Die Trying

said. “Situation like this, nobody should worry about protocol. You call him or go see him?”
    “I went to see him,” Johnson said. “Several times. I had several long conversations with him.”
    Webster thought: face-to-face. Several long conversations. Worse than I thought, but understandable.
    “And?” he asked.
    Johnson shrugged.
    “He told me he’d placed you in personal command,” he said.
    Webster nodded.
    “Kidnapping,” he said. “It’s Bureau territory, whoever the victim is.”
    Johnson nodded, slowly.
    “I accept that,” he said. “For now.”
    “But you’re anxious,” Webster said. “Believe me, General, we’re all anxious.”
    Johnson nodded again. And then he asked the question he’d walked three and a half miles to ask.
    “Any progress?” he said.
    Webster shrugged.
    “We’re into the second full day,” he said. “I don’t like that at all.”
    He lapsed into silence. The second full day of a kidnap is a kind of threshold. Any early chance of a resolution is gone. The situation starts to harden up. It starts to become a long, intractable set-piece. The danger to the victim increases. The best time to clear up a kidnap is the first day. The second day, the process gets tougher. The chances get smaller.
    “Any progress?” Johnson asked again.
    Webster looked away. The second day is when the kidnappers start to communicate. That had always been the Bureau’s experience. The second day, sick and frustrated about missing your first and best chance, you sit around, hoping desperately the guys will call. If they don’t call on the second day, chances are they aren’t going to call at all.
    “Anything I can do?” Johnson asked.
    Webster nodded.
    “You can give me a reason,” he said. “Who would threaten you like this?”
    Johnson shook his head. He had been asking himself the same question since Monday night.
    “Nobody,” he said.
    “You should tell me,” Webster said. “Anything secret, anything hidden, better you tell me right now. It’s important, for Holly’s sake.”
    “I know that,” Johnson said. “But there’s nothing. Nothing at all.”
    Webster nodded. He believed him, because he knew it was true. He had reviewed the whole of Johnson’s Bureau file. It was a weighty document. It started on page one with brief biographies of his maternal great-grandparents. They had come from a small European principality which no longer existed.
    “Will Holly be OK?” Johnson asked quietly.
    The recent file pages recounted the death of Johnson’s wife. A surprise, a vicious cancer, no more than six weeks, beginning to end. Covert psychiatric opinion commissioned by the Bureau had predicted the old guy would hold up because of his daughter. It had proven to be a correct diagnosis. But if he lost her too, you didn’t need to be a psychiatrist to know he wouldn’t handle it well. Webster nodded again and put some conviction into his voice.
    “She’ll be fine,” he said.
    “So what have we got so far?” Johnson asked.
    “Four guys,” Webster said. “We’ve got their pickup truck. They abandoned it prior to the snatch. Burned it and left it. We found it north of Chicago. It’s being airlifted down here to Quantico, right now. Our people will go over it.”
    “For clues?” Johnson said. “Even though it burned?”
    Webster shrugged.
    “Burning is pretty dumb,” he said. “It doesn’t really obscure much. Not from our people, anyway. We’ll use that pickup to find them.”
    “And then what?” Johnson asked.
    Webster shrugged again.
    “Then we’ll go get your daughter back,” he said. “Our Hostage Rescue Team is standing by. Fifty guys, the best in the world at this kind of thing. Waiting right by their choppers. We’ll go get her, and we’ll tidy up the guys who grabbed her.”
    There was a short silence in the dark quiet room.
    “Tidy them up?” Johnson said. “What does that mean?”
    Webster glanced around his own office and lowered his voice. Thirty-six years of habit.
    “Policy,” he said. “A major D.C. case like this? No publicity. No media access. We can’t allow it. This sort of thing gets on TV, every nut in the country is going to be trying it. So we go in quietly. Some weapons will get discharged. Inevitable in a situation like this. A little collateral damage here and there.”
    Johnson nodded slowly.
    “You’re going to execute them?” he asked, vaguely.
    Webster just looked at him, neutrally. Bureau psychiatrists