Three Volvo trucks pulled up at a so-called Hijaz Liberation Force checkpoint. The twelve-lane highway behind the small convoy was almost empty. Ahead, a tight roiling knot of armed and restive humanity patrolled the road.
Within a week, the highway would be packed with shuttle buses, taxis, pickups filled to overflowing with pilgrims. The invaders were trying desperately to be prepared for this flood in a time of war. They were, after all, likely to be the new masters of the Hajj. Just the week before, the last of the Saudi royal family had flown out of Riyadh to Paris. King Abdullah had died on the flight…of old age, insiders said; others, of a broken heart.
Ragged troops wearing everything from jungle camouflage to modern desert battle gear lined up to witness the inspection, some carrying single-shot rifles or waving pistols, a few bearded men hefting late-model, two-part launcher-assault weapons that must have cost thousands of dollars. All were making at least the pretense of limiting access to the areas they claimed to control: a potential nightmare for pilgrims.
Sam looked at himself in the sunshade mirror. His hair was black with hints of gray. He had tanned his skin with Coppertone Plus and eyelids and cheeks with walnut juice. This gave him a convincing two-tone look. Should they pull him out and thoroughly inspect him—not uncommon in this land of war and fear—they would find him circumcised, and not in a hospital, but cut down with a razor to the
sheath, the technique of
es-selkh
or flaying leaving no prepuce whatsoever and a naked rod straining like a serpent when erect, something no non-Muslim would ever want or tolerate. He had done this to himself years before. It had gotten him through several tough inspections in circumstances just like this, when he had been employed by NGOs in Iraq, before joining the FBI.
His eyes stung from bits of fine dust that had crept under his contact lenses. He adjusted his
gutra
and loose robes and lounged back in the seat. Let the Israelis handle this. Their Arabic was better than his.
Five guards broke from the rabble and approached, young and tense but displaying big toothy smiles. From the second truck, Sam listened to the irritated, loud exchanges. Soon, the exchanges became friendlier. He had chosen well from among the settlers’ children. Who could tell a Sephardic Jew from an Arab, ultimately?
The driver of the lead truck produced the papers Sam had given them all in Tel Aviv, proving association with the Yemeni and Iraqi wings of the rebellion. Ibrahim Al-Hitti had provided those papers over a year ago, for another operation entirely. For a moment, the way the five soldiers passed the papers around and smiled, he wondered if perhaps the passes and permissions were overkill. The soldiers were too impressed, excited even, curious as to who these important travelers might be.
Sam closed his eyes, just listening.
Yes, we are carrying celebratory and medicinal goods for Mecca, thanks be to God for his mercy and bounty. As well, no weapons. We are peaceful supporters of Hijaz Liberation.
The guards appeared to lose some of their respect. He heard the English word
ancillaries
used a few times. The guards asked if these men had ever carried weapons in support of the cause. Sheepishly, humbly, the lead driver answered no. This reduced the excitement even more. As these travelers were not warriors, no exceptional
respect need be shown. Arms were waved, hands waggled. Then, the guards moved to the second truck and peered through the lowered window at Sam and his three companions.
Sam wore a pale gray
thobe
, lightly soiled, over loose cotton trousers,
sirwal.
The men with him wore white
thobe
s covered with dark cotton
bisht
s, and all wore red and white or pure white
gutra
s over their
tagiyah
caps, draped around their necks and secured with simple black
agal
s. They might be contract workers or laborers, who could know or care; they were not soldiers. At this point nothing was said.
The men got out. All truck compartments were searched. No weapons. Only celebratory fireworks, safely and neatly packed. Men leaped into the backs and squeezed between the plastic-wrapped bundles on their steel pallets, checking the occasional box with a knife, peeling plastic and cardboard to peer inside. They were asked if they had any alcohol. Only medicinal and rubbing alcohol, not drinkable. No, they did not carry narcotics or strong pain relievers. These would come in other shipments. Drinkable alcohol was being confiscated by the insurrectionists, and drugs as well; the fighting was hard and the men needed relaxation.
And what about
qat
?
The Yemenis among the crowd that now surrounded the trucks pressed forward but were disappointed. No, the travelers did not have
qat
or tobacco.
After the inspections, which took an hour, the guards turned them over to three Iraqis, neatly uniformed Sunnis who argued and vacillated for another ten minutes. Of course, the travelers had high authority—but so did the leaders at this checkpoint. Still, ultimate victory was near. All would share in the honor.
Perhaps now was a good time to be magnanimous, even to multinational Muslim aid workers such as these, the first they had seen in weeks. There would be many wounded and
sick, and with the Hajj beginning soon, much need for medicines and supplies.
The guards settled their differences in time for sunset prayers. The passengers and drivers joined them, laying prayer rugs in the sand and gravel beside the highway. Sam felt a twinge as he went through the motions.
They’re trying to talk to God.
As the horizon covered the sun, they returned to the trucks and were waved on. Campfires were being lit. Cooking kits were lifted out of red plastic bags.
The mob parted, drew aside the makeshift wooden barricades and empty steel drums, and the convoy passed through on the last leg of the road to Mecca.
Special Agent Brian Botnik caught a ride with a division chief from the Riverside County Fire Department. The slipstream through a crack in the truck window speckled the chief’s hair with flakes of gray. ‘This is more like early summer weather,’ he was saying. ‘Big fires put thousands of tons of particulates in the air. We could get more lightning strikes this evening. Damned weird.’
Brilliant white clouds towered tens of thousands of feet over the east as the day approached maximum warming. White ash blew off the incinerated land and coated the truck’s windshield until they could barely see. A squirt of fluid and the wipers turned it all into a streaked mess. The sky was orange from ash and dust blowing off the hills.
Fuel had built up for six wet years, spawning ten huge fires across five counties: chaparral, creosote bush, sage, and scrub oak on the hills had burned for days. The air was still acrid with fresh char.
The chief peered through a clear band in the smear. ‘As soon as we got to the barn, I knew we had something peculiar. The main house survived, miraculously—that’s what they say, don’t they? Miracle, hell—our trucks made a stand at the end of the road and saved it and most of the outbuildings, too.’
In Riverside County, the sheriff was also the coroner and he was still attending to burn victims—so Division Chief Clay Sinclair had volunteered to drive Botnik out to the
winery. The fires were mostly contained in San Diego and Riverside Counties. The chief’s duties now consisted of supervising hotspot control—and escorting congressional lookyloos, as he called them, on fact-finding visits.
‘What about the owner?’ Botnik asked.
‘He must have been living alone for years. They found him inside the house. Big-headed guy. Some sort of mental case. Real sad.’
‘Did he say anything?’
‘Nope, he wasn’t talking. A lawyer showed up. I don’t think they had met in years. Anyway, the fellow didn’t recognize him. The lawyer shrugged and said a few words and drove off. He hasn’t come back. Odd. Used to be a winery, I understand. But that barn full of computer printers…One of the sheriff’s officers got a hit on the KIA trooper in Arizona. A truck full of Epsons, he said. The sheriff thought there might be a connection. Since it’s across state lines and could involve drugs or illegal commerce, we both thought the FBI might be interested. We called San Diego FBI and they passed. Only you showed any interest. Here, put this on. It’s still pretty bad.’ The chief handed him a filter mask.
Botnik strapped the mask over his nose and mouth. He had caught a commuter flight from Phoenix that morning, after passing word along—as a matter of courtesy—to Lieutenant Colonel Jack Gerber of Arizona Public Safety. He had very pointedly not contacted Rebecca Rose. He would leave that to the Phoenix SAC if and when the time came. Headquarters politics had grown too fierce for his blood.
No wonder San Diego FBI had ignored this one. All of these fires had been caused by lightning, not arson. Act of God. No crime, nothing worth looking at, plus the fire had flushed a whole bunch of drug labs in five counties and that was keeping everyone busy.
‘There’s a sheriff’s department service officer out there
holding down the fort. Making sure nobody loots the place and keeping an eye on the big-headed guy, for his own good, we’re saying.’
Botnik looked down at the name on his slate.
Tommy Juan Battista Juarez.
DOB: April 27, 1985. Parents deceased, 2000. High school dropout, homeschooled, no college. No criminal record.
‘Still got lots of winemaking equipment—and of course, what’s in the barn.’
‘Anyone poke around?’ Botnik asked.
‘Just our firefighters,’ the chief said. ‘We only found the one guy.’
The chief turned the truck up a road between a scorched and twisted grove of oaks. ‘I don’t think anyone’s been through the whole complex.’
Fire had taken out the oaks in a seemingly random fashion. The heat had approached two thousand degrees in areas of high brush, and some of the oaks looked like whitish-gray gnomes—burned down to shriveled stumps. As they approached the Spanish-style rambler, Botnik looked out the truck window and saw the broad parallel tracks of fire trucks, rivulets of water and mud, the trampling of booted feet and sinuous hose lines drawn in the still-damp dirt. This was where the firefighters had made their stand. They had kept Tommy Juarez’s place from joining the hell that had consumed the hills—and over four hundred other homes and ranches.
The service officer, a young, earnest fellow in his midtwenties, met them on the drive. The chief introduced Botnik.
‘Owner is still inside,’ the officer told them. ‘He’s pretty much a human zero. He comes to the window sometimes and smiles. It’s what’s in the warehouse and the barn that puzzled the sheriff.’
They walked up the steps and stood in the shade of the porch. Botnik knocked on the front door. ‘Federal agent. FBI.
Mr. Juarez, I’d like to talk with you about the fire.’
Nobody responded. The door was not locked and stood open a crack so he cleaned his shoes on the worn rubber mat, pushed the door wide, and entered. Down a trash-littered hallway with a tiled floor, he saw an archway opening to the living room on the left and another to a kitchen on the right. ‘Mr. Juarez?’
There was a bump and rustle in the kitchen. Botnik put his hand on his holstered pistol. A shadow like a brief cloud crossed the smoke-tinted light falling through the kitchen arch.
‘Mr. Juarez? Federal agent. My name is Botnik. Could I ask some questions?’
A chair on casters squeaked. Botnik approached the kitchen. Through the arch, he could see a refrigerator, then a counter and a nice gas stove, expensive but crusted with food. The chair squeaked again.
Botnik glanced around the corner of the arch.
The man with the large head had sat down at a kitchen table and was staring listlessly over a small stack of scientific journals. He was wearing pajamas. To Botnik he looked like an odd little mannequin trying to hide what had gone missing from its insides.
‘Come on in, Sam,’ the mannequin said. ‘I’ve been catching up on my reading. I have to use the dictionary a lot. Take a seat. I’ve been “thinking” about you.’ He fingered quote marks in the air. ‘I wish I could remember what we were going to do,’ he added, and looked sideways at Botnik’s arm, and then his face. ‘You
are
Sam, aren’t you?’
The service officer and the chief watched from the hall. Botnik asked, ‘Are you Tommy Juarez?’
The big-headed man lifted one shoulder and smiled.
‘Mr. Juarez, would it be okay if we took a look around your property? Just to make sure everything is safe?’
Tommy shrugged again with both shoulders. ‘I suppose
it would be okay,’ he said, and put on a deep frown. ‘I can’t make anything work. Everything’s broken.’
Botnik walked with the chief and the service officer to the barn. Fire had charred one side and chewed away at a corner, leaking hot air into the interior. They walked through a blackened door into a melted, ashen nightmare. Curtains of clear Tyvek had shrunk and curled into grotesque shapes all around. Ducts had slumped away from the walls like singed snakes. Over many tables, dozens—hundreds—of inkjet printers perched in incomprehensible rows. Near the firedamaged wall and corner, the printers had melted into misshapen heads with gaping mouths, trailing wire intestines. Pieces of broken glass plates had fallen or been dunked into plastic tubs of water at one end of the barn. Pools of water from fire hoses had collected across the littered concrete floor.
No paper, no boxes of printed goods—and just the one guy. This was obviously not a hill country porno ring or any sort of publishing outfit.
‘Not like any winery I’ve ever seen,’ Sinclair said.
The warehouse had suffered scorch marks and bent metal panels along two sides but the interior was intact. Botnik walked between giant steel fermenting tanks to the head of the steps, then looked over his shoulder at the two men standing in the big steel door.
‘Stay back,’ he cautioned.
‘I’ve been down there already,’ the service officer said. ‘There’s some kind of lab. They have labs in wineries.’
‘This place hasn’t made wine in years,’ Sinclair said. ‘There used to be lots of wineries around here. I inspected a few of them.’
Rows of respirators and oxygen tanks hung from racks behind the tall steel tanks. A criss-cross of ducting had been suspended from the roof, leading to thick filtration systems
—were those HEPA-type filters?—at the rear. At the head of the steps, he stooped to pry open a cardboard box stained by water but untouched by heat or flame. It was filled with plastic gloves. Hidden under a twisted metal panel, two bags held whole-body suits, and piles of disposable booties had been shoved to one side—not generally used in winemaking.
‘Just stay there,’ he said.
He descended the wooden steps into the cool air pooled at the bottom, and passed from the smell of char to a vinegary, flowery scent. There had not been any power down here for days. He switched on his flashlight and waved the bright circle along the rows of old barrels stretching back under the vaulted ceilings.
Carefully, wondering whether the filter mask was sufficient, he walked to the open door on the left. The service officer’s footprints stopped here. He shined the flashlight into the mess beyond. Someone, perhaps Juarez, had pulled down and smashed equipment as if in blind rage.
Botnik didn’t know much about biology but this had obviously been a well-equipped lab. The field office had received general bulletins about materials, chemicals, and devices that could be useful to bioterrorists, and Botnik recognized a number of listed items smashed on the floor and covered with dust.
He knelt beside a gray enameled box—its sides dented as if it had been kicked—and read the label on the back:
Simugenetics Sequence Assembler.
Plastic tubing clustered and led to jars and jugs on an overturned table. The label on one battered jug read:
Purified Nucleic Acid Residues: Cytosine.
Other jugs had once contained
Tyrosine, Guanine, Uracil,
and
Adenine
—the constituents of DNA and RNA.
A winemaker would not need to assemble or replicate DNA molecules.
Botnik pressed the mask closer to his face. He took out the WAGD marker, uncapped it, tried to hold his breath, and
walked to the rear of the underground room. There, a large box with plastic and steel panels and glove holes had been axed open, revealing trays, drawers, rubber tubes, fans, and black gloves hanging from external access ports. A hot box, ingenious and compact.
The ax was still jammed in the right side.
Botnik moved the marker along an exposed panel, making sure not to cut himself on jagged metal or broken plastic. The marker’s moist tongue licked at a thin layer of dust.
Then he carefully backed away, stepping around the broken glassware, and paused by the stairs, on the verge of blacking out, still afraid to suck in a much-needed breath.
After two minutes, the WAGD chimed that it had a result.
Then it made a sharp little
squeeeee
, as unwanted and scary as the hiss of an angry cobra. Botnik glanced down. This was not the sound you wanted to hear: a biohazard alarm.
We’re All Gonna Die.
‘
Positive test result for anthrax spores
,’ the device’s tinny voice announced. ‘
Evacuate the premises according to government and training guidelines. Repeat: positive test result for anthrax spores. Please consult biohazard experts immediately.
’
Botnik ran up the steps and past the two men waiting above. ‘Get the hell out of here!’ he shouted, and then started choking. ‘Get outside!’
Under the smoky sunlight, pawing at his mask, he remembered who he was and why he was here. His breath returned in agonized whoops and he bent over.
Sinclair and the service officer watched him. ‘Jesus, what’s down there?’ the chief asked.
Botnik waved them off and keyed a general alert code into his arm pad, then made the first of two calls. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he warned the men as they approached. Mechanical voices answered; he keyed in federal Bioshield emergency codes.
‘Don’t come near me. You,’ he pointed to the service officer. ‘Stand back and wait for a HAZMAT team. Understood?’
‘What in hell are we talking about here?’
‘You’re contaminated. Don’t leave the area. Call for backup. Don’t make contact—don’t touch or get close to any other officers or civilians except for medical or HAZMAT personnel. We’re going to seal off this entire farm, winery, whatever the hell it is. They’ll bring Gamma Lysin and antibiotics, so we’ll be okay. But we all have to be tested and treated. And don’t let Juarez go
anywhere.
Keep him in that house. Got it?’
The service officer looked as if he might faint. The division chief backed away from both of them with an openmouthed expression, his hands held out. ‘Whoa, Nelly,’ he said.
Waiting for backup and HAZMAT to arrive, Botnik searched behind the warehouse and down a path, trying to keep from hyperventilating, wondering if he was the zeroth man at this site—after the service officer—the man around whom the experts would draw cautionary circles, measuring death and disease at the epicenters of contamination. But screw the training—he couldn’t just keep still. He’d flip out.
What in hell had big-headed Mr. Tommy Juarez been doing out here in the brush all these years?
There had been bets laid out in his dorm at the Q as to who would rise the quickest to FBI glory. Agent Trainee Brian Botnik had always stayed in the background, letting the bigger and brasher guys compete for future bragging rights, while he had hoped to do well enough on PT and at the firing range to be allowed to get out of the Academy for the weekend and maybe even find a date.
Forcing his lips and cheeks into conformity to keep the mask’s seal, trying to hold back his elation, he shouted
hoarsely at the burned stubble: ‘We got him! We finally got him! Holy Mother, thank you.’
He thrust his fist into the air and stamped the ashen ground.