She just looked at him.
“It shows better than it tells, Special Agent,” he said.
“And time, believe it or not, time is a-wastin’. Help if I say please?”
“Is this something I should call my boss about first?” she asked.
“No-o,” he said. “
“Cause he’s gonna ask you a million questions, and you won’t have any answers whatsoever until I do my show-and-tell. Please?”
Half an hour later, they were leaving Roanoke and headed south on 1-81 in his car. He was explaining how they had tagged Edwin Kreiss’s truck.
“Four bugs? Whatever happened to the notion of the private citizen?”
“Private citizen?” Ransom said, slapping the wheel, as if she’d told a wonderful joke.
“No such thing in America anymore. First of all, nobody’s a citizen anymore.”
Uh-oh, she thought. Brother Ransom has a hobbyhorse. She decided to go with it anyway.
“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“Simple,” he said.
“We are what bureaucracies call us. Like law enforcement? We’re ‘subjects,” Pollsters? We’re ‘respondents.” Marketin’ people? We’re ‘focus groups.” Politicians? We’re ‘voters.” Your Internet provider? You’re a ‘subscriber.” IRS? We’re ‘clients.” Clients—do you love it? Ain’t no more ‘citizens.” Last time there were citizens, in the way you mean it, Special Agent, was during the Roman Empire. And maybe the French Revolution, when they got into their guillotine phase.”
She decided to shut up. She was in no shape for a philosophy discussion.
The coffee was wearing off and she was still very tired. She settled back in the seat and let him drive. Forty minutes later, they were
stopping next to Jared’s lonely driveway. Ransom turned in and parked the car out of sight of the county road. They walked down the dirt lane to the trailer, which Janet could see was sitting at an odd angle.
“This here is the residence of one Jared McGarand,” Ransom announced.
“What’s that smell?” Janet asked, although she already had an idea.
“That is most likely related to brother Jared’s final movement, if you get my meanin’. Under that end of the trailer, right there, where you see the jack handle stickin’ out. And if you check that vehicle over there, you’ll find one very expensive tag tracker on the back bumper.”
“The one you put on Kreiss’s truck?”
“That very one, Special Agent.”
“Okay, I give up. I assume there’s a dead guy under there. What the hell’s going on?”
“I was kinda hopin’ you could shed some light on that, seem’ as you had a meet with subject Edwin Kreiss, apparently right before he came out here and wasted this McGarand individual. Least I think he did. I haven’t gone and lifted that trailer up to make sure, but my nose is makin’ an educated guess here, okay?”
“About a dead body, or Kreiss doing it?”
He grinned and shrugged.
“I got nowhere at that meeting,” she said.
“I’ve already told Farnsworth this. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Well, I didn’t want to admit that Kreiss just totally blew me off, but that’s what he did. He also saw through the proposition that we might work together, you know, to catch the mysterious bomb makers while I helped him find his daughter.”
“Saw through it?”
“He said it was bullshit. That Washington being here was about him.”
“Oh boy,” Ransom said, blowing out a long sigh.
“Here we go again.”
“It was bullshit? Bellhouser and Foster’s bit about the bomb makers?”
“Truth?” Ransom said.
“I don’t have any idea. My assignment was to cooperate with those two. And to keep my bosses at the Agency informed as to what was goin’ down.”
“So if those two were conspiring to trap Kreiss in something, you wouldn’t necessarily know about it?”
Ransom hesitated before answering.
“Lemme just say that if somebody managed to take Ed Kreiss off the boards, my bosses wouldn’t exactly complain, okay?”
“Son of a bitch,” Janet said softly.
“Kreiss was right.”
“What’s his state of mind?”
She snorted.
“I offered to help him find his daughter, you know, as cover for the other little project. He said he didn’t need any help. He also said that if he found out someone had done something to his daughter, he’d catch them and put their severed heads out on pikes on the interstate.”
“That’s our Edwin,” Ransom said admiringly.
“Might be interestin’ to see if this dude under there is headless. On the other hand,” he said, squatting down on his haunches, “might not be much left to mount.” He stood back up.
“Now, you had this meetin’ with Kreiss, he told you to buzz off, then you go home and he comes out here and does a number on this vie here, which we assume is subject Jared McGarand. You go to your weekend class the next mornin’, then you go to the arsenal for your little field trip, and you encounter—Edwin Kreiss. Tell you anythin’?”
“That Kreiss might have found out something from this Jared whatever about his daughter. And that something points back to the arsenal. But—” Ransom cocked his head.
“Yeah, but what?”
“But Kreiss already suspected the kids had gone to the arsenal.”
“At night? Why’s he there at night? And didn’t he tell you he was goin’ back there last night? After he rescued you?”
“Yes.” The smell was making her queasy. She backed away from the mess under the trailer.
“Can we go now? And shouldn’t we call in local law?”
“Yes, we can go now and, no, we will not call in local law. We don’t have anythin’ to do with local law and local homicides, seem’ as we never operate domestically.”
“Oh, right,” she said sarcastically.
“But we do.”
“And you would tell the cops what, exactly?”
“That there’s a dead body under this trailer.”
“Which you found out about in the company of an Agency person, while investigatin’ a missin’ persons case that you’ve already shipped off to Washington. How you feel about explainin’ why you did all that to the local shareef? Or to Farnsworth?”
She took a deep breath. Ransom was right.
“See, here’s the thing, Special Agent. I buy Kreiss goin’ out to that
arsenal durin’ the day, snoopin’ around, lookin’ for Injun signs. But if he’s goin’ at night, he’s goin’ covert. Wearin’ some of those nifty black ninja threads, right? … Thought so. My guess is that he found this guy out there at the arsenal.”
“If he did, and followed him back here, it was because he figured this guy might know what happened to his daughter. He’d want to talk to him, not snuff him.”
“Unless he wouldn’t talk. Not the first guy who wouldn’t talk to Edwin Kreiss had him an accident of some kind.”
“You think this was an accident?” she asked.
“Yeah. The kind that happens when folks resist a peace officer in the performance of his sworn duties, you know?”
“But how do you know it’s Kreiss who did this?”
“Because our tracker tag is on that piece-a-shit pickup truck over there, maybe?”
“Who the hell knows? He could have discovered that while he was shopping at the local Piggly Wiggly and put it on the nearest vehicle. I mean, based on evidence, that’s as reasonable an explanation as all this supposition you’re coming up with. Those security people weren’t alarmed about anything, and I sure as hell didn’t see any signs of anything going on out there.”
“From your tunnel perspective,” he said. He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with both hands.
“Look,” she said.
“You think there’s been a murder here. Okay, homicide is serious s
hit. I want to go back and update my boss, if only because I’m going to have to explain the loss of that car anyway. You come with me. I’ll tell my sad tale: you tell yours. Let’s see what Farnsworth thinks.
Let him fold in your supervisors. If he wants to tell local law, I’m sure he’ll give you guys a chance to cobble up a story to keep your precious Agency out of the picture. That’s the right way to go here. You know that.”
“Tell him today, Sunday.”
“He’s spoiled a couple of mine.”
“And in the meantime, where the hell is Kreiss?”
“Who cares, as long as he’s out looking for his daughter. Hell, he might find her. But I think all you guys are wrong about this arsenal bomb thing.
That place is just a ghost town with a street-maintenance problem.”
Kreiss awoke at dawn on Sunday to the sounds of a single mockingbird rousing the forest from atop a telephone pole. He had to think for a
moment to remember where he was and why. His muscles were stiff and sore from his exertions down in that tunnel. He had come in from the direction of the rail spur rather than the main entrance because of what Carter had said about the security people. He’d climbed the rail gates and bedded down in one of the explosives filling sheds three blocks away from the main street.
He slipped out of his crawl suit and performed morning ablutions with a wet rag. Then he reversed the suit, exposing a tan-and-green camouflage color scheme to replace the all-black night-ops coloration. He reset the packs on his chest and back, put away the hood in favor of a camo watch cap, grabbed his staff, and headed for the back alleys behind the complex of larger buildings.
If he was correct about the vehicle noises last night, the second man had come and gone without entering the arsenal. Kreiss was now counting on him to show up this morning, because this was when the second man would expect Jared to show up. Since Jared would not be showing up anywhere ever again, the second man would have to make a decision: go to Jared’s place to find out why, or come into the arsenal to do whatever they had been doing here. Kreiss planned to listen for sounds of a vehicle and ambush the second man. If no vehicle showed up, he would initiate a thorough door-to-door search. In the meantime, he needed to find a good spot to lay up.
He walked quietly down a side street between two large concrete buildings. The sun wasn’t up yet, but there was plenty of light. As usual, there were no birds or other animals stirring in the main complex. He stopped when he got to the main street. To his right, going up the hill, were the two rows of large buildings. To his left were two more large buildings, an open space of road and rail lines, and then the big power plant building at the end of the street. The big hole out in the street where Carter had lost her bureau car was still there. He didn’t relish her prospects for a happy and productive Monday morning. Whatever that tunnel complex was all about, he thought, it must dip down at a much steeper angle than the street. He checked his watch: It was still about forty-five minutes until actual sunrise. The air was still, and he could hear the occasional hum of a car way out on Route 11. He ought to be able to hear any vehicle that approached the arsenal perimeter. He decided to look around for a few minutes before setting up.
He walked down toward the power plant. It looked to be about five stories high, with one main stack attached to the back side. There
were two huge combustion exhaust ducts slanting into the base of the stack, which indicated at least two boilers inside. The turbo generator hall, half the size of the main building, was on the right side, as evidenced by a fenced bank of transformers and high-tension cables that spread out into the complex. There appeared to be skylights at the very top of the boiler hall, but otherwise no windows. There was an admin building of some kind on the left side. Between the admin building and the boiler hall were four very large garage doors, one of which had a rail spur leading under it.
There was a single man-sized door to the right of the garage doors, and he tried the handle, but it was locked. The metal garage doors had a row of one-foot-square wire-mesh-reinforced windows at head height, and Kreiss checked them, trying to see in. He could see nothing through most of them because of all the dust and grime, but he was surprised to see through the final one that there was a truck parked inside. It was a tanker truck of some kind. The cab was not as big as a semi, but bigger than a pickup truck, and a green-and-white tank was built onto the body of the truck. Other than that, he couldn’t make out any more details. He wondered why a truck would still be here, since the other buildings had all been stripped down when the plant was closed. Probably wouldn’t start when they closed the place and they’d just left it. Typical Army solution.
He walked all the way around the power plant, noting the four huge pipes rising out of the ground that brought water from somewhere to cool the condensers under the generating hall. There was probably an impoundment up on that creek somewhere. There were some steel doors at the back of the plant, but they were windowless and also locked. The stack was easily three hundred feet high, with a line of rusting steel rungs leading all the way to the top. He stopped to listen, and he thought he heard a mechanical noise of some kind, but it was very faint. It was probably far away. Behind the plant building was a tank farm. There were two large fuel-oil tanks, with a rail spur running between them and a pump manifold house at one end. A third, medium-sized tank was labeled boiler feed water, a fourth potable water. Built into a fenced enclosure were two somewhat smaller tanks, each encased in concrete and plastered with danger signs warning of acid. One tank was labeled HNO” the other H2SO4. Nitric acid and sulfuric acid, Kreiss realized. Why would these tanks be back here? he wondered. Because the pumps were in the power plant?
He continued around the building, sizing it up as a hiding place for a prisoner and then dismissing it: The rooms in the plant would be too
big to provide an effective containment place. He came back around to the front of the plant and looked back up the street. Carter’s crash hole was about three blocks up, just past the first two large buildings. The street appeared to disappear up the hill into a tunnel of overhead pipes and their support frames. He had a sudden feeling that his mission was hopeless:
there were too many buildings, too many hiding places out here. No matter what that guy Jared had said, all this place offered was the silence of the tomb.
There was a sound behind him and he whirled around. A tall, black bearded man was standing in the man-sized doorway of the power plant, holding a large revolver down at his side. The man had violent dark eyes and a face out of a Civil War photograph. They stared at each other for a fraction of a second, and then the man raised the pistol and fired from a distance of thirty feet.
Kreiss actually felt the bullet go past his head even as the stunning boom of the Ruger hit his ears, but he was already moving, sideways and then sprinting up the street, opening the distance with some broken-field running, knowing that the big .44 became almost useless as the range opened. He zigged close to the corner of the first building and felt, rather than heard, a blast of concrete above his head. He jinked left, using the stick to balance his running, aware that the big man behind him was not firing indiscriminately. He wanted to turn his face, if just for an instant, to see if the shooter was pursuing him, but he knew better than to slow down now, and then he was careening around the far corner of the first building into a side alley. He stopped just past the corner, spun around, and then ran full tilt back across the main street into the alley on the other side.
This should surprise the shooter and also give him a chance to look left, but the man was gone, the power plant door closed.
Kreiss stopped short in the alley, close to the corner, catching his breath, and wishing now that he’d brought a gun. To do what? he asked himself. Stand there and shoot it out with that guy? The man appeared the next instant at the end of the alley in which Kreiss was standing.
Kreiss jumped sideways as the .44 let go again, this time feeling a tug on his backp
ack. He bolted out into the main street, but with all those concrete walls, there was nowhere to hide, and the big man was pretty handy with that cannon. He ran left into the next side street, considered climbing a building, realized that would be a trap, and then saw the shooter’s shadow coming down the back alley. He jumped back into the main street and went left, all those blank concrete walls,
nowhere to hide, up the hill again, zigzagging as he ran, and then three more rounds came after him in quick succession, all low, but too close to have been anything but carefully aimed, building-steadied shots. He came to the big hole in the street and didn’t hesitate. He scrambled, almost fell down the steel rungs into the darkness of the big tunnel, dropping the stick and retrieving it again when he got down. Knowing that the shooter would be there in a few seconds, he made no attempt to be quiet as he scrambled down the steep slope of the tunnel, using his stick for balance, until he was well down into the darkness. Then he got flat and waited.
After a minute, he could hear the sounds of falling water over the thudding of his heart. Getting too old for this shit, he thought. Five shots. One left if the guy kept coming and didn’t stop to reload. And yet, so far, this guy hadn’t done anything amateurish with that .44, so: safe to bet he’d be reloading. Why not? If he knew anything about the tunnel, he would know Kreiss wasn’t going anywhere. Kreiss began to slide farther back down the tunnel, keeping his eyes on that cone of sunlight coming down through the hole in the street. When he thought he saw a change in the light, he stopped and grabbed the hooked end of his stick and twisted it sharply. It made a sound identical to a semiautomatic pistol’s slide coming forward to the cocked and locked position.
Kreiss waited. Assuming that sound had carried back up the tunnel, the other guy now had a decision to make. The moment he started down into the tunnel, he’d be silhouetted in that cone of light and be fair game for the gun he’s just heard Kreiss cock. Kreiss listened to his own breathing and then started sliding back down the tunnel some more, keeping very quiet this time. The tunnel grew increasingly steeper, until Kreiss was glad he was full length and not trying to stay upright like the last time. At last he felt the tips of his boots go over the ledge, at which point he stopped moving and then rolled off the centerline of the tunnel toward the side wall to his right.
Hunting Season Page 25