The generator would run out of fuel in a little while, but there was now no more need for electrical power. Double-loaded like that, those retorts would generate hydrogen for hours, gradually filling the interior of the power plant with an increasingly explosive mixture of air and hydrogen.
When the feds came knocking, there ought to be at least one smoker.
That’s all it would take.
He walked back up the street to the hole, knelt down, poked the .44 through the grid of pipes, and emptied it into the tunnel again. The noise down there must be terrific, he thought with satisfaction. And, hell, he might have gotten lucky. Then he went back to the truck and drove it up the hill to the tank farm behind the power plant. Leaving it running, he got out and went to the big valve-manifold station by the acid tanks. He searched around until he found a crow’s-foot, a four-foot-long metal bar with three rake like studs that just fit inside the rim of a big valve wheel and allowed a man to apply the full leverage of his body to turning the wheel. He closed the small valve that had supplied nitric acid to the reservoir bottles in the power plant’s water-testing room. From this elevation, the acid would dump into the Ditch above the hole in the street. The other two valves, leading to the main explosive- manufacturing buildings, were already closed. He then opened the much larger dump valve marked emergency— DITCH. He heard a rumble in an eight-inch-pipe that disappeared into the ground ten feet from the tank. There was probably twenty thousand gallons of the acid left in the tank, which was now going to rain down into the Ditch, onto the intruder and the remains of the security guards. He considered waiting to see if the guy would pop up out of the street, but he imagined he could almost hear cops at the front gate.
Every instinct was telling him to get the hell out of there. He got back in the truck and drove it out behind the power plant to the road that led back to the bunker farm and the arsenal’s rear gate.
“Okay, so what the hell’s been going on around here?” Farnsworth growled when he sat down at the head of the conference table. It was 11:20, and he was dressed in his church clothes. He was visibly angry.
Ransom and Janet sat on opposite sides of the table near Farnsworth, while two squad supervisors sat down at the other end. They, too, did not look pleased to have been brought in on a Sunday morning. A black triangular teleconferencing speaker sat in the middle of the table, nearest Farnsworth . After listening to Janet’s preliminary report, Farnsworth had set up a conference call with Foster at his home in McLean, Virginia, and Foster was now on the line.
Janet began by recounting her meeting with Kreiss in Blacksburg, leaving out the part where Kreiss had expressed suspicion about what Bellhouser and Foster were really up to. Then she detailed her expedition to the Ramsey Arsenal. When she was finished, there was an embarrassed silence at the table. The two squad supervisors were looking studiously at their notebooks, undoubtedly very glad she did not work for them.
“All right,” Foster said from the speaker.
“Let me get this straight:
Kreiss essentially told you he wasn’t interested in any cooperative efforts, and that he already knew what Site R was?”
“That’s right,” Janet said. She had also left out his threat to put heads on pikes.
“Which means he was the headless horseman, then,” Farnsworth said.
“I’d expect so,” Janet said.
“How did he react to the theory that there was a bomb cell operating at the arsenal?” Foster asked.
“He thought it unlikely,” Janet said, casting a quick glance at Ransom.
She’d forgotten she’d told him what Kreiss had said. Ransom was looking straight ahead and saying nothing.
“And the next time you saw him, he was pulling you out of some tunnel?”
“That’s correct,” she said.
“And he said nothing about what he was doing there? Or how he happened to stumble on the fact that you were trapped down in the tunnel?”
She hesitated a half beat.
“He said he was looking for his daughter.
Which is what he said he would be doing. At our meeting in Blacksburg.”
“How did he know you were in the tunnel?”
“He heard the noise I was making. I was trying to position a pipe to climb out. He was up on the street above, came to see what was making the noise.”
“Did he think it was his daughter?”
Janet started to answer but then stopped. What had Kreiss been thinking when he heard the noises?
Random leaned forward to address the speaker.
“This is Ransom,” he said.
“I think Kreiss was looking for his daughter, but there’s another angle here.” He went on to describe bugging Kreiss’s truck, and his discovery of what he suspected was a dead body under a trailer, and the fact that his bug had ended up on the vehicle belonging to one Jared McGarand, whom he further suspected was the corpse under the trailer.
“So Kreiss had been there?” Foster asked.
“That what you’re saying?”
“That’s correct.” Janet noticed that Ransom’s street speech was long gone. Enter the professional, she thought. Maybe gofer, maybe more.
“Local law into this trailer business yet?” Jim Willson asked. He ran the surveillance squad and was a senior special agent with nearly twenty years’ experience in the Bureau. Willson had a reputation for being all business, all the time.
“We backed out without doing any notifying,” Ransom said.
“
“We’?” Farnsworth said. Janet saw Willson whisper something to Paul Porter, the other supervisor.
“I took Special Agent Carter here out to the trailer this morning,” Ransom said.
“Why?” Farnsworth asked in a tone of voice that Janet recognized as portending a bureaucratic turf fight. I knew this wouldn’t work, she thought.
Ransom sat back in his chair.
“Because it looked to me like a possible homicide. Domestic homicide isn’t our area, is it? Putting electronic surveillance on Kreiss, on the other hand, was done at the Bureau’s request.
If Kreiss offed some guy, I figured it was time to get the Bureau into it, which is why we’re having this meeting, I think.”
Farnsworth looked like he was about to lose his temper.
“With all due respect, boss,” Willson said, “what the fuck is going on here?”
“Okay, everybody,” Foster chimed in from the speakerphone.
“Let’s get back on track here. I’m hearing that Edwin Kreiss is operational. I’m hearing that there’s evidence he’s been at the scene of a possible homicide, and that he’s made at least one illegal intrusion onto a federal reservation, which used to be an explosives-manufacturing plant. Correct so far?”
No one answered, so Janet spoke up.
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Then may I suggest that our theory might be correct after all? That this Jared Me-whatever might in fact be connected to a bomb-making network we’re all looking for.”
“I disagree,” Janet said immediately.
“Kreiss is looking for his daughter.
If there’s a connection between Kreiss and the body under the trailer,
it has to do with his missing daughter. Kreiss knows nothing about a bomb network. The only reason he went into the arsenal is that a single, somewhat questionable witness told him that’s where his daughter might—and I emphasize the word might—be going. There’s no evidence of a bomb making cell at the arsenal.”
“All right, all right,” Farnsworth said.
