Chapter Thirty

HARLAND WEBSTER GOT back to the Hoover Building from Colorado at three o'clock Thursday afternoon, East Coast time. He went straight to his office suite and checked his messages. Then he buzzed his secretary.

"Car," he said.

He went down in his private elevator to the garage and met his driver. They walked over to the limousine and got in.

"White House," Webster said.

"You seeing the President, sir?" the driver asked, surprised.

Webster scowled forward at the back of the guy's head. He wasn't seeing the President. He didn't see the President very often. He didn't need reminding of that, especially not by a damn driver sounding all surprised that there even was such a possibility.

"Attorney General," he said. "White House is where she is right now. "

His driver nodded silently. Cursed himself for opening his big mouth. Drove on smoothly and unobtrusively. The distance between the Hoover Building and the White House was exactly sixteen hundred yards. Less than a mile. Not even far enough to click over the little number in the speedometer on the limousine's dash. It would have been quicker to walk. And cheaper. Firing up the cold V-8 and hauling all that bulletproof plating sixteen hundred yards really ate up the gas. But the Director couldn't walk anywhere. Theory was he'd get assassinated. Fact was, there were probably about eight people in the city who would recognize him. Just another D. C. guy in a gray suit and a quiet tie. Anonymous. Another reason old Webster was never in the best of tempers, his driver thought.

WEBSTER KNEW THE Attorney General pretty well. She was his boss, but his familiarity with her did not come from their face-to-face meetings. It came instead from the background checks the Bureau had run prior to her confirmation. Webster probably knew more about her than anybody else on earth did. Her parents and friends and ex-colleagues all knew their own separate perspectives. Webster had put all of those together and he knew the whole picture. Her Bureau file took up as much disk space as a short novel. Nothing at all in the file made him dislike her. She had been a lawyer, faintly radical at the start of her career, built up a decent practice, grabbed a judgeship, never annoyed the law enforcement community, without ever becoming a rabid foaming-at-the-mouth pain in the ass. An ideal appointment, sailed through her confirmation with no problem at all. Since then, she had proven 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 you much, not if things start to turn bad up there. "

McGrath nodded.

"You hear from Jackson again?" he asked.

"Not since Monday," the Resident Agent said. "The dynamite thing. "

"Next time he calls, he speaks to me, OK?" McGrath said.

The Butte guy nodded. Fished one-handed in his pocket while he drove. Pulled out a small radio receiver. McGrath took it from him. Put it into his own pocket.

"Be my guest," the Butte guy said. "I'm on vacation. Webster's orders. But don't hold your breath. Jackson doesn't call often. He's very cautious. "

The Field Office was just a single room, second floor of a two-floor municipal building. A desk, two chairs, a computer, a big map of Montana on the wall, a lot of filing space, and a ringing telephone. McGrath answered it. He listened and grunted. Hung up and waited for the Resident Agent to take the hint.

"OK, I'm gone," the old guy said. "Silver Bow Jeep will bring you a couple of vehicles over. Anything else you guys need?"

"Privacy," Brogan said.

The old guy nodded and glanced around his office. Then he was gone.

"Air Force has put a couple of spy planes up there," McGrath said. "Satellite gear is coming in by road. The General and his aide are coming here. Looks like they're going to be our guests for the duration. Can't really argue with that, right?"

Milosevic was studying the map on the wall.

"Wouldn't want to argue with that," he said. "We're going to need some favors. You guys ever seen a worse-looking place?"

McGrath and Brogan joined him in front of the map. Milosevic's finger was planted on Yorke. Ferocious green and brown terrain boiled all around it.

"Four thousand square miles," Milosevic said. "One road and one track. "

"They chose a good spot," Brogan said.

"I SPOKE WITH the President," Dexter said.

He sat back and paused. Webster stared at him

. What the hell else would he have been doing? Pruning the Rose Garden? Dexter was staring back. He was a small guy, burned up, dark, twisted, the way a person gets to look after spending every minute of every day figuring every possible angle.

"And?" Webster said.

"There are sixty-six million gun owners in this country," Dexter said.

"So?" Webster asked.

"Our analysts think they all share certain basic sympathies," Dexter said.

"What analysts?" Webster said. "What sympathies?"

"There was a poll," Dexter said. "Did we send you a copy? One adult in five would be willing to take up arms against the government, if strictly necessary. "

"So?" Webster asked again.

"There was another poll," Dexter said. "A simple question, to be answered intuitively, from the gut. Who's in the right, the government or the militias?"

"And?" Webster said.

"Twelve million Americans sided with the militias," Dexter said.

Webster stared at him. Waited for the message.

"So," Dexter said. "Somewhere between twelve and sixty-six million voters. "

"What about them?" Webster asked.

"And where are they?" Dexter asked back. "You won't find many of them in D. C. or New York or Boston or L. A. It's a skewed sample. Some places they're a tiny minority. They look like weirdos. But other places, they're a majority. Other places, they're absolutely normal, Harland. "

"So?" he said.

"Some places they control counties," Dexter said. "Even states. "

Webster stared at him.

"God's sake, Dexter, this isn't politics," he said. "This is Holly. "

Dexter paused and glanced around the small White House room. It was painted a subtle off-white. It had been painted and repainted that same subtle color every few years, while Presidents came and went. He smiled a connoisseur's smile.

"Unfortunately, everything's politics," he said.

"This is Holly," Webster said again.

Dexter shook his head. Just a slight movement.

"This is emotion," he said. "Think about innocent little emotional words, like patriot, resistance, crush, underground, struggle, oppression, individual, distrust, rebel, revolt, revolution, rights. There's a certain majesty to those words, don't you think? In an American context?"

Webster shook his head doggedly.

"Nothing majestic about kidnapping women," he said. "Nothing majestic about illegal weapons, illegal armies, stolen dynamite. This isn't politics. "

Dexter shook his head again. The same slight movement.

"Things have a way of becoming politics," he said. "Think about Ruby Ridge. Think about Waco, Harland. That wasn't politics, right? But it became politics pretty damn soon. We hurt ourselves with maybe sixty-six million voters there. And we were real dumb about it. Big reactions are what these people want. They figure that harsh reprisals will upset people, bring more people into their fold. And we gave them big reactions. We fueled their fire. We made it look like big government was just about itching to crush the little guy. "

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