Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  The door finally opened and the desk sergeant admitted two men in suits into the room. Kreiss looked up at them and congratulated himself on being right. One of the men, the larger of the two, sat down across the table from him. The other remained standing. The big man was in his forties. He had a round face that needed a shave, impatient blue eyes, and thinning black hair. He produced a credentials wallet and flashed it at Kreiss.

  “Sam john stone FBI,” he said.

  “And you’re Edwin Kreiss. The notorious Edwin Kreiss.”

  Kreiss said nothing. Johnstone leaned back in his chair.

  “We’ve been looking for you, Mr. Kreiss. Or rather, the Roanoke RA has. Seems there’re some questions they want to ask you about a homicide down in Blacksburg.”

  Kreiss maintained his silence. Johnstone looked over at his partner.

  “You not going to speak to me, Mr. Kreiss?” he asked.

  “You haven’t asked me a question yet,” Kreiss said.

  “Okay, here’s one: Why were you loitering around the aTF headquarters building tonight? After being seen loitering around the White House? I guess that’s two questions. Well. And you were also seen on our cameras at Bureau headquarters. You got something going tonight, Mr.

  Kreiss? You’re not still mad at us, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  Johnstone continued to stare at him as if he was an interesting specimen.

  Then his partner spoke.

  “I hear you used to be a spooky guy, Kreiss.

  That you used to go around hunting people down with your pals out in Langley. That true? You a spooky guy?”

  Kreiss turned slowly to look at the partner, who was a medium everything:

  height, weight, build. Even his soft white face was totally unremarkable.

  He would make a very good surveillance asset, Kreiss thought.

  Then he turned back to face Johnstone.

  “He gave me the look, Sam,” the second agent said.

  “Definitely spooky. I think I’m supposed to be scared now.”

  “Better watch your ass, Lanny. I’ve heard that Mr. Kreiss here was responsible for a guy shooting his wife and his kids and then himself. He must be really persuasive. That was before the Bureau shit-canned you, right, Mr. Kreiss?”

  Kreiss smiled at him but said nothing.

  “Damn, there he goes again, Lanny. Won’t talk to me. I think I’ve hurt his feelings. Of course, here he is, in the local pokey, picked up for loitering in downtown Washington. What do you suppose he was looking for, Lanny? A white guy walking the streets at midnight in the District? Looking for some female companionship, maybe? Or maybe some sympathetic male companionship? Is that it, Mr. Kreiss? All those years of playing games with those Agency weirdos, maybe you got a little bent?”

  Kreiss relaxed in his chair and looked past Johnstone as if he didn’t exist. They had either planned their little act in advance in some effort to provoke him or they were pissed off at having to come over here at all, just because a routine name check had triggered the federal want and detain order. Or both. But so far, they weren’t talking about a bomb.

  Apparently, Janet’s attempt to warn them about a bomb threat had gone right into the bureaucratic equivalent of the Grand Canyon. He looked at his wrist, then remembered they’d taken his watch.

  “Got somewhere to go, Mr. Kreiss?”

  “Am I being charged?”

  “Nope. You’re being held. As a material witness to a homicide in Virginia.

  But before you go back down to Blacksburg, we’ve been informed that the commissars out in Langley want to have a word.”

  Shit, shit, shit, Kreiss thought while keeping a studiously indifferent expression on his face. He had managed to evade the best sweeper in the business, and now he had handed himself over to them on a loitering beef.

  Johnstone was looking at his watch.

  “Anyway, now you’re going to come with us, Mr. Kreiss. First we’re going to escort you out to Langley, where some people in their Counterespionage Division want to talk to you. Then you’ll be brought back to our Washington field office for further transport down to Roanoke. Cuff him, Lanny.”

  Kreiss sighed and stood up, putting his two hands out in front of him.

  He was much bigger than the agent called Lanny, and he almost enjoyed the sudden wary look Lanny had in his eyes when he approached Kreiss to put plastic handcuffs on his wrists.

  “He looked at me again, Sam,” Lanny said, trying to keep it going, but Kreiss could hear the note of fear in Lanny’s voice. The man was physically afraid of him. That was good. They’d already made their first mistake, cuffing his hands in front of him. Now, as long as they had a car and not a van, and as long as they put him in the backseat

  and they both rode in front, he was as good as free. He’d do it on the G.W. Parkway, with all those lovely cliffs. He looked down at the floor, putting a despondent expression on his face. He let his shoulders slump and his head hang down a little. Defeated. Captured. Resigned to his fate. He heard Johnstone make kissing noises behind him, and both agents laughed contemptuously.

  Kreiss sincerely hoped that Johnstone would drive.

  Janet was afraid of missing the turn into Micah Wall’s place, but when she saw all the junked cars, rusting refrigerators, tire piles, and pallets of assorted junk on both sides of a wide dirt road, she knew she’d found it.

  She turned the car into the driveway and drove through more junk up toward the lights of a long, low cabin on the hillside. Halfway up the hill, her headlights revealed a telephone pole barring the drive. She slowed and then stopped. Several figures came out of the dark, walking toward her car with rifles and shotguns in their hands. She opened the door and got out, leaving it open.

  “That’s Lynn Kreiss,” she said, pointing into the car.

  “I think she’s been shot. We need some help.”

  “Who done it?” an authoritative voice asked from the darkness.

  “A federal agent who was chasing us. I forced her off the road about a half a mile back there. But if she isn’t seriously injured, she’ll be here very soon.”

  “She?” The voice sounded incredulous.

  “That’s right. Please? We need to see to Lynn. She’s bleeding.”

  Micah Wall materialized out of the darkness and introduced himself while three men went to the other side of the car and lifted Lynn out.

  Janet told him her name, shook his hand, and then went around the front of the car. The girl groaned but did not resist when they laid her out on the ground on her uninjured side, illuminated by the wedge of light coming from the car’s interior. One of them lifted the back of Lynn’s shirt, revealing an entrance wound on the lower-right side of her back. A second man grunted and leaned forward, a long knife suddenly glistening in his hand. Before Janet could object, he probed the wound and then lifted out a spent bullet. The bleeding increased immediately, as if blood had been dammed up behind the bullet, but Janet realized that the wound was not significant. The bullet’s passage through the car’s metal body and the upholstery must have slowed it down.

  “Less’n there’s another one, this ain’t too bad,” the man with the knife said. He had a full black beard and a face like a hatchet. He

  pulled out a handkerchief, folded it, and pressed it against the wound. Janet hoped it was cleaner than the surroundings.

  “Take her up to the house, Big John,” Wall said.

  “Tommy, Marsh, y’all help him. Git some sulfa dust and a real bandage on that. Rest of us, we gotta git ready to met this lady badass, supposed to be comin’ round the mountain any minute now.”

  Janet told him about the fire in the hospital, and her suspicion that the woman had started it deliberately. Micah nodded slowly, looking around at the dark woods.

  “Yonder girl’s daddy, he kept some interesting company.

  Why’n’t you leave your car here, go on up to the house. See to the girl. Boys’n me, we’ll wait and see what comes
along.”

  “Be careful,” Janet said over her shoulder as she stepped past the telephone pole.

  “This woman was Edwin Kreiss’s instructor.”

  “That so,” Micah muttered.

  “Well, then, I wish I had me some other daddy’s lions. Or maybe that there Barrett. Spread out, boys.”

  Browne McGarand awoke at just before 2:00 a.m. and sat up in the seat.

  The truck’s windows were all opaque with dew. He leaned forward and hit the wiper switch for one cycle to clear the windshield, then rolled down his window. The same windows that had been showing lights before in the aTF building were still lighted, which meant that they had simply left the lights on. He reached up and picked the lens cover off the interior cabin light and took out the bulb. Then he opened the door and got out.

  The temperature had dropped noticeably, and the night was now clearing.

  There were no traffic sounds coming from Massachusetts Avenue below, and the remaining cars on the roof deck had fully opaque windows.

  He walked to the back of the truck, stretching his knees, and then to the very back corner of the parking deck. He put his head over the low concrete wall and listened. The sound of vent fans coming from the HVAC building in the alley was much reduced. Good, he thought. They had put the system on low speed for the night. Blocking one of the intake screens wouldn’t raise any system alarms at that fan speed. He checked the time again and then went back to the truck. The hose reel on the back unrolled in the direction of the aTF building. There was a modified brass connector nozzle on the end he was going to lower. At the truck end, the hose was not connected at all, leaving it open to the atmosphere.

  He began pulling hose off the reel, being very careful not to damage the modified brass connector nozzle. He hefted it over the concrete wall and let it down into the darkness. After a few minutes, the

  weight of the hose began to pull itself off the reel and he had to go back to the reel and set the brake halfway to keep it from running away. When a white blaze of paint on the hose showed up, he set the reel brake all the way and then checked the hose. The gleaming brass connector was hanging just a few feet above the surface of the alley. He resumed letting it out until a second blaze of paint marked the length he needed to get the nozzle over to the intake screens. He reset the brake.

  He knew that he was entering the period of greatest exposure, because now he would have to go down, enter the alley, attach the plastic tarp to the one screen to blank it off, and then attach a second tarp, with a nozzle receiver fitting sewn into its center, to the second screen. At that point, all the intake air for the ventilation system would be sucked through that one fitting. If it wasn’t big enough, he should see a lot of strain on both tarps.

  If he had to, he could peel back two or three corners to keep sufficient air moving. Then he would attach the end of the tanker’s hose to the fitting on the tarp and trip the discharge lever. As long as the two tarps and the receiver nozzle let in just enough air, he could go on back up. After that, it would be a matter of choosing the best time to begin sending in the hydrogen gas. He wanted as many of those bastards in the building as possible when the hydrogen reached critical volume, but the more people that were around, the higher were the chances of someone discovering the rig.

  Ideally, he wanted the blast to take place as close as possible to 8:00 A.M. Based on his calculations it would take around ninety minutes to fill the building with an explosive mixture, so gas injection had to begin no later than 6:30. It would still be dark at 6:30, but not for long. He wished now he had some way to spark the mixture from outside the building, if for some reason it didn’t ignite, but they had not been able to devise anything that would do that. Besides, he did not plan to hang around. He checked his watch again: 2:35. The minutes were passing slowly. He wanted to get going, but he knew that he would have to be patient and flexible. Hooking up the hose would be relatively easy: If they hadn’t spotted the hose coming down into the alley, they probably would not spot him. Then it would all depend on the whole lash-up remaining invisible until 8:00 a.m. He made sure the hose brake was secured, then unstrapped the five-gallon gasoline can he’d mounted on the back step of the truck. He took it to the cab, set it down in the middle of the bench seat, and taped on the ignition device, setting it for 8:00 A.M. That would take care of the truck if

  the building explosion didn’t. Then he closed the doors, locked them, walked over to the interior exit ramp, and started down into the darkness of the parking garage.

  It was just after 4:00 A.M. when the two agents finally signed Kreiss out of Metro Police custody. After retrieving the envelope with his wallet, watch, and keys, they escorted him out of the building. Then the agents put him into the backseat of their four-door government sedan, which was parked in the lot for patrol cars at the side of the station. They made him sit right in the middle of the backseat, and they kept him cuffed.

  Lanny buckled both rear seat belts around him, so that if he tried to move, there would be two latches he would have to undo. Kreiss was perfectly happy with this arrangement, and even happier that there had been no hookup wire to which he could have been cuffed in the backseat.

  While Lanny waited in the car with Kreiss, Johnstone went back into the precinct station and came back out with two coffees. The two G-men sat in the car with their coffee for a few minutes, making a point of enjoying it while Kreiss went without. Then Lanny called into their operations center on the car’s radio and reported that they were transporting the subject to Langley, as per previous direction. The ops center acknowledged and told them to report when delivery had been made. Lanny rogered and hung up.

  Johnstone drove while Lanny rode shotgun, turned partially in his seat to keep an eye on Kreiss. It was Johnstone who kept peppering Kreiss with mildly insulting questions about why he was in town, what he had done that made the Agency people so anxious to see him, and what his part in the Blacksburg homicide had been. Lanny seemed to enjoy it all, but he didn’t say anything. Kreiss remained silent, his eyes closed, as if he were trying to sleep. Johnstone gave up after a while and concentrated on his driving. He took Constitution Avenue down to Twenty-third Street, drove past the Lincoln Memorial, and then went over the Memorial Bridge into Arlington. Kreiss kept track of where they were while he made his mental preparations.

  When Johnstone turned down the ramp that led to the northbound George Washington Parkway, Kreiss began to reposition himself, adjusting his body in tiny increments. By now, Lanny had turned back around and was bitching to Johnstone about duty schedules back at FBI headquarters.

  Kreiss, who had driven the G.W. Parkway a few thousand times during his career, needed only an occasional glance out of slitted eyes to know

  precisely where they were. The G.W. was a four-lane divided parkway, climbing up through the Potomac palisades toward McLean and Langley in northern Virginia. Because they were going northwest up the Potomac River, they were on the river side of the parkway. To the left was the low, stonewalled median and the eastbound roadway, bordered by a band of large trees. To his right were more trees, through which the Potomac was clearly visible, initially right alongside, and then increasingly below them as the parkway climbed some two hundred feet above the river’s rocky gorge.

  Kreiss was not going to allow himself to be taken into the Agency headquarters. He knew what could happen there, and where he might be taken from there. Someone pretty senior in the Bureau must have reached an understanding with the Agency hierarchy. Or perhaps higher, he thought, like maybe someone at Justice. This little trip to Langley wasn’t about any bomb plot. This was about payback for Ephraim Glower. It took real juice to launch Misty, so until he knew that Lynn was truly safe, he was going to do whatever it took to remain free and operational. If he could prevent whatever Browne McGarand was planning in the District, fine, although he hadn’t actually promised Carter anything. But she promised you something pretty important, he reminded himself. Either way, he would
not allow these bozos just to hand him over like a lamb to the slaughter to a government agency that had every motive to make him disappear. He had personally delivered one individual to the federal maximum-security prison in Lewisburg, someone he knew for a fact had never seen the inside of any courtroom, or the outside world, ever again.

  When they passed the first scenic overlook turnout, he got ready.

  There was another overlook in exactly one mile, right below the Civil War park where the president’s lawyer had been found shot to death in a supposed suicide. Lanny was complaining about getting stuck on midnight-to-eight shifts twice a month when other, more junior agents were getting tagged only once a month, especially if they were female. Johnstone appeared to be tuning out Lanny’s monologue, but he kept up a steady stream of uh-huhs while he drove and sipped his coffee. Kreiss could see that he was doing an even sixty-five, ten miles over the posted speed limit, but entirely normal for the parkway, especially at 2:30 a.m.

  Any Park Police cruiser sitting out there would recognize the sedan as a government car. Johnstone had his left hand on the wheel and his right hand down in his lap, holding the paper coffee cup.

  Kreiss began surreptitiously tugging on the seat belts, taking out all the slack until they were almost painfully tight around him, the two

  shoulder straps cutting into his chest in an X configuration. When he saw the sign for the next scenic overlook, he sat way back in the seat and tensed his legs. When he saw the actual turnout coming up on the right, he raised his right leg and, pivoting on his left buttock, leaned left and kicked up to strike Johnstone under his right ear as hard as he could. Johnstone gave a grunt and pitched to the left, against the door, which had the effect of turning the car to the left, directly toward the stone wall in the median.

  Lanny dropped his coffee, raised both hands, and yelled, “Look out!” to the stunned Johnstone, and then grabbed the wheel, yanking it hard right.

  The car swerved back across the two lanes, tires screeching, until the left front tire failed and the car whip-rolled three times down the outer northbound lane in a hail of glass and road dust. Then it hit a small tree, spun around the tree on its side, and slid down the embankment and into the scenic-overlook parking lot fifty feet below the level of the roadway. It righted itself as it slalomed into the parking lot and then crunched partially through the low stone wall overlooking a sheer cliff that fell all the way to the Potomac.