She yelped, grabbed the blood-slick windowsill, and hung there for a moment while the car rocked dangerously on the single pipe holding it over the hole. She heard the end of the pipe grinding ominously. She climbed partially back into the car, got another faceful of blood, and then blindly kicked out with her legs until her feet hit solid ground. She arched her back, making a bridge of her body between the rim of the hole and the car, and then stood up, windmilling her arms until she could get her balance.
She sat down, then recoiled when she felt Misty’s foot move against her back. She rolled away, wiping her eyes clear of blood, and came up on all fours. Misty was also on all fours. Her chest pack was a mass of black blood, and there were bloody holes in her right hand and throat. Her left eye was hanging partially out of its socket. Her face was twisted into a white mask of fury. The hole in her throat was pumping visibly, spattering the concrete and literally drowning out the words she was trying to speak.
Janet crawled backward from this horrible apparition as the sweeper brought up a large stainless-steel syringe in her left hand. The needle dripped a fuming substance from its glittering tip, and then Janet, still moving backward, felt a searing lance of pain on her right shoulder as Misty pressed the plunger to fire a jet of acid across the concrete at Janet.
Then Janet heard a single shot from her left and Misty’s head jerked sideways and she dropped like a stone, the syringe clattering into the street.
Janet tried to get up, but her skin was screaming in pain as the acid
melted through her shirt and burned her. She saw Lynn hanging partially out of the car window, her face white, blood streaming from her forehead, still clutching Janet’s .38. The car shifted again, the steel pipe under the wheel well beginning to bend up at a dangerous angle. Janet yelled at Lynn to stop moving as she tore away the upper-right part of her smoking shirt and rubbed at her skin, trying to get the acid off her. Then Kreiss was there, telling her to stop moving, and then he was kneeling next to Misty’s body and dissolving the capture curtain in the fountain of blood coming out other throat until his hands came free, flailing away the ropes of the latex hanging off them like a bundle of snakes. He pulled Lynn all the way out of the car, getting her clear just as the steel pipe made a loud creaking noise and then viciously snapped, dropping the car nose-first down into the hole with a terrible crash. After that came a profound silence, into which the sounds of sirens finally penetrated. Kreiss put Lynn down gently, sitting her up against the building’s wall.
Janet sat on the concrete, still batting at the skin on her shoulder while trying to keep the blood out other eyes with her left arm. Kreiss squatted down next to her, rubbed his bloody hands against the jumpsuit, and took her hand.
“I wasn’t sure you could do it,” he said softly.
“I wasn’t, either,” she said, looking over at the Misty’s shattered body, which was draining four distinct streams of blood across the concrete and into the Ditch. Lynn still held Janet’s .38 in a virtual death grip while she stared at Misty’s inert form. Janet realized she was clutching his hand like a lifeline. Her own legs were trembling.
“Look,” he said.
“You’ve both sustained head injuries. Your memory will be affected. I’m going to take… that… away. Here’s your story:
You got here, heard shooting, saw the thermite, and then fucked up and drove into the hole and got out by the skin of your teeth.”
Janet blinked. The sirens were definitely closer now.
“They’ll certainly believe that,” she said.
“Still the fucking amateur.”
“No, not anymore you’re not,” he said. He looked over at Lynn to make sure she was still conscious.
“Who’d you call?”
“Would you believe the aTF?”
He smiled at that.
“I’ve got to move,” he said.
“You remember the crash, but nothing else. Stay close to Lynn, if you can. I’ll be in touch when things cool off.”
“Will you?” she asked.
“Oh yes, Janet. But first I’ll send you a sign. Now, lie back down, relax.
That’s just a cut on your head. Scalp wounds bleed. Looks worse than it is, but it will divert any questions for a while.” He looked up and listened.
“They’re almost here.”
“Farnsworth is going to be seriously pissed,” she said, not letting go of his hand.
“Farnsworth is going to be too busy to be pissed,” he replied. He squeezed her hand and then he moved to Lynn. She watched him gently put his daughter down on her back in the anti shock position, head down, knees raised. He wiped her forehead, took the gun out of her hand, and then held her face in his hands for a moment. He kissed her forehead and stood up. He picked up Misty’s gun, and then lifted her inert form, hunched into a fireman’s carry, and then he was gone, bent over with the weight of her, like a lion off to hide his kill.
Janet relaxed onto the concrete, hearing the noise of vehicles up by the gate, knowing they’d be down here soon. She let the blood seep over her forehead now without trying to impede it; the bleeding actually seemed to help the headache. The skin along her upper arm and shoulder still burned, but it was more like a really bad sunburn now. She wondered if her shoulder would be scarred forever. She realized she didn’t really care.
What had he called her? Janet? No more “Special Agent”? She smiled at that as headlights flooded the street. It began to rain.
Three weeks later, Janet Carter waited outside the RA’s office for her final meeting with Farnsworth and Keenan before she formally checked out of the office. That morning, she had tentatively accepted a teaching and research position over at Virginia Tech in the materials forensics department of the civil engineering school. The school was developing a post incident forensics program to investigate and determine the cause of catastrophic failures in large structures, such as bridges, streets, or buildings. When the department chair, who had also headed up one of her Saturday seminars, found out she was looking, he had offered her the job immediately, subject, of course, to the
appropriate due diligence on her academic degree and an FBI recommendation. Like many government employees leaving federal service, she’d been a bit surprised at how easy it had been.
As she sat there, she wondered, not for the first time, where Edwin Kreiss was. Based on the way Lynn had been acting lately, she was pretty sure they had been in touch. The past three weeks had been interesting times, in the Chinese sense of that expression. The aTF never did find McGarand, but they had found a vehicle in the woods that had been rented up in Washington at the Reagan Airport, and the driver’s license used had been Browne McGarand’s. A joint forensics team had spent some time at the scene where they found Janet and Lynn. It had taken a specially equipped fire truck to get the fire in the valve pit out because the thermite grenade had ignited some metal fittings. There had been no trace of human remains in or around the valve pit itself, but they had recovered an IR sight-equipped AK-47, along with evidence that it had been emptied almost indiscriminately into the valve pit. She wondered if anyone had tried to account for all the blood trails out on that street, but the rain had probably washed most of it away.
Farnsworth had had a lot of explaining to do to his bosses in Richmond and Washington, as well as to the aTF He stonewalled the latter, while trying to explain what one of his agents had been doing there at the arsenal that night, with a civilian in tow. There had been endless meetings and lots of report writing to do over the whole incident. Janet had had time to prep Lynn in the ER, so their story remained fairly consistent: They had gone out there to help Kreiss and ended up crashing the car. End of story, as far as they knew. Never saw Kreiss. Never saw anyone else. Never saw a firefight. Janet’s acid burns had come somehow from the hole into which they’d crashed the car. Didn’t know how they got out, or how they got back up to the street. Both of them had taken a shot to the head, hadn’t they? Everything after the crash was a
blur. Didn’t remember calling the aTF, but must have. Knew they’d come, wasn’t sure the Bureau would.
That last had hurt Farnsworth’s feelings. No, never saw McGarand.
Billy Smith had been recalled to temporary duty in Washington the day after the incident. Janet had been prepared to pursue the theory that he had been an Agency plant all along, put in place to watch Kreiss. But he was gone, and Farnsworth had bigger fish to fry. Three days after the incident, all the hate mail from Washington had suddenly stopped. Word came down directly from the executive assistant director over Criminal Investigations that the incident was officially closed.
It had been as if a giant hand had simply wiped all the post incident counterops and turned out the lights on the whole affair. One day, she was in the hot seat; the next day, everyone was suddenly all smiles and happiness and the office was back to business as usual. All she could figure was that larger issues, and one in particular, had finally hit the fan at the senior-executive service level.
Lynn Kreiss was back in school, after Janet had explained to the university’s finance office why Lynn had been absent and, more important, why her tuition for that quarter ought not to be forfeited. The university’s finance office had been incredibly unsympathetic, and it wasn’t until Janet had threatened publicity that adult supervision was brought to bear. Lynn had agreed to go with Janet and Larry Talbot to one final meeting with the boys’ parents, which had been tense initially and then extremely emotional.
Now she was spending her weekends at her father’s cabin, waiting and watching for her father to appear out of the woods one night. Janet had been spending her weekends there, too, just to keep an eye on things and to get out of her town house. In the back of her mind, she knew she also wanted to be there when, if, he showed up again, but there had been no sign of Edwin Kreiss.
She had also been assigned to work out a case-closure report with the Montgomery County detectives on the matter of jared McGarand. She had written a Bureau memo outlining her theory that Jared McGarand’s death had probably been accidental, occurring during the course of a confrontation between Edwin Kreiss and the subject. She appended an evidentiary statement provided by Lynn Kreiss as to the sexual abuse and near rape she had endured while a captive at the hands of the subject. The county people, slaves to the same closure statistics that drove their federal cousins, said they would have to keep the case open, but they allowed informally as to how nobody was going to put a lot of man-hours on a creep like that anytime soon. Because she had named Edwin Kreiss in her report, the paperwork was whisked off to Washington and never seen again.
She had spent a great deal of time doing some soul-searching about staying in the Bureau. The Roanoke people might all have been told to forget that anything had happened, but, of course, a hell of a lot had happened.
The kicker came when Farnsworth put her in for a meritorious service award. The headquarters Professional Awards Division had come back disapproving the recommendation, citing an opinion from OPR that there
had been several clear instances where Special Agent Janet Carter had either disobeyed direct operational orders or departed from approved procedures, causing the loss of a Bureau vehicle in two different instances.
Farnsworth had loyally driven up to Richmond to raise hell about the disapproval, but when he returned, all he could say was that he had run into an absolute bureaucratic glacier. It apparently had nothing to do with Janet. It had everything to do with the fact that the Edwin Kreiss case was not only closed but positively entombed.
“Chernobylized,” the SAC in Richmond had said. Images of helicopters dumping concrete on the whole affair.
That was when Janet had made her decision to leave the Bureau. She could understand how the organization would want to pave over the Edwin Kreiss affair. She could not, however, forget what she had done out there in the arsenal. For that one instant, she had become an instinctive, rather than rational, human being. She could justify the shooting; she could not rationalize emptying the Sig, no matter how much she recited Bureau training about gunfights. She had looked Misty in the eye and emptied the Sig until her hands were on fire, and she would have come out of that car and strangled the woman if she’d been close enough. She could still remember the shock of triumph in her heart when she saw the look of surprise in Misty’s face, even as her bullets took that face apart. As far as she was concerned, she’d met the beast, and the beast had looked a lot like her. Once was enough.
“Mr. Farnsworth will see you now, Special Agent Carter,” the secretary said, a triumphant look in her eyes. Janet came back to the present and stared at the secretary long enough to make her look away. Then she went into the RAs office. Ben Keenan was already there, and they both appeared to be in an expansive mood. Janet sat down.
“So I guess this is good-bye,” she said.
Farnsworth nodded. He had not attempted to talk her out of leaving the Bureau this time, which pretty much confirmed Janet’s own suspicions that, careerwise, she had become radioactive.
“Yes, I guess it is, Janet,” he said.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out better, but I think you understand by now that, knowing what you know about the Edwin Kreiss case, any subsequent assignments would always be … uncomfortable? I guess that’s the right word. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll be following you out the door by year’s end.”
“They didn’t—” “Oh, no, but these kind of cases always create a certain amount of fallout.
If I go peacefully, the rest of the troops here get a second chance.”
“The rest of the troops here just did their jobs,” she said.
“Why should they suffer over the Kreiss affair?”
“You know the answer to that, Janet,” he said.
“Kreiss was a Bureau man. He embarrassed the outfit. This whole thing reminded everybody of an old rule.”
“What’s that?”
“Once a deal is made at the executive level, always clean up any loose ends. Kreiss was a loose end with consequences, and look what happened.”
“I would have thought that document would have made them somewhat more grateful,” she said.
“What document was that?” Farnsworth asked. His expression was one of bland disinterest.
Janet cocked her head.
“C’mon now,” she said.
“The document in AD Marchand’s archives. The smoking gun. Which proved—” “Never heard of it,” Farnsworth said, giving Keenan a questioning look. Keenan shook his head. He’d never heard of it, either.
“What!” she exclaimed.
“Nothing of the sort ever happened,” he repeated.
“The resignation of the deputy attorney general of the United States was simply a case of a senior political appointee resigning as the administration ended its own term of office. Nothing more.”
“And the recent retirement of Assistant Director Marchand and his senior deputy AD, and a certain red-faced PA … well, those were driven entirely by personal reasons,” Keenan said.
“Nothing more.”
“And the reappointment of our beloved director for another full term of office had been in the works for, oh, quite a long time,” Farnsworth said, folding his hands across his chest.
“Don’t you think so, Ben?”
“Oh, yes,” Keenan chimed in.
“Quite a long time indeed. Absolutely.
At least according to the attorney general of the United States, who publicly expressed her continuing full faith and confidence in him.”
“As did the president himself. Am I right, Ben?”
“He absolutely did,” Keenan said, beaming.
“Several times. And he loves his Bureau, too.”
“Oh, positively. He loves his Bureau. Just like the AG loves her Bureau.”
“They fucking better,” Keenan said. They looked at Janet with straight faces for a moment, and then they all laughed.
Janet shook her head. In a way, it was
kind of comforting. The ultimate lock was in place. The big fish could afford to smile about
it. Small fry who might know something about the antecedents of such deals were, of course, an embarrassing annoyance. Any offer on said small fry’s part to fold her tents and disappear quietly into the desert night would be gratefully and expeditiously accepted, as evidenced by the recommendation Farnsworth sent over to the university. It had been glowing in the extreme, and, just for good measure, it had been warmly endorsed by the same official at the laboratory who had been the proximate cause of her original exile to the Roanoke office. Wonders never ceased.
Farnsworth was about to say something else, when the secretary buzzed in on the intercom.
“What?” Farnsworth asked.
“An urgent telex for you, sir. From the VHP?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
The secretary read it over the intercom. It was plain from her tone of voice that she was upset. The Virginia Highway Patrol was reporting that they had found two partially mummified human heads impaled on stakes in the median of Interstate 81 outside of Christiansburg. They were requesting immediate FBI forensic assistance. They reported quite a commotion out on the interstate. Media interest was expected.
“Mummified human heads!” Keenan exclaimed.
“On stakes? Christ!”
Janet turned her face away to conceal the smile she was struggling to control.
“Close,” she murmured.
She wondered when he’d call. He probably wouldn’t. He’d come shambling down that hill behind the cabin. Maybe with Micah Wall and Whizbang.
Hunting Season Page 55
