Greg Bear - Quantico

Somehow, given the silence and the stillness after the loud pops, Sam did not think there would be much fuss. And certainly nothing to attract attention to him. Doubtless only a few people saw the flashes of light before the dawn and wondered. Police might be contacted. There might be a report filed. A cruiser might be dispatched to search for anything suspicious.

Sam closed the lid on the trailer, put on his filter mask, cinched it tight, and got behind the wheel of the Dodge. He drove into the wind for a few minutes, then circled around, caught the freeway, and headed east.

He clamped his jaw and imagined the descending ragged plume of invisible dust, so fine, drifting and falling, rising again, spreading and dropping for miles; a few would hear the rattle of small glass beads on their roofs.

For all the angry people, for the righteous, for the zealots and the monsters: a small gift. A gift of the small.

So simple.

It had worked.

Trenton, NJ October

William Griffin stood in the parking garage at the center of six growing piles of sorted trash and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He could not reach under his mask to wipe his nose, which was running continuously. No mask and no amount of cream could cover up the stench. The twelvestory building overhead contained three restaurants and fiftytwo businesses that produced at least four tons of trash each day, sent down three chutes to dumpsters rotated out and stored behind a chain link enclosure to be picked up once every two days. This was the end of the second day and the dumpsters had all been full. And somewhere in the piles, they might find a paper coffee cup, chewed chicken bones, a receipt, a photo, a stack of paper inadvertently left unshredded, in close archaeological association with each other, with just the right set of DNA or fingerprints to connect four Thai scumbags currently in the custody of Border Security to trafficking in underage prostitutes.

Ten-year-olds.

Nine-year-olds.

Five-year-olds.

After only two months in New Jersey, the excitement was gone. This was awful work, sausage work. You never wanted to know these details about how life was made and what it was made of unless you were blue through and through, and even then you regretted it. Whatever its slim rewards-seeing children deported back to the situations their parents had found intolerable in the first place-it had to be done, to maintain his standing with his fellow agents.

The number of crimes you suspected were going on would never match your successes in capture and prosecution. But you did not turn back, once you knew such things intimately, face to face. The door would never be closed. As in a war, the spirit of the squad was everything.

Especially in the last stages of the political siege.

He had seen the headline on the online streamer of the NYT :

SENATE, HOUSE VERDICT FOR FBI: DEATH

William used a long stick to poke through the office paper debris sorted to his left. The cold fluorescent lighting in the parking garage made everyone look sickly, above their masks. Some of the agents wore sealed ski goggles, Tyvek suits, and full filtration gear as they waded through the trash contaminated-illegally, as it turned out-by unsorted restaurant food waste. Animal food waste was supposed to go down a particular chute and be hauled off to a rendering plant, from whence it would return as tiny little bars of hotel soap. It had not. Vegetable food waste and even old oil had been mixed and then the lot had been dumped in with the office and apartment waste. William had long since learned a basic cop truth: some people, in fact a lot of people lived life with little more sense of responsibility and guilt than a bug, intent only on reducing their random walks to a minimum of distance and effort just to get by, to get home and sit in front of their satellite TV or earn discounts on merchandise by signing up for sleep ads.

Five years in NYPD had given William a dark view of life, but it had been a concentrated one. Now, at the bottom end of Newark’s thin blue FBI line, he was getting a more smearedout, multifaceted view. The view of a squashed fly. So be it. The best jobs were the hardest. That’s what he tried to tell himself when the going was so disgusting. Why would anyone want to be here, doing this? Better almost to be in the ME’s office opening rotting corpses.

‘Hey, Tracer, I just had a sentimental moment,’ he called across the pile to Tracy Warnow, who shared his general build and age. They had been called the Blues Brothers a few weeks ago but the name had not caught on-neither of them looked like Jim Belushi.

To nearly everyone, William was known as TP. Warnow was known as the Tracer.

‘Do share,’ Warnow said. ‘If it brings tears to my eyes, it can’t be any worse than this shit.’

‘Which would you rather attend, autopsies or garbage detail?’

‘Autopsies. Hands down. Now tell me whether this is animal, vegetable, or mineral.’

William walked around the paper pile and joined Warnow in peering over the steel rim of a dumpster. A greasy gray something lay in the bottom, refusing to be pried loose.

‘Fungus, I think,’ William decided. ‘It likes it down there. It looks happy.’

‘If it gave up its secrets, would it make our lives any easier?’ Warnow asked.

‘Bag a couple of cc’s, just in case,’ William advised. ‘If it’s human, we can pass it on to Trenton P.D.’

‘I worked New Orleans for three years,’ said Davis Gorton, a forty-something, pasty-faced forensic bookkeeper on loan from Pennsylvania. ‘After two summer days, everything was like that. You couldn’t tell a hooker from a dead pig.’

‘You guys looking for blank DVDs?’ called a Trenton detective. ‘There’s a pile over here. Looks like they were tossed down the chute the Thais used.’

‘Bag them all,’ Gorton said. ‘I love spinning discs all day.’

William lifted his arm to retract his sleeve and look at the time. It was one in the morning. They would be down here past sunrise. Coffee did not help. Some of the agents used Zak-Hepsin, a legal variation on Tart, but William did not like the side-effects, which included-for him, at least-a couple of days of limp pecker. Not that he had had many opportunities to so fail in recent weeks.

‘Coffee break, TP.’

William had not seen Trenton ASAC Gavin North descend the ramp into the garage. He waved his arm at the piles. ‘Don’t prolong the agony, sir. Give us a couple of hours. We’ll have it sorted by five.’

‘You’re dead on your feet. So’s everyone else. We’ve set up a break room in an empty restaurant on the first floor. There’s coffee and a few cots in case anyone wants to catch a nap.’ North waved his hand and whistled loudly. ‘That goes for everybody! Half an hour.’

The first-floor vacancy was indeed bleak but a quiet, cleansmelling paradise compared to the parking garage. Counters and dividers and all but one of the tables had been removed and cooking and plumbing attachments stuck out from a grease-stained back wall. Linoleum patchwork marked the boundaries of the restaurant that had once been there. There was a bathroom at the back but the lights had burned out and William had to take a whiz in the dark.

He lay back on three plastic chairs with his eyes closed but he could not rest, not really. He had just signed papers to move his father into a rest home, on disability, and not just for recuperation. Griff was no longer his father; he was an empty shell living from hour to hour, recovering well enough physically-but memories of anything before the last few months were gone, or liable to pop up sporadically, peppered into brief conversations that within a moment or two seemed puzzling, inexplicable.