Hunting Season (56 page)

“Tell her about the Craggits,” Lynn said.

Micah grinned again.

“Oh, yeah, them Craggits came around, goin’ to git ‘em some ree-venge on Ed Kreiss. He heard ‘em comin’ somehow, turned that big fifty-cal loose on the Craggits’ pickup trucks. They went a-howlin’ and a-yellin’ out into the woods, and then old Ed, he cut loose with them lion sounds into them woods. Them Craggits laid a trail a loose shit all the way back over to Moultrie Mountain. Time since, goin’ on four years now, old Ed’n me become pretty good neighbors.”

“I’m probably being impolite,” Janet said, “but I have to ask: What do you and all these people do up here, Mr. Wall?”

“We git by,” he said, revealing just a hint of a smile. Janet smiled back, understanding that was all she was going to learn.

“Well, look, there’s probably a warrant out for my arrest right now,” she said.

“I ran a federal roadblock last night. And I shot at—well, I’m not sure who the hell she was. But I suppose she’s federal, after a fashion.”

Micah spat onto the dirt floor of the hut.

“Them folks out there, they’s all gov-mint. Got the smell and the look about ‘em. Them people don’t belong up here. Never have, never will. One day, they gonna learn that.

These the same bast ids shot down that woman and chile up on Ruby Ridge. Too many of ‘em just killers with badges is all. They chasin’ that boy Rudolph down in Carolina?” He spat again.

“Shee-it. They ain’t never gonna find that boy. Mountain folk got ‘im hid and hid good.”

The agent in Janet got the better of her.

“That guy Rudolph set bombs that killed and maimed some people,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s what they say. But you willin’ to bet they gonna take him alive?”

“Well, if they catch up with him, he’ll certainly get that option,” she said.

“You reckon? Them folks at Waco, they didn’t git that option,” Wall said.

“How’s a man gonna git his day in court, when them revenuers come a-shootin’ first an’ asking’ questions later?”

Janet had no answer for that one. Lynn was looking down at the dirt floor of the hut.

“Now I’m sorry we put you in this fix, Mr. Wall,” Janet said.

“They might try to arrest all of you, take you off the mountain for obstruction of justice.”

Micah nodded.

“I reckon we’ll do the best we can, they come for us.”

He straightened up.

“Meantime, y’all lay low in here, till old Ed comes for you. And, like I said, keep an ear peeled for any dog ruckus up at the front.

Trap’ll slow ‘em down, but y’all gotta go if they hit it.”

“What kind of trap is it?”

“When I leave, my boys’ll take a hornet nest we sacked last night. Set it up in the passage. Them hornets, they gonna go for the lights.”

“Big nest?”

‘“Bout a million,” Micah said, eyes twinkling.

Janet grinned in spite of herself. She could just see it.

He gathered up the bag.

“Now, lemme show you something’ else. Them people out there—if they come in a-shootin’? That’s different. You open that trapdoor, grab you some lanterns; then you light this fuse right there—you see it? There’s the matches. Light it; then pull that trapdoor down. Then y’all git on down that passage till you get to the first turn.

They’s a dead-end branch passage, goes to the right. Git in that, git down, and stop up your ears.”

Lynn, who had been listening to all this, was nodding her head. Micah checked to see that the lanterns had fuel, then stepped back out the front door of the hut and disappeared into the front passage. Janet examined the fuse, but she wasn’t so sure about doing what the old man had recommended.

Just last week, she could have been one of the people coming in here. On the other hand, somebody seemed to be rewriting all the rules when it came to Edwin Kreiss and his daughter. Just like they did at Waco, she thought. That fire in the hospital, for instance. That had been way out there. And that guy Browne McGarand, going up to Washington with a truckload of hydrogen to blow something up. This old man could crack wise about it, but these people up here were obviously convinced that the government and all its works could not be trusted. If they came in with tracking dogs, looking, they ran into bear grease and

hornets. If they came in with snipers, flash-bangs, and tear gas, as they had proved they could from time to time, they’d get the cave dynamited down on their heads.

Lynn said she was going to explore the trapdoor at the back and make sure they could get it open. Janet sat down at the tiny wooden table and put her head in her hands. Her people had to know she was up here in the mountains with Lynn Kreiss. They’re not your people anymore, are they?

a little voice in her head reminded her. Micah Wall and his people were protecting her until—what? Until Kreiss could get back? She felt as if she were out on the moon somewhere. Last week, she had been a federal agent; now, in the space of a day and a night, she was a federal fugitive.

She began to understand the meaning of the phrase “out in the cold.” She wondered what Farnsworth and her coworkers at the Roanoke office were doing right now: Combing the hills for the two of them? Sitting back and pretending that she did not exist? Waiting for instructions and the spin d’jour from the bosses in Washington? The same bosses who wouldn’t listen to warnings of a bomb plot, and who were apparently more interested in embarrassing another government agency than in protecting peoples’ lives?

What she instinctively wanted to do was call into the Roanoke office and check in, talk to somebody, see what the hell was going on. But whom could she call? Not RA Farnsworth. And not Larry Talbot, who would be too scared to take her call. Not Keenan. She didn’t know anybody in the ATE And not Edwin Kreiss, who was God knew where, and who had at least the Bureau hunting for him, if not the ATR And the Agency, don’t forget the blessed Agency.

Lynn, who had gone through the trapdoor, squeezed back into the hut.

“I left a couple of lanterns and some matches in the passageway. He wasn’t kidding about narrow.”

“Make sure we have that map,” Janet said.

“If we have to escape that way, I want to be able to find my way back out of this mountain.”

“I’ve got it right here, next to the door. You suppose this fuse goes to dynamite or something?”

“Yes. It will probably bring this part of the cave down.”

Lynn came over to the table and sat down, wincing when her ribs touched the table.

“I wish I knew where my father was,” she said.

“And what the hell was going on.”

“That makes nine of us,” Janet said.

“I’m almost tempted to go back out front, see if I can find a phone.”

“Whom would you call?”

“That’s the problem. I don’t exactly know who my friends are right now. Or who’s chasing us. Where the hell does that woman get off, anyway—starting a fire in a fucking hospital! Those Agency people aren’t even supposed to be operating within the United States.”

Lynn nodded slowly.

“I’m not so sure about that,” she said.

“When my father was working with them, he sometimes went overseas to do what he did. But he also worked here, in the States, too. It kind of depended on whom he was pursuing and what they’d done.”

“But if a wrong guy needs pursuing in the States, that’s the Bureau’s job, not the Agency’s.”

Lynn smiled.

“I think that’s why the Agency let him stay: he was technically a Bureau man, not an Agency man.”

“Ah,” Janet said.

“So if some part of an operation broached, he could flash Bureau creds and people would back off.”

“Something like that. He never gave me details of what he did, but I think that the people they went after had overstepped the bounds. A lot.

The big boys just wanted the problem taken care of, and I don’t think they really wanted to know too much about how it was taken care of.”

“You mean they’d go after some guy and just cap him?”

“I don’t think so, actually,” Lynn said.

“Dad says there are some federal prisons where they can put people into the federal corrections system and bury the file. Lewisburg, Fort Leavenworth, for instance; they have lifetime solitary-confinement facilities there. Who’s going to go up to a place like that and ask to see the dungeons?”

“The ACLU maybe?”

“The ACLU would have to know the guy existed in the first place.”

“Jesus, you make it sound like Russia.”

Lynn laughed.

“I met a Russian graduate student at Tech last year. He was in the advanced physics program. We got to talking politics—God, how those Russians love to talk politics! He laughs at the proposition that we live in a ‘free’ country. He told me to go find out how many government police there are now, compared with ten years ago.”

Janet just looked at her.

“Well, I tried. Like, do you know how big the Bureau is?”

“Well, it’s big, I know that. Ten, fifteen thousand people, maybe.”

Lynn shook her head.

“Try twenty-seven thousand employees in the FBI. Ten years ago, it was

sixteen thousand. I tried to find out how many federal government police there are, the total number, and do you know I couldn’t really do it? Maybe you could.”

“There are more cops because there is more crime, and a hundred new mutations of crime every day. Internet crime. Serial killers. Hannibal the Cannibal types. Chat rooms where pedophiles buy and sell children for snuff flicks. Sixty-two thousand bombing incidents in the past five years.”

“Yeah, but look at that Waco thing: Sure, those people were a doomsday cult, and they had some weird people there. Koresh and all his ‘wives’;

all of them waiting around for Judgment Day, praying for it to come, probably, the end of the millennium, the Second Coming. But for that, the government burned them alive? Jesus Christ. Burning people for their beliefs went out with the Inquisition. Supposedly.”

“Koresh burned them,” Janet said.

“Our people didn’t do that.”

“Maybe,” Lynn said.

“But your people gave Koresh the pretext when they drove tanks into the building. Hell, why didn’t they just cut the power and the phones and the water and wait for a few months? But no, some cowboy—or maybe cowgirl, huh?—in Washington decides to send tanks in? And then, afterward, they all do the armadillo and try to cover it all up? I mean, the Bureau and the aTF could be telling the absolute truth, but when shit comes out like that business with the incendiary rounds? Nobody believes them anymore. For that matter, how many women and babies did David Koresh ever burn alive before the tanks showed up?”

“But we’re the good guys,” Janet said.

“Koresh started those fires.

Koresh killed those people. He was wounded and he was dying, and he had nothing more to lose!”

Lynn just looked at her.

“That may be true,” she said.

“But America is a democracy in the full bloom of the information age. If agencies like the Bureau and the aTF aren’t squeaky fucking clean, it will come out. In the past, maybe not, but now? It will come out. And then there’s no more trust. If it’s perceived to be a coverup, then it is a coverup.”

Janet sighed and looked away. Lynn put her hand on Janet’s arm.

“Look,” she said.

“You’re risking your ass to save my ass from some claw of the government we can’t even name. Don’t think I’m not grateful. But four or five years ago, my father found out something about some very high-level people in the government, a secret bad enough that a senior Agency guy shot himself and his whole family to protect it. I think the only reason they didn’t ‘disappear’ my father is that he was a

pretty resourceful operative who might have caused a train wreck or two in the process. When he was quote-unquote ‘retired,” it was all done over a pay phone, okay?”

“You think that’s what this is all about?”

“You know, I think it is,” Lynn said.

“Dad and I have talked about this before. There’s been a lot that’s come out about the Chinese spy case since then. I think he was afraid he was becoming more and more of a major loose end. He knew firsthand what can happen to a loose end, especially these days.”

The kerosene lamp guttered, and Janet got up to light a second one to replace it.

“How do you know all this?” she asked.

Lynn drew her sweater closer about her.

“Dad and I talked a lot after my mom was killed and he was forced out. I son of made it a condition of our reconciliation. I told him I had to know about him and what he did, not operational details, of course, but why my mother had been so afraid.

Why she said some of the things she said.”

“Which weren’t true.”

Lynn looked up at her. She had Kreiss’s intense gray-green eyes, Janet suddenly realized. Eyes that knew too much and had seen too much.

“But that’s the point, Agent Carter,” Lynn said.

“Most of it was true.”

Janet remembered the hunting woman’s face, with eyes like those on a great white shark. Play “Misty” for me. She shivered. Then they heard the dogs.

Browne McGarand rubbed the itchy new stubble rising on his clean shaven face again as he drove the rental down the back side of the arsenal.

It was nearly sundown, and he was looking for the entrance to an old logging road that led back to the western perimeter fence. He planned to drive the little car up the logging road as far as he could and then hide it.

Then he would walk to the perimeter fence and go north along the fence until he got to the point where the creek entered the federal reservation.

Unlike the creek’s exit point, it wasn’t very big, and they had just run the fence atop of it, laying down some concrete culverts. Once inside the two fences, it was a mile’s walk to the bunker farm and to bunker 887.

He had prepared his bolt-hole in the bunker field early in the project.

It was in the remotest part of the ammunition-storage area. They had cut the rusty series padlock and unsealed the air-circulating ventilator fixture at the back of the bunker, converting the ventilator trunk into an escape hatch. Halfway down the bunker’s empty length, he