His light stabbed down at something broad and white on the gray dirt floor. He tried to focus on it.
‘Can you guys see this?’ he asked. There was no answer, only a digital speckle of notes. He bent over, reached down as best he could—but his hand could not reach the ground. He would have to kneel. Slowly, gingerly, he got down on one knee and lifted the edge of a strip of paper. It was part of a city map. It had been torn in thirds, the rips following the folds, and leaving behind only part of the name of the city.
-esia, Ohio
‘Can you see this?’ he asked again, holding up the paper in his lamp.
‘It’s fuzzy,’ Schell said. ‘Not enough resolution, and besides, we’re losing—’
More digital bird-notes.
Watson peered over his shoulder. Her gloved hand touched the partial name of the city, brushing away gray dust and sparkles. ‘What are these?’ she asked, her thick mitt following red arrows and curved lines advancing over the interrupted streets.
‘Wind direction,’ Griff said. ‘Drift.’
The wire grid. The powder on the leaves. They could have been measuring wind drift in the yard. But what were they packing in the charges?
Yeast?
He got to his feet, trying to fold the map and put it in his
pouch. He smelled something like ethanol and singed rubber.
Watson leaned back and again aimed her light high. The air was fogged by drifting curtains of sparkling dust. Griff saw it then. He saw it all. The frames hanging from the ceiling were being vibrated by an electric motor. A few yards in front of him, he saw and understood the device, the arrangement—a short rubber pulley, an off-center cam with a jiggling post, thin cords attached to all the frames. The dust was falling through fine holes punched in aluminum foil laid in the frame troughs.
The entire apparatus was like a gigantic flour sifter.
At the far end of the room, behind the workbenches, something sizzled. In the corner of his eye, Griff saw a tiny flash of light. In the suit, he had to move like the Sta-Puft marshmallow man. He faced the south wall with three ponderous steps. Two wires had been strapped vertically to the rough concrete wall, inches apart. They looked like copper centipedes.
‘That is sure as hell a spark gap,’ Watson said. ‘Let’s—’ She was interrupted by another sizzle as a loop of electricity surged. It curled and snapped between the ends of the wires and then stopped.
Griff let out his breath.
The strip of map fell from his gloved hands.
Fine dark gray powder lay an eighth of an inch thick all over the floor. The sifters had been vibrating for at least thirty minutes—filling the air with a fog of tiny particles.
He moved toward one of the stalls. ‘Rip-and-zip,’ he told Watson. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘It’s partly aluminum powder,’ Watson said. She held up her gloved hand and brushed it with a thick finger. Her voice was childlike, filled with discovery. ‘Mixed with shellac or rubber, maybe. Jesus, Griff—isn’t that what they use for solid rocket boosters?’
‘Get behind a wall,’ he said, watching the spark gap.
‘Screw this,’ Watson said, her voice going up a notch.
He could no longer see the back of the cellar. The fog was too thick. He could see the sparks, however, reaching out like greedy white fingers in the murk.
He began to pull at the releases. They might make it if they ran as fast as they could up the ramp and out of the barn. Dropping and flattening a few yards from the barn, they might survive—if they weren’t hit by shrapnel or falling debris.
He could imagine the pathways of the force—echoing, compressing, like a monster pushing up with its shoulders, doubling in size each thousandth of a second. The blast would shove against the reinforced concrete, squeeze between the ceiling and the walls, escape through the wood floor at each end, then blow out the concrete floor and lift the entire barn like a cracker box.
Alice tore at her releases in the gray billowing pall.
The gleeful sparks leaped. He would not get out of the suit fast enough. It was so quiet in the basement—just his breath and the jiggle of the racks and a faint sizzle.
Andrews whispered in his ear. ‘The whole sky’s on fire out here, Griff. You should see this.’
Oh, he did.
It came down for him as an instant wall of flame and grabbed him by the neck and the crotch and the armpits, a huge swirling brightness that seared his eyes. His ears went quickly, so he heard nothing as he was tossed to the back of the stall at the speed of an angry thought.
Years later, when, miracle of miracles, he thought he might have gotten away, the pain struck.
The study lounge was quiet for seconds after the screen went blank. No one could believe what they had just seen.
William could not breathe. His eyes had misted over and his hand had actually broken the chair arm.
The barn had blown apart at both ends. A split-second later, the middle had lifted and flown outward in pieces chased by hungry, ugly curls of red and orange flame. Agents had dropped to the ground behind black bomb shields lined up like tombstones. Rubble had rained. A large chunk of frame and siding had crushed the roof of the bomb truck, dropping the truck on its shocks like a stunned bullock.
William had seen one agent, unable to get behind a shield fast enough, fly backward with feet dangling like a doll’s. Smoke and dust had immediately made viewing almost impossible. And then the entire screen had blanked.
A chair creaked. Fouad put his hand on William’s shoulder. Then, shouts and everyone standing, talking. William jumped up from the soft cushions and slammed into the end of a couch. As someone reached out to steady him, he threw up his hands, glared, then ran up the steps for the phone bank. He didn’t have change. Fouad was right behind him, and somehow, Fouad had his phone card out and quickly dialed in his access code.
To William this was all transparent. He hardly saw any of it. He had bitten his tongue again. He tasted the blood in his
mouth and knew it was going to hurt. But a certain bitter irony lapped up like a salty sea around his broken thoughts and fear. Here he was, in one of the nerve centers of the law enforcement world, and he was calling his mother to find out what had happened, to see if she knew anything.
Fouad was not judging, he was just there, and then so was Jane Rowland. William, who towered over them both, saw Pete Farrow striding down the short hall toward them.
‘Who’re you calling, Griffin?’ Farrow asked.
He had not finished dialing the number. He could not remember the last four digits. ‘My mother,’ he said. She had moved into an apartment recently, selling the big old house. The house where he had grown up.
‘I think we should take care of that. We don’t know what happened out there. Not yet.’
William stared at the receiver in shock. ‘Okay,’ he said. Then, plaintively, ‘Did anybody see? Did Griff get out?’
‘I don’t know,’ Farrow said. He took the receiver out of William’s hand, gently prying loose his fingers, and hung it up. Then he gripped William’s elbow. ‘Let’s go.’
Fouad and Jane Rowland followed. Rowland’s face was pale as a sheet. Behind them, members of their class stood in a cluster, staring.
Then they were walking back down the hallway past all the pretty prints. Past the chapel. The chapel was empty. For some reason that struck him. They climbed a flight of stairs. William wasn’t sure where they were going. He could hardly see. He stumbled on the steps. He was crying. He felt ashamed for a moment then looked to one side and saw that Farrow had tears on his cheeks.
They all converged on Farrow’s office. Rowland pulled up a chair. William sat. Someone handed him a cup of water. He sipped. Farrow gave him a handkerchief. William looked down and saw a little blood on his shirt, from his tongue. He wiped his lips and blood came away.
‘Take a deep breath,’ Farrow said. William took it as an order and sucked in a scant mouthful of air.
‘I need to know,’ he said and dabbed at his lips again.
‘We’ll all know soon,’ Farrow said.
‘I want to fly out there. Can you get me on a plane?’
‘We’ll see,’ Farrow said.
‘I’m sorry,’ William said. ‘I’m a mess.’
Farrow bent over him. ‘You have to maintain, Agent Griffin,’ he whispered in William’s ear. ‘This hell is just beginning.’
An agent whom William did not know stepped into the office doorway and spoke in a low voice to Farrow. William caught part of the conversation. At least one dead, several injured. That was all they knew. The barn, what was left of it, was burning. He tried to stand but Jane Rowland was behind him, hands on his shoulders, and for some reason she was holding him down. He looked up at her, twisting his neck painfully. She stared straight ahead and dug in her fingers.
Somehow that calmed him. He stopped struggling.
Farrow knelt in front of him. ‘They haven’t found your father. We’ve lost people outside the barn. One at least. A lot more are injured. It’s an inferno. They’re bringing in fire trucks. You saw what happened, William.’
Graduation would have been the day after tomorrow. They would all drink beer in the boardroom. They could hang out with the instructors and the National Academy people, listen to their stories, smiling and nodding and being humble like the rookies they were. Rowland, Fouad, nearly all of the others, would get their credentials. They would be agents. Agents behaved in a certain way, the FBI way, different even from cops. Learning the FBI way—by osmosis, observation, cruel comment, or just plain being emotionally pounded on—was part of what Quantico was all about.
William stilled an urge to shiver. With Fouad in front of
him and Jane Rowland holding on to his shoulders, he kept himself stiff as a ham.
Farrow was right.
This hell was just beginning.
Tommy’s mother and father had been in their late fifties. Ten years before, using money they had earned in the stock market boom, they had paid a premium for the sprawling Temecula property. They had then invested two thirds of their life savings to turn the old hillside estate into a boutique winery.
Their plan had come a cropper in the wine glut of the last years of the twentieth century, and then had ended with an insect invasion and Pierce’s disease. Never very savvy about either business or the needs of their strange child, they had fallen to arguing, and then to planning for divorce.
Tommy was sensitive to noise.
The world had become too noisy.
In 2000, his parents had died from food poisoning. Sixteen-year-old Tommy had been spared. Everyone around Tommy in those awful days had considered him incapable of taking care of himself. Not quite an imbecile, but strange and inept both socially and financially, so the will had described him: a naïve incompetent.
He had spent most of his time working in a concrete room off the underground vaults where the estate’s wine was stored in rows of oak barrels. ‘All he ever does is putter with chemistry sets and computers,’ the probate court had been told by one of his uncles, a rich fellow who had no interest in the property, the inheritance—or in Tommy.
Tommy had inherited everything, but the court had
appointed a caretaker, his father’s older sister, Aunt Tricia, to watch over his interests until his majority. A cheerful, outdoorsy, garrulous woman in her seventies, Aunt Tricia had refused to take no for an answer, much less sullen silence, and she had promptly packed a few bags into her old Jaguar coupe and taken Tommy traveling.
They had spent three months on the road, between August and October of 2001. They had visited Oklahoma and Illinois, then driven south to Florida and back up the coast to New Jersey and New York. Tommy had been miserable, terrified by so many strange places and strange people—and by what he had heard on the news.
They had then returned to Temecula. Resolute to the end, convinced that Tommy must finally grow up, the formidable Aunt Tricia had been planning a second trip when she died in November of that dreadful, noisy year.
After her death, Tommy had mustered up enough courage to approach several local attorneys before finding one desperate to earn some fees. The attorney had brought Tommy out from under the shadow of court protection. Tommy had then inherited the remainder of his parents’ money, enough to pay taxes and keep him comfortable—if he could ever be comfortable.
Tommy had sought to hide away from a world he knew was trying to find him, a world going to war (he believed he was partly to blame for that), a world that made unexpected and unwanted phone calls and sent him suspicious junk email with impossible promises and lures, a world he knew wanted all of his money and cared nothing for him—an inhospitable world he ‘
thought
’ was going completely mad.
He had stripped away the winery’s signs and erected a barrier across the road to the vineyard.
Within a few years, the winery had been forgotten. The fields, hidden in rolling hills, had dropped off the tourist maps. Tommy had kept to himself, staying well away from
the watchful eye of Homeland Security, even after federal edicts had required registry and yearly inspection of wineries, breweries, and other facilities capable of growing large quantities of microbes.
Aunt Tricia’s jaunt across America had taught Tommy that he had wellsprings of unknown strength. Still, he preferred to leave the estate only at night, driving the El Camino or the red Dodge pickup. Rather than buy more equipment and attract unwanted attention, Tommy had burgled local high schools, junior colleges, even a university, to get what he needed, based on what he read in his large collection of textbooks and stacks of science magazines.
Tommy had proven himself much more than an idiot savant—he had become a wizard of improvisation and stealth. But for Tommy, stealth was not a goal in itself. His true delight lay, as always, in reading about nanotech and biotech, playing around in his lab, learning new techniques—and having people leave him be.
Until he needed to reach out and touch them.
As far as Sam could judge, Tommy had only done that two or three times—the first time with his parents, the second, in 2001, with the mailing of fifteen small envelopes.
The death of Tommy’s aunt was an unknown. Tommy did not discuss it.
But Tommy had grown bored. He was discovering he could do many wonderful things in his small lab, things the experts said were impossible, and he could do them cheaply and efficiently. He had a gnawing wish to be important, to be recognized.
And so once again he had reached out, this time to offer his services to someone who might appreciate them…
Some acquaintances that Sam had acquired in a professional capacity—people deeply interested in ecological issues, or in animal rights—had told him about a strange young man who was offering up his odd skills; a creepy little runt
with big hands and a large head and pig-eyes. Tommy had come to Sam’s attention at an important moment in his own life, a time when he was being stalked by grief and finding his calling—all that he did, all that he thought he believed—less than convincing.
In a professional capacity, Sam had decided to check in on Tommy. In some respects, Sam and Tommy were alike. Sam had been doing some burgling of his own. He had collected surprises about which he had not informed his superiors. Sam and Tommy were both foraging through a world changing far too rapidly to even begin to realize where dangers might hide.
For Sam and Tommy, things had clicked into place like the tumblers in a door lock, and that door had opened onto a new life. Sam had applied all of his charm—bringing groceries, books, installing a new generator. Tommy had stopped retreating under the covers in the middle of every visit. He had blossomed under Sam’s patient attention. The man-boy had even learned a number of rudimentary social skills. He could go out in the daytime, if necessary, and run errands. He could meet people without turning away and mumbling.
And since Sam’s appearance, Tommy had not reached out to touch anybody. Sam had assured him they now had a higher purpose. Of course, putting Tommy to use again put a final nail in the coffin of Sam’s former life, his career—everything he knew.
But those things had long ago stopped being important.
Meeting Tommy had stopped Sam from giving up and killing himself.