Hunting Season (31 page)

“Nice outfit,” he said softly.

“Especially the Sig.”

“They told us never to lose our weapon,” she replied, unable to straighten up. Every muscle in her abdomen was cramping and her ribs hurt where the harness had cut into her. Then she began to shake as the adrenaline crashed. He turned her around gently so that she was sitting and wrapped his arms around her chest, below her breasts. She shook like a leaf, uncontrollably, and then realized she had urinated.

“It’s okay,” he whispered.

“It’s okay. Perfectly natural. Doesn’t mean a thing. You’re safe. Say it for me. I’m safe. Say it.”

Her teeth were chattering and she was absolutely mortified, but he kept saying it until finally she got the words out.

“Now, deep breathing,” he ordered, still holding her from behind, his legs alongside hers, both of them sitting on the cold concrete as if in

a luge. He was warm and she was very cold, but there was nothing erotic or sexy about it. The hard ridges and buckles on his crawl suit felt odd, and she was keenly aware of her wet underpants. She suddenly just wanted to go to sleep until it all went away. Then he was lifting her up, strong, large hands under her armpits, dragging her gently to her feet.

“Come on,” he said.

“One more climb.”

An hour and a half later, he pulled his truck alongside the curb in front of her town house. She had slept in the passenger seat of his truck the whole way into Roanoke, waking only when he asked her for directions. He had covered her up with one of his coats as soon as she got into the truck, and she’d gone down like a stone. Now she appeared to be disoriented, rubbing her eyes and looking out the windows.

“This it?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied, stifling a yawn. He had taken off his hood and gloves so as not to attract attention on the road. Her eyes were hollow with fatigue.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For everything.”

“I’ll get the coat back later,” he said.

“That was a Bureau car that went down the hole, right? You’ve still got your own wheels?”

“Yes. My car’s at the office. I suppose I have a significant paperwork exercise ahead of me.”

He didn’t reply. He was ready for her to get out of the car, but she wasn’t moving. He was about to get out and go open her door, when she asked him why he had been crawling around the arsenal.

He’d been anticipating that question.

“Because of what that kid said, that my daughter and her friends had gone to explore that place.”

“But at night?”

“During the day, as much as half of a search area is in shadow. It’s easy to miss something. I have a night-vision pack built into this crawl suit. At night, especially when there’s ambient starlight or moonlight, almost everything’s visible.”

She hesitated, then asked, “You think she’s there?”

He took a deep breath. He was not going to tell them anything, not until he’d had a chance to hunt down the second man and find out what he needed to know. Plus, now there was the little matter of the jared pancake flattened under his trailer.

“It’s the best lead I’ve got,” he said.

“I’ve been there twice before. I’m going to look until I find something or satisfy myself that there’s no trace of them.”

“We could help with that, especially after—”

“No. I mean, I know I can’t stop you, but you can’t help without alerting those Washington people. Their focus is on me. That story about a bomb cell is probably bullshit. Besides, I can do this better alone. And it’s not like I’m hunting someone you’re hunting.”

She missed the gibe.

“My boss is suspicious about those people, too,” she said.

“But it’s the weekend. He can’t raise anybody in Washington in his chain of command to check them out.”

He just looked at her, sitting bare-assed, exhausted, and bedraggled in the front seat of his pickup truck. She had the grace to be embarrassed. If it hadn’t been semidark, he would have sworn she was blushing.

“I can still do it better than anyone you’d send.” And, he thought, you’d bring a crowd, and then my one lead to Lynn might vanish.

“Okay, okay, so I’m not in your league,” she said.

“But surely we have people who are.”

“I doubt that, Special Agent Carter,” he said softly.

“With the Bureau these days, it seems to be a question of quantity over quality. But in any event, I’m going back there tonight. I have nothing else to do. If I do find something concrete, I’ll tell you. Would you like an escort to your door?”

“I can manage, I think.” She glanced down at her bare legs.

“Hopefully, my neighbors won’t see me in this … outfit.”

“They’d probably find mine even more interesting. I’d appreciate it if you’d find a way to leave me out of your report on how you got out of the tunnel. Maybe just say you climbed out.”

She thought about that for a moment.

“If you wish, yes, I can do that,” she said finally.

“But you did save my life. That should go into the record.”

“Not my record, Carter. My record is closed. I’m just a father searching for his missing daughter now. Nothing more.”

She kept looking at him in the dark.

“What was the message that Ransom failed to deliver?” she asked.

He looked down at the white oval other face. Even in the truck, he was taller than she was. He couldn’t tell her, not without explaining the whole story. And if he was right about the message, he had little time to lose. He had to find Lynn before they decided to send someone.

“I can’t tell you that,” he said finally.

“Funny, that’s what Ransom said when I asked him.”

“Well, there you go,” he said.

She hesitated, as if to see whether or not he would say anything else, but then she got out.

Janet was sitting in her kitchen, having a badly needed cup of strong coffee, when the phone rang. It was 7:30 on Sunday morning. To her surprise, it was Ransom on the line.

“So, Special Agent, where you been?”

“You miss me, Ransom?”

“Yeah, well, after a fashion, yes. Your surveillance folks found our little device on Mr. Farnsworth’s car. Very funny, Special Agent. Not too bright, maybe, but very funny.”

“I thought that was one of our bugs?”

“Let’s just say that your boss was, um, agreeable to the notion of tracking your Bu car. Which is why I’m calling, actually: Where is said Bu car?”

“In China, somewhere, probably,” she said.

“Look, I’m just getting my first caffeine of the day. Can this discussion possibly wait?”

“You got more of that coffee around? Because I’m sittin’ outside your town house right now, as a matter of fact, and we do need to talk. Sooner rather than later, as they say in the coolest circles of government.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, yeah, sure, all right.”

She got another mug down from the cabinet and then went to let him in. He was wearing a short-sleeved black shirt, khaki trousers, wraparound black sunglasses, some expensive-looking boots, and a green windbreaker with a Boy Scouts of America logo. She realized she was naked under her bathrobe, so she tugged the strings around her waist.

He sat down in the kitchen, took off his sunglasses, and waited while she fixed him a cup of coffee, “Nice touch,” she said, pointing to the Boy Scout logo.

“Well, you know,” he said.

“We brave, loyal, thrifty, all that good shit.”

“Right. So, what’s the big deal about my Bu car on a Sunday morning?”

she said.

“Where is said Bu car, again?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“You say something about China?” She hesitated for a moment, then told him what had happened, including the fact that she had been rescued by Edwin Kreiss.

He whistled softly when he heard about Kreiss.

“And this was basically at night? You sayin’ Kreiss was creepin’ the arsenal at night? Last night?”

She explained what Kreiss had said about night-vision equipment. He nodded, then asked her precisely when Kreiss had pulled her out of the tunnel.

“It was night. I guess I don’t remember,” she said.

“Elevenish, I’d guess.”

He said, “Uh-huh,” and then looked around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time.

“You got plans for your Sunday, Special Agent?” he asked.

“Uh—” “Now you do. Let me suggest you take that coffee upstairs, make yourself functional, if not too beautiful, and then I need to take you somewhere to show you something’.”

She just looked at him.

“It shows better than it tells, Special Agent,” he said.

“And time, believe it or not, time is a-wastin’. Help if I say please?”

“Is this something I should call my boss about first?” she asked.

“No-o,” he said. “

“Cause he’s gonna ask you a million questions, and you won’t have any answers whatsoever until I do my show-and-tell. Please?”

Half an hour later, they were leaving Roanoke and headed south on 1-81 in his car. He was explaining how they had tagged Edwin Kreiss’s truck.

“Four bugs? Whatever happened to the notion of the private citizen?”

“Private citizen?” Ransom said, slapping the wheel, as if she’d told a wonderful joke.

“No such thing in America anymore. First of all, nobody’s a citizen anymore.”

Uh-oh, she thought. Brother Ransom has a hobbyhorse. She decided to go with it anyway.

“Okay, I’ll bite.”

“Simple,” he said.

“We are what bureaucracies call us. Like law enforcement? We’re ‘subjects,” Pollsters? We’re ‘respondents.” Marketin’ people? We’re ‘focus groups.” Politicians? We’re ‘voters.” Your Internet provider? You’re a ‘subscriber.” IRS? We’re ‘clients.” Clients—do you love it? Ain’t no more ‘citizens.” Last time there were citizens, in the way you mean it, Special Agent, was during the Roman Empire. And maybe the French Revolution, when they got into their guillotine phase.”

She decided to shut up. She was in no shape for a philosophy discussion.

The coffee was wearing off and she was still very tired. She settled back in the seat and let him drive. Forty minutes later, they were

stopping next to Jared’s lonely driveway. Ransom turned in and parked the car out of sight of the county road. They walked down the dirt lane to the trailer, which Janet could see was sitting at an odd angle.

“This here is the residence of one Jared McGarand,” Ransom announced.

“What’s that smell?” Janet asked, although she already had an idea.

“That is most likely related to brother Jared’s final movement, if you get my meanin’. Under that end of the trailer, right there, where you see the jack handle stickin’ out. And if you check that vehicle over there, you’ll find one very expensive tag tracker on the back bumper.”

“The one you put on Kreiss’s truck?”

“That very one, Special Agent.”

“Okay, I give up. I assume there’s a dead guy under there. What the hell’s going on?”

“I was kinda hopin’ you could shed some light on that, seem’ as you had a meet with subject Edwin Kreiss, apparently right before he came out here and wasted this McGarand individual. Least I think he did. I haven’t gone and lifted that trailer up to make sure, but my nose is makin’ an educated guess here, okay?”

“About a dead body, or Kreiss doing it?”

He grinned and shrugged.

“I got nowhere at that meeting,” she said.

“I’ve already told Farnsworth this. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Well, I didn’t want to admit that Kreiss just totally blew me off, but that’s what he did. He also saw through the proposition that we might work together, you know, to catch the mysterious bomb makers while I helped him find his daughter.”

“Saw through it?”

“He said it was bullshit. That Washington being here was about him.”

“Oh boy,” Ransom said, blowing out a long sigh.

“Here we go again.”

“It was bullshit? Bellhouser and Foster’s bit about the bomb makers?”

“Truth?” Ransom said.

“I don’t have any idea. My assignment was to cooperate with those two. And to keep my bosses at the Agency informed as to what was goin’ down.”

“So if those two were conspiring to trap Kreiss in something, you wouldn’t necessarily know about it?”

Ransom hesitated before answering.

“Lemme just say that if somebody managed to take Ed Kreiss off the boards, my bosses wouldn’t exactly complain, okay?”

“Son of a bitch,” Janet said softly.

“Kreiss was right.”

“What’s his state of mind?”

She snorted.

“I offered to help him find his daughter, you know, as cover for the other little project. He said he didn’t need any help. He also said that if he found out someone had done something to his daughter, he’d catch them and put their severed heads out on pikes on the interstate.”

“That’s our Edwin,” Ransom said admiringly.

“Might be interestin’ to see if this dude under there is headless. On the other hand,” he said, squatting down on his haunches, “might not be much left to mount.” He stood back up.

“Now, you had this meetin’ with Kreiss, he told you to buzz off, then you go home and he comes out here and does a number on this vie here, which we assume is subject Jared McGarand. You go to your weekend class the next mornin’, then you go to the arsenal for your little field trip, and you encounter—Edwin Kreiss. Tell you anythin’?”

“That Kreiss might have found out something from this Jared whatever about his daughter. And that something points back to the arsenal. But—” Ransom cocked his head.

“Yeah, but what?”

“But Kreiss already suspected the kids had gone to the arsenal.”

“At night? Why’s he there at night? And didn’t he tell you he was goin’ back there last night? After he rescued you?”

“Yes.” The smell was making her queasy. She backed away from the mess under the trailer.

“Can we go now? And shouldn’t we call in local law?”

“Yes, we can go now and, no, we will not call in local law. We don’t have anythin’ to do with local law and local homicides, seem’ as we never operate domestically.”

“Oh, right,” she said sarcastically.

“But we do.”

“And you would tell the cops what, exactly?”