Hunting Season (61 page)

“Son of a bitch,” Farnsworth muttered.

“This just doesn’t sound right.

We’d have been avalanched with calls if the aTF thought they were chasing one of our agents and there was shooting.”

“Maybe we’re making assumptions,” she said.

“Maybe this wasn’t aTF

Maybe that damned woman just said it was, to throw some shit in the game.”

“You’re assuming they were her people?”

“I’m beginning to think so.”

Farnsworth got up and paced around the kitchen. One of the agents stepped in through the back door and reported all was secure outside.

Farnsworth acknowledged and the man stepped back out. Farnsworth asked Billy to crank up a fresh pot of coffee and get it to the men outside. Billy signed off from the communications terminal and started hunting for coffee makings. The agent, whom Janet knew only slightly, had nodded politely to her before he’d stepped back outside. Back in the fold, she thought.

“Now I know we need to pick up Edwin Kreiss,” Farnsworth said finally.

“I mean, headquarters wants his ass for what he did to those two agents, and local law wants him for the jared McGarand thing. I think we need to bring him in for his own protection. Damn, I think I got snookered here.”

“That woman knew all along that it would be damned difficult to trap Kreiss. Once Lynn was recovered, though, she saw her opportunity. She came after his daughter, knowing Kreiss would come in to protect Lynn.”

“Right, right, I can see that.”

“Once she knew that Kreiss had been picked up in Washington, just before the bombing, she backed off, left us alone at Micah’s. Until, of course, she found out that Kreiss had managed to escape.”

“Which means she has a source inside the Bureau,” Farnsworth said.

“I’ve been making reports up my chain of command since this shit started.

Maybe the leak’s in Richmond.”

“Well, then,” she said. “we have to move. We need to get Lynn to a safer place, and we need to find Kreiss. Actually, I think I know how to do that.”

“How?”

“Let me talk to Micah. Do you have one of your cards? He’s still outside?”

“You going to take those with you?” he asked, indicating the credentials and the Sig. When she hesitated, he added, “How ‘bout if I say I’m sorry?”

She smiled wearily.

“This wasn’t you, boss. This is something slimy and corrupt oozing back out of the ground in Washington. You need to get Lynn to tell you what she knows about her father’s termination.”

Then she picked up the credentials and the gun, her badges of office. He passed her one of his cards, and she went outside.

Micah was sitting in the front seat of one of the Bureau cars, his hat on his lap, his face a mask of shame. Janet opened the driver’s door and got in.

Seeing his expression, she said immediately, “You did the right thing.”

“Not in my book, I didn’t,” he said.

“Your car’s over there.” He wouldn’t look at her. Without the mountain man hat on his head, he looked old and much diminished.

“Look, Mr. Wall. First, you saved Lynn and me from some seriously bad people. Second, nobody in this country can fight the government anymore, not if they decide to come after you the way Mr. Farnsworth said they would. Everyone knows that.”

“Ain’t everyone up here knows that,” he said.

She sighed and then she saw a way to let him save face.

“I didn’t tell you the whole truth, Mr. Wall. Look.”

He looked over at her, and she showed him her credentials.

“I’m the government, too, Mr. Wall. I’m one of them. You didn’t betray anyone.”

His chin rose slightly, and his face cleared.

“I was assigned to protect Lynn Kreiss,” she continued.

“And that’s what I did. With your help. But now we must get in contact with her father. The last he knew, you had

Lynn, so we think he’s going to call.”

He started to shake his head.

“He ain’t told me nothin’,” he said.

“And

I ain’t gonna—” “No, no,” she interrupted.

“We’re not asking you to turn him in to us.

But you must tell him that we have Lynn now, and that I said she’s safe with us. I need him to contact me. Not anyone else. Just me.” She turned Farnsworth’s card over and wrote her home phone number on the back of it.

“Here’s my number.”

“What about them revenuers in the cave?” he asked, taking the card.

“Wasn’t they gov’mint?”

Janet got out of the car.

“What people in the cave, Mr. Wall?” She looked at him for a moment to make sure he understood, and then she went back into Kreiss’s cabin.

“I don’t think he knows where Kreiss is,” she told Farnsworth.

“But I think he’ll put Kreiss in touch with us. For Lynn’s sake.”

“Good,” Farnsworth said.

“We’ll be safer in Roanoke, I think. Get the girl up and let’s get the hell out of these mountains.”

“Why don’t I take her to my place? Micah has my car right over there.

We both need some sleep.”

Farnsworth thought about it.

“Okay,” he said.

“And I’ll put some agents on your house. Then I think we’re going to have to call in the aTF people in the morning; we’ve got to sort this out.”

“Get them to explain the bullet holes in my car, for starters,” Janet said.

“Goddamn cowboys.” Billy grinned at her from the kitchen. Then she went to get Lynn up.

Kreiss awoke and took a moment to remember where he was, which was in his sleeping bag in a one-man tent on the Ramsey Arsenal. He rubbed his face, looked at his watch, and realized he’d overslept. He had wanted to talk to Micah before 2:30 a.m. He listened to the sounds of night outside.

Everything sounded pretty normal. He slipped out of the warm bag and struggled into the crawl suit. He slithered out of the tent, listened again, and then pulled on his boots. It was almost cold, with a clear atmosphere and enough moonlight to define individual trees. There was a steady background noise of crickets and tree frogs. He could barely hear the creek making its way down toward the logjam. He took several deep breaths and watched his exhalations make vapor clouds.

He had to think carefully about what he would say when he called Micah. He had to assume that someone, and possibly more than one someone, would have Micah’s phone line tapped at the local telephone central office. He needed to find out what had happened to Lynn without giving away his current location. Unless the Bureau had set up a very elaborate radio triangulation net, the closest they should be able to get was that he was operating off a Blacksburg or Christiansburg cellphone tower. That would tell them he was in the area, but not where. He switched the phone on and saw that the battery wasn’t at full power. He swore; the damn thing was dependent on being plugged into the rental van. He dialed Micah’s number and got a rejection tone because he hadn’t used the area code first. He exhaled, tried again, and the phone was picked up on the second ring. It sounded like Micah.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Yeah, good. Them federals from Roanoke, they done got your daughter.”

Kreiss felt a surge of alarm.

“Which federals?”

“FBI. That woman what was with her? Said she was with the FBI. She done left a message. Says to call her in Roanoke. Says Lynn is safe with her, but you gotta call, and only to her.”

He gave Kreiss the number and then there was a moment of silence.

Then he asked if Kreiss needed anything. Micah didn’t sound quite right, and Kreiss thought that he might be trying to tell him to get off the line.

He told him no, thanked him, and hung up abruptly. He got a pen out and wrote down Janet’s phone number. He looked at his watch: It was almost 3:00 A.M. Not a terrific time to call anyone, he thought. But Lynn was with Carter, which should keep her safe from Misty, especially if they had her at the federal building in Roanoke.

He was fully awake now, so he decided to scout his immediate area, and perhaps lay in a few approach-warning devices. He went to the edge of the little grove where he had pitched his camp and looked down at the wrecked industrial area, which was about three-quarters of a mile away.

There was no sign of the security patrol vehicle, but there were portable lights rigged to run off a trailer generator around the remains of the power plant. The wreckage of the other buildings looked like a scene from World War II in the dim moonlight.

To his left was the edge of the vast ammunition bunker field, arrayed in rows and lanes to the visible horizon, secure behind their own double fence line. A single road led from the industrial area to a double gate, which was closed and presumably locked. Each of the bunkers was topped by two galvanized-steel helical ventilator cowls, all of which were motionless in the still night air. The hundreds of partially buried bunkers made the place look like one vast graveyard. Two thousand acres of canned death, Kreiss thought. It was a fitting symbol for what they had once contained.

He wondered where McGarand had gone to ground. He set about rigging some motion detectors. He’d call Carter just before daybreak.

Between now and then, he’d try to figure out what his next moves were, assuming he had any left.

Janet sat straight up in her bed with the worst headache she had ever had, a blinding, throbbing pain behind her eyes and lancing down both sides of her neck. Her mouth was dry as parchment and her skin felt hot all over. She tried to clear her throat, but there was no moisture; even her

eyes were sticky and dry. The room was hot, unnaturally hot. There was daylight outside, but not sunlight. She looked at her watch: It was 6:45 on Wednesday morning. Then she realized the heater must be running.

The heater? She didn’t remember turning on the heater. She tried to clear her throat again, but it hurt even to try. She got out of bed, slower than she wanted to, and went into the bathroom. She looked in the mirror and saw that her face was bright red. She blinked her eyes to make sure, then splashed some cold water on her face. It felt wonderful, but the headache hammered away at her temples and she felt a wave of nausea.

What the hell is the matter with me? she wondered. And why is the damned heater going full blast?

She put on her bathrobe and went back into the bedroom to open a window. The cool air from outside felt like she was breathing pure oxygen, and she stood there for a moment taking deep breaths. Then she stopped: blinding headache. Hot, dry skin. Bright red face. She knew what this was: carbon monoxide.

The heater.

She bolted from the bedroom and ran down the hall to Lynn’s room, trying not to breathe. To her horror, Lynn’s door was wide open, and Lynn was gone.

Maybe she had awakened and gone out of the house. She ran to the stairs and called for one of the agents who had been downstairs. Her voice came out in a dry squeak. Dear God, let her be downstairs, she prayed.

She went down, holding on to the banister, her breathing strangely ineffective.

She realized she had made a mistake going downstairs, but she was committed now; no way she was going to make it back up those stairs.

She focused on the front door and made it, her lungs bursting from holding her breath. She threw open the door and stumbled outside. Then she realized what she had seen out of the corners other eyes as she ran for the door: the two agents, down on the floor in the living room.

She took three deep breaths and ran back inside, grabbing the first one she came to and dragging him roughshod over the front threshold and out onto the landing. His face was bright red and he didn’t appear to be breathing. She ran back inside and got the other man, dropping him almost on top of the first. Then she fell down to her knees, gagging, as her lungs screamed for oxygen from the exertion of getting them out. After a minute of this, she got up and staggered over to her car, opened the door, and got on the car phone, calling 911. Then she

called the Roanoke office and asked the duty officer for backup, agents down. Then she rolled out of the car onto the wet grass and fought off a siege of the dry heaves while she desperately tried to get more oxygen into her damaged lungs. A car drove past. She caught a glimpse of a man’s white face gaping at the scene on her lawn, but he didn’t stop. Thanks, pal, she thought.

Lynn was gone.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what would she tell Kreiss?

She opened her eyes and saw the two agents still lying motionless on the front porch, their red faces looking like grotesque Halloween masks.

She forced herself to get up and go back over to the porch, where she checked for heartbeats and then began giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the first agent.

That goddamned woman had done this. She was certain of it.

She thought she heard her phone ringing inside, but she ignored it and moved to the other man, alternating between them now, trying to get some oxygen into both of them while waiting for the ambulance to get there. It seemed forever before the sound of sirens rose in the distance.

Deep in the ammunition bunker, McGarand was cold. The whole damn structure is cold as a tomb, he thought as he shivered under two blankets.

He had food, water, a cot, blankets, flashlights, several lanterns, and a tiny cook stove but no way of heating the seventy-five-footlong portion of the bunker they had closed off. He put a hand out and touched the concrete floor. It was cold as ice. Probably stays that way all year round, he thought.

There was a faint glow of light at the top of the ladder leading up to the ventilator shaft. Must be coming daylight out there, he thought as he groped for the light on his watch. He had climbed out the ventilator shaft last night to lock the front steel door again after getting set up in the back half of the bunker. He wished they had rigged some way to take the front door’s hinges down from inside, but they were much too heavy. The bad news was that there was only one way out; the good news was that there would be no indication outside that this bunker was any different from any other bunker.

He stretched, wondering what he was going to do to pass the time. He hadn’t thought to bring any books or magazines, not even a Bible. He sighed. That had been stupid of him. He realized he must never have really believed he would need this place. He shivered again. There