Hunting Season (6 page)

Janet colored. During her first year back in Washington following the Chicago tour, she had twice managed to embarrass the assistant director over the laboratory by filing dissenting opinions in some high-visibility evidentiary reports. Subsequent reviews proved her right, but, given the rising legal storm over irregularities at the FBI lab, her mentor at headquarters, a female senior supervisory agent, had hustled Janet out of headquarters before she got into any more career-killing trouble. With Farnsworth’s acquiescence, she had been transferred to the Roanoke office under the rubric of getting some out-of-specialty, street-level investigative experience. She nodded.

“Okay,” Farnsworth said.

“Now, there are two reasons why this case is going to MP. First, because I said so, and SAC, Richmond, agrees. There’s no evidence or even any indication that there’s been a crime, and we’ve got other fish to fry. Second, one of the kids was Edwin Kreiss’s daughter.”

He paused to see if she would understand.

She didn’t.

“Yes, sir. And?”

He sighed.

“Edwin Kreiss was not just a senior field agent who elected to retire down here in rustic southwest Virginia. He was Edwin Kreiss.”

“Still is, I suppose, boss. I guess my question is, So what?”

Farnsworth got his pipe out, which told Janet she was not going anywhere soon. He didn’t light it, in deference to the nonsmoking rules, but he did everything but light it. Then he leaned back in his chair.

“I don’t know any of this directly, other than by being an RA and being plugged into that network. Okay? So, like I said, don’t quote me on any of this. But Edwin Kreiss was a specialist in the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Division. In the mid-eighties, he went on an exchange tour at the Agency. He got involved in that Chinese espionage

case—you know, the one where they got into the atomic labs and allegedly stole our warhead secrets.”

“Yes, sir. It supposedly went on for over ten years.”

“Or more. Anyhow, you know that the Agency is restricted to operating outside the continental United States, while the Bureau is responsible for operating primarily inside our national borders.”

“Except we do go overseas.”

“Only when asked by foreign governments, or when we ask them. But the Agency may not operate here in the States, except when they feel they have a mole, an Agency insider who is spying. Then they sometimes team up with the Bureau FCI people to find him.”

“And the Department of Energy case involved a mole? I hadn’t heard that.”

“Well, not exactly a mole. Our people began to wonder why the doe’s own investigation, as well as the Agency’s, seemed to be taking so damn long. It turned out that the Chinese had some help.”

“In our government?”

“Worse—in the Agency’s Counterespionage Division. A guy named Ephraim Glower.”

“Never heard of him, either.”

“This wasn’t exactly given front-page coverage, and, again, I’ve never seen evidence of all this. But here’s the background on Kreiss. While he was on this exchange tour with their CE people, he supposedly uncovered Glower, who, at the time, was an assistant deputy director in the Agency’s Counterespionage Division.”

“Wow. Talk about top cover.”

Farnsworth smiled.

“Precisely. The Agency was furiously embarrassed.

When Kreiss forced the issue, they got him recalled to the Bureau. J. Willard Marchand was the new ADIC over the Bureau’s FCI Division, and he clamped the lid on Kreiss. They stashed him at headquarters for a while, but then the flap about the Chinese government making campaign contributions blew up, and Kreiss resurfaced his accusations. Marchand stepped on Kreiss’s neck. Kreiss then apparently decided to go confront this guy Glower.”

“You mean Glower still had his job?”

“Yes. Kreiss had no proof, or not enough to convince the Agency, so they got rid of Kreiss and left Glower in place.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“They do it all the time, Janet. Then if it blows up, they cover their

asses by saying they were just letting the bad guy run so as to control what he did or gave to the other side. What’s important is that the Glower episode ended in a very bloody mess out in a little village called Millwood, Virginia, up in the Shenandoah Valley. Glower ended up dead.”

“Wow. Kreiss?”

“Well, after he got stepped on the second time, Kreiss went to Millwood and confronted Glower. Glower called for help from Agency security and they forced Kreiss out of the house. But then that night, Glower apparently killed his wife and two kids and then shot himself. The local law said the scene was right out of one of those chain saw-massacre movies. The Agency director called Marchand; for a while, they actually thought Kreiss had done it.”

“So he was there?”

“Not when that happened, but of course they knew he had been there earlier. Fortunately for Kreiss, one of his subordinates at the Bureau could verify that Kreiss had been back at headquarters, writing up his report, at the time of the actual shootings. There were some questions about Kreiss’s alibi, because it was one of his own people providing it. Needless to say, it was a helluva mess, and it became complicated by the fact that Kreiss wasn’t done yet. He surfaced new allegations, that there wasn’t just one scientist-spy at one lab; that there was a whole network. Based on what I’ve read since, he may have been right about that.”

“Why did Glower kill himself?”

“That’s unclear. According to Kreiss’s theory, Glower was running top cover for the spy network. Being a deputy dog in Agency counterespionage, he could throw a lot of monkey wrenches into the various investigations, which is why it all went on for so long.”

“Why would he do that?”

“There was the money.”

“Money from?”

“Money from China, money that went into a certain prominent reelection campaign, which I’m sure you’ve also read about. Kreiss’s theory was that Glower was only doing what he had been told to do—namely, to stymie the investigation at DOE and at the Agency, in return for keeping the Chinese happy, because the Chinese, of course, felt they had bought and paid for happiness.”

“Could Kreiss back that up?”

Farnsworth sucked on his unlit pipe.

“My guess is that if he could have, he would have. But it’s kind of

hard to tell when you start a fire at that level. Those kinds of fires usually get extinguished in a Mount Olympus-level deal of some kind. Although, from what I’ve heard, Kreiss was anything but a deal maker, as the Agency bosses found out much too late.

Supposedly, this guy Glower came from a very rich family, so money should not have been a likely motive. But who knows. The upshot was that Marchand caught hell, and in turn, he forced Kreiss out administratively, using the blood bath at Millwood as a pretext, via the Bureau’s own professional standards board. That in itself should have de fanged anything Kreiss had to say about what or who was driving Glower.”

“A bitter end to an interesting career.”

“Yes, a very interesting career. There are all sorts of stories about Kreiss. You’ve met him and I haven’t, but he apparently went pretty far afield with some of the Agency’s counterespionage specialists, some of whom redefine the notion of ‘far afield.” I’ve been told that he actually trained with some of their people, the ones who are called sweepers.”

“Yes, Larry Talbot mentioned that term. Said they were highly specialized operatives, guys who went after their own agents when they went wrong.”

“And you think that’s all a bunch of Agency bullshit. Ghost-polishing, right?”

Janet started to reply but then stopped. Those were her very words.

Fucking Larry. The RA was still smiling.

“Let me tell you what I’ve heard, and let me again stress the word heard” Farnsworth said.

“A sweeper is ‘reportedly’ someone our beloved brethren at Langley send when one of their own clandestine operations agents goes off the tracks in some fashion. We’re not talking about their regular CE people, the ones who help us chase enemy agents around the streets of Washington. We’re talking about a very special operative who hunts—and retrieves—that’s the term they use—clandestine operatives who have gone nuts, gone over to the other side, or started running some kind of private agenda—like assassinating bad guys instead of playing by the rules. In other words, someone who is so completely out of control that he or she needs to be ‘retrieved’ from the field and brought back to a safe house in the Virginia countryside. Someplace where the problem can be attended to, quote unquote.”

““Attended to’?”

“Define that as your imagination might dictate,” Farnsworth said.

“The interesting thing is, if they develop a problem child out on their operational web, they tell the problem child that a sweeper is coming.

Supposedly, a sweeper notification is enough to bring said problem child to heel. Coming in is preferable to being brought in.”

Janet didn’t know what to say.

“And Kreiss?”

“Kreiss was at the agency on an exchange deal, our FCI with their CE.

Word was, he worked with the sweepers, trained with them. Did several years away from the Bureau. I talked to a guy, he’s SAC now in Louisville, who knew Kreiss back in those days. Said he basically went native. Really got into the Agency hugger-mugger. His supervisors back in Bureau FCI didn’t know what to do, because the one time they borrowed him back to deal with a rogue Bureau agent, the agent turned himself in, requesting protection. He was apparently so scared of Kreiss that he confessed to shit the Bureau didn’t even know about. Then, of course, came Millwood.

People who knew Kreiss tended to keep their distance.”

“I can understand that,” she said.

“I got an impression of contained violence, I mean. And I found myself wondering about the degree of containment.”

“That’s the essence of it. Of course, no one knows what really happened at Millwood, or who else might have been involved by that point in the investigation. Once Glower was dead …”

“What do you mean? Oh, you mean—” “Yeah. The Agency protested a lot, but our FCI people speculated that the Millwood blood bath may have been the Agency itself taking care of business—you know, with one of these sweeper types. But once Kreiss started making accusations about the Chinese government, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the highest levels of our own government, nobody either side of the river wanted it to go any further.”

“Wow. And that’s whose kid is missing.”

“Right. And two others, don’t forget.”

“Could there be a connection?”

“I doubt it. But I’ve been given specific direction from Richmond to put a lid on this right now and shop it to MP.”

“Just because it’s Kreiss’s kid who’s involved?”

Farnsworth just looked at her with that patient expression on his face, which always made Janet feel like a schoolgirl.

“Or are you saying the Agency is going to work it?” she asked.

Farnsworth put his pipe away in the desk.

“Don’t know, as we Vermonters like to say. Don’t know, don’t want to know. And neither do you. I am saying that I’ve, the Roanoke office,

are not going to work it, other than as a routine missing persons case. And you are going to move on to other things.”

Janet thought about that for a moment.

“But what if Kreiss works it?”

“What if he does? If someone was fool enough to abduct Edwin Kreiss’s daughter, then, in my humble estimation, he’ll get what’s coming to him.”

Janet sat back in her chair. Her instincts about Kreiss had been more correct than she had realized. Farnsworth was looking at his watch, which was his signal that the interview was over.

“You, on the other hand,” he said, “need to forget about making any more calls to Washington, okay?

It’ll be a lot better for you, all around. And for me, and for probably everyone in this office. Are we clear on that, Janet?”

She nodded. Clear as a fire bell, she thought. An image of Edwin Kreiss flitted through her mind: coiled silently in that rocking chair, those deepset gray-green eyes like range finders when he looked at her. Crazy man or fanatic? She exhaled carefully. The few spooks she had met from that other world across the Potomac River, military and civilian, had mostly been pasty-faced bureaucrats. Kreiss was apparently from the sharp end of the spear.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Got it.”

“Knew you would,” Farnsworth said with a fatherly smile.

“You have a great day.”

Janet went back to her cubicle, grabbing some coffee on the way. The coffee had a slightly stale, oily smell to it, which was typical of the afternoon batch, but she felt the need for a jolt of caffeine.

Billy was still snoring quietly in the next cubicle when Janet sat down at her desk. She was surprised to see a yellow telephone message indicating that a Dr. Kellermann, of the headquarters Counseling Division, wanted to talk to her. Whoops, she thought. Their deputy dog had called Farnsworth but probably had not canceled Janet’s original query. She looked at her watch. It was 3:15. On a Friday.

She thought about it. Farnsworth had made things pretty clear: Back out. And yet, she could not get Edwin Kreiss out other mind. She’d been in southwest Virginia for a year and a half, and had met absolutely zero truly interesting men in Roanoke. She’d been taking some post doc seminars at Virginia Tech over in Blacksburg to fill the empty hours. And despite the fact that she had married and then divorced an academic before joining the Bureau back in 1991, she knew that she was at least subconsciously hoping she might meet some interesting faculty people.

As it turned out, so far at least, everyone old enough to interest her was either married or so completely engrossed in his or her work, S-corporation, or themselves as to bore her to tears. After her first few appearances in the local fitness center, a couple of the married agents in the office had made it clear they wouldn’t mind a fling, but she had a firm rule about both married men and dating other agents. It wasn’t that Kreiss stirred her romantically, but he sure as hell was interesting.