Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  He peeled the key out of the tape and reinserted the tang just as more blue strobe lights lit up the plaza. He looked over his shoulder and saw a state police cruiser bristling with Lo-Jack antennas pull into the truck stop. Kreiss let himself into the truck, started it up, and quickly drove it over to the motel and behind the front buildings to where the phone company van was parked. He grabbed his bag and the gun out of the van and threw them into McGarand’s truck, locked the van with the keys inside, and then got into the truck.

  Now what? he thought. No—now where? Where the hell was McGarand? He wanted to go cruise that back parking lot next door, but that was out of the question now, and besides, there was something sticking in his mind. Very conscious of the commotion next door, he closed his eyes and tried to reconstruct what he had seen McGarand do. Come out of the building, carrying a coffee thermos, move his truck to no man-land between the motel and the truck stop, and then walk back out to the parking lot out back, where the big rigs were. Then what? The security cops had grabbed him up, and they had walked across the parking lot to the office. No, wait—they had stopped for a truck. No, two trucks. A big semi and a propane truck. A. propane truck! Son of a bitch, it had been that green-and-white tanker truck he’d seen in the power plant maintenance bay!

  He started up the pickup and drove out of the motel lot and back up toward the interchange. There was a second cop car in the plaza now.

  Which way? McGarand had been going south, so south it was. He pulled onto 1-81 and merged quickly. The pulsing blue lights were visible in his mirror for almost a mile beyond the interchange. He put it up to just under eighty; McGarand had a pretty good head start. Then he heard Janet Carter’s beeper start to chirp in his equipment bag.

  Janet awoke to the sound of her phone ringing. She sat up and groaned out loud. Every muscle in her body protested the sudden move. She opened her eyes and tried to focus on the clock. It looked like two something, but her eyes weren’t working. Neither was her brain. The phone kept ringing, so she sat up straighter, cleared her throat, and answered.

  “Janet, this is Ted Farnsworth. I’m sorry to be rousting you out like this.”

  “That’s okay, boss,” she said, clearing her throat again.

  “What’s happened?”

  “We think we got an answer to the pager, but it’s a mobile and the signal died away. We’ve set up a conference call-forward tie between your line and the number I sent to the pager. Assuming he calls back, it will come in direct to you, but we’ll be listening. The question of the hour is, Where is he and what’s he doing? And then—” “And then you still want me to tell him his daughter died in that explosion?”

  Farnsworth hesitated, then said, “That’s affirmative. And that this Browne McGarand guy was responsible for that explosion. McGarand’s driving a ‘98 Ford F-Two fifty south on I-Eighty-one toward Greensboro;

  in fact, we’ve just had a sighting report on the vehicle from the state cops.”

  She said nothing for a moment.

  “Janet,” Farnsworth began, but then she cut him off.

  “If McGarand’s driving south on I-Eighty-one, then he certainly isn’t going to Washington with a bomb,” she said.

  “So why are we doing this to Kreiss? Why not have the state cops pick up McGarand and bring him in for questioning?”

  “Because we have no grounds for a warrant, and the state cops won’t arrest him unless we produce a federal warrant. I already thought of that.”

  “But still, if he’s going south—” “He may very well be going south because he knows we’re onto him.

  He goes south in plain view while members of his cell take a big bomb to D.C.”

  Janet didn’t know what to say.

  “Janet,” Farnsworth said.

  “You’re the only voice in our office Kreiss will listen to. He can find out what the rest of us can’t—whether or not there is a real threat to Washington.”

  “You’re assuming Kreiss will give a shit about a bomb threat to Washington.

  Hell, if this guy hadn’t kidnapped his daughter, he’d probably help the guy drive. I think he’ll just hunt down McGarand and do whatever he does to him. And then we won’t know anything.”

  It was Farnsworth’s turn to stop talking.

  “Look, boss,” she said.

  “Telling Kreiss his daughter is dead is bullshit.

  Why not tell the truth here? Tell Kreiss we’ve recovered his daughter, that she’s alive but comatose over there in Blacksburg. Let him go there, see her, satisfy himself that she’s at least safe, and then tell him about the McGarands.”

  Farnsworth didn’t say anything.

  “I still say, if that guy is headed south, there’s no immediate threat. Put surveillance on him, track him, maybe even let him see the tail. Personally, I think Kreiss might play ball, as long as we tell him the truth. The converse is not true: You do not want Edwin Kreiss coming to your house one night after you’ve lied to him about a thing like this. And it would be a really cruel lie, wouldn’t it, especially if she does die and he never gets a chance to see her?”

  Farnsworth still didn’t say anything.

  “Let me tell him what the hell is going on. I’ll even go meet him at the hospital. These bureaucratic games with the Agency, aTF, those executive lizards from Justice—who knows what that’s all about? The kid in the hospital is real. And she’s somebody’s daughter.”

  “Shit,” Farnsworth said.

  “I’ve been up too long. This whole thing. Ken Whittaker was a good friend—” “Sir, you don’t have to tell Foster and company anything. Let me tell Kreiss the truth, let him see his daughter, and then let’s work this bomb problem. By the book this time. Our book, not these other assholes’ book.”

  “Okay, Janet,” Farnsworth said with a sigh.

  “You’re probably right. I guess if this McGarand’s headed into North Carolina, it gives us some time to straighten this thing out. Okay. We’ll patch the call in as soon as Kreiss tries again.”

  Janet felt a surge of victory.

  “I’ll be waiting,” she said.

  Kreiss stood by his daughter’s hospital bed and tried to control himself.

  She looks so thin, he thought. Lynn was an athlete and normally radiated good health and fitness. Now her face was gaunt and slightly jaundiced.

  He held her hand under the blanket and just watched her breathe.

  She wasn’t on a ventilator, but there was an IV drip going into her left wrist. Her face was bruised, and her normally vibrant hair lay limp on her head like a skullcap. A bank of machines kept score on her vital signs above the bed. Coma, the docs said. As opposed to profound vegetative state. The “good” kind of coma—if there was such a thing—where a badly

  abused body checks out for awhile to work on healing itself without having to deal with the outside world. The room lighting was subdued and there was a quiet music stream coming from somewhere.

  “She was conscious at the explosion site?” he asked.

  “I didn’t see her,” Janet said.

  “I was being scraped off the concrete myself.” Kreiss eyed her, probably noticing for the first time her own puffy face and stiff posture.

  “Apparently, she spoke to whoever found her. They got ‘hydrogen bomb’ and “Washington’ out other, but that was all.”

  “Hydrogen bomb and Washington. Sounds good to me. We’re at just about the right distance, down here in Blacksburg, and the prevailing winds are on our side.”

  “Washington is taking a somewhat different view,” she said.

  “But this whole bomb theory is pretty screwed up. One moment, we’re all running around at top end because we think some bad guys are on the way, as we speak, to bring an H-bomb to Fun City. The next, we’re standing down in the regroup mode. The Bureau is fucking around with the aTF, and the Justice Department is fucking around with the Bureau, and ABC is tucking around with DEF. You know.”

  Kreiss nodded.

 
“Palace games,” he muttered. He let go of Lynn’s hand and smoothed the hair on her forehead.

  “Our divorce was unnecessary,” he said finally.

  “Helen got scared of what I was doing while I was with the Agency. She knew more than she should have, and she just wanted out. I could understand that. Accept it, even. But I never wanted to lose Lynn.”

  “Did your wife poison the well? Set Lynn against you?”

  “Not deliberately, no,” he said.

  “This wasn’t a spiteful separation, adultery, or anything like that. Which made it almost worse, because Helen was so reasonable. She just wanted away from me and what I was doing.

  Like most men, I thought the career, what I was doing, the things I was learning, were terribly important. I let her go with my pride intact.”

  “Mine was different,” she said, surprising herself.

  “My husband turned out to be a no-load. He was sort of a career ectopic pregnancy—he was never going to produce anything, but he was determined to stay in the general area of the academic womb. I think that’s one of the reasons I joined the Bureau about then; I wanted to be around real men.”

  ‘“Real men,”” Kreiss said.

  “Inspector Erskine, where are you?”

  They both smiled.

  “Lynn had to believe that everything her mother was afraid of was true,” he said, smoothing her hair again.

  “Kids can sense bullshit, and Helen was genuinely afraid.”

  “And you and Lynn were reconciled after the plane crash?”

  “Just before, actually.” He told her about Lynn’s unexpected visitation.

  “And then this mess.” He sighed.

  “You said that the McGarands were probably responsible for the bomb. And that they had been holding Lynn the whole time? At the arsenal?”

  Janet suggested they go outside. He seemed reluctant to leave his daughter, but there was obviously nothing he could do for her that wasn’t already being done. He followed Janet down the hall, past the I.C.U nurses’ station. Janet smiled at the nurses and the lone orderly, but they were all staring at Kreiss, whose gaunt face and hulking shape stood out among all the white-coated hospital personnel. He looked as out of place among all the gleaming cleanliness and order of the I.C.U as a bear fresh out of the woods. It had taken a lot of FBI badge waving and friendly persuasion to get them to let Kreiss in to see his daughter. Kreiss had called back fifteen minutes after she had persuaded Farnsworth to stop and regroup, and she had told him immediately that they had found Lynn, that she was alive and in the Montgomery County Hospital. She had asked him where he was, but he wouldn’t tell her. Then she had suggested that she meet him at the hospital, and he had said, “one hour,” and hung up.

  Farnsworth had been listening. He called her back immediately to say he would send along some backup, just until they knew what they were really dealing with. She had asked that they stay well out of sight, because she was going to be on thin ice when Kreiss showed up. The RA agreed and they set up a surveillance support zone outside the hospital. She would park her car somewhere where it was clearly visible in the lot. The backup agents would set up around that car in two unmarked vehicles.

  There was no time to equip her with a portable radio, so Farnsworth said that if Kreiss put her under duress in the car, she was to do something with lights. When she went into the hospital with him, there would be two agents inside in hospital orderly clothes who would keep her in sight at all times. Her signal that everything was all right would be to open her purse and touch up her makeup.

  They reached the main elevator bank and waited for a down car. An orderly carrying a bag of what looked like bed linens joined them at the door. They got in and punched the ground-floor button. The orderly punched the basement button. She had told Kreiss the bare outlines of the McGarands’ suspected involvement in the explosion at the arsenal, but he had offered no response to that. He had wanted to see his daughter;

  any discussion of the rest of it could wait.

  No one spoke until they got to the lobby and the door opened. Janet

  stepped out and Kreiss followed, turning at the last minute to tell the orderly that his shoulder rig was showing. As the elevator doors began closing in front of the surprised agent, Janet made an “I’m sorry about that” face, but Kreiss was already headed for the front door and the parking lot. She caught up with him when he stopped under the marquee at the entrance and looked around at the nearly empty parking lot.

  “I have things to do,” he said as he scanned the lot.

  “You have backup out there?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “I don’t want them following me,” he said.

  “They’re out there to protect me,” she said.

  “Not to follow you.”

  “That something you know, Special Agent?” he asked, looking directly at her for the first time that evening. Actually, it’s this morning, she realized.

  His eyes were rimmed with fatigue, but there was a fierce determination back there, unfinished business.

  “No,” she said.

  “My boss sent them. They may have other orders.”

  “I don’t want that,” he said, looking around again.

  “What did you say about standing down? Earlier, up there in Lynn’s room.”

  “Mr. Kreiss, I need to fill you in on a lot of things. Why don’t we go back inside and let me tell you—” “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said impatiently.

  “I don’t want a war with the Bureau. I do want to leave here without having to take evasive measures. You know what a claymore mine is?”

  She had been shown a claymore during the training for new agents at Quantico.

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  “But—” “My idea of evasive measures is to strap a couple of claymores to the tailgate of my pickup truck and then get someone to chase me in a car.

  Get the picture?”

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said again.

  “I’ll tell you something vitally important about your bomb plot, and you make sure no one follows me.

  Deal?”

  She looked around at the parking lot. There were islands of trees between the lanes for parking, and about thirty vehicles scattered around the lot, which sloped gently down toward the main hospital building. Tall light standards illuminated the entire lot. Her car was visible, but she had no idea where the other agents were. Kreiss was waiting, staring at her.

  “All right, but there’s a lot you don’t know. As in, they’ve tied you to one jared McGarand, for instance?”

  He stared at her for a moment but then dismissed with a shrug what she had just said.

  “Give them the all-clear signal, and then I’m going back into the hospital. Tell them I’ve gone back upstairs. I’ll take it from there.”

  She still hesitated.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m not armed. And like I said, I don’t want trouble with the Bureau, or with you. I’m willing to bet that your superiors weren’t going to tell me that Lynn was here, alive. I suspect that you convinced them otherwise. So I owe you. Again. Give them the signal.” His eyes were boring into hers with a commanding force. She found herself complying, opening her purse, taking out a compact, opening it so that the round mirror caught the marquee light and reflected it out into the parking lot. She pretended to touch up her nonexistent makeup.

  Kreiss nodded and relaxed fractionally.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Here’s my half. You said your people were all spun up about the possibility of a bomb going to Washington but that now they’re standing down, right?”

  She nodded, trying to think of a way to keep him here, to get control of the situation. But this was just like their other meeting, the one at Donaldson-Brown.

  “Well, here’s the thing,” he said.

  “It was me driving McGarand’s truck south on I-Ei
ghty-one, not McGarand. I believe McGarand’s gone north.” Then, before she had a chance to ask any questions, he spun on his heel and went back into the hospital. She watched him go straight back down the main hallway, until he disappeared through some double doors. She turned and hurried out to her car, where her cell phone was.

  What was Kreiss trying to tell them? Farnsworth had said the state police tracked McGarand going to North Carolina.

  She stopped, seeing it now. Not McGarand—McGarand’s vehicle.

  Which, for some unknown reason, Kreiss had been driving. She waved her arms at the parked cars, calling in the backup agents to converge on her car. Lights came on in the parking lot as she got to the car and two Bureau vehicles slid into place on either side with a soft screech of tires.

  Ben Keenan got out of one of them, pulling out his portable radio.

  “Where’s Kreiss?” he asked.

  “He said he was going back in to be with his daughter,” she said.

  “But we need—” Keenan ignored her, and he ordered the agents standing around them to go into the hospital and apprehend Kreiss. Then he got on his portable radio and contacted the agents disguised as orderlies inside the building.

  They reported that they had not seen Kreiss return to the I.C.U.

  “Shit!” Keenan exclaimed. He ordered a search of the hospital building, and then he turned to Janet.

  “Do you know what he’s driving? The state cops want him now, for a felony assault out at a local truck stop.”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” she said.

  “Kreiss was driving McGarand’s truck.”

  “Wonderful. So what is it? A Ford? A Chevy? What?” And then, with a horrified look, he understood.

  “The earlier sighting? That wasn’t

  McGarand?”

  “No, sir, it was Kreiss, driving McGarand’s vehicle.”

  Keenan shook his head.

  “What the rack’s with that?” he said.

  “He didn’t really elaborate,” she replied.

  “But it means McGarand could be halfway to anywhere by now. With a bomb.”