Tenebrae factae sunt. Darkness has fallen. She felt a tingle run up her backbone. Yeah, that would do it for me, she thought. My director and your director. She closed her eyes to think. Something didn’t quite add up here: The people originally interested in Kreiss had been Foster, of the Bureau, and Bellhouser, of the Justice Department. FBI counterintelligence and the deputy AG, to be specific. And now the Agency. Why would the FBI director be supporting that ugly little axis?
She wanted to go talk to Farnsworth again, but he was acting as if he had been stepped on from above and was now in the “yes, sir, no, sir, whatever you say, sir” mode most beloved of the Bureau when it was circling its own bureaucratic wagons. What had Farnsworth told her earlier?
They’d let Kreiss run free. They didn’t know there was a bomb threat, but if Kreiss solved that problem, fine. And if he created bigger
problems while he was doing it, there’d be no stink on them. He wasn’t their asset.
He was the Justice Department’s asset. So what did that make Janet?
Farnsworth’s secretary stepped into the conference room.
“Agent Carter?” she said.
“The Blacksburg hospital is calling? About a Lynn Kreiss? Can you take it? I can’t find the boss, and I know you were involved with that case.”
Janet said sure and went into Farnsworth’s outer office to take the call.
The nurse calling reported that they thought Lynn Kreiss might be coming around. Their log said that the FBI people wanted to be notified when she surfaced. At this very moment, Janet wasn’t sure what her current assignment was, but she said she’d be right over. She went back upstairs to collect her sidearm and purse, grab her sandwich, and then go down to the garage.
There was a street-level sandwich shop diagonally across the street from the office building at 650 Massachusetts Avenue. Browne bought a cup of coffee and a newspaper and sat down at one of the cafe tables out on the street itself. It was a warmish day, although nothing like what was to come in the horrific Washington summertime. There was a steady flow of government workers walking by, some stopping in for coffee or to get a ready-made sandwich to take to the office for lunch.
He studied the aTF headquarters building surreptitiously while pretending to read his newspaper. There did not appear to be any new security cameras on the building or its neighbors, although he could not see what might have been added to the building right above him. He reminded himself to check that when he got up. The attack depended on two factors. The first was that there was a parking garage right next door to his target, separated from the aTF building by a narrow alley. The garage had an outside ramp that led directly up to its roof-level deck.
More importantly, that ramp, which was on the side of the garage away from the aTF building, did not appear to be in the field of view of any of the cameras guarding the aTF’s headquarters. It was also just wide enough to accommodate the propane truck.
The second factor had to do with the aTF building’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system. Like those of most office buildings, it was a recirculating system. A small amount of outside air was taken in and passed over the cooling coils of the chiller plant housed in a small HVAC building at the back of the alley between the garage and the aTF building.
It was then circulated throughout the building via the duct system, but instead of being exhausted from the building, it was recooled and
redistributed again and again, so as to maximize the efficiency of the air-conditioning plant. His plan was simple: Very early tomorrow morning, he would drive the propane truck up the ramp to the top deck of that garage and park it next to the outer wall on the alley side of the building. The aTF headquarters was ten stories high, with a wall of windows overlooking the top deck of the garage. But no cameras looked at the garage; he and Jared had both checked. Instead, a single security camera, mounted on the front corner of that air-conditioning building, looked into the alley, toward the street.
The propane truck came equipped with a four-inch diameter wire reinforced 150-foot-long hose, whose fittings he had modified to handle H the hydrogen gas. He would park the truck, wait until nearly dawn, and then unreel the heavy hose down into the alley behind the air-conditioning building, a distance of perhaps forty, forty-five feet. A big truck like that in the alley would draw instant attention from the security monitoring office, assuming they were awake at the switch at that hour of the morning. But the hose would come down in the predawn darkness behind the security camera, and so would he.
Once on the ground, he would spread a large plastic tarp over one of the HVAC building’s two air intakes to block it off. He would then drape a second tarp, with a receiver fitting sewn into it, over the remaining air intake screen. The screens were eight feet high and six feet wide. At that hour, the building’s environmental-management system would be running the intake fans at very low speed. They wouldn’t speed up the fans until the heat of the day called for more cooling. He had taken rough volumetric measurements of the building by pacing off its length and width on the sidewalk and then multiplying that number by one hundred. Then he had computed the heating ventilation-conditioning volume using the Civil Engineer’s Handbook. The propane truck was designed to hold eight thousand gallons of liquid propane. Now, filled with pure hydrogen gas under nearly four hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, it held more than enough hydrogen to fill the aTF building, using the building’s own recycling ventilation system, in about an hour. What made the building most vulnerable to this kind of attack was the fact that none of its windows could be opened. In fact, he had almost twice the hydrogen he needed to achieve an explosive vapor mixture, but he knew there would be small leaks here and there. No manmade gas system was perfect.
He was going to treat the aTF the same way they and their allies at the FBI had treated the people at Mount Carmel. He would start the
odorless, invisible hydrogen injection at around 6:00 A.M. Sometime in the next 60 to 90 minutes, the building would achieve an explosive mixture of air and hydrogen, courtesy of its own closed-cycle ventilation system. Because it was the start of the day, the intake fans would be running slowly, and the recycling air-handler system would keep almost all the air inside the building to achieve maximum cooling. Sometime after that, as the building filled with aTF agents and their bosses, someone, somewhere, would slip into the men’s room to sneak a cigarette. Or fumble with an aging light switch. Or turn on an entire floor’s worth of fluorescent light fixtures all at once. Or summon the elevator and mash the button several times, making those copper contacts up in the elevator shaft open and close, open and close. He had been a chemist and an explosives engineer for decades. The industrial- safety manuals were filled with stories of how the most mundane objects were capable of producing a static spark: a doorknob in winter, the switch on a desk fan, panty hose on a dry winter day, the keyboard of an electric typewriter, the ringer in a telephone.
In that silent, invisibly deadly atmosphere, one spark would reproduce what had happened down at Ramsey. Only this time, the building wasn’t made of reinforced concrete: It was wall-to-wall windows.
“Some more coffee, sir?” a pleasant young woman asked, pausing at his table with a Silex coffee pitcher.
“Thanks, I’m all done,” he said, smiling up at her through his dark glasses. His heart was actually thumping with excitement. Today, after months of labor at the arsenal, he was finally here. This afternoon, he would find a motel near the airport to crash and get some sleep. Early in the morning, he would take a taxi to the Pentagon, then go retrieve the truck. There was security-camera surveillance of the Pentagon building itself, but he had seen not one single camera on the old power station building. Then he would drive the truck into the city; he even had an official-looking dispatch ticket, lifted when Jared had appropriated the truck. And sometime early tomorrow morning, all those criminal bastards in that building were going to get a taste of what it must have been like at Waco when they burned William along with those Branch Davidians to death, while their agents stood around the perimeter, drinking coffee and making crispy-critter jokes.
He hoped there were cameras on that building. They were going to get the shot of a lifetime.
Forty-five minutes later, Janet was sitting in Lynn Kreiss’s hospital room.
A uniformed sheriff’s deputy sat outside the door, watching the television
in the empty room across the hall. Lynn was still hooked up to an IV, but she actually looked better than the last time Janet had seen her. It’s amazing what some sleep can do for you, Janet thought. The girl was tossing and turning a bit in the bed, and making small noises in the back of her throat, as if she were having a bad dream. Her
