Hunting Season

11

Janet was sitting in her kitchen, having a badly needed cup of strong coffee, when the phone rang. It was 7:30 on Sunday morning. To her surprise, it was Ransom on the line.

“So, Special Agent, where you been?”

“You miss me, Ransom?”

“Yeah, well, after a fashion, yes. Your surveillance folks found our little device on Mr. Farnsworth’s car. Very funny, Special Agent. Not too bright, maybe, but very funny.”

“I thought that was one of our bugs?”

“Let’s just say that your boss was, um, agreeable to the notion of tracking your Bu car. Which is why I’m calling, actually: Where is said Bu car?”

“In China, somewhere, probably,” she said.

“Look, I’m just getting my first caffeine of the day. Can this discussion possibly wait?”

“You got more of that coffee around? Because I’m sittin’ outside your town house right now, as a matter of fact, and we do need to talk. Sooner rather than later, as they say in the coolest circles of government.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, yeah, sure, all right.”

She got another mug down from the cabinet and then went to let him in. He was wearing a short-sleeved black shirt, khaki trousers, wraparound black sunglasses, some expensive-looking boots, and a green windbreaker with a Boy Scouts of America logo. She realized she was naked under her bathrobe, so she tugged the strings around her waist.

He sat down in the kitchen, took off his sunglasses, and waited while she fixed him a cup of coffee, “Nice touch,” she said, pointing to the Boy Scout logo.

“Well, you know,” he said.

“We brave, loyal, thrifty, all that good shit.”

“Right. So, what’s the big deal about my Bu car on a Sunday morning?”

she said.

“Where is said Bu car, again?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“You say something about China?” She hesitated for a moment, then told him what had happened, including the fact that she had been rescued by Edwin Kreiss.

He whistled softly when he heard about Kreiss.

“And this was basically at night? You sayin’ Kreiss was creepin’ the arsenal at night? Last night?”

She explained what Kreiss had said about night-vision equipment. He nodded, then asked her precisely when Kreiss had pulled her out of the tunnel.

“It was night. I guess I don’t remember,” she said.

“Elevenish, I’d guess.”

He said, “Uh-huh,” and then looked around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time.

“You got plans for your Sunday, Special Agent?” he asked.

“Uh—” “Now you do. Let me suggest you take that coffee upstairs, make yourself functional, if not too beautiful, and then I need to take you somewhere to show you something’.”

She just looked at him.

“It shows better than it tells, Special Agent,” he said.

“And time, believe it or not, time is a-wastin’. Help if I say please?”

“Is this something I should call my boss about first?” she asked.

“No-o,” he said. “

“Cause he’s gonna ask you a million questions, and you won’t have any answers whatsoever until I do my show-and-tell. Please?”

Half an hour later, they were leaving Roanoke and headed south on 1-81 in his car. He was explaining how they had tagged Edwin Kreiss’s truck.

“Four bugs? Whatever happened to the notion of the private citizen?”

“Private citizen?” Ransom said, slapping the wheel, as if she’d told a wonderful joke.

“No such thing in America anymore. First of all, nobody’s a citizen anymore.”

Uh-oh, she thought. Brother Ransom has a hobbyhorse. She decided to go with it anyway.

“Okay, I’ll bite.”

“Simple,” he said.

“We are what bureaucracies call us. Like law enforcement? We’re ‘subjects,” Pollsters? We’re ‘respondents.” Marketin’ people? We’re ‘focus groups.” Politicians? We’re ‘voters.” Your Internet provider? You’re a ‘subscriber.” IRS? We’re ‘clients.” Clients—do you love it? Ain’t no more ‘citizens.” Last time there were citizens, in the way you mean it, Special Agent, was during the Roman Empire. And maybe the French Revolution, when they got into their guillotine phase.”

She decided to shut up. She was in no shape for a philosophy discussion.

The coffee was wearing off and she was still very tired. She settled back in the seat and let him drive. Forty minutes later, they were

stopping next to Jared’s lonely driveway. Ransom turned in and parked the car out of sight of the county road. They walked down the dirt lane to the trailer, which Janet could see was sitting at an odd angle.

“This here is the residence of one Jared McGarand,” Ransom announced.

“What’s that smell?” Janet asked, although she already had an idea.

“That is most likely related to brother Jared’s final movement, if you get my meanin’. Under that end of the trailer, right there, where you see the jack handle stickin’ out. And if you check that vehicle over there, you’ll find one very expensive tag tracker on the back bumper.”

“The one you put on Kreiss’s truck?”

“That very one, Special Agent.”

“Okay, I give up. I assume there’s a dead guy under there. What the hell’s going on?”

“I was kinda hopin’ you could shed some light on that, seem’ as you had a meet with subject Edwin Kreiss, apparently right before he came out here and wasted this McGarand individual. Least I think he did. I haven’t gone and lifted that trailer up to make sure, but my nose is makin’ an educated guess here, okay?”

“About a dead body, or Kreiss doing it?”

He grinned and shrugged.

“I got nowhere at that meeting,” she said.

“I’ve already told Farnsworth this. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Well, I didn’t want to admit that Kreiss just totally blew me off, but that’s what he did. He also saw through the proposition that we might work together, you know, to catch the mysterious bomb makers while I helped him find his daughter.”

“Saw through it?”

“He said it was bullshit. That Washington being here was about him.”

“Oh boy,” Ransom said, blowing out a long sigh.

“Here we go again.”

“It was bullshit? Bellhouser and Foster’s bit about the bomb makers?”

“Truth?” Ransom said.

“I don’t have any idea. My assignment was to cooperate with those two. And to keep my bosses at the Agency informed as to what was goin’ down.”

“So if those two were conspiring to trap Kreiss in something, you wouldn’t necessarily know about it?”

Ransom hesitated before answering.

“Lemme just say that if somebody managed to take Ed Kreiss off the boards, my bosses wouldn’t exactly complain, okay?”

“Son of a bitch,” Janet said softly.

“Kreiss was right.”

“What’s his state of mind?”

She snorted.

“I offered to help him find his daughter, you know, as cover for the other little project. He said he didn’t need any help. He also said that if he found out someone had done something to his daughter, he’d catch them and put their severed heads out on pikes on the interstate.”

“That’s our Edwin,” Ransom said admiringly.

“Might be interestin’ to see if this dude under there is headless. On the other hand,” he said, squatting down on his haunches, “might not be much left to mount.” He stood back up.

“Now, you had this meetin’ with Kreiss, he told you to buzz off, then you go home and he comes out here and does a number on this vie here, which we assume is subject Jared McGarand. You go to your weekend class the next mornin’, then you go to the arsenal for your little field trip, and you encounter—Edwin Kreiss. Tell you anythin’?”

“That Kreiss might have found out something from this Jared whatever about his daughter. And that something points back to the arsenal. But—” Ransom cocked his head.

“Yeah, but what?”

“But Kreiss already suspected the kids had gone to the arsenal.”

“At night? Why’s he there at night? And didn’t he tell you he was goin’ back there last night? After he rescued you?”

“Yes.” The smell was making her queasy. She backed away from the mess under the trailer.

“Can we go now? And shouldn’t we call in local law?”

“Yes, we can go now and, no, we will not call in local law. We don’t have anythin’ to do with local law and local homicides, seem’ as we never operate domestically.”

“Oh, right,” she said sarcastically.

“But we do.”

“And you would tell the cops what, exactly?”

“That there’s a dead body under this trailer.”

“Which you found out about in the company of an Agency person, while investigatin’ a missin’ persons case that you’ve already shipped off to Washington. How you feel about explainin’ why you did all that to the local shareef? Or to Farnsworth?”

She took a deep breath. Ransom was right.

“See, here’s the thing, Special Agent. I buy Kreiss goin’ out to that

arsenal durin’ the day, snoopin’ around, lookin’ for Injun signs. But if he’s goin’ at night, he’s goin’ covert. Wearin’ some of those nifty black ninja threads, right? … Thought so. My guess is that he found this guy out there at the arsenal.”

“If he did, and followed him back here, it was because he figured this guy might know what happened to his daughter. He’d want to talk to him, not snuff him.”

“Unless he wouldn’t talk. Not the first guy who wouldn’t talk to Edwin Kreiss had him an accident of some kind.”

“You think this was an accident?” she asked.

“Yeah. The kind that happens when folks resist a peace officer in the performance of his sworn duties, you know?”

“But how do you know it’s Kreiss who did this?”

“Because our tracker tag is on that piece-a-shit pickup truck over there, maybe?”

“Who the hell knows? He could have discovered that while he was shopping at the local Piggly Wiggly and put it on the nearest vehicle. I mean, based on evidence, that’s as reasonable an explanation as all this supposition you’re coming up with. Those security people weren’t alarmed about anything, and I sure as hell didn’t see any signs of anything going on out there.”

“From your tunnel perspective,” he said. He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with both hands.

“Look,” she said.

“You think there’s been a murder here. Okay, homicide is serious shit. I want to go back and update my boss, if only because I’m going to have to explain the loss of that car anyway. You come with me. I’ll tell my sad tale: you tell yours. Let’s see what Farnsworth thinks.

Let him fold in your supervisors. If he wants to tell local law, I’m sure he’ll give you guys a chance to cobble up a story to keep your precious Agency out of the picture. That’s the right way to go here. You know that.”

“Tell him today, Sunday.”

“He’s spoiled a couple of mine.”

“And in the meantime, where the hell is Kreiss?”

“Who cares, as long as he’s out looking for his daughter. Hell, he might find her. But I think all you guys are wrong about this arsenal bomb thing.

That place is just a ghost town with a street-maintenance problem.”

Kreiss awoke at dawn on Sunday to the sounds of a single mockingbird rousing the forest from atop a telephone pole. He had to think for a

moment to remember where he was and why. His muscles were stiff and sore from his exertions down in that tunnel. He had come in from the direction of the rail spur rather than the main entrance because of what Carter had said about the security people. He’d climbed the rail gates and bedded down in one of the explosives filling sheds three blocks away from the main street.

He slipped out of his crawl suit and performed morning ablutions with a wet rag. Then he reversed the suit, exposing a tan-and-green camouflage color scheme to replace the all-black night-ops coloration. He reset the packs on his chest and back, put away the hood in favor of a camo watch cap, grabbed his staff, and headed for the back alleys behind the complex of larger buildings.

If he was correct about the vehicle noises last night, the second man had come and gone without entering the arsenal. Kreiss was now counting on him to show up this morning, because this was when the second man would expect Jared to show up. Since Jared would not be showing up anywhere ever again, the second man would have to make a decision: go to Jared’s place to find out why, or come into the arsenal to do whatever they had been doing here. Kreiss planned to listen for sounds of a vehicle and ambush the second man. If no vehicle showed up, he would initiate a thorough door-to-door search. In the meantime, he needed to find a good spot to lay up.

He walked quietly down a side street between two large concrete buildings. The sun wasn’t up yet, but there was plenty of light. As usual, there were no birds or other animals stirring in the main complex. He stopped when he got to the main street. To his right, going up the hill, were the two rows of large buildings. To his left were two more large buildings, an open space of road and rail lines, and then the big power plant building at the end of the street. The big hole out in the street where Carter had lost her bureau car was still there. He didn’t relish her prospects for a happy and productive Monday morning. Whatever that tunnel complex was all about, he thought, it must dip down at a much steeper angle than the street. He checked his watch: It was still about forty-five minutes until actual sunrise. The air was still, and he could hear the occasional hum of a car way out on Route 11. He ought to be able to hear any vehicle that approached the arsenal perimeter. He decided to look around for a few minutes before setting up.

He walked down toward the power plant. It looked to be about five stories high, with one main stack attached to the back side. There

were two huge combustion exhaust ducts slanting into the base of the stack, which indicated at least two boilers inside. The turbo generator hall, half the size of the main building, was on the right side, as evidenced by a fenced bank of transformers and high-tension cables that spread out into the complex. There appeared to be skylights at the very top of the boiler hall, but otherwise no windows. There was an admin building of some kind on the left side. Between the admin building and the boiler hall were four very large garage doors, one of which had a rail spur leading under it.

There was a single man-sized door to the right of the garage doors, and he tried the handle, but it was locked. The metal garage doors had a row of one-foot-square wire-mesh-reinforced windows at head height, and Kreiss checked them, trying to see in. He could see nothing through most of them because of all the dust and grime, but he was surprised to see through the final one that there was a truck parked inside. It was a tanker truck of some kind. The cab was not as big as a semi, but bigger than a pickup truck, and a green-and-white tank was built onto the body of the truck. Other than that, he couldn’t make out any more details. He wondered why a truck would still be here, since the other buildings had all been stripped down when the plant was closed. Probably wouldn’t start when they closed the place and they’d just left it. Typical Army solution.

He walked all the way around the power plant, noting the four huge pipes rising out of the ground that brought water from somewhere to cool the condensers under the generating hall. There was probably an impoundment up on that creek somewhere. There were some steel doors at the back of the plant, but they were windowless and also locked. The stack was easily three hundred feet high, with a line of rusting steel rungs leading all the way to the top. He stopped to listen, and he thought he heard a mechanical noise of some kind, but it was very faint. It was probably far away. Behind the plant building was a tank farm. There were two large fuel-oil tanks, with a rail spur running between them and a pump manifold house at one end. A third, medium-sized tank was labeled boiler feed water, a fourth potable water. Built into a fenced enclosure were two somewhat smaller tanks, each encased in concrete and plastered with danger signs warning of acid. One tank was labeled HNO” the other H2SO4. Nitric acid and sulfuric acid, Kreiss realized. Why would these tanks be back here? he wondered. Because the pumps were in the power plant?

He continued around the building, sizing it up as a hiding place for a prisoner and then dismissing it: The rooms in the plant would be too

big to provide an effective containment place. He came back around to the front of the plant and looked back up the street. Carter’s crash hole was about three blocks up, just past the first two large buildings. The street appeared to disappear up the hill into a tunnel of overhead pipes and their support frames. He had a sudden feeling that his mission was hopeless:

there were too many buildings, too many hiding places out here. No matter what that guy Jared had said, all this place offered was the silence of the tomb.

There was a sound behind him and he whirled around. A tall, black bearded man was standing in the man-sized doorway of the power plant, holding a large revolver down at his side. The man had violent dark eyes and a face out of a Civil War photograph. They stared at each other for a fraction of a second, and then the man raised the pistol and fired from a distance of thirty feet.

Kreiss actually felt the bullet go past his head even as the stunning boom of the Ruger hit his ears, but he was already moving, sideways and then sprinting up the street, opening the distance with some broken-field running, knowing that the big .44 became almost useless as the range opened. He zigged close to the corner of the first building and felt, rather than heard, a blast of concrete above his head. He jinked left, using the stick to balance his running, aware that the big man behind him was not firing indiscriminately. He wanted to turn his face, if just for an instant, to see if the shooter was pursuing him, but he knew better than to slow down now, and then he was careening around the far corner of the first building into a side alley. He stopped just past the corner, spun around, and then ran full tilt back across the main street into the alley on the other side.

This should surprise the shooter and also give him a chance to look left, but the man was gone, the power plant door closed.

Kreiss stopped short in the alley, close to the corner, catching his breath, and wishing now that he’d brought a gun. To do what? he asked himself. Stand there and shoot it out with that guy? The man appeared the next instant at the end of the alley in which Kreiss was standing.

Kreiss jumped sideways as the .44 let go again, this time feeling a tug on his backpack. He bolted out into the main street, but with all those concrete walls, there was nowhere to hide, and the big man was pretty handy with that cannon. He ran left into the next side street, considered climbing a building, realized that would be a trap, and then saw the shooter’s shadow coming down the back alley. He jumped back into the main street and went left, all those blank concrete walls,

nowhere to hide, up the hill again, zigzagging as he ran, and then three more rounds came after him in quick succession, all low, but too close to have been anything but carefully aimed, building-steadied shots. He came to the big hole in the street and didn’t hesitate. He scrambled, almost fell down the steel rungs into the darkness of the big tunnel, dropping the stick and retrieving it again when he got down. Knowing that the shooter would be there in a few seconds, he made no attempt to be quiet as he scrambled down the steep slope of the tunnel, using his stick for balance, until he was well down into the darkness. Then he got flat and waited.

After a minute, he could hear the sounds of falling water over the thudding of his heart. Getting too old for this shit, he thought. Five shots. One left if the guy kept coming and didn’t stop to reload. And yet, so far, this guy hadn’t done anything amateurish with that .44, so: safe to bet he’d be reloading. Why not? If he knew anything about the tunnel, he would know Kreiss wasn’t going anywhere. Kreiss began to slide farther back down the tunnel, keeping his eyes on that cone of sunlight coming down through the hole in the street. When he thought he saw a change in the light, he stopped and grabbed the hooked end of his stick and twisted it sharply. It made a sound identical to a semiautomatic pistol’s slide coming forward to the cocked and locked position.

Kreiss waited. Assuming that sound had carried back up the tunnel, the other guy now had a decision to make. The moment he started down into the tunnel, he’d be silhouetted in that cone of light and be fair game for the gun he’s just heard Kreiss cock. Kreiss listened to his own breathing and then started sliding back down the tunnel some more, keeping very quiet this time. The tunnel grew increasingly steeper, until Kreiss was glad he was full length and not trying to stay upright like the last time. At last he felt the tips of his boots go over the ledge, at which point he stopped moving and then rolled off the centerline of the tunnel toward the side wall to his right.

He was now flattened on the concrete about three hundred feet from the cone of light. As he remembered from his little adventure with Carter, the ledge was below, and below that was a big water chamber. He pointed his finger over the edge and down, flicked it on, and thought he could see water. He had the rope in his pack; all he needed now was an attachment point up here, and then he could safely slip over the wall and down into the water below if he had to. He began exploring with his fingers, first to the right and then to the left, until he found a crumble of loose concrete underneath the steel coaming of the

lip. He used the steel point of the stick to dig at that until he had enough room to slip the end of the rope under the coaming and knot it to the stick. He let the rest of the rope out and over the ledge behind him.

Still no sign of his pursuer, so his rack-the-slide noise must have done its job. As it had a couple of times before, he remembered. Having something that could make a noise like a gun was almost as useful as having the gun. But now the guy might still put his gun hand into the hole and empty it down the tunnel in his direction just for grins. He secured the stick, then clipped his chest harness onto the rope and went over the edge until just his head was up over the edge, with the rope belayed around his right hip, leg, and ankle for support. He did this just in time. A volley of random rounds banged down the tunnel at him, the big slugs ricocheting in every direction, with some coming back at him off the tunnel wall behind him and whacking into the concrete above the ledge. It was noisy and scary, but in the end, harmless gunfire, and Kreiss just hung on his rope, his head down now, waiting for it to end.

Now it would be stalemate, he thought. The guy knew he couldn’t safely climb down into the tunnel without risking being shot. And he had probably just used up all his carry ammo. Kreiss’s only regret was that he hadn’t been able to get the jump on this bastard, because this was definitely the man he wanted to interrogate. On the other hand, if this was the other McGarand—and there was a definite resemblance to Jared there—Kreiss knew where he lived. It would have been better out here, but he’d go wherever he had to in order to find out what the hell they’d done with Lynn. He waited, his eyes just back up over the edge, watching the cone of light. Unseen water below him coiled in the siphon chamber, compressing the air around him.

Browne stood up in the street and jammed the empty gun into his waistband.

The barrel was still warm from that last volley. He looked down at the line of steel rungs illuminated in the growing sunlight and knew he couldn’t go down there. That guy was a cool customer, running like that and never once turning around. So it would be just like him to be sitting down there in the Ditch, drawing a bead on the ladder and waiting for Browne to screw up. Well, he wasn’t going to do the intruder any favors.

He looked both ways and then walked up the street to where they had piled the pipes from Jared’s trap. He dragged three of them back to the hole in the street, where he placed them quietly over the hole nearest the ladder rungs. Then he got three more pipes and extended

the grid, keeping the spacing at about eight inches. Then he rolled two of the heaviest pipes down and laid them crosswise on the grid, anchoring it. Now when the guy tried to crawl out of the tunnel, he’d find a barrier. He couldn’t move those pipes without making noise, and Browne would hear him.

Meanwhile, he had work to do.

He went back to the power plant and hooked up the electric motor on the leftmost garage door to the power strip and raised the door, revealing the truck. He had worked all night. He was sweaty and dirty and sand eye-tired.

He had brought the hydrogen pressure in the truck to just over four hundred psi. It wasn’t the five hundred he wanted, but it would do, it would do. With those security guards going down the hole and now this lone ranger trapped down in the Ditch, the arsenal was blown as a base of operations. He had to get out of here and begin the final phase, Jared or no Jared. Goddamn kid, going through life with his brain hard-wired to his pecker. There’d be police and probably feds all over this place by morning, but by then he’d be on his way. Jared had painted the truck in the color scheme of a Washington fuel company a month ago from a picture Browne had given him, so now it was just a question of getting it out of here with no witnesses. He wasn’t really worried about Washington; he knew those smug bastards would never see this one coming.

He had hauled the generator out of the boiler housing an hour before dawn and gathered all the other equipment into the control room with the retort. The generator fuel gauge showed it was one-quarter full.

Good. Then he had gone around the boiler hall and sealed as many air inlet points as he could find, including all the boiler fuel-burner registers and the ventilation-duct outlets. It had taken him nearly two hours, but he’d kept the retort chugging, letting the highpressure gas pump squeeze the last bit of hydrogen into the propane truck. Then he closed all the interior doors in the power plant except the one leading from the control room into the boiler hall. He went to the truck, cranked it, and breathed a sigh of relief when it started up. Now all he had to worry about were the tires, but they seemed to be all right. He drove the truck out through the big door and stopped it out in the street, letting its diesel warm up. He checked the pipe grid on the hole in the street, but nothing had been disturbed.

Good. Then he had an idea.

He went back into the control room, where he reloaded his .44 from a box of ammo he kept there. Then he ran a last flush on the retorts and added all the copper he had left in the room. He disconnected the pump piping from the tops of the retorts and recharged them with a double

load of nitric acid. The reactions began immediately and he decided to add one more jug of water to their cooling tubs. Then he walked to the door, took one last look around, closed it, and duct-taped it. He went into the garage bay and taped the door leading back into the control room. He left the generator running and hit the switch to lower the heavy garage door.

Then he ducked out under the descending door and went to the truck.

The generator would run out of fuel in a little while, but there was now no more need for electrical power. Double-loaded like that, those retorts would generate hydrogen for hours, gradually filling the interior of the power plant with an increasingly explosive mixture of air and hydrogen.

When the feds came knocking, there ought to be at least one smoker.

That’s all it would take.

He walked back up the street to the hole, knelt down, poked the .44 through the grid of pipes, and emptied it into the tunnel again. The noise down there must be terrific, he thought with satisfaction. And, hell, he might have gotten lucky. Then he went back to the truck and drove it up the hill to the tank farm behind the power plant. Leaving it running, he got out and went to the big valve-manifold station by the acid tanks. He searched around until he found a crow’s-foot, a four-foot-long metal bar with three rake like studs that just fit inside the rim of a big valve wheel and allowed a man to apply the full leverage of his body to turning the wheel. He closed the small valve that had supplied nitric acid to the reservoir bottles in the power plant’s water-testing room. From this elevation, the acid would dump into the Ditch above the hole in the street. The other two valves, leading to the main explosive-manufacturing buildings, were already closed. He then opened the much larger dump valve marked emergency—DITCH. He heard a rumble in an eight-inch-pipe that disappeared into the ground ten feet from the tank. There was probably twenty thousand gallons of the acid left in the tank, which was now going to rain down into the Ditch, onto the intruder and the remains of the security guards. He considered waiting to see if the guy would pop up out of the street, but he imagined he could almost hear cops at the front gate.

Every instinct was telling him to get the hell out of there. He got back in the truck and drove it out behind the power plant to the road that led back to the bunker farm and the arsenal’s rear gate.

“Okay, so what the hell’s been going on around here?” Farnsworth growled when he sat down at the head of the conference table. It was 11:20, and he was dressed in his church clothes. He was visibly angry.

Ransom and Janet sat on opposite sides of the table near Farnsworth, while two squad supervisors sat down at the other end. They, too, did not look pleased to have been brought in on a Sunday morning. A black triangular teleconferencing speaker sat in the middle of the table, nearest Farnsworth . After listening to Janet’s preliminary report, Farnsworth had set up a conference call with Foster at his home in McLean, Virginia, and Foster was now on the line.

Janet began by recounting her meeting with Kreiss in Blacksburg, leaving out the part where Kreiss had expressed suspicion about what Bellhouser and Foster were really up to. Then she detailed her expedition to the Ramsey Arsenal. When she was finished, there was an embarrassed silence at the table. The two squad supervisors were looking studiously at their notebooks, undoubtedly very glad she did not work for them.

“All right,” Foster said from the speaker.

“Let me get this straight:

Kreiss essentially told you he wasn’t interested in any cooperative efforts, and that he already knew what Site R was?”

“That’s right,” Janet said. She had also left out his threat to put heads on pikes.

“Which means he was the headless horseman, then,” Farnsworth said.

“I’d expect so,” Janet said.

“How did he react to the theory that there was a bomb cell operating at the arsenal?” Foster asked.

“He thought it unlikely,” Janet said, casting a quick glance at Ransom.

She’d forgotten she’d told him what Kreiss had said. Ransom was looking straight ahead and saying nothing.

“And the next time you saw him, he was pulling you out of some tunnel?”

“That’s correct,” she said.

“And he said nothing about what he was doing there? Or how he happened to stumble on the fact that you were trapped down in the tunnel?”

She hesitated a half beat.

“He said he was looking for his daughter.

Which is what he said he would be doing. At our meeting in Blacksburg.”

“How did he know you were in the tunnel?”

“He heard the noise I was making. I was trying to position a pipe to climb out. He was up on the street above, came to see what was making the noise.”

“Did he think it was his daughter?”

Janet started to answer but then stopped. What had Kreiss been thinking when he heard the noises?

Random leaned forward to address the speaker.

“This is Ransom,” he said.

“I think Kreiss was looking for his daughter, but there’s another angle here.” He went on to describe bugging Kreiss’s truck, and his discovery of what he suspected was a dead body under a trailer, and the fact that his bug had ended up on the vehicle belonging to one Jared McGarand, whom he further suspected was the corpse under the trailer.

“So Kreiss had been there?” Foster asked.

“That what you’re saying?”

“That’s correct.” Janet noticed that Ransom’s street speech was long gone. Enter the professional, she thought. Maybe gofer, maybe more.

“Local law into this trailer business yet?” Jim Willson asked. He ran the surveillance squad and was a senior special agent with nearly twenty years’ experience in the Bureau. Willson had a reputation for being all business, all the time.

“We backed out without doing any notifying,” Ransom said.

“

“We’?” Farnsworth said. Janet saw Willson whisper something to Paul Porter, the other supervisor.

“I took Special Agent Carter here out to the trailer this morning,” Ransom said.

“Why?” Farnsworth asked in a tone of voice that Janet recognized as portending a bureaucratic turf fight. I knew this wouldn’t work, she thought.

Ransom sat back in his chair.

“Because it looked to me like a possible homicide. Domestic homicide isn’t our area, is it? Putting electronic surveillance on Kreiss, on the other hand, was done at the Bureau’s request.

If Kreiss offed some guy, I figured it was time to get the Bureau into it, which is why we’re having this meeting, I think.”

Farnsworth looked like he was about to lose his temper.

“With all due respect, boss,” Willson said, “what the fuck is going on here?”

“Okay, everybody,” Foster chimed in from the speakerphone.

“Let’s get back on track here. I’m hearing that Edwin Kreiss is operational. I’m hearing that there’s evidence he’s been at the scene of a possible homicide, and that he’s made at least one illegal intrusion onto a federal reservation, which used to be an explosives-manufacturing plant. Correct so far?”

No one answered, so Janet spoke up.

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Then may I suggest that our theory might be correct after all? That this Jared Me-whatever might in fact be connected to a bomb-making network we’re all looking for.”

“I disagree,” Janet said immediately.

“Kreiss is looking for his daughter.

If there’s a connection between Kreiss and the body under the trailer,

it has to do with his missing daughter. Kreiss knows nothing about a bomb network. The only reason he went into the arsenal is that a single, somewhat questionable witness told him that’s where his daughter might—and I emphasize the word might—be going. There’s no evidence of a bomb making cell at the arsenal.”

“All right, all right,” Farnsworth said.

“We need to get local law out to that trailer, and then I think we need to get federal assets out to this goddamned arsenal. From where I stand, we have a missing persons case that might be a kidnapping-abduction case, and now, a possible homicide.

One of my agents nearly lost her life, and a Bureau vehicle, in the process of what should have been a routine inspection of a federal facility. Mr.

Foster?”

“Yes?”

“In deference to your bomb theories, I want to call in the local ATE We’ll look into this homicide situation in cooperation with the Montgomery County Sheriffs Department. Any information that develops with regard to Mr. Kreiss will be reported directly to you. How’s that sound?”

“I’d prefer to keep the aTF out of it until we ascertain whether or not this jared guy was doing something at the arsenal. For the reasons we discussed previously. I also need to confer with Ms. Bellhouser.”

Janet saw Willson mouth the name Bellhouser and then shake his head.

“I can understand that,” Farnsworth said.

“And I know how much we might like to bust aTF’s chops. But there’s something wrong here. I’ve got agents getting hurt, and a possibly related homicide. No one has ever mentioned any southwestern “Virginia bombing conspiracy to me before.

Now you tell me something: Are you and Bellhouser serious about that, or was that just a ploy to get us to stir up Edwin Kreiss so Marchand and company could whack his ass?”

Wahoo, Janet thought. The boss is back. Willson and Porter were looking on in undisguised fascination. Ransom was hiding his face in his hands.

“We are absolutely serious about that,” Foster said.

“But—” “Then we get aTF into it. Right nicking now. I’ll make the call. Ken Whittaker is our local liaison guy.”

There was a strained silence on the speakerphone. Then Foster said, “Well, may I at least request that the Kreiss angle be confined to Bureau channels?”

“We will try,” Farnsworth said.

“But if he becomes a suspect in a possible homicide—”

“He won’t if you neglect to tell the local cops about the switched tracking device.”

Farnsworth rolled his eyes and began shaking his head.

“I mean,” Foster said, “if they come up with evidence linking Kreiss to the possible victim, then that’s that. But in the meantime, I still think Kreiss may have tripped over something. If there’s any chance that he has, that’s more important to us, and I think to the DCB, than some hillbilly getting squashed under his trailer.”

“The guy under the trailer might not agree with that,” Farnsworth said.

“And that’s another thing: I need a phone number for a point of contact at that DCB.”

“Uh, well, that may not be possible. I’ll have to check with Assistant Director Marchand and the deputy AG’s office. The DCB operates at a senior policy level. I’m not sure we can have field offices, ah, interfacing with that level within the interagency process.”

Gotcha, Farnsworth mouthed silently to the people at the table.

“Okay,” he said.

“I’ll leave that to your discretion, since you’re at the policy level. In the meantime, I’m going to send some people out there to that arsenal just as soon as I get some aTF assets folded in. You tell your people that, okay?”

“What if we encounter Kreiss?” Janet asked.

“We’ll just ask the sumbitch what he’s fucking doing out there,” Farnsworth said.

“If we have to, we’ll pull his ass in, have an intimate conversation.

In the meantime, let’s take it one step at a time. It’s Sunday.

Let’s see what we develop down here before everybody gets all spun up, okay? Mr. Foster, we’ll get back to you.”

“Very well,” Foster said, and hung up. Farnsworth looked at the two squad supervisors.

“Get ahold of Whittaker. Today. Now. Whip a joint team up and go into that arsenal. Notify the Army, and ask them to get their security people out there. Go have a look, see what the hell’s going on out there, if anything. Paul, I want you to liaise with Sheriff Lamb’s office, get them going on the trailer business.”

“What do I tell them when they want to know how we know about this?” Porter asked. He was an intense, thin man and was a stickler for detail.

“Hell, I don’t know—we had a CI call in? Keep it vague. You plus one go out there—I don’t want a crowd. I do want info on the vie as soon as possible.”

Porter nodded, got up, and left the conference room. Farnsworth

turned to Janet and Willson.

“You people be careful out there. If Kreiss killed someone looking for his daughter, then maybe this kidnapping business has driven him over the top. It wouldn’t be the first time he has run out of control, and I don’t want the Bureau embarrassed again if we can avoid it.”

“What was that little phone game you just played with Foster?”

“That was an RA fucking with a headquarters horse-holder. That won’t keep the heavies off our backs for more than twenty-four hours, if indeed this was all about Kreiss from the git-go, which I’m beginning to think it was. But we have to be sure.”

“Why bring in the aTF?” Janet asked.

Farnsworth sighed.

“Because, Janet,” he said, “there’s always the chance, remote as this may seem right now, that the people at headquarters know something we don’t down here in the too lies of Virginia. And if there is some kind of bomb lab hidden at that arsenal, do you want to be the first through the door? Or shall we let our dear friends from the aTF have that honor? Hmm?”

Janet saw Willson and Porter grinning. It made her wonder if she was ever going to get ahead of the politics curve in this business. Like there had never been politics in the lab, she thought. Yeah, right.

“Mr. Ransom,” Farnsworth said, “I’d like you to go along in case my team runs into Kreiss. And if you do, I’d like you to talk to him, see if we can keep Pandora’s box shut until we see what the bigs in Washington are going to do next. Can you do that?”

Ransom looked down at the table for a moment.

“I can try,” he said, not very convincingly. Janet thought he actually looked a little scared.

Kreiss heard the noise of something happening up in the tunnel about the same time as the siphon chamber began another dump cycle. The roar of the water escaping the dark chamber beneath him overpowered all other sounds and filled the air with a fine wet mist. He decided to pull himself back up to the floor of the tunnel and was doing so when a sharp, noxious smell enveloped him. It was not only hard to breathe; it hurt to breathe.

He swallowed involuntarily, causing his eyes to water. He could still hear nothing but the rumble of the chamber emptying into the earth below, but when he got his hands and shoulders up onto the concrete lip of the tunnel, he realized that there was a small, viscous, fuming river headed right for him. He pulled hard right as the stream hit the center of the lip and shot over. The corrosive fumes were so strong now that he dared not

breathe, and then he saw a flat branch of the fluid sweep sideways along the lip. His rope disintegrated right in front of his eyes, and the metal on the end of the stick foamed ominously. He knew that smell.

Acid. Nitric acid!

He buried his nose and mouth in the vee of his crawl suit and took one deep breath, and then he got up and sprinted up the tunnel, trying to ignore the swelling stream of acid, until he reached the cone of sunlight and the ladder rungs. He stopped just outside of the light and took another deep breath, straining air through the tough fabric of the crawl suit. Was the shooter up there, waiting for him to stick his head out? His lungs were bursting, and his eyes were tearing so badly, he could barely see. No more choices here, he thought, and scrambled up the rungs, straining for the bright sunlight of the main street above. The makeshift grid of pipes slowed him down, but not much, and he rolled off the edge of the hole and kept rolling until he was all the way across the street and into a side alley. Finally, he could breathe, and, so far, no one was shooting at him. He lay back on the warm concrete and concentrated on clearing his lungs and eyes.

Acid—a flood of it. Where the hell had that come from? Obviously, the bearded man had initiated that catastrophe. This place wasn’t the ghost town it appeared to be. He rolled over onto his side and looked around.

There was nothing stirring in the morning sunlight. He could hear a faint slurring sound coming up from the tunnel, but nothing else. He took one final deep breath and got up. He’d lost his stick down in the tunnel, but he was lucky to have escaped. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if the rope had been eaten before he’d made it back up to the tunnel.

He climbed the nearest building and spent the next fifteen minutes scanning the entire industrial area from the roof, but there was nothing different about it—same collection of concrete buildings, empty streets, and dilapidated sheds on the bare, dusty hillsides. The man who had pursued him from the power plant was nowhere in evidence. The power plant. He studied the front of the building, with its four garage doors and windowless exterior. The man had come out of the power plant, so whatever they were doing here, that’s where they were doing it.

He climbed back down from the building’s roof and went down a back alley to the side of the power plant. The tank farm up on its side hill was visible behind its concrete mass, and he wondered for a moment if the acid had been dumped down out of one of those tanks up there.

Then he saw what looked like fresh tire tracks coming out of the tank farm’s dirt road. Big dual tracks, the kind a truck would leave. He remembered the truck in the garage bay of the power plant. He wanted to take another look into that garage bay, but he did not want to cross the open space between the explosives finishing building and the power plant, in case the man was in there, waiting for him. He’d taken enough chances already.

He looked at the tire tracks again, then knelt down and fingered the ridges in the dirt. Fresh indeed.

He checked his watch. It was almost eleven o’clock. He decided to go back to his own truck and then go to Blacksburg and look up Mr. Browne McGarand. That green-and-white tanker truck should be pretty easy to spot. Find that truck, find his shooter. And, he hoped, find Lynn. This time, maybe he would take a gun. He still had Jared’s .45 in his truck.

He’d have to find some ammo.

At 3:30, Janet, Ransom, and Ken Whittaker were waiting out in the bright sunlight on the main street of the arsenal’s industrial area. The two young rent-a-cops were finishing unlocking the padlocks on the final two buildings adjacent to the power plant. The Bureau team had arrived at the front gates at just after two o’clock, where they had been met by Ken Whittaker, the local aTF supervisor, and the same two kids in their little rent-a-cop pickup truck. The group had done a quick windshield tour of the bunker area and then descended on the industrial complex. Whittaker, a tall, thin man, wearing oversize horn-rimmed glasses, was in nominal charge. Sunday or not, he was dressed in khaki trousers and shirt, and he had his aTF windbreaker and ball cap on. When Willson had briefed him, he had been all business, and he surprised Janet by asking none of the bureaucratic ground-rule questions that had been swirling around this case from its inception. He agreed that it would be a joint scene, but he insisted on being in charge of any inspection for possible bomb-making facilities. Willson and Porter agreed to this immediately. Willson noticed Janet’s bewilderment, and while Whittaker was giving orders, he quietly pointed out that, at the working-stiff level, federal agents were federal agents and tended to focus on the business at hand. It was Washington where winning the turf battles seemed to be as important as the case, he said, which was the reason he was permanently homesteading in Roanoke.

Janet showed them the hole in the street where the car had gone down.

There was an eye-stinging smell coming up from the hole, which Janet recognized as being the fumes of nitric acid. The rent-a-cops said

they could smell it, too, but they insisted there hadn’t been any industrial activity in the arsenal for years. Janet didn’t remember all those pipes being near the hole, but then she didn’t remember much about getting out of there, period, after Kreiss had shown up. They had then driven up and down the streets and side alleys in a four-vehicle procession, seeing nothing but bare concrete walls. Ransom suggested that they ought to climb down into the hole in the street, but the fumes were too strong.

“There was nothing like that when we came out of that hole,” Janet said, staring down into the darkness.

“That’s new.”

“What’s the purpose of this tunnel?” Whittaker asked. One of the renta-cops said the site maps showed it only as the Ditch. Willson guessed that it was an emergency dump channel for the big buildings lining the street, someplace that an entire batch of chemicals could be dumped if something went wrong while they were making explosives.

“Wow,” Whittaker said.

“And I wonder into whose drinking water that would go.”

Neither of the two kids ventured an answer to that one. Whittaker had asked them if they had keys to all these buildings, and they said, yes, they had the series master-lock keys for every building in the complex. Whittaker had just looked at them until they understood what he wanted. With lots of dramatic sighs, they started at the high end of the street and began taking down padlocks. Whittaker split the joint FBI-aTF team up into groups of two. He briefed them on potential booby traps and told them to go through all the buildings, with orders to stop and back out immediately if something seemed wrong. He kept Janet and Ransom with him.

“And we’re looking for?” one of the agents had asked.

“These buildings are supposed to be empty,” Whittaker said.

“If you come on one that isn’t, back out and sing out. And be careful how you open doors: Bomb makers are into booby traps.”

The FBI agents looked at one another, and then Willson said, “Gee, with all that aTF bomb experience, maybe Whittaker ought to be the guy opening doors.” Whittaker laughed and even agreed, but then Willson said, “No, we’ll do it.” Whittaker, Ransom, and Janet had remained down near the big hole in the street. One of the rent-a-cops came back to where they were standing.

“That’s all the main process buildings,” he said.

“How about the power plant?” He was perspiring, but that hadn’t kept him from lighting up a cigarette. Cigarettes and pimples, Janet thought. Don’t they just go together.

Whittaker checked back with Willson’s team up the street by radio.

They were still working their way down, building to building. So far, they had reported seriously empty buildings.

“Yeah, open it up,” he said in a tired tone of voice.

“The weekend’s shot anyway.”

The kid gave a two-finger salute and trudged across the empty space between the last of the big buildings and the looming facade of the power plant. Whittaker followed him halfway down, then stood in the street, talking on his radio to the two team leaders. Janet walked with Ransom over to a building marked nitro FIXING.

“Now there’s a great name for a building,” Ransom said.

“How’d you like to work in a place that did—” Janet felt rather than saw a great wave of intense heat and pressure on her right side. The blast compressed her body with such strength that her chest, lungs, and extremities felt like they were being stepped on by some fiery giant. She wanted to turn to see what it was, but then she was literally flying through the air and right through a wooden loading-dock fence before rolling like a rag doll out onto the concrete of a side street, until she slammed up against the wall of the next building. She tried to focus, but there was an enormous noise ringing in her ears, and then she felt herself screaming as an avalanche of things began to fall all around her, big things that hit the ground with enough force to make her helpless body bounce right off the ground. The sun had gone out and she could not get her breath. Her right side felt as if she had been kicked by a horse, and she found herself spitting out bits of concrete and lots of dirt and dust. Then a huge mass of reinforced concrete wall, big as a house, crunched into the street right alongside her and she screamed so hard, she fainted.

When she came to, her whole body was buzzing with pain. She wasn’t able to get a good breath because of her side, and she was dimly aware that there were sounds around her she couldn’t quite hear. Her eyes were stuck shut by a coating of concrete dust. When she was able to get them open and focus, she could see that the whole industrial area had been wrecked, with great mounds of concrete rubble piled everywhere—in the street, between the shattered buildings, even on top of the buildings that were still standing. The last two buildings in the row had been partially knocked down, and where the power plant had been, there was only the stump of the main smokestack presiding over two piles of twisted metal that must have been the boilers. She saw Ransom come staggering out into the street from somewhere, his clothes

torn to ribbons, bleeding from the head, eyes, ears, and mouth. He tripped over a mound of rubble and went down like a sack of flour, lying motionless in the street. She was horrified to see a rod of metal sticking out of his head like a feather less arrow. A great cloud of dust hung over the entire area, thick enough to turn the daylight yellowish brown.

She looked around for Whittaker, but he was nowhere in sight. Her knees felt like they were on fire, and she looked down and saw that she had skinned the knees of her pants down to two bloody patches of road rash.

She tried to get up, but there was a large piece of concrete with its re bar still embedded lying on her right leg, and her right hand didn’t seem to be working. She tried calling out for help, but all she managed was a whimper, and that turned into a coughing fit, which hurt her lungs.

Then someone was there, levering the big chunk of concrete off her leg. It was one of the surveillance squad agents—Harris, she thought his name was, pretty sure that’s what it was—and he was saying something to her. She absolutely couldn’t hear him. She pointed to her ears and shook her head, which turned out to be a big mistake. She experienced a major lance of pain, followed by a cool rose haze that enveloped her consciousness, and then, blessedly, it all went away.

When she regained consciousness the next time, she found herself inside an ambulance, but the vehicle was not moving. Her whole body felt awash in some soothing balm, and she was hooked up to IVs in both arms.

A young paramedic was talking urgently on a telephone down near her feet, and she could see out the back doors of the ambulance that it was parked on the main street of the industrial area, looking down toward what had been the power plant. She was shocked by what she saw: The power plant was essentially gone, with nothing remaining but the wrecked boilers on the wide concrete expanse of what had been the floor.

The two large buildings at the far end of the street nearest the power plant had been mostly destroyed, with only their uphill side walls still intact. The streets were littered with pieces of concrete, big and small, and there were two body sheets lying out on the street between her and the open space in front of what had been the power plant. The medic turned around and saw that she was conscious. He said something into the phone, which she could not hear, and then hung up. Then he was talking to her, but she could barely hear him. She shook her head, much more carefully, but couldn’t move her arms. She was able to read his lips.

“Can you hear me?” he was asking.

She winced and mouthed the word no. Her lips felt twice their normal size.

“Can you breathe all right?”

She tried out her lungs. It hurt to inhale, and her ribs were throbbing under the warmth of the painkiller, but she nodded.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked. Three she mouthed, and then she said it out loud: “Three.”

“Okay, good.” She realized she could hear him now, although his voice was still distant. He saw that she could understand him.

“Your vitals are okay,” he said.

“Your pupils are a little bit dilated, and I think you’ve cracked a couple of ribs and maybe your right wrist. I’m guessing a mild concussion, but otherwise, I don’t see anything major, okay? The IVs are for pain and shock, and we’ve got you on a monitor. Just relax. We’re gonna transport in just a few minutes.”

“What happened?” she croaked.

“Looks like an A-bomb to me, lady. There’re a million cops out there right now.”

“What about… them?” she asked, pointing with her eyes to the body sheets down the street.

“Don’t know, ma’am. I mean who they are. The cops in suits are pretty pissed off, though.”

At that moment, Farnsworth’s head appeared over the medic’s shoulder.

His face was a mask of shock and concern. He saw Janet looking at him and tried for a smile. It was ghastly, Janet thought.

“Hey, boss,” she said weakly.

“Thank God,” he said.

“Can she talk to me?” he asked the medic.

“Yeah, but she can’t hear so good,” the man said, and then crawled out of the way so that Farnsworth could climb partially into the ambulance.

“Janet, can you tell me what happened?” he asked, and then swore.

“Listen to me: Are you okay? Are you hurt badly?”

“I took a flying lesson,” she said, trying for a little wisecrack to get that mortal look off his face.

“We were standing next to some building, down there, called Nitro Fixing. Then the world ended. I don’t know what happened.”

“The surviving team members said the power plant blew up,” he said.

“One of them was in the doorway of a building when it went up. Said the whole fucking thing literally disintegrated in a fireball. No warning.”

“Who—” she began, looking past him into the street.

“Ken Whittaker is dead, and definitely one of the rent-a-cops, if not both of them. They were out in the street, we think.”

Janet felt her stomach go cold. But Farnsworth wasn’t finished.

“Ransom is … well, it’s gonna be touch-and-go, I’m afraid. He had a bastard of a head injury. They’ve heloed him out already. Our guys who were up the street inside buildings are pretty much okay. But, listen, we have a development.”

“What?” Despite the pain medication, her side was beginning to really hurt, and it was getting harder to breathe. She tried not to panic. Development?

“The state police pulled Lynn Kreiss out of that last building down there. She’s injured but alive, Janet. She was able to tell us that two guys have been holding her here since those kids disappeared, but then she became incoherent. Started babbling about Washington and a hydrogen bomb. Then she passed out. This is all secondhand—I wasn’t here yet.

But now we have to find out what the hell happened here.”

“Is aTF taking over?”

“Oh, hell yes, they’ve taken over. In force. They’re de laminating about Whittaker. Their lead guy is foaming at the mouth about why Washington never told them they suspected this place of being a bomb factory.”

“Brilliant,” Janet muttered.

“This whole place was a bomb factory.”

“Sir?” the medic said, looking at his monitors.

“I think you’re all done here, okay? We gotta transport now.”

Farnsworth nodded and withdrew.

“Get well quick, Janet,” he called as the attendant began shutting the doors.

“Fucking Kreiss—he was right!”

he added.

And Kreiss had known a lot more than he had been letting on, she thought as the attendant slid forward and rapped on the window to the driver. She wondered if Kreiss was out there among all the rubble, or still in pursuit of these people who had been building—what out here, a hydrogen bomb She was no explosives expert, but she knew that wasn’t possible.

No way. But assuming Kreiss was alive, somebody did need to tell him that they’d found his daughter. That he could stop chasing the phantoms of the arsenal and come in and talk to them. The ambulance was rolling and the attendant was doing something with one of her IVs. She suddenly felt very sleepy. Have to remember that, she thought as she slipped off again.

Browne waited until dark to go back to the Waffle House on Route 11 to retrieve his pickup truck. Earlier, he’d driven the propane truck out

to the interstate and five miles north to the big TA truck stop, where he’d parked it among a hundred other big trucks that were idling out at the back of the cinder lot. He’d cooled his heels for an hour at the truck stop before hitching a ride back down 1-81 into Dublin, south of Ramsey. From Dublin to the Waffle House on Route 11 had been a four mile walk. He’d seen all the emergency vehicles running up and down Route 11, so somebody must have finally opened the door to the power plant. His suspicions were confirmed when he went into the Waffle House for a cold drink and everyone was talking about the big bang out at the arsenal.

As he drove his pickup back to Blacksburg, he was satisfied that any evidence of what they had been doing out there for all those months, including the retort, the pumps, the generator, and even the acid tank were now somewhere in low earth orbit. He’d also put enough acid down that tunnel to obliterate any trace of the security truck and any number of intruders.

Leaving the girl… well, he’d done what he had to do. Regrettable, but necessary. That nitro building’s big vertical expanse of concrete wall facing the power plant should have taken care of the girl once the explosion occurred. Keeping her had been a dumb idea all along, he thought now. It was just that he had never been quite able just to shoot her. He was ashamed about Jared fooling around in there. He should have known that would happen. He would go out to Jared’s this afternoon, find out why that oversexed young pup hadn’t shown up. William had been headstrong, but he would never have taken advantage of the girl that way.

The thought of his dead son stole some of the satisfaction out of what had happened out at the arsenal. The radio was talking about aTF agents.

These were the same federal cops who’d killed William. But two weren’t enough. The goddamned government, with all its alphabet soup of cops, was out of hand. Killing women and children in the name of the law, sending snipers to gun down women with babies in their arms, then lying through their collective teeth about it, then being exonerated in court.

He’d followed the Waco standoff on the television, but had missed the exact moment when they drove their tanks into the building and burned those deluded bastards out. He was convinced that there was the mother of all coverups in place over Waco. William, William, William, he thought sadly. Why did you have to go down there? Why did you join up with such a bunch of misguided fools? I lived for the day I could get you back. And now you’re nothing but a pile of greasy ashes out in some dusty field near Waco.

He took a deep breath to calm himself. Remember what you’re going to do, he told himself. You’re going to show those bastards that they’d killed the wrong man’s son. The arsenal was just the beginning.

His plan now was to wait twenty-four hours to let the hubbub surrounding the arsenal explosion subside, and then he’d head north with the propane truck for the final stage. There was only one thing that could link him to what happened out there, and for that, they’d have to go through every one of the nine hundred ammo bunkers out on the back reservation.

Bunker number 887 looked like every other bunker—partially buried, 150 feet long, 40 feet wide, and 20 feet from floor to the top of its curved ceiling.

It contained his post-attack getaway stash: cash, clothes, passport, food and water for two weeks, and even a car. Assuming he got clear of what he was going to do in Washington, he would come back here, hide out in the bunker for a while, and then disappear. There were people in splinter groups of the Christian Identity network who would help him hide.

What he had to do right now was to make jared understand he needed to keep his head down and his mouth shut from here on out, no matter what happened up in Washington. He’d deliberately not told jared specifically what he was going to do with the hydrogen. What the boy didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. The propane truck was safe for the moment—just one more truck parked at a truck stop, right out in plain sight, which effectively made it invisible. The only other person who knew anything was dead. Just like his William. Fair was fair.

He crossed the New River bridge and headed north toward Blacksburg.

He decided he would go directly to Jared’s trailer before going home. See if the dummy had disentangled himself from his current whore long enough even to know about what had happened out at the arsenal.

Kreiss ended up going back to his cabin. He had driven down Canton Street where Browne McGarand lived and had seen the house. It was a medium-sized two-story brick house on a half-acre lot in a well-kept, heavily treed neighborhood. He had spotted a detached garage at the back of the house, and the yard looked well attended and free of trash. An elderly man had been raking his lawn next door when Kreiss drove by. He had glanced at Kreiss’s truck, but he had not really looked up. One more pickup truck going down the street was apparently not remarkable. There were other people about, and he heard some dogs barking when he stopped at the corner, as if checking a set of directions. There had been

no sign of the tanker truck. He turned at the next corner and discovered an alley that ran behind the houses on Canton Street and the houses on the next street over. The property lines were marked by clusters of metal trash cans standing guard along the alley.

He had decided not to go past twice, not with that geezer out there.

Old people noticed things, and, unless Kreiss was willing to stop and go knock on the door, he didn’t want to be remembered. It looked like a quiet middle-class neighborhood, which told him absolutely nothing about the occupant of number 242 Canton Street. He would come back tonight and try for that alley. He might need to create a diversion of some kind. If the neighbors were mostly elderly, there would be people about, not to mention dogs. A NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH sign emphasized the point. He saw what looked like a mom-and-pop corner gas station one block down from Canton Street where he might be able to park when he came back at night.

After cruising Browne McGarand’s house and neighborhood, he decided to drive out to the area of jared McGarand’s trailer. On the way out there, he thought he heard thunder, but the sky seemed to be clear.

When he approached the intersection of jared’s road with the state road, a Highway Patrol car was blocking the entrance. He kept right on going, catching a quick glimpse of more flashing blue lights back in the trees.

Okay, he thought, Jared’s demise is no longer a secret. He drove on down the state road and turned onto Highway 460, which would take him back toward his own cabin. He decided to go home, catch a quick nap, and then he had some preparations to make for his call on the other McGarand. Maybe this guy would be more forthcoming, and would live long enough to give him what he needed to know. Given the man’s cold, quick decision to begin shooting out there at the arsenal, he might be a tougher nut to crack than the beer-guzzling Jared.

Focus, he reminded himself. The objective is not revenge, the objective is to find Lynn, and this bastard probably knows where she is. As he drove home, he turned on the truck’s radio to get a weather report, and he found out that it had not been thunder he’d heard earlier.

Janet was fully awake in a semiprivate room at the Montgomery County Hospital when Farnsworth showed up with a small crowd that included the red-faced Mr. Foster. Her ribs had been taped, and there were bandages on some of her bandages. The most painful points on her body were actually where the IVs had been. Sounds still echoed in her ears, and she felt as if she had been pummeled all over. The other bed was empty,

and the RA sat down on the edge of it. His expression was somber, and then she remembered that Ken Whittaker had been killed, along with those two kids, the rent-a-cops. Farnsworth was accompanied by Ben Keenan, who was his number two in the Roanoke FBI office. Keenan, who had been away on annual vacation, had come back in after the explosion.

There were three other men, whom she did not recognize, but they looked like feds. They filed in behind the RA and gathered around the end of the bed. She saw a state trooper standing on guard outside her door before Farnsworth shut it. She was almost glad to see them, until Farnsworth introduced the three other men as being from the ATE Two of them appeared to be in their early thirties, and the third was much older. She nodded carefully as each was introduced, then promptly forgot their names.

“How’s Ransom?” she asked, remembering his crumpled form.

“Not terrific,” Keenan said.

“Took a piece of re bar through the head.

He’s in a coma. We’re all praying that he’ll come out of it. But actually…”

He shrugged.

“Janet, can you go through it again?” Farnsworth said.

“What happened out there at the arsenal?”

Janet described their tour of the bunker fields—nothing out there but empty concrete mounds surrounded by tall weeds. Then she described their search in the industrial area, and where she had been standing when the world ended.

“I remember that one of those kids—one of the rent-acops—had gone down to unlock the power plant, but I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention.”

One of the younger aTF agents leaned forward.

“We’re trying to figure out what kind of a bomb it was,” he said.

“The girl they recovered?

She made a fragmentary statement at the scene, said something about a hydrogen bomb and Washington? You have any take on that?”

She shook her head again, carefully. There was a monster headache lurking back in there. The aTF guy must be talking about Lynn Kreiss, she thought. The second aTF agent, the other young one, asked her if she could describe the explosion.

“Felt it, never saw it,” she said.

“Pressure, heat, no noise—I think the sound was there, of course, but it was overwhelming. You all are echoing when you talk.”

“We have a tech team from the Washington NEST at the site right now,” the aTF agent said.

“You know, that nuclear emergency response team? They’re making a

radiation survey, just in case, although we think the nuke angle is unlikely. We’ve backed all the local response people out until we know something, one way or the other.”

Janet didn’t know what to make of all that. She’d caught only a glimpse of the area through the doors of the ambulance. She supposed it could have been a nuclear bomb, given the extent of the destruction, but shouldn’t she have been flash burned On the other hand, that power plant had been absolutely flattened. She could still visualize the molten and smashed boilers where the building had been, and the crumpled tank farm behind it.

“Janet,” Farnsworth said.

“Did you personally see any signs of human activity within the arsenal? Anything in any of the buildings that looked recent? Trash in the street? Shiny metal surfaces?”

“No, sir,” she said.

“I’d been there earlier, of course, and the hole was still in the street where my car went through that plate.” She paused for a moment. Something about pipes. Then she remembered.

“There were some pipes piled next to the hole in the street that I don’t remember being there when Kreiss got me out. But I may not have seen them—I was pretty exhausted by then.”

“Who is this “Kreiss’?” one of the aTF agents asked.

Foster and Farnsworth exchanged a quick guarded look that the aTF agents could not see.

“A security guard at the arsenal,” Farnsworth said.

“They were making a patrol and found the plate gone. Back to these pipes—you’re saying they could have been put there after you got out of the tunnel?”

“Sir, I don’t know. I just remember seeing them and not remembering their being there the last time.”

Farnsworth nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

“Once the NEST people are backed out and the place is verified radiation free, we’re going to do a really comprehensive search of the wreckage area and the rest of the installation. If people have been using this installation, especially if it’s been going on for a while, we should find evidence of it: intrusion routes, trash, chemicals, bomb-making equipment, residues, stuff like that.”

“aTF will be honchoing that effort,” the older agent said, as if to remind Farnsworth whose jurisdiction bomb makers came under.

“Absolutely,” Farnsworth said, looking at Janet with a slightly annoyed expression.

“But we can’t go forward until the nuke people say the place isn’t a hot zone.”

Janet tried to think of something else to tell them, but she couldn’t.

Her body hurt enough to distract her. Farnsworth got up.

“Well, okay, folks,” he said.

“Let’s leave Agent Carter here some room to recuperate. Of course she’ll be available for further questions in due course. I’ll have an interviewer come up and take a dictation for the record tomorrow morning, and we’ll make that available for all concerned.”

The men made sympathetic noises and backed out of the room, leaving only Farnsworth behind. He again nudged the door closed behind them.

“What’s the deal with Kreiss?” she asked softly He shook his head.

“Beats the shit out of me. Foster came down here with his hair on fire when word of the explosion got back to D.C. But now aTF has everyone spun up with what the girl said about a hydrogen bomb. Washington thinks she’s hallucinating, but she’s still out cold, so no one wants to take any chances.”

“Foster want to pin this one on Kreiss, too?”

“I’m no longer in that loop. But there’s something going on, and it involves the damned Agency.”

“I’d like to tell Kreiss we’ve rescued his daughter,” she said.

“Well,” Farnsworth said, glancing over at the closed door, “that guy Foster has a slightly different slant on that proposition. But the focus right now is on the Kreiss girl talking about a hydrogen bomb and the capital. People in D.C. are seriously spun up.”

“An H-bomb? That’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? I mean, don’t you have to have an A-bomb even to initiate an H-bomb?”

“I’m no physicist, Janet. All I know is that when the girl said that, the BATF people did not laugh. In fact, they went semi-ape shit got that nuclear response team heloed down here on an hour’s notice. They were scaring the locals with all those Geiger counters and guys in moon suits until we cleared everybody out of there. Thank God the press didn’t get onto that.”

“But, boss—an H-bomb? C’mon.”

“Did you see that building, Janet? The Army people had some pretty good pictures of the industrial area before the explosion, and that power plant was a big fucking building. It’s now a concrete deck. The debris field is a half mile in every direction, and every vertical wall facing the plant has been damaged or knocked down. They found some pieces of the boiler tubing out on Route Eleven, for Chrissakes. You tell me what kind of bomb that was.”

Her head was hurting and it was hard to concentrate.

“But what has this to do with Kreiss? He was just looking for his daughter.”

“The homicide of jared McGarand is the key to that, we think. Look,

we’re keeping aTF in the dark about Kreiss and the rest of it, because you know that crowd: They’ll go off half-cocked. That’s doubly true if they think there’s Agency shit involved here. They do bombs, and we have the mother of all bombs for them to focus on right now.”

“What’s their theory, if not a nuclear device?”

“The older guy, the one who didn’t talk much? While everybody else was running around yapping on their radios and pretending they hadn’t pissed their pants, he was making a drawing of the bomb site. When I asked him what kind of bomb was in that building, he said something interesting. He said it looked to him like the building was the bomb.”

“And what the hell does that mean?” she asked. She was having trouble keeping her eyes open. She hated being in the hospital, but right now, there was a sleep monster in this bed and it was whispering her name.

“Don’t know, Janet, but Foster is insisting we keep aTF in the mushroom mode for a little while longer, while certain people way above our pay grade, quote unquote, work the Kreiss angle. You get some rest now, okay? Hey, and you did fine out there.”

Janet closed her eyes after Farnsworth left. He was upset—hell, they were all upset—after losing Ken Whittaker. And apparently Ransom’s prognosis wasn’t wonderful. aTF headquarters would of course be asking why a Bureau resident agency had called for one of their people without clearing it through Washington, and why they had even been out there at the arsenal. Farnsworth, anxious at this point to keep the bullshit swirling, had probably told them that it was part of the missing kids case.

She turned in the bed to ease the pressure on her aching ribs. She vaguely remembered going through a wooden railing. That wood must have been very dry. The docs said she had no broken bones, and that she could check out in the morning, as soon as they made sure she hadn’t suffered a cardiac tamponade, whatever the hell that was. Her right wrist was swollen but usable.

The fly in all this ointment, of course, was Edwin Kreiss. She tried to remember if the DCB had been told about the Kreiss angle or not.

Because if they had, then Farnsworth’s game with the aTF wasn’t going to hold up for very long. And poor Kreiss: tearing up the visible world, looking for his daughter, and now the feds had her and weren’t going to tell him? She cursed all bureaucratic rivalries and fell asleep.

Browne didn’t see the cop car until it was too late; he was already signaling his turn into Jared’s entrance road. He slowed as the cop got out and

waved him over. With a sigh, Browne shut down the truck and prepared himself. There was no way someone could have made a connection between the arsenal explosion and him, he reassured himself again. Or Jared, for that matter, so this had to be something else. Had to be.

“Evening, sir. May I see some ID, please?”

“Certainly, Officer,” Browne said, reaching for his wallet.

“What’s going on here?”

The cop didn’t reply as he looked at Browne driver’s license. He asked him to please wait in the truck, then went back to his cruiser to make a radio call. When he came back over, he said, “There’s a sergeant coming out to speak to you, Mr. McGarand. It’ll just be a minute, sir.”

Browne saw that the cop was uncomfortable, rather than angry or suspicious.

Had something happened to Jared? Was this why he hadn’t shown up? Then he had an alarming thought. Had that woman’s husband caught them? Jared had said someone had been creeping around his trailer. He felt a pang of conscience—he remembered hoping that the woman’s husband would catch them. He knew the old rule: Be careful of what you wish for.

A dark four-door sedan nosed alongside the cruiser. Two men in civilian suits accompanied by a bulky state trooper with sergeant’s stripes got out and approached his truck. The trooper took his hat off and informed him that a man, whom they believed to be Jared McGarand, had been found fatally injured. Was he related to Jared McGarand? Browne said yes, he was Jared’s grandfather and his only local next of kin. Would he be able, and willing, to make a next-of-kin identification at the scene?

Browne, a cold feeling in his stomach, nodded a soundless yes. The trooper cleared his throat and began to explain that the victim had been crushed by the trailer, and that identification might be difficult. Browne blinked. Crushed by the trailer? That didn’t sound like some irate husband.

He took a deep breath and said that, yes, he’d do it.

He got out of the truck and waited for the trooper to introduce the two men in suits, but the sergeant did not do so. He almost didn’t have to;

Browne was almost positive they were government agents, probably FBI.

The city suits, the faintly supercilious expressions on their faces, and the body language of the local cops told the tale. Browne forced his expression to remain as neutral as he could get it. This was the enemy: The FBI, along with its incompetent cousin, the BATF, had taken William from him. It was one thing to talk about a formless, faceless, and powerful enemy, and quite another thing altogether to be standing

three feet away from two of its agents. On the other hand, he realized, they would expect him to lose his composure if his grandson had been killed. But why were they here?

They walked, rather than rode, back down jared’s entrance road to the trailer, Browne with the local cops, and the G-men bringing up the rear.

They rounded the corner and Browne saw the yellow Mylar tapes, a Crime Scene Unit van, two police cars, two unmarked police cars, and a coroner’s black-windowed ambulance. Jared’s pickup was parked next to his phone company repair van. Technicians in white overalls were wandering around Jared’s yard, while two men who were probably detectives stood talking and smoking cigarettes near the back of the trailer. The trailer’s doors were open and there were obviously people inside. Browne tried to think if jared would have anything in the trailer that might tie him to what they’d been doing at the arsenal, but he didn’t think so.

Unless he had a stash of copper, and even that could be explained, since he was a telephone repairman. Or had been one.

The trailer was no longer level. The space underneath the downed end of the trailer was curtained off with a temporary railing, on which some kind of fabric had been stretched. There was a portable light stand set up on one side, which a tech turned on as they approached. Browne hadn’t even noticed that it was getting dark. The cops put out their cigarettes as the sergeant escorted Browne to the curtain, offering at least a public show of deference to impending grief. Browne wasn’t worried too much about grief. He’d spent all he had when William had been killed. By some of these people, he reminded himself, glancing sideways at the two feds.

He still couldn’t figure out why they were here. Had something turned up in the trailer to draw in federal agents? And were they FBI or aTF?

The sergeant explained that Jared had been found underneath the trailer, next to a hydraulic jack, and that the jack had broken through the floor of the trailer, causing the trailer to drop directly onto Jared. Browne was conscious of a bad smell coming from behind the curtain. One of the Crime Scene Unit techs walked over and offered a small bottle of Vicks Vapo-Rub. Browne understood at once, and he rubbed a dab into each of his nostrils, then stepped forward. It was not a pretty sight. The end of the trailer had been jacked back up. Jared’s entire body was flattened and his head was swollen, the familiar face almost unrecognizable. There was an industrial-sized hydraulic jack positioned to hold up the near end of the trailer on a steel plate next to the body.

He saw as much as he wanted to see and then stepped back. He put the

back of his hand to his mouth, closed his eyes for a moment, and then nodded. The cops were watching him, probably to see if he was going to throw up, but the wave of nausea passed, replaced by a pang of long-lost familial hurt, the kind of hurt he had not experienced since watching the news tapes of those federal bastards cremating his son at Waco. Hate them, he told himself silently, suddenly very conscious of those two federal agents behind him. Hate them and feed on that hate. Maintain control of yourself. Jared’s beyond help or hurt, but you are the bringer of retribution. But you must not attract further attention.

He caused his shoulders to slump and his face to wilt.

“That’s my grandson, Jared McGarand. I guess I don’t understand what happened here.”

“Well, sir, we’re all looking into that. Do you know of any reason he’d go underneath that trailer like that? Or knock down those cinder blocks?”

Browne looked down at the twisted jack stand. He shook his head.

“Them cinder blocks were either knocked over or they fell over, one or the other,” one of the detectives said, pointing with a flashlight.

“Any idea why or what did that?”

Browne shook his head again.

“It doesn’t make sense, those blocks just falling over. Why would they do that? He hit it with his truck or something?”

The two federals, who had kept back while remaining within earshot, exchanged glances but didn’t say anything. Why are they here? Browne wondered again, fighting off the urge to look at them.

The sergeant was nodding.

“Yes, sir, that’s kinda what we thought. But there’s no sign of that. And it would take something pretty big, what with the weight of the trailer and all. We figured he may have been jacking the trailer so’s to reset the blocks or something.”

“What have you done with the dogs?” Browne asked, looking over their shoulders at the empty pen.

The cops all looked around and then at one another.

“How many dogs we talking about, Mr. McGarand?” the sergeant asked.

“We saw the pen, but there weren’t any dogs here when we got here.”

The sergeant had a bit of a mountain accent, so Browne decided to countrify his own language a bit.

“He had him some pig dogs—three of ‘em. He never let ‘em run free less’n we were hunting.”

One of the detectives introduced himself then, flashing a leather credentials wallet with its golden shield at Browne. He, too, spoke with a southwestern Virginia country accent.

“Your grandson, Mr. McGarand?

He have him any enemies? Anyone who would have wanted to do something like this?”

All Browne could think about was that intruder at the arsenal, the big man in the weird coveralls, or whatever they were, looking right at him with those intense eyes, almost like he knew him. The cool way he had just run off when Browne opened up with the .44, not bothering to shoot back or try anything fancy. That had taken calm professionalism, and Browne was beginning to think that there was something going on here, something much bigger than the disappearance of those college kids.

Instinctively, he decided to throw them a red herring. He looked down at his shoes for a moment and shuffled his feet, creating the picture of a man making up his mind to tell the cops something embarrassing about his grandson.

“My grandson?” he said with a parental sigh.

“He liked the ladies.” The Vicks was making his eyes water, which was perfect, actually.

“And they liked him, if you know what I mean. Some of those ladies had husbands. I was supposed to see him Saturday night, but he called, said he had him a hot date. By the way he was talking, I think she was maybe one of the married ones. I warned him, right there and then, but with jared, well…”

The cops were writing in their notebooks and nodding. This was something they understood right away. It was also something to go on.

“Any idea of who she was?” one of them asked.

“No, sir,” Browne said.

“Jared, he wasn’t one for naming names; knew I disapproved. But my guess is it was someone who’d had a telephone problem, called it in, got Jared as the repairman. Something like that, I imagine.

He usually operates alone, working the back county trouble tickets.”

One cop closed his notebook and headed for his car to make some calls.

Browne kept his eyes downcast. Why were they here?

“Sir, how’s about we go inside, see if you can tell us if anything’s missing?”

They went into the trailer, past a tech who was scraping some gooey looking substance off the edge of the front steps. They walked around inside the sloping trailer, but everything seemed to be in place. Browne went through the bureau and night table drawers but didn’t say anything about the missing guns. He wasn’t entirely sure that Jared had obtained the guns through lawful channels, since Jared frequented the gun shows in Roanoke and up in Winchester. Plus, there was a lot of gun swapping that went on among those Black Hats idiots. While back in the bedroom, he asked, as casually as he could, who the other people were outside.

“Those guys? They’re Roanoke FBI agents. They’re doing some investigation at the phone company, some kind of interstate wire fraud case.

Your grandson worked for the phone company, so a couple of them came out when we made the tentative ID. Me, I think they’re just curious to see how us local yokels do a homicide investigation.”

That settled that, Browne thought with relief. Nothing to do with the arsenal explosion. They walked back through the trailer, although Browne felt weird walking over the area atop of jared’s body like that.

They asked him for some background information on himself, where he lived, and whether he would be seeing to the funeral arrangements. They informed him that, due to the suspicious circumstances, there would have to be an autopsy, after which the body would be released to him. They let him go after that, and he walked back out to his vehicle by himself. He was pretty sure that the two FBI agents watched him go.

He drove away and headed back to Blacksburg, watching his rearview mirror. Now that the propane truck was parked out at the truck stop, the clock was running. He had planned to leave late that night, but now he would have to make sure there was no one operating in his backfield, like maybe those feds, before he set out. After what had happened at the arsenal, he should be in the clear. If the Bureau would be occupied by anything in southwestern Virginia, it’d be with that explosion. He looked forward to watching it on the television news; he wanted to see what the hydrogen had done to a reinforced-concrete building like the power plant. It would give him a feel for what it was going to do to a certain mostly glass and steel office building in downtown Washington, D.C. He smiled in the darkness. He had few doubts on that score: It would absolutely, positively obliterate an office building.

At 10:30, Kreiss drove Jared’s phone repair van down Canton Street and turned at the block just before he would have reached Browne McGarand’s house. He had gone back out to Jared’s trailer at 9:30, hoping to find the cops gone, which they were. He knew he couldn’t operate in Browne’s neighborhood in a crawl suit, but he had kept Jared’s keys. He’d decided that if he could get his hands on that phone company repair van, he’d have some pretty effective cover in town. The cops had apparently towed Jared’s pickup truck away, but the repair van was still sitting there. The dogs were still not back, and the only signs of what had happened there was all that yellow tape fluttering in the semidarkness. He had watched the trailer for fifteen minutes to make sure no one was still there, and then

he’d gone in, after parking his own truck behind an abandoned house a half mile beyond Jared’s road. He had put his surveillance equipment, car phone, Jared’s .45, and Janet Carter’s pager into a bag and taken it with him in the van.

Kreiss was dressed in plain dark blue overalls, and he had Jared’s white plastic phone company helmet sitting on the seat next to him. He also had Jared’s Southern Bell ID pinned to the overalls, although the picture wasn’t even close. He might fool a civilian, but not a cop, so he would have to take some care as to where he parked the van. The vehicle smelled of cigarette smoke and the front seat was a trashy mess of fast-food wrappers, technical bulletins, repair-order manifests, and empty soft-drink cans. The back was a slightly more orderly mess of wire bins, parts shelves, opened boxes, coils of telephone wire, a pair of red traffic cones, and a variety of tools and tech manuals. He had Jared’s .45 auto in a pouch behind the seat, but still no shells. Sometimes an empty .45 was as good as a loaded one, though: People tended to make assumptions when it came to looking a .45 auto in the eye. He found the entrance to the alley that ran behind his target’s house, pulled in, came to the first telephone pole, and doused the main headlights.

Browne McGarand was almost ready to go. His pickup was in the garage, with the cap mounted on the bed to protect his tools and equipment. He had called the weekend number for a local funeral home and made arrangements for them to pick up Jared’s remains for cremation once the autopsy was completed. Then he’d called the detective who’d given him his card and left a voice-mail message that he would be out of town for a couple of days, that he was going down to Greensboro, North Carolina, to inform Jared’s younger brother face-to-face about what had happened.

He explained that the boy was mildly retarded and that the news would take some special handling. He expected to be back on Wednesday. Not asking them, just keeping them informed, everything perfectly routine and normal. That should keep them at bay if they decided they wanted to question him further.

He went out the back door to the garage and put the last bags into the passenger seat. He had everything he needed for the operation in Washington.

He hadn’t planned to leave on a weekend, but it wouldn’t matter at the target’s end, because any weekday morning would do for what he had planned. He went back into the house, turned out all the lights, and locked up. He had no dogs or other pets to worry about, and his

mailbox was big enough to let his bills pile up. He had actually considered burning the house, but in the end, he’d decided against it. If he succeeded at the target, they’d never be able to trace him to the propane truck, which might not even survive the explosion. If the bombing at Oklahoma City was any indication, they would eventually be able to trace the truck back to the town in West Virginia where Jared had heisted it a year ago, but there the trail would end. There was no physical evidence of his clandestine activities in the house, because he had never done anything illegal there.

He looked around the darkened house from the inner kitchen door. He had lived there for over thirty years, twenty-four of them with Holly, until the cancer took her. William’s room down the main hall, untouched since the disaster in Texas. Jared and Kenny’s room across the hall. While raising William, Browne had risen from ordinary chemical engineer to chief engineer of the Ramsey Arsenal. His life had gone as he’d planned it:

Hard work, a persevering attitude toward marriage, regular churchgoing, and a good wife had taken him to the number-two management position at the arsenal. And then it had begun to come apart: William getting that girl pregnant, their aborted marriage, Holly’s cancer, and then a major blow, when the government unexpectedly closed down the arsenal. Holly had worked for seven years at the arsenal in one of the mercury-recovery plants, and Browne was pretty sure that’s where her cancer had come from. There had been three other women who had died of cancer from that unit, but the government scientists all proclaimed that there was no possible connection. Once the plant shut down, the government didn’t want to discuss the problem anymore. They’d even cheated him out of part of his pension, and then, adding insult to injury, made him oversee putting the plant into mothballs in case the Army ever required it again.

He missed Holly as much as he missed William. His wife had been a strong, taciturn woman who never complained, even when the cancer rose in her. When he found out that Holly was going to be taken from him, he had consoled himself with the knowledge that he would still have his son and his grandsons, but then William had gone off to Waco. And always, behind most of his troubles, was the government. Unfeeling, devoid of conscience, overweening in its power over the lives of the individuals it smashed flat without a second glance. He might have saved William if it hadn’t been for everything else that happened, courtesy of the government. He had once been appalled at what those

sick boys had done in Oklahoma City, but now–now he could well understand the impetus to strike back. There was retribution due, by God.

He sighed and stepped out the back door, shutting it and locking it, knowing he’d probably never see the house again. It had all begun so well, and ended in pieces. Holly was dead’ Jared was dead, the arsenal was dead, and Kenny… well, Kenny had truly never lived and never would. He was a virtual ward of the state, working a menial job at the state mental hospital in Greensboro and living there as well in one of the supervised homes.

Browne almost wished he could go down there and tell Kenny that his brother was gone, but Kenny would only smile sadly, accepting this bit of news with the same equanimity as he would the fact that it had begun to rain outside.

He went to the garage. The pickup truck was pointed nose out, so he simply got in, started it up, and drove out into the street, turning right to get to Highway 460 and then make his way out to the interstate. His own life was over. Now he would see how well he could finish it, and the bastards who’d cremated his son.

Kreiss sprinted for the telephone repair van when he heard the truck’s engine start up in the garage. He had been twenty feet away from the back of the garage when McGarand had come out of the house and started up his truck. Once in the van, he blasted straight down the alley, knocking over two trash cans as he turned right and then right again and gunned it back the way he had come in on Canton Street. He ran a stop sign three blocks up. There was no sign of McGarand’s truck ahead, and he almost thought he’d lost him, when he saw the lights of a major traffic intersection a half a mile or so ahead. By the time he got to it, the light was still red and he saw McGarand’s F-250 stopped in the left-turn lane. The truck was sporting a cap over the bed, so this was probably not a trip to the grocery store. He slowed down dramatically to allow a few cars to get ahead of him into the left-turn lane, then closed it up in time to make the turn behind McGarand. He followed the pickup truck for eight miles, until it turned onto the hamburger-alley strip that signaled the approach of the 1-81 interchange. Traffic was heavy, but he was having no trouble following the pickup.

This was a complication he hadn’t planned on, and when the F-250 turned onto 1-81, he had a decision to make. Follow him? Or break it off and go back out to the arsenal to search some more for Lynn? But of

course, that wouldn’t work, not after that big explosion there this afternoon.

The place would be crawling with feds. He didn’t want to think about the possibility that Lynn might have been caught up in all that.

He’d seen a television news report when he got home, a film clip taken from an airplane or a helicopter in the late-afternoon sun, showing the bare concrete floors of what had been the power plant. Big bomb, that, he thought. Really big bomb. The surrounding buildings had all been damaged in some fashion, with the two process buildings nearest the power plant semi flattened He’d checked those buildings, all those buildings, and had found everything locked tight and no signs of recent entry.

Should I go back to the guy’s house? he wondered. The pickup was three cars ahead of him, its big taillights distinctive enough that he didn’t have to stay too close. The traffic out on 1-81 was heavy, as usual, with wall-to-wall semis jockeying for that vital extra hundred feet of progress down the congested roadway. Where the hell was McGarand going? And then turn signals—the pickup was getting off.

Kreiss slowed down, slipped between two semis, and then turned off, going as slowly as he could so as not to come right up on the pickup at the end of the ramp. He almost did that anyway, but McGarand’s vehicle turned right and then right again into the front parking lot of the big TA truck stop. Kreiss waited for as long as he could at the ramp, but then headlights flared behind him and he had to move. He went right, then into the truck-stop plaza, which was brightly lighted. He caught sight of McGarand’s truck going behind the main building, through the big rig fueling lanes, and disappearing out into the back parking lot, which was filled with dozens of semis idling in the smoky darkness. He pulled the repair van up to the auto-fuel lanes and turned out the lights. The lanes weren’t filled to the point that there were cars waiting, so he got out, locked it, and hurried around the corner of the restaurant and store building, dodging incoming vehicles and weary-looking drivers filing in and out of the building. The whole area was brightly illuminated by sodium vapor lights coming from several towers, and the air was filled with the smell of diesel exhaust from the trucks parked out behind the building.

He paused when he got to the back: There was no sign of the pickup truck.

Had McGarand spotted him and ditched him? He didn’t think so. So what was he doing back here among all the semis? He watched the occasional truck driver walking back out of the restaurant building, cradling a thermos of coffee or some carryout gut bomb from the choke and puke

inside. There were three women hanging around a set of phone booths over on the other side of the plaza, kids, really, standing out in their cutoff shorts and halter tops, eyeing the rigs as they rumbled back out through the plaza. AIDS victims in the making, he thought. But where had the pickup gone? He wasn’t thrilled with the thought of walking out into that dense pack of trucks out there, where the only lights were the running lights of the tractor-trailers. There was a high chain-link fence around the whole area, so that truck had to be out there somewhere. Doing what?

And then he squatted down behind a Dumpster by the back of the building as McGarand’s truck reappeared from between two semis in the farthest parking lane, lights out now, going slow and headed back into the main plaza area. The truck went right by the Dumpster, and Kreiss got a good look. Yes, the same guy who’d opened up on him at the power plant.

Which wasn’t there anymore. Courtesy of this guy? Had they been running a bomb factory in that power plant? An illegal bomb factory at an ammunition plant—what a concept. He’d told Carter that Foster and Bellhouser had been blowing smoke; maybe not.

He moved to the corner of the building as the pickup truck cruised out into the open area, did a careful 180, and pulled into a parking place right in front of the restaurant. He watched from around the corner as McGarand went into the restaurant, carrying a thermos, just like any other trucker. Just as soon as the bearded man had gone in, Kreiss hurried back to the telephone company van and checked the fuel gauge. Half-full.

He put Jared’s telephone-company credit card in, cranked up the fuel pump, and filled the tank, keeping an eye on the front door while trying to keep the van between him and the building. Would McGarand see the telephone repair van? Recognize it maybe? He finished fueling and re stowed the hose. There were cars waiting now, so he couldn’t stay there.

He got in, started up, and drove out toward the front area of the plaza, looking for a place to park where he wouldn’t stand out quite so obviously.

Then he saw an Appalachian Power truck parked all by itself in one corner of the plaza, and he drove over there, turned around, backed in, and shut down. He could see the main entrance door and McGarand’s pickup, while the larger truck masked his van. Then he waited.

Janet woke up at 11:00 P.M. and had a confused moment trying to remember where she was and why. The hospital was quiet, and her room was in semidarkness. Lights from the parking lot below illuminated the windows of the hospital building. She sat up carefully. She could

hear nurses talking quietly at the charge desk out in the hall. She hurt in a general sort of way, but her mind was alert. Her wrist was not as swollen, and she was able to breathe without nearly as much pain. She wondered what was going on with the arsenal case. She rolled over very carefully, found the phone, got an outside line, and put a call through to the Roanoke office.

The secretaries weren’t there, of course, but one of the agents in the fraud squad answered and told her everyone was still in the office trying to sort out the disaster over at the arsenal. There were a million questions coming down from both FBI and aTF headquarters in Washington, and everyone was pretty upset about the loss of Ken Whittaker. She told the agent that she was ready to escape from the boneyard and asked him if someone could come get her at the hospital in Blacksburg.

An hour and a half later, she carried into the federal building and went directly to Farnsworth’s office. His door was closed, but there was a group of agents, including Ben Keenan, Farnsworth’s number two, in the RAs conference room. The conference table was piled with papers, site diagrams, photos, teletype messages, and a dozen very used polystyrene coffee cups. They all stopped talking when they saw Janet, which is when she realized that she probably looked a mess.

“Janet, what are you doing here?” Keenan asked, his tone of voice belying his brusque question. Keenan was known for his people skills and was extremely well liked within the Roanoke office.

“Got tired of staring at the ceiling,” she said, coming in and clearing away some papers so she could sit down.

“And it not being my honeymoon and all.” This provoked some smiles as she sat down.

“Since I was there when it happened, I thought maybe I could help.”

Farnsworth’s door opened and the RA came out, accompanied by Marchand’s red-faced executive assistant. They stopped short when they saw Janet. Farnsworth looked like he hadn’t slept for a long time and his suit was a rumpled mess. Foster’s expression was flat. He didn’t make eye contact with anyone.

“Ransom didn’t make it,” the RA announced.

“Died an hour ago.

Never woke up.” He turned to Foster.

“That makes two agencies who are going to be mad at us now, aTF and the spooks.”

Foster nodded as he looked down at the floor. Then he said he needed to make some calls, stepped over into Keenan’s office, and shut the door.

There was a grim silence in the conference room, and then Farnsworth greeted Janet, asked how she felt, and asked her to come into his office.

He closed the door behind her and asked if she wanted some coffee. Her

brain did, but her stomach vetoed the idea. She was now beginning to think that leaving the hospital had not been her brightest idea. She sat down gingerly in one of the chairs while the RA poured what looked like used motor oil from a pitcher on his desk into a mug. The smell of the stale coffee confirmed her stomach’s opinion. He poured in a paper packet of sugar, which literally floated on top of the noxious-looking brew. He sat down heavily.

“Five years here as RA, never lost an agent,” he said quietly.

“Until today. Even if he wasn’t technically one of ours, this really sucks. Ken Whittaker was a good man. You know his wife, Katie?”

She shook her head.

“She’s devastated, of course. Kept saying, “So close, he was so close.”

Meaning close to retirement. This really sucks. And now Ransom. I liked him, too. Shit.”

“Plus the two security kids,” she said.

“I feel responsible. If I hadn’t gone out—” “No, no, that’s all wrong, Janet. You had every right to go out there, although I fault you for going alone. But there obviously was something going on at that place.”

“I guess so. But still… How’s Kreiss’s daughter?”

“She’s alive but in and out of a borderline coma. Took a head shot from flying debris. Damn wall nearly crushed her. She was saved by the fact that she was up by the front door. Hasn’t said anything beyond those few words when they pulled her out of that nitro building: Washington and hydrogen bomb. Intriguing combination, huh?”

She nodded distractedly.

“So, where do we stand?” she asked.

“What’s aTF found out?”

Farnsworth shook his head, then ran his fingers through his graying hair.

“Their people on the scene called out one of their own national response teams, after the nuke guys backed out. Even though the casualty count wasn’t that big, it was one hell of an explosion. The NRT is still there.”

“I’m not familiar with that,” she said. Her stomach growled and she realized she hadn’t eaten for a long time.

“It’s an aTF special team. An NRT has chemists, forensic experts like you, arson and bomb dogs, post blast and fire-origin experts, intel people, special vehicles and mobile labs, all that good shit.”

“The NEST people find anything radioactive?”

“Nope, just radon. I still can’t figure out what that was all about.

But nothing to indicate it was nuclear, although the bang sure seemed big enough.”

“And?” she prompted. She realized she probably sounded impertinent, but Farnsworth was too tired to notice.

“And they haven’t called it yet. Blast origin point in the power plant.

Eureka. But type of explosive? They can’t find it. Some nonstructural physical evidence scattered around the site, but almost every piece of it can be traced back to equipment that was probably installed inside the power plant. Boiler tubes, plant machinery, turbine parts. Otherwise, stone-cold mystery right now. They haven’t found even a trace of the security kid who went down there to unlock the place.”

Janet shifted in her chair and exhaled, causing Farnsworth to look more closely at her.

“You all right? How about a glass of water?”

She nodded and said she thought she needed something in her stomach.

He went out and came back with a cup of water from the jug cooler and a stale-looking doughnut.

“We sent some people in chem-suits down into that tunnel system and found a couple of things, the most interesting of which was evidence of somebody shooting a large-caliber weapon down there. That ring any bells?”

She shook her head, but not too hard. The doughnut helped, and she sipped the cold water.

“The fumes in the tunnels tested to residue of nitric acid. One of the tanks out behind the power plant appeared to be the source of that, although it was, like all the others, flattened.”

“No cars?”

“No cars,” he said with a fleeting smile.

“But the divers reported that the whole thing appears to dump to an even larger underground cavern system. They pulled a guy in there from the Army who used to be what they called a ‘plant rep’ when the civilian company operated the place. He confirmed that the tunnel was called the Ditch. It was used when something went wrong with a chemical batch and they had to dump it quick to prevent an explosion. Said where it went after going into the Ditch was something no one ever knew, or at least he didn’t know.”

“Wonderful,” she murmured.

“And what about Kreiss?”

“Well,” Farnsworth said, trying to get the sugar to dissolve in his coffee, “that’s getting interesting. Foster and Bellhouser may have something there. First of all, no one can locate Kreiss—at least we

can’t and the local law can’t. I don’t know if Foster and company have asked for more help from the Agency. That may be hard after losing Ransom.”

“Might he have been there—when that place blew up?”

“Willson’s troops talked to some of Kreiss’s neighbors, of sorts. Bunch of hillbillies living down the road from Kreiss’s cabin. They weren’t exactly forthcoming, but indications are they’d seen Kreiss alive and well late this past afternoon, which was after the blast. But that’s all they would say.”

“And Kreiss is a suspect in the jared McGarand homicide?”

“Yes and no. You’ll remember what Ransom told you about putting bugs on Kreiss’s vehicle? How he got all but one off, and then Ransom finds that one at that McGarand guy’s trailer, where McGarand got dead?”

She nodded. The doughnut felt like it might be changing sides. She drank some more water and tried to ignore the queasy feeling in her stomach. It was hurting to breathe again.

“Local law hasn’t been told anything about that, or Kreiss. I sent a couple of our people to the scene after seeing Ransom’s report. Told the cops that it might, emphasis on might, relate to a case we’re working on telephone company fraud. Our guys weren’t fully briefed on the Kreiss angle, either. I simply told them to go see what the local cops came up with on this possible homicide and report back.”

“And—?”

“And the locals are definitely calling it homicide, but the physical evidence points all over the map. Jared McGarand’s wallet and keys seem to be missing, and there was evidence that someone had been into his phones, although he himself was a phone repairman, so that might not mean anything. There’s some unknown substance they recovered from the front steps that they were really interested in, because there was some more of it on the body, which for some unknown reason seemed to have been hosed down. But that’s not as important as what we think we’ve found out.”

“Foster still trying to tie this bomb-cell conspiracy theory to Kreiss?”

Farnsworth nodded and leaned forward.

“This is close-hold, for now anyway. I’m telling you because you and Kreiss know each other, at least superficially. We’ve tied Kreiss to the arsenal and to Jared McGarand.

Believe it or not, Foster apparently has a line of some sort into the aTF’s national response team. The NRT people found evidence of

vehicles being parked near the rail line entrance to the arsenal, and that the gates at the rail line were not in fact locked, which they should have been. They also found an electric-eye counter mounted on the interior rail gate. So Foster directed us to ask the local cops to see if there was any evidence that jared McGarand’s truck had been to the arsenal, and damned if they didn’t get a match in samples of mud off jared’s pickup truck. From that parking area outside the rail gates.”

“That quick?”

“The NRT has a mobile lab.”

She was confused.

“Are you saying Jared was a bomb maker? And what’s that got to do with Kreiss?”

“No, all I’m saying is that jared has been going into the arsenal. Why, we don’t know. But Foster thinks, based on what you’ve told us, that Kreiss may have stumbled into Jared or his truck at the arsenal, then followed Jared home to question him about his missing daughter. This happens, as best we can tell, on Friday night. Jared ends up dead, and Kreiss ends up back at the arsenal, bailing you out of the tunnel. Why did he go back? Did Jared reveal something? And then, when we go into the arsenal to see what the hell’s going on, a very big bomb is waiting for us. For you, maybe.”

“Or for Kreiss.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe for Kreiss. And then, who should we recover but Kreiss’s daughter, who’s babbling about H-bombs and Washington.”

“But—” “Wait. Jared’s grandfather shows up at the homicide scene today. His name is Browne McGarand. He id’s the body, agrees with the cops that something is fishy in Denmark, tells them Jared liked to live dangerously with married women, then leaves. Then later, he calls the cops, says he’s leaving town, purportedly to break the bad news to Jared’s brother, his other grandson, who’s down in Greensboro, North Carolina. Cops try to get back to him, go by the house, but he’s already gone. They’ve asked the state cops to see if they can spot him out on the interstate and confirm he’s headed for Greensboro. In the meantime, it turns out the chief of d’s on the sheriff’s force knows this guy Browne. That’s Browne spelled with an e, by the way. And based on what he says, Foster now thinks his theory was right and that this guy might be the second half of the bomb team.”

“Jared’s grandfather?”

“Because it turns out that the grandfather is a retired chemical engineer, whose entire career just happened to be spent with the

company that ran Ramsey Arsenal for the Army. He was the chief chemical engineer there when it closed.”

“Holy shit.”

“It gets better. You know Mike Hanson, our own arson and bomb guy?

He was one of the people I sent out to jared’s trailer. He comes back, runs the name McGarand through the NCIC just for the hell of it. There are several McGarands, but only one hit that ties to this area: There was a William McGarand, formerly of Blacksburg, Virginia, who had a local rap sheet of minor offenses and was listed as having ties to an antigovernment, quasi-militia group called the Black Hats. They’re based up in the mountains west of here in Bluefield; combination Aryan Nation, moonshine runners, and marijuana farmers who like to take pot shots at revenuers-that’s aTF these days. Jared McGarand is also listed as being involved with them. But that wasn’t the kicker.”

“Let me guess: William’s related to Browne McGarand.”

“Yes, he is—or was—Browne’s only son. But more importantly, he was one of the people killed at Mount Carmel.”

“Mount what?”

“Mount Carmel, otherwise referred to in these hallowed halls and in the media as the Waco disaster. William was Browne’s son; Jared was William’s son. William’s wife ran off with some guy, and then William took off, leaving their two kids, Jared and the brother, to be raised by their grandfather.”

“Browne,” Janet said. Her stomach was forgotten.

“God, if there’s a Waco connection, then maybe the theory of a bomb cell in southwest Virginia wasn’t just some wash job to cover up for losing control of Kreiss.”

“Hell, Janet, I don’t know. My guess? It was a smoke screen that just happened to be true. But now we’ve had a bomb, a big fucking bomb, and we have an aTF agent dead, and an Agency operative dead, not to mention two civilians, and now this Jared McGarand.”

“So what happens now?”

“The director is into this one, according to the SAC in Richmond. And because the Justice Department, deputy AG Bill Garrette, and Edwin Kreiss are involved, the director is ordering shields up.”

“He remembers the Kreiss affair?”

“Vividly. Plus, there’s been no love lost between Justice and the Bureau for the past four years. Now Kreiss is missing. Foster says there’s a fair chance that he’s hunting down Browne McGarand, not because of any bomb plot, but because he’s still searching for his daughter.”

“Oh God, that’s right: Kreiss doesn’t know we recovered his daughter.”

“Didn’t you tell me you gave Kreiss your pager?”

Janet blinked.

“Yes, I did.”

“I want to activate that pager, and keep calling it until Kreiss answers.

We’d really like to know where the hell he is and what he’s doing, but more importantly, I want you to tell him something.”

From the expression on his face, she thought she knew what was coming next.

“This is coming from the deputy AG at Main Justice, okay? And I don’t much like it. But you are instructed to tell Kreiss that his daughter was there in the arsenal—but that she was killed in the bomb blast. Second, you tell him that this guy Browne McGarand was responsible for abducting her and getting her killed. We’ll even give him McGarand’s vehicle description.”

“Sweet Jesus, boss,” she whispered.

“You don’t mean it!”

“Look, Janet, if there’s even an outside chance that some maniac is loose with a hydrogen bomb and headed for Washington? You bet your ass I mean it. According to Foster and his pals at Justice, Kreiss will react by hunting this McGarand bastard down and boiling him in oil.”

“But what the hell is the Bureau doing turning loose a—what is Kreiss anyway? A retired bounty hunter? I thought we wanted to tie these bomb people to the antigovernment groups. You know, make a case in court and all that good stuff? With evidence, even?”

“The deputy AG has apparently spoken to the Secretary of the Treasury.

aTF headquarters has worked up an official spin on the explosion.

They’re reporting that it was an accident—a buildup of gases over the years in the industrial complex. Big bang, but end of story. Public and media interest goes south. Privately, of course, they’re still looking.”

“Because of the word hydrogen?”

“Right. That fact has spun official Washington up pretty good, especially when aTF admits it can’t identify what kind of explosive did the deed. The Justice Department’s internal response was pretty simple: Find this guy and stop him. Forget building a case. Essentially, the Bureau and the aTF are gearing up to defend the capital, but we’re the only ones besides the Agency who know about Kreiss.”

“Who is a professional loose cannon!”

“But he’s no longer our loose cannon, Janet. He’s now the Justice Department’s loose cannon. Which is why the director, while officially ignorant about Kreiss, is going along with this. He’s saying, Let him run.

Assuming McGarand is loose with a bomb, if Kreiss tracks down McGarand and does something off the wall, Washington’s immediate problem is solved. If it later turns to shit, the director will state that Kreiss was not our asset.”

“Kreiss will be Bill Garrette’s asset,” Janet said wonderingly. She blinked again. This sounded like bureaucratic hubris on a grand scale.

“I’ve got to tell you,” she said, “when Kreiss finds out you lied about his daughter, you personally may move to the top of his hunting list.”

“That’s where the Agency will come in, Janet,” the RA said.

“Bellhouser told Foster that Deputy AG Garrette has made some arrangements with the Agency, which probably knows Kreiss even better than we do. While we’re all hunting the bombers, they’re going to be hunting Kreiss.”

He paused to let her absorb the import of what he was saying. Jesus, she thought, this was more than she wanted to know. Kreiss had grabbed a real tar baby here, and Garrette and company were now going to use this bombing hairball to do what they had always wanted to do.

Farnsworth got up and paced around his office for a minute.

“What we’re going to tell Kreiss may not be that far off the mark, by the way,” he said.

“The docs aren’t overly optimistic about the girl’s probability of survival anyway.”

“Then it’s doubly cruel to tell Kreiss she’s already dead,” she said.

“Maybe so. But the urgent mission right now is to prevent a replay of what happened at the arsenal. That building was a power plant: reinforced concrete with no windows. It was just about vaporized, and the aTF guys who’ve seen it are genuinely worried, which is scaring Washington.

Now think federal office building in downtown D.C. You were there, Janet. Ken Whittaker was there, too.”

Janet had a “But, sir—” all ready to go until Farnsworth mentioned Whittaker. If her bosses were putting the picture together correctly, the clan McGarand had blood on their hands and more in their eye. Browne McGarand had lost a son at Waco. The son and the grandson had ties to a known quasi-militia group in West Virginia. Browne and Jared had apparently kidnapped Kreiss’s daughter and done God knew what to the other kids. Now Kreiss’s daughter said there was a threat to Washington.

But when? And from whom, exactly?

“I’ll tell you what: Give me that pager number,” Farnsworth said.

“And then you go home. I’ll have someone activate the pager once I know you’re home. If he calls in, we’ll call-forward it to you at home.”

She stared down at the floor. This was wrong. It smelled of the old “operational necessity” ploy. Farnsworth came over and put his hand on her shoulder.

“I know you disapprove of this, Janet, but your voice is the one he knows.”

She nodded, trying to think of a way to get out of this, but her brain wasn’t working all that well. The best hope she had was that Kreiss had pitched the pager into the New River. Her fatigue must have shown, because Farnsworth called in one of the agents outside and asked him to drive her home.

After thirty minutes, Kreiss saw McGarand come out of the restaurant, still carrying his thermos. He got in his truck, backed out, but then he drove diagonally across the plaza, toward a Best Western motel that was right next door. Their parking lot was contiguous to the plaza, and about the time Kreiss was starting up the van, McGarand parked right on the edge of the motel’s lot and got out. He looked around for a moment, then walked back toward the restaurant. Halfway there, he cut diagonally behind the main building and strode purposefully toward the truck park in the back. Kreiss shut down the van and got out to follow. As he did, the doors on the power company truck next to the van opened and two very large men got out. They were wearing green trousers, over which hung expansive Tshirts. Each had on a ball cap that had the TA logo on the front. Both of them carried large black Maglites. One of them had the steroid-enhanced build of a professional weight lifter; the other one was a whale who sported an enormous beer gut, but he had the upper body, shoulders, and arms to match.

“Excuse me, sir,” the weight lifter said.

“We’re TA security, and we’d like you to come with us into the office.” His voice was surprisingly high and no match for his body, but he made sure Kreiss saw him reach behind his back and pat the lump under his T-shirt where the gun was. The second one was already moving behind Kreiss in case he decided to run.

From their expressions, it looked like they almost wished he would.

“What’s the problem?” he asked, trying to see if McGarand was still visible.

“The problem is you’ve been hanging around here, acting in a suspicious manner, that’s the problem, sir. Now let’s go.”

They walked with Kreiss in between them, close, but not too close. He thought fast. If they got him inside, he’d miss McGarand leaving. He stopped, but the one on his right quietly folded a massive paw around

his upper right arm and he was walking again, conscious of the stares from two truckers coming out of the main door. They had to wait in the middle of the plaza while a big semi roared by them in second gear, followed closely by a propane truck. They escorted him down a hall between the restaurant and the shop, past the men’s room and the showers, and into a small office at the back of the building. There, the whale patted him down and then indicated he should sit in a straight-backed chair directly in front of the desk. Kreiss chose to remain standing just to the left of the chair.

The weight lifter sat down behind the desk, while the fat man kicked the door shut and then stood close behind Kreiss.

“So: what the fuck you up to here, bud?” the weight lifter asked.

“You pull in, park at the gas pump, walk out back, come back, gas your van, then park it over next to our truck—not your smartest move, now, was it?—and you sit there and wait.”

Kreiss said nothing. Then the weight lifter picked up a Polaroid camera from the desk and shot it off in Kreiss’s face. While waiting for the photo to develop, he explained to Kreiss that unless he could explain what he was doing here, they’d call the state cops and have him arrested for trespassing.

“Actually,” said the whale from behind him, “we’ll tell ‘em that we caught you wearing panties and waggling your wienie through that little hole in the partition between the stalls in the men’s room.” Kreiss felt the man’s foot rubbing suggestively up the inside of his leg.

“They’ll take you over to the Roanoke city jail, and, hell, you know cops, they’ll tell everybody they see.”

“See, we’ve got this hijacking problem out here in the truck stops,” the weight lifter said.

“And you were acting a whole lot like a lookout, okay?”

“I still think he was just cruisin’,” the whale said, patting him on the ass now and sniggering.

“I was looking for something,” Kreiss said. He reached into the upper pocket of his coveralls and withdrew a retinal-disrupter cube. He felt the whale behind him shift when he reached up into his pocket but then relax when all he produced was something that looked like a fat flashbulb cube.

“One of these,” Kreiss said, offering it to the weight lifter and closing his eyes tightly. As the man reached for it, Kreiss fired it into his face. The big man grunted and then just sat there, stunned, as Kreiss turned, went down on one knee, grabbed the chair by its legs, whirled around, and hit the fat man behind him across both lower legs. The whale grunted and bent forward, giving Kreiss, still crouching low,

the opening he needed to drive his fist into the man’s fleshy throat. The man’s eyes bulged and he started to gag, then sank down to his knees, both hands at his throat, his face already turning red. Kreiss checked on the man behind the desk, but he was still just sitting there, his pupils the size of BBs. The phone rang at that moment, but Kreiss ignored it and went out the door. There was a fire exit to his right, which he took. The door let him out into the back parking lot, which was still wall-to-wall semis. There was no sign of McGarand. He swore and walked rapidly to the van. The cube flash would keep the big man immobilized for another few minutes, and the whale—well, the whale might wish he had a blowhole about now.

He got to the van, jumped in, and took off across the plaza. When he got to the exit, he paused. He looked back and saw McGarand’s truck still parked right where he’d left it. He didn’t know what to do, other than to get the hell out of there. But not too far, he thought—somehow he had to get back on McGarand’s tail. There’d be state cops there pretty quick, and the security people had seen him in a phone company van. Then a cold wave washed over him—he’d forgotten the Polaroid: They had his racking picture! He turned and drove the van into the motel’s parking lot and took it all the way behind the second building of the complex. What he needed now was another vehicle. He could steal one possibly, but it wasn’t likely that people pulling into a motel were going to leave their keys in their cars. Then he remembered McGarand’s truck. A pickup truck.

Every pickup driver he’d ever met always stashed a spare key somewhere outside the truck.

He walked as casually as he could back through the motel complex, staying away from the checkin lobby and keeping an eye on the big truck plaza next door for cop cars. He got to McGarand’s truck, knelt down on the side that faced the plaza, and began feeling along the frame for a magnetic key box. He had reached the tail end of the truck when the first emergency vehicle came down the ramp from the interstate, lights and siren going, and wheeled into the plaza. It wasn’t a cop car, but an ambulance.

Good, he thought—a little more time to look. He searched all along the bumper and frame on the back of the truck, then up the left side. May be out of luck here, he thought. The ambulance had pulled up in front of the building and the attendants were hurrying in. He fingered the exhaust pipe, which was where he often put his key. Nothing. Cops here any minute now, he thought, and went back to the rear bumper.

There was a Reese hitch welded to the back frame, and the receiver had a ball tang inserted and locked with a pin. He pulled the pin,

extracted the tang, and felt inside the receiver. Nothing but some grease on his hand.

He was putting the tang back into the square hole when he saw the wad of duct tape on the very end of the tang. Bingo.

He peeled the key out of the tape and reinserted the tang just as more blue strobe lights lit up the plaza. He looked over his shoulder and saw a state police cruiser bristling with Lo-Jack antennas pull into the truck stop. Kreiss let himself into the truck, started it up, and quickly drove it over to the motel and behind the front buildings to where the phone company van was parked. He grabbed his bag and the gun out of the van and threw them into McGarand’s truck, locked the van with the keys inside, and then got into the truck.

Now what? he thought. No—now where? Where the hell was McGarand? He wanted to go cruise that back parking lot next door, but that was out of the question now, and besides, there was something sticking in his mind. Very conscious of the commotion next door, he closed his eyes and tried to reconstruct what he had seen McGarand do. Come out of the building, carrying a coffee thermos, move his truck to no man-land between the motel and the truck stop, and then walk back out to the parking lot out back, where the big rigs were. Then what? The security cops had grabbed him up, and they had walked across the parking lot to the office. No, wait—they had stopped for a truck. No, two trucks. A big semi and a propane truck. A. propane truck! Son of a bitch, it had been that green-and-white tanker truck he’d seen in the power plant maintenance bay!

He started up the pickup and drove out of the motel lot and back up toward the interchange. There was a second cop car in the plaza now.

Which way? McGarand had been going south, so south it was. He pulled onto 1-81 and merged quickly. The pulsing blue lights were visible in his mirror for almost a mile beyond the interchange. He put it up to just under eighty; McGarand had a pretty good head start. Then he heard Janet Carter’s beeper start to chirp in his equipment bag.

Janet awoke to the sound of her phone ringing. She sat up and groaned out loud. Every muscle in her body protested the sudden move. She opened her eyes and tried to focus on the clock. It looked like two something, but her eyes weren’t working. Neither was her brain. The phone kept ringing, so she sat up straighter, cleared her throat, and answered.

“Janet, this is Ted Farnsworth. I’m sorry to be rousting you out like this.”

“That’s okay, boss,” she said, clearing her throat again.

“What’s happened?”

“We think we got an answer to the pager, but it’s a mobile and the signal died away. We’ve set up a conference call-forward tie between your line and the number I sent to the pager. Assuming he calls back, it will come in direct to you, but we’ll be listening. The question of the hour is, Where is he and what’s he doing? And then—” “And then you still want me to tell him his daughter died in that explosion?”

Farnsworth hesitated, then said, “That’s affirmative. And that this Browne McGarand guy was responsible for that explosion. McGarand’s driving a ‘98 Ford F-Two fifty south on I-Eighty-one toward Greensboro;

in fact, we’ve just had a sighting report on the vehicle from the state cops.”

She said nothing for a moment.

“Janet,” Farnsworth began, but then she cut him off.

“If McGarand’s driving south on I-Eighty-one, then he certainly isn’t going to Washington with a bomb,” she said.

“So why are we doing this to Kreiss? Why not have the state cops pick up McGarand and bring him in for questioning?”

“Because we have no grounds for a warrant, and the state cops won’t arrest him unless we produce a federal warrant. I already thought of that.”

“But still, if he’s going south—” “He may very well be going south because he knows we’re onto him.

He goes south in plain view while members of his cell take a big bomb to D.C.”

Janet didn’t know what to say.

“Janet,” Farnsworth said.

“You’re the only voice in our office Kreiss will listen to. He can find out what the rest of us can’t—whether or not there is a real threat to Washington.”

“You’re assuming Kreiss will give a shit about a bomb threat to Washington.

Hell, if this guy hadn’t kidnapped his daughter, he’d probably help the guy drive. I think he’ll just hunt down McGarand and do whatever he does to him. And then we won’t know anything.”

It was Farnsworth’s turn to stop talking.

“Look, boss,” she said.

“Telling Kreiss his daughter is dead is bullshit.

Why not tell the truth here? Tell Kreiss we’ve recovered his daughter, that she’s alive but comatose over there in Blacksburg. Let him go there, see her, satisfy himself that she’s at least safe, and then tell him about the McGarands.”

Farnsworth didn’t say anything.

“I still say, if that guy is headed south, there’s no immediate threat. Put surveillance on him, track him, maybe even let him see the tail. Personally, I think Kreiss might play ball, as long as we tell him the truth. The converse is not true: You do not want Edwin Kreiss coming to your house one night after you’ve lied to him about a thing like this. And it would be a really cruel lie, wouldn’t it, especially if she does die and he never gets a chance to see her?”

Farnsworth still didn’t say anything.

“Let me tell him what the hell is going on. I’ll even go meet him at the hospital. These bureaucratic games with the Agency, aTF, those executive lizards from Justice—who knows what that’s all about? The kid in the hospital is real. And she’s somebody’s daughter.”

“Shit,” Farnsworth said.

“I’ve been up too long. This whole thing. Ken Whittaker was a good friend—” “Sir, you don’t have to tell Foster and company anything. Let me tell Kreiss the truth, let him see his daughter, and then let’s work this bomb problem. By the book this time. Our book, not these other assholes’ book.”

“Okay, Janet,” Farnsworth said with a sigh.

“You’re probably right. I guess if this McGarand’s headed into North Carolina, it gives us some time to straighten this thing out. Okay. We’ll patch the call in as soon as Kreiss tries again.”

Janet felt a surge of victory.

“I’ll be waiting,” she said.

Kreiss stood by his daughter’s hospital bed and tried to control himself.

She looks so thin, he thought. Lynn was an athlete and normally radiated good health and fitness. Now her face was gaunt and slightly jaundiced.

He held her hand under the blanket and just watched her breathe.

She wasn’t on a ventilator, but there was an IV drip going into her left wrist. Her face was bruised, and her normally vibrant hair lay limp on her head like a skullcap. A bank of machines kept score on her vital signs above the bed. Coma, the docs said. As opposed to profound vegetative state. The “good” kind of coma—if there was such a thing—where a badly

abused body checks out for awhile to work on healing itself without having to deal with the outside world. The room lighting was subdued and there was a quiet music stream coming from somewhere.

“She was conscious at the explosion site?” he asked.

“I didn’t see her,” Janet said.

“I was being scraped off the concrete myself.” Kreiss eyed her, probably noticing for the first time her own puffy face and stiff posture.

“Apparently, she spoke to whoever found her. They got ‘hydrogen bomb’ and “Washington’ out other, but that was all.”

“Hydrogen bomb and Washington. Sounds good to me. We’re at just about the right distance, down here in Blacksburg, and the prevailing winds are on our side.”

“Washington is taking a somewhat different view,” she said.

“But this whole bomb theory is pretty screwed up. One moment, we’re all running around at top end because we think some bad guys are on the way, as we speak, to bring an H-bomb to Fun City. The next, we’re standing down in the regroup mode. The Bureau is fucking around with the aTF, and the Justice Department is fucking around with the Bureau, and ABC is tucking around with DEF. You know.”

Kreiss nodded.

“Palace games,” he muttered. He let go of Lynn’s hand and smoothed the hair on her forehead.

“Our divorce was unnecessary,” he said finally.

“Helen got scared of what I was doing while I was with the Agency. She knew more than she should have, and she just wanted out. I could understand that. Accept it, even. But I never wanted to lose Lynn.”

“Did your wife poison the well? Set Lynn against you?”

“Not deliberately, no,” he said.

“This wasn’t a spiteful separation, adultery, or anything like that. Which made it almost worse, because Helen was so reasonable. She just wanted away from me and what I was doing.

Like most men, I thought the career, what I was doing, the things I was learning, were terribly important. I let her go with my pride intact.”

“Mine was different,” she said, surprising herself.

“My husband turned out to be a no-load. He was sort of a career ectopic pregnancy—he was never going to produce anything, but he was determined to stay in the general area of the academic womb. I think that’s one of the reasons I joined the Bureau about then; I wanted to be around real men.”

‘“Real men,”” Kreiss said.

“Inspector Erskine, where are you?”

They both smiled.

“Lynn had to believe that everything her mother was afraid of was true,” he said, smoothing her hair again.

“Kids can sense bullshit, and Helen was genuinely afraid.”

“And you and Lynn were reconciled after the plane crash?”

“Just before, actually.” He told her about Lynn’s unexpected visitation.

“And then this mess.” He sighed.

“You said that the McGarands were probably responsible for the bomb. And that they had been holding Lynn the whole time? At the arsenal?”

Janet suggested they go outside. He seemed reluctant to leave his daughter, but there was obviously nothing he could do for her that wasn’t already being done. He followed Janet down the hall, past the I.C.U nurses’ station. Janet smiled at the nurses and the lone orderly, but they were all staring at Kreiss, whose gaunt face and hulking shape stood out among all the white-coated hospital personnel. He looked as out of place among all the gleaming cleanliness and order of the I.C.U as a bear fresh out of the woods. It had taken a lot of FBI badge waving and friendly persuasion to get them to let Kreiss in to see his daughter. Kreiss had called back fifteen minutes after she had persuaded Farnsworth to stop and regroup, and she had told him immediately that they had found Lynn, that she was alive and in the Montgomery County Hospital. She had asked him where he was, but he wouldn’t tell her. Then she had suggested that she meet him at the hospital, and he had said, “one hour,” and hung up.

Farnsworth had been listening. He called her back immediately to say he would send along some backup, just until they knew what they were really dealing with. She had asked that they stay well out of sight, because she was going to be on thin ice when Kreiss showed up. The RA agreed and they set up a surveillance support zone outside the hospital. She would park her car somewhere where it was clearly visible in the lot. The backup agents would set up around that car in two unmarked vehicles.

There was no time to equip her with a portable radio, so Farnsworth said that if Kreiss put her under duress in the car, she was to do something with lights. When she went into the hospital with him, there would be two agents inside in hospital orderly clothes who would keep her in sight at all times. Her signal that everything was all right would be to open her purse and touch up her makeup.

They reached the main elevator bank and waited for a down car. An orderly carrying a bag of what looked like bed linens joined them at the door. They got in and punched the ground-floor button. The orderly punched the basement button. She had told Kreiss the bare outlines of the McGarands’ suspected involvement in the explosion at the arsenal, but he had offered no response to that. He had wanted to see his daughter;

any discussion of the rest of it could wait.

No one spoke until they got to the lobby and the door opened. Janet

stepped out and Kreiss followed, turning at the last minute to tell the orderly that his shoulder rig was showing. As the elevator doors began closing in front of the surprised agent, Janet made an “I’m sorry about that” face, but Kreiss was already headed for the front door and the parking lot. She caught up with him when he stopped under the marquee at the entrance and looked around at the nearly empty parking lot.

“I have things to do,” he said as he scanned the lot.

“You have backup out there?”

“Of course,” she said.

“I don’t want them following me,” he said.

“They’re out there to protect me,” she said.

“Not to follow you.”

“That something you know, Special Agent?” he asked, looking directly at her for the first time that evening. Actually, it’s this morning, she realized.

His eyes were rimmed with fatigue, but there was a fierce determination back there, unfinished business.

“No,” she said.

“My boss sent them. They may have other orders.”

“I don’t want that,” he said, looking around again.

“What did you say about standing down? Earlier, up there in Lynn’s room.”

“Mr. Kreiss, I need to fill you in on a lot of things. Why don’t we go back inside and let me tell you—” “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said impatiently.

“I don’t want a war with the Bureau. I do want to leave here without having to take evasive measures. You know what a claymore mine is?”

She had been shown a claymore during the training for new agents at Quantico.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“But—” “My idea of evasive measures is to strap a couple of claymores to the tailgate of my pickup truck and then get someone to chase me in a car.

Get the picture?”

She didn’t know what to say.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said again.

“I’ll tell you something vitally important about your bomb plot, and you make sure no one follows me.

Deal?”

She looked around at the parking lot. There were islands of trees between the lanes for parking, and about thirty vehicles scattered around the lot, which sloped gently down toward the main hospital building. Tall light standards illuminated the entire lot. Her car was visible, but she had no idea where the other agents were. Kreiss was waiting, staring at her.

“All right, but there’s a lot you don’t know. As in, they’ve tied you to one jared McGarand, for instance?”

He stared at her for a moment but then dismissed with a shrug what she had just said.

“Give them the all-clear signal, and then I’m going back into the hospital. Tell them I’ve gone back upstairs. I’ll take it from there.”

She still hesitated.

“Look,” he said, “I’m not armed. And like I said, I don’t want trouble with the Bureau, or with you. I’m willing to bet that your superiors weren’t going to tell me that Lynn was here, alive. I suspect that you convinced them otherwise. So I owe you. Again. Give them the signal.” His eyes were boring into hers with a commanding force. She found herself complying, opening her purse, taking out a compact, opening it so that the round mirror caught the marquee light and reflected it out into the parking lot. She pretended to touch up her nonexistent makeup.

Kreiss nodded and relaxed fractionally.

“Okay,” he said.

“Here’s my half. You said your people were all spun up about the possibility of a bomb going to Washington but that now they’re standing down, right?”

She nodded, trying to think of a way to keep him here, to get control of the situation. But this was just like their other meeting, the one at Donaldson-Brown.

“Well, here’s the thing,” he said.

“It was me driving McGarand’s truck south on I-Eighty-one, not McGarand. I believe McGarand’s gone north.” Then, before she had a chance to ask any questions, he spun on his heel and went back into the hospital. She watched him go straight back down the main hallway, until he disappeared through some double doors. She turned and hurried out to her car, where her cell phone was.

What was Kreiss trying to tell them? Farnsworth had said the state police tracked McGarand going to North Carolina.

She stopped, seeing it now. Not McGarand—McGarand’s vehicle.

Which, for some unknown reason, Kreiss had been driving. She waved her arms at the parked cars, calling in the backup agents to converge on her car. Lights came on in the parking lot as she got to the car and two Bureau vehicles slid into place on either side with a soft screech of tires.

Ben Keenan got out of one of them, pulling out his portable radio.

“Where’s Kreiss?” he asked.

“He said he was going back in to be with his daughter,” she said.

“But we need—” Keenan ignored her, and he ordered the agents standing around them to go into the hospital and apprehend Kreiss. Then he got on his portable radio and contacted the agents disguised as orderlies inside the building.

They reported that they had not seen Kreiss return to the I.C.U.

“Shit!” Keenan exclaimed. He ordered a search of the hospital building, and then he turned to Janet.

“Do you know what he’s driving? The state cops want him now, for a felony assault out at a local truck stop.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” she said.

“Kreiss was driving McGarand’s truck.”

“Wonderful. So what is it? A Ford? A Chevy? What?” And then, with a horrified look, he understood.