A Maiden's Grave

Now, eyes closed, he lifted those same fingertips and gave a backhanded wave, warding off the indistinguishable men.

And federal agents, yes, but God-fearing agents perhaps (many of them were), they kept their distance.

No prayers, but he spoke some words to his bride, lying in the same place where she had lain for these long years. His lips moved. He received responses only because he knew her mind as well as his own. But the presence of the men in the matching suits kept intruding. Finally he rose slowly and looked at the marble flower etched into the granite above her tombstone. He'd ordered a rose but the flower looked like a chrysanthemum. Perhaps the stonecarver had been Japanese.

There was no point in delaying any longer.

"Mr. Potter?"

He sighed and turned away from the grave.

"I'm Special Agent McGovern. This is Special Agent Crowley."

"Yes."

"Sorry to trouble you, sir. Mind if we have a word?"

McGovern added, "Maybe we could step to the car."

"What do you want?"

"The car? Please." No one says "please" quite the way an FBI agent does.

Potter walked with them – he was flanked – to their vehicle. He realized only when he was standing beside it that the wind was steady and ridiculously cold for July. He glanced at the grave and saw the green paper of the flowers roll in the steady breeze.

"All right." He stopped abruptly, deciding to walk no further.

"We're sorry to interrupt your vacation, sir. We tried to call the number where you're staying. There was no answer."

"Did you send somebody over there?" Potter was worried that Linden would be upset if agents came calling.

"Yessir, but when we found you we radioed them."

Potter nodded. He looked at his watch. They were going to have shepherd's pie tonight. Green salad. He was supposed to pick up something to drink. Samuel Smith Nut Brown Ale for him, oatmeal stout for them. Then, after di

"How bad is it?" Potter asked.

"A situation in Kansas," McGovern said.

"It's bad, sir. He's asked you to put together a threat management team. There's a DomTran jet waiting for you at Glenview. Particulars are in here."

Potter took the sealed envelope from the young man, looking down, seeing to his surprise a dot of blood on his own thumb – from, he supposed, a latent thorn somewhere on the stem of a rose with petals like a woman's floppy-brimmed summer hat.

He opened the envelope and read through the fax. It bore the speedy signature of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"How long since he went barricade?"

"First report was around eight forty-five."

"Any communication from him?"

"None yet."

"Contained?"

"Completely. Kansas state troopers and a half-dozen agents from our Wichita office. They're not getting out."

Potter buttoned then unbuttoned his sports coat. He realized that the agents were looking at him with too much reverence and it set his teeth on edge. "I'll want Henry LeBow as my intelligence officer and Tobe Geller for communications. Spelled with an e but you pronounce it Toby."

"Yessir. If they're unavailable -"

"Only them. Find them. Wherever they are. I want them at the barricade in a half-hour. And see if Angie Scapello is available. She'd be at headquarters or Quantico. Behavioral Science. Jet her out too."

"Yessir."

"What's the status of HRT?"

The Bureau's Hostage Rescue Team, consisting of forty-eight agents, was the largest tactical barricade force in the country.

Crowley let McGovern deliver the unfortunate news.

"That's a problem, sir. One team's deployed to Miami. A DEA raid. Twenty-two agents there. And the second's in Seattle. A bank robbery that went barricade last night. Nineteen there. We can scramble a third team but we'll have to pull some agents off the other two. It'll be a while before they're assembled on site."

"Call Quantico, put it together. I'll call Frank from the plane. Where is he?"

"The Seattle incident," the agent told him. "If you want us to meet you at the apartment so you can pack a bag, sir…"

"No, I'll go right to Glenview. Do you have a siren and light?"

"Yessir. But your cousin's apartment's only fifteen minutes from here -"

"Say, if one of you could take the paper off those flowers, there on that grave, I'd appreciate it. Maybe arrange them a little, make sure the wind doesn't blow them away."

"Yessir, I'll do that," Crowley said quickly. So there was a difference between them; McGovern, Potter realized, was not a flower arranger.

"Thank you so much."

Potter started down the path again, following McGovern. The one thing he'd have to stop for was chewing gum. Those military jets climbed so fast his ears filled up like pressure cookers if he didn't chew a whole pack of Wrigley's as soon as the wheels left the asphalt. How he hated to fly.

Oh, I'm tired, he thought. So damn tired.

"I'll be back, Marian," he whispered, not looking toward the grave. "I'll be back."

II THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

10:35 A.M.

As always, an element of circus.

Arthur Potter stood beside the FBI resident agency's best car, a Ford Taurus, and surveyed the scene. Police cars drawn into a circle like pioneers' wagons, press minivans, the reporters holding their chunky cameras like rocket launchers. There were fire trucks everywhere (Waco was on everyone's mind).

Three more government-issue sedans arrived in caravan, bringing the total FBI count to eleven. Half the men were in navy-blue tactical outfits, the rest in their pseudo Brooks Brothers.

The military jet bearing Potter, reserved for civilian government transport, had touched down in Wichita twenty minutes before and he'd transferred to a helicopter for the eighty-mile flight northwest to the tiny town of Crow Ridge.

Kansas was just as flat as he'd expected, though the chopper's route took them along a wide river surrounded by trees, and much of the ground here was hilly. This, the pilot told him, was where the mid-high-grass and short-grass prairies met. To the west had been buffalo country. He pointed toward a dot that was Larned, where a hundred years ago a herd of four million had been sighted. The pilot reported this fact with unmistakable pride.

They'd sped over huge farms, one- and two-thousand-acre spreads. July seemed early for harvest but hundreds of red and green-and-yellow combines were shaving the countryside of the wheat crop.

Now, standing in the chill wind beneath a dense overcast sky, Potter was struck by the relentless bleakness of this place, which he would have traded in an instant to be back amid the Windy City tenements he'd left not long before. A hundred yards away was a red brick industrial building, like a castle, probably a hundred years old. In front of it sat a small school bus and a battered gray car.

"What's the building?" Potter asked Henderson, special agent in charge of the FBI's Wichita resident agency.

"An old slaughterhouse," the SAC responded. "They'd drive herds from western Kansas and Texas up here, slaughter 'em, then barge the carcasses down to Wichita."

The wind slapped them hard, a one-two punch. Potter wasn't expecting it and stepped back to keep his balance.

"They've lent us that, the state boys." The large, handsome man was nodding at a van that resembled a UPS delivery truck, painted olive drab. It was on a rise overlooking the plant. "For a command post." They walked toward it.

"Too much of a target," Potter objected. Even an amateur sportsman could easily make the hundred-yard rifle shot.

"No," Henderson explained. "It's armored. Windows're an inch thick."