“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 welclass="underline" 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, looking 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.