Quantico. Greg Bear
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