by Greg Bear
Sam heard a whisper of sound behind him and froze for a moment, holding his breath.
This is it.
Tommy cleared his throat.
‘I can recover a third more product now, maybe half. I might be able to work double for the next few weeks and get enough product made to do almost everything we planned. That’s what I’m “thinking”, Sam.’
‘Tell me more, Tommy,’ Sam said.
The man-boy stepped to the center of the kitchen. Sam turned. Tommy’s long fingers seemed to move on their own. They made wild shadows on the kitchen walls as they bent and stretched, as if trying to conduct part of the conversation in sign language. ‘I think we can do without the extra printers, if the ones we have don’t break down. I have plenty of cartridges, enough to last. That’s what I “think”.’
‘Show me, Tommy.’
‘Not necessary,’ Tommy said, rocking from one foot to another. ‘It’s under control. I’m just saying, we’ll have enough product, but I don’t know where we’ll get it packed for, you know, delivery.’
‘We’ll think of something,’ Sam said. ‘Want to grab a bite to eat?’
Tommy chuckled. He reached out and grabbed something from the air, then stuffed it into his mouth. ‘There,’ he said.
‘Real food,’ Sam persisted.
‘All right,’ Tommy said. ‘If you “think” I’m hungry.’
‘I think we’re both hungry,’ Sam said. ‘Lasagne would be good.’
‘Lasagne is good,’ Tommy said. ‘I’ll do some work, then we’ll eat. You can wait here.’
‘Let’s eat first,’ Sam said. ‘We’ll think better.’
‘You’re right. I’ve been following your diet plan. I’ve been pretty bright lately,’ Tommy said. ‘That’s why I’m not so upset about the printers. I “think” I have a way to double the output.’ He marked more quotations in the air and grinned toothily.
‘Great. This will take about twenty minutes. Why not set the table?’
‘I will.’
‘Did you wash your hands?’
Tommy grinned and went to the sink. ‘Not a problem, Sam,’ he said reassuringly. ‘I’ve been very careful.’
‘Yeah, but you still pick your nose. I’ve seen you.’
Tommy began laughing. His laughter turned into a bray. ‘Yeah, right. At least I don’t scratch my butt when I get out of a car.’
‘I never do that,’ Sam said, indignant.
Tommy danced around the kitchen, plucking his pants bottom. ‘Wedgy, wedgy!’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Seattle, Washington
William looked through the window into the surgical unit. He could not see his father, not clearly—just a lump covered with blue and green sheets, here and there a spot of what looked like ground red meat showing through, where people in full-out surgical suits, with their own air tubes trailing after them, probed with shining, curved tools and murmured to each other. He could hear the whine and whir of drills and saws and pumps.
One of the surgeons looked up and gave a muffled laugh to someone’s joke. The OR head nurse had told William they had been working for three hours.
William’s knees turned shaky. He sat on the chair. Special Agent Dole from the Seattle Field Office, barely older than William, slender and blond and wearing a brown pants suit, handed him a bottle of water. He drank and watched. All night agents had come in and out, clapping William on the shoulder, saying little, watching the surgery for a few minutes and grimacing as if at some weird object lesson.
Someone named Cap Benson arrived and told Agent Dole she could take a break. He had bandages on his face and around the back of his neck. ‘I was with your dad, up until the last…the barn,’ he said, his words muffled by a swollen jaw. Benson sat on a plastic chair beside William. ‘He’s going to make it.’
William nodded. It did not look good. The OR nurse said surgery could go on for another three or four hours. They were pulling Griff’s face forward and setting shims. The shattered bone was being debrided and they were picking out the chips, soaking them in saline and ReViv, and arranging the best of them back on strips of mesh like mosaics. As they set and repaired Griff’s shattered legs, they were also borrowing pieces of bone from his hip and femur to transplant to his skull.
Jesus Christ, Dad.
The observation room had pale blue walls and scuffed linoleum tile and smelled warm and clean. Benson smelled rank, as if he had not showered in a few days. To tell the truth, he looked more than tired—he looked a little crazy.
‘Griff’s one tough son of a bitch,’ Benson said.
William nodded like a clockwork. All his life he had reacted to his father in one way or another—as authority, something to be rebelled against, something to be loved or feared or even despised. He could not remember ever thinking of Griff as a friend. That raw-meat lump in the OR had guided William’s entire existence by example or counter-example, seldom by encouragement, most often by a scowl or gruff warning, several memorable times by the belt.
‘Your dad’s a hard man, isn’t he?’ Benson said.
‘Yeah,’ William said.
‘Tough as nails. And lucky, goddammit.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Maryland
‘The whole world loves to beat up brown men,’ the prisoner said as he sat, with great care, on the old wooden chair. His face gave evidence of that: both eyes swollen almost shut, one cheek bruised and puffy, lip split and stitched in three places, neck marked by fading Taser jolts. No doubt he had similar burns around his genitals and rectum. Cingulated bruises and abrasions caused by hanging from handcuffs formed yellow and green half-moons on his inner wrists and needle marks crawled up his arms.
Fouad Al-Husam stood in a corner, out of the light. An agent who had been introduced to Fouad as John Q. Anger paced around the central table and the seated man. It was a scene as old as time; a small room, shadows, and a man whose life had value only so long as he could give useful answers.
He had been rendered. Shipped secretly from one country to another; in this case, from Egypt to the United States. As Fouad well knew, the reverse was usually true. Fouad was here as a trainee and an observer. Already, his stomach was being tested.
‘We’re not going to beat you,’ Anger told the seated man. ‘We don’t do that here.’
‘I’m grateful,’ the man said. He had a broad face with a hawk nose and a good black head of hair and his face was squat and his neck was long. Hands and wrists stuck out of too-short orange sleeves. ‘Will you send me back?’
‘Back to where?’
‘I do not know where I was,’ the man admitted with a shrug. ‘I could not see where they took me. I was blinded by my own blood.’
‘Do you know a man named Al-Hitti?’
‘I know a few men by that name. It is a common name in Egypt.’
‘The Iraqis tell us a man named Al-Hitti paid to have people killed. We found them in a house in Sadr City. They died painful deaths.’
‘I am unhappy to hear this,’ the man said. ‘If I knew such a man, I would tell you.’
‘You know him.’
The man on the chair shook his head weakly.
Anger leaned over and with some gentleness pulled his head back by the hair. ‘Nobody here tolerates disrespect. You will respect me. It’s part of our fucking culture. You will sit up straight.’
‘I am sitting straight.’
Anger pressed the man’s back with one hand. ‘Straighter. You have also met a white man named John Brown or John Bedford. He’s either an American or a Brit. We don’t believe he’s Canadian, despite what some Iraqis have told us.’
The man in the center of the room looked around through his bruised eyes and then stared down at the table. ‘Bedford,’ he said. ‘That is in Massachusetts.’
Anger turned his back on the man in the chair and faced Fouad. ‘Talk to him.’
Fouad took a step forward. He spoke in Arabic. ‘Has your treatment been better sin
ce you were brought here?’
‘They let me sleep,’ the man replied. ‘I still can’t eat. I think they ruined my stomach.’
‘They tell me you were born in Jordan.’
‘Yes.’
Anger moved swiftly and grabbed the man’s chin. ‘What do you know about anthrax?’
Fouad was startled by the intrusion. The captive took it as a matter of course. ‘A disease of cattle and people,’ he said. ‘Someone in America sent letters. That is all I know.’
‘Anthrax refers to the black lesions caused by the germ,’ Anger said. He waved his hand at Fouad as he paced. ‘Translate this for me. Like coal. Shiny and black and painful. These victims were kidnapped off the streets of Baghdad, taken to Sadr City, and there they were forced to inhale anthrax powder.’
Fouad translated.
‘You are telling me too much,’ the man protested to Fouad in Arabic. He pleaded with his eyes, one brown man to another. ‘I do not wish to know these things.’
‘Does this knowledge disturb you?’ Anger asked. Fouad translated, feeling sick.
‘It is having the knowledge that is dangerous,’ the man said, this time in English. ‘When you are done with me and give me back, and the Egyptians ask questions, they will see that I know some of which they are asking, and they will assume I know more. Do not tell me any more. It will kill me.’
‘Did you introduce Mr. Brown to Al-Hitti?’
The man in the chair bowed his head. ‘So many planes and trucks and rooms,’ he said.
‘We’re done,’ said Anger. ‘Send him back,’ he instructed the guards. ‘Let the Egyptians finish him.’
‘No, do not send me back. I do not know Al-Hitti. I have not met him!’
Anger took Fouad’s elbow. They walked out of the room together. The door closed softly, muffling the captive’s pleas for mercy. In the green hall outside, Anger kept pacing, finger to chin. ‘How does that make you feel?’
‘Sick,’ Fouad said.
‘Stock up on Pepto. You’re going to see worse. But since the UN threatened to bring war crimes charges against us, we have strict limits on what we can do. You will not be called upon to actually interrogate someone. You may, however, witness such interrogations. Understand this. We would stop torture if we could, because the information we get from tortured detainees is so difficult to filter and reconstruct. But our Muslim allies, especially those at the General Directorate, they seem to believe agony is good for the soul. They keep handing us bullshit they’ve proudly extracted through the application of extreme duress.’
Fouad was confused. ‘How am I supposed to act when I see such things being done?’
‘We need fresh detainees. We need them unspoiled. If, in your opinion, a detainee might have information of use, you will work to get him—or her—rendered before torture begins. We will interrogate them ourselves. We use techniques that produce remarkable results without much pain. If you can’t accomplish that, you will report in exact detail who is being tortured and by whom. So, your first assignment is unpleasant but very important. You will travel with a small team to Egypt and to Jordan, and to some camps in Kuwait, to observe rendition prospects and make reports. Are you up to it?’
‘I will be saving them from torture?’ Fouad asked.
‘Only if they’re useful. The rest, I’m afraid, will have to rely on Allah.’
Fouad’s face grew dark. ‘This American, Brown or Bedford, he is real?’ Fouad asked.
‘Sounds like hooey to me, but some people in Baghdad used anthrax on a few Shiite Muslims. Their leader might be a man called Al-Hitti.’ Anger fixed his stare on Fouad. ‘That’s all we’re cleared to know, for the time being.’
‘You will use your techniques on this man?’
‘No,’ Anger said, shaking his head in disgust. ‘They filled him full of crude drugs in Egypt. He’s a wreck. If we do what we do best, we’d kill him.’
That afternoon, Fouad moved into a motel room near the Marine base and less than eight miles from the Academy. All the other rooms were filled with agents from Diplomatic Security, Homeland Security, the FBI, and the CIA, and all had been instructed not to talk to each other.
BuDark indeed.
He had yet to learn the real name.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Temecula
Sam—he had many names now, but to Tommy, he was just Sam—sat on the porch listening to the soughing of the mourning doves. Dawn was a hint of striated light in the east, like a flaw in his vision breaking up the perfect darkness. The land around Tommy’s house was quiet but for the doves and a few songbirds tuning up for the morning battle of the bands.
Sam spread his bare toes on the splintery wood and sniffed the cool, sweet air. All he could see other than that blemish of dawn was a hard, rough road finally arriving, however long it might take, at failure. There were so many details to get perfect, so many pitfalls to avoid, and he felt sure that somebody would soon be on to him.
The disaster of the truck and the patrol car. And the glove. He could not remember what he had done with the glove after pulling it off with his teeth. He might have jammed it in his pants pocket. It might be near the burned-out cruiser, in which case it was in the hands of the police and probably the FBI. It might have fallen out on the long walk before he was picked up and given his ride. Good cops might work those miles of highway and find it. Either way, he had screwed up. Compounding that, his weakness: the woman in the green van, Charlene.
It was hard to remember what he had actually told her.
Sam wanted a cigarette and he hadn’t smoked in fifteen years.
They would get skin cells out of the glove. They would have the skin cells and the DNA from the blood, and oddly, they would not precisely match, and that would tell them there had been two assailants at the scene. Brothers, perhaps.
That might slow them down.
Everything about him came in pairs, including his moods—back-to-back despair and supernal confidence with nothing in between but little warning flashes, anxious sparks of light he could almost see.
Morning was the hardest for Sam.
Walking through the kitchen and the back door and down a flagstone path between overgrown lawn and what now looked like pasture, Sam used Tommy’s ring of keys to open the first warehouse. He passed between the stainless steel tanks rising from the concrete floor like the heads of giant tin-men with protruding steel mouths.
At the end of the warehouse a flight of plain wooden steps descended to the cellars—three concrete tunnels that stretched off for a hundred feet beyond the warehouse foundation. Sam switched on the ceiling lights. His soft-soled shoes padded silently down an aisle flanked by stacked casks of old French oak and cheaper young American oak. Here, sleeping in quiet darkness, the wine had been meant to age and acquire flavors from the wood—a hint of vanilla mostly—and soften its sharp edges in preparation for the bottling that had never come.
Tommy’s parents had died before they could enjoy the results of their final vintage.
Last year Sam had used a glass funnel—a wine thief—to sample some of the casks through their rubber-stoppered bungholes. The wine had turned lifeless and flat and no wonder. The floor under the casks was stained purple, sticky and slick. The barrels had leaked.
The vaults echoed and the cool still air smelled of moldering oak and dead wine.
At the end of the longest tunnel, during the winery’s construction phase, Tommy’s father had left a room twenty feet square open for Tommy’s use. The room had been plumbed with hot and cold water, two large steel sinks, and a floor drain. A small high window could be poled open for ventilation. There, he had trained his son in basic biology and wine lab techniques—yeast culture and fermentation.
Perhaps that had been only way they could connect emotionally. Sam tried to imagine the father’s satisfaction at his son’s native ability.
The rest Tommy had figured out for himself or researched on the Internet, a cornucopia of odd knowle
dge. According to Tommy both his mother and his father had been thrilled that Tommy was finally revealing his talents. Still they had never bothered to check up on what he was actually doing. Toward the end, they had had their own troubles. Tommy had been kept busy and out of their hair. Whatever scientific equipment he had asked for, in their guilt they had bought, despite the cost—and he had asked for some unusual things.
Sam opened the metal door and switched on the sunwhite lights. The lab glowed. In pristine silence, he looked across tables crammed with a centrifuge and incubators, stirring platforms, small hot boxes—sealed Plexiglas cubes with glove holes, neat arrays of pipettes on white plastic cutting boards, a shelf covered with antiseptic spray cans and wipe dispensers, glass beakers and test tubes mounted on wall racks, small packets of French wine yeast.
Near the back stood a much larger box made of sheet steel and half-inch Lexan: eight feet tall, twelve feet wide, three feet deep. The seams had been caulked with thick beads of silicone putty and the whole was now mothballed—wrapped in multiple layers of translucent Visqueen and strips of duct tape and blue masking tape. This had been the first of Tommy’s amateur production facilities. He had built it at the age of fifteen. At that time, he had been convinced his parents were out to kill him—the first of his major delusions. And so he had set about cultivating Clostridium botulinum—while contemplating the contents of a small vial he had been unfortunate enough to find at his high school.
That had been the turning point in Tommy’s life: someone’s simple if egregious oversight, a monumental mistake made for reasons no one would ever understand by a man unknown, perhaps dead.
Tommy had spent much of his free time in the high school’s science storage room arranging supplies and cleaning glassware. He had found a wax-sealed vial wrapped in cotton in a taped-up cardboard box, pushed back on a high shelf behind jars of chemicals. He did not know how long the box and vial had been there: perhaps since 1984, just after the school had been built.