“Thank you,” she said.
“For everything.”
“I’ll get the coat back later,” he said.
“That was a Bureau car that went down the hole, right? You’ve still got your own wheels?”
“Yes. My car’s at the office. I suppose I have a significant paperwork exercise ahead of me.”
He didn’t reply. He was ready for her to get out of the car, but she wasn’t moving. He was about to get out and go open her door, when she asked him why he had been crawling around the arsenal.
He’d been anticipating that question.
“Because of what that kid said, that my daughter and her friends had gone to explore that place.”
“But at night?”
“During the day, as much as half of a search area is in shadow. It’s easy to miss something. I have a night-vision pack built into this crawl suit. At night, especially when there’s ambient starlight or moonlight, almost everything’s visible.”
She hesitated, then asked, “You think she’s there?”
He took a deep breath. He was not going to tell them anything, not until he’d had a chance to hunt down the second man and find out what he needed to know. Plus, now there was the little matter of the jared pancake flattened under his trailer.
“It’s the best lead I’ve got,” he said.
“I’ve been there twice before. I’m going to look until I find something or satisfy myself that there’s no trace of them.”
“We could help with that, especially after—”
“No. I mean, I know I can’t stop you, but you can’t help without alerting those Washington people. Their focus is on me. That story about a bomb cell is probably bullshit. Besides, I can do this better alone. And it’s not like I’m hunting someone you’re hunting.”
She missed the gibe.
“My boss is suspicious about those people, too,” she said.
“But it’s the weekend. He can’t raise anybody in Washington in his chain of command to check them out.”
He just looked at her, sitting bare-assed, exhausted, and bedraggled in the front seat of his pickup truck. She had the grace to be embarrassed. If it hadn’t been semidark, he would have sworn she was blushing.
“I can still do it better than anyone you’d send.” And, he thought, you’d bring a crowd, and then my one lead to Lynn might vanish.
“Okay, okay, so I’m not in your league,” she said.
“But surely we have people who are.”
“I doubt that, Special Agent Carter,” he said softly.
“With the Bureau these days, it seems to be a question of quantity over quality. But in any event, I’m going back there tonight. I have nothing else to do. If I do find something concrete, I’ll tell you. Would you like an escort to your door?”
“I can manage, I think.” She glanced down at her bare legs.
“Hopefully, my neighbors won’t see me in this … outfit.”
“They’d probably find mine even more interesting. I’d appreciate it if you’d find a way to leave me out of your report on how you got out of the tunnel. Maybe just say you climbed out.”
She thought about that for a moment.
“If you wish, yes, I can do that,” she said finally.
“But you did save my life. That should go into the record.”
“Not my record, Carter. My record is closed. I’m just a father searching for his missing daughter now. Nothing more.”
She kept looking at him in the dark.
“What was the message that Ransom failed to deliver?” she asked.
He looked down at the white oval other face. Even in the truck, he was taller than she was. He couldn’t tell her, not without explaining the whole story. And if he was right about the message, he had little time to lose. He had to find Lynn before they decided to send someone.
“I can’t tell you that,” he said finally.
“Funny, that’s what Ransom said when I asked him.”
“Well, there you go,” he said.
She hesitated, as if to see whether or not he would say anything else, but then she got out.
11
Janet was sitting in her kitchen, having a badly needed cup of strong coffee, when the phone rang. It was 7:30 on Sunday morning. To her surprise, it was Ransom on the line.
“So, Special Agent, where you been?”
“You miss me, Ransom?”
“Yeah, well, after a fashion, yes. Your surveillance folks found our little device on Mr. Farnsworth’s car. Very funny, Special Agent. Not too bright, maybe, but very funny.”
“I thought that was one of our bugs?”
“Let’s just say that your boss was, um, agreeable to the notion of tracking your Bu car. Which is why I’m calling, actually: Where is said Bu car?”
“In China, somewhere, probably,” she said.
“Look, I’m just getting my first caffeine of the day. Can this discussion possibly wait?”
“You got more of that coffee around? Because I’m sittin’ outside your town house right now, as a matter of fact, and we do need to talk. Sooner rather than later, as they say in the coolest circles of government.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, yeah, sure, all right.”
She got another mug down from the cabinet and then went to let him in. He was wearing a short-sleeved black shirt, khaki trousers, wraparound black sunglasses, some expensive-looking boots, and a green windbreaker with a Boy Scouts of America logo. She realized she was naked under her bathrobe, so she tugged the strings around her waist.
He sat down in the kitchen, took off his sunglasses, and waited while she fixed him a cup of coffee, “Nice touch,” she said, pointing to the Boy Scout logo.
“Well, you know,” he said.
“We brave, loyal, thrifty, all that good shit.”
“Right. So, what’s the big deal about my Bu car on a Sunday morning?”
she said.
“Where is said Bu car, again?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“You say something about China?” She hesitated for a moment, then told him what had happened, including the fact that she had been rescued by Edwin Kreiss.
He whistled softly when he heard about Kreiss.
“And this was basically at night? You sayin’ Kreiss was creepin’ the arsenal at night? Last night?”
She explained what Kreiss had said about night-vision equipment. He nodded, then asked her precisely when Kreiss had pulled her out of the tunnel.
“It was night. I guess I don’t remember,” she said.
“Elevenish, I’d guess.”
He said, “Uh-huh,” and then looked around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time.
“You got plans for your Sunday, Special Agent?” he asked.
“Uh—” “Now you do. Let me suggest you take that coffee upstairs, make yourself functional, if not too beautiful, and then I need to take you somewhere to show you something’.”
She just looked at him.
“It shows better than it tells, Special Agent,” he said.
“And time, believe it or not, time is a-wastin’. Help if I say please?”
“Is this something I should call my boss about first?” she asked.
“No-o,” he said. “
“Cause he’s gonna ask you a million questions, and you won’t have any answers whatsoever until I do my show-and-tell. Please?”
Half an hour later, they were leaving Roanoke and headed south on 1-81 in his car. He was explaining how they had tagged Edwin Kreiss’s truck.
“Four bugs? Whatever happened to the notion of the private citizen?”
“Private citizen?” Ransom said, slapping the wheel, as if she’d told a wonderful joke.
“No such thing in America anymore. First of all, nobody’s a citizen anymore.”
Uh-oh, she thought. Brother Ransom has a hobbyhorse. She decided to go with it anyway.