories of germ warfare.

Tommy had pocketed the vial and taken it home, where, he told Sam, he had spent many nights lying in bed staring at the beige powder, wondering what it all meant, whether it was even real.

So much potential .

So much power.

His parents were fighting every night, driving him under his bed pillows, weeping in terror. He had seen a cable TV program about prehistoric animals that depicted the plight of a pair of reptile parents two hundred million years ago. Harried by a small, swift dinosaur predator, they realized they would have to find another burrow-pull up roots. But they could not move their newly hatched offspring. To avoid wasting precious nutrients, they ate them.

Tommy had become convinced that this was what his parents were planning-not to eat him, but certainly to kill him and move on. In self-defense, he had laced an open can of mushrooms in the kitchen with just a drop of liquor from his toxic culture of C. botulinum . To Tommy, the logic had been obvious-but he did not watch television any more. He found movies and TV programs too disturbing. Even comedies gave him nightmares. The expressions on the faces terrified him.

Weeks after their deaths, in between court appearances and even in the presence of his first court-appointed guardian, Tommy had begun his second phase. His brilliance had almost immediately manifested itself. He had started by culturing pinches of anthrax in a broth whose recipe he had found on the Internet.

The basement lab had filled with the scent of stewing meat.

Since not every scrap of information he had needed could be found on the Internet, Tommy had improvised. He had devised several original techniques for preparing and refining his goal: weapons-grade aerosolized material.

Washing, re-drying and re-grinding had removed the dead cell debris, leaving a solution of almost pure spores. The resulting fine powder still had a tendency to clump, however, because of static when dry, and because of moisture when exposed to humidity. He had experimented with suspending the powder in various liquids, and finally arrived at his own ideal formula, using chemicals actually found in printer inks.

Some of those early products he had stored in jars, to avoid waste and as a record of his progress.

But Tommy had known from experience that simply drying and grinding would not prevent clumping. The problem had then become to re-deposit the anthrax in very fine grains, already separated and containing fewer than four or five spores per grain. His brilliant answer: common inkjet printers. He had replaced the ink in the disposable printer cartridges with his special solution of chemicals and, at first, brewer’s yeast as a substitute for anthrax. (Once again, Tommy had suspected that using anthrax’s close relation, BT or Bacillus thuringiensis, ordered from a garden supply store, might result in his being tracked. Yeast, however, he had in abundance-left over from the winery.)

First on heavy paper, then on eight-by-ten-inch glass plates, Tommy had printed out millions of dots of dry solution-tiny granules containing only one or two spores, far finer than he had believed possible. The solution, when expelled through the printer cartridge nozzles, produced a microscopic, silica-wrapped bead that sat high on the glass plate when dry, but strongly resisted mechanical dislodging. The plates could in theory be carried around with minimum precautions, separated only by waxed paper.

Tommy had worked through ten pairs of glove holes arranged in two levels, front and back. A rolling stepped platform once used to stack barrels had allowed him to reach the upper level.

His next act of genius had been to array the plates on a rack in a vacuum chamber at the right end of his large hot box and statically charge them using an apparatus he had borrowed from an old office Xerox machine. The microscopic granules had lifted free and flown to a grid of tiny wires where they had discharged, flocked up briefly, and then been drawn by gravity to a Teflon-lined chute and into small jars. He had kept a long brush in the box, just in case the spores stuck on the wires or in the chute.

He had then networked six printers, so modified, and had finally begun depositing the real thing: weapons-grade, aerosolized Bacillus anthracis . Throughout, he had kept everything sealed in his hot box factory, even the glass plates, which he recycled.

If there had been accidents he had not told Sam-but despite never having been vaccinated or taken antibiotics, both of which could also have been traced, Tommy was still among the living.

After filling two jars with superfine spores, he had capped them, sealed them with caulk, and soaked their exteriors in bleach to destroy any residue.

He had finished in early 2001, just as his aunt had moved into the house. This first lot-fifty grams-had taken Tommy six months of hard, steady labor.

For a complete amateur, working alone, he had done very well indeed.

A year after starting his project, in the company of Aunt Tricia, Tommy had traveled to visit relatives in New Jersey and Florida. Along the way, he had insisted on dropping by local post offices to buy commemorative stamps. Taking walks alone at dusk, he had visited public mail boxes, carrying his specially prepared envelopes in plastic bags within a larger bag. From these boxes Tommy had injected fifteen light, deadly packages into the bloodstream of the U.S. mail.

Five had eventually been discovered.

He had no idea where the other ten were.

Tommy was one of the most wanted people on Earth. In the summer and fall of 2001, his hobby had shut down the U.S. postal system and much of the American government. He had killed five people, sickened dozens, and terrorized tens of millions.

By fitting nobody’s profile, he had eluded the greatest manhunt in domestic American history.

Tommy Juan Battista Juarez was the Amerithrax killer.

Seattle

William Griffin sat at the tiny table in the old coffee shop on Broadway and waited for his coffee to come up. He rubbed one eye with a knuckle and stared through the window at the rainy street. Last night had been rough and he had not been able to get to sleep until four a.m. Griff’s heart had stopped for the ninth time. The doctors had expertly re-started it, then continued surgery.

Six days of surgical procedures. Maybe Griff’s spirit was already downing drinks with the old boys up in Omega Precinct. Maybe they were laughing and laying bets on how long it would take Griff’s body to realize the owner had gone AWOL.

William pursed his lips and felt his eyes go out of focus.

Hey, Griff, time to choose your heavenly name.

Heaven? Christ, boys, I assumed…I mean, the liquor in this bar is terrible.