will expect it.”
“Which old guy?” McGrath asked sourly.
“Whichever, both,” Webster said.
Brogan drove out to O’Hare, middle of the evening, six hours after the
debacle with the Mexicans in the truck in Arizona. McGrath sat beside
him in the front seat, Milosevic in the back. Nobody spoke. Brogan
parked the Bureau Ford on the military compound tarmac, inside the wire
fence. They sat in the car, waiting for the FBI Lear from Andrews. It
landed after twenty minutes. They saw it taxi quickly over toward
them. Saw it come to a halt, caught in the glare of the airport
floodlights, engines screaming. The door opened and the steps dropped
down. Harland Webster appeared in the opening and looked around. He
caught sight of them and gestured them over. A sharp, urgent gesture.
Repeated twice. They climbed inside the small plane. The steps folded
in and the
1R9
door sucked shut behind them. Webster led them forward to a group of
seats. Two facing two across a small table. They sat, McGrath and
Brogan facing Webster, Milosevic next to him. They buckled their belts
and the Lear began to taxi again. The plane lurched through its turn
onto the runway and waited. It quivered and vibrated and then rolled
forward, accelerating down the long concrete strip before suddenly
jumping into the air. It tilted northwest and throttled back to a loud
cruise.
“OK, try this,” Webster said. The joint chairman’s daughter’s been
snatched by some terrorist group, some foreign involvement. They’re
going to make demands on him. Demands with some kind of a military
dimension.”
McGrath shook his head.
“That’s crap,” he said. “How could that possibly work? They’d just
replace him. Old soldiers willing to sit on their fat asses in the
Pentagon aren’t exactly thin on the ground.”
Brogan nodded cautiously.
“I agree, chief,” he said. “That’s a non-viable proposition.”
Webster nodded back.
“Exactly,” he said. “So what does that leave us with?”
Nobody answered that. Nobody wanted to say the words.
The Lear chased the glow of the setting sun west and landed at Fargo in
North Dakota. An agent from the Minneapolis Field Office was up there
to meet them with a car. He wasn’t impressed by Brogan or Milosevic,
and he was too proud to show he was impressed by the Chicago
agent-in-charge. But he was fairly tense about meeting with Harland
Webster. Tense, and determined to show him he meant business.
“We found their hideout, sir,” the guy said. “They used it last night
and moved on. It’s pretty clear. About a mile from where the body was
found.”
He drove them northwest, two hours of tense, darkening silence as the
car crawled like an insect through endless gigantic spreads of barley
and wheat and beans and oats. Then he swung a right and his headlights
opened up a vista of endless grasslands and dark gray sky. The sun was
gone in the west. The local guy threaded through the turns and pulled
up next to a ranch fence. The fence disappeared onward into the dark,
but the headlights caught police tape strung between a couple of trees
and a police cruiser, and a coroner’s wagon waiting twenty yards
away.
“This is where the body was found,” the local guy said.
He had a flashlight. There wasn’t much to see. Just a ditch between
the blacktop and the fence, overgrown with grass, trampled down over a
ten-yard stretch. The body was gone, but the medical examiner had
waited with the details.
“Pretty weird,” the doctor said. The guy was suffocated. That’s for
sure. He was smothered, pushed face down into something soft. There
are petechiae all over the face, and in the eyes. Small pinpoint
hemorrhages, which you get with asphyxia.”
McGrath shrugged.
“What’s weird about that?” he said. “I’d have suffocated the scumbag
myself, given half a chance.”
“Before and after,” the doctor said. “Extreme violence before. Looks
to me like the guy was smashed against a wall, maybe the side of a
truck. The back of his skull was cracked, and he broke three bones in
his back. Then he was kicked in the gut. His insides are a mess. Just
slopping around in there. Extreme violence, awesome force. Whoever did