“I thought we were supposed to pick up some guy along with the girl,” one of the squad supervisors said. Keenan, taking his cue from Farnsworth, gave him a signal to back off, and then Farnsworth told everyone to mount up and get back to Roanoke. He told one of the agents to drive Janet’s car; Janet and Lynn Kreiss were to get in his car.
Lynn Kreiss stared out the back window of the car as they pulled out.
She shivered when she thought of what they’d be doing come nightfall.
She could never do that. She wondered if Lynn knew what was going to happen back there. Of course she did.
Kreiss made his move an hour after sunset, before the chill air of night cooled the ground enough to provide too great an infrared contrast between his body and his surroundings. The sky had clouded over during the afternoon, rendering the darkness almost absolute once the sun went down. But Misty was an active sweeper. She would have a real IR surveillance device, maybe even an illuminator and receiver set, not just a nightscope. IR devices created images based on the contrast between warm objects and a cold background, or vice versa. The greater the contrast, the clearer the image. He crept out of the tree line on his belly and snaked down as fast as he could, hugging the bottom of a swale he had scouted earlier. He was also assuming that Misty was still down in the vicinity of the power plant’s ruins. That van was still there, and there now seemed to be a bio luminescent glow emanating from the ring of rubble surrounding the flattened plant. She might have deployed a defensive light ring, which was a thin, flexible tube of clear plastic Lucite, the diameter of a straw, filled with the material contained in ChemLights. It created a faint green glow that could be used to illuminate a defensive perimeter for hours without degrading the defender’s night vision. He had chosen his vantage point because it put several buildings between him and the rubble around the power plant.
His immediate objective was a valve pit where a dozen of the big overhead pipes came down into a walled enclosure, which was twenty feet square. There were mounds of rubble from collapsed buildings on three sides, and what looked like a storm drain coming out on the fourth side, pointing down into the swale. The swale, a shallow, grassy ditch, cut across a gentle slope of deep grass. He was able to crawl through it to the storm drainpipe, which was nearly three feet in diameter. He went through the drainpipe for ten feet, sweeping a stick ahead to rustle any lurking snakes out, and emerged out onto the concrete floor of the valve pit. There was a carpet of small rubble on the floor, and he had to sweep some of it out of the way with his forearm as he pulled himself across the floor between the huge steel valve stems. The pipes over his head were large, twelve to twenty inches in diameter. Some were lagged with insulation;
others were bare metal. The ones that bent down into the floor of the valve pit pointed in the direction of the Ditch.
He had chosen the pit because it offered concealment, while remaining escapable. Going into one of the ruined buildings would have been risky;
she could trap him in or on top of a building. The big pipes, being metal, would also offer some infrared masking, at least until the cool night air drained all the heat out of the metal. The valve pit was at the end of one of the shorter side streets. It was less than a city block from the main street, and the concrete buildings from that intersection on up the hill toward the admin building remained pretty much intact. All of the buildings below that intersection had been seriously damaged, having lost at least one wall. The four buildings nearest the power plant had been flattened into mounds of broken concrete, surrounded by tangled ropes of steel pipes. The shattered concrete was visible only as big blobs of gray in the near-total darkness.
He extracted his sound-cone apparatus and assembled it up on the lip of the concrete wall surrounding the pit. He pointed it between the nearest buildings, in the general direction of where the power plant had been.
He reminded himself to keep thinking in terms of infrared contrast. He piled some pieces of rubble around the cone to ensure it would blend in with the rest of the structure’s IR signature. Then he pulled out another plastic pouch and extracted two golf ball-sized cubes and a coil of very thin wire. He took one of the cubes and crawled along the pit wall, keeping the top of the wall between him and the power plant. He set the cube on the left corner of the pit, placing it between a pipe fragment and a broken concrete block. He connected some wire to it, then brought the other end of the wire back into the pit, burying the wire as best he could. He repeated this procedure with the second cube, taking it in the opposite direction. Once back down in the pit, he connected the two wire ends to a cigarette package-sized plastic box and set it down. Crouching down behind the pit wall, he extracted a small battery pack and attached it to the plastic box. Then he activated the box, illuminating a small red window.
In the window was a scrolling menu of sounds stored digitally in the box.
He could select a different sound for each of the two channels going out to the miniaturized speakers, or a stereo signal through both at once. He set the box down and turned the digital window down to minimum brightness. Then he took out a pair of silver-mirrored sunglasses and put them on. He couldn’t see anything in the darkness anyway, and these would give him some protection in case she got close enough to pop a disrupter in his face. The coating on the glasses was keyed to the color frequency of the disrupter. Then he crawled as
quietly as he could around the bottom of the pit, patting the floor with his gloved hands until he found a flat piece of metal about a foot square. He slid this into the back of his chest pack. Then he went back to the wall nearest the power plant, slipped the stethoscope on, crouched down behind the wall as comfortably as he could, and settled in to listen.
He was able to train the cone across an arc of about fifty degrees, which was sufficient if his assumptions were correct. She could, of course, come from any direction at all, but he had watched the industrial area for most of the afternoon and had seen no sign of her. The light ring meant either that she was there or it was a distraction. Since he couldn’t know which, all he could do was make his assumptions. He tried to clear his mind and concentrate on the sounds cape in front of him. The air was not moving, and neither was anything else, if the cone was working correctly. He reached up and trained the cone slowly from side to side, straining to detect any differences in the earphones. Nothing. He touched the butt of the .45 hanging in its shoulder holster. He didn’t have any spare ammunition. He drank some water, closed his eyes, and listened. He wondered if McGarand was still alive. He hoped so.
He had no illusions that Misty was coming to talk to him or even to take him in. She was coming to kill him. Those had probably been her orders all along, once the Agency headquarters found out that Lynn was missing. They’d have known full well that if Lynn was dead, and that would have been the logical assumption when a kid had been missing for that long, then the lock was open. Kreiss would have had no incentive to keep quiet anymore. Worse, Kreiss might have thought the Agency had taken Lynn, which would have given him every incentive to reveal what he knew. The solution would have been the same either way they looked at it: This wasn’t a retrieval operation. He had become the mother of all loose ends.
Something clicked in the stethoscope.
Janet stood looking out the window of their fourth-floor room in the Donaldson-Brown Center. Lynn was on the bed, tally dressed, staring at the muted TV screen. The remains of a room-service meal was sitting on the table. Janet could see the Virginia Tech campus stretching before her, a small city of crenellated academic buildings, barracks like dorms, and streetlights. The sidewalks were surprisingly filled with students moving between the buildings like so many industrious ants. Typical engineering school, she thought. Labs all night. Computer time when you could get it.