Quantico

by Greg Bear

  Before it had run into a brick wall, jammed, and blown its super-heated barrels into shrapnel, the D-7 had all by itself killed forty-three agents. Griff had come out of the Muncrow Building alive, not a scratch. He had had nightmares for weeks.

  Still did.

  And in the mess, he had lost his file card.

  The last U.S. President had privately threatened to bomb the Sholem-Schmidt factory outside Haifa. That had put a strain on relations for a few months, until Israeli intelligence had discovered D-7s being exported to Iran. Mossad had finally done the job themselves, arresting the owners and workers and dismantling the factory.

  Wicked old world.

  The barn came into view and then the farmhouse. The farmhouse was unpainted. Griff guessed that both had been assembled from the local trees. The exterior boards had warped slightly under the weather and the cedar roof shingles were rough along their windward edges like the scales on an old lizard. The trees that had once covered the farm had been probably been downed with cross-cut handsaws. He tried to picture the long old trailer-mounted sawmill hauled in by a stoop-shouldered truck and smell the freshcut wood and hear the wik-wik-wik of the boards being planed by hand and fastened together with mortise and tenon and square blacksmithed nails.

  Rustic, independent, living off the land.

  He drove by one end of the apple orchard, peering under the windshield visor at the thin forest of two-by-four studs arranged through the dead-looking trees and around the barn and house. The studs were newer than other wood around the property. Between the studs, someone—presumably the Patriarch and his sons—had strung a high checkerboard of wires at a uniform height of about six feet, sometimes in parallel, sometimes wrapped around each other, like someone’s crazy idea of a network of clothes lines.

  Through his side window, he saw the spring leaves on a few of the apple trees. They were streaked with pale dust. There hadn’t been more than a drizzle of rain in a couple of weeks—perhaps the leaves had been coated with fine dirt from the road. The pines around the barn and the trees all around the old farmstead had all been lightly and uniformly powdered.

  Griffin pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. The dust might be tree pollen. He kept an eye out for any sign of surveillance within the house. The truck made a few last bumps, and then he pulled up in the middle of a dirt parking area marked by a line of four creosoted railroad ties. Griff glanced at his watch. It was eleven. The truck’s noise hadn’t brought anyone to the front door or the porch but he saw a shade flicker in a window.

  The old man had structured his life to a fare-thee-well, and no doubt he had prepared for a moment like this. But for a few minutes, at least, Griff was pretty certain he could convince Chambers he was just a wayward visitor.

  It was a myth that crooks could always tell when somebody was a cop. Donnie Brasco—Joe Piscone—had been an excellent example and there were plenty of others. Criminals were not the shiniest apples in the barrel when it came to understanding human nature. If they were they’d be CEOs and they’d be making a lot more money, with fewer chances of landing in jail.

  As he reached to pull on the emergency brake, he wondered how William was doing back in Quantico. Third generation. He had never wanted that even before the divorce, even before they had been reduced to seeing each other only once or twice a year.

  He straightened and opened the truck door, pushing everything out of his mind but his story, his act. As he stepped down from the truck, he consulted a map and then turned, squinting at the house and the trees and hills.

  His arm hair prickled when his back was to the house.

  When he finished turning, he saw the old man on the front porch, standing with a slight stoop, hands by his sides. Up close he did not look so good. He had long thick white hair, leonine might be the description, but his mustache was darker, almost black. He might have been wearing a wig but where he would get that sort of wig, Griff did not know. A Halloween store, maybe. The old man’s eyes were wide, bright and observant and his face was neither friendly nor concerned. He did not look like he wanted company but he did not look terribly unhappy about it, either.

  ‘Hallo!’ Griff called out. ‘Is this the Tyee farm? I hope I’ve come to the right place.’

  Someone had parked a jug of sun tea on the edge of the porch, away from the steps. It was a big glass jug with a cap and yellow flowers painted on one side.

  ‘This homestead used to be known by that name,’ Chambers said. ‘What’s your beef?’

  ‘I’ve been looking for a place to stay, maybe get work, and some folks in town said you might be able to help me. I’m a traveler in a dry land, friend.’

  Chambers remained on the top step of the porch but his lips twitched. ‘You’re probably in the wrong place.’

  ‘Well, I see the trees are dusty,’ Griff said, trying for a joke. ‘They look dry.’

  The old man’s face settled into concrete. ‘Have to spray all the time, kill the damned insects. Let me know your intentions or move on.’

  Griff tried to look unnerved. ‘What I’m saying is, I hear there’s a church around here and some people I could sympathize with. It’s kind of lonely for that sort of company where I live.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Multnomah County.’

  Chambers grimaced. ‘Queer place. Liberals and queers. Just right for each other.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Griff said. ‘Don’t know why I ever moved there. Niggers and Kikes. Crawl right up your pants leg. Have to squash them or they’ll nip you in the jewels.’ He slapped his pants and shook one foot. Levine had coached Griff on this dialog.

  ‘You’re somewhat of a clown, aren’t you?’ Chambers asked. His eyes had wandered casually to the truck, then to the barn, and finally to the northern hills, and his lids drooped for a moment along with his shoulders. ‘Show-offs and clowns always bring trouble.’

  ‘I apologize. I sure could use some good old-fashioned preaching, whatever you can offer, sir,’ Griff said, hoping for the right amount of awkwardness, out-of-stepness. Chambers was the brightest and most experienced of a sorry lot. He had instincts born of fifty hard, ambitious years. Margaret Thatcher’s loo. Griff could hardly believe it. Right here in Snohomish County.

  ‘You been in prison until recently?’ Chambers asked.

  ‘Yes, sir, Monroe. I did not want to let on right away.’

  ‘Did they tell you about Tyee at Monroe?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘We’ll need to get better acquainted, sir, before I reveal that.’

  ‘Well, come closer, let me get a look at you.’

  Griff took a few steps forward.

  ‘My God, boy, you have arms like pig thighs. Pumping iron?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Weights kept me sane.’

  ‘Some almighty tats. Come on up here. Where you from before Monroe?’

  ‘Boise.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me some names.’

  ‘Jeff Downey, he used to be a friend. Haven’t seen him in ten years. Don’t know if he’s still alive.’

  ‘He isn’t,’ Chambers said, and sniffed. ‘Which is convenient.’

  ‘Mark Lindgren. His wife, Suzelle.’ Again he was working from Jacob Levine’s script.

  ‘You talk with Lindgren recently?’

  ‘Nosir, but he knows me.’

  ‘Mind if I do some checking up on you?’

  ‘Nosir. But right now I’m very thirsty.’

  ‘For word or deed?’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘Will my words quench your thirst, or are you here for deeds? Because I’m not much in the way of deeds these days. Kind of staying quiet out here, like those volcanoes you can see from the road.’

  Griff nodded. ‘I understand, sir. Just wanted to make your acquaintance and get some preaching. Find a church where I can feel comfortable.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right. What’s your experience with weapons?’
<
br />   ‘Knives kept me alive once or twice. Know guns pretty well. Used to collect shotguns. The wife sold my whole gun rack on e-Bay. Ex-wife.’ He jammed a load of masculine resentment into that. ‘Nigh on fifty thousand dollars’ worth, some my granddaddy had back in North Carolina. Frenchmade, German, beautiful things. She just…sold them.’ He waved his hands helplessly, and tightened his throat muscles to make sure his face was red.

  Chambers said, ‘We all lose earthly things. Time comes when we make others lose earthly things, that’s the balance.’ Chambers liked this display of anger, the red face. ‘I’ve got sun tea out there on the porch and ice in the kitchen. Want a glass?’

  ‘Nothing harder?’ Griff asked, twitching his right eye into a wink.

  ‘I do not allow alcohol. I do excuse that request, coming as it does from a Monroe man. Still, you could have been worse off. You could have done your time in Walla Walla.’

  Griff grinned and shook out his hands. ‘Yessir.’

  They sat on the steps of the porch and drank tall glasses of sun tea sweetened with honey. Chambers was surprisingly limber and got down on the front step with barely a wince. His legs were long and skinny within the faded dungarees. His bony ankles stuck up from oversize and well-worn brown leather Oxfords. The sun was high over the farm and the dusty trees cast real shadows. It was the sort of bright day rarely seen up in these foothills at any time of the year and there had been many more of them recently—a long dry spell. They chatted for a few minutes about global warming and what it might mean.

  ‘Fuck, we’ll all get suntans,’ Griff said. ‘Then we’ll be closer to the Mud People. Might even marry one of them.’

  Chambers chortled deep in his beard. ‘I do wish you would clean up that prison language. I have kids here. They’re off celebrating Easter. Good Friday.’

  ‘That’s not till next week,’ Griff said.

  ‘We worship to God’s calendar,’ Chambers said. ‘All the world’s calendar brings is grief and worse luck.’ A little bit of old East Coast had crept into Chamber’s tone. ‘It cannot keep going on the way it is.’

  Griff peered at the Patriarch, respectful, even worshipful, nodding his head. Taking it all in.

  ‘Prophecy’s a crock,’ Chambers said, his voice low and crackling. ‘Revelation is a Jewish fantasy. Israel has nothing to do with prophecy. It is a political entity. It brings disgrace down upon the white races. Jesus was not an observant Jew. His people came from the north, Northern Italy, maybe even Germany. None of the apostles were Jews except Judas. Defending the so-called homeland of the Jews has brought us to this. Brother against brother. 9-11, call the cops, and now 10-4. Roger and out.’

  Chambers stared out across the scrubby grass of the big front yard, then fixed on the barn.

  Eyes betray. Where they look is important.

  ‘It’s so bad, Jesus should have returned long ago,’ Griff said. ‘Don’t you think?’

  Chambers squinted to the north and stuck out his arm, a lean finger pointing. ‘He isn’t coming. He’s disgusted, all these Mud People building places they call churches…He’s not going to help you until you help Him. You got to believe what is in your heart. What’s in your heart?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anger. I’m mad. I want things better. I want things to go down easy.’

  ‘Things are not in the habit of ever being easy, my man from Monroe. I know that in my heart, always have.’ Chambers thumped his chest with a knuckly fist. ‘Circumstance has a way of sneaking up on you, just when you’re ready to sink into old age and enjoy the grandchildren. You have to prepare.’ He pulled down an eyelid and cocked a clear gaze at Griff over a clever grin. ‘Every week or so I hunt deer and take treks around the homestead. I can still get off a straight shot. My eyes are still sharp.’ He leaned forward and swung his right arm out in a point. ‘You see that low ridge? Just in front of the triangular peak. There is a fire tower up on that ridge. See it?’

  Griff tracked along the long arm. ‘Nosir.’

  ‘Used to be a tree up on that ridge,’ Chambers said. ‘A few days back, someone chopped it. Just took it right down.’

  Griff put on a dumb face. ‘Those towers are all around up here.’

  ‘I hiked by that one six months ago. It’s the only one. This time of year, most often it’s rented. Campers use it. Campers don’t cut down trees. Someone’s in that tower.’

  ‘Maybe the rangers moved in early. Warming and all.’

  Chambers shook his head. ‘They’re up there, watching me. But that’s all right. I’m prepared.’

  ‘I could scout for you,’ Griff said, giving the ridge a fierce scowl.

  ‘No need, Monroe man. It’s over. I took a few risks, even risked my family, but it’s going to be worth it in the long scheme.’ He did not look at Griff as he spoke. ‘I told my sons to go out by the back trails, follow the bus, get to a real church somewheres and pray for me.’

  Griff looked puzzled. This was being transmitted back up the road. Another ambush was the last thing he wanted. ‘Why leave?’ he asked. ‘It’s beautiful here. I could live here and be happy.’ He studied Chamber’s dingy white shirt, trying to contour the skinny ribs beneath, looking for padding—any sort of hidden bomb. The shirt was too loose. Bombs could be hidden anywhere.

  ‘The tree hath blossomed in the night, and the fruit it is set. I am an old man, and my family will prosper and do great works after I am gone.’

  Griff shook his head. ‘You got a long life ahead preaching and spreading the word.’

  Chambers took a deep breath through his nose. ‘Come into my house, Monroe man. I’ll show you something glorious and then we’ll say goodbye.’ Chambers pushed himself slowly to his feet; getting down was easier than getting up again. Griff did not like this. Playing a part and being wary all at once had never been easy for him. He followed the old man through the wood-framed screen door with the squealing spring into the neat shade of the snow porch with bundled twigs pushed into a corner and two rusted metal snow shovels, and then into the living room. The oak furniture was sturdy but worn. The big stone fireplace was as described by the deputy, who had eaten his muffin where Griff was now standing.

  ‘I do love my children,’ Chambers said, ‘and they love me. I will miss them, but I have through deeds builded my mansion in heaven. There will be a sharp correction, Monroe man. The Jews will weep and Jesus will greet me as a brother. Mary will soothe me and stroke my hair and though I am reborn in a youthful body, I will mourn for those that still suffer on this Earth, forced to dwell among the ones bathed in darkness. For surely the dark races are hiding from that cleansing ray. Surely the sun is out today, searching, and they hide in their ghettos and in their holes in the cities, in their black and noisome hives of squalor and brick. Comes soon a time when the pillar of fire shall yet again rise, and a man will carry with him across this world a vessel as virulent as the Ark of the Covenant, and all who come near, all the Mud People and the lying and deceitful Jews, wearing their pubic hairs on their heads, their long curly black hairs, shall reach out to touch the beauty of it, and they shall be smote by the tens of thousands, as it was in olden times. God never did much like the Jews. History proves it. Once more, a pillar of fire shall rise over the land by night, and a pillar of cloud by day.’

  Chambers’ face turned peaceful. He favored Griff with a fatherly smile.

  ‘Hallelujah,’ Griff said. ‘That’s preaching, Reverend.’

  ‘You haven’t told me your name, son.’

  ‘Jimmy, Jimmy Roland.’

  The Patriarch held out his hand. Griff shook it: a dry firm grip, no sweat, no worry.

  ‘It is no sin to sweep away the polluted.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Griff said.

  ‘Now you look a proper wise fellow, Jimmy Roland, no sense playing stupid, you’ve been around. You know your work, and you know mine.’ Chambers sat gingerly in a rockerglider and slowly started moving back, forward, back and forward, up a little, down. ‘Nobody comes f
rom Monroe without passing me special words. I am certain I smell a Jew on you.’

  Without being obvious, Griff had taken inventory of the room. Behind and to the immediate right, Chambers had within his reach a narrow cabinet set back to one side of the fireplace, where pokers and shovels might be stored, the door open. Griff could not see the inside.

  ‘You should have been here last month. Nipped it in the bud. You could have had us then. You saw the burn barrels. We cleaned things out. We have cleared the path. The rest is in the hands of the true God. Has been since before you arrived. Just know that the fruit has set, and soon the Jews and their children will bring it to the world’s table and eat of it.’ He leveled a finger at Griff’s chest. ‘They are listening, so let them hear my epitaph.’ He paused with a wicked smile. ‘An end to all the evil they have done since time began. Death to the Jews, my friend.’

  Chambers leaned and thrust his gnarled fingers toward the cabinet.

  Griff slipped his hand through the Velcroed seam in his shirt. ‘FBI!’ he shouted.

  Faster than he had any right to be, Chambers brought out a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun from the cabinet. In an instant he had it cocked. The blued-steel barrel gleamed as it swung.

  Griff’s gun was out and he shot Chambers four times. The shotgun barrel swayed and dropped an inch, the old man’s finger still trying to pull the trigger. Griff squeezed off two more rounds. Chambers let go of the stock and the shotgun fell. Its butt thumped heavily on the floor. The barrel sang against the stones of the fireplace. The old man’s lungs gurgled air through new holes in his chest and neck and his eyes twitched back in their sockets. His voice was liquid and bubbled like a frog’s and he said, ‘Lord, Lord.’ Then, barely audible, eyes quivering but trained on Griff, ‘Fuck you.’

  After that his eyes went flat and he was dead but his movement continued, legs and one arm shivering as he slumped in the chair and finally hung half-in, half-out. His trigger finger jerked like a snake. Stopped.

  Griff raised the SIG and with a grunt rolled the old man over, quickly and rudely palped him, then turned out his pockets looking for IED or remotes or timers. He pulled a plastic restraint cord from his pants pocket and cinched the limp, bony wrists. Only then did he check the old man’s pulse, mostly avoiding the slick smear of blood around the floor and the last of the flow from the nicked carotid.