Wearin’ some of those nifty black ninja threads, right? … Thought so. My guess is that he found this guy out there at the arsenal.”
“If he did, and followed him back here, it was because he figured this guy might know what happened to his daughter. He’d want to talk to him, not snuff him.”
“Unless he wouldn’t talk. Not the first guy who wouldn’t talk to Edwin Kreiss had him an accident of some kind.”
“You think this was an accident?” she asked.
“Yeah. The kind that happens when folks resist a peace officer in the performance of his sworn duties, you know?”
“But how do you know it’s Kreiss who did this?”
“Because our tracker tag is on that piece-a-shit pickup truck over there, maybe?”
“Who the hell knows? He could have discovered that while he was shopping at the local Piggly Wiggly and put it on the nearest vehicle. I mean, based on evidence, that’s as reasonable an explanation as all this supposition you’re coming up with. Those security people weren’t alarmed about anything, and I sure as hell didn’t see any signs of anything going on out there.”
“From your tunnel perspective,” he said. He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with both hands.
“Look,” she said.
“You think there’s been a murder here. Okay, homicide is serious shit. I want to go back and update my boss, if only because I’m going to have to explain the loss of that car anyway. You come with me. I’ll tell my sad tale: you tell yours. Let’s see what Farnsworth thinks.
Let him fold in your supervisors. If he wants to tell local law, I’m sure he’ll give you guys a chance to cobble up a story to keep your precious Agency out of the picture. That’s the right way to go here. You know that.”
“Tell him today, Sunday.”
“He’s spoiled a couple of mine.”
“And in the meantime, where the hell is Kreiss?”
“Who cares, as long as he’s out looking for his daughter. Hell, he might find her. But I think all you guys are wrong about this arsenal bomb thing.
That place is just a ghost town with a street-maintenance problem.”
Kreiss awoke at dawn on Sunday to the sounds of a single mockingbird rousing the forest from atop a telephone pole. He had to think for a
moment to remember where he was and why. His muscles were stiff and sore from his exertions down in that tunnel. He had come in from the direction of the rail spur rather than the main entrance because of what Carter had said about the security people. He’d climbed the rail gates and bedded down in one of the explosives filling sheds three blocks away from the main street.
He slipped out of his crawl suit and performed morning ablutions with a wet rag. Then he reversed the suit, exposing a tan-and-green camouflage color scheme to replace the all-black night-ops coloration. He reset the packs on his chest and back, put away the hood in favor of a camo watch cap, grabbed his staff, and headed for the back alleys behind the complex of larger buildings.
If he was correct about the vehicle noises last night, the second man had come and gone without entering the arsenal. Kreiss was now counting on him to show up this morning, because this was when the second man would expect Jared to show up. Since Jared would not be showing up anywhere ever again, the second man would have to make a decision: go to Jared’s place to find out why, or come into the arsenal to do whatever they had been doing here. Kreiss planned to listen for sounds of a vehicle and ambush the second man. If no vehicle showed up, he would initiate a thorough door-to-door search. In the meantime, he needed to find a good spot to lay up.
He walked quietly down a side street between two large concrete buildings. The sun wasn’t up yet, but there was plenty of light. As usual, there were no birds or other animals stirring in the main complex. He stopped when he got to the main street. To his right, going up the hill, were the two rows of large buildings. To his left were two more large buildings, an open space of road and rail lines, and then the big power plant building at the end of the street. The big hole out in the street where Carter had lost her bureau car was still there. He didn’t relish her prospects for a happy and productive Monday morning. Whatever that tunnel complex was all about, he thought, it must dip down at a much steeper angle than the street. He checked his watch: It was still about forty-five minutes until actual sunrise. The air was still, and he could hear the occasional hum of a car way out on Route 11. He ought to be able to hear any vehicle that approached the arsenal perimeter. He decided to look around for a few minutes before setting up.
He walked down toward the power plant. It looked to be about five stories high, with one main stack attached to the back side. There
were two huge combustion exhaust ducts slanting into the base of the stack, which indicated at least two boilers inside. The turbo generator hall, half the size of the main building, was on the right side, as evidenced by a fenced bank of transformers and high-tension cables that spread out into the complex. There appeared to be skylights at the very top of the boiler hall, but otherwise no windows. There was an admin building of some kind on the left side. Between the admin building and the boiler hall were four very large garage doors, one of which had a rail spur leading under it.
There was a single man-sized door to the right of the garage doors, and he tried the handle, but it was locked. The metal garage doors had a row of one-foot-square wire-mesh-reinforced windows at head height, and Kreiss checked them, trying to see in. He could see nothing through most of them because of all the dust and grime, but he was surprised to see through the final one that there was a truck parked inside. It was a tanker truck of some kind. The cab was not as big as a semi, but bigger than a pickup truck, and a green-and-white tank was built onto the body of the truck. Other than that, he couldn’t make out any more details. He wondered why a truck would still be here, since the other buildings had all been stripped down when the plant was closed. Probably wouldn’t start when they closed the place and they’d just left it. Typical Army solution.
He walked all the way around the power plant, noting the four huge pipes rising out of the ground that brought water from somewhere to cool the condensers under the generating hall. There was probably an impoundment up on that creek somewhere. There were some steel doors at the back of the plant, but they were windowless and also locked. The stack was easily three hundred feet high, with a line of rusting steel rungs leading all the way to the top. He stopped to listen, and he thought he heard a mechanical noise of some kind, but it was very faint. It was probably far away. Behind the plant building was a tank farm. There were two large fuel-oil tanks, with a rail spur running between them and a pump manifold house at one end. A third, medium-sized tank was labeled boiler feed water, a fourth potable water. Built into a fenced enclosure were two somewhat smaller tanks, each encased in concrete and plastered with danger signs warning of acid. One tank was labeled HNO” the other H2SO4. Nitric acid and sulfuric acid, Kreiss realized. Why would these tanks be back here? he wondered. Because the pumps were in the power plant?
He continued around the building, sizing it up as a hiding place for a prisoner and then dismissing it: The rooms in the plant would be too
big to provide an effective containment place. He came back around to the front of the plant and looked back up the street. Carter’s crash hole was about three blocks up, just past the first two large buildings. The street appeared to disappear up the hill into a tunnel of overhead pipes and their support frames. He had a sudden feeling that his mission was hopeless:
there were too many buildings, too many hiding places out here. No matter what that guy Jared had said, all this place offered was the silence of the tomb.
There was a sound behind him and he whirled around. A tall, black bearded man was standing in the man- sized doorway of the power plant, holding a large revolver down at his side. The man had violent dark eyes and a face out of a Civil War photograph. They stared at each other for a fraction of a second, and then the man raised the pistol and fired from a distance of thirty feet.
Kreiss actually felt the bullet go past his head even as the stunning boom of the Ruger hit his ears, but he was already moving, sideways and then sprinting up the street, opening the distance with some broken-field running, knowing that the big .44 became almost useless as the range opened. He zigged close to the corner of the first building and felt, rather than heard, a blast of concrete above his head. He jinked left, using the stick to
