The Overseer Read Free

single lamp shone down on the near-empty desk. “She’s familiar with the dynamic, the motivation.” He leaned back in his chair, swiveled so as to take in the last bits of the sun. “Why the hesitation?”
    Bob Stein shifted in his chair, his thick cream white fingers squeezing into the green leather. His face, like his body, was pear-shaped, the entire effect accentuated by the small tuft of hair he kept close-cropped at the crown. Bob was most at home when staring at his computer or satellite printouts, painstaking hours fueled by diet Coke and cheese balls. Bringing his hands to his lap, he answered, “Look, I’m as anxious to follow this up as anybody, but she’s not …”
    “Yes?” asked Pritchard.
    “I just don’t think she’s … capable anymore. That simple.”
    “‘Capable’?” Pritchard turned and smiled. “To flip over a few rocks? Wasn’t that what we were in Montana to do in the first place?”
    “We were there ,” Stein explained, “to snap a few photos of the venerable Senator Schenten with a few men he’s not suppose to be that chummy with. Ask the senator why he—champion of the New Right—has been meeting with Messrs. Votapek, Tieg, and Sedgewick, and then see where things lead.”
    “A general sweep,” piped in the third of the trio, comfortably seated on the couch against the far wall, and busy unbending a paper clip. Infamous for his plaid shirts and short, fat, cream-colored ties, Gaelin O’Connell was one of the shrewder analysts at COS. He was a tank of a man, just over six feet tall, and easily 220 pounds, more and more of which was tending to jiggle with each passing year. A onetime operative with both the NSC and the Committee, he’d been with Pritchard since Watergate, brought in to deal with some of the stickier issues facing a government back from the precipice. It had been a short-term transfer that had lasted over twenty years, fifteen of which had seen him in the field. Together, the two men had molded a disciplined core of operatives, men and women with the cunning to survive in a highly explosive arena.
    But survive alone. That had been the aim at the outset. Those in the field flew solo—a few words over a phone, a command from a computer—none permitted even to know the building from which their orders came. A single, unknown voice of authority. O’Connell had often thought it ironic that there was no room for group players in the Committee. Both he and Pritchard, though, had recognized early on that such an arrangement was vital to COS’s integrity; and they had spent long hours creating an infrastructure that produced strict operative independence.
    Not surprisingly, the two had grown on each other over the years. In fact, it had been Pritchard who had finally convinced O’Connell to get rid of the polyester pants. He was still working on the ties. “A minor operation to make sure that the money of politics remains ostensibly aboveboard.” The Irish lilt was unmistakable.
    “Exactly,” answered Stein. “We track them, find them together, and start asking questions. Then, whammo, a dead girl turns up. This might sound a little weird, but I don’t think we can ignore that given Anton Votapek’s history. I told you we should have picked him up the moment we located him.”
    “‘Picked him up’?” asked Pritchard somewhat incredulously. “For what? For something that happened nearly thirty years ago, and that no one’s ever been able to prove? A few children go beserk in the woods of upstate New York during the Summer of Love, and you think it’s linked to this ?”
    “The Tempsten Project was ’69, not the Summer of Love,” corrected Stein.
    “Dating aside,” O’Connell conceded, “he’s right, Bob. A girl appears on a tiny strip of Montana highway, less than a mile from an area we’ve been watching for about a week—for reasons, lest we forget, that have nothing to do with teenage girls. Nothing . She’s riddled with bullets; just