The guards all appeared to recognize the man, and people had let him through quickly. The sergeant told him what was going down, including what Kreiss had said about a possible bomb in the building.
“Not in the building,” Kreiss said.
“Your building is the bomb. I believe that truck up there is pumping some kind of explosive vapor into your vent system. While we stand here and talk.”
“Who are you?” the man asked. He spoke with the authority of someone who was used to getting immediate answers.
“My name is Edwin Kreiss, and I’m a civilian. Who are you?”
“I’m Lionel Kroner, deputy associate director. I’ve heard your name.”
“Perhaps in connection with an explosion investigation down in Ramsey, in southwest Virginia. The power plant? The hydrogen bomb?”
Kroner’s eyes widened at the mention of a hydrogen bomb. Some of the people who heard Kreiss use that term were obviously shocked, and a murmur swept the crowd.
“Yes, we sent an NRT on that,” Kroner said.
“Your name came up in a briefing. What was your involvement?”
“Nothing direct, but I know about it. And the guy who did that is probably trying to duplicate what happened down there in your building here. While we stand here and talk.”
The sergeant, who had been on the radio some more, said he had asked Central to get the lab people on the fourth floor to turn on an explosimeter to see if there was anything present in the building.
“Nobody smells anything,” he added.
“They won’t, if he’s using hydrogen,” Kreiss said.
“It’s odorless, tasteless, and completely invisible. Mr. Kroner, do you have a public-address system in this building?”
“Yes, Central does.”
“Can you get everyone to open their windows?”
Kroner blinked but then shook his head.
“We can’t,” he said.
“None of the windows in this building open.”
“Then clear the building. Now. And tell people to run like hell once they’re out of the building, because there’s going to be lots of flying glass.
And if you won’t clear the building, I’m going to leave.”
“Bulls’!” the sergeant said. The other guards still had their weapons drawn; they spread out a little, looking to their sergeant for instructions.
“Sarge, Sarge!” the black guard said urgently, pointing to his radio.
“Lab says there’s an explosive vapor in the building. They recommend an immediate evacuation.”
“You going to pop a cap in here, Sergeant?” Kreiss asked.
“Make a little flame?”
He turned to leave. Some of the guards went into shooting stance, but Kroner waved them down. The sergeant started to protest, but Kroner ordered him to be quiet and get him a microphone patch into the building’s PA system.
“Mr. Kreiss,” he called, as Kreiss neared the doors. He stopped and turned around.
“Thanks for the warning,” Kroner said.
“But we will see you later. That’s a promise.”
“If any of you are still alive,” Kreiss said, which shut everyone up for the moment.
Kreiss nodded at him and stepped through the door. See me later? Not
if I can help it, he thought. It was all he could do not to run like hell.
Behind him, he heard Kroner’s voice identifying himself on the building’s PA system and ordering an immediate evacuation of the building, instructing people to walk to the nearest stairs and to do nothing—repeat, nothing—that might generate a spark. Kreiss hurried back into the parking garage to retrieve his van. When he reached the street level, the turbaned attendant was out on the sidewalk, trying to figure out what was happening next door. Kreiss told him there was a bomb in the aTF building.
The attendant looked at Kreiss, back at the aTF building, and then took off smartly down the street. Kreiss swore, opened his door, and reached into the attendant’s booth to trip the gate.
It took him ten minutes in morning traffic to get three blocks away from the aTF building, at which time he heard the first sirens. Three Metro cop cars with their blue lights flashing came racing past him into Massachusetts Avenue to block off the side streets. He pulled over toward the curb to let them go by. Pedestrians on the sidewalk paused to stare at all the cop cars, wondering if the president was coming.
Fucking McGarand, Kreiss thought as he tried to pull back out into traffic, but now everything was stopped. He had damn near pulled it off, and had done so even after Carter had sent in a very specific warning.
What the hell was it about Washington bureaucrats that made them think they knew everything, that no one could tell them a single goddamn thing?
He felt somebody or something bang hard on the back windows of the van, and he looked in the mirror to see if a vehicle had rear-ended his van.
Instead, he saw an enormous orange fireball rising with a shuddering roar into the sky over the buildings behind him. The glare was strong enough to be seen through the windows of office buildings that were between him and the blast. Looking a lot like an atomic cloud, the fireball turned to a boiling red color and then was enveloped by a bolus of oily black smoke pulsing up into the early-morning sky over downtown. He heard a woman on the sidewalk scream right beside the van, and moments later, debris began to rain down on the sidewalks and the streets. He put the van in gear and pulled onto the sidewalk as people ran for cover into nearby buildings. Ignoring the sudden hail of metal and concrete bits rattling on the roof of the van, he drove down the sidewalk until he reached the next corner, then pulled past the huddled pedestrians and accelerated down toward the river.
Correction, correction, he thought. Not damn near. Score one for the
clan McGarand. And he knew that as soon as the dust settled, there would be a host of feds hunting one Edwin Kreiss. A regular fugitive hat trick, he thought. He would now have the aTF, FBI, and the fucking Agency on his trail. Good job, Kreiss.
He turned right when he got to Constitution and headed toward the Memorial Bridge and northern Virginia. He would have to stay off the interstates once he got clear of the Washington area. He probably had twenty, thirty minutes to get out of town, and then someone would remember the speeding van on the sidewalk. The bigger problem would come when he got close to Blacksburg, because there were only so many ways into the foothills west of the town. He thanked God that Micah had Lynn, because Misty would undoubtedly take another shot, and very soon.
Behind him, the big black cloud had tipped over in the morning air, casting a pall over the entire downtown area and blocking out the rising sun.
Browne McGarand felt a wave of deep satisfaction when he heard the monstrous thump and turned to see the black cloud erupting over the federal district. He had walked down Massachusetts Avenue after starting the hydrogen flow, trying to remain inconspicuous until he was able to cross Constitution Avenue and walk out onto the Mall, the wide expanse of trees and lawns fronting the Capitol grounds. Even at that hour of the morning, there was a surprising number of people out and about: joggers, power-walkers, and a tai chi exercise group of elderly people striking exotic attitudes out on the damp grass. He had rested on a park bench for a while, thinking back to 1993 and the similarly dramatic scenes created by the government’s immolation of David Koresh and Browne’s son, William, at Waco. Both the aTF and the FBI had conspired to cover up the truth of what had happened there, just as they had at Ruby Ridge.
Murder will out, he thought, and the government had flat out murdered those deluded people. Then they lied about it, falsified testimony, concealed evidence, and otherwise acted more like Hitler’s SS than agents of a democracy. Goddamned people burned babies for the crime of being different and delusional, while the president of the United States perjured himself with impunity and released bomb-throwing foreign terrorists for his wife’s political advantage.
Watching the mushroom cloud, he wished he could have managed two bombs, because the FBI had blood on
