Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  “And we’ll get some assets into that hospital.”

  Farnsworth stood up, and so did the two uniformed cops. They shook

  hands and Farnsworth asked Agent Bobby Land to escort them out.

  When they were gone, he sat back down and ran his hands through his hair.

  “Okay, so much for local legends. Janet, we’d been meeting for a while before you got back to the office. That little charade was for purposes of keeping local law occupied while we sort out what we’re really going to do. The U.S. attorney for the Southwestern District of Virginia is running top cover for us, but I thought I’d better add my personal reassurances to those guys.”

  “Sir?” Janet said.

  “I thought we were going to keep the Kreiss angle away from local law?”

  Farnsworth cleared his throat, glancing nervously at the woman at the ‘ other end of the table.

  ‘ “Yes. Well. We’ve had some new guidance from Washington on that score.”

  Janet couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “May I know who she is?” she asked, pointing with her chin to the woman at the end of the table. The woman did not even look at her.

  “When I’m finished, yes. Now, as usual, there’s a turf fight shaping up.

  aTF headquarters is circling the wagons around their ‘natural causes’ theory of the arsenal explosion, apparently because their director found out that they had cleared the arsenal during a previous inspection of the place.”

  “And the Bureau?”

  “Bureau headquarters is officially deferring to aTF, but somehow, aTF has found out that we’re hunting two subjects, McGarand and Kreiss.”

  “aTF is saying there’s no threat to Washington?”

  “aTF is saying there’s no threat unless, of course, we have evidence to the contrary. I think they’re looking for a fig leaf, in case it turns out somebody has actual evidence that some bad guys were in fact making bombs down there.”

  “But we do, sort of—Kreiss. And what his daughter said.”

  “No, we do not, Janet,” he said.

  “As of this morning, based on guidance I’ve received through our regular chain of command, we no longer know anything about any Edwin Kreiss, except as the parent of a girl who is no longer missing.”

  Janet sat back in her chair.

  “But don’t you think he’s chasing McGarand? Shouldn’t we tell Kreiss

  that we think McGarand is going to bomb something in Washington? That’s there’s a tie between McGarand and Waco?”

  “Officially, I no longer have any opinions on the matter of Edwin Kreiss,” Farnsworth said, setting his face into a blank bureaucratic mask.

  Janet, baffled, just looked at him, and then at Keenan, who was now intently studying his hands.

  “But I do,” the woman at the end of the table said. Her voice was low, but filled with quiet authority.

  “And you are .. Janet said, turning in her chair.

  “I am the person assigned by an appropriate authority to attend to the problem of Edwin Kreiss,” the woman said.

  “I understand he is or was carrying a pager you gave him?”

  Attend to—Janet remembered those words. She didn’t know what to say, but she found herself nodding.

  “Very well,” the woman said.

  “I want you to page him at eighteen hundred tonight, exactly. Then key in a number I’m going to give you. It’s a northern Virginia number, but it will bounce back here to this office.

  Assuming he calls in, I have a message I want you to give him.”

  “Not until I know who you are, or what you are,” Janet said. She was beginning to suspect that the “what” would be more important than the “who.”

  “The last guy who wanted me to page Kreiss wanted me to tell him his daughter was dead. And guess what: That didn’t happen.”

  Farnsworth looked up at the ceiling. The woman stood up, and Janet was surprised by how tall she was. She was wearing an expensive loose-fitting pantsuit, and she was clearly over six feet tall even in her flat shoes.

  She picked up a handbag that could have doubled as a briefcase. She asked the two men in the room if they would mind excusing themselves. To Janet’s further surprise, both of them stood and left the room without a word, closing the door behind them. Looking at the expression on the woman’s face, Janet suddenly found herself wishing she was carrying her sidearm. The woman walked around the conference table and came up next to Janet. She perched one hip on the table and looked down at her, forcing Janet to crane her neck to make eye contact. The woman’s expression was disturbing; she was looking at Janet with a flat, slightly unfocused, zero-parallax stare.

  “When we’re all done making the page call and delivering the message, I will return to Washington to attend to the matter of Edwin Kreiss,” the woman said. Her diction was precise and clear.

  “Your director has assured my director that you will make the call, and that you will deliver the message.

  Which goes like this: three words—tenebrae factae sunt. I’ll write it down for you, if you’d like. It’s church Latin for ‘night has fallen.” It will tell Kreiss that I’m coming for him.”

  Janet didn’t like the sound of that, so she tried for a little defiance.

  “And he’ll give a shit? That you’re coming?”

  The woman’s unfocused look went away, and she looked right into Janet’s eyes with a wolfish smile that made her own black eyes glow.

  “Oh yes, Special Agent Carter. He’ll absolutely give a shit. Anyone who knows me would.” She stood back up, smoothed her clothes, and retrieved her handbag.

  “I’ll see you in Mr. Farnsworth’s office at eighteen hundred.

  That’s six P.M. by the way.”

  The woman walked calmly out of the conference room, leaving Janet alone at the table, her face burning just a little, and wondering what in the hell this was all about. She was tempted to page Kreiss right now and warn him that some female cyborg in an Armani pantsuit was after him, but the woman had mentioned her director and Janet’s director. This implied that the woman was an Agency operative of some kind. Another “sweeper” perhaps? What kind of outfit needed to have people like that in their stable? The woman’s mention of directors had been deliberate, though. And if the heads of the Bureau and the Agency were involved, it was definitely not time for junior special agents to be taking any sudden initiatives. Then she remembered what Farnsworth had speculated earlier:

  They were going to let Kreiss hunt McGarand, but the Agency was going to join the hunt for Kreiss.

  Tenebrae factae sunt. Darkness has fallen. She felt a tingle run up her backbone. Yeah, that would do it for me, she thought. My director and your director. She closed her eyes to think. Something didn’t quite add up here: The people originally interested in Kreiss had been Foster, of the Bureau, and Bellhouser, of the Justice Department. FBI counterintelligence and the deputy AG, to be specific. And now the Agency. Why would the FBI director be supporting that ugly little axis?

  She wanted to go talk to Farnsworth again, but he was acting as if he had been stepped on from above and was now in the “yes, sir, no, sir, whatever you say, sir” mode most beloved of the Bureau when it was circling its own bureaucratic wagons. What had Farnsworth told her earlier?

  They’d let Kreiss run free. They didn’t know there was a bomb threat, but if Kreiss solved that problem, fine. And if he created bigger

  problems while he was doing it, there’d be no stink on them. He wasn’t their asset.

  He was the Justice Department’s asset. So what did that make Janet?

  Farnsworth’s secretary stepped into the conference room.

  “Agent Carter?” she said.

  “The Blacksburg hospital is calling? About a Lynn Kreiss? Can you take it? I can’t find the boss, and I know you were involved with that case.”

  Janet said sure and went into Farnsworth’s outer office to take the call.

  The nurse calling reporte
d that they thought Lynn Kreiss might be coming around. Their log said that the FBI people wanted to be notified when she surfaced. At this very moment, Janet wasn’t sure what her current assignment was, but she said she’d be right over. She went back upstairs to collect her sidearm and purse, grab her sandwich, and then go down to the garage.

  There was a street-level sandwich shop diagonally across the street from the office building at 650 Massachusetts Avenue. Browne bought a cup of coffee and a newspaper and sat down at one of the cafe tables out on the street itself. It was a warmish day, although nothing like what was to come in the horrific Washington summertime. There was a steady flow of government workers walking by, some stopping in for coffee or to get a ready-made sandwich to take to the office for lunch.

  He studied the aTF headquarters building surreptitiously while pretending to read his newspaper. There did not appear to be any new security cameras on the building or its neighbors, although he could not see what might have been added to the building right above him. He reminded himself to check that when he got up. The attack depended on two factors. The first was that there was a parking garage right next door to his target, separated from the aTF building by a narrow alley. The garage had an outside ramp that led directly up to its roof-level deck.

  More importantly, that ramp, which was on the side of the garage away from the aTF building, did not appear to be in the field of view of any of the cameras guarding the aTF’s headquarters. It was also just wide enough to accommodate the propane truck.

  The second factor had to do with the aTF building’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system. Like those of most office buildings, it was a recirculating system. A small amount of outside air was taken in and passed over the cooling coils of the chiller plant housed in a small HVAC building at the back of the alley between the garage and the aTF building.

  It was then circulated throughout the building via the duct system, but instead of being exhausted from the building, it was recooled and

  redistributed again and again, so as to maximize the efficiency of the air-conditioning plant. His plan was simple: Very early tomorrow morning, he would drive the propane truck up the ramp to the top deck of that garage and park it next to the outer wall on the alley side of the building. The aTF headquarters was ten stories high, with a wall of windows overlooking the top deck of the garage. But no cameras looked at the garage; he and Jared had both checked. Instead, a single security camera, mounted on the front corner of that air-conditioning building, looked into the alley, toward the street.

  The propane truck came equipped with a four-inch diameter wire reinforced 150-foot-long hose, whose fittings he had modified to handle H the hydrogen gas. He would park the truck, wait until nearly dawn, and then unreel the heavy hose down into the alley behind the air-conditioning building, a distance of perhaps forty, forty-five feet. A big truck like that in the alley would draw instant attention from the security monitoring office, assuming they were awake at the switch at that hour of the morning. But the hose would come down in the predawn darkness behind the security camera, and so would he.

  Once on the ground, he would spread a large plastic tarp over one of the HVAC building’s two air intakes to block it off. He would then drape a second tarp, with a receiver fitting sewn into it, over the remaining air intake screen. The screens were eight feet high and six feet wide. At that hour, the building’s environmental-management system would be running the intake fans at very low speed. They wouldn’t speed up the fans until the heat of the day called for more cooling. He had taken rough volumetric measurements of the building by pacing off its length and width on the sidewalk and then multiplying that number by one hundred. Then he had computed the heating ventilation-conditioning volume using the Civil Engineer’s Handbook. The propane truck was designed to hold eight thousand gallons of liquid propane. Now, filled with pure hydrogen gas under nearly four hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, it held more than enough hydrogen to fill the aTF building, using the building’s own recycling ventilation system, in about an hour. What made the building most vulnerable to this kind of attack was the fact that none of its windows could be opened. In fact, he had almost twice the hydrogen he needed to achieve an explosive vapor mixture, but he knew there would be small leaks here and there. No manmade gas system was perfect.

  He was going to treat the aTF the same way they and their allies at the FBI had treated the people at Mount Carmel. He would start the

  odorless, invisible hydrogen injection at around 6:00 A.M. Sometime in the next 60 to 90 minutes, the building would achieve an explosive mixture of air and hydrogen, courtesy of its own closed-cycle ventilation system. Because it was the start of the day, the intake fans would be running slowly, and the recycling air-handler system would keep almost all the air inside the building to achieve maximum cooling. Sometime after that, as the building filled with aTF agents and their bosses, someone, somewhere, would slip into the men’s room to sneak a cigarette. Or fumble with an aging light switch. Or turn on an entire floor’s worth of fluorescent light fixtures all at once. Or summon the elevator and mash the button several times, making those copper contacts up in the elevator shaft open and close, open and close. He had been a chemist and an explosives engineer for decades. The industrial-safety manuals were filled with stories of how the most mundane objects were capable of producing a static spark: a doorknob in winter, the switch on a desk fan, panty hose on a dry winter day, the keyboard of an electric typewriter, the ringer in a telephone.

  In that silent, invisibly deadly atmosphere, one spark would reproduce what had happened down at Ramsey. Only this time, the building wasn’t made of reinforced concrete: It was wall-to-wall windows.

  “Some more coffee, sir?” a pleasant young woman asked, pausing at his table with a Silex coffee pitcher.

  “Thanks, I’m all done,” he said, smiling up at her through his dark glasses. His heart was actually thumping with excitement. Today, after months of labor at the arsenal, he was finally here. This afternoon, he would find a motel near the airport to crash and get some sleep. Early in the morning, he would take a taxi to the Pentagon, then go retrieve the truck. There was security-camera surveillance of the Pentagon building itself, but he had seen not one single camera on the old power station building. Then he would drive the truck into the city; he even had an official-looking dispatch ticket, lifted when Jared had appropriated the truck. And sometime early tomorrow morning, all those criminal bastards in that building were going to get a taste of what it must have been like at Waco when they burned William along with those Branch Davidians to death, while their agents stood around the perimeter, drinking coffee and making crispy-critter jokes.

  He hoped there were cameras on that building. They were going to get the shot of a lifetime.

  Forty-five minutes later, Janet was sitting in Lynn Kreiss’s hospital room.

  A uniformed sheriff’s deputy sat outside the door, watching the television

  in the empty room across the hall. Lynn was still hooked up to an IV, but she actually looked better than the last time Janet had seen her. It’s amazing what some sleep can do for you, Janet thought. The girl was tossing and turning a bit in the bed, and making small noises in the back of her throat, as if she were having a bad dream. Her face had some color in it, and the monitors on the shelf above her head were busier than they had been the last time. Janet had talked to the attending physician, who told her that Lynn had started talking—babbling might be a better word for it—at 3:30 that morning. The collective opinion was that she would be coming around soon. Janet asked how soon was soon. The collective opinion was that it was anybody’s guess. The marvels of modern medicine, Janet thought.

  As she watched the girl wrestle with the web of unconsciousness, Janet was struggling with her own dilemma. In her mind, she was coming down on the side of a real human-made explosion out there at the arsenal, if only because of the timing. That thing had gone off when a bunch of people ha
d come in there and started unlocking doors. If there had been a pool of explosive vapors down there in that tunnel complex, her own little adventure should have set it off, especially when that car went scraping along the concrete. Then there were the two civilians, the McGarands, one a possible homicide victim, whose truck tires had traces of arsenal mud on them, and the other a retired chemical explosives engineer. And not just any engineer, but the senior engineer at the Ramsey Arsenal. Both of them were blood relations to a guy who had been incinerated at the Waco holocaust.

  And now the surviving McGarand has just flat-assed disappeared, with Kreiss apparently hot on his tail. And all three federal agencies involved, two of which had been responsible for what happened at Waco, were busy going head down, tail up in the bureaucratic ostrich position.

  Oh, and now some shark-eyed dolly with a half-inch-thick karate callus on her hands wanted Janet to relay a love note to Edwin Kreiss.

  She looked up. Lynn Kreiss was staring at her, trying to speak. Janet got up and went over to the bed. The girl’s lips seemed to be dry, so Janet poured her a glass of water.

  “I’m Special Agent Janet Carter,” she said softly.

  “I’m with the FBI. Are you thirsty?”

  The girl nodded and Janet helped her sip some water. Lynn cleared her throat and then asked Janet what time it was.

  Janet told her what day it was, what had happened out at the arsenal, and how long she’d been out of touch here in the hospital. The girl

  drank some more water and then Janet said she was going to summon the nurses but that she needed to talk to Lynn after that, if she was able.

  “Where’s my father?” Lynn asked.

  “We don’t know,” Janet said after a second’s hesitation.

  “He wasn’t involved in the explosion. Personally, I think he’s up in Washington chasing down the guy who kidnapped you.”

  “Guys,” Lynn said. Her voice was gaining strength, and she sat up a little in the bed.

  “There were two of them, a young guy and an older guy, although I only got a quick look at them, when my friends hit the leg traps.”