She sat down, then recoiled when she felt Misty’s foot move against her back. She rolled away, wiping her eyes clear of blood, and came up on all fours. Misty was also on all fours. Her chest pack was a mass of black blood, and there were bloody holes in her right hand and throat. Her left eye was hanging partially out of its socket. Her face was twisted into a white mask of fury. The hole in her throat was pumping visibly, spattering the concrete and literally drowning out the words she was trying to speak.
Janet crawled backward from this horrible apparition as the sweeper brought up a large stainless-steel syringe in her left hand. The needle dripped a fuming substance from its glittering tip, and then Janet, still moving backward, felt a searing lance of pain on her right shoulder as Misty pressed the plunger to fire a jet of acid across the concrete at Janet.
Then Janet heard a single shot from her left and Misty’s head jerked sideways and she dropped like a stone, the syringe clattering into the street.
Janet tried to get up, but her skin was screaming in pain as the acid
melted through her shirt and burned her. She saw Lynn hanging partially out of the car window, her face white, blood streaming from her forehead, still clutching Janet’s .38. The car shifted again, the steel pipe under the wheel well beginning to bend up at a dangerous angle. Janet yelled at Lynn to stop moving as she tore away the upper-right part of her smoking shirt and rubbed at her skin, trying to get the acid off her. Then Kreiss was there, telling her to stop moving, and then he was kneeling next to Misty’s body and dissolving the capture curtain in the fountain of blood coming out other throat until his hands came free, flailing away the ropes of the latex hanging off them like a bundle of snakes. He pulled Lynn all the way out of the car, getting her clear just as the steel pipe made a loud creaking noise and then viciously snapped, dropping the car nose-first down into the hole with a terrible crash. After that came a profound silence, into which the sounds of sirens finally penetrated. Kreiss put Lynn down gently, sitting her up against the building’s wall.
Janet sat on the concrete, still batting at the skin on her shoulder while trying to keep the blood out other eyes with her left arm. Kreiss squatted down next to her, rubbed his bloody hands against the jumpsuit, and took her hand.
“I wasn’t sure you could do it,” he said softly.
“I wasn’t, either,” she said, looking over at the Misty’s shattered body, which was draining four distinct streams of blood across the concrete and into the Ditch. Lynn still held Janet’s .38 in a virtual death grip while she stared at Misty’s inert form. Janet realized she was clutching his hand like a lifeline. Her own legs were trembling.
“Look,” he said.
“You’ve both sustained head injuries. Your memory will be affected. I’m going to take… that… away. Here’s your story:
You got here, heard shooting, saw the thermite, and then fucked up and drove into the hole and got out by the skin of your teeth.”
Janet blinked. The sirens were definitely closer now.
“They’ll certainly believe that,” she said.
“Still the fucking amateur.”
“No, not anymore you’re not,” he said. He looked over at Lynn to make sure she was still conscious.
“Who’d you call?”
“Would you believe the aTF?”
He smiled at that.
“I’ve got to move,” he said.
“You remember the crash, but nothing else. Stay close to Lynn, if you can. I’ll be in touch when things cool off.”
“Will you?” she asked.
“Oh yes, Janet. But first I’ll send you a sign. Now, lie back down, relax.
That’s just a cut on your head. Scalp wounds bleed. Looks worse than it is, but it will divert any questions for a while.” He looked up and listened.
“They’re almost here.”
“Farnsworth is going to be seriously pissed,” she said, not letting go of his hand.
“Farnsworth is going to be too busy to be pissed,” he replied. He squeezed her hand and then he moved to Lynn. She watched him gently put his daughter down on her back in the anti shock position, head down, knees raised. He wiped her forehead, took the gun out of her hand, and then held her face in his hands for a moment. He kissed her forehead and stood up. He picked up Misty’s gun, and then lifted her inert form, hunched into a fireman’s carry, and then he was gone, bent over with the weight of her, like a lion off to hide his kill.
Janet relaxed onto the concrete, hearing the noise of vehicles up by the gate, knowing they’d be down here soon. She let the blood seep over her forehead now without trying to impede it; the bleeding actually seemed to help the headache. The skin along her upper arm and shoulder still burned, but it was more like a really bad sunburn now. She wondered if her shoulder would be scarred forever. She realized she didn’t really care.
What had he called her? Janet? No more “Special Agent”? She smiled at that as headlights flooded the street. It began to rain.
Three weeks later, Janet Carter waited outside the RA’s office for her final meeting with Farnsworth and Keenan before she formally checked out of the office. That morning, she had tentatively accepted a teaching and research position over at Virginia Tech in the materials forensics department of the civil engineering school. The school was developing a post incident forensics program to investigate and determine the cause of catastrophic failures in large structures, such as bridges, streets, or buildings. When the department chair, who had also headed up one of her Saturday seminars, found out she was looking, he had offered her the job immediately, subject, of course, to the
appropriate due diligence on her academic degree and an FBI recommendation. Like many government employees leaving federal service, she’d been a bit surprised at how easy it had been.
As she sat there, she wondered, not for the first time, where Edwin Kreiss was. Based on the way Lynn had been acting lately, she was pretty sure they had been in touch. The past three weeks had been interesting times, in the Chinese sense of that expression. The aTF never did find McGarand, but they had found a vehicle in the woods that had been rented up in Washington at the Reagan Airport, and the driver’s license used had been Browne McGarand’s. A joint forensics team had spent some time at the scene where they found Janet and Lynn. It had taken a specially equipped fire truck to get the fire in the valve pit out because the thermite grenade had ignited some metal fittings. There had been no trace of human remains in or around the valve pit itself, but they had recovered an IR sight-equipped AK-47, along with evidence that it had been emptied almost indiscriminately into the valve pit. She wondered if anyone had tried to account for all the blood trails out on that street, but the rain had probably washed most of it away.
Farnsworth had had a lot of explaining to do to his bosses in Richmond and Washington, as well as to the aTF He stonewalled the latter, while trying to explain what one of his agents had been doing there at the arsenal that night, with a civilian in tow. There had been endless meetings and lots of report writing to do over the whole incident. Janet had had time to prep Lynn in the ER, so their story remained fairly consistent: They had gone out there to help Kreiss and ended up crashing the car. End of story, as far as they knew. Never saw Kreiss. Never saw anyone else. Never saw a firefight. Janet’s acid burns had come somehow from the hole into which they’d crashed the car. Didn’t know how they got out, or how they got back up to the street. Both of them had taken a shot to the head, hadn’t they? Everything after the crash was a blur. Didn’t remember calling the aTF, but must have. Knew they’d come, wasn’t sure the Bureau would.