into the tangle of the logjam. He ended up lying on his belly in wet sand, with one of the small waterfalls pouring ice-cold water onto his back.
Using the rod in his left hand and his fingers on his right hand, he moved sand aside like a giant sea turtle about to lay its eggs on a beach. As he wiggled deeper into the sand, he was able to move farther up under the logjam. With any luck, he could get all the way under it to the stream on the back side and get away, but, either way, they couldn’t get a shot at him while he was under all this debris. He kept digging and inching his way forward.
When Browne heard the shot, he stopped making noise and stood still by the edge of the tree line, keeping one tree between himself and the creek and waiting for jared. Obviously, Jared had been confident enough of seeing someone that he’d taken a shot. Then, to Browne’s left, a bright white flashlight snapped on, its beam traversing the creek bed from right to left quickly, and then much more slowly. He pulled his own light and began doing the same thing, putting his beam where Jared’s wasn’t. They searched back and forth along the area of the creek bed, and along the downstream edge of the logjam pile. Browne saw the occasional glint of steel as his beam hit one of the traps. He moved left to join Jared.
“Well?” he said.
“Saw him at the edge of the creek and the logjam,” Jared said, keeping his voice low.
“Blind once the gun went off. Missed him, though; heard the bullet hit that big tree.”
“Can you tell which way he went?”
“Into the creek. After that…”
Browne was silent for a long moment. He stopped his light when it illuminated Kreiss’s original path through the tall grass leading down to the creek.
“Well, nothing wrong with your instincts. There was someone out here. Question is, Why?”
“Way that grass is flattened down, he was crawling’,” Jared said.
“Whoever it was, he wasn’t hunting’. He was creepin’ this place.”
“This has to be about those kids, then,” Browne said.
“No way anyone could know about the other. Right, Jared?”
“Not from me anyways,” Jared said as he flicked the powerful beam up to the opposite tree line, hoping to flash some eyes. Nothing shone back at him.
“So that’s bad, then.”
“Yes, it is.”
“You want to keep looking? Maybe go get the dogs?”
Browne thought about it. Jared had three mixed-breed hounds he used for hunting wild pigs, but it would be hours before they could get back here with the dogs.
“No,” he said.
“I think we should get off the reservation for the night. Maybe leave it alone for a couple of days. In case this was just some guy wandering around. Tonight he’s scared. Tomorrow he might bring cops.”
“He’d have to admit he broke in here,” Jared said, handing back the heavy Ruger.
“If this wasn’t purposeful, then he’ll never come back.”
“And if it was…”
“Then I need to start patrollin’. You stay on the generator; I need to start hunting’.”
Browne detected the sound of anticipation in his grandson’s voice.
Above all else, Jared was a hunter. They made a few more sweeps of the ravine with their Maglites, and then Browne switched his off. He brought out a much smaller version of the big light and used it to guide them back up the path toward the industrial area.
Behind them, down in the ravine, Edwin Kreiss broke through the last of the tangle, pulled himself out onto a dry sandbar, sniffed the night air, and listened. Then he smiled.
On Monday morning, Janet Carter talked to Larry Talbot and Billy Smith about what she’d learned from Barry dark. Billy Smith was manfully trying to stay awake, but there was a steady parade of yawns.
“Am I mistaken, or didn’t the boss have a word with you Friday?” Talbot said.
“Yes, he did. Warned me off Edwin Kreiss and this whole case. But as I understand it, we get new info, we make sure it gets into the system. Billy, you finished the transmittal letter for the case file?”
“Nope, but I’ll have it today,” Billy said, giving another yawn.
“I need to know which one of you is the official case officer.”
If Billy wasn’t such a nice man, all this yawning would have me yelling at him, she thought. Talbot, however, made a noise of exasperation.
“Look, Jan,” he said. She frowned. She hated being called Jan.
“I
remember that kid dark. Redhead, right?
“Fuck you’ sneer on his face all the time? He’s an asshole. He could be telling you anything, or the latest thing off the Dungeon Masters of Doom bulletin board. Leave the fucking thing alone. You want to put the campus cops’ report and this Site R stuff into that file, fine. But if Farnsworth finds out you’re still messing with this thing, he’ll have you doing background investigation interviews on Honduran gardeners until the end of time. Okay? Enough already.”
Janet acquiesced and slunk back to her cubicle. Billy rose up over the divider.
“What’s the difference between a southern zoo and a northern zoo?”
he asked.
She waited.
“A southern zoo has a description of the animal on the front of a cage, along with a recipe.”
He winked at her over the divider and then did a down periscope.
Sweet dreams, Billy, she thought. She started going through her Email and remembered that the shrink up in Washington had promised to get back to her, but it was only Monday morning. Then she saw an announcement on internal mail that Farnsworth was going to a conference of eastern region SACs and RAs for three days and wanted any pending action-items brought to him before close of business today. She looked around for Talbot, but he had stepped away from his desk. She cut over to the Web and hit her favorite search engine. She typed in Site R and received the usual avalanche of Web site garbage. So much for that, she thought, and went to refill her coffee cup. To her surprise, Billy was working, not sleeping. She offered to fill his cup, and he accepted. When she returned, she asked him about Site R. “Only Site R I ever heard about was the alternate command center for the Pentagon; it’s up near Camp David, in Maryland. Probably five, six hours from here, up I-Eighty-one, then east.”
“Not a place you’d go camping, then?”
“Not unless you like sleeping with a lot of Secret Service agents. It’s like that NORAD thing inside Cheyenne Mountain. You know, the command center for the ICBMs. For what it’s worth, I took a look through that case file. I noticed something: They didn’t take a lot of clothes, like for some long trip. Larry even made a note that Kreiss had questioned that. I don’t know about this Site R business, but I’d be looking for something closer to home.”
“Like what? Site R sounds military.”
“Yeah, well, maybe go talk to some of the homesteaders here. Or local law maybe.”
Janet nodded and went back to her desk. The homesteaders were FBI employees who had been in the Roanoke office for a long time, people who either had low-level technical jobs or were non-career-path special agents. Talbot returned to the office and looked over in her direction;
Janet made a show of tackling her in box. She had half a mind to put a call into Edwin Kreiss, see what he knew about Site R. Yeah, right, she thought. Back to work, Carter.
Edwin Kreiss finished cleaning his trekking gear and then re stowed his packs in the spare bedroom closet. He was waiting for a return call from Dagget Parsons up in northern Virginia. Kreiss had saved Parsons’s life during an Agency retrieval in Oregon, when Dagget had been a pilot for the U.S. Marshals Service. Dagget had retired after the incident, but not before telling Kreiss that if there was ever anything he needed, just call.
Kreiss was hoping that Dag was still flying for that environmental sciences company. The phone rang.
