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these roads sealed off?”
    “Yessir,” Budd said. “And they’re the only way in.”
    “Set up a rear staging area there, Charlie.” He pointed to the bend in the road a mile south of the slaughterhouse. “I want a press tent set up near there. Out of sight of the barricade. Do you have a press officer?”
    “Nup,” Budd said. “I usually give statements ’bout incidents around here if somebody’s got to. Suppose I’ll have to here.”
    “No. I want you with me. Delegate it. Find a low-ranking officer.”
    Henderson interrupted. “This is a federal operation, Arthur. I think I should make any statements.”
    “No, I want somebody state and without much rank. That way we’ll keep the press in the tent, waiting. They’ll be expecting somebody with the answers to show up. And they’ll be less likely to go poking around where they shouldn’t.”
    “Well, I don’t exactly know who’d be good at it,” Budd said uncertainly, looking out the window, as if a trooper resembling Dan Rather might just wander past.
    “They won’t have to be good,” Potter muttered. “All they have to do is say that I’ll make a statement later. Period. Nothing else. Pick somebody who’s not afraid to say ‘No comment.’ ”
    “They won’t like that. The press boys and gals. I mean, there’s a fender-bender over on Route 14 and reporters here’re all over the scene. Something like this, I’ll bet they’ll be coming in from Kansas City even.”
    SAC Henderson, who’d served a stint in the District, laughed.
    “Charlie—” Potter controlled his own smile—“CNN and ABC networks are already here. So’s the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times. Sky TV from Europe, the BBC, and Reuters. The rest of the big boys’re on their way. We’re sitting in the middle of the week’s media big bang.”
    “No kidding. Brokaw, too, you think? Man, I’d like to meet him.”
    “And set up a press-free perimeter one mile around the slaughterhouse, both sides of the river.”
    “What?”
    “Put five or six officers in four-by-fours and start cruising. You find any reporter in that zone—anybody with a camera—you arrest them and confiscate the camera.”
    “Arrest a reporter? We can’t do that. Can we? I mean, look at ’em all out there now. Look at ’em.”
    “Really, Arthur,” Henderson began, “we don’t want to do that, do we? Remember Waco.”
    Potter smiled blandly at the SAC. He was thinking of a hundred other matters, sorting, calculating. “And no press choppers. Pete, could you get a couple Hueys down here from McConnell in Wichita? Set up a no-fly zone for a three-mile radius.”
    “Are you serious, Arthur?”
    LeBow said, “Time’s awasting. Inside for two hours, seventeen.”
    Potter said to Budd, “Oh, and we need a block of rooms at the nearest hotel. What’d that be?”
    “Days Inn. It’s up the road four miles. In Crow Ridge. Downtown, as much as they’ve got a downtown. How many?”
    “Ten.”
    “Okay. What’s the rooms for?”
    “The parents of the hostages. Get a priest and a doctor over there too.”
    “Maybe they should be closer. If we need them to talk to their kids, or—”
    “No, they shouldn’t be. And station four or five troopers there. The families are not to be disturbed by reporters. I want anybody harassing them—”
    “Arrested,” Budd muttered. “Oh, brother.”
    “What’s the matter, Trooper?” LeBow asked brightly.
    “Well, sir, the Kansas state song is ‘Home on the Range.’ ”
    “Is that a fact?” Henderson asked. “And?”
    “I know reporters, and you’re gonna be hearing some pretty discouraging words ’fore this thing’s over.”
    Potter laughed. Then he pointed to the fields. “Look there, Charlie—those troopers’re all exposed. I told them to stay down. They’re not paying attention. Keep them down behind the cars. Tell them Handy’s killed officers before. What’s his relationship with weapons, Henry?”
    LeBow