4

On Friday morning, Janet Carter called Eve Holloway at FBI headquarters.

Eve worked in the Fingerprint Division and had been Janet’s racquetball partner before Janet’s transfer to the Roanoke office. Janet explained that she wanted to find out about a retired senior agent named Edwin Kreiss.

“Is this official?” Eve asked.

“Yes, actually, although we’re moving the case to MP. It’s a disappearance case—three college kids, but, unfortunately, no evidence of a criminal act. Kreiss retired from the Bureau four, maybe five years ago. He’s the father of one of the missing kids, and I have a feeling he knows something he’s not telling us.”

“Or working it off-line, maybe?” Eve asked. Eve’s husband was a senior supervisory agent in the Professional Standards and Inspection Division.

She knew a thing or two.

“Entirely possible. Supposedly, he worked in FCI, but he crashed and burned, and then he was sent home.”

Eve was silent for a moment.

“Kreiss,” she said slowly.

“I know that name. Hey, there was a Helen Kreiss who worked in the lab. That’s right—she was an electron mis—misc—shit, I can’t pronounce it. She ran the electron-microscope facility. Microscopist? Anyway, she and her second husband were killed in that plane crash in the Bay, remember?”

Janet remembered Talbot mentioning a crash to Kreiss.

“She worked for us? In the Bureau?”

“Yeah. I worked a child murder case with her, when she was Helen Kreiss. I remember she was getting a divorce at the time. This was ‘88, ‘89 time frame. I think she later married an agent who worked Organized Crime. Nice lady. I remember the plane crash because we lost two people.

It was late ‘94, thereabouts. But she wasn’t called Kreiss anymore, of course. I’m thinking it was Morgan?”

“Right! Yes, I knew her. Helen Morgan. She worked some taskings for me when I was working in Materials and Devices. I’d been there-what?—just under two years, I think. So she was Kreiss’s ex?”

“Yep. I think she had a medical degree.”

 

“I would have liked to talk to her,” Janet said.

“You said she was getting the divorce when you worked that case together. She ever talk about it?”

“Not really. She seemed more sad than mad. There was one child involved. That must be your misser. But listen, I think she said she had talked to one of our in-house shrinks. Maybe there’s a file?”

Janet thanked her and then called the Administrative Services Division at headquarters. An office supervisor listened to her question and promised that someone from Employee Counseling would get back to her.

Then Janet went to the morning staff meeting.

At 2:30 that afternoon, the RA of the Roanoke office, Ted Farnsworth, called Janet into his office. The nearest full-scale FBI field office was in Richmond. The Roanoke office was subordinate to the larger Richmond office, and, as such, its boss was not called special agent in charge, but, rather, Resident Agent. Farnsworth was a senior supervisory agent who was nearing retirement age. He was generally a kind and not very excitable boss, but, at the moment, his New England accent was audible, which meant that he was perturbed.

“Got a call this afternoon from a Dr. Karsten Goldberg, number-two shrink in the headquarters Counseling Division. Says they received a call from this office concerning a Bureau employee, since deceased, named Helen Kreiss Morgan? I thought this missing kid case had been sent up to MP?”

“It has,” Janet said.

“Or it will be, as of Monday. I think Larry Talbot is still finishing up the paperwork.” She then related the incident involving Barry dark, and her suspicions that Edwin Kreiss might be going solo in the search for his daughter.

Farnsworth cupped his chin with his left hand and frowned.

“And you’re looking for some background on this former special agent, Edwin Kreiss.”

“Yes, sir. His ex-wife worked in the lab in Washington. She was killed in that plane crash in the Bay in late 1994. A contact at headquarters told me she’d been to the counselors during her divorce proceedings. I was hoping—” “Close that door,” Farnsworth said, indicating his office door. Janet was surprised, but she did as he’d asked. In today’s supercharged sexual harassment atmosphere, it was a rare male supervisor indeed who would conduct a conversation with a female employee behind a closed door. He had her attention. She sat back down.

“Now look,” Farnsworth said.

 

“What I’m going to tell you is not for general dissemination, despite what you might have heard from Larry. I hesitate even to go into this, because you’re not supposed to be working this case anymore.”

“Yes, sir,” Janet said.

“But as I understand it, we’ll keep a string on it even when it goes to MP? And I haven’t been assigned to anything else yet.” Even as she said that, Janet realized her reply sounded a little lawyerish.

Farnsworth smiled patiently.

“Janet, you’re a smart young lady. A Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in materials forensics, right? Almost nine years in the outfit, with two Washington tours and a field office tour in Chicago? And now you’re down here with us mossbacks in the hills and hollows doing exactly what with all that specialized knowledge?”

Janet colored. During her first year back in Washington following the Chicago tour, she had twice managed to embarrass the assistant director over the laboratory by filing dissenting opinions in some high-visibility evidentiary reports. Subsequent reviews proved her right, but, given the rising legal storm over irregularities at the FBI lab, her mentor at headquarters, a female senior supervisory agent, had hustled Janet out of headquarters before she got into any more career-killing trouble. With Farnsworth’s acquiescence, she had been transferred to the Roanoke office under the rubric of getting some out-of-specialty, street-level investigative experience. She nodded.

“Okay,” Farnsworth said.

“Now, there are two reasons why this case is going to MP. First, because I said so, and SAC, Richmond, agrees. There’s no evidence or even any indication that there’s been a crime, and we’ve got other fish to fry. Second, one of the kids was Edwin Kreiss’s daughter.”

He paused to see if she would understand.

She didn’t.

“Yes, sir. And?”

He sighed.

“Edwin Kreiss was not just a senior field agent who elected to retire down here in rustic southwest Virginia. He was Edwin Kreiss.”

“Still is, I suppose, boss. I guess my question is, So what?”

Farnsworth got his pipe out, which told Janet she was not going anywhere soon. He didn’t light it, in deference to the nonsmoking rules, but he did everything but light it. Then he leaned back in his chair.

“I don’t know any of this directly, other than by being an RA and being plugged into that network. Okay? So, like I said, don’t quote me on any of this. But Edwin Kreiss was a specialist in the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Division. In the mid-eighties, he went on an exchange tour at the Agency. He got involved in that Chinese espionage

case—you know, the one where they got into the atomic labs and allegedly stole our warhead secrets.”

“Yes, sir. It supposedly went on for over ten years.”

“Or more. Anyhow, you know that the Agency is restricted to operating outside the continental United States, while the Bureau is responsible for operating primarily inside our national borders.”

“Except we do go overseas.”

“Only when asked by foreign governments, or when we ask them. But the Agency may not operate here in the States, except when they feel they have a mole, an Agency insider who is spying. Then they sometimes team up with the Bureau FCI people to find him.”

“And the Department of Energy case involved a mole? I hadn’t heard that.”

“Well, not exactly a mole. Our people began to wonder why the doe’s own investigation, as well as the Agency’s, seemed to be taking so damn long. It turned out that the Chinese had some help.”

“In our government?”

“Worse—in the Agency’s Counterespionage Division. A guy named Ephraim Glower.”

“Never heard of him, either.”

“This wasn’t exactly given front-page coverage, and, again, I’ve never seen evidence of all this. But here’s the background on Kreiss. While he was on this exchange tour with their CE people, he supposedly uncovered Glower, who, at the time, was an assistant deputy director in the Agency’s Counterespionage Division.”

“Wow. Talk about top cover.”

Farnsworth smiled.

“Precisely. The Agency was furiously embarrassed.

When Kreiss forced the issue, they got him recalled to the Bureau. J. Willard Marchand was the new ADIC over the Bureau’s FCI Division, and he clamped the lid on Kreiss. They stashed him at headquarters for a while, but then the flap about the Chinese government making campaign contributions blew up, and Kreiss resurfaced his accusations. Marchand stepped on Kreiss’s neck. Kreiss then apparently decided to go confront this guy Glower.”

“You mean Glower still had his job?”

“Yes. Kreiss had no proof, or not enough to convince the Agency, so they got rid of Kreiss and left Glower in place.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“They do it all the time, Janet. Then if it blows up, they cover their

asses by saying they were just letting the bad guy run so as to control what he did or gave to the other side. What’s important is that the Glower episode ended in a very bloody mess out in a little village called Millwood, Virginia, up in the Shenandoah Valley. Glower ended up dead.”

“Wow. Kreiss?”

“Well, after he got stepped on the second time, Kreiss went to Millwood and confronted Glower. Glower called for help from Agency security and they forced Kreiss out of the house. But then that night, Glower apparently killed his wife and two kids and then shot himself. The local law said the scene was right out of one of those chain saw-massacre movies. The Agency director called Marchand; for a while, they actually thought Kreiss had done it.”

“So he was there?”

“Not when that happened, but of course they knew he had been there earlier. Fortunately for Kreiss, one of his subordinates at the Bureau could verify that Kreiss had been back at headquarters, writing up his report, at the time of the actual shootings. There were some questions about Kreiss’s alibi, because it was one of his own people providing it. Needless to say, it was a helluva mess, and it became complicated by the fact that Kreiss wasn’t done yet. He surfaced new allegations, that there wasn’t just one scientist-spy at one lab; that there was a whole network. Based on what I’ve read since, he may have been right about that.”

“Why did Glower kill himself?”

“That’s unclear. According to Kreiss’s theory, Glower was running top cover for the spy network. Being a deputy dog in Agency counterespionage, he could throw a lot of monkey wrenches into the various investigations, which is why it all went on for so long.”

“Why would he do that?”

“There was the money.”

“Money from?”

“Money from China, money that went into a certain prominent reelection campaign, which I’m sure you’ve also read about. Kreiss’s theory was that Glower was only doing what he had been told to do—namely, to stymie the investigation at DOE and at the Agency, in return for keeping the Chinese happy, because the Chinese, of course, felt they had bought and paid for happiness.”

“Could Kreiss back that up?”

Farnsworth sucked on his unlit pipe.

“My guess is that if he could have, he would have. But it’s kind of

hard to tell when you start a fire at that level. Those kinds of fires usually get extinguished in a Mount Olympus-level deal of some kind. Although, from what I’ve heard, Kreiss was anything but a deal maker, as the Agency bosses found out much too late.

Supposedly, this guy Glower came from a very rich family, so money should not have been a likely motive. But who knows. The upshot was that Marchand caught hell, and in turn, he forced Kreiss out administratively, using the blood bath at Millwood as a pretext, via the Bureau’s own professional standards board. That in itself should have de fanged anything Kreiss had to say about what or who was driving Glower.”

“A bitter end to an interesting career.”

“Yes, a very interesting career. There are all sorts of stories about Kreiss. You’ve met him and I haven’t, but he apparently went pretty far afield with some of the Agency’s counterespionage specialists, some of whom redefine the notion of ‘far afield.” I’ve been told that he actually trained with some of their people, the ones who are called sweepers.”

“Yes, Larry Talbot mentioned that term. Said they were highly specialized operatives, guys who went after their own agents when they went wrong.”

“And you think that’s all a bunch of Agency bullshit. Ghost-polishing, right?”

Janet started to reply but then stopped. Those were her very words.

Fucking Larry. The RA was still smiling.

“Let me tell you what I’ve heard, and let me again stress the word heard” Farnsworth said.

“A sweeper is ‘reportedly’ someone our beloved brethren at Langley send when one of their own clandestine operations agents goes off the tracks in some fashion. We’re not talking about their regular CE people, the ones who help us chase enemy agents around the streets of Washington. We’re talking about a very special operative who hunts—and retrieves—that’s the term they use—clandestine operatives who have gone nuts, gone over to the other side, or started running some kind of private agenda—like assassinating bad guys instead of playing by the rules. In other words, someone who is so completely out of control that he or she needs to be ‘retrieved’ from the field and brought back to a safe house in the Virginia countryside. Someplace where the problem can be attended to, quote unquote.”

““Attended to’?”

“Define that as your imagination might dictate,” Farnsworth said.

“The interesting thing is, if they develop a problem child out on their operational web, they tell the problem child that a sweeper is coming.

 

Supposedly, a sweeper notification is enough to bring said problem child to heel. Coming in is preferable to being brought in.”

Janet didn’t know what to say.

“And Kreiss?”

“Kreiss was at the agency on an exchange deal, our FCI with their CE.

Word was, he worked with the sweepers, trained with them. Did several years away from the Bureau. I talked to a guy, he’s SAC now in Louisville, who knew Kreiss back in those days. Said he basically went native. Really got into the Agency hugger-mugger. His supervisors back in Bureau FCI didn’t know what to do, because the one time they borrowed him back to deal with a rogue Bureau agent, the agent turned himself in, requesting protection. He was apparently so scared of Kreiss that he confessed to shit the Bureau didn’t even know about. Then, of course, came Millwood.

People who knew Kreiss tended to keep their distance.”

“I can understand that,” she said.

“I got an impression of contained violence, I mean. And I found myself wondering about the degree of containment.”

“That’s the essence of it. Of course, no one knows what really happened at Millwood, or who else might have been involved by that point in the investigation. Once Glower was dead …”

“What do you mean? Oh, you mean—” “Yeah. The Agency protested a lot, but our FCI people speculated that the Millwood blood bath may have been the Agency itself taking care of business—you know, with one of these sweeper types. But once Kreiss started making accusations about the Chinese government, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the highest levels of our own government, nobody either side of the river wanted it to go any further.”

“Wow. And that’s whose kid is missing.”

“Right. And two others, don’t forget.”

“Could there be a connection?”

“I doubt it. But I’ve been given specific direction from Richmond to put a lid on this right now and shop it to MP.”

“Just because it’s Kreiss’s kid who’s involved?”

Farnsworth just looked at her with that patient expression on his face, which always made Janet feel like a schoolgirl.

“Or are you saying the Agency is going to work it?” she asked.

Farnsworth put his pipe away in the desk.

“Don’t know, as we Vermonters like to say. Don’t know, don’t want to know. And neither do you. I am saying that I’ve, the Roanoke office,

are not going to work it, other than as a routine missing persons case. And you are going to move on to other things.”

Janet thought about that for a moment.

“But what if Kreiss works it?”

“What if he does? If someone was fool enough to abduct Edwin Kreiss’s daughter, then, in my humble estimation, he’ll get what’s coming to him.”

Janet sat back in her chair. Her instincts about Kreiss had been more correct than she had realized. Farnsworth was looking at his watch, which was his signal that the interview was over.

“You, on the other hand,” he said, “need to forget about making any more calls to Washington, okay?

It’ll be a lot better for you, all around. And for me, and for probably everyone in this office. Are we clear on that, Janet?”

She nodded. Clear as a fire bell, she thought. An image of Edwin Kreiss flitted through her mind: coiled silently in that rocking chair, those deepset gray-green eyes like range finders when he looked at her. Crazy man or fanatic? She exhaled carefully. The few spooks she had met from that other world across the Potomac River, military and civilian, had mostly been pasty-faced bureaucrats. Kreiss was apparently from the sharp end of the spear.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Got it.”

“Knew you would,” Farnsworth said with a fatherly smile.

“You have a great day.”

Janet went back to her cubicle, grabbing some coffee on the way. The coffee had a slightly stale, oily smell to it, which was typical of the afternoon batch, but she felt the need for a jolt of caffeine.

Billy was still snoring quietly in the next cubicle when Janet sat down at her desk. She was surprised to see a yellow telephone message indicating that a Dr. Kellermann, of the headquarters Counseling Division, wanted to talk to her. Whoops, she thought. Their deputy dog had called Farnsworth but probably had not canceled Janet’s original query. She looked at her watch. It was 3:15. On a Friday.

She thought about it. Farnsworth had made things pretty clear: Back out. And yet, she could not get Edwin Kreiss out other mind. She’d been in southwest Virginia for a year and a half, and had met absolutely zero truly interesting men in Roanoke. She’d been taking some post doc seminars at Virginia Tech over in Blacksburg to fill the empty hours. And despite the fact that she had married and then divorced an academic before joining the Bureau back in 1991, she knew that she was at least subconsciously hoping she might meet some interesting faculty people.

 

As it turned out, so far at least, everyone old enough to interest her was either married or so completely engrossed in his or her work, S-corporation, or themselves as to bore her to tears. After her first few appearances in the local fitness center, a couple of the married agents in the office had made it clear they wouldn’t mind a fling, but she had a firm rule about both married men and dating other agents. It wasn’t that Kreiss stirred her romantically, but he sure as hell was interesting.

She decided to take Kellermann’s call. Just to be polite, of course. The case was still theirs, technically, wasn’t it? Maybe Kellermann had something that could keep it here in the field. She looked around the office.

Talbot wasn’t in. It was Friday afternoon; nobody would get back to Farnsworth with the fact that she had called this late in the day.

She dialed the number. A secretary put her through.

“Dr. Kellermann,” a woman’s voice said. Janet identified herself.

“Ah, yes, Dr. Carter. Brianne Kellermann. I was Helen Kreiss’s counselor.

How can I help you?”

The voice was educated and kind, and Janet was momentarily flattered to be called doctor again. Here, she was just called Carter. She briefly described the case, then asked if Dr. Kellermann had any opinions, based on her sessions with Kreiss’s ex-wife, that might bear on the case.

“Please, call me Brianne,” Kellermann said.

“And I’d need to think about that. I need to consider Mrs. Kreiss’s privacy.”

“I understand that, Brianne,” Janet said.

“Although she is, of course, deceased.” She waited for a reply to that, but Kellermann didn’t say anything.

“And I should tell you that this case is being sent up to MP because we haven’t uncovered any evidence that there has been a crime here-these kids might well have just boogied off in search of spotted owls, you know?”

“Let’s hope so. But technically, they are missing? I mean, there’s no evidence the other way, is that what you’re saying?”

“Correct. There are three sets of parents involved, and they had no indication that the kids were just going to take off. Given that these kids were senior engineering students, I think it’s highly unlikely that they did just take off. But—” “And your boss is looking at his budget and wants you to move on.”

Janet smiled. This doc knew the score.

“Right. Which I can understand, of course. Even down here in the thriving metropolis of Roanoke, we’ve got plenty to do.”

There was a pause on the end of the line, and Janet wondered if it was

Dr. Kellermann’s turn to smile. She decided to fill in the silence.

“I’m really calling because one of the parents is Edwin Kreiss. I’m actually more interested in him than in Helen Kreiss.”

“Who is now deceased, of course,” Kellermann said, as if reminding herself.

“Yes. I understand she remarried before the plane crash.”

“Yes, she did. So your interest is really in what Mrs. Kreiss may have said prior to divorcing Edwin Kreiss. Do you suspect he has something to do with the three students’ disappearance?”

Janet hesitated. If she said yes, she’d have some leverage she didn’t have now.

“Actually? No. But one of the things I’m learning here in the field is to pull every string, no matter how unlikely.”

“I understand, Janet. May I call you Janet? And since this case goes back awhile—I think it was 1989 or even ‘88—let me review my files, think about it, and get back to you, okay?”

Janet hesitated. Get back to me when? she thought. As of Monday, the case officially went north. Well, in for a penny … “That would be great, Brianne. Send me an E-mail when you’re ready to talk, and I’ll get in touch.”

“I’ll do that, Janet. Although I may not have much for you. There’s the problem of confidentiality, and my focus is usually on the spouse I’m trying to help, not the other party. That way, we can move beyond blame, you see, and on to more constructive planes.”

Janet rolled her eyes, spelled out her E-mail address, and hung up. She sat back in her chair. She’d given Kellermann her direct E-mail address to avoid any more phone message forms on her desk. Okay, she thought, but let’s say Kellermann goes to her boss, who tells her that Roanoke has been told to put the Kreiss matter back in its box. How would she explain her call if Farnsworth asked? Kellermann contacted her before Farnsworth had called her off? She was only being polite in returning the call? Billy, that well-known Communist, did it?

The Communist woke up with a snort and some throat-clearing noise.

He saw Janet.

“Hey, good-looking,” he said.

“How do you get a sweet little old lady to yell, “Fuck

“Billy—” “You get another sweet little old lady to yell, “Bingo!”

” She laughed.

“Hey, Billy, why don’t you get some of this wonderful coffee and let me run this missing college kids case by you.”

 

Browne McGarand approached the smokeless powder-finishing building from the east side of the complex, staying in the shadows as he walked through the twilight. He had parked his truck well off the fire road that branched to the left off the main entrance road, then had hiked a mile southwest until he intercepted the railroad cut. From there, he had turned northwest, walking along the single track until he reached the security gates that bridged the rail line. When the installation had been shut down, the gates had been padlocked and further secured with metal bars welded top and bottom across, in case someone cut the chains and locks.

Browne had left all the bars, chains, and locks on the exterior gate in place. Instead, he had used a portable cutting-torch rig to cut through the tack welds that married the chain-link fence to the round stock frame of the gates. By undoing one bolt, he was now able to lift a corner flap of the chain-link mesh and simply step through.

There was a second set of gates fifty feet inside, to match the double security fence that surrounded the entire 2,400 acres of the Ramsey Arsenal.

These had been locked but not welded, and here he had cut down and replaced the rusty padlock with a rusty one of his own. The Ramsey Arsenal, which was really an explosives-manufacturing complex, had been in caretaker status for almost twenty years. A local industrial-security firm made periodic inspections. He had watched them often, but their people made all their security and access checks from inside the inner perimeter.

More importantly, with the exception of the main gates, they never physically got out of their truck, choosing simply to drive around and look at everything from the comfort of their air conditioning.

He shifted the backpack with the girl’s supplies down off his back and onto the ground. The water bottles made it heavy. He unlocked the inner gates, slid the right one back a few feet on its wheels, and stepped through with the pack. He closed the gate but did not lock it. Directly ahead lay the main industrial area, which covered almost one hundred acres. The complex consisted of metal and concrete buildings large and small, many connected by overhead steam and cooling water piping. There were mixing and filling sheds built down in blast-deflection pits, chemical-storage warehouses, metal liquid-storage tanks, the cracking towers of the acid plant, rail-and truckloading warehouses, and the hulking mass of a dormant power plant with its one enormous stack. The complex was the size of a small town, behind which slightly more than two thousand acres of trees concealed

the finished ammunition-storage bunkers. The rail line, a spur of the Norfolk & Western main line that ran through Christiansburg, immediately branched out into sidings that pointed into the complex in six different directions.

He checked his watch. It was almost sundown. There was just enough light to see where he was going. He did not want to use his flashlight until he was well into the maze of buildings and side streets of the industrial area. The only sounds came from his boots as he walked down the main approach road. A slight breeze stirred dead leaves in the gutters. The largest buildings flanked the main street, which ran from the admin building down to the power plant four blocks away. A series of pipe frames in the shape of inverted U’s gave the main street a tunnel-like appearance. At fifty-foot intervals, there were large hinged metal plates in the street, measuring twenty feet on a side. The plates gave access to what had been called “the Ditch,” which in reality was a concrete tunnel into which large batches of toxic liquids could be dumped quickly in the event a reaction went wrong. All the buildings were locked and shuttered, and, for the most part, empty. Each building had a white sign with a name and building designation reference number for the use of the security company.

With the exception of the power plant, all of the machinery had long since been taken away.

He reached the nitroglycerine-fixing building. He thought about the girl as he walked toward the building, trying to figure out how she played into his grand scheme. He had only mild regret about the two boys who had been killed by the flash flood. In any event, many more strangers were going to die. The girl and her friends were just a few more innocent bystanders. In the six months that he had been producing the hydrogen, no one had ever intruded into the Ramsey industrial complex. There were long-standing rumors in the nearby towns that Ramsey had produced chemical weapons during World War II. Even a hint that there might be some nerve gas still locked away in the deep bunkers tended to keep people out of the facility, and such rumors had never been officially discouraged by the Army. It was all bunk, of course. The plant had been one of several GOCO facilities: government-owned, contractor-operated by various commercial companies to manufacture artillery propellant and warhead fillers for the Army.

He could not imagine what the three kids had been doing here, but Jared’s traps had done their job. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if the flash flood had taken all three of them. But he could not bring himself to execute her, even though she had seen their faces.

In the back of his mind, he thought she might actually become useful down the road, when he got closer to Judgment Day. That was how he liked to think of it: a day of reckoning, with him and his grandson delivering those agents of Satan into God’s iron hands for summary judgment.

It was much darker now. He slowed and then moved sideways into the shadow of a loading dock and sat down to await full darkness. The concrete felt warm against his back. He always did this when he came in: sat down, listened and watched. Made very, very sure no one had followed him in. He closed his eyes and prayed for the strength to carry on, to go through with his mission of retribution. They had manufactured nearly three-quarters of the hydrogen, and the pressure in the truck was starting to register into the double digits for the first time. Not much longer. All they needed was the rest of the copper, and jared said he had found a new source. There was plenty of acid, thank God. He opened his eyes and listened.

There was nothing but the night wind and the ticking sounds of the metal roofs and the piping towers cooling in the darkness. Time to go.

There were two doors on the nitro building: one large segmented-steel hanging door big enough to admit a truck or rail car the other a human sized steel walk-through door. The building’s sign was still legible in the gloom: nitro fixing. He struck the smaller door once with his fist.

“Put on the blindfold,” he ordered.

He waited for a minute, then unlocked the padlock, removed it, and pushed the door open. The interior of the building was a single huge room, which now was in near-total darkness. With his eyes fully night adapted he could just make out the outline of the skylights far above. He could also just see the girl’s face in the middle of the room, a pale blur of white hovering above the dark pile of blankets. He pushed the base of the door with his foot so that it swung all the way back against the concrete wall and then turned on the flashlight, fixing the girl’s face in its blinding beam. She flinched but said nothing. The blindfold was in place, as he had ordered. The remains of the last food delivery were right by the door. He flipped the light around the open shop floor, illuminating each corner.

Metal foundation plates that looked like the stumps in a cut over forest glinted back at him. The room smelled of old concrete, nitric acid, and a hint of sewage. He set the flashlight onto the floor, pointing at the girl.

He slid the backpack in and emptied it out on the floor. A roll of toilet paper, six plastic bottles of water, two dell-style sandwiches, two apples, and a Gideon’s Bible. He picked up the flashlight and swept it around the building again, being careful to keep it low, away

from the skylights. He put it back down on the floor so that the beam again pointed at the girl.

Then he picked up the bag of trash by the floor and stuffed it into the backpack. She never moved, sitting cross-legged on the blankets as if she was meditating. He had never spoken to her, beyond the command to put on the blindfold, and she had never spoken to him.

He looked at her for a moment. She appeared to be well made, which was why he had stopped letting Jared bring the food. Jared was not entirely trustworthy when it came to women, a function, no doubt, of his youth. They had prayed together on Jared’s womanizing problem several times, but he kept an eye on Jared just the same. He admired the girl’s stoicism.

She had to be strong, not to whimper and beg and carry on when he came. She must have a great deal of inner fortitude, he thought. The Bible would help sustain that. He should have brought her one a long time ago.

He picked up the light, swept the room one more time, and then backed out, turning the light off before he closed the steel door. His night vision was gone, of course, but he could put the lock back on and snap it shut without seeing it. He sat down on the steps leading to the door and closed his eyes, letting his other senses scan the surrounding area. Even after all these years, the air in the complex was tainted with the acrid scent of chemicals, as if decades’ worth of nitric acid, sulfuric acid, ammonia, mercury, and a host of esters and alcohols had permanently stained the air.

It had undoubtedly stained the ground, which was why the whole place was now sealed off. He wondered if all those people fishing that creek below the arsenal had any idea of what was sleeping in the sands of the creek bed, courtesy of some frantic flushes into the Ditch.

He opened his eyes and the shadows assumed shape as buildings again in the dark. The security company’s truck would come tomorrow, even though it would be Saturday. Their contract required them to do at least two weekend checks a month, and it had been two weeks. Which is why he had doped the apples. She should be drowsy and sleep through most of the day. The security people were definitely lowest-bidder types: lazy and incompetent. They never even got out of their little truck. They just drove around the complex for an hour and looked out the windows and then went back out the main gates. He had toyed with the idea of doing something to them, perhaps just before Judgment Day. They deserved to be punished for not doing their jobs.

He got up, picked up the pack, and started back. The girl did not know anything, other than that they were here, presumably doing something

illegal, or they wouldn’t have taken her captive. He would have to decide what to do with her. In truth, if she could not contribute to the mission in some way, before or after, he could always just leave her. The walls of the nitro building were three feet thick, reinforced concrete. She would never be found.

Just before dawn on Saturday, Edwin Kreiss parked his pickup truck at the end of a fire road on the eastern edge of the Ramsey Army Arsenal.

He shut it down, slid down the windows to listen, and waited. He had spent most of Friday looking for the arsenal, which, considering that it took up a couple of thousand acres, had not been as easy as he had anticipated.

The state road map, which showed the installation fronting 1-81 east of Christiansburg, was wrong. Unwilling to be remembered in Christiansburg for asking questions, he’d gone to the public library in the town of Ramsey and found a single book on the history of the arsenal. The reference librarian had told him the Ramsey Arsenal had been shut down for nearly twenty years.

He’d then found the main entrance south of town, but the intersection that led to what he assumed was a main gate was blocked off with concrete-filled barrels that had obviously been there for a long time. After that, he had followed every paved road, dirt road, and fire lane that seemed to point in toward the installation, trying to construct his own map. Every access that ran up against the arsenal ended the same way—in a firebreak and a tall double chain-link fence with barbed wire at the top, festooned with signs warning that this was a U.S. government restricted area and also a federal toxic-waste site. When he found what he assumed was a rail spur into the installation, he parked the truck out of sight and walked along the rusting rails for nearly two miles before seeing double gates. Assuming there would be surveillance, he had not approached the gates, but backtracked to his truck and continued with his mapmaking of the perimeter.

Now he was parked within two hundred yards of the spot he felt was the most discreet way into the reservation, the intersection of the security fences and a wide, quiet creek flowing out of the interior of

the installation The creek had been routed under the fences through a concrete conduit five feet in diameter that slanted down from the higher ground of the installation. There had been a heavy re bar grating out on the exterior side of the tunnel. It had looked intact, until he inspected it and found that the part below the surface of the water had long since rusted away.

The creek widened considerably when it came out of the reservation, and the deep pool below the conduit showed evidence of being a local fishing hole, despite all the toxic-waste SITE signs decorating the fences.

According to the book, the arsenal encompassed about 2,400 acres, but the industrial heart of it appeared to be much smaller than that, if the pictures in the book were accurate. The bulk of the installation’s acreage was occupied by the extensive bunker fields, where the Army’s freshly minted ammunition had been stored. At least that’s what the book implied; one never knew what other things the government might have secreted out here on a restricted area in the southwestern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The place was sufficiently remote and secure as to contain damn near anything. He didn’t care about munitions; he wanted to know if the kids had ever come here. There had been no mention in the book of any Site R. He had considered walking the entire perimeter, to see if he could find any better prospects for easy access, but doing that covertly would entail at least several days. No, he had concluded, it was more important to get inside and do his looking there, where, if the kids had run into trouble, he might find signs of it. 7/’this was the place, of course.

Knowing his chances were slim to begin with, he sighed and got out. It was better than brooding in the cabin, and a lot more than the Bureau had done.

Birds were beginning to stir in the trees, but there was still little light.

The mountains to the east would mask the direct sunrise for another hour and a half yet. The sky was clear and it was almost cold, in the low fifties.

If there were Saturday fishermen coming, he should have at least an hour to get through the one very visible access point: the tunnel. He stripped off his shoes, jeans, and shirt and slipped into the wet suit: bottom, top, hood, mask, and boots. He put his street clothes back into the truck and took out a sealed waterproof duffel bag, which had a short lanyard ending in a snap attached to one end. He locked up the truck, put the keys in the exhaust pipe, and then headed for the pool.

The water was slightly colder than the air, but his only exposure was the skin of his face. He paddled out to the lip of the tunnel, towing the bag behind him. It was dark in the tunnel as he pushed the bag

under the rusting teeth of the re bar grate, and then he ducked under and pulled himself up into the stream flowing over the lip of the tunnel. The concrete was slippery with old moss and he immediately found himself sliding backward, catching himself at the last moment against the top half of the grating. The structure swayed ominously, dropping bits of rusted metal all over him. He got one arm onto dry concrete on the side of the tunnel and worked his way back in, away from the grate. He then crawled on all fours through the stream, towing the bag behind him. The other end of the tunnel was about 150 feet away, visible as a pale circle of light against the blackness in the tunnel. He had to fight his way past a tree snag that was jammed across the tunnel about halfway in. Something dropped from the snag and went slithering past him in the dark water, but he pressed on.

He knew that a snake’s first instinct would be to get away from him. What he didn’t know was whether or not the grate on the other end was intact.

There wasn’t a grate at all. The tunnel opening gave onto a concrete sided high-walled penstock shaped like a broad funnel in reverse. The creek came into the penstock via a waterfall at the far end. He spied a set of rusting steel rungs embedded in the concrete to one side, and he sloshed across the shallow water to get to the ladder. Once up on dry ground, he sat quietly for ten minutes, absorbing his surroundings. He was in a densely wooded area inside the security perimeter. The penstock appeared to be the only manmade structure other than the fences. He scanned the fences in the dawn light for cameras, but did not see any. He had checked the external fence during his reconnaissance yesterday for signs of electrification but had found no evidence of any wiring, not even alarm wires.

He pulled the duffel bag closer. He extracted a towel and a smaller, camouflaged bag. He stripped out of the diving gear, toweled off, and put all the diving gear into the smaller bag. Since he planned to make his daylight surveillance of the arsenal covertly, he had brought a crawl suit, into which he slipped quickly to avoid becoming chilled. The crawl suit was a one-piece camouflaged jumpsuit, which had padded knees, shoulders, and elbows, a wide elasticized waist, and elasticized arm and leg joints. The fabric at the back of his knees and under his arms was a breathable nylon mesh. The chest and upper back areas had segmented black plastic bands running vertically from just below his collarbone to a line level with his rib cage. The bands were made of Kevlar body armor and were separated by raised vertical strips of Velcro. There were tiny penlights sewn into the wrist cuffs on each arm.

 

Next, he pulled on a set of dark green high-topped boots, which were lined outside with Kevlar filament mesh to guard against snakebite. They had articulated steel ridges running vertically over a layer of rubber reaching all the way to the top of his calves. The soles were also rubber, with built-in steel shanks and heel cups. The boots were secured with four Velcro straps, and there was a built-in covered knife sheath on the left boot and a covered holster for wire cutters on the right. There were climbing studs embedded into heavy leather pads on the inside of each boot.

Next out of the bag came two flat mottled green packs, one for his chest and one for his back. Each pack was constructed of nylon netting with Velcro attachment pads. One contained two days’ worth of food, the other his trekking equipment. He put on the backpack first, then the chest pack. The two packs were connected with Velcro straps under his armpits, preventing them from hobbling around.

He then pulled a lightweight camouflaged hunter’s hood over his head, face, and neck. The hood was also mottled black and green, and heavily padded on top. It revealed only his eyes. His gloves were dark gray gauntlets that were made of cotton, lined outside with Kevlar mesh. He used a built-in bladder pump to inflate partially a two-inch cuff around both forearms, and then he attached a water bladder around his waist. He had not brought a gun; he rarely ever carried or used a gun. The last item out of the bag was a dull black telescoping titanium rod, which he extended to four feet in length before setting the locks. The rod had a broad hook topped by a black bulb on one end and a sharp spear point on the other.

He took the bags a hundred yards upstream of the penstock, then climbed up the bank to a knoll above the stream. The larger bag contained a low-profile camouflaged one-man tent, a lightweight sleeping bag, four military long-storage rations, a water-purification tube, and some cooking gear if he needed to stay longer. He sealed and then hid both bags in the middle branches of the largest pine tree on the knoll, then melted back into the woods and sat down to watch and listen for a few minutes. He could see the far edges of the fishing pool through the fences in the growing light, but he was confident that no one around the pool would be able to see him, even once the sun came up. He had seen no evidence around the inside penstock area that anyone else had come through the tunnel recently. Besides, Lynn hated confined spaces, so if the kids had come to the arsenal, it wasn’t likely they had come

through that tunnel. On the other hand, a creek this big probably did not originate within the restricted area, which meant there had to be another water cut through the fence, perhaps over on the higher, western side of the reservation.

The creek appeared to run east-west.

His plan was to follow the south bank of the creek all the way across the arsenal and to look for signs of recent human intrusion along the way.

If that effort turned up nothing, he would follow the north bank back and then cut over into the industrial area, which was north of the creek. He wasn’t even puffing after the exertion of getting through the tunnel and getting set up in the crawl suit, which was a good sign. He was not in the shape he’d been when he was active, but he hadn’t gone entirely soft, either. Except in the head, maybe, he thought. Those two agents had warned him against interfering, and he knew they were right. But since they weren’t actually doing anything, he didn’t feel too bad about it. He also knew that he might not like what he found. He took one last look around the pool area and then started west into the woods.

Browne McGarand sat in what had been the main control room of the power plant, watching the band of morning sunlight advance across the control room’s wall from the skylights. He was keeping an eye on the pressure gauge of the operating hydrogen generator, which was a five foot-high glass-lined stainless-steel retort into which he had put a sponge of copper metal. Suspended above the retort was a glass container of nitric acid, which was dripping down a glass tube at a controlled rate into the retort. The nitric acid combined with the copper to produce a slag of copper-nitrite and pure hydrogen gas. The reaction was exothermic, which required that the bottom of the retort be encased in a large tub of cold water to draw off heat. When the pressure in the retort rose to five pounds per square inch, a check valve lifted in its discharge line. The physical movement of the check valve activated a pressure switch, which, in turn, closed a contact connecting a small gas-transfer pump to its power supply. The pump drew the hydrogen gas out of the retort and pumped it through the wall into the tank of a propane truck that was parked in the maintenance bay next to the control room. When the pressure in the retort dropped back down to three pounds, the check valve reseated, shutting off the transfer pump, and then the whole process would wait for hydrogen pressure to rebuild in the retort.

Five pounds of copper took about two hours to produce as much hydrogen

as it was going to make. Once the reaction began to decay, indicated by a steady drop in temperature, Browne would open valves to bring a second retort on line while he replenished the first one. He would don a respirator, divert the discharge line of the pump into the atmosphere of the control room, and operate the gas-transfer pump with a manual switch until a small vacuum was established on the retort. He would then close all the transfer valves by hand. He would wait, watching the gauge to make sure that it didn’t creep back into the positive pressure range.

Once certain that the reaction had stopped, he would open a vacuum breaker valve on the retort, and then the main cover. He would remove the slag residue using tongs and rubber gloves, add five more pounds of metal, and close up the retort. He would run a short air purge on the retort, using the transfer pump again, until he had once more established a small vacuum in the retort vessel. Then he would start the nitric-acid drip going again.

It was slow, painfully slow. But it was a fairly safe way to make hydrogen, and, ultimately, an absolutely untraceable bomb. He had read with great interest all the news reporting on the Oklahoma City bombing investigation, and he knew all about the authorities’ increasing scrutiny of all materials that had even the slightest explosive potential. This was why Browne had elected to make a hydrogen-gas bomb instead of using conventional explosives. And the container, well, that was going to be the really clever part. After nearly forty years of being a chemical engineer, assembling his little production lab had not required an elaborate scheme.

The retorts he’d bought from a lab that had gone out of business. He’d obtained the small gas pump, as well as the larger one that would be required later to pressurize the truck fully, from a refrigeration and air-conditioning catalog. The small diesel generator, which putted away inside one of the two steam generators out in the boiler hall, was a WalMart special. The rest of the hydrogen setup was conventional plumbing and catalog instrumentation, built into the existing piping of the power plant’s boiler-water treatment and testing lab.

Jared had stolen the propane truck, with Browne’s help. They’d hit a West Virginia propane company’s lot one rainy night. While Browne kept watch, Jared hot-wired the truck and drove it away. They’d taken it to the arsenal and parked it out of sight down a fire lane close to the front gates.

The next time the security truck came in, Jared had been waiting. The guards were in the habit of leaving the front gate unchained while they did their tour, which allowed Jared to drive the truck in once they were down in the industrial area. He’d hidden it in an empty warehouse

until the security people had finished, and then he and Browne had maneuvered it into the power plant maintenance bay. They’d let the propane in the truck boil off to the outside air through its delivery hose for a week before sealing up the maintenance bay again and cleaning the truck tank and putting in new seals.

The pump came on, making a small racket in the room. Browne worried about the noise, and he knew the bigger pump would be even louder.

He walked over to the interior control room door, which had a window in the upper half, and peered out into the cavernous steam-generation hall.

The plant was about one-third the size of a commercial power station, but the two boilers were still forty feet high. He was pretty sure that the pump noise could not penetrate to the outside of the power station building, but he made frequent checks. His concern was that one day he would find a couple of deer hunters or college kids standing out there, poking around to see what that noise was. Just like the ones who had drowned in the creek.

Browne alone ran the hydrogen generator, working at night and on weekends. Jared, his older grandson, provided security. Jared had done his job well. Of his two grandsons, Jared was the one who looked most like his father, William. He was of medium height but strongly built. He worked as a telephone repairmen for the local telephone company, and he had been helping Browne with the bomb-building project right from the beginning. Browne knew that Jared held no great affection for his long gone father, but, like his grandfather, Jared was sympathetic to the beliefs of the Christian Identity. He hated the government and all its works.

William’s death during the Mount Carmel incident had just about shattered Browne. He had loved that boy in spite of everything that had happened—his disastrous teenage marriage, his slut of a wife running off like that, leaving William, and ultimately Browne, to raise the two kids.

Jared had been a handful, no doubt about that, but Kenny, Jared’s younger brother, had been born mildly retarded, and that had been really difficult.

Although he had been angry at the time, he later came to sympathize with his son when he finally bailed out of Blacksburg. A high school education, two squalling kids, the cancer that rose up right about then and claimed Browne’s wife, Holly—well, William never had a chance. Browne had had such high hopes. William had been bright enough to go on to college, maybe even Virginia Tech, right there in Blacksburg. With Browne’s connections at the arsenal, William would have been a

shoo-in for a high paying job, except, of course, that the goddamned government had seen fit to close the arsenal, hadn’t it? Damn near wiped out the town.

Jared had survived, which just about described it. He had been a dutiful, if resentful, child after both his mother and father left home. Raised in the orbit of his increasingly embittered grandfather, Jared had been a plodder. He had never talked to Browne about how he felt about being deserted by his parents, and Browne, with troubles of his own, had never raised the issue. He did often wonder how it might have all turned out if William had had a better shot at life. He had been such a great kid, full of life, friendly, easygoing, always trailing a clutch of giggling females, smart enough not to have to work very hard in school, and the apple of Browne’s eye. Jared wasn’t much like his father, except in one respect: He went through life seemingly obsessed with women. But Jared liked to live dangerously—he only fooled around with married women. Browne thought that this was probably Jared’s way of guaranteeing that he would never repeat his own father’s sorry family history.

Browne sighed as he thought about William and what might have been. All of Browne’s hopes for the future seemed to have dissolved at the same time, right along with the arsenal. Jared was willing to help with Browne’s revenge, not because he loved and missed his father, but because he heartily approved of the idea of the bomb, its target, and especially the timing of it, in the year 2000. Jared’s other interest was what Browne called “the lunatic fringe,” the militias and some of the more apocalyptic religious groups. One of Browne’s continuing worries was that Jared would run his mouth to some of his dumbass militia friends over in West Virginia, but so far, security seemed to be intact. Jared was out there now, somewhere nearby, watching for the security people to begin their windshield tour.

The pump shut off to await the next pressure buildup of hydrogen.

Browne crossed the control room and went into the maintenance bay via the connecting door. The power station was the one building on the installation where the government had not stripped out all the equipment.

Two four-story-high steam boilers and all their auxiliary equipment still filled the open hall on the other side of the control room, and two locomotive-sized turbo electric generators crouched silently in the generating hall, beyond the boiler hall. Two twenty-four-inch cooling mains, now empty, used to bring water up from a reservoir back in the bunker farm to cool the main steam condensers. But it was all quiet

now, quiet and secure, which made it the perfect place for what he was doing, especially since he knew the place like the back of his hand. Browne had been chief chemical engineer of the entire facility up until they shut it down two decades ago.

He opened the main pressure gauge sensing line and saw that the pressure in the truck tank was unchanged from yesterday’s reading. He prayed there wasn’t a leak somewhere, then reassured himself that any leak would have emptied the tank long before now. No, it was just going to take time to fill that huge volume. Browne nodded to himself. The mills of God were grinding away here, but they would indeed grind exceedingly fine when the time came. He went back into the control room. It was almost time for the security people to make their tour. When this cycle was done, he would shut off the electric generator until Jared came to tell him they had come and gone.

Edwin Kreiss moved through the woods like a shadow, gliding silently from tree to tree and cover to cover, using the warning cries of birds as his cue to stop and listen. He blended perfectly with all the vertical shadows among the trees. His rubber boots made no sound in the pine needles carpeting the ground. He was staying fifty feet inside the tree line on the south side of the creek, which was getting narrower as he followed it west back across the arsenal. He had crossed two fire lanes and two gravel roads so far, but he had seen no evidence that there had been any persons or vehicles on any of them in some time. He was warm in the jumpsuit, but not overly so, and he was handling with ease the gentle rise in elevation as he moved westward. It was nearly 11:00 A.M.” and the sun was bright, creating pinwheels of light down through the pines.

So far, he had seen several deer, a raccoon, dozens of squirrels, and one rattlesnake sunning itself on a log. The creek was bordered on his side by a wide expanse of tall green grass, which was littered with branches and other debris, indicating that there had been at least one flash flood in the past month. The north bank, slightly higher and undercut about four feet, showed a tangle of roots and burrows against a face of red clay. Where the terrain allowed, he crept out of the forest and down to the creek bank to examine the watercourse for the signs of human life that seemed to litter every creek and river in America: plastic bottles, polystyrene hamburger wrappers, and aluminum cans. But this creek was pristine by comparison.

The water was cold and clear, with waves of moss undulating on the stony bottom.

 

The only time he had to break cover was to cross a ravine that joined the creek from the south. It contained a tiny feeder brook, small enough to hop over. He crept down through the grass to the creek, stood up to jump it, and dropped back down into the grass. As he was scrambling up the other side, he thought he heard a vehicle off to his right. He dropped flat into the grass and made like a lizard, crawling carefully on all fours into the tree line at the top of the ravine, where he subsided into the pine needles to listen. He remembered doing this on the Agency training farm down near Warrenton: head down, face down, the smell of the dirt accentuating his other senses.

At first, he could hear nothing but the sound of a slight breeze soughing through the pines, but then he heard it again: the sound of a vehicle moving in low gear, far off to the right, beyond the pines lining the opposite bank. He lifted himself enough to see over his cover and was just able to catch a glimpse of a single chimney stack about a quarter of a mile or so to the northwest of his position. It looked like the concrete stack of a power plant, although only the very top was showing above the trees. I must be nearing the industrial area, he thought. He closed his eyes and concentrated, again detecting the far-off sound, a sound that came and went, as if the vehicle was changing direction constantly. Assuming it wasn’t a trick of sound carrying across empty countryside, he figured there was definitely someone else on the reservation. The good news was that they were not getting any closer. The bad news was that he was not alone.

He shifted farther into the trees and the sound faded. He checked his wrist compass and then worked his way west through the woods for another fifteen minutes. He turned north to check on the creek and found that it was veering away from him toward a hard dogleg turn to the north.

He moved back to his right in the woods until he came to the edge of the trees. He crouched behind a holly bush and examined his situation.

Between him and the creek were fifty yards of waist-high bright green grass. He probed the ground with the rod—it was soft. The bright green meant that it was growing in totally saturated ground; he would have to be careful of quicksand and bogs.

At that moment, he felt the hair on the back of his neck lift. He flattened down onto the ground, the fabric of his face hood catching on the sharp spines of some holly leaves.

He was being watched. He was certain of it.

He kept perfectly still and reviewed his movements of the past fifteen

minutes. The only open ground he had crossed was that ravine. Had he been spotted then? The woods noises remained normal; there was no sudden shrieking of jays or chatter of squirrels to announce that someone or something was behind him. Which meant that the watcher was probably on the other side of the creek. He waited for fifteen more minutes, listening carefully, and then began to crawl backward, flat on his belly, deeper into the woods. If there were someone watching from the other side, his movement back into the forest should be invisible.

He had seen something else when he tested the green grass area. Right at the elbow of the creek’s turn, there was a massive twenty-foot-high pile of debris: whole tree trunks, shattered limbs, mud-balled roots, large rocks, and desiccated bushes, all caught up on the remains of a giant hardwood that had come down across the creek a long time ago. The huge logjam extended into the woods on his side for a hundred feet or so. On the north side, it had dammed the creek, which was now leaking through the tumbled mess in several small waterfalls.

He thought about that pile and wondered if he should cross to the north bank—there were bound to be snakes in that mess, and he needed to stay in visual contact with the creek. But there was no cover out there;

he would have to crawl through that tall grass to the creek, and if someone was watching, they’d see the grass moving. He lay still for a few minutes, but the background noises did not change. He moved again, forward this time, but at a slight angle to the way he had come. He was aiming for the root ball of a downed pine tree that was fifty feet west of his original position, the place where he had sensed a possible watcher. He moved slowly, still making like a lizard, placing one hand and foot on the soft ground before moving the other one, inching back to the edge of the tree line. He had heard nothing and seen nothing specific that would indicate surveillance, but he had learned years ago to trust this particular instinct absolutely.

When he got to the root ball, he flattened himself down into the hole and then probed the roots with his rod. Sure enough, a copperhead lifted its diminutive triangular head three feet in front of him and tested the air with its tongue. He put the hooked end of the rod right in front of the snake’s head and it froze. He tapped the snake’s body with the rod and it coiled instantly, its delicate black tongue flickering in and out rapidly as it searched for a target. He angled the rod to line up with the snake’s line of strike and waited. The snake also waited, its head making small angular displacements as it

tried to form a heat image of whatever was in front of it. He moved the rod down to the ground and tapped it. The snake reset its coil and aimed in the direction of the rod. He raised the rod and jabbed at the snake, which struck at the rod straight on. He jammed the hooked end into the snake’s maw and pushed hard, pinning the reptile against a thick root. It thrashed briefly and then stopped fighting, its jaws unlocked and wide open around the metal shaft that was stuck down its gullet. With his other hand, he pulled the knife from his right boot and cut down just behind the snake’s head, killing it. He extended the rod and ejected the snake’s body to his right.

He probed the root ball again to see if there were any more nasty surprises, but nothing moved. He checked to see that the snake was actually dead and then eased himself farther down into the hollow where the tree had grown. There was now a slight mound of dirt between him and the creek bed. If he lifted his head, the tops of that green grass were just visible over the rim of the mound. The feeling that someone was watching out there returned. He knew he had to be invisible from the other side, but he sensed that this was not the time to stand up and take a look. Using the hooked end of the rod, he began to cut a small groove into the rim of the dirt mound, working slowly and making sure the rod stayed perfectly horizontal. When he had cut a six-inch-deep groove, he widened the outside of it into an arrow slit. Then he produced a long, thin telescope from his front pack. He pushed it through the groove and out into the first strands of grass.

He raised his head and the telescope just high enough to see down into the area of the creek bed. Then he scanned the tree line on the opposite bank, inch by inch, degree by degree. The front lens was hooded to prevent reflections, and the sun was partially behind him anyway. He detected nothing in the woods opposite, but the sense of danger was strong now. He turned the scope westward, into the huge pile of the logjam.

And then he saw it: a dull patch of color, a few feet inside the tangle of flood debris. He pulled the scope back and flattened himself into the root depression. Then he backed out of the hole and into the deeper cover of the woods, listening carefully and moving slowly enough not to scare up the birds. He angled back to the tree line, ten feet away from the root ball, and put the telescope back to the diamond-shaped eyehole in his head hood. He found the patch of color again and held his breath, hoping that he would not be looking into a set of binoculars. He focused the eyepiece.

It was a ball cap, snagged on a branch. He felt the blood coming to his face and his breath catching in his throat. The ball cap was

purple, with faded white lettering just barely showing. He thought he could make out one mud-splattered letter, the letter L. Lynn owned a ball cap like that.

She wore it all the time, perched high up on her hair, the way the kids did now. That same color. With LHS embroidered on the front, for Langley High School.

He resisted the impulse to break cover, dash across the fifty yards of open grass, and tear into that tangled mess to retrieve the cap. He forced himself to sit perfectly still instead and deliberately slowed his breathing.

It had to be hers. He pointed the telescope again, but now the cap was obscured. He closed his eyes and listened hard. Birds. Breeze. Crickets and other insects. Water splashing along the creek. No more vehicle noises. Now he had a decision to make.

He could go down there and get that cap, which is what he desperately wanted to do. But if there were people watching, he’d be at their mercy.

Or he could wait for dusk. But then, if the watchers had a night-vision device, and they also were willing to wait, he would again be at their mercy. He visualized the area of the creek bed again. It was lower than the surrounding woods. He could wait until it was full dark, when the creek bed would subside into even deeper shadow. A night-vision device was a light amplifier: no light, no vision. Not like the infrared devices he’d used when he was active, which worked on contrast between warm objects and colder background. The hat was just inside the tangle of trees and roots, and just to the left of the leftmost waterfall. He memorized its location, took a deep breath, and began looking for a spot to hole up.

He decided to climb into the dense bottom branches of a big pine for the rest of the afternoon and wait for sundown. He still couldn’t be positive someone was watching, but if they lost patience and came out of hiding, well, that would be all right, too. He couldn’t think of a reason for someone to be skulking through the woods on this abandoned installation, unless there was something illegal going on, something that might account for the kids’ disappearance. If that was Lynn’s hat, he reminded himself. Another part of his brain tried not to think of all the possible ramifications of that last thought. Every hunt was a sequence of decisions:

when to move, when to wait, where to watch, and when to sleep, which was as close to motionless as one could get. This was a time for sleep.

Janet Carter was finishing her lunch when the idea hit her. She had stopped for lunch after her Saturday-morning post doc seminar at Tech.

 

The place was a vegetarian street cafe. Janet, a devoted carnivore, visited the nuts and twigs scene once in a while to salve her conscience. The seminars weren’t terribly interesting, but at least they filled the beginning of the weekend. Over lunch, she had been thinking about Barry dark. The kid was an insolent, slovenly pup, and Kreiss undoubtedly had applied exactly the right kind of pressure to make the little shit talk. On the other hand, he was probably still immobilized, and perhaps an unexpected act of kindness on her part might spring something loose. So why not take a pizza over there and see if she could get him to tell her what he had revealed to the headless horseman the other night.

She gathered up the paper plate and her Coke. It had to have been Kreiss, of course. Big bad bogeyman in the dark; in and out without a trace, and the kid scared shitless in the process, paralyzed physically and mentally by an encounter that probably had taken all of ninety seconds. Professional bogeyman. He must have learned some interesting things from those people at the Agency. She dumped her table trash and went across the street to the pizza place, resisting an urge to get some real food.

Twenty minutes later, she was banging on dark’s door. It took him a few minutes to answer the door, and his appearance hadn’t changed much since the other night: dirty T-shirt, baggy shorts, flip-flops. His face was sallow and there were pouches under his eyes. The beginnings of a scraggly red beard covered his face. His arms still hung straight down at his sides, although he could move his hands now. He blinked at her for a moment, long enough for her to get a whiff of the apartment within.

“What?” he said, screwing up his face, as if the midday sunlight hurt his eyes.

“I’m Janet Carter,” she said.

“Still with the FBI. Brought you a pizza.”

He blinked again. He must have been asleep, she thought.

“Felt sorry for you,” she said.

“Want me to cut it up for you?”

“Damn,” he muttered.

“Yeah. Thanks. But, I mean, like, why?”

She took her last deep breath of fresh air, toed the door open, and stepped past him into the apartment. It hadn’t improved.

“Leave the door open,” she called over her shoulder.

“You need the fresh air. Where’s a knife?”

He followed her across the room. She stopped at the kitchen threshold and let him pry a knife out of the sink. He could pick it up in his fingers but not lift his arm.

“Why don’t we just wash that,” she suggested, taking it from his limp fingers and running it under some hot water. He just stood there. She cut the pizza into thin slices, scraped and washed a plate, and set him

up in the single living room chair. She put the plate on a stool in front of him and watched him eat hungrily, bending over the stool and slurping it up like a dog. The light streaming in from the open front door showed more of the mess than she wanted to see.

“Actually,” she said, “that’s a bribe.”

“Cops can do bribes?” he said around a mouthful. Now there was a hint of his previous insolence in his eyes. Must be the sudden carbo load, she thought. She no longer wanted any pizza.

“One-way rule,” she said.

“We can’t take bribes; but we can do bribes, especially for information, see?”

He kept chewing while he watched her.

“I still want to know what you told the headless guy the other night,” she said.

“Like I said—” he began.

“No, wait. See, last time I asked you what he wanted. That was the wrong question. This is a different question. What did you say to him? Exact words.”

He sucked another piece of dripping pizza into his mouth. His eyes were definitely wary now, seeking some advantage. She pressed him.

“Look, lemme lay it out for you. If you told him what he wanted to know, he’s never coming back, so it won’t matter if you tell me. If you didn’t give him what he wanted, he will come back, and you’ll need me to protect you. Us to protect you.” She gave him a moment to absorb that “us.”

“So, what did you say to him? Exact words?”

He studied her face.

“For a fuckin’ pizza?” he said.

“You’re out of your league, Barry. Way the hell out of your league.

Think about how big he was. How much stronger he was than you, and that’s when you had arms. Now think about other parts of your body, Barry. Soft parts.”

He blinked at that, licked his lips, and then sighed.

“Site R,” he said.

“He wanted to know where Lynn and the guys went camping. All I knew was Site R. That’s what I heard Rip say. They were going to ‘break into’ Site R. I don’t know what that means. I told him that.

And I still don’t fuckin’ know, okay?”

She looked at him.

“Okay. And has it ever occurred to you that if you’d told someone this a lot sooner, maybe we’d have found them?”

He looked away. Janet got up and left.

Just before sundown, Browne McGarand watched the reaction on the last copper sponge fizzle out. The light coming through the four skylights of

 

the control room was turning sunset red. He shut off the acid drip and was beginning the purge sequence when he heard two distinctive taps on the metal door, followed by two more taps. Jared was back. Browne turned out the single work light, got his flashlight, and went to the control room door. He tapped the door once.

“It’s Jared,” Jared replied from the other side. They had arranged a duress code when the project began. If Jared ever said, “It’s me,” Browne would know that Jared was not alone and that he should get out of there through the vehicle bays. Browne opened the door and Jared came through.

His grandson was a hefty-shouldered man with a large paunch and a heavy black beard. His job with the local telephone company had him spending days by himself checking the more remote lines in the county, where he tended to roadside tree falls, so-called backhoe interrupts, when customers or the other utilities unwittingly dug through a phone line, and feeder-box problems in the isolated cabins and trailers off the main county roads. His clothes always smelled faintly of pine needles and tobacco. Jared was perpetually suspicious, and he had a habit of squinting his eyes at people and things as if he expected them to lunge at him. Browne closed and locked the door and turned the work light back on.

“The security people stop anywhere?”

“Nope. Drove around like always. You could hear their damn radio goin’ a block away—some damn rock and roll crap. Windows rolled up with the AC goin’.” He sniffed.

“Some security.”

“Be thankful they’re not real professionals,” Browne said.

“I’ve always wondered when they might start random building checks.”

“Not that pair,” Jared said, easing his heavy frame into one of the console chairs.

“But we may have us another problem.”

Browne finished the purge and began to set up the retort for cleaning.

“What kind of problem?”

“You know how sometimes you see something’ outta the corner of your eye? You wonder if you really seen it or you just imaginin’ things?”

Browne eyed his grandson.

“Things?”

“I was watchin’ that there security truck from the rail sidin’ control tower. I’d a sworn I saw a man crossin’ that little ravine, joins the creek just below that big logjam? You know where I’m talkin’ about? You can just see that stretch from the sidin’ tower. But something’ was off about it, what I saw, I mean.” He shook his head.

 

“Like he was wearin’ a hood or something’. That’s it—wasn’t no face. I don’t know. I think I saw it. But maybe not.”

Browne rubbed his jaw.

“A man, though? Not a deer or other animal?”

Jared nodded thoughtfully.

“That tall grass out there along the creeks?

Looked like he’d been down in that there grass, but had to stand up to jump that brook, comes through there. Then he was gone.”

“What did you do?”

“When the security truck went out to the back bunker area, I went down there, to the north side of the creek. Hid out in the tree line.

Waited for a coupla hours, see if he came out of the woods or showed himself somehow. But nothin’. And it didn’t feel like there was someone there. Not like when you know there’s deer movin’ around in there, you know? Birds wasn’t yellin’. No bushes were movin’, no other noises.” He rubbed the back of his leg.

“Got into some damn chiggers, I think. Hell, I don’t know. Prob’ly nothin’.”

“A single individual,” Browne said as he closed the retort back up.

“Those traps still set?”

“Yep.”

“Well, maybe we’ll skip taking the girl her food tonight. Maybe we’ll go out there and see what happens. If she ate those apples I fixed for her, she’ll still be out of it anyway.”

“You want me to go check on her?” Jared asked, a little too casually.

Browne wasn’t fooled.

“No, I don’t think so, Jared,” he said.

“Besides, we shouldn’t go near the nitro building, especially if there’s someone here.

He might be here because of those kids going missing. Wouldn’t want to just lead him to her, would we, now?”

Jared nodded but said nothing. He continued to rub the back of his leg while Browne closed off all the valves to the truck in the next bay.

“We’ve got pressure showing on the truck tank,” Browne announced, trying to distract Jared from thoughts of the captive girl. Jared didn’t need to be messing with that girl.

“From now on, we’re building power. But I’m almost out of copper.”

“Got me some back in the central office yard,” Jared said.

“Pallet of cracked switch plates. They’re flat. We can grind ‘em, or just put ‘em in there and use more acid.”

Browne nodded. Acid they had, in vast quantities. No government agency would be putting a pattern together on missing copper. He thought about the pressure. Maybe another thirty batches, if they

could keep the process going. Pretty soon, they’d have to switch to the big pump. He finished up securing the hydrogen generator.

“All right. Let’s go down there and look around,” he said.

“Maybe it was just a late-season turkey hunter sneaking around; those guys cammo up pretty good.”

Edwin Kreiss made his move forty-five minutes after the sun went down behind the ridges to the west of the arsenal. He felt refreshed, having slept for a couple of hours in his hiding place. He had crept out to the tree line just before sundown and again memorized the features in the pile that were closest to the cap. Once darkness just about obscured the opposite tree line, he crept down on his belly through the tall grass, moving directly toward the creek. Mindful of that copperhead, he probed ahead with the rod, parting the grass carefully and probing the spongy earth on either side before slithering forward. The ground was not wet, but it was very soft, with occasional round rocks embedded here and there. It took him ten careful minutes to get down to within six feet of the creek bank, where he stopped to absorb the night sounds around him. His plan was to get into the creek itself and move upstream to the logjam, then get out and crawl sideways until he could retrieve the cap.

The sky above him was clear. A drone of night insects and frogs had begun and the creek bur bled peacefully right ahead. What if it isn’t Lynn’s cap? Wrong question, his brain told him. What if it is her cap? Then what? He forced himself to concentrate on the ground directly ahead of him. He no longer had the sense that someone was watching up in those trees. Even if someone was watching, no one would be able to see him.

Had all that been just a spook on his part? He thought maybe he should cross the creek, go up to the opposite tree line, and check it out for watchers.

No. Focus. Get the cap.

He probed ahead with the rod while he inched toward the creek bank.

The grass had a muddy smell. The cuff on his right sleeve hung up on something resistant in the grass. He pulled gently and heard a tiny chinking sound, like metal scraping on a rock. He froze. Metal? He backed up a few inches, turned his head very slowly to look into the darkness with his peripheral vision, but it was almost night now and he couldn’t see anything at all. His sleeve was free, so he rolled very carefully to the left and began collapsing the rod down to a two-foot-long staff. Then he pointed it into the grass at his right

and began parting the thick stems, moving the rod from side to side, advancing it an inch at a time, until he heard another clink. He put down the rod and snapped on one of his cuff lights, which threw a tiny red beam of light into the base stems of the grass. A sheen of steel reflected back at him. He parted more of the grass to expose the trap and gave a mental whistle. Had he been upright and walking through here, he might have stepped into that thing.

He considered his position. There were traps along the creek, big steel traps, capable of seizing, if not breaking, a man’s leg. He directed the tiny bead of light at the trap again and found the step trigger and the tie-down chain. This trap was much too big for small game: These were man traps

So why in the hell were there man traps out here? He carefully rolled the other way and began exploring the bank, going upstream until he found another trap. As long as he came at them low and from the side, they posed no threat. But for anyone walking along the creek, or down to the creek, to cross maybe… well… Then he wondered if there were any in the creek.

Browne and Jared walked quietly down the path toward the creek. The ghostly buildings of the industrial area were swallowed up behind them by the dense trees. Jared led, with Browne twenty feet behind him. They did not use lights, having used this path before. Browne trusted Jared’s woodcraft instincts; his grandson had been hunting the foothills of the Appalachians since he was a young boy and he was a natural woodsman.

Browne was also pretty sure that Jared’s skills had more than a little bit to do with his penchant for comforting some of the lonelier women back up in those gray hills. Jared was a big boy now, and if he wanted to take chances like that, it was on his own head. If nothing else, fooling around with some of those mountain women had probably sharpened up Jared’s defensive instincts. If Jared thought he’d seen something, then they needed to go take a look down along the creek area. That’s where those kids had come in.

Jared slowed as the trees bordering the path thinned out. They were getting closer to the banks of the creek. Browne patted the Ruger .44caliber revolver on his hip and began to pay close attention to his surroundings.

Kreiss finally reached the edge of the logjam pile and began to feel around for the hole of the big tree that had impounded all the flood debris in the first place. He was thirty feet away from the creek, moving back toward

 

the trees on the south side of the water. The cap ought to be about six feet south of the root ball on the big tree, maybe five feet off the ground and a foot or so back in the tangle. He found the edge of the root ball and retraced his handholds on the trunk, using the rod to estimate the distance.

He didn’t want to turn on a cuff light until he thought he was very close. When he was finally in position, he paused to look straight up. It was a dark, moonless night, but there was plenty of starlight streaming down through the clear mountain air. He adapted his eyes to use the starlight by looking first up the stars and then down and sideways at the top objects in the logjam. When he could make out individual branches and snags, he looked down along the logjam until he could make out the tops of individual trees on the other side of the creek. If there was anyone out here tonight, they’d be over there in those trees, where they could see down into the broad ravine cut by the creek.

He began to scan the dark mass of tangled debris with his peripheral vision, searching for a lighter contrast among all the roots, limbs, packed leaves, and mangled grasses. When he finally thought he had it, he set a cuff light for the dimmest red setting and pointed it into the tangle. The hat was right there. Keeping the light on, he pushed the rod into the tangle, very slowly so as to make no noise, and snagged the hat. He turned off the light, retrieved the cap, and stuffed it quietly into the chest pack without looking at it. Then he subsided to the ground to listen to the night.

The mass of the logjam rose up beside him. It felt like an avalanche, poised to drop on him. The hairs were up on the back of his neck again.

Browne stood to one side of the dim path. He was just able to make out Jared’s silhouette as he stood ten feet behind him. Jared was sweeping binoculars down into the ravine. The wedge of night sky showing through a gap in the trees was clear; the air was cooling fast. He didn’t really expect anything to happen tonight; if Jared had seen someone, they were at best long gone and at worst huddled around a campfire out in the deep storage area somewhere. For a moment, he had a prickly thought that whoever it was might have already gotten behind them and was even now creeping through the streets of the industrial area. The girl, he thought. Is this about the girl?

Jared was moving back in his direction. As always, Browne was amazed that such a heavy man as Jared could move so soundlessly through the woods. Not a twig snapped nor bush swished. He just seemed to get closer and closer, until Browne could smell the cigarette smell on him.

 

But then jared reached for Browne’s left hand. He took it gently, turned it palm up, and jabbed one finger down: He’d seen someone or something, and as best he could tell, there was only one of them out there.

Browne took jared’s hand. He drew the letter W on Jared’s palm with his fingernail, followed by the letter R, meaning, Where exactly is he?

Jared took Browne’s palm. He drew a wiggly line all the way across it.

The creek. Then he bisected that line with the flat of his thumb, twice.

The logjam, just below where those kids had drowned. Then he did it again, and where the two lines met, he drew his finger lightly up the logjam line and then jabbed his fingertip right there: south of the creek, on the other side, near the logjam, one individual.

Browne pulled the heavy pistol and pressed it into Jared’s hand. Then he tapped Jared once on the chest and squeezed Jared’s hand around the pistol grip, indicating he should take the gun. Then he took jared’s other hand, touched his own chest with it, and then his right ear, tapping Jared’s fingertips on his ear two or three times, and then he pointed Jared’s arm first to his own face and then off to the right, meaning, You take the gun.

I’ll go to the right and make noise. Jared nodded in the darkness, turned around, and melted back toward the creek.

Browne waited until he could no longer see the black shape of his grandson, and then he went off the path to the right, moving silently across the carpet of pine needles. When he judged he was about thirty feet away from the path, he felt around for a large stick, picked it up, took a deep breath, and then began yelling, “There he is! Get him!” at the top of his lungs while banging the stick against the trees around him and crashing noisily through the underbrush toward the creek.

Kreiss had crawled almost back to the edge of the creek when the hullabaloo broke out in the opposite tree line. He felt a stab of panic before his hunting discipline reasserted itself. Instead of springing into a dead run across the field of high grass, toward the safety of his own tree line, he lunged toward the noise and the creek, even as a heavy bullet smacked the hole of the big downed tree and a booming pistol report assaulted his ears from up on the opposite tree line. He rolled into the creek bed in the direction of the gunshot and made a split-second decision. If the watchers had been there for a long time, they’d expect him to run back the way he’d come, down the creek and then out through the tall grass, right into the man traps Instead, he scrambled as close to the undercut north bank as he could get and then slipped to his left under the big tree trunk and

 

into the tangle of the logjam. He ended up lying on his belly in wet sand, with one of the small waterfalls pouring ice-cold water onto his back.

Using the rod in his left hand and his fingers on his right hand, he moved sand aside like a giant sea turtle about to lay its eggs on a beach. As he wiggled deeper into the sand, he was able to move farther up under the logjam. With any luck, he could get all the way under it to the stream on the back side and get away, but, either way, they couldn’t get a shot at him while he was under all this debris. He kept digging and inching his way forward.

When Browne heard the shot, he stopped making noise and stood still by the edge of the tree line, keeping one tree between himself and the creek and waiting for jared. Obviously, Jared had been confident enough of seeing someone that he’d taken a shot. Then, to Browne’s left, a bright white flashlight snapped on, its beam traversing the creek bed from right to left quickly, and then much more slowly. He pulled his own light and began doing the same thing, putting his beam where Jared’s wasn’t. They searched back and forth along the area of the creek bed, and along the downstream edge of the logjam pile. Browne saw the occasional glint of steel as his beam hit one of the traps. He moved left to join Jared.

“Well?” he said.

“Saw him at the edge of the creek and the logjam,” Jared said, keeping his voice low.

“Blind once the gun went off. Missed him, though; heard the bullet hit that big tree.”

“Can you tell which way he went?”

“Into the creek. After that…”

Browne was silent for a long moment. He stopped his light when it illuminated Kreiss’s original path through the tall grass leading down to the creek.

“Well, nothing wrong with your instincts. There was someone out here. Question is, Why?”

“Way that grass is flattened down, he was crawling’,” Jared said.

“Whoever it was, he wasn’t hunting’. He was creepin’ this place.”

“This has to be about those kids, then,” Browne said.

“No way anyone could know about the other. Right, Jared?”

“Not from me anyways,” Jared said as he flicked the powerful beam up to the opposite tree line, hoping to flash some eyes. Nothing shone back at him.

“So that’s bad, then.”

“Yes, it is.”

“You want to keep looking? Maybe go get the dogs?”

 

Browne thought about it. Jared had three mixed-breed hounds he used for hunting wild pigs, but it would be hours before they could get back here with the dogs.

“No,” he said.

“I think we should get off the reservation for the night. Maybe leave it alone for a couple of days. In case this was just some guy wandering around. Tonight he’s scared. Tomorrow he might bring cops.”

“He’d have to admit he broke in here,” Jared said, handing back the heavy Ruger.

“If this wasn’t purposeful, then he’ll never come back.”

“And if it was…”

“Then I need to start patrollin’. You stay on the generator; I need to start hunting’.”

Browne detected the sound of anticipation in his grandson’s voice.

Above all else, Jared was a hunter. They made a few more sweeps of the ravine with their Maglites, and then Browne switched his off. He brought out a much smaller version of the big light and used it to guide them back up the path toward the industrial area.

Behind them, down in the ravine, Edwin Kreiss broke through the last of the tangle, pulled himself out onto a dry sandbar, sniffed the night air, and listened. Then he smiled.

On Monday morning, Janet Carter talked to Larry Talbot and Billy Smith about what she’d learned from Barry dark. Billy Smith was manfully trying to stay awake, but there was a steady parade of yawns.

“Am I mistaken, or didn’t the boss have a word with you Friday?” Talbot said.

“Yes, he did. Warned me off Edwin Kreiss and this whole case. But as I understand it, we get new info, we make sure it gets into the system. Billy, you finished the transmittal letter for the case file?”

“Nope, but I’ll have it today,” Billy said, giving another yawn.

“I need to know which one of you is the official case officer.”

If Billy wasn’t such a nice man, all this yawning would have me yelling at him, she thought. Talbot, however, made a noise of exasperation.

“Look, Jan,” he said. She frowned. She hated being called Jan.

“I

 

remember that kid dark. Redhead, right?

“Fuck you’ sneer on his face all the time? He’s an asshole. He could be telling you anything, or the latest thing off the Dungeon Masters of Doom bulletin board. Leave the fucking thing alone. You want to put the campus cops’ report and this Site R stuff into that file, fine. But if Farnsworth finds out you’re still messing with this thing, he’ll have you doing background investigation interviews on Honduran gardeners until the end of time. Okay? Enough already.”

Janet acquiesced and slunk back to her cubicle. Billy rose up over the divider.

“What’s the difference between a southern zoo and a northern zoo?”

he asked.

She waited.

“A southern zoo has a description of the animal on the front of a cage, along with a recipe.”

He winked at her over the divider and then did a down periscope.

Sweet dreams, Billy, she thought. She started going through her Email and remembered that the shrink up in Washington had promised to get back to her, but it was only Monday morning. Then she saw an announcement on internal mail that Farnsworth was going to a conference of eastern region SACs and RAs for three days and wanted any pending action-items brought to him before close of business today. She looked around for Talbot, but he had stepped away from his desk. She cut over to the Web and hit her favorite search engine. She typed in Site R and received the usual avalanche of Web site garbage. So much for that, she thought, and went to refill her coffee cup. To her surprise, Billy was working, not sleeping. She offered to fill his cup, and he accepted. When she returned, she asked him about Site R. “Only Site R I ever heard about was the alternate command center for the Pentagon; it’s up near Camp David, in Maryland. Probably five, six hours from here, up I-Eighty-one, then east.”

“Not a place you’d go camping, then?”

“Not unless you like sleeping with a lot of Secret Service agents. It’s like that NORAD thing inside Cheyenne Mountain. You know, the command center for the ICBMs. For what it’s worth, I took a look through that case file. I noticed something: They didn’t take a lot of clothes, like for some long trip. Larry even made a note that Kreiss had questioned that. I don’t know about this Site R business, but I’d be looking for something closer to home.”

 

“Like what? Site R sounds military.”

“Yeah, well, maybe go talk to some of the homesteaders here. Or local law maybe.”

Janet nodded and went back to her desk. The homesteaders were FBI employees who had been in the Roanoke office for a long time, people who either had low-level technical jobs or were non-career-path special agents. Talbot returned to the office and looked over in her direction;

Janet made a show of tackling her in box. She had half a mind to put a call into Edwin Kreiss, see what he knew about Site R. Yeah, right, she thought. Back to work, Carter.

Edwin Kreiss finished cleaning his trekking gear and then re stowed his packs in the spare bedroom closet. He was waiting for a return call from Dagget Parsons up in northern Virginia. Kreiss had saved Parsons’s life during an Agency retrieval in Oregon, when Dagget had been a pilot for the U.S. Marshals Service. Dagget had retired after the incident, but not before telling Kreiss that if there was ever anything he needed, just call.

Kreiss was hoping that Dag was still flying for that environmental sciences company. The phone rang.

“Edwin Kreiss.”

“Well, well, Edwin Kreiss himself. How the hell are you? Where the hell are you?”

“Nowhere special anymore, Dag; just another Bureau retiree. I’m down in Blacksburg, near Virginia Tech. What are you up to these days?

You still flying for that Geo-Information Services?”

“Yeah. It’s boring, but boring is what I’m after these days. How can I help you?”

Kreiss told him about Lynn. Then he got right down to it.

“Dag, I need some aerial photography of a place called the Ramsey Army Arsenal.

It’s outside of a town called Ramsey, here in southwest Virginia. The place is a mothballed Army ammunition-production complex. Got any contacts who could maybe get me copies of some black-and-white overheads, say from about five thousand feet?” He phrased it that way in case Parsons didn’t want to do it.

“Contacts? No. But I can do it. The company I fly for is over in Suitland, Maryland. Like you said, we do GIS stuff all up and down the East Coast. You know, field condition analyses for farmers, spectrum analysis for crop diseases, pond health, insect infestations, plant pathologies.”

 

“I’m not active anymore, Dag. This is strictly personal. I can cover costs, of course.”

“Understood. And you’re working with local law, or in spite of local law?”

“They’ve declared it a missing persons case. The Bureau, I mean. The locals will follow the feds’ lead on that.”

“The locals know you’re working it? They know who you are?”

“No. Not yet anyway. The local Bureau people do, of course, after my somewhat colorful departure, and I’ve been duly warned off. But I can’t just sit here, Dag.”

“Understood, Ed. I’ll guarantee I’d be doing the same damn thing.

Look, this stuff is all unclassified. We have a humongous database of aerial photography. We probably have coverage. Lemme work on it. How long’s she been missing?”

Kreiss told him.

“Shit. That’s rough.” He paused, not wanting to state the obvious.

“I have to hope, Dag, but, like I said, the cops and the Bureau have given up looking. The feds say there’s no evidence of a crime, so it’s a straight missing persons beef now. But I got a tip about this installation, and I then found her hat there. It’s not a place where she should have been, and I think there’s something going on there.”

“You tell your ex-employers all that?”

“I’d have to tell them how I found it. That wouldn’t be helpful. For a variety of reasons.”

Dagget was silent for a moment.

“But maybe they’d start working it again,” he said.

“I don’t think so. There’s still no crime, except mine. They’re working stiffs with a budget and a boss, Dag. Basically, I’m going solo on this.”

“Roger that,” Parsons said.

“I’m slated into southern Pennsylvania this afternoon, but we did some flights on some big apple orchards in the upper valley about six months ago. Let me look at the GPS maps for this Ramsey Arsenal, see if maybe we got coverage.”

“I can pay for this, Dag.”

“Not me you can’t. The only thing that might take some cash is getting your data out of the center. But we’re talking black-and-white photo recce here, so that ought not to be a big deal. This place restricted airspace?”

“Probably. There’s a big double chain-link fence around the whole thing.”

 

There was a moment of silence on the phone. Then he said, “I’ll get it, Ed. Whatever it takes. I owe you big-time.”

“No, you don’t, but I appreciate it, Dag.”

There was another pause.

“Ed,” Parsons said.

“That incident at Millwood.

I heard some bizarre stories about that. Next time we get together, I’d like to hear your side, you feel like it. The official version smelled like coverup.”

Kreiss didn’t want to get into this.

“The official story closed that book, Dag,” he said.

“Probably best for all concerned.”

“A coupla guys made it sound like Custer’s last stand, but with the Indians losing.”

Kreiss stared out the window for a moment.

“Ancient history, Dag.”

“Yeah. All right. I’ve got your number. If we have coverage, I’ll have something to you by Wednesday. And Ed, anything else—you just screech. You hear me? I’ve got my own plane, and I can still fly, even if I can’t shoot.”

“Appreciate it, Dag. More than you know.” He got Parsons’s beeper number, then hung up. He went out the front door to the porch. He looked into what seemed to be a golden green cloud of new leaves. The air was filled with the scent of pollen and fresh loam. The creek down below was just barely audible through the thickening vegetation.

He had made a mistake going into the arsenal without any idea of the layout. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be people in there, which showed just how much of an edge he’d lost over the past few years.

It had taken him an hour to get out of the logjam tangle, and then another hour to traverse just the fifty yards from the creek back into the trees.

That shooter had to have had a very good pair of optics or a night scope of some kind to get so close with the first shot. That meant they had been down there looking for an intruder. An intruder into what? What was going on in that place that there were men laying traps along that creek and coming after him with guns? A bunch of bikers running a meth lab, possibly? A hillbilly marijuana farm?

But then there was the hat. Lynn’s hat. Carried down that creek until it got caught up in the logjam. Which meant—what, exactly? Had someone stolen that hat a year ago and gone into the arsenal with it? Or had the kids been camping outside of the complex, and the hat blew away and got carried downstream? There certainly were other plausible explanations.

And yet, that kid had said “break into” Site R. While he was almost certain that hat was hers, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d

actually seen her wear it. He should call those FBI people and tell them he’d found the hat. But how would he explain the where part? And even if the Bureau people were sympathetic, would they do anything? Did they even have the case anymore? Did they care? Had they ever cared? He remembered the way that woman agent had looked at him, almost challenging him to interfere: “Do not go solo on this,” she’d said. Pretty or not, she wasn’t old enough to talk to him like that.

He sighed in frustration and went back into the house to make some coffee. He was being unfair. Agents were agents. There was an infinite supply of evil out there. Knock off a bad guy and two more rose up in his place. The working stiffs in the Bureau and the other federal law-enforcement agencies tended to work the ones they could, and the others, well, they did what they could until some boss said, Hey, this isn’t going anywhere;

let’s move on, folks. As long as statistics drove the budget, the bosses would prioritize in the direction of closure. This was nothing new.

The Agency had been different, but that was because they weren’t really accountable to anybody except a committee or two in Congress, where accountability was an extremely flexible concept.

He stood at the sink, washing out the coffeepot, and considered the other problem, the larger problem—that Washington might find out he’d come out of his cave. The terms of his forced retirement after the Millwood incident had been excruciatingly clear, enunciated through clenched teeth by none other than J. Willard Marchand, the assistant director over Bureau Foreign Counterintelligence himself: Kreiss was never to act operationally again, not in any capacity. Not in private security work, not as a consultant, not even in self-defense.

“Some asshole wants your car, you give it up. Someone breaks into your house at night, you sleep through it. You may not carry a firearm. You may not do any of those things you’ve been doing for all those years. You will forget everything you learned from those goddamned people across the river, and you will turn in any special equipment you may have acquired while you were there.”

The deal had been straightforward: He could draw his pension, go down to Blacksburg, be with his daughter, and contemplate his many sins in the woods. But that was it. He remembered that Marchand had been so angry, he could speak only in short bursts.

“We’ll let you keep your retirement package. Despite Millwood, for which the professional standards board could have just fired you. You can live on that. You want to take a civilian job, it had better not

be even remotely related to what you did here. And, most importantly, you keep your wild-ass accusations to yourself.

In other words, Kreiss, find a hole, get in it, and pull it in after you.

And speaking for the deputy attorney general of the United States, if we get even a hint that you’re stirring the pot somewhere, any pot, anywhere, we’ll ask the Agency to send one of your former playmates down there to retrieve your ass. And we will be watching.”

All because of what had happened on a quiet Sunday afternoon in Millwood, Virginia, a tiny village up in the northern Shenandoah Valley. Millwood was home to a restored gristmill, a couple of antique shops, Carter Hall—once the huge estate of the Burwell family, which was now home to the Project Hope foundation—a post office, a private country day school, three dozen or so private homes, and a general store. It also contained the ancestral home of Ephraim Glower, erstwhile assistant deputy director for counterespionage operations for the Agency. Ephraim Glower of the Powhatan School, Choate, and Yale University. Whose ancestors had ridden with Mosby’s Rangers during the Civil War, partnered with J. P. Morgan in the heyday of the robber barons, and served as an assistant secretary of the Treasury during the reign of Franklin Roosevelt. Ephraim Glower had risen to a position of real power within the Agency, while spending the last of the family’s fortune on the family estate, a town house in Georgetown, fox hunting in Middleburg, Washington A-list entertaining, a high-maintenance socialite wife, and a string of young and beautiful “associates.” His superior social standing had been matched by an equally superior attitude, and he had not been beloved by his subordinates within CE.

Kreiss’s team, while working the Energy Department espionage case in collaboration with the Agency CE people and Energy’s own security people, had begun to encounter an increasingly resistant bureaucratic field.

Someone was subtly inhibiting the investigation. Kreiss eventually suspected Glower. When he checked out a rumor that Glower was almost broke, it turned out that he had been rescued by an infusion of mysterious cash. Kreiss, by then operating mostly on his own initiative, had followed the money trail. He had traced the money from its sources in Hong Kong, through the election campaign finance operations of the newly elected administration, directly to Glower. Who, for sums paid, was apparently obstructing the joint Bureau/Agency/Energy Department investigation by spinning a gentle web of bureaucratic and legal taffy over all the efforts to determine if there were Chinese spies at the nuclear research laboratories. Glower

didn’t trade secrets for money, as most spies or traitors did. He provided an insidious form of top cover, and he did it so well that Kreiss eventually concluded that Glower must have been getting some help from over in the Justice Department.

All of this was happening as Kreiss was entering his eighth year of the exchange assignment with the Agency counterespionage directorate. As he and his small team developed the scope and depth of a possible top level conspiracy, Kreiss, the team leader and prime mover, had been suddenly recalled to the Bureau. The word in the corridors was that Langley had complained about Kreiss, claiming he had begun to overstep his brief.

Someone at the highest levels in the Agency had prevailed upon someone injustice to make the Bureau recall him. He had been given an innocuous position within the Bureau’s FCI organization, pending a new assignment.

The pending went on for two years, while he watched the joint Energy Department/ FBI investigation stall out completely.

This had convinced Kreiss that Ephraim Glower had a cohort over at Justice, and possibly within the Bureau itself. His timing turned out to be lousy, since there was already a great deal of bureaucratic acrimony between Justice and FBI headquarters. Since the FBI worked for the attorney general, no one in the Bureau wanted to hear Kreiss’s conspiracy theories about any putative Chinese spy ring, and most emphatically, they did not want to hear about a high-level problem over at Justice. The Bureau was much too busy manning its own ramparts over Waco, Ruby Ridge, and, later, some unpleasant revelations about the FBI laboratory.

When the story about the Chinese government’s attempts to buy influence during and after the 1996 reelection campaign broke in Washington, Kreiss tried again. This time, he was shut down even more forcefully. The FBI director by then had his own problems with the Justice Department as he and the attorney general traded salvos and congressional testimony over independent prosecutors, a laundry list of presidential scandals, and growing talk of a presidential impeachment.

Kreiss, totally frustrated, went to Millwood to confront Ephraim Glower, which led to bloody results. He was preparing to challenge his expulsion from the Bureau, when something happened to change his mind: The Agency had threatened his daughter. The threat had been made indirectly, but it had been unmistakable. It had come during a seemingly casual telephone call from one of his ex-associates in the retrieval business. Langley was still furious about Glower, and the word in CE was that the big bosses didn’t believe Kreiss’s alibi for the time Glower had done all the killing. But they were willing to put

the whole incident to bed as long as Kreiss shut up about what Glower had been doing. And if he didn’t, Kreiss might get to experience his own family tragedy. Kreiss took the hint and subsided. He had done only one thing right that day in Millwood, and that one thing now constituted his only insurance policy.

So now he had a big decision to make: He could call Special Agent Larry Talbot, lay out what he’d done and what he’d found, take his licks from Talbot’s peppery sidekick for intruding, and then get back out of the way. He could even plead with the Roanoke RA to keep his intrusion into the arsenal a secret from Washington. But that wouldn’t work: The Bureau would never change. They’d yell at him and break his balls for going in there, while doing nothing about finding Lynn. So there really wasn’t any decision to make, was there? What he had to do was to go back there, armed this time with some decent overheads, and find out what the hell was going on in the Ramsey Arsenal that might hopefully lead to Lynn, or at least to what had happened to Lynn.

He looked down at the muddy cap, which was lying on the kitchen table. Face it, he thought with a sigh, those kids may be dead. No, not those kids. Lynn might be dead. He couldn’t bear to think about that. He himself would certainly have been dead if that big slug had hit him instead of the tree. Those people hadn’t come out to talk. The shooter, taking his position up in the tree line, the other one acting as game beater, yelling and crashing forward through the woods to startle Kreiss into motion-that had not been extemporaneous. Those people were hunters and knew what they were doing. If the kids had blundered into people like that, they would have been easy pickings.

He felt the rage coming then, the familiar heat in his face, the sensation that his blood pressure was rising. He tried to contain it by deep breathing, but it came anyway, a wave of fury, the tingling sensation in his large hands, a scarlet rim to his peripheral vision. If he found out that those people had done something to Lynn, he would introduce them to the true meaning of terror, sweeper-style, and then he would slaughter them all, until there was blood to his elbows. He closed his eyes, savoring the rage.

But even his fury could not entirely blank out the other possibility, the one he didn’t ever want to think about. That it hadn’t been locals who had taken Lynn.

To Janet’s surprise, Brianne Kellermann called her back from headquarters right after lunch. After some more obligatory waffling about privacy issues, she told Janet that the fundamental issue leading to the breakup of

 

the Kreiss marriage had been what Edwin Kreiss did for a living. According to Brianne’s notes, the former Mrs. Kreiss implied that she had found out more than she wanted to know about what Kreiss was doing during his exchange tour with the Agency, and that it had not squared with what Kreiss had been telling her. There were also some indications of domestic turbulence, incidents of uncontrolled rage on his part that stopped just short of physical violence. The bottom line was that Kreiss’s wife had become afraid of her husband. Four years after he went to the Agency, she sought the divorce.

“And that’s it?” Janet asked.

“That’s all I have in my file pertaining to him,” Brianne said.

“That was your focus, right?”

She had hoped for more, but she did not want Kellermann to detect that.

“Yes, it was. Thank you very much. You’ve been very helpful.”

There was a momentary pause on the line.

“Have you met Edwin Kreiss?”

Her instincts told her to deflect any further interest in her call.

“Yes,” she said.

“When we interviewed the parents. He seemed—I don’t know-pretty normal? A lot of anxiety about his missing daughter, of course, and he wasn’t thrilled when we told him the case was going to MR But killerDiller secret agent? No.”

“Secret agent?”

Janet swore under her breath. Damned shrink was quick.

“Well, you know, that time he spent with the Agency.”

“I see. Not a killer-diner, but not your run-of-the-mill, quietly retired civil servant, either?”

Janet had to think about that one.

“No-o, not exactly,” she said.

“I got the impression that he was immensely self-controlled.” She remembered all the things Farnsworth had told her, but she doubted Brianne Kellermann was in the loop on any of that.

“I guess I wouldn’t want the guy really mad at me, but closet psychopath? No. And he’s not a suspect or anything. The kids just vanished. We’ve been clutching at straws the whole way. That’s what pisses me off, I guess.”

“Well, I wish I could have told you something significant,” Brianne said.

“But that’s all I have.”

Actually, you did, Doc, Janet thought.

“Well, like I said, we have to pull all the strings. And thanks again for getting back to me. I can close our files now; let MP take it.”

Janet flopped back in her chair after hanging up. Kreiss had a

reputation for being a scary guy. Kreiss’s wife had been sufficiently afraid of him to want out. Wait–correct that. Sufficiently afraid to want to go to a Bureau counselor. Having been divorced herself, she knew there was probably a lot more to the Kreiss divorce story than just that, but going to a Bureau counselor had to have been a big step for a senior FBI agent’s wife to take.

With any luck, Kellermann would now just forget the call and move on. Janet had been entirely truthful when she had said she did not figure Kreiss for a part in the kids’ disappearance. What concerned her now was the possibility that he might take up the hunt himself. Possibility, hell—probability, if the headless horseman trick was any indication. And, actually, concerned wasn’t the right word, either. Face it, she told herself.

It’s Kreiss and his exotic career that’s intriguing you. In fact, if Kreiss was on the move, she wouldn’t mind helping him. She laughed out loud at that crazy notion and momentarily woke Billy.

The FedEx truck found its way to Kreiss’s cabin late Wednesday afternoon.

Kreiss signed for the package and took it into the cabin. Parsons had done well. There were two wide-area black-and-white overheads of the Ramsey Arsenal. Each had been taken from an oblique angle, because, of course, the aircraft had no business flying directly over the complex. One of them had been taken from a much greater height than the other, and it showed nearly the entire installation, including the creek that ran through it. The other was a shot that centered on the industrial area, and it gave a perspective to the buildings in the central area that allowed Kreiss to size them. There was one additional sheet in the package, which was a copy of the large overall shot with a global positioning system grid superimposed. The title box on the lower right of each sheet identified the site as the Jonesboro Cement Factory in Canton, Ohio.

Good man, Kreiss thought to himself. Parsons had disguised the identity of the prints from prying eyes at his company. There was a note in the package saying that Parsons had the photos in a computer file and that any of them could be blown up on one of their Sun workstations and reprinted to whatever level of detail he wanted. He had been unable to

 

midnight-requisition the processing work, and he apologetically requested a check for fifteen hundred dollars be made out to the company.

Kreiss got his checkbook and wrote the check immediately. Then he studied the photos for almost an hour, absorbing details of the industrial area.

The individual buildings were blurry in the photograph, which told Kreiss that Parsons had already done some enlargement work.

The buildings of the industrial area took up no more than a small portion on the eastern side of the military reservation. The photo also showed the rail spur leading off the main line connecting Christiansburg to Ramsey and points north. Kreiss would have loved to get nighttime infrared photos of the entire complex, but that would have been pushing it. Besides, whatever those people were doing, they were probably doing it in the industrial area. The problem was that there appeared to be over one hundred identifiable buildings in the complex. He decided he would make one more reconnaissance intrusion, this time at night, and this time into the industrial area. It looked as if the railroad spur might be a better intrusion position, pointing directly into the industrial area and avoiding all the woods-crawling. It shouldn’t be too hard to find his way back to that rail spur. If he could pinpoint where those people were operating, he would back out, come back to the cabin for some of his retrieval equipment, and then go after them. He was looking forward to talking to them, maybe sharing his thinking with them about their itchy trigger fingers.

Just after 6:00 P.M.” Jared picked Browne up at his house in Blacksburg.

Jared was driving his own pickup instead of his telephone repair van.

There was a windowless cap on the back bed of the pickup, where Jared had packed their gear.

“Get the copper?” Browne asked.

“Yep. It’s already stashed by the main gates. Coupla hundred pounds.”

“We have to strip it?”

“No, it’s four switch-gear plates. No insulation. Heavy, though.”

On days they were going into the installation, Jared would drive the telephone company van to the concrete-filled barrels on the main entrance road of the arsenal. He would pretend to be doing something there. When there were no cars in sight, he would move two barrels slightly, just enough so that when they came later, he could pull off the main highway in the early darkness and drive straight between the barrels.

From there, they would drive, lights off, to the actual main gate, about a quarter of a mile back into the trees from the highway. In

front of the shuttered security checkpoint gates, they could turn left onto the fence maintenance and fire-access road, which was a dirt path just big enough for the truck. They would take that around the fence until they intercepted the rail line almost a mile south of the main gate.

Tonight they would stop up by the gates, well out of sight of Route 11, to retrieve the bundle of copper plates. Browne planned to run the hydrogen generator for at least four hours. He also had some sandwiches and water for the girl.

“I think you better go on walking patrol while I do tonight’s batch,” Browne said.

“We still don’t know what we had out there the other night.”

“We had us an intruder, that’s what. Question is, Did he come back, or did that forty-four do the trick?”

Browne rubbed his jaw. They had seen the occasional hunter, who tended to stay away from the industrial area because of all the talk about toxic waste. But since the kids hit the traps, Browne was taking no chances.

“No way of knowing that,” he said, “without going down there for some tracking. We just need to be careful from here on out. I won’t have some nosy sumbitch screwing this thing up, not now.”

Jared didn’t say anything for a few minutes, but then he asked Browne if he thought the intruder might be police.

“I don’t think so,” Browne said.

“Cops come in crowds. Plus, they shoot back when shot at. We’d of known by now if that was a cop. Maybe next time, we ought not to go shooting like that.”

“Paper said the FBI was lookin’ for them kids,” Jared said.

“That was almost a month ago; if the FBI thought those kids had come to the arsenal, we’da had a swarm of those sum bitches all over the place.

Hasn’t been anything like that. We just have to be extra careful for a while. We’re getting pressure in the tanker truck now. Won’t be much longer, I can do this thing.”

Jared passed a clunker out on Route 11. “Kinin’ those kids, that could be some serious heat,” he said.

Browne realized that the incident with the intruder must have spooked Jared a little more than he had anticipated.

“We didn’t kill anyone. That flash flood got ‘em. There wasn’t anything we could do about that. And we did save the girl.”

“Them was our traps, got them kids,” Jared said, slowing as he approached the darkened traffic signal marking the entrance intersection to the arsenal.

 

“They shouldn’t have been in there,” Browne said.

“The Lord sent that flood. It was their time, that’s all.”

Jared was silent as he pulled into the turn lane. There was no one coming the other way, so he was able just to make the turn and douse his lights as he went between the barrels. Browne bit his lip, thinking about what Jared had said. The real question now was what was he going to do about the girl when Judgment Day came. She’s insurance, he kept telling himself.

But if the cops came, and they were holding the girl, she could tie them to what had happened to the other two.

Jared drove up toward the main gate through a corridor of tall pines, then slowed to make the turn onto the fire-access road.

“The copper is over there,” he said.

“Behind that there transformer box.”

He stopped the truck, and they both got out. The night was still and clear, but with no moon. The only sound came from the night insects and the ticking noise of the truck’s engine cooling down. A big semi went whining down the highway below, but they were completely out of sight.

They loaded the heavy copper plates into the bed of the truck, closed the tailgate, and then drove on down the access road until they came to the rail spur gates, where they stopped. Jared began to unload the plates while his grandfather went to move the wire and unlock the interior gates. They hauled the plates through the two sets of gates.

“We’ve been usin’ these here gates for some time now,” Jared said when all the plates were inside the perimeter.

“Maybe we ought to lay down some things, like we got along the creek.”

Browne thought for a moment. That might not be a bad idea.

“Traps, you mean?”

“It’s all gravel and concrete from here on in. I was thinkin’ more along the lines of a counter. One a the guys in the Hats has one, Radio Shack ‘lectric-eye deal. Tell us if it’s just us chickens walkin’ through here.”

Jared belonged to a backwoods militia group, which called itself the Black Hats. They got together up on the West Virginia line to drink beer, tell racist jokes, and shoot up the woods, pretending they were guerrillas.

Browne thought they were all a bunch of beer-bellied retards. William would never have stooped to that crowd. Jared, on the other hand, probably fit right in, but he kept that sentiment to himself.

“I agree,” he said.

“Bring one next time.”

Edwin Kreiss was making his way from building to building along the shadows of the main street of the upper industrial area, when he heard the

 

truck. He had come up the rail spur from the switch point off the main Norfolk & Western line an hour ago. He had not discovered Browne’s arrangements with the rail gates; he had simply climbed the fence a hundred feet from the gates, covering up the barbed wire on the top with the rubber floor mat from his truck. He had come in to make a one-night reconnaissance, so he’d brought only water and a chest pack with some implements of his former trade. His plan was to creep the main industrial area to see if he could find any signs of human activity, especially over toward the ravine on the south side that contained the creek. He stopped when he heard the truck.

The engine seemed to slow down. The sound was coming from the direction of the rail spur security gates. Kreiss looked around and found a steel ladder leading up the side of a three-story windowless concrete building that faced the main street. There was enough starlight in the clear mountain air to allow him to read the sign on the building, which said ammonia concentration PLANT. One of the complex’s internal rail sub spurs ran directly behind the building, and the ladder went up the side of the building to its roof. He listened again. The engine was quiet, or perhaps idling. Then he heard it start back up, rev for thirty seconds or so, and then shut down. They were parking it. And coming in?

He tested the ladder. It seemed to be firmly mounted. He listened again, but there were only night sounds in the air. He made his decision and hoisted himself up onto the ladder and began to climb. At the top, the ladder rails curved up and over the edge of the roof. He stepped carefully out onto the roof, until he realized that it, too, appeared to be made of concrete. There were three large skylights embedded in the center of the roof, and he went over to one and looked down. The glass was clouded with grime and dust; below, there was only darkness. He thought about using a light, but not if there was the possibility that someone was coming.

He felt a slight breeze touch his neck. He went back to the front edge of the roof, where there was a three-foot-high parapet. He knelt down behind the parapet and unzipped his chest pack. He pulled out a stethoscope, a flat cone-shaped object, and a small wire frame. He squeezed the cone open, creating a speaker-shaped object some twelve inches in diameter at the large end and one inch at the small end. He fit the cone into the wire frame and set it up on the parapet, pointing up the main street toward the rail gates, which were some three hundred yards distant. Then he screwed the acoustic diaphragm of the

stethoscope into the back of the cone and put the sound plugs into his ears. There was a faint chuffing background noise sound of the night breeze, but otherwise nothing. He waited, keeping his head down behind the parapet in case someone down below was using a nightscope to scan the darkened buildings.

After five minutes or so, he detected the first footsteps, small, regular crunching sounds coming from the direction of the gates. He smiled in satisfaction as he listened. Two sets of steps, walking slowly, close to each other. They stopped, and there was the sound of some heavy objects hitting the ground. He wanted to take a look, but the cone was telling him what he needed to know. The footsteps resumed, coming up the main street, their boots making clopping noises on the concrete, alternating with a clanking cadence when they crossed the big metal plates in the street, until they passed beneath the cone. While he waited for them to pass, he pulled out his own nightscope. He attached its external power cord to a slim battery pack in his chest pack. He gave them another minute and then rose up behind the parapet and swept the street below.

He almost missed them as they turned the corner a block away, went between two large buildings, and disappeared. Confirm two, and each of them was carrying something under both arms. One much taller than the other. He swept the street back in the direction of the rail gates, but there seemed to be nothing else stirring. Time to get back down on the ground.

He packed up the listening cone and his nightscope and climbed back down the ladder on the side of the building. Without making any noise, he moved as quickly as he could to the other side of the street and then down to the corner where they had turned. A quick look around the corner revealed a cross street with large-and medium-sized buildings on both sides. At the end of the street, about three blocks away, was what looked like a power plant. The street and the bottom of the buildings were all in shadow. He pulled out the nightscope and made a quick sweep, but no figures showed up. So they had gone into one of these buildings.

He reversed course and crept back across the front of the building on the corner, then down the alley along its side wall. He found a steel ladder, but then he hesitated, because the building next to this one on the side street appeared to be taller than the corner building. He scanned the alley and then went farther down. The alley was almost in full darkness, but it was also empty: There were no trash cans or other debris, just the bare concrete and some weeds here and there. A

noticeable chemical smell pervaded all the old concrete, and he was struck by the absence of any living thing.

He found the ladder at the back of the second building and climbed it.

Where the skylights had been on the first building, there was a row of large metal ventilator caps, whose guy wires made it difficult to move around the roof. The parapet was much lower, so he set himself up at the corner of the roof nearest the power plant, from which he ought to be able to see both ways down the cross street. He rigged out the cone device and pointed it directly across the darkened street at the bare concrete wall of the opposite building. Since he didn’t know which direction the men had gone, any sounds they made should reflect off the slab-sided building opposite if they reemerged. Just in case he had missed something, he put on the stethoscope and trained the cone to either side, first down the street and then back up toward the corner. He pointed it at each of the buildings, listening for any acoustic indication of humans inside. He did not expect sounds to penetrate all that windowless concrete, but there was always a chance of a machine making some noise. But there was nothing.

He pointed the cone back across the street and waited.

Two men. Just like last time. Now that he knew what he was dealing with, and roughly where they were, this should be entirely manageable.

Browne got Jared to help him set up the retort for the first generating batch. The copper plates were awkward to move, but they would yield a much longer sustained reaction than the wire he had been using. He would have to cut them in half to get them into the retort.

“Once we get this going, I want you to take a look around the industrial area, make sure we don’t have any close-in visitors. Got your nightscope?”

“Yep. And a three fifty-seven in my jacket, too.”

“If you see something, try to come back here and get me before you use that. I’d rather catch ‘em than shoot ‘em. See who the hell they are. Two guns are better than one for that.”

Browne set up the pump while Jared used a hacksaw to cut the plates.

The soft copper cut quickly. Browne went into the boiler hall to start the generator. He came back and cleared all the lines coming from the retort, then went into the maintenance bay to line up the fill valve on the truck’s tank. He came back and opened the acid feed line, and the reaction in the retort became audible. They waited for the pressure switch to activate the transfer pump, but it didn’t happen. Browne tapped a gauge, then tapped it again.

“Have to do something here; this thing isn’t working.”

 

“Can you jump it? “Jared asked, eyeing the pressure gauge. The frothing noise in the retort was getting louder.

“That safety valve is fixin’ to let go.”

“I know that,” Browne said irritably. Sometimes, he thought, Jared was a master of the obvious. William would have been suggesting solutions.

He checked the lineup with the transfer pump once more and then hurried to hook a wire directly from the supply side of the pressure switch to the hot terminal on the pump motor. The pump kicked in and the pressure began to fall off in the retort as the hydrogen was sent to the truck next door.

“Looks like I’m going to have to run this thing manually,” Browne said.

“Go take the girl her food and water, and then have a look around the immediate area. Check back in an hour.”

“All right.”

“And Jared? No messing around with that girl. Tell her to put the blindfold on, open the door, check the room, make sure she’s not hiding behind the door, leave the food, lock back out.”

Jared acknowledged and grabbed up the paper sack. Then the transfer pump began to chatter and Browne swore.

“Go on,” he said.

“Be back in an hour. This plate should be done by then and we can fix this switch.”

Jared left the control room, an unfathomable expression on his face.

He stood outside the power plant walk-through door for fifteen minutes to get his night vision back, and he thought about the girl. They had brought her here that first afternoon, blindfolded and restrained, and simply left her for several hours. Then they had come back, pausing outside the smaller door at the north end while Browne ordered her to put the blindfold back on. That had been the routine since then, each time they brought her food. She never spoke to them. She would just sit there, motionless, with her back to the door and the blindfold on her face, not even acknowledging their presence. And they, in turn, never spoke to her.

Jared knew that she had seen both of them, but only that one time. The fact that she wouldn’t speak to them kind of pissed him off. She was shining an attitude he wasn’t used to.

He stepped off into the street and headed for the nitro building.

Kreiss was wondering if he should give up his listening position and go search for the two men, when the cone picked up something. He strained to listen, but the sounds were very small, almost beneath the threshold of the night sounds. There must have been some clouds coming through, because the ambient light had diminished, throwing the streets below

 

into total darkness. He reached up and turned the cone to the left. Nothing.

He turned it slowly to the right. Nothing, and then a sound. A footfall?

No. He could not classify it. He wanted to use the nightscope, but that battery was limited, and he normally did not use it until he had a firm directional cue from the cone. If someone was moving around down at the end of the street, there was no way to tell precisely where in this maze of concrete buildings. Then the sounds stopped. He slewed the cone back and forth, trying to regain contact, but now there was only the small breeze. And then there was the unmistakable loud sound of a metal door closing, somewhere out there among all those buildings.

He took off the earpieces of the stethoscope and sat back on his haunches. That had been a door, which meant they were definitely doing something inside one of the big buildings. Probably a drug lab of some kind. He sniffed the night air, but the breeze was blowing toward that end of the street. He looked into the darkness; the only thing he could make out was the tall stack of the power plant, and that was beyond where he thought the noises had come from. Two men, who knew their way around this complex in the dark, were doing something in one of the buildings.

Should he go down and probe that end of the street? And run into some more traps? He had to do something.

And then he had an idea. It had sounded as if they had parked that truck. He would back out and go see about that vehicle. It would have a tag, and a tag would lead to a name, and with a name, he could find an address. That would make things a lot simpler than prowling around this place, where they had had time to rig defenses.

Jared opened the door and shone the light inside. She was right where she was supposed to be. He flashed the light around the room, which was a hundred feet long, seventy wide, and four stories in overall height. There were several cable ways and electrical boxes on the walls, and two large steel garage-type doors at either end. Prominent red NO smoking signs were painted every ten feet along the walls. A set of rusting rail tracks was embedded in the concrete floor, right down the middle. The lighting fixtures suspended overhead were devoid of bulbs, so the only light she would ever see was the daylight that came through the grimy skylights.

There was a single steel walk-through door to one side of the larger sealed doors at each end of the building. Otherwise, it was empty, the machinery and the workers long gone, with only the smell of chemicals lingering in the old concrete to give any indication of its previous function.

 

He shoved the bag of food inside the door and then stepped inside. He put the Maglite down on the floor, pointing at the silent figure in the middle of the room. He pushed the door shut, then backed up against it.

“Stand up,” he ordered. She didn’t move.

“You want this water?” he asked, tapping the plastic bottle with his boot.

“Or you want me to take it back outside? Stand up.”

Slowly, reluctantly, she got on her hands and knees, and then stood up.

The blindfold hid most of her face. The flashlight now pointed at her feet. She was taller than he had remembered, but the loose clothes could not disguise her fine figure. There was definite defiance in her posture, and Jared didn’t like that. Jared liked his women compliant.

“Turn your back to the door,” he ordered.

She complied, and he reached for the light and played it over her body.

“Take your shirt off,” he said.

She just stood there. He waited for her to say something, but she remained silent.

“I said, take your goddamned shirt off.”

She did not move. Jared reached down and picked up one of the three water bottles. He twisted the top off with an audible snapping sound, then poured the entire bottle out onto the concrete. It made an unmistakable sound, and he thought he saw her stiffen when he did it.

“Take your shirt off,” he said again, discarding the now-empty bottle onto the concrete floor, where it clattered into a corner.

This time, she did it, pulling the shirt over her head and dropping it onto the floor.

“Now your halter,” he said.

“Do it.”

She paused for a few seconds, then slipped out of her sports bra. He played the flashlight over her back and ordered her to turn around. She slumped a little and then complied. Her breasts were everything he expected, although her ribs were showing in the harsh white light. Must be the diet here, he thought with a mental guffaw.

“Now the rest of it.”

She hesitated again, turning a little bit, as if to shield herself. He picked up another water bottle and shook it.

“The rest of it. Do it! Now!”

She complied, bending forward to take off the rest other clothes. Then she straightened up and took a deep breath. Her hands hung down at her sides.

“Turn sideways,” Jared commanded, playing the flashlight over her white

body. She did as he ordered, and then he told her to get down on her hands and knees. She bent her head to one side for a moment, as if trying to figure out what he was going to do. But then she got down on her hands and knees, her body in profile to him.

Jared walked over to the pile of blankets and then walked all the way around her, enjoying his rising excitement. Damn, she has a great body, he thought. She must work out.

“Put your head down,” he said, still walking around her. She sighed, the first sound she’d made. Then she put her head down on the blankets.

Jared continued to walk around her, circling her like a predator, reveling in her utterly vulnerable position. He was just about to approach her when he thought he heard something out on the street. He immediately switched off the flashlight.

“Not bad, girlie,” he said softly.

“Not bad a-tall. Next time, we’ll do something about all that.”

He went to the door, listened carefully, and then stepped back through, pulling it shut softly but firmly. He replaced the padlock and closed the bail into the base of the lock as quietly as he could. He turned around and moved sideways to the corner of the building, waiting for his eyes to adjust to darkness again. As his ears strained to detect any noises out on the street, his mind’s eye replayed the scene inside, the great-looking girl with her rump in the air, totally helpless, asking for it, he was sure. Not so defiant, was she, not once she was down there on the blankets. His throat thickened. He’d definitely come back, get him some of that. He listened some more, but there was nothing going on, no one here but him and that crazy old man in there, brewing up his bomb.

On Thursday morning, Janet Carter arrived a half an hour late because of a monster traffic jam. She was surprised to find Billy waiting for her at the security desk when she entered the federal building.

“Thought I ought to warn you,” he announced as they badged in and bypassed the metal-detector station.

“There are some people upstairs in Farnsworth’s office, want to talk to you.”

 

“

 

“Some people’?”

“Yeah. One guy’s from the FCI Division at Bureau headquarters; the

other one, a woman, is from Main Justice, I think. Looks like a pro wrestler in drag. Larry Talbot is acting like he’s about to get fired. He thinks it’s about that missing college students case.”

Janet frowned. She’d dropped the Kreiss case after talking to the shrink. She’s been busy for the past two days reviewing the evidentiary report on a complicated truck hijacking case that was going to be heavily dependent on physical evidence. It had been almost refreshing to work in her specialty again.

“Hasn’t that whole deal gone up the line to MP?” she asked as they got on the elevator.

“Yep. Sent it up Tuesday to Richmond. I thought you were off that thing.”

“I am. I haven’t touched it since—” “Since?” Billy asked quietly.

“Well, I’d already made one call, Friday, before the boss fanged me about it. Lady called back Monday, but it wasn’t anything conclusive.

Some history about one of the parents.”

“Edwin Kreiss perhaps?”

“Well…” she said, making a face. She pushed the button for the fourth floor and then swiped her security card. She remembered that she’d briefed Billy on the case.

“Well, wait till you get a load of the political appointee gorgon from Justice,” Billy said, suppressing a yawn.

“Serious shit.”

They went directly to their office, where they found Larry Talbot pacing around like a nervous cat. His eyes lit up when he caught sight of Janet.

“We need to talk,” he announced without preamble.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Billy said there’re some people from Washington? To see me?”

“Yes, indeedy,” Talbot said, taking her elbow and pulling her to one side of the office. He lowered his voice to a harsh whisper.

“I think it’s something about that Kreiss character. Is there something you need to back-brief me on?”

She explained about the call to the staff psychologist, keeping the exact timing of the calls a little vague.

“But that was it, and Billy’s already sent the case file to Washington via the Richmond field office. I’ve been on the Wentworth Trucking case since then. What’s the big deal?”

Talbot looked around for Billy, but he had left the office.

“Whatever it is, the boss had to leave his conference early and come back here to deal with it.”

 

Janet blinked.

“Not to be repetitious, Larry, but what’s the problem? I tied off a loose end with a case that’s been sent to MP. End of story.”

Talbot shook his head.

“Farnsworth is pissed. He’s acting like you went up to D.C. and burgled the director’s office.” He looked at his watch.

“Shit. You need to get downstairs.”

“Jesus, Larry, can’t I at least get some coffee?”

“I wouldn’t advise it, Janet,” he said.

“This is no time to look routine.”

Janet rolled her eyes and went back down to Farnsworth’s office, which was on the third floor. His secretary, a professionally unpleasant woman who hailed from Arkansas, announced that the RA was in conference with some Washington people. Janet patiently asked her to tell Farnsworth that she was there. The secretary sighed dramatically and buzzed this news into Farnsworth. He appeared at the door to his office a moment later and asked Janet to come in.

The two Washington visitors were sitting at the conference table. One was a large woman, whose fat face reminded Janet of a recent Russian premier. She was looking at Janet with undisguised suspicion. The other visitor was a man in his fifties, also rather large, almost completely bald, with a reddish face and a permanently scowling expression. Farnsworth made introductions. The woman’s name was Bellhouser; the red-faced man’s name was Foster.

“Agent Carter, these folks have driven down from Washington. Ms.

Bellhouser is the executive assistant to Mr. Bill Garrette, who, as I’m sure you know, is the deputy attorney general of the United States. Mr. Foster is the principal deputy to Assistant Director Marchand.”

Janet noted Farnsworth’s sudden formality. She knew that Marchand was the assistant director over Counterintelligence at FBI headquarters.

She had heard of Garrette, but only in the context of his being acting deputy attorney general without benefit of Senate confirmation for the past four years. She nodded, waiting for Farnsworth to invite her to sit down. Surprisingly, he did not.

“Agent Carter,” he said.

“You apparently made recent inquiries about a certain Edwin Kreiss. Ms. Bellhouser and Mr. Foster are interested in why you’re interested.”

Janet took it upon herself to sit down in the only remaining chair.

Farnsworth was acting as if he had never heard of Edwin Kreiss, so she decided to play along and speak directly to him, as if bringing him into the picture for the first time. She reviewed the circumstances of

her involvement with Kreiss. She glossed over the call to the Counseling Division as tying off a loose end before sending up the case file.

“Let’s dispense with the bullshit, Agent Carter,” the woman said when Janet was done. Her voice was as harsh as her expression.

“You persisted in asking questions about Kreiss after you were given specific instructions by the RA here to back off that case. We want to know why.”

Janet looked at Farnsworth as if to say, I thought I just explained that.

The RA kept his expression blank. She turned to Bellhouser.

“I wasn’t aware that I was indulging in bullshit,” she said coolly.

“I asked the original question before I was told to drop it. When Dr. Kellermann was courteous enough to call right back, I took her call. What she had to say didn’t add anything substantial. It is entirely standard procedure to question parents in some detail when their kids go missing. It’s also standard procedure to check them out. What’s the problem here, if I may ask?”

“The problem is Edwin Kreiss,” the woman answered.

“Mr. Kreiss was responsible for an incident that deeply embarrassed both the Department of Justice and the Bureau. Inquiries about him or what he did are not authorized, and, in fact, are cause for alarm.”

“Well excuse me all to hell,” Janet said, trying not to lose her temper.

“I

was investigating the disappearance of his daughter. He is just another citizen as far as I’m concerned, a parent who’s lost his kid. One more time:

What’s the problem?”

The woman sat back in her chair, her expression saying that she wasn’t used to being spoken to like this. Foster intervened.

“Part of the problem is that we did not know Edwin Kreiss’s daughter had gone missing,” he said.

“But—” Bellhouser held up her hand in an imperious gesture, and Foster stopped. She gave Janet a speculative look.

“Perhaps I should clarify a few things for you, Agent Carter. But I want your word that what I’m going to tell you will not be repeated to anyone.” She had changed her tone of voice and was now being a lot more polite.

“Is this something I need to know, then?” Janet asked.

“Because I’m willing to forget Mr. Kreiss, if that’s the order of the day. My interest in him was entirely professional, not personal.”

Bellhouser thought for a moment. Foster was strangely silent.

“I think it is,” she said.

“Do I have your word?”

Janet looked again to the RA, but his face remained a study in neutrality.

He’d told her all about Kreiss, but now he was acting as if he’d never

heard of the guy. She wasn’t quite sure what the game was here but if they wanted to play games, well, hell, she’d play.

“Whatever,” she said.

“Yes.

Fine.”

“Very well. For many years prior to the current administration, there was tension between the Counterespionage Division at the Agency and the Foreign Counterintelligence Division in the Bureau. This administration determined that it would be constructive to break down some of those bureaucratic barriers. Edwin Kreiss was selected to be sent on an exchange tour of duty with the Agency, and one of their CE operatives was sent to Bureau FCI.”

She paused to see if any of this meant anything to Janet, but Janet pretended this was all news.

“Kreiss’s assignment to the Agency represented a dramatic step toward defusing those tensions. He trained under and worked with some of the best man-hunters in the business. It’s fair to say that he participated in some operations that took place, shall we say, out on the less well-defined margins of national policy, with respect to who works where. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I assume you’re talking about the rule that the Agency technically can’t work inside the country.”

“Yes, precisely, just like the armed forces can’t chase criminals inside the borders of the United States. Posse comitatus. The problem is that sometimes the bad guys take advantage of this.”

“And sometimes the good guys turn out to be the bad guys,” Janet said, just to throw some shit in the game.

Bellhouser blinked, looked at Foster, and then they both looked over at Farnsworth.

“Um, yes, well, when I received orders to back out of the Kreiss matter, I told her about the Glower case,” he said, looking uncharacteristically nervous.

“Correction: I told her what I’d heard about the Glower case—I, of course, have no personal knowledge of what happened there.”

Foster’s eyebrows went up.

“Really, Mr. Farnsworth. This is a surprise.

Assistant Director Marchand was of the opinion that you knew nothing about the Glower incident.”

Foster might be a principal deputy, but Farnsworth was still in charge of an operational office, and as such, he didn’t have to take very much static from headquarters assistants, especially when they invoked their boss’s power. He looked at Foster with an avuncular smile.

“When something gets fucked up as badly as that situation got fucked

up,” he said, “everybody knows a little something about it, Mr. Foster. You need to remember that if you ever go back to the field.” Janet felt a smidgen of relief that Farnsworth hadn’t been entirely cowed by these two.

“Let’s get back on point,” Bellhouser said.

“Which is: When Kreiss was forced out of the Bureau following the Millwood incident, he was given some very specific guidance in return for getting retirement instead of outright dismissal. And that was that he was never, ever to act operationally again, especially in those capacities with which he was formerly associated during his time at the Agency.”

“So how was he supposed to make a living, then?” Janet asked.

“According to Larry Talbot’s notes,” Farnsworth said, scanning a piece of paper, “he’s been teaching remedial math at the Montgomery County junior college. He quit that when his daughter went missing.”

“The point is, Agent Carter,” Bellhouser said, “that Kreiss was not permitted to engage in any activity related to law enforcement: federal, state, or local, or to have anything to do with the security field—commercial, personal, computer—anything along that line.”

Janet nodded.

“Okay, and—” Foster leaned forward.

“The question is, Agent Carter, Do you think Mr. Kreiss is going to actively search for his daughter now that Roanoke here is sending the case to MP?”

Janet remembered telling Farnsworth that she thought Kreiss was going solo. She had to assume he had passed this on.

“Yes,” she said.

“In fact, I think he’s already leaned on one of the potential witnesses, but I backed out before I could really follow up on that. And, of course, I can’t prove any of that.”

Bellhouser sighed. Foster frowned and began tapping a pen against the edge of the table.

“I mean,” Janet said, “I guess I can understand it. From his perspective, the Bureau was backing out. He knows how MP works.” No one said anything.

“It’s his daughter, after all,” she concluded.

Bellhouser gave her a patient look and then got up out of her chair. She was even bigger standing up. The chair creaked in relief.

“Thank you, Agent Carter,” she said.

“I think you’ve told us what we needed to find out.

We will brief our respective superiors. We appreciate your cooperation.”

Janet stood up, looking at Farnsworth.

“Is that it, sir?”

Farnsworth glanced over at Bellhouser and Foster as if for confirmation and then said, “Yes.”

“And if anything else pops up concerning Mr. Kreiss?”

 

“Inform Mr. Farnsworth here if that happens,” Foster said.

“We will attend to Mr. Kreiss if that becomes necessary. But we don’t anticipate you will have any further interaction with him.”

“Either at his initiative or yours, Agent Carter,” Bellhouser said. All three of them looked at her expectantly to make sure she understood the warning.

“Okay,” she said brightly, as if this all were totally insignificant. She left Farnsworth’s office, shaking her head, and went back to her own cubicle.

Talbot wanted to know what it was all about, but Janet told him only that it concerned Edwin Kreiss and that the matter had been taken care of.

Talbot was clearly dissatisfied, so she said she’d been ordered not to talk about it and that maybe Farnsworth would fill him in. Talbot stomped out and Janet went looking for some coffee. She met with some other agents on the trucking case for half an hour, and when she returned, Billy had surfaced from his midmorning snooze. He asked her what all the fuss was about. Remembering her promise, she told him in only very general terms, concluding that she’d been clearly told to stay away from Edwin Kreiss and all his works. Billy got some coffee and they talked about the way headquarters horse-holders threw their weight around.

When Talbot reappeared, Janet went back to her cubicle. She pushed papers around her desk while she thought about the meeting with the two principal deputy assistant under executive pooh-bahs. What had that woman said—they would “attend to” Kreiss? For God’s sake, the man’s only child was missing. An image of Kreiss’s face surfaced in her mind.

She wondered if the two horse-holders were capable of “attending to” Edwin Kreiss. She thought idly about warning him.

Edwin Kreiss had obtained a county road map at the Christiansburg Chamber of Commerce that morning, and he was now nosing his pickup truck down a dirt road five miles west of the town. None of the land around these first geologic wrinkles of the Appalachian foothills was horizontal, and he had to keep it in second gear on the rough and winding lane. He had found their truck unlocked last night at the rail spur branch and retrieved the registration. The vehicle belonged to one Jared McGarand, whose rural postbox address he’d finally found on a rusting mailbox at the head of the dirt road. He came around a final bend in the trees and saw a double-wide trailer at the end of the lane. There were no other trailers or houses nearby, but there were some large dogs raising hell from what looked like a pen behind the trailer. He had anticipated the

 

possibility of dogs and had the cure in a plastic bag on the seat. But first, he would see if the dogs’ noise summoned anyone. It was the middle of the day, and the only other trailer he’d seen had been almost a mile back down the county road. It had looked deserted.

He turned around and then parked his truck in front of the trailer, pointed back out the lane. Then he waited. The dogs, still not visible, continued to bark and howl, but after five minutes, they lost interest. The trailer was mounted up on cinder blocks at one end to level it. The place looked reasonably well kept, with some side sheds, a separate metal carport roof, an engine-hoisting stand, and what looked like a rig for butchering deer. The same pickup truck from which he’d obtained the registration was parked under a tree, but there were no junked cars or other hillbilly treasures stacked in the yard, and there was electric power and a phone line attached to the trailer. Whoever Jared McGarand was, he obviously had a job and was not just another member of the Appalachian recycling elite.

Satisfied that no one was coming, he opened the door, grabbed the plastic bag, and went up to the front door of the trailer and knocked on it.

This set off another round of barking from out back. When no one answered, he went around to the back door and tried that, again without result. Then he walked over to the dog pen, which was fifty feet back from the trailer, under some trees. He took out some sugar-coated doughnut holes, into each of which he had put two nonprescription iron-supplement pills. The dogs were some kind of mixed breed, with pit bull predominant, equal parts teeth, bark, and general fury. They were jumping and slavering at the sturdy chain-link fence. He pushed the doughnut holes into the chain link until he was sure each dog had eaten at least one.

Then he went back to the truck and waited. The pills would not kill the dogs, but in about fifteen minutes, they would be feeling ill enough to lie down and whimper for the rest of the day. While he was waiting, his car phone rang. Ever since Lynn disappeared he had made a practice of having any calls that came into the cabin automatically forward to the truck if he was out of the house.

“Kreiss,” he said, visually checking the trailer and its surroundings.

The dogs had stopped their barking.

“Mr. Kreiss, this is Special Agent Janet Carter.”

“You have something on Lynn?” Kreiss asked immediately.

“No. I wish we did, but no. This is something else.” She described the visitation of Bellhouser and Foster.

 

He listened without comment, wishing he had been able to observe that little seance. Attend to me, would they? He took a deep breath to calm himself.

“Mr. Kreiss? Are you still there?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m on my car phone. I appreciate the heads up, Agent Carter. I really do.”

“You didn’t get it from me, Mr. Kreiss.”

“Absolutely.” He paused for a moment, not sure of what to say next.

He was picturing her face, and, after their last meeting, wondering why she was doing this.

“Mr. Kreiss?” she said.

“We asked you not to go solo on your daughter’s disappearance, remember?”

“I remember.”

“Well, let me reiterate that request. And of course, if new information does turn up, let me say again that you need to bring it to us.”

How would two guys skulking around at night on a closed federal ammunition plant, setting man traps and shooting at people, strike you?

he wondered.

“Of course, Agent Carter.”

“Yes. Of course, Mr. Kreiss.”

“Thanks again for the heads up. I owe you one, Agent Carter.”

“Hold that thought, Mr. Kreiss.”

He grunted, clicked the phone off, and got back out of the truck. He positioned a small motion detector on the hood of the pickup, pointed down the lane in the direction of the county road. It would start beeping if anything came down the dirt road toward the cabin. He took a canvas tool bag out of the passenger side and went behind the trailer. The dogs were circled on the concrete floor of their pen. One was drinking lots of water, while the other two were nipping at their flanks.

Fifteen minutes later, he was driving back out onto the county road.

On the front seat beside him, he had some personal documents he’d lifted from a desk inside, enough to confirm that the occupant was Jared McGarand, a telephone company repairman. He also had taken a .357 Magnum he’d removed from the bedroom bureau’s top drawer. He had found a .45 auto in Jared’s night table but left that alone. The man liked big guns. He’d refilled the dogs’ water buckets before he left; they were going to be very thirsty later on. He had mounted a cigarette carton-sized battery-operated box on the roof of the trailer, out of sight behind two vent pipes, and installed a listen-and-record device on the lone telephone.

He turned onto the county road and headed back toward Blacksburg.

 

He had been tempted to tell Carter about the Ramsey Arsenal, except that he thought he could do a better job of finding Lynn than some posse of semi hysterical feds, at least until he knew what the connection was between these two midnight gomers and Lynn’s hat. He would have to find a way to pay Carter back for the favor of that warning; she absolutely did not have to do that, especially after having to take a meeting with Bambi Bellhouser and Chief Red in the Face. She’d probably called him because they pissed her off. He almost hoped they would be stupid enough to come out to his cabin, although he doubted a couple of horse holders like that would ever venture too far away from an office. In the meantime, he had some preparations to make before returning to the arsenal tonight. He wanted to get into the industrial area just at twilight, because those two had shown up the last time about an hour after sundown.

This time, he wanted to be closer to that far end of the main street.

Maybe he would be able to track them into a specific building.

That evening, Browne and Jared were delayed by a traffic accident on the Route 11 bridge over the New River. It was almost eight o’clock before they got to the entrance of the arsenal. Jared was in a bad mood, having found his three hunting dogs sick in their pen when he got home from work.

“Dog crap all over the place,” he complained.

“Had to hose it for half an hour. Dogs sick as babies.”

“All three? Must have been bad feed.”

“They got the same as always. They still ain’t right.” He drove through the concrete barrels and down the fire road with his lights off. There was a sliver of new moon up, which gave enough light to see the road and the high fence.

“You get that counter put up?”

“Yep. It’s just inside the inner gates, waist-high.” He pulled the truck into their regular parking place, between four bushy pines.

“With them side fences, won’t be no critters settin’ it off. I got a line on some more copper, but it’s gonna take some cash money.”

“All right. We’ve got nearly thirty pounds of pressure in the truck tank now. I’ll be shifting over to the big pump at fifty psi.”

They got out and stood at the edge of the trees to night-adapt their eyes. There was a slight breeze blowing pine scent at them, and the railroad tracks gleamed dully in the dim moonlight.

“I did one other thing ‘sides that counter,” Jared said. His

grandfather looked at him.

“I set me up a deadfall along the main street—wire trigger.

Left the wire down for now. We get something’ on that counter, I’ll set the wire when we come out.”

“We get a hit on that counter before we even go in, we’re not going in,” Browne said.

“I may come back tomorrow during the day and do some hunting. Can you get some time off? Bring your dogs?”

“I can if there ain’t a lot of tickets up on the western lines. Don’t know about them dogs.”

“All right,” Browne said, picking up the bag of food and water for the girl.

“Let’s go check your toy.”

They walked up the spur to the security gates, stopping a hundred feet out to watch and listen. Then they stepped through the flap of fencing and Jared walked over to the side fence and squatted down next to a high weed. He straightened back up and came back to where Browne was standing.

“We’ve got us a visitor,” he whispered.

“Counter’s showin’ one.”

“And that wasn’t you leaving, after you set it?”

“Nope.”

“Damn,” Browne said, keeping his voice low. He had been hoping that the intruder the other night had been a onetime thing.

“How far up is your wire?”

“Between the ammonia plant and the shell-casin’ dip station. There’s two hydrants, face each other across the main street. Got some pipe stock racked up on the overhead steam pipe crossovers between them two buildings. He hits that wire, it’ll avalanche his ass.”

Browne pulled out his gun.

“You go up there, set your wire. I’ll follow, fifty feet behind you. Then we’ll back out, reset that counter to zero.”

“What about the stuff for the girl?”

“Not tonight. Not if there’s a chance there’s someone in there. Let’s see what your trap does first. We have to find out who this is, why he’s here.

We’re too close for any mistakes now.”

Kreiss was on the roof of the last building on the right side of the main street, listening to his cone. He was much closer to the power plant this time. The main street came over a low hill and turned slightly to its right as it approached the power plant, so he did not have a perfectly straight acoustic shot all the way to the rail gates at the other end. But if anyone came walking up over that hill, like they did the last time, he would be in position to hear their footfalls and then this time see into which building

 

they went. There was enough moonlight tonight that he could use high magnification binoculars rather than a night-vision device. He had put the stethoscope up to his ears when he first heard the truck approach the rail gates over the hill.

He’d been tempted to look around the complex of buildings when he first came in, right at sunset, but decided he would be better off getting set up in a good vantage point. Besides, there were nearly a hundred buildings, large and small, plus several wooden sheds that seemed to have been deliberately built down in circular earthen depressions. A methodical search would take hours, if not days. He was dressed out in a black one-piece overall, with the mesh head hood, gloves, and both packs. His plan was simple: watch to see where they went, creep that building to see how many entrances there were, close all but one, and then get the jump on them. The few buildings he had examined seemed to have only one human-sized door, but he had not had time to really look this place over.

Besides, it didn’t much matter: These guys had shot at him, which meant they were doing something in here that they should not be doing. If Lynn had worn that hat into the arsenal, these were the guys who would know something about what had happened to her. He settled back down behind the roof parapet to wait some more. They should be coming pretty soon, he thought.

Browne waited for Jared to pull the fence wire flap closed and to set the clips.

“All right,” he whispered when Jared joined him.

“If there is someone up there, he heard the truck. We have to make the truck sound like it’s leaving. You drive it out to the edge of the main gate plaza, then walk back in. I’m going to wait here and listen.”

“This could take all goddamn night,” Jared said.

“Let’s go back in there and find his ass.”

“How? And where would you look? He could be anywhere. He could be wandering around, or he could be inside a building, waiting. No—we pretend to leave, he’ll move.”

“What if he goes into the power plant? Or knocks on that door at the nitro building?”

“Why would he knock on a locked door? All those buildings are shut tight, including the power plant. There’s nothing to see, especially at night. He’ll wait for a while, and then he’ll walk out. We were going to be out here until almost eleven anyway. This way, we have a chance of nailing him. We can’t let this go on, boy. Not now.”

 

Jared grunted in the darkness.

“Awright. I’ll move the truck. Where’ll you be?”

“That pine tree over there. That deadfall going to make some noise?”

“Oh yeah.”

“You hear it, come running, ‘cause I’m going back in if he trips it.”

“We take him, what then?”

“He goes into the acid tank where those boys went. Get going.”

Kreiss waited for two more hours before giving it up. He’d heard the truck leave and that had bothered him. The last time, they’d shut the truck down and then come right into the complex. Tonight, they’d come, spent about half an hour doing something, and then left. The worst possibility was that they had driven the truck away and then walked back and were waiting for him to move. That would mean they knew someone was here. The best possibility was that they had left and he now had the place to himself. But why the hell would they do that? They were doing something in one of these buildings. Why come and then just leave? Had he left some sign of his intrusion? It was almost eleven o’clock. He was tempted just to curl up and go to sleep up on the roof. Put the motion detector on the parapet to catch anything coming down the street and set it to buzz rather than beep. Then search the place at dawn. But suppose they waited, too? Or came in, set up, and waited? He’d walk right into them at first light. Going in circles here, he thought. He decided to get off the building and look around.

There were four large buildings at this lower end of the main street, which ended at the big power plant. He went down the ladder and set up the motion-detector box to point back up the street. He set the alarm to chirp like a cricket if it detected anything moving toward it. It wasn’t much protection, but better than nothing. Then he spent half an hour circling each of the large buildings, creeping from shadow to shadow in the faint moonlight. The buildings were connected by what looked like steam and other utility lines that ran in bundled pipelines over the street. The musty smell of old chemicals was everywhere. The only identification on the buildings was a number, under which was a name printed onto a white block of paint near the entrance. The four buildings were called Ammonia Concentration, Nitro Fixing, Mercury Mix, and Case Heating. Each of them had large steel industrial cargo doors on the front, with a human sized walk-through door to one side. None of them had any windows, and three of the four had a rail spur leading

under the cargo door. He silently examined all the walk-through doors, but they were locked with massive padlocks. He didn’t even bother raiding them.

Then he walked down to the power plant, keeping to the side, not wanting to make noise on those big metal plates out in the street. The power plant’s doors were also locked. He was once again struck by the fact that there appeared to be nothing living in the industrial area: He had heard no rats, mice, birds, or insects, and seen little vegetation growing up through the cracks of the concrete. He concluded that not all of the nitro, ammonia, and mercury had remained in the buildings. There were parallel streets on either side of the main street, with more concrete buildings and pipe mazes running overhead. This was hopeless: Unless he could follow those people to a specific building, he could be here for weeks. He had located and identified one of the men, Jared McGarand;

maybe he would be better off taking him down at his trailer and finding out what he knew.

He gathered up his motion detector and started back up the street toward the rail gates. It was now 12:30, and the moon was setting. When his foot hit the taut wire, his instincts propelled him forward and down, since whatever was coming was probably coming from the sides. To his surprise, there was a roar of metal from above him, and then he was pounded flat by an avalanche of steel pipes. One of them connected with the back of his head and he blacked out.

Jared dropped his grandfather off at his house in Blacksburg just after midnight and then headed home to his trailer. They’d waited until almost 11:30 before giving up, but nothing had happened up in the industrial area. He still thought his grandfather had been wrong about waiting outside.

They should have gone in and rousted that sumbitch, whoever he was. Even if the guy tripped the wire, he could still get away if the pipe deadfall didn’t put him down hard enough. But he had learned the hard way not to cross the old man, and especially not now.

He’d seen Browne McGarand focused before, but never like this. This whole bomb thing was all about William, of course. The old man was positively obsessed with William. That was how Jared thought about his father—William, not Father. Unlike the old man, Jared did not give two shits about William or what had happened to him. His mother, a swelling bride at seventeen, had decamped when Jared was only six, driven to desperation by the responsibilities of a motherhood aggravated by the fact that his younger brother, Kenny, has been born

retarded. Not quite three years later, William pulled the plug as well, running off to California initially, and then eventually to beautiful downtown Waco, Texas, where he got himself mixed up with all those nutcases at Mount Carmel.

He slowed to make the turn into his trailer lot. If only William had just stayed home and done the right thing, none of this shit would be happening.

But old Grandpaw Browne, he was a scorekeeper. He had raised both kids with a firm, often biblical hand, and to this day, Jared was still a little afraid of his grandfather, especially when he got some of that Methodist fire up his ass. His grandfather’s eyes reminded him of pictures he had seen in history books of Stonewall Jackson or that abolitionist, John Brown. That old man, he wanted to make him a bomb, Brother Jared was not even going to get in the way. Even if it was about Saint William.

He sniffed as he turned down his own road. He thought he deserved at least some appreciation for helping the old man. He wasn’t sure what old Browne would have done to those kids in the traps if that flash flood hadn’t come along, but Jared knew he owned at least a piece of their deaths. Not that he cared too much—like the old man said, they shouldn’t have come sneaking around like that. But he was now on the hook as at least an accessory, and had the old man even thanked him? He had not.

He pulled his truck into the yard and shut it down. There was other shit, too. He had stolen that propane truck for him. And hadn’t he paid at least lip service to all that Christian Identity bullshit? Now there was another bunch of nut brains, always praying that the world would end when the year 2001 rolled around. Armageddon on demand, yahoo. He and the boys up in the Black Hats always had a great laugh when all those Doomsday Christians and their woolly-headed blood-and-fire predictions came up. Hell, he knew this wasn’t about Armageddon or the second coming, or the so-called saints versus the sinners. What Browne was fixing up was pure mountain-style revenge, aggravated by his feelings about an oppressive government, out-of-control taxes, even more out-of-control federal lawmen, and the UN with its secret new world order. He’d told the boys his grand paw was making a hydrogen bomb, and they’d laughed at that, too. Well, they’d see. The federal government had snuffed Saint William, and now Browne McGarand had gone and set his face against the whole damned government. The government was dead meat walking.

He got out and locked the truck. What he had to figure out was how to get back in there and get a piece of that pretty naked thing in the nitro building. He knew how to make her behave now, so maybe he’d

sweet talk her this time, talk some sense into her, then give her the ride to glory.

He adjusted his considerable sexual equipment, smiled, and then went to check on the dogs. He refilled their water. They were lethargic, but there was no more kennel mess. He had a beer while he checked through the day’s mail, and then he went to bed.

At just after 2:00 A.M.” Jared snapped awake and sat up in bed. He tried —to figure out what sound had awakened him. The windows were open, and the night was filled with the normal woods noise of insects and a chirping chorus of tree frogs. He rubbed his face and listened carefully.

Maybe he’d been dreaming. Then it came again: the distinct sound of a dry branch breaking, and not far away, either. One of the dogs woofed softly, but they raised no general alarm. Was someone out there in the trees back of the trailer? He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and listened again. A few minutes later, it came again, the distinct crunching sound of someone stepping through the forest undergrowth, then the snap of another dry branch. He got up and went to the edge of the back window. His backyard was bathed in the orange glow from a security light mounted on his power pole. The light illuminated the yard, but it had the perverse effect of making the woods even darker. Keeping an eye out the window, he reached into the drawer of the night table and pulled out his government-model .45 auto. He stepped back from the window, racked in a round, and then crossed to its other side. He could see almost nothing out in the darkness.

He depended on the dogs to alert him to intruders, and they normally did a noisy job of it. But now there was silence in the woods. He went through the trailer, checking the other rooms and the locks and all the windows. There were no signs of intrusion. Then he went back to bed, leaving the .45 out on the bedside table. He was just about asleep, when he distinctly heard the muffled sound of a portable-radio transmission outside, followed by a distinct squelch of static. He sat back up and listened, wondering again if he had been dreaming. Then he got up and went through the whole trailer again, gun in hand, checking to see if he’d left the television or the radio on this time. It was

just past 3:00 A.M.” and this was pissing him off. Then he had a cold thought: A radio—were there cops creeping around out there?

He spent the next half hour going from window to window, looking for any signs of movement in the woods. He could not figure out why the dogs weren’t raising hell. There was no wind, so maybe they heard the noises but caught no scent? Then he wondered if there was any connection between their being sick earlier and the possible intruders outside.

He kept watch for another half hour, and finally went back to bed, this time falling heavily asleep. He would have to tell the old man about this shit in the morning. Except there was always the chance he’d dreamed the whole thing.

Kreiss came to and tried to lift his head but could not. He was pinned facedown to the cold concrete, lying now beneath several objects. The moon was down and he couldn’t see what had him. His right arm was caught, but his left could move. The back of his head hurt like hell, and there was a wet sensation on the back of his neck. He felt around and closed his fingers over a cold steel pipe, about an inch and a half in diameter.

He felt around some more and realized he was under a pile of pipes.

He tried to move his legs and found they were both free. After a minute or so of struggling, he was out from under the pile.

He rolled over on his back, fingered the trip wire at his feet, and looked up at the nest of steam lines looping over the main street between the buildings. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble, climbing up the steel rungs on the pipe crossover structure and piling a couple dozen lengths of steel pipe up there, rigged to the trip wire. The top padding in his head hood and the Kevlar shoulder pads along the top of the jumpsuit had saved him from serious injury. The Kevlar ribs that ran down the jumpsuit on his chest and back had also taken some of the shock, aided by the soft bulk of the chest pack and backpack. Otherwise, a couple of hundred pounds of steel pipe falling from twenty feet might have killed him. He stretched out on the concrete, took some deep breaths, and felt for bruises.

So they’d known he was in there. He’d walked down that street coming in and had not hit any wire. Plus, they’d gone to some trouble to rig that deadfall, which meant they’d expected him to come back. Not good. He looked at his watch; it was 3:30, Friday morning. The night was perfectly still, with not even the slightest breeze. He had some satisfaction in knowing that the little black box on top of brother

Jared’s trailer was going to make him lose some sleep tonight, too, unless he was dead drunk in that trailer.

So, how had they known? He had used the same ingress point twice, the answer must be there. He got up gingerly, brushed himself off, and explored the swelling cut on the back of his head. He got out a military battle dressing and taped it over the cut. Then he walked painfully down to the rail gates, where he quickly found the electric-eye counter. The counter went to 001 when he passed his hand through the beam. He hit the reset button to zero it, then recorded twenty-six hits. Let them think about that. He went over the gates, walked the three miles down the rail line to his truck, got in, and sat there for a minute in the pitch-black. He was no closer to finding Lynn, and he was still in the dark as to what these people were doing in the arsenal. If he went to the Roanoke feds, he would confirm the sharks from Washington’s worst suspicions.

McGarand and his helper had been sure enough about an intruder to set up a deadfall. Hell with it, he thought, as he started up the truck. My objective is to find out what happened to Lynn. I can deal with the likes of Bellhouser and Foster if I have to. They’re just admin pukes with fancy titles and privileged access. There was no more point to creeping the arsenal, where those two guys would always have the home-ground advantage. He decided to just go have a little talk with Mr. Jared McGarand. With a little luck, Jared would maybe give him the other one.

Hell, Jared will absolutely give me the other one, he thought. And between the two of them, I’ll get a line on Lynn. After that, well, with all the unknowns in the equation right now, there was no sense in making long-range plans.

He drove back toward his cabin west of Blacksburg, which would take almost forty-five minutes. He stopped in an all-night gas and convenience store out on Highway 460 to get some coffee. The clerk gave him a sideways look, and he realized he must look more battered than he knew.

While he was refueling the truck, it occurred to him that perhaps the two Washington people had brought along some operational help. Who might be waiting at the cabin for him to return. He finished fueling, paid for his gas and coffee, and then pulled over to one side of the parking lot.

He extracted a local county map from the glove compartment and examined the roads surrounding Pearl’s Mountain. He knew that there was one paved county road that ran along the stream at the bottom front of his property, and another one that ran along the back slope of Pearl’s Mountain.

As he remembered, the two firebreaks that bracketed the big hill on

either side ran all the way to that back paved road. The map confirmed this. If he could get his truck onto one of the firebreaks, and it wasn’t too rough, he could drive partway up the slope and then hike up and over, ending up in a position above his cabin, where he had some toys stashed.

He checked his watch. It was 5:15. It would take another half hour to get to the back of the mountain, and then at least forty five minutes to hike up and over. Sunrise was around 7:00 A.M. With luck, he could be in position just before dawn. If they had been waiting for him all night, they’d come out at daylight to Kreiss’s version of the welcome wagon.

Jared called Browne at just after seven o’clock Friday morning. He told his grandfather what had happened the night before.

“And you hadn’t been drinking? This wasn’t some dream?”

“No, sir, I came home, had me one beer, checked on the dogs, and hit the sack. This shit started sometime around two this morning, a little after.”

“And the dogs didn’t alert on it?”

“No, sir. That’s the weird part. You know them dogs—someone comes around here, they make like it’s dinnertime.”

Browne was silent for a moment.

“I don’t like the sound of this,” he said finally.

“We’ve got someone poking around the arsenal, and now this crap. Tell you what. Go outside when it gets full light and check for sign.

Take a dog with you. See if he picks up on anything. Then I think we have to go back out to the site, see if your trap did any good.”

“He hit that trap, his ass’ll still be there,” Jared declared.

“That was a heap of pipe.”

“We’ll see. Maybe some bastard’s just playing games. Call me back before you go to work.”

Kreiss made it up to the south ridge of Pearl’s Mountain just before sunrise.

He had bought his front slope acreage from the old man who owned the entire mountain. He had permission to hunt all the slopes of the big hill, and he had gone out several times, often with Micah, to hunt deer, grouse, and turkey over its thousand-plus wooded acres. Given his previous career, he had also taken into consideration some defensive measures when siting his prefab cabin, which included arrangements for dealing with the problem of someone getting into the cabin to ambush him. But first, he had to determine if someone was there.

He crept along the south ridge until he reached the top edge of the

tree line on the eastern slope. Below was an open meadow littered with big boulders; it swept all the way down from the tree line to the back of the cabin. He was just able to see the cabin in the morning mist, some two hundred feet in elevation below his position and about three hundred yards distant. There were still large patches of shadow in the dawn light.

A pair of early-morning bobwhites were calling across the grass in the meadow. Above them, a solitary hawk was testing for the first updrafts of the morning, but it was too early. It screeched once in frustration, dropped a wing, and slanted out of sight across the rock face of the upper mountain. There were no lights or other signs of life at the cabin, and he didn’t see any vehicles. He checked again with his binoculars, and then he did see something: There was a Ford Bronco pulled behind some trees to the right of the cabin, well out of sight of the lower driveway.

Well, all right, he thought. So let’s hold a little reveille. He moved along the tree line until the biggest boulder in the meadow shadowed him from view of the cabin, and then he trotted directly down the open meadow, remaining in the sight-line shadow of the boulder until he reached it. He got down on all fours and probed the base of the massive rock until he found the edge of a camouflaged tarp, which he lifted carefully, checking for snakes. Under the tarp was a well-greased five-footlong steel box. He opened it and extracted a Barrett M82A1 .50-caliber rifle, complete with a Swarovsky ten-by-forty-two scope. The twenty eight-pound rifle had a ten-round magazine loaded with RauFoss explosive, armor-piercing rounds. It also had a muzzle brake and a bipod.

Beneath the rifle box was another, smaller box. From this, he extracted a black plastic device that looked like a television remote, and a battery pack, which he plugged into the device. He closed the boxes but left the tarp to one side. Then he lugged the huge rifle and the remote transmitter back up the slope to the trees, and once again he traversed the slope until he had a clear field of view of the back of the cabin and the clump of trees hiding the Bronco.

He checked the controller for electrical continuity with the battery pack, then put it down. He moved backward a few feet until he found level ground on which to set up the Barrett. He lay down beside the weapon, nestled the butt into his shoulder, and sighted down to the Bronco, aligning the crosshairs on the right side of the vehicle’s engine compartment. Even though it was a .50-caliber rifle, the recoil wasn’t too much more than that of a heavy shotgun, because the action was gas operated and the weapon itself weighed so much. The heavy

round would drop substantially at three hundred yards, so he adjusted the scope accordingly and re sighted He fitted the magazine and then racked one round into the chamber. He didn’t plan to use more than a few rounds.

He checked his sight line again. Then he got the remote controller, pulled out a tiny whip antenna, and aimed it at the house. He selected amplifier, power on, volume 9, and hit the red button at the top of the controller. Then he selected program 1, and again hit the red button.

There were twelve Bose speakers placed strategically down in the cabin, all connected to an antique Fisher vacuum tube-driven 2,000-watt audio-amplifier, which was set up in the attic of the cabin. Connected to the amplifier was a CD player with a single compact disc and the radio transceiver, which accepted commands from the remote. The program he had selected was the recorded sound of roaring lions, which let go at close to 150 decibels. The noise was huge, even at Kreiss’s position nearly one thousand feet away. Inside the cabin, it would be earsplitting. He could hear a chorus of dog howling start up from a mile down the country road, where Micah Wall kept a pen of coon hounds. The lion program ran for twenty seconds, and then it switched over to the second program, which erupted with the sound of a machine gun shooting out all the windows in a building. He shut it all down after another fifteen seconds and then sighted back through the scope on the Barrett as he settled himself into firing position.

Just before the machine-gun sounds ended, two men came tumbling out of the cabin’s front door, holding their ears and running for the Bronco. He let them get within twenty feet of the vehicle before squeezing off the first round, which went through the right-front fender, the engine block, the left side, and then tore off a tree limb fifty feet downslope from the vehicle. Well, maybe just a tiny bit more recoil than a shotgun, he thought as he fired again, this time moving the aiming point slightly to the left to hit the body, knocking a dent the size of a trash can’s lid into the right-front door as the bullet went through the Bronco like butter and spanged off a rock down by the creek before decapitating a pine tree on the other side of the road. The third round he put through the rear axle, blasting both tires down and exploding the differential housing out the back of the vehicle. By then, the two men were flat on the ground, trying to reach China. He stopped firing and rubbed his sore shoulder. He checked the sight line again, but the heavy barrel hadn’t moved.

He traversed the sight to where the men were. One of them sat up,

then got up and began brushing off his clothes. He then walked calmly out of the trees and up the hill toward Kreiss’s firing position, acting as if nothing had happened. As Kreiss watched through the scope, the other man stayed down on the ground, his hands over his head, one eye visible as he watched the other man go up the hill. Kreiss sat up and took his finger off the trigger. Coming up the hill was a large black man, who grinned when he saw Kreiss.

“Fuck a duck, Ed, lions? And where the hell did you get a Barrett?”

“Hello, Charlie,” Kreiss said.

“Just something I picked up along the way. And kept. How you doing?”

Charlie Ransom had been in the Agency’s retrieval Field Support Division for almost eight years and had worked for Kreiss from time to time.

He was a deceptively agreeable-looking man who was lethally effective in bringing subjects back from urban environments. He stopped when he got ten feet from Kreiss, showed his hands, and then carefully extracted a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. Kreiss watched him light up.

“Bambi bring you guys along?” he asked finally, once Ransom had his cigarette going.

“Yeah,” Ransom said, exhaling a cloud of pungent blue smoke.

“What’s Foster’s deal? He still Marchand’s toad?”

“I think so. The request for our services came from Justice, so I’m not sure what the play is here.”

Kreiss suddenly realized how badly he wanted a cigarette. He had quit smoking when he’d come down to Blacksburg. Now his neck hurt and he was aware that there must be visible bruises on his face. Ransom was looking him over.

“That was some sound show, man,” Ransom said.

“I think I pissed my pants when them lions did their thing.”

“Who’s the penitent down there?” Kreiss asked. He had not moved from his position behind the Barrett, which still had a round chambered.

“Nice young white boy,” Ransom said.

“Name’s Gerald Cassidy.

Career-minded. Married, too. I suppose that’s why he’s still grabbin’ dirt.

What do you think?”

“He’s taking a reasonable approach to the situation,” Kreiss said.