Greg Bear - Quantico

‘No coffee?’

‘Can’t drink coffee,’ Rebecca said. ‘Makes me anxious. I start having dark thoughts. Isn’t worth it.’

‘I can live on coffee,’ William said. ‘Caffeine is a vitamin.’

‘That’s because you’re fat,’ Rebecca said with a hint of a smile.

‘I’m two ounces underweight for my height,’ William said. He was trying to untie the knot in his stomach. Talking-about anything-felt good.

‘Just a roly-poly puppy. Where’d you start?’

‘NYPD. I wanted to be in Emergency Services. Forget Jesus, ESU saves.’

‘Ha. Good luck.’

‘Right. So I worked vice for a year.’

‘Vice? What’d you do in vice?’

‘I was a pretty boy.’

‘A pretty boy?’

William plumped up nonexistent breasts.

Rebecca pinched out her lips. ‘Put on some eye shadow. You would be kind of pretty.’

‘Skinny tranny with big boobs, blond wig, real fright city,’ William said. ‘I wasn’t that good at improv, so they pushed me out and I transferred over to the big-ass headphone patrol…OCID, organized crime surveillance.’

‘Beats the cold New Yawk streets,’ Rebecca said.

‘Sometimes I miss it. The ladies in their limos, smelling like fresh baked bread and Opium-the perfume. Their insides so warm. The limos, I mean.’

Rebecca wizened her eyes. ‘Kid me not.’

‘I specialized in rich ladies.’

‘Rich ladies do not cruise the streets looking for trannies.’

‘Shows what you know.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘About organized crime?’

Rebecca reached over and lightly whapped his arm. ‘No, asshole. Rich ladies. What’d they like?’

‘I only know what I offered.’

Rebecca laughed. ‘All right, Pretty Boy. How much did you charge?’

‘Five hundred an hour, global. We do the tropics, the poles, and then we do the equator. We get all geo -graphical.’

Rebecca giggled-a genuine girlish giggle. William regarded her with surprise.

‘Did you ever want blow off your bust, just lean in, close the door, and, like, follow through?’ she asked slyly.

‘No, ma’am. Most of them were in their sixties. Well-preserved, lots of tucks and no rolls, but still.’

‘Nothing wrong with ladies in their sixties. How old do you think I am?’

‘Thirty.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Thirty-nine, tops.’

‘Mm hmm. I knew an agent, she used to work vice in San Francisco. She’s retired now. She once confessed that she thought about johns when she was with her husband.’

‘Now that’s sick,’ William said.

‘The young, handsome ones, anyway. She’d visit them in their cells. They’d be whimpering, she’d come in with her police baton, black leather, big silver and gold badge, high boots, tell them to act like the men they were. Then she’d imagine-this is all imagination, you understand-she’d imagine telling them to pull down their pants. Got her off every time.’

William blushed. ‘Jesus,’ he said.

‘It’s all true,’ Rebecca said. ‘Cop gospel.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You don’t believe me.’

‘When a guy’s behind bars, he’s the biggest loser on earth. For women, it’s a complete turn-off. Most it does for them is bring out the motherly instinct, but not the…’

‘The what?’

‘I was going to say something crude, but I’m with a laaadyy.’

‘And don’t you forget it,’ Rebecca said. She stopped to take a right into the town. They passed the white church and the grocery store and the service station, then the feed and tackle store, and that was about it until they came to the motel.

The parking lot of the twenty-room Meriwether Motel was packed with five-year-old American made sedans sporting antennae. The town was already filled to capacity and beyond-agents were staying in rented trailers on a used car lot.

A trooper from the Washington State Patrol met them at the main intersection. He was wearing a slicker against the drizzle. It was four in the afternoon. They showed him their creds and the trooper pulled up a sheet of paper in a plastic cover, wiped away rain drops, and told them to take a left on Boca Raton Drive.

‘Rat Mouth drive,’ Rebecca said. ‘That is what we call setting the scene.’ She drove along the gravel road. ‘We got two females bunking together, and the rest are men, so do the puzzle-we’re stuck with each other.’

The last Mobile Agent Domicile, or MAD, had been crowded off the used car lot and into the back yard of a vacant wreck of a house next door. It was a fifth wheel trailer and had two beds, one in front, in the overhang, and one in back.

Rebecca took the one in back.

Around midnight, rain fell on the thin steel roof and woke William from a tossing sleep. The trailer had no power but was well insulated. He fluffed the hard pillow as best he could and sat up in the low space, feeling like a submariner in a hot bunk. He was sweaty and the rain wouldn’t let up, wouldn’t let him get back to sleep. Somehow time passed and he found himself struggling with a pile of forms on a desk that was too small, trying to puzzle through crooked bookkeeping that could reveal a pattern of long-term embezzlement, or was someone laundering money through a chap nine wrinkled greenhouse?

And what the hell was that? Something he definitely should know for the exam that morning.

Then the slammer swung down from the ceiling and aimed directly at his heart.

Wrong answer , Pete Farrow was saying.

Hotter than ever, William opened his eyes again and let out his breath. You leave the Q, the Q don’t leave you. A line from the FBI Rap. He felt Rebecca walking around in the dining area, then heard her talking on her cell phone.

‘You do what you have to do. I know…I would say that’s a big maybe-best shot, not what I’d call it…Um. Then you just have to let it be. If that’s what you’re looking for.’ She had been speaking softly, gently, but now her tone took an edge. ‘High-class ladies don’t go out for law enforcement. You knew that a year ago. It’s not about what we bring home…Of course. Of course not…Well, I’m sorry to hear it. That’s kind of fatal, don’t you think?’

She uh-hummed without any spirit for another minute, then quickly said she had to go, goodbye. After long seconds of numb silence, she punched in a number.

‘Hello, Frank. I know what time it is. And I know you’re still working. Anything useful?’

William quietly pulled back the curtain and looked down the length of the trailer.

Rebecca paced the short narrow passage, clutching the phone to her ear and chewing on a thumbnail. She was wearing a flannel nightgown that revealed nothing but William was able to judge that she was in great shape. He looked below her raised elbows and realized he was trying to observe the impression of her breasts. He closed the curtain and flopped back in the upper bed, silently cursing himself for an idiot.

‘Fantastic,’ Rebecca said. ‘What about the glove?…So what’s the problem? Yeah, but what have we got here, some sort of marrow transplant, a leukemia patient?…Okay. I like good blood…Two guys, using the same glove?…Brothers. Come on. The morning is young, dear Franco. Call me when it makes sense.’

William looked at his watch. It was two am.

‘Are you awake, Peeping Tom?’ Rebecca called out. ‘You vibrate the whole trailer up there, rolling around.’ She shoved back the curtain and shined a light in his face. ‘I got my four hours,’ she said. ‘You need more?’

‘I’m good,’ William said, blinking.

‘Get dressed. We’re going back to the farm.’ She gave him a hard little grin and replaced the curtain.

William tugged on his pants and slid down the ladder. As he slipped his arms into his jacket sleeves, Rebecca emerged from the bathroom, toweling her face and hair. She handed him a squashed granola bar.