Hunting Season (45 page)

Once on the ground, he would spread a large plastic tarp over one of the HVAC building’s two air intakes to block it off. He would then drape a second tarp, with a receiver fitting sewn into it, over the remaining air intake screen. The screens were eight feet high and six feet wide. At that hour, the building’s environmental-management system would be running the intake fans at very low speed. They wouldn’t speed up the fans until the heat of the day called for more cooling. He had taken rough volumetric measurements of the building by pacing off its length and width on the sidewalk and then multiplying that number by one hundred. Then he had computed the heating ventilation-conditioning volume using the Civil Engineer’s Handbook. The propane truck was designed to hold eight thousand gallons of liquid propane. Now, filled with pure hydrogen gas under nearly four hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, it held more than enough hydrogen to fill the aTF building, using the building’s own recycling ventilation system, in about an hour. What made the building most vulnerable to this kind of attack was the fact that none of its windows could be opened. In fact, he had almost twice the hydrogen he needed to achieve an explosive vapor mixture, but he knew there would be small leaks here and there. No manmade gas system was perfect.

He was going to treat the aTF the same way they and their allies at the FBI had treated the people at Mount Carmel. He would start the

odorless, invisible hydrogen injection at around 6:00 A.M. Sometime in the next 60 to 90 minutes, the building would achieve an explosive mixture of air and hydrogen, courtesy of its own closed-cycle ventilation system. Because it was the start of the day, the intake fans would be running slowly, and the recycling air-handler system would keep almost all the air inside the building to achieve maximum cooling. Sometime after that, as the building filled with aTF agents and their bosses, someone, somewhere, would slip into the men’s room to sneak a cigarette. Or fumble with an aging light switch. Or turn on an entire floor’s worth of fluorescent light fixtures all at once. Or summon the elevator and mash the button several times, making those copper contacts up in the elevator shaft open and close, open and close. He had been a chemist and an explosives engineer for decades. The industrial-safety manuals were filled with stories of how the most mundane objects were capable of producing a static spark: a doorknob in winter, the switch on a desk fan, panty hose on a dry winter day, the keyboard of an electric typewriter, the ringer in a telephone.

In that silent, invisibly deadly atmosphere, one spark would reproduce what had happened down at Ramsey. Only this time, the building wasn’t made of reinforced concrete: It was wall-to-wall windows.

“Some more coffee, sir?” a pleasant young woman asked, pausing at his table with a Silex coffee pitcher.

“Thanks, I’m all done,” he said, smiling up at her through his dark glasses. His heart was actually thumping with excitement. Today, after months of labor at the arsenal, he was finally here. This afternoon, he would find a motel near the airport to crash and get some sleep. Early in the morning, he would take a taxi to the Pentagon, then go retrieve the truck. There was security-camera surveillance of the Pentagon building itself, but he had seen not one single camera on the old power station building. Then he would drive the truck into the city; he even had an official-looking dispatch ticket, lifted when Jared had appropriated the truck. And sometime early tomorrow morning, all those criminal bastards in that building were going to get a taste of what it must have been like at Waco when they burned William along with those Branch Davidians to death, while their agents stood around the perimeter, drinking coffee and making crispy-critter jokes.

He hoped there were cameras on that building. They were going to get the shot of a lifetime.

Forty-five minutes later, Janet was sitting in Lynn Kreiss’s hospital room.

A uniformed sheriff’s deputy sat outside the door, watching the television

in the empty room across the hall. Lynn was still hooked up to an IV, but she actually looked better than the last time Janet had seen her. It’s amazing what some sleep can do for you, Janet thought. The girl was tossing and turning a bit in the bed, and making small noises in the back of her throat, as if she were having a bad dream. Her face had some color in it, and the monitors on the shelf above her head were busier than they had been the last time. Janet had talked to the attending physician, who told her that Lynn had started talking—babbling might be a better word for it—at 3:30 that morning. The collective opinion was that she would be coming around soon. Janet asked how soon was soon. The collective opinion was that it was anybody’s guess. The marvels of modern medicine, Janet thought.

As she watched the girl wrestle with the web of unconsciousness, Janet was struggling with her own dilemma. In her mind, she was coming down on the side of a real human-made explosion out there at the arsenal, if only because of the timing. That thing had gone off when a bunch of people had come in there and started unlocking doors. If there had been a pool of explosive vapors down there in that tunnel complex, her own little adventure should have set it off, especially when that car went scraping along the concrete. Then there were the two civilians, the McGarands, one a possible homicide victim, whose truck tires had traces of arsenal mud on them, and the other a retired chemical explosives engineer. And not just any engineer, but the senior engineer at the Ramsey Arsenal. Both of them were blood relations to a guy who had been incinerated at the Waco holocaust.

And now the surviving McGarand has just flat-assed disappeared, with Kreiss apparently hot on his tail. And all three federal agencies involved, two of which had been responsible for what happened at Waco, were busy going head down, tail up in the bureaucratic ostrich position.

Oh, and now some shark-eyed dolly with a half-inch-thick karate callus on her hands wanted Janet to relay a love note to Edwin Kreiss.

She looked up. Lynn Kreiss was staring at her, trying to speak. Janet got up and went over to the bed. The girl’s lips seemed to be dry, so Janet poured her a glass of water.

“I’m Special Agent Janet Carter,” she said softly.

“I’m with the FBI. Are you thirsty?”

The girl nodded and Janet helped her sip some water. Lynn cleared her throat and then asked Janet what time it was.

Janet told her what day it was, what had happened out at the arsenal, and how long she’d been out of touch here in the hospital. The girl

drank some more water and then Janet said she was going to summon the nurses but that she needed to talk to Lynn after that, if she was able.

“Where’s my father?” Lynn asked.

“We don’t know,” Janet said after a second’s hesitation.

“He wasn’t involved in the explosion. Personally, I think he’s up in Washington chasing down the guy who kidnapped you.”

“Guys,” Lynn said. Her voice was gaining strength, and she sat up a little in the bed.

“There were two of them, a young guy and an older guy, although I only got a quick look at them, when my friends hit the leg traps.”

“Leg traps?”

The girl explained what had happened to her two friends. She reiterated that she had seen only the two men, one much older than the other.

Both guys had black beards and looked like mountain men.

“Yes, that’s what we have,” Janet said.

“The younger guy’s name was Jared McGarand; he’s dead. The older guy is his grandfather, Browne McGarand, and he’s missing.” She told Lynn what had happened to Jared, then asked her what had happened to the boys’ remains. Lynn didn’t know, other than that the water had covered them up. She closed her eyes for a moment, and Janet gave her a minute to rest.

“The younger one—you said he’s dead?”

“Yes,” Janet said.

“An apparent homicide.” She didn’t feel it was the time to discuss her father’s possible involvement.

“Good riddance,” Lynn said.

“That guy was a serious creep.”

“Lynn, when the medics picked you up, you were sort of babbling something about a hydrogen bomb and Washington.”

“I was?”

“Yes. It didn’t make much sense, but it got everybody’s attention.”

Lynn frowned for a moment, and then her face cleared.

“Oh, yes, I do remember. The other one, the older one, told me he was taking a hydrogen bomb to Washington. I said, Yeah, right, like he could just make a hydrogen bomb with some plans off the Web. He said it wasn’t what I thought.”

Oh shit, Janet thought.

“Any indication of what he was going to do with this bomb?”

Lynn frowned again, trying to remember.

“No,” she said.

“Wait—yes.

He said he was going after what he called ‘a legitimate target.”

” Janet studied the girl. There was a toughness there, despite her

current physical frailty. Definitely her father’s daughter.

“Did he sound like a nutcase?”

“Yes and no. He wasn’t raving. He was calm, sort of matter-of-fact. But fanatical, maybe—remember, I could only hear him. He said he’d made a hydrogen bomb, that he was taking it to Washington. Like it was a routine deal, something he did every day. That made it kinda scary, you know?”

Janet nodded, writing it all down in her notebook.

“I wonder why he would tell you,” she said.

“He implied I was supposed to be insurance, a hostage or something, if things went wrong. He told me to get ready to go, but then he never came back. The next thing that happened was that the building fell in on me.

But that was much later.”

Something was playing in the back of Janet’s mind. What had that older aTF guy said—that this had been a gas explosion?

“When he said hydrogen bomb, and you challenged that, and he said it wasn’t what you thought—I wonder if he meant a hydrogen gas bomb?”

Lynn shrugged and then winced. Janet knew that feeling. She stepped out into the hallway and summoned the nurse. Then there was a crowd and Janet backed out into the hall to let the docs do their thing. She went down the hall to the waiting room, which was empty. She fished out her cell phone but then hesitated. She needed to call her immediate supervisor, Larry Talbot, to tell him what had happened to the two boys. There were parents to be notified, and, of course, remains to be found. But there was a bigger question here: That Agency woman wanted her to page some kind of a warning threat to Kreiss. But here was the daughter confirming that Browne McGarand was up to something that did involve a bomb and Washington, D.C. She should report that immediately, but would anybody listen? Her bosses seemed to be so caught up in protecting their rice bowls right now that there might be nobody listening.

She called Talbot, got his voice mail, and told him what Lynn had said about the missing kids. Then she put a call into Farnsworth’s office. The secretary said he was not available. She asked for Keenan, but he was with Farnsworth. Where was the RA? Out, the secretary said helpfully. Feeling like a child, Janet almost hung up, but then she gave the secretary the news about Lynn Kreiss being awake, and that she, Janet, needed to talk to the RA urgently, as in, Now would be nice. The secretary was unimpressed, but she said she would pass it along. Janet gave her the number for her cell phone.

She went back down to I.C.U to talk to Lynn some more, but the doctors were busy and the nurses forbidding. It was now almost three o’clock.

She stood there in the busy corridor, thinking, while a stream of hospital traffic parted indifferently around her, as if she were an island. In three hours, she was supposed to page Kreiss for his wake-up call. If he still had the pager, and if he had it turned on. She could just hear him saying, Now what, Special Agent? In that weary voice of his. Now what, indeed. I’ve got good news and bad news. Your daughter is conscious and apparently doing okay. She says one of the guys who kidnapped her is taking a hydrogen bomb to Washington. If you’re interested, that is. Oh, and an old friend of yours stopped by with a message—want to hear it? And Kreiss would go, Nope, busy right now. Bye. Her cell phone rang. It was Farnsworth’s secretary: “Get back here now.”

Kreiss nosed his rented Ford 150 van into the truck stop off the Van Dorn Street Beltway exit in Alexandria. It wasn’t much of a truck stop, not compared with the interstate facilities, but he had to check it out. His exit guide listed only two such facilities on or near the Beltway, not counting trucking terminals. This was the third trucking terminal he’d stopped into on his circuit of Washington’s infamous 1-495. It was midafternoon, and he knew that in about a half hour or so he would have to quit until after rush hour, because nothing moved during rush hour around Washington.

There were a dozen trucks parked at this stop, and three more filling up in the fuel lanes. No propane truck was in evidence. It was possible, of course, that McGarand had put the thing in a garage somewhere, and he had made a mental note to look up fuel companies in the area and make the rounds of those if the truck stops came up empty. But there was something so nicely anonymous about a truck stop that he was pretty sure that’s where the propane tanker would be. Kreiss believed in the theory that if you want to hide something really well, you hide it in plain sight. He drove the van around the parking lot and behind the store and rest facilities building. No propane tanker. He got back out onto the Beltway and headed east, toward the Wilson Bridge and the crossing into Maryland.

He had a terrible feeling he was wasting time.

A stone-faced Farnsworth was waiting in his office when Janet got back to the Roanoke office. Keenan was with him when Janet took a seat in front of the RA’s desk. He asked her to debrief him on what Lynn Kreiss had told her. When she was finished, he turned in his swivel chair and looked

out the window for a long minute. Janet looked over at Keenan, but his expression was noncommittal. He seemed to be uncomfortable with what was going on, but willing to go along. Farnsworth swiveled his chair back around.

“Okay,” he said.