Quantico (9 page)

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?’

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
painted on its sides stood a few yards away. He could barely make out some robots arranged on the ground around the truck.

William heard the subdued conversations from bombnet. All the heroes were chitchatting, trying to work out the deadly puzzle, to figure out how his father might die and try to prevent it from happening.

William could not just turn away. Family honor.

‘May I sit here?’ he asked Fouad.

‘I am proud to have you,’ Fouad said, and meant it. There was respect in his upturned eyes. ‘Your father shot the Patriarch. He is very brave.’

Chippy found nothing in the two houses. Vogel took her back to the edge of the clearing with her tail between her legs, then tossed her a rubber ball for a few minutes before loading her back into her travel cage.

Watson, Rebecca, and Griff hunkered down behind blast shields about fifty yards from the barn—a trivial distance. At the edge of the clearing, more police and agents squatted behind their vehicles. They could all see Kaczynski’s—the bot’s—progress toward the door.

Griff tapped his gogs. The images from Kaczynski were sharp—better than bomb suit video. The bot paused at the opening, then turned around on its wheels, giving Griff a view of their own position—three black rectangles with heads bobbing behind tiny plastic windows.

Even from outside the barn, the bot’s minitrace was off the scale. There was no hint of plastique, Semtex, or any more recent explosives, but the barn’s air was redolent with a number of suspicious substances: diesel fuel, urea nitrate, particulate carbon that could have been from recent fires or explosions. There could be alternate explanations for most of these traces, however—it was after all a barn and fuel and fertilizer were to be expected. The particulate carbon could have come from a barbecue.

‘Are we ready?’ Andrews asked from the back of the bomb squad truck.

‘Do it,’ Griff said, then took a breath and held it,
hardly aware he was doing so.

Rebecca moved from a crouch to a kneel behind the blast shield and braced her hands on the ground.

Kaczynski walked through the nine-inch opening, quieter than any mouse. At first, the bot’s cameras revealed little more than bouncing splotches and bars of sunlight. Processors adjusted the picture. Details emerged and contrast smoothed.

The barn was big, empty of animals, but most of the stalls and an overhead hayloft were stacked high with containers—bottled water, sacks of sugar and what looked like barrels of wheat, rice and other grains. The Patriarch had been wellprepared for the Endtime.

The three behind the bomb shields listened to the conversation inside the truck. ‘Can you make a bomb out of wheat?’ asked a younger tech, new to the division.

Andrews whuffed. ‘You ever work a grain elevator?’ As he guided the bot, Andrews reminisced about his younger days in Wyoming, when he had witnessed a mishandled load of wheat puff out a dusty fog. A spark from a pump motor had ignited the flour/air mixture and blown the silo cap two hundred feet into the air. Two loaders had been killed and the concrete building had split down its length. ‘Don’t underestimate the calories in a cup of flour, my friend,’ Andrews said.

Griff tapped his gogs again. After a while, he couldn’t see the displays clearly—the problem with aging eyes. With a glance at Rebecca, he whipped off the display glasses and stuck them in his pocket. ‘The hell with this.’ He rose from behind the shield—crouching was playing hell with his knees—and hustled across the short distance to the bomb squad truck. Watson followed.

Rebecca removed her own gogs and joined them. The back of the truck was crowded. Watson grudgingly moved aside for her. They stepped around bomb suits arranged in clear plastic packages on the floor.

‘Welcome to bot central,’ Andrews said. ‘Hope you’re not claustrophobic.’

Griff was, a little.

The small space stank of adrenaline-pumped fear.

‘Don’t you guys use deodorant?’ Watson asked. Griff knew well the sharp, stewy pong. He had become familiar with the smell of frightened men first in combat overseas and later in many tight stateside situations, and he hated it.

They had all learned to work at peak efficiency despite the fear and the smell.

‘Pardon me,’ Andrews said.

The young technician grinned and moved forward, sitting on a steel box.

Inside the Patriarch’s barn, the bot called Kaczynski had paused before what looked like an abstract sculpture—metal tubes welded in bristling clumps on a central steel ball. The bot’s cameras angled down. The whole arrangement was mounted on a wheeled platform. A tow bar stuck out from one end.

‘What in hell is that?’ Griff asked, his voice soft.

‘A calliope?’ Andrews guessed.

Watson pressed her lips together.

Gray cylinders of pressurized gas thrust up behind the wheeled platform. The bot’s camera played over them in up-and-down sweeps. Rebecca was looking for labels. ‘No colorcodes,’ she murmured. ‘Could be anything. We’re going to have to pull his welding license.’

The sensors were negative for acetylene as well as propane and methane. The lack of methane in itself—in a barn—showed that ruminants had not lived there for some time. The bot pulled itself around the abstract metal object and down an aisle between empty stalls. Griff was focused on the display when the image took a jerk. In the corner of their gogs, a red dot blinked.

‘What now?’ Griff asked.

Andrews said, ‘The bot’s located something moving.’ He turned up the sound: harsh breathing, frightened little gasps. Then the dot stopped blinking.

‘Bot’s decided it could be human,’ Andrews said.

The camera image stabilized long enough on the interior of a stall to show a flash of reddish blond hair, then a small, blurred figure. The figure dashed out of view.

‘Did you catch that?’ Griff asked.

‘Looked like a little girl,’ Watson said.

They saw quick blue flashes and heard three distant popping sounds in rapid succession. As they all cringed and hunkered, Kaczynski’s displays blanked.

It took a few seconds for them to relax. The barn had not taken flight.

Andrews fumbled at controls. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Bot’s down.’

‘What, did somebody shoot it?’ Watson asked.

Andrews shook his head. ‘I think we tripped a fryer. I’m getting nothing.’

Fryers were clever little generators of electromagnetic pulses, essentially arrays of hundreds of high-powered, needle-shaped electromagnets that would jam out through a molded lattice of nickel and copper when a small internal ball of explosives went off. In the last few years fryers had been miniaturized for use by terrorists in England, Spain, and Saudi Arabia. They shorted out all solid-state electronics within ten meters. It was difficult to shield bomb robots sufficiently to avoid damage.

Fryers were used by terrorists who wanted to force humans to confront their bombs in person.

Andrews looked around the little trailer and raised his hands from the controls. ‘I can send in another,’ he said, his eyes sad.

‘No need,’ Griff said. ‘We all saw her. There’s a child in there, probably a little girl.’

Rebecca sighed. ‘Did they forget her?’

‘Maybe she didn’t want to go to church,’ Griff said. ‘It happens. Too many kids and you lose track.’ He stood up, shoulders and neck bowed to fit under the roof. His booted toe nudged one of the suits. They were Ang-Sorkin Systems EOD-23 models, made in New Zealand and now standard around the world. EOD referred to Explosive Ordnance Disposal. ‘Time to fit me out with one of these.’

‘No way,’ Andrews said. ‘This isn’t your squad.’ His expression said it all: the FBI agent was older and a bit on the heavy side. Nobody wanted to go in after a guy who’d had a stroke or a heart attack—and if either of these things happened while he was handling a detonator, there would be no need.

‘I’ll go,’ Rebecca said.

‘Well, hell, if you’ll pardon me—’ Andrews began.

Griff put his fingers to his lips, let out a shrill whistle that had them holding their ears. He raised a beefy hand. ‘I’m in charge. And if it means anything, I was once rated a Master Blaster in Navy EOD.’

‘No kidding?’ Andrews said. ‘Crab and laurels? And how old were you then?’

Griff’s lip twitched. ‘I used to teach at Redstone. That’s how I got assigned to the Patriarch. I’m the lead going in, and because I am old and feeble, and may not be up on the hottest new techniques, one of you can come with me.’ He eeny-meeny-miny-moed with a thick finger around the back of the bomb van between Rebecca, Andrews, and Watson.

Griff’s finger stopped at Watson, as he had known it would. He pointed to the suits.

‘Oh, goody,’ Watson said.

Rebecca started to speak but Griff swiveled and cupped his hand over her mouth. She glared over his thick fingers. ‘You can tell me what to look for,’ he said. ‘Tell me what I’m seeing. Okay?’

Rebecca removed his hand with two delicate fingers.

‘Sorry,’ Griff said, brows furrowed.

‘Sorry won’t cut it if we lose our evidence,’ Rebecca said.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Thanks for caring.’

Griff radioed the agents up the road and told them to keep a close watch on the perimeter in case anyone tried to enter or leave. If the girl fled the barn while they were inside they’d pull out and resume robot operations.

Andrews and the tech helped them suit up, a process that took ten minutes. The last step—putting on the aerodynamically curved face-plate and locking it to the chest rig—always made Griff feel like a deep-sea diver. Rip-and-zip could peel them out of the suits in less than twenty seconds if they needed to run away—otherwise, they’d be clumping around like big clumsy beetles.

Griff looked through the thick plastic plate at Rebecca Rose. Her quiet anger comforted him.

‘You’re my good luck charm, Becky,’ he said.

‘Screw you,’ Rebecca said, not unkindly.

In the twilight, the bombot approached the barn door, rammed a metal arm against the edge, dug in, and pushed the door back so they could enter. Wheels on the rusty track squealed in protest and the door shivered as it slid open, but that was all.

Through his face-plate, Griff could see nothing in the gap. Just a dark and empty yawn.

‘What if there is no little girl?’ Alice Watson asked as they waddled toward the barn. Her voice came through his earnode like a buzzing fly. ‘Wouldn’t that be a hoot?’

The bomb truck kicked on a floodlight and trained the intense blue beam into the entrance. A row of stalls and the cart with its strange, bundled pipe sculpture stood revealed in the harsh light. Beyond, like serried paper cutouts against velvety blackness, stood workbenches, cylinders, hanging ropes—a hoist and pulley.

Griff turned and surveyed the farmhouse, the yard, the
nearly black ridgelines hackled with trees, the deep blue of the dusk sky with cottony rips of yellow and orange cloud. He tried to find the gap where the fire tower now stood revealed. He could not. It was late, and his eyes were not sharp enough.

No doubt he was missing other things as well.

‘Me first,’ he told Watson. ‘Stay out of my spray line.’

Below glossy nested plates and front pads, the Ang-Sorkin suits were jacketed with water-filled micro-piping that networked around the exposed front surfaces and exited through sealed blow holes along the back. The shock front of an explosion, as it met the smooth plastic curves of the front pads, would find little purchase. Particles carried by the blast, including shrapnel, would dimple the plates and possibly even pierce them—but all but the largest and sharpest pieces would be stopped by an underlying layer of monocarbon fiber. What gaseous force—and force from shrapnel—did not flow around the suits and faceplate—still a major proportion of the blast pressure—would compress the micropiping beneath those layers and heat the water to steam, which would then jet from the rear of the suit in hundreds of gaseous needles. Within six or eight inches, those water needles would be sharp enough to cut holes in human skin or pierce another suit. You always stayed out of someone’s spray line.

Bomb suits had become very sophisticated. But entering the barn at a deliberate plod, Griff did not feel much safer. He might as well have wrapped himself in Kleenex like a Halloween mummy. Or faced a howitzer in a brown paper bag.

Suit cameras—two mounted to face fore and aft, and a third focusing exclusively on a point less then a meter in front of their breastplates—conveyed some of what they were seeing back to the bomb squad truck and the bombnet viewers. Gimbaled lamps mounted above their face-plates
silently played beams of light wherever their eyes were looking. A small heads-up display mounted below the chin projected data abstracted from the video the bot had captured before being fried. The bomb squad computers in the truck had already used enhancement techniques to outline and identify the objects recorded during the bot’s few minutes inside the barn, and marked them on a floorplan.

Griff found the white and pink map distracting and switched it off using his tongue mouse. Once inside, he could see well enough. The barn had been converted into what looked like a basic engineering shop. A metalworking lathe and drill press covered a wooden workbench behind the pipe sculpture. He was starting to think of the weird shape on its cart as the Calliope, just for reference. ‘We’re passing the Calliope now,’ he said. ‘Looks like it might have been made to disperse powder or water—sort of like a big sprayer or fountain.’ He was thinking of the powder on the trees. ‘Maybe they used it for pesticide.’

‘Pipes are too big,’ Watson said. ‘They’re more like mortars. It could be some sort of hedgehog—a launcher. Could take out a city block if it was lobbing shells.’

Griff made sure to pause before each area. ‘Alice is right. Not a sprayer.’ If he didn’t make it, someone could use the video to figure out what had killed him. They advanced to the workbench, then turned. The bench was littered with tools—wooden and rubber mallets, split tube-shaped molds lying open, tamping implements, scraps of foil and paper, brushes.

‘Not very tidy,’ Watson said.

‘They didn’t get a chance to clean up everything,’ Griff observed. ‘Maybe we moved in faster than they expected.’

But they had been burning trash in barrels all week…

The power outlets had been masked off with duct tape and gummy spark-stop plastic. They would inspect all this in detail later, after they had found the girl. Watson took the
lead down the broad aisle between the rows of stalls. She called out, ‘If there’s anyone in here, you need to come out. We got to evacuate this barn, honey. It could be dangerous, you hear me?’

The bot stood frozen in the middle of the aisle. Mounted to posts on each side, at knee level, were two fryers. Watson bent to inspect the bot. Griff put his hands on his knees and stooped to look at the fryer mechanisms. His helmet light played over them. They resembled wind-up toys with burned heads. The posts had been charred by the heat of their small charges. They were home-made, possibly with German or Italian parts. The whole world was mad against authority.