Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Bambi bring you guys along?” he asked finally, once Ransom had his cigarette going.

  “Yeah,” Ransom said, exhaling a cloud of pungent blue smoke.

  “What’s Foster’s deal? He still Marchand’s toad?”

  “I think so. The request for our services came from Justice, so I’m not sure what the play is here.”

  Kreiss suddenly realized how badly he wanted a cigarette. He had quit smoking when he’d come down to Blacksburg. Now his neck hurt and he was aware that there must be visible bruises on his face. Ransom was looking him over.

  “That was some sound show, man,” Ransom said.

  “I think I pissed my pants when them lions did their thing.”

  “Who’s the penitent down there?” Kreiss asked. He had not moved from his position behind the Barrett, which still had a round chambered.

  “Nice young white boy,” Ransom said.

  “Name’s Gerald Cassidy.

  Career-minded. Married, too. I suppose that’s why he’s still grabbin’ dirt.

  What do you think?”

  “He’s taking a reasonable approach to the situation,” Kreiss said.

  “Sorry about the Bronco.”

  “DEA drug take. Ain’t no big deal. But look, Ed. We were supposed to have us a little talk, not a firefight.” He began to come closer.

  Kreiss twitched the Barrett’s barrel.

  “That wasn’t a firefight. And I can hear you fine from right there.”

  Ransom stopped and flashed his palms at Kreiss in a gesture of peace.

  “All right, that’s cool,” he said, “but this isn’t what you think.”

  The rifle wasn’t pointed right at him, but it would not have taken much to fix that. Kreiss knew that from Ransom’s perspective, the business end of a Barrett light .50 must look like the Holland Tunnel.

  “Right,” he said.

  “Then why were you two laying for me in my own house?”

  ““Cause Bellhouser asked Agency CE for some off-line help. Apparently didn’t want to use Bureau FCI people. Either that or AD Marchand didn’t want the exposure.”

  “Help with what?” Kreiss asked patiently.

  “Word is, Bellhouser’s principal went postal when he heard that you’ve come out of retirement, so to speak. Apparently, one of the Roanoke agents told somebody you been operatin’. Word got back.”

  That would be Carter, Kreiss thought.

  “My daughter is missing,” he said. He was tired and he was hurting. He could hear the edge in his own voice and saw that Ransom was struggling to hold his casual smile.

  “The local Bureau people tucked around with it for a little while, then sent it up to Missing Persons. That’s not good enough. I know a thing or two about looking for someone. They’re not going to look, so I am. You tell Bambi and company that this does not concern them, and to stay out of my way.”

  Ransom gave him a peculiar look, started to say something, but then put up his hands again.

  “All right, all right,” he said.

  “That’s cool.

  I’ll tell ‘em. Not saying that’s going to go down so good, but I’ll certainly tell ‘em.”

  “You do that. You leave anything behind in my house?”

  “Well, now, you know—” “You go back down there. Take Tonto there with you. Get your insects out of my house, whatever you’ve done. Take your time; do a thorough job. I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Then you come out and walk down the drive to the creek, and then walk south on that road. South is to the right.

  I’ll call someone to come get you.”

  “Shit, man, we got the modern conveniences. We can take care of that.”

  Kreiss did not reply, but he indicated with his chin that Ransom should get going. Ransom gave him a little salute and then walked back down the hill, keeping his hands in sight. They might have cell phones, Kreiss thought, but they won’t have a signal. They were in for a long walk. He also knew that their being rousted out of a stakeout was going to look bad enough without him, Kreiss, making the call to come get them.

  He settled in alongside the Barrett and watched Ransom and his partner go back into the cabin. He would certainly have to do a sweep of his own. He swore out loud. This was definitely a development he did not need right now. The number-two guy at Justice had sent his own PA and another horse-holder from Kreiss’s old department at the Bureau down here to step on his neck. He wondered where the heartburn was really coming from; the Agency shouldn’t care. Upon reflection, he realized this probably wasn’t about the Glower incident; this was probably about the Chinese spy case. If he had popped up on radar screens at Justice, the Agency, and the Bureau, then somebody very senior must be very nervous.

  Glower had been a major embarrassment, but his suicide should have long since tempered their pain. He wondered if this was about the money.

  Janet Carter was summoned to the RAs conference room just after noon.

  The call came directly from Farnsworth’s office, which once again set Larry Talbot off. To her surprise, the two Washington people were back, along with a large black man and a much younger white man. The two executive assistants were in business suits, but the other two men were wearing slacks, sport shirts, and windbreakers. Farnsworth asked her to join them at the table. He did not introduce the new players, and Janet saw that the RA was looking worried again.

  “Agent Carter,” Farnsworth announced formally, “This concerns the Edwin Kreiss matter. I’ve been requested to put you on special assignment.

  But first, Mr. Foster here has something to share with you. Mr.

  Foster?”

  Foster looked down for a moment at some papers he had in a folder in front of him.

  “You said the other day that Kreiss went to see one of the people you interviewed about his missing daughter?”

  “I said that I thought it was probably Kreiss.” She replayed the story of the headless man for them.

  “And the kid later told you that he told Kreiss they went to a “Site

  R’?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you know what that is?”

  “I never did find out. Nobody here seems to know about any Site R.”

  Foster shuffled his notes for a moment and then looked over at the woman, Bellhouser. Bambi, Janet thought. Perfect.

  “We think Site R refers to the Ramsey Army Arsenal,” Bellhouser said.

  “More properly known as the Ramsey Army Ammunition Plant. It’s located south of the town of Ramsey, on the other side of the New River.

  It’s been shut down for almost twenty years and is technically in cadre status.”

  “Where’d that name come from, that Site R?” Janet asked.

  “It’s an EPA appellation. The industrial area of the site is highly contaminated, but since it’s a military complex, the EPA doesn’t name it as such on their lists of toxic super sites They just called it Site R.”

  “And?” Janet asked. She was trying to figure out why the Justice Department cared about an abandoned military installation.

  “There’s some history here, Agent Carter. First, let me ask you something:

  Could you establish a working relationship with Kreiss if you had to?”

  “Working relationship? With Edwin Kreiss?”

  Farnsworth got into it.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Like if maybe you went to see him. Told him you were personally unhappy with the fact that the Bureau was just dropping his daughter’s case like that. That you might be interested in helping him look for his daughter, off-line, so to speak.”

  She shook her head.

  “He was a special agent for a long time,” she said, remembering her little confrontation with him in the cabin.

  “He would know that’s bullshit. Agents don’t work off-line and remain agents for very long.”

  “He’s been retired for almost five years,” Foster said.

  “You could play the line that
the Bureau has changed a lot since then. And play up the fact that you are an inexperienced agent.”

  Janet cocked her head to one side and gave Foster a “Fuck you very much” look, but Farnsworth again intervened.

  “I’ve explained to Mr. Foster that your assignment to the Roanoke office was something of a lateral arabesque, Janet,” he said.

  “Not for doing anything substantively wrong, of course, but for annoying a very senior assistant director at headquarters.

  You could tell Kreiss about that. Then imply that if you could solve the case, working with him, your career would be rehabilitated.”

  Janet felt her face redden. She sat back in her chair, embarrassed to have Farnsworth air her career problems in front of these people.

  “That all would be true, by the way,” Farnsworth said to no one in particular.

  “Let Mr. Foster tell you what’s going on before you say anything.”

  “This involves the BATF,” he began, and Janet snorted contemptuously.

  Foster stopped.

  “The Texas toastmastersV she exclaimed.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “Janet,” Farnsworth began, but Foster waved her comment away.

  “This involves a series of bombings that have been going on since the

  early nineties. Abortion clinics. The Atlanta Olympics bombing. And of course, some major incidents, such as the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City bombing. Three letter bombs to federally funded universities that were not the work of the Unibomber. And three other potentially major federal office building bombings that did not succeed, or were derailed by security people.”

  “The theory of interest,” Bellhouser said, “is that the anti-issue and antigovernment groups suspected to be behind these incidents are not technically qualified to design and construct some of the devices that have been used. Even more interesting is that the explosives used in several of the incidents were chemically similar. Some were identical.”

  “Basically,” Foster said, “the BATF thinks that there is one expert or expert group that these anti-everything groups are using to get their big bombs from, because the kind of people who protest at abortion clinics are more likely to be soccer moms than explosives experts.”

  “So they use what, a consultant?” Janet asked.

  Bellhouser nodded.

  “aTF and the Bureau have intercepted communications between some of the groups involved. We’re talking one of the more violence-prone ‘anti’ groups, and some people who might be supporting that guy Rudolph, the one we’re all chasing through the North Carolina woods.”

  “You’re implying that there is a national conspiracy among the anti groups?”

  The two Washington people nodded their heads.

  “Actually,” Foster said, “there’s been an interim national-level task force working that theory since 1994: Justice, the Marshals Service, the Bureau, and aTF It’s focused mainly on the anti-abortion bombings, but the feeling now is that it may be bigger than that. The task force is called the DCB, which stands for Domestic Counterintelligence Board.”

  Janet had never heard of any DCB, but she knew that Washington was full of interim task forces, a sure sign that the permanent organizations had become ineffective.

  “So what’s this got to do with the Roanoke office?” she asked.

  “The Board has only one lead on the so-called consultant,” Foster said.

  “And that is, he’s supposedly based in southwest Virginia.”

  Janet still didn’t see the connection. Foster explained.

  “You’ve told us Kreiss might be looking for something called Site R. Kreiss hunting anything is something that concerns us very much. We ran the national databases on Site R, and that surfaced the Ramsey AAP,

  an explosives-manufacturing complex down here in southwest Virginia. Our query brought the DCB staff up on the line, asking what we were looking for. We didn’t really want to share our Kreiss problem with anyone, so we waffled. But aTF, which is a full member of the DCB, put an agenda item on the board’s next meeting, asking what the Bureau was up to.”

  “And, of course, nobody at the Bureau wanted to give the aTF the time of day,” Farnsworth said. Foster nodded. Janet understood, as did everyone in the Bureau, that after the Waco disaster, cooperation at the policy level in Washington between the Bureau and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had become a very strained business. The BATF worked for the Treasury Department; the FBI worked for the Justice Department. The competition for federal law-enforcement budget dollars had always been fierce, but the Waco disaster had added an extra dimension of enmity between the two law-enforcement agencies. But there was something she did not understand.

  “If you people or this board think there’s something going on at this Ramsey Arsenal that’s related to a national terrorist bombing campaign,” Janet said, “why doesn’t this DCB or whatever just send in the Marines, toss the place?”

  “Because aTF already had,” Foster said.

  “It did an inspection of all such sites two years ago, and it found nothing at Ramsey but a mothballed ammunition plant. For the Bureau to suggest otherwise now is to imply that aTF screwed up or missed something.”

  “What a concept,” Janet muttered.

  “More importantly,” Bellhouser added, ignoring her gibe, “the proximate cause for such an allegation would be Edwin Kreiss’s unauthorized activities. Speaking for the Justice Department, we do not want our Kreiss problem exposed, and certainly not to Treasury and the BATF.”

  “I guess I can see that,” Janet said, although she sensed something was not quite making sense here.

  “So now what?”

  “My principal, Mr. Garrette, has discussed this matter with Assistant Director Marchand. It has been decided that there might be a way to finesse this situation. We’ve told the aTF at the DCB level that an ex operative of ours had maybe stumbled onto something related to the bomb-maker conspiracy theory, and that it might, emphasis on the word might, have something to do with the Ramsey Arsenal. We informed aTF that we proposed to let this guy run free for a while and see what, if anything, he turns up.”

  “But what makes you think there is something going on at this arsenal?”

  “Because Kreiss recently contacted an old buddy who used to work for the U.S. Marshals Service,” Foster said.

  “He did Kreiss a favor, but then his company security officer asked some questions, and in turn, the company reported the matter to the Bureau. They happen to have a contract with the Bureau, and they found out Kreiss used to work for the Bureau.”

  “What was the favor?”

  “The friend is a pilot who does airborne geo-information systems surveys.

  Kreiss wanted an aerial map of the Ramsey Arsenal. He told his friend that something was going on there that shouldn’t be, and that it had something to do with his daughter’s disappearance.”

  Janet frowned. This was news.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said.

  “You’re saying that now you want Kreiss to go operational again, because you think he might lead you to some bomb-making cell operating out of this arsenal?”

  “Correct,” Bellhouser said.

  “Now, if we can put you alongside Kreiss, we can perhaps achieve two objectives: We can find out what he’s doing, and maybe we can catch some serious bombers.”

  “Actually,” Foster said, “nobody knows whether or not the antigovernment groups have organized nationally. It isn’t out of the question that they have in a limited way—say in the matter of getting their bombs. But if this works, we might have a chance here to roll up not only the bomb makers but some of their customers.”

  Janet frowned, but then she thought she understood. Foster had an unspoken objective on the table: If the Bureau could unearth a bomber cell where aTF had failed to find them, the Bureau stood to count considerable coup. At the expense of aTF, she reminded herself.

  �
�And you think that Kreiss acting independently has a better chance to find something than an overt joint aTF Bureau operation?”

  “The last one of those was something less than a signal success,” Bellhouser pointed out.

  “And Kreiss is that good?” Janet asked.

  The large black man, who had been listening impassively up to now, snorted. Foster introduced him.

  “Janet, this is Mr. Ransom. He is a liaison officer to the DCB. The gentleman with him is Mr. Cassidy. Mr. Ransom here has had some, um, experience with Mr. Kreiss.”

  “Experience,” Ransom said.

  “Yeah, you might call it that. Remind me to show you our Bronco.”

  “We’re going to downplay this whole thing at the DCB meeting,” Foster said.

  “The last thing we want right now is the aTF charging into the

  arsenal. Especially if there’s nothing there, because that would necessarily bring the focus back to Kreiss.”

  Janet nodded slowly as she tried to work out all the lines in the water.

  Something was still muddled here. Then an awful idea occurred to her.

  “You people aren’t holding back information on Kreiss’s daughter, are you?” she asked, looking at Foster and Bellhouser.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” snapped Bellhouser angrily. There was an embarrassed silence at the table. Farnsworth was shaking his head. Foster took a deep breath before responding.

  “I won’t dignify that question with an answer, Agent Carter,” he said.

  “Look, Edwin Kreiss is a tough nut. Even in retirement, as Mr. Ransom discovered earlier this morning. I’ll let him brief you after this meeting.

  This Site R business may be entirely off the mark, in which case we’ll break it off and find another way to deal with Kreiss. But the aTF people who went into the Ramsey complex said it would be an absolutely perfect place for someone to set up a covert explosives lab.”

  “But they found nothing?”

  “A bunch of big concrete buildings, stripped down and locked up. The Army has some local rent-a-cops under contract. They make routine patrols of the physical plant, and they’ve never seen anything except signs of the occasional deer hunter back in the bunker area. It seems the central industrial area is known locally to be badly contaminated, which tends to keep intruders out. One of the security guards also said that there are rumors of chemical weapons, nerve gas, that sort of stuff, stored in the complex. We checked with the Army, which says that’s total bullshit, but since it helps to keep out intruders, they’ve always been deliberately coy about denying it.”