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by Greg Bear

  He swallowed hard, trying to focus on the remaining danger, trying to keep the nervous crime-comedy voices out of his forebrain and back in the rear cages where they belonged. Papa has left the premises.

  Suicide by cop. At his age. Preaching and then trying me on. I don’t believe it.

  Griff quickly moved through the house, swinging along the walls, down the hall, into the rooms. He opened the closets just to make sure; very likely with kids so recently in the house they were not booby-trapped but he was still taking a chance. The house was clean and neat, beds made in each of the four small bedrooms, the single office with its roll-top desk prim in ordered austerity.

  He passed the Patriarch on the way out. Erwin Griffin hated dead bodies. He had never admitted that to anyone; agents were supposed to be hardcore. Bodies made him feel sick.

  Only then did he remember he was on the grid and that since the shooting, other than shouting out his affiliation, he had said nothing—maybe grunted, maybe cursed. Back up by the main road, they should have heard and seen everything that had happened inside the house and especially the shots and he did not want hordes of people up here or near the barn, not yet.

  As he stepped through the door and out on the porch, peering left and then right, he said, ‘Chambers is dead. I’m fine. Keep everyone back.’

  He faced north and saw agents and police running toward the house. How long had it taken him to search, two or three minutes? It had seemed like at least ten.

  ‘Get the hell back!’ he shouted from the porch, his voice cracking as he waved them off. They stopped. ‘Get back, you idiots!’ They turned and retreated with equal haste.

  He had blood on his arm. The tattoos were smeared. He sat on the porch, letting his heart slow from Krupa to oompah, wishing to hell he had a cigarette, before deciding he would have to take a turn about the yard, around the house, just to make sure.

  By that time, he saw vans and more people up by the edge of the clearing.

  The farm was no longer quiet.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  El Centro, California

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you were saying,’ Charlene told the tall blond man. It was past noon. Her eyes were puffy. They had made love and slept a little and then talked into the morning. Now they were having breakfast in a Coco’s restaurant. ‘I just can’t be that cynical. I need hope. Even when I know what I’m doing and think about where my husband is, I still want to be a Christian.’

  The blond man glanced at his skinned knuckles. They had already scabbed over. He had told Charlene that he had barked them while changing a tire. In fact, he had slipped in a ditch after shooting an Arizona patrol officer.

  The waitress brought another glass of orange juice. Charlene drank the second glass with equal speed—three quick gulps—sniffed, and looked around the Coco’s: Scotchgarded print fabric on the booth seats, scarred oak table top, one knife magnetically stuck to a fork beside a plate smeared with yolk and bacon grease. Outside, bleached by the sun, El Centro, California: warehouses and auto repair businesses and trucks roaring by. The blond man was in his late forties, thin, run-down. He had put on sunglasses after leaving the Day’s Inn to hide his eyes—one green, one blue.

  ‘You’re so quiet,’ Charlene told him.

  ‘Sorry. I’ve probably said too much already.’

  Charlene had driven the green Ford van from Highway 10, where she had picked him up by the side of the road, to El Centro, stopping at a Day’s Inn. They had both taken rooms. She had met him in the lobby after midnight and asked what his name was and he had told her it was Jim Thorpe. Charlene had been needy. Even after she had fallen asleep, Jim Thorpe had stayed awake. He looked as if he had not slept for weeks.

  Charlene looked through the low window beside the booth, out to the dry lawn and the street beyond. ‘I’m ready to believe in Jesus, just give myself up to something that I know is totally good,’ Charlene said. ‘I mean, I can see Jesus so clearly and he is beautiful and compassionate and he has a lovely smile—just like yours.’ She looked at him with real longing. ‘I do not know why men have to act so tough. You certainly don’t need to be bitter…I mean, you’re an attractive older guy. You can travel the whole world, no responsibilities…’ She stopped, confused, and looked at the table.

  Charlene’s husband had gone to West Point. After 10-4, he had signed up for infantry, taking the idiot sticks, the emblem of crossed rifles, over more plum army opportunities. Charlene had wanted him to stay home and be a husband and a father. He had enlisted for a second tour to kill ragheads and stay with his buddies. His name was Jason. She had shown Jim Thorpe a picture. Her guy was upright, young, strong, bullnecked, laser-eyed. He wondered what Jason was seeing right now.

  ‘I think about him being God knows where because the damned army won’t tell the families anything and I wonder, what is Jesus really up to? What is He thinking, making all of us suffer? But I can’t blame Jesus. It’s us, isn’t it?’ Charlene tapped the juice glass on the table. Made it do a little dance. Made as if to smile bravely, but too late. Women liked confessing to him. It was the one thing that they gave him that he would have gladly dispensed with.

  But hadn’t he confessed to her—just a little, and started her flow? Opened up about his innermost opinions? If she only knew the half of it.

  ‘I know you’re a good man,’ she said. ‘But being so hopeless…I can’t feel that way. It’s just the way the world treats us. We’re being tested.’

  His nerves were starting to jangle. He needed to move on or the grief would slam back and he’d find the brick wall that he had built between him and his lost faces crumbling. ‘Then maybe it’s all taken care of in the end,’ he offered.

  Charlene’s eyes filled with tears.

  ‘It is so wrong to have to wait for my husband, and feel…so hungry to have a man. Just a man to hug me, wrap his arms around me. I have never been desperate, not like this. Never. And my boy needs a father. I need his father.’ Her face hardened. ‘I have never done this before.’

  Yes, you have, he thought.

  ‘When is it all going to come right again?’ she asked.

  ‘Soon,’ Jim Thorpe said. He wrapped one hand around her fingers on the juice glass and gave them a gentle squeeze.

  Charlene frowned at him, don’t tease. ‘I just want my husband home. I want to feel normal, be right with my kids and my family.’

  ‘Of course.’ He stood beside the booth and opened his wallet. ‘Breakfast is on me.’

  ‘No,’ Charlene said primly. ‘We’re not poor.’ She laid a twenty next to his. Then she put down another ten and gave him back the twenty he had put down. Bravely, she said, ‘Your money’s no good here.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure, Mr. Jim Thorpe. Or is it James?’

  He smiled.

  ‘Such a lovely smile,’ she said. Her eyes turned quick and efficient, darting around the tables, squinting through the bright windows. ‘You leave first.’ Even in El Centro she was worried that people who knew her might see her with another man.

  ‘Thanks for breakfast,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks for having a patient ear,’ she said.

  As he walked out into the glare she passed him in a tidy hurry. No one could have guessed what they had been doing on thin hotel sheets just a few hours before. He admired that sort of efficiency. Women were good at such things.

  He was not. The bricks were falling. There was no mental wall thick enough to block what he had lost. He stood on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, waiting, shivering despite the heat. He wasn’t looking forward to telling Tommy. Tommy did not need to know about the patrolman. His selfimportant partner was tippy at the best of times. That was how Tommy described himself: tippy, but enthusiastic—when he wasn’t Dipsy-Down, as he called it.

  Unpredictable—but for the moment, still essential.

  The tall man watched Charlene pull the green Ford van out of the Coco’s parking lot. She rolled down the
window and looked both ways but deliberately did not see him as she drove by.

  Five minutes later, Tommy roared up in his battered, creamcolored El Camino. He reached over and pulled the door lock with fat dexterous fingers. He was small and skinny but for his face and his fingers; these belonged to a larger man. The effect was grotesque but Tommy no longer seemed to care how people reacted.

  ‘No luggage?’ he asked, his plump face showing an early flush of dismay. ‘No truck. No printers. God, Sam, what happened?’

  Sam opened the door and climbed in, sitting on the ripped seat. ‘Let’s drive,’ he said.

  ‘What happened to the big truck?’

  ‘There’s been a change in our strategy,’ Sam said.

  ‘Sam, I don’t like being disappointed,’ Tommy fluted. ‘We need those printers. I can’t do everything we want without those printers. I don’t like failure.’

  Sam was dangerously close to chucking it all. ‘To the winery, Jeeves,’ he said with a flourish.

  ‘You’re in fine spirits. You got laid last night, didn’t you, Sam? That’s why you’re trying to be funny.’ Sometimes, Tommy’s bursts of intuition made him seem psychic—hard to get used to in such a man-child.

  ‘We’re okay, really. We’ll be fine. We’ll get more printers.’

  ‘Before you got here and got laid, something went wrong. Don’t tell me,’ Tommy insisted, his face clouded like a baby about to burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to hear it. Really, I don’t. I couldn’t take it.’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ Sam said.

  ‘Did you leave fingerprints?’ Tommy asked.

  Sam raised his right hand. His fingers were shiny with clear silicone caulk.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Tommy said, his tiny eyes shifting and wild. ‘I turned on the radio. I heard it on the way to pick you up.’ He pushed the radio knob. The big news was the death of the bank robber and abortion clinic bomber called the Patriarch and the ongoing search of his farm hideaway in Washington state. ‘Is that our guy?’ Tommy asked. ‘Sam, is that our guy? Is that our second factory?’

  Sam did not have a quick story to soothe Tommy—or himself. He stared at the radio, then out the window.

  Tommy said, ‘Oh my. Oh my. Sam, oh my.’

  ‘All right, Tommy. Pull over and I’ll drive for a while.’

  Tommy’s nose was dripping and he was shaking badly. He had entered the land of Dipsy-Down and it was all he could do to stop the car without getting them both killed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Washington State

  Griff stripped off his shirt and body armor and handed it to the FBI evidence team. They whisked it to their van to offload the data and video contained in the vest. All of the police vehicles, at Griff’s request, stayed on the edge of the clearing, about a hundred yards from the house and the barn.

  He walked back toward the house with Rebecca Rose at his side. They stared at the barn. Griff’s nostrils flexed and his upper lip twitched as if he were about to sneeze. The breeze was cool against his naked upper torso. He slipped an Underarmor T-shirt over his head. Jacob Levine joined them and handed Griff his own purple vest. Griff declined. Even chilly, he refused to go that far.

  ‘Becky,’ he said, ‘Chambers kept looking at the barn.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘I think you might want to get back with the others.’

  ‘I will if you will,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘Don’t be an asshole,’ Griff said. ‘I’ve done this kind of stuff for decades.’

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘I’ll need to see what’s in the house and the barn ASAP. Then we’ll know what to do next.’

  Levine held his ground, too. ‘Have you heard?’ he asked them.

  ‘Heard about what?’

  ‘The bus never made it to town. It stopped and the families loaded into three cars. They diverted at a side road and threw off the tracking vehicles. Some of them may be headed east to Idaho.’

  Griff rubbed his upper lip, first checking to make sure there was no blood on his finger. ‘He knew about us all along. He saw us cut down the tree.’

  ‘Makes you wonder where his righteous sons are,’ Rebecca said.

  They both stared into the far stands of cedars and larches.

  Griff cringed as a helicopter passed slowly overhead. Even at three hundred feet, the steady beat of the rotors thumped the barn and the ground under his boots. Three crime scene techs came around the main house, stringing yellow tape. The tape flapped and curled in the downdraft. There was a news station imprint on the chopper’s side—KOMO Seattle. Someone must have radioed the pilot that the scene was unsecured and dangerous, for the helicopter abruptly backed off and swung around, heading west over the woods to the highway, probably to take more pictures of the base camp.

  Cap Benson approached bearing in his arms a more suitable blue blazer he had pulled from the trunk of his car. Griff slipped the blazer on over the T-shirt and decided he looked if anything even more ridiculous than he would have wearing Levine’s vest.

  They all stood in the broad, scrubby front yard of the old farmhouse. Inside, the Patriach still lay sprawled on his stomach in a pool of blood, cuffed, awkward and bedraggled and not giving a damn one way or the other. Griff could see him like an after-image over the barn. He had killed three times—four, now—in his FBI career. Six or seven times before that, in the Navy. Much more than the average. He did not enjoy the distinction.

  From the road, blowing in on a westerly breeze, they could hear the faint sounds of big trucks on the move. Washington State Patrol, FBI, ATF, Homeland Security, whatever.

  Dogs running to sniff at the old man’s kingdom.

  ‘That’s one big barn,’ Benson said. ‘Wonder what’s in it?’

  ‘Why don’t you go have a look?’ Griff said. He would have to re-evaluate the entire scene. If Chambers had known he was being watched for several days, who knew what he could have accomplished? What chain of events he could have started by making a few night visits to the barn, or the second house…?

  Chances were, with all the kids, there would not have been tripwires or other traps spread around the yard, or in the houses…but Griff just could not be sure.

  He turned to the north. Several techs in white plastic suits and hoods were swabbing samples of powder off the distant trees. ‘Your people?’ he asked Rebecca. She nodded. ‘What do you think they’ll find? Chambers said they had sprayed for pests.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Levine said. ‘He hated pesticides. Called them a conspiracy by the Jews to help feed the Mud People of the world.’

  Rebecca looked amused. Griff did not know what to think about the world’s evil. Another tech closer in had climbed a ladder braced against one of many wooden poles around the property and was attaching a multimeter to the wires suspended overhead.

  ‘How many long arms of the law do you have back there, Cappy?’ Griff asked.

  ‘There’s me and my boys. ATF has pulled back, I don’t know why.’

  ‘Bureau asked for primacy. We still have some chips to play.’

  ‘I don’t see your boss, Keller,’ Benson said.

  ‘He was called back to Washington, DC,’ Rebecca said. ‘He’s going to testify before some senate committee.’

  Griff sucked that back in. Not even collaring the Patriarch stopped the wheels of partisan politics, trying to grind down the FBI. Trying to kill it and hand its responsibilities over to others. No matter. His retirement was secure. One more year and he would cross the boundary of GS-1811—into mandatory retirement.

  Benson continued, ‘There’s Sergeant Andrews and four guys from the state inter-agency bomb squad. We got Dan Vogel from the K9 explosives unit. I saw Child Protective Services hanging around with nothing to do, and one black girl in a leather jacket, like a goddamned Black Panther, but I suppose she’s one of yours.’

  Griff nodded.

  ‘And two other feds I don’t recognize.’

  ‘Homeland
Security and Bureau of Domestic Intelligence,’ Griff said. ‘They’d love to horn in. I want Dan and his dog to sweep the main house, then the second house, in that order.’ He waved his hands, drawing a plan in the air.

  ‘Not the barn?’ Benson asked.

  ‘Griff thinks the barn is rigged,’ Levine said. He paced in a small circle, eyes on the ground, sweat on his forehead despite the chill.

  ‘Bots coming soon?’ Griff asked.

  Benson nodded.

  ‘Send a bot into the barn. And get some more troopers into those woods. His sons could be drawing a bead on us right now.’ He closed one eye and cocked his finger at Levine.

  ‘Hell, they would have taken you out after you killed their pappy,’ Levine said. ‘The sons are long gone.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Griff did not think the houses were rigged with explosives. Kids had been there too recently; tough to control kids, keep them from setting something off. No one had seen anybody walking outside to the rear house after the bus had departed. Still, it would be necessary to thoroughly check for both explosives and kids in hiding—and the K9 could do that.

  He now stood with hands on hips and faced his main nightmare directly. The big sliding barn door had been left open six or seven inches, not enough for a man to easily squeeze through. He did not want to touch that door. It was too much like an invitation.

  ‘The Patriarch would plan for bots, don’t you think?’ Griff asked Rebecca.

  ‘Sounds like,’ Rebecca said. ‘X-ray triggers. Trip mikes tuned to machine sounds.’

  ‘All these wires,’ Griff said. ‘What the hell are they for? What level of paranoia should we consider unreasonable? He’s been at this for fifty years, right?’

  ‘We should wait,’ Rebecca said. ‘Less chance of someone clumsy hitting a tripwire.’

  Griff turned on her but kept his voice low. ‘What if it’s all hooked up to a goddamned timer, Special Agent Becky Rose?’