Hunting Season (13 page)

Someone was subtly inhibiting the investigation. Kreiss eventually suspected Glower. When he checked out a rumor that Glower was almost broke, it turned out that he had been rescued by an infusion of mysterious cash. Kreiss, by then operating mostly on his own initiative, had followed the money trail. He had traced the money from its sources in Hong Kong, through the election campaign finance operations of the newly elected administration, directly to Glower. Who, for sums paid, was apparently obstructing the joint Bureau/Agency/Energy Department investigation by spinning a gentle web of bureaucratic and legal taffy over all the efforts to determine if there were Chinese spies at the nuclear research laboratories. Glower

didn’t trade secrets for money, as most spies or traitors did. He provided an insidious form of top cover, and he did it so well that Kreiss eventually concluded that Glower must have been getting some help from over in the Justice Department.

All of this was happening as Kreiss was entering his eighth year of the exchange assignment with the Agency counterespionage directorate. As he and his small team developed the scope and depth of a possible top level conspiracy, Kreiss, the team leader and prime mover, had been suddenly recalled to the Bureau. The word in the corridors was that Langley had complained about Kreiss, claiming he had begun to overstep his brief.

Someone at the highest levels in the Agency had prevailed upon someone injustice to make the Bureau recall him. He had been given an innocuous position within the Bureau’s FCI organization, pending a new assignment.

The pending went on for two years, while he watched the joint Energy Department/ FBI investigation stall out completely.

This had convinced Kreiss that Ephraim Glower had a cohort over at Justice, and possibly within the Bureau itself. His timing turned out to be lousy, since there was already a great deal of bureaucratic acrimony between Justice and FBI headquarters. Since the FBI worked for the attorney general, no one in the Bureau wanted to hear Kreiss’s conspiracy theories about any putative Chinese spy ring, and most emphatically, they did not want to hear about a high-level problem over at Justice. The Bureau was much too busy manning its own ramparts over Waco, Ruby Ridge, and, later, some unpleasant revelations about the FBI laboratory.

When the story about the Chinese government’s attempts to buy influence during and after the 1996 reelection campaign broke in Washington, Kreiss tried again. This time, he was shut down even more forcefully. The FBI director by then had his own problems with the Justice Department as he and the attorney general traded salvos and congressional testimony over independent prosecutors, a laundry list of presidential scandals, and growing talk of a presidential impeachment.

Kreiss, totally frustrated, went to Millwood to confront Ephraim Glower, which led to bloody results. He was preparing to challenge his expulsion from the Bureau, when something happened to change his mind: The Agency had threatened his daughter. The threat had been made indirectly, but it had been unmistakable. It had come during a seemingly casual telephone call from one of his ex-associates in the retrieval business. Langley was still furious about Glower, and the word in CE was that the big bosses didn’t believe Kreiss’s alibi for the time Glower had done all the killing. But they were willing to put

the whole incident to bed as long as Kreiss shut up about what Glower had been doing. And if he didn’t, Kreiss might get to experience his own family tragedy. Kreiss took the hint and subsided. He had done only one thing right that day in Millwood, and that one thing now constituted his only insurance policy.

So now he had a big decision to make: He could call Special Agent Larry Talbot, lay out what he’d done and what he’d found, take his licks from Talbot’s peppery sidekick for intruding, and then get back out of the way. He could even plead with the Roanoke RA to keep his intrusion into the arsenal a secret from Washington. But that wouldn’t work: The Bureau would never change. They’d yell at him and break his balls for going in there, while doing nothing about finding Lynn. So there really wasn’t any decision to make, was there? What he had to do was to go back there, armed this time with some decent overheads, and find out what the hell was going on in the Ramsey Arsenal that might hopefully lead to Lynn, or at least to what had happened to Lynn.

He looked down at the muddy cap, which was lying on the kitchen table. Face it, he thought with a sigh, those kids may be dead. No, not those kids. Lynn might be dead. He couldn’t bear to think about that. He himself would certainly have been dead if that big slug had hit him instead of the tree. Those people hadn’t come out to talk. The shooter, taking his position up in the tree line, the other one acting as game beater, yelling and crashing forward through the woods to startle Kreiss into motion-that had not been extemporaneous. Those people were hunters and knew what they were doing. If the kids had blundered into people like that, they would have been easy pickings.

He felt the rage coming then, the familiar heat in his face, the sensation that his blood pressure was rising. He tried to contain it by deep breathing, but it came anyway, a wave of fury, the tingling sensation in his large hands, a scarlet rim to his peripheral vision. If he found out that those people had done something to Lynn, he would introduce them to the true meaning of terror, sweeper-style, and then he would slaughter them all, until there was blood to his elbows. He closed his eyes, savoring the rage.

But even his fury could not entirely blank out the other possibility, the one he didn’t ever want to think about. That it hadn’t been locals who had taken Lynn.

To Janet’s surprise, Brianne Kellermann called her back from headquarters right after lunch. After some more obligatory waffling about privacy issues, she told Janet that the fundamental issue leading to the breakup of

the Kreiss marriage had been what Edwin Kreiss did for a living. According to Brianne’s notes, the former Mrs. Kreiss implied that she had found out more than she wanted to know about what Kreiss was doing during his exchange tour with the Agency, and that it had not squared with what Kreiss had been telling her. There were also some indications of domestic turbulence, incidents of uncontrolled rage on his part that stopped just short of physical violence. The bottom line was that Kreiss’s wife had become afraid of her husband. Four years after he went to the Agency, she sought the divorce.

“And that’s it?” Janet asked.

“That’s all I have in my file pertaining to him,” Brianne said.

“That was your focus, right?”

She had hoped for more, but she did not want Kellermann to detect that.

“Yes, it was. Thank you very much. You’ve been very helpful.”

There was a momentary pause on the line.

“Have you met Edwin Kreiss?”

Her instincts told her to deflect any further interest in her call.

“Yes,” she said.

“When we interviewed the parents. He seemed—I don’t know-pretty normal? A lot of anxiety about his missing daughter, of course, and he wasn’t thrilled when we told him the case was going to MR But killerDiller secret agent? No.”

“Secret agent?”

Janet swore under her breath. Damned shrink was quick.

“Well, you know, that time he spent with the Agency.”

“I see. Not a killer-diner, but not your run-of-the-mill, quietly retired civil servant, either?”

Janet had to think about that one.

“No-o, not exactly,” she said.

“I got the impression that he was immensely self-controlled.” She remembered all the things Farnsworth had told her, but she doubted Brianne Kellermann was in the loop on any of that.

“I guess I wouldn’t want the guy really mad at me, but closet psychopath? No. And he’s not a suspect or anything. The kids just vanished. We’ve been clutching at straws the whole way. That’s what pisses me off, I guess.”

“Well, I wish I could have told you something significant,” Brianne said.

“But that’s all I have.”

Actually, you did, Doc, Janet thought.

“Well, like I said, we have to pull all the strings. And thanks again for getting back to me. I can close our files now; let MP take it.”

Janet flopped back in her chair after hanging up. Kreiss had a

reputation for being a scary guy. Kreiss’s wife had been sufficiently afraid of him to want out. Wait–correct that. Sufficiently afraid to want to go to a Bureau counselor. Having been divorced herself, she knew there was probably a lot more to the Kreiss divorce story than just that, but going to a Bureau counselor had to have been a big step for a senior FBI agent’s wife to take.

With any luck, Kellermann would now just forget the call and move on. Janet had been entirely truthful when she had said she did not figure Kreiss for a part in the kids’ disappearance. What concerned her now was the possibility that he might take up the hunt himself. Possibility, hell—probability, if the headless horseman trick was any indication. And, actually, concerned wasn’t the right word, either. Face it, she told herself.

It’s Kreiss and his exotic career that’s intriguing you. In fact, if Kreiss was on the move, she wouldn’t mind helping him. She laughed out loud at that crazy notion and momentarily woke Billy.

The FedEx truck found its way to Kreiss’s cabin late Wednesday afternoon.

Kreiss signed for the package and took it into the cabin. Parsons had done well. There were two wide-area black-and-white overheads of the Ramsey Arsenal. Each had been taken from an oblique angle, because, of course, the aircraft had no business flying directly over the complex. One of them had been taken from a much greater height than the other, and it showed nearly the entire installation, including the creek that ran through it. The other was a shot that centered on the industrial area, and it gave a perspective to the buildings in the central area that allowed Kreiss to size them. There was one additional sheet in the package, which was a copy of the large overall shot with a global positioning system grid superimposed. The title box on the lower right of each sheet identified the site as the Jonesboro Cement Factory in Canton, Ohio.

Good man, Kreiss thought to himself. Parsons had disguised the identity of the prints from prying eyes at his company. There was a note in the package saying that Parsons had the photos in a computer file and that any of them could be blown up on one of their Sun workstations and reprinted to whatever level of detail he wanted. He had been unable to

midnight-requisition the processing work, and he apologetically requested a check for fifteen hundred dollars be made out to the company.

Kreiss got his checkbook and wrote the check immediately. Then he studied the photos for almost an hour, absorbing details of the industrial area.

The individual buildings were blurry in the photograph, which told Kreiss that Parsons had already done some enlargement work.

The buildings of the industrial area took up no more than a small portion on the eastern side of the military reservation. The photo also showed the rail spur leading off the main line connecting Christiansburg to Ramsey and points north. Kreiss would have loved to get nighttime infrared photos of the entire complex, but that would have been pushing it. Besides, whatever those people were doing, they were probably doing it in the industrial area. The problem was that there appeared to be over one hundred identifiable buildings in the complex. He decided he would make one more reconnaissance intrusion, this time at night, and this time into the industrial area. It looked as if the railroad spur might be a better intrusion position, pointing directly into the industrial area and avoiding all the woods-crawling. It shouldn’t be too hard to find his way back to that rail spur. If he could pinpoint where those people were operating, he would back out, come back to the cabin for some of his retrieval equipment, and then go after them. He was looking forward to talking to them, maybe sharing his thinking with them about their itchy trigger fingers.

Just after 6:00 P.M.” Jared picked Browne up at his house in Blacksburg.

Jared was driving his own pickup instead of his telephone repair van.

There was a windowless cap on the back bed of the pickup, where Jared had packed their gear.

“Get the copper?” Browne asked.

“Yep. It’s already stashed by the main gates. Coupla hundred pounds.”

“We have to strip it?”

“No, it’s four switch-gear plates. No insulation. Heavy, though.”

On days they were going into the installation, Jared would drive the telephone company van to the concrete-filled barrels on the main entrance road of the arsenal. He would pretend to be doing something there. When there were no cars in sight, he would move two barrels slightly, just enough so that when they came later, he could pull off the main highway in the early darkness and drive straight between the barrels.

From there, they would drive, lights off, to the actual main gate, about a quarter of a mile back into the trees from the highway. In

front of the shuttered security checkpoint gates, they could turn left onto the fence maintenance and fire-access road, which was a dirt path just big enough for the truck. They would take that around the fence until they intercepted the rail line almost a mile south of the main gate.

Tonight they would stop up by the gates, well out of sight of Route 11, to retrieve the bundle of copper plates. Browne planned to run the hydrogen generator for at least four hours. He also had some sandwiches and water for the girl.

“I think you better go on walking patrol while I do tonight’s batch,” Browne said.

“We still don’t know what we had out there the other night.”

“We had us an intruder, that’s what. Question is, Did he come back, or did that forty-four do the trick?”

Browne rubbed his jaw. They had seen the occasional hunter, who tended to stay away from the industrial area because of all the talk about toxic waste. But since the kids hit the traps, Browne was taking no chances.

“No way of knowing that,” he said, “without going down there for some tracking. We just need to be careful from here on out. I won’t have some nosy sumbitch screwing this thing up, not now.”