Second paragraph of third chapter:

“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.

This is quite a long way down the list of well-known works by Greg Bear, fifteenth on LibraryThing and twentieth on Goodreads. Published in 2006, set around now, it features the FBI trying to get to grips with a domestic terrorism conspiracy that plans to carry out biological warfare attacks against both American targets and Mecca, to take revenge on Islam; the FBI agents use all kinds of technical stuff to try and prevent them. It’s competently enough written from the technical side, and the characters of some of the FBI agents were interesting, but the plot as such barely hangs together.

This was top of my list of unread books acquired in 2012. Next is another Greg Bear novel, the Star Trek tie-in Corona.