As the special agent in charge of the Boise field office, Tim Werner had tactical command of this operation. Nervously he looked at his watch. “Five minutes,” he announced. “We wait another five minutes. Then we go in.”

Without comment, Special Agent Albert Zimmerman looked at Werner, then back at the door of the shop that was clearly displaying the “Closed” sign. Without making any effort to hide his actions, Zimmerman lifted a small radio to his mouth. “Stand by,” he announced. “We go in five. Repeat, we go in five.”

Like the other agents scattered about the area waiting for the shop owner to emerge, both Werner and Zimmerman had misgivings about the arrest they were about to make. Until the previous afternoon John Doherty had been only one of a dozen suspects that the Boise field office had been keeping tabs on as part of the investigation concerning the militia attack in Wyoming. With all the patience of a general preparing for battle, Werner had built his case against them slowly, methodically. Though he was as anxious to nail the bastards who had gunned down his fellow agents as anyone else, Werner was a chess player who appreciated the value of planning, preparation, and timing. When the trail of the Wyoming killers led to Idaho, Werner and his agents began the meticulous task of marshaling evidence against the suspects, monitoring their movements, and keeping track of who they met. In this way the number of people Werner’s agents had been able to link to the Wyoming affair had doubled. It was Wemer’s hope that given the time, he would be able to piece together the entire puzzle and deliver them all up as a package and crush the organization that supported them.

His systematic and meticulous investigation, however, had been brought to a screeching halt the previous day by a phone call from the head of the Bureau itself. In a rather one-sided conversation, he explained to Werner that a number of people in the Justice Department had been spooked by Jan Fields’s interview with the governor of Idaho. It was felt that if a simple reporter in Denver could dig up enough information about ongoing investigations to make that sort of connection, then the work of Werner’s office and other task forces across the nation was in danger. Rather than watch their suspects scatter and go to ground, a decision was made to pick up those they had a case against and work from there.

While logical, the snap decision made in Washington, D.C., left precious little time for the agents in the field to organize themselves. It gave them even less time to coordinate with state and local law enforcement agencies. This last part was a particularly thorny issue for Tim Werner since he had done nothing to apprise his counterparts in Idaho of his activities. He felt the risk of compromising his investigation had been too great to do so. This assessment was driven home when one of the initial suspects turned out to be the son of a senior state police official. That they had discovered this before asking for assistance caused Werner and every agent involved in the investigation to breathe a collective sigh of relief.