“But, boss—an H-bomb? C’mon.”
“Did you see that building, Janet? The Army people had some pretty good pictures of the industrial area before the explosion, and that power plant was a big fucking building. It’s now a concrete deck. The debris field is a half mile in every direction, and every vertical wall facing the plant has been damaged or knocked down. They found some pieces of the boiler tubing out on Route Eleven, for Chrissakes. You tell me what kind of bomb that was.”
Her head was hurting and it was hard to concentrate.
“But what has this to do with Kreiss? He was just looking for his daughter.”
“The homicide of jared McGarand is the key to that, we think. Look,
we’re keeping aTF in the dark about Kreiss and the rest of it, because you know that crowd: They’ll go off half-cocked. That’s doubly true if they think there’s Agency shit involved here. They do bombs, and we have the mother of all bombs for them to focus on right now.”
“What’s their theory, if not a nuclear device?”
“The older guy, the one who didn’t talk much? While everybody else was running around yapping on their radios and pretending they hadn’t pissed their pants, he was making a drawing of the bomb site. When I asked him what kind of bomb was in that building, he said something interesting. He said it looked to him like the building was the bomb.”
“And what the hell does that mean?” she asked. She was having trouble keeping her eyes open. She hated being in the hospital, but right now, there was a sleep monster in this bed and it was whispering her name.
“Don’t know, Janet, but Foster is insisting we keep aTF in the mushroom mode for a little while longer, while certain people way above our pay grade, quote unquote, work the Kreiss angle. You get some rest now, okay? Hey, and you did fine out there.”
Janet closed her eyes after Farnsworth left. He was upset—hell, they were all upset—after losing Ken Whittaker. And apparently Ransom’s prognosis wasn’t wonderful. aTF headquarters would of course be asking why a Bureau resident agency had called for one of their people without clearing it through Washington, and why they had even been out there at the arsenal. Farnsworth, anxious at this point to keep the bullshit swirling, had probably told them that it was part of the missing kids case.
She turned in the bed to ease the pressure on her aching ribs. She vaguely remembered going through a wooden railing. That wood must have been very dry. The docs said she had no broken bones, and that she could check out in the morning, as soon as they made sure she hadn’t suffered a cardiac tamponade, whatever the hell that was. Her right wrist was swollen but usable.
The fly in all this ointment, of course, was Edwin Kreiss. She tried to remember if the DCB had been told about the Kreiss angle or not.
Because if they had, then Farnsworth’s game with the aTF wasn’t going to hold up for very long. And poor Kreiss: tearing up the visible world, looking for his daughter, and now the feds had her and weren’t going to tell him? She cursed all bureaucratic rivalries and fell asleep.
Browne didn’t see the cop car until it was too late; he was already signaling his turn into Jared’s entrance road. He slowed as the cop got out and
waved him over. With a sigh, Browne shut down the truck and prepared himself. There was no way someone could have made a connection between the arsenal explosion and him, he reassured himself again. Or Jared, for that matter, so this had to be something else. Had to be.
“Evening, sir. May I see some ID, please?”
“Certainly, Officer,” Browne said, reaching for his wallet.
“What’s going on here?”
The cop didn’t reply as he looked at Browne driver’s license. He asked him to please wait in the truck, then went back to his cruiser to make a radio call. When he came back over, he said, “There’s a sergeant coming out to speak to you, Mr. McGarand. It’ll just be a minute, sir.”
Browne saw that the cop was uncomfortable, rather than angry or suspicious.
Had something happened to Jared? Was this why he hadn’t shown up? Then he had an alarming thought. Had that woman’s husband caught them? Jared had said someone had been creeping around his trailer. He felt a pang of conscience—he remembered hoping that the woman’s husband would catch them. He knew the old rule: Be careful of what you wish for.
A dark four-door sedan nosed alongside the cruiser. Two men in civilian suits accompanied by a bulky state trooper with sergeant’s stripes got out and approached his truck. The trooper took his hat off and informed him that a man, whom they believed to be Jared McGarand, had been found fatally injured. Was he related to Jared McGarand? Browne said yes, he was Jared’s grandfather and his only local next of kin. Would he be able, and willing, to make a next-of-kin identification at the scene?
Browne, a cold feeling in his stomach, nodded a soundless yes. The trooper cleared his throat and began to explain that the victim had been crushed by the trailer, and that identification might be difficult. Browne blinked. Crushed by the trailer? That didn’t sound like some irate husband.
He took a deep breath and said that, yes, he’d do it.
He got out of the truck and waited for the trooper to introduce the two men in suits, but the sergeant did not do so. He almost didn’t have to;
Browne was almost positive they were government agents, probably FBI.
The city suits, the faintly supercilious expressions on their faces, and the body language of the local cops told the tale. Browne forced his expression to remain as neutral as he could get it. This was the enemy: The FBI, along with its incompetent cousin, the BATF, had taken William from him. It was one thing to talk about a formless, faceless, and powerful enemy, and quite another thing altogether to be standing
three feet away from two of its agents. On the other hand, he realized, they would expect him to lose his composure if his grandson had been killed. But why were they here?
They walked, rather than rode, back down jared’s entrance road to the trailer, Browne with the local cops, and the G-men bringing up the rear.
They rounded the corner and Browne saw the yellow Mylar tapes, a Crime Scene Unit van, two police cars, two unmarked police cars, and a coroner’s black-windowed ambulance. Jared’s pickup was parked next to his phone company repair van. Technicians in white overalls were wandering around Jared’s yard, while two men who were probably detectives stood talking and smoking cigarettes near the back of the trailer. The trailer’s doors were open and there were obviously people inside. Browne tried to think if jared would have anything in the trailer that might tie him to what they’d been doing at the arsenal, but he didn’t think so.
Unless he had a stash of copper, and even that could be explained, since he was a telephone repairman. Or had been one.
The trailer was no longer level. The space underneath the downed end of the trailer was curtained off with a temporary railing, on which some kind of fabric had been stretched. There was a portable light stand set up on one side, which a tech turned on as they approached. Browne hadn’t even noticed that it was getting dark. The cops put out their cigarettes as the sergeant escorted Browne to the curtain, offering at least a public show of deference to impending grief. Browne wasn’t worried too much about grief. He’d spent all he had when William had been killed. By some of these people, he reminded himself, glancing sideways at the two feds.
He still couldn’t figure out why they were here. Had something turned up in the trailer to draw in federal agents? And were they FBI or aTF?