Hunting Season (12 page)

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

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

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

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

“I

remember that kid dark. Redhead, right?

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

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

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

he asked.

She waited.

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

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

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

“Not a place you’d go camping, then?”

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

“Like what? Site R sounds military.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Edwin Kreiss.”

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

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

You still flying for that Geo-Information Services?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kreiss told him.

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

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

“You tell your ex-employers all that?”

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

Dagget was silent for a moment.

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

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

“Roger that,” Parsons said.

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

“I can pay for this, Dag.”

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

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

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

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

There was another pause.

“Ed,” Parsons said.

“That incident at Millwood.

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

Kreiss didn’t want to get into this.

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

“Probably best for all concerned.”

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

Kreiss stared out the window for a moment.

“Ancient history, Dag.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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