He paused to let her absorb the import of what he was saying. Jesus, she thought, this was more than she wanted to know. Kreiss had grabbed a real tar baby here, and Garrette and company were now going to use this bombing hairball to do what they had always wanted to do.
Farnsworth got up and paced around his office for a minute.
“What we’re going to tell Kreiss may not be that far off the mark, by the way,” he said.
“The docs aren’t overly optimistic about the girl’s probability of survival anyway.”
“Then it’s doubly cruel to tell Kreiss she’s already dead,” she said.
“Maybe so. But the urgent mission right now is to prevent a replay of what happened at the arsenal. That building was a power plant: reinforced concrete with no windows. It was just about vaporized, and the aTF guys who’ve seen it are genuinely worried, which is scaring Washington.
Now think federal office building in downtown D.C. You were there, Janet. Ken Whittaker was there, too.”
Janet had a “But, sir—” all ready to go until Farnsworth mentioned Whittaker. If her bosses were putting the picture together correctly, the clan McGarand had blood on their hands and more in their eye. Browne McGarand had lost a son at Waco. The son and the grandson had ties to a known quasi-militia group in West Virginia. Browne and Jared had apparently kidnapped Kreiss’s daughter and done God knew what to the other kids. Now Kreiss’s daughter said there was a threat to Washington.
But when? And from whom, exactly?
“I’ll tell you what: Give me that pager number,” Farnsworth said.
“And then you go home. I’ll have someone activate the pager once I know you’re home. If he calls in, we’ll call-forward it to you at home.”
She stared down at the floor. This was wrong. It smelled of the old “operational necessity” ploy. Farnsworth came over and put his hand on her shoulder.
“I know you disapprove of this, Janet, but your voice is the one he knows.”
She nodded, trying to think of a way to get out of this, but her brain wasn’t working all that well. The best hope she had was that Kreiss had pitched the pager into the New River. Her fatigue must have shown, because Farnsworth called in one of the agents outside and asked him to drive her home.
After thirty minutes, Kreiss saw McGarand come out of the restaurant, still carrying his thermos. He got in his truck, backed out, but then he drove diagonally across the plaza, toward a Best Western motel that was right next door. Their parking lot was contiguous to the plaza, and about the time Kreiss was starting up the van, McGarand parked right on the edge of the motel’s lot and got out. He looked around for a moment, then walked back toward the restaurant. Halfway there, he cut diagonally behind the main building and strode purposefully toward the truck park in the back. Kreiss shut down the van and got out to follow. As he did, the doors on the power company truck next to the van opened and two very large men got out. They were wearing green trousers, over which hung expansive Tshirts. Each had on a ball cap that had the TA logo on the front. Both of them carried large black Maglites. One of them had the steroid-enhanced build of a professional weight lifter; the other one was a whale who sported an enormous beer gut, but he had the upper body, shoulders, and arms to match.
“Excuse me, sir,” the weight lifter said.
“We’re TA security, and we’d like you to come with us into the office.” His voice was surprisingly high and no match for his body, but he made sure Kreiss saw him reach behind his back and pat the lump under his T-shirt where the gun was. The second one was already moving behind Kreiss in case he decided to run.
From their expressions, it looked like they almost wished he would.
“What’s the problem?” he asked, trying to see if McGarand was still visible.
“The problem is you’ve been hanging around here, acting in a suspicious manner, that’s the problem, sir. Now let’s go.”
They walked with Kreiss in between them, close, but not too close. He thought fast. If they got him inside, he’d miss McGarand leaving. He stopped, but the one on his right quietly folded a massive paw around
his upper right arm and he was walking again, conscious of the stares from two truckers coming out of the main door. They had to wait in the middle of the plaza while a big semi roared by them in second gear, followed closely by a propane truck. They escorted him down a hall between the restaurant and the shop, past the men’s room and the showers, and into a small office at the back of the building. There, the whale patted him down and then indicated he should sit in a straight-backed chair directly in front of the desk. Kreiss chose to remain standing just to the left of the chair.
The weight lifter sat down behind the desk, while the fat man kicked the door shut and then stood close behind Kreiss.
“So: what the fuck you up to here, bud?” the weight lifter asked.
“You pull in, park at the gas pump, walk out back, come back, gas your van, then park it over next to our truck—not your smartest move, now, was it?—and you sit there and wait.”
Kreiss said nothing. Then the weight lifter picked up a Polaroid camera from the desk and shot it off in Kreiss’s face. While waiting for the photo to develop, he explained to Kreiss that unless he could explain what he was doing here, they’d call the state cops and have him arrested for trespassing.
“Actually,” said the whale from behind him, “we’ll tell ‘em that we caught you wearing panties and waggling your wienie through that little hole in the partition between the stalls in the men’s room.” Kreiss felt the man’s foot rubbing suggestively up the inside of his leg.
“They’ll take you over to the Roanoke city jail, and, hell, you know cops, they’ll tell everybody they see.”
“See, we’ve got this hijacking problem out here in the truck stops,” the weight lifter said.
“And you were acting a whole lot like a lookout, okay?”
“I still think he was just cruisin’,” the whale said, patting him on the ass now and sniggering.
“I was looking for something,” Kreiss said. He reached into the upper pocket of his coveralls and withdrew a retinal-disrupter cube. He felt the whale behind him shift when he reached up into his pocket but then relax when all he produced was something that looked like a fat flashbulb cube.
“One of these,” Kreiss said, offering it to the weight lifter and closing his eyes tightly. As the man reached for it, Kreiss fired it into his face. The big man grunted and then just sat there, stunned, as Kreiss turned, went down on one knee, grabbed the chair by its legs, whirled around, and hit the fat man behind him across both lower legs. The whale grunted and bent forward, giving Kreiss, still crouching low,
the opening he needed to drive his fist into the man’s fleshy throat. The man’s eyes bulged and he started to gag, then sank down to his knees, both hands at his throat, his face already turning red. Kreiss checked on the man behind the desk, but he was still just sitting there, his pupils the size of BBs. The phone rang at that moment, but Kreiss ignored it and went out the door. There was a fire exit to his right, which he took. The door let him out into the back parking lot, which was still wall-to-wall semis. There was no sign of McGarand. He swore and walked rapidly to the van. The cube flash would keep the big man immobilized for another few minutes, and the whale—well, the whale might wish he had a blowhole about now.
He got to the van, jumped in, and took off across the plaza. When he got to the exit, he paused. He looked back and saw McGarand’s truck still parked right where he’d left it. He didn’t know what to do, other than to get the hell out of there. But not too far, he thought—somehow he had to get back on McGarand’s tail. There’d be state cops there pretty quick, and the security people had seen him in a phone company van. Then a cold wave washed over him—he’d forgotten the Polaroid: They had his racking picture! He turned and drove the van into the motel’s parking lot and took it all the way behind the second building of the complex. What he needed now was another vehicle. He could steal one possibly, but it wasn’t likely that people pulling into a motel were going to leave their keys in their cars. Then he remembered McGarand’s truck. A pickup truck.