was not as dead as he had expected, with several zombie-eyed truckers wandering rubber-legged around the brightly lighted store and half the tables in the cafe occupied. He went to use the bathroom and then sat down in a booth and ordered coffee and a bowl of hot cereal. Two Highway Patrol troopers came into the cafe and sat down at a table near his booth. Browne felt a tingle of apprehension, but then he relaxed—there should be no reason for anyone to be hunting him. They were sitting close enough that he could hear their shoulder mikes muttering coded calls, although the weary-faced cops weren’t paying any attention to anything but their coffee.
He knew the federal authorities must be elbow-deep in the wreckage of the arsenal by now. They would think they’d broken up a major bomb making cell of antigovernment terrorists. They would probably never solve the mystery of jared being under his trailer. Browne felt there were three possibilities: Jared got drunk and went under the trailer for some reason and the jack collapsed; an irate and cuckolded husband who was playing by mountain rules; or the hard-looking man who had been snooping around in the arsenal. He was betting on the second theory. His own conscience was clear on that score: He had warned Jared often enough about his philandering and his boozing. They had both been careful not to have anything at home that could tie them to the arsenal.
That concrete power plant would have acted like an auto engine’s cylinder when the hydrogen ignited: a momentary compression, and then a massive power stroke and vaporization of the building. The only device that could indicate what he had been doing in there was the retort, and it had been made mostly of glass. He had put all the spent cinders of copper-nitrite into the boiler fireboxes, where they would look like ordinary slag. The two pumps would have been smashed to pieces, so they should look like just another piece of wrecked machinery in the power plant. The aTF would be all over the place, but he was betting they were stumped. A hydrogen explosion left no trace other than water vapor, which would dissipate almost immediately. A nice clean explosive.
One of the cops at the next table was talking into his radio, repeating
a license plate number. As Browne listened, the number suddenly registered.
The cop was writing down his pickup’s plate number.
He turned away from the cops slightly, not wanting to be seen eavesdropping.
The cop had written down the number and was now back to talking to his partner. But it had been his pickup number; he was sure of it. Why? Who wanted him stopped out on the interstate? The Blacksburg cops should not have been all that interested that he was going to Greensboro.
He tried to think it through, but he was just too tired. He had parked his pickup truck between the TA truck stop and that motel, out in no-man’s-land. The state cops should be looking for it out on the road, somewhere between Blacksburg and the North Carolina line. But he was now 150 miles north of that, thirty miles from the interchange with 1-66, which would take him down into Washington. But you’re not in your pickup truck, he told himself. So—so what? He sighed. He was more tired than he’d thought. He rubbed his eyes and signaled the waitress that he needed his thermos filled.
The cops got up and went to the cashier’s stand. He watched them go, as did the other truckers in the room. He might not be thinking all that clearly, but one thing was certain: The only person who had ever seen him at the arsenal was that fire-eyed big guy. Suppose he had been a fed of some kind? They had had signs of an intruder for a couple of days. Suppose it had been the same guy all along, and this guy had been a fed and had somehow survived the nitric-acid dump into the Ditch. If the feds tied the bomb at the arsenal to him and jared, then his target in Washington might have been alerted. If so, that was going to make his plan very, very difficult to carry out. But maybe not: If he could count on one thing, it was the enduring hubris of federal law-enforcement agencies. He could just as easily see them concluding that some bad guys had been screwing around with explosives and there had been an accident. The key was that there was nothing to tie him to Washington. Jared had known he was going to take a bomb to Washington. Jared may have been a skirt-chaser and a boozer, but the boy could usually keep a secret.
He got up and went to the cashier’s counter to pay up. The cops had gone back out into the night and their interstate patrol. He stepped outside into the cool air and told himself to relax. There was simply no way they would see this coming.
At 7:30 on Monday morning, Farnsworth called an urgent all-hands meeting in the Roanoke office. Janet had come back to the office by
herself after meeting Kreiss at the hospital. Keenan and his agents had gone ha ring after Kreiss in the night. She had told Keenan about the claymores. Keenan shrugged that off, but the other agents were giving one another uneasy looks. She had given them two chances of finding Kreiss: slim and none. Farnsworth had gone home by the time she got back to the office, so she slept on the couch in the upstairs conference room. She was awakened by agents coming down the hall, talking about the hurry-up meeting, and just had time to wash her face, comb her hair, and find some coffee before going down to the next floor to the big conference room.
When she got there, the room was pretty much full. It was easy to tell which of the agents had been out all night and which ones were coming in fresh. The older man who had been with the aTF squad out at the arsenal was sitting next to Farnsworth. This time, there was no sign of Foster.
Being a worker bee, Janet stood by the back wall while the supervisory agents took chairs around the table. Her ribs still hurt, but the headache was gone and she could hear much better than yesterday. Farnsworth looked like he’d aged considerably.
“Okay, people,” he said, “Let’s get going.” The room quieted right down. He introduced the aTF senior special agent as Walker Travers, who stood up and walked to the briefer’s podium.
“I don’t have a formal slide show or anything,” Travers said.
“But I’ve got the preliminary results of our NRT’s work out at the Ramsey Arsenal.”
“What was it?” Keenan asked. He hadn’t shaved and was obviously frustrated by his search for Kreiss, which had turned up empty.
“It was what’s known in the trade as a BFB,” Travers said with a perfectly straight face. Janet got it about one second before he explained it: a big fucking bomb. There were some chuckles around the room. Janet noticed that neither Keenan nor Farnsworth joined in. The loss of Ken Whittaker was still weighing heavily.
“We don’t know what it was,” Travers went on.
“We’ve had our EGIS people on it; they’re from our National Laboratory Center. EGIS uses high-speed gas chromatography and chemiluminescent detection systems to identify explosives residue. The weird thing we’re finding with this one is that there isn’t any. Residue, I mean. And it’s complicated by the fact that this was an explosives-manufacturing facility, so once we spread out the search beyond the actual power plant, of course we got the world’s supply of residue.”
“But nothing in the explosion focus?” Keenan asked. He had done a
tour with aTF five years ago and knew something of their technical procedures.
“No, sir,” Travers said.
“The remains of machinery—you know, pumps, pipes, wiring, control instrumentation. Emphasis on the word remains.
The plans say there was a boiler-water-testing laboratory next to the control room, and we’ve raised chemical residues in that area, but nothing that points to anything. It was a very hot and powerful blast.”
“With no readily identifiable residue,” Farnsworth said, shaking his head.
“Which tells a tale, actually,” Travers said.
“From looking at the wreckage, we see a reinforced-concrete building that was leveled in four directions damn near instantaneously, and it released a wave front that flattened everything nearby. Only one substance does that.”
“Which is?”
“A gas,” Travers said.
“An explosive gas. Ever seen a building where somebody left a gas stove on with the pilot light turned off? Or a hot water heater? Then someone comes home and lights a cigarette?” There were nods of recognition around the room.
“A hydrocarbon-based gas, such as propane, so-called producer gas, or natural gas builds up in a structure until the mixture of gas and air becomes an explosive vapor, just waiting for ignition. It doesn’t take as much as you might think, depending on the hydrocarbon involved. When it does let go, it creates an instantaneous overpressure on every square inch of the structure’s interior. Unlike, say, a truck bomb, which punches a wave front at a building, an internal vapor explosion exerts a huge force on every element of the building from inside. Remember your math:
