by Greg Bear
Tommy’s improved productivity no longer mattered. Time was short. They had enough for one test and two prime objectives. Rome would have to be given a pass. Sam had already picked out the test city. A town nobody would remember.
A town it might be good to forget.
When he had finished loading the trailer Sam looked in on Tommy’s small bedroom. The boy-man lay on his stomach in the twin bed and made a faint ‘snuck’ at the end of each whistling intake of breath. He sounded like an old dog. On a small nightstand Tommy had propped four ponderous veterinarian’s texts on the diseases of cattle. Walls not obscured by bookcases were covered with posters and magazine photos of one woman: Jennifer Lopez. Tommy had first read about J-Lo in his mother’s copies of The National Enquirer. Somehow many years ago she had become Tommy’s ideal and to this day he remained faithful to her.
Tommy had caused so much grief.
But Tommy had not caused Sam’s grief.
The sun shone through the branches of the old oaks east of the house.
‘I’m awake now.’ Tommy walked through the French doors and stood on the porch beside Sam. He twisted slowly back and forth on his ankles. He was wearing boxer shorts and a tie-dyed t-shirt. He had something ‘on his mind.’
‘I guess if you have a lot of money, women will pay attention to you,’ Tommy said. ‘That’s what I hear. Is it true?’
‘I suppose it is. Some women.’
‘Have you “given any thought”,’ Tommy marked out these words with crooked finger-quotes, ‘to maybe asking for money not to do the things we’re doing?’
Sam paused before answering. It might or might not be a serious question. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t.’
‘Well, we could bring in a lot of money, but I haven’t figured out how, because the way I “think it through” we’d probably get caught trying to spend it.’
‘Probably,’ Sam said.
‘The whole world’s fighting and we’ll help them stop fighting. It’ll be a lot quieter. That’s worth something, isn’t it? I’ve learned a lot from you, Sam.’
‘You’re my main guy, Tommy.’
‘Yes. For now.’ Tommy sat on the wicker chair beside Sam. ‘But after we’re done I’m afraid you’ll just move on. I’d like to work with you on the next thing, whatever it is.’
‘I’d like to work with you too.’
‘Maybe it could be something about making money so I could have some sort of life. But whatever, Sam, you’re not telling me what it is.’
‘I’m still thinking.’
Tommy rushed to add his own air quotes as Sam said ‘thinking.’
‘But you’ll be in on it,’ Sam said. ‘I want you to feel important.’
‘I am important.’ Tommy moved his large head back and forth, wispy long hair dancing around his eyes. ‘But I’m a grown man and I’ve never been to bed with…slept with…anybody, a woman. I suppose that isn’t so important, but you seem to think it is.’
‘Do you want to sleep with a woman?’
Tommy snickered. ‘I’d like to do more than just “sleep”, Sam.’
‘Of course,’ Sam said.
Tommy’s face went from puzzled to smooth. ‘Tell me how noisy it is out there, everybody arguing. We’ll make it quiet again, won’t we, Sam?’
‘We’ll sure try.’
‘So tell me again. Tell me the story.’
Sam took a small breath, keeping his face neutral. ‘It’s a deeply troubled time we’re living in, filled with lies,’ Sam began. ‘Everybody’s stuck in history.’
‘Like elephants in a tar pit,’ Tommy said, following the formula.
‘Exactly. Nobody knows how to escape because lies and hatred are like tar. You understand that, Tommy.’
‘You hate and you lie and you get stuck.’
‘Right. And nobody knows how to pull themselves out. They’re all stuck.’
‘They lie about God. God is like tar.’
Sam nodded. ‘For these people, God is hatred. God used to be about love.’
‘Lizard Mommy and Daddy used to be about love,’ Tommy said, almost crooning. ‘Trouble made them hate and lie.’
‘So many people need doctors to cut out the hate. We’re the doctors.’
‘We’re performing surgery. We’ll cut out the hate.’
‘Surgery is delicate and loving, even when you have to cut. Surgery preserves life.’
Tommy’s shoulders shook. ‘If you had come earlier, you could have saved Lizard Mommy and Daddy.’
‘You did what you had to do, Tommy. But together we’re going to make a change.’
Tommy wiped his eyes and the wicker chair on the porch creaked under his enthusiasm. Sam watched Tommy until the man-boy’s motion had slowed and he perched on the edge of the wicker chair with eyes half-closed, sated by their ritual. ‘I like to hear about what we’re doing,’ Tommy said. ‘We’re doctors.’
‘Right, Tommy,’ Sam said. ‘You and me, we’re going to cure the planet.’
‘I love you, Sam,’ Tommy said. ‘You saved me. I hope I can return the favor.’
‘You’re the man, Tommy. You’re the one we’re all going to owe favors to someday.’
Blissful Tommy.
Sam leaned back and folded his hands behind his neck.
Tommy did the same. ‘It feels right, doing it here in the winery, doesn’t it?’
‘Trampling out the vintage,’ Sam said. ‘Real grapes of wrath, Tommy.’
part two
PILLAR OF FIRE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Patriarch’s Farm Snohomish County
The air over the farm was as still as a sucked-in breath.
The blast region was cluttered with ripped and dented plastic barrels, big gas cylinders, chunks of concrete, blownout wooden walls, and debris of every size, including splinters fine as toothpicks. Trees behind the barn had been set on fire and a thin haze still lay over the farm.
The farmhouse nearest to the barn had been pushed from its foundation and leaned to one side, boards shivered from its walls, windows blown out. The farther house, shielded by the main house and some trees, had survived, but its windows, too, were gone. Someone had taped blue plastic over them.
William walked past stacked piles of debris to the big hole in the ground where the barn had once stood and stooped to peer down. The central pit—the middle of the barn’s basement—was a maze of concrete-crusted rebar. Reflective tape had been laid over the barn’s rectangular outline in a grid, staked on all sides, large coordinate numbers glued where the tape crossed.
Rebecca stayed a few steps back, giving William his space, his time.
William looked for, and found, the two red flags poking out of the rubble that marked where two agents had been found—one dead, one alive.
A man spoke with Rebecca. He was middle-aged and pale, with mousy brown hair combed back from a broad forehead. His suit was black and his tie was red. They walked to a marked-out square where the bomb truck had been. The man pointed to a blast shield still on the ground and marked by an evidence sticker. Rebecca pointed to William. They approached.
‘Mr. Griffin, my name is Aram Trune. I’m FBI liaison to the National Counter-Proliferation Center. I hope your father is doing better.’
‘Liaison?’ William asked, still stunned by the pulverized nature of the rubble.
‘We’re tasked with helping focus the Bureau’s relationship with the new administration.’
‘Where was Griff found?’ Rebecca asked Trune. ‘I was pretty much out of it after the blast.’
‘So I hear.’ Trune stepped up to the edge of the pit, marked by a sheared-off line of studs and a narrow, ragged overhang of concrete, and pointed. ‘He was pushed into the back of a concrete stall. The wall fell over him and deflected the main force. Most of his injuries were from crushing. Agent Watson—’ He shook his head. ‘We’ve just removed the last of her.’
‘What sort of explosive was it?’ William asked.
‘Will He?’ William asked.
‘Beats me.’ Trune said.
Trune guided them through taped-off and gridded patches of land to the operations trailer, a double-wide thirty-footer with an incongruous porch and lots of gingerbread. Inside, agents and investigators had set up marker and bulletin boards, a big screen display, and folding tables on which they had laid out and were cataloging evidence. Two technicians were transferring bagged pieces of burned, melted plastic and metal and what might have been shrapnel to the central table. A third was preparing to photograph them.
William and Rebecca stood by the table. Rebecca bent over and examined thin blackened metal rods. ‘How many?’ she asked a diminutive female technician.
‘Fifteen or twenty units, plus cables,’ the technician said. ‘We found them in a heap beside some burn barrels, along with the remains of two computers.’
Rebecca glanced at William. ‘Runners from inkjet printers,’ she told William. ‘Older models. Epsons. They don’t sell them anymore. Did the Patriarch strike you as a computer geek?’
Trune maneuvered through the crowd. The room was quiet and efficient; those who were talking tended to move off to the kitchen or the back rooms. A woman started posting photo prints on the cork board: surveillance shots of members of the Patriarch’s family.
William looked through the bay window off the ‘dining room’ and saw another large trailer being moved up behind the house.
Trune slipped on green plastic gloves and lifted a section of steel tube about three feet long off the table. He held it up before Rebecca.
‘Guess?’
‘Pipe?’ Rebecca ventured.
‘Cannon is more like it.’ Trune replaced the tube within its marked outline on the graph paper that covered the table. He walked around the photographer and lifted a plastic bag. The bag contained a small amount of cream-colored powder. ‘We scraped this off the trees. There’s a lot of it out there. Take a another guess.’
‘Anthrax?’ William said.
Rebecca leaned forward to peer at the bag. ‘Yeast.’
‘Good guess,’ Trune said.
‘We saw the bags in the barn.’
‘It’s brewer’s yeast,’ Trune said. ‘Baker’s yeast, actually. All cultivars of the same species. Safe enough, I suppose. It’s all over the rooftops, in the soil, on the leaves outside. Heavier concentration to the north. The wind in the valley blows from the south most days.’ He plucked three sets of gogs off a shelf and led them to the back of the trailer. ‘I’ve reserved a room and arranged for our local server to show the barn vids on demand.’
‘Glorious,’ Rebecca said as he showed them the unplumbed bathroom.
‘The real potties are in another trailer. We have techs working the farm’s septic system and all around the drainfield,’ Trune said. ‘Everyone on site is going to have blood drawn and receive a free CAT scan, until we’re done processing the scene, and probably for a week thereafter.’
William felt the sweat trickling down from his armpits.
‘Okay, now tell me why they used yeast,’ Trune said, lowering his voice.
‘Someone planning a biological attack could use yeast as a neutral test substance,’ Rebecca said.
‘Are we talking weaponized anthrax here?’
‘I don’t know,’ Rebecca said. ‘But finely milled yeast disperses almost as well.’
Trune whistled, then pulled back his coat arm, revealing a keypad. ‘Showtime, folks. I’ll split the screen between Agent Griffin and Agent Watson. Anything catches your eye, let me know, and I’ll zoom in.’
‘I’m dead,’ Rebecca said as they drove up the highway through the woods. ‘I’ve been cruising for forty-eight hours now on nothing but catnaps.’
‘No coffee?’
‘Can’t drink coffee,’ Rebecca said. ‘Makes me anxious. I start having dark thoughts. Isn’t worth it.’
‘I can live on coffee,’ William said. ‘Caffeine is a vitamin.’
‘That’s because you’re fat,’ Rebecca said with a hint of a smile.
‘I’m two ounces underweight for my height,’ William said. He was trying to untie the knot in his stomach. Talking—about anything—felt good.
‘Just a roly-poly puppy. Where’d you start?’
‘NYPD. I wanted to be in Emergency Services. Forget Jesus, ESU saves.’
‘Ha. Good luck.’
‘Right. So I worked vice for a year.’
‘Vice? What’d you do in vice?’
‘I was a pretty boy.’
‘A pretty boy?’
William plumped up nonexistent breasts.
Rebecca pinched out her lips. ‘Put on some eye shadow. You would be kind of pretty.’
‘Skinny tranny with big boobs, blond wig, real fright city,’ William said. ‘I wasn’t that good at improv, so they pushed me out and I transferred over to the big-ass headphone patrol…OCID, organized crime surveillance.’
‘Beats the cold New Yawk streets,’ Rebecca said.
‘Sometimes I miss it. The ladies in their limos, smelling like fresh baked bread and Opium—the perfume. Their insides so warm. The limos, I mean.’
Rebecca wizened her eyes. ‘Kid me not.’
‘I specialized in rich ladies.’
‘Rich ladies do not cruise the streets looking for trannies.’
‘Shows what you know.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘About organized crime?’
Rebecca reached over and lightly whapped his arm. ‘No, asshole. Rich ladies. What’d they like?’
‘I only know what I offered.’
Rebecca laughed. ‘All right, Pretty Boy. How much did you charge?’
‘Five hundred an hour, global. We do the tropics, the poles, and then we do the equator. We get all geo-graphical.’
Rebecca giggled—a genuine girlish giggle. William regarded her with surprise.
‘Did you ever want blow off your bust, just lean in, close the door, and, like, follow through?’ she asked slyly.
‘No, ma’am. Most of them were in their sixties. Well-preserved, lots of tucks and no rolls, but still.’
‘Nothing wrong with ladies in their sixties. How old do you think I am?’
‘Thirty.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Thirty-nine, tops.’
‘Mm hmm. I knew an agent, she used to work vice in San Francisco. She’s retired now. She once confessed that she thought about johns when she was with her husband.’
‘Now that’s sick,’ William said.
‘The young, handsome ones, anyway. She’d visit them in their cells. They’d be whimpering, she’d come in with her police baton, black leather, big silver and gold badge, high boots, tell them to act like the men they were. Then she’d imagine—this is all imagination, you understand—she’d imagine telling them to pull down their pants. Got her off every time.’
William blushed. ‘Jesus,’ he said.
‘It’s all true,’ Rebecca said. ‘Cop gospel.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘When a guy’s behind bars, he’s the biggest loser on earth. For women, it’s a complete turn-off. Most it does for them is bring out the motherly instinct, but not the…’
‘The what?’
‘I was going to say something crude, but I’m with a laaadyy.’
‘And don’t you forget it,’ Rebecca said. She stopped to take a right into the town. They passed the white church and the grocery store and the service station, then the feed and tackle store,
and that was about it until they came to the motel.
The parking lot of the twenty-room Meriwether Motel was packed with five-year-old American made sedans sporting antennae. The town was already filled to capacity and beyond—agents were staying in rented trailers on a used car lot.
A trooper from the Washington State Patrol met them at the main intersection. He was wearing a slicker against the drizzle. It was four in the afternoon. They showed him their creds and the trooper pulled up a sheet of paper in a plastic cover, wiped away rain drops, and told them to take a left on Boca Raton Drive.
‘Rat Mouth drive,’ Rebecca said. ‘That is what we call setting the scene.’ She drove along the gravel road. ‘We got two females bunking together, and the rest are men, so do the puzzle—we’re stuck with each other.’
The last Mobile Agent Domicile, or MAD, had been crowded off the used car lot and into the back yard of a vacant wreck of a house next door. It was a fifth wheel trailer and had two beds, one in front, in the overhang, and one in back.
Rebecca took the one in back.
Around midnight, rain fell on the thin steel roof and woke William from a tossing sleep. The trailer had no power but was well insulated. He fluffed the hard pillow as best he could and sat up in the low space, feeling like a submariner in a hot bunk. He was sweaty and the rain wouldn’t let up, wouldn’t let him get back to sleep. Somehow time passed and he found himself struggling with a pile of forms on a desk that was too small, trying to puzzle through crooked bookkeeping that could reveal a pattern of long-term embezzlement, or was someone laundering money through a chap nine wrinkled greenhouse?
And what the hell was that? Something he definitely should know for the exam that morning.
Then the slammer swung down from the ceiling and aimed directly at his heart.
Wrong answer, Pete Farrow was saying.
Hotter than ever, William opened his eyes again and let out his breath. You leave the Q, the Q don’t leave you. A line from the FBI Rap. He felt Rebecca walking around in the dining area, then heard her talking on her cell phone.
‘You do what you have to do. I know…I would say that’s a big maybe—best shot, not what I’d call it…Um. Then you just have to let it be. If that’s what you’re looking for.’ She had been speaking softly, gently, but now her tone took an edge. ‘High-class ladies don’t go out for law enforcement. You knew that a year ago. It’s not about what we bring home…Of course. Of course not…Well, I’m sorry to hear it. That’s kind of fatal, don’t you think?’
