Especially if she reacted when the sound program let go. He considered the time: He had only a few more minutes to make his decision.
Did she have helpers? He decided that she didn’t. Misty was supremely confident in her own abilities. She also knew that Kreiss wouldn’t run very far into the woods to prolong this. He figured she was moving and scanning, crawling a few yards at a time and then sweeping the entire debris field with the IR scanner, looking for a point of contrast. Or she could have an illuminator up on some wreckage, bathing the whole debris field in invisible light. Probably had the scanner mounted on an AK-47, based on the sound of that single shot earlier this afternoon. Misty normally didn’t carry a handgun, but she had always liked the heavy-duty Eastern Bloc weapons.
The wind blew in his face again, this time carrying the scent of old chemicals, overlaid with a residual whiff of nitric acid. That has to be coming from the main street, he thought. So she should be upwind of him, then, and, therefore, up-sound. He estimated the time remaining.
He had to move, one way or the other, or she’d get close enough to hear him on the ladder. He started up.
Janet shut off her headlights as they coasted quietly down the hill on Route 11. The intersection marking the entrance to the arsenal was a quarter of a mile ahead, the dead traffic lights just visible before she shut off her lights. They had gone out a back fire door of the hotel and circled the block around the library to come into the parking lot from the town side, away from the front entrance. She’d called down to the lobby before they left and told one of the agents that they were going lights-out in the room. He told her to sleep tight. They’d waited a half hour before making their move. Then she and Lynn got into her Bureau car and headed for Ramsey.
Janet pulled the car into the exit lane for the arsenal. The barrels were still there, but they were no longer blocking the ramp. She drove slowly and quietly up the road toward the main gate, stopping just down the hill from the gate itself so as to minimize their engine noise. She parked to the side and shut it down. She rolled down her window and listened. She had been having second thoughts about this little caper ever since leaving downtown Blacksburg, but, given Lynn’s enthusiasm, she couldn’t think of a way to back out. When Farnsworth found out, she’d probably be a civilian again. Lynn had Janet’s .38 in her lap and was rotating the cylinder, click by click.
“So,” Janet said.
“This seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I’m not so sure.”
“I say we drive in there, lights and horn going,” Lynn replied.
“Go in there and make a shitload of noise until Dad pops out of the bushes and yells at us. Then grab him.”
“Might not be that simple,” Janet said.
“If they were going to go after each other, that will be a free fire zone down there. Open season. We go down there, we might get ourselves killed. You heard that rifle this afternoon.
Plus, if you show up, you’ll distract your father. Maybe get him killed.”
“If you’re thinking of leaving me out here,” Lynn said, “you can just forget that shit.”
“I’m thinking we shouldn’t go in there at all,” Janet said, conscious now of the open window and how their voices might be carrying. She scanned the chain-link fences ahead of them.
“Hell, it may be all over by now. But either way, we know nothing about the tactical situation. I’m saying we probably can’t help, and we might even screw things up.”
“Then let’s call the police. The local cops, I mean. Make some hysterical phone call to nine one one; two women in trouble at the Ramsey Arsenal.
Rape. Murder. Frenzied bikers. Bring a mob of cops out here and they’d have to stop it.”
Janet was shaking her head. Coming out here had been a dumb idea.
“They might stop it tonight, but then it would just go on. That woman and your father would melt away into the woods. I think after all that’s happened—in that cave, and with the big explosion we had here—this has become personal now. The matter in Washington is being solved as we speak. I’m just afraid if we go in there now, we might do more harm than good.”
“I think you’re just plain afraid,” Lynn said, turning away from Janet and staring through the darkened windshield.
Janet held her tongue. Of course she was afraid. Anyone who wasn’t afraid of both those people down there would be an idiot. But the more she thought about it, the more she knew she was right. Of course Lynn was burning up with worry about her father, but that didn’t solve the practical problem: They couldn’t just drive down there. What would they do once they got inside? Offer mediation services? Counseling? She could just see herself climbing around the wreckage of the industrial area, calling for them to come out and talk things over. And
if they called the local cops, they’d get one deputy sheriff. Whoopee. What they really needed here was an army of feds. No onesies and twosies, but ten Suburbans with federal SWAT troops, helicopters, dogs, tanks-Tanks.
She picked up the car phone.
“Now what the hell are you doing?” Lynn asked.
“Getting some reinforcements,” Janet said. She pulled her phone book out of her purse and looked up a number, then dialed it. The phone rang three times. She swore when she thought it was going to voice mail, but a man’s voice finally answered.
“Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Special Agent Rogers speaking.”
“This is Special Agent Janet Carter of the Roanoke office, FBI. I’ve got the gomer who blew up your Washington headquarters building cornered in the Ramsey Army Arsenal. I need some backup down here, and I need it right fucking now! My duty officer isn’t picking up. You people interested?”
Kreiss reached the arched top of the ladder and, moving with excruciating care, stepped over the top rung and down—onto nothing at all. He felt himself falling and just barely managed to catch himself on the curved ladder edges. He deliberately let his hands slide down the rusty metal railings right to the mounting brackets in order to soften the noise he was making. It took all his strength just to hang there. He felt the cool night air between his legs and realized that the building’s roof must have collapsed when the power plant blew up. What he had thought was a solid building was nothing more than just a side wall, with the rest of the building blown completely away. He couldn’t see what was below him, but he was at least forty feet up in the air. He was entirely exposed, dangling in plain sight over the debris field below. If she happened to lift the scanner, she’d probably start laughing. He heard the metal in the railing creaking.
But then the sound program saved him.
Back in the valve pit, the tape switched on. A tiny sound of a screwdriver tapping once, very gently against a steel pipe, clinked out into the night. Kreiss heard it, and he hoped like hell Misty heard it too. He tried a two-handed chin-up to pull himself back onto the ladder, but his feet did not connect with anything but air. He couldn’t really use his feet without making scuffing noises against the concrete wall. Gripping tightly with his right hand, he shifted his left hand over to the right railing, lifted his left knee, and this
time was able to use his knee to lever his upper body onto the parapet at the top, then over to the top outside rung of the ladder.
He nearly lost the mirrored glasses off his face in the process. Bits of old concrete dust fell away into the rubble below, sounding to Kreiss like an avalanche.
Then came the sound of a metal buckle hitting the stock of a rifle, a muffled but distinct sound clear enough that he could classify it immediately.
It sounded as if it was coming from in front of the valve pit, but he couldn’t be sure, not way up here, dangling on the side of a building. He had to get down now, because there was nowhere else to go. If she saw him, she’d just blast him off the ladder like a fly off a window. Then the hair went up on the back of his neck.