Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in the office. In Roanoke. That woman—Misty, you called her?

  She’s taken Lynn.”

  He sat down abruptly, his back to the pine tree. A cold wave settled over his chest.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She gave him a brief rundown of everything since the hospital, up to and including Misty’s attack with the carbon monoxide.

  “My boss wants you to come in, preferably down here to Roanoke. He’s—wait a minute.”

  Kreiss sat there with his eyes closed, trying not to think of anything.

  He’d had Lynn, but now he didn’t. A man’s voice came on the phone.

  “Mr. Kreiss, this is Ted Farnsworth, RA Roanoke. We have a warrant for your apprehension as a material witness regarding a homicide over in Montgomery County. We have a federal warrant for you regarding the little diversion you ran in Washington. The aTF wants to talk to you about the bombing of their headquarters. And a certain Agency apparently just plain wants your ass.”

  “It’s nice to be wanted,” Kreiss said.

  “But not very.”

  “Yeah, well, you were in the business. You know the drill. There’s one more want, actually. My AD—that’s Mr. Greer, over at Criminal

  Investigations—wants to know why another AD—that’s Mr. Marchand, over FCI—got someone very senior at Main Justice to activate the person who snatched your daughter and damn near killed two of my agents this mo ming

  Three, if Janet hadn’t awakened and realized something was wrong.”

  “Good question,” Kreiss said. He would have to figure out how to contact Misty. There was no sense in delaying the inevitable. Talking to the FBI was now a waste of time. He knew what Misty wanted: a straight trade. Himself for Lynn.

  “Mr. Kreiss? Are you there?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think we have anything to talk about, Mr. Farnsworth.”

  He could just see the ventilator cowl. It was still moving.

  “That’s not quite so, Mr. Kreiss. I have authority to deal on the Jared McGarand matter and what happened up on the G.W. Parkway. My chain of command feels that what Bellhouser and Foster set in motion is a hell of a lot more important than anything going on down here in Roanoke.

  They also feel that this is all connected to something you know.”

  More than you would ever understand, he thought as he focused on what Farnsworth was saying. And here he was again, facing the same choice he had been given five years ago: “your silence or your daughter.”

  “Mr. Kreiss?”

  “You can’t help me do the one thing I must do, Mr. Farnsworth,” Kreiss said.

  “I need to free my daughter. And I don’t believe you or your boss or even his boss can fight what’s behind all this.”

  “My SAC is telling me the director’s into this one, Mr. Kreiss.”

  “I rest my case.”

  “AD Greer says this is about the Chinese espionage case in the nuclear labs. Is he right?”

  Kreiss was surprised, very surprised. He forced himself to focus.

  Nobody knew this. Except them.

  “Mr. Kreiss? Greer says you came back from your Agency assignment and the Glower incident with information that connects Chinese government campaign contributions to the way the nuclear labs investigations got derailed.”

  “We are speaking on an open radio circuit,” Kreiss warned. He was aghast. Nobody could know this.

  “They’re telling me you agreed to forced retirement and a vow of silence. What he doesn’t know or understand is why. The publicly stated reason was your role in the Glower mass suicides. But now he thinks it was something else.”

  Kreiss sat on the ground in the pine straw, his mind reeling. He had kept his end of the bargain. He had not said a word. He had not done anything but come down here to be with and support his daughter while she finished school. If it hadn’t been for that total wild card, that lunatic McGarand and his mission of revenge, he’d still be sitting in his cabin watching the trees grow. They had broken the agreement. Unless…

  “Mr. Kreiss? My chain of command desperately wants to know what you know, and what you can prove. They are willing to drop all the rest, all of it, in return for that. We think we can help you get your daughter back from those people, but only if we can apply the appropriate pressure at the seat of government. Agency to agency, director to director, if need be.”

  “You don’t know her,” Kreiss said. A bird started up with a racket way up in the trees above his head.

  “What’s that, Mr. Kreiss? Don’t know who?”

  “You don’t know the woman who’s holding Lynn. Ask Carter; she knows her. This is personal now, between me and her. The only way I know I can get Lynn back safely is to trade myself for my daughter. You and the rest of the Bureau would only get in the way.”

  “Not true, Mr. Kreiss. If you give my bosses what they need, they can get her controllers to turn your daughter over. Ephraim Glower’s dead, so the Agency can admit what he was doing now and shrug their shoulders:

  He’s beyond prosecution, dead five years now. They won’t be the ones who’ll have the problem. It will be the people at Justice, and whomever they suborned here at the Bureau. The Agency will play ball when they realize our director is going to reveal the connection.”

  Kreiss thought about it. Could he take on Misty? Could he even find Misty? And what would happen to Lynn if he did?

  “You were a special agent of the FBI, Mr. Kreiss. You know how we do things. We’re the G. We’re big. We’re huge. We overwhelm. So do they.

  If the Agency sets its mind to it, they can and will find you and grind you up. If you let them capture you, you’ll end up in solitary confinement in a federal pen somewhere, and not necessarily in this country.”

  Then Janet Carter came on the line.

  “The last time, when you went along, it was strictly about your daughter, wasn’t it?”

  Kreiss didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  “Well, this time you have some leverage you didn’t have before. Last time, you traded her security for your silence. They broke the deal. So why not use what you’ve got?”

  “Because, Special Agent, she might kill my daughter.”

  “Might? Mr. Kreiss, she already set fire to a hospital. What makes you think she won’t hurt Lynn now? I told you what happened in the cave, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we’re pretty sure now those were her people. They were not aTF assets. In fact, the local head of the aTF has been in here all morning, yelling at Mr. Farnsworth here to find you. aTF hasn’t been conducting any operations down here other than out at that arsenal, after the McGarand thing. So those had to be her people in the cave.”

  He felt the world constrict. Misty had suffered losses. Would she take that out on Lynn? He had given his word. To leave the Bureau. To admit culpability for precipitating the Glower debacle. To maintain his silence.

  To submerge completely. In return, they would leave Lynn alone. Every fiber of his being was crying out for him to hunt that woman down, to destroy her. But he knew Carter and Farnsworth were right. The only realistic fix was in Washington, where the fix was the holy grail of modern government. It wasn’t about tradecraft anymore, or personal competence.

  It was about information and evidence. The director had been demonized by his enemies at Justice ever since the campaign contributions scandal had erupted. Now he’d discovered that there might be a way to destroy those enemies. If he could believe Farnsworth, the director himself was willing to use what he, Kreiss, knew, to strike back. And, not coincidentally, to strike at the heart of the corruption that most people in the Bureau believed had consumed the Justice Department. These were monumental issues: How would one college student fare when federal law enforcement went to war with itself?

  “If I do this, how can you guarantee that Lynn remains safe?”

  “We can’t,” Farnsworth said. The words reso
unded down the phone line.

  “I want to say something different, but that’s probably the truth of it.”

  Kreiss found himself nodding in agreement. At least Farnsworth was shooting straight.

  “But you can’t, either, Mr. Kreiss. From what Janet tells me, Lynn knows more about this than I think you would expect. If she reveals that to them, she becomes expendable, too. The only way this works is if we have information that forces them to let her go. She’s a pawn, and that’s how you want to keep it. You have to come in. You don’t have any workable alternatives.”

  “All right,” he said, almost whispering it.

  “I’m at the Ramsey Arsenal.”

  There was an instant of silence, as if Farnsworth was surprised by that.

  “Where, exactly?” Farnsworth asked.

  Kreiss’s eyes snapped open at that question. It didn’t fit with everything else Farnsworth had been saying. It was too… tactical.

  “Have Carter come alone to the industrial area,” Kreiss said.

  “I’ll find her.”

  There was another pause on the line. Then Farnsworth said, “Three hours. And not alone—she has to have backup.”

  “Distant backup.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Three hours,” Kreiss repeated, and switched the phone off. He leaned sideways and let himself settle back into the pine straw, his eyes staring up into the treetops, unseeing. He did, in fact, have what the Bureau wanted.

  Much more than they needed. Direct corroborating evidence of a deliberate policy to suppress and impede the investigation at the nuclear labs.

  Not derived from any investigation, but from Ephraim Glower’s safe, which he, Kreiss, had rifled after discovering the bodies. He had felt more than a little guilt when he beheld that blood bath, but that guilt vanished when he read what was in Glower’s safe. He smiled for the first time that day, or maybe even that week. They would be expecting him to take them to a safety-deposit box somewhere and produce an envelope. They would positively howl when they found out where it was. And what it was.

  Then he remembered that ventilator, spinning quietly in the still air of morning. He looked at his watch. He had three hours. Why not go see?

  Farnsworth took Janet with him down to the secure-communications area of the office. To her surprise, Billy Smith was manning the communication console. He winked at her as Farnsworth ordered him to get Assistant Director Greer’s office on the line. The operator on the Washington end told him to stand by.

  “This is the biggest thing that you’ll ever be involved in,” he told Janet.

  “If we can prove that the Chinese campaign contributions bought breathing room for their spies in the Energy Department, and that someone at Justice helped it happen, the Bureau will be invincible.”

  “But according to Lynn Kreiss, that ‘someone’ injustice had some help in the Bureau,” Janet pointed out. This comment elicited a gas-pain expression from Farnsworth. Then Assistant Director Greer himself was on the secure link.

  Farnsworth briefed him on what had been agreed. Greer immediately overruled the RAs plan to send just Carter and some backup agents to pick Kreiss up.

  “You go yourself, and take along every swinging dick in the office,” he ordered.

  “I want nothing going wrong here. The last time you sent people to that goddamned arsenal, it blew up in your faces, literally.”

  “Sir, Kreiss is nervous,” Farnsworth said.

  “He sees a crowd, he may change his mind.”

  “Then make sure he doesn’t see a goddamned crowd. Now, you think he has evidence? Real evidence? Not just opinions?”

  “I think if all he had were opinions, he wouldn’t have been hammered the way he was five years ago. I think he has something, and now that all that shit about the labs has resurfaced, those people are scared of it. But first and foremost, we must get the daughter back, or nothing good happens.

  Kreiss without the daughter is useless.”

  “Then make it happen. Pick him up and get him up here, with his evidence.

  Quickly, before our dear friends down at Justice figure out what’s happening. Once the director evaluates the situation, we’ll make the appropriate calls and get the daughter back.”

  “What if they won’t?”

  “Won’t what?”

  “Give the daughter back. What if they insist we give them Kreiss before they’ll let the daughter go?”

  “Once he gives us his evidence, I don’t give a shit about what happens to Kreiss. He embarrassed the Bureau. The spooks can have him. Believe me, we don’t have to go public with what we know to achieve the desired effect.”

  Farnsworth opened his mouth to say something but then closed it.

  Janet was staring at the secure phone in disbelief. Greer told them to get moving and hung up. Farnsworth put the phone down slowly, as if it were very fragile.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said softly.

  “Amen to that,” Janet said, sitting down in a chair by the phone console.

  “I never agreed to anything like that with Kreiss,” he said.

  “He shows his evidence, we send it up the line, and they force those people to recall their operative and get the girl back. That’s the fucking deal. I never agreed to turn Kreiss over to anybody.”

  “But in a way, you just did,” she pointed out.

  “No, I did not,” the RA said, his jaw jutting out.

  “Kreiss used to be one of us. It wasn’t like he went dirty. I don’t

  care what he knows or what he did up there in D.C.; I’m not going to be part of just handing him over to some bunch of out-of-control spooks.”

  “Let’s take it one step at a time,” she said.

  “Let’s get to Kreiss. See his so-called evidence. I also want to know what happened with Jared McGarand; I think that his getting killed may have been an accident. And what he did up there in that car? Well, considering where they were taking him, I’d have tried the same thing, only I’d have probably screwed it up. But first, let’s get Kreiss. Nothing happens until we have him.”

  Farnsworth nodded, staring down at the phone as if it smelled bad.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Find Keenan. We’ll need everybody.”

  Kreiss approached the bunker from the front, along the gravel road that led between one row of bunkers and the next, staying close to the mounded structures in case a security patrol popped over the hill behind him. The bunker number was still visible, black lettering on a dirty white field: 887. The ramp leading down to the heavy steel doors showed no signs of recent human activity. There was a large rusty-looking padlock on the huge steel airtight door, just like all the rest of the bunkers had.

  The grass growing around the bunker was a foot deep, starting at the front face of the bunker and growing all the way around it, making it look like the bunker had grown naturally out of the ground. The building appeared to be 150 feet long.

  Kreiss walked down the gravel and concrete ramp and examined the lock. It was securely made; there were no bright metal scratches to show evidence of any tampering. The steel door was blast-resistant, with heavy airtight seals overlapping its mounting. There was some Army nomenclature on the side of the lock, so it was probably part of a series set. He walked back up the ramp and around to the side of the bunker, climbing through the thick wet grass to stand at the bottom of the rounded top.

  The front ventilator was still; the rear one was just barely moving, making a repetitive pinging noise as a rusty bearing complained. But it was definitely moving. Stepping softly, he climbed up the rounded concrete top of the bunker, sliding his feet instead of stepping. That concrete was probably a foot thick, but if there was someone inside, he didn’t want to be heard. When he got to the rear ventilator cowl, he smelled kerosene smoke. It was very faint, but recognizable. He put his nose to the cowl and the smell was stronger. Kerosene lantern or heater in there.

  Someone was in the bunker. And since the f
ront door was locked tight from the outside, there must be another way in. He slid back down the

  roof of the bunker and walked all the way around it. It was solid, with no other entrances or exits. He checked the boundary area where the grass met the sloping concrete of the structure, looking for a trapdoor, but it was all solid ground. He looked back up at the ventilator, then went to the front of the bunker and climbed to the front cowl. He sniffed that, but there was no smell of anything but the wet grass on his boots. He studied it, then went to the back cowl to see what was different, and he found it immediately.

  The base of the rear ventilator cowl was hinged. The hinges had been tack-welded on and then painted flat black to match the tar that sealed the cowl flashing to the concrete. The tarred flashing, however, was gone. He put his fingers under the base of the cowling and lifted just a tiny bit. The whole structure moved. He went back to the front cowling and tried the same thing. Solid as a rock. He shuffled back to the rear cowling, looked on the side opposite the hinges, and saw a crude latch. The latch was made so that the ventilator cowling wouldn’t move sideways if the turbine head really began to spin. He was willing to bet there was a ladder down there.

  He squatted down on the roof of the bunker. Someone was hiding in there. Now who would be hiding out in the ammunition-storage area of an abandoned military facility? No, not military. Civilian. This place had been a GOCO installation—government-owned, commercially operated.

  McGarand had run this whole installation as the chief chemical engineer.

  He had set up his hydrogen laboratory in the most secure building on the site, the one that offered the most sound and physical insulation, the power plant. That must have taken months of effort. He had set up traps along the approach perimeter, and he had rigged the industrial area itself to destruct if anybody came around to take a serious look. Which meant he had had all the time in the world to prepare something like this, for the aftermath of his revenge bombing. If the kids hadn’t come along, he would probably still be living in Blacksburg, watching the feds reel from another bombing that, somewhat like the OK City bombing, had no clear motivations. The bunker farm was a perfect place to hide, just like the industrial area had been the perfect place for a bomb factory. It was another case of hiding in almost plain sight: The one place no one would look for McGarand would be back in the damned arsenal. It had to be McGarand.