“The earlier sighting? That wasn’t

McGarand?”

“No, sir, it was Kreiss, driving McGarand’s vehicle.”

Keenan shook his head.

“What the rack’s with that?” he said.

“He didn’t really elaborate,” she replied.

“But it means McGarand could be halfway to anywhere by now. With a bomb.”

Kreiss drove down the street that went along the back side of the hospital parking lot. He had earlier parked McGarand’s pickup truck in front of a private residence and walked over to the hospital. Now he was going to go back out to Jared’s trailer and switch trucks yet again, leaving McGarand’s truck and retrieving his own. Then he was going to go north on 1-81 this time and hunt down that propane truck. Acting on the assumption that the Bureau had requested traffic surveillance out there, he had been careful about what he had and had not told Carter. As for what McGarand was really up to, Kreiss didn’t care. His daughter was safe. Jared was dead, and his grandfather on the move. He was going to find this bastard and crush him for what he’d done to his daughter, period. The Bureau wanted McGarand for the explosion at the arsenal;

fine. He didn’t want the Bureau getting to McGarand before he did. The good news was that the Bureau wouldn’t know anything about the propane truck. It took almost five hours to get from Blacksburg to downtown Washington, D.C.” and McGarand had a good head start on him. If at all possible, he wanted to be in Washington before they stopped looking for McGarand’s pickup truck and started looking for his.

Browne McGarand turned off the northbound lanes of 1-81 at 2:30 A.M.

and eased into a truck stop. He’d been driving for almost three hours and needed a rest break and some more coffee. It had been a long time since he had made a really long drive, especially at night. The propane tanker, thankfully, was holding up just fine. With this refueling, he could make it all the way to the final setup point in Crystal City, on the Virginia side of Washington. He wanted to be

there by dawn, and before the major Monday-morning traffic snarl coiled around the Washington Beltway. He would lay up the truck for the day and make a final reconnaissance run to the target. If the situation hadn’t changed since the last time he and jared had scoped it out, he’d make the attack tonight, before all those feds down in Roanoke put two and two together.

He parked the truck out in the back lot after fueling it and walked into the restaurant-store area. The place was not as dead as he had expected, with several zombie-eyed truckers wandering rubber-legged around the brightly lighted store and half the tables in the cafe occupied. He went to use the bathroom and then sat down in a booth and ordered coffee and a bowl of hot cereal. Two Highway Patrol troopers came into the cafe and sat down at a table near his booth. Browne felt a tingle of apprehension, but then he relaxed—there should be no reason for anyone to be hunting him. They were sitting close enough that he could hear their shoulder mikes muttering coded calls, although the weary-faced cops weren’t paying any attention to anything but their coffee.

He knew the federal authorities must be elbow-deep in the wreckage of the arsenal by now. They would think they’d broken up a major bomb making cell of antigovernment terrorists. They would probably never solve the mystery of jared being under his trailer. Browne felt there were three possibilities: Jared got drunk and went under the trailer for some reason and the jack collapsed; an irate and cuckolded husband who was playing by mountain rules; or the hard-looking man who had been snooping around in the arsenal. He was betting on the second theory. His own conscience was clear on that score: He had warned Jared often enough about his philandering and his boozing. They had both been careful not to have anything at home that could tie them to the arsenal.

That concrete power plant would have acted like an auto engine’s cylinder when the hydrogen ignited: a momentary compression, and then a massive power stroke and vaporization of the building. The only device that could indicate what he had been doing in there was the retort, and it had been made mostly of glass. He had put all the spent cinders of copper-nitrite into the boiler fireboxes, where they would look like ordinary slag. The two pumps would have been smashed to pieces, so they should look like just another piece of wrecked machinery in the power plant. The aTF would be all over the place, but he was betting they were stumped. A hydrogen explosion left no trace other than water vapor, which would dissipate almost immediately. A nice clean explosive.

One of the cops at the next table was talking into his radio, repeating

a license plate number. As Browne listened, the number suddenly registered.

The cop was writing down his pickup’s plate number.

He turned away from the cops slightly, not wanting to be seen eavesdropping.

The cop had written down the number and was now back to talking to his partner. But it had been his pickup number; he was sure of it. Why? Who wanted him stopped out on the interstate? The Blacksburg cops should not have been all that interested that he was going to Greensboro.

He tried to think it through, but he was just too tired. He had parked his pickup truck between the TA truck stop and that motel, out in no-man’s-land. The state cops should be looking for it out on the road, somewhere between Blacksburg and the North Carolina line. But he was now 150 miles north of that, thirty miles from the interchange with 1-66, which would take him down into Washington. But you’re not in your pickup truck, he told himself. So—so what? He sighed. He was more tired than he’d thought. He rubbed his eyes and signaled the waitress that he needed his thermos filled.

The cops got up and went to the cashier’s stand. He watched them go, as did the other truckers in the room. He might not be thinking all that clearly, but one thing was certain: The only person who had ever seen him at the arsenal was that fire-eyed big guy. Suppose he had been a fed of some kind? They had had signs of an intruder for a couple of days. Suppose it had been the same guy all along, and this guy had been a fed and had somehow survived the nitric-acid dump into the Ditch. If the feds tied the bomb at the arsenal to him and jared, then his target in Washington might have been alerted. If so, that was going to make his plan very, very difficult to carry out. But maybe not: If he could count on one thing, it was the enduring hubris of federal law-enforcement agencies. He could just as easily see them concluding that some bad guys had been screwing around with explosives and there had been an accident. The key was that there was nothing to tie him to Washington. Jared had known he was going to take a bomb to Washington. Jared may have been a skirt-chaser and a boozer, but the boy could usually keep a secret.

He got up and went to the cashier’s counter to pay up. The cops had gone back out into the night and their interstate patrol. He stepped outside into the cool air and told himself to relax. There was simply no way they would see this coming.

At 7:30 on Monday morning, Farnsworth called an urgent all-hands meeting in the Roanoke office. Janet had come back to the office by

 

herself after meeting Kreiss at the hospital. Keenan and his agents had gone ha ring after Kreiss in the night. She had told Keenan about the claymores. Keenan shrugged that off, but the other agents were giving one another uneasy looks. She had given them two chances of finding Kreiss: slim and none. Farnsworth had gone home by the time she got back to the office, so she slept on the couch in the upstairs conference room. She was awakened by agents coming down the hall, talking about the hurry-up meeting, and just had time to wash her face, comb her hair, and find some coffee before going down to the next floor to the big conference room.

When she got there, the room was pretty much full. It was easy to tell which of the agents had been out all night and which ones were coming in fresh. The older man who had been with the aTF squad out at the arsenal was sitting next to Farnsworth. This time, there was no sign of Foster.

Being a worker bee, Janet stood by the back wall while the supervisory agents took chairs around the table. Her ribs still hurt, but the headache was gone and she could hear much better than yesterday. Farnsworth looked like he’d aged considerably.

“Okay, people,” he said, “Let’s get going.” The room quieted right down. He introduced the aTF senior special agent as Walker Travers, who stood up and walked to the briefer’s podium.

“I don’t have a formal slide show or anything,” Travers said.

“But I’ve got the preliminary results of our NRT’s work out at the Ramsey Arsenal.”

“What was it?” Keenan asked. He hadn’t shaved and was obviously frustrated by his search for Kreiss, which had turned up empty.

“It was what’s known in the trade as a BFB,” Travers said with a perfectly straight face. Janet got it about one second before he explained it: a big fucking bomb. There were some chuckles around the room. Janet noticed that neither Keenan nor Farnsworth joined in. The loss of Ken Whittaker was still weighing heavily.

“We don’t know what it was,” Travers went on.

“We’ve had our EGIS people on it; they’re from our National Laboratory Center. EGIS uses high-speed gas chromatography and chemiluminescent detection systems to identify explosives residue. The weird thing we’re finding with this one is that there isn’t any. Residue, I mean. And it’s complicated by the fact that this was an explosives-manufacturing facility, so once we spread out the search beyond the actual power plant, of course we got the world’s supply of residue.”

“But nothing in the explosion focus?” Keenan asked. He had done a

tour with aTF five years ago and knew something of their technical procedures.

“No, sir,” Travers said.

“The remains of machinery—you know, pumps, pipes, wiring, control instrumentation. Emphasis on the word remains.

The plans say there was a boiler-water-testing laboratory next to the control room, and we’ve raised chemical residues in that area, but nothing that points to anything. It was a very hot and powerful blast.”

“With no readily identifiable residue,” Farnsworth said, shaking his head.

“Which tells a tale, actually,” Travers said.

“From looking at the wreckage, we see a reinforced-concrete building that was leveled in four directions damn near instantaneously, and it released a wave front that flattened everything nearby. Only one substance does that.”

“Which is?”

“A gas,” Travers said.

“An explosive gas. Ever seen a building where somebody left a gas stove on with the pilot light turned off? Or a hot water heater? Then someone comes home and lights a cigarette?” There were nods of recognition around the room.

“A hydrocarbon-based gas, such as propane, so-called producer gas, or natural gas builds up in a structure until the mixture of gas and air becomes an explosive vapor, just waiting for ignition. It doesn’t take as much as you might think, depending on the hydrocarbon involved. When it does let go, it creates an instantaneous overpressure on every square inch of the structure’s interior. Unlike, say, a truck bomb, which punches a wave front at a building, an internal vapor explosion exerts a huge force on every element of the building from inside. Remember your math: Force equals pressure times the area affected. You take a wall, twenty feet long by eight feet high, that’s a hundred and sixty square feet, or a little over twenty thousand square inches. Times a pressure of a hundred pounds per square inch, and you get an impulse force of a little over two million pounds. That is somewhat outside the normal load-bearing specs for buildings.”

“So you’re saying this explosion might really have been accidental?”

Janet asked from the back of the room, remembering what Farnsworth had told her. Agents turned to look at her.

“Like a natural buildup of methane or some other bad shit left over from when the plant was open, and when that guy went down there to open the building with a cigarette in his mouth, boom?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Travers replied.

 

“As you may or may not know, that’s our official conclusion. Originally issued to choke off media speculation. But that’s in fact what it’s coming down to—a gas explosion. We found piping connections between the turbine hall and a large underground chamber where cooling water for the turbo generator condensers was discharged. There are chemical residues of all kinds, including nitric acid, of all things, in that chamber.”

“I have some personal knowledge of that chamber,” Janet said. There were some covert grins around the room.

“I don’t remember smelling nitric acid down there.”

“Would you recognize it if you did smell it, Agent Carter?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Well. That’s a mystery, then. The explosive vapors may not have originated in the underground area. There are several gases that can become explosive air-gas mixtures, and they have no scent whatsoever. For that matter, the gas in your house comes odorless—the gas company puts the sulfur smell in to alert people to leaks.” He stopped for a moment to look at his notes.

“That place has been shut down for a long time. The security company’s records don’t indicate that they ever went into that power plant.

There were rumors of toxic wastes and even chemical weapons going around about the Ramsey Arsenal. A small accretion of methane, which occurs in nature, could build up in that building over the years, creating a huge bomb. Which is what we got, folks.”

“And that’s how you’re calling it?” Farnsworth asked.

“An act of God?”

“Basically, yes, sir, that’s what we’re calling it. There is no evidence of any chemical or commercial explosive residues, and the way that heavily reinforced-concrete building blew up—it all points to a gas explosion.”

“Could it have been hydrogen?” Farnsworth asked, shooting Janet a cautionary look.

Travers frowned. He had obviously heard about what Lynn Kreiss had said.

“No, sir, I don’t think so. I mean, hydrogen would certainly have done the job, but it doesn’t occur in nature in concentrations like that. It tends to dissipate, rather than concentrate, due to its molecular structure.

No, my guess is methane, and though we can usually smell methane, this explosion so completely leveled the building that there was nowhere for any residual gas to pocket. I think it was methane, coming up from that underground cavern, where, I’m told, they used to dump chemically unstable batches of feed stocks when a reaction went out of limits.

God only knows what kinds of things are lurking down in that cavern, or in what amounts.”

There was a surprised silence in the room. Everyone had been thinking a conventional, chemically based bomb. Farnsworth stood up.

“Okay, folks, there we have it. These people are the foremost experts in reconstructing explosions in the country. How many bombing incidents has the aTF investigated in the past five years, Mr. Travers?”

“Sixty-two thousand and counting,” Travers said. This produced expressions of surprise and some low whistles.

“Good enough for us country folks,” Farnsworth said.

“All right, everybody, it’s Monday and there’s paperwork to be done. I’ll have word about the funeral service this afternoon.”

The meeting broke up and Janet started back to her office. She had to wait for the crowd that was bunched up at the elevator. Ben Keenan escorted Travers to the front door of the security area. She was toying with the idea of going home to get fresh clothes and a shower, when Farnsworth gave her the high sign that she was to join him in his office.

She had to wait for a few more minutes while some supervisors cornered the RA. When they were finished, she went into his office. Ben Keenan was already there, along with someone she had not expected to see: Foster.

Her heart sank when she saw Foster.

The RA, his deputy, and the Washington executive assistant. This isn’t over, she thought. Foster had another man with him, someone she did not recognize. Everyone sat down. Farnsworth looked at Keenan.

“No word on finding Kreiss?”

“No, sir, he plain vanished. We have local law looking for his vehicle, another pickup truck, like McGarand’s, but no hits so far.”

“And he didn’t return home last night?” Foster asked.

“No, we had some of our people in position.”

“Now that aTF has taken a formal position on this explosion,” Farnsworth said, “we’ve got to find Kreiss.”

“Why?” Janet asked.

“We’ve got too many pieces to this puzzle: The McGarands are linked to Waco, Kreiss is linked to jared McGarand’s homicide. Jared’s truck has been physically linked to the Ramsey Arsenal via samples from his truck’s tires. Kreiss has revealed that he was the one the state cops sighted driving the other McGarand’s truck south on the interstate, not McGarand. We have a very large explosion that aTF is classifying as an

act of God. But now Browne McGarand, ex-chief explosives engineer at the Ramsey Arsenal, is missing, Kreiss is missing, Jared McGarand’s dead, and Kreiss’s daughter was heard ranting and raving about a hydrogen bomb and Washington, D.C. Mr. Foster thinks we still have a problem here.”

“Do we think Kreiss killed Jared McGarand?” Janet asked.

“Maybe,” Farnsworth said.

“The local cops say that it could have been an accident. They’re all hung up about some goo they found on the trailer and also on the body.”

“Goo?” the man with Foster said.

“What color was it?” He was what Janet would have called “an M-squared, B-squared” if she had to describe him: medium-medium, brown-brown, and totally forgettable.

“I have no goddamn idea,” Farnsworth replied, obviously exasperated and also still very tired.

“Purple,” Keenan said, consulting his notes.

“It was purple and very sticky. And who are you, sir?”

“This gentleman is from the Agency,” Farnsworth said.

The man nodded as if introductions had been made.

“That ‘goo,”” he said, “is a substance used in something we call ‘a capture web.” It comes in a spray can. It’s like a spiderweb, only much thicker. Very sticky. The more you fight, the more you get entangled, until you are immobilized.

When you’re ready to release your subject, you hose him down—it’s totally water-soluble.”

Jared’s body had been wet when they found it, Janet remembered.

“Okay, so maybe it was Kreiss who got Jared,” Janet said.

“But I’m willing to bet that was about his daughter, not any bomb plot. And, Kreiss was right: They did have his daughter. So if they had his daughter captive at the arsenal, the McGarands weren’t using that place for a fishing hole.

They were doing some bad shit out there. If this is about Waco, we need to warn Washington.”

“That’s going to present a problem,” Keenan said, and Farnsworth nodded, obviously already knowing what Keenan was going to say.

“What?”

“The aTF is going on record, as we speak, that this was an explosion resulting from natural causes. Without direct evidence of a bomb, what you suggest is purely supposition. aTF will view any alternative theories we bring up as a challenge to their authority in the area of explosives determination.”

“Oh, for crying—”

 

“Think about the state of relations at the Washington level among our respective agencies just now,” Farnsworth said.

“Which haven’t been helped by Ken Whittaker’s death, during what was essentially a Bureau deal.”

Janet took a deep breath and then let it out.

“So if we could find Kreiss,” she said, “maybe we could firm this up a little?”

“If you find Kreiss, he goes in a box somewhere where nobody can get to him, and that includes aTF,” Foster said.

“Assistant Director Marchand has those instructions from the deputy AG’s office. Edwin Kreiss isn’t going to testify to anything. We can’t allow it.”

“Hell, I suspect he wouldn’t allow it,” Janet said.

That last remark produced an uncomfortable silence, which Keenan finally broke.

“Look, boss,” he said, addressing Farnsworth.

“It’s time to elevate this hairball to headquarters. Tell ‘em what we know, tell ‘em what we think, and then hunker back down in the weeds, where we belong.”

“I represent headquarters,” Foster told him.

“Not my part of it,” Farnsworth said. There was a strained silence in the room. Finally, Farnsworth instructed Keenan to keep looking for Edwin Kreiss. He told Janet to notify Keenan if she had any further contact from Kreiss, and to get with the surveillance people to put a locating tap on the hospital lines into the I.C.U, where his daughter was. The RA and Foster then went into the secure-communications cube to get on the horn to Richmond, which, as the supervisory field office, was directly over the Roanoke RA.

Keenan stopped Janet outside Farnsworth’s office. As Farnsworth’s deputy, he dealt primarily with the four squad supervisors, so he had not had very much direct contact with Janet.

“You’ve met this guy Kreiss,” he said.

“Whose side is he on if this does turn out to be a bomb plot against the seat of government?”

Janet had to think about that.

“I’ve met him, but I wouldn’t say I know him. All these bomb conspiracies notwithstanding, the only thing Kreiss has ever been focused on was finding his daughter. She is now at least safe, if not fully recovered. I don’t know whose side he’d be on.”

“You’re the last person who spoke directly to him,” Keenan said gently.

“Take a guess.”

Janet sighed.

“Well, sir, if Kreiss thinks the older McGarand had a part in kidnapping his daughter and getting her hurt, he’ll pursue him and punish him, maybe even kill him. Everything else would be incidental

to that objective. I don’t think Edwin Kreiss takes sides anymore, and I don’t think he takes prisoners, either, or at least not for very long.”

Keenan nodded thoughtfully.

“Do you understand what Foster and his buddy over at Main Justice are up to?” he asked.

“No, sir, I haven’t a clue. But if Foster’s really acting for Assistant Director Marchand, I think it has something to do with what happened when Kreiss was forcibly retired.”

Keenan looked away, nodded his head slowly.

“Lord, I hope not,” he said, and then went back into his office.

Kreiss had left the interstate near Harrisonburg and made his way east over to the Skyline Drive, the mountain road. It would be much slower than running the interstate, but it accomplished two things: It got him out of the state police’s primary surveillance zone, and the narrow, winding mountain road made it easy to spot a tail. He left the Skyline Drive south of Front Royal and worked the back roads along the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah River into Clarke County until he cut U.S. Route 50, at which point he turned east and joined the morning rush-hour traffic. An astonishing number of cars were headed into Washington at that hour of the morning, but the heavy traffic would be a good place to hide his vehicle in case the northern Virginia cops had been alerted. By the time he’d made it down through Upperville, Middleburg, and Aldie, it was nearing 7:00 A.M. He was now in familiar territory, having lived in northern Virginia for many years, so when he hit Route 58, the Dulles Airport connector, he got off the main highway and stopped at a diner next to a large shopping mall for some coffee and breakfast.

As he watched the sluggish stream of commuter traffic drag by on the four-lane highway outside, he thought about his next steps. Ideally, he needed another vehicle. Second, he needed a place to stay while he hunted McGarand. Third, he wouldn’t mind a nice GPS position on McGarand and the propane truck. He smiled grimly. Actually, finding McGarand shouldn’t be all that hard, as long as he stayed with that distinctive green-and-white truck. The Washington area was served by a large metropolitan gas company, which meant that there were not a lot of propane customers in or near the city. Driving something like that downtown, especially in Washington, was strictly regulated, which left the Maryland and northern Virginia suburbs. If he intended to park it, he would most likely use a truck stop along the Beltway. The biggest trucking terminals in the Washington area were in Alexandria, on the

Virginia side of the Potomac River, and near the rail yards on the Maryland side.

Browne McGarand had come up from southwest Virginia, so Kreiss would begin his search in Alexandria along 1-95 and 1-49$.

The easiest way for him to get a new vehicle would be to rent one. For that, he needed to get to a couple of ATMs. He had brought some cash with him, and there was a motel right behind the diner. He would prepay a room, park his truck in the back somewhere, get cleaned up, and walk over to the mall, where there were bound to be ATMs. Then he would taxi over to Dulles, rent a van, find a trucker’s atlas or an exit guide, and get to work. Then it would be a matter of slogging through the Washington-area trucking centers, looking for that propane truck. He remembered that there had been a logo on the truck, but he couldn’t recollect what it said. Something about that logo had not been quite right, but he simply could not remember it. So, first a motel room and a shower. Then some scut work.

Browne McGarand got off the Beltway and made his way up U.S. Route 1 into the rail yards on the Reagan National Airport side of Crystal City.

He parked at an all-night diner and got some breakfast. He and Jared had scouted out this phase of the plan some months ago. He would drive into Crystal City proper after rush hour, staying on the old Jefferson Davis Highway until he reached the Pentagon interchange, just before Route 1 ascended onto the Fourteenth Street Bridge over the Potomac. Then he would get back off the elevated highway, loop underneath it, and drive down a small two-lane road that led into the Pentagon parking areas. Just before the turn that would take him into Pentagon South Parking, he would turn into the driveway that led to the Pentagon power plant.

The power plant had originally been a coal-fired facility, then an oil fired one, designed to provide emergency power to the huge military headquarters. Now it housed a dozen large gas turbine generators in a fenced yard next to what had been its coal yard. Because the gas turbine emergency generators could be started remotely from the Pentagon, the facility was no longer manned. Its entrances had been chained and locked.

All except the parking lot, which was really an extension of the old coal yard. The parking lot had a long chain across it, but no lock, probably to let fire trucks get in. The coal yard, now empty, was surrounded on three sides by high concrete walls, originally used to contain a small mountain of coal. He would back the truck out of sight of the entranceway and shut it down. It had been Jared who had found

this spot when he’d gotten lost in the maze of roads around the approaches to the Fourteenth Street Bridge. He’d blown a tire right in front of the power plant, pulled into the driveway to change it, and discovered the perfect hiding place. Someone would have to come into the driveway and then all the way back into the old coal yard ever to see the truck.

From the power plant, it was a five-minute walk to the Pentagon Metro station. Browne was dressed in what he hoped were suitably touristy clothes: khaki slacks, short-sleeved shirt, a windbreaker, and a floppy sun hat and some sunglasses. He wished he had a camera to complete the outfit, but, as long as nothing had changed, this would do. The Pentagon Metro station was on the east side of the Pentagon building. He would take a Yellow Line train into the District, then get off at the Mount Vernon Place station. His target would then be within easy walking distance.

He ordered another cup of coffee, and, as the caffeine kicked in, wondered if he should bother getting a motel room.

Janet got back into the office at 11:30. She picked up a sandwich at the first-floor deli and took it upstairs to her office. She had just popped open her Coke when the intercom buzzed and Farnsworth’s secretary called her down to a meeting in the RA’s conference room. She sighed, poured her Coke into her coffee mug, put the sandwich in the office fridge, and went downstairs. Farnsworth was there, along with Keenan, Special Agent Bobby Land from the Roanoke surveillance squad, and two uniformed police lieutenants, one from the Virginia State Police and the other from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department.

The person who got her attention, however, was a woman who was sitting by herself at the other end of the conference table from where the men were standing. Janet struggled not to stare at her. She had a striking, witch like face: intense black eyes under thin eyebrows, a slightly hooked nose, wide cheekbones, and dark red lips. She appeared to be in good physical shape, tall, with wide shoulders and a fit tautness to her skin. She looked to be in her late forties, and the way she was sitting at the table, still as a grave, staring quietly into the middle distance, projected an attitude of total composure that made her utterly unapproachable. As the only other woman in the room, Janet would normally have gone over to introduce herself, but something in this woman’s demeanor gave her pause.

“Okay, gents, this is Special Agent Janet Carter,” Farnsworth said.

“Let’s get going.” Everyone took a chair, leaving the other woman in

semi splendid isolation at the far end of the conference table. Janet forced herself to face Farnsworth, who shuffled some papers before beginning.

“We’ve had some developments in the McGarand business,” he announced.

“Not to be confused with progress, however. Janet, for your benefit, this is Lieutenant Whitney from the Virginia State Police, and Lieutenant Harter from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department.”

Farnsworth glanced down at his papers for a second while Janet waited for him to introduce the woman, but he did not.

“There’ve been some musical chairs with vehicles in the arsenal case,” he said.

“Browne McGarand’s pickup truck has been located at his grandson’s house, where it was not present during yesterday’s sweep, except for the brief time that Browne McGarand visited there. Jared McGarand’s telephone company repair van, which had been parked at jared’s trailer, was found by another phone company crew at the TA truck stop above the Christiansburg interchange. This is the same truck stop where two security guards allege that an unknown subject, later identified as Edwin Kreiss from a Polaroid photograph the security guards took, attacked them without provocation in their office. They’d detained him in the parking lot, where they had been watching him ‘case the place,” to use their words.”

“Unprovoked attack’?” Janet asked.

Farnsworth shrugged.

“Both of them were steroid junkies. One of them nearly died from a partially strangulated larynx, and the other reported being disabled with a … weapon, I guess, that another branch of government said was something subject Edwin Kreiss might have been carrying. They called it ‘a retinal disrupter.”

” “A retinal what?” Keenan asked.

“They described it as a very powerful flashcube, tuned to the optical frequency of a purple substance in the human eye that can be overloaded by a strong pulse of light. Firing a retinal disrupter into a subject’s eyes renders him stunned and immobilized for up to sixty seconds, if not longer, which has its obvious tactical advantages.”

“Where can I get me one of those?” Lieutenant Whitney asked. He was a large-shouldered man in his fifties, with buzz-cut gray hair and a huge pair of mirrored sunglasses hanging down from his perfectly creased shirt pocket.

“You can’t,” Farnsworth said.

“If it’s any comfort, neither can we.” He gave the lieutenant a second for that to sink in, then continued.

“Kreiss’s personal vehicle is also a pickup truck. It is not at his house, nor is Kreiss.

Browne McGarand is not at his house, and we have information that he

did not go to Greensboro, North Carolina, as he told the local police he was going to do. His other grandson, whom we located in Greensboro, confirmed he had not heard from his grandfather, and he also did not know about Jared McGarand’s demise.”

“Sir, what’s the status on Kreiss’s daughter?” Janet asked.

“She’s stable, comatose, but breathing on her own. The docs now think she’ll come out of it, but they can’t say when.”

“You guys designated a prime suspect for the Jared McGarand homicide?”

Keenan asked.

“We like this guy Kreiss, based on what you folks have told us,” Lieutenant Harter said. He was a dark-haired, well-built young man, whose short-sleeved tan uniform shirt fit him like a glove. He had been giving I Janet the eye while Farnsworth spoke.

Janet was surprised to hear this: Now what had Farnsworth done? The last thing she’d been told was that they were going to stay quiet about Kreiss. And she was still wondering who the woman was. She was wearing a visitor’s badge, but it was not one requiring an escort. She had not moved a muscle, reminding Janet of an exquisitely made Japanese robot she had seen at Disney World several years ago. She did not even appear to be listening to the discussion. Her hands rested motionless on the table. Janet noticed that the outside edge of the woman’s right palm was ridged with calluses, which fairly shouted karate training. She jerked her attention back to what the lieutenant was saying.

“Is there a federal warrant out?” Harter asked.

“No,” Farnsworth said, looking down at the papers in front of him.

“And we’ve asked the state and local authorities to hold up on obtaining a warrant for right now.”

“Because of what happened out at the Ramsey Arsenal,” Janet said, concentrating again on the discussion.

“Exactly,” Farnsworth said.

“The purpose of this meeting is to confirm that we will continue to press our search for Edwin Kreiss and Browne McGarand, but we will do so in conjunction with a larger federal investigation being conducted in cooperation with the ATE” Farnsworth shot Janet a quick glance to make sure she wasn’t going to blow his cover, but she had caught on—Farnsworth wanted local law to think the Bureau was working hand in glove with the aTF

“This is all about that big explosion, out at the arsenal?” Lieutenant Harter asked. His expression indicated that he wasn’t exactly following what was being said.

 

“Yes, and we have reason to believe that subject Browne McGarand may be engaged in a bombing conspiracy, which might involve the capital city,” Farnsworth continued.

“Do y’all think the explosion at the arsenal was their lab going up?”

Whitney asked.

“We think it was, but the aTF national response team is leaning toward natural causes. A methane buildup. Given the size of that explosion, we’re treating the whole matter very seriously. If there was a bomb-making cell operating out of the arsenal, and they blew themselves up, then end of story. aTF tells us that happens sometimes. But if that explosion was a package left behind to entertain federal authorities who might come snooping, then they’re capable of making one hell of a bomb, and we have to assume a clear and present danger.”

“We’ll play it any way you want to, Mr. Farnsworth,” Harter said.

“But when it’s all over, we’re still going to want to have a talk with this Kreiss fella.”

“And you’ll get it. I guess what I’m saying is that we just want to make sure that there isn’t a bigger deal going down here. You know, like an Oklahoma City-scale conspiracy.”

“What’s this Kreiss guy’s role in that theory?” Harter asked.

“Kreiss’s daughter was one of those college kids that went missing, remember? As we told you, he’s been looking for his missing daughter, who turned up at that arsenal.”

“And right now, y’all think he’s chasing down this Browne McGarand?”

“Yes.”

Harter and Whitney looked at each other and then back at Farnsworth, who knew what their question was.

“Kreiss used to be pretty good at hunting people. We wouldn’t necessarily be upset if he finds McGarand, especially if it prevents another bombing.”

Janet watched as Whitney nodded his head slowly. Farnsworth was obviously confusing the shit out of the locals “Oka-a-y,” Whitney said.

“But how do we get him for this homicide deal?”

“His daughter is now hospitalized in Blacksburg. I’m requesting that she be placed under police guard. Eventually, we’re pretty sure Kreiss will come back here to see her. Can you help?”

“Yes, sir, he comes back, we can take it from there, I think,” Harter said.

“And we’ll get some assets into that hospital.”

Farnsworth stood up, and so did the two uniformed cops. They shook

hands and Farnsworth asked Agent Bobby Land to escort them out.

When they were gone, he sat back down and ran his hands through his hair.

“Okay, so much for local legends. Janet, we’d been meeting for a while before you got back to the office. That little charade was for purposes of keeping local law occupied while we sort out what we’re really going to do. The U.S. attorney for the Southwestern District of Virginia is running top cover for us, but I thought I’d better add my personal reassurances to those guys.”

“Sir?” Janet said.

“I thought we were going to keep the Kreiss angle away from local law?”

Farnsworth cleared his throat, glancing nervously at the woman at the ‘ other end of the table.

‘ “Yes. Well. We’ve had some new guidance from Washington on that score.”

Janet couldn’t stand it anymore.

“May I know who she is?” she asked, pointing with her chin to the woman at the end of the table. The woman did not even look at her.

“When I’m finished, yes. Now, as usual, there’s a turf fight shaping up.

aTF headquarters is circling the wagons around their ‘natural causes’ theory of the arsenal explosion, apparently because their director found out that they had cleared the arsenal during a previous inspection of the place.”

“And the Bureau?”

“Bureau headquarters is officially deferring to aTF, but somehow, aTF has found out that we’re hunting two subjects, McGarand and Kreiss.”

“aTF is saying there’s no threat to Washington?”

“aTF is saying there’s no threat unless, of course, we have evidence to the contrary. I think they’re looking for a fig leaf, in case it turns out somebody has actual evidence that some bad guys were in fact making bombs down there.”

“But we do, sort of—Kreiss. And what his daughter said.”

“No, we do not, Janet,” he said.

“As of this morning, based on guidance I’ve received through our regular chain of command, we no longer know anything about any Edwin Kreiss, except as the parent of a girl who is no longer missing.”

Janet sat back in her chair.

“But don’t you think he’s chasing McGarand? Shouldn’t we tell Kreiss

that we think McGarand is going to bomb something in Washington? That’s there’s a tie between McGarand and Waco?”

“Officially, I no longer have any opinions on the matter of Edwin Kreiss,” Farnsworth said, setting his face into a blank bureaucratic mask.

Janet, baffled, just looked at him, and then at Keenan, who was now intently studying his hands.

“But I do,” the woman at the end of the table said. Her voice was low, but filled with quiet authority.

“And you are .. Janet said, turning in her chair.

“I am the person assigned by an appropriate authority to attend to the problem of Edwin Kreiss,” the woman said.

“I understand he is or was carrying a pager you gave him?”

Attend to—Janet remembered those words. She didn’t know what to say, but she found herself nodding.

“Very well,” the woman said.

“I want you to page him at eighteen hundred tonight, exactly. Then key in a number I’m going to give you. It’s a northern Virginia number, but it will bounce back here to this office.

Assuming he calls in, I have a message I want you to give him.”

“Not until I know who you are, or what you are,” Janet said. She was beginning to suspect that the “what” would be more important than the “who.”

“The last guy who wanted me to page Kreiss wanted me to tell him his daughter was dead. And guess what: That didn’t happen.”

Farnsworth looked up at the ceiling. The woman stood up, and Janet was surprised by how tall she was. She was wearing an expensive loose-fitting pantsuit, and she was clearly over six feet tall even in her flat shoes.

She picked up a handbag that could have doubled as a briefcase. She asked the two men in the room if they would mind excusing themselves. To Janet’s further surprise, both of them stood and left the room without a word, closing the door behind them. Looking at the expression on the woman’s face, Janet suddenly found herself wishing she was carrying her sidearm. The woman walked around the conference table and came up next to Janet. She perched one hip on the table and looked down at her, forcing Janet to crane her neck to make eye contact. The woman’s expression was disturbing; she was looking at Janet with a flat, slightly unfocused, zero-parallax stare.

“When we’re all done making the page call and delivering the message, I will return to Washington to attend to the matter of Edwin Kreiss,” the woman said. Her diction was precise and clear.

 

“Your director has assured my director that you will make the call, and that you will deliver the message.

Which goes like this: three words—tenebrae factae sunt. I’ll write it down for you, if you’d like. It’s church Latin for ‘night has fallen.” It will tell Kreiss that I’m coming for him.”

Janet didn’t like the sound of that, so she tried for a little defiance.

“And he’ll give a shit? That you’re coming?”

The woman’s unfocused look went away, and she looked right into Janet’s eyes with a wolfish smile that made her own black eyes glow.

“Oh yes, Special Agent Carter. He’ll absolutely give a shit. Anyone who knows me would.” She stood back up, smoothed her clothes, and retrieved her handbag.

“I’ll see you in Mr. Farnsworth’s office at eighteen hundred.

That’s six P.M. by the way.”

The woman walked calmly out of the conference room, leaving Janet alone at the table, her face burning just a little, and wondering what in the hell this was all about. She was tempted to page Kreiss right now and warn him that some female cyborg in an Armani pantsuit was after him, but the woman had mentioned her director and Janet’s director. This implied that the woman was an Agency operative of some kind. Another “sweeper” perhaps? What kind of outfit needed to have people like that in their stable? The woman’s mention of directors had been deliberate, though. And if the heads of the Bureau and the Agency were involved, it was definitely not time for junior special agents to be taking any sudden initiatives. Then she remembered what Farnsworth had speculated earlier:

They were going to let Kreiss hunt McGarand, but the Agency was going to join the hunt for Kreiss.

Tenebrae factae sunt. Darkness has fallen. She felt a tingle run up her backbone. Yeah, that would do it for me, she thought. My director and your director. She closed her eyes to think. Something didn’t quite add up here: The people originally interested in Kreiss had been Foster, of the Bureau, and Bellhouser, of the Justice Department. FBI counterintelligence and the deputy AG, to be specific. And now the Agency. Why would the FBI director be supporting that ugly little axis?

She wanted to go talk to Farnsworth again, but he was acting as if he had been stepped on from above and was now in the “yes, sir, no, sir, whatever you say, sir” mode most beloved of the Bureau when it was circling its own bureaucratic wagons. What had Farnsworth told her earlier?

They’d let Kreiss run free. They didn’t know there was a bomb threat, but if Kreiss solved that problem, fine. And if he created bigger

problems while he was doing it, there’d be no stink on them. He wasn’t their asset.

He was the Justice Department’s asset. So what did that make Janet?

Farnsworth’s secretary stepped into the conference room.

“Agent Carter?” she said.

“The Blacksburg hospital is calling? About a Lynn Kreiss? Can you take it? I can’t find the boss, and I know you were involved with that case.”

Janet said sure and went into Farnsworth’s outer office to take the call.

The nurse calling reported that they thought Lynn Kreiss might be coming around. Their log said that the FBI people wanted to be notified when she surfaced. At this very moment, Janet wasn’t sure what her current assignment was, but she said she’d be right over. She went back upstairs to collect her sidearm and purse, grab her sandwich, and then go down to the garage.

There was a street-level sandwich shop diagonally across the street from the office building at 650 Massachusetts Avenue. Browne bought a cup of coffee and a newspaper and sat down at one of the cafe tables out on the street itself. It was a warmish day, although nothing like what was to come in the horrific Washington summertime. There was a steady flow of government workers walking by, some stopping in for coffee or to get a ready-made sandwich to take to the office for lunch.

He studied the aTF headquarters building surreptitiously while pretending to read his newspaper. There did not appear to be any new security cameras on the building or its neighbors, although he could not see what might have been added to the building right above him. He reminded himself to check that when he got up. The attack depended on two factors. The first was that there was a parking garage right next door to his target, separated from the aTF building by a narrow alley. The garage had an outside ramp that led directly up to its roof-level deck.

More importantly, that ramp, which was on the side of the garage away from the aTF building, did not appear to be in the field of view of any of the cameras guarding the aTF’s headquarters. It was also just wide enough to accommodate the propane truck.

The second factor had to do with the aTF building’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system. Like those of most office buildings, it was a recirculating system. A small amount of outside air was taken in and passed over the cooling coils of the chiller plant housed in a small HVAC building at the back of the alley between the garage and the aTF building.

It was then circulated throughout the building via the duct system, but instead of being exhausted from the building, it was recooled and

redistributed again and again, so as to maximize the efficiency of the air-conditioning plant. His plan was simple: Very early tomorrow morning, he would drive the propane truck up the ramp to the top deck of that garage and park it next to the outer wall on the alley side of the building. The aTF headquarters was ten stories high, with a wall of windows overlooking the top deck of the garage. But no cameras looked at the garage; he and Jared had both checked. Instead, a single security camera, mounted on the front corner of that air-conditioning building, looked into the alley, toward the street.

The propane truck came equipped with a four-inch diameter wire reinforced 150-foot-long hose, whose fittings he had modified to handle H the hydrogen gas. He would park the truck, wait until nearly dawn, and then unreel the heavy hose down into the alley behind the air-conditioning building, a distance of perhaps forty, forty-five feet. A big truck like that in the alley would draw instant attention from the security monitoring office, assuming they were awake at the switch at that hour of the morning. But the hose would come down in the predawn darkness behind the security camera, and so would he.

Once on the ground, he would spread a large plastic tarp over one of the HVAC building’s two air intakes to block it off. He would then drape a second tarp, with a receiver fitting sewn into it, over the remaining air intake screen. The screens were eight feet high and six feet wide. At that hour, the building’s environmental-management system would be running the intake fans at very low speed. They wouldn’t speed up the fans until the heat of the day called for more cooling. He had taken rough volumetric measurements of the building by pacing off its length and width on the sidewalk and then multiplying that number by one hundred. Then he had computed the heating ventilation-conditioning volume using the Civil Engineer’s Handbook. The propane truck was designed to hold eight thousand gallons of liquid propane. Now, filled with pure hydrogen gas under nearly four hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, it held more than enough hydrogen to fill the aTF building, using the building’s own recycling ventilation system, in about an hour. What made the building most vulnerable to this kind of attack was the fact that none of its windows could be opened. In fact, he had almost twice the hydrogen he needed to achieve an explosive vapor mixture, but he knew there would be small leaks here and there. No manmade gas system was perfect.

He was going to treat the aTF the same way they and their allies at the FBI had treated the people at Mount Carmel. He would start the

odorless, invisible hydrogen injection at around 6:00 A.M. Sometime in the next 60 to 90 minutes, the building would achieve an explosive mixture of air and hydrogen, courtesy of its own closed-cycle ventilation system. Because it was the start of the day, the intake fans would be running slowly, and the recycling air-handler system would keep almost all the air inside the building to achieve maximum cooling. Sometime after that, as the building filled with aTF agents and their bosses, someone, somewhere, would slip into the men’s room to sneak a cigarette. Or fumble with an aging light switch. Or turn on an entire floor’s worth of fluorescent light fixtures all at once. Or summon the elevator and mash the button several times, making those copper contacts up in the elevator shaft open and close, open and close. He had been a chemist and an explosives engineer for decades. The industrial-safety manuals were filled with stories of how the most mundane objects were capable of producing a static spark: a doorknob in winter, the switch on a desk fan, panty hose on a dry winter day, the keyboard of an electric typewriter, the ringer in a telephone.

In that silent, invisibly deadly atmosphere, one spark would reproduce what had happened down at Ramsey. Only this time, the building wasn’t made of reinforced concrete: It was wall-to-wall windows.

“Some more coffee, sir?” a pleasant young woman asked, pausing at his table with a Silex coffee pitcher.

“Thanks, I’m all done,” he said, smiling up at her through his dark glasses. His heart was actually thumping with excitement. Today, after months of labor at the arsenal, he was finally here. This afternoon, he would find a motel near the airport to crash and get some sleep. Early in the morning, he would take a taxi to the Pentagon, then go retrieve the truck. There was security-camera surveillance of the Pentagon building itself, but he had seen not one single camera on the old power station building. Then he would drive the truck into the city; he even had an official-looking dispatch ticket, lifted when Jared had appropriated the truck. And sometime early tomorrow morning, all those criminal bastards in that building were going to get a taste of what it must have been like at Waco when they burned William along with those Branch Davidians to death, while their agents stood around the perimeter, drinking coffee and making crispy-critter jokes.

He hoped there were cameras on that building. They were going to get the shot of a lifetime.

Forty-five minutes later, Janet was sitting in Lynn Kreiss’s hospital room.

A uniformed sheriff’s deputy sat outside the door, watching the television

 

in the empty room across the hall. Lynn was still hooked up to an IV, but she actually looked better than the last time Janet had seen her. It’s amazing what some sleep can do for you, Janet thought. The girl was tossing and turning a bit in the bed, and making small noises in the back of her throat, as if she were having a bad dream. Her face had some color in it, and the monitors on the shelf above her head were busier than they had been the last time. Janet had talked to the attending physician, who told her that Lynn had started talking—babbling might be a better word for it—at 3:30 that morning. The collective opinion was that she would be coming around soon. Janet asked how soon was soon. The collective opinion was that it was anybody’s guess. The marvels of modern medicine, Janet thought.

As she watched the girl wrestle with the web of unconsciousness, Janet was struggling with her own dilemma. In her mind, she was coming down on the side of a real human-made explosion out there at the arsenal, if only because of the timing. That thing had gone off when a bunch of people had come in there and started unlocking doors. If there had been a pool of explosive vapors down there in that tunnel complex, her own little adventure should have set it off, especially when that car went scraping along the concrete. Then there were the two civilians, the McGarands, one a possible homicide victim, whose truck tires had traces of arsenal mud on them, and the other a retired chemical explosives engineer. And not just any engineer, but the senior engineer at the Ramsey Arsenal. Both of them were blood relations to a guy who had been incinerated at the Waco holocaust.

And now the surviving McGarand has just flat-assed disappeared, with Kreiss apparently hot on his tail. And all three federal agencies involved, two of which had been responsible for what happened at Waco, were busy going head down, tail up in the bureaucratic ostrich position.

Oh, and now some shark-eyed dolly with a half-inch-thick karate callus on her hands wanted Janet to relay a love note to Edwin Kreiss.

She looked up. Lynn Kreiss was staring at her, trying to speak. Janet got up and went over to the bed. The girl’s lips seemed to be dry, so Janet poured her a glass of water.

“I’m Special Agent Janet Carter,” she said softly.

“I’m with the FBI. Are you thirsty?”

The girl nodded and Janet helped her sip some water. Lynn cleared her throat and then asked Janet what time it was.

Janet told her what day it was, what had happened out at the arsenal, and how long she’d been out of touch here in the hospital. The girl

drank some more water and then Janet said she was going to summon the nurses but that she needed to talk to Lynn after that, if she was able.

“Where’s my father?” Lynn asked.

“We don’t know,” Janet said after a second’s hesitation.

“He wasn’t involved in the explosion. Personally, I think he’s up in Washington chasing down the guy who kidnapped you.”

“Guys,” Lynn said. Her voice was gaining strength, and she sat up a little in the bed.

“There were two of them, a young guy and an older guy, although I only got a quick look at them, when my friends hit the leg traps.”

“Leg traps?”

The girl explained what had happened to her two friends. She reiterated that she had seen only the two men, one much older than the other.

Both guys had black beards and looked like mountain men.

“Yes, that’s what we have,” Janet said.

“The younger guy’s name was Jared McGarand; he’s dead. The older guy is his grandfather, Browne McGarand, and he’s missing.” She told Lynn what had happened to Jared, then asked her what had happened to the boys’ remains. Lynn didn’t know, other than that the water had covered them up. She closed her eyes for a moment, and Janet gave her a minute to rest.

“The younger one—you said he’s dead?”

“Yes,” Janet said.

“An apparent homicide.” She didn’t feel it was the time to discuss her father’s possible involvement.

“Good riddance,” Lynn said.

“That guy was a serious creep.”

“Lynn, when the medics picked you up, you were sort of babbling something about a hydrogen bomb and Washington.”

“I was?”

“Yes. It didn’t make much sense, but it got everybody’s attention.”

Lynn frowned for a moment, and then her face cleared.

“Oh, yes, I do remember. The other one, the older one, told me he was taking a hydrogen bomb to Washington. I said, Yeah, right, like he could just make a hydrogen bomb with some plans off the Web. He said it wasn’t what I thought.”

Oh shit, Janet thought.

“Any indication of what he was going to do with this bomb?”

Lynn frowned again, trying to remember.

“No,” she said.

“Wait—yes.

He said he was going after what he called ‘a legitimate target.”

” Janet studied the girl. There was a toughness there, despite her

current physical frailty. Definitely her father’s daughter.

“Did he sound like a nutcase?”

“Yes and no. He wasn’t raving. He was calm, sort of matter-of-fact. But fanatical, maybe—remember, I could only hear him. He said he’d made a hydrogen bomb, that he was taking it to Washington. Like it was a routine deal, something he did every day. That made it kinda scary, you know?”

Janet nodded, writing it all down in her notebook.

“I wonder why he would tell you,” she said.

“He implied I was supposed to be insurance, a hostage or something, if things went wrong. He told me to get ready to go, but then he never came back. The next thing that happened was that the building fell in on me.

But that was much later.”

Something was playing in the back of Janet’s mind. What had that older aTF guy said—that this had been a gas explosion?

“When he said hydrogen bomb, and you challenged that, and he said it wasn’t what you thought—I wonder if he meant a hydrogen gas bomb?”

Lynn shrugged and then winced. Janet knew that feeling. She stepped out into the hallway and summoned the nurse. Then there was a crowd and Janet backed out into the hall to let the docs do their thing. She went down the hall to the waiting room, which was empty. She fished out her cell phone but then hesitated. She needed to call her immediate supervisor, Larry Talbot, to tell him what had happened to the two boys. There were parents to be notified, and, of course, remains to be found. But there was a bigger question here: That Agency woman wanted her to page some kind of a warning threat to Kreiss. But here was the daughter confirming that Browne McGarand was up to something that did involve a bomb and Washington, D.C. She should report that immediately, but would anybody listen? Her bosses seemed to be so caught up in protecting their rice bowls right now that there might be nobody listening.

She called Talbot, got his voice mail, and told him what Lynn had said about the missing kids. Then she put a call into Farnsworth’s office. The secretary said he was not available. She asked for Keenan, but he was with Farnsworth. Where was the RA? Out, the secretary said helpfully. Feeling like a child, Janet almost hung up, but then she gave the secretary the news about Lynn Kreiss being awake, and that she, Janet, needed to talk to the RA urgently, as in, Now would be nice. The secretary was unimpressed, but she said she would pass it along. Janet gave her the number for her cell phone.

 

She went back down to I.C.U to talk to Lynn some more, but the doctors were busy and the nurses forbidding. It was now almost three o’clock.

She stood there in the busy corridor, thinking, while a stream of hospital traffic parted indifferently around her, as if she were an island. In three hours, she was supposed to page Kreiss for his wake-up call. If he still had the pager, and if he had it turned on. She could just hear him saying, Now what, Special Agent? In that weary voice of his. Now what, indeed. I’ve got good news and bad news. Your daughter is conscious and apparently doing okay. She says one of the guys who kidnapped her is taking a hydrogen bomb to Washington. If you’re interested, that is. Oh, and an old friend of yours stopped by with a message—want to hear it? And Kreiss would go, Nope, busy right now. Bye. Her cell phone rang. It was Farnsworth’s secretary: “Get back here now.”

Kreiss nosed his rented Ford 150 van into the truck stop off the Van Dorn Street Beltway exit in Alexandria. It wasn’t much of a truck stop, not compared with the interstate facilities, but he had to check it out. His exit guide listed only two such facilities on or near the Beltway, not counting trucking terminals. This was the third trucking terminal he’d stopped into on his circuit of Washington’s infamous 1-495. It was midafternoon, and he knew that in about a half hour or so he would have to quit until after rush hour, because nothing moved during rush hour around Washington.

There were a dozen trucks parked at this stop, and three more filling up in the fuel lanes. No propane truck was in evidence. It was possible, of course, that McGarand had put the thing in a garage somewhere, and he had made a mental note to look up fuel companies in the area and make the rounds of those if the truck stops came up empty. But there was something so nicely anonymous about a truck stop that he was pretty sure that’s where the propane tanker would be. Kreiss believed in the theory that if you want to hide something really well, you hide it in plain sight. He drove the van around the parking lot and behind the store and rest facilities building. No propane tanker. He got back out onto the Beltway and headed east, toward the Wilson Bridge and the crossing into Maryland.

He had a terrible feeling he was wasting time.

A stone-faced Farnsworth was waiting in his office when Janet got back to the Roanoke office. Keenan was with him when Janet took a seat in front of the RA’s desk. He asked her to debrief him on what Lynn Kreiss had told her. When she was finished, he turned in his swivel chair and looked

 

out the window for a long minute. Janet looked over at Keenan, but his expression was noncommittal. He seemed to be uncomfortable with what was going on, but willing to go along. Farnsworth swiveled his chair back around.

“Okay,” he said.

“I’m glad the girl’s going to recover. I’m sorry the other two kids didn’t make it. Larry Talbot is going to make family notification, and we’re sending in some search teams to see if we can find remains.”

“The county people are getting up a search team and a canine unit,” Keenan said.

“Larry’s coordinating it.”

“Good,” Farnsworth said. As best Janet could tell, the RA was only minimally interested in the resolution of the case of the missing college kids.

“Now, this other business: You have a page to make at six P.M.” right?”

“Yes, that’s what Mata Hari wanted me to do. I wanted to ask you about—” Farnsworth was shaking his head.

“No,” he said.

“Make the page. If he calls back, give him whatever message she wants. Then I hope we’re done with the Edwin Kreiss affair. His daughter’s been recovered, and the other two missing persons have been … accounted for.”

“But what about the girl’s statement? That Browne McGarand’s going to Washington with a bomb?”

“You said she said she was blindfolded,” Farnsworth said.

“We have no evidence that Browne McGarand has ever even been to the arsenal or that he was the man who abducted Lynn Kreiss.”

“Then show her his picture,” she said.

“She saw them both in the storm. It just about has to be him. She described him as a big man with a huge beard. Looked like a mountain man.”

Farnsworth and Keenan exchanged looks.

“What we know is that jared McGarand’s truck had been parked outside the arsenal fence. We have no evidence that he himself penetrated that arsenal perimeter, either.”

Janet frowned. What the hell was this? Farnsworth was sounding like a barracks lawyer.

“There were two people involved in Lynn’s abduction,” she said.

“One young, one much older. She was abducted inside the arsenal.

She saw them both and can identify them. We found her inside the arsenal, so they must have been inside the arsenal, too. Doing what? She said that the older man told her he was holding her as a possible hostage, in case things went wrong with his little H-bomb project in Washington.

She was found in a building right near that power plant. What more do we need?”

 

Her voice had risen with that last question, and she became acutely aware of the way her two supervisors were looking at her. Impertinence was not an attribute much admired within the Bureau. Farnsworth leaned forward.

“We need to adhere to the very explicit guidance we have been given from headquarters. Now, I would very much appreciate it if you would comply with my orders. Make the page. Give Kreiss the message if and when he calls in, nothing more, nothing less.”

What the hell is going on here? she wondered.

“Can I tell him his daughter is back among us?”

Keenan made a noise of exasperation.

“What part of ‘nothing more, nothing less’ don’t you understand, Carter? How about doing what you’re told for a change?”

Janet had never heard Keenan speak this way, but she had about had it.

“How about telling me what’s going on around here?” she countered.

“Why is this office so hell-bent on mind-fucking Edwin Kreiss?”

“You’ve got it wrong, Janet,” Farnsworth said.

“That page will conclude your involvement in the Edwin Kreiss matter. Then you can help Larry Talbot close out the missing persons case.”

“But what about the bomb? Are we just going to sit on that?”

“You’re talking about wholly uncorroborated information, obtained from a young woman who has just awakened from a coma, as if it were evidence. There is no evidence of a bomb, and if there were, bombs are the business of the aTF, and even they are saying there was no bomb.”

Christ, Janet thought. This was like being back in the lab: We know the answer we want; how about a little cooperation here?

“But they don’t know what we do,” she protested.

“Of course they’re saying there’s no bomb!”

Farnsworth closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“I am ordering you to drop this matter.” He opened his eyes.

“And if you can’t accept that order, you have an alternative.”

That shocked her. She sat back in her chair, unable to think of what she should say next. Both Farnsworth and Keenan were watching her, almost expectantly. Then, surprising herself, she fished out her credentials and leaned forward to put them on Farnsworth’s desk. Then she hooked her Sig out of its holster, ejected the clip, and then racked and locked back the slide. A single round popped out onto the floor. Keenan automatically bent to retrieve it. She put the gun on the RA’s desk, as well.

 

“You guys page Kreiss,” she said, getting up.

“This is all fucked up, and I quit.”

She walked out of the RA!s office and went straight upstairs to her cubicle.

Larry Talbot and Billy were in the office. Talbot took one look at her face and asked her what was wrong. She told him she’d just quit. He sat there at his desk with his mouth open.

“You did what? Why? What’s happened now?”

“There’s something way wrong with this Kreiss business,” she began, but then she stopped. Talbot probably wouldn’t know what she was talking about. His expression confirmed that. The intercom phone on his desk buzzed. He picked it up, listened, said, “Yes, sir,” and then hung up.

“Mr. Keenan wants to see you.”

“He can fuck off and die, too,” she said.

“He’s not my boss anymore. I quit and I meant it. I’ll come back later for my desk stuff. They have my piece and credentials. I’m outta here.”

“But, Jan, what the hell—” Larry said, getting up.

“Obviously there’s been some misunderstanding. Look—” “No, Larry. The more I think about what I’ve just done, the better I like it. You got what you need on the missing kids?”

“Um, only the basic story of what happened to them; I was on my way to talk to the Kreiss girl before I did the actual notifications. Hey, look, Jan, why don’t you just take the rest of the day off. You’ve been through a lot. Go home and think about this. Quitting the Bureau—that’s a big deal.”

“It’s the Bureau’s loss, as far as I’m concerned. Think of it as a logical consequence of my being sent down here to this … this backwater. I’m a Ph.D.-level forensic scientist, for Chrissakes. I’m here because I wouldn’t come up with the quote-unquote right answer in an evidentiary hearing.

Now here we go again. I should have quit the last time. And for the last goddamned time, don’t call me Jan!”

Talbot put up his hands in mock surrender and left the office. Billy got up and came over to her cube.

“Hey,” he said gently.

“What the hell was it they wanted you to do?”

“They won’t go after this guy who’s on his way to D.C. with a big-ass bomb. And they won’t let me tell Kreiss that his daughter is in safe hands.

It’s outrageous!”

“What did they want you to do? Quitting is a pretty big step, Janet.”

“The Agency sent some gorgon down here to give Kreiss a message.

 

I’m supposed to be the messenger. I’m just tired of all the lies, Billy. First in the lab, now here. This isn’t what I signed up for. Nice knowing you.”

Billy seemed lost for words, so she grabbed her jacket and her purse and left the office. She was home in thirty minutes, and she went directly into the bathroom to take a long shower. As she stood in the streaming water, she reflected on her decision and concluded that it had been the right move. She realized she needed to put it in writing, and that she also needed to get something in that letter referring to the arsenal case. She smiled then: Bureau habits died hard—she was still thinking about covering her ass, even in the process of resignation.

She turned off the shower, got out, and dried off. She put on fresh underwear and was combing her hair when she heard a noise from the bedroom door. She whirled around and found the Agency woman standing in the doorway. She was wearing slacks and some kind of safari shirt with lots of pockets. Her eyes were invisible behind wraparound black sunglasses.

“Brought you something,” the woman said, proffering a shiny object in her outstretched hand. Janet blinked, focused on it, and then there was a shattering pulse of purple light. The next thing she knew, she was on her back in her bed, completely enveloped in a sticky web of some kind. The individual strands were the consistency of raw yarn and smelled of some strong chemical. Her arms were pinned down at her sides, her hands turned palm-in against her hips. Her legs were bent to one side. She made an instinctive move to escape, but the effort only caused the web to contract everywhere it touched her body. She felt as if she were in an elasticized-rubber onion sack. Only her head was free. Everything she looked at had a purple penumbra, and the center focus other vision was a haze of small black dots. The woman was sitting calmly at Janet’s dressing table, watching her, her sunglasses gone now. Janet tried to think of something clever to say, but there was no escaping the fact that she was lying on her bed, in nothing but her underwear, trussed like a de boned turkey. She tried to blink away the haze of purple-black spots. The woman’s expression was totally blank.

“So that’s a retinal disrupter?” Janet asked.

“Yes. The spots will go away in about an hour. Usually, there’s no permanent damage done.”

“Usually? That’s comforting. And you did this—why?”

“To ensure you’d make the page, Agent Carter.”

“I’m not Agent anybody anymore,” Janet said.

 

“Especially because of that.” The woman looked at her watch.

“We have a little over an hour. I’ve arranged for the return call to bounce here, and then you’ll give him the message I asked you to give him. Still remember it?”

“What if I don’t?” Janet asked.

“What if I simply tell him to run like hell?”

“Same difference,” the woman said.

“That’s what my message is designed to do anyway. It’s just more effective if he knows it’s me. But I think you’ll want to do it my way.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll go get another capture curtain and wrap it around your throat. Then you could practice some very care mi breathing until someone finds you. Think of it as Lamaze with a twist. Whenever that might be, now that you’re… unattached, shall we say? Why don’t you relax now. Attend to your breathing. That stuff’s like a boa constrictor:

It tightens on the exhale, as I suspect you’ve discovered.”

Janet had indeed discovered that.

“Why the hell are you doing this?

Taking down another federal agent?”

“But you’re not a federal agent anymore, are you, Carter?” the woman said sweetly.

“Not that you ever were. An agent, I mean.”

“Huh?

“Janet said.

“You were a glorified lab rat, Carter. As a street agent, you’re a joke.

You’ve got the situational awareness of a tree. I was standing in that doorway the whole time you were taking a shower.”

“Enjoy the view?” Janet asked.

The woman cocked her head to one side and gave Janet the once-over, staring at her body just long enough for Janet to blush.

“You’re nicely made, for a breast-Fed,” she said.

“Was that why they sent you to get close to Kreiss?”

“That probably wasn’t their brightest idea,” Janet said, trying to feel how much give there was in the yarn. Not very damn much.

The Agency woman laughed once.

“Edwin Kreiss has zero time for amateurs,” she said.

“Of any stripe. What’d they do—tell you to show a little leg, bat your eyes at him?”

“Why are you doing this?” Janet asked again, trying to strain against the sticky web without showing it.

“Because now you’re just another annoying civilian who’s getting in my way. Stop testing the curtain. You can permanently damage your circulation.

Lie still. Rest your eyes. Take a nap. I’ll wake you when it’s time.”

 

The woman left the room, and Janet immediately tried to move her hands. The sticky rubbery substance clung to her skin like shrink-wrap, but it did give when she pushed out with the back of her right hand. But when she relaxed, it tightened, and she realized that it was now noticeably tighter than it had been. She thought about several coils of the chemical yarn around her throat and involuntarily swallowed. Then she remembered the discussion in Farnsworth’s office about the capture curtain, and the fact that it was water-soluble. If she could roll off the bed and get to the bathroom without Medusa out there hearing her, she could get it off.

She looked around, trying to figure out how to move quietly with her legs bent sideways like that, and saw the three strands that went around the right-hand bedpost. Shit. So much for that idea.

She closed her eyes. Okay, she thought, so make the call. Do what this bitch says. Hell, Kreiss might not even answer the page. She opened her eyes, suddenly afraid. He’d better answer the page, she thought. She wondered where he was.

Kreiss was sitting in the parking lot of a fast-food joint three blocks from the Beltway interchange with U.S. Route 1. He was munching on a lukewarm, well-oiled three-dollar heart attack when he heard the pager chirping in the duffel bag behind his seat. He put the grease burger down and turned around to get at the pager. He’d forgotten he had it. The number in the window made him sit right up, though: It had been his own unlisted office number when he was at the Agency. Now who the hell was sending this little summons? He didn’t have to write the number down, so he simply cleared the pager, which beeped at him gratefully. There was a phone booth at the edge of the parking lot, but there were two very fat teenaged girls hanging on it, so he went back to his gourmet extravaganza. He had been through all the truck stops and terminals on the northern Virginia side and was now working up the nerve to cross the Wilson Bridge, Washington’s monument to uncivil engineering. He had planned to wait another half hour for rush hour to subside somewhat and to make sure no big semis had fallen through the bridge deck today.

The girls finally left the phone booth in gales of laughter, multiple chins jiggling in unison. He started to get out but then hesitated. It was just after 6:00 on a Monday evening. The pager had belonged to Janet Carter, which meant it was Bureau equipment. Now someone had called it and left a northern Virginia phone number on it that no one in the Bureau should have had access to. Ergo, this wasn’t a Bureau summons.

 

He turned on the cabin light and examined the pager for signs of a second antenna, something that might transmit his location when he had acknowledged the message. Then it occurred to him that this might be about Lynn. Hell with it, he thought.

He got out and went over to the phone booth, which reeked of chewing gum and cheap perfume when he cracked open the door. He dialed the number. It rang four times before being picked up, and, to his surprise, it was Janet Carter.

“Is this about Lynn?” he asked.

“I have a message for you,” Janet said in a wooden voice.

“From whom?”

“The message is as follows: Tenebrae factae sunt.”

“What—” he said, but the connection had been broken. And then the message penetrated. Almost in slow motion, he put the handset back on the hook and backed out of the booth. He walked back to the van, got in, and started it up. Hamburger forgotten, he drove out of the parking lot, turned left when he came to Route 1, and headed south, away from the Beltway.

Well, well, well, he thought. Tenebrae factae sunt. Darkness has fallen.

Misty’s coming. That was the nickname she’d been given, in memory of the psychotic woman character who kept calling Clint Eastwood to play “Misty” for her in that movie. The message was her trademark. It was supposed to spook him, and in a way, it did. Misty was in her fifties, looked forty the last time he had seen her, and had been the preeminent stalker in the stable, bar none. Kreiss had concluded a long time ago that Misty had a Terminator personality. She was either sitting up there on her shelf, like some neighborhood black hole, absorbing light, motion, sound, everything that was going on around her, with those disturbing black eyes staring into infinity with perfect indifference, or she was on the move, morphing through keyholes or running down cars, a human Velociraptor, leading with her teeth. She tracked like a damned adult mamba, moving fast through the bush on a molecular prey trail, its head and upper body occasionally coming up and off the ground, testing the air with its tongue, looking, eager to deliver a fatal strike, hunting because it liked to.

He had trained under her supervision for two years before getting his first operational assignment, so there was nothing that he knew that she didn’t also know. Well, maybe a couple of things, he thought hopefully.

But realistically, he was now, officially and irrevocably—put it on the evening news, folks—in deep shit. He would have to abandon

immediately his pursuit of Browne McGarand and look to his own defenses.

Maybe head out to Dulles and get on the evening flight to Zanzibar, or, better yet, lower Patagonia. That would be about the right distance.

Except he’d probably just be finishing the evening meal when she appeared out of the cockpit. The only chance he had was if Misty was going solo and had not brought along a cast of thousands. Given the history, she might well be solo. Misty was a sport.

He drove down Route 1 for twenty minutes until he came to the entrance to Fort Belvoir, where he turned in. Belvoir was an open post, the home of the Army Corps of Engineers School, so there were no gates or guards. But it was still a military reservation, and it seemed safer to stop there than out on the street. He drove around the cam puslike facility for a few minutes before parking the van in front of the main post exchange complex. He shut the van down and closed his eyes, commanding his brain to organize and think about his situation.

Misty was coming. She’d used Janet Carter as her messenger, which meant that Janet was having a bad evening. Daniella Morganavicz was her real name. Her parents had supposedly emigrated from Serbia, and she had clearly inherited the ruthless faculties of that bloody-minded tribe.

Somebody at Langley must be really worried if Misty had been put in play.

Then the pager went off again.

He looked down at the little device and thought about throwing it out the window. The first page had been the warning; was this one Misty making a tracking call? He looked at the number in the window. It was the Roanoke area code and a number he didn’t recognize. Carter again?

He had rented a cell phone with the van, but wanted to save using that for when he was certain someone was hunting him. How certain do you want it? he thought, remembering the warning. He looked around for a phone booth and finally saw a bank of them by the exchange entrance. He looked at the number again and then turned the pager off without acknowledging the call. He got out, threw the pager into a concrete flower planter, and walked over to the bank of pay phones. He dialed the number, entered his credit-card number, and waited. The credit card would tie him to this place, but he hadn’t really begun to run and hide yet, so that shouldn’t matter. Emphasis on the shouldn’t. It was Carter who answered.

“Sorry about being rude,” she said.

“That goddamned woman was here. Do you know whom I mean?”

 

“Oh yes,” he said.

“Tallish? Black eyes? Absorbs ambient light?”

“That’s the one. Said you would understand that message to mean she was coming for you.”

“Clear as a bell. Why are you calling me?”

“I’m on a pay phone. My phone is being tapped, I think. I called because I need to talk to you, first about your daughter, and second about what’s going on.”

He felt a clang of alarm when she mentioned Lynn.

“What about Lynn?”

“She’s awake. I was there when she came around. I think she’s going to be fine—no apparent mental damage. We talked. She told me what happened out there at the arsenal. The other two kids apparently got caught in some kind of traps and were drowned by a flash flood.”

“Yes, I found leg traps.”

“Well, she also told me some stuff about the guy I think you’re hunting.

It involves a bomb, and I think I know what it is. I—” “Hold on a minute, Carter. I’m not hunting anyone.”

There was a moment’s hesitation.

“I think you are, or at least you were,” she said.

“I think you were hunting one Browne McGarand, because he kidnapped Lynn. I also think you did something to his grandson, Jared.”

She stopped talking, but he decided to remain silent.

“This woman—is she a real threat?” Janet asked.

“What do you think?” When she didn’t answer, he explained her nickname.

“Scared me just to look at her,” Janet said.

“I think she took it as a given that you’d be afraid other, too.”

“Which is why I have to go now, Carter.”

“I’ve quit the Bureau,” she said.

That surprised him.

“What happened?”

“They wanted me to do something that I didn’t want to do. They wanted me to page you for the Dragon Lady.”

“But you did anyway.”

“Because she showed up here at my house and dazzled me with her personality and some nasty little number you people call a ‘retinal disrupter!”

Then she trussed me up in some kind of sticky shit and told me that things would go poorly for me if I didn’t do what she said. I elected to do what she said.”

“That was the correct decision. Carter.”

 

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Humiliating, maybe, but ultimately smart.

But that was only the half of it. I quit because, originally, they wanted me to tell you they’d found Lynn but that she had not survived.”

It was his turn to be silent for a moment.

“Sweet,” he said.

“Well, it kind of offended me, too. But I was able to talk Farnsworth out of that. Games like that—not my style. Then this shit with Dracula’s daughter. Even Farnsworth wouldn’t mess with her.”

“Your boss knows the real thing when he sees it,” he said, looking around at the darkening parking lot. If Misty had been in Roanoke at 6:00 P.M. he had a few hours before she could be here, but no more than that.

Unless she had helpers, and of course she might. Time to go. And yet—he owed this woman.

“You really put a snake in a guy’s car?” Janet asked, seemingly out of nowhere.

Ransom, he thought.

“No, a tape of a snake. But you’re asking about Misty? She likes things visual. She cut the rattles off a snake and stuffed the thing into the back pocket of a guy’s bucket seat. He never heard it buzz, of course, but he did get to see it in his mirror just before it slid over his shoulder and dropped into his lap. What’s this about a bomb?”

Janet filled him in on what she had been doing since Kreiss had pulled her out of the tunnels. She emphasized McGarand’s ties to the Waco disaster.

Krless didn’t say anything when she finished. The bureaucrats never change, he thought. He wondered if he should tell her about the propane truck.

“Are you still there?”

“I have to go,” he said, cutting her off.

“And I dumped your pager. It’s in a flower planter in front of the main exchange at Fort Belvoir, if you’re interested.”

“Do you think that McGarand’s taken a bomb to Washington?”

“It’s possible. But that’s not my problem anymore, Carter. You recovered my daughter, like you said you would. I thank you for that. I’ve got other problems right now.”

“But—” “Does that woman know about Lynn?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible. She was there in the Roanoke office when I got there. I don’t know what Farnsworth told her. But why—oh.”

“Yeah, oh.”

Another silence.

“Would you like me to go to the hospital? Stay with her until you can get back here?”

 

“I appreciate the offer, but in what capacity? You’re not with the Bureau anymore.”

“Everybody tells me I was a shitty agent. How about as just a human, perhaps?”

He laughed but hesitated. If he went back to Blacksburg, he might walk directly into a trap. But if he didn’t, and Misty took Lynn, then he’d have no choices at all. Carter was no match for Misty, but she might be better than no one at all. And Misty would never take Carter seriously, so Carter, suitably warned, might have a chance to do something.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said.

“I have a neighbor out there near my cabin.

Name’s Micah Wall. He has a phone. And he’s got lots of kinfolk, as they call them. They’re mountain people. They’re pretty decent people, although they don’t look it. If Lynn can be moved, maybe you could get her out of that hospital and into Micah’s hands.”

“I can sure as hell try,” Janet said.

“If they’ll release her into my custody.”

“Lynn’s over twenty-one. Technically, I think she can release herself, as long as there’s no medical issue. Take her to my cabin, make sure you’re not followed, and then call Micah. I think he’ll know what to do, and I’m also pretty sure he and his boys can make it tough for Misty if she tries them on. But you’ll have to move fast.”

“I will. Now, how’s about a quid pro quo: I seem to be the only person down here who thinks McGarand has gone to D.C. on a bombing mission.

My bosses, my ex-bosses, are suddenly not interested in hearing that, based, I think, on guidance they’re getting from Bureau headquarters.

If you have something, some evidence, I can give to Farnsworth, and then maybe I can ask that they protect Lynn in return.”

Kreiss shook his head slowly in the darkness.

“You are depressingly naive for an ex-special agent,” he said with a sigh.

“Your boss has been told to assist this woman who is coming after me, not get in her way.

Those orders probably came from Bureau headquarters, if not Justice. At this juncture, I’ll bet Farnsworth won’t even take your calls.”

“But that explosion at the arsenal was huge. If there’s anything like that being planned for Washington, we have to do something!”

“Look, Carter. If there’s a bomb here in Washington, that’s your ex employer problem. Or actually, it’s aTF’s problem.”

“But they won’t even admit the possibility, or at least that’s their official stance. They keep saying there’s no direct evidence. Please, can’t you tell me something?”

 

Kreiss thought about it. Carter sounded frantic, and she still cared, even if she had left the Bureau. And she was going to help him with Lynn.

“Okay. Tell ‘em this: McGarand left Blacksburg driving a propane truck. I saw that truck at the arsenal, inside the power plant.”

“Propane truck?”

“I’ve got to roll, Carter. Listen to me: If Misty needs a distraction to get Lynn out of that hospital, she’s most likely to start a fire. So be prepared.

Take a gun if you have one.”

“I’ll give it my best shot,” Janet said.

Her best shot, he thought, giving a mental sigh. Right through her foot, probably.

“Okay,” he said.

“And whatever happens with Lynn, thank you. Big-time.”

“Can you stop McGarand?”

“Stop him? I can’t even find him.”

“But if you do, you can do better than revenge, Mr. Kreiss. You might prevent a tragedy. You say he has a propane truck. I think he has a truckload of hydrogen. That would make a helluva truck bomb.”

“This what you really mean by quid pro quo, Carter? You get my daughter out of harm’s way if I’ll prevent a bombing?”

“I’ll try to help your daughter regardless, Mr. Kreiss. But right now, the people who mean you harm are depending on your staying true to form: an eye for an eye, blood for blood, heads on pikes. Why don’t you try doing a good deed for once? Think of how badly that would confound your enemies.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. Impudent goddamn woman.

“Now that you’re a civilian, you’re getting devious, Carter,” he said.

“Hey?” she said.

“What?”

“You ever going to call me by my first name?”

“Don’t know you well enough,” he replied.

“Gotta boogie.”

He hung up the phone and strode back to the van, kicking an empty Coke can halfway across the parking lot. He got in and slammed the door shut.

Decision time. Ever since his termination, he had had some preplanned disappearance arrangements in place. But until he knew that Lynn was safe, he wasn’t really free to move. The next twenty-four hours would be crucial. Misty was already in Roanoke, and he had not been exaggerating about her starting a fire. Even in a hospital, it was what he would have done. He hadn’t given Carter anywhere near enough

information to prepare herself for what Misty might do. He considered calling her back, then decided against it. His using the telephone credit card would bring someone here pretty quick. He had to move. The question of where didn’t matter all that much right now.

But what to do about McGarand? He was not about to indulge in altruism at this late stage in his life. On the other hand, Carter was right from a tactical standpoint: Misty and company would expect him to bolt, to go to ground, possibly to a hidey-hole they already knew about. If instead he continued to hunt McGarand, that would be unexpected. He’d already spun his wheels looking for that truck. Maybe he was going about this the wrong way. Instead of looking for a rolling truck bomb, maybe he ought to look for the truck bomb’s target. If this was about Waco, that left two possibilities, both of them easy targets for a determined truck bomber. He started up and drove out of the exchange parking lot, heading back to Route 1 and Washington. He thought about Carter. She’d do, for an amateur.

Janet hung up the phone and got back into her car. She was dressed in jeans and a sweater, having had to take a second shower to get all that sticky crap off once the woman had released her arms and hands. She drove back to her town house from the convenience store. Propane truck, she thought. Hydrogen bomb. She shivered at the thought. That aTF expert had said it had been a gas explosion. Okay: A propane truck was designed to carry gas, or at least she was pretty sure it was. Or was propane a liquid? Damn! But she’d been right: Kreiss had gone after McGarand, which, as far as she was concerned, confirmed that McGarand was already in Washington. With a propane truck fall of—what?

Propane? Or hydrogen? Either one, she thought. Either one would generate a real crowd-pleaser.

She got home, parked, and went in. She went through the house to make sure there was no one else there. Situational awareness of a tree-bitch had hurt her feelings. So what was the target? Lynn had said the bearded man claimed to be going after a “legitimate target.” As in, I’m going after combatants, not innocent civilians. McGarand had lost his only son at Waco. Son of a bitch, she thought with a sudden cold certainty:

He’s going after Bureau headquarters. The FBI had been in charge at Waco, at least by the time the Mount Carmel compound had been torched. Aided and abetted by their smaller cousins, the BATE She looked at her

watch: It was almost seven o’clock. She went into the kitchen and dialed into the Roanoke FBI office, got the after-hours tape, and hit the extension for the RAs office. There was no answer, then main voice mail. She hung up, remembered he’d given her his home number, but then couldn’t find it. The number was in her case notebook, which was in her office. Her ex-office, she reminded herself. She looked Farnsworth up in the phone book for the Roanoke area. Not listed. She called the Roanoke office number back. When the tape came up, she hit three digits and her call was forwarded to the day’s duty officer, an agent who worked in the felony fraud squad. His phone was in use, but she did get his voice mail. She groaned, then left a message that she needed to get an urgent message to the RA about a possible bomb threat against Bureau headquarters and gave her home number. Then she hung up and went to make a cup of coffee. The phone rang in five minutes, and it was the duty officer, Special Agent Jim Walker.

“Got your call,” he said.

“Called the boss, gave him your message and your phone number. But don’t hold your breath. Is it true you resigned today?”

“Yes, I did, but I have new information.”

“Well, um, what the boss said was, and I quote, “Janet Carter no longer works for the Bureau, and one of the reasons is that she’s become obsessed with this notion of a bomb threat to Washington. I may call her and I may not.” Okay?”

His tone was faintly patronizing, with none of the familiar agent-to agent courtesy. It pissed her off, but she held her anger in check.

“No, not okay,” she said quickly.

“Please, would you make one more call?”

“Hey, Carter—” “Please! I know you think you’re dealing with a hysterical female. But look, if there is a bombing, do you want to be the one link in the chain of precursor events that did not pass on vital information? When some independent prosecutor comes investigating? Remember Waco? This involves Waco.”

Walker didn’t say anything, and she knew she’d touched a nerve. These days everyone in the Bureau considered his or her every action in light of what might happen later if the case, investigation, or operation recoiled on them. She pressed him.

“Just call Farnsworth back and tell him that Browne McGarand, that’s Browne with an e, went to Washington with a propane truck. That the hydrogen bomb isn’t a nuclear device—it’s hydrogen gas, which is what probably did the arsenal power plant. Got all that?”

 

“That explosion at the arsenal? Hydrogen bomb? Are you fucking serious?”

“Please, Jim, just make the call. Please? Tell him exactly what I just told you.” She repeated it.

“If he chews your ass for bothering him, tell him you’re so sorry, hang up, log the call, and go back to watching TV. But then if something happens, it’s on him, not you, right?”

Walker reluctantly agreed to make the call and hung up. Janet let out a long sigh: She had done the best she could. If they chose to ignore this, then it would indeed be on their heads. She wondered if she shouldn’t put a call into Bureau headquarters operations, but then she realized she didn’t have the number. It was in her official phone book at her office, at her ex-office, she realized again. She’d get what any civilian who called the Bureau headquarters would get: a polite tape recording introducing the caller to a menu labyrinth. Life was going to be very different now that she wasn’t part of the most powerful law-enforcement organization in the country. Those FBI credentials had given her almost automatic entree into any place or situation. Now she was just Janet Carter, unemployed civilian. She almost felt a bit naked. But at least now Kreiss would have to stop calling her “Special Agent.”

She went into the kitchen, wanting a drink, not coffee, but satisfied herself with the coffee. She was hoping the phone would ring again, with Farnsworth on the other end this time. But he didn’t call. That damned Kreiss. She started pacing her kitchen floor. How long should she wait?

Kreiss had been pretty specific about her moving quickly to protect his daughter. That might end up being a tough play, especially now that she no longer had any standing as a law-enforcement official. On the other hand, Lynn had seemed pretty strong, and stashing the girl with a bunch of mountain hillbillies might be the perfect answer, especially if they were his friends.

She got out the area phone book and found a number for an M. Wall on Kreiss’s road. The phone rang, but there was no answer. She wrote down the number on a scrap of paper, put it in her pocket, finished her coffee, and went back upstairs to her bedroom. She took out the Detective’s Special hidden in her sock drawer and then rooted around in the closet until she found the waist holster for it. She checked to make sure it was loaded, then clipped it on her jeans waistband in the small of her back, pulling the sweater down over it. She checked the dial tone of her phone to make sure she hadn’t missed a call, grabbed her car keys, and left for Blacksburg.

 

Forty minutes later, she checked in with the main reception desk at the Montgomery County Hospital and learned that Lynn had been moved from I.C.U to a semiprivate room on the fourth floor. She took the elevator upstairs and was relieved to see that there was no longer a police officer stationed outside the girl’s door. Lynn’s door was open, and she appeared to be dozing in the semi darkened room. It was after visiting hours, but the nurse who had been in I.C.U the day before remembered Janet and waved her by. The girl woke up when Janet came into the room and gently shut the door.

“Hey,” Janet said.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better,” Lynn said.

“The deputy got me some real food before he left.

Made a big improvement over Jell-0.”

“Do you feel up to moving?”

“Moving? As in out of here?”

“Yes. As in checking out and coming with me. Per your father’s urgent instructions. There’s someone after him, and that someone may try to take you in order to trap your father.”

” What!” Lynn exclaimed, sitting up in the bed.

“But he’s retired. Who’s after him? And why?”

“Lynn, I’ll tell you everything once we’re in the car. But your old man gave me the impression we have minutes, not hours. Do you have clothes here?”

The girl looked around the room with a bewildered expression.

“I

don’t know—check that closet.”

Janet got up and looked in the closet, where there were a pair of battered jeans, a shirt, a jacket, and some hiking shoes. There was no underwear or socks. She brought it all out and then turned away to give Lynn some privacy. The girl got dressed, but it was obvious that she was still pretty weak. Janet had to help her tie the laces on her hiking shoes. She explained quickly about the Agency woman, and she also told Lynn she had resigned from the FBI over the handling of the bombing case. Lynn put her hand on Janet’s forearm.

“Describe the woman,” she said. Janet did, emphasizing the extraordinary black eyes, pale white face, and the detached, almost lifeless expression.

“Shit,” Lynn said.

“I think she’s been here. But she was dressed like a doctor. She stopped by my door about, oh, I don’t know, an hour ago? I was dozing, but I remember that face. There’d been docs coming and going all afternoon. But I distinctly remember that face.”

 

“What did she do?”

“Nothing. She stood in the doorway. I was kind of tired of being poked and prodded all day, so I didn’t really open my eyes. But when she looked at me, I had the feeling she knew I was watching her. It was creepy.” Lynn looked pale and drawn, and her clothes appeared to be too big for her. She sat on the edge of the bed and held herself upright with rigid arms.

“She’s apparently pretty dangerous,” Janet said.

“I’ll tell you more in the car. But first we have to get you out of here and not spend three hours doing paperwork. I—” Just then, from outside the room, came the jarring blare of an alarm system, which emitted five obnoxious Klaxon noises, followed by an announcement that there was an electrical fire on the second floor and that all floors were to begin evacuation procedures. Then came five more blats, with the announcement repeated. There was an immediate bustle of people and gurneys out in the hallway.

“Quick,” Janet said, going to the door, cracking it, and looking out into the corridor.

“Your father said this is how she’d do it—start a fire and grab you in the confusion.” Two nurses went hurrying by, one pushing two wheelchairs in front of her, while the other consulted a metal clipboard and talked on a cell phone. There was another wheelchair parked across the corridor from Lynn’s door. Janet stepped out, grabbed the wheelchair, and pulled it back into Lynn’s room. The fire alarm sounded again, repeating the fire announcement. We got it, we got it, Janet found herself thinking.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said.

Lynn sat down in the wheelchair. Janet folded a blanket over Lynn’s legs and rolled her out into the corridor. Janet knew the elevators would have gone out of service, which meant that everyone would head for the stairs. They joined a procession of nurses and patients, some ambulatory, some in wheelchairs, and a couple of frightened patients being pushed on gurneys. The movement was orderly toward the end of the corridor, where Janet could see red exit signs. But suddenly, the overhead lights went out and there was a wave of concerned noises up and down the corridor.

Small emergency lights along the edge of the ceiling came on, which helped until a sudden and very distinct smell of acrid smoke broke into the hallway from the ventilation ducts. Janet couldn’t see smoke, but she could sure as hell smell it, and it was getting stronger. The parade of wheelchairs and patients surged forward. If the noise was any indication, the level of anxiety had gone way up. She could also hear the sounds of angry congestion down at the end of the corridor near the exit doors.

 

That did it. Janet turned Lynn around and pushed her rapidly back up the darkened hallway, away from the growing traffic jam at the other end.

She went past Lynn’s room and came to a cross-corridor intersection. She looked both ways but saw no exit doors. The smell of smoke was getting stronger, and now there was a gray pall building along the ceiling. Janet turned around to look back at the original route. There appeared to be one large elevator still working, and everyone appeared to be trying to get in it or into the stairwell. It was genuine bedlam down there, with both patients and hospital staff shouting at one another.

“There has to be another exit, at least a stairwell,” Janet said.

“But I sure as hell don’t see it.”

“Try the passenger elevators?” Lynn suggested. Her face was still pale, and she was clutching the blanket as if she was cold.

“They won’t work once the fire alarm’s gone off. Not until the fire trucks get here. That’s probably what’s happened down the hall there.”

The smoke was getting strong enough to sting Janet’s eyes, but the evacuation effort at the other end of the hall sounded as if it was rapidly turning into a disaster as sixty or so people tried to get patients and wheelchairs into the single elevator or down four flights of stairs. Janet decided to look one more time, but after two more minutes of trotting the full length of the cross corridors, she gave up. There really was only one exit down. As she wheeled Lynn back to the intersection, the smoke was thick enough that she could no longer see what was going on down at the exit stairwell. But she could hear it, and it was not a pleasant sound. The smoke stung her eyes and smelled of burning plastic.

“We’re going to have to find a room with an exterior window and wait this thing out,” she said.

“The fire department will have a ladder truck.”

She took Lynn all the way back to the end of the right-hand cross corridor and began looking into every door that wasn’t locked. She finally found a small lab room of some sort that had windows, through which the lights in the parking lot were visible. She wheeled Lynn backward into the room and shut the door. There was a stink of smoke in the room, but it was not as strong as out in the corridor. Sirens were audible outside, although she couldn’t see fire trucks.

“You okay?” she asked Lynn as she searched for towels or rags to stuff under the door.

“Yeah, I’m good. I’d help, but my head is spinning a little.”

“Sit tight. They said the fire was on the second floor. We have one

floor between us and the fire. They’ll have it out pretty damn quick. If it’s electrical, they turn off the power, and that usually stops it.”

As if the building were listening, they heard the sound of big vent fans winding down, and then even the emergency lighting system out in the corridor expired in a clatter of relays as the battery-operated lights came on. Janet saw that Lynn was frightened by this. She tried to reassure her.

“That’s good, actually. I think the vent system was spreading the smoke.

We should be okay up here. This building is mostly concrete.”

“I’m glad we’re not down there in that corridor. That sounded pretty ugly.”

“Amen. As soon as I seal the door cracks, we’ll check out the windows.”

There were three large windows along the back wall of the lab. Enough light came through these from the streetlights in the parking lot for them to move around the lab benches without running into things. Janet found some paper towels and stuffed them along the bottom crack of the door.

With the ventilation system off, the smoke didn’t seem to be getting any stronger, so she didn’t bother with the rest of the door. She found a fire extinguisher and set it out on a lab table. Then red strobe lights lit up the ceiling as a fire engine came around the building, stopped, and began setting up in the parking lot. She tried to open the windows but could not budge them.

“See? They’ll have this mess under control pretty quick. I think we’ll just wait until we hear firemen out in the hall.”

“What about that woman?”

Janet stopped what she was doing. She’d forgotten all about the Terminatrix.

Kreiss had said she might do something like this to cause maximum distraction. She’d forgotten that Lynn thought she’d already seen her in the building. Shit.

She went over to the door and looked for a lock, but it took a key to lock this door. She put her ear to the opaque glass panel in the upper section of the door and listened, but all she could hear were the sounds of firefighting commands over the loudspeakers on the truck outside.

There were more strobe lights out in the parking lot now. She looked around for a way to block the door, and found a lab table that could be moved. She slid it across the floor, but its top edge was two inches too tall to fit under the knob.

“Lift it and wedge it,” Lynn said. She pushed the blanket aside and got out of the wheelchair. She came over to where Janet was standing,

steadying herself on the edge of the lab table. The table, which was six feet long and two feet wide, was made of heavy wood, with a zinc top. The two women lifted the far end and slid the end nearest the door under the doorknob, then gently let the table back down. It wedged under the knob, its back legs off the floor about half an inch. Janet went around and tried the knob, which was now jammed.

“That’ll at least make it feel like it’s locked,” Lynn said. Then she wobbled back to the wheelchair and sat down heavily. Janet saw a sheen of perspiration on the girl’s forehead.

“Good thinking,” Janet said, a little embarrassed that she hadn’t thought of it herself.

“You got a gun?” Lynn asked.

“Yes,” Janet said, patting the lump at the small of her back.

“Good,” Lynn said.

“After all this, if that woman shows up, you better use it. She’s not coming as the fucking welcome wagon, and I’m not going to be abducted again. Had enough of that.”

“We’ll wait until we hear firemen out there, then open the door.”

“Lots of firemen, okay? That creature looked pretty competent to me.”

“Let’s move to the back of the room. If she opens that door, we might still fool her.”

“Not with that table there,” Lynn said.

“You go find a good shooting position. I’ll be at the other end of the room. Give her two directions to cover.”

Janet nodded. The room wasn’t that big, but the girl was making tactical sense.

“Your father give you lessons?” she asked.

“He taught me about situational awareness,” Lynn said.

“I used to go deer hunting with him. You should see him in the woods. He could whack a deer on the ass with a stick before it knew he was there.” Lynn gave her a studied look.

“Can you do it?” she asked.

“Shoot someone? Shoot a woman?”

Janet hesitated. She wanted to say, Of course I can. I’m a big FBI agent now. But she knew that it wasn’t a done deal until she pulled that trigger.

“Because if you can’t, give me the gun. I’m the one she wants. And I’m not going to be taken again, by anybody.” Lynn’s face was set in a mask of determination. Definitely her father’s daughter, Janet thought.

“I can do it if I have to,” she said.

“But I’m not going to just start shooting the moment someone comes through that door, okay? There are rules about that.”

“According to my old man, Agent Carter, the only rule those people

have is that there are no rules. If you’ve got reservations, give me the gun.”

Janet wished Kreiss were here right now. She assessed the room from a tactical standpoint, trying to remember her training at Quantico. The room had four large lab stands, the single table now wedged against the door, several glass-fronted cabinets against the side walls, the window wall overlooking the parking lot, and two desks with PCs. The corridor outside was still darkened, and the room had lots of shadow zones. Lynn had backed her wheelchair into a shadowed corner next to a lab stand. She was doing something with her blanket. Janet moved to the opposite corner, pulled over a trash can, upended it, and sat down behind a bench. She pulled over a stack of notebooks. If she leaned down, her head would be barely visible from the doorway, and she would have the lab bench on which to steady her gun.

“You’re closer,” Janet said.

“She shows up, comes in, shout or say something, talk to her. I’ll keep down. If she has a gun, use the word surprise.

And if you see something small and shiny in her hand, close your eyes immediately.”

“You said you’d tell me what this is all about?”

In low tones, Janet explained about the bombing incident out at the arsenal, the palace games going on among the agencies involved, and what little she knew about the woman pursuing Kreiss. Lynn took it all in without saying anything, leading Janet to wonder just how much the girl knew about her father’s former professional life.

The noise level from outside the building was rising as more fire units came into the parking lot. The sounds of tactical radios could be heard above the steady roar of diesel engines. Janet wondered if the fire was indeed out, and, if so, why there were so many more fire units out there.

The air in the room wasn’t clear, but it wasn’t getting any smokier, either.

“Maybe we ought to get someone’s attention out there,” she said to Lynn.

“Break a window or something. Except I don’t think they’d hear us.”

But Lynn was pointing urgently at the door. Janet turned and saw a dark silhouette on the other side of the cloudy white glass. She got down on one knee, then realized she couldn’t see what was going on with the door handle. She got back up in time to see the table tremble ever so slightly as whoever was out there tried the handle. She reached behind her and drew the .38, checked the loads, and waited, staying upright enough to watch the door handle. The shadow withdrew and she

relaxed fractionally, only to yell in surprise when all the glass in the door shattered and a fully masked fireman thrust a hose nozzle through the broken out window. Janet stood up to get his attention, but she was stunned when he fired a stream of water full force into her face. Her head snapped back and she went flying back into the corner, her gun skittering across the floor into the opposite corner. She tried to get up, but the stream of highpressure water kept coming, rolling her around in the corner of the room like a dog under a truck, until all she could do was curl into a ball while yelling at the guy to stop it. Until she realized that a fireman wouldn’t have done that.

When the stream stopped, she tried frantically to get up, but her eyes were totally out of focus, the eyeballs bruised and stinging from the hard stream of water. By the time she got onto all fours, all she could make out were shapes and shadows, so she couldn’t find her gun. Then she heard Lynn scream, followed by a rocket sound from the other side of the room.

In another moment, Lynn was at her side, grabbing at her, pulling her upright, yelling, “C’mon, c’mon, we gotta move.” She stood up, staggered, and then went with Lynn, blindly banging into the lab stands until they got to the door. Janet felt her foot kick the gun, and she reached down to retrieve it. The table had been shoved aside, so they spilled out into the corridor, which now was murky with smoke. A single portable floodlight stood on the floor, illuminating the doorway. Janet grabbed it and they struggled down the cross corridor through the smoke, keeping low, getting away from the lab room.

“What did you do?” Janet asked.

“Got her with the damn fire extinguisher,” Lynn said.

“Had it under my blanket. She took her mask off and grinned at me, and I shot her right in the face, and then I threw the damn thing at her. Jesus, I can’t breathe in this shit.”

“Stay low,” Janet said.

“There’s more air down here.”

They stumbled over something on the floor—a fireman who appeared to be unconscious, his rubberized coat, breathing rig, and helmet missing.

In the distance was a vertical rectangle of light on the wall.

“The elevator,” Janet shouted.

“The fireman brought a passenger elevator up. Go! Go!”

Lynn staggered through the smoke toward the elevator. Janet grabbed the fireman under his armpits and pulled him backward toward the rectangle of light. Lynn helped her pull the man into the elevator, and then Janet was smacking the buttons to close the door, but nothing was happening.

 

“Use the key,” Lynn said.

“The fireman’s key—I think it controls the door.”

Janet peered down at the console, saw the black cylinder sacking out of the control panel, but she was barely able to read the instructions on operating the elevator with a fire key. Finally, she succeeded in keying the door shut and punching the button for the ground floor. The elevator started down. She slipped down the wall to a sitting position, where she faced Lynn over the prostrate body of the fireman. He looked far too young to be a fireman. She blew a long breath out of her lungs, glad for the marginally fresher air in the elevator.

“Is he breathing?”

“Yes,” Lynn said.

“What do we do now?” She was still pale-faced, but her eyes were bright with excitement.

“We get off at the ground floor and get out to the parking lot. Tell someone about him.”

“What about her?” Lynn said, indicating upstairs.

“I hope she fucking cooks up there. But somehow, I doubt it. And she probably has helpers in the building.” The elevator slowed as it neared the ground floor. She got back up.

“We’re two hysterical women who got trapped upstairs,” she said to Lynn.

“And now we want out and we don’t want to be seen to by EMTs, grief counselors, priests, or anybody else, okay?”

Lynn grinned at her.

“I can do hysterical,” she said as the door opened.

There was a pack of firemen standing right there and Lynn screamed when she saw them. Janet grabbed her and pushed through them.

“One of your guys was down on the fourth floor,” she shouted.

“We got him in and came down. How do we get out of here?”

There wasn’t as much smoke on the ground floor and there were more portable lights stabbing through the gloom. The biggest fireman pointed her in the direction of the front doors as the rest lunged into the cab to tend to their downed mate. Janet heard one of them ask, “Where’s his nicking air rig?” before she and Lynn bolted out the front door and into the blessed coolness of clean, fresh night air. Janet’s eyes were just about back to normal, except that she couldn’t stop blinking. She realized they were on the wrong side of the building: Her car was parked out back of the hospital. It had probably been visible from the lab windows. She told Lynn to wait and said she would go get her car. Lynn said, “no way in hell,” and went right along with Janet.

Ten minutes later, they were out on the main drag and headed south to

intersect Highway 460. She asked Lynn if she knew the number for Micah Wall, but Lynn did not. Then she remembered she’d written it down, and she went fishing for the scrap of paper. It was soaked but still legible. She dialed the number on her cell phone, but there was still no answer.

She explained her plan, and Lynn nodded.

“We’ll be as safe with Micah’s clan as with anyone,” she said.

“But we have to tell him that she’s a revenuer.”

“We? The idea is to protect you, Lynn. I promised your father I’d keep you out of the clutches of that creature back there.” She kept an eye on her rearview mirror.

Lynn was grinning again.

“And who’s going to protect you? Excuse me for saying so, but you’re not very good at this shit, are you?”

Janet felt a spike of irritation, but then she grinned back. Kreiss had said the same thing.

“Believe it or not, I’m getting better,” she said.

“You have no idea. But I wouldn’t mind knowing where your father keeps that fifty-caliber rifle.”

Kreiss drove the van across the Fourteenth Street Bridge into the downtown District of Columbia. Leaving the bridge, he went straight, past the U.S. Mint and toward the Washington Monument grounds, until he cut Independence Avenue, then went right until he came to Tenth Street. A sign on Tenth Street said NO LEFT TURN, but he ignored that and went up to within one block of Constitution Avenue, where he found a parking place. It was just after 10:30, and what traffic there was consisted mostly of cabs and the occasional long black limousine streaking through the nearly empty streets. A Washington Metro cop car was parked across the street; two cops inside appeared to be reading newspapers. They paid him zero attention when he got out of the van, put on a windbreaker, and walked up the street toward Constitution. It was a cloudy night, with a hint of spring rain in the air. He stopped when he got to the corner.

Constitution Avenue was eight lanes wide, in keeping with its ceremonial use, and pedestrians crossed it at night at their considerable peril. By day, the traffic was usually dense enough that it was almost possible for a pedestrian to walk over the cars with impunity. One block away, diagonally to his right, was the FBI headquarters building, the. J. Edgar Hoover Building. It was on Constitution Avenue, between Ninth and Tenth streets, and bounded on the north by Pennsylvania Avenue, which went off at an angle from

Constitution. Architecturally, it was an oddity, which Kreiss thought lent a certain historical consistency to the design, given some of the stories that had surfaced about Hoover after his demise. From overhead, the building was shaped like a hollow rectangle, with the top of the rectangle cut back at an angle to accommodate the diagonal run of Pennsylvania Avenue as it diverged from Constitution. The upper floors were cantilevered out over the streets below, which made the building look top-heavy. Kreiss wondered if the architect had been having some fan with the Bureau’s design committee. The windows were slightly case mated giving the building’s facade a fortresslike character. Most of the windows were still illuminated, although Kreiss could not see people from where he stood. But one thing was for sure: The building was absolutely made for a truck bomb, because that cantilevered overhang would trap any street-level blast and focus its full force directly into the structure.

McGarand had come up here in a propane truck. His son had been killed at Waco. His grandson, who had apparently been helping him in whatever nastiness they’d been doing out there at the arsenal, was now dead. Given the appearance of feds at the arsenal and the subsequent explosion of the power plant, McGarand would surely link the feds to Jared’s death. In a manner of speaking, he’d be right. He looked around.

There were no street barriers to prevent McGarand from driving that truck right up alongside the building and throwing a switch, as long as he was willing to die along with everyone in the building. Suppose they’d been brewing some powerful explosive out there at the ammunition plant.

That truck could probably carry eight, ten thousand gallons of propane.

Having been a chemical explosives engineer, McGarand was surely qualified to construct a truck bomb. Look what McVeigh and company had done in OK City. If they had filled a propane truck with that much C-4 or even dynamite, it would be enough to put the Hoover Building out onto the Beltway.

Even from half a block away, he could see the array of security cameras on the building’s corners, and there were probably others right over his head. Most of downtown Washington was covered by surveillance cameras, and the Bureau’s headquarters was undoubtedly well covered. Some steely-eyed agent in the security control room could probably see him even now, standing out here on a street corner at 10:30 at night, looking at the headquarters. He started walking down the block toward Ninth Street, trying to act like a tourist, out from his hotel, taking a walk, getting some fresh air. He looked mostly straight ahead, but

he was able to scan the Constitution Avenue side of the Hoover Building without being too obvious about it. When he got to Ninth Street, he dutifully waited for the crosswalk signal. If anyone was watching him, that simple act would brand him as a definite out-of-towner. He kept going east, leaving the building behind him, passing the huge National Gallery of Art on his right, until he reached Fourth Street, at which point, he sprinted across Constitution and Pennsylvania avenues and then walked back northwest up Pennsylvania. This would take him along the diagonal segment of the headquarters building, where once again the pronounced overhang of the upper floors made the place look like a fort. But it was a fort with the same terrible vulnerability to a large truck bomb, and McGarand probably knew this. The question was, Did McGarand plan to make this a suicide bombing, or was he going to try to survive the operation?

He kept going up Pennsylvania, assuming he had been tracked along the sidewalk by the television cameras, until he was out of sight of the building. Then he cut back down along Fifteenth Street, walking by the White House and the Treasury Building, where the security forces were very visible. All the immediately adjacent streets near the White House were blocked off with large concrete objects in all directions, in celebration, no doubt, of the president’s popularity among the lunatic fringe. He kept his hands in his pockets and walked briskly down to Constitution, where once again he waited for the crossing signal.

He had seen dozens of no trucks signs on the bridges and along the main downtown streets, but he had also seen a large heating-oil tanker truck, bearing the logo of the Fannon Heating Oil Company, maneuvering into an alley behind the Smithsonian Building institution, across the Mall. So the propane truck would not have been an automatic stop for the local cops. McGarand must have known this, too. But getting a heating oil truck up next to the Hoover Building would require a ton of paperwork and advanced scheduling. Then a cop car swung in alongside the curb, going the wrong way. The driver’s window rolled down.

“Help you, sir?” the cop asked.

“Nope,” he said.

“Out for a walk. Got a big presentation tomorrow and I’m nervous as hell about it. This area’s okay, isn’t it?”

“If it isn’t, we’re all in big trouble,” the cop said, nodding his head back toward the White House.

“You have a good evening.”

The light changed and Kreiss crossed Constitution and headed back to the van. The Hoover Building might be the target, but, based on what

those cops had just done, it was also within the security envelope of the White House. A thought had occurred to him: Given that McGarand’s motive might be Waco, there was another possible target.

Janet drove carefully down the darkened mountain road, alert for deer on the road and lights in her rearview mirror. She had seen neither since turning off 460, and she hoped to keep it that way. Lynn was dozing in the passenger seat, the hospital blanket wrapped around her, despite the car’s heater being on. Janet’s clothes were just about dry, and she had the .38 out on the seat beside her. The girl had saved them both with that fire extinguisher trick, and perhaps had disabled their pursuer, at least for the night. It would depend on what kind of extinguisher that had been. A blast of CO2 in the eyes ought to do some damage.

She glanced into the rearview mirror again, but it was still dark. She woke Lynn.

“Do you recognize where we are?” she asked.

Lynn blinked and watched the headlights for a minute. They descended a steep hill and crossed a creek. Green eyes blazed at them from the creek bed and Janet tapped the brake.

“Yes, we’re about ten minutes from Dad’s cabin. Micah’s is a half a mile beyond. Nobody following us?”

“Not so far,” Janet said, looking in the mirror again. It would have been pretty damned obvious if there had been a vehicle back there. The night around Pearl’s Mountain was clear, but there was no moon, and the surrounding forest was dense and dark. She would not have liked to have driven that road without headlights.

“We’ll have to be careful going up to Micah’s,” Lynn said.

“That’s sometimes a crowd that shoots first, asks questions later.”

“What are they so sensitive about?”

Lynn laughed.

“They’re Appalachian mountain people. They distrust anyone who spends more than an hour a day walking on flat ground.

They make their own clothes, grow most of their own food, and hunt down the meat they eat. They also make their own whiskey, grow their own dope, and operate a pretty interesting black economy of barter and trade, for which they pay no taxes.”

“Sounds pretty good.”

“Well. It does, until you get a close look at sanitary conditions, pediatric health, the death rate from cancers caused by chewing

tobacco, the infant mortality rate, the prevalence of incest and other self-destructive practices. Paradise it is not. But they hew to their way of life, and treat outsiders poorly.”

“How did your father come to fit in?”

“Think about it, Agent Carter. Dad was a professional hunter. He’s a loner. He’s more than a little scary to be around. I think they recognized one of their own. Plus, he saved Micah Wall’s youngest son from a bad situation, literally the day he moved into the cabin.”

Janet braked hard to allow three small deer to bound across the road.

“What this guy Wall like?”

“Micah Wall is a damned hoot. He’s got this dog—it’s like a Jack Russell terrier mix? The dog’s idea of fun is when Micah brings out this huge old western-style Colt .45 and sits on his back porch. The dog takes off and Micah shoots right in front of it, and the dog chases the bullets when they go ricocheting around the back sheds and all the junk out there. He calls the dog Whizbang.”

They went down a long, dark hill, crossed another creek, and began to climb again. As they rounded the hairpin turn that came up just before the entrance to Kreiss’s cabin, Janet swore and braked hard again, this time to avoid a large white Suburban that was parked partially across the road, with only its parking lights on. There was barely enough room for her to pass the larger vehicle, and she would have to stop first to manage it. As she got her car stopped, two men got out of the Suburban. They were wearing windbreakers with aTF emblazoned in reflective tape, khaki pants, and ball caps with the aTF logo. She could see a third man inside the vehicle when they opened their doors. There were several aerials on the top of the Suburban, but no police lights.

“Shit,” Janet murmured.

“What do we do?” Lynn asked, gathering the blanket around her.

“Hold on to this,” Janet said, passing the .38 to Lynn as she rolled the window down. Lynn reached under the blanket and put it in her lap.

Then Janet reached back into the seat-back pouch and pulled out her own ball cap, which had FBI emblazoned on it. The men came up on either side of Janet’s car, but Janet told Lynn not to roll her window down.

“What’s going on?” she said to the man who came up to the driver’s side. He was a large black man, who kept one hand in his coat pocket.

She put both hands on the top of the steering wheel so he could see them.

“Evening, ma’am. We’re with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and

Firearms.” He glanced nervously at Lynn’s hands resting beneath the blanket. Then he saw Janet’s ball cap.

“You’re Bureau?”

“That’s right. Special Agent Janet Carter, Roanoke office.” She normally would have asked for his identification, but since she no longer had her own credentials, she had to finesse it.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re on orders to apprehend one Edwin Kreiss. Subject’s wanted in connection with a federal homicide warrant. Who is this with you, Agent Carter?”

“She’s my niece, visiting me from Washington.” The second man was standing three feet back from the right side of her car, in position to handle any sudden emergencies. Lynn was keeping her mouth shut and her hands were still beneath the blanket.

“And you’re going where?”

“I’m going to my uncle’s house; that’s a mile beyond the Kreiss cabin.”

“That… place? With all the junk? That’s your uncle?”

“Micah Wall. Her father, my father’s sister’s brother. We’re not necessarily proud of him, but, well, what I can I tell you? Now you know why I’m assigned to the Roanoke office.”

He nodded, obviously trying to sort through the father-brother-sister lineage.

“Would you mind waiting right here, please, Agent Carter? I have orders to call in anyone who comes down this road. There’s a pretty big manhunt up for this Kreiss guy.”

Janet shrugged.

“Sure, but can we make it quick? We’re late, and I’m tired of dancing through the damned deer on these mountain roads.”

He promised that he’d be right back and walked over to the Suburban, taking down her license plate number as he did so. The other man kept his station on the edge of the road, slightly behind her line of vision. She couldn’t see the third man inside the Suburban until the black man opened the door on the driver’s side.

“Hand me the cell phone,” she said quietly, “and hit the recall button and then the one for send when you do it. Move slowly.”

Lynn did as Janet asked, and Janet put the phone up to her ear. The man outside shifted his position when he saw Janet’s hand leave the steering wheel. The phone rang. C’mon, she thought urgently. C’mon. I need you to answer this time.

“Micah Wall,” a gnarly voice spoke into her ear.

“Mr. Wall, this is Janet Carter. You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Edwin Kreiss. I have Lynn Kreiss in the car with me and we’re in trouble with the local law. We’re about a mile south of your place,

and we need somewhere to hide. And we may have some company on our tail when we get there.”

“Lynn Kreiss? She gone missin’,” Wall said. Janet handed the phone to Lynn, then leaned over to listen to what he said.

“Micah, it’s me. Dad’s in trouble and I need a place to hide.”

“How’n I know it’s you?”

“Lions, Micah. Dad’s cabin has lions in it.”

“Yeah, it does. C’mon, then. You got cops on your tail?”

“ATE”

There was a short laugh.

“The revenuers? Bring ‘em bast ids on.”

The connection was broken and Janet put the phone down. The black man was half in, half out of the Suburban, talking on either a radio or a phone. She could see him better now because there was suddenly more light, and then she realized there must be a vehicle coming up behind them, and coming fast. Really fast. She saw the man silhouetted in the right mirror moving back, his hands waving, and decided this was the moment. She slammed the car into drive and accelerated right at the Suburban. The black man looked back and then dived into the front seat as she clipped his door and roared past, fishtailing all over the place. She thought she heard a gunshot but it was hard to tell with all the gravel flying everywhere. She rounded the next curve as the other vehicle’s lights flooded her mirror, but then the hillside obscured them.

She took her foot off the gas momentarily to keep control of the car as she pushed it up the winding road.

“How far?” she asked Lynn, but Lynn didn’t answer. She glanced over and saw that Lynn was sagging against the opposite door, a confused look on her face.

“I think I’ve been shot,” she said in a weak voice. She pulled her right hand out from under the blanket and it was shiny with blood.

Janet swore and accelerated.

“Where are you hit?”

“I don’t know,” Lynn said in a dreamy voice.

“Back, I think. Side, maybe? It’s not too bad. Feels like I got kicked by a small horse.”

There was a brief flare of bright lights behind her, but then she rounded the next curve and hurried past Kreiss’s driveway. The next turn again blocked out the pursuing headlights. Another half a mile. She took it up as fast as she could. She couldn’t believe it—one of those aTF agents had fired at an FBI agent’s car? Even if they had found out she’d quit, they shouldn’t have been shooting. Unless-The bright headlights came up again in her mirror, and she realized the

aTF agents could not have gotten that big Suburban turned around and headed after her that quickly. This was the other car, and she had a sinking feeling she knew exactly who this was. She nearly lost it on the next curve, again shooting gravel and other roadside debris out into the woods.

“Hang in there, Lynn. Can you reach the spot? Can you feel where you’re hit?”

“No. I can’t—can’t move my right arm all that well anymore.” Her voice was drifting.

“Right side. My side is hurting real bad now.”

A straightaway opened up and Janet accelerated, trying to think of something she could do to slow down her pursuer. But then she came into the next turn, too fast, spinning the wheel, hitting the brakes, anything to get control, but the car spun out and actually rolled backward for a moment, tires squealing, before shooting ahead again back down the way they had come. She was about to slam on the brakes, but then she had an idea. She doused her headlights and braked to slow down. The sharp curve was dead ahead, behind which the loom of bright white lights was rising. She got it stopped right at her side of the curve, found her .38, and rolled the window back down. Holding one hand on the brights switch, she reached out with her left hand, extending the pistol and resting her wrist on the little metal valley formed by the mirror housing. In the next instant, the pursuing vehicle came sweeping around the curve. Janet flipped on her bright lights and opened fire with the .38, deliberately aiming low, right between the approaching headlights, letting off five rounds before diving down behind the steering wheel. There was a screech of brakes, an instant of silence, and then the roar of the other vehicle’s engine racing as it went crashing down into the scrub woods, smashing into rocks and small trees and then flipping partially over on its side in a hail of gravel and a spray of window glass.

Janet raised her head to look. The other car was a hundred feet down the embankment. Its headlights were still on, pointing up into the pine trees. Its left front wheel was spinning furiously. Janet did not hesitate.

She turned her car around and sped up the hill as fast as she could go, aware that Lynn wasn’t making any noise at all.

Browne McGarand got back to the propane truck at 11:30, after spending the afternoon and early evening asleep in a motel room. He was dressed in a set of dark coveralls that had lots of pockets. All of the equipment he would need was in the cab of the truck. He had made a detailed map of his

 

approach routes to the aTF building, and he had laid out a couple of possible escape routes once he’d abandoned the truck. The fake delivery manifest was on a clipboard by his side.

The night was cloudy, and the lights on the Pentagon building were fuzzy in the mist blowing in from the river. There had been no traffic in the approach roads to the Pentagon when he had walked over from Crystal City. He looked around the deserted parking lot and sighed. This was the moment he had been working toward all these months. Now there was nothing more to do than to get going. He got in, started up the truck, backed it across the parking area, and drove out onto the approach road, turning right to go under the elevated highway, then taking the tight ramp up to get on the Fourteenth Street Bridge. Big trucks were generally not allowed into the District, but fuel trucks were an exception. He was hoping not to be stopped. The manifest should get him by a cursory police inspection, as long as the cop didn’t ask him for the exemption certificate, which he did not have. Shift change for the Metro Police came at midnight, which was why he had chosen this time to make his approach to the target. Most of the District’s patrol cars would be in station house parking lots, refueling for the next shift, all the cops inside.

In the event, he didn’t see a single cop car. He made it onto Massachusetts Avenue, where there was zero traffic. The aTF headquarters building loomed to his left as he turned into the ramp gate for the parking garage next door. It was a tight fit and his rear bumper tagged a concrete abutment, but he just made it. There was an attendant’s booth at the bottom of the ramp, but it was dark and unoccupied. He had to get out of the cab to extract the ticket from a dispenser. The side ramp was a two-way ramp, and a sign said to give way to vehicles coming down. The gate dutifully opened when he took the ticket, and up he went in first gear, making a lot more noise than he wanted to. At the top of the ramp, he turned right and headed for the back corner nearest the aTF building. There were some SUVs and a couple of pickup trucks up on the roof deck, more than he had expected. He backed the truck into the corner space along the wall and shut it down. First exposure successfully completed, he thought.

He looked over at the aTF building. Only a few of the windows facing him were lighted on his side of the building, but the interiors were above his line of sight. He scanned the side face and corners of the building again for video cameras, but the only one he could see was pointed down onto Massachusetts Avenue. He took out a small pair of binoculars and scanned the top edges of the buildings across the street

from the aTF building. As he had suspected, there was one camera jutting out of the middle of the office building directly opposite, but it, too, was pointed down onto Massachusetts Avenue. It might conceivably look into the alley, but the back of the alley was in deep shadow. He cracked his window, then nodded his head when he heard the sound of the vent fans down in the alley below.

He looked at his watch. It was just after midnight. He sat back in the lumpy seat, listening to the ticking sounds of his diesel engine cooling down. The windows of the cars parked around him were already glistening with nighttime dew. There was a flare of yellow light as the stairwell door opened up at the front of the roof deck and a couple stepped out, arm in arm. They appeared to be wine-happy from an evening in one of the local restaurants. They got into a Toyota Land Cruiser and left, going down the exit ramp. Neither of them had given the big truck parked back in the dark corner a second look. Good.

Now he waited. He wanted to begin dropping the hose sometime around 2:30, when most humans were at their low ebb of performance, and then go down to attach it to the air-intake vent screens in the back of the alley between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. Originally, he had planned to shinny down the hose itself, but he might just walk down the interior exit ramps and see if he could hop a wall at the back of the ground-level parking deck, out of sight of any cameras, of course. In the meantime, he would watch the aTF building for any signs of walking patrols or other security features he might have missed. But he didn’t expect any: Above all else, these people were bureaucrats. They would pay close attention to the size of their office and whether or not they got a parking space, but he was pretty sure they weren’t too concerned about someone attacking them in their own building. If he could permeate that entire building with hydrogen, the explosion would certainly be memorable. Even if he only got a partial ignition, it would still create a two-thousand-degree fireball in every cubic inch of the affected office spaces. Quicker and somewhat more merciful than what these goons had done to those people at Mount Carmel, who had cooked for a while as the burning building melted down around them, helped along by tanks, for God’s sake. Maybe next time they’d be a little more careful, those who survived what he was about to do. He settled back against the seat to watch and wait. He wished he could have done the FBI building, but, short of a suicide attack with something like a truckload of Ampho, there were no good approaches that would let him walk away from it. Not like this one. It was wide open.