“Not to follow you.”
“That something you know, Special Agent?” he asked, looking directly at her for the first time that evening. Actually, it’s this morning, she realized.
His eyes were rimmed with fatigue, but there was a fierce determination back there, unfinished business.
“No,” she said.
“My boss sent them. They may have other orders.”
“I don’t want that,” he said, looking around again.
“What did you say about standing down? Earlier, up there in Lynn’s room.”
“Mr. Kreiss, I need to fill you in on a lot of things. Why don’t we go back inside and let me tell you—” “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said impatiently.
“I don’t want a war with the Bureau. I do want to leave here without having to take evasive measures. You know what a claymore mine is?”
She had been shown a claymore during the training for new agents at Quantico.
“Yes, of course,” she said.
“But—” “My idea of evasive measures is to strap a couple of claymores to the tailgate of my pickup truck and then get someone to chase me in a car.
Get the picture?”
She didn’t know what to say.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said again.
“I’ll tell you something vitally important about your bomb plot, and you make sure no one follows me.
Deal?”
She looked around at the parking lot. There were islands of trees between the lanes for parking, and about thirty vehicles scattered around the lot, which sloped gently down toward the main hospital building. Tall light standards illuminated the entire lot. Her car was visible, but she had no idea where the other agents were. Kreiss was waiting, staring at her.
“All right, but there’s a lot you don’t know. As in, they’ve tied you to one jared McGarand, for instance?”
He stared at her for a moment but then dismissed with a shrug what she had just said.
“Give them the all-clear signal, and then I’m going back into the hospital. Tell them I’ve gone back upstairs. I’ll take it from there.”
She still hesitated.
“Look,” he said, “I’m not armed. And like I said, I don’t want trouble with the Bureau, or with you. I’m willing to bet that your superiors weren’t going to tell me that Lynn was here, alive. I suspect that you convinced them otherwise. So I owe you. Again. Give them the signal.” His eyes were boring into hers with a commanding force. She found herself complying, opening her purse, taking out a compact, opening it so that the round mirror caught the marquee light and reflected it out into the parking lot. She pretended to touch up her nonexistent makeup.
Kreiss nodded and relaxed fractionally.
“Okay,” he said.
“Here’s my half. You said your people were all spun up about the possibility of a bomb going to Washington but that now they’re standing down, right?”
She nodded, trying to think of a way to keep him here, to get control of the situation. But this was just like their other meeting, the one at Donaldson-Brown.
“Well, here’s the thing,” he said.
“It was me driving McGarand’s truck south on I-Eighty-one, not McGarand. I believe McGarand’s gone north.” Then, before she had a chance to ask any questions, he spun on his heel and went back into the hospital. She watched him go straight back down the main hallway, until he disappeared through some double doors. She turned and hurried out to her car, where her cell phone was.
What was Kreiss trying to tell them? Farnsworth had said the state police tracked McGarand going to North Carolina.
She stopped, seeing it now. Not McGarand—McGarand’s vehicle.
Which, for some unknown reason, Kreiss had been driving. She waved her arms at the parked cars, calling in the backup agents to converge on her car. Lights came on in the parking lot as she got to the car and two Bureau vehicles slid into place on either side with a soft screech of tires.
Ben Keenan got out of one of them, pulling out his portable radio.
“Where’s Kreiss?” he asked.
“He said he was going back in to be with his daughter,” she said.
“But we need—” Keenan ignored her, and he ordered the agents standing around them to go into the hospital and apprehend Kreiss. Then he got on his portable radio and contacted the agents disguised as orderlies inside the building.
They reported that they had not seen Kreiss return to the I.C.U.
“Shit!” Keenan exclaimed. He ordered a search of the hospital building, and then he turned to Janet.
“Do you know what he’s driving? The state cops want him now, for a felony assault out at a local truck stop.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” she said.
“Kreiss was driving McGarand’s truck.”
“Wonderful. So what is it? A Ford? A Chevy? What?” And then, with a horrified look, he understood.
“The earlier sighting? That wasn’t
McGarand?”
“No, sir, it was Kreiss, driving McGarand’s vehicle.”
Keenan shook his head.
“What the rack’s with that?” he said.
“He didn’t really elaborate,” she replied.
“But it means McGarand could be halfway to anywhere by now. With a bomb.”
Kreiss drove down the street that went along the back side of the hospital parking lot. He had earlier parked McGarand’s pickup truck in front of a private residence and walked over to the hospital. Now he was going to go back out to Jared’s trailer and switch trucks yet again, leaving McGarand’s truck and retrieving his own. Then he was going to go north on 1-81 this time and hunt down that propane truck. Acting on the assumption that the Bureau had requested traffic surveillance out there, he had been careful about what he had and had not told Carter. As for what McGarand was really up to, Kreiss didn’t care. His daughter was safe. Jared was dead, and his grandfather on the move. He was going to find this bastard and crush him for what he’d done to his daughter, period. The Bureau wanted McGarand for the explosion at the arsenal;
fine. He didn’t want the Bureau getting to McGarand before he did. The good news was that the Bureau wouldn’t know anything about the propane truck. It took almost five hours to get from Blacksburg to downtown Washington, D.C.” and McGarand had a good head start on him. If at all possible, he wanted to be in Washington before they stopped looking for McGarand’s pickup truck and started looking for his.
Browne McGarand turned off the northbound lanes of 1-81 at 2:30 A.M.
and eased into a truck stop. He’d been driving for almost three hours and needed a rest break and some more coffee. It had been a long time since he had made a really long drive, especially at night. The propane tanker, thankfully, was holding up just fine. With this refueling, he could make it all the way to the final setup point in Crystal City, on the Virginia side of Washington. He wanted to be
there by dawn, and before the major Monday-morning traffic snarl coiled around the Washington Beltway. He would lay up the truck for the day and make a final reconnaissance run to the target. If the situation hadn’t changed since the last time he and jared had scoped it out, he’d make the attack tonight, before all those feds down in Roanoke put two and two together.
He parked the truck out in the back lot after fueling it and walked into the restaurant-store area. The place
