McGrath nodded.

“I’m going to call Harland Webster,” he said. “I want to get sent to Montana.”

“GO TO NORTH Dakota first,” Webster said.

“Why?” McGrath asked him.

There was a pause on the line.

“One step at a time,” Webster said. “We need to check out this Peter Wayne Bell situation. So stop off in North Dakota first, OK?”

“You sure, chief?” McGrath said.

“Patient grunt work,” Webster said. “That’s what’s going to do it for us. Work the clues, right? It’s worked so far. Your boy Brogan did some good work. I like the sound of him.”

“So let’s go with it, chief,” McGrath said. “All the way to Montana, right?”

“No good rushing around until we know something,” Webster said back. “Like who and where and why. That’s what we need to know, Mack.”

“We know who and where,” he said. “This Beau Borken guy. In Montana. It’s clear enough, right?”

There was another pause on the line.

“Maybe,” Webster said. “But what about why?”

McGrath jammed the phone into his shoulder and lit up his next cigarette.

“No idea,” he said, reluctantly.

“We looked at the mug shots,” Webster said. “I sent them over to the Behavioral Science Unit. Shrinks looked them over.”

“And?” McGrath asked.

“I don’t know,” Webster said. “They’re a pretty smart bunch of people down there, but how much can you get from gazing at a damn photograph?”

“Any conclusions at all?” McGrath asked.

“Some,” Webster said. “They felt three of the guys belonged together, and the big guy was kind of separate. The three looked the same. Did you notice that? Same kind of background, same looks, same genes maybe. They could all three be related. This guy Bell was from California. Mojave, right? Beau Borken, too. The feeling is the three of them are probably all from the same area. All West Coast types. But the big guy is different. Different clothes, different stance, different physically. The anthropologists down there in Quantico think he could be foreign, at least partly, or maybe second-generation. Fair hair and blue eyes, but there’s something in his face. They say maybe he’s European. And he’s big. Not pumped up at the gym, just big, like naturally.”

“So?” McGrath asked. “What were their conclusions?”

“Maybe he is European,” Webster said. “A big tough guy, maybe from Europe, they’re worried he’s some kind of a terrorist. Maybe a mercenary. They’re checking overseas.”

“A terrorist?” McGrath said. “A mercenary? But why?”

“That’s the point,” Webster said. “The why part is what we need to nail down. If this guy really is a terrorist, what’s his purpose? Who recruited who? Who is the motivating force here? Did Borken’s militia hire him to help them out, or is it the other way around? Is this his call? Did he hire Borken’s militia for local color inside the States?”

“What the hell is going on?” McGrath asked.

“I’m flying up to O’Hare,” Webster said. “I’ll take over day-to-day from here, Mack. Case this damn big, I’ve got to, right? The old guy 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 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 nonviable 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 facedown 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 that, I wouldn’t want him to get mad at me, that’s for damn sure.”

“What about after?” McGrath said.

“The body was moved,” the doctor said. “Hypostasis pattern is all screwed up. Like somebody beat on the guy, suffocated him, left him for an hour, then thought better of it and moved the body out here and dumped it.”

Webster and McGrath and Brogan all nodded. Milosevic stared down into the ditch. They regrouped on the shoulder and stood looking at the vast dark landscape for a long moment and then turned together back to the car.

“Thank you, doc,” Webster said vaguely. “Good work.”