“Edwin Kreiss.”
“Well, well, Edwin Kreiss himself. How the hell are you? Where the hell are you?”
“Nowhere special anymore, Dag; just another Bureau retiree. I’m down in Blacksburg, near Virginia Tech. What are you up to these days?
You still flying for that Geo-Information Services?”
“Yeah. It’s boring, but boring is what I’m after these days. How can I help you?”
Kreiss told him about Lynn. Then he got right down to it.
“Dag, I need some aerial photography of a place called the Ramsey Army Arsenal.
It’s outside of a town called Ramsey, here in southwest Virginia. The place is a mothballed Army ammunition-production complex. Got any contacts who could maybe get me copies of some black-and-white overheads, say from about five thousand feet?” He phrased it that way in case Parsons didn’t want to do it.
“Contacts? No. But I can do it. The company I fly for is over in Suitland, Maryland. Like you said, we do GIS stuff all up and down the East Coast. You know, field condition analyses for farmers, spectrum analysis for crop diseases, pond health, insect infestations, plant pathologies.”
“I’m not active anymore, Dag. This is strictly personal. I can cover costs, of course.”
“Understood. And you’re working with local law, or in spite of local law?”
“They’ve declared it a missing persons case. The Bureau, I mean. The locals will follow the feds’ lead on that.”
“The locals know you’re working it? They know who you are?”
“No. Not yet anyway. The local Bureau people do, of course, after my somewhat colorful departure, and I’ve been duly warned off. But I can’t just sit here, Dag.”
“Understood, Ed. I’ll guarantee I’d be doing the same damn thing.
Look, this stuff is all unclassified. We have a humongous database of aerial photography. We probably have coverage. Lemme work on it. How long’s she been missing?”
Kreiss told him.
“Shit. That’s rough.” He paused, not wanting to state the obvious.
“I have to hope, Dag, but, like I said, the cops and the Bureau have given up looking. The feds say there’s no evidence of a crime, so it’s a straight missing persons beef now. But I got a tip about this installation, and I then found her hat there. It’s not a place where she should have been, and I think there’s something going on there.”
“You tell your ex-employers all that?”
“I’d have to tell them how I found it. That wouldn’t be helpful. For a variety of reasons.”
Dagget was silent for a moment.
“But maybe they’d start working it again,” he said.
“I don’t think so. There’s still no crime, except mine. They’re working stiffs with a budget and a boss, Dag. Basically, I’m going solo on this.”
“Roger that,” Parsons said.
“I’m slated into southern Pennsylvania this afternoon, but we did some flights on some big apple orchards in the upper valley about six months ago. Let me look at the GPS maps for this Ramsey Arsenal, see if maybe we got coverage.”
“I can pay for this, Dag.”
“Not me you can’t. The only thing that might take some cash is getting your data out of the center. But we’re talking black-and-white photo recce here, so that ought not to be a big deal. This place restricted airspace?”
“Probably. There’s a big double chain-link fence around the whole thing.”
There was a moment of silence on the phone. Then he said, “I’ll get it, Ed. Whatever it takes. I owe you big- time.”
“No, you don’t, but I appreciate it, Dag.”
There was another pause.
“Ed,” Parsons said.
“That incident at Millwood.
I heard some bizarre stories about that. Next time we get together, I’d like to hear your side, you feel like it. The official version smelled like coverup.”
Kreiss didn’t want to get into this.
“The official story closed that book, Dag,” he said.
“Probably best for all concerned.”
“A coupla guys made it sound like Custer’s last stand, but with the Indians losing.”
Kreiss stared out the window for a moment.
“Ancient history, Dag.”
“Yeah. All right. I’ve got your number. If we have coverage, I’ll have something to you by Wednesday. And Ed, anything else—you just screech. You hear me? I’ve got my own plane, and I can still fly, even if I can’t shoot.”
“Appreciate it, Dag. More than you know.” He got Parsons’s beeper number, then hung up. He went out the front door to the porch. He looked into what seemed to be a golden green cloud of new leaves. The air was filled with the scent of pollen and fresh loam. The creek down below was just barely audible through the thickening vegetation.
He had made a mistake going into the arsenal without any idea of the layout. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be people in there, which showed just how much of an edge he’d lost over the past few years.
It had taken him an hour to get out of the logjam tangle, and then another hour to traverse just the fifty yards from the creek back into the trees.
That shooter had to have had a very good pair of optics or a night scope of some kind to get so close with the first shot. That meant they had been down there looking for an intruder. An intruder into what? What was going on in that place that there were men laying traps along that creek and coming after him with guns? A bunch of bikers running a meth lab, possibly? A hillbilly marijuana farm?
But then there was the hat. Lynn’s hat. Carried down that creek until it got caught up in the logjam. Which meant—what, exactly? Had someone stolen that hat a year ago and gone into the arsenal with it? Or had the kids been camping outside of the complex, and the hat blew away and got carried downstream? There certainly were other plausible explanations.
And yet, that kid had said “break into” Site R. While he was almost certain that hat was hers, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d
actually seen her wear it. He should call those FBI people and tell them he’d found the hat. But how would he explain the where part? And even if the Bureau people were sympathetic, would they do anything? Did they even have the case anymore? Did they care? Had they ever cared? He remembered the way that woman agent had looked at him, almost challenging him to interfere: “Do not go solo on this,” she’d said. Pretty or not, she wasn’t old enough to talk to him like that.
He sighed in frustration and went back into the house to make some coffee. He was being unfair. Agents were agents. There was an infinite supply of evil out there. Knock off a bad guy and two more rose up in his place. The working stiffs in the Bureau and the other federal law-enforcement agencies tended to work the ones they could, and the others, well, they did what they could until some boss said, Hey, this isn’t going anywhere;
let’s move on, folks. As long as statistics drove the budget, the bosses would prioritize in the direction of closure. This was nothing new.
The Agency had been different, but that was because they weren’t really accountable to anybody except a committee or two in Congress, where accountability was an extremely flexible concept.
He stood at the sink, washing out the coffeepot, and considered the other problem, the larger problem—that Washington might find out he’d come out of his cave. The terms of his forced retirement after the Millwood incident had been excruciatingly clear, enunciated through clenched teeth by none other than J. Willard Marchand, the assistant director over Bureau Foreign Counterintelligence himself: Kreiss was never to act operationally again, not in any capacity. Not in private security work, not as a consultant, not even in self-defense.
