Janet had explained what Kreiss had told her on the way to the hotel, and the girl had just nodded. She was obviously deeply disturbed that the Bureau had chosen to throw her father to whatever wolf was waiting in the ruins of the arsenal. She’d given Farnsworth a look of such reproach that he had actually blushed. Now they had orders to stay at the hotel and wait to see what, if anything, broke loose in Washington. The aTF was still hunting McGarand, but that particular mad bomber had simply disappeared.
Janet wondered if he, too, was out there at the demolished arsenal.
Probably not.
She had mixed emotions about what they’d done. It was 11:30, and Leno was doing his monologue. Somehow, none of it seemed very funny tonight. Yes, Kreiss had made this deal, and gotten his daughter out of that woman’s clutches. Her own bosses were about to peel back a scab they thought would give them nearly unlimited leverage over their tormentors at Justice. That might or might not be true, she thought, given the fact that the current administration was in its final months, with not too much left to lose in terms of its already-odious legacy.
Farnsworth said he was putting Janet in for an award, and he had told her to think about going back to a headquarters assignment in Washington. Janet wasn’t so sure about that, either.
“Palace games,” the woman had said.
Pretty fucking lethal palace games, Janet thought. And what Greer had done to Kreiss was just plain dishonorable. She might have made a mistake coming back to the fold.
She turned around, to find Lynn watching her. Something in the girl’s expression reminded her of Kreiss. No drama, just a patient consideration of the situation and a hint, just a hint, of unexpected action if an opportunity presented itself. She and Lynn looked at each other. They had done the wrong thing.
“What would you think about going back out there?” Janet asked.
“See if we can find your old man?”
Lynn sat up.
“About fucking time, Special Agent,” she said.
“You got another gun?”
Kreiss carefully put his gloved hand on the cone to see which way it was pointing. To the right of the direct line between the valve pit and the power plant. He removed the stethoscope, closed his eyes behind the mirrored glasses, and listened hard to the bare susurrations of a night breeze filtering through the piles of debris all around him. The breeze was just enough to obscure the sounds of traffic out on Route 11. It had been three hours since he’d heard the last noise. He’d been dozing since then, which actually was part of his craft. Relax the body and concentrate the mind.
Build energy reserves while that part of his brain that did the sound work listened with all the mysterious precision of the subconscious mind. He looked at his watch: 11:40. He shifted his body behind the wall, easing a cramp out of his knee. He put the stethoscope back to his ears.
Ten minutes later came another click, followed by what sounded like the rattle of a very small pebble. Something, or someone, moving out there. Misty? He pulled the glasses down again. Black night to the max. Tenebrae factae sunt. Darkness has fallen. Got that right.
He shifted position again, putting his left shoulder in touch with the cooling surface of the wall, his right hand now holding the .45 automatic.
The tactical question was, How many people did Misty have with her?
They’d sent a crew into the mountain after Janet and Lynn, but they hadn’t come back out. Lost them all? That would put Misty in a rare mood, especially being defeated by a redheaded amateur. She wouldn’t agree: The cave had done them in, not Janet Carter. But would she have
had time to summon more backup? One-on-one against Misty was bad enough, but if she had help, this was probably hopeless.
Another click, not as loud. He reached up again and swung the cone to the right ten degrees. The faintest movement of air against his cheek told him that the weather might be changing. The night now smelled faintly of moisture against the backdrop of the pine forests surrounding the industrial area. He squeezed the stethoscope earphones harder into his ears. If Misty was moving, she’d be doing so while searching for some visual cue that he was out there. Some small patch of infrared contrast, a blob of green warmth where there shouldn’t be one. He reached up again and moved the cone farther to the right. A minute passed, and then another. Then a new sound, a tiny scraping noise. Fabric over concrete? It had seemed marginally louder. He wondered if she’d done the same thing he had—parked herself in a corner and dozed for a few hours before starting the hunt. One thing about a sleeping human: If properly hidden and wedged the body didn’t move. You took a chance, of course, of being caught sound asleep. It depended on how well your subconscious mind had been trained to listen. He took a deep breath, let it out quietly, and then decided it was time to get things under way.
He took out the piece of metal he had been warming inside his chest pack and placed it up on the top of the side wall. If what the cone had detected was Misty, she shouldn’t be able to see the warm piece of metal until she had moved another hundred feet or so farther to his right, because of the buildings. Then he reached down for the control box and selected the third program and entered a fifteen-minute delay. He slipped off the stethoscope, brought the cone down off the wall, and buried them in loose gravel. Then he slithered silently into the big drainpipe. A minute later, he crawled out of the valve pit altogether, rounded the first street corner, and began inching toward the nearest concrete building rising above the side street that led back down to the valve pit. He crawled six feet and then stopped to listen. This was the dangerous bit: If she illuminated the area with the IR system, he was dead meat down here on the street. He repeated these movements until he reached the corner of the building. There he got up, flattened himself against the wall of the building, and went hand over hand until he felt the ladder.
This was the decision: There was only one ladder. If he went up it, he could not get down again if she detected him up there. But if this worked, and she closed in on the valve pit to investigate the infrared target he’d left for her, he’d be in a position to fire down at her.
Especially if she reacted when the sound program let go. He considered the time: He had only a few more minutes to make his decision.
Did she have helpers? He decided that she didn’t. Misty was supremely confident in her own abilities. She also knew that Kreiss wouldn’t run very far into the woods to prolong this. He figured she was moving and scanning, crawling a few yards at a time and then sweeping the entire debris field with the IR scanner, looking for a point of contrast. Or she could have an illuminator up on some wreckage, bathing the whole debris field in invisible light. Probably had the scanner mounted on an AK-47, based on the sound of that single shot earlier this afternoon. Misty normally didn’t carry a handgun, but she had always liked the heavy-duty Eastern Bloc weapons.
The wind blew in his face again, this time carrying the scent of old chemicals, overlaid with a residual whiff of nitric acid. That has to be coming from the main street, he thought. So she should be upwind of him, then, and, therefore, up-sound. He estimated the time remaining.
He had to move, one way or the other, or she’d get close enough to hear him on the ladder. He started up.
Janet shut off her headlights as they coasted quietly down the hill on Route 11. The intersection marking the entrance to the arsenal was a quarter of a mile ahead, the dead traffic lights just visible before she shut off her lights. They had gone out a back fire door of the hotel and circled the block around the library to come into the parking lot from the town side, away from the front entrance. She’d called down to the lobby before they left and told one of the agents that they were going lights-out in the room. He told her to sleep tight. They’d waited a half hour before making their move. Then she and Lynn got into her Bureau car and headed for Ramsey.
Janet pulled the car into the exit lane for the arsenal. The barrels were still there, but they were no longer blocking the ramp. She drove slowly and quietly up the road toward the main gate, stopping just down the hill from the gate itself so as to minimize their engine noise. She parked to the side and shut it down. She rolled down her window and listened. She had been having second thoughts about this little caper ever since leaving downtown Blacksburg, but, given Lynn’s enthusiasm, she couldn’t think of a way to back out. When Farnsworth found out, she’d probably be a civilian again. Lynn had Janet’s .38 in her lap and was rotating the cylinder, click by click.
“So,” Janet said.
“This seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I’m not so sure.”
