the larger truck masked his van. Then he waited.
Janet woke up at 11:00 P.M. and had a confused moment trying to remember where she was and why. The hospital was quiet, and her room was in semidarkness. Lights from the parking lot below illuminated the windows of the hospital building. She sat up carefully. She could
hear nurses talking quietly at the charge desk out in the hall. She hurt in a general sort of way, but her mind was alert. Her wrist was not as swollen, and she was able to breathe without nearly as much pain. She wondered what was going on with the arsenal case. She rolled over very carefully, found the phone, got an outside line, and put a call through to the Roanoke office.
The secretaries weren’t there, of course, but one of the agents in the fraud squad answered and told her everyone was still in the office trying to sort out the disaster over at the arsenal. There were a million questions coming down from both FBI and aTF headquarters in Washington, and everyone was pretty upset about the loss of Ken Whittaker. She told the agent that she was ready to escape from the boneyard and asked him if someone could come get her at the hospital in Blacksburg.
An hour and a half later, she carried into the federal building and went directly to Farnsworth’s office. His door was closed, but there was a group of agents, including Ben Keenan, Farnsworth’s number two, in the RAs conference room. The conference table was piled with papers, site diagrams, photos, teletype messages, and a dozen very used polystyrene coffee cups. They all stopped talking when they saw Janet, which is when she realized that she probably looked a mess.
“Janet, what are you doing here?” Keenan asked, his tone of voice belying his brusque question. Keenan was known for his people skills and was extremely well liked within the Roanoke office.
“Got tired of staring at the ceiling,” she said, coming in and clearing away some papers so she could sit down.
“And it not being my honeymoon and all.” This provoked some smiles as she sat down.
“Since I was there when it happened, I thought maybe I could help.”
Farnsworth’s door opened and the RA came out, accompanied by Marchand’s red-faced executive assistant. They stopped short when they saw Janet. Farnsworth looked like he hadn’t slept for a long time and his suit was a rumpled mess. Foster’s expression was flat. He didn’t make eye contact with anyone.
“Ransom didn’t make it,” the RA announced.
“Died an hour ago.
Never woke up.” He turned to Foster.
“That makes two agencies who are going to be mad at us now, aTF and the spooks.”
Foster nodded as he looked down at the floor. Then he said he needed to make some calls, stepped over into Keenan’s office, and shut the door.
There was a grim silence in the conference room, and then Farnsworth greeted Janet, asked how she felt, and asked her to come into his office.
He closed the door behind her and asked if she wanted some coffee. Her
brain did, but her stomach vetoed the idea. She was now beginning to think that leaving the hospital had not been her brightest idea. She sat down gingerly in one of the chairs while the RA poured what looked like used motor oil from a pitcher on his desk into a mug. The smell of the stale coffee confirmed her stomach’s opinion. He poured in a paper packet of sugar, which literally floated on top of the noxious-looking brew. He sat down heavily.
“Five years here as RA, never lost an agent,” he said quietly.
“Until today. Even if he wasn’t technically one of ours, this really sucks. Ken Whittaker was a good man. You know his wife, Katie?”
She shook her head.
“She’s devastated, of course. Kept saying, “So close, he was so close.”
Meaning close to retirement. This really sucks. And now Ransom. I liked him, too. Shit.”
“Plus the two security kids,” she said.
“I feel responsible. If I hadn’t gone out—” “No, no, that’s all wrong, Janet. You had every right to go out there, although I fault you for going alone. But there obviously was something going on at that place.”
“I guess so. But still… How’s Kreiss’s daughter?”
“She’s alive but in and out of a borderline coma. Took a head shot from flying debris. Damn wall nearly crushed her. She was saved by the fact that she was up by the front door. Hasn’t said anything beyond those few words when they pulled her out of that nitro building: Washington and hydrogen bomb. Intriguing combination, huh?”
She nodded distractedly.
“So, where do we stand?” she asked.
“What’s aTF found out?”
Farnsworth shook his head, then ran his fingers through his graying hair.
“Their people on the scene called out one of their own national response teams, after the nuke guys backed out. Even though the casualty count wasn’t that big, it was one hell of an explosion. The NRT is still there.”
“I’m not familiar with that,” she said. Her stomach growled and she realized she hadn’t eaten for a long time.
“It’s an aTF special team. An NRT has chemists, forensic experts like you, arson and bomb dogs, post blast and fire-origin experts, intel people, special vehicles and mobile labs, all that good shit.”
“The NEST people find anything radioactive?”
“Nope, just radon. I still can’t figure out what that was all about.
But nothing to indicate it was nuclear, although the bang sure seemed big enough.”
“And?” she prompted. She realized she probably sounded impertinent, but Farnsworth was too tired to notice.
“And they haven’t called it yet. Blast origin point in the power plant.
Eureka. But type of explosive? They can’t find it. Some nonstructural physical evidence scattered around the site, but almost every piece of it can be traced back to equipment that was probably installed inside the power plant. Boiler tubes, plant machinery, turbine parts. Otherwise, stone-cold mystery right now. They haven’t found even a trace of the security kid who went down there to unlock the place.”
Janet shifted in her chair and exhaled, causing Farnsworth to look more closely at her.
“You all right? How about a glass of water?”
She nodded and said she thought she needed something in her stomach.
He went out and came back with a cup of water from the jug cooler and a stale-looking doughnut.
“We sent some people in chem-suits down into that tunnel system and found a couple of things, the most interesting of which was evidence of somebody shooting a large-caliber weapon down there. That ring any bells?”
She shook her head, but not too hard. The doughnut helped, and she sipped the cold water.
“The fumes in the tunnels tested to residue of nitric acid. One of the tanks out behind the power plant appeared to be the source of that, although it was, like all the others, flattened.”
“No cars?”
“No cars,” he said with a fleeting smile.
“But the divers reported that the whole thing appears to dump to an even larger underground cavern system. They pulled a guy in there from the Army who used to be what they called a ‘plant rep’ when the civilian company operated the place. He confirmed that the tunnel was called the Ditch. It was used when something went wrong with a chemical batch and they had to dump it quick to prevent an explosion. Said where it went after going into the Ditch was something no one ever knew, or at least he didn’t know.”
“Wonderful,” she murmured.
“And what about Kreiss?”
“Well,” Farnsworth said, trying to get the sugar to dissolve in his coffee, “that’s getting interesting. Foster and Bellhouser may have something there. First of all, no one can locate Kreiss—at least we
can’t and the local law can’t. I don’t know if Foster and company have asked for more help from the Agency. That may be hard after losing Ransom.”
“Might he have been there—when that place blew up?”
“Willson’s troops talked to some of Kreiss’s neighbors, of sorts. Bunch of hillbillies living down the road from
