Greg Bear - Quantico

The chief peered through a clear band in the smear. ‘As soon as we got to the barn, I knew we had something peculiar. The main house survived, miraculously-that’s what they say, don’t they? Miracle, hell-our trucks made a stand at the end of the road and saved it and most of the outbuildings, too.’

In Riverside County, the sheriff was also the coroner and he was still attending to burn victims-so Division Chief Clay Sinclair had volunteered to drive Botnik out to the winery. The fires were mostly contained in San Diego and Riverside Counties. The chief’s duties now consisted of supervising hotspot control-and escorting congressional lookyloos, as he called them, on fact-finding visits.

‘What about the owner?’ Botnik asked.

‘He must have been living alone for years. They found him inside the house. Big-headed guy. Some sort of mental case. Real sad.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘Nope, he wasn’t talking. A lawyer showed up. I don’t think they had met in years. Anyway, the fellow didn’t recognize him. The lawyer shrugged and said a few words and drove off. He hasn’t come back. Odd. Used to be a winery, I understand. But that barn full of computer printers…One of the sheriff’s officers got a hit on the KIA trooper in Arizona. A truck full of Epsons, he said. The sheriff thought there might be a connection. Since it’s across state lines and could involve drugs or illegal commerce, we both thought the FBI might be interested. We called San Diego FBI and they passed. Only you showed any interest. Here, put this on. It’s still pretty bad.’ The chief handed him a filter mask.

Botnik strapped the mask over his nose and mouth. He had caught a commuter flight from Phoenix that morning, after passing word along-as a matter of courtesy-to Lieutenant Colonel Jack Gerber of Arizona Public Safety. He had very pointedly not contacted Rebecca Rose. He would leave that to the Phoenix SAC if and when the time came. Headquarters politics had grown too fierce for his blood.

No wonder San Diego FBI had ignored this one. All of these fires had been caused by lightning, not arson. Act of God. No crime, nothing worth looking at, plus the fire had flushed a whole bunch of drug labs in five counties and that was keeping everyone busy.

‘There’s a sheriff’s department service officer out there holding down the fort. Making sure nobody loots the place and keeping an eye on the big-headed guy, for his own good, we’re saying.’

Botnik looked down at the name on his slate. Tommy Juan Battista Juarez. DOB: April 27, 1985. Parents deceased, 2000. High school dropout, homeschooled, no college. No criminal record.

‘Still got lots of winemaking equipment-and of course, what’s in the barn.’

‘Anyone poke around?’ Botnik asked.

‘Just our firefighters,’ the chief said. ‘We only found the one guy.’

The chief turned the truck up a road between a scorched and twisted grove of oaks. ‘I don’t think anyone’s been through the whole complex.’

Fire had taken out the oaks in a seemingly random fashion. The heat had approached two thousand degrees in areas of high brush, and some of the oaks looked like whitish-gray gnomes-burned down to shriveled stumps. As they approached the Spanish-style rambler, Botnik looked out the truck window and saw the broad parallel tracks of fire trucks, rivulets of water and mud, the trampling of booted feet and sinuous hose lines drawn in the still-damp dirt. This was where the firefighters had made their stand. They had kept Tommy Juarez’s place from joining the hell that had consumed the hills-and over four hundred other homes and ranches.

The service officer, a young, earnest fellow in his midtwenties, met them on the drive. The chief introduced Botnik.

‘Owner is still inside,’ the officer told them. ‘He’s pretty much a human zero. He comes to the window sometimes and smiles. It’s what’s in the warehouse and the barn that puzzled the sheriff.’

They walked up the steps and stood in the shade of the porch. Botnik knocked on the front door. ‘Federal agent. FBI. Mr. Juarez, I’d like to talk with you about the fire.’

Nobody responded. The door was not locked and stood open a crack so he cleaned his shoes on the worn rubber mat, pushed the door wide, and entered. Down a trash-littered hallway with a tiled floor, he saw an archway opening to the living room on the left and another to a kitchen on the right. ‘Mr. Juarez?’

There was a bump and rustle in the kitchen. Botnik put his hand on his holstered pistol. A shadow like a brief cloud crossed the smoke-tinted light falling through the kitchen arch.

‘Mr. Juarez? Federal agent. My name is Botnik. Could I ask some questions?’

A chair on casters squeaked. Botnik approached the kitchen. Through the arch, he could see a refrigerator, then a counter and a nice gas stove, expensive but crusted with food. The chair squeaked again.

Botnik glanced around the corner of the arch.

The man with the large head had sat down at a kitchen table and was staring listlessly over a small stack of scientific journals. He was wearing pajamas. To Botnik he looked like an odd little mannequin trying to hide what had gone missing from its insides.

‘Come on in, Sam,’ the mannequin said. ‘I’ve been catching up on my reading. I have to use the dictionary a lot. Take a seat. I’ve been “thinking” about you.’ He fingered quote marks in the air. ‘I wish I could remember what we were going to do,’ he added, and looked sideways at Botnik’s arm, and then his face. ‘You are Sam, aren’t you?’

The service officer and the chief watched from the hall. Botnik asked, ‘Are you Tommy Juarez?’

The big-headed man lifted one shoulder and smiled.

‘Mr. Juarez, would it be okay if we took a look around your property? Just to make sure everything is safe?’

Tommy shrugged again with both shoulders. ‘I suppose it would be okay,’ he said, and put on a deep frown. ‘I can’t make anything work. Everything’s broken.’

Botnik walked with the chief and the service officer to the barn. Fire had charred one side and chewed away at a corner, leaking hot air into the interior. They walked through a blackened door into a melted, ashen nightmare. Curtains of clear Tyvek had shrunk and curled into grotesque shapes all around. Ducts had slumped away from the walls like singed snakes. Over many tables, dozens-hundreds-of inkjet printers perched in incomprehensible rows. Near the firedamaged wall and corner, the printers had melted into misshapen heads with gaping mouths, trailing wire intestines. Pieces of broken glass plates had fallen or been dunked into plastic tubs of water at one end of the barn. Pools of water from fire hoses had collected across the littered concrete floor.

No paper, no boxes of printed goods-and just the one guy. This was obviously not a hill country porno ring or any sort of publishing outfit.

‘Not like any winery I’ve ever seen,’ Sinclair said.

The warehouse had suffered scorch marks and bent metal panels along two sides but the interior was intact. Botnik walked between giant steel fermenting tanks to the head of the steps, then looked over his shoulder at the two men standing in the big steel door.

‘Stay back,’ he cautioned.

‘I’ve been down there already,’ the service officer said. ‘There’s some kind of lab. They have labs in wineries.’

‘This place hasn’t made wine in years,’ Sinclair said. ‘There used to be lots of wineries around here. I inspected a few of them.’

Rows of respirators and oxygen tanks hung from racks behind the tall steel tanks. A criss-cross of ducting had been suspended from the roof, leading to thick filtration systems -were those HEPA-type filters?-at the rear. At the head of the steps, he stooped to pry open a cardboard box stained by water but untouched by heat or flame. It was filled with plastic gloves. Hidden under a twisted metal panel, two bags held whole-body suits, and piles of disposable booties had been shoved to one side-not generally used in winemaking.