Greg Bear - Quantico

He had read and re-read Dr. Wheatstone’s reports on the plane from Ohio. The last few pages had hit him hard.

The PrPSc prion genes inserted into this transgenic laboratory yeast are easily transferred to other yeast. What is more interesting, the genes have acquired adaptive modifications within the yeast, such that they can also be exchanged with naturally occurring varieties of fungus. Such fungi are ubiquitous in our environment.

Once the modified yeast are released into the wild, there may be no way to cap the genie’s bottle. These transformably infectious proteins could become widespread in our environment. The entire world could be exposed to a memory-destroying, brain-wasting sickness as insidious as bovine spongiform encephalopathy-Mad Cow disease.

Rebecca stood by the baggage carousel. William waved a greeting. ‘Thanks for coming.’ He tapped the handle of his rolling suitcase. ‘This is all I’m carrying.’

Rebecca surreptitiously stuck out her finger in the direction of the trainee. ‘Isn’t she lovely?’

‘Cute,’ William admitted.

The trainee quickly pulled her luggage from the carousel to the doors.

‘Was I ever that fresh, that new ?’ Rebecca asked.

William buttoned his coat. ‘In my eyes, Agent Rose, you sparkle with morning dew.’

Rebecca blinked. ‘Let’s move,’ she said. ‘We’re going where she’s going, but we’re not waiting for the bus.’

‘Why Quantico?’ William asked.

‘We have an appointment with Pete Farrow.’

‘Damn,’ William said.

‘You got out of Ohio just in time, I hear,’ Rebecca said as she drove them down 95 through pouring rain.

William nodded. ‘They’re setting up a Joint Operations Center. EPA is working the hospitals. FEMA brought in their trucks yesterday. Full-blast terror alert. Naturally, they’ve clamped a lid on everything.’

‘Looky what you started,’ Rebecca said.

‘How did it go with the President?’ William asked.

‘Awful,’ Rebecca said with a grimace. ‘Nobody in the White House is in any mood to be magnanimous. They’re still finding booby traps.’

‘What?’

‘Bugs in the paint, even in the situation room. Can you blame them for being paranoid?’

That left them in silence for a few minutes.

‘How did you find Wheatstone?’ Rebecca asked.

‘I did a search,’ William said. ‘Plugged in the words memory, yeast, and dementia . That brought me to Wheatstone’s university Web site. I called-and he told me about the transgenic experiments, then, with a little prodding, about two accidental contaminations, a lab break-in six years ago, and the burgled yeast. He said he had reported all that to Homeland Security and the CDC, as required. Then I tracked down the CDC records. Did our good doctor impress the President?’

‘Threat Level Ex-Lax,’ Rebecca said. ‘They’re still not telling me everything they know, William-not yet. What the fuck happened to this country?’

‘We got scared,’ William said.

‘Scared stupid?’ Rebecca’s tone was pure acid.

‘Shall I drive?’ William asked.

‘I’m fine, ’ Rebecca said, her knuckles white on the wheel.

‘Congratulations, by the way,’ William said after another pause.

‘Botnik collared Amerithrax,’ Rebecca said. ‘Just as well. I’d have shot the bastard.’ She looked at the highway through underslung eyes. ‘Did you meet any of the people in Silesia?’

‘I visited the hospital,’ William said.

‘What are they like?’

‘Like my father. Pleasant. Forgetful. Nothing much left from before a year or two ago. They still have language, habits, skills…personality. Just no memory of how they got them. There might be tens of thousands affected already. It got into a bakery.’

Rebecca’s eyelids fluttered and her lips turned down. Quietly, ‘A bakery?’

‘They shut it down and sealed it off.’

‘So it’s too late, whatever we do?’

‘Wheatstone thinks one release won’t tip the balance. But two or three, around the world…That would be bad.’

Rebecca stopped at the red line twenty feet from the guard house and waited for the first stage security inspection. ‘Are we infected?’ she asked.

‘I hope not,’ William said. ‘It was raining at the farm when we arrived.’

The car’s radio frequency ID tag met the first guard’s approval and the gate lifted. They drove slowly past the concrete gatehouse, then she pulled off to the side and parked and they both got out while the car was examined with undercarriage mirrors, high frequency sonic imagers. One guard checked their stress levels with pong sniffers. ‘Big meeting today?’ he asked with a wry grin.

The young Marine at the gate dropped the concrete and steel barriers across the drive. ‘Welcome to the FBI Academy,’ she said.

Hogantown

Pete Farrow walked ahead on Ness Avenue, huge shoulders straining at his knit shirt, loafers silent on the pavement, tapping his folded umbrella. William and Rebecca followed. The rain had stopped at one in the morning and the streets of Hogantown were shiny and empty. Somewhere east, a Hostage Rescue Team helicopter was practicing touch-and-go, turbines alternately whining and roaring, but mostly the Academy was asleep. There was an early morning wakeup.

‘We’ll talk in the shoot house,’ Farrow called back, ‘It’s safe. I swept it myself.’

William exchanged a glance with Rebecca as they turned into a shallow alleyway. Farrow unlocked the steel door to the command center and pointed them up the long flight of steps to the overlook’s bay window. Rebecca went first.

‘Still have buck fever?’ Farrow asked William.

William smiled.

‘All my tricks revealed-shoot house will never play the same.’ Farrow unlocked the door at the top of the steps and they entered a cool, dark silence.

‘I don’t think you’ve met Jacob Levine,’ Farrow said as a shadow swung around in a chair before the bay window. Farrow switched on the overhead light. Levine was wearing a purple fleece vest and a yarmulke. His face was puffy and stiff. ‘He knew Griff pretty well,’ Farrow said.

‘Rebecca and I have met,’ Levine said. ‘Sorry about your father, Agent Griffin.’ They shook hands. Levine offered his seat to Farrow, who took it as his due. The rest of the seats in the command overlook were folding chairs. The floor was plywood. Exercise plans on butcher paper had been pasted along the side walls, Xs and Ys scattered around the floor plan as if in preparation for a game of football. Everything smelled of warm electronics with a cold tang of concrete powder from the slug-absorbing walls below.

Farrow sat back in the command chair and folded his hands behind his head. ‘Winter was class of ’97. I tried to dig up his file.’ He tapped a small folder filled with multicolored sheets of paper. ‘This is all I got. Someone’s swept the records-I don’t need to guess why. Jacob worked with Winter years later when he was assigned undercover to track bigots in Georgia, and later on, eco-terrorists in Oregon and Washington state.’

‘He was a sharp guy,’ Levine said. ‘Spoke four or five languages. He had worked with defense contractors in Iraq and Egypt before joining the FBI. Real personable. You could trust him. Handsome, quick, strong.’

‘A couple of weeks after 10-4, Lawrence Winter came to see me again,’ Farrow said. ‘We had dinner at Pirelli’s in town. He filled me in about a few of his activities in the northwest. He was pretty down. Poor bastard had lost most of his family.’

‘So we’ve heard,’ Rebecca said.

‘I told him he should take some leave-even go on disability. Winter said he had other plans. He told me that four years after 9-11 he had volunteered to work on a secret project.’