Hunting Season (33 page)

Now it would be stalemate, he thought. The guy knew he couldn’t safely climb down into the tunnel without risking being shot. And he had probably just used up all his carry ammo. Kreiss’s only regret was that he hadn’t been able to get the jump on this bastard, because this was definitely the man he wanted to interrogate. On the other hand, if this was the other McGarand—and there was a definite resemblance to Jared there—Kreiss knew where he lived. It would have been better out here, but he’d go wherever he had to in order to find out what the hell they’d done with Lynn. He waited, his eyes just back up over the edge, watching the cone of light. Unseen water below him coiled in the siphon chamber, compressing the air around him.

Browne stood up in the street and jammed the empty gun into his waistband.

The barrel was still warm from that last volley. He looked down at the line of steel rungs illuminated in the growing sunlight and knew he couldn’t go down there. That guy was a cool customer, running like that and never once turning around. So it would be just like him to be sitting down there in the Ditch, drawing a bead on the ladder and waiting for Browne to screw up. Well, he wasn’t going to do the intruder any favors.

He looked both ways and then walked up the street to where they had piled the pipes from Jared’s trap. He dragged three of them back to the hole in the street, where he placed them quietly over the hole nearest the ladder rungs. Then he got three more pipes and extended

the grid, keeping the spacing at about eight inches. Then he rolled two of the heaviest pipes down and laid them crosswise on the grid, anchoring it. Now when the guy tried to crawl out of the tunnel, he’d find a barrier. He couldn’t move those pipes without making noise, and Browne would hear him.

Meanwhile, he had work to do.

He went back to the power plant and hooked up the electric motor on the leftmost garage door to the power strip and raised the door, revealing the truck. He had worked all night. He was sweaty and dirty and sand eye-tired.

He had brought the hydrogen pressure in the truck to just over four hundred psi. It wasn’t the five hundred he wanted, but it would do, it would do. With those security guards going down the hole and now this lone ranger trapped down in the Ditch, the arsenal was blown as a base of operations. He had to get out of here and begin the final phase, Jared or no Jared. Goddamn kid, going through life with his brain hard-wired to his pecker. There’d be police and probably feds all over this place by morning, but by then he’d be on his way. Jared had painted the truck in the color scheme of a Washington fuel company a month ago from a picture Browne had given him, so now it was just a question of getting it out of here with no witnesses. He wasn’t really worried about Washington; he knew those smug bastards would never see this one coming.

He had hauled the generator out of the boiler housing an hour before dawn and gathered all the other equipment into the control room with the retort. The generator fuel gauge showed it was one-quarter full.

Good. Then he had gone around the boiler hall and sealed as many air inlet points as he could find, including all the boiler fuel-burner registers and the ventilation-duct outlets. It had taken him nearly two hours, but he’d kept the retort chugging, letting the highpressure gas pump squeeze the last bit of hydrogen into the propane truck. Then he closed all the interior doors in the power plant except the one leading from the control room into the boiler hall. He went to the truck, cranked it, and breathed a sigh of relief when it started up. Now all he had to worry about were the tires, but they seemed to be all right. He drove the truck out through the big door and stopped it out in the street, letting its diesel warm up. He checked the pipe grid on the hole in the street, but nothing had been disturbed.

Good. Then he had an idea.

He went back into the control room, where he reloaded his .44 from a box of ammo he kept there. Then he ran a last flush on the retorts and added all the copper he had left in the room. He disconnected the pump piping from the tops of the retorts and recharged them with a double

load of nitric acid. The reactions began immediately and he decided to add one more jug of water to their cooling tubs. Then he walked to the door, took one last look around, closed it, and duct-taped it. He went into the garage bay and taped the door leading back into the control room. He left the generator running and hit the switch to lower the heavy garage door.

Then he ducked out under the descending door and went to the truck.

The generator would run out of fuel in a little while, but there was now no more need for electrical power. Double-loaded like that, those retorts would generate hydrogen for hours, gradually filling the interior of the power plant with an increasingly explosive mixture of air and hydrogen.

When the feds came knocking, there ought to be at least one smoker.

That’s all it would take.

He walked back up the street to the hole, knelt down, poked the .44 through the grid of pipes, and emptied it into the tunnel again. The noise down there must be terrific, he thought with satisfaction. And, hell, he might have gotten lucky. Then he went back to the truck and drove it up the hill to the tank farm behind the power plant. Leaving it running, he got out and went to the big valve-manifold station by the acid tanks. He searched around until he found a crow’s-foot, a four-foot-long metal bar with three rake like studs that just fit inside the rim of a big valve wheel and allowed a man to apply the full leverage of his body to turning the wheel. He closed the small valve that had supplied nitric acid to the reservoir bottles in the power plant’s water-testing room. From this elevation, the acid would dump into the Ditch above the hole in the street. The other two valves, leading to the main explosive-manufacturing buildings, were already closed. He then opened the much larger dump valve marked emergency—DITCH. He heard a rumble in an eight-inch-pipe that disappeared into the ground ten feet from the tank. There was probably twenty thousand gallons of the acid left in the tank, which was now going to rain down into the Ditch, onto the intruder and the remains of the security guards. He considered waiting to see if the guy would pop up out of the street, but he imagined he could almost hear cops at the front gate.

Every instinct was telling him to get the hell out of there. He got back in the truck and drove it out behind the power plant to the road that led back to the bunker farm and the arsenal’s rear gate.

“Okay, so what the hell’s been going on around here?” Farnsworth growled when he sat down at the head of the conference table. It was 11:20, and he was dressed in his church clothes. He was visibly angry.

Ransom and Janet sat on opposite sides of the table near Farnsworth, while two squad supervisors sat down at the other end. They, too, did not look pleased to have been brought in on a Sunday morning. A black triangular teleconferencing speaker sat in the middle of the table, nearest Farnsworth . After listening to Janet’s preliminary report, Farnsworth had set up a conference call with Foster at his home in McLean, Virginia, and Foster was now on the line.

Janet began by recounting her meeting with Kreiss in Blacksburg, leaving out the part where Kreiss had expressed suspicion about what Bellhouser and Foster were really up to. Then she detailed her expedition to the Ramsey Arsenal. When she was finished, there was an embarrassed silence at the table. The two squad supervisors were looking studiously at their notebooks, undoubtedly very glad she did not work for them.

“All right,” Foster said from the speaker.

“Let me get this straight:

Kreiss essentially told you he wasn’t interested in any cooperative efforts, and that he already knew what Site R was?”

“That’s right,” Janet said. She had also left out his threat to put heads on pikes.

“Which means he was the headless horseman, then,” Farnsworth said.

“I’d expect so,” Janet said.

“How did he react to the theory that there was a bomb cell operating at the arsenal?” Foster asked.

“He thought it unlikely,” Janet said, casting a quick glance at Ransom.

She’d forgotten she’d told him what Kreiss had said. Ransom was looking straight ahead and saying nothing.

“And the next time you saw him, he was pulling you out of some tunnel?”

“That’s correct,” she said.

“And he said nothing about what he was doing there? Or how he happened to stumble on the fact that you were trapped down in the tunnel?”

She hesitated a half beat.

“He said he was looking for his daughter.

Which is what he said he would be doing. At our meeting in Blacksburg.”

“How did he know you were in the tunnel?”

“He heard the noise I was making. I was trying to position a pipe to climb out. He was up on the street above, came to see what was making the noise.”

“Did he think it was his daughter?”

Janet started to answer but then stopped. What had Kreiss been thinking when he heard the noises?

Random leaned forward to address the speaker.

“This is Ransom,” he said.

“I think Kreiss was looking for his daughter, but there’s another angle here.” He went on to describe bugging Kreiss’s truck, and his discovery of what he suspected was a dead body under a trailer, and the fact that his bug had ended up on the vehicle belonging to one Jared McGarand, whom he further suspected was the corpse under the trailer.

“So Kreiss had been there?” Foster asked.

“That what you’re saying?”

“That’s correct.” Janet noticed that Ransom’s street speech was long gone. Enter the professional, she thought. Maybe gofer, maybe more.

“Local law into this trailer business yet?” Jim Willson asked. He ran the surveillance squad and was a senior special agent with nearly twenty years’ experience in the Bureau. Willson had a reputation for being all business, all the time.

“We backed out without doing any notifying,” Ransom said.

“

“We’?” Farnsworth said. Janet saw Willson whisper something to Paul Porter, the other supervisor.

“I took Special Agent Carter here out to the trailer this morning,” Ransom said.

“Why?” Farnsworth asked in a tone of voice that Janet recognized as portending a bureaucratic turf fight. I knew this wouldn’t work, she thought.

Ransom sat back in his chair.

“Because it looked to me like a possible homicide. Domestic homicide isn’t our area, is it? Putting electronic surveillance on Kreiss, on the other hand, was done at the Bureau’s request.

If Kreiss offed some guy, I figured it was time to get the Bureau into it, which is why we’re having this meeting, I think.”

Farnsworth looked like he was about to lose his temper.

“With all due respect, boss,” Willson said, “what the fuck is going on here?”

“Okay, everybody,” Foster chimed in from the speakerphone.

“Let’s get back on track here. I’m hearing that Edwin Kreiss is operational. I’m hearing that there’s evidence he’s been at the scene of a possible homicide, and that he’s made at least one illegal intrusion onto a federal reservation, which used to be an explosives-manufacturing plant. Correct so far?”

No one answered, so Janet spoke up.

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Then may I suggest that our theory might be correct after all? That this Jared Me-whatever might in fact be connected to a bomb-making network we’re all looking for.”

“I disagree,” Janet said immediately.

“Kreiss is looking for his daughter.

If there’s a connection between Kreiss and the body under the trailer,

it has to do with his missing daughter. Kreiss knows nothing about a bomb network. The only reason he went into the arsenal is that a single, somewhat questionable witness told him that’s where his daughter might—and I emphasize the word might—be going. There’s no evidence of a bomb making cell at the arsenal.”

“All right, all right,” Farnsworth said.

“We need to get local law out to that trailer, and then I think we need to get federal assets out to this goddamned arsenal. From where I stand, we have a missing persons case that might be a kidnapping-abduction case, and now, a possible homicide.

One of my agents nearly lost her life, and a Bureau vehicle, in the process of what should have been a routine inspection of a federal facility. Mr.

Foster?”

“Yes?”

“In deference to your bomb theories, I want to call in the local ATE We’ll look into this homicide situation in cooperation with the Montgomery County Sheriffs Department. Any information that develops with regard to Mr. Kreiss will be reported directly to you. How’s that sound?”

“I’d prefer to keep the aTF out of it until we ascertain whether or not this jared guy was doing something at the arsenal. For the reasons we discussed previously. I also need to confer with Ms. Bellhouser.”

Janet saw Willson mouth the name Bellhouser and then shake his head.

“I can understand that,” Farnsworth said.

“And I know how much we might like to bust aTF’s chops. But there’s something wrong here. I’ve got agents getting hurt, and a possibly related homicide. No one has ever mentioned any southwestern “Virginia bombing conspiracy to me before.

Now you tell me something: Are you and Bellhouser serious about that, or was that just a ploy to get us to stir up Edwin Kreiss so Marchand and company could whack his ass?”

Wahoo, Janet thought. The boss is back. Willson and Porter were looking on in undisguised fascination. Ransom was hiding his face in his hands.

“We are absolutely serious about that,” Foster said.

“But—” “Then we get aTF into it. Right nicking now. I’ll make the call. Ken Whittaker is our local liaison guy.”

There was a strained silence on the speakerphone. Then Foster said, “Well, may I at least request that the Kreiss angle be confined to Bureau channels?”

“We will try,” Farnsworth said.

“But if he becomes a suspect in a possible homicide—”

“He won’t if you neglect to tell the local cops about the switched tracking device.”