Quantico

by Greg Bear

  ‘Your call,’ Rebecca said, pursing her lips. Griff was the only agent who called her Becky and she didn’t like it much, but in the grand scheme…

  ‘Is it? Or is News breathing down my back?’

  ‘As I said…’

  ‘Right. It’s my call. Well, fuck that, too.’

  The police waiting up at the start of the clearing were milling about, observing the four of them as they faced the barn.

  ‘He’d know,’ Levine said. ‘He’d plan for dogs.’

  ‘Our dogs are trained to avoid wires. They work through all sorts of masking scents,’ Benson said. ‘I’d rather trust them than the bots.’

  ‘No dog I ever met could spot a tripwire in dim light or slip past a motion detector,’ Griff said. ‘I think the houses are safest. Dogs for the houses. We’ll send bots into the barn.’

  He was starting to shake. It had been hours since he had shot the old man. Shot him six times in his fucking living room. A man’s home is his castle. Deep things were churning in him and making his hands and shoulders tremble. ‘Well,’ Griff said. ‘Let’s bring them all forward. Get me Watson.’

  Rebecca used her comm.

  Special Agent Alice Watson pushed through the crowd of police and agents and walked down the road with quick, offkilter steps. She was a plump woman of thirty-three with one leg shorter than the other, acres of attitude, and the expertise to justify it. Long scars pulled her face on one side. She wore a thick lens over one eye but with the other eye she could still see clearly.

  Watson had nearly died two years ago, in Paris. She had made one small mistake dealing with an Al Aqsa handbag packed with a proximity fuse and two charges of T6 Anafex, set to release a vial of osmium tetroxide through spray cans that had once held Raid. The bag had been found in a public park. There had been no time to bring in robots. The main charge had dudded. The canister of tetrox had remained intact, sparing a large crowd—and Watson. But there had been a third fuse buried under the pack, and she had taken the backup charge—just a pinch—square in the face.

  Later, in the hospital, she had told Griff, ‘I met the ghost of that bomb. I put both my fingers up its nose and twisted. That’s why it let me go. Next time, it’ll share some secrets.’

  Watson had spent time recuperating with her husband and kid. She had returned to the job after six months but had spent the next four months in a powered walker. The bomb ghost might or might not be a joke. Griff didn’t care.

  She was the best bomb expert he knew.

  Watson shook hands with Rebecca, then stood beside Griff and said, ‘We’re on bombnet at HDS and Eglin. They’re feeding it to experts in Los Angeles and Washington. We’re going to have about fifteen good eyes on this one, including mine.’ Her grin was a cruel parody but it bucked up Griff’s spirits.

  A few steps behind Watson followed a short man with close-cut brown hair, wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt and leading a golden retriever on a glittering chain. The dog whined and dodged, eager to earn her play treat. This would be Dan Vogel and Chippy, Griff thought. Beautiful dog, fluffy and reddish-gold, recently shampooed and totally focused on the red ball that Vogel clutched in one hand. A happy dog with way too much energy. Under one arm, Vogel carried a thick folder filled with scent tabs: a library of bomb ingredients to help Chippy focus. In the last ten years there had been a substantial revolution in both the variety, the compactness, and the strength of explosives. Microreactors—chemical factories little bigger than a breadbox—had put the creation of lethal amounts of dangerous substances into the hands of small groups, and even individuals.

  ‘Chippy’s happy,’ Watson said.

  ‘All my bitches are happy. Where first, boss?’

  ‘That is a big barn,’ Watson said.

  ‘What’s your ghost telling you?’ Griff asked.

  Watson glared at him with one good eye, the other goggling behind its lens like a blank moon in a telescope. ‘That was private, Griff.’

  ‘All right. What kind of bomb would fill a barn?’ he asked. ‘Fertilizer,’ Watson said. ‘But this bastard has used kitchen TAMP, C4, Semtex, Anafex, triminol, passage clay, Poly-S phosphate, and aerosol kerosene—that’s a baby daisy-cutter, to you guys—you name it. I really don’t know. This would be his pièce de résistance?’

  ‘Sounds right,’ Griff said. ‘He died proud. He said it was all in God’s hands.’

  ‘Shit,’ Benson said, and his face went a shade more pale in the dusk. Levine stopped pacing and shoved his hands in his pockets. Rebecca looked down at her feet, then up again, eyes slitted.

  Vogel knelt by the retriever and opened the book to the first page, a stimulating scent. The dog snuffled happily, eyes bright and tail wagging. Then she sneezed.

  Watson looked at the network of wires on poles surrounding the house and strung over the dirt road. She took a cleansing breath, let it out, pointed to the edge of the clearing, and said, ‘Gentlemen, Agent Rose, if you’re nonessential, you best move on out. Who knows what you might step in—or on?’

  Rebecca said, ‘I’ll stay.’

  ‘You’re not going in there, Rebecca,’ Griff said.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’ve put in my request.’

  ‘Shit. We need to reduce personnel and do our search, no crap. I’ve been involved in tracking this bastard for twenty years.’

  ‘No crap,’ Rebecca said steadily. ‘I’ve been working bioterror for longer than that. I’m here, I’m interested. I won’t get in your way.’

  ‘Becky—’

  ‘Can you identify a minilab, Griff? Sequencers? Fermenters? Do you know what to look for?’

  Griff set his jaw. ‘You could tell me. You’re a Janie-come-lately here. You three, bug out.’

  Benson shrugged. ‘You’ve got enough grief, you don’t need any more from me,’ he said, and patted Griff’s arm. He and Levine walked up the road, leaving the field and the barn to the experts, and to Rebecca Rose, who had set her jaw and was interested.

  Levine looked back over his shoulder. Griff did not like having people look back, one last glance; that sort of shit bothered him. He pointed his finger at Rebecca. ‘You’re not even rated for a bomb suit.’

  She folded her arms.

  Watson eyed them both with amusement.

  Chippy was whining and tugging toward the barn.

  ‘Is Chippy good on her own?’ Griff asked Vogel.

  ‘Got a four zero on the Fairview course last month,’ Vogel said. ‘Found ten out of ten devices, including Anafex.’

  ‘Is she okay with kids?’ Griff asked.

  ‘Loves them. Kids play fetch.’

  Chippy strained at her leash. She really wanted into that barn. Griff did not want her or anyone else in there. That barn was creeping him out badly. He glared at Rebecca.

  ‘Number one.’ Griff pointed to the main house. ‘Then the house behind.’

  Vogel led the dog away to the first house. He opened the screen door then reached down and unclipped her collar. The golden retriever trotted inside.

  A snow-white and freshly waxed inter-agency bomb truck, sporting the odd symbol of a flaming wasp nest, rumbled through the cordon and approached the house. Cap Benson rode the running board, wearing a boyish grin. Inside was the bombot coordinator, a sergeant whom Griff had hung out with in Portland during a training session for local police departments. They had gone drinking together. His name was George Carlin Andrews.

  Benson jumped off as the truck pulled up beside them. ‘No guts, no glory,’ he said to Griff.

  Griff brushed past him without a word. Watson opened the door for Andrews. ‘The machine gods have arrived,’ she announced.

  ‘Why, thank you, pretty miss,’ Andrews said, stepping down with his aluminum box of goodies. ‘Griff, is that you, all dolled up?’ He peeled off a glove and held out his hand. He was tall and thick across the middle but he had delicate fingers, jeweler’s hands.

  Griff nodded and shook with him.

  ‘
What are we hoping not to find? Any clues?’ Andrews asked.

  ‘Not many,’ Griff said. He told Andrews about the way Chambers had looked at the barn and a little more about his history. ‘He said it was all in God’s hands.’

  Rebecca liked that even less the second time she heard it.

  ‘Uh huh,’ Andrews said. ‘Jacob Levine filled me in. We probably can’t move back far enough to escape that sort of wrath. We could take time to dig some foxholes. What do you think?’

  ‘If something that big blows, we’d just get sucked out,’ Watson said.

  ‘Pink clouds,’ Rebecca said.

  Andrews faced her square. ‘We haven’t met, have we?’

  ‘Special Agent Rebecca Rose,’ Griff said. ‘She thinks there might be biologicals in there.’

  ‘I surely do love this job,’ Andrews said. ‘I’m told Homeland Security could have EEOs flown up from Walnut Creek in a few hours.’

  ‘It would be wise to—’ Rebecca began.

  ‘We don’t have time,’ Griff said.

  ‘I thought you’d say that.’ Andrews walked around to the back of the truck and opened the gate, then pulled down a rack stuffed with rounded foot-high cylinders, six of them, striped black and yellow like the business end of a hornet. One by one, he plucked four from the rack and let them roll in the dust, inert. ‘How many of my little beauties do you want?’

  ‘Two for now, one at a time,’ Griff said. ‘Best if they can squeeze through that opening without jiggling the barn door.’

  Andrews opened the aluminum case and pulled out earnodes and gogs. ‘We’re on Lynx with bombnet and HDS,’ he said. ‘The bots will relay pretty good pictures. If they find anything, I suggest we just close the roads and blow the whole damned thing. You’ve got your man, right?’

  ‘I want to see what he has in there,’ Griff said. ‘When he tried to blow my head off with his shotgun, he was happy. The last words he said were, “Death to the Jews.”’ Well, not quite the last words. But it makes my point.

  ‘There aren’t many Jews around here,’ Andrews said.

  Griff stuck his hands in his pockets. Christ, he was tired. He just wanted this to be over, to find out how his son was doing at Quantico, to lie in bed and pull the covers up to his shoulders and breathe deeply of a dark quiet bedroom’s home-scented air.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘In his sixty active years, Robert Chambers worked with mobsters, the IRA, Thai smugglers, probably the Russians, and Aryan Nations. Is there anyone here who isn’t curious about what he really meant, and who else he might be connected to?’

  Watson raised her arm. ‘Me,’ she said like a student in class. She looked around the group. ‘Just joking.’

  Griff ignored her. ‘Can one of those fit through that opening?’

  ‘I think so,’ Andrews said. ‘Armatec 9 D-lls and a D-l2. They’re smaller and cheaper than last year’s models, and so far they’re pretty damned good. Each one is a little different, you know. Custom programs, more and more independent. I’ve named them all.’ He upended one of the cans and unscrewed the container cover. Inside, folded and strapped into a compact unit, was a cross between a go-kart and a cockroach, with three wheels mounted on springs and pistons and five triple-jointed legs, two in the front and three in the rear. Andrews unlatched the bot and it stretched out with a hydraulic sigh. A pole as thick as a pencil rose from a lozenge-shaped ‘head’ above a three-wheeled base plate. The head looked like the bridge on a toy ship. The pole thrust out two little black eyes on thin flexible stalks. A third eye was mounted on the pole itself, centered just below the stalks. Pressed into grooves behind the head were two retracted arms with graspers and cutters extensible from their tips. Griff, vaguely familiar with Armatec bots, looked for and saw the case that contained the scanner kit—fluoroscope and stethoscope, along with remote chemical analyzer. He also spotted two disruptors, slender barrels mounted behind the head designed to shoot slugs into bomb detonators. Unfolded, the bot was about fifteen inches long, with a wheelbase of six inches.

  ‘This one’s Kaczynski. These guys here are McVeigh and Nichols. And this one, the temperamental one, is Marilyn Monroe.’ Marilyn was bigger than the others.

  Rebecca walked up to the nearest wooden post and examined the wires strung overhead. ‘I’ll bet it’s some sort of antenna. But it’s new to me. No sign of it being wired to the barn, but the wires could be buried.’ Rebecca patted the post. Griff could not read her expression. ‘We’re at solar max,’ she said. ‘Auroras all the way down to San Diego, prettiest I’ve ever seen—like a sign from God. Was the Patriarch the kind of guy who liked to watch the skies?’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Quantico

  William walked briskly to the library to drop off two texts. Along the way, two agents in red shirts ran past double-time, heading for the lounge, eager to see the bombnet telecast. He was in no hurry. Bombs held little interest for him. Having to wait up long nights as a boy for his father to come home had cured him of any interest in blowing up model airplanes with firecrackers or concocting little pipe bombs to light off in the woods. There had of course been those weeks when Griff had taught him about fireworks…Odd, exciting weeks. He’d almost forgotten about them.

  He passed part of the Academy art gallery—framed prints lining the walls, all realistic and comforting, landscapes and farms and domestic situations. These he liked well enough. They served as a perfect counterbalance to gory crime scene photos and shoot-’em-ups in training. Why we fight. His favorite was of a young blond girl tending a newborn calf in a grassy field. He paused for a moment in front of the framed print. He really wanted to be there with that girl and that calf.

  William Griffin was aware he looked nothing like the typical FBI agent, if there is such a person. At six feet four inches tall, he certainly looked nothing like his father, a bluff, stocky bull of a man. Even after five years in the NYPD, William had acquired none of the solid decorum and steady, critical gaze of the good cop. Instead, his brown eyes tended to be sympathetic, humored, and friendly, and beneath a long, straight knife of a nose, his lips wore a perpetual, half-hidden smile.

  He jogged up the stairs—PT had put him in great shape—dropped off the texts, and jogged down the stairs again, passing a glass case with some of the Academy’s prizes on display. He had studied these artifacts many times in the past few months and knew them by heart: weapons manufactured from household items—including an ice pick with an incised groove for poison—bomb-making materials, dogeared Arabic printouts of Al Qaeda manuals on killing and conducting terror operations confiscated from safe houses in Iraq, Germany, and England.

  A meticulous model of an insect-carriage gunbot like the one that had almost killed his father in Portland.

  The cases weren’t changed out often. Everyone was too busy to look back over their shoulders. And here he was, in the shadow of legends—including his own father—coming across as a gangling, bright but not too savvy agent trainee who had buck fever and a wicked way with a cholo stick.

  Still, he was doing okay. In two days he would graduate—by the skin of his teeth.

  He picked up his pace, turned the corner and jogged past the chapel. Then a return loop back by the art gallery. Had these been Hoover’s favorites? Not many students had much to say about Hoover. Most didn’t remember him.

  In the study lounge, chairs and couches had been pulled up in front of an old model plasma TV with lots of missing pixels. Some students were still studying. Others had firmly fixed their gazes on the spotty display.

  William walked up behind Fouad, who was sitting straight up in one of the lounge’s well-cushioned chairs. ‘Where’s this?’ William asked him.

  ‘Washington state,’ Fouad said. ‘A farmhouse has been raided. The Patriarch, Robert Chambers, was killed in a shootout. Erwin Griffin, is he your father?’

  William let out his breath. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Well, he is due to go into that barn and discover if there is a bomb
. Everyone with bomb expertise is listening. It is very interesting, very frightening.’

  William pressed his teeth together and sat on the arm of Fouad’s chair. Saturday night at the Griffin household. ‘Griff’s at it again,’ Mom would say, sitting at the dinner table with her son and an empty chair, a plate set out, on more than one occasion with tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘I can feel it. Can’t you?’

  Then he recognized his father, seen from behind—stocky and poised, of medium height, standing with two others in front of a big barn. A shiny bomb squad truck with Washington State Patrol painted on its sides stood a few yards away. He could barely make out some robots arranged on the ground around the truck.

  William heard the subdued conversations from bombnet. All the heroes were chitchatting, trying to work out the deadly puzzle, to figure out how his father might die and try to prevent it from happening.

  William could not just turn away. Family honor.

  ‘May I sit here?’ he asked Fouad.

  ‘I am proud to have you,’ Fouad said, and meant it. There was respect in his upturned eyes. ‘Your father shot the Patriarch. He is very brave.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Washington State

  Chippy found nothing in the two houses. Vogel took her back to the edge of the clearing with her tail between her legs, then tossed her a rubber ball for a few minutes before loading her back into her travel cage.

  Watson, Rebecca, and Griff hunkered down behind blast shields about fifty yards from the barn—a trivial distance. At the edge of the clearing, more police and agents squatted behind their vehicles. They could all see Kaczynski’s—the bot’s—progress toward the door.

  Griff tapped his gogs. The images from Kaczynski were sharp—better than bomb suit video. The bot paused at the opening, then turned around on its wheels, giving Griff a view of their own position—three black rectangles with heads bobbing behind tiny plastic windows.

  Even from outside the barn, the bot’s minitrace was off the scale. There was no hint of plastique, Semtex, or any more recent explosives, but the barn’s air was redolent with a number of suspicious substances: diesel fuel, urea nitrate, particulate carbon that could have been from recent fires or explosions. There could be alternate explanations for most of these traces, however—it was after all a barn and fuel and fertilizer were to be expected. The particulate carbon could have come from a barbecue.