“They, the feds, already know it was me in that car. They may or may not know who Lynn was.” She stopped, and then it penetrated—what the woman had said about Kreiss.
“Oh, hell” she said.
“She said they had Kreiss. Up in Washington. She said the FBI had him and was taking him to Langley. Where she’s from.”
Micah obviously didn’t know what she meant by Langley, but then the phone rang again.
“Grand Central Station,” Micah muttered, reaching for it. He said his name, then smiled.
“She’s right here.” He handed her the phone. This time, it was Kreiss.
“Where are you?” she said in a rush.
“I’m in a pay phone. I don’t have much time. Where’s Lynn?”
“She’s here and we’re safe, for the moment anyway.” She saw Micah shaking his head slowly. He was warning her not to tell him his daughter had been shot. She nodded.
“A lot’s happened, but we’re safe. But that woman just called, said the Bureau had you.”
“They had me, and then I had them. Look, I’ve got to get back to my vehicle, and then I’m coming down there. I don’t know where McGarand is. He and his truck have disappeared.”
“That woman said she was no longer interested in Lynn because the FBI was bringing you in—to Langley. When she finds out—” “Yeah, that’s why I’m leaving here. Soon.”
“And there’s no sign that McGarand is going to bomb something up there? Like Bureau headquarters?”
“I looked. I looked for his truck at all the Washington truck terminals.
Then I went over into town and looked around the Hoover Building, and then I went up to the aTF headquarters building. There was no sign of the propane truck.”
Janet gnawed her lip. The warnings. All for nothing, apparently.
“Let me talk to Micah,” Kreiss said.
Janet handed the phone back to Micah, who listened for a long minute.
“I can do that,” he said.
“Keep your powder dry.” Then he hung up.
“What?
“Janet asked.
“We need to clear on outta here,” Micah said, getting up.
“First, we need to git you and the girl in there some warm clothes.”
“Can she be moved?”
“Seem’ that’s just a flesh wound, yes. Even if it wasn’t, old Ed says we gotta move. Now. Come with me.”
Kreiss had the cab let him out at an all-night cafe one block up from Constitution Avenue, and four blocks away from the parking garage where he’d put the van. It was 5:45 when a yawning waitress brought him black coffee and a stale-looking Danish. He had taken a corner booth back from the door and was yawning himself. Outside, the first headlights of Washington’s morning rush hour were starting to appear, and he could see even more vehicles down on Constitution. It didn’t surprise him: Washington’s traffic was so bad that many office workers went to work in the early morning darkness just to avoid it. By 7:30 most mornings, a large majority of government workers were already in the office, stalking the coffee pot. His plan was to eat his fat pill, get some caffeine in him, and then go retrieve the rental van. Given the fact of rush hour, his best plan was to sleep in the van until the traffic crush was over, then hit the road south for Blacksburg. He would simply take the van, and leave his pickup truck at the motel. If they were looking for him, the cash-rental van would buy him an extra day, whereas his own truck might be picked up pretty quick.
He thought about driving down by the Hoover Building and waving to the cameras. Then he thought about Misty getting the word that he’d escaped again. Micah and his boys would provide as much safety as anyone could, especially on their home ground on the slopes and crags of Pearl’s Mountain. Misty and her associates were pretty damned lethal in a city, but Micah might be a good match for them in the Appalachian woods, especially once he got them to one of the caves. He decided to get going, before those same two cops came in for morning coffee and busted him again.
He paid up and went out onto the sidewalk. There were no pedestrians, but definitely a lot more traffic. He walked up three blocks to Massachusetts Avenue and then over one to the parking garage. There was a line of cars turning in to both the street-level entrance and the ramp, probably desk-bound revenuers from the ATE building right next door. A bearded and turbaned Sikh carrying a rolled-up Washington Post and a paper cup of coffee was unlocking the ticket booth as Kreiss walked into the garage, but the man ignored him. Kreiss climbed the stairs and came out on the level just beneath the roof. His van was parked in the back right corner, mostly out of habit. His level wasn’t fall yet, but it was getting that way. It was 6:50; in another thirty
minutes, the Sikh would be putting a garage FULL sign out in front. He unlocked the door, climbed in, and set the locks again. The rear seat folded down, so he was able to create a good-enough sleeping pad back there. The left windows of his van were right up against the outside wall, so incoming vehicles could park only on his right side. He draped a jacket up over that side’s window and stretched out. The first light of dawn was coming through the apertures between the concrete support columns, and he could see people moving around in the aTF building right next door. Their offices looked like every other government hive: computer cubes, plants in corners, conference rooms, pacifying pastel dividers, vision-impairing fluorescent lights, and all the coat-and-tie drones, moving slow until their morning caffeine fix took hold. He had spent many, many hours in similar circumstances between operational missions, and he did not miss it.
He was just closing his eyes when he caught sight of something odd in the space of daylight next to the window. It looked like a hose, a big black reinforced rubber hose, and it was just barely moving from side to side in some invisible updraft. He closed his eyes anyway, then opened them again. What the hell was a hose doing there? He stared at it again, trying to see if he had imagined movement, but it did move, as if it were dangling down from the deck above him. He sat up and looked at it again. There was something familiar about it, but he couldn’t place it. Just then a vehicle came by in front of the van, stopped, and then laboriously backed in alongside his vehicle. He lay back down instinctively, but the jacket blocked the view of the people getting out. Obviously a car pool; the men were finishing up an argument about the Washington Redskins, or Deadskins, as one of the men called them. They extracted briefcases, closed and locked the doors, and then disappeared toward the exit stairs. Kreiss sat back up again when they were clear. His eyes were stinging and he was dead tired, but there was something about that hose that bothered him.
He slid into the front seat, looked around at the nearly full parking deck, and then got out on the driver’s side. The hose came straight down from above, within easy hand reach across the low concrete wall. He reached out and touched it, surprised at how cold it was. There was a sheen of moisture on the rubber, and a shiny metal collar just out of reach had a definite rime of white frost on it. When he stretched out to look up, he saw that the hose went up one more level to the roof deck, then disappeared.
He looked down. The hose went straight down, then across a small, still, dark alley, and disappeared behind what looked like a small utility building at the back of the alley. The utility building
appeared to be connected to the aTF building. As he listened, he heard the low whistling noise of vent fans rising from the alley.
He leaned back into the garage and looked across the space between the aTF building and the garage. He could see right into a bank of offices. He watched office workers arrive in their cubes, stash lunch bags in office refrigerators, and stand around with cups of coffee, talking to their cell mates. He saw one middle-aged woman come into what was obviously an executive corner office, turn on the lights, close the door, and sit down in her chair, where she proceeded to hike up her skirt and make a major adjustment to her panty hose. None of them so much as glanced out their windows, even though it was now getting light all around. Great situational awareness, he thought. He saw no more vehicles coming up into his parking level, so he went over to the exit stairs and climbed up to the roof. Once out on the roof, he looked around and then remembered where he had seen that hose before: on the green-and-white propane truck driven by Browne McGarand, which was now parked in the corner of the roof deck.
He didn’t bother even going over there. He could see that there was no one in the truck, and he knew instinctively that whatever had been in that truck was probably now inside that office building next door. He ran
