The RA had taken AD Greer’s direction literally and pulled everyone into the operation, even Billy Smith, who was again assigned to tactical communications. Janet, like the rest of the agents, had changed into tactical gear: jumpsuit, Kevlar vest, tactical equipment belt, and FBI ball cap.
She had a portable radio with collar microphone and her SIG was bolstered on her right hip. Her personal .38 revolver was in the glove compartment.
She looked at her watch: The tactical radio circuit would be established in twenty minutes, after which the various elements of the team would check in onstation. After that, she would be cleared to do whatever she needed to do to find Kreiss. Which was probably nothing, she realized. Kreiss would probably just step out of one of these wrecked buildings and come over to the car. That’s when it might get hard.
She still had a residual headache from the carbon monoxide, and she would have loved to have had a bottle of oxygen to suck on for a while.
Goddamned woman. The frustrating thing was that once they had Kreiss and could get what he had into the right channels, they would then all have to wait some more, for the right pressure to be applied and the Agency’s black widow to turn loose her hostage. The nagging question in the back of Janet’s head hadn’t changed: What if Misty wouldn’t go along?
What if she had gone off the tracks and was now engaged in some personal vendetta against Kreiss? If this didn’t work for some reason, and Kreiss didn’t get Lynn back, there would be hell to pay. Coupled with the implied treachery in what AD Greer had said, she felt pretty uncomfortable about Kreiss’s prospects.
She shook her head to clear her thoughts and focused on what was going on around her. Too many what if’s could be very distracting. The aTF van hadn’t moved and there was still no sign of their techs. She wondered where they might be working, since most of the structures at that end were demolished or too badly damaged even to be safe. For that matter, she thought they now pretty much knew what had caused the blast: a concentration of hydrogen. Then she remembered what the civilian gate guard had said: aTF forensics hadn’t signed in on-site yet. Then what-The radio squawked in her left ear as Keenan came up on channel one, establishing the tactical net. She acknowledged when he polled the various teams. He reported that the aTF’s aircraft was still at the local airport, down temporarily with a parts problem, ETA one hour. Here we go, she thought, stuff going wrong before we even get going. She scanned the wrecked buildings down the hill for signs of Kreiss. She had parked the car in plain sight, and he could surely recognize a Bu car. She looked at her watch again: 12:20. They were now in the window.
Where are you, Kreiss? she thought, beginning to feel exposed out here in the sunlight. She thought of the stark contrast between what he’d been doing for all those years, on his own, and the way the rest of the Bureau did business. Dependent solely on his wits and cunning, with no partners, no backup, no base, and no rules. Every new mission coming with its own fresh hunting license. The silence around her was palpable.
C’mon, Kreiss. This is your only hope of getting Lynn back, this, or giving yourself up to those people. Now you need us. No more Lone Ranger. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The sooner the better, Kreiss.
Kreiss was in the trees above the creek, flat on his belly, scanning the entire industrial area through his binoculars. He had seen Carter drive down the main access road and park near the admin building. He was waiting to see if he could detect how much backup there would be and where they would set up. And he was curious about that van down by the flattened power plant. It looked like a CSU van, except there was no lettering of any kind to identify whose CSU might be there. He couldn’t see
the license plate, either. He knew aTF would work a scene like this for weeks, even if they had already figured out what had happened. They liked to gather a ton of evidence, and bomb sites often yielded literally tons of evidence.
He scrunched around in the pine needles to get a better visual line on the van. Ford, fall-sized, tan. It could be a piece of the FBI backup team, too. Except he was pretty sure he remembered seeing it earlier, when he had gone into the bunker farm. He studied it carefully. The windows facing into the morning sun were clear; the others, toward the back, still had dew on them. It had definitely been there awhile. He scanned up the street to Carter’s Bu car; he couldn’t make out the details of her face, but it looked like her, sitting alone in the driver’s seat.
He continued to scan right, up into the tree line where the road from the main gate came out into the industrial area. That’s where the bulk of the backup team would be, he figured. And probably at the other entrances to the arsenal. He rolled over on his back, looked into the sky, and listened. No airplanes, or not yet anyway. The empty bright sky made his eyes water. It was tempting to close his eyes and just relax there, safe in the pine needles among all these silent trees. The birds had quit worrying about him. So what was he waiting for? He rolled back over. Two things:
Farnsworth’s question about where he was, exactly, and that van. The RA had probably just been trying to figure out where to deploy his backup team. In any event, he couldn’t do anything about Farnsworth. The van was something else. It might be FBI, aTF, or even local law.
Or it might be Misty.
Why would she be here at the arsenal? She could hide anywhere, and, unlike McGarand, she had not had that much time to prepare a place here. More likely, he thought, she had a source inside the Bureau and knew why Carter was here. Her mission was to bring him in. A straight retrieval. That was the only logical explanation for her taking Lynn hostage: They didn’t want Lynn. They wanted him. And Misty would trade. If she was here, and watching, he would have to be very damned careful about getting to Carter’s car. He began sliding back into the woods, and then he stopped as it hit him.
Ford, full-sized, tan. My God, he thought. Was that the van he’d rented in Washington and left at the strip mall? Wasn’t that his van?
Janet acknowledged a second station poll on the tactical net, confirming again that she was in position. It was getting warm in the car, especially in
the vest, and she was tempted to move into the tiny bit of shade of the admin building, on the other side from where she was parked now. But that would put the building between her and her backup, and her instincts told her not to do that. Farnsworth came up and asked if she saw anything going on. She reported that there was nothing moving. Then she asked if the aTF Crime Scene people had been backed out during the pickup window.
“What aTF Crime Scene people?” Farnsworth asked. She told him about the van down by the power plant. Farnsworth told her to stand by, then, a few minutes later, came back.
“aTF does not have any people or vehicles on the installation. Describe the van.”
Janet asked him to wait and then got out of the car. She put binoculars on the van and described it to the RA. She could not get a license plate.
She asked if he wanted her to go down there. He told her to stand by. She knew that he didn’t want to reveal the scope of the backup forces, in case Kreiss was watching and got spooked. She also didn’t think he would want her to approach an unknown vehicle on her own. He came back on the net.
“Move your vehicle to a position where you can get a license plate on that van,” he instructed.
“Do not get out of your vehicle.”
She acknowledged, got back in, and started the car. She rolled up the windows, switched on the AC, and then drove around the admin building and onto the main street. She had to go very slowly as she threaded her way through chunks of concrete and piles of other debris in the street.
The toppled overhead pipe racks obstructed her way, so when she reached the first side street, she went left, down around the pushed-over remains of the wooden sheds, and then up a small rise where a water tower lay on its side like a smashed pumpkin. From this vantage, she could get the binocs on the van’s back plate. She called it in to Farnsworth. He acknowledged and told her to hold her position and reiterated his instruction to stay in her car.
She looked around the area where she had parked. Behind her was the line of pine trees, and behind that, she was pretty sure, there was a creek, just over that hill. In front of her, the full scale of the blast was evident, highlighted by the bare concrete swath where the power plant had been, surrounded by a nearly perfect circle of rubble and boiler parts. The two enormous turbo generators wrecked and shifted off their foundations, leaned to one side in mute testimony to the force of the explosion. The shredded insulation and shattered
