would end. There was no physical evidence of his clandestine activities in the house, because he had never done anything illegal there.
He looked around the darkened house from the inner kitchen door. He had lived there for over thirty years, twenty-four of them with Holly, until the cancer took her. William’s room down the main hall, untouched since the disaster in Texas. Jared and Kenny’s room across the hall. While raising William, Browne had risen from ordinary chemical engineer to chief engineer of the Ramsey Arsenal. His life had gone as he’d planned it:
Hard work, a persevering attitude toward marriage, regular churchgoing, and a good wife had taken him to the number-two management position at the arsenal. And then it had begun to come apart: William getting that girl pregnant, their aborted marriage, Holly’s cancer, and then a major blow, when the government unexpectedly closed down the arsenal. Holly had worked for seven years at the arsenal in one of the mercury-recovery plants, and Browne was pretty sure that’s where her cancer had come from. There had been three other women who had died of cancer from that unit, but the government scientists all proclaimed that there was no possible connection. Once the plant shut down, the government didn’t want to discuss the problem anymore. They’d even cheated him out of part of his pension, and then, adding insult to injury, made him oversee putting the plant into mothballs in case the Army ever required it again.
He missed Holly as much as he missed William. His wife had been a strong, taciturn woman who never complained, even when the cancer rose in her. When he found out that Holly was going to be taken from him, he had consoled himself with the knowledge that he would still have his son and his grandsons, but then William had gone off to Waco. And always, behind most of his troubles, was the government. Unfeeling, devoid of conscience, overweening in its power over the lives of the individuals it smashed flat without a second glance. He might have saved William if it hadn’t been for everything else that happened, courtesy of the government. He had once been appalled at what those
sick boys had done in Oklahoma City, but now–now he could well understand the impetus to strike back. There was retribution due, by God.
He sighed and stepped out the back door, shutting it and locking it, knowing he’d probably never see the house again. It had all begun so well, and ended in pieces. Holly was dead’ Jared was dead, the arsenal was dead, and Kenny… well, Kenny had truly never lived and never would. He was a virtual ward of the state, working a menial job at the state mental hospital in Greensboro and living there as well in one of the supervised homes.
Browne almost wished he could go down there and tell Kenny that his brother was gone, but Kenny would only smile sadly, accepting this bit of news with the same equanimity as he would the fact that it had begun to rain outside.
He went to the garage. The pickup truck was pointed nose out, so he simply got in, started it up, and drove out into the street, turning right to get to Highway 460 and then make his way out to the interstate. His own life was over. Now he would see how well he could finish it, and the bastards who’d cremated his son.
Kreiss sprinted for the telephone repair van when he heard the truck’s engine start up in the garage. He had been twenty feet away from the back of the garage when McGarand had come out of the house and started up his truck. Once in the van, he blasted straight down the alley, knocking over two trash cans as he turned right and then right again and gunned it back the way he had come in on Canton Street. He ran a stop sign three blocks up. There was no sign of McGarand’s truck ahead, and he almost thought he’d lost him, when he saw the lights of a major traffic intersection a half a mile or so ahead. By the time he got to it, the light was still red and he saw McGarand’s F-250 stopped in the left-turn lane. The truck was sporting a cap over the bed, so this was probably not a trip to the grocery store. He slowed down dramatically to allow a few cars to get ahead of him into the left-turn lane, then closed it up in time to make the turn behind McGarand. He followed the pickup truck for eight miles, until it turned onto the hamburger-alley strip that signaled the approach of the 1-81 interchange. Traffic was heavy, but he was having no trouble following the pickup.
This was a complication he hadn’t planned on, and when the F-250 turned onto 1-81, he had a decision to make. Follow him? Or break it off and go back out to the arsenal to search some more for Lynn? But of
course, that wouldn’t work, not after that big explosion there this afternoon.
The place would be crawling with feds. He didn’t want to think about the possibility that Lynn might have been caught up in all that.
He’d seen a television news report when he got home, a film clip taken from an airplane or a helicopter in the late-afternoon sun, showing the bare concrete floors of what had been the power plant. Big bomb, that, he thought. Really big bomb. The surrounding buildings had all been damaged in some fashion, with the two process buildings nearest the power plant semi flattened He’d checked those buildings, all those buildings, and had found everything locked tight and no signs of recent entry.
Should I go back to the guy’s house? he wondered. The pickup was three cars ahead of him, its big taillights distinctive enough that he didn’t have to stay too close. The traffic out on 1-81 was heavy, as usual, with wall-to- wall semis jockeying for that vital extra hundred feet of progress down the congested roadway. Where the hell was McGarand going? And then turn signals—the pickup was getting off.
Kreiss slowed down, slipped between two semis, and then turned off, going as slowly as he could so as not to come right up on the pickup at the end of the ramp. He almost did that anyway, but McGarand’s vehicle turned right and then right again into the front parking lot of the big TA truck stop. Kreiss waited for as long as he could at the ramp, but then headlights flared behind him and he had to move. He went right, then into the truck-stop plaza, which was brightly lighted. He caught sight of McGarand’s truck going behind the main building, through the big rig fueling lanes, and disappearing out into the back parking lot, which was filled with dozens of semis idling in the smoky darkness. He pulled the repair van up to the auto-fuel lanes and turned out the lights. The lanes weren’t filled to the point that there were cars waiting, so he got out, locked it, and hurried around the corner of the restaurant and store building, dodging incoming vehicles and weary-looking drivers filing in and out of the building. The whole area was brightly illuminated by sodium vapor lights coming from several towers, and the air was filled with the smell of diesel exhaust from the trucks parked out behind the building.
He paused when he got to the back: There was no sign of the pickup truck.
Had McGarand spotted him and ditched him? He didn’t think so. So what was he doing back here among all the semis? He watched the occasional truck driver walking back out of the restaurant building, cradling a thermos of coffee or some carryout gut bomb from the choke and puke
inside. There were three women hanging around a set of phone booths over on the other side of the plaza, kids, really, standing out in their cutoff shorts and halter tops, eyeing the rigs as they rumbled back out through the plaza. AIDS victims in the making, he thought. But where had the pickup gone? He wasn’t thrilled with the thought of walking out into that dense pack of trucks out there, where the only lights were the running lights of the tractor- trailers. There was a high chain-link fence around the whole area, so that truck had to be out there somewhere. Doing what?
And then he squatted down behind a Dumpster by the back of the building as McGarand’s truck reappeared from between two semis in the farthest parking lane, lights out now, going slow and headed back into the main plaza area. The truck went right by the Dumpster, and Kreiss got a good look. Yes, the same guy who’d opened up on him at the power plant.
Which wasn’t there anymore. Courtesy of this guy? Had they been running a bomb factory in that power plant? An illegal bomb factory at an ammunition plant—what a concept. He’d told Carter that Foster and Bellhouser had been blowing smoke; maybe not.
He moved to the corner of the building as the pickup truck cruised out into the open area, did a careful 180, and pulled into a parking place right in front of the restaurant. He watched from around the corner as McGarand went into the restaurant, carrying a thermos, just like any other trucker. Just as soon as the bearded man had gone in, Kreiss hurried back to the telephone company van and checked the fuel gauge. Half-full.
He put Jared’s telephone-company credit card in, cranked up the fuel pump, and filled the tank, keeping an eye on the front door while trying to keep the van between him and the building. Would McGarand see the telephone repair van? Recognize it maybe? He finished fueling and re stowed the hose. There were cars waiting now, so he couldn’t stay there.
He got in, started up, and drove out toward the front area of the plaza, looking for a place to park where he wouldn’t stand out quite so obviously.
Then he saw an Appalachian Power truck parked all by itself in one corner of the plaza, and he drove over there, turned around, backed in, and shut down. He could see the main entrance door and McGarand’s pickup, while
