He turned around to face the stream of people coming from the garage to
the building. When one of the approaching men, who looked like a mid grade bureaucrat, gave him a quizzical look, he put up his hand to stop him and then flashed Johnstone’s FBI credentials.
“Johnstone, FBI,” he announced to the startled man.
“Would you please ask one of the security guards to come out here? I think there’s a problem in that alley.”
The man looked into the alley and then back at Kreiss, and then he said, “Sure, wait here.” Kreiss stepped out of the flow of pedestrian traffic and watched through the glass as the man went inside and talked to the security people at the counter, who all looked back through the glass at Kreiss. One of them, a young black man, put on his hat and started around the counter while the guard next to him picked up a phone and began talking. Kreiss’s messenger put his briefcase on the X-ray machine’s belt and stepped through the metal detector, taking one last look at Kreiss before disappearing into the building. The security guard came through the front door and walked over to him, carrying a small radio in one hand and keeping his other hand near the butt of his gun. Kreiss made sure his hands were visible, and he held open the credentials so that the approaching guard could see the big black FBI letters. He closed it before the guard could get a close look at Johnstone’s picture, which wasn’t even a passing match for Kreiss’s face.
“Back there, in the alley. We’ve had a report of a possible bomb attack on your building. See that hose?”
The guard, who wanted another look at those credentials, locked on to the b word.
“Say what? A bomb? Where?”
“See that hose—there, all the way at the back of the alley? Look up-it’s coming down from the top deck of the parking garage. There’s a truck up there on the top deck. A propane truck. That hose looks like it’s going into your building’s ventilation system—see it?”
The guard looked, frowned, and then nodded.
“Yeah, I see it. But wait a minute. Propane? That shit stinks. We’re not smelling anything inside.”
“There’s a tanker truck on the roof of that garage that’s pumping something into your building. It might not be propane. Don’t you think you ought to check that out?”
Kreiss stood there while the bewildered guard spoke on his radio to someone inside. As he held the radio up to his ear for a reply, three more guards came running out of the lobby with guns drawn, headed straight for Kreiss. They were not smiling.
Janet held on to Lynn’s hand as Micah led them through the rising dawn up into the woods behind the cabin. The forested slopes of Pearl’s
tain rose above them like some brooding dark green mass. The rock face that overlooked Kreiss’s place was only partially visible from this angle.
Lynn was walking better than Janet had expected. Micah was following a path that led diagonally across the slope into the nearest trees, a kerosene lantern in his hand.
“Where are we going?” Janet asked.
“This here’s Pearl’s Mountain,” he replied over his shoulder.
“Limestone.
Full of caves. We got us a hidey-hole up there.”
“But if we can walk to it, so can anyone coming after us,” she protested.
“They can, but then they gotta find the right one. Harder’n it looks.”
They entered the trees, and the path diverged in three directions.
Micah stopped.
“Y’all take that left one there. Follow it ‘til it hits the bare rock. Then wait there. I’ll be along directly.”
They did as he said, arriving at a sheer rock wall fifteen minutes later.
Janet looked around for a cave entrance but found nothing. There was a broken segment of dead tree trunk propped against the rock, and they sat down on the log to rest. The climb had been steep, and Janet was a little winded. Lynn was taking deep breaths and holding her side.
Micah showed up five minutes later, dragging his jacket behind him by one of its sleeves. He put the jacket on the ground and grinned at them.
“See it?” he asked.
Janet and Lynn looked around but saw nothing that looked like a cave entrance. Janet shook her head.
“Mebbe that’s cuz y’all are sittin’ on it,” he said, pointing at the log.
They got up and Micah rolled the log sideways, revealing a narrow storm cellar door laid flat into the ground. He tugged on a rope handle, and the door opened, exposing steps cut into the dirt. Holding the lantern high, he went down into the hole. Janet let Lynn go next and then followed.
Micah told her to leave the door open.
The steps ended eight feet underground in a narrow passage of what felt like packed earth. Janet, less than thrilled to be underground, hurried to keep up with Micah’s lantern. The air in the passage was dank and still.
Kreiss folded his arms across his chest as the three guards hurried over.
One of them appeared to be older and in charge.
“You the guy claiming to be Special Agent Johnstone of the FBI?”
“That’s what he said to me, Sarge,” the man with the radio said. He had backed away from Kreiss.
The sergeant pointed his gun at Kreiss.
“We called the Bureau ops center,” he announced.
“And they said Agents Johnstone and West had been involved in a vehicle accident this morning while transporting a prisoner.
That would be you, am I right?”
Kreiss nodded but said nothing. The flow of pedestrian traffic parted visibly around the scene on the sidewalk. The sergeant had everybody go into the lobby to get this scene off the street. Once inside the lobby, he directed one of the guards to search Kreiss for weapons.
“Sarge, he says there’s some shit going down in the building. Like a bomb. Says that hose back there is pumping gas into the building.”
“What racking hose?” the sergeant demanded. The guard took him over to a window and pointed back into the alley. A second guard told Kreiss to raise ‘em while he patted him down for weapons. Kreiss obliged, trying to remain oblivious to all the stares from people going through the security checkpoint. He could hear the guard telling the sergeant about the propane truck.
The sergeant consulted by radio with the main security office upstairs.
Kreiss put his hands back down while the guard who searched him examined Johnstone’s credentials.
“Roger that,” the sergeant said into his radio. He looked at Kreiss.
“Central says there is a tanker truck up on the garage. What do you know about this?”
“I told the guard here: I think that truck is pumping an explosive gas into your building’s vent supply, via that utility building back there. In a nonzero amount of time your building here is going to vaporize when some idiot lights up a cigarette in a bathroom. Don’t you think you ought to clear the building?”
“Not on your say-so, bub; you’re the one impersonating a feeb.”
A large gray-headed man stepped out of the gathering crowd and approached the guards.
“What’s happening here, Sergeant?” he asked.
The guards all appeared to recognize the man, and people had let him through quickly. The sergeant told him what was going down, including what Kreiss had said about a possible bomb in the building.
“Not in the building,” Kreiss said.
“Your building is the bomb. I believe that truck up there is pumping some kind of explosive vapor into your vent system. While we stand here and talk.”
“Who are you?” the man asked. He spoke with the authority of someone who was used to getting immediate answers.
“My name is Edwin Kreiss, and I’m a civilian. Who are you?”
“I’m Lionel Kroner, deputy associate director. I’ve heard your name.”
“Perhaps in connection with an explosion investigation down in Ramsey, in southwest Virginia. The power plant? The hydrogen bomb?”
Kroner’s eyes wid
ened at the mention of a hydrogen bomb. Some of the people who heard Kreiss use that term were obviously shocked, and a murmur swept the crowd.
“Yes, we sent an NRT on that,” Kroner said.
“Your name came up in a briefing. What was your involvement?”
“Nothing direct, but I know about it. And the guy who did that is probably trying to duplicate what happened down there in your building here. While we stand here and talk.”
The sergeant, who had been on the radio some more, said he had asked Central to get the lab people on the fourth floor to turn on an explosimeter to see if there was anything present in the building.
“Nobody smells anything,” he added.
“They won’t, if he’s using hydrogen,” Kreiss said.
“It’s odorless, tasteless, and completely invisible. Mr. Kroner, do you have a public-address system in this building?”
“Yes, Central does.”
“Can you get everyone to open their windows?”
Kroner blinked but then shook his head.
“We can’t,” he said.
“None of the windows in this building open.”
“Then clear the building. Now. And tell people to run like hell once they’re out of the building, because there’s going to be lots of flying glass.
And if you won’t clear the building, I’m going to leave.”
“Bulls’!” the sergeant said. The other guards still had their weapons drawn; they spread out a little, looking to their sergeant for instructions.
“Sarge, Sarge!” the black guard said urgently, pointing to his radio.
“Lab says there’s an explosive vapor in the building. They recommend an immediate evacuation.”
“You going to pop a cap in here, Sergeant?” Kreiss asked.
“Make a little flame?”
He turned to leave. Some of the guards went into shooting stance, but Kroner waved them down. The sergeant started to protest, but Kroner ordered him to be quiet and get him a microphone patch into the building’s PA system.
“Mr. Kreiss,” he called, as Kreiss neared the doors. He stopped and turned around.
“Thanks for the warning,” Kroner said.
“But we will see you later. That’s a promise.”
“If any of you are still alive,” Kreiss said, which shut everyone up for the moment.
Kreiss nodded at him and stepped through the door. See me later? Not
if I can help it, he thought. It was all he could do not to run like hell.
Behind him, he heard Kroner’s voice identifying himself on the building’s PA system and ordering an immediate evacuation of the building, instructing people to walk to the nearest stairs and to do nothing—repeat, nothing—that might generate a spark. Kreiss hurried back into the parking garage to retrieve his van. When he reached the street level, the turbaned attendant was out on the sidewalk, trying to figure out what was happening next door. Kreiss told him there was a bomb in the aTF building.
The attendant looked at Kreiss, back at the aTF building, and then took off smartly down the street. Kreiss swore, opened his door, and reached into the attendant’s booth to trip the gate.
It took him ten minutes in morning traffic to get three blocks away from the aTF building, at which time he heard the first sirens. Three Metro cop cars with their blue lights flashing came racing past him into Massachusetts Avenue to block off the side streets. He pulled over toward the curb to let them go by. Pedestrians on the sidewalk paused to stare at all the cop cars, wondering if the president was coming.
Fucking McGarand, Kreiss thought as he tried to pull back out into traffic, but now everything was stopped. He had damn near pulled it off, and had done so even after Carter had sent in a very specific warning.
What the hell was it about Washington bureaucrats that made them think they knew everything, that no one could tell them a single goddamn thing?
He felt somebody or something bang hard on the back windows of the van, and he looked in the mirror to see if a vehicle had rear-ended his van.
Instead, he saw an enormous orange fireball rising with a shuddering roar into the sky over the buildings behind him. The glare was strong enough to be seen through the windows of office buildings that were between him and the blast. Looking a lot like an atomic cloud, the fireball turned to a boiling red color and then was enveloped by a bolus of oily black smoke pulsing up into the early-morning sky over downtown. He heard a woman on the sidewalk scream right beside the van, and moments later, debris began to rain down on the sidewalks and the streets. He put the van in gear and pulled onto the sidewalk as people ran for cover into nearby buildings. Ignoring the sudden hail of metal and concrete bits rattling on the roof of the van, he drove down the sidewalk until he reached the next corner, then pulled past the huddled pedestrians and accelerated down toward the river.
Correction, correction, he thought. Not damn near. Score one for the
clan McGarand. And he knew that as soon as the dust settled, there would be a host of feds hunting one Edwin Kreiss. A regular fugitive hat trick, he thought. He would now have the aTF, FBI, and the fucking Agency on his trail. Good job, Kreiss.
He turned right when he got to Constitution and headed toward the Memorial Bridge and northern Virginia. He would have to stay off the interstates once he got clear of the Washington area. He probably had twenty, thirty minutes to get out of town, and then someone would remember the speeding van on the sidewalk. The bigger problem would come when he got close to Blacksburg, because there were only so many ways into the foothills west of the town. He thanked God that Micah had Lynn, because Misty would undoubtedly take another shot, and very soon.
Behind him, the big black cloud had tipped over in the morning air, casting a pall over the entire downtown area and blocking out the rising sun.
Browne McGarand felt a wave of deep satisfaction when he heard the monstrous thump and turned to see the black cloud erupting over the federal district. He had walked down Massachusetts Avenue after starting the hydrogen flow, trying to remain inconspicuous until he was able to cross Constitution Avenue and walk out onto the Mall, the wide expanse of trees and lawns fronting the Capitol grounds. Even at that hour of the morning, there was a surprising number of people out and about: joggers, power-walkers, and a tai chi exercise group of elderly people striking exotic attitudes out on the damp grass. He had rested on a park bench for a while, thinking back to 1993 and the similarly dramatic scenes created by the government’s immolation of David Koresh and Browne’s son, William, at Waco. Both the aTF and the FBI had conspired to cover up the truth of what had happened there, just as they had at Ruby Ridge.
Murder will out, he thought, and the government had flat out murdered those deluded people. Then they lied about it, falsified testimony, concealed evidence, and otherwise acted more like Hitler’s SS than agents of a democracy. Goddamned people burned babies for the crime of being different and delusional, while the president of the United States perjured himself with impunity and released bomb-throwing foreign terrorists for his wife’s political advantage.
Watching the mushroom cloud, he wished he could have managed two bombs, because the FBI had blood on its hands from Waco, too. But it had been the aTF who set the stage for the ultimate carnage with their pigheaded
assault. He didn’t hate the agents who had bled and died on the roof of the compound. He blamed the coldhearted bastards here in Washington who had ordered it, and then pretended that they hadn’t. Well, that black cloud rising above the federal office buildings would bring the message home right here to those same people: If the government won’t hold agencies accountable, then, by God, an avenger will come out of the hills and teach the lesson. When the moral standards disappeared, it was time for the Old Testament rules: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, fire for fire.
He watched the smoke cloud collapse into itself as the rumble of the explosion died away over the Virginia hills. A wail of sirens and the astonished cries of the peop
le out on the Mall followed. He got up and resumed walking, heading casually but purposefully down the Mall, past the Reflecting Pool, toward the Lincoln Memorial and the Memorial Bridge. His goal was to cross the river and walk to the Arlington Cemetery Metro station. From there, he would take the subway over to Reagan National Airport. He had enough cash to rent a car, and he didn’t see any problem with using his own driver’s license—all that would prove was that he had been in Washington. Then he was going to drive like hell back down to the Ramsey Arsenal, where he had everything prepositioned for his imminent disappearance. He rubbed his bare face. He had shaved off his beard in the motel and his face felt naked. He averted his face as he passed by Lincoln’s somber statue. He searched his soul for a sign of remorse and found nothing of the kind.
Janet and Lynn were huddled in a tiny wooden hut that had been built into the entrance passage, fifty feet back from the actual entrance. The hut consisted of a single room, containing two bunks, a tiny table, two straight-backed chairs, and a rack where six kerosene lanterns hung on one wall. Micah returned in the early afternoon, calling softly from the tunnel as he approached. He brought some sandwiches and a thermos of hot soup. Lynn was sitting up by now and feeling much better. She said her back and ribs hurt, but Janet was able to report that, thankfully, no infection was showing. Janet had slept like a log on one of the cots for three hours. They were both very grateful for the food.
Hunting Season Page 43