Greg Bear - Quantico

‘Good evening, Mrs. Miller,’ the doctor said.

‘Good evening.’

It was three in the afternoon.

‘We met yesterday,’ the doctor said.

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘This is William, from the government, Mrs. Miller.’

‘Can he help me find my husband?’

‘Your husband is waiting for you at home, Mrs. Miller.’

‘Oh.’

‘Can you tell me where you were born?’

‘No,’ she said, eyes piercing. ‘Have you found my birth certificate?’

‘Do you remember your children, Mrs. Miller?’

‘I have children, yes.’ She tracked between William and the doctor, like an actor hoping for a cue from the wings.

‘And their names?’

‘I’ve written them down. I know my children’s names, of course. Just look.’ She took a notebook from a metal table and began flipping through it. ‘Here they are. Nicholas and Susan and Karl.’

‘Thank you. And your religion? Where do you go to church, Mrs. Miller?’

She referred to the notebook again. ‘First Ohio Evangelical Lutheran. My husband is a deacon. My youngest son sings in the choir.’

‘Thank you, Mrs. Miller.’

‘I’d like to go home soon, Doctor.’

‘We’re working on that. I’ll check back in a couple of hours. Do you need more magazines or books, Mrs. Miller?’

‘No, thank you,’ she said, smiling. ‘These are just fine.’

The doctor pulled back the curtain and walked to the double doors at the end of the gym. He held up Mrs. Miller’s patient chart and biographical data for William to read. ‘A lot of our patients began making notes to hide their symptoms from their families. Yesterday, I switched Mrs. Miller’s notebook with that from a woman across the aisle. Mrs. Miller is a Southern Baptist, Agent Griffin. And those magazines and books are the ones she was given a week ago. She’s re-read them at least three or four times. To her, they’re still fresh. Some of our patients have portable DVD players. They watch their movies over and over again-if they can remember how to use the players.’

William looked down the aisle and listened to the quiet. For the most part, the patients seemed contented, even happy.

‘What we’re experiencing here is like nothing I’ve ever heard of,’ the doctor said. ‘It combines elements of Alzheimer’s and CJD-Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. It strikes all ages, like variant CJD. But it’s fast-it acts in weeks or months, not years. And it’s epidemic. We may have three or four thousand cases in the next few weeks. They can’t go home, they can’t work, they just wander off if we don’t watch them day and night. That requires twenty-four-hour care, one-on-one nursing. We’re already past our breaking point. We’re not a rich county, and federal funding for this level of care has become nonexistent. But let’s not focus on the money. Where in hell are we going to find that many nurses ?’

SIOC J. Edgar Hoover Building Washington, DC

Charles Cahill, the outgoing director, was a short dapper man with a cap of prematurely white hair, a short wide nose, and perfect teeth. He firmly shook Hiram Newsome’s hand and then Rebecca’s and led them down the fifth-floor hallway to the Center. ‘Congratulations, Hiram. I can’t think of a better choice.’

Hiram shook his head. ‘I haven’t met with the President yet. And there’s still the meat grinder-vetting and confirmation.’

‘Oh, you’ll be confirmed,’ Cahill said. ‘Talk radio bastards are already calling you a liberal wienie special-ordered to tear down the agency. That’ll endear you to Josephson.’ He winked at Rebecca. Cahill was younger than Hiram Newsome but looked older. He was renowned for his shoes-he always wore two-tones, white and brown, highly polished.

The Strategic Information and Operations Center at Headquarters-SIOC, or just the Center-had been redone three years before. Half of its operations had been moved to the sixth floor, reducing its footprint by half on the fourth and fifth floors-and now, once again, the FBI had a command center that actually did look as if it belonged in a high-budget thriller-two stories high, walls of glass and polished steel, floating projections of data and video that circled the room like ghosts, and the ability to access a twenty-four-hour bank of analysts who could look up and process anything available on information networks around the world.

The door to SIOC opened at Cahill’s approach. The room beyond was like a dark cave, deserted. ‘I’ve got a few minutes before my next meeting and I thought we might spend it in here,’ Cahill said as he walked around the room, rubbing his hand on the leather chairs. He smiled. ‘This place can make you believe you know all there is to know.’

‘Where do you want us? Rebecca’s the majordomo on this.’

‘So I hear.’ Cahill seated himself in one of the audience chairs, leaving Hiram to assume the Throne-a large black chair mounted on a three-step riser, with the best view of every display. Rebecca stood in a spotlight where the second ring of the circus might have been-the room was almost that large. ‘Makes you feel like a little girl about to give a recital, doesn’t it?’ Cahill asked.

‘We could move elsewhere,’ Hiram suggested.

‘Wouldn’t think of it. Sitting here helps you understand our problems better than anything. We so much wanted to be movie stars. Pretty soon, if we don’t do something, and fast, we’ll just be extras without any lines. Rebecca, don’t get all choked up by the glitz.’

‘I gave my files to the data logger, sir. They should be coming up shortly.’

‘And here they are,’ Cahill said. ‘My last chance to control the vertical, control the horizontal. News, here you go-the Magic Wand is easy to learn.’ He raised a small silver remote.

‘No, sir,’ Hiram said. ‘It’s Rebecca’s show.’

‘So it is,’ Cahill said. ‘Begin.’

‘Amerithrax was a punk, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘Compared to what we’re facing now, what he did to this country was trivial.’

On video and slides, sheep, cows, baboons, monkeys, and chimpanzees died awful deaths. She discussed the creation of antibiotics-resistant anthrax in the FSU-the Former Soviet Union-and showed downwind casualty charts from the accidental 1979 outflow of powder-fine anthrax at Sverdlovsk. Next, she flashed the files of U.S. weapons experts who had been the target of FBI suspicions in the years following Amerithrax. She concluded this segment by saying, ‘Compared to the thousands of tons created in Russia and shipped off to Resurrection Island, the five letters mailed in 2001 were no worse than a mosquito bite on an elephant. But the elephant flinched and it got pretty damned expensive. So Amerithrax was an extremely effective punk, and we never caught him. Now, we think he-or someone with his knowledge and expertise-has surfaced again. We think he and his partners are trying to sell genetically modified anthrax to antagonists in the Middle East. Not necessarily to use against us-though that’s a possibility, of course. But to use against each other. The Israelis have recently arrested and sequestered a group equipped with crude but effective bioweapons apparently shipped from the United States-fireworks shells that match the description of those that could have been produced at the farm of Robert Chambers, the Patriarch.

‘Our new Amerithrax may be using a particularly seductive lure. He claims that these anthrax shells carry germs modified to attack only Jews. Apparently, he’s managed to convince a number of Muslim extremists. They’ve tested his germs in Iraq at two locations, Baghdad and Kifri. Just off the BuDark wire service,’ Rebecca added, looking up. ‘One of our agents, Fouad Al-Husam, was rescued after being shot down in northern Iraq. He delivered autopsy samples to an army assessment unit in Turkey. They came from the bodies of Kurdish Jews exposed to anthrax spores. Weaponized and genetically modified Ames-type Anthrax has been confirmed as their cause of death. We believe the victims were detained and dosed by Sunnis operating in the area, militants connected to a string-puller and money guy named Ibrahim Al-Hitti.’