Hunting Season (21 page)

“Okay, so he has a bad temper,” Ransom started laughing.

“Temper? Temper! What are you, Special Agent, a comedienne? Temper! No, no, no, no. Kreiss? He wasn’t mad. He cool as a fuckin’ cucumber when I go up the hill to pay my respects, you know, say hello, see how his morning is goin’. No, no, see: This the kind of shit he does when he just workin’. Now, rumor has it he does have a teeny little problem with rage. That’s when he does the really bad shit, the shit got him retired. And that leads me to the second reason. You sure you don’t already know this?”

“I’ve heard a little bit about the Glower incident, if that’s what you mean. I’m not sure I want to know any more.”

“Well, you better, you be messin’ aroun’ with those executive back stabbers in there. Edwin Kreiss, when he flamed out after the Glower thing, he supposedly said some things. Made some accusations. Like he’d been right about Glower, seem’ as Glower offed himself and his whole family rather than answer to what was comin’. Some other people where I work thought the same thing, only they couldn’t say so, because sayin’ so wasn’t such a healthy thing to do, careerwise.”

“My boss said Kreiss thought there was someone else who had been obstructing the DOE laboratories investigation. Somebody in another agency.”

“But that’s the thing, Special Agent. That’s the reason nobody willin’ to order up a gang bang on Mr. Kreiss. Because, the way the jungle drums told it, brother Kreiss just might have some evidence to back up all those accusations he made. You know, evidenced Like what got you sent down here to East Bumfuck Egypt? Me, I’m just a workin’ stiff, but my guess is there are some senior people in both your outfit and mine who just might be afraid of Edwin Kreiss.”

She stared at the bleeding Bronco.

“Fuck me,” she said quietly.

“Now you talkin’ like a veteran,” Ransom said approvingly.

They headed back toward the building. Janet still felt that there was something wrong with the logic of what Bellhouser and Foster had asked her to do, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

“So where does a retired FBI agent get his hands on a fifty-caliber rifle?” she asked.

“Probably got it when he was with Agency CE,” Ransom said.

“You gotta remember: Kreiss worked with the sweepers, and those are some serious spooks. Those guys can draw on any kind of equipment the CS-that’s our Clandestine Services—have in the toy store, along with DOD’s toy store. Word is, those dudes go out and get some of their own

shit, ‘cause the operatin’ cash is, shall we say, loosely controlled? When it’s time for them to retire, go raise plutonium somewhere, they turn in the issue stuff, but there’s no tellin’ what kinda shit they got stashed, or where. Ain’t nobody asks ‘em, either.”

She stopped at the door, took a deep breath, and blew it out though pursed lips.

“Maybe I need to go back and talk to Farnsworth. I’m definitely not qualified to do this by myself.”

“Who says you be by yourself, Special Agent? You gonna have some top line backup while you on this little vacation.”

She looked at him. He was smiling broadly.

“You?” she said.

“One and only.”

They went through the door and she stopped again.

“And you just walked up the hill to talk to him?”

“Couldn’t dance, Special Agent. Might as well go see what the man wants, makin’ all that noise. Besides, I didn’t like the sounds Gerald was makin’.”

She shook her head.

“He okay now?”

They started up the stairs.

“I believe Gerald’s had a small change of heart,” Ransom said.

“Brother Gerald has decided he’s going into another line of work. He was in the computer-research end of the CS before he came to the retrieval shop. I believe the Barrett influenced his career thinkin’ this morning. And maybe the lions, too. Hard to say which.”

“Gerald sounds intelligent,” she said.

“So, what was significant about the message you were supposed to deliver to Kreiss?”

He looked down at her for a moment.

“I can’t tell you that,” he said.

“Because I don’t know what it means. What I can say is that it involves something’ way above your pay grade and mine. Now, let’s go look at some of my surveillance toys.”

Kreiss spent the rest of the day checking his property’s perimeter, retrieving his truck, and then cleaning and re stashing the Barrett. Micah Wall wandered up about midmorning to inquire if everything was all right at the Kreiss homestead. His eyes widened when he saw the Barrett.

“Been some years since I heard me a fifty-cal,” he said, looking around for bodies.

“Korea, I believe it was. They didn’t look like that.”

“Unmistakable, aren’t they?” Kreiss said.

Micah eyed the bandage on Kreiss’s neck but said nothing about it.

“Fifty works real good on Chicoms, specially when they bunch up. We gonna have buzzards? You need a mass grave dug or anything?”

Kreiss laughed.

“No, this was just a little domestic dispute. I think we got it all sorted out. For the moment anyway.”

“Hate to hear you do a big domestic dispute, neighbor. Oh, and my dogs was inquirin’ about them lions?”

“The wonders of modern science, Micah. Just a little something to make people move out of their prepared positions.”

“Uh-huh,” Micah said, nodding thoughtfully.

“Well, like I’ve said before, you need me or any of my kinfolk to take a walk in the woods now and then, you just holler. Any word on Lynn?”

“I appreciate the offer, Micah. And no, nothing on Lynn from the authorities. I may have found out a couple of things, though.” He told Micah about finding Lynn’s hat inside the Ramsey Arsenal, and that he thought there was something going on in there.

“What kinda something, you reckon?”

“I’m not sure. My guess is a meth lab, maybe some other kind of heavy drug thing. Something that made those two guys willing to shoot first and talk about it later. I did find out who one of them is, however. We’re going to have a talk.”

“You think maybe them kids went in there and ran into the wrong kinda folks?”

Kreiss nodded, sighing.

“It’s possible, Micah. And that’s not a happy thought.”

“You want, I got some kinfolk who can go git this fella, bring him back to our place. We can put him in the caves for a while. Give him time to reflect. Then you can have that there talk in private, you want.”

“I appreciate it, Micah, but I better do this one myself. There are some folks who are interested in the fact that I’m stepping out at night, and they’re not people you want to meet.”

“Like them two boys I seen goin’ down the road this mornin’?”

Kreiss nodded his head. Micah thought about that for a moment.

“They revenuers?”

“Not exactly. They are federal. I used to work with one of them.

There’s some bad history here. I want to focus on finding Lynn, and I don’t want them drawn into it.”

Wall nailed a cricket with a shot of chaw.

“Well, you know where we at,” he said.

“You git into a fix, you call, hear?”

Kreiss thanked him again and Micah trudged back into the forest, keeping a wary eye out for lions. Kreiss made a mental note that maybe he would take Micah up on his offer. Micah’s clan had been walking

these hills for decades. If Bambi and the Bureau had made some kind of deal with the Agency, there might be more watchers. The Wall clan might actually have some fun with them. Maybe he should lend them some lions, or maybe the tape of an adult male grizzly at full power, complete with noises of crashing through the brush and snapping limbs; that was a beauty for woods and cave work, especially if dogs were in pursuit. Their handlers might know it was a tape, but the dogs would inevitably leave the scene, sometimes with the handlers’ arms attached to their leashes.

He had checked the house out for bugs and other electronic vermin, sanitized his phone line, and disconnected the house electrical power at the breaker box to scan the house wiring for devices that drew power by induction. His computer was strictly a communications device; as far as he was concerned, it was eternally un secure Everything that went out on the Net was an open book anyway, so he didn’t bother to check it other than to do an occasional cookie scan. Once he was reasonably sure the place was clean, he checked his truck. There, his scanner found two bugs right away. They were so easy, he knew there had to be a third, which he finally found mounted on the inside of the right-rear wheel, where it drew inductive power from axle rotation via magnets fixed to the frame. If the wheel wasn’t moving, there was no power signal to be detected by the scanner. Clever. He found it by getting on his back and looking.

Then he took a long, hot shower, dressed the cuts on his neck, ate a sandwich, and lay down for a long nap. He would redo the house sweep in twenty-four hours to pick up any delayed-action devices. He almost hoped they’d left one, because a bug you knew about was a wonderful way to feed back disinformation.

He was awakened at 3:30 by the phone. It was the FBI lady, Janet Carter.

“You have something new on Lynn?” he asked immediately.

“No, Mr. Kreiss, I don’t. But I’d like to meet with you, if I could. Today if possible, before the weekend.”

“Today is almost over and weekends don’t mean anything to me, Agent Carter. Why do we need to meet?”

“To talk about something that shouldn’t be heard on a phone, Mr.

Kreiss.”

He thought about that, trying to wipe the sleep from his eyes. His body was sore all over from his little pipe bath at the arsenal. He had planned to work on jared McGarand tonight. If the FBI lady didn’t have anything on Lynn, he wasn’t sure he wanted to waste any time with

her. She was pretty enough to look at, but until Lynn was recovered, he wasn’t interested in women.

“Well, that’s sufficiently mysterious to make me curious, but I’m busy tonight, Agent Carter. How about some other time?”

“Maybe I can help you find Site R; you know, the place Barry dark told you about?”

That sat him up in his bed. She must have gone back to reinterview that little creep. And made him talk. He’d better hear this.

“Okay.” He sighed.

“Where and when?”

“I live in Roanoke. You live well west of Blacksburg. You know where the Virginia Tech main library is? The university has a convention center hotel across the street. Called the Donaldson-Brown Center?”

“I know it.” He’d had lunch with Lynn there a week before she disappeared.

The memory of it pinched his heart.

“The bar at seven?”

“All right,” he said, and hung up. What the hell is this all about? he wondered. First, she had warned him about the Washington people coming to town. Now she said she wanted to help him find Lynn, even though her bosses supposedly had closed the local case. He lay back in the bed.

Were the Agency and the Bureau really working together? Not likely, he thought. Especially after the Glower incident. So what had brought Bambi and Chief Red in the Face to beautiful downtown Roanoke, Virginia, if not something to do with him? As farther evidenced by the appearance of Charlie Ransom plus one at his cabin. Why? What had brought them now? Carter had just mentioned Barry dark. She couldn’t know that he’d been the headless visitor, but what if she’d reported the incident and named him as the most likely suspect? Would that generate Washington’s interest?

He got up with a grunt and checked the time. It was going on four o’clock. Jared ought not to be home yet. He went to his desk and got out a file marked “Tax Return.” He had transcribed all the pertinent numbers from the papers he’d taken from jared’s trailer into what looked like a personal tax record, and then he’d burned the McGarand papers. He got Jared’s phone number and dialed it. When the phone had rung three times, he pressed the buttons marked 7 and 5 together for two seconds.

This activated the recorder, which diverted the ring signal and initiated a ten-second wait period, in case the owner picked up his phone. Then it activated its playback feature. He listened to Jared’s call to someone, pressed the star key, listened to it again, and then

pressed 6 and 9. The digits of a phone number were read to him by a robotic voice. He copied down the number. He pressed the buttons 7 and 5 again. There was one incoming call, an older man’s voice. It sounded like the same man in the previous call. The man told Jared that they would go out to the site tonight to get set up for tomorrow and to look for their “visitor.” He listened to the voice again, memorizing the sound of it. There were no more calls. He pressed the zero button three times and hung up.

He looked up the number for the Donaldson-Brown Center and called for a room reservation, specifically requesting a room overlooking the parking lot. Then he went back to sleep, setting his clock in time to get cleaned up for his trip into that throbbing metropolis known as Blacksburg, Virginia.

Janet Carter arrived at Donaldson-Brown at 6:30. She was driving an unmarked tan Bureau Crown Vie, which she parked in the front parking lot. It was twilight, but the parking lot lights weren’t on yet. She had had time to go to her townhouse in Roanoke before coming over to Blacksburg, and she was wearing a light wool pantsuit over a plain dark blouse.

Earlier, she’d spent an hour with Ransom looking at various surveillance and communications gadgets, and then she had met with Farnsworth alone to nail down the ground rules for her new assignment.

Farnsworth had been pretty specific: All communications regarding what she was doing with Edwin Kreiss were to be via secure means directly to him—preferably via scrambled landline. No cell phones and no clear tactical radio unless it was an emergency. Ransom was to be her distant tactical backup—distant meaning that Kreiss was not to know that Ransom was operating with her if at all possible. She was not to go anywhere alone with Kreiss without clearance from the RA. If her situation got at all hinky, she was to back out and return immediately to the federal building, day or night, and notify him. They would not establish a response cell in the federal building unless something more than a surveillance operation developed. She was to be armed at all times, and she was to carry an encapsulated CFR—call for rescue—pod at all times. He gave her the phone codes that would forward any call she made to the FBI office in Roanoke directly to him wherever he was, twenty-four hours a day. Finally, Farnsworth told her that there was always the chance that the two horse-holders from Washington might have other assets besides Ransom in the area. If she detected that situation, she was to back out immediately.