Greg Bear - Quantico

The officer parked. William got out and saw George Matty, the Mississippi agent from his class, standing by an open flap near one corner of the tent. ‘Thanks,’ William told the officer. She popped the trunk and retrieved his floppy bag, then backed her patrol car out for more runs to the airport.

William walked across the patchy grass toward the tent. The afternoon air was crisp. He sidestepped a dog turd. Matty grinned. ‘Scoop your poop, Agent Griffin,’ he called out. ‘That one’s been lying in wait for some unwary bastard for two days.’ He held out his hand and William shook it firmly. ‘I’m case agent. Luck of the draw, I guess.’

William suspected it was much more than that. Matty had slimmed down in the months since Quantico. He had also lost some of his drawl. He wore a gray suit and black walking shoes and looked a proper FBI agent, blue through and through. Compared to Matty, William suspected he still looked rumpled.

‘How’s Cincinatti?’ William asked.

‘Gritty,’ Matty said. ‘Nice town on a long slide. Great work environment. I hate it. Silesia is better, except nobody remembers where they left their keys.’ He smirked. ‘That makes interviews a challenge.’

‘You pulled me out of garbage detail,’ William said. ‘I owe you one.’

Matty escorted him across the tent. ‘As soon we got a bulletin about cardboard tubes and traces of polybutadiene, the Patriarch connection came up and we flew out of Cincinatti like bats out of hell. I told the ASAC one of my Academy mates had worked Patriarch fireworks with Rebecca Rose. He doesn’t get along with Agent Rose, I guess, so he told me to bring you in.’

‘Show me,’ William said. Matty took him to a folding table. Beside a a small portable spectrum analyzer, a row of ten clear-top plastic boxes had been filled with fragments of mushy cardboard reassembled on pristine white paper. Pieces were missing but at a quick glance William could see that each cardboard tube, reassembled, would be two or three inches in diameter and about fifteen inches long.

‘A sleepless little old lady filed a complaint,’ Matty said. ‘She said there were about a dozen bright flashes one morning, very early, right over the park and the town. She was out on her porch and she says she counted them. A couple of months later, an officer scouting for drug use in the park found fragments of fireworks tubes on the top of that very same comfort facility.’ Matty pointed through a breeze-whipped gap in the tent at the brick restrooms. ‘All together, we’ve recovered the remains of ten tubes, scattered from the comfort station to the parking lot of a church just beyond the park.’

William peered down at the boxes. ‘HAZMAT team?’

‘Of course,’ Matty said. ‘We put the officer and any locals who had touched the fragments under observation and ran tests. I’m sure you’re dying to ask…Did we find anthrax?’

‘Just dying,’ William agreed.

‘Well, we’re not, and neither is anybody else. There was perchlorate residue, poly-B, aluminum powder, some glass beads, talc, fine white sand, and…this’ll sound familiar…’ Matty looked a challenge.

‘Yeast,’ William said.

‘Damn. You’re brighter than I remember. So, can you tell me why we’re here? Why somebody would bother to shoot fireworks filled with yeast all over a small town?’

‘What kind of yeast?’

‘Regular kind. I’m no expert. But it’s pretty fine.’

‘Was the yeast killed by the heat?’

‘Not according to our analysts. They’re growing some right now back in Cincinnati. I’d say most of it blew right out of the tubes and spread out from the point of origin, not far from that curb over there. Are these like the tubes the Patriarch’s family was packing?’

William nodded. ‘They look right,’ he said. ‘Any ideas about motive?’

‘The Patriarch’s kids are rampaging across America, shooting off their damned yeast shells, and thereby telling us they could just as easily use anthrax. Ransom notes to follow.’

William frowned. ‘That would explain a lot, but we haven’t heard word one from any of the others.’

‘Then maybe these were duds. Maybe they didn’t work the way they planned. SAC’s on my butt about getting a piece of Patriarch pie. Your confirmation could really set me up here.’

William walked along the line of boxes. Yeast at the farm, dozens of pounds of it spread over the trees. Yeast in the printer cartridges. Yeast everywhere, but no anthrax-not even BT or some other more suitable anthrax substitute.

‘Any guess what altitude they exploded?’ William asked.

‘Anywhere from five hundred to three thousand feet,’ Matty said.

‘I assume you’ve already checked up on supremacist churches in town.’

‘There aren’t any. No Nazis, either. Just schnitzel.’

‘How about you-have you gone to church?’

‘Not yet, but there’s plenty to choose from.’

‘Synagogues?’

‘Not a one,’ Matty said.

‘Anybody check how far the yeast might have spread?’

‘Why? It’s yeast.’ Matty grinned. ‘Might give our young ladies itchy privates. Is that what you’re worried about?’

William shrugged. ‘My father mentioned Silesia on his hospital bed.’

Matty tightened like a race horse at the post. ‘In what connection?’

‘There might have been a map or fragment of a map in the Patriarch’s barn. Griff asked us to check out Silesia. It wasn’t in the final report because there wasn’t any anthrax, nobody could make sense of it, and…well, they weren’t interested in the fireworks angle. Griff told us there were lots of churches. He seemed to think that might be a motive, that the Patriarch wanted to kill both Jews and mainstream Christians.’

‘I’m interested, you can bet on that.’

‘I don’t know if anybody kept my father’s scrawls. I doubt it.’

‘Sounds like a bad lapse of judgment,’ Matty said.

‘Well, now it does,’ William said. ‘But that’s all there was.’

‘Why didn’t you check it out?’

‘We were shut down. You know that.’

Matty nodded. ‘Question is, will this be enough to reopen?’

‘I’d sure like to know why someone gets his jollies by flinging yeast.’

‘Could we re-interview your father?’ Matty asked.

‘You can try. His thinking fades in and out. He doesn’t remember a lot of things.’

‘Doesn’t know where his keys are?’ Matty asked. ‘It’s a pattern. That’s what happened to the deputy who first checked out the Patriarch. He’s on disability leave. Happy guy, from what I hear.’

I’m telling you, some of it I just don’t remember! They’re putting stuff in my food. This place is making me crazy.

Jeremiah Chambers, the Patriarch’s son-

Griff. And now, the Snohomish County sheriff’s deputy, William tried to remember his name-Markham, Kerry Markham.

William stood in front of the table and the boxes, not moving a muscle. He had just felt a sour foreboding, like guilt for a mistake he had yet to make. Matty was watching him. ‘Can I set up in the trailer…or here?’ William asked. ‘I’d like to make some calls.’

‘As long as you share, and I mean everything ,’ Matty said, ‘you’re welcome to join our little circus.’ He reached in his coat pocket and handed William a green bottle: gingko biloba tablets. ‘Try some. Whole town’s popping them like candy.’

Incirlik Air Base Turkey

Fouad saw his mother standing in the far rocks. His father pointed and smiled. The Jinn swirled around her, whirlwinds of blue and red. ‘She’s making it all up,’ his father said. ‘There’s nothing to come home to, no blankets, no hot water, no chocolate, no comforts, and neither of us can hide, right? We’ll both kill again. No fairy tales. Just a madness for God.’