Hunting Season (63 page)

Except one was moving. Right there, almost on the visible horizon, to the right of a large stand of trees. A bunker like all the rest, except that the helical cylinder on the back end of the bunker was turning very slowly.

Now why is that? he wondered.

He knew that the helical cowls could provide ventilation two ways. If there was a breeze, it would spin the helix, which in turn would draw warm air out of the bunker. But if there was no breeze, as was the

case today, it had to mean there was warm air inside the bunker, rising through the shaft to turn the helix. But the bunkers were supposedly all empty.

Empty, cold, manmade tombs.

He walked carefully down the full length of the bunker roof he was standing on to examine the distant cowl from a slightly different angle. It was definitely moving. It was nearly half a mile away; perhaps there was a breeze over there. But then both cowls ought to be moving. He swung around to scan the fence and the gates behind him, but there was still no one there, and no sound of any vehicles coming. He took a mental bearing on the distant bunker, slid down from the one he had climbed, and headed for the ridge, trotting purposefully down one of the lanes. It was full daylight now, so he tried to keep a line of bunkers between him and the main gate to the bunker farm. He was almost there, crossing into a line of trees from the gravel lane, when the tiny cellular phone in his backpack went off. He moved sideways into the tree line, stood with his back against a tree, opened the phone, and hit the send button.

“You called me,” he announced quietly.

“This is Janet Carter; where are you?”

“At the other end of this phone circuit, Special Agent,” he replied. She sounded upset.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the office. In Roanoke. That woman—Misty, you called her?

She’s taken Lynn.”

He sat down abruptly, his back to the pine tree. A cold wave settled over his chest.

“Tell me,” he said.

She gave him a brief rundown of everything since the hospital, up to and including Misty’s attack with the carbon monoxide.

“My boss wants you to come in, preferably down here to Roanoke. He’s—wait a minute.”

Kreiss sat there with his eyes closed, trying not to think of anything.

He’d had Lynn, but now he didn’t. A man’s voice came on the phone.

“Mr. Kreiss, this is Ted Farnsworth, RA Roanoke. We have a warrant for your apprehension as a material witness regarding a homicide over in Montgomery County. We have a federal warrant for you regarding the little diversion you ran in Washington. The aTF wants to talk to you about the bombing of their headquarters. And a certain Agency apparently just plain wants your ass.”

“It’s nice to be wanted,” Kreiss said.

“But not very.”

“Yeah, well, you were in the business. You know the drill. There’s one more want, actually. My AD—that’s Mr. Greer, over at Criminal

Investigations—wants to know why another AD—that’s Mr. Marchand, over FCI—got someone very senior at Main Justice to activate the person who snatched your daughter and damn near killed two of my agents this mo ming

Three, if Janet hadn’t awakened and realized something was wrong.”

“Good question,” Kreiss said. He would have to figure out how to contact Misty. There was no sense in delaying the inevitable. Talking to the FBI was now a waste of time. He knew what Misty wanted: a straight trade. Himself for Lynn.

“Mr. Kreiss? Are you there?”

“Yes, but I don’t think we have anything to talk about, Mr. Farnsworth.”

He could just see the ventilator cowl. It was still moving.

“That’s not quite so, Mr. Kreiss. I have authority to deal on the Jared McGarand matter and what happened up on the G.W. Parkway. My chain of command feels that what Bellhouser and Foster set in motion is a hell of a lot more important than anything going on down here in Roanoke.

They also feel that this is all connected to something you know.”

More than you would ever understand, he thought as he focused on what Farnsworth was saying. And here he was again, facing the same choice he had been given five years ago: “your silence or your daughter.”

“Mr. Kreiss?”

“You can’t help me do the one thing I must do, Mr. Farnsworth,” Kreiss said.

“I need to free my daughter. And I don’t believe you or your boss or even his boss can fight what’s behind all this.”

“My SAC is telling me the director’s into this one, Mr. Kreiss.”

“I rest my case.”

“AD Greer says this is about the Chinese espionage case in the nuclear labs. Is he right?”

Kreiss was surprised, very surprised. He forced himself to focus.

Nobody knew this. Except them.

“Mr. Kreiss? Greer says you came back from your Agency assignment and the Glower incident with information that connects Chinese government campaign contributions to the way the nuclear labs investigations got derailed.”

“We are speaking on an open radio circuit,” Kreiss warned. He was aghast. Nobody could know this.

“They’re telling me you agreed to forced retirement and a vow of silence. What he doesn’t know or understand is why. The publicly stated reason was your role in the Glower mass suicides. But now he thinks it was something else.”

Kreiss sat on the ground in the pine straw, his mind reeling. He had kept his end of the bargain. He had not said a word. He had not done anything but come down here to be with and support his daughter while she finished school. If it hadn’t been for that total wild card, that lunatic McGarand and his mission of revenge, he’d still be sitting in his cabin watching the trees grow. They had broken the agreement. Unless…

“Mr. Kreiss? My chain of command desperately wants to know what you know, and what you can prove. They are willing to drop all the rest, all of it, in return for that. We think we can help you get your daughter back from those people, but only if we can apply the appropriate pressure at the seat of government. Agency to agency, director to director, if need be.”

“You don’t know her,” Kreiss said. A bird started up with a racket way up in the trees above his head.

“What’s that, Mr. Kreiss? Don’t know who?”

“You don’t know the woman who’s holding Lynn. Ask Carter; she knows her. This is personal now, between me and her. The only way I know I can get Lynn back safely is to trade myself for my daughter. You and the rest of the Bureau would only get in the way.”

“Not true, Mr. Kreiss. If you give my bosses what they need, they can get her controllers to turn your daughter over. Ephraim Glower’s dead, so the Agency can admit what he was doing now and shrug their shoulders:

He’s beyond prosecution, dead five years now. They won’t be the ones who’ll have the problem. It will be the people at Justice, and whomever they suborned here at the Bureau. The Agency will play ball when they realize our director is going to reveal the connection.”

Kreiss thought about it. Could he take on Misty? Could he even find Misty? And what would happen to Lynn if he did?

“You were a special agent of the FBI, Mr. Kreiss. You know how we do things. We’re the G. We’re big. We’re huge. We overwhelm. So do they.

If the Agency sets its mind to it, they can and will find you and grind you up. If you let them capture you, you’ll end up in solitary confinement in a federal pen somewhere, and not necessarily in this country.”

Then Janet Carter came on the line.

“The last time, when you went along, it was strictly about your daughter, wasn’t it?”

Kreiss didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

“Well, this time you have some leverage you didn’t have before. Last time, you traded her security for your silence. They broke the deal. So why not use what you’ve got?”

“Because, Special Agent, she might kill my daughter.”

“Might? Mr. Kreiss, she already set fire to a hospital. What makes you think she won’t hurt Lynn now? I told you what happened in the cave, remember?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’re pretty sure now those were her people. They were not aTF assets. In fact, the local head of the aTF has been in here all morning, yelling at Mr. Farnsworth here to find you. aTF hasn’t been conducting any operations down here other than out at that arsenal, after the McGarand thing. So those had to be her people in the cave.”

He felt the world constrict. Misty had suffered losses. Would she take that out on Lynn? He had given his word. To leave the Bureau. To admit culpability for precipitating the Glower debacle. To maintain his silence.

To submerge completely. In return, they would leave Lynn alone. Every fiber of his being was crying out for him to hunt that woman down, to destroy her. But he knew Carter and Farnsworth were right. The only realistic fix was in Washington, where the fix was the holy grail of modern government. It wasn’t about tradecraft anymore, or personal competence.

It was about information and evidence. The director had been demonized by his enemies at Justice ever since the campaign contributions scandal had erupted. Now he’d discovered that there might be a way to destroy those enemies. If he could believe Farnsworth, the director himself was willing to use what he, Kreiss, knew, to strike back. And, not coincidentally, to strike at the heart of the corruption that most people in the Bureau believed had consumed the Justice Department. These were monumental issues: How would one college student fare when federal law enforcement went to war with itself?

“If I do this, how can you guarantee that Lynn remains safe?”

“We can’t,” Farnsworth said. The words resounded down the phone line.

“I want to say something different, but that’s probably the truth of it.”

Kreiss found himself nodding in agreement. At least Farnsworth was shooting straight.

“But you can’t, either, Mr. Kreiss. From what Janet tells me, Lynn knows more about this than I think you would expect. If she reveals that to them, she becomes expendable, too. The only way this works is if we have information that forces them to let her go. She’s a pawn, and that’s how you want to keep it. You have to come in. You don’t have any workable alternatives.”

“All right,” he said, almost whispering it.

“I’m at the Ramsey Arsenal.”

There was an instant of silence, as if Farnsworth was surprised by that.

“Where, exactly?” Farnsworth asked.

Kreiss’s eyes snapped open at that question. It didn’t fit with everything else Farnsworth had been saying. It was too… tactical.

“Have Carter come alone to the industrial area,” Kreiss said.

“I’ll find her.”

There was another pause on the line. Then Farnsworth said, “Three hours. And not alone—she has to have backup.”

“Distant backup.”

“Agreed.”

“Three hours,” Kreiss repeated, and switched the phone off. He leaned sideways and let himself settle back into the pine straw, his eyes staring up into the treetops, unseeing. He did, in fact, have what the Bureau wanted.

Much more than they needed. Direct corroborating evidence of a deliberate policy to suppress and impede the investigation at the nuclear labs.

Not derived from any investigation, but from Ephraim Glower’s safe, which he, Kreiss, had rifled after discovering the bodies. He had felt more than a little guilt when he beheld that blood bath, but that guilt vanished when he read what was in Glower’s safe. He smiled for the first time that day, or maybe even that week. They would be expecting him to take them to a safety-deposit box somewhere and produce an envelope. They would positively howl when they found out where it was. And what it was.

Then he remembered that ventilator, spinning quietly in the still air of morning. He looked at his watch. He had three hours. Why not go see?

Farnsworth took Janet with him down to the secure-communications area of the office. To her surprise, Billy Smith was manning the communication console. He winked at her as Farnsworth ordered him to get Assistant Director Greer’s office on the line. The operator on the Washington end told him to stand by.

“This is the biggest thing that you’ll ever be involved in,” he told Janet.

“If we can prove that the Chinese campaign contributions bought breathing room for their spies in the Energy Department, and that someone at Justice helped it happen, the Bureau will be invincible.”

“But according to Lynn Kreiss, that ‘someone’ injustice had some help in the Bureau,” Janet pointed out. This comment elicited a gas-pain expression from Farnsworth. Then Assistant Director Greer himself was on the secure link.

Farnsworth briefed him on what had been agreed. Greer immediately overruled the RAs plan to send just Carter and some backup agents to pick Kreiss up.

“You go yourself, and take along every swinging dick in the office,” he ordered.

“I want nothing going wrong here. The last time you sent people to that goddamned arsenal, it blew up in your faces, literally.”

“Sir, Kreiss is nervous,” Farnsworth said.

“He sees a crowd, he may change his mind.”

“Then make sure he doesn’t see a goddamned crowd. Now, you think he has evidence? Real evidence? Not just opinions?”

“I think if all he had were opinions, he wouldn’t have been hammered the way he was five years ago. I think he has something, and now that all that shit about the labs has resurfaced, those people are scared of it. But first and foremost, we must get the daughter back, or nothing good happens.

Kreiss without the daughter is useless.”

“Then make it happen. Pick him up and get him up here, with his evidence.

Quickly, before our dear friends down at Justice figure out what’s happening. Once the director evaluates the situation, we’ll make the appropriate calls and get the daughter back.”

“What if they won’t?”

“Won’t what?”

“Give the daughter back. What if they insist we give them Kreiss before they’ll let the daughter go?”

“Once he gives us his evidence, I don’t give a shit about what happens to Kreiss. He embarrassed the Bureau. The spooks can have him. Believe me, we don’t have to go public with what we know to achieve the desired effect.”

Farnsworth opened his mouth to say something but then closed it.