Greg Bear - Quantico

Tommy’s shoulders shook. ‘If you had come earlier, you could have saved Lizard Mommy and Daddy.’

‘You did what you had to do, Tommy. But together we’re going to make a change.’

Tommy wiped his eyes and the wicker chair on the porch creaked under his enthusiasm. Sam watched Tommy until the man-boy’s motion had slowed and he perched on the edge of the wicker chair with eyes half-closed, sated by their ritual. ‘I like to hear about what we’re doing,’ Tommy said. ‘We’re doctors.’

‘Right, Tommy,’ Sam said. ‘You and me, we’re going to cure the planet.’

‘I love you, Sam,’ Tommy said. ‘You saved me. I hope I can return the favor.’

‘You’re the man, Tommy. You’re the one we’re all going to owe favors to someday.’

Blissful Tommy.

Sam leaned back and folded his hands behind his neck.

Tommy did the same. ‘It feels right, doing it here in the winery, doesn’t it?’

‘Trampling out the vintage,’ Sam said. ‘Real grapes of wrath, Tommy.’

The Patriarch’s Farm Snohomish County

The air over the farm was as still as a sucked-in breath.

The blast region was cluttered with ripped and dented plastic barrels, big gas cylinders, chunks of concrete, blownout wooden walls, and debris of every size, including splinters fine as toothpicks. Trees behind the barn had been set on fire and a thin haze still lay over the farm.

The farmhouse nearest to the barn had been pushed from its foundation and leaned to one side, boards shivered from its walls, windows blown out. The farther house, shielded by the main house and some trees, had survived, but its windows, too, were gone. Someone had taped blue plastic over them.

William walked past stacked piles of debris to the big hole in the ground where the barn had once stood and stooped to peer down. The central pit-the middle of the barn’s basement-was a maze of concrete-crusted rebar. Reflective tape had been laid over the barn’s rectangular outline in a grid, staked on all sides, large coordinate numbers glued where the tape crossed.

Rebecca stayed a few steps back, giving William his space, his time.

William looked for, and found, the two red flags poking out of the rubble that marked where two agents had been found-one dead, one alive.

A man spoke with Rebecca. He was middle-aged and pale, with mousy brown hair combed back from a broad forehead. His suit was black and his tie was red. They walked to a marked-out square where the bomb truck had been. The man pointed to a blast shield still on the ground and marked by an evidence sticker. Rebecca pointed to William. They approached.

‘Mr. Griffin, my name is Aram Trune. I’m FBI liaison to the National Counter-Proliferation Center. I hope your father is doing better.’

‘Liaison?’ William asked, still stunned by the pulverized nature of the rubble.

‘We’re tasked with helping focus the Bureau’s relationship with the new administration.’

‘Where was Griff found?’ Rebecca asked Trune. ‘I was pretty much out of it after the blast.’

‘So I hear.’ Trune stepped up to the edge of the pit, marked by a sheared-off line of studs and a narrow, ragged overhang of concrete, and pointed. ‘He was pushed into the back of a concrete stall. The wall fell over him and deflected the main force. Most of his injuries were from crushing. Agent Watson-’ He shook his head. ‘We’ve just removed the last of her.’

‘What sort of explosive was it?’ William asked.

‘Perchlorate and aluminum powder in a polybutadiene base,’ Trune said. ‘We call it a Thiokol special. Basically, it’s what they use in solid rocket motors, like on the old space shuttle. The explosion was triggered by a spark mechanism.’ He pointed to the tangled remains of the poles and wires spread around the farmyard and the field. ‘Induced current from the upper atmosphere, flowing through a network of wires. The Patriarch wanted God to take the blame.’

‘Will He?’ William asked.

‘Beats me.’ Trune said.

Trune guided them through taped-off and gridded patches of land to the operations trailer, a double-wide thirty-footer with an incongruous porch and lots of gingerbread. Inside, agents and investigators had set up marker and bulletin boards, a big screen display, and folding tables on which they had laid out and were cataloging evidence. Two technicians were transferring bagged pieces of burned, melted plastic and metal and what might have been shrapnel to the central table. A third was preparing to photograph them.

William and Rebecca stood by the table. Rebecca bent over and examined thin blackened metal rods. ‘How many?’ she asked a diminutive female technician.

‘Fifteen or twenty units, plus cables,’ the technician said. ‘We found them in a heap beside some burn barrels, along with the remains of two computers.’

Rebecca glanced at William. ‘Runners from inkjet printers,’ she told William. ‘Older models. Epsons. They don’t sell them anymore. Did the Patriarch strike you as a computer geek?’

Trune maneuvered through the crowd. The room was quiet and efficient; those who were talking tended to move off to the kitchen or the back rooms. A woman started posting photo prints on the cork board: surveillance shots of members of the Patriarch’s family.

William looked through the bay window off the ‘dining room’ and saw another large trailer being moved up behind the house.

Trune slipped on green plastic gloves and lifted a section of steel tube about three feet long off the table. He held it up before Rebecca.

‘Guess?’

‘Pipe?’ Rebecca ventured.

‘Cannon is more like it.’ Trune replaced the tube within its marked outline on the graph paper that covered the table. He walked around the photographer and lifted a plastic bag. The bag contained a small amount of cream-colored powder. ‘We scraped this off the trees. There’s a lot of it out there. Take a another guess.’

‘Anthrax?’ William said.

Rebecca leaned forward to peer at the bag. ‘Yeast.’

‘Good guess,’ Trune said.

‘We saw the bags in the barn.’

‘It’s brewer’s yeast,’ Trune said. ‘Baker’s yeast, actually. All cultivars of the same species. Safe enough, I suppose. It’s all over the rooftops, in the soil, on the leaves outside. Heavier concentration to the north. The wind in the valley blows from the south most days.’ He plucked three sets of gogs off a shelf and led them to the back of the trailer. ‘I’ve reserved a room and arranged for our local server to show the barn vids on demand.’

‘Glorious,’ Rebecca said as he showed them the unplumbed bathroom.

‘The real potties are in another trailer. We have techs working the farm’s septic system and all around the drainfield,’ Trune said. ‘Everyone on site is going to have blood drawn and receive a free CAT scan, until we’re done processing the scene, and probably for a week thereafter.’

William felt the sweat trickling down from his armpits.

‘Okay, now tell me why they used yeast,’ Trune said, lowering his voice.

‘Someone planning a biological attack could use yeast as a neutral test substance,’ Rebecca said.

‘Are we talking weaponized anthrax here?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rebecca said. ‘But finely milled yeast disperses almost as well.’

Trune whistled, then pulled back his coat arm, revealing a keypad. ‘Showtime, folks. I’ll split the screen between Agent Griffin and Agent Watson. Anything catches your eye, let me know, and I’ll zoom in.’

‘I’m dead,’ Rebecca said as they drove up the highway through the woods. ‘I’ve been cruising for forty-eight hours now on nothing but catnaps.’