by Greg Bear
At this end of the barn, and probably the other end as well, the floor was made of wood. In the middle, he had been pretty sure he was walking over concrete. At some point, no doubt many years ago, the barn had been expanded on both sides.
Beneath the trap door Griff could make out a wooden ramp leading down into the darkness under the floor. The long strip of metal tape had been glued to another strip that ran down the middle of the ramp.
A small child could have crawled through the gap. But a small child would not have needed a piece of metal tape to guide her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Temecula, California
The trip west into the hills lasted several hours. Sam drove smoothly and steadily. Tommy slumped in the passenger seat wearing a fixed look of light concern. He chose his faces with care and often wore them for some time.
They approached the winery by a gravel road as the sun dropped below the oak-crowned hills. The air was hot and dusty and smelled of dry brush. The old vineyards stretched to their left, undulating rows of stakes and dead gnarled vines almost covered with grass and weeds—well over eighty acres, left to rot.
Sam turned the El Camino up the long, tree-shaded drive. Half-dead ivy covered the northeast side of the single-story, Spanish-style stucco house. Recent rains had greened some of the overgrown front lawn. Tommy’s aunt had placed plaster gnomes out front and they grinned amid the grass and weeds like happy dwarf guerillas. The house’s big picture windows were marked by rivulets through a thin layer of dust.
Behind the house rose three winery warehouses and equipment sheds, their gray steel sides catching the last of the daylight.
Tommy turned to look at Sam. ‘I’m sorry. I overreacted, Sam. I didn’t “think”.’ He fingered quote-marks in the air. ‘I was taught to be polite, really, but I’ve been alone for so many years. You know that.’
‘I know, Tommy.’
‘I’m supposed to ask, “were you hurt?”’
‘Not really. I skinned my knuckles.’
‘That’s good. If you’re okay, then we don’t have to go to a hospital. That will save us some time. I’m sorry.’
‘We’re fine, Tommy. Both of us.’
‘We’ll figure out another timetable, won’t we?’
‘I doubt we’ll even have to worry about that.’
‘Good.’ Tommy sighed dramatically. ‘Well then, that’s over.’ He opened the door and got out. Sam pushed the button on the remote clipped to the visor. The garage door swung up with a creaking song of coil springs, revealing a bright red Dodge truck and a double-wide horse trailer.
Sam remained in the El Camino with the engine running, considering how close to failure they actually were. He watched Tommy walk around the side of the house and up the step to the front door. The man-boy’s shoulders were slumped but he was doing much better. He was lost in thought.
It was, after all, a nutty idea, from start to finish—the kind of idea a disappointed man might dream about, tossing and winding up sheets in the dark of the night. The kind of plan a grieving man might consider when his life seemed pointless and the hours dragged on, and then got lost—time that simply vanished in large chunks, day after day, irretrievable.
Tommy was not the only one who could go Dipsy-Down.
Sam took his foot off the brake, slipped the El Camino in gear, and slowly pulled forward to the right of the horse trailer. The garage door closed and he sat in the dim orange light of the opener’s single low-watt bulb.
He could not shake the memory of the cone-shaped explosion of blood and the officer spinning to the side of the road.
People had paid a severe price. The gears were turning. This wasn’t just about Sam and Tommy.
‘They have to listen to God,’ Sam murmured as he opened the door to the house. ‘They have to forget their hate and listen.’
Near the end of his other life, five years ago, Sam had first met Tommy. He had driven out to the house and knocked on the front door and announced that he wanted Tommy’s help.
Tommy had been desperate for company. The time for confession, it seemed, had arrived. Tommy had wanted to explain himself and all that he had done and why.
Sam had accepted Tommy’s offer of a tour of the winery. It could have been the biggest break of Sam’s career. Tommy had been pitifully vulnerable, telling his story with hyperactive enthusiasm…and then, without warning, as they drank orange juice in the big kitchen, Tommy had crashed and burned.
Utterly terrified by what he had revealed to a stranger, Tommy had fled and hidden under a blanket in his smelly, crowded bedroom. Sam had followed the man-boy, had seen the walls covered with bookshelves, posters, and magazine pictures of Jennifer Lopez—J-Lo, the queen of Tommy’s inner sanctum.
Around his twin bed, Tommy had piled stacks of texts and magazines, their edges bursting with color-coded Post-it notes.
Sam had watched the man-boy cower and a switch had turned on in his head. He had followed the path between the bedroom stacks and put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder. ‘What a brave, brave man,’ he had soothed. ‘Do I ever understand. A brilliant guy like you. They all want a piece of you, don’t they? Let’s go back to the living room. Let’s talk. I bet that together, you and I can work this out.’
Tommy had pulled back the covers and peered out at Sam like some pink, wet-faced gargoyle. ‘Not really,’ he had said.
‘Really,’ Sam had said.
Tommy had sat up. ‘You believe me?’
‘What’s not to believe?’
‘You want to see more?’ Tommy had asked, wiping away the slicks of moisture below his eyes and nose.
Sam had realized he had the power. Tommy was his. This was the find of a career—something that could change everything for him.
Or it was the find of a lifetime. Something that could change everything, for everybody.
‘Show me as much as you like,’ Sam had said. ‘I’d like to see it all.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Quantico
‘They’re going down.’
William hunched and rubbed his jaw to keep it from aching. There was little enough to see on the screen—blurry images from the two helmet cams, people sitting in the back of the bomb squad truck. And little enough to hear—bombnet had fallen mostly silent back in Eglin and Redstone and Washington, DC.
The students were transfixed. This is what some of them would end up doing unless they made some serious decisions right now. But William could tell. They were into it. They were as focused and intent as if they were on the actual scene, offering helpless murmurs of advice to their onscreen counterparts. They were already thinking like agents. William was scared as hell. That was his father in there, once again risking his life, unconcerned about family or friends—duty was all.
Duty came first every single goddamned time, no matter how much it might cost.
That had made William angry when he was a boy. Now, he didn’t know which side to come down on. Because he was sure that his father was having another big damned adventure. Another day in the life of a hero. Jack Armstrong, all-seeing, all-knowing G-Man, Jimmy Stewart with a biker’s build.
‘I will stand,’ Fouad said, getting up. ‘You will sit.’
‘Thanks,’ William said. His legs were shaky. He replaced Fouad in the chair. Fouad stood beside him, arms crossed.
‘I hate the suspense,’ Fouad said. ‘I am here for it, but I hate it.’
‘Thanks,’ William said again, but he wasn’t paying much attention.
The pictures from the helmet cams had brightened and the experts at Eglin were talking again, speculating on the wires and posts outside the barn, the fryers, the long stretch of tape, and why Griff was still going after a little girl.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Washington State
Griff took a deep breath. He was starting to feel the old claustrophobia—unable to catch a deep breath, the sensation that first his nostrils and then his throat would close up and he would suffocate
. Bomb suits always had that effect on him—the warmth, his stale breath bouncing back from the faceplate, the squeezing closeness of all the armor and the weight, more and more overbearing.
Andrews was suddenly in his ear. The volume seemed to have gone up. Griff was sensitive to all sounds. ‘I’m patching through George Schell from Eglin.’
Schell had gone with Griff through EOD school at Redstone. He was a short whippet-wire guy with thinning hair and sharp gray eyes and a quick temper that miraculously vanished when he worked around ordnance.
‘Griff, we’ve been discussing this in the room here,’ Schell said, ‘and we’ve come up with a crazy idea. Have you ever heard of Alfvén waves?’
‘No,’ Griff said, annoyed. ‘I don’t pay much attention to hairstyles.’
‘This is physics,’ Schell said. ‘Listen up. We’re going through a major solar storm. They can trigger electrical currents in power grids. Alfvén waves. I don’t see how a few acres of strung wire can pull in much of a current, but then, it might not take much, right? Do you see anything like a spark gap, something that could be a low-amp, high-voltage fuse?’
‘No,’ Griff said. Then, to be polite—and because, frankly, the idea made his stomach churn—he added, ‘Not yet.’
‘I knew it,’ Watson said, under her breath. ‘Like Rose said. He was watching the skies.’
‘Hush,’ Griff said. ‘George, explain this dumb idea to me.’ Clever people. Just shoot them all.
‘Let’s say we get a big pulse from space,’ Schell said. ‘The wires on the posts could pick up a current and feed it into the barn. The current could be strong enough to set off a fuse or trigger something else.’
Andrews added, ‘I’m standing outside the truck. It’s completely dark and I can see the aurora, Griff. It’s spectacular. There’s a big pink and orange corona overhead. It’s like staring up at God’s eye. Maybe it’s just me, but He looks unhappy.’
‘Fuck,’ Alice Watson said.
‘Is this idea credible?’ Griff asked.
‘You told Andrews this was the Patriarch’s piece de resistance,’ Schell said, using English not French pronunciation. ‘He’s been making bombs for sixty years. You tell me what’s credible.’
‘Amen,’ Watson said.
Griff gave her a critical squint. ‘Bombers don’t play dice with timers or fuses,’ he said. ‘How would he know it wouldn’t go off while his family was still here?’
‘He might have flipped a switch as soon as you drove up,’ Schell said. ‘Put his fate in God’s hands. And yours, too. Isn’t that his style?’
‘Pull out, Griff,’ Andrews said. His voice was steady but Griff could tell. ‘Let ’em drop a doodlebug.’
‘Divine whim,’ Watson said, dead-pan. ‘God is the timer. Very clever. You boys are scaring me.’ She was facing him from the other side of the trap door.
‘That’s nuts,’ Griff murmured. ‘God doesn’t make lights in the sky. Magnetic fields and particles do that, right?’
‘If you say so,’ Schell said. ‘What would the Patriarch think?’
Death to the Jews. Griff walked around the trap door. He was beginning to have real doubts about there being a little girl anywhere in the barn. But he had to make sure. She might have gone down into the basement to hide. The Patriarch would have certainly taught his children to be afraid of police, of government agents. There might not be enough time to get the big bot in here to move that hatch—certainly not time enough for them to reach minimum safe distance if the hatch was hot.
He wanted us to go deeper, see a little more of what he was up to. The trap door is not rigged.
Twenty years he had worked on the Patriarch’s case. Twenty years of his life, off and on, hunting down an elusive mystery—how and why—until he thought he knew the man without ever having met him. The profiler’s illusion, of course, is that his work is a science. Illusions are like thick layers of fat. They slow you down and eventually they kill you.
‘The wire runs the length of the barn,’ he told Andrews and the boys and girls across the country, on bombnet. ‘It jumps to a board ramp and probably goes all the way down to the floor of the cellar.’
‘Could be double-stranded tape, live current and ground,’ Schell said. Bombnet had appointed him spokesperson. ‘Do you think it’s attached to a charge?’
‘I think it’s a guide tape for some sort of mechanism,’ Watson said, and challenged Griff to contradict her. He did not. Instead, he said,
‘I’ll go down there and find the girl. We won’t need two. Back out of here, Alice.’ He meant that literally. The bomb suits worked best facing a blast.
‘You first,’ Alice said. ‘I’ll hold your mitt.’
‘You really believe this stuff about elf-vane waves?’ Griff called out, louder than necessary. ‘I’m looking at a trap door. I think the girl might be hiding down there.’
Andrews spoke up again. ‘Bombnet wants you out of there. They think Schell’s boys have come up with a credible theory. Some of the guys have pulled out their electrical textbooks and calculators, but their gut says it could be done. Redstone, Eglin, Washington—one and all, Griff. It’s unanimous.’
‘The Patriarch wants to tell me something,’ Griff said. ‘He’ll try to make me pay, but I think it’s going to be interesting.’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Schell said, his voice skipping in and out. Satellite communications were suffering—that’s how big the solar storm was, way above them, up in God’s cruel heaven. The aurora was just a sideshow.
The video feed from their helmet cams was probably suffering, as well.
‘Law enforcement officers make irrational decisions if they’ve been through a bout of depression,’ Schell added. ‘Their priorities get all screwed up. They act out resentments…taking risks. Cap Benson tells me…from depression.’
‘Who the hell hasn’t in this business?’ Griff asked. Was it true? Was there a death-wish here? I honestly don’t think so. I’d like to see William graduate from the Academy. I’d like to see him prove his asshole father was wrong. ‘Cap, stop telling tales out of court.’
‘Sorry, Griff. Just get out of there.’
‘There was something big going on down here. Don’t you feel it? I’d like to know what it is, wouldn’t you?’
‘No,’ Andrews said.
‘Screw it, Griff,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’m not seeing anything of interest. Get out. We’ll do everything we can to grab evidence later.’
‘Griff, everyone here—’ Schell was saying.
‘Well, I’d like to find the girl and look around a bit, and then I’ll get out, pronto.’ Silence on bombnet. Griff could imagine Schell stomping and cursing in that faraway room, or just standing there—shaking his head.
‘We’re on our own, Alice,’ Griff said. ‘You feeling depressed?’
‘No, sir,’ Watson said. ‘I want to see what’s down there.’
‘A basement beneath an old barn. I’m sure it’s a wonderland.’
Watson grinned. But then, she was always grinning. Her mishap had left her looking like death’s girlfriend.
He reached the toe of his boot under the trap door and worked to push it aside. It scraped out a hollow groan as it moved. Watson aimed her light. The ramp was a long one. The basement was big.
Griff fought back against the sensation that the suit was clamping down on him. Fear is the mind-killer, he told himself, quoting from a novel he had read as a teenager. Fear is the Little Death.
But another voice was telling him, Fuck that. The Big Sleep is a lot worse than the Little Death.
‘The brain’s a bitch,’ Watson said, ‘you know that?’
Griff chuckled. That’s why he had chosen Watson. When they worked these situations together, she always seemed to know just what he was thinking. The ramp board was wide and thick and felt sturdy. He figured it could hold him and the bomb suit, but not the both of them. ‘I’ll go first,’ he said.
‘By all means,’ Wats
on said, with a stuffed-sausage kind of curtsey. She steadied his arm as he got up on the board. From that point on it was an awkward little ballet, shuffling sideways, feeling the board bend, wondering if carpenter ants or termites had been busy down there.
Watson watched as the darkness swallowed him. His helmet light plunged off into the gloom like a smudge of white chalk. After an impossibly long time, hours it seemed, he reached a solid floor.
‘All right, I’m down.’
‘Back off the board. I’m coming,’ Watson said.
He turned to his right. The stalls above were echoed by stalls below. He turned left. Just a few feet away, something moved—something he could not make out, that he saw but that his brain could not analyze. The plastic in the face-plate reduced and distorted visual cues. He lifted his head slightly to put the outer glow of helmet light on the object.
Watson seemed to descend in record time. Her light flared across his own.
‘Jesus H. Christ. Hold off,’ he said, raising an arm.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
He began to take a step forward, then stopped. Attractive objects lured you through tripwires. You never reach the object or solve the puzzle. ‘I found our little girl.’
A cardboard cutout of a child with a red wig on top had been mounted on a motorized toy offroad vehicle. The big toy was still faintly whirring and butting against a concrete wall. The vehicle had followed the taped path, carrying the bewigged shape out of an upper stall, through the barn, and down the ramp like a target in a shooting gallery. Simple enough and effective. A small music player had been ducttaped to the back of the toy. It was still making weak little sobbing sounds.
‘What set it moving?’ Watson asked. ‘A timer?’
‘Our bot crossed the tape,’ Griff guessed. ‘A few seconds delay—then, bang, the fryers.’
The stick supporting the cutout slipped to one side and the silhouette fell to the floor, setting loose the toy to whir into a corner like a frustrated bug. It dragged the flat image in a half-circle. Then its motor stopped. The music player stopped as well.