to be operating within the United States.”
Lynn nodded slowly.
“I’m not so sure about that,” she said.
“When my father was working with them, he sometimes went overseas to do what he did. But he also worked here, in the States, too. It kind of depended on whom he was pursuing and what they’d done.”
“But if a wrong guy needs pursuing in the States, that’s the Bureau’s job, not the Agency’s.”
Lynn smiled.
“I think that’s why the Agency let him stay: he was technically a Bureau man, not an Agency man.”
“Ah,” Janet said.
“So if some part of an operation broached, he could flash Bureau creds and people would back off.”
“Something like that. He never gave me details of what he did, but I think that the people they went after had overstepped the bounds. A lot.
The big boys just wanted the problem taken care of, and I don’t think they really wanted to know too much about how it was taken care of.”
“You mean they’d go after some guy and just cap him?”
“I don’t think so, actually,” Lynn said.
“Dad says there are some federal prisons where they can put people into the federal corrections system and bury the file. Lewisburg, Fort Leavenworth, for instance; they have lifetime solitary-confinement facilities there. Who’s going to go up to a place like that and ask to see the dungeons?”
“The ACLU maybe?”
“The ACLU would have to know the guy existed in the first place.”
“Jesus, you make it sound like Russia.”
Lynn laughed.
“I met a Russian graduate student at Tech last year. He was in the advanced physics program. We got to talking politics—God, how those Russians love to talk politics! He laughs at the proposition that we live in a ‘free’ country. He told me to go find out how many government police there are now, compared with ten years ago.”
Janet just looked at her.
“Well, I tried. Like, do you know how big the Bureau is?”
“Well, it’s big, I know that. Ten, fifteen thousand people, maybe.”
Lynn shook her head.
“Try twenty-seven thousand employees in the FBI. Ten years ago, it was
sixteen thousand. I tried to find out how many federal government police there are, the total number, and do you know I couldn’t really do it? Maybe you could.”
“There are more cops because there is more crime, and a hundred new mutations of crime every day. Internet crime. Serial killers. Hannibal the Cannibal types. Chat rooms where pedophiles buy and sell children for snuff flicks. Sixty-two thousand bombing incidents in the past five years.”
“Yeah, but look at that Waco thing: Sure, those people were a doomsday cult, and they had some weird people there. Koresh and all his ‘wives’;
all of them waiting around for Judgment Day, praying for it to come, probably, the end of the millennium, the Second Coming. But for that, the government burned them alive? Jesus Christ. Burning people for their beliefs went out with the Inquisition. Supposedly.”
“Koresh burned them,” Janet said.
“Our people didn’t do that.”
“Maybe,” Lynn said.
“But your people gave Koresh the pretext when they drove tanks into the building. Hell, why didn’t they just cut the power and the phones and the water and wait for a few months? But no, some cowboy—or maybe cowgirl, huh?—in Washington decides to send tanks in? And then, afterward, they all do the armadillo and try to cover it all up? I mean, the Bureau and the aTF could be telling the absolute truth, but when shit comes out like that business with the incendiary rounds? Nobody believes them anymore. For that matter, how many women and babies did David Koresh ever burn alive before the tanks showed up?”
“But we’re the good guys,” Janet said.
“Koresh started those fires.
Koresh killed those people. He was wounded and he was dying, and he had nothing more to lose!”
Lynn just looked at her.
“That may be true,” she said.
“But America is a democracy in the full bloom of the information age. If agencies like the Bureau and the aTF aren’t squeaky fucking clean, it will come out. In the past, maybe not, but now? It will come out. And then there’s no more trust. If it’s perceived to be a coverup, then it is a coverup.”
Janet sighed and looked away. Lynn put her hand on Janet’s arm.
“Look,” she said.
“You’re risking your ass to save my ass from some claw of the government we can’t even name. Don’t think I’m not grateful. But four or five years ago, my father found out something about some very high-level people in the government, a secret bad enough that a senior Agency guy shot himself and his whole family to protect it. I think the only reason they didn’t ‘disappear’ my father is that he was a
pretty resourceful operative who might have caused a train wreck or two in the process. When he was quote-unquote ‘retired,” it was all done over a pay phone, okay?”
“You think that’s what this is all about?”
“You know, I think it is,” Lynn said.
“Dad and I have talked about this before. There’s been a lot that’s come out about the Chinese spy case since then. I think he was afraid he was becoming more and more of a major loose end. He knew firsthand what can happen to a loose end, especially these days.”
The kerosene lamp guttered, and Janet got up to light a second one to replace it.
“How do you know all this?” she asked.
Lynn drew her sweater closer about her.
“Dad and I talked a lot after my mom was killed and he was forced out. I son of made it a condition of our reconciliation. I told him I had to know about him and what he did, not operational details, of course, but why my mother had been so afraid.
Why she said some of the things she said.”
“Which weren’t true.”
Lynn looked up at her. She had Kreiss’s intense gray-green eyes, Janet suddenly realized. Eyes that knew too much and had seen too much.
“But that’s the point, Agent Carter,” Lynn said.
“Most of it was true.”
Janet remembered the hunting woman’s face, with eyes like those on a great white shark. Play “Misty” for me. She shivered. Then they heard the dogs.
Browne McGarand rubbed the itchy new stubble rising on his clean shaven face again as he drove the rental down the back side of the arsenal.
It was nearly sundown, and he was looking for the entrance to an old logging road that led back to the western perimeter fence. He planned to drive the little car up the logging road as far as he could and then hide it.
Then he would walk to the perimeter fence and go north along the fence until he got to the point where the creek entered the federal reservation.
Unlike the creek’s exit point, it wasn’t very big, and they had just run the fence atop of it, laying down some concrete culverts. Once inside the two fences, it was a mile’s walk to the bunker farm and to bunker 887.
He had prepared his bolt-hole in the bunker field early in the project.
It was in the remotest part of the ammunition-storage area. They had cut the rusty series padlock and unsealed the air-circulating ventilator fixture at the back of the bunker, converting the ventilator trunk into an escape hatch. Halfway down the bunker’s empty length, he
and Jared had constructed a fake partition of studs and plywood, creating a smooth wooden surface that ran
