But then there was the hat. Lynn’s hat. Carried down that creek until it got caught up in the logjam. Which meant—what, exactly? Had someone stolen that hat a year ago and gone into the arsenal with it? Or had the kids been camping outside of the complex, and the hat blew away and got carried downstream? There certainly were other plausible explanations.
And yet, that kid had said “break into” Site R. While he was almost certain that hat was hers, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d
actually seen her wear it. He should call those FBI people and tell them he’d found the hat. But how would he explain the where part? And even if the Bureau people were sympathetic, would they do anything? Did they even have the case anymore? Did they care? Had they ever cared? He remembered the way that woman agent had looked at him, almost challenging him to interfere: “Do not go solo on this,” she’d said. Pretty or not, she wasn’t old enough to talk to him like that.
He sighed in frustration and went back into the house to make some coffee. He was being unfair. Agents were agents. There was an infinite supply of evil out there. Knock off a bad guy and two more rose up in his place. The working stiffs in the Bureau and the other federal law-enforcement agencies tended to work the ones they could, and the others, well, they did what they could until some boss said, Hey, this isn’t going anywhere;
let’s move on, folks. As long as statistics drove the budget, the bosses would prioritize in the direction of closure. This was nothing new.
The Agency had been different, but that was because they weren’t really accountable to anybody except a committee or two in Congress, where accountability was an extremely flexible concept.
He stood at the sink, washing out the coffeepot, and considered the other problem, the larger problem—that Washington might find out he’d come out of his cave. The terms of his forced retirement after the Millwood incident had been excruciatingly clear, enunciated through clenched teeth by none other than J. Willard Marchand, the assistant director over Bureau Foreign Counterintelligence himself: Kreiss was never to act operationally again, not in any capacity. Not in private security work, not as a consultant, not even in self-defense.
“Some asshole wants your car, you give it up. Someone breaks into your house at night, you sleep through it. You may not carry a firearm. You may not do any of those things you’ve been doing for all those years. You will forget everything you learned from those goddamned people across the river, and you will turn in any special equipment you may have acquired while you were there.”
The deal had been straightforward: He could draw his pension, go down to Blacksburg, be with his daughter, and contemplate his many sins in the woods. But that was it. He remembered that Marchand had been so angry, he could speak only in short bursts.
“We’ll let you keep your retirement package. Despite Millwood, for which the professional standards board could have just fired you. You can live on that. You want to take a civilian job, it had better not
be even remotely related to what you did here. And, most importantly, you keep your wild-ass accusations to yourself.
In other words, Kreiss, find a hole, get in it, and pull it in after you.
And speaking for the deputy attorney general of the United States, if we get even a hint that you’re stirring the pot somewhere, any pot, anywhere, we’ll ask the Agency to send one of your former playmates down there to retrieve your ass. And we will be watching.”
All because of what had happened on a quiet Sunday afternoon in Millwood, Virginia, a tiny village up in the northern Shenandoah Valley. Millwood was home to a restored gristmill, a couple of antique shops, Carter Hall—once the huge estate of the Burwell family, which was now home to the Project Hope foundation—a post office, a private country day school, three dozen or so private homes, and a general store. It also contained the ancestral home of Ephraim Glower, erstwhile assistant deputy director for counterespionage operations for the Agency. Ephraim Glower of the Powhatan School, Choate, and Yale University. Whose ancestors had ridden with Mosby’s Rangers during the Civil War, partnered with J. P. Morgan in the heyday of the robber barons, and served as an assistant secretary of the Treasury during the reign of Franklin Roosevelt. Ephraim Glower had risen to a position of real power within the Agency, while spending the last of the family’s fortune on the family estate, a town house in Georgetown, fox hunting in Middleburg, Washington A-list entertaining, a high-maintenance socialite wife, and a string of young and beautiful “associates.” His superior social standing had been matched by an equally superior attitude, and he had not been beloved by his subordinates within CE.
Kreiss’s team, while working the Energy Department espionage case in collaboration with the Agency CE people and Energy’s own security people, had begun to encounter an increasingly resistant bureaucratic field.
Someone was subtly inhibiting the investigation. Kreiss eventually suspected Glower. When he checked out a rumor that Glower was almost broke, it turned out that he had been rescued by an infusion of mysterious cash. Kreiss, by then operating mostly on his own initiative, had followed the money trail. He had traced the money from its sources in Hong Kong, through the election campaign finance operations of the newly elected administration, directly to Glower. Who, for sums paid, was apparently obstructing the joint Bureau/Agency/Energy Department investigation by spinning a gentle web of bureaucratic and legal taffy over all the efforts to determine if there were Chinese spies at the nuclear research laboratories. Glower
didn’t trade secrets for money, as most spies or traitors did. He provided an insidious form of top cover, and he did it so well that Kreiss eventually concluded that Glower must have been getting some help from over in the Justice Department.
All of this was happening as Kreiss was entering his eighth year of the exchange assignment with the Agency counterespionage directorate. As he and his small team developed the scope and depth of a possible top level conspiracy, Kreiss, the team leader and prime mover, had been suddenly recalled to the Bureau. The word in the corridors was that Langley had complained about Kreiss, claiming he had begun to overstep his brief.
Someone at the highest levels in the Agency had prevailed upon someone injustice to make the Bureau recall him. He had been given an innocuous position within the Bureau’s FCI organization, pending a new assignment.
The pending went on for two years, while he watched the joint Energy Department/ FBI investigation stall out completely.
This had convinced Kreiss that Ephraim Glower had a cohort over at Justice, and possibly within the Bureau itself. His timing turned out to be lousy, since there was already a great deal of bureaucratic acrimony between Justice and FBI headquarters. Since the FBI worked for the attorney general, no one in the Bureau wanted to hear Kreiss’s conspiracy theories about any putative Chinese spy ring, and most emphatically, they did not want to hear about a high-level problem over at Justice. The Bureau was much too busy manning its own ramparts over Waco, Ruby Ridge, and, later, some unpleasant revelations about the FBI laboratory.
When the story about the Chinese government’s attempts to buy influence during and after the 1996 reelection campaign broke in Washington, Kreiss tried again. This time, he was shut down even more forcefully. The FBI director by then had his own problems with the Justice Department as he and the attorney general traded salvos and congressional testimony over independent prosecutors, a laundry list of presidential scandals, and growing talk of a presidential impeachment.
Kreiss, totally frustrated, went to Millwood to confront Ephraim Glower, which led to bloody results. He was preparing to challenge his expulsion from the Bureau, when something happened to change his mind: The Agency had threatened his daughter. The threat had been made indirectly, but it had been unmistakable. It had come during a seemingly casual telephone call from one of his ex-associates in the retrieval business. Langley was still furious about Glower, and the word in CE was that the big bosses didn’t believe Kreiss’s alibi for the ti
me Glower had done all the killing. But they were willing to put
the whole incident to bed as long as Kreiss shut up about what Glower had been doing. And if he didn’t, Kreiss might get to experience his own family tragedy. Kreiss took the hint and subsided. He had done only one thing right that day in Millwood, and that one thing now constituted his only insurance policy.
So now he had a big decision to make: He could call Special Agent Larry Talbot, lay out what he’d done and what he’d found, take his licks from Talbot’s peppery sidekick for intruding, and then get back out of the way. He could even plead with the Roanoke RA to keep his intrusion into the arsenal a secret from Washington. But that wouldn’t work: The Bureau would never change. They’d yell at him and break his balls for going in there, while doing nothing about finding Lynn. So there really wasn’t any decision to make, was there? What he had to do was to go back there, armed this time with some decent overheads, and find out what the hell was going on in the Ramsey Arsenal that might hopefully lead to Lynn, or at least to what had happened to Lynn.
He looked down at the muddy cap, which was lying on the kitchen table. Face it, he thought with a sigh, those kids may be dead. No, not those kids. Lynn might be dead. He couldn’t bear to think about that. He himself would certainly have been dead if that big slug had hit him instead of the tree. Those people hadn’t come out to talk. The shooter, taking his position up in the tree line, the other one acting as game beater, yelling and crashing forward through the woods to startle Kreiss into motion-that had not been extemporaneous. Those people were hunters and knew what they were doing. If the kids had blundered into people like that, they would have been easy pickings.
He felt the rage coming then, the familiar heat in his face, the sensation that his blood pressure was rising. He tried to contain it by deep breathing, but it came anyway, a wave of fury, the tingling sensation in his large hands, a scarlet rim to his peripheral vision. If he found out that those people had done something to Lynn, he would introduce them to the true meaning of terror, sweeper-style, and then he would slaughter them all, until there was blood to his elbows. He closed his eyes, savoring the rage.
But even his fury could not entirely blank out the other possibility, the one he didn’t ever want to think about. That it hadn’t been locals who had taken Lynn.
To Janet’s surprise, Brianne Kellermann called her back from headquarters right after lunch. After some more obligatory waffling about privacy issues, she told Janet that the fundamental issue leading to the breakup of
the Kreiss marriage had been what Edwin Kreiss did for a living. According to Brianne’s notes, the former Mrs. Kreiss implied that she had found out more than she wanted to know about what Kreiss was doing during his exchange tour with the Agency, and that it had not squared with what Kreiss had been telling her. There were also some indications of domestic turbulence, incidents of uncontrolled rage on his part that stopped just short of physical violence. The bottom line was that Kreiss’s wife had become afraid of her husband. Four years after he went to the Agency, she sought the divorce.
“And that’s it?” Janet asked.
“That’s all I have in my file pertaining to him,” Brianne said.
“That was your focus, right?”
She had hoped for more, but she did not want Kellermann to detect that.
“Yes, it was. Thank you very much. You’ve been very helpful.”
There was a momentary pause on the line.
“Have you met Edwin Kreiss?”
Her instincts told her to deflect any further interest in her call.
“Yes,” she said.
“When we interviewed the parents. He seemed—I don’t know-pretty normal? A lot of anxiety about his missing daughter, of course, and he wasn’t thrilled when we told him the case was going to MR But killerDiller secret agent? No.”
“Secret agent?”
Janet swore under her breath. Damned shrink was quick.
“Well, you know, that time he spent with the Agency.”
“I see. Not a killer-diner, but not your run-of-the-mill, quietly retired civil servant, either?”
Janet had to think about that one.
“No-o, not exactly,” she said.
“I got the impression that he was immensely self-controlled.” She remembered all the things Farnsworth had told her, but she doubted Brianne Kellermann was in the loop on any of that.
“I guess I wouldn’t want the guy really mad at me, but closet psychopath? No. And he’s not a suspect or anything. The kids just vanished. We’ve been clutching at straws the whole way. That’s what pisses me off, I guess.”
“Well, I wish I could have told you something significant,” Brianne said.
“But that’s all I have.”
Actually, you did, Doc, Janet thought.
“Well, like I said, we have to pull all the strings. And thanks again for getting back to me. I can close our files now; let MP take it.”
Janet flopped back in her chair after hanging up. Kreiss had a
reputation for being a scary guy. Kreiss’s wife had been sufficiently afraid of him to want out. Wait–correct that. Sufficiently afraid to want to go to a Bureau counselor. Having been divorced herself, she knew there was probably a lot more to the Kreiss divorce story than just that, but going to a Bureau counselor had to have been a big step for a senior FBI agent’s wife to take.
With any luck, Kellermann would now just forget the call and move on. Janet had been entirely truthful when she had said she did not figure Kreiss for a part in the kids’ disappearance. What concerned her now was the possibility that he might take up the hunt himself. Possibility, hell—probability, if the headless horseman trick was any indication. And, actually, concerned wasn’t the right word, either. Face it, she told herself.
It’s Kreiss and his exotic career that’s intriguing you. In fact, if Kreiss was on the move, she wouldn’t mind helping him. She laughed out loud at that crazy notion and momentarily woke Billy.
The FedEx truck found its way to Kreiss’s cabin late Wednesday afternoon.
Kreiss signed for the package and took it into the cabin. Parsons had done well. There were two wide-area black-and-white overheads of the Ramsey Arsenal. Each had been taken from an oblique angle, because, of course, the aircraft had no business flying directly over the complex. One of them had been taken from a much greater height than the other, and it showed nearly the entire installation, including the creek that ran through it. The other was a shot that centered on the industrial area, and it gave a perspective to the buildings in the central area that allowed Kreiss to size them. There was one additional sheet in the package, which was a copy of the large overall shot with a global positioning system grid superimposed. The title box on the lower right of each sheet identified the site as the Jonesboro Cement Factory in Canton, Ohio.
Good man, Kreiss thought to himself. Parsons had disguised the identity of the prints from prying eyes at his company. There was a note in the package saying that Parsons had the photos in a computer file and that any of them could be blown up on one of their Sun workstations and reprinted to whatever level of detail he wanted. He had been unable to
midnight-requisition the processing work, and he apologetically requested a check for fifteen hundred dollars be made out to the company.
Kreiss got his checkbook and wrote the check immediately. Then he studied the photos for almost an hour, absorbing details of the industrial area.
The individual buildings were blurry in the photograph, which told Kreiss that Parsons had already done some enlargement work.
The buildings of the industrial area took up no more than a small portion on the eastern side of the military reservation. The photo also showed the rail spur leading off the main line connecting Christiansburg to Ramsey and points north. Kreiss would have loved to get nighttime infrared photos of the entire complex, but that would have been pushing it. Besides, whatever those people were doing, they were probably d
oing it in the industrial area. The problem was that there appeared to be over one hundred identifiable buildings in the complex. He decided he would make one more reconnaissance intrusion, this time at night, and this time into the industrial area. It looked as if the railroad spur might be a better intrusion position, pointing directly into the industrial area and avoiding all the woods-crawling. It shouldn’t be too hard to find his way back to that rail spur. If he could pinpoint where those people were operating, he would back out, come back to the cabin for some of his retrieval equipment, and then go after them. He was looking forward to talking to them, maybe sharing his thinking with them about their itchy trigger fingers.
Just after 6:00 P.M.” Jared picked Browne up at his house in Blacksburg.
Jared was driving his own pickup instead of his telephone repair van.
There was a windowless cap on the back bed of the pickup, where Jared had packed their gear.
“Get the copper?” Browne asked.
“Yep. It’s already stashed by the main gates. Coupla hundred pounds.”
“We have to strip it?”
“No, it’s four switch-gear plates. No insulation. Heavy, though.”
On days they were going into the installation, Jared would drive the telephone company van to the concrete-filled barrels on the main entrance road of the arsenal. He would pretend to be doing something there. When there were no cars in sight, he would move two barrels slightly, just enough so that when they came later, he could pull off the main highway in the early darkness and drive straight between the barrels.
From there, they would drive, lights off, to the actual main gate, about a quarter of a mile back into the trees from the highway. In
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