The streetlights were crowned with fuzzy halos as the evening atmosphere thickened.
Farnsworth had set up a debriefing session with Lynn Kreiss upon return to the federal building and then closeted himself in the secure communications pod, with no operator this time, for an hour and a half.
When he finally came out, he had ordered them into the hotel as a protective measure. There were supposedly four agents downstairs in a loose perimeter.
Janet didn’t think they were in any danger, because that woman would be busy. Kreiss was definitely in danger, however, based on the look on his face when he’d left the car. She had argued as vehemently as she could that they ought to go back out there, in force, and retrieve him.
Farnsworth had given her a strange look when she used that particular word, but he remained adamant: Their mission was complete. AD Greer and a horde of executive assistants from the director’s office were probably combing through the FCI archives as she stood looking out the window.
Once they found the document, all hell would break loose, especially with a national election looming. Or, more likely, and as Kreiss had predicted, an extremely private deal would be made at the highest levels of the Justice Department, and the Bureau would enjoy a sudden degree of unprecedented operational freedom.
Lynn hadn’t said three words since they’d left the federal building.
Janet had explained what Kreiss had told her on the way to the hotel, and the girl had just nodded. She was obviously deeply disturbed that the Bureau had chosen to throw her father to whatever wolf was waiting in the ruins of the arsenal. She’d given Farnsworth a look of such reproach that he had actually blushed. Now they had orders to stay at the hotel and wait to see what, if anything, broke loose in Washington. The aTF was still hunting McGarand, but that particular mad bomber had simply disappeared.
Janet wondered if he, too, was out there at the demolished arsenal.
Probably not.
She had mixed emotions about what they’d done. It was 11:30, and Leno was doing his monologue. Somehow, none of it seemed very funny tonight. Yes, Kreiss had made this deal, and gotten his daughter out of that woman’s clutches. Her own bosses were about to peel back a scab they thought would give them nearly unlimited leverage over their tormentors at Justice. That might or might not be true, she thought, given the fact that the current administration was in its final months, with not too much left to lose in terms of its already-odious legacy.
Farnsworth said he was putting Janet in for an award, and he had told her to think about going back to a headquarters assignment in Washington. Janet wasn’t so sure about that, either.
“Palace games,” the woman had said.
Pretty fucking lethal palace games, Janet thought. And what Greer had done to Kreiss was just plain dishonorable. She might have made a mistake coming back to the fold.
She turned around, to find Lynn watching her. Something in the girl’s expression reminded her of Kreiss. No drama, just a patient consideration of the situation and a hint, just a hint, of unexpected action if an opportunity presented itself. She and Lynn looked at each other. They had done the wrong thing.
“What would you think about going back out there?” Janet asked.
“See if we can find your old man?”
Lynn sat up.
“About fucking time, Special Agent,” she said.
“You got another gun?”
Kreiss carefully put his gloved hand on the cone to see which way it was pointing. To the right of the direct line between the valve pit and the power plant. He removed the stethoscope, closed his eyes behind the mirrored glasses, and listened hard to the bare susurrations of a night breeze filtering through the piles of debris all around him. The breeze was just enough to obscure the sounds of traffic out on Route 11. It had been three hours since he’d heard the last noise. He’d been dozing since then, which actually was part of his craft. Relax the body and concentrate the mind.
Build energy reserves while that part of his brain that did the sound work listened with all the mysterious precision of the subconscious mind. He looked at his watch: 11:40. He shifted his body behind the wall, easing a cramp out of his knee. He put the stethoscope back to his ears.
Ten minutes later came another click, followed by what sounded like the rattle of a very small pebble. Something, or someone, moving out there. Misty? He pulled the glasses down again. Black night to the max. Tenebrae factae sunt. Darkness has fallen. Got that right.
He shifted position again, putting his left shoulder in touch with the cooling surface of the wall, his right hand now holding the .45 automatic.
The tactical question was, How many people did Misty have with her?
They’d sent a crew into the mountain after Janet and Lynn, but they hadn’t come back out. Lost them all? That would put Misty in a rare mood, especially being defeated by a redheaded amateur. She wouldn’t agree: The cave had done them in, not Janet Carter. But would she have
had time to summon more backup? One-on-one against Misty was bad enough, but if she had help, this was probably hopeless.
Another click, not as loud. He reached up again and swung the cone to the right ten degrees. The faintest movement of air against his cheek told him that the weather might be changing. The night now smelled faintly of moisture against the backdrop of the pine forests surrounding the industrial area. He squeezed the stethoscope earphones harder into his ears. If Misty was moving, she’d be doing so while searching for some visual cue that he was out there. Some small patch of infrared contrast, a blob of green warmth where there shouldn’t be one. He reached up again and moved the cone farther to the right. A minute passed, and then another. Then a new sound, a tiny scraping noise. Fabric over concrete? It had seemed marginally louder. He wondered if she’d done the same thing he had—parked herself in a corner and dozed for a few hours before starting the hunt. One thing about a sleeping human: If properly hidden and wedged the body didn’t move. You took a chance, of course, of being caught sound asleep. It depended on how well your subconscious mind had been trained to listen. He took a deep breath, let it out quietly, and then decided it was time to get things under way.
He took out the piece of metal he had been warming inside his chest pack and placed it up on the top of the side wall. If what the cone had detected was Misty, she shouldn’t be able to see the warm piece of metal until she had moved another hundred feet or so farther to his right, because of the buildings. Then he reached down for the control box and selected the third program and entered a fifteen-minute delay. He slipped off the stethoscope, brought the cone down off the wall, and buried them in loose gravel. Then he slithered silently into the big drainpipe. A minute later, he crawled out of the valve pit altogether, rounded the first street corner, and began inching toward the nearest concrete building rising above the side street that led back down to the valve pit. He crawled six feet and then stopped to listen. This was the dangerous bit: If she illuminated the area with the IR system, he was dead meat down here on the street. He repeated these movements until he reached the corner of the building. There he got up, flattened himself against the wall of the building, and went hand over hand until he felt the ladder.
This was the decision: There was only one ladder. If he went up it, he could not get down again if she detected him up there. But if this worked, and she closed in on the valve pit to investigate the infrared target he’d left for her, he’d be in a position to fire down at her.