Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  Lynn was gone.

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what would she tell Kreiss?

  She opened her eyes and saw the two agents still lying motionless on the front porch, their red faces looking like grotesque Halloween masks.

  She forced herself to get up and go back over to the porch, where she checked for heartbeats and then began giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the first agent.

  That goddamned woman had done this. She was certain of it.

  She thought she heard her phone ringing inside, but she ignored it and moved to the other man, alternating between them now, trying to get some oxygen into both of them while waiting for the ambulance to get there. It seemed forever before the sound of sirens rose in the distance.

  Deep in the ammunition bunker, McGarand was cold. The whole damn structure is cold as a tomb, he thought as he shivered under two blankets.

  He had food, water, a cot, blankets, flashlights, several lanterns, and a tiny cook stove but no way of heating the seventy-five-footlong portion of the bunker they had closed off. He put a hand out and touched the concrete floor. It was cold as ice. Probably stays that way all year round, he thought.

  There was a faint glow of light at the top of the ladder leading up to the ventilator shaft. Must be coming daylight out there, he thought as he groped for the light on his watch. He had climbed out the ventilator shaft last night to lock the front steel door again after getting set up in the back half of the bunker. He wished they had rigged some way to take the front door’s hinges down from inside, but they were much too heavy. The bad news was that there was only one way out; the good news was that there would be no indication outside that this bunker was any different from any other bunker.

  He stretched, wondering what he was going to do to pass the time. He hadn’t thought to bring any books or magazines, not even a Bible. He sighed. That had been stupid of him. He realized he must never have really believed he would need this place. He shivered again. There

  was plenty of kerosene. Maybe if he lit all the lanterns and put them close to his cot, they might warm the place up. The ventilator above his head should take care of any problems with the fumes. He decided to try it.

  Janet sat in the back of a Roanoke EMS ambulance, sucking on an oxygen mask while the EMTs worked on the two agents behind privacy screens in the yard. Farnsworth and two more agents had shown up right behind the ambulance and were now in the house. All the windows in her house were open. Out on the street, two county deputies kept traffic moving and curious neighbors from getting too close. Her headache was abating very slowly, and she had downed two bottles of water and wanted another one.

  Farnsworth came out of the house, his face grim. She put down the oxygen mask.

  “They came in through the basement; through that half window at ground level. Connected the damned furnace exhaust line to the house supply vents.”

  “Not they,” Janet said.

  “She.”

  “We don’t know that,” he said, looking over at the EMTs huddled inside their screens. They’d been there a long time.

  “Yes, we do,” Janet said, hopping down from the back of the ambulance.

  “She took Lynn. You know it’s her.”

  Farnsworth kicked an empty water bottle across the yard.

  “How are they doing?” she asked, indicating the downed agents.

  “Not so good,” he said.

  “They were downstairs, I take it?”

  “Yes, sir. Lynn and I were sleeping upstairs. They were supposed to keep each other awake and make sure no one got in or upstairs.”

  “Well, apparently nobody heard a thing,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t have heard a bomb go off, I’m afraid. Once I realized there was something wrong, I checked on Lynn. She was gone. Then I ran downstairs.”

  “They were already unconscious?”

  “Yes. I got the front door open and then pulled them out. I gave them mouth-to-mouth until the EMTs got here, but there were two of them. I didn’t do a very good job, I’m afraid.”

  He fixed the scene with an angry glare.

  “Goddamned woman disabled all of you with gas. She didn’t have to leave it on once she had the girl.”

  “I think maybe those were her people in the cavern,” Janet said.

  He looked at her, then nodded slowly. His cell phone went off in his

  pocket. He snapped it open and answered it. After a minute, he said they would be back shortly.

  “That was my secretary. Abel Mecklen from the aTF is in my office.

  He was Whittaker’s boss. Judy says he’s going ballistic. I better get over there.”

  “Do you need me to come along?”

  He thought about it.

  “No, not at this time. You’ve had a bad experience, and we’ve got a lot of things to sort out. One of them involves you and that roadblock. Kreiss hasn’t contacted the office; has he contacted you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Damn. We just about had a handle on this mess. Tell Kreiss we have his daughter, get him to come in, tell us what he knows about McGarand’s little expedition.”

  “Uh, sir? After what happened up in D.C.? He might not be so willing just to come in and talk. Plus, there’s the little matter of the Jared McGarand homicide. Although, Lynn told me some things that might mitigate what happened there.”

  Farnsworth looked across the lawn again at the EMTs.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said.

  “I’m willing to deal on the G.W. Parkway caper and the McGarand homicide, in exchange for what he knows about the aTF headquarters bombing and his help in catching whoever did this. Because this”—he pointed with his chin at the EMTs—”this is personal. Plus, I think there might be something going on at headquarters that’s bigger than both of those other two items.”

  “Can I tell him that if he calls me?”

  “Janet, you tell him whatever it takes to get him to come in. The trick is going to be to talk to him before that Agency creature does. Because we know the trade she’s going to offer.”

  Janet pulled her bathrobe tighter around her.

  “I can tell you right now,” she said.

  “He’ll focus on that above all else. None of this other stuff matters to him. Everything he’s done has been in pursuit of getting his daughter back. That won’t change now. Especially now.”

  “Not if he still thinks she’s safe with us,” he said.

  Janet gave him a look and he raised his hands.

  “Okay, okay, it was just a thought. You do the best you can, and then notify me the moment he makes contact. Tell him we’ll help him get his daughter back—anything he wants. He’s all alone now. He’s going to need help, and I think he’ll realize that.”

  “Why can’t we get our bosses in Washington to go to the Agency and just get this shit stopped?” Janet asked.

  “Why are -we dealing with it?”

  “Because the people at headquarters who are authorized to deal with the Agency are Marchand’s people. Fortunately, you and I work for a different directorate. I have very specific orders to leave those people alone until our AD—that’s Mr. Greer-finds out who authorized Bellhouser and Foster to start this shit in the first place. If it’s Marchand, that’s going to be pretty significant. If it’s someone in Main Justice, like maybe Bellhouser’s boss, that’s doubly significant. Right now, everybody’s still spun up over the bombing of the aTF headquarters.”

  “I can just imagine,” she said.

  “You probably can’t, actually. But Greer, and also the director, I’m told, are very interested in why the Agency is targeting a retired FBI agent, and why that effort is being aided and abetted by someone senior in the FBI and possibly over at Justice.”

  Janet rubbed her eyes. The other reason, as she well knew, was that there was no proof that anyone from the Agency had been in her house last night. Or in the cave, now that she thought about it. By now, Micah Wall and his people would have rem
oved any evidence left on the shores by the subterranean lake. Probably into that pit.

  Across the yard, the EMTs were getting ready to transport the two agents. Farnsworth went over there and talked about the agents’ condition.

  His face was grim when he came back over.

  “You need to go to the hospital?”

  She thought back about that night and her encounter with Misty in the hospital.

  “No, sir. No more hospitals just now.”

  “Okay, then get some rest, if that’s possible. And stay here until you hear from Kreiss. He trusts you, I think. Try hard to get him in.”

  She thought about that for a moment.

  “I don’t think I want to stay here right now,” she said.

  “Let me get dressed, and then I’ll go down to the office. My head hurts too much for me to sleep. We can call-forward my phone line.”

  He agreed, and she went into the house. A Crime Scene Unit was coming up from the lower level as she went in. The agent in charge told her it was pretty straightforward: They cut the glass out of the window, let themselves into the lower level. They took the hose off the dryer in the utility room, unbolted a section of the smoke pipe from the gas furnace, and then taped the hose to route exhaust gas to the heated-air-supply vent for the whole house.

  “How did they get Lynn out of the house?” she asked.

  “Through the front door, it looks like. You said in your statement that you yanked it open, but you didn’t say anything about unlocking it. I assume it was locked last night?”

  “Yes, locked and dead-bolted.”

  “Yeah, well, you might want to invest in a dead-bolt that uses a key instead of a knob. The furnace room had a lot of dust on the floor. We found traces of that up here on the hallway rug and also upstairs. They probably had a respirator mask on, waited for twenty minutes or so for everyone in the house to start flopping around on the floor, and then made their move.”

  She nodded dejectedly. She, Janet thought. Not they. She had come into Janet’s house like it was nothing, right under the noses of two agents, grabbed what she wanted, and then left. Hell, she probably had a key from the last time.

  The CSU leader escorted his team out and then stepped back in.

  “We’re finished up here,” he said.

  “Good moves on getting Williams and Jackson out, by the way. EMTs said they’re breathing on their own. They said that was your doing. Glad to have you back. Carter.”

  She smiled weakly and went upstairs to get dressed. As she was washing her face, she remembered that the phone had rung while she was getting the agents out. Kreiss? She went to her bedside, got a pen and pad out, and then dialed star 69. The robot quoted her a phone number. She hung up and looked at it. It had a 703 area code. Northern Virginia. Shit, she thought. Is Kreiss still up in the Washington area? She started to dial it, then thought better of that. She’d take it to the office, where they could run the number and see what and who it was.

  Kreiss moved out of his camp at daylight. He’d decided to have a look around the arsenal, mostly to see what kind of activity was going on down in the industrial area, and to walk the fence perimeter to identify alternative ways out in case he had to run for it. He figured the van would be safe for two, maybe three days in that shopping center parking lot before someone noticed it or stole it. He’d walk out and move it before then.

  He was dressed out in the camo-pattern crawl suit, and he had some water, one MRE, the gun, and the cell phone. His call to Carter had not been answered, and he wanted to try again later in the morning. He wasn’t sure if the number Micah had given him was her home or office, but she might have call forwarding on it. He went back through the

  woods in the direction of the railway cut to get to a point high enough to see down into the industrial area. There did not seem to be anyone down there, although there was what appeared to be a tan-colored van parked by the first intact building along the main street. The blast at the power plant had been powerful enough to knock down all the wooden structures in the low areas, as well as badly damage several of the big concrete buildings.

  He concluded that the van was an aTF Crime Scene Unit still working the site for evidence. As long as he stayed out of sight and sound, he should be free to move about the rest of the installation.

  An hour later, he was in the bunker farm, which looked to be every bit as big as the overhead photos indicated. He’d gone over the fence rather than fool with the gates, especially with police and aTF people around.

  The ground inside the bunker farm was rolling, with narrow gravel roads defining the lanes and rows of the partially buried round-topped bunkers.

  From his vantage point on top of a bunker, he could see perhaps five hundred of the structures, interspersed with clumps of pines. There were no telephone poles, so power and monitoring circuits going to the structures must be underground. He fished the binoculars out of the chest pack and sat down to take a careful look at everything. He knew there were at least that many bunkers, if not more, over the far ridge, and behind that was the section of the perimeter fence he wanted to explore. The day was turning hazy with weak sunlight.

  As he scanned the bunkers to the right of the main road, carefully studying the stands of trees and occasionally turning the glasses back onto the gates to make sure no one was coming, he worried about Lynn. The thought of Misty hunting Lynn had been very much on his mind. Even if she was with Carter, it didn’t mean she was safe. Inexperienced as she was, Carter was no match for someone like Misty. Hell, most of the Bureau was no match for Misty. It wasn’t just all the gizmos and special toys that made the sweepers so effective; it was their willingness to do very unconventional and dangerous things that made them so lethal, like starting that fire in the hospital. That plus the use of disabling weapons like the retinal disrupter, or psychological measures, like his own use of sounds.

  He could still remember his first training session with Misty: “If you’re going to hunt someone,” she said, “there are two ways to go about it. You can hunt your target in secret and attempt to take him by surprise. But, by definition, you’ll get only one chance doing it that way; if you fail, the element of surprise is lost. Considering that we are normally dealing with trained operatives when we go

  hunting, a miss can be permanent. On the other hand, if you subtly let the quarry know you’re hunting him, you add the element of fear to all the other weapons at your disposal. The people we hunt are highly trained to pay attention to situational awareness, which is another way of saying they’re permanently paranoid. If you choose the second method, you can amplify that existing paranoia with lots of nonlethal means, to the point where you can make the quarry bolt.

  Once he bolts, his situational awareness is gone, and he’s yours for the taking.”

  After the first month, he’d realized that Misty truly enjoyed her work.

  And so, if he thought about it honestly, had he. It hadn’t been at all like the Bureau, which tended to throw a wide net of resources around a subject and then slowly, if often not very efficiently, pull it tight. His first boss in the Bureau had explained it well: The Bureau was first and foremost a bureaucracy. The word had two roots: bureau, meaning “administrative unit,” and cracy, from the Greek kratos, meaning “strength” or “power.”

  We strangle the bad guys with paperwork—research, evidence, legal maneuvers, surveillance, wire-taps, warrants, and laws—while trying not to drown in our own internal paperwork. His work with the sweepers had been the absolute antithesis of the Bureau’s approach: Tracking down and retrieving an Agency operative who had gone bad was an intensely personal mission. It was one-on-one ball, an exciting match of professional wits, stamina, cunning, mechanical skills, and, ultimately, the direct psychological engagement of the target. He hadn’t liked it; he had loved it.

  He shifted his position on the top of the bunker and scanned the other half of the bunker field, starting from the road and working to his left, lookin
g for anything out of place or different from all the other bunkers.

  He also scanned the fence line; nothing there except some plastic bags and other windblown trash hung up at the base of the wire. The bunkers all looked much the same: old grayish green concrete, rusting steel doors facing a ramp that had been cut down into the ground, and two motionless rusting helical ventilators on each structure, looking like little frozen smokestacks.

  Except one was moving. Right there, almost on the visible horizon, to the right of a large stand of trees. A bunker like all the rest, except that the helical cylinder on the back end of the bunker was turning very slowly.

  Now why is that? he wondered.

  He knew that the helical cowls could provide ventilation two ways. If there was a breeze, it would spin the helix, which in turn would draw warm air out of the bunker. But if there was no breeze, as was the

  case today, it had to mean there was warm air inside the bunker, rising through the shaft to turn the helix. But the bunkers were supposedly all empty.

  Empty, cold, manmade tombs.

  He walked carefully down the full length of the bunker roof he was standing on to examine the distant cowl from a slightly different angle. It was definitely moving. It was nearly half a mile away; perhaps there was a breeze over there. But then both cowls ought to be moving. He swung around to scan the fence and the gates behind him, but there was still no one there, and no sound of any vehicles coming. He took a mental bearing on the distant bunker, slid down from the one he had climbed, and headed for the ridge, trotting purposefully down one of the lanes. It was full daylight now, so he tried to keep a line of bunkers between him and the main gate to the bunker farm. He was almost there, crossing into a line of trees from the gravel lane, when the tiny cellular phone in his backpack went off. He moved sideways into the tree line, stood with his back against a tree, opened the phone, and hit the send button.

  “You called me,” he announced quietly.

  “This is Janet Carter; where are you?”

  “At the other end of this phone circuit, Special Agent,” he replied. She sounded upset.