foaming-at-the-mouth pain in the ass. An ideal appointment, sailed
through her confirmation with no problem at all. Since then she had
proved to be a good boss and a great ally. Her name was Ruth Rosen and
the only problem Webster had with her was that she was twelve years
younger than him, very good looking, and a whole lot more famous than
he was.
His appointment was for four o’clock. He found Rosen alone in a small
room, two floors and eight Secret Service agents away from the Oval
Office. She greeted him with a strained smile and an urgent
inclination of her elegant head.
“Holly?” she asked.
He nodded. He gave her the spread, top to bottom. She listened hard
and ended up pale, with her lips clamped tight.
“We totally sure this is where she is?” she asked.
He nodded again.
“Sure as we can be,” he said.
“OK,” she said. “Wait there, will you?”
She left the small room. Webster waited. Ten minutes, then twenty,
then a half-hour. He paced. He gazed out of the window. He opened
the door and glanced out into the corridor. A secret serviceman
glanced back at him. Took a pace forward. Webster shook his head in
answer to the question the guy hadn’t asked and closed the door again.
Just sat down and waited.
Ruth Rosen was gone an hour. She came back in and closed the door.
Then she just stood there, a yard inside the small room, pale,
breathing hard, some kind of shock on her face. She said nothing. Just
let it dawn on him that there was some kind of a big problem
happening.
“What?” he asked.
“I’m out of the loop on this,” she said.
“What?” he asked again.
“They took me out of the loop,” she said. “My reactions were wrong.
Dexter is handling it from here.”
“Dexter?” he repeated. Dexter was the president’s White House chief
of staff. A political fixer from the old school. As hard as a nail,
and half as sentimental. But he was the main reason the president was
sitting there in the Oval Office with a big majority of the popular
vote.
“I’m very sorry, Harland,” Ruth Rosen said. “He’ll be here in a
minute.”
He nodded sourly and she went back out the door and left him to wait
again.
The relationship between the rest of the FBI and the Field Office in
Butte, Montana, is similar to the relationship between Moscow and
Siberia, proverbially speaking. It’s a standard Bureau joke. Screw
up, the joke goes, and you’ll be working out of Butte tomorrow. Like
some kind of an internal exile. Like KGB foul-ups were supposedly sent
out to write parking tickets in Siberia.
But on that Thursday July third, the Field Office in Butte felt like
the center of the universe for McGrath and Milosevic and Brogan. It
felt like the most desirable posting in the world. None of the three
had ever been there before. Not on business, not on vacation. None of
them would have ever considered going there. But now they were peering
out of the air force helicopter like kids on their way to the Magic
Kingdom. They were looking at the landscape below and swiveling their
gaze northwest toward where they knew Yorke County was hiding under the
distant hazy mist.
The resident agent at Butte was a competent Bureau veteran still
reeling after a personal call from Harland Webster direct from the
Hoover Building. His instructions were to drive the three Chicago
agents to his office, brief them on the way, get them installed, rent
them a couple of jeeps, and then get the hell out and stay the hell out
until further notice. So he was waiting at the Silver Bow County
Airport when the dirty black air force chopper clattered in. He piled
the agents into his government Buick and blasted back north to town.
“Distances are big around here,” he said to McGrath. “Don’t ever
forget that. We’re still two hundred forty miles shy of Yorke. On our
roads, that’s four hours, absolute minimum. Me, I’d get some mobile
units and move up a lot closer. Basing yourselves down here won’t help