Quantico
Greg Bear

To those who put themselves in harm’s way to save us from madness, greed, and folly.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

part one BREWER, BAKER, CANDLESTICK MAKER

Chapter One Guatemala, near the Mexican Border Year Minus Two

Chapter Two Iraq Year Minus One

Chapter Three Year Zero Arizona

Chapter Four FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia

Chapter Five Washington State

Chapter Six Quantico

Chapter Seven Washington State

Chapter Eight El Centro, California

Chapter Nine Washington State

Chapter Ten Quantico

Chapter Eleven Washington State

Chapter Twelve Temecula, California

Chapter Thirteen Quantico

Chapter Fourteen Washington State

Chapter Fifteen Quantico

Chapter Sixteen Temecula, California

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen Washington, DC

Chapter Nineteen Temecula, California

Chapter Twenty Seattle, Washington

Chapter Twenty-one Maryland

Chapter Twenty-two Temecula

Chapter Twenty-three Seattle

Chapter Twenty-four Temecula

part two PILLAR OF FIRE

Chapter Twenty-five The Patriarch’s Farm Snohomish County

Chapter Twenty-six Temecula

Chapter Twenty-seven Snohomish County

Chapter Twenty-eight Virginia

Chapter Twenty-nine Washington State

Chapter Thirty Turkey/Iraq

Chapter Thirty-one Seattle, Harborview Medical Center

Chapter Thirty-two Middle America

Chapter Thirty-three Iraq

Chapter Thirty-four Washington State

Chapter Thirty-five Silesia, Ohio

Chapter Thirty-six Seattle

Chapter Thirty-seven Northern Iraq, near the Turkish Border

Chapter Thirty-eight Silesia, Ohio

Chapter Thirty-nine Seattle

Chapter Forty Northern Iraq

Chapter Forty-one Seattle

Chapter Forty-two Silesia, Ohio

Chapter Forty-three Seattle

Chapter Forty-four Northern Iraq

Chapter Forty-five Silesia, Ohio

part three MEMORY

Chapter Forty-six Trenton, NJ October

Chapter Forty-seven Bethesda, Maryland

Chapter Forty-eight Silesia, Ohio

Chapter Forty-nine Incirlik Air Base Turkey

Chapter Fifty washington, DC

Chapter Fifty-one Silesia, Ohio

Chapter Fifty-two SIOC J. Edgar Hoover Building Washington, DC

Chapter Fifty-three The Hajj Road, ten kilometers from Mecca

Chapter Fifty-four Temecula, California

Chapter Fifty-five Spider/Argus Complex Virginia

Chapter Fifty-six Secure Strategic Support Command (SSSC) Forward Base DAGMAR Jordan

Chapter Fifty-seven Private Home Maryland

Chapter Fifty-eight Mecca

Chapter Fifty-nine Reagan International Airport

Chapter Sixty Hogantown

Chapter Sixty-one Turkey, Iraq

Chapter Sixty-two Mecca

Chapter Sixty-three Federal Correction Institution Cumberland, Maryland Domestic Security Wing

Chapter Sixty-four Mecca

Chapter Sixty-five The Red Sea U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein, SF-TMS 41

Chapter Sixty-six Mecca 9th Day, Dhu-Al-Hijjah

Chapter Sixty-seven SAPTAO Airspace Saudi Arabian Peninsula Tactical Area of Operations Mecca

Chapter Sixty-eight Desert, East of Mina

Chapter Sixty-nine The Red Sea U.S.S. Heinlein

Chapter Seventy Mina

Chapter Seventy-one Arafat, Mina

Chapter Seventy-two

Chapter Seventy-three

Chapter Seventy-four Arafat

After Note

About The Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

part one BREWER, BAKER, CANDLESTICK MAKER

They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God; they have provoked me to anger with their vanities; and I will move them to jealousy with those which are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.

—KJV, Deuteronomy, 32:21, cf. Romans 10:19

…make the town see that he was an enemy of the people, and that the guerillas shot him because the guerillas recognized as their first duty the protection of the citizens.

Central Intelligence Agency Instruction Manual, Psychological Operations in Guerilla Wars

CHAPTER ONE Guatemala, near the Mexican Border Year Minus Two

From the front seat of the Range Rover, the small fat man with the sawed-off shotgun reached back and pulled the hood from his passenger’s head. ‘Too hot, seńor?’ the fat man asked. His breath smelled of TicTacs but that did not conceal the miasma of bad teeth.

The Nortamericano’s short sandy blond hair bristled with sweat. He took a deep breath and looked out at the red brick courtyard and the surrounding lush trees. His eyes were wild before they settled. ‘A little.’

‘I am sorry, and also it is so humid today. It will be nice and cool inside. Senńor Guerrero is a man of much hospitality, once he knows he is safe.’

‘I understand.’

‘Without that assurance,’ the fat man continued, ‘he can be moody.’

Two Indians ran from the hacienda. They were young and hungry-looking and carried AK-47s across their chests. One opened the Range Rover’s door and invited the Nortamericano out with a strong tug. He stepped down slowly to the bricks. He was lanky and taller than the fat man. The Indians spoke Mam to each other and broken Spanish to the driver. The driver smiled, showing gaps in his tobacco-stained teeth. He leaned against the hood and lit a Marlboro. His face gleamed in the match’s flare.

The Indians patted down the tall man as if they did not trust the fat man, the driver, or the others who had accompanied them from Pajapita. They made as if to pat down the driver but he cursed and pushed them away. This was an awkward moment but the fat man barked some words in Mam and the Indians backed off with sour looks. They swaggered and jerked the barrels of their guns. The driver turned away with patient eyes and continued smoking.

The tall man wiped his face with a handkerchief. Somewhere a generator hummed. The roads at the end had been brutal, rutted and covered with broken branches from the recent hurricane. Still the hacienda seemed to have suffered no damage and glowed with lights in the dusk. In the center of the courtyard a small fountain cast a single stream of greenish water two meters into the air. The stream splashed through a cloud of midges. Small bats swooped back and forth across the blue dusk like swallows. A lone little girl with long black hair, dressed in shorts, a halter top, and pink sandals, played around the fountain. She stopped for a moment to look at the tall man and the Range Rover, then swung her hair and resumed playing.

The fat man walked to the back of the truck and opened the gate. He pulled down a quintal bag of coffee. It thudded and hissed on the bricks as the beans settled.

‘Mr. Guerrero uses no drugs but for coffee, and that he drinks in quantity,’ the fat man said. He squinted one eye. ‘We will wait for you here.’ He tapped his platinum watch. ‘It is best to be brief.’

A small old woman wearing a long yellow and red cotton dress approached from the hacienda and took the tall man by the hand. She smiled up at him and led him across the courtyard. The little girl watched with a somber expression. Beneath a fine dark fuzz, her upper lip had the faint pink mark of a cleft palate that had been expertly repaired. The bronze gates before the hacienda’s patio were decorated with roughly cast figures of putti, little angels doing chores such as carrying fruit. The angels’ eyes, sad but resigned, resembled the eyes of the old woman and their color was a good match for her skin. Beyond a serious iron door and then a glass door, the hacienda’s centrally cooled air stroked the tall man’s face. Music played through the broad white rooms—light jazz, Kenny G. The old woman showed him to a white couch and pushed him back until he sat. She knelt and removed his shoes, replacing them with sandals from a pouch concealed in the folds of her dress.

Mr. Guerrero appeared alone in the doorway to the dining room. He was small and well-formed and he wore a yellow and black Hawaiian shirt tucked in and white linen pants and a rope belt. His hair was thick and dark. He looked like a well-to-do man pretending to be a beachcomber.

‘Mr. Santerra, welcome,’ Guerrero said. ‘I trust your ride was sincerely terrible.’

The tall man, whose name was not Santerra, held up a small cloth bag. Glass vials jingled softly inside. ‘At least nothing broke.’

Guerrero’s cheek jerked. ‘It is done, then?’

‘Proof of concept,’ the tall man said. ‘Pure and lethal. Try it on someone you no longer need.’

Guerrero held up his hands. ‘I am not that kind of man,’ he said. ‘We will test it in a lab, with animals. If it is what you say, you will be given your next money at a place of our choosing. Money is not safe here or in the islands. Terrorism has forced your nation to pay too much attention to world banking.’

A large balding black man in a black suit entered from the kitchen and walked around Guerrero. He stood in front of the tall man and held out his hand. He received the bag and opened it carefully. Three vials filled with fine powder tinkled into his pink palm. ‘You realize this is not the final product,’ the black man said in a reedy voice with an Austrian accent, to Guerrero. ‘It proves nothing.’

Guerrero waved his hand, dismissing that concern. ‘You will tell me if they have proven good faith before the next payment. Correct, Seńor Santerra?’

The tall man nodded.

‘I may never see an end to this trouble,’ Guerrero said. He had not taken a step closer since the tall man held up the cloth bag. ‘But I hope my children will. Have you viewed the movie, M, Seńor Santerra?’

The tall man shook his head.

‘The underworld of Germany seeks out a child molester and puts him on trial because he is bringing down so much heat on their operations. It is so here. If you keep your promise, we will give those thoughtless monsters what they deserve.’ He paused, allowing the black Austrian to leave the room with the bag. Then he sat on a heavy wooden chair. His face was lined with years of worry. ‘You have a dangerous quality. It makes me want to trust you.’

The tall man did not acknowledge this compliment, if it was one.

‘I appreciate that you have come in person. When can I expect news?’

‘Within three months, at most six.’ The tall man held out his hand to shake on their deal.

Guerrero looked down at the hand. His cheek twitched once more. He looked decades older than his forty years. ‘Now you will go,’ he said.

The old bronze woman hustled into the room again and knelt to replace the tall man’s shoes. He stood and walked to the door.

In the courtyard, they had kept the engine running. The little girl had gone inside. The driver extinguished his cigarette and deposited the butt in a tin he drew from his pocket.

The fat man opened the door to the Range Rover and dangled the hood from one hand, smiling. ‘There are too many bats around here,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is because there are so many insects.’

CHAPTER TWO Iraq Year Minus One

The red plastic beads on the curtain rattled like finger bones in a cup.

The man who stepped down into the coffee house had yellow hair. He wore sunglasses, as did almost every man in Baghdad, a city of thieves, killers, and merchants. Fine dust swirled from his shoes as he pushed them through a double brush set in the bricks. For a moment, he turned up his nose and frowned as if possessed by some noble doubt, and his temple and cheek were lit by a false hope of rubies. A hero, obviously—an Englishman perhaps—tall and slender and possibly strong, though that was difficult to judge beneath the baggy cut of his linen coat.

Ibrahim Al-Hitti watched from the small round table and pulled in his polished black shoes, not wishing them to be trampled. There was little room in the basement, few tables and fewer customers. A one-eyed cousin of a cousin owned the establishment and had been persuaded it could be used on occasion as a place of personal business, not to be asked after. He would literally turn a blind eye to any activities. That plump and ill-dressed relative now stood behind the small black bar surrounded by a rising cloud of steam from an old espresso machine imported, so he boasted, from Italy. The steam frightened two horseflies seeking refuge from the outer heat. They buzzed and batted until settling on the plaster wall beside a small fogged mirror. The air in the basement café was humid and hot like the rest of Iraq this time of year, a climate fit for sordid talk and deeds.

Al-Hitti had been born in Yemen but had spent most of his youth in Egypt and England. He had no love for Iraq and he did not like Iraqis in general. This part of town, near Firdos Square—allegedly cooled by breezes off the Tigris—was frequented by businessmen mostly and the secretaries and office workers of Shiite clerics. Businessmen he despised. Of clerics he held no opinions.

Though a Muslim and a Sunni, Al-Hitti was of that pragmatic sect that had proliferated in the Middle East in the last century—a nonaligned brotherhood most interested in diverting the rivers of power. Religious passions had divided Muslims for too many centuries and only made them weak. What would bring them together and restore lost glory were the cool efforts of the mind, working to enact difficult, some would say sordid deeds.

The tall man removed his sunglasses, unafraid to reveal his face. Al-Hitti saw immediately that he was American, not English—they were as different in step and behavior to his discerning eye as Ethiopians and Somalis. So this was the one whom he was scheduled to meet. It was an appointment he had not looked forward to. A disappointment.

He enjoyed playing with English words.

And he was even less happy now that he saw that the man he would have to kill was in fact a decent-looking fellow with strong features and even a respectable tan. That English word, tan, appeared in his head, surrounded by half-naked women. This irritated him.

The American caught his eye and stepped forward, walking lightly around the tables to the rear of the shop. To Al-Hitti he offered his right hand and in low, mellow tones introduced himself. His name was John Brown. He was from Massachusetts—a silly, sneezing sort of name for a place. His Arabic was of the Cairo variety and surprisingly good.

‘You are just as I imagined you,’ Al-Hitti told the American, a lie. He had imagined instead a small, furtive man wearing loose clothing.

‘Is it so?’ the American said, and pulled back a flimsy wrought-iron chair to sit. They both measured out tiny smiles.

The cousin arrived to take their orders. He pointedly ignored the American, turning his good eye from that part of the room. John Brown did not seem to mind.

As Al-Hitti waited for a glass of thick sweet tea, he examined the American closely. Their silence drew out. His first impression had been one of quiet strength, a man who would appeal to women. But Al-Hitti’s deeper instincts made him less certain. There were telling lines in the American’s face and a determined sadness that reminded Al-Hitti of an old fighter—not a soldier, who could be casually cruel and blame others, but a mountain guerilla, used to working and living alone for months and having no one to blame but himself.

John Brown’s appearance was made more striking by the fact that he had one blue eye and one green eye. Al-Hitti had never seen such a thing.

The American put his hand to his chest. ‘Before you decide whether or not to kill me…’ He reached swiftly into his coat pocket and pulled out a heat-sealed plastic packet full of beige powder.

Al-Hitti reacted as if stung by one of the horseflies. He pushed back, eyes wide, and his chair banged into another chair. ‘What is this?’

‘A sample,’ the American answered.

‘Complete?’ Al-Hitti asked, his voice rising in pitch.

The American raised his chin. ‘Not yet. Soon.’

Al-Hitti refused to handle the package until he saw his courage was in question and that the American was rapidly losing confidence. It was probably fake, anyway. Anything else would be too much to hope for. He took it. The plastic was beaded with sweat from the American’s hands, but inside, the powder was miraculously fine and light, clinging and dry.

A handful of a hundred thousand miseries.

‘Tell your scientists, or your graduate students at university, to examine it with great care,’ the American instructed. ‘It will behave like a gas, penetrating everywhere if not properly handled. They will tell you that it is pure and that it has been genetically modified, but it is not complete. Not yet. Try it on someone you wish dead. Let your subject breathe a few grains, or swallow it, or touch it to his skin. In time, examined in the dark, his lesions will glow green and then red. These inserted genes are proof that we can do what we say.’

Al-Hitti could not help avoiding the tall American’s gaze. There was something about the blue eye that reminded him of the sky over a desert waste.

Al-Hitti leaned forward. ‘What sort of proof is this, just a package of powder extracted from the soil of Texas, where a steer has died, perhaps? How can we believe the rest of your story?’ Al-Hitti held the package out between two fingers. ‘I hear this is easy to make. That is what I am told.’

‘Believe what fools say,’ the American said, ‘less the fools they.’ He brought forth a small knife, pulled open a blade, and laid it on the table between them. ‘Rub it on your skin like baby powder. Let’s breathe it together.’

Al-Hitti shrugged too quickly, hiding a shudder. ‘We are not here to piss up a wall.’

‘No,’ the American said.

‘When will the final product be ready?’

‘When money is made available. I will conduct my own tests and you will do yours. Then, next year…Jerusalem.’

‘There are very few Jews in Iraq. Saddam no longer protects them, and the clerics…’ He lowered his eyelids. He was getting ahead of himself, like a cart before a horse.

‘Until the gene sockets are filled, as specified, Jews need fear this no more than you or I,’ the American said. ‘And no less.’

‘Who is paying for what you have done so far, a Wahhabi?’ Al-Hitti asked with quiet anger. ‘May he die in the bed of an incontinent pig.’ Al-Hitti did not like Wahhabis. What they had done to maintain their hold on power had killed many of his best men. Now, all Saudi Arabia was in turmoil. Just retribution had finally arrived.

The American noiselessly pushed back his chair. He looked down on Al-Hitti.

‘If I say yes, and arrange for people, and the money is given?’

‘Then we will meet next year,’ the American said.

The cousin’s cousin had had enough, and a crack like a tiny shot sounded in the small coffee house. Al-Hitti turned to look. The proprietor raised a swatter besmirched by horsefly.

When Al-Hitti turned back, the American was at the door, parting the beaded curtain. Another horsefly entered with a looping buzz and the American was gone.

The proprietor returned to the table to remove the glass. He stared at Al-Hitti through his one good eye. ‘Is it that you are taking tea alone today?’ he asked.

No one of any importance in Iraq other than himself could remember seeing a pale blond American with the face of a warrior and eyes of two different colors. But there was always the plastic bag. And what was in it was true. Indeed, very true.

Al-Hitti had the powder examined and then tested. It made five kidnapped Iraqi businessmen and two secretaries of the clerics ill and pitiable. In the dark, their lesions glowed first green and then red, so the doctors reported to people that Al-Hitti knew.

And then they died, all of them.

As the months passed, Al-Hitti came to believe that it would actually happen. His hope reflected how bad things had become for his people. Three years ago, the Dome of the Rock had been blown to pieces by a Jewish terrorist to make way for the rebuilding of their Temple. In response, a few weeks later, on October the fourth—thereafter known as 10-4—another blow had been struck against the financier of all things evil, the United States. Thousands had died. Though he had secretly approved and even gloated, it had made Al-Hitti’s job that much harder.

The Israelis were now assassinating the immediate families of suicide bombers and leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah. Muslim youth rushed to destruction and did not seem to care that by so doing they were also condemning their brothers and sisters, their mothers and fathers—and then, their uncles and cousins. Back and forth, the slaughter turned all into monsters.

In the late summer or early fall, he knew, Saudi Arabia would be invaded by tens of thousands of anti-Wahhabists working out of Sudan, Oman, and Iraq. Irony of ironies, it was said Americans were financing a number of the insurgents, including Iraqis, in hopes of replacing the House of Saud with a more stable regime. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. For the time being.

Once again Muslims were engaged in Takfir wa Hijra, condemnation and exile, killing nonbelievers and traitors—Westerners and Muslims alike—to reclaim the holy lands.

The next hot wind would blow from the desert and cleanse the world like a pillar of fire.

CHAPTER THREE Year Zero Arizona

Special Agent Rebecca Rose stared through the window of the FBI Econoline van at the dark desert along the highway. Brian Botnik from the Phoenix Field Office looked sideways at Rose in the front passenger seat. She rubbed her hand nervously over her knee—gray pants, cuff of dark pink cotton blouse protruding half an inch from her coatsleeve, fingers thin and strong, red-enameled nails bitten short and chipped. It was five a.m. and she could almost see the heat of the past day rising slowly into space. That’s what happened at night—the Earth shed its heat like a cooling corpse. The sun hid away, nowhere to be seen; maybe it would never return.

‘Gerber’s a good fellow,’ Botnik said. ‘But he hates being kept in the dark. So tell me—why are we keeping him in the dark?’ Botnik was a big man with a deep voice, a tight stomach, farmer’s hands, and sandy hair—attractive, had she the energy to think about such things. Ten years younger than her, she guessed, but neither inexperienced nor a dummy.

Rose smiled. ‘Because if I tell him why we’re interested, he’ll think we’re idiots.’

‘I’m open to that possibility,’ Botnik said, flashing a grin.

‘Hush,’ Rose said.

Two FBI analysts sat in the middle seat behind them. Both were young, white, clean-cut, and male. Both were respectful and earnest. Little pitchers have big ears. The younger, whiter, and more clean-cut the male agent, the more likely he would talk behind her back.

After the flights and the drive from Tucson, she was bone-tired and on the edge of hallucinations; her science and most of her sense had fled. But she had to stay tactical. This would not be easy. Every cop seemed to regard FBI agents, especially senior agents, as short-timers going down for the third time in a flood of politics. Some felt sorry, others exhibited a parochial gloat. It was getting harder and harder to focus on work even when she wasn’t exhausted.

The headline of the newspaper folded across the divider read:

FBI ‘PATRIOT’ FILES KEPT ON

6 DEM SENATORS, VP:

‘Traitors to the Nation’, Dossiers Claim

Rose was acquainted with the agents who had prepared those dossiers. Two were clowns; she had thought that the other six were good men. Now they were buried in the depths of Headquarters or testifying before a federal grand jury. One and all, they had messed their britches.

Screw that. Just do your job.

The first sign of happy times along the highway was a single-vehicle set of peel-out marks. Sixty yards further on, deep truck-tire gouges marred the right shoulder. In the blink of an eye, a second pair of smudges like strokes of artist’s charcoal extended for thirty feet. A half-mile beyond that, multiple curving conga lines of laid-down rubber—some parallel, some crossing—played with the divider for a hundred yards. Those tracks ended at an overturned and battered big rig trailer.

Patrol officers were stationed to flag drivers through the single open lane. At this hour of the morning there was almost no traffic.

Botnik steered the Econoline to the side of the road, parking behind a gray Suburban marked with Arizona’s rising sun. As Rose stepped out and stretched, the young agents pulled aluminum cases from the rear of the van. Botnik introduced her to three Department of Public Safety officers. Lieutenant Colonel Jack Gerber, the Deputy Director of Criminal Investigations, had been dispatched from Phoenix along with two analysts. They had been waiting at the scene for three hours. Remarkably they were still willing to pretend not to be teed off.

Gerber was a tall lean man in his late forties with straight black hair and a brown boyish face lacking any trace of a beard. Multi-racial, Rose judged: American Indian, Anglo, and some black. America’s future. His eyes were brown and his large fingernails curved around the upper half of each fingertip, rounded and neatly manicured.

Rose walked with Gerber and Botnik back along the highway and studied the scene from the beginning of the skid marks. Gerber was explaining what little they knew. ‘The chase must have begun about ten miles back. Patrolman Porter queried the truck’s RFLM—Radio Frequency License and Manifest transponder—and got a bogus authentication. When the truck’s driver ignored his lights and siren and the truck failed to respond to Cop Block, the patrolman became aware he might have a situation. We get a lot of drug traffic. Patrolman Porter was an excellent officer, very keen on his job.’

All cars and trucks in the U.S. were now required to have Cop Block. A patrol car could radio a coded signal that slowed and then shut down the engine. Workarounds were illegal and the fines were expensive, plus real jail time.

The rig had jackknifed and the trailer had flipped and twisted the truck along with it, corkscrewing the rear frame and tires a quarter turn. The International 9200 had then split off from the trailer and skidded on its side for fifty-two yards, leaving a broad scrape of paint and sidewall rubber and lots of fresh gray grooves in the asphalt. The trailer’s rear doors had sprung open and about a third of the contents had tumbled out, depositing a trail of white boxes along the road, most of them intact.

They were all inkjet printers.

Rose held back an urge to request that the trailer and the boxes be marked off and tested by a HAZMAT team. Too early and too obvious, a tipping of her hand. She had yet to bring out her WAGD—pronounced Wag-Dee, for Wright Assay Germ Detector—a biohazard analyzer the size and shape of a large Magic Marker. She carried two in her coat pocket. Some in the field called the WAGD the Death Stick. Others had corrupted the acronym to ‘We’re All Gonna Die.’

One of the white boxes had ripped open. She pulled back a flap and bent to peer inside. The printer had fallen out of its foam packing. Its top had broken off, exposing the metal tracking bars and ribbon cables within. The cartridge wells were empty.

‘We’re still not sure what happened after that,’ Gerber said. ‘Porter must have been ahead of the truck when it flipped—it’s our procedure to park behind an accident and switch on all lights, to warn traffic. At around eight p.m., the officer was shot three times. He had not called in the wreck, and he did not call in his situation. He must have been surprised. We think there was another man, perhaps hiding in the trailer. The officer did manage to get off two shots. Neither of them hit the truck.’

‘Patrolman Porter’s Infodeck—when did it last make its uplink?’

‘Seven forty-one,’ Gerber said. ‘Nothing unusual. He was at the Bluebird Tall Stack, a truck stop. You passed it on the way here.’

‘We did,’ Rose said.

The reflecting tape between the lighted mobile cone barriers flapped in the early morning breeze. A patrolman waved through a small silver Toyota. It drove slowly around the scene, well clear of the rippling tape, its middle-aged female driver goggling.

Colonel Gerber was being straightforward and professional, and for that Rose was grateful. She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a WAGD, hiding most of it in her palm and up her sleeve, then swiftly uncapped it, bent over the open printer box, and ran the moist gel tip along the inside and across the printer carriage. She capped and pocketed the device, then moved on with Gerber.

Twenty yards further on, the patrol car was a blackened shell hunkered on the right shoulder and facing the wrong direction—east. It had been set on fire with gas siphoned from its own tank. The patrol car’s tires had burned to the steel belts. Melted aluminum traced shiny rivers down to the roadside gravel. Whatever onboard data—video, officer commentary, the contents of the patrol car’s orange box—that had not been transferred by satellite link from the car’s Infodeck had been destroyed.

A small grass fire had been extinguished by a quick light rain minutes after the wreck.

The officer’s body had been found on the north shoulder of the road, ten yards from the burnt-out patrol car. The body had been removed by the Pima County Medical Examiner but a silver marker line still recorded its outline. A rain-diluted smear of blood pointed in the direction of the cruiser, about thirty feet away.

In the center of the outline, a small spherical projector sitting on a hammered peg threw out grainy patterns of blue and red light.

‘Glasses?’ Rose asked.

Gerber offered a pair from his pocket. She unfolded the temple pieces and slipped them on. The officer’s body came into clear view, frozen in place and lit all around by multiple strobes. Legs straight, arms limp and angled.

‘The body was moved before we got here,’ Gerber said.

She walked around the projector and stooped. Patrolman Porter’s body looked perfectly solid against the black pavement. Had he been closer to the cruiser, he would have burned. Someone dragged him across the highway. A bystander? The killer?

Why have empathy for a dead or dying cop?

Projectors were good but the emotional assault of seeing an actual corpse always heightened her senses. Death so close, injustice everywhere. Still, the photographer had done a good job. The 3-D image was clean and sharp. In a few hours, no doubt, the ME and the CID would merge their data and she could call up the same projection and see a reconstruction of the officer’s stance, the lines along which the slugs had traveled, his reaction to the force of tons of accelerated mass hitting his shoulder, his chest, his neck.

The FBI evidence techs had fanned out along the road and were busy taking pictures, checking the interior of the truck’s cab, scraping paint and rubber off the road, setting up survey poles and lasers, repeating much of what Gerber’s people had already done.

‘You still haven’t told me why the feds are interested in a few hundred gray-market computer printers,’ Gerber said. ‘Obsolete models, too.’

‘We’re curious where the truck was going. Whether it had any escorts.’

Gerber flipped his hand at the International. ‘There’s no driver log, no valid license, no bills of lading or any of the records required for interstate transport. The truck seems to have been modified in Mexico and driven across state lines about two months ago—we have a video of a rig with that federal ID number crossing the border at that time, with all its papers in order. But the last registered owner claims he sold it in Mexico six years ago. Still, the truck had a Grit Mitt and seemed to be trying to meet current highway standards—other than Cop Block, of course. Nor are there any signs of these printers being a dummy cargo—our K-9s just looked bored. We’re still pursuing the trail…but backwards, not forwards. I have no idea where this rig was going, and if we don’t catch the second man, or woman, we’ll probably never know.’

‘Second man or woman?’

‘Just a possibility. Someone gave our perp or perps a ride. Between here and the next town it’s fifty miles of nothing. Long walk. We’ve looked. And no hospital here or across either border reports anyone with gunshot injuries.’ He rubbed a light stubble on his chin. ‘We’re done. Let us know when can we clear our highway.’

‘Thanks for your patience. I need another hour.’

‘Porter was a smart patrolman. Nobody could have just got the drop on him,’ Gerber said. ‘This whole thing is an awful mess.’

‘Amen,’ Rose said, getting back to her feet. She folded the glasses and returned them to Gerber. ‘Was Porter married?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Gerber said. He called to one of his analysts, a short, plump man with a dapper mustache. ‘Earl, was Porter married?’

‘No, sir,’ Earl said, glad to get in on the conversation. He had been checking out Rose. ‘Never married. Patrol was his life. Well, he liked to drive to Vegas once a year.’

‘Eager?’ Rose asked.

‘The best always are,’ Gerber said. He sniffed and peered around the highway and the distant hills. His irritation was about to break through. ‘As long as you’re here, I’d be fascinated to hear your take. I’m sure it’s filled with exceptional, FBI-level insight.’

Sometimes, cops let other cops reel out a little rope. Whoever went first was eager to jump to conclusions. Earl backed off and returned to his group.

Rose said, ‘I’m curious as to how your cruiser ends up spun around in front of a jackknifed semi.’

‘A curious situation,’ Gerber agreed.

‘You’ve had problems with escort vehicles that can interrupt communications. Are you looking for a jammer?’ Rose glanced up at Botnik, ten yards off. He could hear their conversation. He gave her a quick nod, out of Gerber’s sight.

‘Should we be?’ Gerber asked innocently.

‘There could have been two vehicles,’ Rose continued, ‘one traveling a few minutes behind the other. The first, our International and its trailer, must have attracted Porter’s attention. He decided to bird-dog the rig and look for an excuse to pull it over.’

‘Okay,’ Gerber said, and stuck his hands in his pockets. They were walking side by side now, the best of chums.

The WAGD was still quiet.

‘The second vehicle could have followed at a discreet distance,’ Rebecca said. ‘Porter lit up and pulled the rig over for inspection. Maybe the driver couldn’t produce the right papers. He called for backup but didn’t get a response.’

‘We received no request for backup,’ Gerber said, but he wasn’t disagreeing.

‘Porter’s Infodeck told him he was off the grid and he couldn’t make direct radio contact. His display told him he was being jammed.’

‘All right.’

‘With the rig pulled over, the occupant or occupants of the second vehicle decided to make a run for it. Porter suspected this was the jammer, got his wind up, ordered his first quarry to stay put, and took off after the second truck.’

Gerber looked thoughtful. ‘Evidence?’ he asked pleasantly.

‘Nothing, really,’ Rose said. ‘Unless we count tire marks a few miles back, two vehicles peeling out, not far from a long set of truck tracks in the gravel.’

‘Mm,’ Gerber said, and his smile broadened. She wasn’t ahead of him yet. He knew about those marks. ‘Jammers work for hire and don’t carry contraband. Porter knew the drill. He would have let the little one go.’

‘But you said he was a gambler,’ Rose said. ‘Right? Unmarried, eager, a Vegas kind of guy. Patrol was his life. For just a few seconds, he couldn’t think past the glory of making a twofer—of pulling over a rich cargo, and grabbing a jammer besides.’

‘Are we about to cast aspersions on an officer who can’t defend himself?’ Gerber asked. His face was professionally blank but his pupils had widened.

‘Not at all,’ Rose said. ‘Happens to the best of us.’

Gerber squinted. ‘Tell me, why would any driver risk a chase and the hoosegow for a load of old printers?’

Gerber had spent a lifetime figuring out what people were really interested in. Rose walked back toward the burnt-out patrol car. ‘Porter reacquired his perspective after a peek in the rear view mirror. He saw the rig get underway and quickly decided to give up on the jammer. He and the rig played a little chicken. Risky, but maybe not out of character. He got in front and tried to brake the rig to a stop—got tapped, spun out…and the rig jackknifed and flipped. Porter ended up by the side of the road, reversed.’

She stood beside the distorted, blackened curve of the cruiser’s driver’s side door. ‘Porter squatted behind the door and drew down on the truck cab. Based on chase maneuvers and the spin-out, his Infodeck would have automatically attempted to re-connect and call for urgent backup, and he probably surmised the jammer would soon be out of range.’

‘All right,’ Gerber said. ‘Now explain to me, how did he end up getting shot? Did the jammer return? Was he caught in a crossfire?’

Botnik and Earl approached. ‘No fingerprints or blood inside the truck cab,’ Botnik told Rose. ‘No food items or cups or urine jugs. Nothing much at all. We’re fuming and dusting the exterior, but I’ll bet the driver was wearing gloves.’

Rose stood behind the burned-out cruiser door, looked back at the rig, drew sight-lines. Then she and Botnik crossed the highway and walked along the south side. Gerber and Earl glanced both ways for traffic—the road was almost empty—and followed. ‘Did you work the ditch here, off the shoulder?’ she asked.

Gerber turned to Earl. The younger man shook his head, uncertain whether he was admitting to a mistake.

Botnik caught on right away. ‘Jesus. Sounds like some sort of combat vet.’

Gerber was now the one short on rope. He looked along the length of the ditch and saw how a man could have exited the International and crawled along the ditch without being seen. His face wrinkled. ‘Shit.’

‘After the wreck,’ Rose said, ‘Porter may have called for the driver to get out or shout if he was unable to comply.’ She took two steps into the ditch, put her hand on her hips, raised her right arm, then lined up her eye and her pointing finger with the position that Porter would have assumed beside his cruiser. ‘From this angle, the shooter could have watched and waited until Porter got impatient and stood up. The first shot passed over the hood and between the door and the window frame and hit Porter in his left shoulder. Porter may have been knocked half about, then lurched forward and hung on to the door. The second shot could have passed through his neck, spinning him around again, and the third impacted the chest. The neck wound, was it from the side or rear?’

Gerber pointed to the right rear of his own neck.

She stepped gingerly along the rocks. ‘Rough crawl, but someone well-trained could have done it in thirty seconds or less. Your shooter pushed up…Here and here.’ She pointed to the rain-softened remains of two gouges, one shallow, one deep in the gravel and dirt. ‘Knee mark. Toe of shoe or boot digging in. No sole imprint. He shot your patrolman three times, then walked across the highway and made sure he was dead or dying. The assailant then dragged Porter away from the car.’

She finished with, ‘Our shooter unplugged the Infodeck, removed the officer’s data vest, tossed it in the car, then set the car on fire and cooked the memory so there wouldn’t be any record. But for some reason, the assailant was squeamish about letting an officer burn. Even a dead one.’

Gerber’s jaw muscles flexed. ‘All that, for old printers?’ he asked.

Botnik gave Rose a hard stare.

‘I can’t see it,’ Gerber said. ‘Too many holes. I think we have drug runners getting creative. Maybe this time, the escort vehicle carried both contraband and jamming equipment, with the International truck, full of a dummy load, acting as decoy. Hell, you could pack ten million dollars worth of Tart in a suitcase. Maybe Porter saw the printers, surmised the rig wasn’t carrying, and went after the jammer. That explains the tire tracks.’

‘Then why would the driver of the rig light out?’ Rose asked. ‘Why not just stay put, act innocent, plead to a misdemeanor and get a ticket?’

Because he did not want anyone to learn about his printers.

The bastard knows I’m looking for him.

‘I believe in the competence of our patrol officers,’ Gerber said, his face flushed. ‘We’re done here, Agent Rose.’

‘Mm hmm.’ Rose knelt in the gravel and rocks and looked hard at the ground around the knee imprint and the toe mark. Didn’t feel right torching an officer. What sort of smuggler…?

A former cop?

Rose pictured the driver of the International biting on his glove’s fingers to pull it off. It could have dangled from his teeth as he fired at Porter. She got down on her hands and knees. Urban cops tended to wear close-weave protected gloves, to reduce the chances of cuts or needle pricks during pat-downs. Many wore Turtleskins. Rose preferred Friskmasters. ‘Did anybody find a glove?’ she asked.

‘No, ma’am,’ Gerber said.

Rebecca measured the distance between the toe marks. A smooth stone in just the right place had been pressed down and twisted, the dirt scrunched up around its perimeter. She picked it up. A fleashit speck of rain-washed blood had fallen on the tumbled-smooth surface. She palmed the stone, and then saw another drop of blood, unmistakable, on a pebble nested in a patch of sand. ‘Something here,’ she said. The young analysts joined her in the ditch. As they worked over the area, she pocketed the larger rock, unseen.

‘Could be a ground squirrel or a coyote,’ Gerber said with a sniff.

‘I’d like to be copied on any human DNA results.’

‘Of course.’ Gerber knelt beside her. ‘It’s a golden age of cooperation.’

Botnik walked beside Rose back to the Suburban. ‘Gerber’s a good guy. He won’t stand in our way if we need something. And don’t get me wrong. If Hiram Newsome shows an interest in inkjet printers, I’ll be there for you with bells on.’

‘Thanks,’ Rose said. ‘Has your Minitest been certified recently?’

‘Not in the last month,’ Botnik said.

‘Can I borrow a plastic bag?’

One of the young agents gave her a baggie. She pulled the rock from her pocket and slipped it into the baggie, inspecting it to make sure the blood speck was still there.

‘Jesus,’ Botnik said, and whapped the steering wheel with his hand. ‘This is just the kind of federal arrogance that’s killing us.’

‘They have blood evidence, we have blood evidence,’ Rose said, deadpan. ‘Pima County ME lost its board certification again last year. Arizona CID is backed up for days or even weeks. And you haven’t even primed your Minitest. What’s a poor girl to do?’

Botnik turned a fine ruddy shade. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ve got it figured out. But you still have a problem. You still have to learn where the suspect was going. Maybe somebody around here can help. To that end, I’m hoping you’ll spread at least a little enlightenment.’

‘Thanks again,’ Rose said. ‘But we have reasons to keep it quiet.’

‘Quiet?’ Botnik chuckled. ‘This is the worst-kept secret in the FBI. It’s got something to do with Amerithrax. The only question I have is, what the hell’s the connection?’

Rose took a shallow breath.

‘I do crossword puzzles,’ she said. ‘Sometimes, when I can’t solve one right away, I put it aside. Some of my puzzles have been waiting for years.’

‘Secrecy is most of why we’re boots up in a pile of shit,’ Botnik said. ‘What if there’s another anthrax attack and you could have prevented it by sharing?’

Rose stared straight ahead.

‘Is there going to be another attack?’ Botnik asked.

She climbed into the truck. The WAGD in her pocket buzzed. No squeeee of alarm, just a little warning buzz: all done. ‘Keep the rest of the boxes sealed and make sure nobody pokes around the open ones. Take along a HAZMAT team. I’d like a thorough fingerprint check and PCR on all of them. If HAZMAT clears them, I’d like them quietly removed from state jurisdiction and impounded as federal terrorist evidence. Send them on to Frank Chao at Quantico.’

Botnik shrugged. ‘You got it.’ The two field agents climbed into the seats behind.

‘You’re investigating jammers, right?’ Rose asked.

‘We are,’ Botnik said.

‘What priority?’

‘Moderate.’

‘Push it higher. Let’s spread the theory that jammers might have killed Porter. And if you find our particular jammer, let me know.’

‘Anything to help.’

The sun was coming up. ‘Could we drive west for a few miles?’ Rose asked. ‘Slowly. Before we return to Tucson.’

‘I hear and obey,’ Botnik said, and salaamed lightly over the steering wheel. ‘Looking for something in particular?’

‘Just being thorough.’ She leaned her head back, mouth gaping, pulled down one eyelid with a finger, and deposited a drop of Visine. She treated the other eye, returned the Visine to her coat, and removed the marker-sized analyzer. Reading small print was becoming harder and harder. The narrow LCD panel flashed happy zeroes. No WAGD biohazards were on the printer or inside the box. No anthrax. She hadn’t really expected any. They wouldn’t use the printers and then pack them up and ship them. Nobody was that stupid—nobody still alive.

Half a mile down the road, she spotted something crumpled and black on the gravel shoulder. Botnik stopped to let her retrieve it.

‘Hatch Friskmaster, right hand,’ she said as she climbed back into the Suburban. Botnik pulled out another Baggie. She slipped it in and he sealed it.

The earnest agent sitting directly behind her looked impressed. He held up a Thermos. ‘Coffee?’

‘Christ, no thanks,’ she said briskly, her cheeks flushed. ‘I’d jump out of my skin.’

Her slate buzzed in her pocket and she jerked. Botnik lifted the corners of his lips. ‘Just like that,’ she said, then answered the slate.

‘Rebecca, it’s News.’ Hiram Newsome—News to friends and close associates—was Assistant Director of Training Division at Quantico. He had taught Rebecca most of what she knew and had long supported her work on this unfinished puzzle. ‘Tell Botnik to haul your ass back to Tucson. I’ve chartered you a jet to Seattle. Someone’s been ordering medical equipment they have no honest use for. I’ve told Griff you’re coming in. He’s irritated, of course.’

‘Erwin Griffin?’

‘The same. Play nice, Rebecca.’

‘Always,’ Rebecca said.

CHAPTER FOUR FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia

Quantico is cop Valhalla. They say good cops go there when they die. Every day you solve crimes, make arrests, study hard, work out, do target practice, and at the end of the day you get together with your fellow agents in the boardroom, swig back some beers, and laugh. Hardly nobody gets hurt, nobody locks their doors, everyone knows the rules, and the bad guys always lose.

—Note pasted on a bulletin board, Jefferson Dormitory, FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia

I’m FBI. More beef!

—Apocryphal incident in New York between an FBI agent and a deli sandwich maker.

Hogantown covered twelve acres on the sprawling Academy campus, nestled between copses of pine, maple, and dogwood. The most crime-ridden town in America, possibly on Earth, Hogantown used to look small and quaint, like a backlot movie set—Hogan’s Alley. Now it was an entire town with real apartments—for role-players and directors—and real stakeouts and real-time, year-around crime taking a month or more to solve and involving multiple classes of agent trainees. The town had a functioning drug store, AllMed, and a good-sized Giga-Mart that was a favorite hangout for Marines.

Hogantown employed fourteen crime scenarists who surveyed the goings-on—alongside teachers and directors—from hidden walkways. It was the world’s biggest training center for law enforcement—even larger than the Gasforth complex at Bram’s Hill in England.

Crime and terror had been good to Hogantown.

Invisible flame shot along his arms and legs and up his neck to his jaw. William Griffin gritted his teeth to keep from screaming and clutched his pistol with two spasming hands. Ahead, angular and black against the gray concrete walls, the slammer wobbled on its drop-down carriage like an old dentist’s X-ray machine. This was Agent Instructor Pete Farrow’s last word on screw-ups—a quick, sharp blast from the shoot house’s microwave pain projector.

Farrow had just blown the last of his meager reserve of patience.

William jerked off his helmet and stepped away from the test track. Still trembling, he lowered his weapon and switched off his Lynx. There was blood in his mouth. He had bitten halfway through his tongue.

Hogantown’s Rough-and-Tough had just gotten him killed—for the third time.

‘Mr. Griffin, you are a pissant.’ Farrow came around the corner of the observation deck and descended the metal stairs into the shoot house with quickstep precision. He stood six and a half feet tall and weighed in at two hundred and thirty pounds. With a bristle-fuzz of blond hair, a dubious squint, onyx eyes, and a face that seemed always on the edge of a cruel grin, Farrow looked more like a Bond villain than an FBI agent.

‘Sorry, sir.’ William had been second in a team of four going into an apartment. All his partners had been virtual. They had waltzed through the rooms with precision and then there had been gunshots and smoke and confusion. Dripping red letters across his visual field announced that he had taken two in the chest and one in the head. To emphasize the point, Farrow had unleashed the slammer.

Even before the pain, the simulation had been so real that William could still feel the acid in his gut and the sweat under his body armor.

Farrow took William’s Glock and with the click of a hidden switch removed it from the grid of computer tracking and control. ‘You heard shots. You saw Agent Smith go down. Then you saw Agent Wesson go down. Then you saw a miscreant come from behind the fridge.’

‘There was a child.’

‘The murdering SOB was right in front of you. The child was not in your line of fire.’

‘I’m not making excuses, sir.’ He could barely talk.

Farrow hitched up his pants. He had the kind of build—barrel chest and slim hips—that precluded getting a good fit anywhere outside of a tailor’s shop. ‘Your squeeze and firing patterns are daggers, same height, all in a row, just fine—whenever you’re shooting at a target. Otherwise, you’re a complete, balls-to-the-wall pissant. Have you ever gone hunting, Mr. Griffin?’

‘Yes, sir,’ William said, his shoulders falling about as low as they could go. ‘I mean, no, sir.’

‘Your daddy never took you hunting? That’s a disgrace.’

‘Sir, I do not understand what you mean by “pissant”.’

‘Look it up. A useless, insignificant creature. It means you’re not worth your native clay. It means in a situation of selfdefense, with clearly defined antagonists whose mission in life is to put you down like a mangy dog, you cringe. To me, specifically, it means you have buck fever. Put anything living at the end of your nine mil and you start to shake like a cup of dice. Your teeth click like castanets, mister.’

‘Yes, sir. I would like to try one more time, sir.’

‘Son,’ Farrow said, his face an ominous shade of pre-heartattack red, ‘this shoot house consumes twenty-five thousand watts of electricity. I will not waste any more of our nation’s valuable energy. I brought you here this late to see whether you could acquire your live target skills if we subjected you to a little less peer review. You have not done me proud. Nobody gets through the Academy without passing Rough-and-Tough.’

‘I need one more chance, sir.’

Farrow stood with hands on hips, the perfect figure of fitness and power. ‘Buck fever, Griffin. Some people just cannot kill. Your father was a Marine, right?’

‘Navy Seal, sir.’

‘Did he ever talk to you about killing people?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Did he ever kill people in the line of duty?’

‘He did not talk about it, sir.’

‘I know for a fact that as an FBI agent he has killed three people. How does that make you feel?’

William swallowed. At times, Griff had been hard on his family—irrational fits of anger, silent drinking, and one awful night, wailing and shrieking long into the morning. His mother had grabbed William’s shoulders, pulling him back to keep him out of the den. He had so much wanted to comfort his father.

William had been nine years old.

Griff had sung an awful song in the den, twenty years ago, the words slurred by a pint of Johnny Walker: ‘Bullet to the thorax, cried the Lorax. Bullet to the brain, what a pain. Bullet to the gut, then you’ll know what’s what, and mister, you’ll never be the same, all the dead are in your head, not the same.’

Had Special Agent Erwin Griffin killed a man that day?

William had spent five years in NYPD and not once had he drawn his weapon while on duty—and he had been grateful for that. He closed his eyes and recalled Griff’s face on the morning after that bout, puffy yet still hard, a face that had once again learned how to hide what was inside, to tamp down the hopefulness that it could not get any worse.

After William’s mother and father had finalized their divorce, Griff had moved to Washington state. He currently worked out of the Seattle Field Office.

William felt like he wanted to throw up. ‘For my father’s sake, sir.’

Farrow did not look pleased. ‘Last chance, Griffin. One more bout of buck fever, and the blue is not for you.’

CHAPTER FIVE Washington State

Special Agent Erwin Griffin—known as Griff to practically everyone—removed a pair of wire-rim sunglasses from his faded blue eyes and slipped them into his pocket. The snowdusted mountains to the east caught the last of the daylight like blunt rock fingers with flaming tips. The interior of the fire tower cabin was quiet, just a soft, stubborn whistle of wind through the boards and occasional creaks and groans, like a boat caught in a slow wash. Rising forty feet above the ridge, supported by a slender lattice of iron beams and cedar planks, the cabin peered over the listless crowns of the second-growth hemlocks and gave a good vantage on the valley to the east.

Griff had occupied the cabin for two days, tending a telescope, two pairs of high-powered binoculars, digital cameras, and a small computer. He wore jeans and a zipped-up navy blue windbreaker with ‘FBI’ printed in yellow on the back.

The windbreaker had a pinky-sized hole to the right of the ‘I’, just below his shoulder blade.

It had been a peaceful time, mostly alone, with a Port-a-Potty and an ice chest full of sandwiches and canned ice tea. Time to think. Time enough to wonder why he hadn’t worked for the Forest Service or become a hermit. It seemed all his life he had been chasing and catching. He had hundreds of felony arrests and convictions to his credit. He had helped lock up bad guys and sometimes judges and juries threw away the keys but it never seemed to do a damned bit of good. There were always more.

Tides of crime, sweeping in, sweeping out, always leaving the bodies behind. So many bodies.

Griff wiped his eyes and prepared to move things around in preparation for the coming darkness. At night all he had was a single red lantern mounted under the lookout’s north-facing window. It made him look like a submarine captain.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Cap Benson said, pushing up through the hatch with a whuff of steaming breath. Benson was with the Washington State Patrol, thirty-seven years old and a twelve-year veteran of their SWAT team. Griff had known Benson for ten years. Benson owned a mobile home on a two-acre lot twenty miles down the road. He had a slender, pretty wife who liked to wear aprons and bake bread, and a white scar crept down his neck—terminating, Griff knew, at an unnatural notch in his clavicle. He was in better shape than Griff, who was pretty fit for his age, and the whuff was just an expression.

They had last seen each other at a big drug lab bust in Thurston County the month before.

‘I’m going crazy up here,’ Griff deadpanned. He twitched an eyebrow, held a stick of Doublemint gum between his front teeth, pulled back his lips, and waggled it. ‘Hey, look,’ he said. ‘I’m FDR.’

‘You need a long black holder,’ Benson said, unfazed.

‘For gum?’ Griff fixed Benson with a squint. ‘That would be silly.’ He pulled the gum in and started chewing.

‘Any luck?’ Benson asked, walking toward the window that faced the valley.

‘Today, a couple of women. A few kids. No animals. It’s quiet. They’ve been burning trash in barrels.’

‘What about the Patriarch?’

‘Not a sign.’

‘Your Jewish law center guy should be here in a few minutes. He’s wearing snow pants. Looks like a cheechako.’

‘Maybe, but he knows everything there is to know about Chambers.’

‘You sure you don’t want to just hand this over to us?’

‘Thanks, Cap, but I guarantee you don’t want it.’

‘We’re awesome and eager, Griff.’

‘Right,’ Griff said. He called up the stabilized image on the computer screen and showed Benson what he had been looking at all day. Three and a half miles away, green spruces, loblolly pines and sapling cedars spotted the seventy acres around a big gray weather-battered farmhouse. Sixty yards to the east stood a large barn. Right now, the farm looked deserted. No visible cows or other livestock. No dogs.

‘Nice,’ Benson said. ‘Kind of place I might like to retire. I’d paint the house, though.’

It was a pretty place, a mile from the nearest road, serene and quiet on a chilly but clear April evening. Nothing like the Old Testament desert where sun-dazzled, long-bearded patriarchs stashed their wives and ruled their tribes. Though there was a fire on the mountain—the high snows looked as if they were burning.

Judgment light.

‘You sure it’s him?’ Benson asked.

‘We’ll have a positive ID soon enough,’ Griff said. ‘Pass me those binders, will you, Cap?’

Benson reached across to the small table and handed Griff three thick white binders filled with photographs. Griff laid them out under the binoculars and opened each one to a good photo or mug shot, for his next visitor. They could hear his footsteps on the narrow stairs.

A shaved tanned head crowned by a plain black yarmulke poked up through the hatch and swung a green army duffel bag onto the floor with a thump. ‘Ahoy there. Anybody home?’

‘Come on in, Jacob,’ Griff said. ‘Good to see you.’

The small, skinny man stood up from the step below the hatch, climbed onto the cabin’s rough board floor and brushed his baggy black snow pants with one hand. He wore a sleeveless purple down vest over a spotless and pressed white business shirt. ‘Always good to hear from you, Agent Griffin,’ he said. ‘You have such interesting things to show me.’ He grinned at Benson, who nodded back, polite but noncommittal, a seasoned cop greeting an outsider who was not himself a cop.

The hatch creaked again, making them all jerk. Griff was not disposed to like whoever climbed up through that hatch, not now. Three was already a crowd. Worse still, this one was female: thin strong hands with chipped nails, hazel eyes, mussed auburn hair, high cheekbones, and a goddamned gray power suit.

‘Pardon me, gentlemen.’ The female stood up straight and wiry on the drafty wooden floor and pulled down her jacket. She wore black running shoes and white socks, her only concessions to the woods and the climb.

Griff scowled at Levine. Levine lifted his brows.

‘Apologies for interrupting,’ she said. Griff hadn’t seen this woman in over ten years and it took him a moment to go through his memory, age a face, and place her name.

Griff introduced them all. ‘Cap Benson, Washington State Patrol SWAT team, this is Jacob Levine from the Southern Poverty Law Center. And this is Special Agent Rebecca Rose. She investigates bioterror. That was what you were working on the last time we met.’

‘Still do,’ Rebecca said.

‘Pleasure,’ Benson said. They firmly shook hands, but all three men looked like boys whose tree-house club had been violated.

‘What brings you here, Rebecca?’ Griff asked.

‘Someone down in that valley has taken delivery of contraband biotech equipment. Fermenters, incubators, some driers.’

‘No shit,’ Griff said. ‘And…?’

‘Don’t mind me,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’m just an observer.’ She whistled at the array of binoculars and the telescope. ‘There must be two dozen guys loafing around at the trail head. What have you got down there?’

‘Ant farm,’ Griff said.

‘Sonofabitch,’ she said. ‘Can I see?’

‘Be my guest.’

Rebecca applied her eyes to the biggest pair of binoculars. ‘Your ant farm doesn’t have any ants,’ she murmured.

‘Just wait,’ Griff said.

The operation had begun a week ago, following a complaint about illegal fireworks. Intense white flashes like giant morning glories had bloomed in the middle of the night over the hills around the farm, letting loose echoing booms, two a night for three nights in a row, bright enough and loud enough to wake up the nearest neighbor—a sleepless old codger who lived with his Airedale four miles away.

Two days after the complaint had been filed, a Snohomish County sheriff’s deputy had driven down the long dirt road to the farm to investigate. He had found a hidden homestead with a concrete and wood-frame barn, one large old house, and a newer, smaller house at the rear, almost lost in the trees. A polite knock at the door of the main house had roused a gray-bearded, broad-shouldered, proud old man with brilliant green eyes. The old man had two middleaged women, slender and worn-looking, living with him in the big house. Six kids had come around from the back and stood in the yard, ranging in age from three to seventeen, all well-fed, conservatively dressed, and well-behaved. Respectful. The deputy had asked about fireworks and been met with puzzled denials and the offer of a hot cup of coffee and fresh sourdough biscuits. He had been invited into the house. The deputy had removed his Smoky hat and held it to one side, leaving his gun hand free. Taking it all in.

The bearded old man had asked one of the women to get coffee. They had waited in the living room, the deputy’s brown uniform wrinkle-free, his equipment and holster shiny black, shirt tucked tight over a young patrol car paunch: a good and reasonable defender of the peace, standing straight and a little awkward on the throw rug in the living room; the old man tall and erect in a loose white shirt and denims, dignified and relaxed. The house inside neat and spare, with handmade shelves and a big antique oak table. Red curtains on the windows. Yellow daffodils in a big vase on a mantel over the stone fireplace.

The old man had seemed amused by the idea that he might be setting off fireworks. People around here, he had told the deputy, tended to be a little dotty. ‘It’s the air. Too pure for some, not pure enough for others.’

The deputy had drunk one cup of good strong coffee poured by one of the tired women from an iron pot. Two kids, a boy and a girl, both about nine, had sat quietly side by side in a big rocking chair near the fireplace.

To be polite, the deputy had eaten a sourdough biscuit slathered with homemade jam and fresh sweet butter. He had found it very tasty.

The woman and the kids had let the old man do all the talking. The deputy was welcome to come back any time. His presence made everyone feel protected, watched over. ‘The Lord God provides for those who heed the necessity of strong arms,’ the old man had said.

The deputy had paid his respects and returned to his car. He could not begin to figure why a stern but hospitable old man with a Biblical grip on his large family would be lobbing starburst fireworks in the early morning darkness.

But something had stuck up in the deputy’s memory like a log rising in a smooth river. Back at the office, he had looked up the NCIS and NCIC files on one Robert Cavitt Chambers, AKA Bob Cavitt, AKA Charles Roberts. Chambers had last been seen in Texas in 1995. A computer artist at FBI headquarters had updated an ATM security photo taken that year to show Chambers in his sprightly eighties.

The aging trick had worked.

The deputy had recognized the biblical old man at the farmhouse.

‘We lost track of Chambers years ago,’ Levine said. There was only one folding chair in the fire tower. He did not want to occupy the one chair, not with Cap Benson watching him like a hawk. Levine smiled, showing large, even teeth, lightly speckled. He had been raised in Texas on naturally fluoridated water and his teeth were colored like turkey eggs, but strong. ‘You sure this is him?’

‘Positive ID from the deputy,’ Benson said.

‘Too good to be true,’ Levine said. ‘But if it is true, we could be in a world of trouble.’

‘Why is that?’ Benson asked.

‘Who do you think we have down there?’ Levine asked. Now it was Levine’s turn to give Benson a look, and slowly shift that look to Griff, then to Rebecca. At that moment, Levine owned the fire tower.

‘Bank robber. Abortion clinic bomber,’ Benson said.

‘Ah.’ Levine pressed his lips together. ‘That’s all?’

‘That’s enough for me,’ Benson said. Griff let Levine have his fun.

‘Well, I wouldn’t want you to underestimate him. If it is him. Because the Patriarch has lived a life of almost uninterrupted criminal activity since 1962. Before that, he was an altar boy for St. Jude’s in Philadelphia, a predominantly Irish parish. In the seventies, he committed at least five bank robberies in Oklahoma and Arizona. One arrest and trial led to a hung jury. The Oklahoma County prosecutor’s office refused to try Chambers again. I quote the DA, “We will always have some trailer-trash slattern with damp panties sitting in the jury box. Just get him the hell out of my state.”’

They all looked to see if Levine had offended Rebecca. He hadn’t. Levine continued.

‘Chambers moved to Ireland in 1979. He became an expert in IED—improvised explosive devices. His specialty was nasty booby traps. Don’t hold me to it, but he may have been the guy who actually set the charge in Margaret Thatcher’s toilet in a Brighton hotel in 1986. He returned to the United States later that year, when things got too hot in the UK, but he couldn’t stay out of trouble. In 1988, Nevada State Police caught him at the tail end of a barroom brawl, drunk out of his mind, with a broken pool cue in one hand and a perforated buddy bleeding out on the floor. Chambers was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison in 1989. Sometime the next year, he broke from his Irish roots, swore off drink, and converted from Catholicism to the Aryan Church of Christ Militant. White supremacists.’

‘I am aware of that,’ Benson said.

‘In 1992, his conviction got thrown out on appeal. Turned out an FBI technician didn’t conduct the tests he said he did. Chambers was released in 1993. After that, from 1995 to 1999, he robbed banks from Oklahoma to Alabama. They called him the Proud Poppa because he was assisted by two pre-adolescent males whom he referred to as “my strong and righteous sons.” He then organized the bombing of three Planned Parenthood Clinics in Boston and Baltimore in 1999, resulting in two deaths and six injuries. He’s been on the Post Office hit parade for the last twenty years.’

‘All because of an FBI screw-up?’ Benson asked.

‘Uh-huh,’ Griff said.

‘If that really is his family down there,’ Levine said, ‘and he thinks we’re on to him, he’s going to fight like a cornered bobcat. He will not go back to prison. How are you going to handle this?’

‘We’re still working on that,’ Griff said.

Levine looked doubtful and took his turn peeking through the big binoculars. ‘Well, looky here. Ants.’

The day after the Snohomish County sheriff’s department had passed the deputy’s information along to the FBI, Griff had driven from the Seattle Field Office and taken over a seldom-used Forest Service fire tower with a pretty good view of the farm. Without asking permission, he had instructed two agents to chainsaw the single obstructing tree. He had then set up his surveillance. Seattle Field Office Special Agent in Charge John Keller had put Griff in command of the operation, but provisionally, in case it threatened to turn into another Waco.

FBI headquarters wanted to be very sure of their footing before they made a move.

Other agents had worked their way into Prince, the nearest town: a gas station, hardware/feed store, three churches, and a diner. They had learned that three women and at least seven children picked up groceries and sometimes their mail in Prince. Less frequently, the citizens saw four men ranging in age from seventeen to thirty-five. The family or families also drove into Prince for church services. Chambers himself never ventured into town. The best guess was that Chambers had about twenty men, women, and children living on his farm.

Their church was a thorny cane of the original Seventh Day Adventist bush known as The Empty Tomb of God Risen. Tombers, FBI files said, showed strong anti-Semitic tendencies, often associated with Christian Identity types, and were allied in some northwestern states with Aryan Nations. Their ministers were banned from visiting federal prisons.

Upon learning this, Griff had contacted Jacob Levine.

They took turns looking through the binoculars while the computer used a satellite link to try to make facial comparisons with National Security Service records in Virginia.

‘What are all those posts and clothes lines for?’ Rebecca asked.

Griff shrugged. ‘You tell me.’

‘Looks like an antenna. TV, maybe?’

‘Even Jed Clampett has a dish out here,’ Benson said.

Two women stood on the porch. One was knitting and the other just stared out over the long span of weedy lawn in front of the main house. They were talking but there was no way of knowing what they were saying. At this angle and that distance, the lip-reading software on the computer wasn’t much good.

‘They look nervous,’ Benson observed.

‘Chambers starts out charming but in the end he rules by force,’ Levine said. ‘He picks women who want nothing but guidance and routine, but that doesn’t mean he makes them happy. Though he does provide, in his way, and he loves his kids. In his way.’

‘They’re all his?’ Rebecca asked.

‘Chambers has never shared his harem,’ Levine said. ‘He teaches his sons to be crack shots but forbids his wives or daughters to use guns, ever. When are you planning to make a raid?’

Griff winced at the word ‘raid’ but he did not answer in the negative. Something would have to be done and he would likely be at the tip of the spear going in. ‘Not until we know all there is to know,’ he said.

‘There could be an opportune moment,’ Levine said. ‘That is, if what the guys in town have found out is true—about them being Tombers.’

‘Do tell,’ Griff said.

‘It is likely the women and children will all go to Easter services at the church, and that could be a good time to find Chambers home alone, or at most with his eldest son in attendance. He insists on piety but I’ve never heard of his entering a church, not since he was a kid. He needs to be top dog wherever he stands, and that includes before God.’

‘No way we’re going in at Easter,’ Griff said. ‘Besides, people in town are alerted. We can’t afford to wait.’

Levine smiled. ‘You’re in luck. Tombers are Julians. They believe Easter comes before the date commonly observed by you goyim. They’re eleven days off. The Gregorian calendar is the work of the devil, you know.’

‘Scout’s honor?’ Griff asked. He was looking through the scope now. A Coleman lantern had been slung on a beam inside the porch overhang and the two women were setting up folding chairs.

‘For them, Good Friday is tomorrow.’

Then, down in the valley, the old man finally came out and stood watching the twilight. His face was clear in the bright white glow of the lantern: an aquiline, craggy profile. The old man appeared thoughtful. For a moment, Griff thought he might be watching them.

Rebecca folded her arms. ‘Just the kind of fellow to need a microbial incubator.’

Griff set the digital cameras humming and backed away. ‘Is that him?’ he asked Levine.

Levine peered. ‘I hope I look that good when I’m his age.’

‘Whenever you’re sure, Jacob.’

Levine spent a few more seconds on the binoculars. ‘It’s him,’ he said.

CHAPTER SIX Quantico

William Griffin jogged across the lawn to join the group of nine students standing in front of the Biograph theater, on the edge of Hogantown and just across Hoover Road from the towering dorms and walkways and the squat tan bulk of the Academy.

‘All right, listen up,’ Pete Farrow called out. The recruits—two women and seven men: two blacks, one Asian, one Middle-Eastern, five shades of white—stopped talking and assumed parade rest. Compared to the instructor they were a motley bunch, spread over the range of physical specimens: plump and skinny, tall and short, dark-haired and light.

Farrow walked along the loose line. ‘All right, agents, this is it. Today, you will be using equipment worth about two hundred thousand dollars. Try not to break it. Only about twenty percent of our field offices have all this stuff. It is rare. It is valuable. But it is the future—and you will get used to it.

‘If you are a sadist, you are shit out of luck. Some of this new stuff threatens to turn you bloody-minded SOBs into kinder, gentler peace officers.’ Farrow winked in the general direction of William Griffin. ‘Out on the street, if you do this right, nobody has to die. Though I do expect a few sprained ankles and wrenched necks, and we have been known to break arms and even legs. Understood?’

The class nodded in unison.

Three men in gray suits passed behind the students and entered the Bank of Hogantown. They were carrying bagged sandwiches from the Pastime Deli. One turned and said, ‘Farrow’s litter. What do you think? Blood in the gutters?’ The others flashed evil smiles and pushed through the swinging glass doors.

William watched Jane Rowland scratch her ribs under her suit coat and the white FBI Academy golf-style shirt. His underwear itched, too. Something about the diagnostic sensors embedded in the bulletproof weave or the fluid piping that smoothly wrapped around the torso.

Medium-sized piles of equipment lay at their feet. They would soon put on masks and special network jackets. More weight, more wires.

In their holsters they carried blue-handled revolvers filled with paint ball rounds. The Academy cars were equipped with pump-action shotguns with blue stocks that discharged a nasty, smelly pink spray, and mock H&K MP5 9mm carbines that fired nothing but made a horrible racket—all networked training weapons. Everything they did with these guns showed up on monitors somewhere in the recesses of Hogantown.

‘You have made your case,’ Farrow said. ‘You are now about to arrest four suspects who are transporting an illegal substance for sale. This is no longer the good old days of cocaine or heroin. Neuraminoline tartrate, known on the street as Tart, is colorless, odorless, and tasteless—but it is the most dangerous and destructive GM drug on the market today. Loser users tell themselves that Tart is a harmless organic performance enhancer. It produces long-lasting feelings of angelic well-being. But in five percent of its devotees, Tart leads to a degenerative neuromuscular disease called Kepler’s Syndrome. You end up in a wheelchair, drooling, unable to control your bowels and in constant pain. But that’s not the end of Tart’s charms. In an estimated seven percent of users, Tart binds to chromosomes in sex cells— eggs and sperm. It causes distortions that can be passed on to future offspring, who, if they survive beyond the age of two, will suffer the agonies of the damned. Tart makes babies into monsters.’ Farrow slipped on his grid-linked gogs—short for goggles, but actually more like a thick-framed pair of glasses. ‘If that doesn’t psych you for this bust nothing will. Remember—if you screw up, your classmates could get hurt. I do not like to have my heart flutter. I do not want to grieve for lost ducklings. Stay tactical. Use all the skills we’ve taught you. Ready?’

‘Ready!’ they shouted.

‘Suit up and get your Lynxes on the grid. Today we’re all top code, to keep the bad guys from knowing who and where you are, so line up and get your numbers.’ He began handing out strips of paper.

William Griffin put on his gogs and field jacket, labeled with a strip of silver tape with his name on it. He ran his index finger along the bumps and ridges on the forearm Lynx keyboard, logging on to the team server and inputting his number and five fake numbers and positions that his node would disperse like chaff, should someone hack in. The others did the same. They all stood clutching their paintball masks, clear visors with plastic headbands. Cheeks, temples, and ears were no longer protected—hadn’t been for years. Pain was a teacher, a tool.

They then clipped health stats boxes to their belts and arranged their shoulder-mounted holsters. Farrow checked them over, as solicitous as a mother hen.

‘Keep boxy stuff away from your mid-back. Clip everything to the side. If you fall backward on a hard surface, you could injure your spine.’

They sheepishly readjusted. This was basic stuff and already they were screwing up.

Farrow checked his slate. ‘Mr. Al-Husam, you’re not on the grid. Get your numbers.’

Fouad Al-Husam, a small man with beautiful black eyes and a round, almost feminine face, touched his keyboard, trying to find the bumps. Farrow approached him and patted his jacket sleeve. ‘Here,’ he said, and lifted Al-Husam’s arm to the right place. ‘Follow the guide ridges.’ Al-Husam smiled but his face darkened with embarrassment.

‘Still not there,’ Farrow said after a few seconds. ‘Reboot your pad. I have eight Lynxes on the grid, all healthy and happy. I see code in action. Good scatter. Ms. Lee, are you happy?’

Lee was the shortest and lightest person in the group but that did not faze Farrow. He was running her hard through her paces. ‘Yes, sir, I am happy,’ she called out.

‘Happy to be here at the Q?’

‘Sir, I am very happy to be here at the Q.’

‘We are not Gyrenes, Ms. Lee. Academy mandates snappy repartee. Show me your FBI beef.’

‘Happy as an aardvark under a full moon…at the Q, sir.’

Farrow’s grin was tepid. ‘Is wit truly dead?’ He glanced around the group, raising his shoulders in a long, sad shrug.

They all laughed.

‘Focus,’ Farrow shouted. ‘You’ve been working toward this moment for three weeks. You have the bastards in your sights. Remember your training. You ARE ready.’

William quietly sucked in his breath. He was far from sure of that. Standing beside him, Jane Rowland looked confident—hard as a piece of glass and about as brittle.

‘Okay—Al-Husam, you’re on the grid. You can stop fiddling with the keys.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You are knights in high-tech armor,’ Farrow said. ‘Make the flame-tormented shade of Mr. Hoover proud. Let’s go.’

‘Right, coach,’ William Griffin said under his breath as they fanned out.

They dispersed as four teams in four vehicles. William and Jane Rowland had drawn chits and were partnered for the bust. They climbed into an unmarked tan Caprice from the last century. Rowland took the wheel. ‘Ready?’ she asked William, face forward.

‘I am icy.’ He grinned.

Rowland rotated and poked her finger. ‘Don’t mess up,’ she instructed. ‘We have our docs, right?’

William held up his steno pad and a plastic folder full of paper-copy warrants and mug shots. The actors in the shots looked tough and bored.

‘We’ll do fine,’ he said. ‘You’ll do great.’

Rowland gave William a don’t patronize me scowl and cinched her seat belt. A helicopter blew overhead. Rowland flinched. Hostage Rescue Team personnel dressed in black and armed to the teeth hung out of the chopper doors like commandoes, waiting to abseil down to a roof. Hogantown could get crowded and noisy. Ten or twelve practicals could fill any given day.

‘Yeah. Right,’ Rowland said. She started the Caprice, pulled out onto Hogan Boulevard and drove around the corner and down Ness Avenue to their stake-out, just across the two-way street from the Giga-Mart parking lot. The suspects had been sighted shopping there this morning by an alert police officer, who had traced one of the men back to the Dogwood Hotel and the other to the Tolson Arms apartments. The Dogwood was across the street from the Giga-Mart. The Giga-Mart was small but functional. Its shelves had been stocked with goods that agents and Marines could buy but its clerks doubled as actors in Academy scenarios.

William put on his gogs and waited for the display to come up. The data and graphics looked greenish blue in the daytime, red at night. A little bell dinged in his earnode. He heard his own pulse magnified. He sounded nervous. He checked the pong sensor that detected human stress chemistry. The watch displayed three green lights, one yellow. Yeah, he was nervous. So was Rowland.

William glanced up at the Eyes in the Sky—cameras jutting out over the intersection from a power pole on the corner. A red light was on—surveillance was underway. The Masters of the Universe, agent instructors in the second floor command center above the Bank of Hogan, were waiting to pass judgment. MAVs—Micro Air Vehicles equipped with cameras—buzzed overhead.

William and Rowland were to take point once the suspects had been spotted. Team two and team three would serve as reinforcements and backup as each arrest was made. Team four would stand ready to intercept fleeing vehicles if necessary.

‘Team one to all teams,’ William said. Their grid lights blinked in his gogs. ‘Are we set?’

‘Team two in rear view of your position,’ came the response through their earnodes. That was Matty’s soft drawl—George Matty and Al-Husam had been partnered, almost certainly to Matty’s displeasure. He was a deep Mississippi boy and generally kept quiet around Al-Husam, but so far had played things professionally. And well he might. Al-Husam was special, they all knew that. Bigger judges than the Masters of the Universe were looking down on Quantico this year.

‘Team three here. We’re at Tolson Arms.’ Team three was Errol Henson, Nicky Di Martinez, and Carla Lee. They were in the dark blue engineering van, equipped for surveillance and carrying the Lynx server.

‘Team four setting up on State Street.’ Team four was Finch and Greavy, heavy-set men with bulldog expressions and quiet, efficient manners. ‘We’d like video hookups as soon as possible. Let us know which way they’re coming, gang.’

‘Apartment twelve at Tolson has motion,’ Lee said. ‘Lights are on.’

‘What’s parked out front, team three?’ William asked.

‘Five cars and a pickup,’ Errol Henson responded. His voice trembled. They were all high with excitement, like a brace of puppies chasing ducks for the first time.

William glanced at Rowland. She pressed her lips together.

‘Our suspect, Geronimo del Torres, is driving a 1959 Chevy Impala, primer gray with mottled paint, tinted windows, a work in progress, according to our sheet,’ Lee said.

‘We don’t see it,’ Henson said. ‘I like Impalas.’

Someone else said, ‘I catch and eat Impalas.’

‘Identify, joker,’ Farrow growled in all their ears, his voice like an angry God.

‘Team two, that’s me, Matty, sir.’

‘Tongues in neutral, team two.’

‘Yes, sir. Wit, sir.’

‘Team three here. A man and a woman, both Hispanic, are leaving unit twelve. They’re getting into a late model blue Camaro, license plate Wonka MF8905. Neither resembles del Torres.’

Hogantown police activities involved residents of five fictitious states: Graceland, Oceania, Sylvania, Wonka, and Numbutt. White-collar criminals usually came from Sylvania, smart crooks and contraband dealers of any stripe from Graceland; violent crooks from Wonka; drug dealers and dumb-asses from Numbutt. Profiling on that basis, however, was discouraged.

Matty pushed his head back against the neck rest. ‘I watched you in Rough-and-Tough. Very impressive.’

‘Thank you,’ Fouad Al-Husam said.

‘Natural born killer instinct.’

‘Not so killer,’ Al-Husam said. ‘They are images and cutouts, not people.’

‘Felt real to me. I wanted to throw up.’

‘Perhaps so did I,’ Al-Husam said.

‘Arabs don’t naturally like killing? That’s kind of news, isn’t it?’

‘I am not Arab,’ Al-Husam said, and he looked out of the car side window to avoid showing his irritation.

Matty glanced at Al-Husam. ‘I always feel like praying before going into practicals. How about you?’

Al-Husam nodded. ‘A little prayer,’ he said.

‘You pray five times a day, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘I hope you don’t need to get down and pray right here,’ Matty said. ‘That would be inconvenient.’

Al-Husam took a shallow breath.

‘Five times a day. That’s more than my grandma used to do. She and my mama put me off praying. They were always asking for little things. “God, make my garden green. God, let me grow the prettiest roses, the biggest tomatoes. God, I hope the pot roast doesn’t burn.” See what I mean? But going through Quantico, I totally get it. “God, don’t let me screw up.” Where do you pray when you have to?’

‘Wherever there is room. Shall we concentrate?’ Al-Husam asked.

‘I am concentrating. Got it. Hoo-ah!’ Matty exclaimed, and touched his gogs.

Al-Husam jerked in surprise, that this man should proclaim Huwa, the name of the essence, Qul Huwa Llahu Ahad—Say, He is God, He is One.

‘That plate was on the board,’ Matty said, triumphant. ‘Let’s run a check before the others catch it.’

‘Of course,’ Al-Husam said.

William twitched in his worn bucket seat. ‘We had a bulletin on that vehicle,’ he said to Rowland. ‘I saw it in the briefing room.’ He pulled out his notebook and flipped through the pages, then resorted to the button pad hidden in his sleeve, to bring up the case on his gogs. Before he could find what he wanted, in his ear he heard Matty saying, ‘We ID that as belonging to a Constanza Valenzuela, registered guest worker from Honduras, no criminal record, nothing on VICAP.’

William frowned intensely at Rowland. ‘I’m sure there’s more,’ he said. Both worked their keypads. William’s face brightened and he parted his lips.

Al-Husam broke in before he could speak. ‘We have info that Ms. Valenzuela has gone missing in Wonka and that her car has not been located.’

‘What’s a stolen car from Wonka doing here in Virginia?’ William asked, muting his headset. ‘Highly suspicious.’

‘Confirm with a case number, Al-Husam,’ Farrow instructed. ‘Give the other teams all you have so they can log in and exercise their own judgment.’

Now it was Al-Husam’s turn to be slow.

Rowland butted in and read out an FBI Crime Index Case Number, issued to the Wonka Department of Public Safety. ‘VICAP not yet filed,’ she added.

‘Why no VICAP, Ms. Rowland?’ Farrow asked.

‘Recent missing person report,’ Rowland answered crisply. ‘Wonka authorities do not yet know whether a violent crime is involved, sir. That could be a car filled with buyers or partners. Or a mule’s car. It could lead us to the Impala.’

‘We’re on it, team three,’ said Matty. ‘Will follow.’

‘Team three will backup,’ Henson offered.

‘Negative,’ William said. ‘Team two is sufficient. Let’s head toward the Dogwood and see if we can find that Impala on our own.’

‘Roger that, team one,’ Henson said.

Rowland nodded and turned the old Caprice around in the middle of the street, heading toward the Dogwood Motel.

Team four reported they had bubble gum at the ready.

‘Just relax,’ William said. ‘We’re doing fine.’

Rowland narrowed her eyes.

If the Impala suspected it was being tracked, then eluded them and left Hogantown—which, of necessity, had few real escape routes—then Farrow would be very disappointed.

A map of the area around the motel popped up on William’s display. His eyes were tearing up—the image in his gogs was too bright. The map began to wriggle. None of the students had been fitted—these were generics and his tended to slide down his nose. He blinked and looked far left, then back. The view cleared. He saw two red dots moving south on Rosa Parks street—team two and team three. A small video square in the upper right corner showed what the van was seeing: team two’s Ford Crown Victoria and the suspect blue Camaro with Wonka plates. Traffic was light in Hogantown today. It would almost certainly get worse once they made their stop. Farrow liked to keep up the pressure and the presence of too many civilians in the line of fire would certainly do that.

Griffith dimmed the display in his gogs and concentrated on the street. ‘There,’ he said. The Impala was parked in front of the motel about a block and a half away. Two men were loading boxes into the open trunk. Rowland slowed. William touched his hand to his holstered pistol. It lightly buzzed approval—instantly recognizing the keycode in his Lynx. Some field agents resorted to surgery to hide their small cylindrical keycode units.

Rowland kept one hand on the wheel and reached down to connect with her own gun.

The men by the Impala glanced over their shoulders and spotted the Caprice. They slammed the trunk and rushed to the open car doors. William compared them to the mug shots. One matched the description: Geronimo del Torres, bulky, dark, denim jacket with cholo markings and baggy pants. The other was a younger male, ID unknown.

‘Team one here. We have Impala and suspect del Torres in sight,’ William said. ‘There’s two in the front seat, one’s a possible juvenile. I see no one in the back seat.’

The doors of the Impala slammed and the car’s tires squealed.

‘They’re fleeing the scene!’

The wide, heavy car peeled out from in front of the motel and took a sharp left down Ness Avenue, the longest street in Hogantown.

‘Gives him room to pick up speed,’ Rowland said, spinning the wheel and turning left as she lit up the dash lights. ‘He’s going for the Freedom.’

If the Impala made it to the Freedom Highway, they would have to change their plans, not a good thing. Highway pursuit was not desirable since it was always rush hour and the next off ramp—so they had been told—led directly into Gangsta City. In fact the onramp led nowhere and the nonexistent Gangsta City meant a forfeit.

Rowland gunned the Caprice. A few wary pedestrians jumped to the curb and flipped them off. Heads leaned out of windows on second-floor buildings.

‘This is fun,’ she said. ‘Like playing Vice City when I was a kid.’

‘My dad never let me play that,’ William said.

‘Makes you smarter,’ Rowland said.

Then, abruptly, team three’s van roared into the intersection ahead. The Impala skidded to a halt, tail wagging, tires smoking. They were a block from the onramp. Lee got out and drew down on the fugitives.

The blue Camaro came to a stop at the cross street ahead. Two people got out, one male, one female. Both put up their hands. From William’s perspective, both cars were in a line—and the engineering van was moving slowly onto that line, a bad situation for putting colleagues in jeopardy.

Team two came out of Melvin Purvis Boulevard and pulled up behind them. Two unknown vehicles joined the tail of the procession, honking. William and Rowland unstrapped their holsters. Rowland pulled up to the curb twenty feet behind the Impala, parking at an angle so that the engine block provided maximum protection. The visor cam blinked red. ‘We’re on the record,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it.’

William exited first and squatted behind the door with gun poised to gauge the situation. The two occupants of the Impala faced forward, hands out of sight.

‘Exit your car!’ Rowland shouted.

‘FBI,’ William prompted. ‘Tell ’em.’

Fuck. ‘This is the FBI!’ Rowland called out. ‘Get out of the car with your hands in plain sight.’

William repeated the command in Spanish.

They did not respond.

‘Get out of the car, hands in plain sight, now.’

Smoke puffed from the tailpipe. The driver, presumably del Torres, stuck out his arm and waved as if giving them permission to go around. ‘Joker,’ William said.

Team two angled their car and blocked the street behind them. Matty exited with a pump shotgun and positioned himself behind the Caprice’s right rear bumper.

William tried to focus on the corner video image in his gogs but sweat was dripping in his eye and he could barely make out anything.

‘Team three in place,’ Henson announced in his ear. ‘We’re at the corner of Hoover and Grand. We’re going to block their escape.’

William instructed, ‘Pull around and hem them in, team two.’

‘Roger that,’ Matty said. ‘Fred, stay with team one. I’ll block.’

Al-Husam exited the car, pistol drawn, finger resting on the trigger guard. The Glock had no safety, merely a little flippy switch on the trigger itself that went down way too smooth and fast. Matty drove the Crown Victoria around the Impala and wedged the right front wheel against the curb, almost slamming their bumper into a blue mailbox.

‘They’re eyeballing and grinning,’ Matty said. Al-Husam walked up behind William.

‘It’s my collar,’ Rowland said.

‘Quaint,’ Al-Husam said.

‘Just, you know, throw down on them, with your guns,’ Rowland said. Her face was slick with sweat. Beneath the jacket, William’s shirt clung damp as a washrag despite the coolness in the morning air.

Rowland approached the left bumper of the Impala, parked a generous three feet from the curb. She assumed a classic Weaver stance and trained her mock SIG on the heads in the rear window. William stayed in a crouch behind his door, also aiming at the Impala’s rear window. Al-Husam took a stance behind the Caprice’s driver side door.

‘Yo, lady,’ said a youngish voice from the Impala. The window rolled down in jerks.

Rowland stopped. ‘Exit the car now,’ she called out. ‘Show me your hands.’ She would have them out and flat on the street in seconds.

‘Lady, we are just hangin’,’ the young man said. ‘Just drivin’ and chillin’. No hassles?’ Arms covered with crude gang tats, tiny goatee, hennaed lips smirking, he looked like the real thing, a true murdering scumbag.

In Hogantown, he is real, William thought. He can kill your career.

William moved to the rear bumper. He took another step. The young man hung his head out the window, and his hands, both empty. He was grinning like a happy whore, more than a little obvious. The driver stared straight ahead, hands still on the wheel. William wondered if all those hands were real. Rubber hands had been used in the past; you walk up to the window and blam.

‘Exit the vehicle. Get out now and lie on the ground face down with arms and legs spread!’ Rowland ordered. ‘Both of you!’

‘Tell us what you want, bitch,’ the young man said. ‘We doing nothin’, we got nothin’.’

They weren’t complying. They were going to force the issue. William sidled around the bumper. The car had been through nine different kinds of hell, a mottled patchwork of paint and primer, but it was still chugging along, still being targeted by naïve recruits. What would they really throw at you? Think icy. Stay tactical.

William glanced left to see where Rowland was. Suddenly, his shins exploded in pain. His legs flew backward and out from under him and he came down on the left rear panel of the Impala, then toppled into the street, barely breaking his fall with his right hand. The pistol discharged a paintball and flew from his grip. Rolling to one side, he saw a rubber bar waggling from a spring-loaded hinge below the Impala’s rear door.

In the texts they called it a cop blade. A cholo trick. In real life it would have been made of steel and honed as sharp as a sword. It would have sliced off his feet.

Rowland saw William go down. Inside the Impala, both heads ducked. Her partner was writhing on the asphalt, trying to roll up onto the curb. In real life they could—they would back over him.

Al-Husam and Rowland aimed and fired. Paintballs exploded red and purple across the Impala’s rear window.

The car’s engine roared and the wheels spun, throwing rubber smoke all over William. The Impala barely grazed the bumper of team two’s Crown Victoria, making it rock, and accelerated down the street. Matty and Lee blazed away, scoring more paintball hits on the side windows and door panels. Puffs of purple and red trailed behind the Impala as it sprinted toward freedom, belching gray smoke. It had reached thirty miles an hour when loud bangs and ear-piercing shrieks echoed between the brick buildings. Long ropes of steaming pink shot from both sides of the street. Team four had efficiently and quickly dropped flares to halt traffic on the side streets and set up bubble-gum pylons at the end of the block. The gum net wrapped around the Impala, sizzling and popping. Its trailing edges grabbed at the asphalt and stuck, spinning the car around, while the span of the net slapped across the windshield and gelled to the consistency of tire rubber. The car jounced on its shocks and rolled on for fifty feet, dragging both pylons sparking and clanging down the street.

The Impala’s engine died.

Matty and Al-Husam gave chase on foot and took up positions on both sides of the gummed car. Pistols poised, they ordered the occupants to stay where they were and keep their hands in view or they would shoot. Finch and Greavy joined them, happy as larks at having expended precious FBI resources, and with such a loud bang, too.

The actors, barely visible through the pink strands and paintball splatters, raised their hands. They would have to be cut out with box knives. Right now, they weren’t going anywhere. Al-Husam kept his gun trained on them.

Rowland stood by William and watched as teams three and four joined Al-Husam and Matty, taking up front and rear.

‘Goddammit,’ William said, over and over, rolling back and forth, clutching his shins.

‘You okay?’

‘I should have seen it. I should have seen it coming. Fucking cholo car.’

‘You need a medic?’

‘Christ, no, it was just a rubber hose. I’m fine.’ He glared up at her. ‘Don’t you goddamn laugh at me. It hurts.’ Tears streamed down his cheeks.

‘Nobody’s laughing,’ Rowland said solemnly. She sat on the curb beside him.

‘I’m toast,’ William said.

Farrow seemed to come out of nowhere. He was trying hard to hold a grim face. Clearly he was enjoying this. ‘You all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ William said, pushing up to his feet. The whites of his eyes showed like a skittish horse.

‘It ain’t over until it’s over,’ Farrow said in a low growl. He held up a box-cutter and thumbed out a length of blade. ‘Get those bastards out of that vehicle and make your arrest. Pick up your pieces and finish your job. Tonight, meet me in the motor pool garage. You’re gonna buff and scrape my car until it shines.’

CHAPTER SEVEN Washington State

Griff looked over the map he had drawn. It showed places on the property where they had seen children playing or people walking. Little x’s peppered the paper, safe places and paths to the houses, the barn, just in case. He drew lines, boundaries.

The children tended to stay away from the barn.

Everybody stayed away from the barn.

Only a crazy man would mine or booby trap the yard where his own children and grandchildren were playing, right?

After all the years Griff had been tracking the Patriarch, he still could not say, with certainty, that they could rule out that possibility.

They had been ready to move out when edicts had come down simultaneously from FBI headquarters and the Attorney General—no big raid, no massive force maneuver, on any date that anyone by any stretch of the imagination could say was Good Friday. If something had gone wrong—or even if they had done their jobs perfectly, and nobody had died—then the headlines could wreak havoc with federal law enforcement in general. The whole country was on edge. It had been on edge for over thirty years, worried and challenged and bitten from without and within. America was half-crazy with suppressed rage.

They didn’t have much time. The Patriarch would surely find out something in the next couple of days, and there were any number of ways he could slip out of the farm and get clean away.

A small white bus drove onto the farm during the midmorning. While Griff notified the incursion team at the trailhead, Rebecca counted the women and children boarding the vehicle, parked just yards from the main house’s front porch—two middle-aged women in long dresses and six younger children dressed in their best church clothes. The children boarded the bus with cheery energy.

Griff played back the digital video record and counted heads again, to be sure.

Cap Benson, Charles Sprockett of the ATFE, and SAC John Keller, Griff’s Seattle boss, climbed into the tower at ten thirty and looked over the evidence. They conferred briefly.

‘Are we sure that’s all the dependents down there?’ Sprockett asked.

‘No,’ Griff said. ‘Jacob thinks there might be two young adult males, and so do I, based on those bank robberies. They’re not on the bus. There might be two more kids, and we’ve been talking over the possibility that the males have girlfriends or wives. We haven’t seen the kids all together to count them, but—’

‘There’s a redheaded girl, and maybe a white-blond boy of five or six. We did not see them get on the bus,’ Rebecca said. ‘Younger than the others. They may be the Patriarch’s grandchildren. They may all be living in the rear house.’

‘Why wouldn’t they go to Easter services?’ SAC Keller asked.

Levine shrugged. ‘Some sort of sharing of familial power. Training his sons to be heads of households. Or, they’re just figments of the light and our imagination.’

‘Well, his two sons are certainly not on that bus,’ Keller said.

‘What if they start firing back? The kids, I mean,’ Levine said.

‘You think they’d do that?’ Sprockett asked. ‘You think he’s trained them all to fight?’

Levine rubbed his forehead with two close-spaced fingers. ‘Chambers is hard core. The Big Time’s coming, and a White Christ out of the north is going to scourge the ungodly and drive the Mud People into their graves, from which they will be resurrected as the zombie slaves of true Aryans everywhere. Anybody who doesn’t defend themselves will be raped and eaten alive by the Mud People.’

‘No shit,’ Cap Benson said.

‘He’s off the main sequence, philosophically speaking.’

Keller said, ‘Griff, you’ve tracked him for two decades. This may be the best opportunity we’ve got. We can’t afford to lose him to old age…or let him bomb a few more clinics, if he’s so inclined.’

‘Or worse,’ Rebecca said.

‘Are your seriously thinking there’s a bioterror operation going on down there?’ Levine asked. ‘I have to say, that just isn’t the Patriarch’s style. He’s classic. He loves to blow stuff up.’

Rebecca smiled sweetly. Keller said, ‘Washington doesn’t want a raid. They’re afraid we’ll hurt some kids down there.’

Griff rubbed his cheek stubble. ‘Obviously, I’m going to have to go in alone and reconnoiter.’

‘The hell you say,’ Keller commented dryly.

‘It’s worth a shot. We’ve never actually met. He let the deputy go in and out—offered him coffee and biscuits. I think I could go in and take a closer look, ask some questions, and come out alive.’

‘On what pretext?’ Keller asked.

‘I’d have a better chance,’ Rebecca said. ‘A social worker. Census-taker. I look less like FBI than any of you.’

‘The Patriarch hates social workers,’ Griff said.

‘She might try for the harem,’ Sprockett said. No one seemed to think that was a good idea.

‘Can you make me look like an aging yardbird?’ Griff said. ‘I already have a few tats.’

Sprockett and Keller stared at him.

‘Time’s short,’ Griff said.

‘Shit,’ Sprockett said.

Keller got on his cell phone to issue instructions. Sprockett and Rebecca, working different phones, told the agents in town to let them know when the bus arrived.

Griff took a deep breath. He hated wearing body armor—especially the new reactive stuff. It was thin but it wriggled whenever you walked. Made him feel like he was in a living straitjacket.

‘You are what you eat,’ Rebecca told him as she followed Griff down the steps to the first landing. ‘What’d you have for breakfast this morning?’

‘Flakes,’ Griff said, grinning back at her. He then paused to look through the trees. His eyes were wide and he had difficulty taking a cleansing breath. What would it be like after they suited him up?

Over the next few hours, they procured a beat-up Ford pickup, a pair of denim dungarees, a T-shirt, and three quick forearm tattoos, on top of the two he already had, courtesy of one of Cap Benson’s backup team who moonlighted as a makeup artist. Benson called up Monroe to find out the latest trends in jailhouse art. Ten minutes later, they sent him some scans. Skulls, ripped hearts, Jesus on the cross, scorpions, and chains were still big. For some reason, fat seated Buddhas were having a good run—wearing berets and cradling Tommy guns in their ample laps.

As a last touch, Rebecca shaved Griff’s head down to a stubble.

‘You look like someone I’d boot out of town,’ Benson said.

Rebecca was less sanguine. ‘Twenty to one he’ll still peg you as FBI.’

‘All right,’ Griff said. ‘Tell me what I should look for.’

Rebecca pulled a lab catalog from her travel bag.

The mile down the dirt road in the noonday sun was long and bumpy. The trip would have been pleasant, but there was no way he could know what waited at the end.

Fresh to the FBI, he had carried a folded file card he would read whenever he ventured into a dangerous situation. On that card he had printed his own little set of mantras:

You can relax and trust your training. You know you’re good.

You can count on coming out of anything alive, you’re so damned good.

Say it to yourself: I will live and prosper, and the bad guys will rue the day.

He had lost that card on the day his team had encountered the Israeli gunbot, but he knew the mantras by heart. They still had juju.

Griff steered a slow curve around a big cedar stump, found the less bouncy part of the road, slowed, then glanced down at a black lapel button, a small camera that would feed video to the team forming at the main road and the smaller team working their way through the woods from the fire tower.

Hidden in the bagginess of the dungarees was his SIG, strapped to his waist and available through a large side pocket. Someone hadn’t positioned the Velcro fasteners properly. One of them was chafing.

‘SIG’s nothing,’ he reminded himself. ‘SIG’s a peashooter.’

The gunbot…

A team of fifty agents from the FBI and the Secret Service had stormed the Muncrow Building in downtown Portland two years before, preparing to arrest ten Serbian counterfeiters. They had been met by seven guys and two women in body armor, expecting no mercy and wielding a savage array of automatic weapons—but what lay hidden in the corrugated steel shed that blocked their only exit route—what had brought down nearly all of the team within twenty seconds, cutting them into bloody gobbets—had been an Israeli Sholem-Schmidt D-7, a self-directed, insect-carriage automated cannon. None of them had never seen one outside of Popular Science magazine.

Before it had run into a brick wall, jammed, and blown its super-heated barrels into shrapnel, the D-7 had all by itself killed forty-three agents. Griff had come out of the Muncrow Building alive, not a scratch. He had had nightmares for weeks.

Still did.

And in the mess, he had lost his file card.

The last U.S. President had privately threatened to bomb the Sholem-Schmidt factory outside Haifa. That had put a strain on relations for a few months, until Israeli intelligence had discovered D-7s being exported to Iran. Mossad had finally done the job themselves, arresting the owners and workers and dismantling the factory.

Wicked old world.

The barn came into view and then the farmhouse. The farmhouse was unpainted. Griff guessed that both had been assembled from the local trees. The exterior boards had warped slightly under the weather and the cedar roof shingles were rough along their windward edges like the scales on an old lizard. The trees that had once covered the farm had been probably been downed with cross-cut handsaws. He tried to picture the long old trailer-mounted sawmill hauled in by a stoop-shouldered truck and smell the freshcut wood and hear the wik-wik-wik of the boards being planed by hand and fastened together with mortise and tenon and square blacksmithed nails.

Rustic, independent, living off the land.

He drove by one end of the apple orchard, peering under the windshield visor at the thin forest of two-by-four studs arranged through the dead-looking trees and around the barn and house. The studs were newer than other wood around the property. Between the studs, someone—presumably the Patriarch and his sons—had strung a high checkerboard of wires at a uniform height of about six feet, sometimes in parallel, sometimes wrapped around each other, like someone’s crazy idea of a network of clothes lines.

Through his side window, he saw the spring leaves on a few of the apple trees. They were streaked with pale dust. There hadn’t been more than a drizzle of rain in a couple of weeks—perhaps the leaves had been coated with fine dirt from the road. The pines around the barn and the trees all around the old farmstead had all been lightly and uniformly powdered.

Griffin pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. The dust might be tree pollen. He kept an eye out for any sign of surveillance within the house. The truck made a few last bumps, and then he pulled up in the middle of a dirt parking area marked by a line of four creosoted railroad ties. Griff glanced at his watch. It was eleven. The truck’s noise hadn’t brought anyone to the front door or the porch but he saw a shade flicker in a window.

The old man had structured his life to a fare-thee-well, and no doubt he had prepared for a moment like this. But for a few minutes, at least, Griff was pretty certain he could convince Chambers he was just a wayward visitor.

It was a myth that crooks could always tell when somebody was a cop. Donnie Brasco—Joe Piscone—had been an excellent example and there were plenty of others. Criminals were not the shiniest apples in the barrel when it came to understanding human nature. If they were they’d be CEOs and they’d be making a lot more money, with fewer chances of landing in jail.

As he reached to pull on the emergency brake, he wondered how William was doing back in Quantico. Third generation. He had never wanted that even before the divorce, even before they had been reduced to seeing each other only once or twice a year.

He straightened and opened the truck door, pushing everything out of his mind but his story, his act. As he stepped down from the truck, he consulted a map and then turned, squinting at the house and the trees and hills.

His arm hair prickled when his back was to the house.

When he finished turning, he saw the old man on the front porch, standing with a slight stoop, hands by his sides. Up close he did not look so good. He had long thick white hair, leonine might be the description, but his mustache was darker, almost black. He might have been wearing a wig but where he would get that sort of wig, Griff did not know. A Halloween store, maybe. The old man’s eyes were wide, bright and observant and his face was neither friendly nor concerned. He did not look like he wanted company but he did not look terribly unhappy about it, either.

‘Hallo!’ Griff called out. ‘Is this the Tyee farm? I hope I’ve come to the right place.’

Someone had parked a jug of sun tea on the edge of the porch, away from the steps. It was a big glass jug with a cap and yellow flowers painted on one side.

‘This homestead used to be known by that name,’ Chambers said. ‘What’s your beef?’

‘I’ve been looking for a place to stay, maybe get work, and some folks in town said you might be able to help me. I’m a traveler in a dry land, friend.’

Chambers remained on the top step of the porch but his lips twitched. ‘You’re probably in the wrong place.’

‘Well, I see the trees are dusty,’ Griff said, trying for a joke. ‘They look dry.’

The old man’s face settled into concrete. ‘Have to spray all the time, kill the damned insects. Let me know your intentions or move on.’

Griff tried to look unnerved. ‘What I’m saying is, I hear there’s a church around here and some people I could sympathize with. It’s kind of lonely for that sort of company where I live.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Multnomah County.’

Chambers grimaced. ‘Queer place. Liberals and queers. Just right for each other.’

‘Exactly,’ Griff said. ‘Don’t know why I ever moved there. Niggers and Kikes. Crawl right up your pants leg. Have to squash them or they’ll nip you in the jewels.’ He slapped his pants and shook one foot. Levine had coached Griff on this dialog.

‘You’re somewhat of a clown, aren’t you?’ Chambers asked. His eyes had wandered casually to the truck, then to the barn, and finally to the northern hills, and his lids drooped for a moment along with his shoulders. ‘Show-offs and clowns always bring trouble.’

‘I apologize. I sure could use some good old-fashioned preaching, whatever you can offer, sir,’ Griff said, hoping for the right amount of awkwardness, out-of-stepness. Chambers was the brightest and most experienced of a sorry lot. He had instincts born of fifty hard, ambitious years. Margaret Thatcher’s loo. Griff could hardly believe it. Right here in Snohomish County.

‘You been in prison until recently?’ Chambers asked.

‘Yes, sir, Monroe. I did not want to let on right away.’

‘Did they tell you about Tyee at Monroe?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Who told you?’

‘We’ll need to get better acquainted, sir, before I reveal that.’

‘Well, come closer, let me get a look at you.’

Griff took a few steps forward.

‘My God, boy, you have arms like pig thighs. Pumping iron?’

‘Yes, sir. Weights kept me sane.’

‘Some almighty tats. Come on up here. Where you from before Monroe?’

‘Boise.’

‘Why don’t you tell me some names.’

‘Jeff Downey, he used to be a friend. Haven’t seen him in ten years. Don’t know if he’s still alive.’

‘He isn’t,’ Chambers said, and sniffed. ‘Which is convenient.’

‘Mark Lindgren. His wife, Suzelle.’ Again he was working from Jacob Levine’s script.

‘You talk with Lindgren recently?’

‘Nosir, but he knows me.’

‘Mind if I do some checking up on you?’

‘Nosir. But right now I’m very thirsty.’

‘For word or deed?’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘Will my words quench your thirst, or are you here for deeds? Because I’m not much in the way of deeds these days. Kind of staying quiet out here, like those volcanoes you can see from the road.’

Griff nodded. ‘I understand, sir. Just wanted to make your acquaintance and get some preaching. Find a church where I can feel comfortable.’

‘Well, that’s all right. What’s your experience with weapons?’

‘Knives kept me alive once or twice. Know guns pretty well. Used to collect shotguns. The wife sold my whole gun rack on e-Bay. Ex-wife.’ He jammed a load of masculine resentment into that. ‘Nigh on fifty thousand dollars’ worth, some my granddaddy had back in North Carolina. Frenchmade, German, beautiful things. She just…sold them.’ He waved his hands helplessly, and tightened his throat muscles to make sure his face was red.

Chambers said, ‘We all lose earthly things. Time comes when we make others lose earthly things, that’s the balance.’ Chambers liked this display of anger, the red face. ‘I’ve got sun tea out there on the porch and ice in the kitchen. Want a glass?’

‘Nothing harder?’ Griff asked, twitching his right eye into a wink.

‘I do not allow alcohol. I do excuse that request, coming as it does from a Monroe man. Still, you could have been worse off. You could have done your time in Walla Walla.’

Griff grinned and shook out his hands. ‘Yessir.’

They sat on the steps of the porch and drank tall glasses of sun tea sweetened with honey. Chambers was surprisingly limber and got down on the front step with barely a wince. His legs were long and skinny within the faded dungarees. His bony ankles stuck up from oversize and well-worn brown leather Oxfords. The sun was high over the farm and the dusty trees cast real shadows. It was the sort of bright day rarely seen up in these foothills at any time of the year and there had been many more of them recently—a long dry spell. They chatted for a few minutes about global warming and what it might mean.

‘Fuck, we’ll all get suntans,’ Griff said. ‘Then we’ll be closer to the Mud People. Might even marry one of them.’

Chambers chortled deep in his beard. ‘I do wish you would clean up that prison language. I have kids here. They’re off celebrating Easter. Good Friday.’

‘That’s not till next week,’ Griff said.

‘We worship to God’s calendar,’ Chambers said. ‘All the world’s calendar brings is grief and worse luck.’ A little bit of old East Coast had crept into Chamber’s tone. ‘It cannot keep going on the way it is.’

Griff peered at the Patriarch, respectful, even worshipful, nodding his head. Taking it all in.

‘Prophecy’s a crock,’ Chambers said, his voice low and crackling. ‘Revelation is a Jewish fantasy. Israel has nothing to do with prophecy. It is a political entity. It brings disgrace down upon the white races. Jesus was not an observant Jew. His people came from the north, Northern Italy, maybe even Germany. None of the apostles were Jews except Judas. Defending the so-called homeland of the Jews has brought us to this. Brother against brother. 9-11, call the cops, and now 10-4. Roger and out.’

Chambers stared out across the scrubby grass of the big front yard, then fixed on the barn.

Eyes betray. Where they look is important.

‘It’s so bad, Jesus should have returned long ago,’ Griff said. ‘Don’t you think?’

Chambers squinted to the north and stuck out his arm, a lean finger pointing. ‘He isn’t coming. He’s disgusted, all these Mud People building places they call churches…He’s not going to help you until you help Him. You got to believe what is in your heart. What’s in your heart?’

‘I don’t know. Anger. I’m mad. I want things better. I want things to go down easy.’

‘Things are not in the habit of ever being easy, my man from Monroe. I know that in my heart, always have.’ Chambers thumped his chest with a knuckly fist. ‘Circumstance has a way of sneaking up on you, just when you’re ready to sink into old age and enjoy the grandchildren. You have to prepare.’ He pulled down an eyelid and cocked a clear gaze at Griff over a clever grin. ‘Every week or so I hunt deer and take treks around the homestead. I can still get off a straight shot. My eyes are still sharp.’ He leaned forward and swung his right arm out in a point. ‘You see that low ridge? Just in front of the triangular peak. There is a fire tower up on that ridge. See it?’

Griff tracked along the long arm. ‘Nosir.’

‘Used to be a tree up on that ridge,’ Chambers said. ‘A few days back, someone chopped it. Just took it right down.’

Griff put on a dumb face. ‘Those towers are all around up here.’

‘I hiked by that one six months ago. It’s the only one. This time of year, most often it’s rented. Campers use it. Campers don’t cut down trees. Someone’s in that tower.’

‘Maybe the rangers moved in early. Warming and all.’

Chambers shook his head. ‘They’re up there, watching me. But that’s all right. I’m prepared.’

‘I could scout for you,’ Griff said, giving the ridge a fierce scowl.

‘No need, Monroe man. It’s over. I took a few risks, even risked my family, but it’s going to be worth it in the long scheme.’ He did not look at Griff as he spoke. ‘I told my sons to go out by the back trails, follow the bus, get to a real church somewheres and pray for me.’

Griff looked puzzled. This was being transmitted back up the road. Another ambush was the last thing he wanted. ‘Why leave?’ he asked. ‘It’s beautiful here. I could live here and be happy.’ He studied Chamber’s dingy white shirt, trying to contour the skinny ribs beneath, looking for padding—any sort of hidden bomb. The shirt was too loose. Bombs could be hidden anywhere.

‘The tree hath blossomed in the night, and the fruit it is set. I am an old man, and my family will prosper and do great works after I am gone.’

Griff shook his head. ‘You got a long life ahead preaching and spreading the word.’

Chambers took a deep breath through his nose. ‘Come into my house, Monroe man. I’ll show you something glorious and then we’ll say goodbye.’ Chambers pushed himself slowly to his feet; getting down was easier than getting up again. Griff did not like this. Playing a part and being wary all at once had never been easy for him. He followed the old man through the wood-framed screen door with the squealing spring into the neat shade of the snow porch with bundled twigs pushed into a corner and two rusted metal snow shovels, and then into the living room. The oak furniture was sturdy but worn. The big stone fireplace was as described by the deputy, who had eaten his muffin where Griff was now standing.

‘I do love my children,’ Chambers said, ‘and they love me. I will miss them, but I have through deeds builded my mansion in heaven. There will be a sharp correction, Monroe man. The Jews will weep and Jesus will greet me as a brother. Mary will soothe me and stroke my hair and though I am reborn in a youthful body, I will mourn for those that still suffer on this Earth, forced to dwell among the ones bathed in darkness. For surely the dark races are hiding from that cleansing ray. Surely the sun is out today, searching, and they hide in their ghettos and in their holes in the cities, in their black and noisome hives of squalor and brick. Comes soon a time when the pillar of fire shall yet again rise, and a man will carry with him across this world a vessel as virulent as the Ark of the Covenant, and all who come near, all the Mud People and the lying and deceitful Jews, wearing their pubic hairs on their heads, their long curly black hairs, shall reach out to touch the beauty of it, and they shall be smote by the tens of thousands, as it was in olden times. God never did much like the Jews. History proves it. Once more, a pillar of fire shall rise over the land by night, and a pillar of cloud by day.’

Chambers’ face turned peaceful. He favored Griff with a fatherly smile.

‘Hallelujah,’ Griff said. ‘That’s preaching, Reverend.’

‘You haven’t told me your name, son.’

‘Jimmy, Jimmy Roland.’

The Patriarch held out his hand. Griff shook it: a dry firm grip, no sweat, no worry.

‘It is no sin to sweep away the polluted.’

‘Amen to that,’ Griff said.

‘Now you look a proper wise fellow, Jimmy Roland, no sense playing stupid, you’ve been around. You know your work, and you know mine.’ Chambers sat gingerly in a rockerglider and slowly started moving back, forward, back and forward, up a little, down. ‘Nobody comes from Monroe without passing me special words. I am certain I smell a Jew on you.’

Without being obvious, Griff had taken inventory of the room. Behind and to the immediate right, Chambers had within his reach a narrow cabinet set back to one side of the fireplace, where pokers and shovels might be stored, the door open. Griff could not see the inside.

‘You should have been here last month. Nipped it in the bud. You could have had us then. You saw the burn barrels. We cleaned things out. We have cleared the path. The rest is in the hands of the true God. Has been since before you arrived. Just know that the fruit has set, and soon the Jews and their children will bring it to the world’s table and eat of it.’ He leveled a finger at Griff’s chest. ‘They are listening, so let them hear my epitaph.’ He paused with a wicked smile. ‘An end to all the evil they have done since time began. Death to the Jews, my friend.’

Chambers leaned and thrust his gnarled fingers toward the cabinet.

Griff slipped his hand through the Velcroed seam in his shirt. ‘FBI!’ he shouted.

Faster than he had any right to be, Chambers brought out a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun from the cabinet. In an instant he had it cocked. The blued-steel barrel gleamed as it swung.

Griff’s gun was out and he shot Chambers four times. The shotgun barrel swayed and dropped an inch, the old man’s finger still trying to pull the trigger. Griff squeezed off two more rounds. Chambers let go of the stock and the shotgun fell. Its butt thumped heavily on the floor. The barrel sang against the stones of the fireplace. The old man’s lungs gurgled air through new holes in his chest and neck and his eyes twitched back in their sockets. His voice was liquid and bubbled like a frog’s and he said, ‘Lord, Lord.’ Then, barely audible, eyes quivering but trained on Griff, ‘Fuck you.’

After that his eyes went flat and he was dead but his movement continued, legs and one arm shivering as he slumped in the chair and finally hung half-in, half-out. His trigger finger jerked like a snake. Stopped.

Griff raised the SIG and with a grunt rolled the old man over, quickly and rudely palped him, then turned out his pockets looking for IED or remotes or timers. He pulled a plastic restraint cord from his pants pocket and cinched the limp, bony wrists. Only then did he check the old man’s pulse, mostly avoiding the slick smear of blood around the floor and the last of the flow from the nicked carotid.

He swallowed hard, trying to focus on the remaining danger, trying to keep the nervous crime-comedy voices out of his forebrain and back in the rear cages where they belonged. Papa has left the premises.

Suicide by cop. At his age. Preaching and then trying me on. I don’t believe it.

Griff quickly moved through the house, swinging along the walls, down the hall, into the rooms. He opened the closets just to make sure; very likely with kids so recently in the house they were not booby-trapped but he was still taking a chance. The house was clean and neat, beds made in each of the four small bedrooms, the single office with its roll-top desk prim in ordered austerity.

He passed the Patriarch on the way out. Erwin Griffin hated dead bodies. He had never admitted that to anyone; agents were supposed to be hardcore. Bodies made him feel sick.

Only then did he remember he was on the grid and that since the shooting, other than shouting out his affiliation, he had said nothing—maybe grunted, maybe cursed. Back up by the main road, they should have heard and seen everything that had happened inside the house and especially the shots and he did not want hordes of people up here or near the barn, not yet.

As he stepped through the door and out on the porch, peering left and then right, he said, ‘Chambers is dead. I’m fine. Keep everyone back.’

He faced north and saw agents and police running toward the house. How long had it taken him to search, two or three minutes? It had seemed like at least ten.

‘Get the hell back!’ he shouted from the porch, his voice cracking as he waved them off. They stopped. ‘Get back, you idiots!’ They turned and retreated with equal haste.

He had blood on his arm. The tattoos were smeared. He sat on the porch, letting his heart slow from Krupa to oompah, wishing to hell he had a cigarette, before deciding he would have to take a turn about the yard, around the house, just to make sure.

By that time, he saw vans and more people up by the edge of the clearing.

The farm was no longer quiet.

CHAPTER EIGHT El Centro, California

‘I’ve been thinking about what you were saying,’ Charlene told the tall blond man. It was past noon. Her eyes were puffy. They had made love and slept a little and then talked into the morning. Now they were having breakfast in a Coco’s restaurant. ‘I just can’t be that cynical. I need hope. Even when I know what I’m doing and think about where my husband is, I still want to be a Christian.’

The blond man glanced at his skinned knuckles. They had already scabbed over. He had told Charlene that he had barked them while changing a tire. In fact, he had slipped in a ditch after shooting an Arizona patrol officer.

The waitress brought another glass of orange juice. Charlene drank the second glass with equal speed—three quick gulps—sniffed, and looked around the Coco’s: Scotchgarded print fabric on the booth seats, scarred oak table top, one knife magnetically stuck to a fork beside a plate smeared with yolk and bacon grease. Outside, bleached by the sun, El Centro, California: warehouses and auto repair businesses and trucks roaring by. The blond man was in his late forties, thin, run-down. He had put on sunglasses after leaving the Day’s Inn to hide his eyes—one green, one blue.

‘You’re so quiet,’ Charlene told him.

‘Sorry. I’ve probably said too much already.’

Charlene had driven the green Ford van from Highway 10, where she had picked him up by the side of the road, to El Centro, stopping at a Day’s Inn. They had both taken rooms. She had met him in the lobby after midnight and asked what his name was and he had told her it was Jim Thorpe. Charlene had been needy. Even after she had fallen asleep, Jim Thorpe had stayed awake. He looked as if he had not slept for weeks.

Charlene looked through the low window beside the booth, out to the dry lawn and the street beyond. ‘I’m ready to believe in Jesus, just give myself up to something that I know is totally good,’ Charlene said. ‘I mean, I can see Jesus so clearly and he is beautiful and compassionate and he has a lovely smile—just like yours.’ She looked at him with real longing. ‘I do not know why men have to act so tough. You certainly don’t need to be bitter…I mean, you’re an attractive older guy. You can travel the whole world, no responsibilities…’ She stopped, confused, and looked at the table.

Charlene’s husband had gone to West Point. After 10-4, he had signed up for infantry, taking the idiot sticks, the emblem of crossed rifles, over more plum army opportunities. Charlene had wanted him to stay home and be a husband and a father. He had enlisted for a second tour to kill ragheads and stay with his buddies. His name was Jason. She had shown Jim Thorpe a picture. Her guy was upright, young, strong, bullnecked, laser-eyed. He wondered what Jason was seeing right now.

‘I think about him being God knows where because the damned army won’t tell the families anything and I wonder, what is Jesus really up to? What is He thinking, making all of us suffer? But I can’t blame Jesus. It’s us, isn’t it?’ Charlene tapped the juice glass on the table. Made it do a little dance. Made as if to smile bravely, but too late. Women liked confessing to him. It was the one thing that they gave him that he would have gladly dispensed with.

But hadn’t he confessed to her—just a little, and started her flow? Opened up about his innermost opinions? If she only knew the half of it.

‘I know you’re a good man,’ she said. ‘But being so hopeless…I can’t feel that way. It’s just the way the world treats us. We’re being tested.’

His nerves were starting to jangle. He needed to move on or the grief would slam back and he’d find the brick wall that he had built between him and his lost faces crumbling. ‘Then maybe it’s all taken care of in the end,’ he offered.

Charlene’s eyes filled with tears.

‘It is so wrong to have to wait for my husband, and feel…so hungry to have a man. Just a man to hug me, wrap his arms around me. I have never been desperate, not like this. Never. And my boy needs a father. I need his father.’ Her face hardened. ‘I have never done this before.’

Yes, you have, he thought.

‘When is it all going to come right again?’ she asked.

‘Soon,’ Jim Thorpe said. He wrapped one hand around her fingers on the juice glass and gave them a gentle squeeze.

Charlene frowned at him, don’t tease. ‘I just want my husband home. I want to feel normal, be right with my kids and my family.’

‘Of course.’ He stood beside the booth and opened his wallet. ‘Breakfast is on me.’

‘No,’ Charlene said primly. ‘We’re not poor.’ She laid a twenty next to his. Then she put down another ten and gave him back the twenty he had put down. Bravely, she said, ‘Your money’s no good here.’

‘You sure?’

‘I’m sure, Mr. Jim Thorpe. Or is it James?’

He smiled.

‘Such a lovely smile,’ she said. Her eyes turned quick and efficient, darting around the tables, squinting through the bright windows. ‘You leave first.’ Even in El Centro she was worried that people who knew her might see her with another man.

‘Thanks for breakfast,’ he said.

‘Thanks for having a patient ear,’ she said.

As he walked out into the glare she passed him in a tidy hurry. No one could have guessed what they had been doing on thin hotel sheets just a few hours before. He admired that sort of efficiency. Women were good at such things.

He was not. The bricks were falling. There was no mental wall thick enough to block what he had lost. He stood on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, waiting, shivering despite the heat. He wasn’t looking forward to telling Tommy. Tommy did not need to know about the patrolman. His selfimportant partner was tippy at the best of times. That was how Tommy described himself: tippy, but enthusiastic—when he wasn’t Dipsy-Down, as he called it.

Unpredictable—but for the moment, still essential.

The tall man watched Charlene pull the green Ford van out of the Coco’s parking lot. She rolled down the window and looked both ways but deliberately did not see him as she drove by.

Five minutes later, Tommy roared up in his battered, creamcolored El Camino. He reached over and pulled the door lock with fat dexterous fingers. He was small and skinny but for his face and his fingers; these belonged to a larger man. The effect was grotesque but Tommy no longer seemed to care how people reacted.

‘No luggage?’ he asked, his plump face showing an early flush of dismay. ‘No truck. No printers. God, Sam, what happened?’

Sam opened the door and climbed in, sitting on the ripped seat. ‘Let’s drive,’ he said.

‘What happened to the big truck?’

‘There’s been a change in our strategy,’ Sam said.

‘Sam, I don’t like being disappointed,’ Tommy fluted. ‘We need those printers. I can’t do everything we want without those printers. I don’t like failure.’

Sam was dangerously close to chucking it all. ‘To the winery, Jeeves,’ he said with a flourish.

‘You’re in fine spirits. You got laid last night, didn’t you, Sam? That’s why you’re trying to be funny.’ Sometimes, Tommy’s bursts of intuition made him seem psychic—hard to get used to in such a man-child.

‘We’re okay, really. We’ll be fine. We’ll get more printers.’

‘Before you got here and got laid, something went wrong. Don’t tell me,’ Tommy insisted, his face clouded like a baby about to burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to hear it. Really, I don’t. I couldn’t take it.’

‘We’ll be fine,’ Sam said.

‘Did you leave fingerprints?’ Tommy asked.

Sam raised his right hand. His fingers were shiny with clear silicone caulk.

‘There’s something else,’ Tommy said, his tiny eyes shifting and wild. ‘I turned on the radio. I heard it on the way to pick you up.’ He pushed the radio knob. The big news was the death of the bank robber and abortion clinic bomber called the Patriarch and the ongoing search of his farm hideaway in Washington state. ‘Is that our guy?’ Tommy asked. ‘Sam, is that our guy? Is that our second factory?’

Sam did not have a quick story to soothe Tommy—or himself. He stared at the radio, then out the window.

Tommy said, ‘Oh my. Oh my. Sam, oh my.’

‘All right, Tommy. Pull over and I’ll drive for a while.’

Tommy’s nose was dripping and he was shaking badly. He had entered the land of Dipsy-Down and it was all he could do to stop the car without getting them both killed.

CHAPTER NINE Washington State

Griff stripped off his shirt and body armor and handed it to the FBI evidence team. They whisked it to their van to offload the data and video contained in the vest. All of the police vehicles, at Griff’s request, stayed on the edge of the clearing, about a hundred yards from the house and the barn.

He walked back toward the house with Rebecca Rose at his side. They stared at the barn. Griff’s nostrils flexed and his upper lip twitched as if he were about to sneeze. The breeze was cool against his naked upper torso. He slipped an Underarmor T-shirt over his head. Jacob Levine joined them and handed Griff his own purple vest. Griff declined. Even chilly, he refused to go that far.

‘Becky,’ he said, ‘Chambers kept looking at the barn.’

‘Yeah,’ Rebecca said.

‘I think you might want to get back with the others.’

‘I will if you will,’ Rebecca said.

‘Don’t be an asshole,’ Griff said. ‘I’ve done this kind of stuff for decades.’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘I’ll need to see what’s in the house and the barn ASAP. Then we’ll know what to do next.’

Levine held his ground, too. ‘Have you heard?’ he asked them.

‘Heard about what?’

‘The bus never made it to town. It stopped and the families loaded into three cars. They diverted at a side road and threw off the tracking vehicles. Some of them may be headed east to Idaho.’

Griff rubbed his upper lip, first checking to make sure there was no blood on his finger. ‘He knew about us all along. He saw us cut down the tree.’

‘Makes you wonder where his righteous sons are,’ Rebecca said.

They both stared into the far stands of cedars and larches.

Griff cringed as a helicopter passed slowly overhead. Even at three hundred feet, the steady beat of the rotors thumped the barn and the ground under his boots. Three crime scene techs came around the main house, stringing yellow tape. The tape flapped and curled in the downdraft. There was a news station imprint on the chopper’s side—KOMO Seattle. Someone must have radioed the pilot that the scene was unsecured and dangerous, for the helicopter abruptly backed off and swung around, heading west over the woods to the highway, probably to take more pictures of the base camp.

Cap Benson approached bearing in his arms a more suitable blue blazer he had pulled from the trunk of his car. Griff slipped the blazer on over the T-shirt and decided he looked if anything even more ridiculous than he would have wearing Levine’s vest.

They all stood in the broad, scrubby front yard of the old farmhouse. Inside, the Patriach still lay sprawled on his stomach in a pool of blood, cuffed, awkward and bedraggled and not giving a damn one way or the other. Griff could see him like an after-image over the barn. He had killed three times—four, now—in his FBI career. Six or seven times before that, in the Navy. Much more than the average. He did not enjoy the distinction.

From the road, blowing in on a westerly breeze, they could hear the faint sounds of big trucks on the move. Washington State Patrol, FBI, ATF, Homeland Security, whatever.

Dogs running to sniff at the old man’s kingdom.

‘That’s one big barn,’ Benson said. ‘Wonder what’s in it?’

‘Why don’t you go have a look?’ Griff said. He would have to re-evaluate the entire scene. If Chambers had known he was being watched for several days, who knew what he could have accomplished? What chain of events he could have started by making a few night visits to the barn, or the second house…?

Chances were, with all the kids, there would not have been tripwires or other traps spread around the yard, or in the houses…but Griff just could not be sure.

He turned to the north. Several techs in white plastic suits and hoods were swabbing samples of powder off the distant trees. ‘Your people?’ he asked Rebecca. She nodded. ‘What do you think they’ll find? Chambers said they had sprayed for pests.’

‘I doubt that,’ Levine said. ‘He hated pesticides. Called them a conspiracy by the Jews to help feed the Mud People of the world.’

Rebecca looked amused. Griff did not know what to think about the world’s evil. Another tech closer in had climbed a ladder braced against one of many wooden poles around the property and was attaching a multimeter to the wires suspended overhead.

‘How many long arms of the law do you have back there, Cappy?’ Griff asked.

‘There’s me and my boys. ATF has pulled back, I don’t know why.’

‘Bureau asked for primacy. We still have some chips to play.’

‘I don’t see your boss, Keller,’ Benson said.

‘He was called back to Washington, DC,’ Rebecca said. ‘He’s going to testify before some senate committee.’

Griff sucked that back in. Not even collaring the Patriarch stopped the wheels of partisan politics, trying to grind down the FBI. Trying to kill it and hand its responsibilities over to others. No matter. His retirement was secure. One more year and he would cross the boundary of GS-1811—into mandatory retirement.

Benson continued, ‘There’s Sergeant Andrews and four guys from the state inter-agency bomb squad. We got Dan Vogel from the K9 explosives unit. I saw Child Protective Services hanging around with nothing to do, and one black girl in a leather jacket, like a goddamned Black Panther, but I suppose she’s one of yours.’

Griff nodded.

‘And two other feds I don’t recognize.’

‘Homeland Security and Bureau of Domestic Intelligence,’ Griff said. ‘They’d love to horn in. I want Dan and his dog to sweep the main house, then the second house, in that order.’ He waved his hands, drawing a plan in the air.

‘Not the barn?’ Benson asked.

‘Griff thinks the barn is rigged,’ Levine said. He paced in a small circle, eyes on the ground, sweat on his forehead despite the chill.

‘Bots coming soon?’ Griff asked.

Benson nodded.

‘Send a bot into the barn. And get some more troopers into those woods. His sons could be drawing a bead on us right now.’ He closed one eye and cocked his finger at Levine.

‘Hell, they would have taken you out after you killed their pappy,’ Levine said. ‘The sons are long gone.’

‘Maybe.’

Griff did not think the houses were rigged with explosives. Kids had been there too recently; tough to control kids, keep them from setting something off. No one had seen anybody walking outside to the rear house after the bus had departed. Still, it would be necessary to thoroughly check for both explosives and kids in hiding—and the K9 could do that.

He now stood with hands on hips and faced his main nightmare directly. The big sliding barn door had been left open six or seven inches, not enough for a man to easily squeeze through. He did not want to touch that door. It was too much like an invitation.

‘The Patriarch would plan for bots, don’t you think?’ Griff asked Rebecca.

‘Sounds like,’ Rebecca said. ‘X-ray triggers. Trip mikes tuned to machine sounds.’

‘All these wires,’ Griff said. ‘What the hell are they for? What level of paranoia should we consider unreasonable? He’s been at this for fifty years, right?’

‘We should wait,’ Rebecca said. ‘Less chance of someone clumsy hitting a tripwire.’

Griff turned on her but kept his voice low. ‘What if it’s all hooked up to a goddamned timer, Special Agent Becky Rose?’

‘Your call,’ Rebecca said, pursing her lips. Griff was the only agent who called her Becky and she didn’t like it much, but in the grand scheme…

‘Is it? Or is News breathing down my back?’

‘As I said…’

‘Right. It’s my call. Well, fuck that, too.’

The police waiting up at the start of the clearing were milling about, observing the four of them as they faced the barn.

‘He’d know,’ Levine said. ‘He’d plan for dogs.’

‘Our dogs are trained to avoid wires. They work through all sorts of masking scents,’ Benson said. ‘I’d rather trust them than the bots.’

‘No dog I ever met could spot a tripwire in dim light or slip past a motion detector,’ Griff said. ‘I think the houses are safest. Dogs for the houses. We’ll send bots into the barn.’

He was starting to shake. It had been hours since he had shot the old man. Shot him six times in his fucking living room. A man’s home is his castle. Deep things were churning in him and making his hands and shoulders tremble. ‘Well,’ Griff said. ‘Let’s bring them all forward. Get me Watson.’

Rebecca used her comm.

Special Agent Alice Watson pushed through the crowd of police and agents and walked down the road with quick, offkilter steps. She was a plump woman of thirty-three with one leg shorter than the other, acres of attitude, and the expertise to justify it. Long scars pulled her face on one side. She wore a thick lens over one eye but with the other eye she could still see clearly.

Watson had nearly died two years ago, in Paris. She had made one small mistake dealing with an Al Aqsa handbag packed with a proximity fuse and two charges of T6 Anafex, set to release a vial of osmium tetroxide through spray cans that had once held Raid. The bag had been found in a public park. There had been no time to bring in robots. The main charge had dudded. The canister of tetrox had remained intact, sparing a large crowd—and Watson. But there had been a third fuse buried under the pack, and she had taken the backup charge—just a pinch—square in the face.

Later, in the hospital, she had told Griff, ‘I met the ghost of that bomb. I put both my fingers up its nose and twisted. That’s why it let me go. Next time, it’ll share some secrets.’

Watson had spent time recuperating with her husband and kid. She had returned to the job after six months but had spent the next four months in a powered walker. The bomb ghost might or might not be a joke. Griff didn’t care.

She was the best bomb expert he knew.

Watson shook hands with Rebecca, then stood beside Griff and said, ‘We’re on bombnet at HDS and Eglin. They’re feeding it to experts in Los Angeles and Washington. We’re going to have about fifteen good eyes on this one, including mine.’ Her grin was a cruel parody but it bucked up Griff’s spirits.

A few steps behind Watson followed a short man with close-cut brown hair, wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt and leading a golden retriever on a glittering chain. The dog whined and dodged, eager to earn her play treat. This would be Dan Vogel and Chippy, Griff thought. Beautiful dog, fluffy and reddish-gold, recently shampooed and totally focused on the red ball that Vogel clutched in one hand. A happy dog with way too much energy. Under one arm, Vogel carried a thick folder filled with scent tabs: a library of bomb ingredients to help Chippy focus. In the last ten years there had been a substantial revolution in both the variety, the compactness, and the strength of explosives. Microreactors—chemical factories little bigger than a breadbox—had put the creation of lethal amounts of dangerous substances into the hands of small groups, and even individuals.

‘Chippy’s happy,’ Watson said.

‘All my bitches are happy. Where first, boss?’

‘That is a big barn,’ Watson said.

‘What’s your ghost telling you?’ Griff asked.

Watson glared at him with one good eye, the other goggling behind its lens like a blank moon in a telescope. ‘That was private, Griff.’

‘All right. What kind of bomb would fill a barn?’ he asked. ‘Fertilizer,’ Watson said. ‘But this bastard has used kitchen TAMP, C4, Semtex, Anafex, triminol, passage clay, Poly-S phosphate, and aerosol kerosene—that’s a baby daisy-cutter, to you guys—you name it. I really don’t know. This would be his pièce de résistance?’

‘Sounds right,’ Griff said. ‘He died proud. He said it was all in God’s hands.’

‘Shit,’ Benson said, and his face went a shade more pale in the dusk. Levine stopped pacing and shoved his hands in his pockets. Rebecca looked down at her feet, then up again, eyes slitted.

Vogel knelt by the retriever and opened the book to the first page, a stimulating scent. The dog snuffled happily, eyes bright and tail wagging. Then she sneezed.

Watson looked at the network of wires on poles surrounding the house and strung over the dirt road. She took a cleansing breath, let it out, pointed to the edge of the clearing, and said, ‘Gentlemen, Agent Rose, if you’re nonessential, you best move on out. Who knows what you might step in—or on?’

Rebecca said, ‘I’ll stay.’

‘You’re not going in there, Rebecca,’ Griff said.

‘We’ll see,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’ve put in my request.’

‘Shit. We need to reduce personnel and do our search, no crap. I’ve been involved in tracking this bastard for twenty years.’

‘No crap,’ Rebecca said steadily. ‘I’ve been working bioterror for longer than that. I’m here, I’m interested. I won’t get in your way.’

‘Becky—’

‘Can you identify a minilab, Griff? Sequencers? Fermenters? Do you know what to look for?’

Griff set his jaw. ‘You could tell me. You’re a Janie-come-lately here. You three, bug out.’

Benson shrugged. ‘You’ve got enough grief, you don’t need any more from me,’ he said, and patted Griff’s arm. He and Levine walked up the road, leaving the field and the barn to the experts, and to Rebecca Rose, who had set her jaw and was interested.

Levine looked back over his shoulder. Griff did not like having people look back, one last glance; that sort of shit bothered him. He pointed his finger at Rebecca. ‘You’re not even rated for a bomb suit.’

She folded her arms.

Watson eyed them both with amusement.

Chippy was whining and tugging toward the barn.

‘Is Chippy good on her own?’ Griff asked Vogel.

‘Got a four zero on the Fairview course last month,’ Vogel said. ‘Found ten out of ten devices, including Anafex.’

‘Is she okay with kids?’ Griff asked.

‘Loves them. Kids play fetch.’

Chippy strained at her leash. She really wanted into that barn. Griff did not want her or anyone else in there. That barn was creeping him out badly. He glared at Rebecca.

‘Number one.’ Griff pointed to the main house. ‘Then the house behind.’

Vogel led the dog away to the first house. He opened the screen door then reached down and unclipped her collar. The golden retriever trotted inside.

A snow-white and freshly waxed inter-agency bomb truck, sporting the odd symbol of a flaming wasp nest, rumbled through the cordon and approached the house. Cap Benson rode the running board, wearing a boyish grin. Inside was the bombot coordinator, a sergeant whom Griff had hung out with in Portland during a training session for local police departments. They had gone drinking together. His name was George Carlin Andrews.

Benson jumped off as the truck pulled up beside them. ‘No guts, no glory,’ he said to Griff.

Griff brushed past him without a word. Watson opened the door for Andrews. ‘The machine gods have arrived,’ she announced.

‘Why, thank you, pretty miss,’ Andrews said, stepping down with his aluminum box of goodies. ‘Griff, is that you, all dolled up?’ He peeled off a glove and held out his hand. He was tall and thick across the middle but he had delicate fingers, jeweler’s hands.

Griff nodded and shook with him.

‘What are we hoping not to find? Any clues?’ Andrews asked.

‘Not many,’ Griff said. He told Andrews about the way Chambers had looked at the barn and a little more about his history. ‘He said it was all in God’s hands.’

Rebecca liked that even less the second time she heard it.

‘Uh huh,’ Andrews said. ‘Jacob Levine filled me in. We probably can’t move back far enough to escape that sort of wrath. We could take time to dig some foxholes. What do you think?’

‘If something that big blows, we’d just get sucked out,’ Watson said.

‘Pink clouds,’ Rebecca said.

Andrews faced her square. ‘We haven’t met, have we?’

‘Special Agent Rebecca Rose,’ Griff said. ‘She thinks there might be biologicals in there.’

‘I surely do love this job,’ Andrews said. ‘I’m told Homeland Security could have EEOs flown up from Walnut Creek in a few hours.’

‘It would be wise to—’ Rebecca began.

‘We don’t have time,’ Griff said.

‘I thought you’d say that.’ Andrews walked around to the back of the truck and opened the gate, then pulled down a rack stuffed with rounded foot-high cylinders, six of them, striped black and yellow like the business end of a hornet. One by one, he plucked four from the rack and let them roll in the dust, inert. ‘How many of my little beauties do you want?’

‘Two for now, one at a time,’ Griff said. ‘Best if they can squeeze through that opening without jiggling the barn door.’

Andrews opened the aluminum case and pulled out earnodes and gogs. ‘We’re on Lynx with bombnet and HDS,’ he said. ‘The bots will relay pretty good pictures. If they find anything, I suggest we just close the roads and blow the whole damned thing. You’ve got your man, right?’

‘I want to see what he has in there,’ Griff said. ‘When he tried to blow my head off with his shotgun, he was happy. The last words he said were, “Death to the Jews.”’ Well, not quite the last words. But it makes my point.

‘There aren’t many Jews around here,’ Andrews said.

Griff stuck his hands in his pockets. Christ, he was tired. He just wanted this to be over, to find out how his son was doing at Quantico, to lie in bed and pull the covers up to his shoulders and breathe deeply of a dark quiet bedroom’s home-scented air.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘In his sixty active years, Robert Chambers worked with mobsters, the IRA, Thai smugglers, probably the Russians, and Aryan Nations. Is there anyone here who isn’t curious about what he really meant, and who else he might be connected to?’

Watson raised her arm. ‘Me,’ she said like a student in class. She looked around the group. ‘Just joking.’

Griff ignored her. ‘Can one of those fit through that opening?’

‘I think so,’ Andrews said. ‘Armatec 9 D-lls and a D-l2. They’re smaller and cheaper than last year’s models, and so far they’re pretty damned good. Each one is a little different, you know. Custom programs, more and more independent. I’ve named them all.’ He upended one of the cans and unscrewed the container cover. Inside, folded and strapped into a compact unit, was a cross between a go-kart and a cockroach, with three wheels mounted on springs and pistons and five triple-jointed legs, two in the front and three in the rear. Andrews unlatched the bot and it stretched out with a hydraulic sigh. A pole as thick as a pencil rose from a lozenge-shaped ‘head’ above a three-wheeled base plate. The head looked like the bridge on a toy ship. The pole thrust out two little black eyes on thin flexible stalks. A third eye was mounted on the pole itself, centered just below the stalks. Pressed into grooves behind the head were two retracted arms with graspers and cutters extensible from their tips. Griff, vaguely familiar with Armatec bots, looked for and saw the case that contained the scanner kit—fluoroscope and stethoscope, along with remote chemical analyzer. He also spotted two disruptors, slender barrels mounted behind the head designed to shoot slugs into bomb detonators. Unfolded, the bot was about fifteen inches long, with a wheelbase of six inches.

‘This one’s Kaczynski. These guys here are McVeigh and Nichols. And this one, the temperamental one, is Marilyn Monroe.’ Marilyn was bigger than the others.

Rebecca walked up to the nearest wooden post and examined the wires strung overhead. ‘I’ll bet it’s some sort of antenna. But it’s new to me. No sign of it being wired to the barn, but the wires could be buried.’ Rebecca patted the post. Griff could not read her expression. ‘We’re at solar max,’ she said. ‘Auroras all the way down to San Diego, prettiest I’ve ever seen—like a sign from God. Was the Patriarch the kind of guy who liked to watch the skies?’

CHAPTER TEN Quantico

William walked briskly to the library to drop off two texts. Along the way, two agents in red shirts ran past double-time, heading for the lounge, eager to see the bombnet telecast. He was in no hurry. Bombs held little interest for him. Having to wait up long nights as a boy for his father to come home had cured him of any interest in blowing up model airplanes with firecrackers or concocting little pipe bombs to light off in the woods. There had of course been those weeks when Griff had taught him about fireworks…Odd, exciting weeks. He’d almost forgotten about them.

He passed part of the Academy art gallery—framed prints lining the walls, all realistic and comforting, landscapes and farms and domestic situations. These he liked well enough. They served as a perfect counterbalance to gory crime scene photos and shoot-’em-ups in training. Why we fight. His favorite was of a young blond girl tending a newborn calf in a grassy field. He paused for a moment in front of the framed print. He really wanted to be there with that girl and that calf.

William Griffin was aware he looked nothing like the typical FBI agent, if there is such a person. At six feet four inches tall, he certainly looked nothing like his father, a bluff, stocky bull of a man. Even after five years in the NYPD, William had acquired none of the solid decorum and steady, critical gaze of the good cop. Instead, his brown eyes tended to be sympathetic, humored, and friendly, and beneath a long, straight knife of a nose, his lips wore a perpetual, half-hidden smile.

He jogged up the stairs—PT had put him in great shape—dropped off the texts, and jogged down the stairs again, passing a glass case with some of the Academy’s prizes on display. He had studied these artifacts many times in the past few months and knew them by heart: weapons manufactured from household items—including an ice pick with an incised groove for poison—bomb-making materials, dogeared Arabic printouts of Al Qaeda manuals on killing and conducting terror operations confiscated from safe houses in Iraq, Germany, and England.

A meticulous model of an insect-carriage gunbot like the one that had almost killed his father in Portland.

The cases weren’t changed out often. Everyone was too busy to look back over their shoulders. And here he was, in the shadow of legends—including his own father—coming across as a gangling, bright but not too savvy agent trainee who had buck fever and a wicked way with a cholo stick.

Still, he was doing okay. In two days he would graduate—by the skin of his teeth.

He picked up his pace, turned the corner and jogged past the chapel. Then a return loop back by the art gallery. Had these been Hoover’s favorites? Not many students had much to say about Hoover. Most didn’t remember him.

In the study lounge, chairs and couches had been pulled up in front of an old model plasma TV with lots of missing pixels. Some students were still studying. Others had firmly fixed their gazes on the spotty display.

William walked up behind Fouad, who was sitting straight up in one of the lounge’s well-cushioned chairs. ‘Where’s this?’ William asked him.

‘Washington state,’ Fouad said. ‘A farmhouse has been raided. The Patriarch, Robert Chambers, was killed in a shootout. Erwin Griffin, is he your father?’

William let out his breath. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Well, he is due to go into that barn and discover if there is a bomb. Everyone with bomb expertise is listening. It is very interesting, very frightening.’

William pressed his teeth together and sat on the arm of Fouad’s chair. Saturday night at the Griffin household. ‘Griff’s at it again,’ Mom would say, sitting at the dinner table with her son and an empty chair, a plate set out, on more than one occasion with tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘I can feel it. Can’t you?’

Then he recognized his father, seen from behind—stocky and poised, of medium height, standing with two others in front of a big barn. A shiny bomb squad truck with Washington State Patrol

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