Okay, he thought, Jared’s demise is no longer a secret. He drove on down the state road and turned onto Highway 460, which would take him back toward his own cabin. He decided to go home, catch a quick nap, and then he had some preparations to make for his call on the other McGarand. Maybe this guy would be more forthcoming, and would live long enough to give him what he needed to know. Given the man’s cold, quick decision to begin shooting out there at the arsenal, he might be a tougher nut to crack than the beer-guzzling Jared.
Focus, he reminded himself. The objective is not revenge, the objective is to find Lynn, and this bastard probably knows where she is. As he drove home, he turned on the truck’s radio to get a weather report, and he found out that it had not been thunder he’d heard earlier.
Janet was fully awake in a semiprivate room at the Montgomery County Hospital when Farnsworth showed up with a small crowd that included the red-faced Mr. Foster. Her ribs had been taped, and there were bandages on some of her bandages. The most painful points on her body were actually where the IVs had been. Sounds still echoed in her ears, and she felt as if she had been pummeled all over. The other bed was empty,
and the RA sat down on the edge of it. His expression was somber, and then she remembered that Ken Whittaker had been killed, along with those two kids, the rent-a-cops. Farnsworth was accompanied by Ben Keenan, who was his number two in the Roanoke FBI office. Keenan, who had been away on annual vacation, had come back in after the explosion.
There were three other men, whom she did not recognize, but they looked like feds. They filed in behind the RA and gathered around the end of the bed. She saw a state trooper standing on guard outside her door before Farnsworth shut it. She was almost glad to see them, until Farnsworth introduced the three other men as being from the ATE Two of them appeared to be in their early thirties, and the third was much older. She nodded carefully as each was introduced, then promptly forgot their names.
“How’s Ransom?” she asked, remembering his crumpled form.
“Not terrific,” Keenan said.
“Took a piece of re bar through the head.
He’s in a coma. We’re all praying that he’ll come out of it. But actually…”
He shrugged.
“Janet, can you go through it again?” Farnsworth said.
“What happened out there at the arsenal?”
Janet described their tour of the bunker fields—nothing out there but empty concrete mounds surrounded by tall weeds. Then she described their search in the industrial area, and where she had been standing when the world ended.
“I remember that one of those kids—one of the rent-acops—had gone down to unlock the power plant, but I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention.”
One of the younger aTF agents leaned forward.
“We’re trying to figure out what kind of a bomb it was,” he said.
“The girl they recovered?
She made a fragmentary statement at the scene, said something about a hydrogen bomb and Washington? You have any take on that?”
She shook her head again, carefully. There was a monster headache lurking back in there. The aTF guy must be talking about Lynn Kreiss, she thought. The second aTF agent, the other young one, asked her if she could describe the explosion.
“Felt it, never saw it,” she said.
“Pressure, heat, no noise—I think the sound was there, of course, but it was overwhelming. You all are echoing when you talk.”
“We have a tech team from the Washington NEST at the site right now,” the aTF agent said.
“You know, that nuclear emergency response team? They’re making a
radiation survey, just in case, although we think the nuke angle is unlikely. We’ve backed all the local response people out until we know something, one way or the other.”
Janet didn’t know what to make of all that. She’d caught only a glimpse of the area through the doors of the ambulance. She supposed it could have been a nuclear bomb, given the extent of the destruction, but shouldn’t she have been flash burned On the other hand, that power plant had been absolutely flattened. She could still visualize the molten and smashed boilers where the building had been, and the crumpled tank farm behind it.
“Janet,” Farnsworth said.
“Did you personally see any signs of human activity within the arsenal? Anything in any of the buildings that looked recent? Trash in the street? Shiny metal surfaces?”
“No, sir,” she said.
“I’d been there earlier, of course, and the hole was still in the street where my car went through that plate.” She paused for a moment. Something about pipes. Then she remembered.
“There were some pipes piled next to the hole in the street that I don’t remember being there when Kreiss got me out. But I may not have seen them—I was pretty exhausted by then.”
“Who is this “Kreiss’?” one of the aTF agents asked.
Foster and Farnsworth exchanged a quick guarded look that the aTF agents could not see.
“A security guard at the arsenal,” Farnsworth said.
“They were making a patrol and found the plate gone. Back to these pipes—you’re saying they could have been put there after you got out of the tunnel?”
“Sir, I don’t know. I just remember seeing them and not remembering their being there the last time.”
Farnsworth nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
“Once the NEST people are backed out and the place is verified radiation free, we’re going to do a really comprehensive search of the wreckage area and the rest of the installation. If people have been using this installation, especially if it’s been going on for a while, we should find evidence of it: intrusion routes, trash, chemicals, bomb-making equipment, residues, stuff like that.”
“aTF will be honchoing that effort,” the older agent said, as if to remind Farnsworth whose jurisdiction bomb makers came under.
“Absolutely,” Farnsworth said, looking at Janet with a slightly annoyed expression.
“But we can’t go forward until the nuke people say the place isn’t a hot zone.”
Janet tried to think of something else to tell them, but she couldn’t.
Her body hurt enough to distract her. Farnsworth got up.
“Well, okay, folks,” he said.
“Let’s leave Agent Carter here some room to recuperate. Of course she’ll be available for further questions in due course. I’ll have an interviewer come up and take a dictation for the record tomorrow morning, and we’ll make that available for all concerned.”
The men made sympathetic noises and backed out of the room, leaving only Farnsworth behind. He again nudged the door closed behind them.
“What’s the deal with Kreiss?” she asked softly He shook his head.
“Beats the shit out of me. Foster came down here with his hair on fire when word of the explosion got back to D.C. But now aTF has everyone spun up with what the girl said about a hydrogen bomb. Washington thinks she’s hallucinating, but she’s still out cold, so no one wants to take any chances.”
“Foster want to pin this one on Kreiss, too?”
“I’m no longer in that loop. But there’s something going on, and it involves the damned Agency.”
“I’d like to tell Kreiss we’ve rescued his daughter,” she said.
“Well,” Farnsworth said, glancing over at the closed door, “that guy Foster has a slightly different slant on that proposition. But the focus right now is on the Kreiss girl talking about a hydrogen bomb and the capital. People in D.C. are seriously spun up.”
“An H-bomb? That’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? I mean, don’t you have to have an A-bomb even to initiate an H-bomb?”
“I’m no physicist, Janet. All I know is that when the girl said that, the BATF people did not laugh. In fact, they went semi-ape shit got that nuclear response team heloed down here on an hour’s notice. They were scaring the locals with all those Geiger counters and guys in moon suits until we cleared everybody out of there. Thank God the press didn’t get onto that.”