Hunting Season (36 page)

After cruising Browne McGarand’s house and neighborhood, he decided to drive out to the area of jared McGarand’s trailer. On the way out there, he thought he heard thunder, but the sky seemed to be clear.

When he approached the intersection of jared’s road with the state road, a Highway Patrol car was blocking the entrance. He kept right on going, catching a quick glimpse of more flashing blue lights back in the trees.

Okay, he thought, Jared’s demise is no longer a secret. He drove on down the state road and turned onto Highway 460, which would take him back toward his own cabin. He decided to go home, catch a quick nap, and then he had some preparations to make for his call on the other McGarand. Maybe this guy would be more forthcoming, and would live long enough to give him what he needed to know. Given the man’s cold, quick decision to begin shooting out there at the arsenal, he might be a tougher nut to crack than the beer-guzzling Jared.

Focus, he reminded himself. The objective is not revenge, the objective is to find Lynn, and this bastard probably knows where she is. As he drove home, he turned on the truck’s radio to get a weather report, and he found out that it had not been thunder he’d heard earlier.

Janet was fully awake in a semiprivate room at the Montgomery County Hospital when Farnsworth showed up with a small crowd that included the red-faced Mr. Foster. Her ribs had been taped, and there were bandages on some of her bandages. The most painful points on her body were actually where the IVs had been. Sounds still echoed in her ears, and she felt as if she had been pummeled all over. The other bed was empty,

and the RA sat down on the edge of it. His expression was somber, and then she remembered that Ken Whittaker had been killed, along with those two kids, the rent-a-cops. Farnsworth was accompanied by Ben Keenan, who was his number two in the Roanoke FBI office. Keenan, who had been away on annual vacation, had come back in after the explosion.

There were three other men, whom she did not recognize, but they looked like feds. They filed in behind the RA and gathered around the end of the bed. She saw a state trooper standing on guard outside her door before Farnsworth shut it. She was almost glad to see them, until Farnsworth introduced the three other men as being from the ATE Two of them appeared to be in their early thirties, and the third was much older. She nodded carefully as each was introduced, then promptly forgot their names.

“How’s Ransom?” she asked, remembering his crumpled form.

“Not terrific,” Keenan said.

“Took a piece of re bar through the head.

He’s in a coma. We’re all praying that he’ll come out of it. But actually…”

He shrugged.

“Janet, can you go through it again?” Farnsworth said.

“What happened out there at the arsenal?”

Janet described their tour of the bunker fields—nothing out there but empty concrete mounds surrounded by tall weeds. Then she described their search in the industrial area, and where she had been standing when the world ended.

“I remember that one of those kids—one of the rent-acops—had gone down to unlock the power plant, but I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention.”

One of the younger aTF agents leaned forward.

“We’re trying to figure out what kind of a bomb it was,” he said.

“The girl they recovered?

She made a fragmentary statement at the scene, said something about a hydrogen bomb and Washington? You have any take on that?”

She shook her head again, carefully. There was a monster headache lurking back in there. The aTF guy must be talking about Lynn Kreiss, she thought. The second aTF agent, the other young one, asked her if she could describe the explosion.

“Felt it, never saw it,” she said.

“Pressure, heat, no noise—I think the sound was there, of course, but it was overwhelming. You all are echoing when you talk.”

“We have a tech team from the Washington NEST at the site right now,” the aTF agent said.

“You know, that nuclear emergency response team? They’re making a

radiation survey, just in case, although we think the nuke angle is unlikely. We’ve backed all the local response people out until we know something, one way or the other.”

Janet didn’t know what to make of all that. She’d caught only a glimpse of the area through the doors of the ambulance. She supposed it could have been a nuclear bomb, given the extent of the destruction, but shouldn’t she have been flash burned On the other hand, that power plant had been absolutely flattened. She could still visualize the molten and smashed boilers where the building had been, and the crumpled tank farm behind it.

“Janet,” Farnsworth said.

“Did you personally see any signs of human activity within the arsenal? Anything in any of the buildings that looked recent? Trash in the street? Shiny metal surfaces?”

“No, sir,” she said.

“I’d been there earlier, of course, and the hole was still in the street where my car went through that plate.” She paused for a moment. Something about pipes. Then she remembered.

“There were some pipes piled next to the hole in the street that I don’t remember being there when Kreiss got me out. But I may not have seen them—I was pretty exhausted by then.”

“Who is this “Kreiss’?” one of the aTF agents asked.

Foster and Farnsworth exchanged a quick guarded look that the aTF agents could not see.

“A security guard at the arsenal,” Farnsworth said.

“They were making a patrol and found the plate gone. Back to these pipes—you’re saying they could have been put there after you got out of the tunnel?”

“Sir, I don’t know. I just remember seeing them and not remembering their being there the last time.”

Farnsworth nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

“Once the NEST people are backed out and the place is verified radiation free, we’re going to do a really comprehensive search of the wreckage area and the rest of the installation. If people have been using this installation, especially if it’s been going on for a while, we should find evidence of it: intrusion routes, trash, chemicals, bomb-making equipment, residues, stuff like that.”

“aTF will be honchoing that effort,” the older agent said, as if to remind Farnsworth whose jurisdiction bomb makers came under.

“Absolutely,” Farnsworth said, looking at Janet with a slightly annoyed expression.

“But we can’t go forward until the nuke people say the place isn’t a hot zone.”

Janet tried to think of something else to tell them, but she couldn’t.

Her body hurt enough to distract her. Farnsworth got up.

“Well, okay, folks,” he said.

“Let’s leave Agent Carter here some room to recuperate. Of course she’ll be available for further questions in due course. I’ll have an interviewer come up and take a dictation for the record tomorrow morning, and we’ll make that available for all concerned.”

The men made sympathetic noises and backed out of the room, leaving only Farnsworth behind. He again nudged the door closed behind them.

“What’s the deal with Kreiss?” she asked softly He shook his head.

“Beats the shit out of me. Foster came down here with his hair on fire when word of the explosion got back to D.C. But now aTF has everyone spun up with what the girl said about a hydrogen bomb. Washington thinks she’s hallucinating, but she’s still out cold, so no one wants to take any chances.”

“Foster want to pin this one on Kreiss, too?”

“I’m no longer in that loop. But there’s something going on, and it involves the damned Agency.”

“I’d like to tell Kreiss we’ve rescued his daughter,” she said.

“Well,” Farnsworth said, glancing over at the closed door, “that guy Foster has a slightly different slant on that proposition. But the focus right now is on the Kreiss girl talking about a hydrogen bomb and the capital. People in D.C. are seriously spun up.”

“An H-bomb? That’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? I mean, don’t you have to have an A-bomb even to initiate an H-bomb?”

“I’m no physicist, Janet. All I know is that when the girl said that, the BATF people did not laugh. In fact, they went semi-ape shit got that nuclear response team heloed down here on an hour’s notice. They were scaring the locals with all those Geiger counters and guys in moon suits until we cleared everybody out of there. Thank God the press didn’t get onto that.”

“But, boss—an H-bomb? C’mon.”

“Did you see that building, Janet? The Army people had some pretty good pictures of the industrial area before the explosion, and that power plant was a big fucking building. It’s now a concrete deck. The debris field is a half mile in every direction, and every vertical wall facing the plant has been damaged or knocked down. They found some pieces of the boiler tubing out on Route Eleven, for Chrissakes. You tell me what kind of bomb that was.”

Her head was hurting and it was hard to concentrate.

“But what has this to do with Kreiss? He was just looking for his daughter.”

“The homicide of jared McGarand is the key to that, we think. Look,

we’re keeping aTF in the dark about Kreiss and the rest of it, because you know that crowd: They’ll go off half-cocked. That’s doubly true if they think there’s Agency shit involved here. They do bombs, and we have the mother of all bombs for them to focus on right now.”

“What’s their theory, if not a nuclear device?”

“The older guy, the one who didn’t talk much? While everybody else was running around yapping on their radios and pretending they hadn’t pissed their pants, he was making a drawing of the bomb site. When I asked him what kind of bomb was in that building, he said something interesting. He said it looked to him like the building was the bomb.”

“And what the hell does that mean?” she asked. She was having trouble keeping her eyes open. She hated being in the hospital, but right now, there was a sleep monster in this bed and it was whispering her name.

“Don’t know, Janet, but Foster is insisting we keep aTF in the mushroom mode for a little while longer, while certain people way above our pay grade, quote unquote, work the Kreiss angle. You get some rest now, okay? Hey, and you did fine out there.”

Janet closed her eyes after Farnsworth left. He was upset—hell, they were all upset—after losing Ken Whittaker. And apparently Ransom’s prognosis wasn’t wonderful. aTF headquarters would of course be asking why a Bureau resident agency had called for one of their people without clearing it through Washington, and why they had even been out there at the arsenal. Farnsworth, anxious at this point to keep the bullshit swirling, had probably told them that it was part of the missing kids case.

She turned in the bed to ease the pressure on her aching ribs. She vaguely remembered going through a wooden railing. That wood must have been very dry. The docs said she had no broken bones, and that she could check out in the morning, as soon as they made sure she hadn’t suffered a cardiac tamponade, whatever the hell that was. Her right wrist was swollen but usable.

The fly in all this ointment, of course, was Edwin Kreiss. She tried to remember if the DCB had been told about the Kreiss angle or not.

Because if they had, then Farnsworth’s game with the aTF wasn’t going to hold up for very long. And poor Kreiss: tearing up the visible world, looking for his daughter, and now the feds had her and weren’t going to tell him? She cursed all bureaucratic rivalries and fell asleep.

Browne didn’t see the cop car until it was too late; he was already signaling his turn into Jared’s entrance road. He slowed as the cop got out and

waved him over. With a sigh, Browne shut down the truck and prepared himself. There was no way someone could have made a connection between the arsenal explosion and him, he reassured himself again. Or Jared, for that matter, so this had to be something else. Had to be.

“Evening, sir. May I see some ID, please?”

“Certainly, Officer,” Browne said, reaching for his wallet.

“What’s going on here?”

The cop didn’t reply as he looked at Browne driver’s license. He asked him to please wait in the truck, then went back to his cruiser to make a radio call. When he came back over, he said, “There’s a sergeant coming out to speak to you, Mr. McGarand. It’ll just be a minute, sir.”

Browne saw that the cop was uncomfortable, rather than angry or suspicious.

Had something happened to Jared? Was this why he hadn’t shown up? Then he had an alarming thought. Had that woman’s husband caught them? Jared had said someone had been creeping around his trailer. He felt a pang of conscience—he remembered hoping that the woman’s husband would catch them. He knew the old rule: Be careful of what you wish for.

A dark four-door sedan nosed alongside the cruiser. Two men in civilian suits accompanied by a bulky state trooper with sergeant’s stripes got out and approached his truck. The trooper took his hat off and informed him that a man, whom they believed to be Jared McGarand, had been found fatally injured. Was he related to Jared McGarand? Browne said yes, he was Jared’s grandfather and his only local next of kin. Would he be able, and willing, to make a next-of-kin identification at the scene?

Browne, a cold feeling in his stomach, nodded a soundless yes. The trooper cleared his throat and began to explain that the victim had been crushed by the trailer, and that identification might be difficult. Browne blinked. Crushed by the trailer? That didn’t sound like some irate husband.

He took a deep breath and said that, yes, he’d do it.

He got out of the truck and waited for the trooper to introduce the two men in suits, but the sergeant did not do so. He almost didn’t have to;

Browne was almost positive they were government agents, probably FBI.

The city suits, the faintly supercilious expressions on their faces, and the body language of the local cops told the tale. Browne forced his expression to remain as neutral as he could get it. This was the enemy: The FBI, along with its incompetent cousin, the BATF, had taken William from him. It was one thing to talk about a formless, faceless, and powerful enemy, and quite another thing altogether to be standing