thing like this. And it would be a really cruel lie, wouldn’t it, especially if she does die and he never gets a chance to see her?”
Farnsworth still didn’t say anything.
“Let me tell him what the hell is going on. I’ll even go meet him at the hospital. These bureaucratic games with the Agency, aTF, those executive lizards from Justice—who knows what that’s all about? The kid in the hospital is real. And she’s somebody’s daughter.”
“Shit,” Farnsworth said.
“I’ve been up too long. This whole thing. Ken Whittaker was a good friend—” “Sir, you don’t have to tell Foster and company anything. Let me tell Kreiss the truth, let him see his daughter, and then let’s work this bomb problem. By the book this time. Our book, not these other assholes’ book.”
“Okay, Janet,” Farnsworth said with a sigh.
“You’re probably right. I guess if this McGarand’s headed into North Carolina, it gives us some time to straighten this thing out. Okay. We’ll patch the call in as soon as Kreiss tries again.”
Janet felt a surge of victory.
“I’ll be waiting,” she said.
Kreiss stood by his daughter’s hospital bed and tried to control himself.
She looks so thin, he thought. Lynn was an athlete and normally radiated good health and fitness. Now her face was gaunt and slightly jaundiced.
He held her hand under the blanket and just watched her breathe.
She wasn’t on a ventilator, but there was an IV drip going into her left wrist. Her face was bruised, and her normally vibrant hair lay limp on her head like a skullcap. A bank of machines kept score on her vital signs above the bed. Coma, the docs said. As opposed to profound vegetative state. The “good” kind of coma—if there was such a thing—where a badly
abused body checks out for awhile to work on healing itself without having to deal with the outside world. The room lighting was subdued and there was a quiet music stream coming from somewhere.
“She was conscious at the explosion site?” he asked.
“I didn’t see her,” Janet said.
“I was being scraped off the concrete myself.” Kreiss eyed her, probably noticing for the first time her own puffy face and stiff posture.
“Apparently, she spoke to whoever found her. They got ‘hydrogen bomb’ and “Washington’ out other, but that was all.”
“Hydrogen bomb and Washington. Sounds good to me. We’re at just about the right distance, down here in Blacksburg, and the prevailing winds are on our side.”
“Washington is taking a somewhat different view,” she said.
“But this whole bomb theory is pretty screwed up. One moment, we’re all running around at top end because we think some bad guys are on the way, as we speak, to bring an H-bomb to Fun City. The next, we’re standing down in the regroup mode. The Bureau is fucking around with the aTF, and the Justice Department is fucking around with the Bureau, and ABC is tucking around with DEF. You know.”
Kreiss nodded.
“Palace games,” he muttered. He let go of Lynn’s hand and smoothed the hair on her forehead.
“Our divorce was unnecessary,” he said finally.
“Helen got scared of what I was doing while I was with the Agency. She knew more than she should have, and she just wanted out. I could understand that. Accept it, even. But I never wanted to lose Lynn.”
“Did your wife poison the well? Set Lynn against you?”
“Not deliberately, no,” he said.
“This wasn’t a spiteful separation, adultery, or anything like that. Which made it almost worse, because Helen was so reasonable. She just wanted away from me and what I was doing.
Like most men, I thought the career, what I was doing, the things I was learning, were terribly important. I let her go with my pride intact.”
“Mine was different,” she said, surprising herself.
“My husband turned out to be a no-load. He was sort of a career ectopic pregnancy—he was never going to produce anything, but he was determined to stay in the general area of the academic womb. I think that’s one of the reasons I joined the Bureau about then; I wanted to be around real men.”
‘“Real men,”” Kreiss said.
“Inspector Erskine, where are you?”
They both smiled.
“Lynn had to believe that everything her mother was afraid of was true,” he said, smoothing her hair again.
“Kids can sense bullshit, and Helen was genuinely afraid.”
“And you and Lynn were reconciled after the plane crash?”
“Just before, actually.” He told her about Lynn’s unexpected visitation.
“And then this mess.” He sighed.
“You said that the McGarands were probably responsible for the bomb. And that they had been holding Lynn the whole time? At the arsenal?”
Janet suggested they go outside. He seemed reluctant to leave his daughter, but there was obviously nothing he could do for her that wasn’t already being done. He followed Janet down the hall, past the I.C.U nurses’ station. Janet smiled at the nurses and the lone orderly, but they were all staring at Kreiss, whose gaunt face and hulking shape stood out among all the white-coated hospital personnel. He looked as out of place among all the gleaming cleanliness and order of the I.C.U as a bear fresh out of the woods. It had taken a lot of FBI badge waving and friendly persuasion to get them to let Kreiss in to see his daughter. Kreiss had called back fifteen minutes after she had persuaded Farnsworth to stop and regroup, and she had told him immediately that they had found Lynn, that she was alive and in the Montgomery County Hospital. She had asked him where he was, but he wouldn’t tell her. Then she had suggested that she meet him at the hospital, and he had said, “one hour,” and hung up.
Farnsworth had been listening. He called her back immediately to say he would send along some backup, just until they knew what they were really dealing with. She had asked that they stay well out of sight, because she was going to be on thin ice when Kreiss showed up. The RA agreed and they set up a surveillance support zone outside the hospital. She would park her car somewhere where it was clearly visible in the lot. The backup agents would set up around that car in two unmarked vehicles.
There was no time to equip her with a portable radio, so Farnsworth said that if Kreiss put her under duress in the car, she was to do something with lights. When she went into the hospital with him, there would be two agents inside in hospital orderly clothes who would keep her in sight at all times. Her signal that everything was all right would be to open her purse and touch up her makeup.
They reached the main elevator bank and waited for a down car. An orderly carrying a bag of what looked like bed linens joined them at the door. They got in and punched the ground-floor button. The orderly punched the basement button. She had told Kreiss the bare outlines of the McGarands’ suspected involvement in the explosion at the arsenal, but he had offered no response to that. He had wanted to see his daughter;
any discussion of the rest of it could wait.
No one spoke until they got to the lobby and the door opened. Janet
stepped out and Kreiss followed, turning at the last minute to tell the orderly that his shoulder rig was showing. As the elevator doors began closing in front of the surprised agent, Janet made an “I’m sorry about that” face, but Kreiss was already headed for the front door and the parking lot. She caught up with him when he stopped under the marquee at the entrance and looked around at the nearly empty parking lot.
“I have things to do,” he said as he scanned the lot.
“You have backup out there?”
“Of course,” she said.
“I don’t want them following me,” he said.
“They’re out there to protect me,” she said.
