Hunting Season (59 page)

There was a soft, contemptuous guffaw on the phone, and then the man hung up.

Kreiss pressed the button to end the call and turned the phone off. He had to assume there was a government signals intelligence van somewhere, listening to that entire conversation. What had they learned? Kreiss was in the area. He was working with Micah Wall. He was going to lay up somewhere that Micah would recognize. Ergo, they would want to talk to Micah, who would tell them zip-point shit, assuming they could even find him at all. Right now, there was a probably a lanky, bearded figure with a rifle humping it up the ridge to find Micah and deliver the warning.

He leaned back in the driver’s seat and rubbed his eyes. He needed some coffee, but the convenience store was shut for the night, its doors and windows barred, security lights burning, and the gas pumps locked.

The Virginia countryside and backwoods were apparently no longer places of safety and sociable trust. And the hills were alive with the sounds of—what? Federal agents, with dogs. Hunting two women, one of them an ex-federal agent. Which government law-enforcement agency was it?

The Bureau? The aTF? Or could it even be the Langley crowd? He still wanted to settle accounts with Browne McGarand for what he had done to those kids, but McGarand was probably long gone, or being hunted by the feds himself.

He took a deep breath, let it out, and started the van. First, he needed to make sure Lynn was safe. For that, he would have to get in touch with Micah. He couldn’t exactly go home, and he couldn’t go to Micah’s. If the feds had real coverage of the Blacksburg-Christiansburg area, he couldn’t go to a motel, either. He

had stashed the essentials of a base camp at the arsenal the first time he’d gone in. He had his crawl suit in the bag, his sound equipment, and this time he had a gun. He decided to make one stop for a meal and some extra drinking water, and then he’d go to ground in the last place anyone would expect him to go: back to the Ramsey Arsenal.

Janet and Lynn flopped down on the cave floor when they finally reached the flat wooden door. The rising passage had been covered in smelly, slippery clay, and they were both filthy with it. They were also very thirsty, having taken no water with them. The lantern was guttering, which meant it was nearly out of fuel.

“What time is it?” Lynn asked.

Janet looked at her watch. She could feel the moisture in the clay seeping into her clothes, but she was so tired, she didn’t care. She was already covered in mud from head to toe anyway. The passage up from the subterranean lake had climbed forever, through some incredibly narrow cracks, and one scary part where the ceiling had come down to within two feet of the floor, an area that they’d done on their backs. She blanked that part out other mind with a shiver.

“Ten-thirty. At night, I think.”

“So what do we do now?” Lynn asked, holding her side. She sounded as exhausted as Janet was.

“Just go out there and see who’s waiting?”

Janet looked over at the girl. She looked like she had been camouflaged for hunting, but there was also some pain showing in her face.

“That wound hurting?”

“Ribs, mostly,” Lynn said.

“Plus, I wasn’t a hundred percent when we left that hospital.”

“You’ve done amazingly well. I want to open that door and get out of here, but I have this nightmare that goddamned woman will be sitting on a stump out there, looking at her watch as if we’re late.”

Lynn grinned.

“Then you cap her ass, Special Agent. I need a shower and a hot meal.”

Janet patted the .38 that was still strapped into her waist holster.

“She’d probably catch it in her teeth and spit it back at me,” Janet said.

“But actually, it should be Mr. Wall out there. Presumably, no one else knows where this cave comes out.”

“They discovered where we went in,” Lynn pointed out.

“They had dogs; the dogs followed our trail to the cave.”

“Where’s my father, I wonder,” Lynn said, rolling over on her side.

“Last time I talked to him, he was still in Washington, looking for

McGarand. But he said he was coming back down here. Apparently, the Bureau picked him up in Washington, but he got away from them. Which is why I’m worried about that woman being out there when we open the door.”

“She doesn’t want me—she wants him?”

“Yes. But don’t ask me why. Whatever it is, my boss got some pretty high-level guidance, because at one point, he wasn’t willing to cooperate in moving against your father, and then all of a sudden, he was.”

“And that’s why you quit?”

“Partially. They wanted me to do some things that I thought were wrong. It involved that woman. When Farnsworth—that’s my boss in Roanoke—couldn’t or wouldn’t explain why, I quit.”

“What will you do now?”

“I have a Ph.D. in forensic sciences from Johns Hopkins. I can do anything with that.”

“Wow, I guess you can. The Bureau won’t queer the deal for you, will they? Because you quit?”

“You mean when I go looking for a job? No, I don’t think so. I have pretty damn good performance evaluations, and I also have worked inside the laboratory. I don’t think the Bureau would want any more publicity about its laboratory just now.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning the Bureau has a basic problem in its laboratory: The lab rats work for the prosecutors. Sometimes their evidentiary conclusions aren’t exactly unbiased. That’s where I got into trouble in the first place, and it’s the real reason I was sent to Roanoke.”

Lynn thought about that, turned again, and winced. Janet checked her bandage for signs of bleeding, but there was nothing significant.

“You know,” she said, “that woman said she didn’t shoot you; she said it was the aTF doing that roadblock, that they shot you.”

“The aTF? But why? Why were they even doing a roadblock? And, besides, they thought you were FBI. They wouldn’t shoot at an FBI agent, would they?”

“Some of them would probably like to, actually,” Janet said.

“But no, I wouldn’t have expected that.”

“Well, somebody sure as hell did,” Lynn said, rubbing her side.

“I have two bullets,” Janet said, patting her own pocket.

“We’ll have to look into that when we get clear of this mess.”

“Speaking of which …”

“Yeah,” Janet said, getting up.

“I guess it’s time to open sesame.”

Lynn dragged herself off the floor of the cave, and together they examined the wooden door. It was horizontal and appeared to be seated in the ceiling of the small chamber they had reached. It was not quite six feet off the floor of the chamber, but Janet couldn’t see how they could get it open more than a few inches without something to stand on. There did not appear to be any hinges or connection point. There was a handle on one end.

“You suppose it’s pull instead of push?” Lynn asked.

Then the lantern went out.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Janet said.

“We’ll try to do this quietly.” She pulled down on the handle. The door, which was hinged on the other end, pulled grudgingly down into the chamber, accompanied by a rockfall of dirt and small stones from above.

The other side of the door had a set of small boards nailed onto its surface, which they could feel but not see. A draft of cool, clean air filled with the scent of pine trees blew down into their faces.

“All right!” Janet whispered.

“Up we go.”

They clambered up, using the boards as steps, Janet leading, gun in hand. They crawled out onto the forest floor, staying low. The night was clear and moonlit now. They could see that they were on the side of a steep slope covered in tall pines. As soon as Lynn came off the door, it rose from the chamber below and settled back onto the level of the hillside.

They sat there for a few minutes, getting their night vision. There was a small breeze blowing up the mountain. It was enough to stir the pines, which, in turn, made it impossible to hear if anyone was moving around them. The ground was covered in a thick bed of pine straw, adding to the sound insulation. Above them, an outcropping of rock rose straight up, gleaming gray-white in the darkness. It looked like the bow of an enormous ship towering above them.

Janet moved closer to Lynn so that she could whisper softly.

“You live here. Where do you think we are?” she asked.

“My father lives here. I live in Blacksburg. But we’re probably on the back side of Pearl’s Mountain. That’s the west side. Dad’s cabin and Micah’s place are on the east side. So now what?”

Janet put the gun back in its holster. Her damp clothes made her cold. If anybody was waiting out there in the woods, he or she would be able to smell all this cave mud, she thought.

“We need to get to Micah or some of his people,” she whispered.

“The question is, Up and over, or walk around?”

“Up and over is out of the question,” Lynn said.

“I’m not sure I can even walk around. And the east side has a sheer rock face. I don’t know how high we are, but…”

“We’re going to have to do something,” Janet said.

“We stay out here in these wet clothes, we’re going to get hypothermia. We know they had people at your father’s cabin. Let’s go the other way, north, around the mountain. Micah has to have some scouts out on the mountain. Hopefully, we’ll run into one.”

Lynn groaned but got to her feet. Janet wished they had brought along those sticks Micah had pointed out. She had gone hiking several times up on the Appalachian Trail and knew the value of a good stick. The bigger problem was to keep from going in aimless circles in the darkness of the pine forest. They would have to pay attention and keep the top of the mountain to their right. And watch for timber rattlers, stump holes, waita-minute vines, dead falls loose rocks, and whatever else the mountain slope had in store for them. She tripped over a long stick, picked it up, broke it down to a useful length, and told Lynn to find one, too. Then they set out into the trees.

Kreiss established his hideout up behind the wrecked industrial area of the arsenal. He picked a heavily wooded spot upstream of the logjam and near the top of a hill on the opposite bank of the creek. Come daylight, he should be able to look down into most of the industrial area where the power plant had been, and also into the beginning rows of the vast bunker farm. He had driven north on Route 11 past the entrance to the arsenal.

The signal lights had still been out, but the barrels were gone and there were floodlights up on the hill where the entrance gates were, which told him that the investigation into the explosion was still going on. He’d driven on into Ramsey, stopped to eat at a drive-through burger joint, and then retraced his route past the arsenal entrance to the place where the rail spur turned off to go into the arsenal. A half a mile beyond was a small shopping mall, where he had parked the van. He then walked back along the highway, carrying one bag of equipment, until he came to the railroad line, and then he turned off to get into the arsenal.

His plan was to get some sleep and then call into Micah’s around midnight.

By then, hopefully, there would be news of Lynn. After that, he would have some decisions to make. The only way he could prove his own innocence with respect to the Washington bombing was to bring in McGarand, and that would be tough to do with everybody hunting him.

Plus, he had no idea where McGarand was. What he might have to do would be go into permanent hiding for a few years and maybe tell his story through the public press. But that would leave Lynn unprotected.

He wasn’t worried about the Bureau or even the aTF doing anything to Lynn, but what Misty would do was a very different question.

Headlights flared down in the industrial area. As he watched from the trees, he could see and then hear a security truck prowling through the littered streets. So there was active security now, he thought. He’d been lucky to get over the fence. The truck turned away and went down a road behind the blank concrete slabs that had been the power plant, then headed into the bunker fields. The headlights disappeared.

He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly. Focus, he told himself. Get some rest. Find out what’s happened to Lynn. Then decide.

Janet stepped across the trail before recognizing what it was. Lynn did see it, and she said, “Hey.” They examined the trail, which was not much more than a footpath, but it ran up and down the mountain, not across it.

It looked to Janet like it was maybe five, six hundred feet to the summit.

“If this goes all the way to the top,” Janet said, “we could cut our little hike here in half.”

Lynn groaned and then sat down on a log.

“I’m sorry. You go ahead, and I’ll hole up somewhere. I can’t make that climb.”

Janet sat down next to her.

“I’m not going to leave you out here,” she said.

“Let’s rest a while and then see what we can do.”

“I know what I can’t do,” Lynn said.

“I can’t climb this frigging mountain.”

Janet said nothing, just sat there in the darkness. She had regained her night vision, and she could see amazingly well. The sky was full of bright stars and a partial moon. Light-colored objects stood out with sudden clarity against the dark pines. Like the man standing there by that tree, watching them.

“Shit!” she shouted, jumping up and fumbling to get her gun out. Lynn saw where Janet was staring and got up slowly, backing in the direction they had come. The man didn’t move, but just continued to stand there, motionless. He was very tall, bearded, and was wearing a slouch hat and carrying a long rifle with a scope in the crook of his arm. Finally, he advanced one step and raised the rifle into the air. A single shot blasted out against the night air, followed by two more as he worked the bolt so fast, Janet couldn’t see his hands move. The

final gunshot reverberated across the rock face of the mountain like an insult against all nature. Back in the forest, a night bird squawked its disapproval. The man put the rifle back into the crook of his arm and stepped forward. Janet kept her own gun ready, but pointed it at the ground. The man approached, his footfalls silent on the pine straw. He was even taller than she had thought. She could smell the gun smoke rising from the barrel of his rifle.