information to prepare herself for what Misty might do. He considered calling her back, then decided against it. His using the telephone credit card would bring someone here pretty quick. He had to move. The question of where didn’t matter all that much right now.
But what to do about McGarand? He was not about to indulge in altruism at this late stage in his life. On the other hand, Carter was right from a tactical standpoint: Misty and company would expect him to bolt, to go to ground, possibly to a hidey-hole they already knew about. If instead he continued to hunt McGarand, that would be unexpected. He’d already spun his wheels looking for that truck. Maybe he was going about this the wrong way. Instead of looking for a rolling truck bomb, maybe he ought to look for the truck bomb’s target. If this was about Waco, that left two possibilities, both of them easy targets for a determined truck bomber. He started up and drove out of the exchange parking lot, heading back to Route 1 and Washington. He thought about Carter. She’d do, for an amateur.
Janet hung up the phone and got back into her car. She was dressed in jeans and a sweater, having had to take a second shower to get all that sticky crap off once the woman had released her arms and hands. She drove back to her town house from the convenience store. Propane truck, she thought. Hydrogen bomb. She shivered at the thought. That aTF expert had said it had been a gas explosion. Okay: A propane truck was designed to carry gas, or at least she was pretty sure it was. Or was propane a liquid? Damn! But she’d been right: Kreiss had gone after McGarand, which, as far as she was concerned, confirmed that McGarand was already in Washington. With a propane truck fall of—what?
Propane? Or hydrogen? Either one, she thought. Either one would generate a real crowd-pleaser.
She got home, parked, and went in. She went through the house to make sure there was no one else there. Situational awareness of a tree-bitch had hurt her feelings. So what was the target? Lynn had said the bearded man claimed to be going after a “legitimate target.” As in, I’m going after combatants, not innocent civilians. McGarand had lost his only son at Waco. Son of a bitch, she thought with a sudden cold certainty:
He’s going after Bureau headquarters. The FBI had been in charge at Waco, at least by the time the Mount Carmel compound had been torched. Aided and abetted by their smaller cousins, the BATE She looked at her
watch: It was almost seven o’clock. She went into the kitchen and dialed into the Roanoke FBI office, got the after-hours tape, and hit the extension for the RAs office. There was no answer, then main voice mail. She hung up, remembered he’d given her his home number, but then couldn’t find it. The number was in her case notebook, which was in her office. Her ex-office, she reminded herself. She looked Farnsworth up in the phone book for the Roanoke area. Not listed. She called the Roanoke office number back. When the tape came up, she hit three digits and her call was forwarded to the day’s duty officer, an agent who worked in the felony fraud squad. His phone was in use, but she did get his voice mail. She groaned, then left a message that she needed to get an urgent message to the RA about a possible bomb threat against Bureau headquarters and gave her home number. Then she hung up and went to make a cup of coffee. The phone rang in five minutes, and it was the duty officer, Special Agent Jim Walker.
“Got your call,” he said.
“Called the boss, gave him your message and your phone number. But don’t hold your breath. Is it true you resigned today?”
“Yes, I did, but I have new information.”
“Well, um, what the boss said was, and I quote, “Janet Carter no longer works for the Bureau, and one of the reasons is that she’s become obsessed with this notion of a bomb threat to Washington. I may call her and I may not.” Okay?”
His tone was faintly patronizing, with none of the familiar agent-to agent courtesy. It pissed her off, but she held her anger in check.
“No, not okay,” she said quickly.
“Please, would you make one more call?”
“Hey, Carter—” “Please! I know you think you’re dealing with a hysterical female. But look, if there is a bombing, do you want to be the one link in the chain of precursor events that did not pass on vital information? When some independent prosecutor comes investigating? Remember Waco? This involves Waco.”
Walker didn’t say anything, and she knew she’d touched a nerve. These days everyone in the Bureau considered his or her every action in light of what might happen later if the case, investigation, or operation recoiled on them. She pressed him.
“Just call Farnsworth back and tell him that Browne McGarand, that’s Browne with an e, went to Washington with a propane truck. That the hydrogen bomb isn’t a nuclear device—it’s hydrogen gas, which is what probably did the arsenal power plant. Got all that?”
“That explosion at the arsenal? Hydrogen bomb? Are you fucking serious?”
“Please, Jim, just make the call. Please? Tell him exactly what I just told you.” She repeated it.
“If he chews your ass for bothering him, tell him you’re so sorry, hang up, log the call, and go back to watching TV. But then if something happens, it’s on him, not you, right?”
Walker reluctantly agreed to make the call and hung up. Janet let out a long sigh: She had done the best she could. If they chose to ignore this, then it would indeed be on their heads. She wondered if she shouldn’t put a call into Bureau headquarters operations, but then she realized she didn’t have the number. It was in her official phone book at her office, at her ex-office, she realized again. She’d get what any civilian who called the Bureau headquarters would get: a polite tape recording introducing the caller to a menu labyrinth. Life was going to be very different now that she wasn’t part of the most powerful law-enforcement organization in the country. Those FBI credentials had given her almost automatic entree into any place or situation. Now she was just Janet Carter, unemployed civilian. She almost felt a bit naked. But at least now Kreiss would have to stop calling her “Special Agent.”
She went into the kitchen, wanting a drink, not coffee, but satisfied herself with the coffee. She was hoping the phone would ring again, with Farnsworth on the other end this time. But he didn’t call. That damned Kreiss. She started pacing her kitchen floor. How long should she wait?
Kreiss had been pretty specific about her moving quickly to protect his daughter. That might end up being a tough play, especially now that she no longer had any standing as a law-enforcement official. On the other hand, Lynn had seemed pretty strong, and stashing the girl with a bunch of mountain hillbillies might be the perfect answer, especially if they were his friends.
She got out the area phone book and found a number for an M. Wall on Kreiss’s road. The phone rang, but there was no answer. She wrote down the number on a scrap of paper, put it in her pocket, finished her coffee, and went back upstairs to her bedroom. She took out the Detective’s Special hidden in her sock drawer and then rooted around in the closet until she found the waist holster for it. She checked to make sure it was loaded, then clipped it on her jeans waistband in the small of her back, pulling the sweater down over it. She checked the dial tone of her phone to make sure she hadn’t missed a call, grabbed her car keys, and left for Blacksburg.
Forty minutes later, she checked in with the main reception desk at the Montgomery County Hospital and learned that Lynn had been moved from I.C.U to a semiprivate room on the fourth floor. She took the elevator upstairs and was relieved to see that there was no longer a police officer stationed outside the girl’s door. Lynn’s door was open, and she appeared to be dozing in the semi darkened room. It was after visiting hours, but the nurse who had been in I.C.U the day before remembered Janet and waved her by. The girl woke up when Janet came into the room and gently shut the door.
“Hey,” Janet said.
“How are you feeling?”
“Better,” Lynn said.
“The deputy got me some real food before he left.
Made a big improvement over Jell-0.”
“Moving? As in out of here?”
“Yes. As in checking out and coming with me. Per your father’s urgent instructions. There’s someone after him, and that someone may try to take you in order to trap your father.”
” What!” Lynn exclaimed, sitting up in the bed.
“But he’s retired. Who’s after him? And why?”
“Lynn, I’ll tell you everything once we’re in the car. But your old man gave me the impression we have minutes, not hours. Do you have clothes here?”
The girl looked around the room with a bewildered expression.
“I
don’t know—check that closet.”
Janet got up and looked in the closet, where there were a pair of battered jeans, a shirt, a jacket, and some hiking shoes. There was no underwear or socks. She brought it all out and then turned away to give Lynn some privacy. The girl got dressed, but it was obvious that she was still pretty weak. Janet had to help her tie the laces on her hiking shoes. She explained quickly about the Agency woman, and she also told Lynn she had resigned from the FBI over the handling of the bombing case. Lynn put her hand on Janet’s forearm.
“Describe the woman,” she said. Janet did, emphasizing the extraordinary black eyes, pale white face, and the detached, almost lifeless expression.
“Shit,” Lynn said.
“I think she’s been here. But she was dressed like a doctor. She stopped by my door about, oh, I don’t know, an hour ago? I was dozing, but I remember that face. There’d been docs coming and going all afternoon. But I distinctly remember that face.”
“What did she do?”
“Nothing. She stood in the doorway. I was kind of tired of being poked and prodded all day, so I didn’t really open my eyes. But when she looked at me, I had the feeling she knew I was watching her. It was creepy.” Lynn looked pale and drawn, and her clothes appeared to be too big for her. She sat on the edge of the bed and held herself upright with rigid arms.
“She’s apparently pretty dangerous,” Janet said.
“I’ll tell you more in the car. But first we have to get you out of here and not spend three hours doing paperwork. I—” Just then, from outside the room, came the jarring blare of an alarm system, which emitted five obnoxious Klaxon noises, followed by an announcement that there was an electrical fire on the second floor and that all floors were to begin evacuation procedures. Then came five more blats, with the announcement repeated. There was an immediate bustle of people and gurneys out in the hallway.
“Quick,” Janet said, going to the door, cracking it, and looking out into the corridor.
“Your father said this is how she’d do it—start a fire and grab you in the confusion.” Two nurses went hurrying by, one pushing two wheelchairs in front of her, while the other consulted a metal clipboard and talked on a cell phone. There was another wheelchair parked across the corridor from Lynn’s door. Janet stepped out, grabbed the wheelchair, and pulled it back into Lynn’s room. The fire alarm sounded again, repeating the fire announcement. We got it, we got it, Janet found herself thinking.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said.
Lynn sat down in the wheelchair. Janet folded a blanket over Lynn’s legs and rolled her out into the corridor. Janet knew the elevators would have gone out of service, which meant that everyone would head for the stairs. They joined a procession of nurses and patients, some ambulatory, some in wheelchairs, and a couple of frightened patients being pushed on gurneys. The movement was orderly toward the end of the corridor, where Janet could see red exit signs. But suddenly, the overhead lights went out and there was a wave of concerned noises up and down the corridor.
Small emergency lights along the edge of the ceiling came on, which helped until a sudden and very distinct smell of acrid smoke broke into the hallway from the ventilation ducts. Janet couldn’t see smoke, but she could sure as hell smell it, and it was getting stronger. The parade of wheelchairs and patients surged forward. If the noise was any indication, the level of anxiety had gone way up. She could also hear the sounds of angry congestion down at the end of the corridor near the exit doors.
That did it. Janet turned Lynn around and pushed her rapidly back up the darkened hallway, away from the growing traffic jam at the other end.
She went past Lynn’s room and came to a cross-corridor intersection. She looked both ways but saw no exit doors. The smell of smoke was getting stronger, and now there was a gray pall building along the ceiling. Janet turned around to look back at the original route. There appeared to be one large elevator still working, and everyone appeared to be trying to get in it or into the stairwell. It was genuine bedlam down there, with both patients and hospital staff shouting at one another.
“There has to be another exit, at least a stairwell,” Janet said.
“But I sure as hell don’t see it.”
“Try the passenger elevators?” Lynn suggested. Her face was still pale, and she was clutching the blanket as if she was cold.
“They won’t work once the fire alarm’s gone off. Not until the fire trucks get here. That’s probably what’s happened down the hall there.”
The smoke was getting strong enough to sting Janet’s eyes, but the evacuation effort at the other end of the hall sounded as if it was rapidly turning into a disaster as sixty or so people tried to get patients and wheelchairs into the single elevator or down four flights of stairs. Janet decided to look one more time, but after two more minutes of trotting the full length of the cross corridors, she gave up. There really was only one exit down. As she wheeled Lynn back to the intersection, the smoke was thick enough that she could no longer see what was going on down at the exit stairwell. But she could hear it, and it was not a pleasant sound. The smoke stung her eyes and smelled of burning plastic.
“We’re going to have to find a room with an exterior window and wait this thing out,” she said.
“The fire department will have a ladder truck.”
She took Lynn all the way back to the end of the right-hand cross corridor and began looking into every door that wasn’t locked. She finally found a small lab room of some sort that had windows, through which the lights in the parking lot were visible. She wheeled Lynn backward into the room and shut the door. There was a stink of smoke in the room, but it was not as strong as out in the corridor. Sirens were audible outside, although she couldn’t see fire trucks.
“You okay?” she asked Lynn as she searched for towels or rags to stuff under the door.
“Yeah, I’m good. I’d help, but my head is spinning a little.”
“Sit tight. They said the fire was on the second floor. We have one
floor between us and the fire. They’ll have it out pretty damn quick. If it’s electrical, they turn off the power, and that usually stops it.”
As if the building were listening, they heard the sound of big vent fans winding down, and then even the emergency lighting system out in the corridor expired in a clatter of relays as the battery-operated lights came on. Janet saw that Lynn was frightened by this. She tried to reassure her.
“That’s good, actually. I think the vent system was spreading the smoke.
We should be okay up here. This building is mostly concrete.”
“I’m glad we’re not down there in that corridor. That sounded pretty ugly.”
“Amen. As soon as I seal the door cracks, we’ll check out the windows.”
There were three large windows along the back wall of the lab. Enough light came through these from the streetlights in the parking lot for them to move around the lab benches without running into things. Janet found some paper towels and stuffed them along the bottom crack of the door.
With the ventilation system off, the smoke didn’t seem to be getting any stronger, so she didn’t bother with the rest of the door. She found a fire extinguisher and set it out on a lab table. Then red strobe lights lit up the ceiling as a fire engine came around the building,
stopped, and began setting up in the parking lot. She tried to open the windows but could not budge them.
“See? They’ll have this mess under control pretty quick. I think we’ll just wait until we hear firemen out in the hall.”
“What about that woman?”
Janet stopped what she was doing. She’d forgotten all about the Terminatrix.
Kreiss had said she might do something like this to cause maximum distraction. She’d forgotten that Lynn thought she’d already seen her in the building. Shit.
She went over to the door and looked for a lock, but it took a key to lock this door. She put her ear to the opaque glass panel in the upper section of the door and listened, but all she could hear were the sounds of firefighting commands over the loudspeakers on the truck outside.
There were more strobe lights out in the parking lot now. She looked around for a way to block the door, and found a lab table that could be moved. She slid it across the floor, but its top edge was two inches too tall to fit under the knob.
“Lift it and wedge it,” Lynn said. She pushed the blanket aside and got out of the wheelchair. She came over to where Janet was standing,
steadying herself on the edge of the lab table. The table, which was six feet long and two feet wide, was made of heavy wood, with a zinc top. The two women lifted the far end and slid the end nearest the door under the doorknob, then gently let the table back down. It wedged under the knob, its back legs off the floor about half an inch. Janet went around and tried the knob, which was now jammed.
“That’ll at least make it feel like it’s locked,” Lynn said. Then she wobbled back to the wheelchair and sat down heavily. Janet saw a sheen of perspiration on the girl’s forehead.
“Good thinking,” Janet said, a little embarrassed that she hadn’t thought of it herself.
“You got a gun?” Lynn asked.
“Yes,” Janet said, patting the lump at the small of her back.
Hunting Season Page 38