Hunting Season (46 page)

“I’m glad the girl’s going to recover. I’m sorry the other two kids didn’t make it. Larry Talbot is going to make family notification, and we’re sending in some search teams to see if we can find remains.”

“The county people are getting up a search team and a canine unit,” Keenan said.

“Larry’s coordinating it.”

“Good,” Farnsworth said. As best Janet could tell, the RA was only minimally interested in the resolution of the case of the missing college kids.

“Now, this other business: You have a page to make at six P.M.” right?”

“Yes, that’s what Mata Hari wanted me to do. I wanted to ask you about—” Farnsworth was shaking his head.

“No,” he said.

“Make the page. If he calls back, give him whatever message she wants. Then I hope we’re done with the Edwin Kreiss affair. His daughter’s been recovered, and the other two missing persons have been … accounted for.”

“But what about the girl’s statement? That Browne McGarand’s going to Washington with a bomb?”

“You said she said she was blindfolded,” Farnsworth said.

“We have no evidence that Browne McGarand has ever even been to the arsenal or that he was the man who abducted Lynn Kreiss.”

“Then show her his picture,” she said.

“She saw them both in the storm. It just about has to be him. She described him as a big man with a huge beard. Looked like a mountain man.”

Farnsworth and Keenan exchanged looks.

“What we know is that jared McGarand’s truck had been parked outside the arsenal fence. We have no evidence that he himself penetrated that arsenal perimeter, either.”

Janet frowned. What the hell was this? Farnsworth was sounding like a barracks lawyer.

“There were two people involved in Lynn’s abduction,” she said.

“One young, one much older. She was abducted inside the arsenal.

She saw them both and can identify them. We found her inside the arsenal, so they must have been inside the arsenal, too. Doing what? She said that the older man told her he was holding her as a possible hostage, in case things went wrong with his little H-bomb project in Washington.

She was found in a building right near that power plant. What more do we need?”

Her voice had risen with that last question, and she became acutely aware of the way her two supervisors were looking at her. Impertinence was not an attribute much admired within the Bureau. Farnsworth leaned forward.

“We need to adhere to the very explicit guidance we have been given from headquarters. Now, I would very much appreciate it if you would comply with my orders. Make the page. Give Kreiss the message if and when he calls in, nothing more, nothing less.”

What the hell is going on here? she wondered.

“Can I tell him his daughter is back among us?”

Keenan made a noise of exasperation.

“What part of ‘nothing more, nothing less’ don’t you understand, Carter? How about doing what you’re told for a change?”

Janet had never heard Keenan speak this way, but she had about had it.

“How about telling me what’s going on around here?” she countered.

“Why is this office so hell-bent on mind-fucking Edwin Kreiss?”

“You’ve got it wrong, Janet,” Farnsworth said.

“That page will conclude your involvement in the Edwin Kreiss matter. Then you can help Larry Talbot close out the missing persons case.”

“But what about the bomb? Are we just going to sit on that?”

“You’re talking about wholly uncorroborated information, obtained from a young woman who has just awakened from a coma, as if it were evidence. There is no evidence of a bomb, and if there were, bombs are the business of the aTF, and even they are saying there was no bomb.”

Christ, Janet thought. This was like being back in the lab: We know the answer we want; how about a little cooperation here?

“But they don’t know what we do,” she protested.

“Of course they’re saying there’s no bomb!”

Farnsworth closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“I am ordering you to drop this matter.” He opened his eyes.

“And if you can’t accept that order, you have an alternative.”

That shocked her. She sat back in her chair, unable to think of what she should say next. Both Farnsworth and Keenan were watching her, almost expectantly. Then, surprising herself, she fished out her credentials and leaned forward to put them on Farnsworth’s desk. Then she hooked her Sig out of its holster, ejected the clip, and then racked and locked back the slide. A single round popped out onto the floor. Keenan automatically bent to retrieve it. She put the gun on the RA’s desk, as well.

“You guys page Kreiss,” she said, getting up.

“This is all fucked up, and I quit.”

She walked out of the RA!s office and went straight upstairs to her cubicle.

Larry Talbot and Billy were in the office. Talbot took one look at her face and asked her what was wrong. She told him she’d just quit. He sat there at his desk with his mouth open.

“You did what? Why? What’s happened now?”

“There’s something way wrong with this Kreiss business,” she began, but then she stopped. Talbot probably wouldn’t know what she was talking about. His expression confirmed that. The intercom phone on his desk buzzed. He picked it up, listened, said, “Yes, sir,” and then hung up.

“Mr. Keenan wants to see you.”

“He can fuck off and die, too,” she said.

“He’s not my boss anymore. I quit and I meant it. I’ll come back later for my desk stuff. They have my piece and credentials. I’m outta here.”

“But, Jan, what the hell—” Larry said, getting up.

“Obviously there’s been some misunderstanding. Look—” “No, Larry. The more I think about what I’ve just done, the better I like it. You got what you need on the missing kids?”

“Um, only the basic story of what happened to them; I was on my way to talk to the Kreiss girl before I did the actual notifications. Hey, look, Jan, why don’t you just take the rest of the day off. You’ve been through a lot. Go home and think about this. Quitting the Bureau—that’s a big deal.”

“It’s the Bureau’s loss, as far as I’m concerned. Think of it as a logical consequence of my being sent down here to this … this backwater. I’m a Ph.D.-level forensic scientist, for Chrissakes. I’m here because I wouldn’t come up with the quote-unquote right answer in an evidentiary hearing.

Now here we go again. I should have quit the last time. And for the last goddamned time, don’t call me Jan!”

Talbot put up his hands in mock surrender and left the office. Billy got up and came over to her cube.

“Hey,” he said gently.

“What the hell was it they wanted you to do?”

“They won’t go after this guy who’s on his way to D.C. with a big-ass bomb. And they won’t let me tell Kreiss that his daughter is in safe hands.

It’s outrageous!”

“What did they want you to do? Quitting is a pretty big step, Janet.”

“The Agency sent some gorgon down here to give Kreiss a message.

I’m supposed to be the messenger. I’m just tired of all the lies, Billy. First in the lab, now here. This isn’t what I signed up for. Nice knowing you.”

Billy seemed lost for words, so she grabbed her jacket and her purse and left the office. She was home in thirty minutes, and she went directly into the bathroom to take a long shower. As she stood in the streaming water, she reflected on her decision and concluded that it had been the right move. She realized she needed to put it in writing, and that she also needed to get something in that letter referring to the arsenal case. She smiled then: Bureau habits died hard—she was still thinking about covering her ass, even in the process of resignation.

She turned off the shower, got out, and dried off. She put on fresh underwear and was combing her hair when she heard a noise from the bedroom door. She whirled around and found the Agency woman standing in the doorway. She was wearing slacks and some kind of safari shirt with lots of pockets. Her eyes were invisible behind wraparound black sunglasses.

“Brought you something,” the woman said, proffering a shiny object in her outstretched hand. Janet blinked, focused on it, and then there was a shattering pulse of purple light. The next thing she knew, she was on her back in her bed, completely enveloped in a sticky web of some kind. The individual strands were the consistency of raw yarn and smelled of some strong chemical. Her arms were pinned down at her sides, her hands turned palm-in against her hips. Her legs were bent to one side. She made an instinctive move to escape, but the effort only caused the web to contract everywhere it touched her body. She felt as if she were in an elasticized-rubber onion sack. Only her head was free. Everything she looked at had a purple penumbra, and the center focus other vision was a haze of small black dots. The woman was sitting calmly at Janet’s dressing table, watching her, her sunglasses gone now. Janet tried to think of something clever to say, but there was no escaping the fact that she was lying on her bed, in nothing but her underwear, trussed like a de boned turkey. She tried to blink away the haze of purple-black spots. The woman’s expression was totally blank.

“So that’s a retinal disrupter?” Janet asked.

“Yes. The spots will go away in about an hour. Usually, there’s no permanent damage done.”

“Usually? That’s comforting. And you did this—why?”

“To ensure you’d make the page, Agent Carter.”

“I’m not Agent anybody anymore,” Janet said.

“Especially because of that.” The woman looked at her watch.

“We have a little over an hour. I’ve arranged for the return call to bounce here, and then you’ll give him the message I asked you to give him. Still remember it?”

“What if I don’t?” Janet asked.

“What if I simply tell him to run like hell?”

“Same difference,” the woman said.

“That’s what my message is designed to do anyway. It’s just more effective if he knows it’s me. But I think you’ll want to do it my way.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll go get another capture curtain and wrap it around your throat. Then you could practice some very care mi breathing until someone finds you. Think of it as Lamaze with a twist. Whenever that might be, now that you’re… unattached, shall we say? Why don’t you relax now. Attend to your breathing. That stuff’s like a boa constrictor:

It tightens on the exhale, as I suspect you’ve discovered.”

Janet had indeed discovered that.

“Why the hell are you doing this?

Taking down another federal agent?”

“But you’re not a federal agent anymore, are you, Carter?” the woman said sweetly.

“Not that you ever were. An agent, I mean.”

“Huh?

“Janet said.

“You were a glorified lab rat, Carter. As a street agent, you’re a joke.

You’ve got the situational awareness of a tree. I was standing in that doorway the whole time you were taking a shower.”

“Enjoy the view?” Janet asked.

The woman cocked her head to one side and gave Janet the once-over, staring at her body just long enough for Janet to blush.

“You’re nicely made, for a breast-Fed,” she said.

“Was that why they sent you to get close to Kreiss?”

“That probably wasn’t their brightest idea,” Janet said, trying to feel how much give there was in the yarn. Not very damn much.

The Agency woman laughed once.

“Edwin Kreiss has zero time for amateurs,” she said.

“Of any stripe. What’d they do—tell you to show a little leg, bat your eyes at him?”

“Why are you doing this?” Janet asked again, trying to strain against the sticky web without showing it.

“Because now you’re just another annoying civilian who’s getting in my way. Stop testing the curtain. You can permanently damage your circulation.

Lie still. Rest your eyes. Take a nap. I’ll wake you when it’s time.”

The woman left the room, and Janet immediately tried to move her hands. The sticky rubbery substance clung to her skin like shrink-wrap, but it did give when she pushed out with the back of her right hand. But when she relaxed, it tightened, and she realized that it was now noticeably tighter than it had been. She thought about several coils of the chemical yarn around her throat and involuntarily swallowed. Then she remembered the discussion in Farnsworth’s office about the capture curtain, and the fact that it was water-soluble. If she could roll off the bed and get to the bathroom without Medusa out there hearing her, she could get it off.

She looked around, trying to figure out how to move quietly with her legs bent sideways like that, and saw the three strands that went around the right-hand bedpost. Shit. So much for that idea.

She closed her eyes. Okay, she thought, so make the call. Do what this bitch says. Hell, Kreiss might not even answer the page. She opened her eyes, suddenly afraid. He’d better answer the page, she thought. She wondered where he was.

Kreiss was sitting in the parking lot of a fast-food joint three blocks from the Beltway interchange with U.S. Route 1. He was munching on a lukewarm, well-oiled three-dollar heart attack when he heard the pager chirping in the duffel bag behind his seat. He put the grease burger down and turned around to get at the pager. He’d forgotten he had it. The number in the window made him sit right up, though: It had been his own unlisted office number when he was at the Agency. Now who the hell was sending this little summons? He didn’t have to write the number down, so he simply cleared the pager, which beeped at him gratefully. There was a phone booth at the edge of the parking lot, but there were two very fat teenaged girls hanging on it, so he went back to his gourmet extravaganza. He had been through all the truck stops and terminals on the northern Virginia side and was now working up the nerve to cross the Wilson Bridge, Washington’s monument to uncivil engineering. He had planned to wait another half hour for rush hour to subside somewhat and to make sure no big semis had fallen through the bridge deck today.

The girls finally left the phone booth in gales of laughter, multiple chins jiggling in unison. He started to get out but then hesitated. It was just after 6:00 on a Monday evening. The pager had belonged to Janet Carter, which meant it was Bureau equipment. Now someone had called it and left a northern Virginia phone number on it that no one in the Bureau should have had access to. Ergo, this wasn’t a Bureau summons.