He stared down at her for a moment.
“You mean without the FBI Manual?
Without a squad supervisor, and the ASAC and the SAC, and a fistful of teletypes from some ad hoc committee in Washington telling you when to go right, when to go left? What was that like?”
“Yes.”
“It was amazing. It was every G-man’s dream, Special Agent. Until I came up with the right answer to the wrong politicians.”
“Come in with us,” she said impulsively.
“Once she lets Lynn go.”
His weary eyes smiled at her.
“Can’t do that, Special Agent. You know how it is: You can fall in love with the Bureau, but the Bureau never falls in love with you. Take care of Lynn.”
Then he was gone, loping up the hill and into the trees like some big cat.
“Wait,” she tried to say, but the word died in her throat. She got out to look for the speaker microphone, found it, and stuck the jack back into the wiring harness on her left collar shoulder. Farnsworth was yelling.
“Carter? What the hell’s going on down there, Carter? Carter! Come in, damn it!”
“Kreiss was here; now he’s gone,” she said. Her chest felt constricted by her sense of failure.
“I’m going to wait for Lynn Kreiss. I’m returning to the admin building position. Request you meet me there.”
“Goddamn it, Carter, what the hell is going on?”
“Request you meet me at the admin building,” she said again.
“For what it’s worth, I believe we have achieved AD Greer’s objective.”
Kreiss pushed into the tree line, hit the ground, rolled to the right, and then scurried through the underbrush for fifty feet before stopping. He then crawled back to a point from which he could see down into the industrial area. Carter’s car was moving back toward the admin building, its tires crunching through gravel and broken glass. The van was still sitting there. He felt his pulse throbbing from the dash up the hill, during which he’d half-expected to hear a rifle shot. But maybe Misty had developed a sporting side. He, on the other hand, would have made that deal and then dropped his quarry as soon as he appeared.
Carter had stopped the car on the power plant side of the admin building.
In the distance, he heard other vehicles coming as the Bureau’s backup brigade closed in. Then he saw Lynn emerge from the wreckage of the turbo generator building beside the power plant’s foundations, hesitantly at first, shielding her eyes against the sunlight, as if she had been blindfolded. She took three steps out into the debris field, stumbled over something, recovered, stopped, and looked around.
Move, goddamn it, move, Kreiss thought. The first of the backup cars reached Carter, spilling agents. Lynn had to see them, but she still wasn’t moving and seemed disoriented. He needed to get Lynn out of there. He drew the big .45 from his chest holster and sighted down the stubby barrel at the nearest of the two ruined generators behind her. It was a distance of at least two hundred yards, so he elevated the barrel, pointing it at least a foot over the top of the generator, and fired once. The booming sound of the .45 echoed across all the wrecked
buildings in the industrial area, dropping all the agents, including Carter, instantly to the ground.
The bullet, partially spent, hit the base of the generator well behind Lynn, causing her to yelp and take off up the main street at a dead run toward the cars and the agents huddling behind them at the top of the street.
Kreiss backed away from the tree line. He had accomplished two things: made Lynn move, and told Misty that, for once, he had a gun. He was deciding what to do next when something blasted an entire branch off the tree under which he was hiding, followed by the distinctive crack-boom of a big rifle. Misty answering in kind: I know where you are, and I, too, have a gun.
The agents must be going nuts down there, he thought with a small smile. Then he squirmed farther back into the woods and began crawling, head down, as fast as he could go, east this time, away from the power plant. His objective was the patch of trees that projected down to the area where the wooden mixing sheds had been. It was about five hundred yards, line of sight, but longer the way he went through the woods.
From there, maybe he could get back into the wreckage of the industrial area. Misty was down there somewhere, in among that ring of rubble surrounding the remains of the power plant. She would expect him to stay in the woods, where he was most proficient. He intended to travel in a large circle, staying literally on the ground, moving slow enough to keep the wildlife from revealing his position. He would creep for an hour, then dig in and rest, making his move back into the industrial area right after dark.
He didn’t think Misty would come out until after dark, either, especially if the Bureau people hung around.
He hoped they wouldn’t linger after Carter told her boss about the archive. Farnsworth should see where his interests lay and invoke standard procedure: They had the hostage clear and a line to the evidence, which was all his bosses really wanted. What happened back at the arsenal after that shouldn’t matter, especially to the big guns at Bureau headquarters, where life in the fast lane was probably about to get really interesting.
Janet didn’t hesitate after getting Lynn into her car. She took off, turning the car in a screech of tires and gunning it up the hill toward where Farnsworth and the rest of the backup team were waiting. The other two cars followed, once they were sure she had the hostage out of harm’s way.
She made Lynn put her head down on the front seat until she thought they were well out of rifle range. Fucking Kreiss, letting off that cannon.
But it had done the job.
“You okay?” she shouted as she maneuvered noisily around a pile of concrete blocks.
“Yes,” Lynn said.
“She had me blindfolded. I didn’t see anything useful.
Thanks for the rescue. Again.”
“My pleasure, but it was your father who got you out, not me.”
“Dad? Here? Where is he?”
“Up there in the woods somewhere. I think he’s going to have it out with that woman, now that you’re clear.”
Lynn sat up, biting her lip as Janet pulled up alongside Farnsworth’s car. He was sitting in the right-rear seat, with the window open, a radio mike in his hand. His driver had his gun out and was searching the industrial area with binoculars. Janet got out to explain what had happened, while Lynn laid her head back on the back of the front seat and closed her eyes.
“Goddamn it,” he said.
“We were supposed to bring him in.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, we were supposed to bring in the evidence he has.”
He gave her an exasperated look.
“So? Where the hell is it?”
She leaned forward and whispered what Kreiss had told her. He blinked, then gave a slow whistle of surprise.
“In Marchand’s own archive system? Man!”
“I believe we can access that archive right here from Roanoke.”
“But we’re not going to,” he said, shaking his head.
“I’m gonna let AD Greer and his people go grab that little buzz saw.”
“Don’t you want to see it? After all this?”
“Hell no,” he said.
“And neither do you. Look what happened to Kreiss for knowing what he knows. Where is he anyway?”
“Out there in the weeds,” she said.
“And that woman is down there somewhere, in all that rubble around the power plant. That’s where that second shot seemed to come from.”
The other agents were gathering around, looking for orders.
Farnsworth thought for a moment, then announced they were pulling out, that their mission was complete.