Nothing appeared to be moving behind them anymore.
“Son of a bitch,” Lynn murmured. She lit her lantern.
“Micah said not to shoot off a gun down here,” Janet said.
“Let’s get going before they regroup.”
As they started forward along the ledge, one last immense stalactite came down, way out in the darkness. Lynn raised her lantern, but the ceiling was still too high to see. Moments later, actual waves washed against their feet. The silence behind them was absolute; Janet didn’t think they would be regrouping anytime soon. She pressed forward, shivering, and soon they were at the other side of the lake. Behind them, there were no further signs of pursuit.
When Kreiss saw the first road signs for Blacksburg, he pulled into the parking lot of the next convenience store that came along on Route 11
and placed a call to Micah Wall. He used the rented cell phone this time:
They could get a number off a tap, but it should trace back to the Washington calling area. He looked at his watch while the phone was ringing:
It was 8:30. He had taken back roads all the way down from Washington, and it had nearly doubled the time for the trip. But there were too many people hunting for him now. The Bureau would be after him for what he done to john stone and Lanny boy. The aTF would want to question him further in connection with the bombing of their headquarters building.
He had listened to news reports of the blast on Massachusetts Avenue.
They had apparently listened to his warning, but McGarand’s bomb had done its job. The attack would really shock them, he thought. The aTF was a tiny organization compared to the Bureau, but they had been a pretty high-profile group lately. The field agents he had known were competent people who were sincerely trying to make the country a safer place. But their policy people in Washington were another story, especially when a “situation” developed. Then too many of them wanted to play John Wayne.
And the Agency? That posed a trickier question. He suspected that some senior devils in Main Justice and Langley had decided to eliminate their Edwin Kreiss problem once and for all. If so, his maneuvering room was shrinking fast. Right now, he needed to know where Lynn was. And his favorite ex-special agent, for that matter. Someone picked up the phone at the other end and he asked for Micah.
“Who’s callin’?”
“The lion keeper,” he answered. The man told him to hold on, and he could hear the sounds of an urgent discussion in the background. Then the man came back.
“Pap’s done gone. Buncha damn revenuers into them caves under Pearl’s Mountain. Pap says they’s hunting’ kin o’yourn. Pap’s up on the back ridge, with some a the boys, waitin’ on ‘em. Ain’t had no word back yet.”
Revenuers? He wondered what the aTF was doing going after Lynn.
Unless they were trying what Misty had tried—take the daughter, bag the father.
“Was Janet Carter with her? When they went in?”
“Don’t rightly know. They was two wimmen, all’s I know.”
“Did these people show any identification? Warrants?”
“Don’t know who they was. Pap said they didn’t bring no warrants.
They was wantin’ to come in here, search the whole damn place, but Pap and Uncle Jed took the ten-gauges out, tole ‘em to git on out a here.
They went on back down to the road. Then they come back, with ‘em dogs. It was ‘em dogs took ‘em to the cave. Ain’t seen hide nor hair of ‘em since.”
Micah had shown Kreiss the cave hideout up behind the cabin and the junkyard. He had implied there were passages leading back from the tiny hut, but he hadn’t volunteered any further information, and Kreiss hadn’t wanted to pry. Now he needed to tell Micah where he would be hiding, but he knew the government people would have put a tap on Micah’s line.
“All right. I appreciate it. Tell Micah I’m back, and that there’s a bunch of revenuers after me, too. Tell him I’m going to lay up in that place he and I talked about, last time he heard the lions.”
“Awright.”
“And one more thing—the government is probably listening to this conversation. Tell your Pap to stay shy.”
There was a soft, contemptuous guffaw on the phone, and then the man hung up.
Kreiss pressed the button to end the call and turned the phone off. He had to assume there was a government signals intelligence van somewhere, listening to that entire conversation. What had they learned? Kreiss was in the area. He was working with Micah Wall. He was going to lay up somewhere that Micah would recognize. Ergo, they would want to talk to Micah, who would tell them zip-point shit, assuming they could even find him at all. Right now, there was a probably a lanky, bearded figure with a rifle humping it up the ridge to find Micah and deliver the warning.
He leaned back in the driver’s seat and rubbed his eyes. He needed some coffee, but the convenience store was shut for the night, its doors and windows barred, security lights burning, and the gas pumps locked.
The Virginia countryside and backwoods were apparently no longer places of safety and sociable trust. And the hills were alive with the sounds of—what? Federal agents, with dogs. Hunting two women, one of them an ex-federal agent. Which government law-enforcement agency was it?
The Bureau? The aTF? Or could it even be the Langley crowd? He still wanted to settle accounts with Browne McGarand for what he had done to those kids, but McGarand was probably long gone, or being hunted by the feds himself.
He took a deep breath, let it out, and started the van. First, he needed to make sure Lynn was safe. For that, he would have to get in touch with Micah. He couldn’t exactly go home, and he couldn’t go to Micah’s. If the feds had real coverage of the Blacksburg-Christiansburg area, he couldn’t go to a motel, either. He
had stashed the essentials of a base camp at the arsenal the first time he’d gone in. He had his crawl suit in the bag, his sound equipment, and this time he had a gun. He decided to make one stop for a meal and some extra drinking water, and then he’d go to ground in the last place anyone would expect him to go: back to the Ramsey Arsenal.
Janet and Lynn flopped down on the cave floor when they finally reached the flat wooden door. The rising passage had been covered in smelly, slippery clay, and they were both filthy with it. They were also very thirsty, having taken no water with them. The lantern was guttering, which meant it was nearly out of fuel.
“What time is it?” Lynn asked.
Janet looked at her watch. She could feel the moisture in the clay seeping into her clothes, but she was so tired, she didn’t care. She was already covered in mud from head to toe anyway. The passage up from the subterranean lake had climbed forever, through some incredibly narrow cracks, and one scary part where the ceiling had come down to within two feet of the floor, an area that they’d done on their backs. She blanked that part out other mind with a shiver.
“Ten-thirty. At night, I think.”
“So what do we do now?” Lynn asked, holding her side. She sounded as exhausted as Janet was.
“Just go out there and see who’s waiting?”
Janet looked over at the girl. She looked like she had been camouflaged for hunting, but there was also some pain showing in her face.
“That wound hurting?”
“Ribs, mostly,” Lynn said.
“Plus, I wasn’t a hundred percent when we left that hospital.”