“Yes, they did. That’s how Lynn was wounded. Then that damned woman came over the hill.” She told him how she had driven the woman off the road and then made it to Micah’s, and then she described the cave expedition that followed. He was shaking his head in amazement when she was done.

“You think those people were all killed down there?” he asked.

“In the lake?”

“Don’t know,” she said.

“But it got real quiet when the stalactites stopped falling. No dogs, no more lights or voices. I don’t know how many men there were back there. But we were not pursued after that.”

 

“Son of a bitch,” Farnsworth muttered.

“This just doesn’t sound right.

We’d have been avalanched with calls if the aTF thought they were chasing one of our agents and there was shooting.”

“Maybe we’re making assumptions,” she said.

“Maybe this wasn’t aTF

Maybe that damned woman just said it was, to throw some shit in the game.”

“You’re assuming they were her people?”

“I’m beginning to think so.”

Farnsworth got up and paced around the kitchen. One of the agents stepped in through the back door and reported all was secure outside.

Farnsworth acknowledged and the man stepped back out. Farnsworth asked Billy to crank up a fresh pot of coffee and get it to the men outside. Billy signed off from the communications terminal and started hunting for coffee makings. The agent, whom Janet knew only slightly, had nodded politely to her before he’d stepped back outside. Back in the fold, she thought.

“Now I know we need to pick up Edwin Kreiss,” Farnsworth said finally.

“I mean, headquarters wants his ass for what he did to those two agents, and local law wants him for the jared McGarand thing. I think we need to bring him in for his own protection. Damn, I think I got snookered here.”

“That woman knew all along that it would be damned difficult to trap Kreiss. Once Lynn was recovered, though, she saw her opportunity. She came after his daughter, knowing Kreiss would come in to protect Lynn.”

“Right, right, I can see that.”

“Once she knew that Kreiss had been picked up in Washington, just before the bombing, she backed off, left us alone at Micah’s. Until, of course, she found out that Kreiss had managed to escape.”

“Which means she has a source inside the Bureau,” Farnsworth said.

“I’ve been making reports up my chain of command since this shit started.

Maybe the leak’s in Richmond.”

“Well, then,” she said. “we have to move. We need to get Lynn to a safer place, and we need to find Kreiss. Actually, I think I know how to do that.”

“How?”

“Let me talk to Micah. Do you have one of your cards? He’s still outside?”

“You going to take those with you?” he asked, indicating the credentials and the Sig. When she hesitated, he added, “How ‘bout if I say I’m sorry?”

She smiled wearily.

“This wasn’t you, boss. This is something slimy and corrupt oozing back out of the ground in Washington. You need to get Lynn to tell you what she knows about her father’s termination.”

 

Then she picked up the credentials and the gun, her badges of office. He passed her one of his cards, and she went outside.

Micah was sitting in the front seat of one of the Bureau cars, his hat on his lap, his face a mask of shame. Janet opened the driver’s door and got in.

Seeing his expression, she said immediately, “You did the right thing.”

“Not in my book, I didn’t,” he said.

“Your car’s over there.” He wouldn’t look at her. Without the mountain man hat on his head, he looked old and much diminished.

“Look, Mr. Wall. First, you saved Lynn and me from some seriously bad people. Second, nobody in this country can fight the government anymore, not if they decide to come after you the way Mr. Farnsworth said they would. Everyone knows that.”

“Ain’t everyone up here knows that,” he said.

She sighed and then she saw a way to let him save face.

“I didn’t tell you the whole truth, Mr. Wall. Look.”

He looked over at her, and she showed him her credentials.

“I’m the government, too, Mr. Wall. I’m one of them. You didn’t betray anyone.”

His chin rose slightly, and his face cleared.

“I was assigned to protect Lynn Kreiss,” she continued.

“And that’s what I did. With your help. But now we must get in contact with her father. The last he knew, you had

Lynn, so we think he’s going to call.”

He started to shake his head.

“He ain’t told me nothin’,” he said.

“And

I ain’t gonna—” “No, no,” she interrupted.

“We’re not asking you to turn him in to us.

But you must tell him that we have Lynn now, and that I said she’s safe with us. I need him to contact me. Not anyone else. Just me.” She turned Farnsworth’s card over and wrote her home phone number on the back of it.

“Here’s my number.”

“What about them revenuers in the cave?” he asked, taking the card.

“Wasn’t they gov’mint?”

Janet got out of the car.

“What people in the cave, Mr. Wall?” She looked at him for a moment to make sure he understood, and then she went back into Kreiss’s cabin.

“I don’t think he knows where Kreiss is,” she told Farnsworth.

“But I think he’ll put Kreiss in touch with us. For Lynn’s sake.”

“Good,” Farnsworth said.

“We’ll be safer in Roanoke, I think. Get the girl up and let’s get the hell out of these mountains.”

“Why don’t I take her to my place? Micah has my car right over there.

We both need some sleep.”

 

Farnsworth thought about it.

“Okay,” he said.

“And I’ll put some agents on your house. Then I think we’re going to have to call in the aTF people in the morning; we’ve got to sort this out.”

“Get them to explain the bullet holes in my car, for starters,” Janet said.

“Goddamn cowboys.” Billy grinned at her from the kitchen. Then she went to get Lynn up.

Kreiss awoke and took a moment to remember where he was, which was in his sleeping bag in a one-man tent on the Ramsey Arsenal. He rubbed his face, looked at his watch, and realized he’d overslept. He had wanted to talk to Micah before 2:30 a.m. He listened to the sounds of night outside.

Everything sounded pretty normal. He slipped out of the warm bag and struggled into the crawl suit. He slithered out of the tent, listened again, and then pulled on his boots. It was almost cold, with a clear atmosphere and enough moonlight to define individual trees. There was a steady background noise of crickets and tree frogs. He could barely hear the creek making its way down toward the logjam. He took several deep breaths and watched his exhalations make vapor clouds.

He had to think carefully about what he would say when he called Micah. He had to assume that someone, and possibly more than one someone, would have Micah’s phone line tapped at the local telephone central office. He needed to find out what had happened to Lynn without giving away his current location. Unless the Bureau had set up a very elaborate radio triangulation net, the closest they should be able to get was that he was operating off a Blacksburg or Christiansburg cellphone tower. That would tell them he was in the area, but not where. He switched the phone on and saw that the battery wasn’t at full power. He swore; the damn thing was dependent on being plugged into the rental van. He dialed Micah’s number and got a rejection tone because he hadn’t used the area code first. He exhaled, tried again, and the phone was picked up on the second ring. It sounded like Micah.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Yeah, good. Them federals from Roanoke, they done got your daughter.”

Kreiss felt a surge of alarm.

“Which federals?”

“FBI. That woman what was with her? Said she was with the FBI. She done left a message. Says to call her in Roanoke. Says Lynn is safe with her, but you gotta call, and only to her.”

 

He gave Kreiss the number and then there was a moment of silence.

Then he asked if Kreiss needed anything. Micah didn’t sound quite right, and Kreiss thought that he might be trying to tell him to get off the line.

He told him no, thanked him, and hung up abruptly. He got a pen out and wrote down Janet’s phone number. He looked at his watch: It was almost 3:00 A.M. Not a terrific time to call anyone, he thought. But Lynn was with Carter, which should keep her safe from Misty, especially if they had her at the federal building in Roanoke.

He was fully awake now, so he decided to scout his immediate area, and perhaps lay in a few approach-warning devices. He went to the edge of the little grove where he had pitched his camp and looked down at the wrecked industrial area, which was about three-quarters of a mile away.

There was no sign of the security patrol vehicle, but there were portable lights rigged to run off a trailer generator around the remains of the power plant. The wreckage of the other buildings looked like a scene from World War II in the dim moonlight.

To his left was the edge of the vast ammunition bunker field, arrayed in rows and lanes to the visible horizon, secure behind their own double fence line. A single road led from the industrial area to a double gate, which was closed and presumably locked. Each of the bunkers was topped by two galvanized-steel helical ventilator cowls, all of which were motionless in the still night air. The hundreds of partially buried bunkers made the place look like one vast graveyard. Two thousand acres of canned death, Kreiss thought. It was a fitting symbol for what they had once contained.

He wondered where McGarand had gone to ground. He set about rigging some motion detectors. He’d call Carter just before daybreak.

Between now and then, he’d try to figure out what his next moves were, assuming he had any left.

Janet sat straight up in her bed with the worst headache she had ever had, a blinding, throbbing pain behind her eyes and lancing down both sides of her neck. Her mouth was dry as parchment and her skin felt hot all over. She tried to clear her throat, but there was no moisture; even her

 

eyes were sticky and dry. The room was hot, unnaturally hot. There was daylight outside, but not sunlight. She looked at her watch: It was 6:45 on Wednesday morning. Then she realized the heater must be running.

The heater? She didn’t remember turning on the heater. She tried to clear her throat again, but it hurt even to try. She got out of bed, slower than she wanted to, and went into the bathroom. She looked in the mirror and saw that her face was bright red. She blinked her eyes to make sure, then splashed some cold water on her face. It felt wonderful, but the headache hammered away at her temples and she felt a wave of nausea.

What the hell is the matter with me? she wondered. And why is the damned heater going full blast?

She put on her bathrobe and went back into the bedroom to open a window. The cool air from outside felt like she was breathing pure oxygen, and she stood there for a moment taking deep breaths. Then she stopped: blinding headache. Hot, dry skin. Bright red face. She knew what this was: carbon monoxide.

The heater.

She bolted from the bedroom and ran down the hall to Lynn’s room, trying not to breathe. To her horror, Lynn’s door was wide open, and Lynn was gone.

Maybe she had awakened and gone out of the house. She ran to the stairs and called for one of the agents who had been downstairs. Her voice came out in a dry squeak. Dear God, let her be downstairs, she prayed.

She went down, holding on to the banister, her breathing strangely ineffective.

She realized she had made a mistake going downstairs, but she was committed now; no way she was going to make it back up those stairs.

She focused on the front door and made it, her lungs bursting from holding her breath. She threw open the door and stumbled outside. Then she realized what she had seen out of the corners other eyes as she ran for the door: the two agents, down on the floor in the living room.

She took three deep breaths and ran back inside, grabbing the first one she came to and dragging him roughshod over the front threshold and out onto the landing. His face was bright red and he didn’t appear to be breathing. She ran back inside and got the other man, dropping him almost on top of the first. Then she fell down to her knees, gagging, as her lungs screamed for oxygen from the exertion of getting them out. After a minute of this, she got up and staggered over to her car, opened the door, and got on the car phone, calling 911. Then she

called the Roanoke office and asked the duty officer for backup, agents down. Then she rolled out of the car onto the wet grass and fought off a siege of the dry heaves while she desperately tried to get more oxygen into her damaged lungs. A car drove past. She caught a glimpse of a man’s white face gaping at the scene on her lawn, but he didn’t stop. Thanks, pal, she thought.

Lynn was gone.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what would she tell Kreiss?

She opened her eyes and saw the two agents still lying motionless on the front porch, their red faces looking like grotesque Halloween masks.

She forced herself to get up and go back over to the porch, where she checked for heartbeats and then began giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the first agent.

That goddamned woman had done this. She was certain of it.

She thought she heard her phone ringing inside, but she ignored it and moved to the other man, alternating between them now, trying to get some oxygen into both of them while waiting for the ambulance to get there. It seemed forever before the sound of sirens rose in the distance.

Deep in the ammunition bunker, McGarand was cold. The whole damn structure is cold as a tomb, he thought as he shivered under two blankets.

He had food, water, a cot, blankets, flashlights, several lanterns, and a tiny cook stove but no way of heating the seventy-five-footlong portion of the bunker they had closed off. He put a hand out and touched the concrete floor. It was cold as ice. Probably stays that way all year round, he thought.

There was a faint glow of light at the top of the ladder leading up to the ventilator shaft. Must be coming daylight out there, he thought as he groped for the light on his watch. He had climbed out the ventilator shaft last night to lock the front steel door again after getting set up in the back half of the bunker. He wished they had rigged some way to take the front door’s hinges down from inside, but they were much too heavy. The bad news was that there was only one way out; the good news was that there would be no indication outside that this bunker was any different from any other bunker.

He stretched, wondering what he was going to do to pass the time. He hadn’t thought to bring any books or magazines, not even a Bible. He sighed. That had been stupid of him. He realized he must never have really believed he would need this place. He shivered again. There

was plenty of kerosene. Maybe if he lit all the lanterns and put them close to his cot, they might warm the place up. The ventilator above his head should take care of any problems with the fumes. He decided to try it.

Janet sat in the back of a Roanoke EMS ambulance, sucking on an oxygen mask while the EMTs worked on the two agents behind privacy screens in the yard. Farnsworth and two more agents had shown up right behind the ambulance and were now in the house. All the windows in her house were open. Out on the street, two county deputies kept traffic moving and curious neighbors from getting too close. Her headache was abating very slowly, and she had downed two bottles of water and wanted another one.

Farnsworth came out of the house, his face grim. She put down the oxygen mask.

“They came in through the basement; through that half window at ground level. Connected the damned furnace exhaust line to the house supply vents.”

“Not they,” Janet said.

“She.”

“We don’t know that,” he said, looking over at the EMTs huddled inside their screens. They’d been there a long time.

“Yes, we do,” Janet said, hopping down from the back of the ambulance.

“She took Lynn. You know it’s her.”

Farnsworth kicked an empty water bottle across the yard.

“How are they doing?” she asked, indicating the downed agents.

“Not so good,” he said.

“They were downstairs, I take it?”

“Yes, sir. Lynn and I were sleeping upstairs. They were supposed to keep each other awake and make sure no one got in or upstairs.”

“Well, apparently nobody heard a thing,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have heard a bomb go off, I’m afraid. Once I realized there was something wrong, I checked on Lynn. She was gone. Then I ran downstairs.”

“They were already unconscious?”

“Yes. I got the front door open and then pulled them out. I gave them mouth-to-mouth until the EMTs got here, but there were two of them. I didn’t do a very good job, I’m afraid.”

He fixed the scene with an angry glare.

“Goddamned woman disabled all of you with gas. She didn’t have to leave it on once she had the girl.”

“I think maybe those were her people in the cavern,” Janet said.

He looked at her, then nodded slowly. His cell phone went off in his

pocket. He snapped it open and answered it. After a minute, he said they would be back shortly.

“That was my secretary. Abel Mecklen from the aTF is in my office.

He was Whittaker’s boss. Judy says he’s going ballistic. I better get over there.”

“Do you need me to come along?”

He thought about it.

“No, not at this time. You’ve had a bad experience, and we’ve got a lot of things to sort out. One of them involves you and that roadblock. Kreiss hasn’t contacted the office; has he contacted you?”

“No, sir.”

“Damn. We just about had a handle on this mess. Tell Kreiss we have his daughter, get him to come in, tell us what he knows about McGarand’s little expedition.”

“Uh, sir? After what happened up in D.C.? He might not be so willing just to come in and talk. Plus, there’s the little matter of the Jared McGarand homicide. Although, Lynn told me some things that might mitigate what happened there.”

Farnsworth looked across the lawn again at the EMTs.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said.

“I’m willing to deal on the G.W. Parkway caper and the McGarand homicide, in exchange for what he knows about the aTF headquarters bombing and his help in catching whoever did this. Because this”—he pointed with his chin at the EMTs—”this is personal. Plus, I think there might be something going on at headquarters that’s bigger than both of those other two items.”

“Can I tell him that if he calls me?”

“Janet, you tell him whatever it takes to get him to come in. The trick is going to be to talk to him before that Agency creature does. Because we know the trade she’s going to offer.”

Janet pulled her bathrobe tighter around her.

“I can tell you right now,” she said.

“He’ll focus on that above all else. None of this other stuff matters to him. Everything he’s done has been in pursuit of getting his daughter back. That won’t change now. Especially now.”

“Not if he still thinks she’s safe with us,” he said.

Janet gave him a look and he raised his hands.

“Okay, okay, it was just a thought. You do the best you can, and then notify me the moment he makes contact. Tell him we’ll help him get his daughter back—anything he wants. He’s all alone now. He’s going to need help, and I think he’ll realize that.”

 

“Why can’t we get our bosses in Washington to go to the Agency and just get this shit stopped?” Janet asked.

“Why are -we dealing with it?”

“Because the people at headquarters who are authorized to deal with the Agency are Marchand’s people. Fortunately, you and I work for a different directorate. I have very specific orders to leave those people alone until our AD—that’s Mr. Greer-finds out who authorized Bellhouser and Foster to start this shit in the first place. If it’s Marchand, that’s going to be pretty significant. If it’s someone in Main Justice, like maybe Bellhouser’s boss, that’s doubly significant. Right now, everybody’s still spun up over the bombing of the aTF headquarters.”

“I can just imagine,” she said.

“You probably can’t, actually. But Greer, and also the director, I’m told, are very interested in why the Agency is targeting a retired FBI agent, and why that effort is being aided and abetted by someone senior in the FBI and possibly over at Justice.”

Janet rubbed her eyes. The other reason, as she well knew, was that there was no proof that anyone from the Agency had been in her house last night. Or in the cave, now that she thought about it. By now, Micah Wall and his people would have removed any evidence left on the shores by the subterranean lake. Probably into that pit.

Across the yard, the EMTs were getting ready to transport the two agents. Farnsworth went over there and talked about the agents’ condition.

His face was grim when he came back over.

“You need to go to the hospital?”

She thought back about that night and her encounter with Misty in the hospital.

“No, sir. No more hospitals just now.”

“Okay, then get some rest, if that’s possible. And stay here until you hear from Kreiss. He trusts you, I think. Try hard to get him in.”

She thought about that for a moment.

“I don’t think I want to stay here right now,” she said.

“Let me get dressed, and then I’ll go down to the office. My head hurts too much for me to sleep. We can call-forward my phone line.”

He agreed, and she went into the house. A Crime Scene Unit was coming up from the lower level as she went in. The agent in charge told her it was pretty straightforward: They cut the glass out of the window, let themselves into the lower level. They took the hose off the dryer in the utility room, unbolted a section of the smoke pipe from the gas furnace, and then taped the hose to route exhaust gas to the heated-air-supply vent for the whole house.

 

“How did they get Lynn out of the house?” she asked.

“Through the front door, it looks like. You said in your statement that you yanked it open, but you didn’t say anything about unlocking it. I assume it was locked last night?”

“Yes, locked and dead-bolted.”

“Yeah, well, you might want to invest in a dead-bolt that uses a key instead of a knob. The furnace room had a lot of dust on the floor. We found traces of that up here on the hallway rug and also upstairs. They probably had a respirator mask on, waited for twenty minutes or so for everyone in the house to start flopping around on the floor, and then made their move.”

She nodded dejectedly. She, Janet thought. Not they. She had come into Janet’s house like it was nothing, right under the noses of two agents, grabbed what she wanted, and then left. Hell, she probably had a key from the last time.

The CSU leader escorted his team out and then stepped back in.

“We’re finished up here,” he said.

“Good moves on getting Williams and Jackson out, by the way. EMTs said they’re breathing on their own. They said that was your doing. Glad to have you back. Carter.”

She smiled weakly and went upstairs to get dressed. As she was washing her face, she remembered that the phone had rung while she was getting the agents out. Kreiss? She went to her bedside, got a pen and pad out, and then dialed star 69. The robot quoted her a phone number. She hung up and looked at it. It had a 703 area code. Northern Virginia. Shit, she thought. Is Kreiss still up in the Washington area? She started to dial it, then thought better of that. She’d take it to the office, where they could run the number and see what and who it was.

Kreiss moved out of his camp at daylight. He’d decided to have a look around the arsenal, mostly to see what kind of activity was going on down in the industrial area, and to walk the fence perimeter to identify alternative ways out in case he had to run for it. He figured the van would be safe for two, maybe three days in that shopping center parking lot before someone noticed it or stole it. He’d walk out and move it before then.

He was dressed out in the camo-pattern crawl suit, and he had some water, one MRE, the gun, and the cell phone. His call to Carter had not been answered, and he wanted to try again later in the morning. He wasn’t sure if the number Micah had given him was her home or office, but she might have call forwarding on it. He went back through the

woods in the direction of the railway cut to get to a point high enough to see down into the industrial area. There did not seem to be anyone down there, although there was what appeared to be a tan-colored van parked by the first intact building along the main street. The blast at the power plant had been powerful enough to knock down all the wooden structures in the low areas, as well as badly damage several of the big concrete buildings.

He concluded that the van was an aTF Crime Scene Unit still working the site for evidence. As long as he stayed out of sight and sound, he should be free to move about the rest of the installation.

An hour later, he was in the bunker farm, which looked to be every bit as big as the overhead photos indicated. He’d gone over the fence rather than fool with the gates, especially with police and aTF people around.

The ground inside the bunker farm was rolling, with narrow gravel roads defining the lanes and rows of the partially buried round-topped bunkers.

From his vantage point on top of a bunker, he could see perhaps five hundred of the structures, interspersed with clumps of pines. There were no telephone poles, so power and monitoring circuits going to the structures must be underground. He fished the binoculars out of the chest pack and sat down to take a careful look at everything. He knew there were at least that many bunkers, if not more, over the far ridge, and behind that was the section of the perimeter fence he wanted to explore. The day was turning hazy with weak sunlight.

As he scanned the bunkers to the right of the main road, carefully studying the stands of trees and occasionally turning the glasses back onto the gates to make sure no one was coming, he worried about Lynn. The thought of Misty hunting Lynn had been very much on his mind. Even if she was with Carter, it didn’t mean she was safe. Inexperienced as she was, Carter was no match for someone like Misty. Hell, most of the Bureau was no match for Misty. It wasn’t just all the gizmos and special toys that made the sweepers so effective; it was their willingness to do very unconventional and dangerous things that made them so lethal, like starting that fire in the hospital. That plus the use of disabling weapons like the retinal disrupter, or psychological measures, like his own use of sounds.

He could still remember his first training session with Misty: “If you’re going to hunt someone,” she said, “there are two ways to go about it. You can hunt your target in secret and attempt to take him by surprise. But, by definition, you’ll get only one chance doing it that way; if you fail, the element of surprise is lost. Considering that we are normally dealing with trained operatives when we go

hunting, a miss can be permanent. On the other hand, if you subtly let the quarry know you’re hunting him, you add the element of fear to all the other weapons at your disposal. The people we hunt are highly trained to pay attention to situational awareness, which is another way of saying they’re permanently paranoid. If you choose the second method, you can amplify that existing paranoia with lots of nonlethal means, to the point where you can make the quarry bolt.

Once he bolts, his situational awareness is gone, and he’s yours for the taking.”

After the first month, he’d realized that Misty truly enjoyed her work.

And so, if he thought about it honestly, had he. It hadn’t been at all like the Bureau, which tended to throw a wide net of resources around a subject and then slowly, if often not very efficiently, pull it tight. His first boss in the Bureau had explained it well: The Bureau was first and foremost a bureaucracy. The word had two roots: bureau, meaning “administrative unit,” and cracy, from the Greek kratos, meaning “strength” or “power.”

We strangle the bad guys with paperwork—research, evidence, legal maneuvers, surveillance, wire-taps, warrants, and laws—while trying not to drown in our own internal paperwork. His work with the sweepers had been the absolute antithesis of the Bureau’s approach: Tracking down and retrieving an Agency operative who had gone bad was an intensely personal mission. It was one-on-one ball, an exciting match of professional wits, stamina, cunning, mechanical skills, and, ultimately, the direct psychological engagement of the target. He hadn’t liked it; he had loved it.

He shifted his position on the top of the bunker and scanned the other half of the bunker field, starting from the road and working to his left, looking for anything out of place or different from all the other bunkers.

He also scanned the fence line; nothing there except some plastic bags and other windblown trash hung up at the base of the wire. The bunkers all looked much the same: old grayish green concrete, rusting steel doors facing a ramp that had been cut down into the ground, and two motionless rusting helical ventilators on each structure, looking like little frozen smokestacks.

Except one was moving. Right there, almost on the visible horizon, to the right of a large stand of trees. A bunker like all the rest, except that the helical cylinder on the back end of the bunker was turning very slowly.

Now why is that? he wondered.

He knew that the helical cowls could provide ventilation two ways. If there was a breeze, it would spin the helix, which in turn would draw warm air out of the bunker. But if there was no breeze, as was the

case today, it had to mean there was warm air inside the bunker, rising through the shaft to turn the helix. But the bunkers were supposedly all empty.

Empty, cold, manmade tombs.

He walked carefully down the full length of the bunker roof he was standing on to examine the distant cowl from a slightly different angle. It was definitely moving. It was nearly half a mile away; perhaps there was a breeze over there. But then both cowls ought to be moving. He swung around to scan the fence and the gates behind him, but there was still no one there, and no sound of any vehicles coming. He took a mental bearing on the distant bunker, slid down from the one he had climbed, and headed for the ridge, trotting purposefully down one of the lanes. It was full daylight now, so he tried to keep a line of bunkers between him and the main gate to the bunker farm. He was almost there, crossing into a line of trees from the gravel lane, when the tiny cellular phone in his backpack went off. He moved sideways into the tree line, stood with his back against a tree, opened the phone, and hit the send button.

“You called me,” he announced quietly.

“This is Janet Carter; where are you?”

“At the other end of this phone circuit, Special Agent,” he replied. She sounded upset.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the office. In Roanoke. That woman—Misty, you called her?

She’s taken Lynn.”

He sat down abruptly, his back to the pine tree. A cold wave settled over his chest.

“Tell me,” he said.

She gave him a brief rundown of everything since the hospital, up to and including Misty’s attack with the carbon monoxide.

“My boss wants you to come in, preferably down here to Roanoke. He’s—wait a minute.”

Kreiss sat there with his eyes closed, trying not to think of anything.

He’d had Lynn, but now he didn’t. A man’s voice came on the phone.

“Mr. Kreiss, this is Ted Farnsworth, RA Roanoke. We have a warrant for your apprehension as a material witness regarding a homicide over in Montgomery County. We have a federal warrant for you regarding the little diversion you ran in Washington. The aTF wants to talk to you about the bombing of their headquarters. And a certain Agency apparently just plain wants your ass.”

“It’s nice to be wanted,” Kreiss said.

“But not very.”

“Yeah, well, you were in the business. You know the drill. There’s one more want, actually. My AD—that’s Mr. Greer, over at Criminal

Investigations—wants to know why another AD—that’s Mr. Marchand, over FCI—got someone very senior at Main Justice to activate the person who snatched your daughter and damn near killed two of my agents this mo ming

Three, if Janet hadn’t awakened and realized something was wrong.”

“Good question,” Kreiss said. He would have to figure out how to contact Misty. There was no sense in delaying the inevitable. Talking to the FBI was now a waste of time. He knew what Misty wanted: a straight trade. Himself for Lynn.

“Mr. Kreiss? Are you there?”

“Yes, but I don’t think we have anything to talk about, Mr. Farnsworth.”

He could just see the ventilator cowl. It was still moving.

“That’s not quite so, Mr. Kreiss. I have authority to deal on the Jared McGarand matter and what happened up on the G.W. Parkway. My chain of command feels that what Bellhouser and Foster set in motion is a hell of a lot more important than anything going on down here in Roanoke.

They also feel that this is all connected to something you know.”

More than you would ever understand, he thought as he focused on what Farnsworth was saying. And here he was again, facing the same choice he had been given five years ago: “your silence or your daughter.”

“Mr. Kreiss?”

“You can’t help me do the one thing I must do, Mr. Farnsworth,” Kreiss said.

“I need to free my daughter. And I don’t believe you or your boss or even his boss can fight what’s behind all this.”

“My SAC is telling me the director’s into this one, Mr. Kreiss.”

“I rest my case.”

“AD Greer says this is about the Chinese espionage case in the nuclear labs. Is he right?”

Kreiss was surprised, very surprised. He forced himself to focus.

Nobody knew this. Except them.

“Mr. Kreiss? Greer says you came back from your Agency assignment and the Glower incident with information that connects Chinese government campaign contributions to the way the nuclear labs investigations got derailed.”

“We are speaking on an open radio circuit,” Kreiss warned. He was aghast. Nobody could know this.

“They’re telling me you agreed to forced retirement and a vow of silence. What he doesn’t know or understand is why. The publicly stated reason was your role in the Glower mass suicides. But now he thinks it was something else.”

 

Kreiss sat on the ground in the pine straw, his mind reeling. He had kept his end of the bargain. He had not said a word. He had not done anything but come down here to be with and support his daughter while she finished school. If it hadn’t been for that total wild card, that lunatic McGarand and his mission of revenge, he’d still be sitting in his cabin watching the trees grow. They had broken the agreement. Unless…

“Mr. Kreiss? My chain of command desperately wants to know what you know, and what you can prove. They are willing to drop all the rest, all of it, in return for that. We think we can help you get your daughter back from those people, but only if we can apply the appropriate pressure at the seat of government. Agency to agency, director to director, if need be.”

“You don’t know her,” Kreiss said. A bird started up with a racket way up in the trees above his head.

“What’s that, Mr. Kreiss? Don’t know who?”

“You don’t know the woman who’s holding Lynn. Ask Carter; she knows her. This is personal now, between me and her. The only way I know I can get Lynn back safely is to trade myself for my daughter. You and the rest of the Bureau would only get in the way.”

“Not true, Mr. Kreiss. If you give my bosses what they need, they can get her controllers to turn your daughter over. Ephraim Glower’s dead, so the Agency can admit what he was doing now and shrug their shoulders:

He’s beyond prosecution, dead five years now. They won’t be the ones who’ll have the problem. It will be the people at Justice, and whomever they suborned here at the Bureau. The Agency will play ball when they realize our director is going to reveal the connection.”

Kreiss thought about it. Could he take on Misty? Could he even find Misty? And what would happen to Lynn if he did?

“You were a special agent of the FBI, Mr. Kreiss. You know how we do things. We’re the G. We’re big. We’re huge. We overwhelm. So do they.

If the Agency sets its mind to it, they can and will find you and grind you up. If you let them capture you, you’ll end up in solitary confinement in a federal pen somewhere, and not necessarily in this country.”

Then Janet Carter came on the line.

“The last time, when you went along, it was strictly about your daughter, wasn’t it?”

Kreiss didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

“Well, this time you have some leverage you didn’t have before. Last time, you traded her security for your silence. They broke the deal. So why not use what you’ve got?”

 

“Because, Special Agent, she might kill my daughter.”

“Might? Mr. Kreiss, she already set fire to a hospital. What makes you think she won’t hurt Lynn now? I told you what happened in the cave, remember?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’re pretty sure now those were her people. They were not aTF assets. In fact, the local head of the aTF has been in here all morning, yelling at Mr. Farnsworth here to find you. aTF hasn’t been conducting any operations down here other than out at that arsenal, after the McGarand thing. So those had to be her people in the cave.”

He felt the world constrict. Misty had suffered losses. Would she take that out on Lynn? He had given his word. To leave the Bureau. To admit culpability for precipitating the Glower debacle. To maintain his silence.

To submerge completely. In return, they would leave Lynn alone. Every fiber of his being was crying out for him to hunt that woman down, to destroy her. But he knew Carter and Farnsworth were right. The only realistic fix was in Washington, where the fix was the holy grail of modern government. It wasn’t about tradecraft anymore, or personal competence.

It was about information and evidence. The director had been demonized by his enemies at Justice ever since the campaign contributions scandal had erupted. Now he’d discovered that there might be a way to destroy those enemies. If he could believe Farnsworth, the director himself was willing to use what he, Kreiss, knew, to strike back. And, not coincidentally, to strike at the heart of the corruption that most people in the Bureau believed had consumed the Justice Department. These were monumental issues: How would one college student fare when federal law enforcement went to war with itself?

“If I do this, how can you guarantee that Lynn remains safe?”

“We can’t,” Farnsworth said. The words resounded down the phone line.

“I want to say something different, but that’s probably the truth of it.”

Kreiss found himself nodding in agreement. At least Farnsworth was shooting straight.

“But you can’t, either, Mr. Kreiss. From what Janet tells me, Lynn knows more about this than I think you would expect. If she reveals that to them, she becomes expendable, too. The only way this works is if we have information that forces them to let her go. She’s a pawn, and that’s how you want to keep it. You have to come in. You don’t have any workable alternatives.”

 

“All right,” he said, almost whispering it.

“I’m at the Ramsey Arsenal.”

There was an instant of silence, as if Farnsworth was surprised by that.

“Where, exactly?” Farnsworth asked.

Kreiss’s eyes snapped open at that question. It didn’t fit with everything else Farnsworth had been saying. It was too… tactical.

“Have Carter come alone to the industrial area,” Kreiss said.

“I’ll find her.”

There was another pause on the line. Then Farnsworth said, “Three hours. And not alone—she has to have backup.”

“Distant backup.”

“Agreed.”

“Three hours,” Kreiss repeated, and switched the phone off. He leaned sideways and let himself settle back into the pine straw, his eyes staring up into the treetops, unseeing. He did, in fact, have what the Bureau wanted.

Much more than they needed. Direct corroborating evidence of a deliberate policy to suppress and impede the investigation at the nuclear labs.

Not derived from any investigation, but from Ephraim Glower’s safe, which he, Kreiss, had rifled after discovering the bodies. He had felt more than a little guilt when he beheld that blood bath, but that guilt vanished when he read what was in Glower’s safe. He smiled for the first time that day, or maybe even that week. They would be expecting him to take them to a safety-deposit box somewhere and produce an envelope. They would positively howl when they found out where it was. And what it was.

Then he remembered that ventilator, spinning quietly in the still air of morning. He looked at his watch. He had three hours. Why not go see?

Farnsworth took Janet with him down to the secure-communications area of the office. To her surprise, Billy Smith was manning the communication console. He winked at her as Farnsworth ordered him to get Assistant Director Greer’s office on the line. The operator on the Washington end told him to stand by.

“This is the biggest thing that you’ll ever be involved in,” he told Janet.

“If we can prove that the Chinese campaign contributions bought breathing room for their spies in the Energy Department, and that someone at Justice helped it happen, the Bureau will be invincible.”

“But according to Lynn Kreiss, that ‘someone’ injustice had some help in the Bureau,” Janet pointed out. This comment elicited a gas-pain expression from Farnsworth. Then Assistant Director Greer himself was on the secure link.

 

Farnsworth briefed him on what had been agreed. Greer immediately overruled the RAs plan to send just Carter and some backup agents to pick Kreiss up.

“You go yourself, and take along every swinging dick in the office,” he ordered.

“I want nothing going wrong here. The last time you sent people to that goddamned arsenal, it blew up in your faces, literally.”

“Sir, Kreiss is nervous,” Farnsworth said.

“He sees a crowd, he may change his mind.”

“Then make sure he doesn’t see a goddamned crowd. Now, you think he has evidence? Real evidence? Not just opinions?”

“I think if all he had were opinions, he wouldn’t have been hammered the way he was five years ago. I think he has something, and now that all that shit about the labs has resurfaced, those people are scared of it. But first and foremost, we must get the daughter back, or nothing good happens.

Kreiss without the daughter is useless.”

“Then make it happen. Pick him up and get him up here, with his evidence.

Quickly, before our dear friends down at Justice figure out what’s happening. Once the director evaluates the situation, we’ll make the appropriate calls and get the daughter back.”

“What if they won’t?”

“Won’t what?”

“Give the daughter back. What if they insist we give them Kreiss before they’ll let the daughter go?”

“Once he gives us his evidence, I don’t give a shit about what happens to Kreiss. He embarrassed the Bureau. The spooks can have him. Believe me, we don’t have to go public with what we know to achieve the desired effect.”

Farnsworth opened his mouth to say something but then closed it.

Janet was staring at the secure phone in disbelief. Greer told them to get moving and hung up. Farnsworth put the phone down slowly, as if it were very fragile.

“Son of a bitch,” he said softly.

“Amen to that,” Janet said, sitting down in a chair by the phone console.

“I never agreed to anything like that with Kreiss,” he said.

“He shows his evidence, we send it up the line, and they force those people to recall their operative and get the girl back. That’s the fucking deal. I never agreed to turn Kreiss over to anybody.”

“But in a way, you just did,” she pointed out.

“No, I did not,” the RA said, his jaw jutting out.

“Kreiss used to be one of us. It wasn’t like he went dirty. I don’t

care what he knows or what he did up there in D.C.; I’m not going to be part of just handing him over to some bunch of out-of-control spooks.”

“Let’s take it one step at a time,” she said.

“Let’s get to Kreiss. See his so-called evidence. I also want to know what happened with Jared McGarand; I think that his getting killed may have been an accident. And what he did up there in that car? Well, considering where they were taking him, I’d have tried the same thing, only I’d have probably screwed it up. But first, let’s get Kreiss. Nothing happens until we have him.”

Farnsworth nodded, staring down at the phone as if it smelled bad.

“Okay,” he said.

“Find Keenan. We’ll need everybody.”

Kreiss approached the bunker from the front, along the gravel road that led between one row of bunkers and the next, staying close to the mounded structures in case a security patrol popped over the hill behind him. The bunker number was still visible, black lettering on a dirty white field: 887. The ramp leading down to the heavy steel doors showed no signs of recent human activity. There was a large rusty-looking padlock on the huge steel airtight door, just like all the rest of the bunkers had.

The grass growing around the bunker was a foot deep, starting at the front face of the bunker and growing all the way around it, making it look like the bunker had grown naturally out of the ground. The building appeared to be 150 feet long.

Kreiss walked down the gravel and concrete ramp and examined the lock. It was securely made; there were no bright metal scratches to show evidence of any tampering. The steel door was blast-resistant, with heavy airtight seals overlapping its mounting. There was some Army nomenclature on the side of the lock, so it was probably part of a series set. He walked back up the ramp and around to the side of the bunker, climbing through the thick wet grass to stand at the bottom of the rounded top.

The front ventilator was still; the rear one was just barely moving, making a repetitive pinging noise as a rusty bearing complained. But it was definitely moving. Stepping softly, he climbed up the rounded concrete top of the bunker, sliding his feet instead of stepping. That concrete was probably a foot thick, but if there was someone inside, he didn’t want to be heard. When he got to the rear ventilator cowl, he smelled kerosene smoke. It was very faint, but recognizable. He put his nose to the cowl and the smell was stronger. Kerosene lantern or heater in there.

Someone was in the bunker. And since the front door was locked tight from the outside, there must be another way in. He slid back down the

roof of the bunker and walked all the way around it. It was solid, with no other entrances or exits. He checked the boundary area where the grass met the sloping concrete of the structure, looking for a trapdoor, but it was all solid ground. He looked back up at the ventilator, then went to the front of the bunker and climbed to the front cowl. He sniffed that, but there was no smell of anything but the wet grass on his boots. He studied it, then went to the back cowl to see what was different, and he found it immediately.

The base of the rear ventilator cowl was hinged. The hinges had been tack-welded on and then painted flat black to match the tar that sealed the cowl flashing to the concrete. The tarred flashing, however, was gone. He put his fingers under the base of the cowling and lifted just a tiny bit. The whole structure moved. He went back to the front cowling and tried the same thing. Solid as a rock. He shuffled back to the rear cowling, looked on the side opposite the hinges, and saw a crude latch. The latch was made so that the ventilator cowling wouldn’t move sideways if the turbine head really began to spin. He was willing to bet there was a ladder down there.

He squatted down on the roof of the bunker. Someone was hiding in there. Now who would be hiding out in the ammunition-storage area of an abandoned military facility? No, not military. Civilian. This place had been a GOCO installation—government-owned, commercially operated.

McGarand had run this whole installation as the chief chemical engineer.

He had set up his hydrogen laboratory in the most secure building on the site, the one that offered the most sound and physical insulation, the power plant. That must have taken months of effort. He had set up traps along the approach perimeter, and he had rigged the industrial area itself to destruct if anybody came around to take a serious look. Which meant he had had all the time in the world to prepare something like this, for the aftermath of his revenge bombing. If the kids hadn’t come along, he would probably still be living in Blacksburg, watching the feds reel from another bombing that, somewhat like the OK City bombing, had no clear motivations. The bunker farm was a perfect place to hide, just like the industrial area had been the perfect place for a bomb factory. It was another case of hiding in almost plain sight: The one place no one would look for McGarand would be back in the damned arsenal. It had to be McGarand.

He stood up. McGarand had held his daughter prisoner for almost a month, after allowing the other two kids to die in a flash flood like bugs.

 

Then he had simply walked away, leaving Lynn in the nitro building to starve. This was an opportunity for justice such as rarely had come along in his previous life in law enforcement. He walked down the bunker roof and out to the gravel lane, looking along the ditches. He finally found what he was searching for, a piece of thin steel rod, about two feet long. It was rusted but still solid. He climbed back to the top of the bunker and quietly inserted the rod through the latch at the edge of the cowling base.

Then he bent the two ends up to form a wide vee, so that the rod could not be shaken out. The hinges were solid steel and mounted on the outside.

The cowling surrounding the turbine head was heavy steel, designed to allow a controlled release of combustion gases should the ammunition that had been stored there ever cook off. Rusty, covered in bird lime, but solid steel. Then he went down and found a stick, brought it back up, and jammed it roughly into the turbine housing, stopping the motion. No motion, no reason for anyone else to notice there was anything different about this bunker. And, best of all, McGarand had locked the front steel door from the outside before climbing back in through the ventilator.

He slid back down the concrete and examined his handiwork. Then he remembered the plastic bags out on the fence line. Even better. He trotted back out to the fence line, gathered up three of the largest plastic trash bags, and returned to the bunker. He climbed back up and hooded the front vent grill with one of the bags. Then he covered the immobilized vent with the other two. Before knotting on the final piece, he fished in his backpack and extracted Lynn’s weather-beaten high school ball cap, which he had carried with him ever since recovering it from the logjam.

He pushed it through the grill, dropping it into the bunker below, and then finished wrapping plastic over the vent grill. The bunker was now sealed. In twelve hours or so, there would be no more oxygen in there, even less time if McGarand kept a kerosene lamp going.

“Burn in hell, Browne McGarand,” he said not so quietly.

At noon, Janet Carter checked through the arsenal’s main gate in a Bureau car and drove down into what was left of the industrial area. The new civilian security guards reported that an aTF forensics team was going to be on the site today, although they had not signed in yet. She told him that there would be four more vehicles with FBI agents coming behind her. She parked her Bureau car near the windowless administrative building at the top of the hill, shut it down, and opened the car’s windows. She could see what she assumed to be the aTF CSU van down near the rubble

 

of the power plant, but not the technicians. The hole in the main street, into which she had driven her car, was still visible. Several of the overhead pipe frames had been blown down in the blast and remained where they had fallen, looking like piles of steel spaghetti in the now-cluttered street.

The windows in the administrative building had been blown through the building and into the parking lot, which sparkled as if covered in new frost. There was a fifteen-foot-high ring of rubble surrounding the site of the power plant.

Farnsworth and Keenan had worked up a quick plan back in the Roanoke office. They would post two-man teams at the known incursion points, such as the rail spur, the back gates, and the creek penstock. The rest of the tactical squad would go through the main gate and then deploy on foot into the tree line overlooking the open meadow above the industrial area. Farnsworth had briefed Abel Mecklen, the SAC of the Roanoke aTF office, as to what they would be doing at the arsenal, and he had requested that the aTF launch one of their small surveillance planes. The aircraft would be tasked to orbit the arsenal perimeter at ten thousand feet with its engine muffled. A county hospital MedLift helicopter was put on short standby at the hospital pad; after their last exciting visit to the arsenal, Farnsworth was taking no chances.

The RA had taken AD Greer’s direction literally and pulled everyone into the operation, even Billy Smith, who was again assigned to tactical communications. Janet, like the rest of the agents, had changed into tactical gear: jumpsuit, Kevlar vest, tactical equipment belt, and FBI ball cap.

She had a portable radio with collar microphone and her SIG was bolstered on her right hip. Her personal .38 revolver was in the glove compartment.

She looked at her watch: The tactical radio circuit would be established in twenty minutes, after which the various elements of the team would check in onstation. After that, she would be cleared to do whatever she needed to do to find Kreiss. Which was probably nothing, she realized. Kreiss would probably just step out of one of these wrecked buildings and come over to the car. That’s when it might get hard.

She still had a residual headache from the carbon monoxide, and she would have loved to have had a bottle of oxygen to suck on for a while.

Goddamned woman. The frustrating thing was that once they had Kreiss and could get what he had into the right channels, they would then all have to wait some more, for the right pressure to be applied and the Agency’s black widow to turn loose her hostage. The nagging question in the back of Janet’s head hadn’t changed: What if Misty wouldn’t go along?

 

What if she had gone off the tracks and was now engaged in some personal vendetta against Kreiss? If this didn’t work for some reason, and Kreiss didn’t get Lynn back, there would be hell to pay. Coupled with the implied treachery in what AD Greer had said, she felt pretty uncomfortable about Kreiss’s prospects.

She shook her head to clear her thoughts and focused on what was going on around her. Too many what if’s could be very distracting. The aTF van hadn’t moved and there was still no sign of their techs. She wondered where they might be working, since most of the structures at that end were demolished or too badly damaged even to be safe. For that matter, she thought they now pretty much knew what had caused the blast: a concentration of hydrogen. Then she remembered what the civilian gate guard had said: aTF forensics hadn’t signed in on-site yet. Then what-The radio squawked in her left ear as Keenan came up on channel one, establishing the tactical net. She acknowledged when he polled the various teams. He reported that the aTF’s aircraft was still at the local airport, down temporarily with a parts problem, ETA one hour. Here we go, she thought, stuff going wrong before we even get going. She scanned the wrecked buildings down the hill for signs of Kreiss. She had parked the car in plain sight, and he could surely recognize a Bu car. She looked at her watch again: 12:20. They were now in the window.

Where are you, Kreiss? she thought, beginning to feel exposed out here in the sunlight. She thought of the stark contrast between what he’d been doing for all those years, on his own, and the way the rest of the Bureau did business. Dependent solely on his wits and cunning, with no partners, no backup, no base, and no rules. Every new mission coming with its own fresh hunting license. The silence around her was palpable.

C’mon, Kreiss. This is your only hope of getting Lynn back, this, or giving yourself up to those people. Now you need us. No more Lone Ranger. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The sooner the better, Kreiss.

Kreiss was in the trees above the creek, flat on his belly, scanning the entire industrial area through his binoculars. He had seen Carter drive down the main access road and park near the admin building. He was waiting to see if he could detect how much backup there would be and where they would set up. And he was curious about that van down by the flattened power plant. It looked like a CSU van, except there was no lettering of any kind to identify whose CSU might be there. He couldn’t see

 

the license plate, either. He knew aTF would work a scene like this for weeks, even if they had already figured out what had happened. They liked to gather a ton of evidence, and bomb sites often yielded literally tons of evidence.

He scrunched around in the pine needles to get a better visual line on the van. Ford, fall-sized, tan. It could be a piece of the FBI backup team, too. Except he was pretty sure he remembered seeing it earlier, when he had gone into the bunker farm. He studied it carefully. The windows facing into the morning sun were clear; the others, toward the back, still had dew on them. It had definitely been there awhile. He scanned up the street to Carter’s Bu car; he couldn’t make out the details of her face, but it looked like her, sitting alone in the driver’s seat.

He continued to scan right, up into the tree line where the road from the main gate came out into the industrial area. That’s where the bulk of the backup team would be, he figured. And probably at the other entrances to the arsenal. He rolled over on his back, looked into the sky, and listened. No airplanes, or not yet anyway. The empty bright sky made his eyes water. It was tempting to close his eyes and just relax there, safe in the pine needles among all these silent trees. The birds had quit worrying about him. So what was he waiting for? He rolled back over. Two things:

Farnsworth’s question about where he was, exactly, and that van. The RA had probably just been trying to figure out where to deploy his backup team. In any event, he couldn’t do anything about Farnsworth. The van was something else. It might be FBI, aTF, or even local law.

Or it might be Misty.

Why would she be here at the arsenal? She could hide anywhere, and, unlike McGarand, she had not had that much time to prepare a place here. More likely, he thought, she had a source inside the Bureau and knew why Carter was here. Her mission was to bring him in. A straight retrieval. That was the only logical explanation for her taking Lynn hostage: They didn’t want Lynn. They wanted him. And Misty would trade. If she was here, and watching, he would have to be very damned careful about getting to Carter’s car. He began sliding back into the woods, and then he stopped as it hit him.

Ford, full-sized, tan. My God, he thought. Was that the van he’d rented in Washington and left at the strip mall? Wasn’t that his van?

Janet acknowledged a second station poll on the tactical net, confirming again that she was in position. It was getting warm in the car, especially in

 

the vest, and she was tempted to move into the tiny bit of shade of the admin building, on the other side from where she was parked now. But that would put the building between her and her backup, and her instincts told her not to do that. Farnsworth came up and asked if she saw anything going on. She reported that there was nothing moving. Then she asked if the aTF Crime Scene people had been backed out during the pickup window.

“What aTF Crime Scene people?” Farnsworth asked. She told him about the van down by the power plant. Farnsworth told her to stand by, then, a few minutes later, came back.

“aTF does not have any people or vehicles on the installation. Describe the van.”

Janet asked him to wait and then got out of the car. She put binoculars on the van and described it to the RA. She could not get a license plate.

She asked if he wanted her to go down there. He told her to stand by. She knew that he didn’t want to reveal the scope of the backup forces, in case Kreiss was watching and got spooked. She also didn’t think he would want her to approach an unknown vehicle on her own. He came back on the net.

“Move your vehicle to a position where you can get a license plate on that van,” he instructed.

“Do not get out of your vehicle.”

She acknowledged, got back in, and started the car. She rolled up the windows, switched on the AC, and then drove around the admin building and onto the main street. She had to go very slowly as she threaded her way through chunks of concrete and piles of other debris in the street.

The toppled overhead pipe racks obstructed her way, so when she reached the first side street, she went left, down around the pushed-over remains of the wooden sheds, and then up a small rise where a water tower lay on its side like a smashed pumpkin. From this vantage, she could get the binocs on the van’s back plate. She called it in to Farnsworth. He acknowledged and told her to hold her position and reiterated his instruction to stay in her car.

She looked around the area where she had parked. Behind her was the line of pine trees, and behind that, she was pretty sure, there was a creek, just over that hill. In front of her, the full scale of the blast was evident, highlighted by the bare concrete swath where the power plant had been, surrounded by a nearly perfect circle of rubble and boiler parts. The two enormous turbo generators wrecked and shifted off their foundations, leaned to one side in mute testimony to the force of the explosion. The shredded insulation and shattered

flanges on the scattered steam pipes made them look like giant broken bones. Big black holes gaped beneath each turbo generator and she wondered if they led down into the water chamber at the end of the Ditch. She put the car in park, shut it down, and rolled her window down. A small building whose roof was gone provided a patch of shadow for the car, for which she was duly grateful.

“It’s a rental,” Farnsworth reported.

“Rented two days ago in northern Virginia, along with a cell phone. We’re waiting now for headquarters to get the info on the drivers license. The contract is in the name of a John Smith, who paid cash.”

“I’ll bet that’s Kreiss’s vehicle,” she said.

“And you’d be right,” a voice behind her said softly. She turned and found Kreiss crouching by her door, a finger to his lips.

“Hold your position and report any movement,” Farnsworth was saying.

She acknowledged, while Kreiss walked around the back to the other side and let himself into the front seat. He asked her to roll the window down on his side. He was dressed in a camo jumpsuit, head hood, a pack front and back, and a heavy equipment belt, not unlike her own, which was strapped around his waist. A large automatic, probably a .45, was slung under the left side of his chest pack, ready for a cross-draw. He smelled of pine needles and wet mud.

“Well, Special Agent,” he said in a tired voice, “here we are.”

She didn’t say anything as he took off the hood. His face was gaunt with fatigue, and his normally well-trimmed beard was a little ragged around the edges. His eyes were red-rimmed, but alert, looking at her while keeping a watchful eye on their surroundings, as if he were expecting something dangerous to spring out of the rubble.

“Do you think she’s here?” Janet asked.

“Not Lynn. That woman?”

“It’s possible,” he said.

“That van down there? I left it in a shopping center parking lot last night,” He patted his front pack.

“I still have the keys.”

“So how did it get here?”

“Beats the shit out of me, but someone with the right resources could manage it. I thought maybe you guys had moved it here.”

“Nope,” she said.

“Bad sign,” he said as he scanned the area again.

“So what happens now?”

“I tell them you’re here and then we leave,” she said, getting a little anxious about the possible presence of Misty.

“Sooner rather then later, okay?”

 

“What about Lynn?”

“You give headquarters what they need, they pressure the Agency to get that woman to release Lynn.”

“And what if she doesn’t?” he asked, echoing her own earlier question.

Then the vehicle’s cell phone rang. Kreiss looked at her. She shook her head.

“Moot point now, I suspect,” he said with a wintry smile. Janet had no idea of who might be calling her vehicle’s cell phone when there was a tactical radio net up. She picked it up.

“Carter,” she said. Her voice cracked and she cleared it.

“Let me talk to him,” the woman’s voice said.

“No,” Janet said.

“Don’t be an ass, Carter. How do you think I knew when to make this call?”

“I don’t care,” Janet said.

“Yes, you do. I’m looking at you through a sniper scope. Want proof?”

“Tell me what you want.”

“You know exactly what I want. Kreiss.”

Then Kreiss was reaching for the phone. Janet didn’t want to hand it over, but something in his eyes made her yield. Then he slid across the seat so she could listen to both sides of the conversation. She was suddenly very aware of him as the front seat dipped under his weight. She hadn’t realized how large he was.

“Speak,” he said.

“I have your daughter. I will release her, now, as long as you get out of that car and go back into the woods until the feebs leave.”

Kreiss was trying to scan the area outside the car without turning his head.

“I’ve had a better offer,” he said.

“I’m going to give these people something, and then they’re going to make your people an offer they can’t refuse.”

“And then what happens to you?”

“What?”

“I said, what happens to you?”

“I get to live in peace.”

“And you believe that?”

“Why not? They get the smoking gun and a lock on Justice that even Hoover would love. And your people basically shouldn’t care. Your traitor blew his brains out five years ago up in Millwood.”

“Palace games, Edwin,” she said.

“You’ve never cared for palace games.

 

And you think you can come in from the cold once you’ve done this, do you? A grateful Bureau welcoming the exiled hero back into the family, right? Listen to this.”

There was a pause, and then, to Janet’s shocked amazement, Farnsworth’s conversation with Howell Greer was playing back to them. She cringed when she heard Greer’s words about Kreiss being expendable.

She stared rigidly out the windshield, holding her breath, unable to meet his eyes when it was over. That damned woman had someone in the Roanoke office. Someone who had had access to secure communications, while they were being transmitted. Oh shit, Billyh Farnsworth’s voice came over her collar radio. Kreiss, not letting go of the phone, ripped the mike off her shoulder and threw it out the window.

“Edwin,” the woman said.

“I’ve been sent to retrieve you. I’m not leaving until I do. Here’s the real deal: You get out of that car and walk back up into the woods. If you don’t, I’ll drop your daughter down one of these deep holes I keep finding here.”

Janet saw Kreiss’s hand close on the phone handset so hard that it began to crack.

“Edwin,” the woman continued.

“You get out of the car and she gets to walk away. You have my word, which you now know is a lot more reliable than your precious Bureau’s word, isn’t it? Then I’ll give you an hour or two. Let’s wait until dark. Then we’ll work it out, you and me. Sound and light, like old times. You can even try to stop me. But this way, what happens to your daughter is up to you, not some faceless bureaucrat in Washington.”

Kreiss said nothing, staring straight ahead.

“It’s a no-brainer, Edwin.”

He hesitated, then said, “I need a minute.”

“Take a lot. Take two. I know where to find you.”

The phone subsided into a hissing noise. Janet was paralyzed: She absolutely did not know what to do. Kreiss closed his eyes and then the handset shattered in his white-knuckled grip. Janet tried to think of an argument, a reason, any reason for him not to take the woman’s deal, but she knew there wasn’t one. Not after what he’d heard Assistant Director Greer say. Son of a bitch} “I’m trying to think of an argument not to do what she wants,” she said.

“For the life of me, I can’t.”

“There isn’t one,” he said, dropping the broken handset onto the seat and moving back to his side of the front seat, his hand opening and closing.

 

“Can you tell me what it is the bosses want so badly?” she asked.

“A graphic file. A picture of a letter. Signed by the deputy AG. Garrette himself. Sent to Ephraim Glower. Telling him that Justice was attaching one of his bank accounts.”

Janet didn’t understand.

“Why is that important?”

He rubbed the sides of his face with his hands. Then he turned to look at her, his eyes hollow. His expression scared her.

“Glower didn’t kill himself and his family because he was going to be uncovered as a servant of the Chinese government. He killed himself because they took the money back.”

“What money? And who is ‘they’?”

“The money he’d been paid to derail the espionage investigation for all those years. He’d run through the family fortune, but this Chinese money was going to save his ass. When they got caught taking the illegal campaign contributions—you know, the Hong Kong connection money—the reelection committee opted to give it all back. Some of that, a couple of million, had been used to pay off Glower. So they used Justice to get the IRS to attach Glower’s bank accounts. That meant Glower was now broke again. That’s why he did it.”

“The reelection committee knew about Glower? My God! That means’ Yeah he said, scanning the area around the car again.

“Anyone who has that letter can tie the Chinese campaign contributions to a quid pro quo: a fee paid for services rendered. Access to our nuclear weapons secrets in return for several millions in campaign contributions. Not directly, of course. Through the Hong Kong cutout. Basically, anyone who knows the case would recognize the letter as the smoking gun. Only problem was, the political side lost their nerve. What a surprise.”

She took a deep breath and tried to get her mind around all this.

“What was your deal?” she asked.

“When you were terminated?”

“Glower called Agency security to have me thrown out of his house that day I went to confront him. But I went back a few hours later. Found him and his entire family slaughtered. Very obvious suicide. Maybe too obvious, now that I think about it. Like that White House lawyer? Anyhow, he had a wall safe. I broke into it, found the letter.”

“They found the safe, they knew somebody knew too much.”

“Something like that. Initially, they didn’t know who, or what. Later, after the investigation, they began to figure it out. They knew it had to be me, so they threatened the only remaining thing of value I had: Lynn.

 

The threat was pretty clear. If I agreed to remain silent, they agreed to leave her alone.”

“Why didn’t they just move against you?”

“Because by then, I had a lock on them: AD Marchand was part of it.

He’d been taking care of the FBI end. I let Marchand know that I had documentary evidence on the real reason Glower killed himself. Anything happened to me or Lynn, there was a mechanism in place that would guarantee that information would get to the appropriate congressional committee chairmen. When I told Marchand what it was, he just about fainted. Basically, I had a gun to the administration’s head. They had a gun to Lynn’s head. A lock.”

“And it held until Lynn disappeared,” she said.

“Oh, that’s why they came, not because of any phony bomb cell. With her gone, you had no more reason to keep quiet.”

“Precisely, Special Agent.” He sighed.

“Only there was a bomb cell, wasn’t there. That was the kicker. Browne McGarand and his merry band.”

“What would happen if Greer and the director got their hands on this letter?”

“They’ll burn Marchand and Garrette right down. After that, it’s whatever deal the director wants to make with the attorney general herself.

Based on all the friction these past five years, they’ll have a lot to talk about, don’t you think? Problem is, now I can’t give it to you.”

“What! Why not?”

“I’ve already explained that. Lynn.”

She stared out the window for a moment.

“You’re wrong, you know,” she said.

“About the lock. They will have learned from all this. You get Lynn back this time, they’ll just send someone else. There’s an infinite supply of them. Even if you take that woman out there, they’ll tap someone else. Someone maybe worse than she is. You have to turn loose of what you know. That’s the only thing that’ll put this thing to rest.”

He started to say something, to argue with her, but then stopped. He was listening. She went for broke.

“The problem with your so-called lock is that you’re just one individual,” she said.

“Okay, you’re Edwin Kreiss. But the G’s gotten too big. Too powerful. Trust me, I’m part of it—I know. One man? No chance. Lynn will never be safe until you give up what you have to another government agency. Let them get a lock. Hoover-style. Then everyone will leave you alone. Otherwise, you’re condemned to a permanent hunting season.”

 

She stopped. She was almost afraid to look at him. She could feel his anger. The clock on the dashboard advanced silently, each increment increasing the tension between them.

“You mean give the Bureau the lock.”

“Exactly. The organization can make it stick. As a lone individual, you can’t. No disrespect intended.”

He took a deep breath and let it out in a prolonged sigh.

“What the hell,” he said finally through clenched teeth.

“I’m getting too old for this shit. I hid it in Marchand’s own archives, FCI Division.”

“Sweet Jesus,” she whispered.

“It’s right there? In the fucking Hoover Building?”

“Right there. File name: Year of the Rat. Just like that book. Password:

Amoral.” He gave a cold smile.

“Think they’ll be embarrassed?”

Janet could just imagine.

“What happens now?” she asked.

He looked at his watch.

“I just made a deal, and now I need to ask another favor. I need you to cover Lynn for a while, once Misty releases her.”

“And you?”

“She has orders to retrieve me,” he said, pulling down his hood.

“I have other plans. One of us will prevail. Will you take care of Lynn for me?”

“Yes, of course, but—” He opened the door and got out. Then he leaned back in.

“If I survive this, you’ll eventually know about it. But I’m going to have to go underground for a while until the elephants sort things out in Washington.”

Knowing she might not ever see him again, she felt she had to ask.

“What was it like being on your own for all those years? Hunting people down, making up the rules as you went along?”

He stared down at her for a moment.

“You mean without the FBI Manual?

Without a squad supervisor, and the ASAC and the SAC, and a fistful of teletypes from some ad hoc committee in Washington telling you when to go right, when to go left? What was that like?”

“Yes.”

“It was amazing. It was every G-man’s dream, Special Agent. Until I came up with the right answer to the wrong politicians.”

“Come in with us,” she said impulsively.

“Once she lets Lynn go.”

His weary eyes smiled at her.

“Can’t do that, Special Agent. You know how it is: You can fall in love with the Bureau, but the Bureau never falls in love with you. Take care of Lynn.”

 

Then he was gone, loping up the hill and into the trees like some big cat.

“Wait,” she tried to say, but the word died in her throat. She got out to look for the speaker microphone, found it, and stuck the jack back into the wiring harness on her left collar shoulder. Farnsworth was yelling.

“Carter? What the hell’s going on down there, Carter? Carter! Come in, damn it!”

“Kreiss was here; now he’s gone,” she said. Her chest felt constricted by her sense of failure.

“I’m going to wait for Lynn Kreiss. I’m returning to the admin building position. Request you meet me there.”

“Goddamn it, Carter, what the hell is going on?”

“Request you meet me at the admin building,” she said again.

“For what it’s worth, I believe we have achieved AD Greer’s objective.”

Kreiss pushed into the tree line, hit the ground, rolled to the right, and then scurried through the underbrush for fifty feet before stopping. He then crawled back to a point from which he could see down into the industrial area. Carter’s car was moving back toward the admin building, its tires crunching through gravel and broken glass. The van was still sitting there. He felt his pulse throbbing from the dash up the hill, during which he’d half-expected to hear a rifle shot. But maybe Misty had developed a sporting side. He, on the other hand, would have made that deal and then dropped his quarry as soon as he appeared.

Carter had stopped the car on the power plant side of the admin building.

In the distance, he heard other vehicles coming as the Bureau’s backup brigade closed in. Then he saw Lynn emerge from the wreckage of the turbo generator building beside the power plant’s foundations, hesitantly at first, shielding her eyes against the sunlight, as if she had been blindfolded. She took three steps out into the debris field, stumbled over something, recovered, stopped, and looked around.

Move, goddamn it, move, Kreiss thought. The first of the backup cars reached Carter, spilling agents. Lynn had to see them, but she still wasn’t moving and seemed disoriented. He needed to get Lynn out of there. He drew the big .45 from his chest holster and sighted down the stubby barrel at the nearest of the two ruined generators behind her. It was a distance of at least two hundred yards, so he elevated the barrel, pointing it at least a foot over the top of the generator, and fired once. The booming sound of the .45 echoed across all the wrecked

buildings in the industrial area, dropping all the agents, including Carter, instantly to the ground.

The bullet, partially spent, hit the base of the generator well behind Lynn, causing her to yelp and take off up the main street at a dead run toward the cars and the agents huddling behind them at the top of the street.

Kreiss backed away from the tree line. He had accomplished two things: made Lynn move, and told Misty that, for once, he had a gun. He was deciding what to do next when something blasted an entire branch off the tree under which he was hiding, followed by the distinctive crack-boom of a big rifle. Misty answering in kind: I know where you are, and I, too, have a gun.

The agents must be going nuts down there, he thought with a small smile. Then he squirmed farther back into the woods and began crawling, head down, as fast as he could go, east this time, away from the power plant. His objective was the patch of trees that projected down to the area where the wooden mixing sheds had been. It was about five hundred yards, line of sight, but longer the way he went through the woods.

From there, maybe he could get back into the wreckage of the industrial area. Misty was down there somewhere, in among that ring of rubble surrounding the remains of the power plant. She would expect him to stay in the woods, where he was most proficient. He intended to travel in a large circle, staying literally on the ground, moving slow enough to keep the wildlife from revealing his position. He would creep for an hour, then dig in and rest, making his move back into the industrial area right after dark.

He didn’t think Misty would come out until after dark, either, especially if the Bureau people hung around.

He hoped they wouldn’t linger after Carter told her boss about the archive. Farnsworth should see where his interests lay and invoke standard procedure: They had the hostage clear and a line to the evidence, which was all his bosses really wanted. What happened back at the arsenal after that shouldn’t matter, especially to the big guns at Bureau headquarters, where life in the fast lane was probably about to get really interesting.

Janet didn’t hesitate after getting Lynn into her car. She took off, turning the car in a screech of tires and gunning it up the hill toward where Farnsworth and the rest of the backup team were waiting. The other two cars followed, once they were sure she had the hostage out of harm’s way.

She made Lynn put her head down on the front seat until she thought they were well out of rifle range. Fucking Kreiss, letting off that cannon.

But it had done the job.

 

“You okay?” she shouted as she maneuvered noisily around a pile of concrete blocks.

“Yes,” Lynn said.

“She had me blindfolded. I didn’t see anything useful.

Thanks for the rescue. Again.”

“My pleasure, but it was your father who got you out, not me.”

“Dad? Here? Where is he?”

“Up there in the woods somewhere. I think he’s going to have it out with that woman, now that you’re clear.”

Lynn sat up, biting her lip as Janet pulled up alongside Farnsworth’s car. He was sitting in the right-rear seat, with the window open, a radio mike in his hand. His driver had his gun out and was searching the industrial area with binoculars. Janet got out to explain what had happened, while Lynn laid her head back on the back of the front seat and closed her eyes.

“Goddamn it,” he said.

“We were supposed to bring him in.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, we were supposed to bring in the evidence he has.”

He gave her an exasperated look.

“So? Where the hell is it?”

She leaned forward and whispered what Kreiss had told her. He blinked, then gave a slow whistle of surprise.

“In Marchand’s own archive system? Man!”

“I believe we can access that archive right here from Roanoke.”

“But we’re not going to,” he said, shaking his head.

“I’m gonna let AD Greer and his people go grab that little buzz saw.”

“Don’t you want to see it? After all this?”

“Hell no,” he said.

“And neither do you. Look what happened to Kreiss for knowing what he knows. Where is he anyway?”

“Out there in the weeds,” she said.

“And that woman is down there somewhere, in all that rubble around the power plant. That’s where that second shot seemed to come from.”

The other agents were gathering around, looking for orders.

Farnsworth thought for a moment, then announced they were pulling out, that their mission was complete.

“I thought we were supposed to pick up some guy along with the girl,” one of the squad supervisors said. Keenan, taking his cue from Farnsworth, gave him a signal to back off, and then Farnsworth told everyone to mount up and get back to Roanoke. He told one of the agents to drive Janet’s car; Janet and Lynn Kreiss were to get in his car.

Lynn Kreiss stared out the back window of the car as they pulled out.

 

She shivered when she thought of what they’d be doing come nightfall.

She could never do that. She wondered if Lynn knew what was going to happen back there. Of course she did.

Kreiss made his move an hour after sunset, before the chill air of night cooled the ground enough to provide too great an infrared contrast between his body and his surroundings. The sky had clouded over during the afternoon, rendering the darkness almost absolute once the sun went down. But Misty was an active sweeper. She would have a real IR surveillance device, maybe even an illuminator and receiver set, not just a nightscope. IR devices created images based on the contrast between warm objects and a cold background, or vice versa. The greater the contrast, the clearer the image. He crept out of the tree line on his belly and snaked down as fast as he could, hugging the bottom of a swale he had scouted earlier. He was also assuming that Misty was still down in the vicinity of the power plant’s ruins. That van was still there, and there now seemed to be a bio luminescent glow emanating from the ring of rubble surrounding the flattened plant. She might have deployed a defensive light ring, which was a thin, flexible tube of clear plastic Lucite, the diameter of a straw, filled with the material contained in ChemLights. It created a faint green glow that could be used to illuminate a defensive perimeter for hours without degrading the defender’s night vision. He had chosen his vantage point because it put several buildings between him and the rubble around the power plant.

His immediate objective was a valve pit where a dozen of the big overhead pipes came down into a walled enclosure, which was twenty feet square. There were mounds of rubble from collapsed buildings on three sides, and what looked like a storm drain coming out on the fourth side, pointing down into the swale. The swale, a shallow, grassy ditch, cut across a gentle slope of deep grass. He was able to crawl through it to the storm drainpipe, which was nearly three feet in diameter. He went through the drainpipe for ten feet, sweeping a stick ahead to rustle any lurking snakes out, and emerged out onto the concrete floor of the valve pit. There was a carpet of small rubble on the floor, and he had to sweep some of it out of the way with his forearm as he pulled himself across the floor between the huge steel valve stems. The pipes over his head were large, twelve to twenty inches in diameter. Some were lagged with insulation;

others were bare metal. The ones that bent down into the floor of the valve pit pointed in the direction of the Ditch.

 

He had chosen the pit because it offered concealment, while remaining escapable. Going into one of the ruined buildings would have been risky;

she could trap him in or on top of a building. The big pipes, being metal, would also offer some infrared masking, at least until the cool night air drained all the heat out of the metal. The valve pit was at the end of one of the shorter side streets. It was less than a city block from the main street, and the concrete buildings from that intersection on up the hill toward the admin building remained pretty much intact. All of the buildings below that intersection had been seriously damaged, having lost at least one wall. The four buildings nearest the power plant had been flattened into mounds of broken concrete, surrounded by tangled ropes of steel pipes. The shattered concrete was visible only as big blobs of gray in the near-total darkness.

He extracted his sound-cone apparatus and assembled it up on the lip of the concrete wall surrounding the pit. He pointed it between the nearest buildings, in the general direction of where the power plant had been.

He reminded himself to keep thinking in terms of infrared contrast. He piled some pieces of rubble around the cone to ensure it would blend in with the rest of the structure’s IR signature. Then he pulled out another plastic pouch and extracted two golf ball-sized cubes and a coil of very thin wire. He took one of the cubes and crawled along the pit wall, keeping the top of the wall between him and the power plant. He set the cube on the left corner of the pit, placing it between a pipe fragment and a broken concrete block. He connected some wire to it, then brought the other end of the wire back into the pit, burying the wire as best he could. He repeated this procedure with the second cube, taking it in the opposite direction. Once back down in the pit, he connected the two wire ends to a cigarette package-sized plastic box and set it down. Crouching down behind the pit wall, he extracted a small battery pack and attached it to the plastic box. Then he activated the box, illuminating a small red window.

In the window was a scrolling menu of sounds stored digitally in the box.

He could select a different sound for each of the two channels going out to the miniaturized speakers, or a stereo signal through both at once. He set the box down and turned the digital window down to minimum brightness. Then he took out a pair of silver-mirrored sunglasses and put them on. He couldn’t see anything in the darkness anyway, and these would give him some protection in case she got close enough to pop a disrupter in his face. The coating on the glasses was keyed to the color frequency of the disrupter. Then he crawled as

quietly as he could around the bottom of the pit, patting the floor with his gloved hands until he found a flat piece of metal about a foot square. He slid this into the back of his chest pack. Then he went back to the wall nearest the power plant, slipped the stethoscope on, crouched down behind the wall as comfortably as he could, and settled in to listen.

He was able to train the cone across an arc of about fifty degrees, which was sufficient if his assumptions were correct. She could, of course, come from any direction at all, but he had watched the industrial area for most of the afternoon and had seen no sign of her. The light ring meant either that she was there or it was a distraction. Since he couldn’t know which, all he could do was make his assumptions. He tried to clear his mind and concentrate on the sounds cape in front of him. The air was not moving, and neither was anything else, if the cone was working correctly. He reached up and trained the cone slowly from side to side, straining to detect any differences in the earphones. Nothing. He touched the butt of the .45 hanging in its shoulder holster. He didn’t have any spare ammunition. He drank some water, closed his eyes, and listened. He wondered if McGarand was still alive. He hoped so.

He had no illusions that Misty was coming to talk to him or even to take him in. She was coming to kill him. Those had probably been her orders all along, once the Agency headquarters found out that Lynn was missing. They’d have known full well that if Lynn was dead, and that would have been the logical assumption when a kid had been missing for that long, then the lock was open. Kreiss would have had no incentive to keep quiet anymore. Worse, Kreiss might have thought the Agency had taken Lynn, which would have given him every incentive to reveal what he knew. The solution would have been the same either way they looked at it: This wasn’t a retrieval operation. He had become the mother of all loose ends.

Something clicked in the stethoscope.

Janet stood looking out the window of their fourth-floor room in the Donaldson-Brown Center. Lynn was on the bed, tally dressed, staring at the muted TV screen. The remains of a room-service meal was sitting on the table. Janet could see the Virginia Tech campus stretching before her, a small city of crenellated academic buildings, barracks like dorms, and streetlights. The sidewalks were surprisingly filled with students moving between the buildings like so many industrious ants. Typical engineering school, she thought. Labs all night. Computer time when you could get it.

 

The streetlights were crowned with fuzzy halos as the evening atmosphere thickened.

Farnsworth had set up a debriefing session with Lynn Kreiss upon return to the federal building and then closeted himself in the secure communications pod, with no operator this time, for an hour and a half.

When he finally came out, he had ordered them into the hotel as a protective measure. There were supposedly four agents downstairs in a loose perimeter.

Janet didn’t think they were in any danger, because that woman would be busy. Kreiss was definitely in danger, however, based on the look on his face when he’d left the car. She had argued as vehemently as she could that they ought to go back out there, in force, and retrieve him.

Farnsworth had given her a strange look when she used that particular word, but he remained adamant: Their mission was complete. AD Greer and a horde of executive assistants from the director’s office were probably combing through the FCI archives as she stood looking out the window.

Once they found the document, all hell would break loose, especially with a national election looming. Or, more likely, and as Kreiss had predicted, an extremely private deal would be made at the highest levels of the Justice Department, and the Bureau would enjoy a sudden degree of unprecedented operational freedom.

Lynn hadn’t said three words since they’d left the federal building.

Janet had explained what Kreiss had told her on the way to the hotel, and the girl had just nodded. She was obviously deeply disturbed that the Bureau had chosen to throw her father to whatever wolf was waiting in the ruins of the arsenal. She’d given Farnsworth a look of such reproach that he had actually blushed. Now they had orders to stay at the hotel and wait to see what, if anything, broke loose in Washington. The aTF was still hunting McGarand, but that particular mad bomber had simply disappeared.

Janet wondered if he, too, was out there at the demolished arsenal.

Probably not.

She had mixed emotions about what they’d done. It was 11:30, and Leno was doing his monologue. Somehow, none of it seemed very funny tonight. Yes, Kreiss had made this deal, and gotten his daughter out of that woman’s clutches. Her own bosses were about to peel back a scab they thought would give them nearly unlimited leverage over their tormentors at Justice. That might or might not be true, she thought, given the fact that the current administration was in its final months, with not too much left to lose in terms of its already-odious legacy.

Farnsworth said he was putting Janet in for an award, and he had told her to think about going back to a headquarters assignment in Washington. Janet wasn’t so sure about that, either.

“Palace games,” the woman had said.

Pretty fucking lethal palace games, Janet thought. And what Greer had done to Kreiss was just plain dishonorable. She might have made a mistake coming back to the fold.

She turned around, to find Lynn watching her. Something in the girl’s expression reminded her of Kreiss. No drama, just a patient consideration of the situation and a hint, just a hint, of unexpected action if an opportunity presented itself. She and Lynn looked at each other. They had done the wrong thing.

“What would you think about going back out there?” Janet asked.

“See if we can find your old man?”

Lynn sat up.

“About fucking time, Special Agent,” she said.

“You got another gun?”

Kreiss carefully put his gloved hand on the cone to see which way it was pointing. To the right of the direct line between the valve pit and the power plant. He removed the stethoscope, closed his eyes behind the mirrored glasses, and listened hard to the bare susurrations of a night breeze filtering through the piles of debris all around him. The breeze was just enough to obscure the sounds of traffic out on Route 11. It had been three hours since he’d heard the last noise. He’d been dozing since then, which actually was part of his craft. Relax the body and concentrate the mind.

Build energy reserves while that part of his brain that did the sound work listened with all the mysterious precision of the subconscious mind. He looked at his watch: 11:40. He shifted his body behind the wall, easing a cramp out of his knee. He put the stethoscope back to his ears.

Ten minutes later came another click, followed by what sounded like the rattle of a very small pebble. Something, or someone, moving out there. Misty? He pulled the glasses down again. Black night to the max. Tenebrae factae sunt. Darkness has fallen. Got that right.

He shifted position again, putting his left shoulder in touch with the cooling surface of the wall, his right hand now holding the .45 automatic.

The tactical question was, How many people did Misty have with her?

They’d sent a crew into the mountain after Janet and Lynn, but they hadn’t come back out. Lost them all? That would put Misty in a rare mood, especially being defeated by a redheaded amateur. She wouldn’t agree: The cave had done them in, not Janet Carter. But would she have

had time to summon more backup? One-on-one against Misty was bad enough, but if she had help, this was probably hopeless.

Another click, not as loud. He reached up again and swung the cone to the right ten degrees. The faintest movement of air against his cheek told him that the weather might be changing. The night now smelled faintly of moisture against the backdrop of the pine forests surrounding the industrial area. He squeezed the stethoscope earphones harder into his ears. If Misty was moving, she’d be doing so while searching for some visual cue that he was out there. Some small patch of infrared contrast, a blob of green warmth where there shouldn’t be one. He reached up again and moved the cone farther to the right. A minute passed, and then another. Then a new sound, a tiny scraping noise. Fabric over concrete? It had seemed marginally louder. He wondered if she’d done the same thing he had—parked herself in a corner and dozed for a few hours before starting the hunt. One thing about a sleeping human: If properly hidden and wedged the body didn’t move. You took a chance, of course, of being caught sound asleep. It depended on how well your subconscious mind had been trained to listen. He took a deep breath, let it out quietly, and then decided it was time to get things under way.

He took out the piece of metal he had been warming inside his chest pack and placed it up on the top of the side wall. If what the cone had detected was Misty, she shouldn’t be able to see the warm piece of metal until she had moved another hundred feet or so farther to his right, because of the buildings. Then he reached down for the control box and selected the third program and entered a fifteen-minute delay. He slipped off the stethoscope, brought the cone down off the wall, and buried them in loose gravel. Then he slithered silently into the big drainpipe. A minute later, he crawled out of the valve pit altogether, rounded the first street corner, and began inching toward the nearest concrete building rising above the side street that led back down to the valve pit. He crawled six feet and then stopped to listen. This was the dangerous bit: If she illuminated the area with the IR system, he was dead meat down here on the street. He repeated these movements until he reached the corner of the building. There he got up, flattened himself against the wall of the building, and went hand over hand until he felt the ladder.

This was the decision: There was only one ladder. If he went up it, he could not get down again if she detected him up there. But if this worked, and she closed in on the valve pit to investigate the infrared target he’d left for her, he’d be in a position to fire down at her.

Especially if she reacted when the sound program let go. He considered the time: He had only a few more minutes to make his decision.

Did she have helpers? He decided that she didn’t. Misty was supremely confident in her own abilities. She also knew that Kreiss wouldn’t run very far into the woods to prolong this. He figured she was moving and scanning, crawling a few yards at a time and then sweeping the entire debris field with the IR scanner, looking for a point of contrast. Or she could have an illuminator up on some wreckage, bathing the whole debris field in invisible light. Probably had the scanner mounted on an AK-47, based on the sound of that single shot earlier this afternoon. Misty normally didn’t carry a handgun, but she had always liked the heavy-duty Eastern Bloc weapons.

The wind blew in his face again, this time carrying the scent of old chemicals, overlaid with a residual whiff of nitric acid. That has to be coming from the main street, he thought. So she should be upwind of him, then, and, therefore, up-sound. He estimated the time remaining.

He had to move, one way or the other, or she’d get close enough to hear him on the ladder. He started up.

Janet shut off her headlights as they coasted quietly down the hill on Route 11. The intersection marking the entrance to the arsenal was a quarter of a mile ahead, the dead traffic lights just visible before she shut off her lights. They had gone out a back fire door of the hotel and circled the block around the library to come into the parking lot from the town side, away from the front entrance. She’d called down to the lobby before they left and told one of the agents that they were going lights-out in the room. He told her to sleep tight. They’d waited a half hour before making their move. Then she and Lynn got into her Bureau car and headed for Ramsey.

Janet pulled the car into the exit lane for the arsenal. The barrels were still there, but they were no longer blocking the ramp. She drove slowly and quietly up the road toward the main gate, stopping just down the hill from the gate itself so as to minimize their engine noise. She parked to the side and shut it down. She rolled down her window and listened. She had been having second thoughts about this little caper ever since leaving downtown Blacksburg, but, given Lynn’s enthusiasm, she couldn’t think of a way to back out. When Farnsworth found out, she’d probably be a civilian again. Lynn had Janet’s .38 in her lap and was rotating the cylinder, click by click.

 

“So,” Janet said.

“This seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I’m not so sure.”

“I say we drive in there, lights and horn going,” Lynn replied.

“Go in there and make a shitload of noise until Dad pops out of the bushes and yells at us. Then grab him.”

“Might not be that simple,” Janet said.

“If they were going to go after each other, that will be a free fire zone down there. Open season. We go down there, we might get ourselves killed. You heard that rifle this afternoon.

Plus, if you show up, you’ll distract your father. Maybe get him killed.”

“If you’re thinking of leaving me out here,” Lynn said, “you can just forget that shit.”

“I’m thinking we shouldn’t go in there at all,” Janet said, conscious now of the open window and how their voices might be carrying. She scanned the chain-link fences ahead of them.

“Hell, it may be all over by now. But either way, we know nothing about the tactical situation. I’m saying we probably can’t help, and we might even screw things up.”

“Then let’s call the police. The local cops, I mean. Make some hysterical phone call to nine one one; two women in trouble at the Ramsey Arsenal.

Rape. Murder. Frenzied bikers. Bring a mob of cops out here and they’d have to stop it.”

Janet was shaking her head. Coming out here had been a dumb idea.

“They might stop it tonight, but then it would just go on. That woman and your father would melt away into the woods. I think after all that’s happened—in that cave, and with the big explosion we had here—this has become personal now. The matter in Washington is being solved as we speak. I’m just afraid if we go in there now, we might do more harm than good.”

“I think you’re just plain afraid,” Lynn said, turning away from Janet and staring through the darkened windshield.

Janet held her tongue. Of course she was afraid. Anyone who wasn’t afraid of both those people down there would be an idiot. But the more she thought about it, the more she knew she was right. Of course Lynn was burning up with worry about her father, but that didn’t solve the practical problem: They couldn’t just drive down there. What would they do once they got inside? Offer mediation services? Counseling? She could just see herself climbing around the wreckage of the industrial area, calling for them to come out and talk things over. And

if they called the local cops, they’d get one deputy sheriff. Whoopee. What they really needed here was an army of feds. No onesies and twosies, but ten Suburbans with federal SWAT troops, helicopters, dogs, tanks-Tanks.

She picked up the car phone.

“Now what the hell are you doing?” Lynn asked.

“Getting some reinforcements,” Janet said. She pulled her phone book out of her purse and looked up a number, then dialed it. The phone rang three times. She swore when she thought it was going to voice mail, but a man’s voice finally answered.

“Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Special Agent Rogers speaking.”

“This is Special Agent Janet Carter of the Roanoke office, FBI. I’ve got the gomer who blew up your Washington headquarters building cornered in the Ramsey Army Arsenal. I need some backup down here, and I need it right fucking now! My duty officer isn’t picking up. You people interested?”

Kreiss reached the arched top of the ladder and, moving with excruciating care, stepped over the top rung and down—onto nothing at all. He felt himself falling and just barely managed to catch himself on the curved ladder edges. He deliberately let his hands slide down the rusty metal railings right to the mounting brackets in order to soften the noise he was making. It took all his strength just to hang there. He felt the cool night air between his legs and realized that the building’s roof must have collapsed when the power plant blew up. What he had thought was a solid building was nothing more than just a side wall, with the rest of the building blown completely away. He couldn’t see what was below him, but he was at least forty feet up in the air. He was entirely exposed, dangling in plain sight over the debris field below. If she happened to lift the scanner, she’d probably start laughing. He heard the metal in the railing creaking.

But then the sound program saved him.

Back in the valve pit, the tape switched on. A tiny sound of a screwdriver tapping once, very gently against a steel pipe, clinked out into the night. Kreiss heard it, and he hoped like hell Misty heard it too. He tried a two-handed chin-up to pull himself back onto the ladder, but his feet did not connect with anything but air. He couldn’t really use his feet without making scuffing noises against the concrete wall. Gripping tightly with his right hand, he shifted his left hand over to the right railing, lifted his left knee, and this

time was able to use his knee to lever his upper body onto the parapet at the top, then over to the top outside rung of the ladder.

He nearly lost the mirrored glasses off his face in the process. Bits of old concrete dust fell away into the rubble below, sounding to Kreiss like an avalanche.

Then came the sound of a metal buckle hitting the stock of a rifle, a muffled but distinct sound clear enough that he could classify it immediately.

It sounded as if it was coming from in front of the valve pit, but he couldn’t be sure, not way up here, dangling on the side of a building. He had to get down now, because there was nowhere else to go. If she saw him, she’d just blast him off the ladder like a fly off a window. Then the hair went up on the back of his neck.

She was here, or at least very near. Down there in the dark.

He froze on the ladder, willing himself to become invisible. With one finger, he pulled the glasses down his nose and peered down into the side street below. It was pitch-black, darker than dark, but he sensed there was something down there. Something moving.

The side street pointed directly at the valve pit, which was about twenty-five yards away. The sound program was set to make a noise every three minutes. He waited, dangling on the ladder, afraid even to breathe.

Then from the valve pit came the sound of a human sniffing, one little noise, as if a man was clearing his nose while he waited for something. He pushed the glasses back up on his nose. Soon now.

A gust of wind came down the street, and he could feel it along the full length of his body. It was almost strong enough to ruffle his clothes. Was she down there right now, pressed against a building, this building, in the kneeling position, holding the assault rifle and sweeping the IR sight back and forth across the sector from which the tiny noises were coming? Seeing the barely visible fuzzy patch of green in the scope where the warm piece of metal, cooling fast now, would show up against all that cold concrete?

Gripping the railing as hard as he could with his left hand, he drew the .45 across his chest and pointed it down into the black void beneath his feet. Virtually blind behind the glasses, he put his thumb on the hammer and then squeezed all thought and sensation out of his forebrain and focused every bit of his energy into listening.

The next sound came a minute later. This time, it was a barely audible squeak, like the sound a plastic egg carton makes when a human hand pushes down on it. Then something definitely moved down below him, not a whole body in motion, but something less, a human effort, the sound of cloth straining for just a second, and then a brilliant purple flash

ignited over the valve pit. The glasses protected him from the full effect, but the soundless, dazzling blaze of light still almost blinded him. He caught a glimpse of a black figure bolting down the street, straight at the valve pit, and then there was a second purple explosion, followed by the thump of a thermite grenade erupting down in the pit, the explosion flaring into a brilliant white bolus of sparks and flame. Then the AK-47 opened up in a roar, blasting rounds directly down into the pit, sending red-and-yellow ricochets off into the night, the sound of the automatic weapon rebounding off the nearby concrete structures. The rifle hammered away on full auto until the magazine was empty. Misty with a gun, Kreiss marveled as he thumbed back the hammer, I’ll be goddamned.

He flipped the glasses off his nose as the thermite fire hit its peak, throwing every feature of the wrecked buildings into searing black-and white relief. He finally saw Misty silhouetted against the opposite wall, and he didn’t hesitate. He twisted his body in midair, took a snap aim at the silhouetted figure, and emptied the .45, the big gun banging painfully back into his wrist with each round. Just as he realized that all the bullets had done nothing more than blast chunks of concrete off the opposite wall, a voice below him said, “Nice shooting, Edwin, but you just killed an illusion. Now come down from there.”

Janet saw the familiar purple flare over the hill behind the main gates and instinctively closed her eyes, missing the second one. Then she heard Lynn gasp as an unearthly white glow lit up the trees in front of them, accompanied by the stuttering roar of an assault rifle. They looked at each other for an instant, and then she started the car, slammed it into gear, and punched it up the road, through the police barrier tapes, and right through the chain-link gate at the top of the drive. Accelerating too fast, she nearly lost it on the first curve. They topped the hill leading down into the industrial area, going fast enough to lift the car off its shocks and then bang it down on the concrete. She started braking when she saw the searing glare of burning phosphorus in the valve pit and heard the thumping reports as the .45 let go. The boiling thermite fire turned the wreckage of the arsenal into a vision of hell, throwing grotesque demon like shadows onto the stark concrete shells of the buildings. She felt the car lose traction on all the loose gravel and concrete bits in the street, the tires scattering debris like shrapnel. She instinctively braked hard, too hard, whipping it around in a 360-degree spin, and then the next thing she saw was that big black hole that led down into the Ditch right in front

 

of them. She started to scream, but then the car hit the pile of pipes, steel straws clattering along the sides of the car, and then it plunged through them and into the hole, slamming both of them into the windshield. Her last thought before she lost consciousness was that she really should have put on her seat belt.

Kreiss dropped the empty .45 down into the street and came down the ladder. Misty stood there in full field gear, with an IR goggle headset pushed back up over her hood. She held what looked like a miniature camcorder in her left hand and a Colt Woodsman .22 semiautomatic pistol in her right hand. As he reached the street and dropped onto all fours in the gravel, he saw that the camcorder was really a video projector. A green-lighted human silhouette was bouncing around the adjacent walls as Misty walked over to him.

“Put out your hands,” she ordered.

“Let’s just get it done, why don’t we?” he said.

“Get what done? I’m not going to shoot you. This is a retrieval mission.

Put out your hands. Fingers joined together.”

He crouched there for a second, considering his options. Her expression confirmed what he already knew: He didn’t have any options. He put out his hands. She dropped the projector and brought out a small cylinder, from which she sprayed capture curtain all over his joined hands. It felt cold and then warm. His hands disappeared into a glob of latex.

They both heard the car coming at the same time. Kreiss turned to look, hoping she would look also, but Misty never moved as she kept that Woodsman pointed at his face. The car sounded as if it were out of control coming down the main street, which was now out of sight behind Misty. They heard the brakes squeal and then the sound of tortured tires losing traction. The car hit something solid. The engine raced for a moment before stalling out. Then silence.

“Your cavalry?” she asked.

He shook his head. He desperately needed to distract her. His hands were glob bed up, but he still had his feet. As if she sensed his intentions, she moved back a step. There was an ominous silence behind the building where the car had hit something.

“Well, it’s not mine, either,” she said.

“So let’s go see. Sounds to me like they fucked it up. You first.”

He complied, holding his hands out in front of him to keep his arms free. He didn’t want the sticky stuff enveloping his hands to touch

any other part of his body. He could see from the shadows thrown by the subsiding fire that Misty was behind him, but he could not determine how far back she was. It smelled as if some wooden boards were burning back in the valve pit. The wood smoke was a pleasant contrast to the poisonous stink of burned phosphorus. He kept looking for an opening, but Misty wasn’t likely to give him one.

They came around the shattered front wall of the building and saw the car. It looked to Kreiss like a Bu car, with those two whip antennas on the trunk. It was nosed down into that same big hole Carter had driven into before. Carter? Could Carter have come back here? And then he had a really bad thought: Had she brought Lynn with her? No, she wouldn’t have been that dumb.

They approached the car carefully. He had the sense that Misty was even farther behind him. Maybe he could jump past the car down into the Ditch. But then he remembered how far down it was; he’d break both his legs.

“Stop there,” she ordered. He complied.

“Get down on your knees.”

He didn’t move. There was nothing moving in the car, which he could see now was held in place by a lone steel pipe bent under its frame. The nose of the car was below street level, kept from falling all the way through into the Ditch by the pipe that was jammed up under its left front wheel well. No one was visible inside.

“Get down on your knees or I’ll wrap you. Then you’ll get to roll all the way to the van.”

He sighed and got down awkwardly onto his knees, his hands still held out in front of him. His arms were getting tired, but he was determined not to get his hands tack-welded to his body if he could help it. The firelight behind the building shell was dying out, and the street was slipping back into darkness. Misty was moving around him, staying at least ten feet away, the gun still pointed at his head while she examined the car. Then he thought he heard distant sirens.

Janet awoke into a red haze with a splitting headache. Getting tired of all these goddamned headaches, she thought irrelevantly, and then she tried to open her eyes. They were stuck together by some warm sticky substance, which she finally realized was her own blood. Her forehead was covered in blood, and she could feel it dripping down her chin and onto

 

her chest. She moved sideways and tried to wipe the blood out of her eyes.

She wiped the blood off her hands and felt around for her Sig, then I remembered it was in her holster. She looked over to see what had happened to Lynn, but the girl was not visible. Then she was, a crumpled I white-faced form scrunched into the space between the dashboard and ; the front seat. No, not white-faced—red-faced. She, too, had hit the windshield and was bleeding profusely from a scalp cut. Janet swore softly and tried to untangle herself from between the front seat and the steering wheel. Then she heard something outside, sat up very carefully, raised her head, and looked through the shattered windshield. There was just enough light coming from the fire to reveal Kreiss on his knees in the street, and a tall black figure with a gun moving slowly toward the car. She recognized that figure, and she moved her hand behind her to draw the Sig. Lynn moaned from under the dashboard, but she did not move.

“It’s your cavalry all right,” Misty said.

“She drives like she shoots, though. Nice going, Special Agent.”

Janet shook some more blood out of her eyes as she struggled to get more upright in the seat. She glared at Misty through the open side window.

She saw two Mistys, then three, then one, and blinked her eyes rapidly to clear her vision. She held the Sig just out of sight below the windowsill, her fingers sticky with blood. Misty was stepping closer, but her gun hand kept that Colt aimed right at Kreiss’s head as if it had its own fire-control system. Janet looked over at Kreiss. He appeared to have a ball of fabric wrapped around his hands, which he held out in front of him as if praying.

“We’ve come for Kreiss,” Janet said.

“We? We? Got a mouse in your pocket, there, Special Agent?” Misty was smiling wolfishly.

Janet swallowed to relieve the dryness in her throat. She thought she heard distant sirens, but she dismissed it as wishful thinking. Then she saw Misty’s expression change. Damn it, she did hear sirens.

“Here’s the deal,” Misty said.

“He’s going with me. You try to interfere, I’ll execute plan B.”

“Plan B?” Janet repeated stupidly.

Misty gave her a patient look but said nothing. Janet figured it out.

Janet tried to think of something to say, a move to make, but she was staring at an impasse here and she knew it. God, her head hurt. Her teeth hurt and her eyes hurt and she was feeling a little nauseous.

She felt the Sig in her hands, and wondered when she’d managed to draw it. Misty smiled as if reading her mind.

“Whatcha got there, Special Agent?” she said in a taunting voice.

“Got your gun, do you?” She stepped closer, her weapon still pointed unwaveringly at Kreiss. Janet definitely heard sirens now, but they were getting closer not nearly as fast as she wanted. Lynn groaned again behind her.

Kreiss looked over at the car; he had heard his daughter.

“Want to try it out, Special Agent?” Misty asked. She took a fighting stance, extending her arms, crouching, and gripping her weapon with both hands, still keeping it pointed at Kreiss. She was maybe six feet from the car, her body facing Janet but her head turned to watch Kreiss.

“Think you can actually shoot someone? Because I don’t think you can. I think I can nail you and then him in the time it’ll take you to work up your nerve, because you’re just another fucking amateur and always will be.

But, hey, Carter, I’m game if you are.”

Kreiss moved then, struggling to his feet. Janet felt her heart start to pound. Her mouth was now absolutely dry and there was a chemical taste in her throat. The Sig suddenly seemed to weigh twenty pounds, and she gripped the butt even harder.

This was the moment she had dreaded the whole time she had been in the Bureau.

“Get back on your fucking knees, Kreiss,” Misty hissed, steadying the gun on him but now watching Janet.

“No,” he said, starting to walk toward her. Janet realized what he was doing. He was creating a diversion, forcing Misty to split her concentration.

Giving Janet the shot. But only if she did it right now.

Time slowed down. A rivulet of blood ran into her right eye and she had to blink rapidly to clear her vision. Misty saw Janet blink and smiled.

Kreiss kept coming.

“Watch this, baby face,” Misty said, snapping her eyes back to Kreiss for a second and then back to Janet.

“Let me show you how this is done.”

Janet fired right through the car door. She didn’t try to aim. She just stared at Misty and forced her hands to track that stare, willing the bullets to slash through the six feet of air between them and tear into that goddamned woman’s body. She fired until the Sig wouldn’t fire anymore, her fingers burning as the car’s insulation caught fire, watching with grim satisfaction as Misty staggered back from the hail of bullets that were tearing into her, still trying to bring the

Woodsman around and then dropping it with a wail that was cut off as the final round tore out her throat, spinning her around and down onto the concrete. Janet’s last three rounds hit the concrete wall behind, sending two ricochets howling down the ruined street and one back into her own car, inches from her knee.

When the noise finally stopped, Janet tried to focus on the scene in front of her. Misty was motionless on the ground. Janet turned her head to locate Kreiss. Oh God, oh God, Kreiss was down, too, face flat on the concrete, not moving, his face buried in the rubble.

She dropped the Sig by her foot and tried to get the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. Lynn was crying behind her now, making a whimpering little-girl sound that surprised Janet. She pushed herself sideways, getting more blood in her face, wiping it off on the seat back, and then started climbing through the window feet first She felt the car move then, swaying as she changed position. She froze, then resumed her movements, forcing her legs and then her hips out the window, straining her back, and then dropping out of the car onto—nothing.

She yelped, grabbed the blood-slick windowsill, and hung there for a moment while the car rocked dangerously on the single pipe holding it over the hole. She heard the end of the pipe grinding ominously. She climbed partially back into the car, got another faceful of blood, and then blindly kicked out with her legs until her feet hit solid ground. She arched her back, making a bridge of her body between the rim of the hole and the car, and then stood up, windmilling her arms until she could get her balance.

She sat down, then recoiled when she felt Misty’s foot move against her back. She rolled away, wiping her eyes clear of blood, and came up on all fours. Misty was also on all fours. Her chest pack was a mass of black blood, and there were bloody holes in her right hand and throat. Her left eye was hanging partially out of its socket. Her face was twisted into a white mask of fury. The hole in her throat was pumping visibly, spattering the concrete and literally drowning out the words she was trying to speak.

Janet crawled backward from this horrible apparition as the sweeper brought up a large stainless-steel syringe in her left hand. The needle dripped a fuming substance from its glittering tip, and then Janet, still moving backward, felt a searing lance of pain on her right shoulder as Misty pressed the plunger to fire a jet of acid across the concrete at Janet.

Then Janet heard a single shot from her left and Misty’s head jerked sideways and she dropped like a stone, the syringe clattering into the street.

Janet tried to get up, but her skin was screaming in pain as the acid

melted through her shirt and burned her. She saw Lynn hanging partially out of the car window, her face white, blood streaming from her forehead, still clutching Janet’s .38. The car shifted again, the steel pipe under the wheel well beginning to bend up at a dangerous angle. Janet yelled at Lynn to stop moving as she tore away the upper-right part of her smoking shirt and rubbed at her skin, trying to get the acid off her. Then Kreiss was there, telling her to stop moving, and then he was kneeling next to Misty’s body and dissolving the capture curtain in the fountain of blood coming out other throat until his hands came free, flailing away the ropes of the latex hanging off them like a bundle of snakes. He pulled Lynn all the way out of the car, getting her clear just as the steel pipe made a loud creaking noise and then viciously snapped, dropping the car nose-first down into the hole with a terrible crash. After that came a profound silence, into which the sounds of sirens finally penetrated. Kreiss put Lynn down gently, sitting her up against the building’s wall.

Janet sat on the concrete, still batting at the skin on her shoulder while trying to keep the blood out other eyes with her left arm. Kreiss squatted down next to her, rubbed his bloody hands against the jumpsuit, and took her hand.

“I wasn’t sure you could do it,” he said softly.

“I wasn’t, either,” she said, looking over at the Misty’s shattered body, which was draining four distinct streams of blood across the concrete and into the Ditch. Lynn still held Janet’s .38 in a virtual death grip while she stared at Misty’s inert form. Janet realized she was clutching his hand like a lifeline. Her own legs were trembling.

“Look,” he said.

“You’ve both sustained head injuries. Your memory will be affected. I’m going to take… that… away. Here’s your story:

You got here, heard shooting, saw the thermite, and then fucked up and drove into the hole and got out by the skin of your teeth.”

Janet blinked. The sirens were definitely closer now.

“They’ll certainly believe that,” she said.

“Still the fucking amateur.”

“No, not anymore you’re not,” he said. He looked over at Lynn to make sure she was still conscious.

“Who’d you call?”

“Would you believe the aTF?”

He smiled at that.

“I’ve got to move,” he said.

“You remember the crash, but nothing else. Stay close to Lynn, if you can. I’ll be in touch when things cool off.”

“Will you?” she asked.

 

“Oh yes, Janet. But first I’ll send you a sign. Now, lie back down, relax.

That’s just a cut on your head. Scalp wounds bleed. Looks worse than it is, but it will divert any questions for a while.” He looked up and listened.

“They’re almost here.”

“Farnsworth is going to be seriously pissed,” she said, not letting go of his hand.

“Farnsworth is going to be too busy to be pissed,” he replied. He squeezed her hand and then he moved to Lynn. She watched him gently put his daughter down on her back in the anti shock position, head down, knees raised. He wiped her forehead, took the gun out of her hand, and then held her face in his hands for a moment. He kissed her forehead and stood up. He picked up Misty’s gun, and then lifted her inert form, hunched into a fireman’s carry, and then he was gone, bent over with the weight of her, like a lion off to hide his kill.

Janet relaxed onto the concrete, hearing the noise of vehicles up by the gate, knowing they’d be down here soon. She let the blood seep over her forehead now without trying to impede it; the bleeding actually seemed to help the headache. The skin along her upper arm and shoulder still burned, but it was more like a really bad sunburn now. She wondered if her shoulder would be scarred forever. She realized she didn’t really care.

What had he called her? Janet? No more “Special Agent”? She smiled at that as headlights flooded the street. It began to rain.

Three weeks later, Janet Carter waited outside the RA’s office for her final meeting with Farnsworth and Keenan before she formally checked out of the office. That morning, she had tentatively accepted a teaching and research position over at Virginia Tech in the materials forensics department of the civil engineering school. The school was developing a post incident forensics program to investigate and determine the cause of catastrophic failures in large structures, such as bridges, streets, or buildings. When the department chair, who had also headed up one of her Saturday seminars, found out she was looking, he had offered her the job immediately, subject, of course, to the

appropriate due diligence on her academic degree and an FBI recommendation. Like many government employees leaving federal service, she’d been a bit surprised at how easy it had been.

As she sat there, she wondered, not for the first time, where Edwin Kreiss was. Based on the way Lynn had been acting lately, she was pretty sure they had been in touch. The past three weeks had been interesting times, in the Chinese sense of that expression. The aTF never did find McGarand, but they had found a vehicle in the woods that had been rented up in Washington at the Reagan Airport, and the driver’s license used had been Browne McGarand’s. A joint forensics team had spent some time at the scene where they found Janet and Lynn. It had taken a specially equipped fire truck to get the fire in the valve pit out because the thermite grenade had ignited some metal fittings. There had been no trace of human remains in or around the valve pit itself, but they had recovered an IR sight-equipped AK-47, along with evidence that it had been emptied almost indiscriminately into the valve pit. She wondered if anyone had tried to account for all the blood trails out on that street, but the rain had probably washed most of it away.

Farnsworth had had a lot of explaining to do to his bosses in Richmond and Washington, as well as to the aTF He stonewalled the latter, while trying to explain what one of his agents had been doing there at the arsenal that night, with a civilian in tow. There had been endless meetings and lots of report writing to do over the whole incident. Janet had had time to prep Lynn in the ER, so their story remained fairly consistent: They had gone out there to help Kreiss and ended up crashing the car. End of story, as far as they knew. Never saw Kreiss. Never saw anyone else. Never saw a firefight. Janet’s acid burns had come somehow from the hole into which they’d crashed the car. Didn’t know how they got out, or how they got back up to the street. Both of them had taken a shot to the head, hadn’t they? Everything after the crash was a blur. Didn’t remember calling the aTF, but must have. Knew they’d come, wasn’t sure the Bureau would.

That last had hurt Farnsworth’s feelings. No, never saw McGarand.

Billy Smith had been recalled to temporary duty in Washington the day after the incident. Janet had been prepared to pursue the theory that he had been an Agency plant all along, put in place to watch Kreiss. But he was gone, and Farnsworth had bigger fish to fry. Three days after the incident, all the hate mail from Washington had suddenly stopped. Word came down directly from the executive assistant director over Criminal Investigations that the incident was officially closed.

It had been as if a giant hand had simply wiped all the post incident counterops and turned out the lights on the whole affair. One day, she was in the hot seat; the next day, everyone was suddenly all smiles and happiness and the office was back to business as usual. All she could figure was that larger issues, and one in particular, had finally hit the fan at the senior-executive service level.

Lynn Kreiss was back in school, after Janet had explained to the university’s finance office why Lynn had been absent and, more important, why her tuition for that quarter ought not to be forfeited. The university’s finance office had been incredibly unsympathetic, and it wasn’t until Janet had threatened publicity that adult supervision was brought to bear. Lynn had agreed to go with Janet and Larry Talbot to one final meeting with the boys’ parents, which had been tense initially and then extremely emotional.

Now she was spending her weekends at her father’s cabin, waiting and watching for her father to appear out of the woods one night. Janet had been spending her weekends there, too, just to keep an eye on things and to get out of her town house. In the back of her mind, she knew she also wanted to be there when, if, he showed up again, but there had been no sign of Edwin Kreiss.

She had also been assigned to work out a case-closure report with the Montgomery County detectives on the matter of jared McGarand. She had written a Bureau memo outlining her theory that Jared McGarand’s death had probably been accidental, occurring during the course of a confrontation between Edwin Kreiss and the subject. She appended an evidentiary statement provided by Lynn Kreiss as to the sexual abuse and near rape she had endured while a captive at the hands of the subject. The county people, slaves to the same closure statistics that drove their federal cousins, said they would have to keep the case open, but they allowed informally as to how nobody was going to put a lot of man-hours on a creep like that anytime soon. Because she had named Edwin Kreiss in her report, the paperwork was whisked off to Washington and never seen again.

She had spent a great deal of time doing some soul-searching about staying in the Bureau. The Roanoke people might all have been told to forget that anything had happened, but, of course, a hell of a lot had happened.

The kicker came when Farnsworth put her in for a meritorious service award. The headquarters Professional Awards Division had come back disapproving the recommendation, citing an opinion from OPR that there

had been several clear instances where Special Agent Janet Carter had either disobeyed direct operational orders or departed from approved procedures, causing the loss of a Bureau vehicle in two different instances.

Farnsworth had loyally driven up to Richmond to raise hell about the disapproval, but when he returned, all he could say was that he had run into an absolute bureaucratic glacier. It apparently had nothing to do with Janet. It had everything to do with the fact that the Edwin Kreiss case was not only closed but positively entombed.

“Chernobylized,” the SAC in Richmond had said. Images of helicopters dumping concrete on the whole affair.

That was when Janet had made her decision to leave the Bureau. She could understand how the organization would want to pave over the Edwin Kreiss affair. She could not, however, forget what she had done out there in the arsenal. For that one instant, she had become an instinctive, rather than rational, human being. She could justify the shooting; she could not rationalize emptying the Sig, no matter how much she recited Bureau training about gunfights. She had looked Misty in the eye and emptied the Sig until her hands were on fire, and she would have come out of that car and strangled the woman if she’d been close enough. She could still remember the shock of triumph in her heart when she saw the look of surprise in Misty’s face, even as her bullets took that face apart. As far as she was concerned, she’d met the beast, and the beast had looked a lot like her. Once was enough.

“Mr. Farnsworth will see you now, Special Agent Carter,” the secretary said, a triumphant look in her eyes. Janet came back to the present and stared at the secretary long enough to make her look away. Then she went into the RAs office. Ben Keenan was already there, and they both appeared to be in an expansive mood. Janet sat down.

“So I guess this is good-bye,” she said.

Farnsworth nodded. He had not attempted to talk her out of leaving the Bureau this time, which pretty much confirmed Janet’s own suspicions that, careerwise, she had become radioactive.

“Yes, I guess it is, Janet,” he said.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out better, but I think you understand by now that, knowing what you know about the Edwin Kreiss case, any subsequent assignments would always be … uncomfortable? I guess that’s the right word. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll be following you out the door by year’s end.”

“They didn’t—” “Oh, no, but these kind of cases always create a certain amount of fallout.

If I go peacefully, the rest of the troops here get a second chance.”

 

“The rest of the troops here just did their jobs,” she said.

“Why should they suffer over the Kreiss affair?”

“You know the answer to that, Janet,” he said.

“Kreiss was a Bureau man. He embarrassed the outfit. This whole thing reminded everybody of an old rule.”

“What’s that?”

“Once a deal is made at the executive level, always clean up any loose ends. Kreiss was a loose end with consequences, and look what happened.”

“I would have thought that document would have made them somewhat more grateful,” she said.

“What document was that?” Farnsworth asked. His expression was one of bland disinterest.

Janet cocked her head.

“C’mon now,” she said.

“The document in AD Marchand’s archives. The smoking gun. Which proved—” “Never heard of it,” Farnsworth said, giving Keenan a questioning look. Keenan shook his head. He’d never heard of it, either.

“What!” she exclaimed.

“Nothing of the sort ever happened,” he repeated.

“The resignation of the deputy attorney general of the United States was simply a case of a senior political appointee resigning as the administration ended its own term of office. Nothing more.”

“And the recent retirement of Assistant Director Marchand and his senior deputy AD, and a certain red-faced PA … well, those were driven entirely by personal reasons,” Keenan said.

“Nothing more.”

“And the reappointment of our beloved director for another full term of office had been in the works for, oh, quite a long time,” Farnsworth said, folding his hands across his chest.

“Don’t you think so, Ben?”

“Oh, yes,” Keenan chimed in.

“Quite a long time indeed. Absolutely.

At least according to the attorney general of the United States, who publicly expressed her continuing full faith and confidence in him.”

“As did the president himself. Am I right, Ben?”

“He absolutely did,” Keenan said, beaming.

“Several times. And he loves his Bureau, too.”

“Oh, positively. He loves his Bureau. Just like the AG loves her Bureau.”

“They fucking better,” Keenan said. They looked at Janet with straight faces for a moment, and then they all laughed.

Janet shook her head. In a way, it was kind of comforting. The ultimate lock was in place. The big fish could afford to smile about

it. Small fry who might know something about the antecedents of such deals were, of course, an embarrassing annoyance. Any offer on said small fry’s part to fold her tents and disappear quietly into the desert night would be gratefully and expeditiously accepted, as evidenced by the recommendation Farnsworth sent over to the university. It had been glowing in the extreme, and, just for good measure, it had been warmly endorsed by the same official at the laboratory who had been the proximate cause of her original exile to the Roanoke office. Wonders never ceased.

Farnsworth was about to say something else, when the secretary buzzed in on the intercom.

“What?” Farnsworth asked.

“An urgent telex for you, sir. From the VHP?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

The secretary read it over the intercom. It was plain from her tone of voice that she was upset. The Virginia Highway Patrol was reporting that they had found two partially mummified human heads impaled on stakes in the median of Interstate 81 outside of Christiansburg. They were requesting immediate FBI forensic assistance. They reported quite a commotion out on the interstate. Media interest was expected.

“Mummified human heads!” Keenan exclaimed.

“On stakes? Christ!”

Janet turned her face away to conceal the smile she was struggling to control.

“Close,” she murmured.

She wondered when he’d call. He probably wouldn’t. He’d come shambling down that hill behind the cabin. Maybe with Micah Wall and Whizbang.

“Hey, Special Agent,” he’d say.

“So where’s your bu-car?” She could just see it.