Hunting Season (51 page)

She took her foot off the gas momentarily to keep control of the car as she pushed it up the winding road.

“How far?” she asked Lynn, but Lynn didn’t answer. She glanced over and saw that Lynn was sagging against the opposite door, a confused look on her face.

“I think I’ve been shot,” she said in a weak voice. She pulled her right hand out from under the blanket and it was shiny with blood.

Janet swore and accelerated.

“Where are you hit?”

“I don’t know,” Lynn said in a dreamy voice.

“Back, I think. Side, maybe? It’s not too bad. Feels like I got kicked by a small horse.”

There was a brief flare of bright lights behind her, but then she rounded the next curve and hurried past Kreiss’s driveway. The next turn again blocked out the pursuing headlights. Another half a mile. She took it up as fast as she could. She couldn’t believe it—one of those aTF agents had fired at an FBI agent’s car? Even if they had found out she’d quit, they shouldn’t have been shooting. Unless-The bright headlights came up again in her mirror, and she realized the

aTF agents could not have gotten that big Suburban turned around and headed after her that quickly. This was the other car, and she had a sinking feeling she knew exactly who this was. She nearly lost it on the next curve, again shooting gravel and other roadside debris out into the woods.

“Hang in there, Lynn. Can you reach the spot? Can you feel where you’re hit?”

“No. I can’t—can’t move my right arm all that well anymore.” Her voice was drifting.

“Right side. My side is hurting real bad now.”

A straightaway opened up and Janet accelerated, trying to think of something she could do to slow down her pursuer. But then she came into the next turn, too fast, spinning the wheel, hitting the brakes, anything to get control, but the car spun out and actually rolled backward for a moment, tires squealing, before shooting ahead again back down the way they had come. She was about to slam on the brakes, but then she had an idea. She doused her headlights and braked to slow down. The sharp curve was dead ahead, behind which the loom of bright white lights was rising. She got it stopped right at her side of the curve, found her .38, and rolled the window back down. Holding one hand on the brights switch, she reached out with her left hand, extending the pistol and resting her wrist on the little metal valley formed by the mirror housing. In the next instant, the pursuing vehicle came sweeping around the curve. Janet flipped on her bright lights and opened fire with the .38, deliberately aiming low, right between the approaching headlights, letting off five rounds before diving down behind the steering wheel. There was a screech of brakes, an instant of silence, and then the roar of the other vehicle’s engine racing as it went crashing down into the scrub woods, smashing into rocks and small trees and then flipping partially over on its side in a hail of gravel and a spray of window glass.

Janet raised her head to look. The other car was a hundred feet down the embankment. Its headlights were still on, pointing up into the pine trees. Its left front wheel was spinning furiously. Janet did not hesitate.

She turned her car around and sped up the hill as fast as she could go, aware that Lynn wasn’t making any noise at all.

Browne McGarand got back to the propane truck at 11:30, after spending the afternoon and early evening asleep in a motel room. He was dressed in a set of dark coveralls that had lots of pockets. All of the equipment he would need was in the cab of the truck. He had made a detailed map of his

approach routes to the aTF building, and he had laid out a couple of possible escape routes once he’d abandoned the truck. The fake delivery manifest was on a clipboard by his side.

The night was cloudy, and the lights on the Pentagon building were fuzzy in the mist blowing in from the river. There had been no traffic in the approach roads to the Pentagon when he had walked over from Crystal City. He looked around the deserted parking lot and sighed. This was the moment he had been working toward all these months. Now there was nothing more to do than to get going. He got in, started up the truck, backed it across the parking area, and drove out onto the approach road, turning right to go under the elevated highway, then taking the tight ramp up to get on the Fourteenth Street Bridge. Big trucks were generally not allowed into the District, but fuel trucks were an exception. He was hoping not to be stopped. The manifest should get him by a cursory police inspection, as long as the cop didn’t ask him for the exemption certificate, which he did not have. Shift change for the Metro Police came at midnight, which was why he had chosen this time to make his approach to the target. Most of the District’s patrol cars would be in station house parking lots, refueling for the next shift, all the cops inside.

In the event, he didn’t see a single cop car. He made it onto Massachusetts Avenue, where there was zero traffic. The aTF headquarters building loomed to his left as he turned into the ramp gate for the parking garage next door. It was a tight fit and his rear bumper tagged a concrete abutment, but he just made it. There was an attendant’s booth at the bottom of the ramp, but it was dark and unoccupied. He had to get out of the cab to extract the ticket from a dispenser. The side ramp was a two-way ramp, and a sign said to give way to vehicles coming down. The gate dutifully opened when he took the ticket, and up he went in first gear, making a lot more noise than he wanted to. At the top of the ramp, he turned right and headed for the back corner nearest the aTF building. There were some SUVs and a couple of pickup trucks up on the roof deck, more than he had expected. He backed the truck into the corner space along the wall and shut it down. First exposure successfully completed, he thought.

He looked over at the aTF building. Only a few of the windows facing him were lighted on his side of the building, but the interiors were above his line of sight. He scanned the side face and corners of the building again for video cameras, but the only one he could see was pointed down onto Massachusetts Avenue. He took out a small pair of binoculars and scanned the top edges of the buildings across the street

from the aTF building. As he had suspected, there was one camera jutting out of the middle of the office building directly opposite, but it, too, was pointed down onto Massachusetts Avenue. It might conceivably look into the alley, but the back of the alley was in deep shadow. He cracked his window, then nodded his head when he heard the sound of the vent fans down in the alley below.

He looked at his watch. It was just after midnight. He sat back in the lumpy seat, listening to the ticking sounds of his diesel engine cooling down. The windows of the cars parked around him were already glistening with nighttime dew. There was a flare of yellow light as the stairwell door opened up at the front of the roof deck and a couple stepped out, arm in arm. They appeared to be wine-happy from an evening in one of the local restaurants. They got into a Toyota Land Cruiser and left, going down the exit ramp. Neither of them had given the big truck parked back in the dark corner a second look. Good.

Now he waited. He wanted to begin dropping the hose sometime around 2:30, when most humans were at their low ebb of performance, and then go down to attach it to the air-intake vent screens in the back of the alley between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. Originally, he had planned to shinny down the hose itself, but he might just walk down the interior exit ramps and see if he could hop a wall at the back of the ground-level parking deck, out of sight of any cameras, of course. In the meantime, he would watch the aTF building for any signs of walking patrols or other security features he might have missed. But he didn’t expect any: Above all else, these people were bureaucrats. They would pay close attention to the size of their office and whether or not they got a parking space, but he was pretty sure they weren’t too concerned about someone attacking them in their own building. If he could permeate that entire building with hydrogen, the explosion would certainly be memorable. Even if he only got a partial ignition, it would still create a two-thousand-degree fireball in every cubic inch of the affected office spaces. Quicker and somewhat more merciful than what these goons had done to those people at Mount Carmel, who had cooked for a while as the burning building melted down around them, helped along by tanks, for God’s sake. Maybe next time they’d be a little more careful, those who survived what he was about to do. He settled back against the seat to watch and wait. He wished he could have done the FBI building, but, short of a suicide attack with something like a truckload of Ampho, there were no good approaches that would let him walk away from it. Not like this one. It was wide open.

Edwin Kreiss sat in a locked interview room at the Seventh Street police station, wondering how he was going to get out of this one. He had been standing on the corner of Twelfth Street and Massachusetts Avenue, looking at the aTF headquarters building, when the same cops who had seen him down by the White House drove by, on their way into shift change. The cop car had slowed and then stopped. Kreiss had briefly considered bolting, but he didn’t know the streets and alleys around this area of office buildings. They would have had him in a heartbeat for taking off. The car had backed up, and this time the cop’s partner got out, one hand on his nightstick, the other parking his hat on his head. The cop driving, who had apparently recognized him, stayed in the car but watched over his shoulder. The cop had asked him politely enough what he was doing up there, and Kreiss literally had no answer. Fortunately, he had left the gun in the van, which he had parked in an all-night parking garage right next door to the aTF building. They’d cuffed him, pat searched him, and put him in the backseat. They brought him into the police station, presumably on a loitering beef. They had not booked him, however, and he had been in the interview room for what he estimated was almost three hours now. He was no longer cuffed, but they had taken his wallet, watch, and his keys. He would have appreciated some coffee.

He had not had enough time to do a complete reconnaissance of the aTF building, but it had been pretty clear that it was a softer target than the FBI headquarters. The building was much smaller, and though there were surveillance cameras, the approach to the front of the building was a lot more straightforward than driving down Constitution and dealing with all the traffic islands where the major avenues met. Yes, they would see the propane truck pulling up in front of the building, but, by then, it would be too late. In fact, McGarand would probably have time to park it, set a fuse, and run before the security people in the building could really react. He smiled grimly to himself as he thought of the options facing a guy at the security desk when he saw a big truck pull up in front of the building and a guy get out and run. Now what? Who goes down to see what’s in the truck, and who goes out the back door at the speed of heat?

In the meantime, he was stuck in here, and he had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. And who was going to come through that door next.

The door finally opened and the desk sergeant admitted two men in suits into the room. Kreiss looked up at them and congratulated himself on being right. One of the men, the larger of the two, sat down across the table from him. The other remained standing. The big man was in his forties. He had a round face that needed a shave, impatient blue eyes, and thinning black hair. He produced a credentials wallet and flashed it at Kreiss.

“Sam john stone FBI,” he said.

“And you’re Edwin Kreiss. The notorious Edwin Kreiss.”

Kreiss said nothing. Johnstone leaned back in his chair.

“We’ve been looking for you, Mr. Kreiss. Or rather, the Roanoke RA has. Seems there’re some questions they want to ask you about a homicide down in Blacksburg.”

Kreiss maintained his silence. Johnstone looked over at his partner.

“You not going to speak to me, Mr. Kreiss?” he asked.

“You haven’t asked me a question yet,” Kreiss said.

“Okay, here’s one: Why were you loitering around the aTF headquarters building tonight? After being seen loitering around the White House? I guess that’s two questions. Well. And you were also seen on our cameras at Bureau headquarters. You got something going tonight, Mr.

Kreiss? You’re not still mad at us, are you?”

“Nope.”

Johnstone continued to stare at him as if he was an interesting specimen.

Then his partner spoke.

“I hear you used to be a spooky guy, Kreiss.

That you used to go around hunting people down with your pals out in Langley. That true? You a spooky guy?”

Kreiss turned slowly to look at the partner, who was a medium everything:

height, weight, build. Even his soft white face was totally unremarkable.

He would make a very good surveillance asset, Kreiss thought.

Then he turned back to face Johnstone.

“He gave me the look, Sam,” the second agent said.

“Definitely spooky. I think I’m supposed to be scared now.”

“Better watch your ass, Lanny. I’ve heard that Mr. Kreiss here was responsible for a guy shooting his wife and his kids and then himself. He must be really persuasive. That was before the Bureau shit-canned you, right, Mr. Kreiss?”

Kreiss smiled at him but said nothing.

“Damn, there he goes again, Lanny. Won’t talk to me. I think I’ve hurt his feelings. Of course, here he is, in the local pokey, picked up for loitering in downtown Washington. What do you suppose he was looking for, Lanny? A white guy walking the streets at midnight in the District? Looking for some female companionship, maybe? Or maybe some sympathetic male companionship? Is that it, Mr. Kreiss? All those years of playing games with those Agency weirdos, maybe you got a little bent?”

Kreiss relaxed in his chair and looked past Johnstone as if he didn’t exist. They had either planned their little act in advance in some effort to provoke him or they were pissed off at having to come over here at all, just because a routine name check had triggered the federal want and detain order. Or both. But so far, they weren’t talking about a bomb.