She was alive}
Janet Carter was still disappointed with herself when she got up on Saturday morning. She had dutifully called Farnsworth the night before to tell him about the bug. There had been an embarrassed silence on the line for a long moment, and then Farnsworth somewhat sheepishly admitted that he had ordered the Roanoke surveillance squad to put a locator device on her car.
“Those Agency people made me nervous,” he said.
“I’m still not a hundred percent sure what the hell they’re up to.”
“Sir, I know I’m fairly new to street work,” she said, “but somebody could have told me.”
Farnsworth ducked that one.
“I’m curious—how’d you spot it?” he had asked.
“I didn’t. I’d proposed the Donaldson-Brown Center at Virginia Tech for the meet. Kreiss saw them put it on. He was watching from his hotel room. He told me.”
“He took a room in the hotel where you did the meet?” Farnsworth said with a chuckle.
“Told you, that guy is a pro. Just forget about the locator for the time being, Janet. What did you achieve with Kreiss?”
Janet had been unwilling to admit total failure.
“He’s thinking about it, but he made no commitments. He’s focused on finding his daughter.”
“Did you get any sense of where he’s been looking?”
“Locally. He wouldn’t admit to going into the arsenal, but he already knew that was Site R. I think he’s been there.”
“Based on what evidence?”
“Based on no evidence.”
“And that was it?”
She hesitated.
“I gave him my pager. Told him if we got anything on his daughter, we might need to get a hold of him.”
“He took your pager? It’s probably in the river by now.”
“I’m not so sure. I’m telling you—he is totally focused on finding his daughter. Why not take the pager? If we get something, he’d want to hear it.”
She realized later that Farnsworth hadn’t reminded her of the obvious:
No one in the Roanoke office was looking for Kreiss’s daughter anymore.
He did tell her to keep him informed and then hung up. She had gone back down to the parking lot to the Bureau car, where she searched for and found the tracking device. It was a lot bigger than she had expected.
She’d pulled it off the frame, and then she went across the parking lot and mounted it on the RAs personal Bureau car. Then she had driven home.
Her Saturday seminar at Virginia Tech began at ten o’clock, after which she grabbed some lunch and then went back to her Bureau car. She found a gas station, where she changed into some outdoor clothes and refueled, then drove south out of Blacksburg through Christiansburg and Ramsey, until she came to the New River bridge on Route 11. From there, according to her map, it was five miles south to the arsenal entrance. She arrived at a little before 2:00 P.M.” and discovered that she could not drive directly up to the main gates of the installation because of a concrete-barrel barrier. She got back on Route 11 and spent an hour trying to drive around the arsenal’s perimeter, but she got nowhere. Then she went back to the main
entrance road, got out, and wrestled one of the barrels out of the way. She drove through, replaced the barrel, and then drove up a short hill through a stand of trees to the main gates, where she came head-to-head with a small white pickup truck that was coming through the gates.
She pulled to one side, stopped, and parked. The pickup came all the way through the gates and stopped. She got out and identified herself to the two young men in the truck, which had a logo on the door proclaiming federal SECURITY SYSTEMS. One of them had a bad case of acne, while the other sported multiple earrings on both ears and a diseased looking metal protrusion behind his lower lip. Judas Priest, she thought, this freak has pierced a tooth} She told them she wanted to make a windshield tour of the arsenal.
They examined her credentials and badge, then told her that she could not drive onto the reservation without prior authorization. She asked them to get it, and they pointed out it was a Saturday. They went back and forth like this for a few minutes, and then they compromised by letting her park outside the main gates and walk in. They would lock the front gates using the chain and combination lock, but they would give her the combination. They warned her gravely that they would change it the next time they came through. They gave her a map of the complex and told her that the industrial area was not a place she wanted to spend much time walking around in without a mask and gloves. She asked why.
“They made bombs and shit for the Army back there,” Pimples said.
“Like lots of seriously toxic chemicals, going back to World War One? As in, a long time before there was an EPA or any rules about disposal? We, like, stay in the truck. With the windows up, okay?”
“Don’t go, like, kicking up any dust,” the pierced beauty said.
“You’ve just made a tour of the entire facility?”
“Uh, no, not this time,” Pierced said, glancing sideways at Pimples.
“We did the bunkers. We did the industrial area last time.”
“We want, like, to minimize the time in that area?” Pimples said.
“That’s why we did the bunker fields.”
She solemnly thanked them for all their assistance and terrific advice.
They waited while she got her FBI windbreaker, some gloves, a flashlight, and a bottle of water out of her car and locked it up. They stared at the sidearm bolstered in her shoulder rig. Pierced made a big deal of writing down her name and badge number before they left, and she thanked them again. They waved as they left. She could hear
their radio cranking back up as they drove down the access road to the main gate. She stared after the dynamic duo for a moment. Like, if that’s security, the arsenal is, like, in trouble, man, she told herself.
Once they were out of sight, she went back and tried the combination.
She unlocked the padlock, slid one side of the big chain-link gate back on its wheels, and then brought the car through. She closed the gate but left the heavy padlock unlocked, dangling on its chain. As far as she was concerned, this was a federal reservation and she was federal law. She wasn’t about to answer to two postadolescent assholes from some podunk rent-acop organization. She put her stuff in the trunk, got back in the car, looked quickly at the map, and drove down the main road toward the industrial area.
Kreiss toyed with the idea of splicing together a voice message from jared to the other man, in which Jared would agree to meet him at the site Saturday night after all. That way, the other man would get there and wait, which would make it easier for Kreiss to take him. But then he discarded the idea: It would take some specialized equipment and a lot of time to lift Jared’s voice and words from the recorder and kludge together a workable message. He would just go out there three hours before sunset and set up in the area of the rail gate. And stay away from the steel plates in the main street of the industrial area, he reminded himself.
In the meantime, he’d learned that the second man was probably a relative.
He had looked up the name McGarand in three local phone books and found, in addition to Jared, a B. McGarand located in Blacksburg, with the same phone number intercepted by the recorder. The man had sounded much older. A grandfather? Uncle? The listing gave him an address in Blacksburg, and he toyed with the idea of going over there and starting early. But there was too much he didn’t know: Would there be family members? Children? A crowded neighborhood? He didn’t want another Millwood, which ordinarily meant that he would have to do a lot of reconnaissance. No, it made more sense to wait for the man at the remote arsenal, in the darkness after sunset. There was always a chance that B. McGarand might call Jared back to convince him to make the rendezvous, but he doubted it: The older man had sounded genuinely angry.
That left only one remaining complication: someone discovering Jared’s body under the trailer. He thought that unlikely, at least in the next twenty-four hours. The mailbox was up at the head of the dirt road,
and unless Mr. B. McGarand went out there himself, Jared would stay put until the buzzards gave him away.
He spent the early afternoon checking the perimeter of his property for any sign that the Agency people had
