“We’ll have to be careful going up to Micah’s,” Lynn said.
“That’s sometimes a crowd that shoots first, asks questions later.”
“What are they so sensitive about?”
Lynn laughed.
“They’re Appalachian mountain people. They distrust anyone who spends more than an hour a day walking on flat ground.
They make their own clothes, grow most of their own food, and hunt down the meat they eat. They also make their own whiskey, grow their own dope, and operate a pretty interesting black economy of barter and trade, for which they pay no taxes.”
“Sounds pretty good.”
“Well. It does, until you get a close look at sanitary conditions, pediatric health, the death rate from cancers caused by chewing
tobacco, the infant mortality rate, the prevalence of incest and other self-destructive practices. Paradise it is not. But they hew to their way of life, and treat outsiders poorly.”
“How did your father come to fit in?”
“Think about it, Agent Carter. Dad was a professional hunter. He’s a loner. He’s more than a little scary to be around. I think they recognized one of their own. Plus, he saved Micah Wall’s youngest son from a bad situation, literally the day he moved into the cabin.”
Janet braked hard to allow three small deer to bound across the road.
“What this guy Wall like?”
“Micah Wall is a damned hoot. He’s got this dog—it’s like a Jack Russell terrier mix? The dog’s idea of fun is when Micah brings out this huge old western-style Colt .45 and sits on his back porch. The dog takes off and Micah shoots right in front of it, and the dog chases the bullets when they go ricocheting around the back sheds and all the junk out there. He calls the dog Whizbang.”
They went down a long, dark hill, crossed another creek, and began to climb again. As they rounded the hairpin turn that came up just before the entrance to Kreiss’s cabin, Janet swore and braked hard again, this time to avoid a large white Suburban that was parked partially across the road, with only its parking lights on. There was barely enough room for her to pass the larger vehicle, and she would have to stop first to manage it. As she got her car stopped, two men got out of the Suburban. They were wearing windbreakers with aTF emblazoned in reflective tape, khaki pants, and ball caps with the aTF logo. She could see a third man inside the vehicle when they opened their doors. There were several aerials on the top of the Suburban, but no police lights.
“Shit,” Janet murmured.
“What do we do?” Lynn asked, gathering the blanket around her.
“Hold on to this,” Janet said, passing the .38 to Lynn as she rolled the window down. Lynn reached under the blanket and put it in her lap.
Then Janet reached back into the seat-back pouch and pulled out her own ball cap, which had FBI emblazoned on it. The men came up on either side of Janet’s car, but Janet told Lynn not to roll her window down.
“What’s going on?” she said to the man who came up to the driver’s side. He was a large black man, who kept one hand in his coat pocket.
She put both hands on the top of the steering wheel so he could see them.
“Evening, ma’am. We’re with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms.” He glanced nervously at Lynn’s hands resting beneath the blanket. Then he saw Janet’s ball cap.
“You’re Bureau?”
“That’s right. Special Agent Janet Carter, Roanoke office.” She normally would have asked for his identification, but since she no longer had her own credentials, she had to finesse it.
“What’s going on?”
“We’re on orders to apprehend one Edwin Kreiss. Subject’s wanted in connection with a federal homicide warrant. Who is this with you, Agent Carter?”
“She’s my niece, visiting me from Washington.” The second man was standing three feet back from the right side of her car, in position to handle any sudden emergencies. Lynn was keeping her mouth shut and her hands were still beneath the blanket.
“And you’re going where?”
“I’m going to my uncle’s house; that’s a mile beyond the Kreiss cabin.”
“That… place? With all the junk? That’s your uncle?”
“Micah Wall. Her father, my father’s sister’s brother. We’re not necessarily proud of him, but, well, what I can I tell you? Now you know why I’m assigned to the Roanoke office.”
He nodded, obviously trying to sort through the father-brother-sister lineage.
“Would you mind waiting right here, please, Agent Carter? I have orders to call in anyone who comes down this road. There’s a pretty big manhunt up for this Kreiss guy.”
Janet shrugged.
“Sure, but can we make it quick? We’re late, and I’m tired of dancing through the damned deer on these mountain roads.”
He promised that he’d be right back and walked over to the Suburban, taking down her license plate number as he did so. The other man kept his station on the edge of the road, slightly behind her line of vision. She couldn’t see the third man inside the Suburban until the black man opened the door on the driver’s side.
“Hand me the cell phone,” she said quietly, “and hit the recall button and then the one for send when you do it. Move slowly.”
Lynn did as Janet asked, and Janet put the phone up to her ear. The man outside shifted his position when he saw Janet’s hand leave the steering wheel. The phone rang. C’mon, she thought urgently. C’mon. I need you to answer this time.
“Micah Wall,” a gnarly voice spoke into her ear.
“Mr. Wall, this is Janet Carter. You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Edwin Kreiss. I have Lynn Kreiss in the car with me and we’re in trouble with the local law. We’re about a mile south of your place,
and we need somewhere to hide. And we may have some company on our tail when we get there.”
“Lynn Kreiss? She gone missin’,” Wall said. Janet handed the phone to Lynn, then leaned over to listen to what he said.
“Micah, it’s me. Dad’s in trouble and I need a place to hide.”
“How’n I know it’s you?”
“Lions, Micah. Dad’s cabin has lions in it.”
“Yeah, it does. C’mon, then. You got cops on your tail?”
“ATE”
There was a short laugh.
“The revenuers? Bring ‘em bast ids on.”
The connection was broken and Janet put the phone down. The black man was half in, half out of the Suburban, talking on either a radio or a phone. She could see him better now because there was suddenly more light, and then she realized there must be a vehicle coming up behind them, and coming fast. Really fast. She saw the man silhouetted in the right mirror moving back, his hands waving, and decided this was the moment. She slammed the car into drive and accelerated right at the Suburban. The black man looked back and then dived into the front seat as she clipped his door and roared past, fishtailing all over the place. She thought she heard a gunshot but it was hard to tell with all the gravel flying everywhere. She rounded the next curve as the other vehicle’s lights flooded her mirror, but then the hillside obscured them.
She took her foot off the gas momentarily to keep control of the car as she pushed it up the winding road.
“How far?” she asked Lynn, but Lynn didn’t answer. She glanced over and saw that Lynn was sagging against the opposite door, a confused look on her face.
“I think I’ve been shot,” she said in a weak voice. She pulled her right hand out from under the blanket and it was shiny with blood.
Janet swore and accelerated.
“Where are you hit?”
“I don’t know,” Lynn said in a dreamy voice.
“Back, I think. Side, maybe? It’s not too bad. Feels like I got kicked by a small horse.”
There was a brief flare of bright lights behind her, but then she rounded the next curve and hurried past Kreiss’s driveway. The next turn again blocked out the pursuing
headlights. Another half a mile. She took it up as fast as she could. She couldn’t believe it—one of those aTF agents had fired at an FBI agent’s car? Even if they had found out she’d quit, they shouldn’t have been shooting. Unless-The bright headlights came up again in her mirror, and she realized the
aTF agents could not have gotten that big Suburban turned around and headed after her that quickly. This was the other car, and she had a sinking feeling she knew exactly who this was. She nearly lost it on the next curve, again shooting gravel and other roadside debris out into the woods.
“Hang in there, Lynn. Can you reach the spot? Can you feel where you’re hit?”
“No. I can’t—can’t move my right arm all that well anymore.” Her voice was drifting.
“Right side. My side is hurting real bad now.”
A straightaway opened up and Janet accelerated, trying to think of something she could do to slow down her pursuer. But then she came into the next turn, too fast, spinning the wheel, hitting the brakes, anything to get control, but the car spun out and actually rolled backward for a moment, tires squealing, before shooting ahead again back down the way they had come. She was about to slam on the brakes, but then she had an idea. She doused her headlights and braked to slow down. The sharp curve was dead ahead, behind which the loom of bright white lights was rising. She got it stopped right at her side of the curve, found her .38, and rolled the window back down. Holding one hand on the brights switch, she reached out with her left hand, extending the pistol and resting her wrist on the little metal valley formed by the mirror housing. In the next instant, the pursuing vehicle came sweeping around the curve. Janet flipped on her bright lights and opened fire with the .38, deliberately aiming low, right between the approaching headlights, letting off five rounds before diving down behind the steering wheel. There was a screech of brakes, an instant of silence, and then the roar of the other vehicle’s engine racing as it went crashing down into the scrub woods, smashing into rocks and small trees and then flipping partially over on its side in a hail of gravel and a spray of window glass.
Janet raised her head to look. The other car was a hundred feet down the embankment. Its headlights were still on, pointing up into the pine trees. Its left front wheel was spinning furiously. Janet did not hesitate.
She turned her car around and sped up the hill as fast as she could go, aware that Lynn wasn’t making any noise at all.
Browne McGarand got back to the propane truck at 11:30, after spending the afternoon and early evening asleep in a motel room. He was dressed in a set of dark coveralls that had lots of pockets. All of the equipment he would need was in the cab of the truck. He had made a detailed map of his
approach routes to the aTF building, and he had laid out a couple of possible escape routes once he’d abandoned the truck. The fake delivery manifest was on a clipboard by his side.
The night was cloudy, and the lights on the Pentagon building were fuzzy in the mist blowing in from the river. There had been no traffic in the approach roads to the Pentagon when he had walked over from Crystal City. He looked around the deserted parking lot and sighed. This was the moment he had been working toward all these months. Now there was nothing more to do than to get going. He got in, started up the truck, backed it across the parking area, and drove out onto the approach road, turning right to go under the elevated highway, then taking the tight ramp up to get on the Fourteenth Street Bridge. Big trucks were generally not allowed into the District, but fuel trucks were an exception. He was hoping not to be stopped. The manifest should get him by a cursory police inspection, as long as the cop didn’t ask him for the exemption certificate, which he did not have. Shift change for the Metro Police came at midnight, which was why he had chosen this time to make his approach to the target. Most of the District’s patrol cars would be in station house parking lots, refueling for the next shift, all the cops inside.
In the event, he didn’t see a single cop car. He made it onto Massachusetts Avenue, where there was zero traffic. The aTF headquarters building loomed to his left as he turned into the ramp gate for the parking garage next door. It was a tight fit and his rear bumper tagged a concrete abutment, but he just made it. There was an attendant’s booth at the bottom of the ramp, but it was dark and unoccupied. He had to get out of the cab to extract the ticket from a dispenser. The side ramp was a two-way ramp, and a sign said to give way to vehicles coming down. The gate dutifully opened when he took the ticket, and up he went in first gear, making a lot more noise than he wanted to. At the top of the ramp, he turned right and headed for the back corner nearest the aTF building. There were some SUVs and a couple of pickup trucks up on the roof deck, more than he had expected. He backed the truck into the corner space along the wall and shut it down. First exposure successfully completed, he thought.
He looked over at the aTF building. Only a few of the windows facing him were lighted on his side of the building, but the interiors were above his line of sight. He scanned the side face and corners of the building again for video cameras, but the only one he could see was pointed down onto Massachusetts Avenue. He took out a small pair of binoculars and scanned the top edges of the buildings across the street
from the aTF building. As he had suspected, there was one camera jutting out of the middle of the office building directly opposite, but it, too, was pointed down onto Massachusetts Avenue. It might conceivably look into the alley, but the back of the alley was in deep shadow. He cracked his window, then nodded his head when he heard the sound of the vent fans down in the alley below.
He looked at his watch. It was just after midnight. He sat back in the lumpy seat, listening to the ticking sounds of his diesel engine cooling down. The windows of the cars parked around him were already glistening with nighttime dew. There was a flare of yellow light as the stairwell door opened up at the front of the roof deck and a couple stepped out, arm in arm. They appeared to be wine-happy from an evening in one of the local restaurants. They got into a Toyota Land Cruiser and left, going down the exit ramp. Neither of them had given the big truck parked back in the dark corner a second look. Good.
Now he waited. He wanted to begin dropping the hose sometime around 2:30, when most humans were at their low ebb of performance, and then go down to attach it to the air-intake vent screens in the back of the alley between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. Originally, he had planned to shinny down the hose itself, but he might just walk down the interior exit ramps and see if he could hop a wall at the back of the ground-level parking deck, out of sight of any cameras, of course. In the meantime, he would watch the aTF building for any signs of walking patrols or other security features he might have missed. But he didn’t expect any: Above all else, these people were bureaucrats. They would pay close attention to the size of their office and whether or not they got a parking space, but he was pretty sure they weren’t too concerned about someone attacking them in their own building. If he could permeate that entire building with hydrogen, the explosion would certainly be memorable. Even if he only got a partial ignition, it would still create a two-thousand-degree fireball in every cubic inch of the affected office spaces. Quicker and somewhat more merciful than what these goons had done to those people at Mount Carmel, who had cooked for a while as the burning building melted down around them, helped along by tanks, for God’s sake. Maybe next time they’d be a little more careful, those who survived what he was about to do. He settled back against the seat to watch and wait. He wished he could have done the FBI building, but, short of a suicide attack with something like a truckload of Ampho, there were no good approaches that would let him walk away from it. Not like this one. It was wide open.
13
Edwin Kreiss sat in a locked interview room at the Seventh Street police station, wondering how he was going to get out of this one. He had been standing on the corner of Twelfth Street and Massachusetts Avenue, looking at the aTF headquarters building, when the same cops who had seen him down by the White House drove
by, on their way into shift change. The cop car had slowed and then stopped. Kreiss had briefly considered bolting, but he didn’t know the streets and alleys around this area of office buildings. They would have had him in a heartbeat for taking off. The car had backed up, and this time the cop’s partner got out, one hand on his nightstick, the other parking his hat on his head. The cop driving, who had apparently recognized him, stayed in the car but watched over his shoulder. The cop had asked him politely enough what he was doing up there, and Kreiss literally had no answer. Fortunately, he had left the gun in the van, which he had parked in an all-night parking garage right next door to the aTF building. They’d cuffed him, pat searched him, and put him in the backseat. They brought him into the police station, presumably on a loitering beef. They had not booked him, however, and he had been in the interview room for what he estimated was almost three hours now. He was no longer cuffed, but they had taken his wallet, watch, and his keys. He would have appreciated some coffee.
He had not had enough time to do a complete reconnaissance of the aTF building, but it had been pretty clear that it was a softer target than the FBI headquarters. The building was much smaller, and though there were surveillance cameras, the approach to the front of the building was a lot more straightforward than driving down Constitution and dealing with all the traffic islands where the major avenues met. Yes, they would see the propane truck pulling up in front of the building, but, by then, it would be too late. In fact, McGarand would probably have time to park it, set a fuse, and run before the security people in the building could really react. He smiled grimly to himself as he thought of the options facing a guy at the security desk when he saw a big truck pull up in front of the building and a guy get out and run. Now what? Who goes down to see what’s in the truck, and who goes out the back door at the speed of heat?
In the meantime, he was stuck in here, and he had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. And who was going to come through that door next.
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