Greg Bear - Quantico

Assume nothing. We make the booze ourselves. God likes cops, Griff.

Bullshit. God’s a judge, not a cop.

Then what are angels? You come up here, join our precinct, pick up your flaming sword, and you go back down, invisible like, and kick some ass. Never have to Mirandize anybody. And the judge never denies a warrant.

‘Americano, no sugar?’ the waitress asked.

William accepted the cup. Taking his first sip, he saw a slender woman with a bandaged cheek, intense hazel eyes, and auburn hair peering through the window. She was wearing a gray pantsuit and a peach-colored blouse with a loose ruffled collar. Another bandage covered her right hand. She gave him a small wave, then opened the door, setting off a clang of cowbells.

‘Mind if I join you?’

‘Excuse me?’ William asked. He was in no mood for conversation.

‘My name is Rose. Rebecca Rose.’

Now he placed the face and he certainly knew the name. ‘Sorry,’ William said, transferring his cup and holding out his hand. ‘I’m William Griffin.’

‘So I guessed,’ Rebecca said. ‘Pardon me if I shake southpaw. Sprockett told me you’d be here. I’m your driver.’

William looked incredulous and pulled out a chair.

She sat. ‘I’m taking you with me to the farm.’

‘Thanks, but I’d like to stay here until they know something for sure.’

‘You’re on FBI time. Keller thinks you need a break from the hospital, and so do I. They checked me out an hour ago. Then they let me see Griff. Your father’s not going to recognize anyone for days, maybe weeks.’ Rebecca stretched out her long legs. She had a third bandage around her left ankle. ‘Hiram Newsome thinks Griff might have broken open an important case. Maybe two cases, one old, one new. He asked Keller for you to be temporarily assigned to the taskforce.’

Newsome was another legend. William had met him once in a hallway at the Q, a big, bear-like man with a square face and large, sympathetic eyes. Despite his exhaustion, William’s pulse quickened. He looked around the coffee shop. There were two other customers, both in a far corner, and the barista was busy grinding beans. ‘I’m listening,’ he said.

Rebecca leaned forward, drawing in one leg. ‘The hell you say.’ She tapped the table with a long fingernail, freshly polished. Some of the polish had smeared beyond the cuticles. She had applied the polish herself, William judged, with her bandaged hand. ‘You are about to pass Go and dance straight on over to Park Place. You’d better do a hell of a lot more than just listen .’

William felt the coffee kicking in. ‘Is this for my sake, or for Griff’s?’

Rebecca leaned her head to one side. ‘Right. Someone will tell Griff we’re giving his son a free pass, a terrific case, outside of the rules, and that will give him the will to live. That will perk him right up.’ She raised her eyebrows.

‘Sorry,’ William said.

‘Farrow recommended you.’

‘He did?’

‘That puts three aces up your sleeve.’ Rebecca shaped her hands into cups, then pretended to mold something in the air over the table. William watched her bright eyes. She had the tightest little dimples. ‘When Griff is himself again, we’ll bring him back in-and you will brief him. Four aces. It doesn’t get any better than that for a junior G-man.’

Rebecca finished molding and tossed him an invisible ball.

He held up one hand and caught it.

‘There you go,’ she said. ‘Simpatico.’

Temecula

Sam walked around the Visqueen-covered box. When Sam had first shown up on Tommy’s doorstep, he had not used the old hot box for over a decade. To the best of Sam’s knowledge, the last time Tommy had used it had been three years ago, to prepare the genetically modified anthrax samples delivered to Honduras and Iraq.

Tommy had found it easy to induce the anthrax to take up plasmids-small loops of DNA-containing bioluminescent genes. The modified bacilli had grown with unaltered enthusiasm and within two weeks Tommy had produced another twenty grams of purified anthrax spores, a trillion spores per gram.

Roughly four thousand spores, inhaled, would be enough to cause death in fifty per cent of individuals. This was called the LD 50number, LD short for Lethal Dose. As few as a hundred spores could cause death if inhaled by the elderly or the immune-compromised. Children seemed to be more resilient.

Sam studied the box. Some of the Visqueen had been pulled aside. The power was on. A small quiet blower fan was running, attached by flexible plastic tubing to a HEPA filter mounted in the room’s high window. Bottles of bleach and tins of alcohol had been stacked in a vacant corner.

Sam gingerly pulled aside a long, horizontally ripped sheet of plastic. Four layers beneath had been taped shut but could easily be opened to allow access to the glove holes.

On a nearby table Tommy had mounted a small glassfronted incubator loaded with Petri dishes. A jar filled with solidified agar sat next to the incubator. On a corner lab table, a single flask of pinkish liquid like strawberry milk was being rocked in a mechanical cradle. Tommy was working on something new.

He was using his lab again, and his special box, without telling Sam.

In the shed, Sam put on a SCBA-self-contained breathing apparatus-and then a loose green plastic Seal-Go suit and helmet with a carbon-filter industrial mask. The suits were warm and puffed out like balloons after a few minutes but Tommy insisted on them-and washed them by hand at the end of each week. He still had dozens of unused suits in boxes in the warehouse.

The trek to the rear barn took two minutes. Sam walked over gravel and broken asphalt. The barn had been built during the house’s pre-winery days and was beautifully made of brick and wood. It covered three thousand square feet and in layout was much like the barn on the Patriarch’s farm except that it had no basement.

Sam opened the small door at the side-the only entrance they used now. He stood in the computer room watching small monitors on six networked machines. The lights in the computer room were left on all the time but the lights in the barn itself were now reduced to a minimum.

Ramping up powder production had been Tommy’s most brilliant accomplishment so far, and he had done it with simplicity and ingenuity. He had laid thick plastic sheeting over the barn’s interior, including the ceiling, and had then hung an additional series of curtains using guidelines he had found on the Web for removing asbestos. There was no way Sam could know how thorough Tommy had been but Tommy was nothing if not obsessive. Sam had seen no trace of residue anywhere in the computer room or on the approach to the barn. If he had, he would have backed off immediately.

Tommy had worked his science down to a mind-numbing routine. The suits were surplus models from computer chip manufacture, designed to block volatiles and effective at filtering extremely fine particles. But Sam was not about to take any obvious risks.

The door into the main barn opened with a swish of rubber seals and a hiss of air-negative pressure maintained by a HEPA-filtered fan on the other side. When the factory was working, a fine spray of water played outside the air filter outlet, designed to catch dust and drain it through a large PVC conduit into a deep concrete catch basin where it would just settle and…sit.

Not even Tommy went near the catch basin.

Sam walked along the inner curtain. Through the last layer of plastic sheeting, in the dim glow of a few scattered fluorescent bulbs Sam saw twenty rows of inkjet printers now dormant while Tommy slept, twenty printers per row. The printers in the last four rows still had glass plates mounted under their rubber rollers ready to resume work later in the day.