Hunting Season

13

Edwin Kreiss sat in a locked interview room at the Seventh Street police station, wondering how he was going to get out of this one. He had been standing on the corner of Twelfth Street and Massachusetts Avenue, looking at the aTF headquarters building, when the same cops who had seen him down by the White House drove by, on their way into shift change. The cop car had slowed and then stopped. Kreiss had briefly considered bolting, but he didn’t know the streets and alleys around this area of office buildings. They would have had him in a heartbeat for taking off. The car had backed up, and this time the cop’s partner got out, one hand on his nightstick, the other parking his hat on his head. The cop driving, who had apparently recognized him, stayed in the car but watched over his shoulder. The cop had asked him politely enough what he was doing up there, and Kreiss literally had no answer. Fortunately, he had left the gun in the van, which he had parked in an all-night parking garage right next door to the aTF building. They’d cuffed him, pat searched him, and put him in the backseat. They brought him into the police station, presumably on a loitering beef. They had not booked him, however, and he had been in the interview room for what he estimated was almost three hours now. He was no longer cuffed, but they had taken his wallet, watch, and his keys. He would have appreciated some coffee.

He had not had enough time to do a complete reconnaissance of the aTF building, but it had been pretty clear that it was a softer target than the FBI headquarters. The building was much smaller, and though there were surveillance cameras, the approach to the front of the building was a lot more straightforward than driving down Constitution and dealing with all the traffic islands where the major avenues met. Yes, they would see the propane truck pulling up in front of the building, but, by then, it would be too late. In fact, McGarand would probably have time to park it, set a fuse, and run before the security people in the building could really react. He smiled grimly to himself as he thought of the options facing a guy at the security desk when he saw a big truck pull up in front of the building and a guy get out and run. Now what? Who goes down to see what’s in the truck, and who goes out the back door at the speed of heat?

In the meantime, he was stuck in here, and he had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. And who was going to come through that door next.

The door finally opened and the desk sergeant admitted two men in suits into the room. Kreiss looked up at them and congratulated himself on being right. One of the men, the larger of the two, sat down across the table from him. The other remained standing. The big man was in his forties. He had a round face that needed a shave, impatient blue eyes, and thinning black hair. He produced a credentials wallet and flashed it at Kreiss.

“Sam john stone FBI,” he said.

“And you’re Edwin Kreiss. The notorious Edwin Kreiss.”

Kreiss said nothing. Johnstone leaned back in his chair.

“We’ve been looking for you, Mr. Kreiss. Or rather, the Roanoke RA has. Seems there’re some questions they want to ask you about a homicide down in Blacksburg.”

Kreiss maintained his silence. Johnstone looked over at his partner.

“You not going to speak to me, Mr. Kreiss?” he asked.

“You haven’t asked me a question yet,” Kreiss said.

“Okay, here’s one: Why were you loitering around the aTF headquarters building tonight? After being seen loitering around the White House? I guess that’s two questions. Well. And you were also seen on our cameras at Bureau headquarters. You got something going tonight, Mr.

Kreiss? You’re not still mad at us, are you?”

“Nope.”

Johnstone continued to stare at him as if he was an interesting specimen.

Then his partner spoke.

“I hear you used to be a spooky guy, Kreiss.

That you used to go around hunting people down with your pals out in Langley. That true? You a spooky guy?”

Kreiss turned slowly to look at the partner, who was a medium everything:

height, weight, build. Even his soft white face was totally unremarkable.

He would make a very good surveillance asset, Kreiss thought.

Then he turned back to face Johnstone.

“He gave me the look, Sam,” the second agent said.

“Definitely spooky. I think I’m supposed to be scared now.”

“Better watch your ass, Lanny. I’ve heard that Mr. Kreiss here was responsible for a guy shooting his wife and his kids and then himself. He must be really persuasive. That was before the Bureau shit-canned you, right, Mr. Kreiss?”

Kreiss smiled at him but said nothing.

“Damn, there he goes again, Lanny. Won’t talk to me. I think I’ve hurt his feelings. Of course, here he is, in the local pokey, picked up for loitering in downtown Washington. What do you suppose he was looking for, Lanny? A white guy walking the streets at midnight in the District? Looking for some female companionship, maybe? Or maybe some sympathetic male companionship? Is that it, Mr. Kreiss? All those years of playing games with those Agency weirdos, maybe you got a little bent?”

Kreiss relaxed in his chair and looked past Johnstone as if he didn’t exist. They had either planned their little act in advance in some effort to provoke him or they were pissed off at having to come over here at all, just because a routine name check had triggered the federal want and detain order. Or both. But so far, they weren’t talking about a bomb.

Apparently, Janet’s attempt to warn them about a bomb threat had gone right into the bureaucratic equivalent of the Grand Canyon. He looked at his wrist, then remembered they’d taken his watch.

“Got somewhere to go, Mr. Kreiss?”

“Am I being charged?”

“Nope. You’re being held. As a material witness to a homicide in Virginia.

But before you go back down to Blacksburg, we’ve been informed that the commissars out in Langley want to have a word.”

Shit, shit, shit, Kreiss thought while keeping a studiously indifferent expression on his face. He had managed to evade the best sweeper in the business, and now he had handed himself over to them on a loitering beef.

Johnstone was looking at his watch.

“Anyway, now you’re going to come with us, Mr. Kreiss. First we’re going to escort you out to Langley, where some people in their Counterespionage Division want to talk to you. Then you’ll be brought back to our Washington field office for further transport down to Roanoke. Cuff him, Lanny.”

Kreiss sighed and stood up, putting his two hands out in front of him.

He was much bigger than the agent called Lanny, and he almost enjoyed the sudden wary look Lanny had in his eyes when he approached Kreiss to put plastic handcuffs on his wrists.

“He looked at me again, Sam,” Lanny said, trying to keep it going, but Kreiss could hear the note of fear in Lanny’s voice. The man was physically afraid of him. That was good. They’d already made their first mistake, cuffing his hands in front of him. Now, as long as they had a car and not a van, and as long as they put him in the backseat

and they both rode in front, he was as good as free. He’d do it on the G.W. Parkway, with all those lovely cliffs. He looked down at the floor, putting a despondent expression on his face. He let his shoulders slump and his head hang down a little. Defeated. Captured. Resigned to his fate. He heard Johnstone make kissing noises behind him, and both agents laughed contemptuously.

Kreiss sincerely hoped that Johnstone would drive.

Janet was afraid of missing the turn into Micah Wall’s place, but when she saw all the junked cars, rusting refrigerators, tire piles, and pallets of assorted junk on both sides of a wide dirt road, she knew she’d found it.

She turned the car into the driveway and drove through more junk up toward the lights of a long, low cabin on the hillside. Halfway up the hill, her headlights revealed a telephone pole barring the drive. She slowed and then stopped. Several figures came out of the dark, walking toward her car with rifles and shotguns in their hands. She opened the door and got out, leaving it open.

“That’s Lynn Kreiss,” she said, pointing into the car.

“I think she’s been shot. We need some help.”

“Who done it?” an authoritative voice asked from the darkness.

“A federal agent who was chasing us. I forced her off the road about a half a mile back there. But if she isn’t seriously injured, she’ll be here very soon.”

“She?” The voice sounded incredulous.

“That’s right. Please? We need to see to Lynn. She’s bleeding.”

Micah Wall materialized out of the darkness and introduced himself while three men went to the other side of the car and lifted Lynn out.

Janet told him her name, shook his hand, and then went around the front of the car. The girl groaned but did not resist when they laid her out on the ground on her uninjured side, illuminated by the wedge of light coming from the car’s interior. One of them lifted the back of Lynn’s shirt, revealing an entrance wound on the lower-right side of her back. A second man grunted and leaned forward, a long knife suddenly glistening in his hand. Before Janet could object, he probed the wound and then lifted out a spent bullet. The bleeding increased immediately, as if blood had been dammed up behind the bullet, but Janet realized that the wound was not significant. The bullet’s passage through the car’s metal body and the upholstery must have slowed it down.

“Less’n there’s another one, this ain’t too bad,” the man with the knife said. He had a full black beard and a face like a hatchet. He

pulled out a handkerchief, folded it, and pressed it against the wound. Janet hoped it was cleaner than the surroundings.

“Take her up to the house, Big John,” Wall said.

“Tommy, Marsh, y’all help him. Git some sulfa dust and a real bandage on that. Rest of us, we gotta git ready to met this lady badass, supposed to be comin’ round the mountain any minute now.”

Janet told him about the fire in the hospital, and her suspicion that the woman had started it deliberately. Micah nodded slowly, looking around at the dark woods.

“Yonder girl’s daddy, he kept some interesting company.

Why’n’t you leave your car here, go on up to the house. See to the girl. Boys’n me, we’ll wait and see what comes along.”

“Be careful,” Janet said over her shoulder as she stepped past the telephone pole.

“This woman was Edwin Kreiss’s instructor.”

“That so,” Micah muttered.

“Well, then, I wish I had me some other daddy’s lions. Or maybe that there Barrett. Spread out, boys.”

Browne McGarand awoke at just before 2:00 a.m. and sat up in the seat.

The truck’s windows were all opaque with dew. He leaned forward and hit the wiper switch for one cycle to clear the windshield, then rolled down his window. The same windows that had been showing lights before in the aTF building were still lighted, which meant that they had simply left the lights on. He reached up and picked the lens cover off the interior cabin light and took out the bulb. Then he opened the door and got out.

The temperature had dropped noticeably, and the night was now clearing.

There were no traffic sounds coming from Massachusetts Avenue below, and the remaining cars on the roof deck had fully opaque windows.

He walked to the back of the truck, stretching his knees, and then to the very back corner of the parking deck. He put his head over the low concrete wall and listened. The sound of vent fans coming from the HVAC building in the alley was much reduced. Good, he thought. They had put the system on low speed for the night. Blocking one of the intake screens wouldn’t raise any system alarms at that fan speed. He checked the time again and then went back to the truck. The hose reel on the back unrolled in the direction of the aTF building. There was a modified brass connector nozzle on the end he was going to lower. At the truck end, the hose was not connected at all, leaving it open to the atmosphere.

He began pulling hose off the reel, being very careful not to damage the modified brass connector nozzle. He hefted it over the concrete wall and let it down into the darkness. After a few minutes, the

weight of the hose began to pull itself off the reel and he had to go back to the reel and set the brake halfway to keep it from running away. When a white blaze of paint on the hose showed up, he set the reel brake all the way and then checked the hose. The gleaming brass connector was hanging just a few feet above the surface of the alley. He resumed letting it out until a second blaze of paint marked the length he needed to get the nozzle over to the intake screens. He reset the brake.

He knew that he was entering the period of greatest exposure, because now he would have to go down, enter the alley, attach the plastic tarp to the one screen to blank it off, and then attach a second tarp, with a nozzle receiver fitting sewn into its center, to the second screen. At that point, all the intake air for the ventilation system would be sucked through that one fitting. If it wasn’t big enough, he should see a lot of strain on both tarps.

If he had to, he could peel back two or three corners to keep sufficient air moving. Then he would attach the end of the tanker’s hose to the fitting on the tarp and trip the discharge lever. As long as the two tarps and the receiver nozzle let in just enough air, he could go on back up. After that, it would be a matter of choosing the best time to begin sending in the hydrogen gas. He wanted as many of those bastards in the building as possible when the hydrogen reached critical volume, but the more people that were around, the higher were the chances of someone discovering the rig.

Ideally, he wanted the blast to take place as close as possible to 8:00 A.M. Based on his calculations it would take around ninety minutes to fill the building with an explosive mixture, so gas injection had to begin no later than 6:30. It would still be dark at 6:30, but not for long. He wished now he had some way to spark the mixture from outside the building, if for some reason it didn’t ignite, but they had not been able to devise anything that would do that. Besides, he did not plan to hang around. He checked his watch again: 2:35. The minutes were passing slowly. He wanted to get going, but he knew that he would have to be patient and flexible. Hooking up the hose would be relatively easy: If they hadn’t spotted the hose coming down into the alley, they probably would not spot him. Then it would all depend on the whole lash-up remaining invisible until 8:00 a.m. He made sure the hose brake was secured, then unstrapped the five-gallon gasoline can he’d mounted on the back step of the truck. He took it to the cab, set it down in the middle of the bench seat, and taped on the ignition device, setting it for 8:00 A.M. That would take care of the truck if

the building explosion didn’t. Then he closed the doors, locked them, walked over to the interior exit ramp, and started down into the darkness of the parking garage.

It was just after 4:00 A.M. when the two agents finally signed Kreiss out of Metro Police custody. After retrieving the envelope with his wallet, watch, and keys, they escorted him out of the building. Then the agents put him into the backseat of their four-door government sedan, which was parked in the lot for patrol cars at the side of the station. They made him sit right in the middle of the backseat, and they kept him cuffed.

Lanny buckled both rear seat belts around him, so that if he tried to move, there would be two latches he would have to undo. Kreiss was perfectly happy with this arrangement, and even happier that there had been no hookup wire to which he could have been cuffed in the backseat.

While Lanny waited in the car with Kreiss, Johnstone went back into the precinct station and came back out with two coffees. The two G-men sat in the car with their coffee for a few minutes, making a point of enjoying it while Kreiss went without. Then Lanny called into their operations center on the car’s radio and reported that they were transporting the subject to Langley, as per previous direction. The ops center acknowledged and told them to report when delivery had been made. Lanny rogered and hung up.

Johnstone drove while Lanny rode shotgun, turned partially in his seat to keep an eye on Kreiss. It was Johnstone who kept peppering Kreiss with mildly insulting questions about why he was in town, what he had done that made the Agency people so anxious to see him, and what his part in the Blacksburg homicide had been. Lanny seemed to enjoy it all, but he didn’t say anything. Kreiss remained silent, his eyes closed, as if he were trying to sleep. Johnstone gave up after a while and concentrated on his driving. He took Constitution Avenue down to Twenty-third Street, drove past the Lincoln Memorial, and then went over the Memorial Bridge into Arlington. Kreiss kept track of where they were while he made his mental preparations.

When Johnstone turned down the ramp that led to the northbound George Washington Parkway, Kreiss began to reposition himself, adjusting his body in tiny increments. By now, Lanny had turned back around and was bitching to Johnstone about duty schedules back at FBI headquarters.

Kreiss, who had driven the G.W. Parkway a few thousand times during his career, needed only an occasional glance out of slitted eyes to know

precisely where they were. The G.W. was a four-lane divided parkway, climbing up through the Potomac palisades toward McLean and Langley in northern Virginia. Because they were going northwest up the Potomac River, they were on the river side of the parkway. To the left was the low, stonewalled median and the eastbound roadway, bordered by a band of large trees. To his right were more trees, through which the Potomac was clearly visible, initially right alongside, and then increasingly below them as the parkway climbed some two hundred feet above the river’s rocky gorge.

Kreiss was not going to allow himself to be taken into the Agency headquarters. He knew what could happen there, and where he might be taken from there. Someone pretty senior in the Bureau must have reached an understanding with the Agency hierarchy. Or perhaps higher, he thought, like maybe someone at Justice. This little trip to Langley wasn’t about any bomb plot. This was about payback for Ephraim Glower. It took real juice to launch Misty, so until he knew that Lynn was truly safe, he was going to do whatever it took to remain free and operational. If he could prevent whatever Browne McGarand was planning in the District, fine, although he hadn’t actually promised Carter anything. But she promised you something pretty important, he reminded himself. Either way, he would not allow these bozos just to hand him over like a lamb to the slaughter to a government agency that had every motive to make him disappear. He had personally delivered one individual to the federal maximum-security prison in Lewisburg, someone he knew for a fact had never seen the inside of any courtroom, or the outside world, ever again.

When they passed the first scenic overlook turnout, he got ready.

There was another overlook in exactly one mile, right below the Civil War park where the president’s lawyer had been found shot to death in a supposed suicide. Lanny was complaining about getting stuck on midnight-to-eight shifts twice a month when other, more junior agents were getting tagged only once a month, especially if they were female. Johnstone appeared to be tuning out Lanny’s monologue, but he kept up a steady stream of uh-huhs while he drove and sipped his coffee. Kreiss could see that he was doing an even sixty-five, ten miles over the posted speed limit, but entirely normal for the parkway, especially at 2:30 a.m.

Any Park Police cruiser sitting out there would recognize the sedan as a government car. Johnstone had his left hand on the wheel and his right hand down in his lap, holding the paper coffee cup.

Kreiss began surreptitiously tugging on the seat belts, taking out all the slack until they were almost painfully tight around him, the two

shoulder straps cutting into his chest in an X configuration. When he saw the sign for the next scenic overlook, he sat way back in the seat and tensed his legs. When he saw the actual turnout coming up on the right, he raised his right leg and, pivoting on his left buttock, leaned left and kicked up to strike Johnstone under his right ear as hard as he could. Johnstone gave a grunt and pitched to the left, against the door, which had the effect of turning the car to the left, directly toward the stone wall in the median.

Lanny dropped his coffee, raised both hands, and yelled, “Look out!” to the stunned Johnstone, and then grabbed the wheel, yanking it hard right.

The car swerved back across the two lanes, tires screeching, until the left front tire failed and the car whip-rolled three times down the outer northbound lane in a hail of glass and road dust. Then it hit a small tree, spun around the tree on its side, and slid down the embankment and into the scenic-overlook parking lot fifty feet below the level of the roadway. It righted itself as it slalomed into the parking lot and then crunched partially through the low stone wall overlooking a sheer cliff that fell all the way to the Potomac.

Kreiss, who had been prepared for the crash and was double-belted, was unhurt. He popped the latches on the seat belts and lunged forward to grab Lanny around the throat with his cuff chain. Lanny, stunned by the violence of the crash and entangled in his deflated air bag, did not resist as Kreiss hauled him back over the seat and stuffed him down into the space between the backseat and the floor. He checked on Johnstone, who appeared to be unconscious and pinned beneath the headliner of the car, which had been smashed down on him in the crash. His face was obscured by his deflated air bag. The front windshield was gone, as were all the windows, and there was a strong smell of gasoline in the car.

Kreiss fished in Lanny’s suit pockets for the cuff key. When the agent stirred, Kreiss hit him once in the temple with a raised-knuckle fist, and the man sagged. Kreiss got the key, unlocked the cuffs, threw them out the window, and climbed over the front seat to retrieve the envelope with his own wallet and keys from the floor. He reached into Johnstone’s suit jacket pocket and took his credentials. He left their guns alone. He turned off the ignition and threw the car’s keys over the wall. He tried the right rear door, but it was jammed. He climbed out the right-front window and dropped to the pavement, shaking off bits of glass from his clothes. He found himself standing in a spreading stain of gasoline. He swore and then spent the next five minutes dragging the two unconscious agents out of the car and fifty

feet back away from the wreck. Both had been wearing seat belts and neither one appeared to be bleeding or otherwise seriously injured. They are assholes, he told himself, but they are essentially just working stiffs doing their jobs. There is no reason for them to die for their incompetence. He retrieved the handcuffs from the ground and cuffed their wrists together through the iron rail of a park bench that was cemented to the ground. He took their guns and threw them onto the floor of the car’s backseat.

He went back into the car one more time and ripped out the radio handset, throwing it over the cliff. He saw their car phone dangling by its floor-mount wire. The light was still on in the dial. He hesitated and then punched in Janet Carter’s number in Blacksburg. The phone rang several times but then hit voice mail. He hung up, ripped out the handset, and threw it over the cliff. Then he brushed himself off again, suddenly aware that there really was a hell of a lot of gasoline on the ground. He started up the overlook exit ramp. He hoped the car would not burn, because that would attract immediate attention, and he needed some time to get back down to the vicinity of Key Bridge. There was a hotel right near the parkway ramps at the bridge, and hopefully he could get a cab back into the District. The good news was that it was all downhill.

He got up to the parkway and started jogging back down the northbound lane. He would have plenty of time to duck down behind the stone walls if he saw approaching headlights. He would try to get a call through to Carter again from his van. Right now, everything would depend on how long it took for the Park Police to find the wreck. He watched for signs of a fire as he jogged back down the empty roadway, but the woods behind him remained dark.

Janet Carter came out of the tiny bedroom where Lynn lay, relieved that the bleeding had stopped. An elderly woman who smelled of lilacs had cleaned the wound with soap and water, then applied some yellow powder and a clean bandage. There was a large bruise around the wound, but the bullet had apparently hit a rib and stopped. Lynn had remained awake and had gasped when the soap and water hit, but the old woman had given her some hot herbal tea, and now she was asleep.

To Janet’s surprise, the interior of the log house was spotlessly clean, in sharp contrast to all the junk piled around the front entrance and out behind the cabin. She couldn’t tell how many people actually lived in the cabin, which appeared to be a central log house with a conglomeration of additions and extensions. It was much bigger

than it had appeared from the road. The woman, who had not spoken since Janet had followed the men carrying Lynn into the house, led her back to a kitchen and family room area. The kitchen smelled of coffee and baking bread, and Janet saw three more loaves of bread rising in an oven next to the stove. There was another small bedroom and bath behind the kitchen, and the woman indicated Janet could go in there and clean up. She closed the wooden door behind her and went into the bathroom to wash her hands and face. She had some bloodstains on her hands and her face was sooty. She cleaned up as best she could and then went back into the kitchen. Micah Wall was there, taking off his jacket. A semiautomatic shotgun was parked on the wall next to an ancient-looking refrigerator.

“What happened?” Janet asked.

“Took the pickup down the road, and they was a bunch of meanlookin’ boys and some cars pulled up where the other one went into the woods. One of ‘em told me to turn around, take my boys, and git outta there. He had him a Steyr machine pistol, so we done like he said.

They friends of your’s?”

“Nope,” Janet said, surprised to hear this old mountain man talking about Steyr machine pistols.

“How many of them were there and how were they dressed?”

“Couldn’t rightly tell. They was lotsa of headlights, so most of ‘em was in shadow. The one doin’ the talkin’ was wearin’ sunglasses. Big fella.”

“But not uniforms? Not deputies?”

“No, hell no. We know all the deputies in these parts. No, these boys wasn’t from round here. Now your car’s got five bullet holes in it. Here’s a coupla the rounds we dug out. How’s about you tell me what’s goin’ on here with that girl yonder.”

Janet explained who she was, and how she came to be flying through the night with federal agents in hot pursuit. The old woman brought them both a cup of coffee and then sliced some fresh bread, which she put on the table with a crock of butter and another one with preserves. Micah indicated Janet should eat something, and she ate three slices of the fresh bread before stopping short of eating all of it. Micah took it all in, nodding his head a couple of times when Janet described Ransom and his partner and told about the incident with the Bronco. When she was finished, he just sat there, staring down at the table, as if lost in thought.

Then the phone rang. He looked at Janet with raised eyebrows, but Janet just shook her head. He went over to the wall-mounted phone,

answered, and listened for a moment. Then he handed the phone to Janet with an amused expression in his eyes.

“Yes?” she said.

The woman’s voice was as cold as she remembered it.

“Not bad for an amateur,” she said.

“But you can’t shoot for shit.”

“I was aiming low, between the headlights,” Janet said.

“Otherwise, you’d be dead.”

“You put them all through my windshield. Like I said, you can’t shoot for shit. I have some news for you.”

“You shot Kreiss’s daughter,” Janet interrupted. There was a second of silence on the line.

“No, I didn’t,” the woman said.

“I’m not carrying,” Janet didn’t know what to say.

“Then who—” “Did you recover a bullet?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Keep it. It might give you some leverage later. But in the meantime, I thought you’d want to know. We have Kreiss. The Bureau picked him up in Washington and is delivering him to Langley. So I don’t need the daughter anymore. You can relax.”

“Relax. Right,” Janet said.

“Suit yourself, Carter, I no longer care. But the aTF people whose roadblock you ran might.”

“The ones who shot at my car and hit a kid?”

“That’s why I told you to keep the bullet. If you get your tail feathers in a crack over it, find a reporter, tell your tale. The aTF hates that. And don’t let your famous Bureau lab get the bullet; their ballistics work goes to the highest bidder these days. But you probably knew that.”

The dial tone came on and the woman was gone. Janet, her face a bit red, slowly hung up the phone.

“Friend of yourn?” Micah asked.

“No,” Janet said.

“She was the one who set the hospital on fire and then chased us up here. But she says she didn’t do any shooting. That it was a bunch of aTF guys who did that.”

“Now, that’ll please brother Edwin no end,” Micah said.

“Revenuers shootin’ at his little girl.” He shook his head slowly.

“Mama says the girl’s goin’ to be all right; we don’t have to get a doctor into it, less’n we see proud flesh.”

“Shouldn’t we do that anyway?”

“Doc sees a bullet wound, he’s obliged to call local law,” Micah said.

“Might want to wait on that.”

Janet sat back down at the table. She was aware that there were other men in the cabin, out in the front rooms. She was suddenly very tired.

“They, the feds, already know it was me in that car. They may or may not know who Lynn was.” She stopped, and then it penetrated—what the woman had said about Kreiss.

“Oh, hell” she said.

“She said they had Kreiss. Up in Washington. She said the FBI had him and was taking him to Langley. Where she’s from.”

Micah obviously didn’t know what she meant by Langley, but then the phone rang again.

“Grand Central Station,” Micah muttered, reaching for it. He said his name, then smiled.

“She’s right here.” He handed her the phone. This time, it was Kreiss.

“Where are you?” she said in a rush.

“I’m in a pay phone. I don’t have much time. Where’s Lynn?”

“She’s here and we’re safe, for the moment anyway.” She saw Micah shaking his head slowly. He was warning her not to tell him his daughter had been shot. She nodded.

“A lot’s happened, but we’re safe. But that woman just called, said the Bureau had you.”

“They had me, and then I had them. Look, I’ve got to get back to my vehicle, and then I’m coming down there. I don’t know where McGarand is. He and his truck have disappeared.”

“That woman said she was no longer interested in Lynn because the FBI was bringing you in—to Langley. When she finds out—” “Yeah, that’s why I’m leaving here. Soon.”

“And there’s no sign that McGarand is going to bomb something up there? Like Bureau headquarters?”

“I looked. I looked for his truck at all the Washington truck terminals.

Then I went over into town and looked around the Hoover Building, and then I went up to the aTF headquarters building. There was no sign of the propane truck.”

Janet gnawed her lip. The warnings. All for nothing, apparently.

“Let me talk to Micah,” Kreiss said.

Janet handed the phone back to Micah, who listened for a long minute.

“I can do that,” he said.

“Keep your powder dry.” Then he hung up.

“What?

“Janet asked.

“We need to clear on outta here,” Micah said, getting up.

“First, we need to git you and the girl in there some warm clothes.”

“Can she be moved?”

“Seem’ that’s just a flesh wound, yes. Even if it wasn’t, old Ed says we gotta move. Now. Come with me.”

Kreiss had the cab let him out at an all-night cafe one block up from Constitution Avenue, and four blocks away from the parking garage where he’d put the van. It was 5:45 when a yawning waitress brought him black coffee and a stale-looking Danish. He had taken a corner booth back from the door and was yawning himself. Outside, the first headlights of Washington’s morning rush hour were starting to appear, and he could see even more vehicles down on Constitution. It didn’t surprise him: Washington’s traffic was so bad that many office workers went to work in the early morning darkness just to avoid it. By 7:30 most mornings, a large majority of government workers were already in the office, stalking the coffee pot. His plan was to eat his fat pill, get some caffeine in him, and then go retrieve the rental van. Given the fact of rush hour, his best plan was to sleep in the van until the traffic crush was over, then hit the road south for Blacksburg. He would simply take the van, and leave his pickup truck at the motel. If they were looking for him, the cash-rental van would buy him an extra day, whereas his own truck might be picked up pretty quick.

He thought about driving down by the Hoover Building and waving to the cameras. Then he thought about Misty getting the word that he’d escaped again. Micah and his boys would provide as much safety as anyone could, especially on their home ground on the slopes and crags of Pearl’s Mountain. Misty and her associates were pretty damned lethal in a city, but Micah might be a good match for them in the Appalachian woods, especially once he got them to one of the caves. He decided to get going, before those same two cops came in for morning coffee and busted him again.

He paid up and went out onto the sidewalk. There were no pedestrians, but definitely a lot more traffic. He walked up three blocks to Massachusetts Avenue and then over one to the parking garage. There was a line of cars turning in to both the street-level entrance and the ramp, probably desk-bound revenuers from the ATE building right next door. A bearded and turbaned Sikh carrying a rolled-up Washington Post and a paper cup of coffee was unlocking the ticket booth as Kreiss walked into the garage, but the man ignored him. Kreiss climbed the stairs and came out on the level just beneath the roof. His van was parked in the back right corner, mostly out of habit. His level wasn’t fall yet, but it was getting that way. It was 6:50; in another thirty

minutes, the Sikh would be putting a garage FULL sign out in front. He unlocked the door, climbed in, and set the locks again. The rear seat folded down, so he was able to create a good-enough sleeping pad back there. The left windows of his van were right up against the outside wall, so incoming vehicles could park only on his right side. He draped a jacket up over that side’s window and stretched out. The first light of dawn was coming through the apertures between the concrete support columns, and he could see people moving around in the aTF building right next door. Their offices looked like every other government hive: computer cubes, plants in corners, conference rooms, pacifying pastel dividers, vision-impairing fluorescent lights, and all the coat-and-tie drones, moving slow until their morning caffeine fix took hold. He had spent many, many hours in similar circumstances between operational missions, and he did not miss it.

He was just closing his eyes when he caught sight of something odd in the space of daylight next to the window. It looked like a hose, a big black reinforced rubber hose, and it was just barely moving from side to side in some invisible updraft. He closed his eyes anyway, then opened them again. What the hell was a hose doing there? He stared at it again, trying to see if he had imagined movement, but it did move, as if it were dangling down from the deck above him. He sat up and looked at it again. There was something familiar about it, but he couldn’t place it. Just then a vehicle came by in front of the van, stopped, and then laboriously backed in alongside his vehicle. He lay back down instinctively, but the jacket blocked the view of the people getting out. Obviously a car pool; the men were finishing up an argument about the Washington Redskins, or Deadskins, as one of the men called them. They extracted briefcases, closed and locked the doors, and then disappeared toward the exit stairs. Kreiss sat back up again when they were clear. His eyes were stinging and he was dead tired, but there was something about that hose that bothered him.

He slid into the front seat, looked around at the nearly full parking deck, and then got out on the driver’s side. The hose came straight down from above, within easy hand reach across the low concrete wall. He reached out and touched it, surprised at how cold it was. There was a sheen of moisture on the rubber, and a shiny metal collar just out of reach had a definite rime of white frost on it. When he stretched out to look up, he saw that the hose went up one more level to the roof deck, then disappeared.

He looked down. The hose went straight down, then across a small, still, dark alley, and disappeared behind what looked like a small utility building at the back of the alley. The utility building

appeared to be connected to the aTF building. As he listened, he heard the low whistling noise of vent fans rising from the alley.

He leaned back into the garage and looked across the space between the aTF building and the garage. He could see right into a bank of offices. He watched office workers arrive in their cubes, stash lunch bags in office refrigerators, and stand around with cups of coffee, talking to their cell mates. He saw one middle-aged woman come into what was obviously an executive corner office, turn on the lights, close the door, and sit down in her chair, where she proceeded to hike up her skirt and make a major adjustment to her panty hose. None of them so much as glanced out their windows, even though it was now getting light all around. Great situational awareness, he thought. He saw no more vehicles coming up into his parking level, so he went over to the exit stairs and climbed up to the roof. Once out on the roof, he looked around and then remembered where he had seen that hose before: on the green-and-white propane truck driven by Browne McGarand, which was now parked in the corner of the roof deck.

He didn’t bother even going over there. He could see that there was no one in the truck, and he knew instinctively that whatever had been in that truck was probably now inside that office building next door. He ran back to the exit stair on the roof and started down, two steps at a time. He hadn’t really figured out what he was going to do when he got down to the street: run like hell, or warn them? And would they listen?

He was slowed by morning commuters on the stairs as he neared the ground level, and he rudely pushed past them to a chorus of “Hey, watch it” from the people he jostled. He kept saying, “Sorry, sorry,” but he also kept going. When he got outside to the street level, he stopped. The main entrance to the aTF building was a glass-walled lobby, and he could see the security people at their counter, next to X-ray machines and metal detectors. One of the men whom he had pushed by in the stairwell came abreast and gave him an angry look, but Kreiss ignored him. They were all in coats and ties; he was in slacks, a shirt, and a windbreaker. In about a minute, one of those angry aTF agents was going to ask him what he was doing out here. He looked into the alley. The hose was still there, barely distinguishable from the morning shadows. He wanted to go back there, make sure it had been routed into the ventilation building before calling a warning. But there might not be time.

He turned around to face the stream of people coming from the garage to

the building. When one of the approaching men, who looked like a mid grade bureaucrat, gave him a quizzical look, he put up his hand to stop him and then flashed Johnstone’s FBI credentials.

“Johnstone, FBI,” he announced to the startled man.

“Would you please ask one of the security guards to come out here? I think there’s a problem in that alley.”

The man looked into the alley and then back at Kreiss, and then he said, “Sure, wait here.” Kreiss stepped out of the flow of pedestrian traffic and watched through the glass as the man went inside and talked to the security people at the counter, who all looked back through the glass at Kreiss. One of them, a young black man, put on his hat and started around the counter while the guard next to him picked up a phone and began talking. Kreiss’s messenger put his briefcase on the X-ray machine’s belt and stepped through the metal detector, taking one last look at Kreiss before disappearing into the building. The security guard came through the front door and walked over to him, carrying a small radio in one hand and keeping his other hand near the butt of his gun. Kreiss made sure his hands were visible, and he held open the credentials so that the approaching guard could see the big black FBI letters. He closed it before the guard could get a close look at Johnstone’s picture, which wasn’t even a passing match for Kreiss’s face.

“Back there, in the alley. We’ve had a report of a possible bomb attack on your building. See that hose?”

The guard, who wanted another look at those credentials, locked on to the b word.

“Say what? A bomb? Where?”

“See that hose—there, all the way at the back of the alley? Look up-it’s coming down from the top deck of the parking garage. There’s a truck up there on the top deck. A propane truck. That hose looks like it’s going into your building’s ventilation system—see it?”

The guard looked, frowned, and then nodded.

“Yeah, I see it. But wait a minute. Propane? That shit stinks. We’re not smelling anything inside.”

“There’s a tanker truck on the roof of that garage that’s pumping something into your building. It might not be propane. Don’t you think you ought to check that out?”

Kreiss stood there while the bewildered guard spoke on his radio to someone inside. As he held the radio up to his ear for a reply, three more guards came running out of the lobby with guns drawn, headed straight for Kreiss. They were not smiling.

Janet held on to Lynn’s hand as Micah led them through the rising dawn up into the woods behind the cabin. The forested slopes of Pearl’s

tain rose above them like some brooding dark green mass. The rock face that overlooked Kreiss’s place was only partially visible from this angle.

Lynn was walking better than Janet had expected. Micah was following a path that led diagonally across the slope into the nearest trees, a kerosene lantern in his hand.

“Where are we going?” Janet asked.

“This here’s Pearl’s Mountain,” he replied over his shoulder.

“Limestone.

Full of caves. We got us a hidey-hole up there.”

“But if we can walk to it, so can anyone coming after us,” she protested.

“They can, but then they gotta find the right one. Harder’n it looks.”

They entered the trees, and the path diverged in three directions.

Micah stopped.

“Y’all take that left one there. Follow it ‘til it hits the bare rock. Then wait there. I’ll be along directly.”

They did as he said, arriving at a sheer rock wall fifteen minutes later.

Janet looked around for a cave entrance but found nothing. There was a broken segment of dead tree trunk propped against the rock, and they sat down on the log to rest. The climb had been steep, and Janet was a little winded. Lynn was taking deep breaths and holding her side.

Micah showed up five minutes later, dragging his jacket behind him by one of its sleeves. He put the jacket on the ground and grinned at them.

“See it?” he asked.

Janet and Lynn looked around but saw nothing that looked like a cave entrance. Janet shook her head.

“Mebbe that’s cuz y’all are sittin’ on it,” he said, pointing at the log.

They got up and Micah rolled the log sideways, revealing a narrow storm cellar door laid flat into the ground. He tugged on a rope handle, and the door opened, exposing steps cut into the dirt. Holding the lantern high, he went down into the hole. Janet let Lynn go next and then followed.

Micah told her to leave the door open.

The steps ended eight feet underground in a narrow passage of what felt like packed earth. Janet, less than thrilled to be underground, hurried to keep up with Micah’s lantern. The air in the passage was dank and still.

Kreiss folded his arms across his chest as the three guards hurried over.

One of them appeared to be older and in charge.

“You the guy claiming to be Special Agent Johnstone of the FBI?”

“That’s what he said to me, Sarge,” the man with the radio said. He had backed away from Kreiss.

The sergeant pointed his gun at Kreiss.

“We called the Bureau ops center,” he announced.

“And they said Agents Johnstone and West had been involved in a vehicle accident this morning while transporting a prisoner.

That would be you, am I right?”

Kreiss nodded but said nothing. The flow of pedestrian traffic parted visibly around the scene on the sidewalk. The sergeant had everybody go into the lobby to get this scene off the street. Once inside the lobby, he directed one of the guards to search Kreiss for weapons.

“Sarge, he says there’s some shit going down in the building. Like a bomb. Says that hose back there is pumping gas into the building.”

“What racking hose?” the sergeant demanded. The guard took him over to a window and pointed back into the alley. A second guard told Kreiss to raise ‘em while he patted him down for weapons. Kreiss obliged, trying to remain oblivious to all the stares from people going through the security checkpoint. He could hear the guard telling the sergeant about the propane truck.

The sergeant consulted by radio with the main security office upstairs.

Kreiss put his hands back down while the guard who searched him examined Johnstone’s credentials.

“Roger that,” the sergeant said into his radio. He looked at Kreiss.

“Central says there is a tanker truck up on the garage. What do you know about this?”

“I told the guard here: I think that truck is pumping an explosive gas into your building’s vent supply, via that utility building back there. In a nonzero amount of time your building here is going to vaporize when some idiot lights up a cigarette in a bathroom. Don’t you think you ought to clear the building?”

“Not on your say-so, bub; you’re the one impersonating a feeb.”

A large gray-headed man stepped out of the gathering crowd and approached the guards.

“What’s happening here, Sergeant?” he asked.

The guards all appeared to recognize the man, and people had let him through quickly. The sergeant told him what was going down, including what Kreiss had said about a possible bomb in the building.

“Not in the building,” Kreiss said.

“Your building is the bomb. I believe that truck up there is pumping some kind of explosive vapor into your vent system. While we stand here and talk.”

“Who are you?” the man asked. He spoke with the authority of someone who was used to getting immediate answers.

“My name is Edwin Kreiss, and I’m a civilian. Who are you?”

“I’m Lionel Kroner, deputy associate director. I’ve heard your name.”

“Perhaps in connection with an explosion investigation down in Ramsey, in southwest Virginia. The power plant? The hydrogen bomb?”

Kroner’s eyes widened at the mention of a hydrogen bomb. Some of the people who heard Kreiss use that term were obviously shocked, and a murmur swept the crowd.

“Yes, we sent an NRT on that,” Kroner said.

“Your name came up in a briefing. What was your involvement?”

“Nothing direct, but I know about it. And the guy who did that is probably trying to duplicate what happened down there in your building here. While we stand here and talk.”

The sergeant, who had been on the radio some more, said he had asked Central to get the lab people on the fourth floor to turn on an explosimeter to see if there was anything present in the building.

“Nobody smells anything,” he added.

“They won’t, if he’s using hydrogen,” Kreiss said.

“It’s odorless, tasteless, and completely invisible. Mr. Kroner, do you have a public-address system in this building?”

“Yes, Central does.”

“Can you get everyone to open their windows?”

Kroner blinked but then shook his head.

“We can’t,” he said.

“None of the windows in this building open.”

“Then clear the building. Now. And tell people to run like hell once they’re out of the building, because there’s going to be lots of flying glass.

And if you won’t clear the building, I’m going to leave.”

“Bulls’!” the sergeant said. The other guards still had their weapons drawn; they spread out a little, looking to their sergeant for instructions.

“Sarge, Sarge!” the black guard said urgently, pointing to his radio.

“Lab says there’s an explosive vapor in the building. They recommend an immediate evacuation.”

“You going to pop a cap in here, Sergeant?” Kreiss asked.

“Make a little flame?”

He turned to leave. Some of the guards went into shooting stance, but Kroner waved them down. The sergeant started to protest, but Kroner ordered him to be quiet and get him a microphone patch into the building’s PA system.

“Mr. Kreiss,” he called, as Kreiss neared the doors. He stopped and turned around.

“Thanks for the warning,” Kroner said.

“But we will see you later. That’s a promise.”

“If any of you are still alive,” Kreiss said, which shut everyone up for the moment.

Kreiss nodded at him and stepped through the door. See me later? Not

if I can help it, he thought. It was all he could do not to run like hell.

Behind him, he heard Kroner’s voice identifying himself on the building’s PA system and ordering an immediate evacuation of the building, instructing people to walk to the nearest stairs and to do nothing—repeat, nothing—that might generate a spark. Kreiss hurried back into the parking garage to retrieve his van. When he reached the street level, the turbaned attendant was out on the sidewalk, trying to figure out what was happening next door. Kreiss told him there was a bomb in the aTF building.

The attendant looked at Kreiss, back at the aTF building, and then took off smartly down the street. Kreiss swore, opened his door, and reached into the attendant’s booth to trip the gate.

It took him ten minutes in morning traffic to get three blocks away from the aTF building, at which time he heard the first sirens. Three Metro cop cars with their blue lights flashing came racing past him into Massachusetts Avenue to block off the side streets. He pulled over toward the curb to let them go by. Pedestrians on the sidewalk paused to stare at all the cop cars, wondering if the president was coming.

Fucking McGarand, Kreiss thought as he tried to pull back out into traffic, but now everything was stopped. He had damn near pulled it off, and had done so even after Carter had sent in a very specific warning.

What the hell was it about Washington bureaucrats that made them think they knew everything, that no one could tell them a single goddamn thing?

He felt somebody or something bang hard on the back windows of the van, and he looked in the mirror to see if a vehicle had rear-ended his van.

Instead, he saw an enormous orange fireball rising with a shuddering roar into the sky over the buildings behind him. The glare was strong enough to be seen through the windows of office buildings that were between him and the blast. Looking a lot like an atomic cloud, the fireball turned to a boiling red color and then was enveloped by a bolus of oily black smoke pulsing up into the early-morning sky over downtown. He heard a woman on the sidewalk scream right beside the van, and moments later, debris began to rain down on the sidewalks and the streets. He put the van in gear and pulled onto the sidewalk as people ran for cover into nearby buildings. Ignoring the sudden hail of metal and concrete bits rattling on the roof of the van, he drove down the sidewalk until he reached the next corner, then pulled past the huddled pedestrians and accelerated down toward the river.

Correction, correction, he thought. Not damn near. Score one for the

clan McGarand. And he knew that as soon as the dust settled, there would be a host of feds hunting one Edwin Kreiss. A regular fugitive hat trick, he thought. He would now have the aTF, FBI, and the fucking Agency on his trail. Good job, Kreiss.

He turned right when he got to Constitution and headed toward the Memorial Bridge and northern Virginia. He would have to stay off the interstates once he got clear of the Washington area. He probably had twenty, thirty minutes to get out of town, and then someone would remember the speeding van on the sidewalk. The bigger problem would come when he got close to Blacksburg, because there were only so many ways into the foothills west of the town. He thanked God that Micah had Lynn, because Misty would undoubtedly take another shot, and very soon.

Behind him, the big black cloud had tipped over in the morning air, casting a pall over the entire downtown area and blocking out the rising sun.

Browne McGarand felt a wave of deep satisfaction when he heard the monstrous thump and turned to see the black cloud erupting over the federal district. He had walked down Massachusetts Avenue after starting the hydrogen flow, trying to remain inconspicuous until he was able to cross Constitution Avenue and walk out onto the Mall, the wide expanse of trees and lawns fronting the Capitol grounds. Even at that hour of the morning, there was a surprising number of people out and about: joggers, power-walkers, and a tai chi exercise group of elderly people striking exotic attitudes out on the damp grass. He had rested on a park bench for a while, thinking back to 1993 and the similarly dramatic scenes created by the government’s immolation of David Koresh and Browne’s son, William, at Waco. Both the aTF and the FBI had conspired to cover up the truth of what had happened there, just as they had at Ruby Ridge.

Murder will out, he thought, and the government had flat out murdered those deluded people. Then they lied about it, falsified testimony, concealed evidence, and otherwise acted more like Hitler’s SS than agents of a democracy. Goddamned people burned babies for the crime of being different and delusional, while the president of the United States perjured himself with impunity and released bomb-throwing foreign terrorists for his wife’s political advantage.

Watching the mushroom cloud, he wished he could have managed two bombs, because the FBI had blood on its hands from Waco, too. But it had been the aTF who set the stage for the ultimate carnage with their pigheaded

assault. He didn’t hate the agents who had bled and died on the roof of the compound. He blamed the coldhearted bastards here in Washington who had ordered it, and then pretended that they hadn’t. Well, that black cloud rising above the federal office buildings would bring the message home right here to those same people: If the government won’t hold agencies accountable, then, by God, an avenger will come out of the hills and teach the lesson. When the moral standards disappeared, it was time for the Old Testament rules: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, fire for fire.

He watched the smoke cloud collapse into itself as the rumble of the explosion died away over the Virginia hills. A wail of sirens and the astonished cries of the people out on the Mall followed. He got up and resumed walking, heading casually but purposefully down the Mall, past the Reflecting Pool, toward the Lincoln Memorial and the Memorial Bridge. His goal was to cross the river and walk to the Arlington Cemetery Metro station. From there, he would take the subway over to Reagan National Airport. He had enough cash to rent a car, and he didn’t see any problem with using his own driver’s license—all that would prove was that he had been in Washington. Then he was going to drive like hell back down to the Ramsey Arsenal, where he had everything prepositioned for his imminent disappearance. He rubbed his bare face. He had shaved off his beard in the motel and his face felt naked. He averted his face as he passed by Lincoln’s somber statue. He searched his soul for a sign of remorse and found nothing of the kind.

Janet and Lynn were huddled in a tiny wooden hut that had been built into the entrance passage, fifty feet back from the actual entrance. The hut consisted of a single room, containing two bunks, a tiny table, two straight-backed chairs, and a rack where six kerosene lanterns hung on one wall. Micah returned in the early afternoon, calling softly from the tunnel as he approached. He brought some sandwiches and a thermos of hot soup. Lynn was sitting up by now and feeling much better. She said her back and ribs hurt, but Janet was able to report that, thankfully, no infection was showing. Janet had slept like a log on one of the cots for three hours. They were both very grateful for the food.

“They’s a ton of revenuers out there along the road,” Micah announced as they ate. There was a single railroad-style kerosene lamp on the table, and the light in the tiny wooden room made his skin look like parchment.

Janet wondered how old he was.

“Had a passel of ‘em come up to the cabin, asking’ what we’d seen or heard.”

“Which was nothing at all, right?” Lynn said.

Micah smiled.

“Maybe heard some shootin’ last night, heard some veehicles rammin’ around on the county road. Buncha kids out a West Virginia, playin’ thunder road, most like. But otherwise …”

“They search your place?”

“I reckon they will, soon’s they git them a warrant,” Micah said.

“The boss man asked if they could look around. I told ‘im no. Told ‘im four of my fightin’ pit bulls was holed up somewhere’s in all that junk. Wouldn’t be safe for no strangers to be pokin’ around. Boss man said fightin’ dogs was illegal; I told ‘im they could tell them dogs that, they wanted to go take their chances.”

“They’ll find my vehicle,” Janet said.

“No, ma’am, I don’t b’lieve they will,” Micah said solemnly. Janet just nodded.

“Was there a woman with them?” she asked.

“No, ma’am, no women, just a mess a revenuers we’ve never seen before. They surely ain’t from around here, way they talkin’.”

Janet nodded again. Micah probably called any kind of federal law enforcement a revenuer. These people had probably been aTF, with maybe some FBI and possibly even some of that horrible woman’s crew sprinkled in.

“They been to your daddy’s cabin,” Micah said to Lynn.

“Had one a my boys watching the place from the ridge. Buncha vehicles people goin’ every which a way. They had some dogs with ‘em, too, so they may do some trackin’. If ‘n they do, they might could find the entrance to this here cave.”

“Is there another way out?”

Micah smiled.

“Three ways, one sorta easy, two real hard. Meantime, I got one a the boys paintin’ some bear fat on that log near the entrance y’all used. Ain’t no city dog gonna like that. But if there’s a ruckus, that’ll be the sign for y’all to move back into the mountain. Whatever y’all do, don’t come out the way we come in. We gonna lay down a little trap in that passage. Now, this here’s a map.”

He unrolled a piece of brown paper cut out of a grocery bag and showed Janet where the hut was. The map showed three passages that led from the hut to various other chambers and passages back into the mountain, and, eventually, to the woods on the west slope. He pointed out the lanterns on the back wall and showed her where extra lanterns were cached along the passages. The way out of the hut was through a concealed door in the back wall. Each of the passages on the map was marked by a number.

“Number one here, it’s the easiest goin’,” he said. “

“Bout a mile all told, maybe mile and a half. Goes down maybe a hundred feet before climbin’ back up and out. Comes out by a dirt road, through a flat door like we came in. You come out that away you pile on a buncha rocks on that door once you out if someone’s behind you.”

“And the others?”

“Two and three are longer and deeper, and they’s some tight-assed narrow-downs.

Three’s got a lake. You gotta hand-over-hand along a ledge over on the left side to make it across. That there ledge is ‘bout six, eight inches underwater. You don’t even want to fall in, ‘cause it’s deep and cold as hell.”

“But if they bring dogs into the cave?”

“Then three’s the one you want. Be careful when you git to Dawson’s Pit.”

“Why is it called that?” Lynn asked.

‘“Cause Dawson’s still in it. They’s a long, real narrow passage just before the lake; you women will have to be sideways to git through it. A man’s gotta hold his breath and grease his ass and his belly to git through it. But you could kill a dog easy, he comes after you in that crack. Here. I brought your wheel gun.”

“I’m afraid I ran it out of ammo, out there on the road.”

Micah grinned.

“Got you a refill. Ammo’s something’ we keep aplenty of up here. But looka here: Take one a them hickory sticks over there in the corner . Don’t shoot the gun less’n you have to, ‘cause you never know what the cave’ll do. You follow?”

“You mean, as in cave-in?”

“Somethin’ like that. Specially around that lake. It don’t got a bottom, best as we can find out, and the ceiling in the lake cave is way up there.

Lots a them stone icicles up there, I reckon. Lantern won’t light it. Use the sticks on any dogs; that’s why they got points.”

Janet took a deep breath and thanked him.

“Let’s pray for no dogs,” she said.

“Tell me: When her father comes back, will he contact you?”

“I reckon,” Micah said.

“Them ain’t no friends a his at his cabin just now. But we got ways.”

Janet took the .38 and put it on the table. It didn’t seem like much, compared to some of the weapons she had seen in the past twenty-four hours.

“You’ve saved our skins a couple of times, Mr. Wall,” she said.

“I

surely appreciate it. I don’t even know who half the people chasing us are anymore.”

Micah looked over at Lynn and nodded in the yellow light.

“Ed Kreiss, he did me a real big favor, back when he first moved up here on the mountain. Didn’t even know me or none of my kin, and he saved one a my boys. His name’s Ben. He’s a big’ un but Ben, he’s a mite simple.

Three old boys from the Craggit bunch over on Moultrie Mountain took it into their rock heads to whup Ben’s ass. They caught up with him out on the county road and was fixin’ to flat bust his head with some tire irons. Don’t rightly know why. Old Ed, he come up on it. Said Ben was rolled up in a ball under his truck, and them bast ids was yankin’ on him.

Old Ed said they was fixin’ to kill him, most like. Old Ed, he went after them bast ids with his truck, knocked two of ‘em clean off the road and down into Hangman’s Creek. Third one run off. Then he brung Ben home.”

“Tell her about the Craggits,” Lynn said.

Micah grinned again.

“Oh, yeah, them Craggits came around, goin’ to git ‘em some ree-venge on Ed Kreiss. He heard ‘em comin’ somehow, turned that big fifty-cal loose on the Craggits’ pickup trucks. They went a-howlin’ and a-yellin’ out into the woods, and then old Ed, he cut loose with them lion sounds into them woods. Them Craggits laid a trail a loose shit all the way back over to Moultrie Mountain. Time since, goin’ on four years now, old Ed’n me become pretty good neighbors.”

“I’m probably being impolite,” Janet said, “but I have to ask: What do you and all these people do up here, Mr. Wall?”

“We git by,” he said, revealing just a hint of a smile. Janet smiled back, understanding that was all she was going to learn.

“Well, look, there’s probably a warrant out for my arrest right now,” she said.

“I ran a federal roadblock last night. And I shot at—well, I’m not sure who the hell she was. But I suppose she’s federal, after a fashion.”

Micah spat onto the dirt floor of the hut.

“Them folks out there, they’s all gov-mint. Got the smell and the look about ‘em. Them people don’t belong up here. Never have, never will. One day, they gonna learn that.

These the same bast ids shot down that woman and chile up on Ruby Ridge. Too many of ‘em just killers with badges is all. They chasin’ that boy Rudolph down in Carolina?” He spat again.

“Shee-it. They ain’t never gonna find that boy. Mountain folk got ‘im hid and hid good.”

The agent in Janet got the better of her.

“That guy Rudolph set bombs that killed and maimed some people,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s what they say. But you willin’ to bet they gonna take him alive?”

“Well, if they catch up with him, he’ll certainly get that option,” she said.

“You reckon? Them folks at Waco, they didn’t git that option,” Wall said.

“How’s a man gonna git his day in court, when them revenuers come a-shootin’ first an’ asking’ questions later?”

Janet had no answer for that one. Lynn was looking down at the dirt floor of the hut.

“Now I’m sorry we put you in this fix, Mr. Wall,” Janet said.

“They might try to arrest all of you, take you off the mountain for obstruction of justice.”

Micah nodded.

“I reckon we’ll do the best we can, they come for us.”

He straightened up.

“Meantime, y’all lay low in here, till old Ed comes for you. And, like I said, keep an ear peeled for any dog ruckus up at the front.

Trap’ll slow ‘em down, but y’all gotta go if they hit it.”

“What kind of trap is it?”

“When I leave, my boys’ll take a hornet nest we sacked last night. Set it up in the passage. Them hornets, they gonna go for the lights.”

“Big nest?”

‘“Bout a million,” Micah said, eyes twinkling.

Janet grinned in spite of herself. She could just see it.

He gathered up the bag.

“Now, lemme show you something’ else. Them people out there—if they come in a-shootin’? That’s different. You open that trapdoor, grab you some lanterns; then you light this fuse right there—you see it? There’s the matches. Light it; then pull that trapdoor down. Then y’all git on down that passage till you get to the first turn.

They’s a dead-end branch passage, goes to the right. Git in that, git down, and stop up your ears.”

Lynn, who had been listening to all this, was nodding her head. Micah checked to see that the lanterns had fuel, then stepped back out the front door of the hut and disappeared into the front passage. Janet examined the fuse, but she wasn’t so sure about doing what the old man had recommended.

Just last week, she could have been one of the people coming in here. On the other hand, somebody seemed to be rewriting all the rules when it came to Edwin Kreiss and his daughter. Just like they did at Waco, she thought. That fire in the hospital, for instance. That had been way out there. And that guy Browne McGarand, going up to Washington with a truckload of hydrogen to blow something up. This old man could crack wise about it, but these people up here were obviously convinced that the government and all its works could not be trusted. If they came in with tracking dogs, looking, they ran into bear grease and

hornets. If they came in with snipers, flash-bangs, and tear gas, as they had proved they could from time to time, they’d get the cave dynamited down on their heads.

Lynn said she was going to explore the trapdoor at the back and make sure they could get it open. Janet sat down at the tiny wooden table and put her head in her hands. Her people had to know she was up here in the mountains with Lynn Kreiss. They’re not your people anymore, are they?

a little voice in her head reminded her. Micah Wall and his people were protecting her until—what? Until Kreiss could get back? She felt as if she were out on the moon somewhere. Last week, she had been a federal agent; now, in the space of a day and a night, she was a federal fugitive.

She began to understand the meaning of the phrase “out in the cold.” She wondered what Farnsworth and her coworkers at the Roanoke office were doing right now: Combing the hills for the two of them? Sitting back and pretending that she did not exist? Waiting for instructions and the spin d’jour from the bosses in Washington? The same bosses who wouldn’t listen to warnings of a bomb plot, and who were apparently more interested in embarrassing another government agency than in protecting peoples’ lives?

What she instinctively wanted to do was call into the Roanoke office and check in, talk to somebody, see what the hell was going on. But whom could she call? Not RA Farnsworth. And not Larry Talbot, who would be too scared to take her call. Not Keenan. She didn’t know anybody in the ATE And not Edwin Kreiss, who was God knew where, and who had at least the Bureau hunting for him, if not the ATR And the Agency, don’t forget the blessed Agency.

Lynn, who had gone through the trapdoor, squeezed back into the hut.

“I left a couple of lanterns and some matches in the passageway. He wasn’t kidding about narrow.”

“Make sure we have that map,” Janet said.

“If we have to escape that way, I want to be able to find my way back out of this mountain.”

“I’ve got it right here, next to the door. You suppose this fuse goes to dynamite or something?”

“Yes. It will probably bring this part of the cave down.”

Lynn came over to the table and sat down, wincing when her ribs touched the table.

“I wish I knew where my father was,” she said.

“And what the hell was going on.”

“That makes nine of us,” Janet said.

“I’m almost tempted to go back out front, see if I can find a phone.”

“Whom would you call?”

“That’s the problem. I don’t exactly know who my friends are right now. Or who’s chasing us. Where the hell does that woman get off, anyway—starting a fire in a fucking hospital! Those Agency people aren’t even supposed to be operating within the United States.”

Lynn nodded slowly.

“I’m not so sure about that,” she said.

“When my father was working with them, he sometimes went overseas to do what he did. But he also worked here, in the States, too. It kind of depended on whom he was pursuing and what they’d done.”

“But if a wrong guy needs pursuing in the States, that’s the Bureau’s job, not the Agency’s.”

Lynn smiled.

“I think that’s why the Agency let him stay: he was technically a Bureau man, not an Agency man.”

“Ah,” Janet said.

“So if some part of an operation broached, he could flash Bureau creds and people would back off.”

“Something like that. He never gave me details of what he did, but I think that the people they went after had overstepped the bounds. A lot.

The big boys just wanted the problem taken care of, and I don’t think they really wanted to know too much about how it was taken care of.”

“You mean they’d go after some guy and just cap him?”

“I don’t think so, actually,” Lynn said.

“Dad says there are some federal prisons where they can put people into the federal corrections system and bury the file. Lewisburg, Fort Leavenworth, for instance; they have lifetime solitary-confinement facilities there. Who’s going to go up to a place like that and ask to see the dungeons?”

“The ACLU maybe?”

“The ACLU would have to know the guy existed in the first place.”

“Jesus, you make it sound like Russia.”

Lynn laughed.

“I met a Russian graduate student at Tech last year. He was in the advanced physics program. We got to talking politics—God, how those Russians love to talk politics! He laughs at the proposition that we live in a ‘free’ country. He told me to go find out how many government police there are now, compared with ten years ago.”

Janet just looked at her.

“Well, I tried. Like, do you know how big the Bureau is?”

“Well, it’s big, I know that. Ten, fifteen thousand people, maybe.”

Lynn shook her head.

“Try twenty-seven thousand employees in the FBI. Ten years ago, it was

sixteen thousand. I tried to find out how many federal government police there are, the total number, and do you know I couldn’t really do it? Maybe you could.”

“There are more cops because there is more crime, and a hundred new mutations of crime every day. Internet crime. Serial killers. Hannibal the Cannibal types. Chat rooms where pedophiles buy and sell children for snuff flicks. Sixty-two thousand bombing incidents in the past five years.”

“Yeah, but look at that Waco thing: Sure, those people were a doomsday cult, and they had some weird people there. Koresh and all his ‘wives’;

all of them waiting around for Judgment Day, praying for it to come, probably, the end of the millennium, the Second Coming. But for that, the government burned them alive? Jesus Christ. Burning people for their beliefs went out with the Inquisition. Supposedly.”

“Koresh burned them,” Janet said.

“Our people didn’t do that.”

“Maybe,” Lynn said.

“But your people gave Koresh the pretext when they drove tanks into the building. Hell, why didn’t they just cut the power and the phones and the water and wait for a few months? But no, some cowboy—or maybe cowgirl, huh?—in Washington decides to send tanks in? And then, afterward, they all do the armadillo and try to cover it all up? I mean, the Bureau and the aTF could be telling the absolute truth, but when shit comes out like that business with the incendiary rounds? Nobody believes them anymore. For that matter, how many women and babies did David Koresh ever burn alive before the tanks showed up?”

“But we’re the good guys,” Janet said.

“Koresh started those fires.

Koresh killed those people. He was wounded and he was dying, and he had nothing more to lose!”

Lynn just looked at her.

“That may be true,” she said.

“But America is a democracy in the full bloom of the information age. If agencies like the Bureau and the aTF aren’t squeaky fucking clean, it will come out. In the past, maybe not, but now? It will come out. And then there’s no more trust. If it’s perceived to be a coverup, then it is a coverup.”

Janet sighed and looked away. Lynn put her hand on Janet’s arm.

“Look,” she said.

“You’re risking your ass to save my ass from some claw of the government we can’t even name. Don’t think I’m not grateful. But four or five years ago, my father found out something about some very high-level people in the government, a secret bad enough that a senior Agency guy shot himself and his whole family to protect it. I think the only reason they didn’t ‘disappear’ my father is that he was a

pretty resourceful operative who might have caused a train wreck or two in the process. When he was quote-unquote ‘retired,” it was all done over a pay phone, okay?”

“You think that’s what this is all about?”

“You know, I think it is,” Lynn said.

“Dad and I have talked about this before. There’s been a lot that’s come out about the Chinese spy case since then. I think he was afraid he was becoming more and more of a major loose end. He knew firsthand what can happen to a loose end, especially these days.”

The kerosene lamp guttered, and Janet got up to light a second one to replace it.

“How do you know all this?” she asked.

Lynn drew her sweater closer about her.

“Dad and I talked a lot after my mom was killed and he was forced out. I son of made it a condition of our reconciliation. I told him I had to know about him and what he did, not operational details, of course, but why my mother had been so afraid.

Why she said some of the things she said.”

“Which weren’t true.”

Lynn looked up at her. She had Kreiss’s intense gray-green eyes, Janet suddenly realized. Eyes that knew too much and had seen too much.

“But that’s the point, Agent Carter,” Lynn said.

“Most of it was true.”

Janet remembered the hunting woman’s face, with eyes like those on a great white shark. Play “Misty” for me. She shivered. Then they heard the dogs.

Browne McGarand rubbed the itchy new stubble rising on his clean shaven face again as he drove the rental down the back side of the arsenal.

It was nearly sundown, and he was looking for the entrance to an old logging road that led back to the western perimeter fence. He planned to drive the little car up the logging road as far as he could and then hide it.

Then he would walk to the perimeter fence and go north along the fence until he got to the point where the creek entered the federal reservation.

Unlike the creek’s exit point, it wasn’t very big, and they had just run the fence atop of it, laying down some concrete culverts. Once inside the two fences, it was a mile’s walk to the bunker farm and to bunker 887.

He had prepared his bolt-hole in the bunker field early in the project.

It was in the remotest part of the ammunition-storage area. They had cut the rusty series padlock and unsealed the air-circulating ventilator fixture at the back of the bunker, converting the ventilator trunk into an escape hatch. Halfway down the bunker’s empty length, he

and Jared had constructed a fake partition of studs and plywood, creating a smooth wooden surface that ran from top to bottom. Jared, an able carpenter, had done most of the work, including building in a single flush-mounted door.

They then painted the side of the barrier facing the bunker doors a flat black. The idea was to make it look to anyone shining a flashlight quickly into the partially buried bunker that it was as empty as all the rest. He had taken this precaution after watching the security patrols for a few weeks and seeing them occasionally pick a bunker at random, unlock the heavy steel doors, and poke their flashlights in for a moment. The barrier wouldn’t stand a thorough search, of course, especially if someone restored electricity to the bunker farm and turned on each bunker’s main lights.

Jared had then taken the old padlock to a swap meet up in Harpers Ferry, to a guy who claimed to be able to find a key for any lock. Since the Army’s padlock was part of a series, the locksmith had been able to produce a master key. Then all they had to do was to lift a padlock from another bunker, well removed, and put it on their hideout. That way, they could keep it locked but not raise flags when security encountered a lock not of the series. If the security patrols ever came upon the bunker that no longer had its lock, they would go in and have a look. But there would be nothing there and then they would simply replace it.

He had listened to an all-news radio station on the way down from Washington. The aTF headquarters bombing was the center of attention, of course, with excited reports of hundreds killed and major damage to the entire downtown area. Reporters on the scene gave breathless accounts of the shattered building, streets full of glass and office debris, and five fire companies and their EMTs working isolated bloody vignettes up and down Massachusetts Avenue. Spokespersons for the Treasury Department, Justice Department, FBI, and belatedly, the aTF had all made grave pronouncements about the growing threat of domestic terrorists, the need for increased resources, expressions of condolence for the victims, and determination to hunt down the perpetrators. One interview had been most revealing, when a reporter put a microphone in front of the bleeding face of an aTF agent who had been injured up on the roof deck of the parking garage. He had sworn a bloody oath to find the son of a bitch who had done this and blow his—word bleeped—head right off, an hysterical comment his supervisors would undoubtedly regret.

Over the course of the day, however, the reports were toned down significantly.

It was revealed that most of the building had been evacuated before the blast. Apparently, there had been a last-minute warning. There were indeed dozens of people injured, but most of these had been hurt in the street, or had not moved far enough away from the building when the top half was blown off. When he finally got to the logging road, they were reporting three civilian security men killed on the roof of the parking garage, twenty-six injured within the vicinity of the building, and the top four floors of the aTF building destroyed. By the time he switched off, speculation as to the source of the bomb and the motives behind it was driving any hard, factual news off the story.

He was sorry that he had not been able to kill them all, to drive an explosive stake into the heart of that agency and to immolate the Washington policy makers he held responsible for Waco once and for all else.

But there had been no disguising the sense of outrage and, behind the outrage, palpable fear in the voices of all those federal law-enforcement agency spokes persons They probably all thought they had paid for Waco in the Oklahoma City bombing. Now they would know that there were people out there who felt otherwise. He got to the end of the logging road and parked the car as far back into the trees as he could maneuver it. He sat in the darkened vehicle for a moment. If there had been aTF building security people injured in the parking garage, they must have known about the propane truck. In any event, the truck would have survived, but they would trace it back to West Virginia, not here to the Blacksburg area.

The gasoline incendiary he’d left behind in the cab should have taken care of any fingerprints. He was taking a mixed chance coming back here to the arsenal, but he still believed in the old rule about hiding things under people’s noses. Especially these people.

By the time the first dog hit the front wall of the hut, Lynn had the back door open and two lanterns lighted and ready to go. She waited in the narrow passage behind the hut while Janet wedged the little table against the front door. They both heard a man shout, “In here!” from the front passage, and then there was a huge commotion of dogs and shouting voices as someone brought a light into the passage and the hornets finally had a target.

As the voices and screaming dogs withdrew, Janet stepped through the narrow back door and shut it tightly. She had the .38 stuffed into her waistband holster and was struggling into her jacket. She looked for some way to block the back door, but there wasn’t one.

“Let’s go,” she whispered, picking up a lantern.

“They’ll be right behind us.”

“Not until they figure out a way to get past those hornets,” Lynn said.

Lynn led the way down the narrow passage behind the hut. The passage was seven or eight feet high, and the rock on either side was cold and damp. The trail beneath their feet was hard-packed dirt. Janet had pulled the fuse in the hut out into full view, hoping that whoever was hunting them would see it and slow down to check for booby traps. The passage went straight for fifty feet and then there was a cross passage, with two more caverns opening into the intersection. Lynn consulted the map and chose the left branch. The noise behind them had subsided, but Janet knew the dogs would be coming soon, even if the men did not.

The passage they were in now was even narrower, and the roof came down the farther they went. The floor had turned to loose gravel, and they had to slow down to keep from turning an ankle. At one point, Janet lost her footing and sat down heavily, sliding on her backside for a yard or so before stopping. She managed to put her lantern out in the process.

“Leave it out,” Lynn said.

“We may need the fuel later.”

Janet got back up and hurried after the girl, who seemed to be doing just fine. She wondered if Lynn had been in the caves before. There was still no sign of pursuit behind them, for which she was very grateful. The air remained dank and oppressive. Janet was not exactly claustrophobic, but she was certainly aware of the mass of the mountain above their heads.

“Can you follow the map?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s pretty clear. There’s a pit coming up. Not sure what that means.”

They rounded a dogleg turn in the cave, the lone lantern throwing weird shadows along the ceiling, and Lynn stopped suddenly. They had entered a round chamber, which was about twenty feet wide. The ceiling domed up a similar distance. The path ahead skirted a perfectly smooth conical hole, which disappeared into the depths of the mountain. The top of the hole was almost as wide as the chamber. Lynn kicked a small rock off the trail. It slid down over the smooth edge of the hole and then disappeared without a sound. The bobbing lantern made the walls look like they were moving.

“That’s what “pit” means,” Janet whispered.

“Damn thing goes to China.”

“And we go that way,” Lynn said. She pointed with the lantern to the left side of the pit, where an eighteen-inch-wide ledge led around the lip of the hole and into another passage on the far side. The walls of the chamber curved up toward the top of the dome.

“Shit,” Janet said, “Look at that curving wall. What do we hold on to?”

Behind them came the sounds of something moving down the passageway.

“Duck-walk,” Lynn said.

“Now.”

She led the way, holding the lantern extended in her left hand to move her center of gravity closer to the wall. She squatted down, facing the hole so as to maximize the room between the side wall and the lip of the pit, then duck-walked sideways out onto the ledge. Janet followed, willing her eyes to look at Lynn’s bobbing back and not into the pit. They were halfway across the ledge when they distinctly heard a dog coming, its unmistakable snuffling sounds amplified by the narrow tunnel. There was nothing they could do; they couldn’t move any faster, and the dog would be on them in seconds. Suddenly, the lantern went out, and Janet gasped.

She froze in place, her left hand scrabbling against the damp rock, searching for something to hold on to. The darkness was absolute, and she was terrified.

“Don’t move,” Lynn hissed.

The dog, hearing her voice, barked once and kept coming. Judging by the size of that bark, it had to be a pretty big dog, and Janet could feel its presence when it launched into the chamber, accelerating down the path as it hunted the sound of Lynn’s voice and their fresh scent. Then there was an instant of complete silence, followed by a plaintive yelp as the dog sailed over the smooth edge of the pit and fell away into nothingness.

Janet heard a scratching sound, and then Lynn had a match going, relighting the lantern. She realized she had been holding her breath and now let it out in a small sob, and then Lynn was moving again, duck walking across the remainder of the ledge into a small antechamber beyond.

Janet followed, her knees and hips hurting. Her mouth was dry as dust and her heart was pounding.

When they got to the other side, Lynn stood up and grinned at her.

“Pretty good, huh?” she said, her eyes alight. Christ on a crutch, Janet thought as she carefully stood up, she’s enjoying this. But there was no getting around it: Lynn had done the one thing that eliminated the pursuing dog problem. There were two passages leading out of the chamber, and Lynn consulted the map.

“Left,” she said.

“We’re going on trail three.”

“Any more pits on that trail?” Janet asked in a strained voice. But Lynn was already moving into the smaller of the two passages, ducking

her head to get through. Janet took one last look at the pit chamber as Lynn’s lantern bobbed away: she shivered, then followed.

They tried to keep quiet as they pressed into the narrowing passage. It went level for a while, then dipped precipitously. The footing was now slippery clay, and they really had to slow down to keep from pitching headlong down the passage. Janet banged her lantern against the rock wall and thought she heard the glass crack. Lynn, six feet ahead of her, kept going for another fifteen minutes and then stopped and swore.

“What?” Janet asked, dreading another pit.

“No trail,” Lynn said, consulting the map.

“But I don’t see any other way to go.”

Janet came up alongside her. Lynn lifted her lantern. The passage had opened onto the edge of what looked like a very steep slope that disappeared down into the darkness. There was a faint movement of cold, wet air against her face, and then she realized they had come into a very large cavern, whose vaulted ceiling rose up out of the range of the lantern light.

“Jesus, this is huge,” Janet said. Her voice echoed out into space. They stood there for a minute, taking it all in, when they again heard sounds behind them, men’s voices and the excited yelping of dogs. They weren’t close, but they were certainly back there.

“That pit will slow them down,” Lynn said softly.

“But I don’t see any other way to do this.”

Janet looked down. They had forgotten to bring the sticks. The surface of the slope was loose rock and what looked like shale.

“You mean slide?”

“Yeah. This has to be the way. It’s been a straight shot so far. So it’s probably safe. I’ll go first. Hold this.”

She gave the lantern to Janet, turned around, and let herself out onto the slope. Her feet precipitated a small avalanche of stones and dirt, but she was able to maintain position on the slope. She reached for the lantern.

“You got matches?” she asked.

“Yes,” Janet said.

“Okay, light your lantern. I’m going to put this one out while I go down.”

Janet lit her lantern, and she saw that she had indeed cracked the glass.

The flame burned unevenly until she adjusted the wick. Lynn doused her own lantern, then started down the slope, moving carefully to keep from starting a big slide and going with it. Janet held her lantern out as far as she could, while listening for sounds of pursuit. She could

just barely hear the men back there, but the cave distorted the sounds and she had no idea of how far back they were. She was more worried about dogs ranging ahead of the men. Then she heard a noise below her. Lynn swore as she lost control of her climb down the slope and began to slide. Janet leaned way out but could no longer see her down the slope. Based on all the noise, Lynn was going for a ride. After a minute or so, the raiding noise of falling stones died out.

“Lynn?” Janet called, trying not to make too much noise.

“Yeah, I’m all right. Lemme get this lantern going. Then you come down. Douse yours before you try it.”

There was a flare of light below, and Janet could see that the slope ended about two hundred feet down. There was a glint of water at the base of the cliff. She could see Lynn’s light but not Lynn. She doused her own lantern and then listened again. The men’s voices were getting louder, but she still had no idea of how close they were. It sounded as if there were lots of them back there. Then she heard a dog barking eagerly, and the dog sounded a whole lot closer. She went backward over the edge and started down, getting into the rhythm of a controlled slide while she protected the lantern. Lynn must have taken the loose stuff with her, because Janet got down to the bottom without going into an uncontrolled slide. She dusted off her hands and knees and got up. She stepped away from the slope and then turned around. In front of her was a vast lake, whose size she could only feel. The lantern light reflected only about fifty feet out onto its surface. She could get no sense of walls or the ceiling.

“Man, look at that,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s huge,” Lynn said.

“We go this way.”

She turned to their left and began picking her way along the shore of the lake, which was made up of small round stones, some larger boulders, and loose gravel. The mass of the shale cliff rose into total darkness to their left. The shoreline curved around slowly to the right, and they had to go slowly to keep from slipping into the water. Janet listened for sounds of pursuit, but now she heard nothing. They climbed over the treacherous footing for five minutes before arriving at a sheer rock face.

The gravel beach disappeared at the foot of the cliff. The water stretched out into darkness on their right, and the shale cliff rose on their left.

“Now what?” Janet asked.

Lynn studied the map.

“I think this must be the submerged ledge Micah was talking about.”

Suddenly, from way above and behind them, a dog barked once and then again, excitedly. Lynn took Janet’s lantern and raised it as high as she could to see how far across it was, but there was only the black water and the glimmering reflection of the lantern. The cavern wall rose on their left, black and sheer. The dog kept barking, and Janet realized there was no echo down here. This cavern must be really huge.

“Shouldn’t we douse the light?” Janet whispered urgently.

“We have to find the ledge,” Lynn said.

“We’ll find that with our feet. Douse the light. They can’t see us without it, not until they come down the slope. We need time to get across this thing and out of range of any guns.”

Lynn complied, and the dog stopped barking. Janet led the way, stepping down into the icy water, her left hand held out on the rock wall. Her feet found the ledge, which was about a foot underwater. She explored with her toe to see how wide it was; not very, she decided. She was wearing sneakers with a hiking tread, which gave her pretty good traction. She started forward, keeping her hand on the wall, leaning into it actually, while trying not to think of what a full-body plunge into that water would feel like. She sensed Lynn was behind her, but she did not turn around.

She slid her feet forward, rather than taking steps, to make sure the ledge didn’t end suddenly.

The dog barked once more from the top of the slope, tentatively now that there was nothing to see. Then Janet heard a familiar sound, that of a tactical radio. The sound seemed to be coming from ahead of them, and she hoped that it was just the tricky acoustics of the cavern. If their pursuers had managed to get ahead of them here, they were screwed. She heard Lynn’s lantern tap the rock wall.

“Okay?” she said softly “Yeah,” Lynn whispered.

“Cold.”

The water was extremely cold, and Janet’s ankles were getting numb.

She had no idea of how far they had gone, when, from way above and behind them, beams of white light shot out. She looked up out of the corner other eye but kept going. She thought she could see the ceiling of the cavern, but there was something odd about the shape of it. The dog started barking again, and then there were two dogs, getting excited now.

The light beams came down onto the lake and played about, and she could hear men’s voices, and more radio noises. Inevitably, one of the light beams found them.

“Halt!” a man shouted from up on the slope.

“Halt or I’ll shoot.”

“Fuck you,” Lynn said matter-of-factly, her voice carrying clearly over

the water. Janet squinted her eyes against the reflection of the flashlight in the water and kept going.

“Send the goddamn dogs,” a man ordered.

“It’s straight down,” protested a second voice.

Janet and Lynn were a good fifty yards off the rock beach by now, but Janet had no idea of how far they had to go. She dared not light a lantern.

The men argued, and then there was a yip from one of the dogs, which was followed by the sounds of a small-scale avalanche. Janet realized someone had pushed one of the dogs over the cliff, and it was coming down the slope. There was a loud splash, more yelping, and then the dog was out and casting about on the rock beach. A second dog came crashing down the slope. Janet kept going, taking bigger sliding steps now, determined to get off this ledge. She didn’t think the dog could follow them out here, but there was no telling. Then the flashlights came back to them, illuminating them both. Whether the dogs saw them or picked up their scent, they gave cry and came bounding down the gravel beach to the spot where the women had gone into the water.

“Git ‘em, Tiger,” a third man yelled.

“Go on, boy, git ‘em!”

From the sounds of it, the dogs were unwilling to plunge into the water and were milling about on the beach behind them, barking excitedly. Not small dogs, Janet thought as she pressed on. Her front foot slid out onto nothing and she barely got stopped in time. The ledge had ended.

“What?” Lynn asked as she came right up on Janet. The man up on the top of the slope was still urging the dogs to go after them. Their lights were weaker now that the women had progressed farther out into the lake.

“No more ledge,” Janet whispered.

“I think we’re fucked.”

“Are you sure?” Lynn asked.

“I’ll hold your hand. Reach way out.”

Janet leaned against the rock wall and extended her foot as far as she could. She thought she felt something, but she couldn’t quite reach. The flashlights were still on them. There was more light reflecting off the black water than shining directly on them.

“It’s a giant step,” she told Lynn.

“If it’s not the ledge, I’ll fall in.”

There was more noise from up on top of the cliff. And more lights.

“You have to try,” Lynn said.

“I can’t get past you.”

“I can’t do it with the lantern,” Janet said. Then she had an idea.

“Give me a match.”

Lynn passed her a match and asked what she was doing.

“I’m going to light this and set it afloat. That might distract them.

It’ll look like we’re not getting anywhere. I have to ditch it anyway to make this step, so what the hell, okay?”

She struck a match and lit the lantern. Immediately, there was more noise up on the cliff, with another voice telling them to halt or he would shoot, Janet set the lantern into the water; the weight of the base kept it upright, the wick assembly just out of the water. She gave it a gentle shove, took a deep breath, and stepped way out. Her foot hit ledge and she took a giant step across the gap. She moved forward one step and then told Lynn to pass her lantern over. The lantern in the water bobbed gently from side to side in the ripples coming from the dogs, who were splashing in and out of the water somewhere behind them. Lynn stepped across the gap, and they hurried on, getting farther from their pursuers and the bobbing lantern. The ledge actually began to get wider, and Janet, greatly relieved, was able to step normally now instead of slide. Lynn picked right up on it, and they made better progress.

Then they heard the sounds of men coming down the slope, accompanied by several avalanches of rocks, sand, and gravel and lots of shouting.

It sounded like at least half a dozen men were coming. The dogs stepped up their own noise, eager to continue the hunt but not sure how. Janet bent low after bumping her forehead on an overhang of rock that had appeared out of nowhere. She warned Lynn, but Lynn bumped her head anyway and swore.

“There’s a ledge!” a voice shouted.

“C’mon. We can follow them.”

Someone else back on the gravel beach punched on a much more powerful flashlight, which just reached the two women, and once again warned them to halt or he would shoot. Janet tied to ignore the noises behind them, but it sounded like both men and dogs were coming, the dogs swimming now and the men coming out along the ledge. Then a second light found and pinned them in its beam; at least one of them had remained back on the beach. There was a great splash and some excited yelling behind them as one of the men fell in, swearing furiously about how cold it was. Janet had to duck even farther under the overhang, which now stuck out almost three feet. There were more splashes, and it sounded like most of their pursuers were now in the water, thrashing about, trying to find the ledge in the darkness. The two bright white beams stayed on them, however, and the big voice warned them one more time.

“Halt or I’ll shoot. I mean it, goddamn it. Stop right there!”

“Keep going,” Janet whispered.

“Unless they have rifles, we’re too far.”

She was wrong, she realized, as a gun boomed behind them and a heavy round spanged off the rock face above them and slashed into the water.

The booming sound reverberated in the cavern. The powerful lights never wavered. Janet took two more steps and then a second round came, hitting between them and causing Lynn to cry out in fright. Janet stopped and turned around, blinded now by the bright light. Some of the men were still in the water behind them, apparently thrashing back toward the stone beach. Whoever had the lights on them was definitely down on the beach at the foot of the cliff. The sound of the shot reverberated in the cavern.

“Now what?” Lynn whispered.

Janet was about to answer, when there was a sudden noise in the water, about ten feet off. Then another, and another. Janet recognized it as the sound of something heavy and sharp hitting the water like a champion diver, a wicked slashing noise that was instantly covered over in a small boil of foam. Janet flattened herself against the rock wall under the overhang, pulling Lynn back with her. Then it was raining heavy objects, and a man screamed way behind them. A second man screamed, and the lights suddenly went out as a hail of stalactites came down from the ceiling of the cavern like a shower of stone knives. A dog made a horrible noise as it went under, still screaming. The rain of stone intensified for a few seconds, seemingly covering every inch of the lake before it stopped, leaving only an occasional cutting splash way out in the lake. Behind them, all was silent. Janet strained to see in the sudden silence, and she thought she saw a single flashlight pointing out into the water, but it was not moving.

Nothing appeared to be moving behind them anymore.

“Son of a bitch,” Lynn murmured. She lit her lantern.

“Micah said not to shoot off a gun down here,” Janet said.

“Let’s get going before they regroup.”

As they started forward along the ledge, one last immense stalactite came down, way out in the darkness. Lynn raised her lantern, but the ceiling was still too high to see. Moments later, actual waves washed against their feet. The silence behind them was absolute; Janet didn’t think they would be regrouping anytime soon. She pressed forward, shivering, and soon they were at the other side of the lake. Behind them, there were no further signs of pursuit.

When Kreiss saw the first road signs for Blacksburg, he pulled into the parking lot of the next convenience store that came along on Route 11

and placed a call to Micah Wall. He used the rented cell phone this time:

They could get a number off a tap, but it should trace back to the Washington calling area. He looked at his watch while the phone was ringing:

It was 8:30. He had taken back roads all the way down from Washington, and it had nearly doubled the time for the trip. But there were too many people hunting for him now. The Bureau would be after him for what he done to john stone and Lanny boy. The aTF would want to question him further in connection with the bombing of their headquarters building.

He had listened to news reports of the blast on Massachusetts Avenue.

They had apparently listened to his warning, but McGarand’s bomb had done its job. The attack would really shock them, he thought. The aTF was a tiny organization compared to the Bureau, but they had been a pretty high-profile group lately. The field agents he had known were competent people who were sincerely trying to make the country a safer place. But their policy people in Washington were another story, especially when a “situation” developed. Then too many of them wanted to play John Wayne.

And the Agency? That posed a trickier question. He suspected that some senior devils in Main Justice and Langley had decided to eliminate their Edwin Kreiss problem once and for all. If so, his maneuvering room was shrinking fast. Right now, he needed to know where Lynn was. And his favorite ex-special agent, for that matter. Someone picked up the phone at the other end and he asked for Micah.

“Who’s callin’?”

“The lion keeper,” he answered. The man told him to hold on, and he could hear the sounds of an urgent discussion in the background. Then the man came back.

“Pap’s done gone. Buncha damn revenuers into them caves under Pearl’s Mountain. Pap says they’s hunting’ kin o’yourn. Pap’s up on the back ridge, with some a the boys, waitin’ on ‘em. Ain’t had no word back yet.”

Revenuers? He wondered what the aTF was doing going after Lynn.

Unless they were trying what Misty had tried—take the daughter, bag the father.

“Was Janet Carter with her? When they went in?”

“Don’t rightly know. They was two wimmen, all’s I know.”

“Did these people show any identification? Warrants?”

“Don’t know who they was. Pap said they didn’t bring no warrants.

They was wantin’ to come in here, search the whole damn place, but Pap and Uncle Jed took the ten-gauges out, tole ‘em to git on out a here.

They went on back down to the road. Then they come back, with ‘em dogs. It was ‘em dogs took ‘em to the cave. Ain’t seen hide nor hair of ‘em since.”

Micah had shown Kreiss the cave hideout up behind the cabin and the junkyard. He had implied there were passages leading back from the tiny hut, but he hadn’t volunteered any further information, and Kreiss hadn’t wanted to pry. Now he needed to tell Micah where he would be hiding, but he knew the government people would have put a tap on Micah’s line.

“All right. I appreciate it. Tell Micah I’m back, and that there’s a bunch of revenuers after me, too. Tell him I’m going to lay up in that place he and I talked about, last time he heard the lions.”

“Awright.”

“And one more thing—the government is probably listening to this conversation. Tell your Pap to stay shy.”

There was a soft, contemptuous guffaw on the phone, and then the man hung up.

Kreiss pressed the button to end the call and turned the phone off. He had to assume there was a government signals intelligence van somewhere, listening to that entire conversation. What had they learned? Kreiss was in the area. He was working with Micah Wall. He was going to lay up somewhere that Micah would recognize. Ergo, they would want to talk to Micah, who would tell them zip-point shit, assuming they could even find him at all. Right now, there was a probably a lanky, bearded figure with a rifle humping it up the ridge to find Micah and deliver the warning.

He leaned back in the driver’s seat and rubbed his eyes. He needed some coffee, but the convenience store was shut for the night, its doors and windows barred, security lights burning, and the gas pumps locked.

The Virginia countryside and backwoods were apparently no longer places of safety and sociable trust. And the hills were alive with the sounds of—what? Federal agents, with dogs. Hunting two women, one of them an ex-federal agent. Which government law-enforcement agency was it?

The Bureau? The aTF? Or could it even be the Langley crowd? He still wanted to settle accounts with Browne McGarand for what he had done to those kids, but McGarand was probably long gone, or being hunted by the feds himself.

He took a deep breath, let it out, and started the van. First, he needed to make sure Lynn was safe. For that, he would have to get in touch with Micah. He couldn’t exactly go home, and he couldn’t go to Micah’s. If the feds had real coverage of the Blacksburg-Christiansburg area, he couldn’t go to a motel, either. He

had stashed the essentials of a base camp at the arsenal the first time he’d gone in. He had his crawl suit in the bag, his sound equipment, and this time he had a gun. He decided to make one stop for a meal and some extra drinking water, and then he’d go to ground in the last place anyone would expect him to go: back to the Ramsey Arsenal.

Janet and Lynn flopped down on the cave floor when they finally reached the flat wooden door. The rising passage had been covered in smelly, slippery clay, and they were both filthy with it. They were also very thirsty, having taken no water with them. The lantern was guttering, which meant it was nearly out of fuel.

“What time is it?” Lynn asked.

Janet looked at her watch. She could feel the moisture in the clay seeping into her clothes, but she was so tired, she didn’t care. She was already covered in mud from head to toe anyway. The passage up from the subterranean lake had climbed forever, through some incredibly narrow cracks, and one scary part where the ceiling had come down to within two feet of the floor, an area that they’d done on their backs. She blanked that part out other mind with a shiver.

“Ten-thirty. At night, I think.”

“So what do we do now?” Lynn asked, holding her side. She sounded as exhausted as Janet was.

“Just go out there and see who’s waiting?”

Janet looked over at the girl. She looked like she had been camouflaged for hunting, but there was also some pain showing in her face.

“That wound hurting?”

“Ribs, mostly,” Lynn said.

“Plus, I wasn’t a hundred percent when we left that hospital.”

“You’ve done amazingly well. I want to open that door and get out of here, but I have this nightmare that goddamned woman will be sitting on a stump out there, looking at her watch as if we’re late.”

Lynn grinned.

“Then you cap her ass, Special Agent. I need a shower and a hot meal.”

Janet patted the .38 that was still strapped into her waist holster.

“She’d probably catch it in her teeth and spit it back at me,” Janet said.

“But actually, it should be Mr. Wall out there. Presumably, no one else knows where this cave comes out.”

“They discovered where we went in,” Lynn pointed out.

“They had dogs; the dogs followed our trail to the cave.”

“Where’s my father, I wonder,” Lynn said, rolling over on her side.

“Last time I talked to him, he was still in Washington, looking for

McGarand. But he said he was coming back down here. Apparently, the Bureau picked him up in Washington, but he got away from them. Which is why I’m worried about that woman being out there when we open the door.”

“She doesn’t want me—she wants him?”

“Yes. But don’t ask me why. Whatever it is, my boss got some pretty high-level guidance, because at one point, he wasn’t willing to cooperate in moving against your father, and then all of a sudden, he was.”

“And that’s why you quit?”

“Partially. They wanted me to do some things that I thought were wrong. It involved that woman. When Farnsworth—that’s my boss in Roanoke—couldn’t or wouldn’t explain why, I quit.”

“What will you do now?”

“I have a Ph.D. in forensic sciences from Johns Hopkins. I can do anything with that.”

“Wow, I guess you can. The Bureau won’t queer the deal for you, will they? Because you quit?”

“You mean when I go looking for a job? No, I don’t think so. I have pretty damn good performance evaluations, and I also have worked inside the laboratory. I don’t think the Bureau would want any more publicity about its laboratory just now.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning the Bureau has a basic problem in its laboratory: The lab rats work for the prosecutors. Sometimes their evidentiary conclusions aren’t exactly unbiased. That’s where I got into trouble in the first place, and it’s the real reason I was sent to Roanoke.”

Lynn thought about that, turned again, and winced. Janet checked her bandage for signs of bleeding, but there was nothing significant.

“You know,” she said, “that woman said she didn’t shoot you; she said it was the aTF doing that roadblock, that they shot you.”

“The aTF? But why? Why were they even doing a roadblock? And, besides, they thought you were FBI. They wouldn’t shoot at an FBI agent, would they?”

“Some of them would probably like to, actually,” Janet said.

“But no, I wouldn’t have expected that.”

“Well, somebody sure as hell did,” Lynn said, rubbing her side.

“I have two bullets,” Janet said, patting her own pocket.

“We’ll have to look into that when we get clear of this mess.”

“Speaking of which …”

“Yeah,” Janet said, getting up.

“I guess it’s time to open sesame.”

Lynn dragged herself off the floor of the cave, and together they examined the wooden door. It was horizontal and appeared to be seated in the ceiling of the small chamber they had reached. It was not quite six feet off the floor of the chamber, but Janet couldn’t see how they could get it open more than a few inches without something to stand on. There did not appear to be any hinges or connection point. There was a handle on one end.

“You suppose it’s pull instead of push?” Lynn asked.

Then the lantern went out.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Janet said.

“We’ll try to do this quietly.” She pulled down on the handle. The door, which was hinged on the other end, pulled grudgingly down into the chamber, accompanied by a rockfall of dirt and small stones from above.

The other side of the door had a set of small boards nailed onto its surface, which they could feel but not see. A draft of cool, clean air filled with the scent of pine trees blew down into their faces.

“All right!” Janet whispered.

“Up we go.”

They clambered up, using the boards as steps, Janet leading, gun in hand. They crawled out onto the forest floor, staying low. The night was clear and moonlit now. They could see that they were on the side of a steep slope covered in tall pines. As soon as Lynn came off the door, it rose from the chamber below and settled back onto the level of the hillside.

They sat there for a few minutes, getting their night vision. There was a small breeze blowing up the mountain. It was enough to stir the pines, which, in turn, made it impossible to hear if anyone was moving around them. The ground was covered in a thick bed of pine straw, adding to the sound insulation. Above them, an outcropping of rock rose straight up, gleaming gray-white in the darkness. It looked like the bow of an enormous ship towering above them.

Janet moved closer to Lynn so that she could whisper softly.

“You live here. Where do you think we are?” she asked.

“My father lives here. I live in Blacksburg. But we’re probably on the back side of Pearl’s Mountain. That’s the west side. Dad’s cabin and Micah’s place are on the east side. So now what?”

Janet put the gun back in its holster. Her damp clothes made her cold. If anybody was waiting out there in the woods, he or she would be able to smell all this cave mud, she thought.

“We need to get to Micah or some of his people,” she whispered.

“The question is, Up and over, or walk around?”

“Up and over is out of the question,” Lynn said.

“I’m not sure I can even walk around. And the east side has a sheer rock face. I don’t know how high we are, but…”

“We’re going to have to do something,” Janet said.

“We stay out here in these wet clothes, we’re going to get hypothermia. We know they had people at your father’s cabin. Let’s go the other way, north, around the mountain. Micah has to have some scouts out on the mountain. Hopefully, we’ll run into one.”

Lynn groaned but got to her feet. Janet wished they had brought along those sticks Micah had pointed out. She had gone hiking several times up on the Appalachian Trail and knew the value of a good stick. The bigger problem was to keep from going in aimless circles in the darkness of the pine forest. They would have to pay attention and keep the top of the mountain to their right. And watch for timber rattlers, stump holes, waita-minute vines, dead falls loose rocks, and whatever else the mountain slope had in store for them. She tripped over a long stick, picked it up, broke it down to a useful length, and told Lynn to find one, too. Then they set out into the trees.

Kreiss established his hideout up behind the wrecked industrial area of the arsenal. He picked a heavily wooded spot upstream of the logjam and near the top of a hill on the opposite bank of the creek. Come daylight, he should be able to look down into most of the industrial area where the power plant had been, and also into the beginning rows of the vast bunker farm. He had driven north on Route 11 past the entrance to the arsenal.

The signal lights had still been out, but the barrels were gone and there were floodlights up on the hill where the entrance gates were, which told him that the investigation into the explosion was still going on. He’d driven on into Ramsey, stopped to eat at a drive-through burger joint, and then retraced his route past the arsenal entrance to the place where the rail spur turned off to go into the arsenal. A half a mile beyond was a small shopping mall, where he had parked the van. He then walked back along the highway, carrying one bag of equipment, until he came to the railroad line, and then he turned off to get into the arsenal.

His plan was to get some sleep and then call into Micah’s around midnight.

By then, hopefully, there would be news of Lynn. After that, he would have some decisions to make. The only way he could prove his own innocence with respect to the Washington bombing was to bring in McGarand, and that would be tough to do with everybody hunting him.

Plus, he had no idea where McGarand was. What he might have to do would be go into permanent hiding for a few years and maybe tell his story through the public press. But that would leave Lynn unprotected.

He wasn’t worried about the Bureau or even the aTF doing anything to Lynn, but what Misty would do was a very different question.

Headlights flared down in the industrial area. As he watched from the trees, he could see and then hear a security truck prowling through the littered streets. So there was active security now, he thought. He’d been lucky to get over the fence. The truck turned away and went down a road behind the blank concrete slabs that had been the power plant, then headed into the bunker fields. The headlights disappeared.

He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly. Focus, he told himself. Get some rest. Find out what’s happened to Lynn. Then decide.

Janet stepped across the trail before recognizing what it was. Lynn did see it, and she said, “Hey.” They examined the trail, which was not much more than a footpath, but it ran up and down the mountain, not across it.

It looked to Janet like it was maybe five, six hundred feet to the summit.

“If this goes all the way to the top,” Janet said, “we could cut our little hike here in half.”

Lynn groaned and then sat down on a log.

“I’m sorry. You go ahead, and I’ll hole up somewhere. I can’t make that climb.”

Janet sat down next to her.

“I’m not going to leave you out here,” she said.

“Let’s rest a while and then see what we can do.”

“I know what I can’t do,” Lynn said.

“I can’t climb this frigging mountain.”

Janet said nothing, just sat there in the darkness. She had regained her night vision, and she could see amazingly well. The sky was full of bright stars and a partial moon. Light-colored objects stood out with sudden clarity against the dark pines. Like the man standing there by that tree, watching them.

“Shit!” she shouted, jumping up and fumbling to get her gun out. Lynn saw where Janet was staring and got up slowly, backing in the direction they had come. The man didn’t move, but just continued to stand there, motionless. He was very tall, bearded, and was wearing a slouch hat and carrying a long rifle with a scope in the crook of his arm. Finally, he advanced one step and raised the rifle into the air. A single shot blasted out against the night air, followed by two more as he worked the bolt so fast, Janet couldn’t see his hands move. The

final gunshot reverberated across the rock face of the mountain like an insult against all nature. Back in the forest, a night bird squawked its disapproval. The man put the rifle back into the crook of his arm and stepped forward. Janet kept her own gun ready, but pointed it at the ground. The man approached, his footfalls silent on the pine straw. He was even taller than she had thought. She could smell the gun smoke rising from the barrel of his rifle.

“Y’all cold?” he asked in an old man’s voice. Janet couldn’t really see his face.

“Yes,” she said. Had he signaled Micah? Or someone else?

“Them rocks yonder? They still warm. Y’all stay here. Pap’s a-comin’.”

Then he stepped back into the forest and disappeared right in front of their eyes.

“That mean what I think it means?” Lynn asked in a low whisper.

“I sure hope so,” Janet said.

“Scared the shit out of me. Let’s go see if he’s right about those rocks.”

Half an hour later, they were sitting with their backs up against a smooth wall of rock, which had indeed still been warm from the afternoon sun. They saw a lantern approaching through the trees, and then Micah and the tall man came across the path. The man was still carrying the big rifle, and Micah was carrying what looked like a stubby double barreled shotgun in one hand, the lantern in the other. He greeted them and then put a finger to his lips, signaling for silence.

“We’re goin’ down,” he began.

“Thank God,” Lynn murmured.

“Cain’t talk,” he said, dousing the lantern.

“They’s revenuers aplenty out on the mountain.”

“Where are you taking us?” Janet asked, wondering why the revenuers wouldn’t have heard the shots.

“To ole Ed’s cabin. Ain’t no one there right now. Where’s them folks what came after you in the cave?”

Janet told him about what had happened on the subterranean lake, and Micah nodded. He put a finger to his lips again and then started down the trail. Janet and Lynn followed, Lynn limping a little. The tall man followed for a while, but then, on Micah’s signal, he stepped sideways into the forest and disappeared again.

It took them forty minutes to get down to the level of the big meadow behind Kreiss’s cabin. Micah signaled for them to rest while he went forward to the edge of the woods. He watched for a few minutes. Then he walked carefully out into the meadow until he reached the rock where

Kreiss hid his Barrett. He lit the lantern, cropped the flame down to a minimum, and then extended it beyond the side of the huge boulder. As Janet strained to see, an answering flicker of light appeared down among the trees at the cabin. What is this? she thought. He had said there was no one at the cabin. Micah turned around and waved them out of the trees.

Had to be some of Micah’s people, she concluded. She had to help Lynn get to her feet, and the girl staggered when she first started to walk. All in, Janet thought, giving her an arm for support.

“We’re almost there,” she said.

“Almost where?” Lynn asked, which is when Janet noticed Lynn’s eyes were closed.

“Your dad’s cabin. Micah got a signal that it was all clear.”

They walked across the meadow, going slow to accommodate Lynn’s halting footsteps. Janet felt terribly exposed out in the broad expanse of grass between the woods up above and the dark cabin, but Micah proceeded ahead confidently. When they stepped into the shadows of the trees around the cabin, Lynn was stunned to see Farnsworth and five of the Roanoke agents, including Billy Smith, step out of the darkness. They converged on Micah. She was reaching instinctively for her weapon, when she realized from the way he was acting that Micah had known they were there. Farnsworth came over, took one look at Lynn, and instructed two agents to help her into the cabin. Janet just stood there with her mouth hanging open until she saw Farnsworth smile. He had something in his hands, but she couldn’t see what it was.

“Hey, Janet,” he said.

“Feel like a cup of coffee?”

Janet looked at Micah, who was standing to one side, looking considerably embarrassed. He had led them directly into the government’s hands.

“Mr. Wall, what have you done?” she asked.

“Don’t blame him, Janet,” Farnsworth said.

“He’s doing what he had to do. Let’s get a cup of coffee. I’ve got some things to tell you.”

Forty-five minutes later, after a hot shower and some dry clothes borrowed from Lynn’s closet, Janet sat with Farnsworth in the kitchen, having a cup of coffee. Lynn had been seen by some county EMTs and then had collapsed on her father’s bed, where she was now fast asleep. The rest of the Roanoke agents, except for Billy, were outside. Farnsworth put Janet’s credentials and her Sig down on the kitchen table. Billy sat at the dining room table, facing a laptop computer that was used for secure communications from the field.

“First, I want to ask you to take these back,” Farnsworth said,

pointing to them.

“I never sent in any paperwork, and the circumstances surrounding your resignation have changed. A lot.”

She looked at the credentials, pulled them toward her, but then she left them on the table between them.

“Tell me about those changes,” she said.

She was physically tired, but the caffeine was working and her mind was alert. She decided that she wasn’t going back to the federal fold until she heard Farnsworth’s explanation. Billy pulled on a set of headphones and started talking to someone.

Farnsworth sat back in his chair and rubbed his fingers across his chin in his characteristic gesture.

“You were dead right about a second bomb.

Somebody went to Washington and parked a propane truck next to the aTF headquarters building and managed to pump several thousand cubic feet of hydrogen gas into the building. Right at the start of the working day.”

“Oh my God! The aTF building? Not the Hoover Building?”

“Right. The results were very similar to what happened down at the Ramsey Arsenal. Obliterated the top floors of the building, and burned the rest.”

“Damn!” she whispered.

“How many—” “Almost none. They had some warning and got all the people out before it let go. Guess who provided the warning?”

“Kreiss.”

He cocked his head to one side.

“And you knew that how?”

“We’ve been in touch. As you know, I’ve been protecting his daughter.”

“Yes. Well, Kreiss appeared in front of the building to deliver said warning after having been picked up earlier by two Washington beat cops for loitering in the White House security zone. There’d been a security alert downtown ever since the Ramsey thing. Then—and this is the interesting part—he was transferred to Bureau custody, from which he escaped by causing a car crash out on the G.W. Parkway at oh-dark-thirty in the morning, leaving two agents handcuffed to a park bench to watch their Bu car marinate in gasoline.”

“Oh my,” Janet said, working hard to keep a serious expression on her face. They had me and then I had them.

“Why was he transferred to Bureau custody?”

“Because the local cops did a wants and warrants check, and the next thing they knew, here came two crackerjacks from the Hoover Building, saying they had instructions to take subject Edwin Kreiss into custody in connection with a homicide down here in Blacksburg. District cops

said, Be our guest. Got him off their blotter. But in the meantime, these two superstars took him, on instructions from the Foreign Counter Intelligence Division duty officer, for a midnight ride to Langley, Virginia, where certain people out there wanted to have a word.”

“Did you file an apprehend-and-detain order on Kreiss?”

“No, I did not. We’re all looking into that little mystery.”

“This has to involve that horrible woman.”

He got up to get more coffee.

“Beats the shit out of me,” he said.

“I discovered all of this after the fact. The last thing I did before the aTF building changed shape was to call in your warning that FBI headquarters was a possible target, and that that hydrogen bomb business referred to gaseous hydrogen, not nuclear hydrogen.”

“What was their reaction?”

Farnsworth grinned.

“Building security thanked me for my interest in federal law enforcement, than wished me a good night. Several hours later, the world ended up on Mass Avenue. By the way, what did you tell Agent Walker, about forwarding the report?”

“I asked him if he wanted to be the one link in the chain that failed to forward warning of a bombing up the line, in the event that there was a bombing.”

Farnsworth nodded.

“I want you to know that he was very, very insistent.

Said he was logging and date-stamping his call to me.”

Janet smiled.

“We never change, do we?” she said.

“CYA forever. Anyway, back to Kreiss: He shows up at aTF headquarters at daybreak, flashing the creds of one of the agents he stranded out on the parkway. While he was warning them, one of the guards checked with our headquarters, and then they apprehended him at gunpoint. This was about the time their gas monitors detected the hydrogen. Kreiss starts to walk away. They give him the usual warning. So Kreiss, cool as a cucumber, asks the guards if they really want to pop a cap in a hydrogen atmosphere.

Instant hoo-ha. Fortunately, one of their ADs was there; he let Kreiss walk. But now, of course, they want to have a word, as well.”

“Why the trip to Langley? What’s up with that, boss?”

Farnsworth tugged at his shirt collar.

“That’s a great deal more complicated, and it’s why I’m here with five agents, and why they’re outside in tactical gear. And it’s also why I leaned on those Hatfields and McCoys to make them bring you and Kreiss’s daughter to me.”

“How did you know they even had us?” she asked.

“That Agency woman? We got word to her that Kreiss had been picked up. She said she had tracked you and the girl in there to the Wall clan, but now that they had Kreiss up in D.C.” she was backing out. End of story. Good-bye. That was before Kreiss did his thing on the parkway and got away again, of course.”

“And Mr. Wall? He’s not a fan of things federal.”

“That old man was here when we got here, sitting on the damned porch like he owned the place. I think he had some of his ‘boys’ out there in the woods. Probably still does. All we got out of him initially was tobacco spit.”

“What changed his mind?”

Farnsworth moved his coffee cup around on the table in a small circle for a moment.

“Well,” he said, “Mr. Wall out there is a realist. I told him who I was and that I was not one of his regular revenuers. I told him I’d bring the full weight of every government law-enforcement agency—FBI, DEA, aTF, DCIS, IRS, and even the Secret fucking Service in here and hound him and all the fruits of his two-branch family tree until the end of time. I told him we’d freeze his bank accounts, audit everybody’s tax returns, cut off their Social Security and Medicaid, intercept his mail, tap his phones, tail his pickup truck, haul him and everyone he knew into court on a weekly basis, and force him to consort with lots and lots of lawyers. I think the thought of lots and lots of lawyers did it, actually.”

“Micah Wall doesn’t strike me as a heavy-duty crook,” she said.

“Oh, hell, all these hillbillies are fringe, at worst. They make a big deal of being fierce mountain men and the last of the Mohicans, that kind of stuff. But what they really are is a bunch of poor, undereducated white trash making a subsistence living up here in the hills. They work onagain, off-again minimum-wage jobs while making side money salvaging parts out of junked cars and appliances, distilling a little ‘shine, fighting their roosters and their dogs, or poaching illegal furs. It’s more lifestyle than crime.”

“He didn’t strike me as someone who scares easily.”

“Mostly I convinced him that there are no more refuges from the government, not even for hillbillies. Then, I told him something else.”

“Which was?”

“That you’d be safer with us than with him, because the person hunting both of you worried even us.”

Janet put her coffee cup down on the table.

“Last time I checked, you were on her side.”

“Because I had specific instructions to that effect. From the

executive assistant director over FCI, no less. That was before I went and checked with my SAC in Richmond, and he with our assistant director. Like I said, we now have significantly changed circumstances. Remember that DCB deal?”

“That Domestic Counterintelligence Board that Bellhouser was being so coy about?”

“Right. Best we can tell, there isn’t any such board. Nobody in our chain of command can put a line on it, and the question’s been asked at the director’s level at headquarters.”

“Son of a bitch,” Janet said.

“That means Bellhouser and Foster had their own agenda. That business about a bomb cell was bullshit.”

“Except, as things turned out, it wasn’t exactly bullshit, was it? As the aTF found out the hard way. But here’s the thing: My boss says AD Marhand was personally involved in Kreiss’s termination. What he can’t find out is what that was really all about. The Office of Professional Responsibility has the files, and they’re not only all sealed but physically over at Main Justice. Now, tell me something. You think Kreiss had a part in that bombing?”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

“Kreiss was not involved in that bombing.

He was up in Washington hunting that McGarand guy because of what he did to Lynn.”

Farnsworth considered that and then nodded.

“Yeah, I buy that.”

“Okay. Now, that Agency woman—let me tell you about that piece of work.” She began with Misty’s appearing in her house, then told him what had happened at the hospital and her breaking through the roadblock on the way to Micah’s. When she said that they were aTF people, Farnsworth interrupted her.

“We’ve had no report of that,” he said.

“And their SAC would have been in my office with his hair on fire if they thought one of my people did that. They shot at your car?”