“First, I want to ask you to take these back,” Farnsworth said,
pointing to them.
“I never sent in any paperwork, and the circumstances surrounding your resignation have changed. A lot.”
She looked at the credentials, pulled them toward her, but then she left them on the table between them.
“Tell me about those changes,” she said.
She was physically tired, but the caffeine was working and her mind was alert. She decided that she wasn’t going back to the federal fold until she heard Farnsworth’s explanation. Billy pulled on a set of headphones and started talking to someone.
Farnsworth sat back in his chair and rubbed his fingers across his chin in his characteristic gesture.
“You were dead right about a second bomb.
Somebody went to Washington and parked a propane truck next to the aTF headquarters building and managed to pump several thousand cubic feet of hydrogen gas into the building. Right at the start of the working day.”
“Oh my God! The aTF building? Not the Hoover Building?”
“Right. The results were very similar to what happened down at the Ramsey Arsenal. Obliterated the top floors of the building, and burned the rest.”
“Damn!” she whispered.
“How many—” “Almost none. They had some warning and got all the people out before it let go. Guess who provided the warning?”
“Kreiss.”
He cocked his head to one side.
“And you knew that how?”
“We’ve been in touch. As you know, I’ve been protecting his daughter.”
“Yes. Well, Kreiss appeared in front of the building to deliver said warning after having been picked up earlier by two Washington beat cops for loitering in the White House security zone. There’d been a security alert downtown ever since the Ramsey thing. Then—and this is the interesting part—he was transferred to Bureau custody, from which he escaped by causing a car crash out on the G.W. Parkway at oh-dark-thirty in the morning, leaving two agents handcuffed to a park bench to watch their Bu car marinate in gasoline.”
“Oh my,” Janet said, working hard to keep a serious expression on her face. They had me and then I had them.
“Why was he transferred to Bureau custody?”
“Because the local cops did a wants and warrants check, and the next thing they knew, here came two crackerjacks from the Hoover Building, saying they had instructions to take subject Edwin Kreiss into custody in connection with a homicide down here in Blacksburg. District cops
said, Be our guest. Got him off their blotter. But in the meantime, these two superstars took him, on instructions from the Foreign Counter Intelligence Division duty officer, for a midnight ride to Langley, Virginia, where certain people out there wanted to have a word.”
“Did you file an apprehend-and-detain order on Kreiss?”
“No, I did not. We’re all looking into that little mystery.”
“This has to involve that horrible woman.”
He got up to get more coffee.
“Beats the shit out of me,” he said.
“I discovered all of this after the fact. The last thing I did before the aTF building changed shape was to call in your warning that FBI headquarters was a possible target, and that that hydrogen bomb business referred to gaseous hydrogen, not nuclear hydrogen.”
“What was their reaction?”
Farnsworth grinned.
“Building security thanked me for my interest in federal law enforcement, than wished me a good night. Several hours later, the world ended up on Mass Avenue. By the way, what did you tell Agent Walker, about forwarding the report?”
“I asked him if he wanted to be the one link in the chain that failed to forward warning of a bombing up the line, in the event that there was a bombing.”
Farnsworth nodded.
“I want you to know that he was very, very insistent.
Said he was logging and date-stamping his call to me.”
Janet smiled.
“We never change, do we?” she said.
“CYA forever. Anyway, back to Kreiss: He shows up at aTF headquarters at daybreak, flashing the creds of one of the agents he stranded out on the parkway. While he was warning them, one of the guards checked with our headquarters, and then they apprehended him at gunpoint. This was about the time their gas monitors detected the hydrogen. Kreiss starts to walk away. They give him the usual warning. So Kreiss, cool as a cucumber, asks the guards if they really want to pop a cap in a hydrogen atmosphere.
Instant hoo-ha. Fortunately, one of their ADs was there; he let Kreiss walk. But now, of course, they want to have a word, as well.”
“Why the trip to Langley? What’s up with that, boss?”
Farnsworth tugged at his shirt collar.
“That’s a great deal more complicated, and it’s why I’m here with five agents, and why they’re outside in tactical gear. And it’s also why I leaned on those Hatfields and McCoys to make them bring you and Kreiss’s daughter to me.”
“How did you know they even had us?” she asked.
“That Agency woman? We got word to her that Kreiss had been picked up. She said she had tracked you and the girl in there to the Wall clan, but now that they had Kreiss up in D.C.” she was backing out. End of story. Good-bye. That was before Kreiss did his thing on the parkway and got away again, of course.”
“And Mr. Wall? He’s not a fan of things federal.”
“That old man was here when we got here, sitting on the damned porch like he owned the place. I think he had some of his ‘boys’ out there in the woods. Probably still does. All we got out of him initially was tobacco spit.”
“What changed his mind?”
Farnsworth moved his coffee cup around on the table in a small circle for a moment.
“Well,” he said, “Mr. Wall out there is a realist. I told him who I was and that I was not one of his regular revenuers. I told him I’d bring the full weight of every government law-enforcement agency—FBI, DEA, aTF, DCIS, IRS, and even the Secret fucking Service in here and hound him and all the fruits of his two-branch family tree until the end of time. I told him we’d freeze his bank accounts, audit everybody’s tax returns, cut off their Social Security and Medicaid, intercept his mail, tap his phones, tail his pickup truck, haul him and everyone he knew into court on a weekly basis, and force him to consort with lots and lots of lawyers. I think the thought of lots and lots of lawyers did it, actually.”
“Micah Wall doesn’t strike me as a heavy-duty crook,” she said.
“Oh, hell, all these hillbillies are fringe, at worst. They make a big deal of being fierce mountain men and the last of the Mohicans, that kind of stuff. But what they really are is a bunch of poor, undereducated white trash making a subsistence living up here in the hills. They work onagain, off-again minimum-wage jobs while making side money salvaging parts out of junked cars and appliances, distilling a little ‘shine, fighting their roosters and their dogs, or poaching illegal furs. It’s more lifestyle than crime.”
“He didn’t strike me as someone who scares easily.”
“Mostly I convinced him that there are no more refuges from the government, not even for hillbillies. Then, I told him something else.”
“Which was?”
“That you’d be safer with us than with him, because the person hunting both of you worried even us.”
Janet put her coffee cup down on the table.
“Last time I checked, you were on her side.”
“Because I had specific instructions to that effect. From the
executive assistant director over FCI, no less. That was before I went and checked with my SAC in Richmond, and he with our assistant director. Like I said, we now have significantly changed circumstances. Remember that DCB deal?”