Hunting Season (42 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, sir,” Travers said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Which is?”

“A gas,” Travers said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I would.”

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

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

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

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

“An act of God?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her heart sank when she saw Foster.

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

“No word on finding Kreiss?”

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

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

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

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

“Why?” Janet asked.

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

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

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

“Maybe,” Farnsworth said.

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

“Goo?” the man with Foster said.

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

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

“Purple,” Keenan said, consulting his notes.

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

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

The man nodded as if introductions had been made.

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

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

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

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

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

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