Die Trying by Lee Child

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