Greg Bear - Quantico

Harris said, ‘Beatty and I know each other already.’

‘Pleasure’s mutual,’ Beatty said.

Fouad shook hands but felt he was missing something crucial-history. ‘And why are you here, Mr. Beatty?’ he asked. Boldness seemed called for-Harris did not like the man and neither did Fergus. Master Sergeant seemed irritated but also amused.

‘I’m a retired colonel,’ Beatty said. ‘I served in Iraq in GW 2. Don’t ever call it the Coalition War to my face. Right, friends?’

‘Colonel Beatty is something more than local color,’ Fergus said. ‘He was given a State Department assignment, at the behest of six senators, to continue the search for Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons. That assignment has not been revoked, unfortunately.’

‘I heard about your plague house on the weed vine,’ Beatty said. ‘I wish you gentleman had called me. I could have scurried up here and gotten the facts and that would have saved the U.S. taxpayers some real money. Superhawks are expensive pieces of machinery. Bright and shiny. I am well acquainted with Dr. Mirza Al-Tabrizi. He represents the Shiites in Kifri, kind of a pooh-bah for the oppressed majority. The Kurds seem to like him, too. That does not make him an objective source, in my book.’

Al-Tabrizi folded his arms and leaned against the closed door.

‘We’d appreciate your standing second fiddle on this one, sir,’ Master Sergeant advised in a low tone.

‘That’s play second fiddle, not stand. I’ve been here, continuously, longer than any other American soldier,’ Beatty said. ‘A true gentleman never gives up on a good cause.’ He turned to Fouad. ‘Sir, like Fergus, you are Special Agent, FBI, am I correct? And connected somehow with this Bureau of Ultimate Darkness, or whatever the hell it’s called now?’

Fouad was about to speak when Beatty moved in, towering over him. ‘They drag you in here to interpret?’

‘His identity is not important to you, Beatty,’ Harris growled. ‘Bad enough you know who we are.’

Beatty swung around and looked them all in the face in sequence. ‘I speak Kurdish, Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, and Arabic,’ he said. ‘Six or seven dialects.’

‘All with a Tennessee accent,’ Harris added.

‘True, but I am understood wherever I go in this country. And who are we interviewing? Any live people, this time?’

‘Sir,’ Master Sergeant said, more forcefully. ‘You are subordinate to our mission. Whatever help you can render will be appreciated but you are not in charge here.’

‘Well, who in hell is in charge? On the ground, I mean.’

‘That would be me,’ said Harris.

‘Lead on,’ Beatty exclaimed with a broad smile. He clapped Harris on the back. ‘I will call you sir, and mean it. Just explain to me what in hell anthrax is doing this far north.’

Inside the house the stench of death was strong, but carried on wafts of cool moist air, the smell seemed somehow unnatural and frustrated. Fouad watched the men move through the empty trash-filled rooms with detachment. He did not like this strange sense of calm. There was a perversity in him that his mother would not have appreciated but that his father might have understood too well, and it had been exaggerated by his training at Quantico. To see the awful things is to see life as it really is. It makes you sharper, stronger, superior. You can stand it when others cannot.

That is why young men go off to war.

The house had looked better from the outside. Most of the rooms were open to the air, with gaping shell holes in the roof. The courtyard was filled with broken and burned sticks of furniture. Someone had tried to stay warm in the winter.

Al-Tabrizi took Fouad by the shoulder. ‘Be at ease with me,’ he said in Arabic. ‘I take solace that Muslims at least sometimes speak with these men and temper them. The bull, Beatty, is not respected around here. He has made too many deals, spoken from both sides of his mouth to gain information.’

‘I heard that, you old bastard,’ Beatty called out.

Al-Tabrizi ignored him.

‘Then tell me, what brings you here?’ Fouad asked the old man.

‘A pious man spoke out of turn for the sake of his closeness to God. Some of my people went at his behest to this house and found the Kurds, these Jews, dead. Ice was brought by police. Had they been Muslims we would have buried them…’ He shrugged. ‘It is possible the Sunnis have been doing experiments with our poor Jews. I do not know. They have no respect for life.’

‘Amen,’ Beatty said.

Walking around the courtyard, they approached the back of the house-the kitchen. A pump handle stood in one corner before a small stone and mortar cistern.

Fergus slipped on rubber gloves. He removed from his rucksack more gloves and fine-filter masks with little rubber bellows and a jar of nose cream and handed them around. ‘Slip these on and fasten them tight.’

‘Nobody else has fallen ill,’ Al-Tabrizi said, this time in English.

Past the kitchen, stepping over broken glass and empty cans, they came to what might have once been a workshop or a storage room. In the center of the room, blocks of ice had been arranged in a flat igloo and shaved ice had been sprinkled over a tarp that partially covered the blocks. Naked feet stuck out from under the tarp, heels soaking in puddles of filthy water.

Master Sergeant put his gloved hand over his mask. Harris stood with hands on his hips staring critically at the wrinkled and discolored feet.

Al-Tabrizi handed Fouad an old and battered compact flash memory card. ‘We took many pictures before the ice arrived, donated by a hotel and a hospital. The people who did this left Kifri two days ago in a truck. We have pictures of them as well. If we have disturbed the truth of what is here, I apologize, but you understand…There was urgency.’

‘All right,’ Fergus said. ‘Gentlemen, lend a hand. Let’s pull one of them out.’

‘Then they haven’t been here more than a few days,’ Beatty said. His voice had dropped by half in the smelly chill of the back workshop.

Fouad moved to help Harris and Fergus tug a corpse from beneath the nearest igloo of ice. It was an older woman, naked but for a single undergarment. Her face was a mask. Her mouth fell open in a dead scream. Her tongue was swollen and black.

‘They are not from Kifri,’ Al-Tabrizi said. ‘They were brought here from farther north by men in trucks. Workers who were paid to clean this room and prepare have told me the men who delivered these poor souls were bragging they had something that would kill only Jews, and that the planet would soon be cleansed.’

‘Jesus,’ Beatty said.

Fergus checked the woman’s skin. Her legs, torso, and one arm were covered with wide black scabs. He removed a microlume, a small plastic plate, from his belt pack, pulled out a red tab, turned her head, and rubbed the tip over her tongue, then examined the read-out. He did the same on an eschar-one of the flaking black lesions on her chest.

‘It’s anthrax, both pulmonary and cutaneous,’ he said. He pointed to black marks and splotches on her stomach and around her ribs. ‘GI as well. They must have made her eat some of it.’ He examined the card’s display from a few inches, scowling. ‘I see protective antigen, edema factor, and lethal factor-PA, EF, LF-but I’m also getting something unfamiliar. Could be a new plasmid.’ He looked up at Al-Tabrizi. ‘I have to take internal samples. It would be better if you left the room. I will do my best to be respectful.’

‘I will stay,’ Al-Tabrizi said. ‘It is my duty, and the necessity is clear.’

‘Sir, we’re talking about the likely release of bacilli made even more virulent by vegetative mutation inside a victim,’ Fergus said. ‘Please leave.’