The large black man, who had been listening impassively up to now, snorted. Foster introduced him.
“Janet, this is Mr. Ransom. He is a liaison officer to the DCB. The gentleman with him is Mr. Cassidy. Mr. Ransom here has had some, um, experience with Mr. Kreiss.”
“Experience,” Ransom said.
“Yeah, you might call it that. Remind me to show you our Bronco.”
“We’re going to downplay this whole thing at the DCB meeting,” Foster said.
“The last thing we want right now is the aTF charging into the
arsenal. Especially if there’s nothing there, because that would necessarily bring the focus back to Kreiss.”
Janet nodded slowly as she tried to work out all the lines in the water.
Something was still muddled here. Then an awful idea occurred to her.
“You people aren’t holding back information on Kreiss’s daughter, are you?” she asked, looking at Foster and Bellhouser.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” snapped Bellhouser angrily. There was an embarrassed silence at the table. Farnsworth was shaking his head. Foster took a deep breath before responding.
“I won’t dignify that question with an answer, Agent Carter,” he said.
“Look, Edwin Kreiss is a tough nut. Even in retirement, as Mr. Ransom discovered earlier this morning. I’ll let him brief you after this meeting.
This Site R business may be entirely off the mark, in which case we’ll break it off and find another way to deal with Kreiss. But the aTF people who went into the Ramsey complex said it would be an absolutely perfect place for someone to set up a covert explosives lab.”
“But they found nothing?”
“A bunch of big concrete buildings, stripped down and locked up. The Army has some local rent-a-cops under contract. They make routine patrols of the physical plant, and they’ve never seen anything except signs of the occasional deer hunter back in the bunker area. It seems the central industrial area is known locally to be badly contaminated, which tends to keep intruders out. One of the security guards also said that there are rumors of chemical weapons, nerve gas, that sort of stuff, stored in the complex. We checked with the Army, which says that’s total bullshit, but since it helps to keep out intruders, they’ve always been deliberately coy about denying it.”
“Based on his reputation, if something is going on there, Kreiss will uncover it,” Bellhouser said.
“If and when he does, that’s when the DCB would want to reassert control.”
“And bring in some more assets, like maybe the aTF?”
“Or the appropriate Bureau people,” Foster said.
“And also because if someone hurt or killed his daughter, and those other two kids, you know—they broke into the arsenal on a lark, stumbled onto something, and somebody took them—Edwin Kreiss is likely to stake them out naked on the forest floor and build small fires on their bellies. For starters.”
“Sounds about right to me,” Janet said.
Ransom grinned in the background, but Foster and Bellhouser did not
see any humor in it, “The objective,” Bellhouser said, “over and above our Kreiss problem, is to see if we can smash the whole thing—the bomb consultant, his lab, and his conduits into the violent antigovernment groups.”
“These are the people who bomb whole buildings full of innocent civilians,” Foster said.
“Remember OK City? The day-care center?”
Ransom stopped grinning. Janet nodded. That was certainly a worthwhile objective.
“All right, I think I understand. And Kreiss is not to know anything about all this, correct? I offer to help him where I can, and then keep you people informed via our office here?”
“You said she was smart,” Bellhouser murmured to Farnsworth.
Puh-leeze, Janet thought.
“This all assumes Kreiss will give me the time of day,” she pointed out.
“He doesn’t exactly strike me as a team player.”
“He may or may not accept your help,” Foster said.
“The first thing we want to know is whether or not he’s been into the arsenal, and what, if anything, he’s found there. How you get that information will be entirely up to you.”
This guy’s a master of the obvious, Janet thought.
“It’s been several days,” she said.
“Since the incident in that kid’s apartment, I mean. We may be a little late here.”
“For what it’s worth, he was gone all night last night,” Ransom said.
“And when he came back, he also anticipated that somebody might be waiting there in his cabin.”
“How? we wonder,” Bellhouser asked rhetorically.
Janet kept her face a perfect blank.
“Maybe he is just that good,” she said.
“Especially if he’s working something after you guys told him never to go operational again.”
“Perhaps,” Bellhouser said, giving her a speculative look.
“But for now, this is a Bureau/fustice Department play. With a little help from our Agency friends here.”
Agency friends? Janet thought. Then she realized Bellhouser was talking about the two so-called liaison men.
“And aTF doesn’t suspect you’ve got something going?” she asked.
“We think not,” Bellhouser said.
“If Kreiss turns up solid evidence of a bomber cell, we’ll take it to the DCB, and, of course, that will fold in aTF
But right now, Kreiss and what he’s doing is our focus.”
“What this ‘we’ shit, white woman?” Ransom murmured.
“Maybe you should go deal with that crazy motherfucker. Him and his fifty-caliber rifle.”
Bellhouser looked over at Ransom.
“I will if I have to, since you failed to deliver the message.”
“Didn’t need to,” Ransom said.
“He doesn’t think it’s you.”
“Huh?” Janet said.
“What message? What are you two talking about?”
Bellhouser ignored her question.
“We’ll coordinate this through Mr.
Farnsworth. You will report exclusively to him. Think of him as your field controller.”
Field controller, Janet thought with another mental roll of her eyes.
Just call me Bond, Janet Bond.
“Okay,” she said.
“Boss, would you please back-brief Larry Talbot?” She looked at her watch.
“It’s Friday afternoon.
I should get in touch with Mr. Kreiss ASAP, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely,” Foster said.
Janet hesitated, an image of Edwin Kreiss’s watchful face in her mind.
“You don’t think Kreiss will tumble to all this?” she asked.
“He seems pretty… perceptive.”
“Not if it’s done right,” Foster said.
“Think of it as the ‘frog in the pot’ analogy: You drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, out he comes. Put him in a pot of cold water and slowly turn up the heat? He boils to death without ever realizing he’s in trouble.”
Janet just looked at Foster. From her brief acquaintance with Edwin Kreiss, she saw a hundred things wrong with his little analogy.
“And Mr. Ransom here has some equipment to show you. Why don’t you go with him, while we sort out
