“Definitely spooky. I think I’m supposed to be scared now.”
“Better watch your ass, Lanny. I’ve heard that Mr. Kreiss here was responsible for a guy shooting his wife and his kids and then himself. He must be really persuasive. That was before the Bureau shit-canned you, right, Mr. Kreiss?”
Kreiss smiled at him but said nothing.
“Damn, there he goes again, Lanny. Won’t talk to me. I think I’ve hurt his feelings. Of course, here he is, in the local pokey, picked up for loitering in downtown Washington. What do you suppose he was looking for, Lanny? A white guy walking the streets at midnight in the District? Looking for some female companionship, maybe? Or maybe some sympathetic male companionship? Is that it, Mr. Kreiss? All those years of playing games with those Agency weirdos, maybe you got a little bent?”
Kreiss relaxed in his chair and looked past Johnstone as if he didn’t exist. They had either planned their little act in advance in some effort to provoke him or they were pissed off at having to come over here at all, just because a routine name check had triggered the federal want and detain order. Or both. But so far, they weren’t talking about a bomb.
Apparently, Janet’s attempt to warn them about a bomb threat had gone right into the bureaucratic equivalent of the Grand Canyon. He looked at his wrist, then remembered they’d taken his watch.
“Got somewhere to go, Mr. Kreiss?”
“Am I being charged?”
“Nope. You’re being held. As a material witness to a homicide in Virginia.
But before you go back down to Blacksburg, we’ve been informed that the commissars out in Langley want to have a word.”
Shit, shit, shit, Kreiss thought while keeping a studiously indifferent expression on his face. He had managed to evade the best sweeper in the business, and now he had handed himself over to them on a loitering beef.
Johnstone was looking at his watch.
“Anyway, now you’re going to come with us, Mr. Kreiss. First we’re going to escort you out to Langley, where some people in their Counterespionage Division want to talk to you. Then you’ll be brought back to our Washington field office for further transport down to Roanoke. Cuff him, Lanny.”
Kreiss sighed and stood up, putting his two hands out in front of him.
He was much bigger than the agent called Lanny, and he almost enjoyed the sudden wary look Lanny had in his eyes when he approached Kreiss to put plastic handcuffs on his wrists.
“He looked at me again, Sam,” Lanny said, trying to keep it going, but Kreiss could hear the note of fear in Lanny’s voice. The man was physically afraid of him. That was good. They’d already made their first mistake, cuffing his hands in front of him. Now, as long as they had a car and not a van, and as long as they put him in the backseat
and they both rode in front, he was as good as free. He’d do it on the G.W. Parkway, with all those lovely cliffs. He looked down at the floor, putting a despondent expression on his face. He let his shoulders slump and his head hang down a little. Defeated. Captured. Resigned to his fate. He heard Johnstone make kissing noises behind him, and both agents laughed contemptuously.
Kreiss sincerely hoped that Johnstone would drive.
Janet was afraid of missing the turn into Micah Wall’s place, but when she saw all the junked cars, rusting refrigerators, tire piles, and pallets of assorted junk on both sides of a wide dirt road, she knew she’d found it.
She turned the car into the driveway and drove through more junk up toward the lights of a long, low cabin on the hillside. Halfway up the hill, her headlights revealed a telephone pole barring the drive. She slowed and then stopped. Several figures came out of the dark, walking toward her car with rifles and shotguns in their hands. She opened the door and got out, leaving it open.
“That’s Lynn Kreiss,” she said, pointing into the car.
“I think she’s been shot. We need some help.”
“Who done it?” an authoritative voice asked from the darkness.
“A federal agent who was chasing us. I forced her off the road about a half a mile back there. But if she isn’t seriously injured, she’ll be here very soon.”
“She?” The voice sounded incredulous.
“That’s right. Please? We need to see to Lynn. She’s bleeding.”
Micah Wall materialized out of the darkness and introduced himself while three men went to the other side of the car and lifted Lynn out.
Janet told him her name, shook his hand, and then went around the front of the car. The girl groaned but did not resist when they laid her out on the ground on her uninjured side, illuminated by the wedge of light coming from the car’s interior. One of them lifted the back of Lynn’s shirt, revealing an entrance wound on the lower-right side of her back. A second man grunted and leaned forward, a long knife suddenly glistening in his hand. Before Janet could object, he probed the wound and then lifted out a spent bullet. The bleeding increased immediately, as if blood had been dammed up behind the bullet, but Janet realized that the wound was not significant. The bullet’s passage through the car’s metal body and the upholstery must have slowed it down.
“Less’n there’s another one, this ain’t too bad,” the man with the knife said. He had a full black beard and a face like a hatchet. He
pulled out a handkerchief, folded it, and pressed it against the wound. Janet hoped it was cleaner than the surroundings.
“Take her up to the house, Big John,” Wall said.
“Tommy, Marsh, y’all help him. Git some sulfa dust and a real bandage on that. Rest of us, we gotta git ready to met this lady badass, supposed to be comin’ round the mountain any minute now.”
Janet told him about the fire in the hospital, and her suspicion that the woman had started it deliberately. Micah nodded slowly, looking around at the dark woods.
“Yonder girl’s daddy, he kept some interesting company.
Why’n’t you leave your car here, go on up to the house. See to the girl. Boys’n me, we’ll wait and see what comes along.”
“Be careful,” Janet said over her shoulder as she stepped past the telephone pole.
“This woman was Edwin Kreiss’s instructor.”
“That so,” Micah muttered.
“Well, then, I wish I had me some other daddy’s lions. Or maybe that there Barrett. Spread out, boys.”
Browne McGarand awoke at just before 2:00 a.m. and sat up in the seat.
The truck’s windows were all opaque with dew. He leaned forward and hit the wiper switch for one cycle to clear the windshield, then rolled down his window. The same windows that had been showing lights before in the aTF building were still lighted, which meant that they had simply left the lights on. He reached up and picked the lens cover off the interior cabin light and took out the bulb. Then he opened the door and got out.
The temperature had dropped noticeably, and the night was now clearing.
There were no traffic sounds coming from Massachusetts Avenue below, and the remaining cars on the roof deck had fully opaque windows.
He walked to the back of the truck, stretching his knees, and then to the very back corner of the parking deck. He put his head over the low concrete wall and listened. The sound of vent fans coming from the HVAC building in the alley was much reduced. Good, he thought. They had put the system on low speed for the night. Blocking one of the intake screens wouldn’t raise any system alarms at that fan speed. He checked the time again and then went back to the truck. The hose reel on the back unrolled in the direction of the aTF building. There was a modified brass connector nozzle on the end he was going to lower. At the truck end, the hose was not connected at all, leaving it open to the atmosphere.
He began pulling hose off the reel, being very careful not to damage the modified brass connector nozzle. He hefted it over the concrete wall and let it down into the darkness. After a few minutes, the
weight of the hose began to pull itself off the reel and he had to go back to the reel and set the brake halfway to keep it from running away. When a white blaze of paint on the hose showed up, he set the reel brake all the way and then checked the hose. The gleaming brass connector was hanging just a few feet above the surface of the alley. He resumed letting it out until a second blaze of paint marked the length he needed to get the nozzle over to
