by Greg Bear
She uh-hummed without any spirit for another minute, then quickly said she had to go, goodbye. After long seconds of numb silence, she punched in a number.
‘Hello, Frank. I know what time it is. And I know you’re still working. Anything useful?’
William quietly pulled back the curtain and looked down the length of the trailer.
Rebecca paced the short narrow passage, clutching the phone to her ear and chewing on a thumbnail. She was wearing a flannel nightgown that revealed nothing but William was able to judge that she was in great shape. He looked below her raised elbows and realized he was trying to observe the impression of her breasts. He closed the curtain and flopped back in the upper bed, silently cursing himself for an idiot.
‘Fantastic,’ Rebecca said. ‘What about the glove?…So what’s the problem? Yeah, but what have we got here, some sort of marrow transplant, a leukemia patient?…Okay. I like good blood…Two guys, using the same glove?…Brothers. Come on. The morning is young, dear Franco. Call me when it makes sense.’
William looked at his watch. It was two am.
‘Are you awake, Peeping Tom?’ Rebecca called out. ‘You vibrate the whole trailer up there, rolling around.’ She shoved back the curtain and shined a light in his face. ‘I got my four hours,’ she said. ‘You need more?’
‘I’m good,’ William said, blinking.
‘Get dressed. We’re going back to the farm.’ She gave him a hard little grin and replaced the curtain.
William tugged on his pants and slid down the ladder. As he slipped his arms into his jacket sleeves, Rebecca emerged from the bathroom, toweling her face and hair. She handed him a squashed granola bar.
‘This place sucks,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Temecula
Sam pulled the truck from the garage and parked it on the drive. The moon hung cool and aloof between thin sheets of blue cloud, casting come-and-go shadows under the trees that fronted the house. He checked the tires and the oil, then did another inventory of the horse trailer’s contents. They were well-packed but there was no margin for error. An accident in this truck would likely prove fatal to anyone within fifty yards.
He moved to the front and opened the trailer’s side door to look at the launcher. It stood just over five feet high, including the plate-steel base.
Purity of heart is to will one thing. Kierkegaard.
Everything was set. Except for Tommy. He could not allow Tommy to reach out again. That would be an impurity.
He quietly closed the trailer door and latched it, then put on his own combination lock, a big one.
No sense letting anyone get at the pretty horses.
Sam gripped the vial in his left hand and slowly pushed open the door to Tommy’s room. The small nightlight that Tommy always left on cast a dim but reassuring glow. All the J-Los watched Sam with seductive smiles. And in the east corner, surrounded by his celebrity angels, Tommy lay sleeping as he always slept—deeply and innocently, making his little dog noises.
Four or five times, Sam had stood here with this vial in his hand, trying to make up his mind. In his other life, facing someone who had done what Tommy had done and who had the potential to do so much more, Sam would not have hesitated to put a pistol to the man-boy’s head and pull the trigger…
Now, the time had come for a gentler, slower farewell.
Sam had been too ambitious. He could live with cutting back on the number of targets. The point would be made.
Tommy’s work was done.
He moved silently to the side of the bed, despite the plastic suit, avoiding the obstacles around the bed, the crumpled papers and candy wrappers, the cans that had once held chili, Tommy’s favorite food when Sam was away. He could not smell the room now but he remembered the aroma well: like the monkey house at a zoo. Tommy’s sheets had not been changed since Sam had done a load of wash five weeks ago.
Sam opened the screw cap on the vial, held the vial a foot above Tommy’s head, tipped it, and let the powder drift. It fell in a small dense cloud, billowing almost like steam but fading at the edges, seeming to evaporate in its fineness, its purity. It fell with such a lightness that Tommy could not feel it and would not smell it, though he might notice it on his sheets and pillow in the morning. If Tommy turned and tossed, the powder would be smoothed into the fibers, where it would blend in and get lost, finer than any household dust.
Tommy breathed—snuck, uck. Sam watched as he vacuumed part of a billow into his nose. His cheeks puffed and a little cloud blew out between his lips like yellowish cigarette smoke. It rose up and reversed at a wave of Sam’s hand, then drifted across Tommy’s eyelids. Every motion made it lift from the smooth pale skin in tendrils that returned with caressing tenacity.
It wants to go home.
Tommy’s masterpiece.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Snohomish County
Traveling on the shiny, empty highway, walls of silent, dripping trees on either side, William watched Rebecca at the steering wheel and tried to figure out who she was.
‘I can drive,’ he offered.
‘I always drive,’ she said.
Her face was thin and strong and attractive, good cheekbones supporting skin that showed no signs of laxity and had even firmed a little under stress—those tight dimples. She did not look as if she smiled often, neither did she have frown lines. Her tawny pupils were surrounded by a startle of whites, and when she looked at William he could not decide whether she might be a harsh mistress or a sympathetic schoolmarm, thank you ma’am, you’re shore beautiful.
He cut off that line of thought—unproductive, unprofessional, and he wanted to keep his balls. ‘How long have you worked bioterror?’
‘Twenty years, off and on, mostly off the last four years,’ Rebecca said.
‘What’s that about a glove?’ he asked.
‘Hatch Friskmaster,’ Rebecca said. ‘Left hand. I borrowed it from Arizona. It’s being examined at Quantico.’
‘My father sent me a pair when I joined NYPD. Didn’t wear them much.’
‘You never worked narcotics, did you?’
‘No,’ William said.
‘Frank Chao found skin cells mixed with fragments of silicone in the fingertips,’ Rebecca said. ‘Clear silicone caulk is one way to hide prints. It works—for a while.’
‘Tell me about your anthrax theory. I wish there was a file or something to read.’
‘I assume you’re up on Amerithrax.’
‘September and October, 2001,’ William said. ‘Envelopes filled with anthrax spores sent through the U.S. Mail. Five dead. Never found the culprit but they—we—did make life hell for some oddballs with ties to weapons research. Until about six years ago. Then—nothing. Nothing I’ve heard, anyway.’
Rebecca nodded. ‘The experts told us it was impossible to manufacture such high-grade material outside of a major defense lab. The thinking back then was it had to be some group or possibly a brilliant individual from Fort Detrick or Porton Down, maybe Rhodesia or South Africa—scientists with formal top-secret training and access to labs. Microbiologists working for us traced genetic signatures in the bacillus—anthrax is a kind of bacteria found in soil, amazingly similar to gardener’s BT—’
‘I know,’ William said.
‘Traced them to the so-called Ames strain. Not actually from the University of Ames, Iowa, as it turned out, but isolated from a cow in Texas in 1981 and sent to a number of labs, including Porton Down, but not to Iraq or Russia. So we weren’t dealing with another Sverdlovsk, 1979. That was good—Amerithrax wasn’t mailing drug-resistant spores…’
Rebecca fell silent for a moment, then murmured, ‘After a while, I just learned to never touch my eyes, my nose. Always wash before going to the bathroom—and after. My hands got all dry, like a doctor’s. I carried antibiotic skin cream wherever I went. Even affected my sex life. After a while, guys started to wonder about my little habits.’
> ‘Price to pay,’ William said.
‘But I haven’t had a cold or the flu in ten years.’ She smiled. ‘What’s the cost-benefit ratio? There’s an island near Scotland that’s been off limits for forty years because of WW-2 research. The Brits spread anthrax over sheep in cages. Within three days, the sheep got sick and died.’
‘Gruinard,’ William said. ‘But that wasn’t Ames, either.’
Rebecca nodded appreciatively. ‘A scholar.’
‘I heard they finally decontaminated it in 1986.’
‘I doubt the real estate will ever be worth much. The spores can stay in the soil for centuries. Anthrax is a nasty little bug with a hardened spore and simple habits, all of them painful or deadly. One scientist I talked to called it “the devil in the dirt.”.’
‘Aren’t there vaccines?’
Rebecca nodded. ‘All sorts, plus antibiotics. Now, if someone’s pretty far gone, they can also use something called Gamma Lysin. But nobody’s ever convinced an entire country to get vaccinated. So we vaccinate first responders—doctors, nurses—and soldiers, off and on, who might be exposed. But the focus is off now. We haven’t heard much about anthrax for years.’
‘You think It’s going to happen again?’
‘God only knows,’ Rebecca said. ‘But there is an alternate theory, about how it doesn’t take Fort Detrick to mail an anthrax letter. Carl Macek, an agent and a good guy, he and I came up with it over drinks in a San Francisco bar one fine wet evening eight years ago. We had just attended a seminar on forensic nanotechnology—high-tech future, end of crime, all that crap. But I ran into a guy who told me they were using inkjet printers to lay down microcircuits and tiny plastic channels and things. And out of the blue, Carl asked him, “Could you just deposit tiny little blobs? Less than five microns?’
‘“No problem,” he told us. “Could be a big thing in pharmaceuticals.” So Carl and I told News—Hiram Newsome. And News got it right away. We did some research, and we were both hot on it until the then-director started focusing on shit that nobody wanted to deal with. Political shit.’
She took the turn once more onto the farm road. The car started jouncing but she did not slow.
‘Where did it go after that?’ William asked.
‘Nowhere,’ Rebecca said. ‘It was a cold case. FBI had already taken a lot of heat for ruining the lives of a few innocent suspects. Well, innocent of spreading anthrax, anyway. Carl Macek died of a heart attack three years ago. And back then, News wasn’t Ay-Dick…Assistant Director of Training Division.’
She slowed the car. The scene was surrounded by mobile lights on tall poles. It looked like a tree farm on the night before Christmas. Analysts were still in the yard and clambering gingerly over the collapsed pit of the barn, doing their work through the early morning hours, even in the rain.
Rebecca parked beside an unmarked black panel truck festooned with antennas. She kicked down the emergency brake. ‘Our newly appointed director is busy trying to keep the bureau from being dismantled. News has more time in the bureau than he does, and a lot more contacts and probably more downright respect among field agents, and so for the moment nobody looks over his shoulder. And he tells me there’s interest again, in high places. So, here I am. And you.’
‘You’ve got a glove, saliva, blood, and…?’
‘You were listening, you snoop. Some people killed a state patrol officer rather than let themselves be caught with a cargo of three hundred inkjet printers. Nobody knows where they were going—yet. Almost simultaneously, we find the remains of more inkjets on a farm in Washington state—a barn owned by a white supremacist. Why?’
‘Maybe they were printing extra copies of The Turner Diaries.’
Rebecca tightened her grip on the steering wheel. ‘I don’t want to screw it up again.’
William wasn’t quite sure what to believe. He decided a neutral concession was best. ‘At Quantico, it’s all just a game, until you think of the stakes.’
‘I hate games,’ Rebecca said.
‘Anthrax,’ William said, and could not help shaking his head. ‘That kind of operation—it would take dozens of skilled, heavily protected workers and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. We monitor all lab equipment and antibiotics sales.’
‘We didn’t back then. Despite years of threats and false alarms, we didn’t, God bless our pointy little heads.’
William admitted that was true. ‘Have there been any recent cases in the U.S.?’
‘One in Texas, last year. An illegal alien tried to eat part of a dead steer. Four others at a wedding party in Oklahoma. A family slaughtered and ate an infected sheep, medium rare.’ She gave him a wry glance. ‘Nobody knows what motivated Amerithrax. He sent out one envelope before 9-11, then 9-11 really set him off. His targets didn’t make a lot of sense. Why lash out at The National Enquirer, for Christ’s sake? No profile we could come up with panned out. Suppose Amerithrax was responsible for both the hoax letters and the real letters? For the different grades of anthrax mailed to different parties? Maximize the confusion and terror, conserve the best product—and wait for another opportunity.’
‘But no anthrax was sent out after 2001—or for that matter, after 10-4.’
‘And why not? Did he die, is he lying low, or is he just busy with something else? Suppose now it’s the same guy, or a small group of guys—what if the process can be mechanized, privately financed, kept quiet for years?’
‘That’s a lot to suppose,’ William said.
‘Carl and I did some calculations,’ Rebecca said. ‘If you had a fermentation tank of sufficient size and used a highefficiency growth medium, and then you have, say, one hundred inkjet printers, you could, in theory, produce more than thirty kilos of perfectly weaponized anthrax spores in six months. Hijack a crop duster, and that’s enough to spray every large city on the west coast. There isn’t that much antibiotics in the entire world. Back in 2001, that’s what we thought terrorists might have been planning—to use a crop duster to spray a city. The bastards couldn’t get crop dusters so they took jetliners instead, a poor second by comparison. Now, suppose someone has stockpiled tons of the stuff, ready to go, right here?’
Rebecca got out. Over the car’s roof she stared at him for a second, then said, ‘I want another chance, another look—without Agent Trune watching over our shoulders. Humor me.’
The trailer was quiet. Only two police officers and two FBI agents remained inside, sitting before computers filing the pieces of information they had been handed earlier in the day and drinking black coffee from large cups.
Rebecca requested an access code to the server, then spun around a big monitor on its rolling stand. The monitor had been used to brief local chiefs and agents. She fast-forwarded through Griff’s video until she came to the steel organ-pipe cluster—the hedgehog. Griff’s voice hissed from the display’s small speakers. ‘They could use the tractor to haul that Calliope outside. I’m wondering why, though.’
Rebecca paused. ‘You okay with seeing this again?’ she asked William.
‘So far,’ William said, and pulled up a chair. The other agents turned to watch. Rebecca resumed the video, then split the screen between the two helmet-mounted cameras.
Alice Watson spoke next. ‘Fireworks,’ she said. ‘Shit.’
They had been looking right at each other, two thick monsters in olive-green suits.
Griff extended his thumb. ‘I should have thought of that. Hey, listen up, guys. Alice just set off a little light bulb.’
‘We heard,’ said someone off site, probably Andrews from HDS Redstone. ‘Watch for devices triggered by bright ideas.’
‘Well, why didn’t we think of it earlier? Portable fireworks launcher. Atta girl. Why?’
Rebecca ran the video back to the steel pipe assembly. ‘Looks like a hedgehog. What in hell is it for?’ she asked in an undertone. ‘Can you actually use fireworks to spread a powder?’
Another man entered the room.
‘I heard you two were staying up late,’ he said.
They both turned and Rebecca shut off the monitor. She did not know him. He had tight black hair and broad cheeks and a turned-up nose. He was wearing a DS cap—Diplomatic Security. ‘You’re Rebecca Rose, right?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And this is Griff’s pup?’ The DS agent held out his hand. ‘Sorry about your father. We’re rooting for him.’
Rebecca looked him over coolly. ‘What can we do for you?’
‘David Grange. Special Agent Trune said I could take a look around, in the spirit of sharing.’
‘Do you suspect a threat to our esteemed State Department?’
Grange smiled. ‘The Patriarch has been on our list since before I was born. Congratulations. But more to the point, I’m curious as to why you’re here.’
‘Fair enough,’ Rebecca said. ‘Have you looked at this apparatus?’ She wheeled the display around to show him the hedgehog.
‘Put it out for the smash and dent sale. It’s mostly just little pieces.’
‘You’ve looked at it.’
The DS agent squeezed his eyes together and looked as if divulging anything might be painful. ‘Griff should never have forced the issue,’ he said. ‘If he hadn’t pushed the Patriarch, we could have gone in slow. We’d have more to look at now than just broken tubing.’
William walked around behind Grange, leaving Rebecca in front of him. ‘I beg your pardon?’ William asked.
‘No disrespect,’ Grange said, twisting his head.
‘FBI found the Patriarch, staked him out, alerted everyone to his presence,’ William said. ‘How is that a screw-up?’
‘I didn’t say it was.’