Terror thriller "Quantico" is frightening in its plausibility

Greg Bear has written a near-future novel as impossible to let go of as a live wire. "Quantico" (Vanguard Press, 326 pp., $24.95) fuses local author Bear's award-winning technical clarity with human insights rare in a thriller — as well as disturbing speculations about new trends in terrorism.

Two of the book's protagonists are just about to graduate from Quantico, the FBI training school for which the book is named, when the action starts. Fouad Al-Husam, an American citizen born in Kuwait, finds himself drafted into a shadowy interdepartmental operation known as "BuDark" and spirited away to an anonymous office in "Building 6." Not even his escorts can tell him where he's going from there.

Meanwhile, William Griffin, a third-generation FBI agent, watches on TV as the anti-abortion bomb factory his father's team is investigating explodes. He's taken under the wing of yet another agent, Rebecca Rose: tough, smart, middle-age and beautiful. Rose was on the scene when Griffin the elder narrowly escaped being blown to smithereens; she and Griffin the younger follow a trail from rural Washington to Mecca as they piece together a conspiracy that threatens to make a simple nuclear strike look like a playground fistfight.

Even more than in his earlier books in this vein ("Darwin's Radio," "Vitals," and "Darwin's Children"), Bear does the hard work of extrapolating from current engineering to shiny new tech-toys just over the event horizon: portable crime-scene holograph projectors; sparrow-sized winged surveillance cameras; ID-activated handguns and other proofs of humanity's talent for making tools.

But it's his analysis of the potential for terrorist biological attacks that's so frighteningly realistic. As he points out, the "Amerithrax" case was never solved by those looking for a connection to known labs. Could the letters containing weaponized anthrax mailed out in the wake of Sept. 11 have been sent by a warped loner with no formal training? Concocting a highly likely scenario and connecting it to fresh possibilities for destruction, Bear provides enough details on the process to fill his readers' minds with justified dread, without (he hopes) giving wannabe evil geniuses an instruction manual.

Technical expertise apart, Bear is also a fine writer. Agent Rose is one of his best-crafted characters, and her relationship with newbie Griffin hums with sexual energy complicated by differences in age and experience. When the pair takes down an armed assailant using burning toilet paper and a fire extinguisher, Griffin sees her with starry eyes: "Rebecca's broad, well-defined shoulders, smudged with soot, glistened as she bound the young man. With dripping hair askew, black brassiere revealed, slacks halfway down her hips ... she looked absolutely amazing."

The portrayals of both Agent Griffins, younger and elder, are involving, but Al-Husam's viewpoint is more difficult to penetrate. He's a Muslim and an immigrant, and some of his background is outside Bear's own experience as well as that of much of the book's presumed audience; a loner, he tells his troubles to no one but himself. Yet there are moments of Al-Husam's it's easy to see yourself in: his wary verbal fencing with the bigot he's paired with during a Quantico training session; his longing for the magical purity of the fairy tales his mother told him before she was stricken with Alzheimer's; his disgust at the end-zone dance of the religious extremist who beheads an unarmed, injured soldier.

Bear treats even his villains, the plotters Al-Husam, Rose and Griffin go up against, as worthy of our understanding. In this time of synthetic tribalism and political hatemongers, it's an attitude one can only wish were universal.