Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  Farnsworth nodded and leaned forward.

  “This is close-hold, for now anyway. I’m telling you because you and Kreiss know each other, at least superficially. We’ve tied Kreiss to the arsenal and to Jared McGarand.

  Believe it or not, Foster apparently has a line of some sort into the aTF’s national response team. The NRT people found evidence of

  vehicles being parked near the rail line entrance to the arsenal, and that the gates at the rail line were not in fact locked, which they should have been. They also found an electric-eye counter mounted on the interior rail gate. So Foster directed us to ask the local cops to see if there was any evidence that jared McGarand’s truck had been to the arsenal, and damned if they didn’t get a match in samples of mud off jared’s pickup truck. From that parking area outside the rail gates.”

  “That quick?”

  “The NRT has a mobile lab.”

  She was confused.

  “Are you saying Jared was a bomb maker? And what’s that got to do with Kreiss?”

  “No, all I’m saying is that jared has been going into the arsenal. Why, we don’t know. But Foster thinks, based on what you’ve told us, that Kreiss may have stumbled into Jared or his truck at the arsenal, then followed Jared home to question him about his missing daughter. This happens, as best we can tell, on Friday night. Jared ends up dead, and Kreiss ends up back at the arsenal, bailing you out of the tunnel. Why did he go back? Did Jared reveal something? And then, when we go into the arsenal to see what the hell’s going on, a very big bomb is waiting for us. For you, maybe.”

  “Or for Kreiss.”

  “Yeah, okay, maybe for Kreiss. And then, who should we recover but Kreiss’s daughter, who’s babbling about H-bombs and Washington.”

  “But—” “Wait. Jared’s grandfather shows up at the homicide scene today. His name is Browne McGarand. He id’s the body, agrees with the cops that something is fishy in Denmark, tells them Jared liked to live dangerously with married women, then leaves. Then later, he calls the cops, says he’s leaving town, purportedly to break the bad news to Jared’s brother, his other grandson, who’s down in Greensboro, North Carolina. Cops try to get back to him, go by the house, but he’s already gone. They’ve asked the state cops to see if they can spot him out on the interstate and confirm he’s headed for Greensboro. In the meantime, it turns out the chief of d’s on the sheriff’s force knows this guy Browne. That’s Browne spelled with an e, by the way. And based on what he says, Foster now thinks his theory was right and that this guy might be the second half of the bomb team.”

  “Jared’s grandfather?”

  “Because it turns out that the grandfather is a retired chemical engineer, whose entire career just happened to be spent with the

  company that ran Ramsey Arsenal for the Army. He was the chief chemical engineer there when it closed.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “It gets better. You know Mike Hanson, our own arson and bomb guy?

  He was one of the people I sent out to jared’s trailer. He comes back, runs the name McGarand through the NCIC just for the hell of it. There are several McGarands, but only one hit that ties to this area: There was a William McGarand, formerly of Blacksburg, Virginia, who had a local rap sheet of minor offenses and was listed as having ties to an antigovernment, quasi-militia group called the Black Hats. They’re based up in the mountains west of here in Bluefield; combination Aryan Nation, moonshine runners, and marijuana farmers who like to take pot shots at revenuers-that’s aTF these days. Jared McGarand is also listed as being involved with them. But that wasn’t the kicker.”

  “Let me guess: William’s related to Browne McGarand.”

  “Yes, he is—or was—Browne’s only son. But more importantly, he was one of the people killed at Mount Carmel.”

  “Mount what?”

  “Mount Carmel, otherwise referred to in these hallowed halls and in the media as the Waco disaster. William was Browne’s son; Jared was William’s son. William’s wife ran off with some guy, and then William took off, leaving their two kids, Jared and the brother, to be raised by their grandfather.”

  “Browne,” Janet said. Her stomach was forgotten.

  “God, if there’s a Waco connection, then maybe the theory of a bomb cell in southwest Virginia wasn’t just some wash job to cover up for losing control of Kreiss.”

  “Hell, Janet, I don’t know. My guess? It was a smoke screen that just happened to be true. But now we’ve had a bomb, a big fucking bomb, and we have an aTF agent dead, and an Agency operative dead, not to mention two civilians, and now this Jared McGarand.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “The director is into this one, according to the SAC in Richmond. And because the Justice Department, deputy AG Bill Garrette, and Edwin Kreiss are involved, the director is ordering shields up.”

  “He remembers the Kreiss affair?”

  “Vividly. Plus, there’s been no love lost between Justice and the Bureau for the past four years. Now Kreiss is missing. Foster says there’s a fair chance that he’s hunting down Browne McGarand, not because of any bomb plot, but because he’s still searching for his daughter.”

  “Oh God, that’s right: Kreiss doesn’t know we recovered his daughter.”

  “Didn’t you tell me you gave Kreiss your pager?”

  Janet blinked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I want to activate that pager, and keep calling it until Kreiss answers.

  We’d really like to know where the hell he is and what he’s doing, but more importantly, I want you to tell him something.”

  From the expression on his face, she thought she knew what was coming next.

  “This is coming from the deputy AG at Main Justice, okay? And I don’t much like it. But you are instructed to tell Kreiss that his daughter was there in the arsenal—but that she was killed in the bomb blast. Second, you tell him that this guy Browne McGarand was responsible for abducting her and getting her killed. We’ll even give him McGarand’s vehicle description.”

  “Sweet Jesus, boss,” she whispered.

  “You don’t mean it!”

  “Look, Janet, if there’s even an outside chance that some maniac is loose with a hydrogen bomb and headed for Washington? You bet your ass I mean it. According to Foster and his pals at Justice, Kreiss will react by hunting this McGarand bastard down and boiling him in oil.”

  “But what the hell is the Bureau doing turning loose a—what is Kreiss anyway? A retired bounty hunter? I thought we wanted to tie these bomb people to the antigovernment groups. You know, make a case in court and all that good stuff? With evidence, even?”

  “The deputy AG has apparently spoken to the Secretary of the Treasury.

  aTF headquarters has worked up an official spin on the explosion.

  They’re reporting that it was an accident—a buildup of gases over the years in the industrial complex. Big bang, but end of story. Public and media interest goes south. Privately, of course, they’re still looking.”

  “Because of the word hydrogen?”

  “Right. That fact has spun official Washington up pretty good, especially when aTF admits it can’t identify what kind of explosive did the deed. The Justice Department’s internal response was pretty simple: Find this guy and stop him. Forget building a case. Essentially, the Bureau and the aTF are gearing up to defend the capital, but we’re the only ones besides the Agency who know about Kreiss.”

  “Who is a professional loose cannon!”

  “But he’s no longer our loose cannon, Janet. He’s now the Justice Department’s loose cannon. Which is why the director, while officially ignorant about Kreiss, is going along with this. He’s saying, Let him run.

  Assuming McGarand is loose with a bomb, if Kreiss tracks down McGarand and does something off the wall, Washington’s immediate problem is solved. If it later turns to shit, the director will state that Kreiss was not our asset.”

  “Kreiss will be Bill
Garrette’s asset,” Janet said wonderingly. She blinked again. This sounded like bureaucratic hubris on a grand scale.

  “I’ve got to tell you,” she said, “when Kreiss finds out you lied about his daughter, you personally may move to the top of his hunting list.”

  “That’s where the Agency will come in, Janet,” the RA said.

  “Bellhouser told Foster that Deputy AG Garrette has made some arrangements with the Agency, which probably knows Kreiss even better than we do. While we’re all hunting the bombers, they’re going to be hunting Kreiss.”

  He paused to let her absorb the import of what he was saying. Jesus, she thought, this was more than she wanted to know. Kreiss had grabbed a real tar baby here, and Garrette and company were now going to use this bombing hairball to do what they had always wanted to do.

  Farnsworth got up and paced around his office for a minute.

  “What we’re going to tell Kreiss may not be that far off the mark, by the way,” he said.

  “The docs aren’t overly optimistic about the girl’s probability of survival anyway.”

  “Then it’s doubly cruel to tell Kreiss she’s already dead,” she said.

  “Maybe so. But the urgent mission right now is to prevent a replay of what happened at the arsenal. That building was a power plant: reinforced concrete with no windows. It was just about vaporized, and the aTF guys who’ve seen it are genuinely worried, which is scaring Washington.

  Now think federal office building in downtown D.C. You were there, Janet. Ken Whittaker was there, too.”

  Janet had a “But, sir—” all ready to go until Farnsworth mentioned Whittaker. If her bosses were putting the picture together correctly, the clan McGarand had blood on their hands and more in their eye. Browne McGarand had lost a son at Waco. The son and the grandson had ties to a known quasi-militia group in West Virginia. Browne and Jared had apparently kidnapped Kreiss’s daughter and done God knew what to the other kids. Now Kreiss’s daughter said there was a threat to Washington.

  But when? And from whom, exactly?

  “I’ll tell you what: Give me that pager number,” Farnsworth said.

  “And then you go home. I’ll have someone activate the pager once I know you’re home. If he calls in, we’ll call-forward it to you at home.”

  She stared down at the floor. This was wrong. It smelled of the old “operational necessity” ploy. Farnsworth came over and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I know you disapprove of this, Janet, but your voice is the one he knows.”

  She nodded, trying to think of a way to get out of this, but her brain wasn’t working all that well. The best hope she had was that Kreiss had pitched the pager into the New River. Her fatigue must have shown, because Farnsworth called in one of the agents outside and asked him to drive her home.

  After thirty minutes, Kreiss saw McGarand come out of the restaurant, still carrying his thermos. He got in his truck, backed out, but then he drove diagonally across the plaza, toward a Best Western motel that was right next door. Their parking lot was contiguous to the plaza, and about the time Kreiss was starting up the van, McGarand parked right on the edge of the motel’s lot and got out. He looked around for a moment, then walked back toward the restaurant. Halfway there, he cut diagonally behind the main building and strode purposefully toward the truck park in the back. Kreiss shut down the van and got out to follow. As he did, the doors on the power company truck next to the van opened and two very large men got out. They were wearing green trousers, over which hung expansive Tshirts. Each had on a ball cap that had the TA logo on the front. Both of them carried large black Maglites. One of them had the steroid-enhanced build of a professional weight lifter; the other one was a whale who sported an enormous beer gut, but he had the upper body, shoulders, and arms to match.

  “Excuse me, sir,” the weight lifter said.

  “We’re TA security, and we’d like you to come with us into the office.” His voice was surprisingly high and no match for his body, but he made sure Kreiss saw him reach behind his back and pat the lump under his T-shirt where the gun was. The second one was already moving behind Kreiss in case he decided to run.

  From their expressions, it looked like they almost wished he would.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked, trying to see if McGarand was still visible.

  “The problem is you’ve been hanging around here, acting in a suspicious manner, that’s the problem, sir. Now let’s go.”

  They walked with Kreiss in between them, close, but not too close. He thought fast. If they got him inside, he’d miss McGarand leaving. He stopped, but the one on his right quietly folded a massive paw around

  his upper right arm and he was walking again, conscious of the stares from two truckers coming out of the main door. They had to wait in the middle of the plaza while a big semi roared by them in second gear, followed closely by a propane truck. They escorted him down a hall between the restaurant and the shop, past the men’s room and the showers, and into a small office at the back of the building. There, the whale patted him down and then indicated he should sit in a straight-backed chair directly in front of the desk. Kreiss chose to remain standing just to the left of the chair.

  The weight lifter sat down behind the desk, while the fat man kicked the door shut and then stood close behind Kreiss.

  “So: what the fuck you up to here, bud?” the weight lifter asked.

  “You pull in, park at the gas pump, walk out back, come back, gas your van, then park it over next to our truck—not your smartest move, now, was it?—and you sit there and wait.”

  Kreiss said nothing. Then the weight lifter picked up a Polaroid camera from the desk and shot it off in Kreiss’s face. While waiting for the photo to develop, he explained to Kreiss that unless he could explain what he was doing here, they’d call the state cops and have him arrested for trespassing.

  “Actually,” said the whale from behind him, “we’ll tell ‘em that we caught you wearing panties and waggling your wienie through that little hole in the partition between the stalls in the men’s room.” Kreiss felt the man’s foot rubbing suggestively up the inside of his leg.

  “They’ll take you over to the Roanoke city jail, and, hell, you know cops, they’ll tell everybody they see.”

  “See, we’ve got this hijacking problem out here in the truck stops,” the weight lifter said.

  “And you were acting a whole lot like a lookout, okay?”

  “I still think he was just cruisin’,” the whale said, patting him on the ass now and sniggering.

  “I was looking for something,” Kreiss said. He reached into the upper pocket of his coveralls and withdrew a retinal-disrupter cube. He felt the whale behind him shift when he reached up into his pocket but then relax when all he produced was something that looked like a fat flashbulb cube.

  “One of these,” Kreiss said, offering it to the weight lifter and closing his eyes tightly. As the man reached for it, Kreiss fired it into his face. The big man grunted and then just sat there, stunned, as Kreiss turned, went down on one knee, grabbed the chair by its legs, whirled around, and hit the fat man behind him across both lower legs. The whale grunted and bent forward, giving Kreiss, still crouching low,

  the opening he needed to drive his fist into the man’s fleshy throat. The man’s eyes bulged and he started to gag, then sank down to his knees, both hands at his throat, his face already turning red. Kreiss checked on the man behind the desk, but he was still just sitting there, his pupils the size of BBs. The phone rang at that moment, but Kreiss ignored it and went out the door. There was a fire exit to his right, which he took. The door let him out into the back parking lot, which was still wall-to-wall semis. There was no sign of McGarand. He swore and walked rapidly to the van. The cube flash would keep the big man immobilized for another few minutes, and the whale—well, the whale might wish he had a blowhole about now.

  He got to the van, jumped in, and took off across the plaza. Whe
n he got to the exit, he paused. He looked back and saw McGarand’s truck still parked right where he’d left it. He didn’t know what to do, other than to get the hell out of there. But not too far, he thought—somehow he had to get back on McGarand’s tail. There’d be state cops there pretty quick, and the security people had seen him in a phone company van. Then a cold wave washed over him—he’d forgotten the Polaroid: They had his racking picture! He turned and drove the van into the motel’s parking lot and took it all the way behind the second building of the complex. What he needed now was another vehicle. He could steal one possibly, but it wasn’t likely that people pulling into a motel were going to leave their keys in their cars. Then he remembered McGarand’s truck. A pickup truck.

  Every pickup driver he’d ever met always stashed a spare key somewhere outside the truck.

  He walked as casually as he could back through the motel complex, staying away from the checkin lobby and keeping an eye on the big truck plaza next door for cop cars. He got to McGarand’s truck, knelt down on the side that faced the plaza, and began feeling along the frame for a magnetic key box. He had reached the tail end of the truck when the first emergency vehicle came down the ramp from the interstate, lights and siren going, and wheeled into the plaza. It wasn’t a cop car, but an ambulance.

  Good, he thought—a little more time to look. He searched all along the bumper and frame on the back of the truck, then up the left side. May be out of luck here, he thought. The ambulance had pulled up in front of the building and the attendants were hurrying in. He fingered the exhaust pipe, which was where he often put his key. Nothing. Cops here any minute now, he thought, and went back to the rear bumper.

  There was a Reese hitch welded to the back frame, and the receiver had a ball tang inserted and locked with a pin. He pulled the pin,

  extracted the tang, and felt inside the receiver. Nothing but some grease on his hand.

  He was putting the tang back into the square hole when he saw the wad of duct tape on the very end of the tang. Bingo.