She stared at the bleeding Bronco.
“Fuck me,” she said quietly.
“Now you talkin’ like a veteran,” Ransom said approvingly.
They headed back toward the building. Janet still felt that there was something wrong with the logic of what Bellhouser and Foster had asked her to do, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
“So where does a retired FBI agent get his hands on a fifty-caliber rifle?” she asked.
“Probably got it when he was with Agency CE,” Ransom said.
“You gotta remember: Kreiss worked with the sweepers, and those are some serious spooks. Those guys can draw on any kind of equipment the CS-that’s our Clandestine Services—have in the toy store, along with DOD’s toy store. Word is, those dudes go out and get some of their own
shit, ‘cause the operatin’ cash is, shall we say, loosely controlled? When it’s time for them to retire, go raise plutonium somewhere, they turn in the issue stuff, but there’s no tellin’ what kinda shit they got stashed, or where. Ain’t nobody asks ‘em, either.”
She stopped at the door, took a deep breath, and blew it out though pursed lips.
“Maybe I need to go back and talk to Farnsworth. I’m definitely not qualified to do this by myself.”
“Who says you be by yourself, Special Agent? You gonna have some top line backup while you on this little vacation.”
She looked at him. He was smiling broadly.
“You?” she said.
“One and only.”
They went through the door and she stopped again.
“And you just walked up the hill to talk to him?”
“Couldn’t dance, Special Agent. Might as well go see what the man wants, makin’ all that noise. Besides, I didn’t like the sounds Gerald was makin’.”
She shook her head.
“He okay now?”
They started up the stairs.
“I believe Gerald’s had a small change of heart,” Ransom said.
“Brother Gerald has decided he’s going into another line of work. He was in the computer-research end of the CS before he came to the retrieval shop. I believe the Barrett influenced his career thinkin’ this morning. And maybe the lions, too. Hard to say which.”
“Gerald sounds intelligent,” she said.
“So, what was significant about the message you were supposed to deliver to Kreiss?”
He looked down at her for a moment.
“I can’t tell you that,” he said.
“Because I don’t know what it means. What I can say is that it involves something’ way above your pay grade and mine. Now, let’s go look at some of my surveillance toys.”
Kreiss spent the rest of the day checking his property’s perimeter, retrieving his truck, and then cleaning and re stashing the Barrett. Micah Wall wandered up about midmorning to inquire if everything was all right at the Kreiss homestead. His eyes widened when he saw the Barrett.
“Been some years since I heard me a fifty-cal,” he said, looking around for bodies.
“Korea, I believe it was. They didn’t look like that.”
“Unmistakable, aren’t they?” Kreiss said.
Micah eyed the bandage on Kreiss’s neck but said nothing about it.
“Fifty works real good on Chicoms, specially when they bunch up. We gonna have buzzards? You need a mass grave dug or anything?”
Kreiss laughed.
“No, this was just a little domestic dispute. I think we got it all sorted out. For the moment anyway.”
“Hate to hear you do a big domestic dispute, neighbor. Oh, and my dogs was inquirin’ about them lions?”
“The wonders of modern science, Micah. Just a little something to make people move out of their prepared positions.”
“Uh-huh,” Micah said, nodding thoughtfully.
“Well, like I’ve said before, you need me or any of my kinfolk to take a walk in the woods now and then, you just holler. Any word on Lynn?”
“I appreciate the offer, Micah. And no, nothing on Lynn from the authorities. I may have found out a couple of things, though.” He told Micah about finding Lynn’s hat inside the Ramsey Arsenal, and that he thought there was something going on in there.
“What kinda something, you reckon?”
“I’m not sure. My guess is a meth lab, maybe some other kind of heavy drug thing. Something that made those two guys willing to shoot first and talk about it later. I did find out who one of them is, however. We’re going to have a talk.”
“You think maybe them kids went in there and ran into the wrong kinda folks?”
Kreiss nodded, sighing.
“It’s possible, Micah. And that’s not a happy thought.”
“You want, I got some kinfolk who can go git this fella, bring him back to our place. We can put him in the caves for a while. Give him time to reflect. Then you can have that there talk in private, you want.”
“I appreciate it, Micah, but I better do this one myself. There are some folks who are interested in the fact that I’m stepping out at night, and they’re not people you want to meet.”
“Like them two boys I seen goin’ down the road this mornin’?”
Kreiss nodded his head. Micah thought about that for a moment.
“They revenuers?”
“Not exactly. They are federal. I used to work with one of them.
There’s some bad history here. I want to focus on finding Lynn, and I don’t want them drawn into it.”
Wall nailed a cricket with a shot of chaw.
“Well, you know where we at,” he said.
“You git into a fix, you call, hear?”
Kreiss thanked him again and Micah trudged back into the forest, keeping a wary eye out for lions. Kreiss made a mental note that maybe he would take Micah up on his offer. Micah’s clan had been walking
these hills for decades. If Bambi and the Bureau had made some kind of deal with the Agency, there might be more watchers. The Wall clan might actually have some fun with them. Maybe he should lend them some lions, or maybe the tape of an adult male grizzly at full power, complete with noises of crashing through the brush and snapping limbs; that was a beauty for woods and cave work, especially if dogs were in pursuit. Their handlers might know it was a tape, but the dogs would inevitably leave the scene, sometimes with the handlers’ arms attached to their leashes.
He had checked the house out for bugs and other electronic vermin, sanitized his phone line, and disconnected the house electrical power at the breaker box to scan the house wiring for devices that drew power by induction. His computer was strictly a communications device; as far as he was concerned, it was eternally un secure Everything that went out on the Net was an open book anyway, so he didn’t bother to check it other than to do an occasional cookie scan. Once he was reasonably sure the place was clean, he checked his truck. There, his scanner found two bugs right away. They were so easy, he knew there had to be a third, which he finally found mounted on the inside of the right-rear wheel, where it drew inductive power from axle rotation via magnets fixed to the frame. If the wheel wasn’t moving, there was no power signal to be detected by the scanner. Clever. He found it by getting on his back and looking.
Then he took a long, hot shower, dressed the cuts on his neck, ate a sandwich, and lay down for a long nap. He would redo the house sweep in twenty-four hours to pick up any delayed-action devices. He almost hoped they’d left one, because a bug you knew about was a wonderful way to feed back disinformation.
He was awakened at 3:30 by the phone. It was the FBI lady, Janet Carter.
