“Sorry about the Bronco.”

“DEA drug take. Ain’t no big deal. But look, Ed. We were supposed to have us a little talk, not a firefight.” He began to come closer.

Kreiss twitched the Barrett’s barrel.

“That wasn’t a firefight. And I can hear you fine from right there.”

 

Ransom stopped and flashed his palms at Kreiss in a gesture of peace.

“All right, that’s cool,” he said, “but this isn’t what you think.”

The rifle wasn’t pointed right at him, but it would not have taken much to fix that. Kreiss knew that from Ransom’s perspective, the business end of a Barrett light .50 must look like the Holland Tunnel.

“Right,” he said.

“Then why were you two laying for me in my own house?”

““Cause Bellhouser asked Agency CE for some off-line help. Apparently didn’t want to use Bureau FCI people. Either that or AD Marchand didn’t want the exposure.”

“Help with what?” Kreiss asked patiently.

“Word is, Bellhouser’s principal went postal when he heard that you’ve come out of retirement, so to speak. Apparently, one of the Roanoke agents told somebody you been operatin’. Word got back.”

That would be Carter, Kreiss thought.

“My daughter is missing,” he said. He was tired and he was hurting. He could hear the edge in his own voice and saw that Ransom was struggling to hold his casual smile.

“The local Bureau people tucked around with it for a little while, then sent it up to Missing Persons. That’s not good enough. I know a thing or two about looking for someone. They’re not going to look, so I am. You tell Bambi and company that this does not concern them, and to stay out of my way.”

Ransom gave him a peculiar look, started to say something, but then put up his hands again.

“All right, all right,” he said.

“That’s cool.

I’ll tell ‘em. Not saying that’s going to go down so good, but I’ll certainly tell ‘em.”

“You do that. You leave anything behind in my house?”

“Well, now, you know—” “You go back down there. Take Tonto there with you. Get your insects out of my house, whatever you’ve done. Take your time; do a thorough job. I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Then you come out and walk down the drive to the creek, and then walk south on that road. South is to the right.

I’ll call someone to come get you.”

“Shit, man, we got the modern conveniences. We can take care of that.”

Kreiss did not reply, but he indicated with his chin that Ransom should get going. Ransom gave him a little salute and then walked back down the hill, keeping his hands in sight. They might have cell phones, Kreiss thought, but they won’t have a signal. They were in for a long walk. He also knew that their being rousted out of a stakeout was going to look bad enough without him, Kreiss, making the call to come get them.

 

He settled in alongside the Barrett and watched Ransom and his partner go back into the cabin. He would certainly have to do a sweep of his own. He swore out loud. This was definitely a development he did not need right now. The number-two guy at Justice had sent his own PA and another horse-holder from Kreiss’s old department at the Bureau down here to step on his neck. He wondered where the heartburn was really coming from; the Agency shouldn’t care. Upon reflection, he realized this probably wasn’t about the Glower incident; this was probably about the Chinese spy case. If he had popped up on radar screens at Justice, the Agency, and the Bureau, then somebody very senior must be very nervous.

Glower had been a major embarrassment, but his suicide should have long since tempered their pain. He wondered if this was about the money.

Janet Carter was summoned to the RAs conference room just after noon.

The call came directly from Farnsworth’s office, which once again set Larry Talbot off. To her surprise, the two Washington people were back, along with a large black man and a much younger white man. The two executive assistants were in business suits, but the other two men were wearing slacks, sport shirts, and windbreakers. Farnsworth asked her to join them at the table. He did not introduce the new players, and Janet saw that the RA was looking worried again.

“Agent Carter,” Farnsworth announced formally, “This concerns the Edwin Kreiss matter. I’ve been requested to put you on special assignment.

But first, Mr. Foster here has something to share with you. Mr.

Foster?”

Foster looked down for a moment at some papers he had in a folder in front of him.

“You said the other day that Kreiss went to see one of the people you interviewed about his missing daughter?”

“I said that I thought it was probably Kreiss.” She replayed the story of the headless man for them.

“And the kid later told you that he told Kreiss they went to a “Site

R’?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you know what that is?”

“I never did find out. Nobody here seems to know about any Site R.”

Foster shuffled his notes for a moment and then looked over at the woman, Bellhouser. Bambi, Janet thought. Perfect.

“We think Site R refers to the Ramsey Army Arsenal,” Bellhouser said.

“More properly known as the Ramsey Army Ammunition Plant. It’s located south of the town of Ramsey, on the other side of the New River.

 

It’s been shut down for almost twenty years and is technically in cadre status.”

“Where’d that name come from, that Site R?” Janet asked.

“It’s an EPA appellation. The industrial area of the site is highly contaminated, but since it’s a military complex, the EPA doesn’t name it as such on their lists of toxic super sites They just called it Site R.”

“And?” Janet asked. She was trying to figure out why the Justice Department cared about an abandoned military installation.

“There’s some history here, Agent Carter. First, let me ask you something:

Could you establish a working relationship with Kreiss if you had to?”

“Working relationship? With Edwin Kreiss?”

Farnsworth got into it.

“Yes,” he said.

“Like if maybe you went to see him. Told him you were personally unhappy with the fact that the Bureau was just dropping his daughter’s case like that. That you might be interested in helping him look for his daughter, off-line, so to speak.”

She shook her head.

“He was a special agent for a long time,” she said, remembering her little confrontation with him in the cabin.

“He would know that’s bullshit. Agents don’t work off-line and remain agents for very long.”

“He’s been retired for almost five years,” Foster said.

“You could play the line that the Bureau has changed a lot since then. And play up the fact that you are an inexperienced agent.”

Janet cocked her head to one side and gave Foster a “Fuck you very much” look, but Farnsworth again intervened.

“I’ve explained to Mr. Foster that your assignment to the Roanoke office was something of a lateral arabesque, Janet,” he said.

“Not for doing anything substantively wrong, of course, but for annoying a very senior assistant director at headquarters.

You could tell Kreiss about that. Then imply that if you could solve the case, working with him, your career would be rehabilitated.”

Janet felt her face redden. She sat back in her chair, embarrassed to have Farnsworth air her career problems in front of these people.

“That all would be true, by the way,” Farnsworth said to no one in particular.

“Let Mr. Foster tell you what’s going on before you say anything.”

“This involves the BATF,” he began, and Janet snorted contemptuously.

Foster stopped.

“The Texas toastmastersV she exclaimed.

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“Janet,” Farnsworth began, but Foster waved her comment away.

“This involves a series of bombings that have been going on since the

early nineties. Abortion clinics. The Atlanta Olympics bombing. And of course, some major incidents, such as the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City bombing. Three letter bombs to federally funded universities that were not the work of the Unibomber. And three other potentially major federal office building bombings that did not succeed, or were derailed by security people.”

“The theory of interest,” Bellhouser said, “is that the anti-issue and antigovernment groups suspected to be behind these incidents are not technically qualified to design and construct some of the devices that have been used. Even more interesting is that the explosives used in several of the incidents were chemically similar. Some were identical.”

“Basically,” Foster said, “the BATF thinks that there is one expert or expert group that these anti-everything groups are using to get their big bombs from, because the kind of people who protest at abortion clinics are more likely to be soccer moms than explosives experts.”

“So they use what, a consultant?” Janet asked.

Bellhouser nodded.

“aTF and the Bureau have intercepted communications between some of the groups involved. We’re talking one of the more violence-prone ‘anti’ groups, and some people who might be supporting that guy Rudolph, the one we’re all chasing through the North Carolina woods.”

“You’re implying that there is a national conspiracy among the anti groups?”

The two Washington people nodded their heads.

“Actually,” Foster said, “there’s been an interim national-level task force working that theory since 1994: Justice, the Marshals Service, the Bureau, and aTF It’s focused mainly on the anti-abortion bombings, but the feeling now is that it may be bigger than that. The task force is called the DCB, which stands for Domestic Counterintelligence Board.”

Janet had never heard of any DCB, but she knew that Washington was full of interim task forces, a sure sign that the permanent organizations had become ineffective.

“So what’s this got to do with the Roanoke office?” she asked.

“The Board has only one lead on the so-called consultant,” Foster said.

“And that is, he’s supposedly based in southwest Virginia.”

Janet still didn’t see the connection. Foster explained.

“You’ve told us Kreiss might be looking for something called Site R. Kreiss hunting anything is something that concerns us very much. We ran the national databases on Site R, and that surfaced the Ramsey AAP,

an explosives-manufacturing complex down here in southwest Virginia. Our query brought the DCB staff up on the line, asking what we were looking for. We didn’t really want to share our Kreiss problem with anyone, so we waffled. But aTF, which is a full member of the DCB, put an agenda item on the board’s next meeting, asking what the Bureau was up to.”

“And, of course, nobody at the Bureau wanted to give the aTF the time of day,” Farnsworth said. Foster nodded. Janet understood, as did everyone in the Bureau, that after the Waco disaster, cooperation at the policy level in Washington between the Bureau and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had become a very strained business. The BATF worked for the Treasury Department; the FBI worked for the Justice Department. The competition for federal law-enforcement budget dollars had always been fierce, but the Waco disaster had added an extra dimension of enmity between the two law-enforcement agencies. But there was something she did not understand.

“If you people or this board think there’s something going on at this Ramsey Arsenal that’s related to a national terrorist bombing campaign,” Janet said, “why doesn’t this DCB or whatever just send in the Marines, toss the place?”

“Because aTF already had,” Foster said.

“It did an inspection of all such sites two years ago, and it found nothing at Ramsey but a mothballed ammunition plant. For the Bureau to suggest otherwise now is to imply that aTF screwed up or missed something.”

“What a concept,” Janet muttered.

“More importantly,” Bellhouser added, ignoring her gibe, “the proximate cause for such an allegation would be Edwin Kreiss’s unauthorized activities. Speaking for the Justice Department, we do not want our Kreiss problem exposed, and certainly not to Treasury and the BATF.”

“I guess I can see that,” Janet said, although she sensed something was not quite making sense here.

“So now what?”

“My principal, Mr. Garrette, has discussed this matter with Assistant Director Marchand. It has been decided that there might be a way to finesse this situation. We’ve told the aTF at the DCB level that an ex operative of ours had maybe stumbled onto something related to the bomb-maker conspiracy theory, and that it might, emphasis on the word might, have something to do with the Ramsey Arsenal. We informed aTF that we proposed to let this guy run free for a while and see what, if anything, he turns up.”

“But what makes you think there is something going on at this arsenal?”

 

“Because Kreiss recently contacted an old buddy who used to work for the U.S. Marshals Service,” Foster said.

“He did Kreiss a favor, but then his company security officer asked some questions, and in turn, the company reported the matter to the Bureau. They happen to have a contract with the Bureau, and they found out Kreiss used to work for the Bureau.”

“What was the favor?”

“The friend is a pilot who does airborne geo-information systems surveys.

Kreiss wanted an aerial map of the Ramsey Arsenal. He told his friend that something was going on there that shouldn’t be, and that it had something to do with his daughter’s disappearance.”

Janet frowned. This was news.

“Let me get this straight,” she said.

“You’re saying that now you want Kreiss to go operational again, because you think he might lead you to some bomb-making cell operating out of this arsenal?”

“Correct,” Bellhouser said.

“Now, if we can put you alongside Kreiss, we can perhaps achieve two objectives: We can find out what he’s doing, and maybe we can catch some serious bombers.”

“Actually,” Foster said, “nobody knows whether or not the antigovernment groups have organized nationally. It isn’t out of the question that they have in a limited way—say in the matter of getting their bombs. But if this works, we might have a chance here to roll up not only the bomb makers but some of their customers.”

Janet frowned, but then she thought she understood. Foster had an unspoken objective on the table: If the Bureau could unearth a bomber cell where aTF had failed to find them, the Bureau stood to count considerable coup. At the expense of aTF, she reminded herself.

“And you think that Kreiss acting independently has a better chance to find something than an overt joint aTF Bureau operation?”

“The last one of those was something less than a signal success,” Bellhouser pointed out.

“And Kreiss is that good?” Janet asked.

The large black man, who had been listening impassively up to now, snorted. Foster introduced him.

“Janet, this is Mr. Ransom. He is a liaison officer to the DCB. The gentleman with him is Mr. Cassidy. Mr. Ransom here has had some, um, experience with Mr. Kreiss.”

“Experience,” Ransom said.

“Yeah, you might call it that. Remind me to show you our Bronco.”

“We’re going to downplay this whole thing at the DCB meeting,” Foster said.

“The last thing we want right now is the aTF charging into the

arsenal. Especially if there’s nothing there, because that would necessarily bring the focus back to Kreiss.”

Janet nodded slowly as she tried to work out all the lines in the water.

Something was still muddled here. Then an awful idea occurred to her.

“You people aren’t holding back information on Kreiss’s daughter, are you?” she asked, looking at Foster and Bellhouser.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” snapped Bellhouser angrily. There was an embarrassed silence at the table. Farnsworth was shaking his head. Foster took a deep breath before responding.

“I won’t dignify that question with an answer, Agent Carter,” he said.

“Look, Edwin Kreiss is a tough nut. Even in retirement, as Mr. Ransom discovered earlier this morning. I’ll let him brief you after this meeting.

This Site R business may be entirely off the mark, in which case we’ll break it off and find another way to deal with Kreiss. But the aTF people who went into the Ramsey complex said it would be an absolutely perfect place for someone to set up a covert explosives lab.”

“But they found nothing?”

“A bunch of big concrete buildings, stripped down and locked up. The Army has some local rent-a-cops under contract. They make routine patrols of the physical plant, and they’ve never seen anything except signs of the occasional deer hunter back in the bunker area. It seems the central industrial area is known locally to be badly contaminated, which tends to keep intruders out. One of the security guards also said that there are rumors of chemical weapons, nerve gas, that sort of stuff, stored in the complex. We checked with the Army, which says that’s total bullshit, but since it helps to keep out intruders, they’ve always been deliberately coy about denying it.”

“Based on his reputation, if something is going on there, Kreiss will uncover it,” Bellhouser said.

“If and when he does, that’s when the DCB would want to reassert control.”

“And bring in some more assets, like maybe the aTF?”

“Or the appropriate Bureau people,” Foster said.

“And also because if someone hurt or killed his daughter, and those other two kids, you know—they broke into the arsenal on a lark, stumbled onto something, and somebody took them—Edwin Kreiss is likely to stake them out naked on the forest floor and build small fires on their bellies. For starters.”

“Sounds about right to me,” Janet said.

Ransom grinned in the background, but Foster and Bellhouser did not

see any humor in it, “The objective,” Bellhouser said, “over and above our Kreiss problem, is to see if we can smash the whole thing—the bomb consultant, his lab, and his conduits into the violent antigovernment groups.”

“These are the people who bomb whole buildings full of innocent civilians,” Foster said.

“Remember OK City? The day-care center?”

Ransom stopped grinning. Janet nodded. That was certainly a worthwhile objective.

“All right, I think I understand. And Kreiss is not to know anything about all this, correct? I offer to help him where I can, and then keep you people informed via our office here?”

“You said she was smart,” Bellhouser murmured to Farnsworth.

Puh-leeze, Janet thought.

“This all assumes Kreiss will give me the time of day,” she pointed out.

“He doesn’t exactly strike me as a team player.”

“He may or may not accept your help,” Foster said.

“The first thing we want to know is whether or not he’s been into the arsenal, and what, if anything, he’s found there. How you get that information will be entirely up to you.”

This guy’s a master of the obvious, Janet thought.

“It’s been several days,” she said.

“Since the incident in that kid’s apartment, I mean. We may be a little late here.”

“For what it’s worth, he was gone all night last night,” Ransom said.

“And when he came back, he also anticipated that somebody might be waiting there in his cabin.”

“How? we wonder,” Bellhouser asked rhetorically.

Janet kept her face a perfect blank.

“Maybe he is just that good,” she said.

“Especially if he’s working something after you guys told him never to go operational again.”

“Perhaps,” Bellhouser said, giving her a speculative look.

“But for now, this is a Bureau/fustice Department play. With a little help from our Agency friends here.”

Agency friends? Janet thought. Then she realized Bellhouser was talking about the two so-called liaison men.

“And aTF doesn’t suspect you’ve got something going?” she asked.

“We think not,” Bellhouser said.

“If Kreiss turns up solid evidence of a bomber cell, we’ll take it to the DCB, and, of course, that will fold in aTF

But right now, Kreiss and what he’s doing is our focus.”

“What this ‘we’ shit, white woman?” Ransom murmured.

“Maybe you should go deal with that crazy motherfucker. Him and his fifty-caliber rifle.”

 

Bellhouser looked over at Ransom.

“I will if I have to, since you failed to deliver the message.”

“Didn’t need to,” Ransom said.

“He doesn’t think it’s you.”

“Huh?” Janet said.

“What message? What are you two talking about?”

Bellhouser ignored her question.

“We’ll coordinate this through Mr.

Farnsworth. You will report exclusively to him. Think of him as your field controller.”

Field controller, Janet thought with another mental roll of her eyes.

Just call me Bond, Janet Bond.

“Okay,” she said.

“Boss, would you please back-brief Larry Talbot?” She looked at her watch.

“It’s Friday afternoon.

I should get in touch with Mr. Kreiss ASAP, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” Foster said.

Janet hesitated, an image of Edwin Kreiss’s watchful face in her mind.

“You don’t think Kreiss will tumble to all this?” she asked.

“He seems pretty… perceptive.”

“Not if it’s done right,” Foster said.

“Think of it as the ‘frog in the pot’ analogy: You drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, out he comes. Put him in a pot of cold water and slowly turn up the heat? He boils to death without ever realizing he’s in trouble.”

Janet just looked at Foster. From her brief acquaintance with Edwin Kreiss, she saw a hundred things wrong with his little analogy.

“And Mr. Ransom here has some equipment to show you. Why don’t you go with him, while we sort out communications and coordination with Mr. Farnsworth.”

Janet glanced at Farnsworth, who nodded. She knew she would have to talk to him later, to make sure she understood the real bureaucratic ground rules here. As she got up to leave, the Bellhouser woman was giving her a studied look. It occurred to Janet that their scheme depended entirely on Mr. Kreiss going along with her offer of “help.” The woman’s expression somehow reminded Janet of a snake who’d just missed a rabbit.

She followed Ransom out of the conference room and closed the door behind her. The more she thought about this, the more she thought Kreiss would just blow her off. On the other hand, she had warned him about the Agency people showing up. Maybe he would be grateful. Edwin Kreiss grateful. Sure.

“So,” she said, “what’s this about a fifty-caliber rifle? And a Bronco?”

He shook his head.

“It’s in your impound lot. You know what a Barrett light fifty is?”

“I’m a materials forensics nerdette, so, no. What’s a Barrett light fifty?”

 

They went down to the basement and then took back stairs out to the multistoried parking garage behind the federal building. A fenced area on the lower level held impounded vehicles. The Bronco was in one corner of the compound, hunkered down in a pool of its body fluids. Ransom walked them over to it.

“A Barrett light fifty is a big-ass rifle. Currently being used by Navy SEALs as a long-range personal communicator. The Army is using it to detonate land mines. He did this with three rounds.”

“Wow. Was he after you guys?”

“Kreiss? No way. He normally doesn’t use guns on people. He uses guns to scare the shit out of people. Like me and Gerald back there at his cabin. We were playing dive the submarine by the time that second round came down the hill. Somebody lets off a Barrett, you know you’re in a world of shit.”

Janet looked at the car and wondered what she’d gotten herself into.

Ransom was watching her.

“I guess I don’t understand,” she said.

“Somebody pops a cap at Bureau agents, the immediate result is that a hundred more agents come kick his ass. Tell me some more about this Kreiss guy.

And you work for the Agency? Did you work with Kreiss?”

“Nobody worked with Edwin Kreiss. For him, maybe, but never with him. That’s part of his charm. And me, I’m just a glorified gofer.”

Janet looked sideways at him. Ransom’s flexible speech patterns were beginning to make her think that he was perhaps being modest.

“Well, look, whatever you are, I’m a regular whiz bang in a federal forensics investigation. You want courtroom-ready evidence to lock some wrong guys up, I’m your agent. I’m here in Roanoke to get some out-of-specialty field experience, which means I have next to no field experience. Get the picture?”

“Got the picture. Man upstairs said you pissed off some heavy dudes.

What you do—tell the truth on ‘em?”

“I was working in the Bureau laboratory. As you may have read, we’ve had some problems there. I told them what the evidence said. Not what they wanted to hear. You know, facts getting in the way of preconceived notions. Some of the bigger bosses hate that.”

“See, we don’t have that problem where I work.”

“Oh really?”

“Yeah, see, at the Agency, ain’t nobody ever asks for facts in the first place. That way, nothing interferes with their preconceived notions. Lot less friction.”

 

She smiled.

“I’ll bet. Anyway, I do believe I’m out of my league getting mixed up with a guy like this,” she said, pointing with her chin to the deflated Bronco.

“We all out of our league, Special Agent Carter. That’s why he was so damned effective when he worked for us.”

“I don’t understand. If he’s such a big problem, why don’t you all just gang up and take him in, do some spooky number on him?”

Ransom stopped and looked around.

“You really don’t know, do you?”

he said.

“No, I don’t.”

He looked around again.

“Okay, there’s two reasons. The first is because he’s Edwin Kreiss. Listen, Gerald and me? We were sent to just have us a little talk with the man last night. Just talk, now, nothing heavy.

He don’t come home, and next thing I know, it’s morning and I’m looking for coffee makings. I’m opening a cupboard door and a fuckin’ zoo-ful of goddamn monster-ass lions sound off in that big room.”

“Lions.”

“Fuckin’ right, lions. I never heard a live lion in my fuckin’ life outside of the movies, and I not only knew it was lions but that there was a hundred of them bastards in the house. We talkin’ loud motherfuckers, aw right I mean, we talkin’ a hundred fifty decibels’ worth of roaring lions. Then it was a machine gun, blowing all the windows in the house out, along with our eardrums. I’m talkin’ glass flyin’, bullets blowin’ through walls, dishes breakin’—and it’s so loud, I can’t hear myself screamin’.”

“He shoot at his own house?”

“Naw, he didn’t shoot nothin’—then. My man Kreiss does sounds.

These were just sounds. I knew that—still scared the shit out of me. And Gerald? My man Gerald crapped himself.”

“He does this with what—speakers? Tapes?”

“Tactical sound. It’s a Kreiss trademark. See, if you can hear it but you can’t see it, then your imagination automatically comes up with the worst case monster, right? And if you get your target spooked enough, he’s gonna move in straight lines. He put a rattlesnake tape in a guy’s car one time—rattles, hiss, ground sounds, the whole nine yards. Dude drove it into a tree tryin’ to find that snake. I gotta tell you, I knew all about this, but Gerald an’ me? We both out the fuckin’ door in about two nanoseconds, all that shit starts up, runnin’ for the Bronco, and then, then, here come the crack of doom to split the engine block into four pieces.”

 

“Okay, so he has a bad temper,” Ransom started laughing.

“Temper? Temper! What are you, Special Agent, a comedienne? Temper! No, no, no, no. Kreiss? He wasn’t mad. He cool as a fuckin’ cucumber when I go up the hill to pay my respects, you know, say hello, see how his morning is goin’. No, no, see: This the kind of shit he does when he just workin’. Now, rumor has it he does have a teeny little problem with rage. That’s when he does the really bad shit, the shit got him retired. And that leads me to the second reason. You sure you don’t already know this?”

“I’ve heard a little bit about the Glower incident, if that’s what you mean. I’m not sure I want to know any more.”

“Well, you better, you be messin’ aroun’ with those executive back stabbers in there. Edwin Kreiss, when he flamed out after the Glower thing, he supposedly said some things. Made some accusations. Like he’d been right about Glower, seem’ as Glower offed himself and his whole family rather than answer to what was comin’. Some other people where I work thought the same thing, only they couldn’t say so, because sayin’ so wasn’t such a healthy thing to do, careerwise.”

“My boss said Kreiss thought there was someone else who had been obstructing the DOE laboratories investigation. Somebody in another agency.”

“But that’s the thing, Special Agent. That’s the reason nobody willin’ to order up a gang bang on Mr. Kreiss. Because, the way the jungle drums told it, brother Kreiss just might have some evidence to back up all those accusations he made. You know, evidenced Like what got you sent down here to East Bumfuck Egypt? Me, I’m just a workin’ stiff, but my guess is there are some senior people in both your outfit and mine who just might be afraid of Edwin Kreiss.”

She stared at the bleeding Bronco.

“Fuck me,” she said quietly.

“Now you talkin’ like a veteran,” Ransom said approvingly.

They headed back toward the building. Janet still felt that there was something wrong with the logic of what Bellhouser and Foster had asked her to do, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

“So where does a retired FBI agent get his hands on a fifty-caliber rifle?” she asked.

“Probably got it when he was with Agency CE,” Ransom said.

“You gotta remember: Kreiss worked with the sweepers, and those are some serious spooks. Those guys can draw on any kind of equipment the CS-that’s our Clandestine Services—have in the toy store, along with DOD’s toy store. Word is, those dudes go out and get some of their own

shit, ‘cause the operatin’ cash is, shall we say, loosely controlled? When it’s time for them to retire, go raise plutonium somewhere, they turn in the issue stuff, but there’s no tellin’ what kinda shit they got stashed, or where. Ain’t nobody asks ‘em, either.”

She stopped at the door, took a deep breath, and blew it out though pursed lips.

“Maybe I need to go back and talk to Farnsworth. I’m definitely not qualified to do this by myself.”

“Who says you be by yourself, Special Agent? You gonna have some top line backup while you on this little vacation.”

She looked at him. He was smiling broadly.

“You?” she said.

“One and only.”

They went through the door and she stopped again.

“And you just walked up the hill to talk to him?”

“Couldn’t dance, Special Agent. Might as well go see what the man wants, makin’ all that noise. Besides, I didn’t like the sounds Gerald was makin’.”

She shook her head.

“He okay now?”

They started up the stairs.

“I believe Gerald’s had a small change of heart,” Ransom said.

“Brother Gerald has decided he’s going into another line of work. He was in the computer-research end of the CS before he came to the retrieval shop. I believe the Barrett influenced his career thinkin’ this morning. And maybe the lions, too. Hard to say which.”

“Gerald sounds intelligent,” she said.

“So, what was significant about the message you were supposed to deliver to Kreiss?”

He looked down at her for a moment.

“I can’t tell you that,” he said.

“Because I don’t know what it means. What I can say is that it involves something’ way above your pay grade and mine. Now, let’s go look at some of my surveillance toys.”

Kreiss spent the rest of the day checking his property’s perimeter, retrieving his truck, and then cleaning and re stashing the Barrett. Micah Wall wandered up about midmorning to inquire if everything was all right at the Kreiss homestead. His eyes widened when he saw the Barrett.

“Been some years since I heard me a fifty-cal,” he said, looking around for bodies.

“Korea, I believe it was. They didn’t look like that.”

“Unmistakable, aren’t they?” Kreiss said.

Micah eyed the bandage on Kreiss’s neck but said nothing about it.

“Fifty works real good on Chicoms, specially when they bunch up. We gonna have buzzards? You need a mass grave dug or anything?”

 

Kreiss laughed.

“No, this was just a little domestic dispute. I think we got it all sorted out. For the moment anyway.”

“Hate to hear you do a big domestic dispute, neighbor. Oh, and my dogs was inquirin’ about them lions?”

“The wonders of modern science, Micah. Just a little something to make people move out of their prepared positions.”

“Uh-huh,” Micah said, nodding thoughtfully.

“Well, like I’ve said before, you need me or any of my kinfolk to take a walk in the woods now and then, you just holler. Any word on Lynn?”

“I appreciate the offer, Micah. And no, nothing on Lynn from the authorities. I may have found out a couple of things, though.” He told Micah about finding Lynn’s hat inside the Ramsey Arsenal, and that he thought there was something going on in there.

“What kinda something, you reckon?”

“I’m not sure. My guess is a meth lab, maybe some other kind of heavy drug thing. Something that made those two guys willing to shoot first and talk about it later. I did find out who one of them is, however. We’re going to have a talk.”

“You think maybe them kids went in there and ran into the wrong kinda folks?”

Kreiss nodded, sighing.

“It’s possible, Micah. And that’s not a happy thought.”

“You want, I got some kinfolk who can go git this fella, bring him back to our place. We can put him in the caves for a while. Give him time to reflect. Then you can have that there talk in private, you want.”

“I appreciate it, Micah, but I better do this one myself. There are some folks who are interested in the fact that I’m stepping out at night, and they’re not people you want to meet.”

“Like them two boys I seen goin’ down the road this mornin’?”

Kreiss nodded his head. Micah thought about that for a moment.

“They revenuers?”

“Not exactly. They are federal. I used to work with one of them.

There’s some bad history here. I want to focus on finding Lynn, and I don’t want them drawn into it.”

Wall nailed a cricket with a shot of chaw.

“Well, you know where we at,” he said.

“You git into a fix, you call, hear?”

Kreiss thanked him again and Micah trudged back into the forest, keeping a wary eye out for lions. Kreiss made a mental note that maybe he would take Micah up on his offer. Micah’s clan had been walking

these hills for decades. If Bambi and the Bureau had made some kind of deal with the Agency, there might be more watchers. The Wall clan might actually have some fun with them. Maybe he should lend them some lions, or maybe the tape of an adult male grizzly at full power, complete with noises of crashing through the brush and snapping limbs; that was a beauty for woods and cave work, especially if dogs were in pursuit. Their handlers might know it was a tape, but the dogs would inevitably leave the scene, sometimes with the handlers’ arms attached to their leashes.

He had checked the house out for bugs and other electronic vermin, sanitized his phone line, and disconnected the house electrical power at the breaker box to scan the house wiring for devices that drew power by induction. His computer was strictly a communications device; as far as he was concerned, it was eternally un secure Everything that went out on the Net was an open book anyway, so he didn’t bother to check it other than to do an occasional cookie scan. Once he was reasonably sure the place was clean, he checked his truck. There, his scanner found two bugs right away. They were so easy, he knew there had to be a third, which he finally found mounted on the inside of the right-rear wheel, where it drew inductive power from axle rotation via magnets fixed to the frame. If the wheel wasn’t moving, there was no power signal to be detected by the scanner. Clever. He found it by getting on his back and looking.

Then he took a long, hot shower, dressed the cuts on his neck, ate a sandwich, and lay down for a long nap. He would redo the house sweep in twenty-four hours to pick up any delayed-action devices. He almost hoped they’d left one, because a bug you knew about was a wonderful way to feed back disinformation.

He was awakened at 3:30 by the phone. It was the FBI lady, Janet Carter.

“You have something new on Lynn?” he asked immediately.

“No, Mr. Kreiss, I don’t. But I’d like to meet with you, if I could. Today if possible, before the weekend.”

“Today is almost over and weekends don’t mean anything to me, Agent Carter. Why do we need to meet?”

“To talk about something that shouldn’t be heard on a phone, Mr.

Kreiss.”

He thought about that, trying to wipe the sleep from his eyes. His body was sore all over from his little pipe bath at the arsenal. He had planned to work on jared McGarand tonight. If the FBI lady didn’t have anything on Lynn, he wasn’t sure he wanted to waste any time with

her. She was pretty enough to look at, but until Lynn was recovered, he wasn’t interested in women.

“Well, that’s sufficiently mysterious to make me curious, but I’m busy tonight, Agent Carter. How about some other time?”

“Maybe I can help you find Site R; you know, the place Barry dark told you about?”

That sat him up in his bed. She must have gone back to reinterview that little creep. And made him talk. He’d better hear this.

“Okay.” He sighed.

“Where and when?”

“I live in Roanoke. You live well west of Blacksburg. You know where the Virginia Tech main library is? The university has a convention center hotel across the street. Called the Donaldson-Brown Center?”

“I know it.” He’d had lunch with Lynn there a week before she disappeared.

The memory of it pinched his heart.

“The bar at seven?”

“All right,” he said, and hung up. What the hell is this all about? he wondered. First, she had warned him about the Washington people coming to town. Now she said she wanted to help him find Lynn, even though her bosses supposedly had closed the local case. He lay back in the bed.

Were the Agency and the Bureau really working together? Not likely, he thought. Especially after the Glower incident. So what had brought Bambi and Chief Red in the Face to beautiful downtown Roanoke, Virginia, if not something to do with him? As farther evidenced by the appearance of Charlie Ransom plus one at his cabin. Why? What had brought them now? Carter had just mentioned Barry dark. She couldn’t know that he’d been the headless visitor, but what if she’d reported the incident and named him as the most likely suspect? Would that generate Washington’s interest?

He got up with a grunt and checked the time. It was going on four o’clock. Jared ought not to be home yet. He went to his desk and got out a file marked “Tax Return.” He had transcribed all the pertinent numbers from the papers he’d taken from jared’s trailer into what looked like a personal tax record, and then he’d burned the McGarand papers. He got Jared’s phone number and dialed it. When the phone had rung three times, he pressed the buttons marked 7 and 5 together for two seconds.

This activated the recorder, which diverted the ring signal and initiated a ten-second wait period, in case the owner picked up his phone. Then it activated its playback feature. He listened to Jared’s call to someone, pressed the star key, listened to it again, and then

pressed 6 and 9. The digits of a phone number were read to him by a robotic voice. He copied down the number. He pressed the buttons 7 and 5 again. There was one incoming call, an older man’s voice. It sounded like the same man in the previous call. The man told Jared that they would go out to the site tonight to get set up for tomorrow and to look for their “visitor.” He listened to the voice again, memorizing the sound of it. There were no more calls. He pressed the zero button three times and hung up.

He looked up the number for the Donaldson-Brown Center and called for a room reservation, specifically requesting a room overlooking the parking lot. Then he went back to sleep, setting his clock in time to get cleaned up for his trip into that throbbing metropolis known as Blacksburg, Virginia.

Janet Carter arrived at Donaldson-Brown at 6:30. She was driving an unmarked tan Bureau Crown Vie, which she parked in the front parking lot. It was twilight, but the parking lot lights weren’t on yet. She had had time to go to her townhouse in Roanoke before coming over to Blacksburg, and she was wearing a light wool pantsuit over a plain dark blouse.

Earlier, she’d spent an hour with Ransom looking at various surveillance and communications gadgets, and then she had met with Farnsworth alone to nail down the ground rules for her new assignment.

Farnsworth had been pretty specific: All communications regarding what she was doing with Edwin Kreiss were to be via secure means directly to him—preferably via scrambled landline. No cell phones and no clear tactical radio unless it was an emergency. Ransom was to be her distant tactical backup—distant meaning that Kreiss was not to know that Ransom was operating with her if at all possible. She was not to go anywhere alone with Kreiss without clearance from the RA. If her situation got at all hinky, she was to back out and return immediately to the federal building, day or night, and notify him. They would not establish a response cell in the federal building unless something more than a surveillance operation developed. She was to be armed at all times, and she was to carry an encapsulated CFR—call for rescue—pod at all times. He gave her the phone codes that would forward any call she made to the FBI office in Roanoke directly to him wherever he was, twenty-four hours a day. Finally, Farnsworth told her that there was always the chance that the two horse-holders from Washington might have other assets besides Ransom in the area. If she detected that situation, she was to back out immediately.

 

“Unfortunately, all we know about this little deal is what those people have told us, no more, no less,” he said.

“I’ve got some calls into the Criminal Investigations operations center at our headquarters to verify this DCB thing—I’ve never heard of it, although that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. And much as I hate the idea of working with aTF, I’m uneasy about cutting them out if this is turning into a bombing case. For all their Washington warts, their field people are pretty good at working bombs.”

“I got the impression that those two weren’t telling us everything,” Janet said.

“You’ve got good instincts,” Farnsworth said.

“I’ve got to be careful here. Foster works for Marchand and the FCI people. As the Roanoke office, we don } work for Marchand. I have the authority to put you on this thing, but I want some top cover before it goes much further. I also want to know more about this purported bomb-making cell operating down here in southwest Virginia, which I damn well should have been told about.”

“One final warning, Janet,” he said.

“I know you’ve had one previous field tour, but that was in your specialty, right?”

“Yes, sir, in Chicago. I didn’t do much street work.”

He nodded.

“That’s what I’m getting at, your lack of street experience, through no fault of yours, of course. But this guy Kreiss is the walking embodiment of street experience, and, apparently, then some. You’re a smart young lady, but don’t try to use those brains to outwit Edwin Kreiss.

Use them to know when to back out and call me. Maintain situational awareness, and keep it simple, okay?”

Another “Yes, sir,” and then she was out of there. And now she was here. The parking lot was almost full, and there were people unloading bags from cars lined up by the hotel’s front entrance. She wondered if Edwin Kreiss was standing under a streetlight nearby, a newspaper in his face, watching her. Yeah, and a brown fedora, tan trench coat, and some shades to complete the ensemble. She smiled and automatically checked her makeup. She had deliberately put on plain clothes, not wanting to put any boy-girl elements into the meeting. He’s just a retired Bureau agent, she reminded herself. Which isn’t quite true, is it? she thought. Ransom’s story of the acoustic attack and then the .50 caliber fire down the hill would have been almost funny except for one thing: Ransom and his partner had been frightened out of their wits. His partner was apparently quitting over what had happened up there. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to imagine what lions roaring at 150 decibels would do to her own presence of mind. A

flash-bang grenade was 175 decibels. And, yes, your forebrain would tell you there couldn’t be lions in the house, she thought, but she was pretty sure her own instincts would have been to bolt out of that cabin while trying not to leave a trail. This Kreiss was a piece of work.

She got out of the car and walked directly to the front entrance. She was carrying a leather purse, which held her credentials. She had her Sig Sauer model 225 in a hip holster under her jacket. Farnsworth had asked her if she carried more than one gun, but, like most agents, she did not.

She carried the CFR pod, which was the size of a change purse, in her pants pocket. If squeezed hard, it would begin emitting a coded signal on one of the satellite-monitored search and rescue frequencies, which in turn would key a reaction transponder at FBI headquarters. It couldn’t pinpoint her precise location, but it would tell the system who was in trouble. Ransom had agreed to follow her to Blacksburg but to stay away from the hotel. She hoped he wouldn’t get all independent on her and blow their cover, such as it was.

She found the lounge located to one side of the lobby and took a table at the back. There was a conventional bar running down one wall, booths along the opposite wall, and smaller tables out in the middle. A couple of men at the bar were looking her over. She went through the looking-at her-watch pantomime to discourage any walk-ups. C’mon, Kreiss, she thought, and then realized she was the one who was early.

Three floors above, Edwin Kreiss kept watch on the parking lot from his darkened window. The building front faced northeast, so anyone looking up at the windows at sunset should not be able to see in. He had watched Janet drive into the lot in her rather obvious Bureau car, complete with the small whip antenna on the trunk. He had wondered what she’d been doing down there for ten minutes, but then she’d gone inside. He was waiting to see if any more unmarked cars showed up. He had, in fact, been watching the lot since five o’clock, looking for any vehicle that came into the area either to make repeated passes or to park, with no one getting out. His own vehicle was parked almost a mile away, on the other side of the Virginia Tech parade field, behind the main administration building. If Carter was working with a surveillance squad, her backup might try to plant something on his truck while she was inside with him. Assuming she had backup.

He was still suspicious about her call for a meet. It had to be more than something generated out of the goodness of her heart, and, regrettably, something to do with the firestorm he’d caused when he

left the government. He swore quietly. If that’s what this was all about, his life could get really complicated. Especially with Lynn missing.

And then he saw a minivan come into the parking lot, turn its headlights off, and start to cruise the lanes with just its parking lights on. That was okay, except that it went by two perfectly good parking spaces, and then a third and a fourth. He got out his binoculars, trying for a make on the plate, but the plate light was conveniently not working. The windows must have been tinted, because he could not see inside the van, either.

The van cruised down one more lane and then came up past Carter’s Crown Vie. There was a brief flare of brake lights, but then the van continued on. Bingo, he thought. The van went out of the parking lot and onto a small side street that led into the main campus. A passing car honked and flashed its lights at the van to get its main lights on. The van complied, then pulled into a handicapped space to one side of the hotel building. As Kreiss watched, a tall man got out and walked purposefully back to Carter’s car, where he looked both ways and then bent down to put something under the left-rear wheel well. The man then walked back to the minivan and got in. A moment later, he drove away.

Kreiss pulled the drapes closed. It looked like Carter had backup all right, but not necessarily working for her. He slipped on his sport coat, having decided to dress up a little, in deference to the fact that Carter would probably still be in her office clothes. He went downstairs.

Janet saw him come into the bar and raised her hand. He was wearing khaki-colored slacks, a white shirt open at the throat, and a dark blue sport coat. With his gray-white hair and clipped beard, he looked almost professorial, except for the heft of his shoulders and a look in his eye that made other men in the crowded room ease out of his way as he came across to her table. He nodded to her as he sat down and ordered a glass of sparkling water from the waitress.

“Special Agent Carter,” he said.

“You called.”

“Yes, I did,” she said. The bar was really filling up now, and the noise level was growing. Up close, his face looked a little puffy on one side and there was a bandage peeking up over his collar.

“Hurt yourself?” she asked, looking at the bandage.

“Let’s get to it,” he said, ignoring her question.

“I want to find my daughter. What do you want?”

“I reinterviewed Barry dark. He said he told you they were going to Site R. I think I can help you identify what that is.”

 

“I already know,” he said.

“It’s the Ramsey Arsenal. What do you want?”

She was taken aback and suddenly didn’t know what to say. She realized she should have had a plan B. He leaned forward, his eyes intense.

“Listen to me, Special Agent Carter. I want to find my daughter. Three case folders gathering dust up in the MP shop don’t cut it. I’m going to do what I’m going to do, regardless of the Bureau. If I determine that she’s been abducted and injured or killed, I’ll find out who did it and put their severed heads on pikes out on the interstate.”

She blinked, desperately trying to think of something clever to say.

This wasn’t going anything like the way she had anticipated. She had forgotten how intense he was. Focus, she commanded herself. Focus. Then he surprised her.

“Who would want to plant a bug on your Bu car?” he asked.

“What? A bug?”

“I watched you arrive in the parking lot. Tan Crown Vie? You parked and stayed in the car for a few minutes. Then you walked in. Ten minutes after that, a nondescript minivan came into the lot, cruised all the lanes, paused at your car, left the lot, and then parked long enough for some tall white guy to walk back and put something under your left-rear wheel well. Who would want to bug a Bureau car?”

What the hell is this? she thought.

“I looked for you,” she said.

“Where were you watching from?”

“My room, Special Agent.”

His room.

“Oh” was all she could manage.

He sat back in his chair and drank some of his water.

“You’re obviously not a street agent. What’s your specialty?”

The look in his eyes was one of calm appraisal. She decided this was no time for bullshit.

“I’m a materials forensics evidence specialist. Most of my assignments have been in support of Washington task forces, qualifying the evidence. I did one field tour in Chicago, but it was in-specialty.”

“You do a lot of materials forensics over there in beautiful downtown Roanoke, Virginia?”

“Well,” she said, “some senior people at the headquarters thought it was time for me to get some field experience.”

“You mean you were playing straight-arrow in the lab, upset some prosecutor’s preconceived notions about the evidence, and your mentor was concerned enough about your career to get you out of Dodge for a couple of years.”

 

She colored and then nodded. To cover her embarrassment, she drank some Coke. It was watery.

“What brought Bambi and Marchand’s lapdog down here?”

“I did, I guess.”

“You guess?”

She winced mentally. Talking to him was like being back at the damned Academy. She kept forgetting he had been a senior agent with many years of experience.

“I made a routine inquiry. It’s… it’s perhaps not something you want to hear.”

He just looked at her, so she described her conversation with Dr.

Kellermann.

He nodded when she was finished. He had been coming at her like an interrogator. Now his expression softened.

“And that inquiry got back to the Justice Department how, exactly?”

“That, I don’t know,” she said. The waitress buzzed by and asked if they needed anything else. Kreiss didn’t look at her, just shook his head.

“I mean, I guess the Counseling Division notified somebody,” she said.

“Although I don’t know why, exactly. My inquiry concerned your ex-wife, not you.” She was trying to keep the conversation going, but there he was, looking at his watch. She had gotten nowhere.

“Have you been to this Ramsey Arsenal place?” she asked.

He sat back in his chair and steepled his hands beneath his chin.

“Who wants to know?”

“I do. Why did you ask that?”

“Because I don’t believe the PA to the deputy AG and her counterpart from Marchand’s office came down here to work a missing persons case. I think they came down here to find out what the hell I’m up to. Let me guess: They send you to get close to me?”

The question came so directly and so unexpectedly that Janet couldn’t keep her expression from revealing the truth. Kreiss smiled wearily.

“They’re so damned transparent. They sit around in Washington for years and years, playing all these palace games. They think field people believe their bullshit.”

“That’s not quite it,” she said.

“They think there’s some kind of bomb making cell that might be working out of the arsenal. They—” “Bombs?” he said with a snort.

“The Bureau doesn’t work bombs; aTF works bombs. If they thought that, they’d turn loose a herd of aTF agents in there and find out. This

isn’t about any goddamned bombs. If those two are here, they’re here about me. Which is probably why two Agency CE worker bees were waiting at my cabin when I got back this morning.”

She thought she saw an opening.

“Got back from where, Mr. Kreiss?”

“That’s my business, Agent Carter,” he said, ignoring her gambit.

“Now, I have a daughter to locate. I don’t really think there’s anything you can do for me. I appreciate your telling me about the Washington interest, but that’s between me and them. If I find my daughter, I’ll let you know. If I don’t but I find the people responsible for her disappearance, you’ll hear about that, too.”

“Right,” she said.

“Heads out on I-Eighty-one.”

He smiled, but his eyes remained grim.

“It’d be a change from all those billboards,” he said.

“Did you really operate alone?” she asked. She surprised herself, asking the question, but she couldn’t imagine what that must be like.

He thought about it for a moment.

“Not at first, but later, yes. The backup was available, but it was more technical than human. Once I went down a hole after somebody, it was an individual effort.”

“But why? Why give away our biggest advantage, our ability to overwhelm a subject, with agents, with data, with surveillance, the whole boat?”

“We weren’t sent after ‘subjects,” Special Agent. We were only activated to retrieve professional clandestine operatives. That’s not a game for groups. Besides, we applied a different theory of pursuit.”

“Which was?”

“A single hunter. One-on-one. That made it personal, which gave us a chance to provoke an emotional reaction.”

“Why?”

“Emotion distracts. The more emotion, the more distraction. Distraction leads to mistakes. Mistakes lead to capture. This is all news to you, isn’t it?”

She shrugged.

“I went through basic agent training. I’ve just never done it at the street level.”

“And you probably never will. You’re not tough enough.”

She felt herself coloring.

“That something you know, Mr. Kreiss?”

“Yes, it is. For instance, could you shoot someone?”

“Yes. Well, I think so. To save my life. Or another agent’s life.”

“Sure about that? Could you pull that trigger and blast another human’s heart out his back?”

 

She started to get angry.

“Well, the real answer to that is, I don’t know.

Probably won’t know until the time comes to do it, will I?”

He smiled then.

“Well, at least you’re not stupid. I think we’re done here.”

He looked at his watch again, which was when she remembered something during the discussion in Farnsworth’s office.

“The Washington people were pretty specific about a bombing conspiracy. But one of them, the woman, said something I didn’t understand. She jumped in Ransom’s shit because he failed to deliver a message. I asked, “What message?” but she wouldn’t say, and neither would Ransom.”

Kreiss looked away for a moment.

“I don’t know,” he said, finally.

“Like she said, Ransom didn’t deliver any message.”

He pushed his chair back. She couldn’t just let him walk away, but she could not figure out a way of prolonging the conversation. She also wanted to be able to contact him again if something developed.

“Wait,” she said. She fished in her purse and brought out her Bureau-issue pager.

“Would you take this?” she said, handing the device across the table.

“In case I need to reach you quickly. You know, in case we get news of Lynn.”

He cocked his head.

“You want me to carry your pager?”

“It’s not what you think,” she said quickly, too quickly.

“I mean, it’s not a tracking device or anything. It’s just a plain vanilla pager. Please?”

“Sure it is,” he said, but then he took it and got up.

“You have a good evening, Special Agent Carter. And remember to check out your passenger.”

He left a five-dollar bill on the table and walked out. She noticed that all those intelligent-looking men at the bar again moved aside to let him by, moving quickly enough that he didn’t have to slow down. Kind of like the Red Sea opening up for Moses, she thought. She took another sip of her Coke, grimaced, and left the bar. Great job, she thought. You coopted him very nicely. Had him eating out of the palm of your hand, didn’t you? You’re supposed to be setting up on him, and he has to tell you somebody’s put a bug on your car? And in compensation for seeing right through you, he’s really going to walk around with your pager on his belt.

Jesus, what had she been thinking?

She went out the front door and walked directly to her Bureau car. She thought about looking for the bug, then decided to take the vehicle directly back to the Roanoke office and let someone from the

surveillance squad take a look. It had better not have been Ransom or one of his people planting that thing, she thought, because if it had, this little game was over before it began. She started the car and then just sat there for a moment. Kreiss had touched a nerve when he asked her if she could shoot someone. She was pretty damn sure she could never do that. Even in tactical range training, when the bad guy silhouette popped up right in front other, she had hesitated. After the final qualifications, the chief instructor had given her a look that spoke volumes. It was probably still in her record. And here was Kreiss, reading her like an open book. She wondered if he was watching her now. She resisted the impulse to look up at the windows. Then she wondered how she was going to break the news to Farnsworth.

“Hold up a minute,” Browne McGarand said. It was another cool, clear night, with moonrise not due until around midnight. The arsenal rail gates gleamed dully a hundred yards ahead of them. Jared stopped and looked back at his grandfather, who was scanning the gates and the dark woods around them through a pair of binoculars.

“You see something’?” Jared whispered.

“Nope. Just looking to see if anything’s different.”

“That counter’ll tell the tale,” Jared said, peering into the nearby trees.

“Unless he got by your little trap and laid down one of his own. He’s been using the same gate as we have. Okay, let’s go.”

When Jared finally read the counter, he swore out loud. Browne looked at it and let out a long sigh.

“Zero it, “he ordered.

“And then what? Twenty-six hits means thirteen people been in and out of here. That has to mean cops.”

“Or one guy waving his hand twenty-six times across the beam,” Browne pointed out.

“If he tripped your deadfall, all this means is that he got by it.”

“Why not a buncha cops?”

“Because there would have been a mess outside. Grass smashed down, vehicle tracks, cigarette butts. Cops come in a crowd; they leave sign.

There was no sign out there. Let’s go see your trap.”

They found the pile of pipes where Kreiss had left it. Browne got down on all fours and searched the concrete of the street until he found the dried bloodstains where Kreiss had lain stunned after the initial fall.

“Here,” he said.

“This mess got him, but he must have ducked most of it.”

 

“That there’s a coupla hunnert pounds a steel,” Jared said, looking up at the steam pipe overpass.

“I know. I carried it all up there.”

Browne was standing back up again, looking up the street, and thinking.

“One guy, not thirteen,” he mused.

“One guy who doesn’t belong here, just like we don’t belong here. And for some reason, he hasn’t brought cops. Now who could that be? I wonder.”

“Hell,” Jared said.

“After this here, he might be back.”

“Yes, he might,” Browne said.

“Or he might be here now, watching us. Let’s go exploring tonight. I want a look at these rooftops, see if he’s been laying up, watching us.”

“What about the girl?” Jared said, lifting the sack of food and water.

“Later. Leave it here in the middle of the street so we don’t forget.

She’ll be out of water by now.”

“Rats’ll git it,” Jared said.

“Chemicals got all the rats twenty years ago,” Browne said.

“And all the other critters, too. Hasn’t been anything living in this area since the place closed down. Come on.”

The first thing Kreiss did was to release the dogs. He climbed up on the side of the pen, ignoring the lunging, barking beasts below, and then blew hard on a soundless dog whistle. The dogs shut up immediately and began to run around the pen to get away from the painful noise. Then he tripped the pen’s door latch and swung the door open, blowing the whistle hard as he did it. The dogs bolted into the woods and then came back to bark at him. He laid into the whistle again. This time, they yelped and took off into the darkness to do what they liked to do most—hunt. Within minutes, the sound of their baying was coming from over the next hill and diminishing as they went.

He climbed down off the pen, watching to make sure that one of the dogs hadn’t doubled back, and then he went to the trailer. The telephone repair van was there, but Jared’s truck was gone, which he hoped meant that he and his partner were up at the arsenal, doing whatever they did up there at night. And trying to figure out the number on that counter, and whether or not he or a posse of cops was waiting for them in the industrial area. He needed about an hour to get set up inside and outside the trailer, and then he would wait for Jared to return from his nocturnal operations.

Then he would find out what Jared and his friend knew about Lynn and her friends. He dismissed the possibility that they might not know a damn thing.

 

Browne called it off at around 10:30. They’d looked over several of the buildings and found nothing, although Browne thought that some of the ladder rungs looked scuffed. Someone or thing had obviously tripped the deadfall. There were some stains on the concrete that could have been dried blood, although the darkness made it difficult to tell. The only other hard indication they had was the gate counter. Jared was still perplexed by the deadfall.

“That shoulda got him,” he kept saying.

“He might have sensed it coming, or heard something above him and jumped back,” Browne pointed out.

“Or only part of it got him. If those stains are blood, it didn’t do much damage.”

Jared could only shake his head. Browne decided that they should stay away from the site during the day on Saturday. Let the whole area cool off. He told Jared to check the power plant while he took the food and water to the girl. Then they’d leave, and come back two hours after sunset on Saturday night. They’d do a quick night-vision sweep, and then Browne would run the hydrogen generator all night while Jared either patrolled the industrial area or hid out on one of the rooftops to spot any intruders. He told Jared to just leave the pipes out in the street, but Jared pointed out that if the security truck came on Saturday, they would see them and wonder what the hell had happened. Browne concurred, and they spent fifteen minutes moving the pipes into an alley. Then they split up, agreeing to meet up at the main gates in twenty minutes. Jared suggested setting one more trap, in case their intruder came back Saturday.

“This time, I got just the thing,” he said.

Janet got back to the Roanoke federal building and drove her Bureau car into the security-lock parking area. She parked it near the vehicle-search rack and shut it down. It was Friday night, so the chances of finding one of the surveillance squad techs were slim to none. She was anxious to see if she could find the bug herself, but she knew she should let the pros have a clear field. If there was a bug under there, she’d have to call the RA. And he, of course, would want to know how the meeting had gone. Oh, just wonderful, sir. He told me that he didn’t need any help from me and that I was much too inexperienced even to be out on the street by myself without a nanny. He saw through those two Washington wienies and didn’t believe a word about the so-called bomb plot. Other than that, we bonded very

 

well and formed an effective and maybe a productive partnership. And I did manage to get him to take my pager along with him.

She leaned back in the seat and tried to think it out. They talked, and then he left to do—what? He’d said earlier that he was busy tonight.

Doing what? Going where? To Site R? What would he be doing down at the Ramsey Arsenal on a Friday night? Crashing the AntiAbortion League’s underground bomb makers’ happy hour at the abandoned munitions factory? The place was a mothballed military installation, for Chrissakes.

Why the hell didn’t Farnsworth and his new playmates just send in the army and rake through the place with a few hundred guys and see what’s what?

Because Foster and Bellhouser were blowing smoke. Kreiss was right:

Their interest was in him, not some outlandish bomb plot and the mysterious message that didn’t get delivered. He had ducked her question on that at the bar. There was a lot more going on here than just some simple bomb plot. That was why they didn’t want aTF in on it. She exhaled forcefully, trying to clear her mind. For Edwin Kreiss, there was just one point of reality: He was determined to find out what had happened to his daughter. Those oily bastards from headquarters and the AG’s office knew that and were trying to leverage his personal tragedy.

She banged the steering wheel in frustration. She literally did not know what to do. Then she remembered Farnsworth’s instructions: “Any sign of somebody else in this little game, back out and call me.” When in doubt, why not do what the boss says? What a concept, she thought, as she reached for her purse and her building key card.

Jared got back to his trailer just before midnight and parked his pickup next to the telephone company repair van. He went in the back door, as usual. He washed his hands, grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator, slugged it down, thought briefly of taking a quick shower and heading down to Boomers, a local gin mill, and then decided not to. The West Virginia motorcycle crowd usually arrived just about now, and unless some of his own Black Hat buddies were there, he’d probably end up in a

 

one-sided brawl over nothing. He checked his answering machine, and there—thank you, Lord—was a message from Terry Kay. Her husband was out of town until Tuesday and she wanted to know if he would like to come over and make some Saturday-night noises at her place. He grinned, erased the message, and got another beer.

Terry Kay was a thirty-something housewife whom he had met on a service call out on Broward Road. He’d been out there once before, and she’d called in a second service call. Her husband was on the faculty at Virginia Tech and traveled a lot. Terry Kay was about five two, with black hair, teasing brown eyes, and a delectably round body. She had met him at the door wearing a short skirt, a straining cashmere sweater, and a pouty little smile. She was Terry Kay Olson, she said. With an 0, rounding her lips to show him. The problem was in her husband’s study; she thought it might be in the floor jack under the desk. When he had knelt down in front of the desk kneehole to examine the floor jack, Terry Kay had slid into the desk chair on the other side in such a fashion as to reveal what her real problem was all about. They had been together a few times after that, always on the spur of the moment, and always with an element of the danger of being discovered involved. Terry Kay liked it hot, hard, and fast, and Jared was just the guy for that. He had no time for the talkers. The prospect of an entire Saturday night with Terry Kay instead of another endless duty night with his grandfather at the power plant, well, hell, no contest. Besides, he was ready for a break. He finished the beer and decided to have just one more.

He called his grandfather, who always turned his phones off late at night, to leave him an excuse message. To his surprise, Browne answered the phone. Jared swore silently.

“What?” Browne said.

“Uh, I didn’t tell you what I set up. In case he comes again and we’re not there.”

“Yes?”

“I did the Ditch. You know, those steel plates out on the main street? I set them one of them as a pit trap. Took out them center support bars.

Anyone walks on that steel, he’s goin’ down twenty feet into the Ditch.

That’s all concrete down there. Break his legs, prob’ly. Then we’ll have his ass.”

“Yeah, that should do it. Which panel?”

“Second up from the power plant. That way, comin’ in, he’ll walk on several of them, and feel safe. Uh—”

 

“What, Jared? It’s late.”

“Tomorrow? I’m gonna be runnin’ errands all day—laundry, grocery store, stuff like that? Then this lady friend called me. Wants to get together tomorrow night.”

“Jared, we’re almost finished with this thing. I need you there tomorrow night.”

“I haven’t had a night off in a long while,” Jared whined.

“I’m a young man. I’ve got my needs, for Chrissakes!” He winced, knowing what was coming next.

“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain, young man. This is your father we are avenging, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“He wasn’t my father for very long, was he?” Jared said, and again winced, waiting for the explosion. But the old man didn’t say anything.

That was almost worse.

“Look,” Jared said, rushing to fill that ominous silence.

“It’s just one night. Why don’t we leave it all alone, let the place cool off. Let my trap do its job. Go in on Sunday instead, during the day. Change the pattern, screw this guy up, whoever he is.”

“Because, for one thing, we’re close to finishing. There should be enough copper. The sooner the truck is pressurized, the sooner I can get out of there. And for another, I’ve got to feed our prisoner.”

Jared formed a quick image of Lynn’s taut body.

“Shit, she’s in pretty good shape. She’ll survive.”

“And how would you know that, Jared?”

“I just mean, one night ain’t gonna kill her,” Jared said quickly.

“Look, I promised this woman I’d go see her, all right? I’m a man, damn it. I’ve got needs.”

There was an angry silence on the line.

“You’ve got a short circuit between your brain and your dick is what you’ve got,” Browne said.

“Well, go on, you ungrateful pup. I’ll do this thing without you. Go hump your slut. I hope her husband comes home with a shotgun and catches the both of you.”

Browne slammed the phone in Jared’s ear. Jared put the handset back on up on the wall, sighed, and finished his beer. Hell with him, he thought.

He’ll get over it. He’ll want me back when we catch whoever the hell has been racking around out there. Old man is half-crazy anyway. He felt a surge of resentment. The old man loved the memory of dead William a whole lot more than he loved Jared. He wondered why. Must have something to do with the way everything turned to shit for him

after William left. The cancer. The closing of the arsenal. That shit with his pension. He shook his head. Screw it. It was almost over anyway.

He dropped down into the ratty old recliner and popped the television on. Three fat women in miniskirts were wrestling across a stage while a talk-show host watched with mock alarm and the audience screamed for blood. He smiled as he wondered what kinds of things might be down in that tunnel. The old man himself had probably sent thousands of gallons down there during all those years he’d been working there. Bet there’s some regular mutant shit down there by now.

He settled back to watch the fun, when the lights cut out and the television went black.

“What the fuck?” he muttered into the sudden silence, getting up out of his chair. Then he realized he could see, because the orange security light on the power pole was still on. That meant that the power company had not dropped the load. He squinted out the kitchen windows, but there was nothing moving out there in his yard. Or in the dog pen, he realized. He squinted harder but could see no sign of his dogs. Was that pen door shut? They might all three be in their igloos, but usually one was stretched out on the concrete. He tried a light switch in the kitchen, but nothing happened.

He went to the junk drawer by the sink, resurrected a flashlight, and went outside. He checked the power box, where the overhead wires came down to his meter. There was no sign of trouble. Then he called to his dogs, to see if they were stirring. There was no reaction, so he walked over to the pen and found the door slightly ajar. This time, he swore out loud: “How the hell did this happen?” He listened for the sound of baying and rooing in the distance, but the only dog he heard was that little yapper belonging to that crazy old deaf woman who lived a mile down the county road. He was sure he had latched up this gate after feeding them.

He was sure of it. Then he remembered the sounds he had heard the other night, and he hurried back into the trailer to get a gun. If somebody was out here fucking around, he wanted to be ready for the bastard.

He went back into the bedroom, got the .45 out of the bedside table, checked to make sure it was ready to go, and then went into the tiny utility closet to check the power panel. He cycled all the circuit breakers, but nothing happened; the trailer remained dark. Then he distinctly heard the sound of footsteps crunching outside. He backed carefully out of the utility closet, which was in the hallway leading from the living room-kitchen area back to the bedroom, and squatted

down in the doorway of the trailer’s second bathroom. The footsteps stopped. It sounded like the bastard was outside, right at the back of the trailer. Amazingly, the next sound he heard was that of a Zippo-type cigarette lighter cap being flipped back and the flame ignited. Bold as brass: The guy was lighting up a goddamned cigarette! Which meant at least one hand was occupied.

Jared stood up and moved swiftly down the hallway to the edge of the kitchen, where he popped his head quickly around the corner for a look and then withdrew it. Nothing but the orange glow of the security light in the window; no silhouettes.

He waited. He was beginning to perspire, and his sweat smelled a lot like beer. Maybe he should call his grandfather. The phone was in the kitchen. He would have to go into the kitchen to reach it, but he knew the trailer’s squeaky floors would give him away if he tried that. The next sound caught his breath right up in his throat: a shotgun being racked, again, somewhere out behind the trailer. He immediately got down on the floor, really sweating now. What the fuck is this? Then footsteps crunching again, but getting quieter, as if the guy was circling the trailer.

After hearing the shotgun, Jared was afraid even to put his head up.

Sumbitch had let his dogs loose so he’d be free to walk around out there. Shit!

Get to the fucking phone, a voice in his head told him. Call the old man. Hell, call 9 II! He crept around the corner of the entrance to the kitchen, trying to keep the floor from creaking, and reached carefully for the phone, listening very hard for sounds from outside. It was just out of reach. He grabbed a magazine off the table, rolled it up, and then used it to tip the phone off its wall jack, catching it just before it could clatter onto the floor. Then he hit the red button on the handset and heard the welcome sound of ringing. He felt a wave of relief.

“Nine one one. What is your emergency?” a male voice asked.

“Guy’s outside my trailer,” he whispered as loudly as he dared.

“Bastard’s got a gun, I need some help out here.”

“Sir? I can’t hear you, sir? Give me the address please and state the nature of your emergency.” The voice sounded unnaturally loud, and he squeezed the earpiece to his head to keep the noise down.

“I need a deputy!” he said.

“There’s a guy with a fuckin’ shotgun outside my trailer. One three eight County Line Road.”

“Gee, that’s too bad,” the voice said, and then, to Jared’s horror, there came the booming laugh of a fun-house scary monster. The huge sound reverberated in his ear as he swore and dropped the handset on

the floor like a hot potato. The laughter went on, loud, very loud, as he backed away from the phone, waving the .45 around him, like cops did in the movies, until he was back in the hallway again, down on all fours, scrunching backward like a baby toward his bedroom.

Then a sound. Behind him. Something behind him.

He whirled around, and there was an enormous figure all in black looming over him. It was wearing a hideous mask, and there were bright round mirrors where the eyes should have been. Jared gasped but didn’t hesitate. He brought the .45 up and fired, but all that came out was the pop of a primer. Then from the figure came the loudest sound he had ever heard, a roar, a lion’s heart-grabbing, ear-pounding roar. The sound was so loud that Jared dropped the useless gun, clapped his hands to his ears, and scooted backward, nailing his way back into the living room, rounding the hallway corner on his hand and knees, scuttling toward the front door, which he never used, the bottom of his jeans warm and wet. There was a nightmarish scramble to get the door unlocked and open as a second roar came down the hallway, louder than the first. He screamed and then tumbled through the doorway, right into a tangle of wet, rubbery strands. It felt like a huge spiderweb. He fought furiously to get away from it, but the more he fought, the tighter it enveloped him, until he could do little more than twitch, and then the horrible mirror-eyed figure was filling the doorway and pointing something at him, something shiny and bright. He knew he shouldn’t look at it, but he couldn’t help it. There was an incredibly bright flash of purple light and he was just gone.

Kreiss pocketed the retinal disrupter and stripped off the hood and mirror-eyed horror mask. He looked down from the trailer’s doorway at the stunned figure of Jared McGarand, balled up in the capture curtain at the side of the steps. Then he stepped past Jared and picked up a garden hose that was attached to the end of the trailer. He turned it on and sprayed water all over Jared and the curtain until all the sticky strands had dissolved, after which, he dragged Jared under the end of the trailer that was perched up on the cinder blocks. He positioned him so that his body was under the trailer, with his head just outside the metal edge of the trailer’s frame. He went over to the engine-hoisting A-frame and brought back a large five-ton hydraulic jack stand, which he positioned under the edge of the trailer, about two feet away from Jared’s head. He pumped the jack stand until it engaged the bottom edge of the trailer and then actually

 

lifted it. Keeping an eye on jared’s inert form, he got a four-by-four from a stack of junk lumber and battered down the two cinder-block support columns until the trailer was supported entirely on the jack stand. Then he lowered the stand until the bottom of the trailer came to rest just barely on jared’s chest, pinning him firmly to the ground.

He went back inside the trailer. In the kitchen, he got the telephone recorder to play back Jared’s calls. There was only one: to that second man. He listened to it twice, then disconnected the telephone dial intercept equipment, the recording device from the kitchen phone, the four inside speakers, and the breaker box diversion switch. He turned the lights back on in the trailer. The television boomed to life and he shut the obnoxious noise down. He gathered up all his equipment and Jared’s .45, which he had previously disarmed by unloading it, leaving one shell case with no powder or bullet under the hammer. He spotted Jared’s truck keys and wallet on the kitchen table, and he took those, too. Then he went out the back door, climbed up to the roof edge, and retrieved the sound box.

He listened for the dogs, but the woods were still quiet.

He took all his equipment and Jared’s weapon out to the truck and then took off the disposable blackout suit, under which he had been wearing khaki pants and a plain white shirt. He put on a dark ball cap with an extended brim, which he pulled down low over his face. He put on a pair of blocky black-framed glasses, which had a mildly reflective coating on the outside of the lenses. The glasses were magnifiers, which distorted the image of his own eyes while allowing him to see very well up close. He strapped a voice-distortion box onto his chest, put on a wire headset with a very thin boom mike in front of his lips. He pulled on rubber gloves and retrieved a box-shaped battery lantern from the truck. That’s when he noticed the cover on the license plate.

He swore and bent down to examine it. It was not the plate cover that had been there originally, although it was very damn close. It was too new-looking, the metal too bright. He got out a Phillips screwdriver and took off the plate and its cover frame. He separated the plate from the frame and examined the back of the frame. He found the two stub antennas at once. Son of a bitch, he thought. This is a surveillance tag: Based on those antennas, it probably responds to a satellite interrogation signal. He looked down at the rear bumper. Gets its power from the plate light by induction. There were four rubber buttons glued onto the plate mounting to insulate the plate frame from the truck’s frame.

 

He stood up. So he’d missed one. The question now was whether or not he’d been followed here. He didn’t think so, but he’d better make sure. Jared wasn’t going anywhere.

He slipped into the woods and made a big circle out to the road, where he looked for any signs of vehicles. The road was empty. He knew the plate tag wasn’t a device used for following someone down the road. It could give a general location when the satellite transmitted a query signal, but it was not precise enough to do block-by-block surveillance. The question was, then, When would they query it? That would determine how much time he had out here. That tag changed the equation.

He walked back through the woods to where Jared was pinned under the trailer. He hauled over two cinder blocks and made himself a rough bench. He sat down and watched as Jared started to come around. He was whimpering and trying to move, and then he opened his eyes wide when he realized he could we? move. Kreiss switched on the lantern and pointed it into jared’s face. He switched on the voice-distortion box.

“Can you hear me?” he asked. The box transmitted his words in the softly booming tones of a giant computer-generated voice, atonal and without any accent or inflection.

Jared blinked rapidly in the glare of the lantern’s beam and tried to move again, pushing himself sideways as he tried to escape the weight of the trailer. Kreiss knew that jared’s vision would be a purple-rimmed haze for a few minutes. He waited motionless, while Jared figured out where he was. Then Kreiss reached over and lifted the handle of the jack stand one notch, which settled the trailer one-eighth of an inch downward. Jared made a terrified noise and stopped struggling. Both his hands were flat against the bottom of the trailer, as if he were going to hold it up. He had to look up and back over his shoulder even to see Kreiss.

“Can you hear me?” Kreiss asked again.

“Y-yeah!” Jared said, but his voice was little more than a hoarse whisper.

“Get it off a me, man. Jesus Christ! Get it off a me. Can’t breathe.”

Kreiss leaned closer.

“About a month ago, three college kids disappeared from Virginia Tech. I have evidence that one of them was at the Ramsey Arsenal. What do you know?”

Jared’s expression changed from one of fear to one of suspicion.

“Who the fuck are you, man? Why you doin’ this?”

“I know you go there,” Kreiss said.

“You and one other. I’ve been watching you. I found your traps, the ones on the creek and the other one, remember? Do you want to die here?”

 

Jared’s face hardened.

“Don’t know what the fuck you’re talkin’ about.”

He still had his hands in the push-up position. They were white and trembling.

The trailer’s frame was making ominous creaking sounds along its full length.

“Sure about that’ Jared said, reaching for the jack handle.

“Don’t know—what—you’re talking about,” Jared gasped. The muscles in his upper arms were straining as he tried to push up against the trailer.

Kreiss lowered the trailer another eighth of an inch, and Jared would have screamed had he been able to muster the breath. He made a sound that was half wheeze, half whimper. His boots were pushing dirt around in an involuntary reflex. The trailer made some more creaking noises.

“Hope this jack has good 0-rings, Jared,” Kreiss said.

“I want to know about the girl. What did you do with the girl?”

Kreiss thought he saw a flash of recognition in Jared’s frightened, sweating eyes. He leaned forward, pushing the light right into Jared’s red face. Jared was trying desperately to see around the light. Kreiss moved the lantern slightly, allowing Jared to see the outsized eyes staring back at him. His lips moved as he tried to say something. It looked like he was saying, Fuck you.

“What?” Kreiss said. He wiggled the jack handle.

“You’re—one—of—them, ain’t—you?” Jared wheezed.

“You—killed-my—old—man. So fuck you!”

Kreiss didn’t know what Jared was talking about.

“Talk to me, dumbass,” he said, “or I’m going to squash you flat, right now!”

“You—do,” Jared gasped out, “she—starves!”

Kreiss experienced a flare of pure rage. He’d been right! Lynn must still be alive! He felt his heart racing and his face getting hot. It took every ounce of control he had not to release the jack and mash this creature into a bloody pulp under the trailer. He put the light completely to one side so Jared could see the fire in his own eyes through those enormous lenses.

He adjusted the volume of the synthesizer output.

“Where—are—you-holding—her?” he asked, enunciating each word very deliberately, letting the anger leak into his own voice.

Jared blinked his eyes to get the sweat out of them as he took a series of short, difficult breaths. Then he pushed up with all his might. He relaxed and then did it again, trying to get a rhythm in it, as if he were trying to rock the trailer off of his chest. All the while he kept mouthing the same thing, Fuck you. Fuck you. He actually got the trailer to move a tiny bit, and then, in a blast of adrenaline, he

accentuated the rhythm. Kreiss slammed his gloved hand against the metal side of the trailer, trying to shock Jared into stopping it. But before he could say anything, Jared heaved again and the frame member slid just off the lift point of the jack. Instantly, the jack punched through the flimsy metal bottom pan of the trailer and all ten thousand pounds of the structure crunched down to obliterate Jared McGarand in one grotesque sound. Kreiss stared in fury for a second and then slammed his hand against the trailer again and swore out loud. Then he sat back on his haunches, closed his eyes, and took some deep breaths.

Control, control, control, he thought. The dumb son of a bitch had killed himself, and taken with him the one thing Kreiss had to know. But the important thing was that Lynn was alive} She was probably being held out there in one of those buildings at the arsenal. He knew there had been at least two men operating out there. Now they were going to be one short. He had to find the other man, and do so before the other man found out about this one.

He opened his eyes and looked down at the trailer. The only sign of what had just happened was the bent handle of the jack, which was sticking out from the dirt under the edge of the trailer like a broken bone.

Then he caught the smell of jared’s corpse releasing itself. He thought about what to do. There probably wasn’t another jack available, so he couldn’t extract the body. And even if he did, he would be faced with a body-disposal problem. He had not intended for Jared to die, although he wasn’t exactly sorry.

“You do, she starves.” Good news and bad news.

He stood up and retrieved the lantern. If he left the scene as it was, Jared would eventually be found. By the second man? Could he set up a trap right here? No. If he did that, he would have to wait until the second man showed up, if ever. Meanwhile, Lynn was locked up somewhere and the clock was ticking, assuming Jared’s threat about her starving was real.

No, he wasn’t going to wait. He would pursue the second man. First, sanitize this scene, then go after the bastard. He looked back down at the trailer. He would make it look like Jared had gone under the trailer by himself for some reason, and then the thing had collapsed on him. It would stand a cursory investigation, as long as he set things right. If they got forensics into it, well, that would be another matter.

He looked at his watch. He had to assume that that tag had been tracked, so he didn’t have the rest of the night to set the stage here. The taped conversation indicated the other man wouldn’t be going back into the arsenal until Saturday night. He would sanitize this scene and then go out to the arsenal and spend Saturday looking for Lynn.

But Jared here had already rigged one trap. He could probably spot another one of those, but what if there were others? Alternatively, he could call in that FBI lady:

She had clearly offered collaboration. If the FBI believed him, they could flood the industrial area with people and search all the buildings. But what if Lynn wasn’t in a building? What if she was hidden in one of those bunkers back out there in the two thousand acres? Or in a cave somewhere?

And what were the chances of the Bureau believing him? Especially in view of the unholy alliance they apparently had going with Justice and the Agency. Charlie Ransom had been supposed to deliver a message, and now Kreiss thought he knew what that message was: We don’t have her. He’d thought of that, of course, but he had kept his end of the bargain, and thus he had no reason to think they would not keep theirs. He could, of course, be all wrong about that.

All his instincts told him that he shouldn’t trust anyone from Washington, especially in view of the surveillance tag he’d found. That was sweeper gear. Maybe someone up there had decided to move against him because Lynn had gone missing. He had known all along that the deal might not survive if circumstances changed in Washington.

Focus, he told himself. Ambush the second man, find out where Lynn is hidden, and then retrieve her.

As he walked back to the truck to get his other gloves, he realized he still had no idea what those two men were doing out there at the arsenal.

Then he realized he didn’t give a damn. In a little over twenty-four hours, even if he had to pull some guy’s limbs off one by one to find out where she was, he would have Lynn back. That was all that mattered. And she had better be unharmed.

She was alive}

Janet Carter was still disappointed with herself when she got up on Saturday morning. She had dutifully called Farnsworth the night before to tell him about the bug. There had been an embarrassed silence on the line for a long moment, and then Farnsworth somewhat sheepishly admitted that he had ordered the Roanoke surveillance squad to put a locator device on her car.

“Those Agency people made me nervous,” he said.

“I’m still not a hundred percent sure what the hell they’re up to.”

“Sir, I know I’m fairly new to street work,” she said, “but somebody could have told me.”

Farnsworth ducked that one.

“I’m curious—how’d you spot it?” he had asked.

 

“I didn’t. I’d proposed the Donaldson-Brown Center at Virginia Tech for the meet. Kreiss saw them put it on. He was watching from his hotel room. He told me.”

“He took a room in the hotel where you did the meet?” Farnsworth said with a chuckle.

“Told you, that guy is a pro. Just forget about the locator for the time being, Janet. What did you achieve with Kreiss?”

Janet had been unwilling to admit total failure.

“He’s thinking about it, but he made no commitments. He’s focused on finding his daughter.”

“Did you get any sense of where he’s been looking?”

“Locally. He wouldn’t admit to going into the arsenal, but he already knew that was Site R. I think he’s been there.”

“Based on what evidence?”

“Based on no evidence.”

“And that was it?”

She hesitated.

“I gave him my pager. Told him if we got anything on his daughter, we might need to get a hold of him.”

“He took your pager? It’s probably in the river by now.”

“I’m not so sure. I’m telling you—he is totally focused on finding his daughter. Why not take the pager? If we get something, he’d want to hear it.”

She realized later that Farnsworth hadn’t reminded her of the obvious:

No one in the Roanoke office was looking for Kreiss’s daughter anymore.

He did tell her to keep him informed and then hung up. She had gone back down to the parking lot to the Bureau car, where she searched for and found the tracking device. It was a lot bigger than she had expected.

She’d pulled it off the frame, and then she went across the parking lot and mounted it on the RAs personal Bureau car. Then she had driven home.

Her Saturday seminar at Virginia Tech began at ten o’clock, after which she grabbed some lunch and then went back to her Bureau car. She found a gas station, where she changed into some outdoor clothes and refueled, then drove south out of Blacksburg through Christiansburg and Ramsey, until she came to the New River bridge on Route 11. From there, according to her map, it was five miles south to the arsenal entrance. She arrived at a little before 2:00 P.M.” and discovered that she could not drive directly up to the main gates of the installation because of a concrete-barrel barrier. She got back on Route 11 and spent an hour trying to drive around the arsenal’s perimeter, but she got nowhere. Then she went back to the main

entrance road, got out, and wrestled one of the barrels out of the way. She drove through, replaced the barrel, and then drove up a short hill through a stand of trees to the main gates, where she came head-to-head with a small white pickup truck that was coming through the gates.

She pulled to one side, stopped, and parked. The pickup came all the way through the gates and stopped. She got out and identified herself to the two young men in the truck, which had a logo on the door proclaiming federal SECURITY SYSTEMS. One of them had a bad case of acne, while the other sported multiple earrings on both ears and a diseased looking metal protrusion behind his lower lip. Judas Priest, she thought, this freak has pierced a tooth} She told them she wanted to make a windshield tour of the arsenal.

They examined her credentials and badge, then told her that she could not drive onto the reservation without prior authorization. She asked them to get it, and they pointed out it was a Saturday. They went back and forth like this for a few minutes, and then they compromised by letting her park outside the main gates and walk in. They would lock the front gates using the chain and combination lock, but they would give her the combination. They warned her gravely that they would change it the next time they came through. They gave her a map of the complex and told her that the industrial area was not a place she wanted to spend much time walking around in without a mask and gloves. She asked why.

“They made bombs and shit for the Army back there,” Pimples said.

“Like lots of seriously toxic chemicals, going back to World War One? As in, a long time before there was an EPA or any rules about disposal? We, like, stay in the truck. With the windows up, okay?”

“Don’t go, like, kicking up any dust,” the pierced beauty said.

“You’ve just made a tour of the entire facility?”

“Uh, no, not this time,” Pierced said, glancing sideways at Pimples.

“We did the bunkers. We did the industrial area last time.”

“We want, like, to minimize the time in that area?” Pimples said.

“That’s why we did the bunker fields.”

She solemnly thanked them for all their assistance and terrific advice.

They waited while she got her FBI windbreaker, some gloves, a flashlight, and a bottle of water out of her car and locked it up. They stared at the sidearm bolstered in her shoulder rig. Pierced made a big deal of writing down her name and badge number before they left, and she thanked them again. They waved as they left. She could hear

their radio cranking back up as they drove down the access road to the main gate. She stared after the dynamic duo for a moment. Like, if that’s security, the arsenal is, like, in trouble, man, she told herself.

Once they were out of sight, she went back and tried the combination.

She unlocked the padlock, slid one side of the big chain-link gate back on its wheels, and then brought the car through. She closed the gate but left the heavy padlock unlocked, dangling on its chain. As far as she was concerned, this was a federal reservation and she was federal law. She wasn’t about to answer to two postadolescent assholes from some podunk rent-acop organization. She put her stuff in the trunk, got back in the car, looked quickly at the map, and drove down the main road toward the industrial area.

Kreiss toyed with the idea of splicing together a voice message from jared to the other man, in which Jared would agree to meet him at the site Saturday night after all. That way, the other man would get there and wait, which would make it easier for Kreiss to take him. But then he discarded the idea: It would take some specialized equipment and a lot of time to lift Jared’s voice and words from the recorder and kludge together a workable message. He would just go out there three hours before sunset and set up in the area of the rail gate. And stay away from the steel plates in the main street of the industrial area, he reminded himself.

In the meantime, he’d learned that the second man was probably a relative.

He had looked up the name McGarand in three local phone books and found, in addition to Jared, a B. McGarand located in Blacksburg, with the same phone number intercepted by the recorder. The man had sounded much older. A grandfather? Uncle? The listing gave him an address in Blacksburg, and he toyed with the idea of going over there and starting early. But there was too much he didn’t know: Would there be family members? Children? A crowded neighborhood? He didn’t want another Millwood, which ordinarily meant that he would have to do a lot of reconnaissance. No, it made more sense to wait for the man at the remote arsenal, in the darkness after sunset. There was always a chance that B. McGarand might call Jared back to convince him to make the rendezvous, but he doubted it: The older man had sounded genuinely angry.

That left only one remaining complication: someone discovering Jared’s body under the trailer. He thought that unlikely, at least in the next twenty-four hours. The mailbox was up at the head of the dirt road,

and unless Mr. B. McGarand went out there himself, Jared would stay put until the buzzards gave him away.

He spent the early afternoon checking the perimeter of his property for any sign that the Agency people had come back. Then he re swept the cabin for delayed-action bugs. He even went over to Micah’s to see if he’d seen or heard anyone creeping around, but Micah said he had people watching and that the woods were empty. If anything federal showed up on the roads or in the woods, Micah would give him warning. He checked out his truck again, but he found nothing other than Special Agent Carter’s pager on his front seat. It was just a small black box with an LED readout window. He scanned it for a carrier signal, but it was a receive-only device. He started to turn it off, but then he thought about it: He was probably closer to finding Lynn than they were. But Carter might have another warning for him about the Washington contingent. If he’d successfully swept out all the tags, they might try to come find him.

He was so close to recovering Lynn that he would do everything in his power to avoid them just now. So he left the pager on but threw it into the glove compartment. That way, if there was a transmitter in it, being in the glove compartment would attenuate the hell out of any signal that little thing could produce. Then he went back to the cabin to prepare for the night’ sops

Janet had driven around the entire Ramsey Arsenal for almost two hours, seeing mostly bunkers, more bunkers, and pine trees. Hundreds of bunkers and thousands of pine trees, to be exact. She had crossed and recrossed a creek that must have transected the entire installation, but that seemed to be the only moving thing on the entire reservation. The steel doors on all the bunkers were rusted and securely locked, with no signs or labels to indicate what had been stored there. By four o’clock, she was back at the industrial area, pausing on a street in front of what looked like the site’s power plant. Around her, there were dozens of buildings, sheds, tanks, and towers scattered around a maze of streets, alleys, and rail-siding lines.

Okay, she thought, if this is Site R, it might have made an interesting afternoon exploration for three college kids on a camping expedition. But so what? She could well believe that the EPA had listed this site, based on the fact that nothing green was growing within a hundred yards of any of the buildings. Even with the air conditioning going, she

could detect the chemical smell in the air. Could the kids have gone into one these big buildings and locked themselves in by accident? She hoped not—it had been four weeks now, and even with some camping supplies, they would be on their way to mummy status by now. None of the buildings appeared to have windows of any kind, and those doors looked like they had been made to restrain powerful forces. That dark kid said they were going to break into Site R. Break into. So, it fit. Maybe the thing to do was to call out the Army or whoever owned this mausoleum and search every bloody building. She thought of Edwin Kreiss, pictured him sitting out here on the curb and watching a bunch of soldiers search the buildings. It was not a pretty image. Plus, there was all that bomb-cell theory the Washington people had been talking about.

Hell with it. This was pointless. Her assignment was to get close to Kreiss, see what he was doing. Find a leverage point. And then she thought once more about the mysterious bombers. She looked around again. Now that would make sense. The aTF was right: This would be an absolutely perfect place to set up a bomb lab. But they’d been through the place and found nothing. Assuming aTF knew what a bomb lab looked like, she was not likely to find something they had not. So go home, regroup. Get a line on Kreiss. Have a drink. Find a life.

She put the car in gear, went up the street in front of the power plant, turned left, and drove up the hill on what appeared to be the main drag.

The car banged noisily over huge steel plates that were spaced every fifty feet or so. She slowed down so as not to hit them so hard, and she was reaching for her purse when the car suddenly banged on something and then tilted down at an impossible angle. She slammed on the brakes, but it was too late—the car was plunging down into a black hole. She started to scream, but the air bag smothered it as the car hit bottom with an enormous crash and all the side windows blew out in a shower of safety glass.

The engine shut down at the jolt, and it sounded as if some major components had fallen off the underside of the vehicle.

She took a moment to recover her breath and to get her hands disentangled from the air bag. The skin on her face and wrists stung from the air bag, and the seat belt had damn near cut her into three pieces. She couldn’t see much through a cloud of dust, and then she realized she was in darkness, or semidarkness—there was a cone of light coming from above. The windshield was intact but out of its frame. The concrete flanks of what appeared to be an immense tunnel rose up on either side of the car. Her ribs hurt and her shins were

bruised, but she didn’t think she’d sustained any major injuries. The car, on the other hand, felt very wrong.

It was sitting too low upon whatever it had landed. And the angle was odd, with the back significantly lower than the front. She was in some kind of tunnel, and it felt like the tunnel sloped down behind her. She saw the rungs of a ladder embedded into the concrete wall to one side, so at least there was a way out of here.

As she reached to release the seat belt, the damn car moved! Backward.

She reflexively stomped down on the brakes, but nothing happened except that the brake pedal went all the way to the fire wall. The car gathered velocity and the cone of light, now in front of her, became fainter as the car rolled down an increasingly steep incline. A horrible scraping and screeching sound came from underneath, as if the car was dragging its drive train or exhaust system over concrete. She tried to turn around in her seat, but the damned belt had tightened a lot and she had to fight hard even to get her neck turned, trying to see behind her, but of course it was pitch-black. She yelled almost involuntarily as the car slid faster, but the noise from underneath was incredible—a cacophony of scraping and grinding metal that drowned out even her thoughts. Then came the giddy sensation of launching off a cliff as the car went airborne for a second before crashing down again on something very hard and then slewing sideways and down into—water!

The vehicle stopped with a whooshing sound and then tilted ominously toward the driver’s side, admitting a tidal wave of ice-cold water over the windowsills. Amazingly, the second impact had activated the cabin dome light over her head, and Janet tried to see where she was as she mashed the seat belt button and rose up in the front seat. The black water engulfed the interior in an incredibly few seconds. Outside was utter darkness, but Janet had no choice. She ejected herself through the driver’s side window as the car filled completely and went down behind her, sucking at her legs as she scrambled to get away from it.

The water was frigid. It went up her slacks and gripped her bare legs and thighs like an ice pack. Her chest felt squeezed and she had trouble catching her breath as she water in the darkness. Both her arms and her right leg stung from small cuts. She thought she saw the glow of the dome light beneath her, but then it was gone. She splashed around in the darkness for a minute before getting control other panic and slowing everything down. She regulated her breathing and made her strokes more deliberate. Two huge invisible bubbles burst onto the surface nearby, the second one bringing up the stink of gasoline. She

felt one other shoes go and she kicked off the other one. The Sig in her shoulder rig felt like a brick, but she wasn’t ready to get rid of that quite yet. Then she remembered her lifesaving courses and took off her slacks. Treading water with just her feet, she brought the waist of the pants up to her face, zipped the zipper, and closed the button. Then she tied an awkward knot in the bottom of each leg of the pants, took a deep breath, ducked her head, and exhaled into the billowing waist of the slacks. She did this five more times before the pants legs inflated enough to hold her up. She moved between the two puffed-up trouser legs and relaxed, bobbing gently in the utter darkness. She caught the smell of gasoline and oil again as the drowned car began to give up some more of its fluids. She yelped when something large moved under the water, but it was just another air bubble. Then there was only silence.

She tried to determine whether or not she was moving, but, without any visual references, it was impossible to tell. Probably not, she thought—that air bubble had come out of the car from almost directly beneath her. She called out, then listened as her voice reverberated from unseen walls. She knew there were flashlights in the car’s trunk, but she had no way of knowing exactly where the car was beneath her, and she was definitely not going to let go of her life preserver in this darkness. From somewhere above her and far away, she heard what sounded like a large piece of sheet metal falling onto concrete. Then silence.

No, not quite silence. There was the sound of falling water somewhere nearby. Not a huge stream, but certainly a steady one. Dropping from a substantial height. She couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from.

She began dog-paddling in what she hoped was a straight line, and within a minute, she bumped into what felt like a concrete wall. She stopped and felt the surface. It was smooth and slippery, as if covered in moss. She felt her way along the wall for several feet but encountered no other features.

The sound of falling water seemed to be louder in this direction, but still far off. Her limbs were beginning to tremble in the cold, and she knew she had to get out of the water before hypothermia set in. She stopped to think. If this is a tunnel, then the opposite side ought to be straight across from this side. She flattened her back against the wall and then shoved away across the surface, her eyes closed as she tried to visualize a tunnel.

She paddled for what seemed like forever before her fingertips touched a hard, slippery surface.

She stopped. Had she gone in a circle? No, the falling water sound was coming from a different angle. Or at least she hoped so. She

started her search again, this time bumping along the wall to her left, hand over hand, looking for a pipe or a ladder or steps—any protruding feature she could use to get her shivering body out of this water. She realized her chin was in the water, which meant it was time to refill her trouser legs. She bobbed under and exhaled five more times until she got her makeshift water wings back. Then she rested. Which way had she been going? The first tendril of despair wrapped around her gut and she wondered if she was just going to drown down here, alone, in this stygian blackness. She reached out for the wall, but it was gone. A lance of panic shot through her and she kicked out forcefully, only to bang her forehead on the wall.

She reached out with both hands, bending forward into the Y of her inflated trousers, and rested again.

Think, she told herself. This is a manmade tunnel complex. The car had been climbing a hill when it had fallen through one of those metal plate sections. The tunnel obviously conformed to the hill’s slope, which meant it ran down to some bottom or collection point. The tunnel had been big enough to accommodate a Crown Vie, so there had to be some ladders down here somewhere, some means by which the tunnel could be inspected or cleaned out. All she had to do was find one, then climb up out of the water. If she could get back to the original tunnel, the one under the main drag, she could get back to the point where the car had fallen through. After that—well, first things first.

She continued her hand-over-hand search, stopping to listen and look for light. Finally, she realized she could no longer hear the sound of falling water. For some reason, that worried her, so she reversed course and went back the way she had come, going faster now, since this was wall she had already covered. Her legs were getting numb and her feet weren’t there at all. She tried to ignore what this meant and kept going. At last, she heard the falling water again, and this time she headed for that sound.

She was heartened when she smelled gasoline again, and she actually felt a slipperiness in the water. This meant she was back to the point where the car had come down from that big tunnel. She stopped and looked up, imagining that she could see light, but she knew it was an illusion. She could see nothing.

She kept going, past the oil slick from the car. The sound of falling water got steadily louder, and then she was in it, a small torrent of cold water dropping down from somewhere above. She stopped and put her head back, grateful to get the oil sheen off her face. Listening to the sound of the water, she realized there was a constant echo. Had

she reached the end of this tunnel or pool or whatever it was? She kept going and immediately bumped up against a new wall. She followed it at what seemed like right angles to the direction she had been going for a distance of about twenty feet and then hit another wall, another right turn. So she had been right: This was the end of the cross tunnel. She felt the concrete and noticed that it was slippery underneath the water, although fairly dry above the waterline. She tried to think if this was different from what she had felt originally. It was getting hard to think. It was getting hard to do anything. Her chin was back in the water again, and this time she was less worried about that.

She snapped out of it and refilled the trouser legs again. She remembered the CFR device, but it was gone, probably slipped out when she’d taken her pants off. She sputtered and blew water out of her mouth forcefully just to make a noise and reached out for her wall. Her wall. That was a laugh. And then there was an ominous rumbling sound that originated somewhere way down to her right, a rumbling that seemed to be approaching. Dear God, what is that? she thought as she grabbed for the concrete, which was moving. Moving?

Moving!

No, it was not moving; she was moving, toward the rumbling sound.

She grabbed again, but there was nothing to grab, just that slippery, mossy surface. She felt her fingernails breaking as she tried to stop herself, not wanting to go toward that awful sound. But go she did, faster as the noise got louder, her hand bouncing off the invisible wall, in a palpable current now, a rush of water as something huge happened in the tunnel. She tried to picture what was going on, but it made no difference if her eyes were open or shut—there was only blackness and that end-of-the-world noise.

Then there were eddies and large air bubbles swirling around her bare legs, and a vicious sucking sound somewhere up ahead in the darkness.

That’s when she really panicked, screaming and kicking to get back up the current, her hands and legs flailing desperately as the water became even more violent. As the sucking sound approached, her hand hit on something metal, a vertical thing, which she grabbed for in one final, desperate lunge even as the current turned her whole body horizontal. She hung on with everything she had, grappling frantically to get a second hand on it.

Her semi-inflated trousers were swept away in the maelstrom. She closed her eyes and held on with a virtual death grip until she realized the sound was subsiding. She was hanging from the thing she

had grabbed. The water was going away, was beneath her, as if some giant had opened the drain on the whole system.

She probed with her left hand and found the other stanchion of what felt like a steel ladder. She felt for a rung to set her feet on and then let her head fall against another rung while she got control of her breathing.

Below her, the water was subsiding into a rumble of air and noxious bubbles, and then it all went quiet, with the only sound being that other own breathing. Her legs felt suddenly, terribly exposed in the clammy air. She could hear the falling water again, far to her left, but this time it sounded as if it was falling onto concrete instead of into water. She looked up, but there was only darkness. She began to climb, and after fifteen rungs, she came to what seemed like a ledge. The ladder arms arched up over the edge, so that she could continue climbing and pull herself onto the ledge.

It wasn’t wide, perhaps two, possibly three feet, but she sensed that it was above the water level. There was even a faint breeze, which felt warmer than the air down here.

She rested for several minutes before she realized she could smell gasoline again. The fumes were strong and seemed to be coming from right below her. The falling water, now to her right as she sat on the ledge, was definitely falling on bare concrete. The tunnel system must be some kind of giant siphon, she thought, remembering that the moss on the wall had been underwater just before the thing emptied itself. The water got to a certain level, and the pressure in the tunnel overcame the pressure in a drain system of some kind and the whole thing dumped. She nodded to herself in the darkness. It was urgently important that she understand how it all worked, because it had been terrifying when the water had started to move. Overcoming panic meant substituting known, manmade things for the huge unknown forces that had taken her down the tunnel.

Fumes, she thought. She wondered if perhaps the car had been washed down to this end of the tunnel, and whether or not it had gone out the drain. If the tunnel was empty, maybe she could get to the trunk and retrieve a flashlight. It meant climbing back down the ladder, and then letting go of the ladder as she groped around the bottom of the tunnel for the car. What if she got lost? Or couldn’t find the ladder again? She shivered at that thought, because she knew that the falling water was probably going to refill this thing.

So go now. Do it. You must have light to find your way out of this nightmare.

 

With a reluctant sigh, she groped around for the ladder arch and got back on it. She climbed down slowly, the rusty rungs hurting her bare feet. Finally, she reached the bottom, discovered water already standing on the floor of the tunnel. She put her back to the ladder and tried to think of a way to lay down a trail of some kind. The smell of gasoline was even stronger, which meant that the carcass of the car was close. She bent down to feel the bottom, and she discovered a crack or seam in the concrete that led directly away from the bottom rung of the ladder. It felt like old asphalt, hard yet soft when she pushed a finger into it. If she kept her hand on that and never let go, she could follow it back to the ladder.

She tried it, going out six feet or so, then following it back to the ladder.

It was all she had. She realized her eyes were closed, so she opened them. Better closed, she thought, because at least that way she could construct an image of what this place looked like. She stepped away from the ladder again, crouching down to keep her left hand firmly on the seam.

She went all the way across the tunnel floor, through water that was getting deeper again, until she hit the opposite wall. No car. She went back, just to make damn sure she returned to the ladder again, and she did. She came back out to what she sensed was the middle of the tunnel, then said, “Hey!” She listened to the echo other own voice, and did it again. This time, she thought she detected an object to her left. She called out again, listening like a bat to the reflected sound. She turned ninety degrees to the left, felt behind her for the seam, and then, taking a deep breath and a major leap of faith, stepped out and away from the seam. She had gone ten steps when she realized that in this direction lay the main drain. Was she walking straight toward it?

She called out again and sensed that there was something right in front of her. Was it the end of the tunnel, with some huge hole right in front of her? She began to take baby steps, her hands outstretched, trying not to think of how she would find the seam again, and then her hand ran into the smooth side of the car. She almost wept at the feel of it. She felt around until she could determine that the car was upright, with its nose to her right. She felt back along its side to her left until she came to the trunk. Which she was going to open how? She swore. The trunk latch release was a large button under the driver’s side armrest. Would it still work? She worked her way back to the front door and tried to open it, but it was jammed shut. She felt the jagged edges of the glass in the window frame. She put her hand through and then her head and chest, until she could retrieve the

passenger-side floor mat. She put that over the window coaming and climbed through, trying not to cut her bare legs. The Sig hung up on something, but then she was through and was able to feel her way across the front seat. She was within six inches of the button when she felt the car begin to move, a slow leaning motion toward its left side.

She screamed and scrambled back out. She felt the car settle back down.

She crouched by the window, gasping, and tried to collect her thoughts. Damn thing must be balanced over what—the main drain? Was the drain big enough to suck down the whole car? Apparently not, or it would have already done so, right? Then why had it moved? God, she needed a light, any kind of light. She dared not climb over the hood; if it tilted, she might be thrown down into the drain. She realized the water was up to her mid calves And rising, she thought.

Think, Janet, think. You need to reach that button. You have to go back in and try it again. She took a deep breath and climbed back into the front seat, being very careful about how quickly she moved. Then she drew the Sig out of its holster, hoping to use it to extend her reach. She knew right where that button was, even in the total darkness. She crept across the front seat, trying to keep her center of gravity over on the passenger side while stretching her arm out as far as it would go. The car didn’t move.

She stretched another few inches, tapping the Sig under the steering column, then extracting it when it got tangled in limp folds of the deflated air bag. She felt the car just barely sway, at which point she moved two feet back toward the passenger-side window. The car settled. She moved toward the driver’s side, carefully, very carefully now, lunged with the Sig, and banged down on where the button ought to be, then scrambled back as the car began to tip again. To her relief, it settled back. She crawled out the window and went to the back of the car. The trunk was still closed.

Was the switch inoperative, or had she just missed it? She crept around the back of the car, keeping her hand on the trunk, until she got to the left-rear corner. She felt with her toes that the concrete dropped off, with the edge just inside the car’s flattened rear tire. She erased the image that formed—of some dreadful drop-off into oblivion waiting to swallow up the car and her with it. Have to try again, she thought, and went back to the passenger-side window.

It took her four more tries before she heard the familiar chunking sound of the trunk hatch opening. She climbed out eagerly, reholstered her weapon, and went hand over hand back to the trunk, where she promptly hit her head on the raised hatch. Inside, everything was a total jumble, but at last her fingers found a rubberized flashlight.

Crossing mental fingers, she switched it on. The bright white light hurt her eyes, but she didn’t mind one bit. She could see} She swept the light around her and saw that she was in a large concrete chamber, with the tunnel she had explored over to her left. It appeared to be about twenty feet square. A pool of black water covered the bottom 10 percent of the tunnel. She swept the light over to the walls of the chamber and found the ladder, and saw the ledge above. She could see nothing above that. She turned the light downward, toward the far side of the car, and stopped breathing.

The car was perched on the edge of a monstrous hole, which was already filled to the brim with shimmering black water as the tunnel system refilled. There was nothing holding the car back from ripping over into it;

only the turbulence around the siphon drain had probably kept it from going over in the first place.

She exhaled nervously and went back into the trunk, where she retrieved a soaking-wet blanket, a second flashlight, the first-aid kit, and a plastic bag of green ChemLights. She gathered up her treasures in the blanket and followed the bright white beam of the light back to the ladder.

She would climb up to the ledge, which would keep her out of the rising water. If that ledge ran all the way back to the intersection with the main tunnel, she could then follow that back to the point where her car had crashed through the street. Assuming the ledge was high enough for her to get back into the main tunnel.

But first she would have to rest. Her legs barely supported her, and her upper body was beginning to tremble. She knew she was close to exhaustion, as much because other immersion in the cold water as from the fear, and she wasn’t sure she could make the climb back up to the ledge. But even wet, that blanket would be warmer than nothing. She could use the ChemLights to provide ambient light and save the flashlight batteries for later. The main thing was that she could see. That made up for damn near everything. The water rising to her shaking knees reminded her that she need to get a move on. She walked over to the ladder rungs and began the long climb up.

Browne McGarand pulled his truck through the barrels just after sundown.

He was still furious that Jared had gone chasing skirt when they were so close to finishing the hydrogen project. The intruder was an unwanted complication, but Browne wasn’t willing to forgo another day.

There was pressure in the truck tank now, which meant he was getting

close. The target wasn’t going anywhere, but if someone was snooping around, his setup here on the arsenal might be in jeopardy. He drove up the entrance road toward the main gates, slowed when he got there, turned off his headlights, and then turned onto the fire-access road as usual. And then he stopped. Something about the main gates was different.

He put the truck into reverse, backed up in the direction of the gates, stopped, set the hand brake, and got out. He left it in reverse so that the glow of the taillights illuminated the guard shed and the rolling chain-link gates. They were closed and locked as usual. No, not locked. That was it.

The padlock and its chain were hanging on the center post of the gates.

That’s what had caught his eye.

Now what the hell? Were those security twerps in there? At night? He stared at the padlock. Then he went up and tested the gates, which, in fact, rolled back when he tugged on them. He walked over to his truck, shut it completely down, and listened for the sound of their truck, which he could usually hear when it was in the industrial area. There was nothing but the sounds of occasional traffic out on Route 11. Had they come in and then left, leaving the place unlocked? Not likely—he had never seen them do that.

The intruder? He got his flashlight and examined the padlock, but there were no signs of damage. Whoever had opened it had known the combination, and that had to mean the security people. Logically, then, they were in there. He looked down the main road inside the arsenal. It led through dense trees for about two miles before getting to the industrial area. The road curved as soon as it got into the trees, so there was no way to see headlights. For that matter, they might be on their way back to the front gate right now, having gotten a late start on their tour, or had trouble with their truck. He decided to go in this way and save himself a long walk up the rail line. He really wished Jared was here.

He went back to his truck, got the food for the girl and his night pack, and brought the stuff through the main gate, where he stashed it out of sight. Then he drove his pickup as quietly as he could back down the access road to the main gate, through the barrels, and out onto Route 11.

He drove a mile south on Route 11 to a Waffle House, where he parked his pickup at the far end of the diner’s parking lot. Waffle Houses were open twenty-four hours a day, so there were always vehicles in the lot.

Then he walked back along Route 11 to the arsenal, waited for all

traffic to disappear from sight, and turned back up the main access road. If anyone was in there, listening, and they’d heard his truck, they should now think he had come up to the gates and then gone away.

He walked to the gate and let himself through, rolling the gates shut again as quietly as he could. He hefted his pack and started walking down the side of the main road, stopping every few minutes to listen for any signs of the security truck. He still couldn’t believe they were in here at night, but he would have to be careful, especially if they suspected intrusion and were waiting to see if anyone showed up. He thought about going back home, but that would mean admitting Jared had been right about waiting awhile to let the place cool off. He was damned if he was going to wait. He’d do a thorough look around the main street of the industrial area and then—he stopped dead.

Jared had left a trap.

Damnation, he thought. Those fools might have driven their little pickup truck over that steel plate and gone down into the Ditch. Great God, he thought, now that would be a real complication. They’d made their required weekend tour the previous weekend, so they should not have been here yesterday. But there was no getting around that padlock. And that would certainly account for their still being here, dead or injured in their little pickup truck at the deep end of the siphon chamber. He would have to check it out as soon as he went in, and then he might have to move the whole operation the hell out of here, like tonight. If the security patrol failed to report in, there would be a mob of cops and maybe even federal people out here pretty quick. Or would they? It was early Saturday night. He might have twenty-four, thirty-six hours. Appalled, he hurried down the dark road.

Kreiss listened to the vehicle noise on the access road and rechecked his position. There was a small concrete switch house just inside the interior rail-line gate, and he had set up shop behind it. The night was dark and clear, with decent ambient starlight. He planned to take the guy down right after he came through the interior rail gates, probably while he was occupied with looking at the electric-eye counter. When the vehicle noises subsided, he became still and listened hard. The sounds had stopped short of where those two had been parking their truck before.

Now what the hell were they—no, not they anymore—what was he doing?

He waited for fifteen minutes. He was dressed out in the same crawl

suit rig he’d used on his first reconnaissance of this place. He’d thought about bringing Jared’s .45, then decided against it. Guns were just extra weight, and he shouldn’t need any firearms once he took this guy down, especially since he knew there would be only one of them this time. If Jared did show up, Kreiss thought with a grim smile, it would definitely be time to get the hell out of here. He closed his eyes to concentrate on what he was hearing. There were the usual night sounds coming from the forest outside the arsenal fence, but no more manmade sounds. Was this guy taking extra precautions because of the counter hits? Or had he discovered Jared? Kreiss wanted to go up the rail line into the industrial area. He decided instead to wait some more, and he concentrated on the rail line outside the gates, from which direction he expected the man to come.

Assuming he hadn’t changed his mind and driven away.

Janet crawled to the intersection of the main tunnel and the siphon chamber by the faint green light of a ChemLight stick, only to discover that the ledge was at least ten feet below the lip of the main tunnel. There were no ladders visible, nor any other apparent way to climb up to the main tunnel. She sighed out loud and lay down on the ledge, wrapping the soggy blanket around her. Below, the water, invisible several feet down, was rising again. She hoped it stayed down there.

After what seemed to her like a few minutes, she looked at her watch and found it was almost 7:00 P.M. Her eyes opened wide—she must have slept for almost two hours. She shivered at the thought: What if she’d rolled off the ledge? The trusty ChemLight was still going, so she held it out over the siphon chamber, and gasped. There was the water, right there, perhaps two inches below the ledge. The surface was smooth, but the great cold bulk of it felt as if it were compressing the air around her.

She switched on the flashlight and pointed it to the left. The water level was almost up to the top of the siphon chamber, which should mean it would not rise all the way up to the ledge. Should mean.

She switched off the flashlight, shed the blanket, and got to her hands and knees. Holding the ChemLight in one hand, she crawled along the ledge, past the intersection with the tunnel up above, looking for any way to get up there. Fifty feet beyond the tunnel intersection, she found a single vertical pipe anchored to the concrete wall. She held up the ChemLight to try to see where it went, but it simply disappeared into the darkness above. She grabbed it. It was maybe two, three inches in diameter and seemed pretty solid. Could she shinny up this thing? To go where?

It wasn’t anywhere near the main tunnel.

 

Just then came the deep rumbling sound she’d heard before as the siphon pressures equalized and the chamber began to drain. She breathed deeply in relief, knowing that the water was going down now. The rumbling grew louder and louder, and the air pressure changed in the chamber, making her ears pop a little. She looked at the pipe again, and had an idea.

Browne stepped into a clump of trees when he got to the edge of the industrial area. The main road from the front entrance went straight down the hill into the main street of the building complex, but there was an open space of perhaps three hundred yards between the tree line and the buildings. He wanted to wait and watch before crossing that space.

The buildings were slightly downslope from his position. Their normal way in, along the rail line, came from his left front as he looked down on the complex. The majority of the buildings fell away on a broad hillside that ended up in the tree line above the creek, almost half a mile away.

All those white concrete buildings looked like a ghost town in the starlight, and, of course, that’s what it was now, ever since the government had shut it down with no warning. Were those security boys waiting down there, parked in a dark alley? Or had they driven into Jared’s trap and were now dead or injured down in the Ditch? He kicked himself mentally for not anticipating that possibility; he should have told Jared to set up a different trap. He well remembered the Ditch. Each of the eight main chemical-processing buildings had a twenty-four-inch emergency drain main leading from the batch machinery to the Ditch, which in reality wasn’t a ditch at all, but an enormous concrete dump channel built under the main chemical complex. He remembered the night he had ordered six thousand gallons of nitro-toluene dumped into the Ditch after the night run manager lost temperature control of the TNT process. That was back before the days of all this environmental sensitivity, when the nation’s armaments took clear priority over its air and water quality. The Ditch had been designed to flush any spills into a second tunnel, designed as a siphon chamber, which led to a natural cavern under the hillside. The cavern’s depth was shown as being over five hundred feet on the plant’s schematics, so where the spill ultimately went was anyone’s guess. It went “away,” as one of the company’s managers had told him when he first started working there.

He concentrated on listening. He closed his eyes and let the night sounds sweep over him, searching for any noises that didn’t belong. If

those security people had gone into the Ditch, he had, at best, thirty-six hours. Was that enough time to finish pressurizing the truck? If he worked straight through Sunday night, it might be enough. Then he’d drive the truck out those front gates, take it to Jared’s place. Then to the target. At least that part of the operation was already planned out.

And what about that girl? Leave her? Take her? He hadn’t thought that one through well. She was insurance, but against what? A getaway hostage after he completed the attack? He had a vague plan of taking her to the target with him in the truck. If things went wrong, he would have something to bargain with. At least up to the point where the bomb went off.

After that, all those very special agents would probably be in something less than a negotiating mood. The ones who were still alive, he thought, a savage grimace covering his face. He’d decide about the girl when the bomb was finished. And when he saw what, if anything, was down in the Ditch. He listened some more.

After half an hour, Kreiss decided to move up into the industrial area.

Either the guy wasn’t coming after all or he was coming in a different way.

It had sounded as if that vehicle had stopped closer to the main gates.

They had been operating on the arsenal for some time; it was conceivable they had cracked the front gates. He would move as quickly as he could up to the main complex of buildings, beyond the place where the pipe trap had been set, and climb a building. That would give him a vantage point from which to listen. This time he would stay off the main street and move through the alley behind the largest buildings. He checked his packs and then moved out, walking quietly but quickly up the rail line, past the first switch points, toward the cluster of the biggest buildings.

When he got into the alley behind the first building, he stopped to listen.

There was some creaking and cracking going on as the buildings and the nests of pipes above the street contracted in the cool night air. The by-now-familiar chemical smell rose up from between his feet. He flattened himself against the still-warm concrete side of the building and crept around to the front corner to take a look-and-listen into the main street. He tried to remember where the main road from the front gates entered the complex, but then he realized he didn’t know. He did remember a building that looked like it was more administrative than industrial.

Probably the front road led to that building first. The main street appeared to be empty. It was much darker between the buildings, and he wished he had his cone set up. He could barely make out the big steel

plates interspersed at regular intervals along the dusty white concrete surface of the street. Except—were his eyes playing tricks on him? Down toward the power plant, about a third of the way up the hill in his direction, it looked like there was a massive hole in the street. He remembered Jared’s description of the trap: second plate up from the power plant. Step on it and fall twenty feet into some ditch. Break your legs. Sweet people.

Who are holding Lynn. Well, he was holding one of them now, wasn’t he, in a manner of speaking?

He slipped back away from the corner and found the ladder to the roof.

He stopped to listen again, then climbed swiftly to the top of the building.

This roof was flat and covered in graveled asphalt. There were steel ventilator cowlings spaced randomly around the top, with guy wires anchored into the asphalt. He made his way through the maze of guy wires to the front of the building, rigged the cone, and conducted a quick acoustic sweep of the main street. There was a single, very faint sound coming from the direction of the opened plate in the street, some hundred yards away. He concentrated but could not identify it. Whatever it was, it was steady and not rhythmic. He repositioned the cone, but he still could not identify the noise. He sat back, then trained the cone in the opposite direction, hoping to catch the second man coming up from the rail line. But there was nothing. He swung the cone back toward the hole in the street. The noise was still there. What the hell was that? If it’s not a human walking up the street, he told himself, disregard it and focus on finding bad guy number two. And Lynn. He dismantled the cone and put the apparatus back into his pack.

Janet stood at the bottom of the siphon chamber, listening to the water drip off the concrete walls, while she worked the section of pipe back and forth in a slow, tedious arc. She had waited for the water to drain out before going down the ladder and then coming all the way back to the pipe, which terminated, as she had hoped, on the bottom of the chamber.

Some kind of instrument conduit, she assumed. She’d torn the bottom of it loose from its rusted bracket and was now attempting to break off a section by causing metal fatigue. It appeared to be working. Each arc was getting a little bigger. She was working by the light of her trusty ChemLight, which was plenty bright down here in the absolute darkness of the tunnels. She actually felt as if she knew her way around the siphon chamber now, and the cold, clammy air swirling around her bare legs felt almost normal. Better air than water, she realized.

The Sig was still hanging in her shoulder rig, and she giggled when she thought what she must look like, half-naked, with that big automatic under her arm. Despite its awkwardness, she was glad she still had it. Because if this worked, and if she got out of here, there was no telling what or who was up there in the ammunition plant complex.

She felt water around her ankles as the siphon chamber began to fill again, and she realized she did not have all night. She pushed harder on the pipe, putting her legs into it now, and felt it giving way somewhere up there in the darkness. Then suddenly, the weight of it was in her hands and she jumped back as she lost control of it. The pipe clattered to the floor of the chamber with a huge ringing noise of steel on concrete, barely missing her feet. She picked one end up and found she was able to move it. She put the end down and took a rough measurement. About twenty feet. Good. It had broken off about where she had intended it to. Now, she had to get it to the ladder, haul it up to the ledge, and then see if she could position it somehow on the ledge and shinny up the damn thing to the main tunnel. The trick was going to be locking the bottom end into something long enough for her to make the climb. She began dragging the pipe down the siphon chamber toward the ladder rungs.

Browne heard something. He opened his eyes, shocked to realize he’d been drifting off to sleep. What was that noise? He leaned forward and cupped his good ear, straining to hear it again. He swore silently to himself.

His hearing was fair, for his age, but it was still the product of too many years working in an industrial environment without hearing protection.

He looked at his watch; it was a little after 8:00 P.M. He was wasting time; he had to get going. He decided to wait another fifteen minutes, see if he heard the noise again, and, if not, go down to the main street and check out the plates. If nothing appeared to have happened, he would go to the power plant, start up the hydrogen generator, and get to work.

Kreiss got down off the roof as quietly as he could and began moving from building to building, staying in the deepest shadows and hugging the still-warm concrete sides of the structures. He stopped at each corner, listening carefully but hearing nothing but a slight breeze blowing down the empty street. When he was two buildings away from the power plant, he did hear something, a metallic scraping noise, like a pipe being dragged on concrete. He was about to go up on top of the nearest building to set up the cone, when he realized the noise was coming from the

 

street—no, from that big hole in the street. He stopped where he was, and he heard it again. Definitely coming from that big hole, where the steel plate appeared to be missing. The guy must have come in the front entrance after all and was now doing something down below the street.

Or had he fallen into his own trap?

Kreiss moved quickly to the edge of the hole. He listened. Definitely something going on, but at a distance—the sound was echoing up what had to be a tunnel, a really big tunnel, under the street. He pointed his finger light into the hole but could barely see the bottom. Something glinted back at him—glass? He heard another noise, coming up out of the tunnel from the direction of the power plant. His light illuminated the ladder rungs embedded into the concrete on one side. He decided to go down. He went over to the far edge of the hole, pointed the tiny light down, and saw where hinges had been ripped out of the concrete right above the ladder. He thought about that for a minute. A man walking out onto one of those big steel plates and falling through because the support was gone wouldn’t have ripped the hinges off. He moved quickly around the perimeter of the hole until he found what he was looking for: scrape marks on the down-street edge of the hole, and a tire scuff on the concrete behind the edge. A vehicle had fallen through, not a human. He pointed his tiny finger light down the hole again. So where was it?

He listened again, but there were no more sounds. He went back to the ladder and climbed over the edge and started down. A cool draft eased by his face as he went down, one rung at a time, with pauses to listen. When he finally reached bottom he stepped away from the ladder and crunched on what turned out to be auto glass, a whole carpet of it, covering two large fluid stains. The steel plate was lying upward from the point of impact. The next thing he noticed was the slope: The tunnel angled down toward the power plant at a surprisingly steep angle. He turned on his finger light and examined the floor. Heavy metal scrape marks went down the tunnel. He stood up. The tunnel was big, its floor perhaps twenty feet down from street level and a bit over fifteen feet square. It smelled of chemicals and stagnant water, and the stream of air coming up from the bottom was heavy with moisture.

Okay. A vehicle had crashed through the plate, hit bottom here, and then slid down the tunnel into—what? Another metallic clank, this one much clearer than when he had been up on the street. From way down there, in the darkness. He stepped away from all the broken glass as carefully as he could and started down the tunnel, using the finger

light in spot mode to sweep the tunnel floor directly in front of him. The farther he went, the steeper it seemed to get, until he had to walk alongside the tunnel wall with one hand on the sloping concrete sides to keep from sliding down out of control.

After going a couple of hundred feet, he thought he saw a faint green glow ahead. The smell of water was much stronger, and then he could hear falling water. He kept going, taking smaller steps now to maintain his balance. He must be near or even past that power plant building. The green glow was getting stronger, and then he realized he was listening to someone working, working hard, huffing and puffing a little, doing something with a metal object. Based on the shape of the glow, the tunnel he was in ended up fifty feet ahead, and whatever was going on was happening below the level of the tunnel. He decided to get down flat and crawl the rest of the way. As he got closer to the edge, he suddenly froze in place as a swaying snakelike object rose over the edge, backlit by the green glow from below. In silhouette, it looked like a large cobra.

Browne crept down the main street from the administration building, keeping to the sides of the buildings and walking as quietly as he could. He stopped frequently to listen for any more of the mysterious sounds, but there was only the normal nighttime silence. He’d probably imagined it.

When he got to the hole in the street where the plate had been, he shook his head. He broke out his flashlight and played it around the edges of the hole, saw the scrapes and scuffs on the concrete, and then pointed the light straight down into the Ditch. He saw the steel plate, which had been torn off its hinges. The carpet of smashed automobile glass gleamed back at him, and he saw the drag marks leading down toward the power plant.

He swore softly. They’d driven right into it. Right into it. He snapped the light off and sat back on his haunches. There was a ladder of steel rungs built into the concrete wall. Should he go down there? Confirm what had happened? What if they were still alive? He thought he heard distant noises from the tunnel, but then decided he was imagining things. He went to the up-slope side of the hole and shined the light as far down the tunnel as he could, but there was nothing visible. That cinched it: Their vehicle was probably down in the siphon chamber, so even if they’d survived the fall, they were gone. Really gone. Swallowed up by the endless caverns under the arsenal.

He stood up, wishing the plate had not come off its hinges. But it had and that was that. The clock was running. As of Monday morning, at

the latest, someone would be in here looking for those two, and he would have to be gone. He and the truck would have to be gone. Time to get to the power plant. He had between twenty-four and thirty-six hours to finish pressurizing the truck. He grabbed the girl’s supply bag and headed down the street.

The water was swelling in the siphon chamber below as Janet struggled with the heavy pipe, determined not to drop it. It had taken nearly all her strength to pull the damn thing up to the ledge, and now she was trying to stand it on end to reach the main tunnel up above. She had braced herself against the rusty steel ladder rails that arched onto the ledge and was trying to direct the swaying end of the pipe to the lip of the tunnel above.

She had to get it perfectly vertical or it would simply roll off and she’d have to start again, and the ChemLight gave off barely enough light. She was very conscious of how narrow the ledge was, and that her strength was waning. She had to get this right, then summon the strength to shinny up the pipe.

She landed the top of the pipe on the concrete above, made sure it would stay there, and then took a moment to rest. She kept one hand on the pipe as she closed her eyes and slumped against the ladder rails, breathing deeply. Her legs were getting cold again as the clammy air rose up to the ledge, driven by the rising water. She had to get out of here. Then she felt the pipe moving and she jumped to steady it. She stood up too quickly, lost her balance, and reflexively grabbed the pipe with both hands to steady herself and keep from falling over backward into the siphon chamber. But of course the pipe wasn’t attached to anything, and she cried out as she realized she was going to fall. And then the pipe stopped moving. She swayed out over the edge for a terrifying instant, recovered her footing, and hugged the pipe. She looked up. There in the green glow from the ChemLight, a frightening black-masked face was looking down at her.

Blazing dark eyes framed in a horizontal oval of black fabric like a ninja.

Kreiss?

“Special Agent Carter,” Kreiss said.

“What in hell are you doing down there?”

She closed her eyes and started to laugh, although, even to herself, she sounded more than a little hysterical.

Browne had the hydrogen generator up and running in fifteen minutes.

As pressure built in the retort, he went through the connecting door to

 

the truck. He found the battery charger on the front seat and pulled in an extension cord from the power strip so that he could begin to trickle charge the truck’s two batteries. The propane truck had been parked here for a long time now, and he wanted it ready to go when the time came to get out of here. The pressure gauge on the main propane tank had been shut off to prevent leakage. He cracked it open and saw it registered forty-two pounds. For weeks, it had registered nothing at all, but now that there was pressure, it ought to build faster. The copper supply should be sufficient; if not, he would tear down some of the circuit breakers in the turbo generator hall. But he knew what his major constraint was now: time.

He went back into the control room and saw that the low-pressure pump had activated, sending pure warm hydrogen gas into the propane truck’s tank. The retort was boiling happily away, with a chunk of copper still visible. He could hear the putt-putt sound of the little diesel generator next door. Nothing to do now but wait for this lump of copper to dissolve, switch over to the second one, flush this retort, and reload it. Once he began using the larger pump, the volume transfer would be smaller, but he might be able to get it up to three, maybe four hundred pounds before he had to get out of here. It all depended on when an alarm would be raised about the missing security truck. He was almost certain it would not be until Monday, or at least no one would come here until Monday. If he could generate straight through until early Monday morning, he might make his target pressure. He wondered if he could stay awake. Maybe Jared would come in Sunday morning. He checked to see that the row of five-gallon nitric-acid bottles were full, felt the side of the retort to make sure it wasn’t getting too hot, and then picked up the food sack.

He switched off the single lightbulb and slipped out the door into the loading bay. The street was just outside. He stood there, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness and listening for any unusual sounds. When the street became visible as a pale avenue in the darkness, he walked out toward the nitro building. He still had not decided what to do with the girl. If it came to it, though, he could just leave her.

Kreiss steadied the pipe while the semi hysterical woman down below on the ledge caught her breath. His question had not been rhetorical: What in hell was she doing down here? Or at the arsenal, for that matter? He looked over the side of the tunnel lip again. There was a ChemLight sitting on the ledge next to her. She appeared to be in her underwear, except

 

for her blouse and her gun rig. He called her name. She looked up, her face a pale mask of fatigue.

“I have a rope. Have you looked for any other way up?”

“There isn’t one.” Her voice was dull. She was right on the edge of exhaustion.

“All right. I’m going to tie a harness into the rope and pass it down. Put it on, wrap your legs around the pipe, and I’ll pull you up.”

She nodded but said nothing. She still had a death grip on the pipe. He sensed there was water rising in the chamber beneath the ledge. He peeled the Velcro straps off the packs he wore on his chest and back and then shrugged out of the harness. He pulled the fifty-foot-long coil of six hundred-pound test nylon line out of the backpack, then attached it to the harness using a bowline. He passed it down to her on the ledge. He had to instruct her on how to put on the harness, and her movements were unnaturally slow. Finally, she had it. He felt the lip of the main tunnel and found a segment of steel angle iron. Good. No concrete edges to fray the rope.

“Wrap your ankles and hands around the pipe,” he ordered.

“Pull yourself up like an inchworm, hands, then ankles. If the pipe starts to go, let it go, and hold on to the rope.”

She didn’t say anything. He said it all again and made her acknowledge.

She did, but her voice was faint. The harness would hold her, but it would help a lot if she could assist. He wasn’t sure if he was strong enough to pull up a deadweight, not with the way this tunnel sloped. He was very glad he’d worn the rubber-soled boots.

“Okay,” he said.

“Go.”

He had wrapped the end of the rope around his hips and belayed it once over his right shoulder. Each time he felt the tension come out of the rope, he pulled gently by backing up the tunnel. He concentrated on the rope, feeling what she was doing: arm pull, hold, ankles, up, grip, arm pull, hold. He kept a steady tension on the rope, more to steady the pipe than to pull her up. He was alert for a slip, because that’s what he expected. She’d get halfway up and then run out of steam. He was ten feet back from the edge now, keeping the tension on.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“A third,” she gasped.

“Rest when you get halfway up,” he said.

“Grip with hands and feet.

Relax the rest of your body. Deep breathing. The pipe and I have your weight.”

 

She didn’t say anything.

“Acknowledge,” he barked.

“All right. Halfway. Rest. Got it.”

He kept the tension steady, waiting until he felt her ankles grip and then pulling a little to help her. He had to save his own energy in case she slipped.

“Halfway,” she said.

“But I think I’m done.”

“Grip with hands and feet. Deep breathing for two minutes.”

“Okay.”

He tried to picture her as he held tension in the line. The pipe at about an eighty-degree angle, almost straight up and down. She was halfway up the pipe, trying not to spin around on it. That would be a real disaster, because he couldn’t get her over the lip if she was upside down. His own footing wasn’t that solid as he backed uphill. He tried to think of another way to help her, but the pipe was about all they had. He looked around the tunnel for a projection to anchor the rope, but there wasn’t anything visible in the green gloom.

“The pipe stable?”

“So far,” she said.

“Can you climb any farther?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“I’m afraid of rolling on the pipe.”

“All right,” he said.

“You concentrate on staying upright. I’m going to pull you the rest of the way. Ready?”

“Very,” she said. Good, he thought. A little wise crack meant she was still in charge of herself. He set his feet, took a second belaying turn around his shoulders, and then pulled back with his arms and his upper body, leaning backward at the same time. The rope moved. She must be 140, 150, he thought, and I’m losing some pull to friction at the lip. He stepped backward, leaning way back so as not to lose ground. Then he felt a slight slack in the line, which meant she was trying to help, probably using her legs on the pipe.

It took him fifteen minutes of excruciatingly slow effort to get her to the lip of the tunnel, and even then, it wasn’t over. In fact, this was the dangerous bit, because he had to get her over the lip, and her whole body would add to the friction.

“Put your hands up on the top of the pipe,” he called. He watched as she slid first one hand and then the other up to the top of the pipe, about four feet above the lip.

“Lock them there. When I tell you, try a chin-up.”

 

“You’ve got… to be shitting me,” she said. It sounded as if talking was almost beyond her.

“No. Do it. The pipe’s going to go when I pull again. Push off from it, let it go, and then let me do the rest. Now, deep breathing. One minute.”

“Me or you?” she asked.

He almost grinned, except that his whole body was straining to hold her at the top of the pipe. But she had a point. He went into deep breathing, his body bent backward, his knees bent and flexing like springs, his hands hurting where he had the rope, the palms of his gloves actually hot with the pressure.

“Okay, stand by,” he said. He needed her help to get some other body weight over the lip.

“One long pull on the top of the pipe, both hands, then let it go when it moves and stretch out with your arms, like you’re diving. Then we’re done.”

She didn’t answer and her head was hanging down. Her hands were visibly white at the top of the pipe. She was done. He had to go now.

“Pull!” he commanded.

“Pull! Pull!”

He saw her try to pull up on the top of the pipe, and he laid into it, pulling back with all his might, jerking her right off the pipe, which disappeared behind her. Her head, chest, and arms came over the lip, but the heavy part, her lower body, stuck on the edge, just above her waist. Her head was down and he couldn’t see her face. The pipe clanged softly once on something hard and then fell into some water down behind her. She was a deadweight now and he couldn’t move her. He felt the line start to go backward, small tugs toward oblivion down the inclined floor of the tunnel.

Browne went through the procedure at the steel door into the nitro building, telling her to put the blindfold on, to turn around. He waited, unlocked the door, and shone the flashlight at her. She was right where she was supposed to be. He stepped in and put the food sack down. He didn’t bother to pick up the remnants of the last food delivery. The big room smelled fusty and stale, and the stink of sewage was more pronounced.

“It’s almost over,” he said, not knowing exactly what he meant by that.

She did not reply. He thought for a moment.

“I have two options,” he said.

“I can either take you with me as a hostage or I can simply leave you here when I go.”

“Take me where?” she asked.

It was the first time she’d spoken to him, and it surprised him. Her

tone of voice was not what he had expected. There was a matter-of factness about it, almost a tone of defiance. His first reaction was not to tell her anything, but then, why not? She would either be with him in the truck, suitably subdued, or she’d be mewed up here in this concrete building.

No, wait: He couldn’t leave her alive—if they searched the whole facility for the missing security people, they’d search all the buildings. So he either had to kill her outright or take her with him. He considered the prospect of simply pulling his gun and killing her right now. He shook his head. No, he’d kept her as a bargaining chip, and that’s what he would use her for. He rehearsed his mantra: The two boys killed themselves when they stumbled into Jared’s traps. They should not have been here. The flash flood had killed them.

“To Washington,” he said.

She didn’t answer at first, then coughed and asked him why.

“With a hydrogen bomb.”

“Bullshit,” she said immediately.

“No individual can make a hydrogen bomb.”

“Oh yes I can. In fact, I have.”

“It takes a fission device to trigger a hydrogen bomb,” she said.

“You’re going to tell me you made one of those, too?”

“I have made a hydrogen bomb,” he said.

“But it’s not what you think.”

“I’ll bet,” she said.

“What do you want with me?”

“You are insurance. A hostage, in case things go wrong. I don’t want to have to kill you.”

“If you’re taking a hydrogen bomb to Washington, you’re going to kill lots of people; I’m supposed to believe you’ll spare me?”

“That’s different,” he said, shining the light around the interior of the building, making sure she wasn’t trying to distract him from something she’d set up.

“This is personal, and as far as I’m concerned, this is an entirely legitimate target. You blundered into this by accident, which is the only reason you’re still alive.”

“Where’s the other one?” she asked.

“The one who likes to see me naked.”

Browne felt a surge of anger. Goddamn Jared.

“Don’t worry about him anymore. His part in this is over, and he won’t be going along. Pm taking the bomb to Washington.”

“I’m hungry,” she said.

“Why don’t you go away, so I can eat.”

“I will. But we may be leaving soon. If you cooperate—no, if you simply go quietly—I’ll let you live. If I get cornered, I’m going to

trade them you for me. If you won’t go along, I’ll put you out in one of the underground field magazines to starve. If you tell me one thing and then do another, I’ll be forced to cut your throat and pitch you out onto the highway.

Think about it.”

He switched off the flashlight and closed the steel door. Outside, the night was still, only the faint buzz of insects from the nearby woods breaking the silence. He looked at his watch; he had a few minutes before the retort needed changing. He turned away from the power plant and walked up the main street for three blocks, turned right, and then walked down a side street and across an open area of hard-packed dirt to a low lying concrete bunker that was fenced off from the rest of the industrial area. A dusty sign on the bunker read mercury-contaminated

SOIL;

keep out. He looked around and then opened a walk-through gate in the chain-link fence and went through. There were two doors to the bunker:

one big enough to admit a front-loader tractor, and the man-sized door on the other end. He unlocked and stepped through the man-sized door, closing it behind him. He switched on his flashlight and checked through his getaway stash. Not even Jared knew about this. This was one of two supply caches he had prepositioned in the arsenal. This one was for his run to Washington. There was some cash, a gun, a fuel-delivery manifest from the company whose name was on the truck, and some spare clothes in a duffel bag. He gathered up what he needed and closed the bunker up again. Then he walked back down the dark side street to the power plant and went inside. He wished Jared was here to patrol against intruders, although there was no sign that anyone was out there.

Janet felt the rope slipping back and tried to do something, anything, but her muscles were turning to jelly and she couldn’t force another ounce of strength into her hands. Her hips and bare legs were dangling out over the ledge and the lip of the tunnel was cutting into her middle. Her attempt to hoist herself on the end of the pipe had been a total failure.

Despite the cold air in the tunnel complex, her eyes were stinging with sweat and she was having trouble breathing. The rope slipped back another quarter of an inch. He was losing it. She was going to fall, all the way back down into the black waters of the siphon chamber.

“Can you lift your legs?” Kreiss called through clenched teeth. His voice was filled with strain.

“W-what?” she asked stupidly. She’d heard him just fine, but she didn’t understand.

 

“Your legs—can you lift a leg, get a knee over the edge?”

She tried, but the angle was wrong. Her knee just bumped into the hard concrete, and she crumpled back against the unforgiving wall. Her center of gravity was still below the lip. She knew she did not have the upper-body strength simply to pull herself over. But the effort gave her an idea, a last, desperate idea.

“Wait,” she said, bending in the middle so as to get her feet flat against the wall.

“I can’t wait. I can’t hold you much longer.”

“I’m going to straighten out my legs and then lock them,” she said, hoping Kreiss would understand. She didn’t have energy to waste talking.

“As the rope comes back. Then I’ll walk up the wall as far as I can. I think I can do it.”

“Go ahead. Tell me when you’re ready and I’ll give you some slack.”

“Just hold what you’ve got,” she said. She didn’t want him to let go, he was losing ground as it was. As the rope jerked back toward her in quarter-inch increments, she planted her feet firmly against the concrete and willed her legs to straighten. She would have a very brief window of opportunity to fly-walk up the wall, after which, she’d just have to let go and drop. She wondered how deep the water was down in the big chamber.

She forced her eyes open but could not turn her head. Her left leg straightened out first, then her right. She locked her knees, but she was still bent like a hairpin. She would have to let him lose more ground.

She gripped the rope as hard as she could with her left hand and then quickly wrapped the loose end around her right wrist three times. She took up the strain on her right wrist and hand and did the same thing with her left, then equalized it. It gave her a much more solid grip, but then she realized she was losing circulation in both hands. Mistake. Big mistake, but there was nothing to be done. She had to go for it, and do it now, angle or no angle. She slid her right foot up two inches, and then her left foot. It was hard, very hard, and her arms felt like they were coming out of their sockets. She did it again.

“Hold it if you can,” she grunted.

Kreiss didn’t answer from up above, but the rope seemed to steady. She moved her feet again, getting the hang of it now, slide up, hold, slide the other one, hold. Breathe, she told herself; don’t forget to breathe. She was hanging out like a wind surfer now, forcing herself to ignore the void below her and concentrating on the green swatch of concrete right in front of her. Her wrists were burning, but her hands

were beyond sensation. She slid her feet again and realized she was close, only about two feet to go before they would reach the edge. Slide, plant it, bend the knee a little bit as her back flattened some more, slide the other one, plant it. Hold the fucking rope, Kreiss. Don’t let go; don’t let go. Thank God I’m barefoot….

And then she felt the toes of her right foot engage the smooth steel edge of the lip. She twisted slightly on the rope, trying to get a foot over. Wrong move. She had to get the other foot up to the edge first, then simply pull herself vertical hand over hand.

But she couldn’t go hand over hand because her hands were completely wrapped in the coils of the rope, and paralyzed besides. She gave a small cry of total frustration and looked up the slope at Kreiss, who was barely visible except for the oval patch of white that was his face. She tried to speak, but her lungs were bursting with the effort of holding herself at the edge, her feet pinned against the cold steel, while the rest of her body hung out like some mountain climber enjoying the view. She was trapped, unable to go either up or back without falling. One of them had to do something, but she didn’t know what.

Then Kreiss moved. He must have seen her predicament, because he locked his feet and leaned back hard, up the slope of the tunnel, so that the angle of the rope straightened. It produced a small tug, but it was enough to bring her body more vertical. He leaned some more, until his back was at nearly the same angle as hers, and suddenly she was able to simply step up into the tunnel. Kreiss sat down hard with a grunt as Janet sunk first to her knees and then down onto her shins and forearms. She resisted a temptation to kiss the concrete. Then Kreiss was there, unwrapping her hands and wrists.

“Nice outfit,” he said softly.

“Especially the Sig.”

“They told us never to lose our weapon,” she replied, unable to straighten up. Every muscle in her abdomen was cramping and her ribs hurt where the harness had cut into her. Then she began to shake as the adrenaline crashed. He turned her around gently so that she was sitting and wrapped his arms around her chest, below her breasts. She shook like a leaf, uncontrollably, and then realized she had urinated.

“It’s okay,” he whispered.

“It’s okay. Perfectly natural. Doesn’t mean a thing. You’re safe. Say it for me. I’m safe. Say it.”

Her teeth were chattering and she was absolutely mortified, but he kept saying it until finally she got the words out.

“Now, deep breathing,” he ordered, still holding her from behind, his legs alongside hers, both of them sitting on the cold concrete as if in

a luge. He was warm and she was very cold, but there was nothing erotic or sexy about it. The hard ridges and buckles on his crawl suit felt odd, and she was keenly aware of her wet underpants. She suddenly just wanted to go to sleep until it all went away. Then he was lifting her up, strong, large hands under her armpits, dragging her gently to her feet.

“Come on,” he said.

“One more climb.”

An hour and a half later, he pulled his truck alongside the curb in front of her town house. She had slept in the passenger seat of his truck the whole way into Roanoke, waking only when he asked her for directions. He had covered her up with one of his coats as soon as she got into the truck, and she’d gone down like a stone. Now she appeared to be disoriented, rubbing her eyes and looking out the windows.

“This it?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied, stifling a yawn. He had taken off his hood and gloves so as not to attract attention on the road. Her eyes were hollow with fatigue.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For everything.”

“I’ll get the coat back later,” he said.

“That was a Bureau car that went down the hole, right? You’ve still got your own wheels?”

“Yes. My car’s at the office. I suppose I have a significant paperwork exercise ahead of me.”

He didn’t reply. He was ready for her to get out of the car, but she wasn’t moving. He was about to get out and go open her door, when she asked him why he had been crawling around the arsenal.

He’d been anticipating that question.

“Because of what that kid said, that my daughter and her friends had gone to explore that place.”

“But at night?”

“During the day, as much as half of a search area is in shadow. It’s easy to miss something. I have a night-vision pack built into this crawl suit. At night, especially when there’s ambient starlight or moonlight, almost everything’s visible.”

She hesitated, then asked, “You think she’s there?”

He took a deep breath. He was not going to tell them anything, not until he’d had a chance to hunt down the second man and find out what he needed to know. Plus, now there was the little matter of the jared pancake flattened under his trailer.

“It’s the best lead I’ve got,” he said.

“I’ve been there twice before. I’m going to look until I find something or satisfy myself that there’s no trace of them.”

“We could help with that, especially after—”

 

“No. I mean, I know I can’t stop you, but you can’t help without alerting those Washington people. Their focus is on me. That story about a bomb cell is probably bullshit. Besides, I can do this better alone. And it’s not like I’m hunting someone you’re hunting.”

She missed the gibe.

“My boss is suspicious about those people, too,” she said.

“But it’s the weekend. He can’t raise anybody in Washington in his chain of command to check them out.”

He just looked at her, sitting bare-assed, exhausted, and bedraggled in the front seat of his pickup truck. She had the grace to be embarrassed. If it hadn’t been semidark, he would have sworn she was blushing.

“I can still do it better than anyone you’d send.” And, he thought, you’d bring a crowd, and then my one lead to Lynn might vanish.

“Okay, okay, so I’m not in your league,” she said.

“But surely we have people who are.”

“I doubt that, Special Agent Carter,” he said softly.

“With the Bureau these days, it seems to be a question of quantity over quality. But in any event, I’m going back there tonight. I have nothing else to do. If I do find something concrete, I’ll tell you. Would you like an escort to your door?”

“I can manage, I think.” She glanced down at her bare legs.

“Hopefully, my neighbors won’t see me in this … outfit.”

“They’d probably find mine even more interesting. I’d appreciate it if you’d find a way to leave me out of your report on how you got out of the tunnel. Maybe just say you climbed out.”

She thought about that for a moment.

“If you wish, yes, I can do that,” she said finally.

“But you did save my life. That should go into the record.”

“Not my record, Carter. My record is closed. I’m just a father searching for his missing daughter now. Nothing more.”

She kept looking at him in the dark.

“What was the message that Ransom failed to deliver?” she asked.

He looked down at the white oval other face. Even in the truck, he was taller than she was. He couldn’t tell her, not without explaining the whole story. And if he was right about the message, he had little time to lose. He had to find Lynn before they decided to send someone.

“I can’t tell you that,” he said finally.

“Funny, that’s what Ransom said when I asked him.”

“Well, there you go,” he said.

She hesitated, as if to see whether or not he would say anything else, but then she got out.