Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Good,” Lynn said.

  “After all this, if that woman shows up, you better use it. She’s not coming as the fucking welcome wagon, and I’m not going to be abducted again. Had enough of that.”

  “We’ll wait until we hear firemen out there, then open the door.”

  “Lots of firemen, okay? That creature looked pretty competent to me.”

  “Let’s move to the back of the room. If she opens that door, we might still fool her.”

  “Not with that table there,” Lynn said.

  “You go find a good shooting position. I’ll be at the other end of the room. Give her two directions to cover.”

  Janet nodded. The room wasn’t that big, but the girl was making tactical sense.

  “Your father give you lessons?” she asked.

  “He taught me about situational awareness,” Lynn said.

  “I used to go deer hunting with him. You should see him in the woods. He could whack a deer on the ass with a stick before it knew he was there.” Lynn gave her a studied look.

  “Can you do it?” she asked.

  “Shoot someone? Shoot a woman?”

  Janet hesitated. She wanted to say, Of course I can. I’m a big FBI agent now. But she knew that it wasn’t a done deal until she pulled that trigger.

  “Because if you can’t, give me the gun. I’m the one she wants. And I’m not going to be taken again, by anybody.” Lynn’s face was set in a mask of determination. Definitely her father’s daughter, Janet thought.

  “I can do it if I have to,” she said.

  “But I’m not going to just start shooting the moment someone comes through that door, okay? There are rules about that.”

  “According to my old man, Agent Carter, the only rule those people

  have is that there are no rules. If you’ve got reservations, give me the gun.”

  Janet wished Kreiss were here right now. She assessed the room from a tactical standpoint, trying to remember her training at Quantico. The room had four large lab stands, the single table now wedged against the door, several glass-fronted cabinets against the side walls, the window wall overlooking the parking lot, and two desks with PCs. The corridor outside was still darkened, and the room had lots of shadow zones. Lynn had backed her wheelchair into a shadowed corner next to a lab stand. She was doing something with her blanket. Janet moved to the opposite corner, pulled over a trash can, upended it, and sat down behind a bench. She pulled over a stack of notebooks. If she leaned down, her head would be barely visible from the doorway, and she would have the lab bench on which to steady her gun.

  “You’re closer,” Janet said.

  “She shows up, comes in, shout or say something, talk to her. I’ll keep down. If she has a gun, use the word surprise.

  And if you see something small and shiny in her hand, close your eyes immediately.”

  “You said you’d tell me what this is all about?”

  In low tones, Janet explained about the bombing incident out at the arsenal, the palace games going on among the agencies involved, and what little she knew about the woman pursuing Kreiss. Lynn took it all in without saying anything, leading Janet to wonder just how much the girl knew about her father’s former professional life.

  The noise level from outside the building was rising as more fire units came into the parking lot. The sounds of tactical radios could be heard above the steady roar of diesel engines. Janet wondered if the fire was indeed out, and, if so, why there were so many more fire units out there.

  The air in the room wasn’t clear, but it wasn’t getting any smokier, either.

  “Maybe we ought to get someone’s attention out there,” she said to Lynn.

  “Break a window or something. Except I don’t think they’d hear us.”

  But Lynn was pointing urgently at the door. Janet turned and saw a dark silhouette on the other side of the cloudy white glass. She got down on one knee, then realized she couldn’t see what was going on with the door handle. She got back up in time to see the table tremble ever so slightly as whoever was out there tried the handle. She reached behind her and drew the .38, checked the loads, and waited, staying upright enough to watch the door handle. The shadow withdrew and she

  relaxed fractionally, only to yell in surprise when all the glass in the door shattered and a fully masked fireman thrust a hose nozzle through the broken out window. Janet stood up to get his attention, but she was stunned when he fired a stream of water full force into her face. Her head snapped back and she went flying back into the corner, her gun skittering across the floor into the opposite corner. She tried to get up, but the stream of highpressure water kept coming, rolling her around in the corner of the room like a dog under a truck, until all she could do was curl into a ball while yelling at the guy to stop it. Until she realized that a fireman wouldn’t have done that.

  When the stream stopped, she tried frantically to get up, but her eyes were totally out of focus, the eyeballs bruised and stinging from the hard stream of water. By the time she got onto all fours, all she could make out were shapes and shadows, so she couldn’t find her gun. Then she heard Lynn scream, followed by a rocket sound from the other side of the room.

  In another moment, Lynn was at her side, grabbing at her, pulling her upright, yelling, “C’mon, c’mon, we gotta move.” She stood up, staggered, and then went with Lynn, blindly banging into the lab stands until they got to the door. Janet felt her foot kick the gun, and she reached down to retrieve it. The table had been shoved aside, so they spilled out into the corridor, which now was murky with smoke. A single portable floodlight stood on the floor, illuminating the doorway. Janet grabbed it and they struggled down the cross corridor through the smoke, keeping low, getting away from the lab room.

  “What did you do?” Janet asked.

  “Got her with the damn fire extinguisher,” Lynn said.

  “Had it under my blanket. She took her mask off and grinned at me, and I shot her right in the face, and then I threw the damn thing at her. Jesus, I can’t breathe in this shit.”

  “Stay low,” Janet said.

  “There’s more air down here.”

  They stumbled over something on the floor—a fireman who appeared to be unconscious, his rubberized coat, breathing rig, and helmet missing.

  In the distance was a vertical rectangle of light on the wall.

  “The elevator,” Janet shouted.

  “The fireman brought a passenger elevator up. Go! Go!”

  Lynn staggered through the smoke toward the elevator. Janet grabbed the fireman under his armpits and pulled him backward toward the rectangle of light. Lynn helped her pull the man into the elevator, and then Janet was smacking the buttons to close the door, but nothing was happening.

  “Use the key,” Lynn said.

  “The fireman’s key—I think it controls the door.”

  Janet peered down at the console, saw the black cylinder sacking out of the control panel, but she was barely able to read the instructions on operating the elevator with a fire key. Finally, she succeeded in keying the door shut and punching the button for the ground floor. The elevator started down. She slipped down the wall to a sitting position, where she faced Lynn over the prostrate body of the fireman. He looked far too young to be a fireman. She blew a long breath out of her lungs, glad for the marginally fresher air in the elevator.

  “Is he breathing?”

  “Yes,” Lynn said.

  “What do we do now?” She was still pale-faced, but her eyes were bright with excitement.

  “We get off at the ground floor and get out to the parking lot. Tell someone about him.”

  “What about her?” Lynn said, indicating upstairs.

  “I hope she fucking cooks up there. But somehow, I doubt it. And she probably has helpers in the building.” The elevator slowed as it neared the ground floor. She got back up.

  “We’re two hysterical women who got trapped upstairs,” she said to Lynn.

  �
��And now we want out and we don’t want to be seen to by EMTs, grief counselors, priests, or anybody else, okay?”

  Lynn grinned at her.

  “I can do hysterical,” she said as the door opened.

  There was a pack of firemen standing right there and Lynn screamed when she saw them. Janet grabbed her and pushed through them.

  “One of your guys was down on the fourth floor,” she shouted.

  “We got him in and came down. How do we get out of here?”

  There wasn’t as much smoke on the ground floor and there were more portable lights stabbing through the gloom. The biggest fireman pointed her in the direction of the front doors as the rest lunged into the cab to tend to their downed mate. Janet heard one of them ask, “Where’s his nicking air rig?” before she and Lynn bolted out the front door and into the blessed coolness of clean, fresh night air. Janet’s eyes were just about back to normal, except that she couldn’t stop blinking. She realized they were on the wrong side of the building: Her car was parked out back of the hospital. It had probably been visible from the lab windows. She told Lynn to wait and said she would go get her car. Lynn said, “no way in hell,” and went right along with Janet.

  Ten minutes later, they were out on the main drag and headed south to

  intersect Highway 460. She asked Lynn if she knew the number for Micah Wall, but Lynn did not. Then she remembered she’d written it down, and she went fishing for the scrap of paper. It was soaked but still legible. She dialed the number on her cell phone, but there was still no answer.

  She explained her plan, and Lynn nodded.

  “We’ll be as safe with Micah’s clan as with anyone,” she said.

  “But we have to tell him that she’s a revenuer.”

  “We? The idea is to protect you, Lynn. I promised your father I’d keep you out of the clutches of that creature back there.” She kept an eye on her rearview mirror.

  Lynn was grinning again.

  “And who’s going to protect you? Excuse me for saying so, but you’re not very good at this shit, are you?”

  Janet felt a spike of irritation, but then she grinned back. Kreiss had said the same thing.

  “Believe it or not, I’m getting better,” she said.

  “You have no idea. But I wouldn’t mind knowing where your father keeps that fifty-caliber rifle.”

  Kreiss drove the van across the Fourteenth Street Bridge into the downtown District of Columbia. Leaving the bridge, he went straight, past the U.S. Mint and toward the Washington Monument grounds, until he cut Independence Avenue, then went right until he came to Tenth Street. A sign on Tenth Street said NO LEFT TURN, but he ignored that and went up to within one block of Constitution Avenue, where he found a parking place. It was just after 10:30, and what traffic there was consisted mostly of cabs and the occasional long black limousine streaking through the nearly empty streets. A Washington Metro cop car was parked across the street; two cops inside appeared to be reading newspapers. They paid him zero attention when he got out of the van, put on a windbreaker, and walked up the street toward Constitution. It was a cloudy night, with a hint of spring rain in the air. He stopped when he got to the corner.

  Constitution Avenue was eight lanes wide, in keeping with its ceremonial use, and pedestrians crossed it at night at their considerable peril. By day, the traffic was usually dense enough that it was almost possible for a pedestrian to walk over the cars with impunity. One block away, diagonally to his right, was the FBI headquarters building, the. J. Edgar Hoover Building. It was on Constitution Avenue, between Ninth and Tenth streets, and bounded on the north by Pennsylvania Avenue, which went off at an angle from

  Constitution. Architecturally, it was an oddity, which Kreiss thought lent a certain historical consistency to the design, given some of the stories that had surfaced about Hoover after his demise. From overhead, the building was shaped like a hollow rectangle, with the top of the rectangle cut back at an angle to accommodate the diagonal run of Pennsylvania Avenue as it diverged from Constitution. The upper floors were cantilevered out over the streets below, which made the building look top-heavy. Kreiss wondered if the architect had been having some fan with the Bureau’s design committee. The windows were slightly case mated giving the building’s facade a fortresslike character. Most of the windows were still illuminated, although Kreiss could not see people from where he stood. But one thing was for sure: The building was absolutely made for a truck bomb, because that cantilevered overhang would trap any street-level blast and focus its full force directly into the structure.

  McGarand had come up here in a propane truck. His son had been killed at Waco. His grandson, who had apparently been helping him in whatever nastiness they’d been doing out there at the arsenal, was now dead. Given the appearance of feds at the arsenal and the subsequent explosion of the power plant, McGarand would surely link the feds to Jared’s death. In a manner of speaking, he’d be right. He looked around.

  There were no street barriers to prevent McGarand from driving that truck right up alongside the building and throwing a switch, as long as he was willing to die along with everyone in the building. Suppose they’d been brewing some powerful explosive out there at the ammunition plant.

  That truck could probably carry eight, ten thousand gallons of propane.

  Having been a chemical explosives engineer, McGarand was surely qualified to construct a truck bomb. Look what McVeigh and company had done in OK City. If they had filled a propane truck with that much C-4 or even dynamite, it would be enough to put the Hoover Building out onto the Beltway.

  Even from half a block away, he could see the array of security cameras on the building’s corners, and there were probably others right over his head. Most of downtown Washington was covered by surveillance cameras, and the Bureau’s headquarters was undoubtedly well covered. Some steely-eyed agent in the security control room could probably see him even now, standing out here on a street corner at 10:30 at night, looking at the headquarters. He started walking down the block toward Ninth Street, trying to act like a tourist, out from his hotel, taking a walk, getting some fresh air. He looked mostly straight ahead, but

  he was able to scan the Constitution Avenue side of the Hoover Building without being too obvious about it. When he got to Ninth Street, he dutifully waited for the crosswalk signal. If anyone was watching him, that simple act would brand him as a definite out-of-towner. He kept going east, leaving the building behind him, passing the huge National Gallery of Art on his right, until he reached Fourth Street, at which point, he sprinted across Constitution and Pennsylvania avenues and then walked back northwest up Pennsylvania. This would take him along the diagonal segment of the headquarters building, where once again the pronounced overhang of the upper floors made the place look like a fort. But it was a fort with the same terrible vulnerability to a large truck bomb, and McGarand probably knew this. The question was, Did McGarand plan to make this a suicide bombing, or was he going to try to survive the operation?

  He kept going up Pennsylvania, assuming he had been tracked along the sidewalk by the television cameras, until he was out of sight of the building. Then he cut back down along Fifteenth Street, walking by the White House and the Treasury Building, where the security forces were very visible. All the immediately adjacent streets near the White House were blocked off with large concrete objects in all directions, in celebration, no doubt, of the president’s popularity among the lunatic fringe. He kept his hands in his pockets and walked briskly down to Constitution, where once again he waited for the crossing signal.

  He had seen dozens of no trucks signs on the bridges and along the main downtown streets, but he had also seen a large heating-oil tanker truck, bearing the logo of the Fannon Heating Oil Company, maneuvering into an alley behind the Smithsonian Building institution, across the Mall. So the propane truck would not have been an automatic stop for the local cops. McGarand must have known this, too. But getting a heating oil truck up next t
o the Hoover Building would require a ton of paperwork and advanced scheduling. Then a cop car swung in alongside the curb, going the wrong way. The driver’s window rolled down.

  “Help you, sir?” the cop asked.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Out for a walk. Got a big presentation tomorrow and I’m nervous as hell about it. This area’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “If it isn’t, we’re all in big trouble,” the cop said, nodding his head back toward the White House.

  “You have a good evening.”

  The light changed and Kreiss crossed Constitution and headed back to the van. The Hoover Building might be the target, but, based on what

  those cops had just done, it was also within the security envelope of the White House. A thought had occurred to him: Given that McGarand’s motive might be Waco, there was another possible target.

  Janet drove carefully down the darkened mountain road, alert for deer on the road and lights in her rearview mirror. She had seen neither since turning off 460, and she hoped to keep it that way. Lynn was dozing in the passenger seat, the hospital blanket wrapped around her, despite the car’s heater being on. Janet’s clothes were just about dry, and she had the .38 out on the seat beside her. The girl had saved them both with that fire extinguisher trick, and perhaps had disabled their pursuer, at least for the night. It would depend on what kind of extinguisher that had been. A blast of CO2 in the eyes ought to do some damage.

  She glanced into the rearview mirror again, but it was still dark. She woke Lynn.

  “Do you recognize where we are?” she asked.

  Lynn blinked and watched the headlights for a minute. They descended a steep hill and crossed a creek. Green eyes blazed at them from the creek bed and Janet tapped the brake.

  “Yes, we’re about ten minutes from Dad’s cabin. Micah’s is a half a mile beyond. Nobody following us?”

  “Not so far,” Janet said, looking in the mirror again. It would have been pretty damned obvious if there had been a vehicle back there. The night around Pearl’s Mountain was clear, but there was no moon, and the surrounding forest was dense and dark. She would not have liked to have driven that road without headlights.