face had some color in it, and the monitors on the shelf above her head were busier than they had been the last time. Janet had talked to the attending physician, who told her that Lynn had started talking—babbling might be a better word for it—at 3:30 that morning. The collective opinion was that she would be coming around soon. Janet asked how soon was soon. The collective opinion was that it was anybody’s guess. The marvels of modern medicine, Janet thought.
As she watched the girl wrestle with the web of unconsciousness, Janet was struggling with her own dilemma. In her mind, she was coming down on the side of a real human-made explosion out there at the arsenal, if only because of the timing. That thing had gone off when a bunch of people had come in there and started unlocking doors. If there had been a pool of explosive vapors down there in that tunnel complex, her own little adventure should have set it off, especially when that car went scraping along the concrete. Then there were the two civilians, the McGarands, one a possible homicide victim, whose truck tires had traces of arsenal mud on them, and the other a retired chemical explosives engineer. And not just any engineer, but the senior engineer at the Ramsey Arsenal. Both of them were blood relations to a guy who had been incinerated at the Waco holocaust.
And now the surviving McGarand has just flat-assed disappeared, with Kreiss apparently hot on his tail. And all three federal agencies involved, two of which had been responsible for what happened at Waco, were busy going head down, tail up in the bureaucratic ostrich position.
Oh, and now some shark-eyed dolly with a half-inch-thick karate callus on her hands wanted Janet to relay a love note to Edwin Kreiss.
She looked up. Lynn Kreiss was staring at her, trying to speak. Janet got up and went over to the bed. The girl’s lips seemed to be dry, so Janet poured her a glass of water.
“I’m Special Agent Janet Carter,” she said softly.
“I’m with the FBI. Are you thirsty?”
The girl nodded and Janet helped her sip some water. Lynn cleared her throat and then asked Janet what time it was.
Janet told her what day it was, what had happened out at the arsenal, and how long she’d been out of touch here in the hospital. The girl
drank some more water and then Janet said she was going to summon the nurses but that she needed to talk to Lynn after that, if she was able.
“Where’s my father?” Lynn asked.
“We don’t know,” Janet said after a second’s hesitation.
“He wasn’t involved in the explosion. Personally, I think he’s up in Washington chasing down the guy who kidnapped you.”
“Guys,” Lynn said. Her voice was gaining strength, and she sat up a little in the bed.
“There were two of them, a young guy and an older guy, although I only got a quick look at them, when my friends hit the leg traps.”
“Leg traps?”
The girl explained what had happened to her two friends. She reiterated that she had seen only the two men, one much older than the other.
Both guys had black beards and looked like mountain men.
“Yes, that’s what we have,” Janet said.
“The younger guy’s name was Jared McGarand; he’s dead. The older guy is his grandfather, Browne McGarand, and he’s missing.” She told Lynn what had happened to Jared, then asked her what had happened to the boys’ remains. Lynn didn’t know, other than that the water had covered them up. She closed her eyes for a moment, and Janet gave her a minute to rest.
“The younger one—you said he’s dead?”
“Yes,” Janet said.
“An apparent homicide.” She didn’t feel it was the time to discuss her father’s possible involvement.
“Good riddance,” Lynn said.
“That guy was a serious creep.”
“Lynn, when the medics picked you up, you were sort of babbling something about a hydrogen bomb and Washington.”
“I was?”
“Yes. It didn’t make much sense, but it got everybody’s attention.”
Lynn frowned for a moment, and then her face cleared.
“Oh, yes, I do remember. The other one, the older one, told me he was taking a hydrogen bomb to Washington. I said, Yeah, right, like he could just make a hydrogen bomb with some plans off the Web. He said it wasn’t what I thought.”
Oh shit, Janet thought.
“Any indication of what he was going to do with this bomb?”
Lynn frowned again, trying to remember.
“No,” she said.
“Wait—yes.
He said he was going after what he called ‘a legitimate target.”
” Janet studied the girl. There was a toughness there, despite her
current physical frailty. Definitely her father’s daughter.
“Did he sound like a nutcase?”
“Yes and no. He wasn’t raving. He was calm, sort of matter-of-fact. But fanatical, maybe—remember, I could only hear him. He said he’d made a hydrogen bomb, that he was taking it to Washington. Like it was a routine deal, something he did every day. That made it kinda scary, you know?”
Janet nodded, writing it all down in her notebook.
“I wonder why he would tell you,” she said.
“He implied I was supposed to be insurance, a hostage or something, if things went wrong. He told me to get ready to go, but then he never came back. The next thing that happened was that the building fell in on me.
But that was much later.”
Something was playing in the back of Janet’s mind. What had that older aTF guy said—that this had been a gas explosion?
“When he said hydrogen bomb, and you challenged that, and he said it wasn’t what you thought—I wonder if he meant a hydrogen gas bomb?”
Lynn shrugged and then winced. Janet knew that feeling. She stepped out into the hallway and summoned the nurse. Then there was a crowd and Janet backed out into the hall to let the docs do their thing. She went down the hall to the waiting room, which was empty. She fished out her cell phone but then hesitated. She needed to call her immediate supervisor, Larry Talbot, to tell him what had happened to the two boys. There were parents to be notified, and, of course, remains to be found. But there was a bigger question here: That Agency woman wanted her to page some kind of a warning threat to Kreiss. But here was the daughter confirming that Browne McGarand was up to something that did involve a bomb and Washington, D.C. She should report that immediately, but would anybody listen? Her bosses seemed to be so caught up in protecting their rice bowls right now that there might be nobody listening.
She called Talbot, got his voice mail, and told him what Lynn had said about the missing kids. Then she put a call into Farnsworth’s office. The secretary said he was not available. She asked for Keenan, but he was with Farnsworth. Where was the RA? Out, the secretary said helpfully. Feeling like a child, Janet almost hung up, but then she gave the secretary the news about Lynn Kreiss being awake, and that she, Janet, needed to talk to the RA urgently, as in, Now would be nice. The secretary was unimpressed, but she said she would pass it along. Janet gave her the number for her cell phone.
She went back down to I.C.U to talk to Lynn some more, but the doctors were busy and the nurses forbidding. It was now almost three o’clock.
She stood there in the busy corridor, thinking, while a stream of hospital traffic parted indifferently around her, as if she were an island. In three hours, she was supposed to page Kreiss for his wake-up call. If he still had the pager, and if he had it turned on. She could just hear him saying, Now what, Special Agent? In that weary voice
