Free Seven Silent Men by Noel; Behn

and operations. FOs are run by the special agent in charge and an assistant special agent in charge, the SAC and ASAC respectively, who have private offices on the premises. Supervisors and chief clerks function from their own cubicles. The workaday “bricks,” or special agents, operate from large squad rooms, are usually assigned to “squads” which specialize in specific categories of crime.
    Strewn between the galaxy of field offices, and subservient to them, are five hundred and sixteen satellite operations known as resident agencies. RAs, or residencies, are predicated totally on population and range in size from one agent covering a territory to as many as thirty. Each resident agent, according to protocol, reports officially to the squad in the parent field office … from this squad receives his formal assignments. Most residencies have some sort of office space. Many do not, with the resident agents of the area mailing or phoning in their reports to the field office. Few RAs boast the luxury of secretaries or stenographers. Certain of the larger RAs designate a senior resident agent, SRA, and an assistant senior resident agent, ASRA, who have no formal authority over the other resident agents at the office and who are responsible only for matters of administration and coordination. Not so at Prairie Port.
    Prairie Port, technically, was in the dominion, and therefore under the jurisdiction, of the St. Louis, Missouri, field office. But Ed Grafton would have no truck with St. Louis. He had, as long as anyone could recall, dealt directly with Washington headquarters … very often took his orders from no mortal less than J. Edgar Hoover himself … operated Prairie Port as its own entity … seemed to be the only SRA or SAC in the Bureau who had the power to reject agents sent to his residency by Washington headquarters. A decade of enormous population growth in the Prairie Port area and the assignment of an assistant U.S. attorney to cover the newly built federal courthouse in the city added credence to those headquarters men pushing for the residency to become a full-fledged and proper field office. The pervasive enemy to such a plan was Grafton. He wished Prairie Port to remain as it was … a curious creature vacillating somewhere between residency and field office. Ed Grafton didn’t have to bother about the chaos such vacillation created. John Sunstrom did. Sunstrom served as assistant senior resident agent, the second-in-command to Grafton, and was in sole and total charge of the administrative end of things at Prairie Port.
    The telephone conference call with A. R. Roland at Washington headquarters which Strom had hurriedly arranged began at 1 P . M . sharp in the eleventh-floor residency offices in downtown Prairie Port. Since the temperature outside was ninety-two degrees and the building’s central air-conditioning system was non-operative on Sundays and the office’s three auxiliary window air-conditioning units had long since broken down, the seven attending Bureau agents were in their perspired-through shirt-sleeves. Twenty-eight-year-old Rodney Willis recorded the Prairie Port end of the conversation on the office reel-to-reel Magnavox tape machine. Billy Yates was relegated to operating the speaker box so all in the room could hear, be heard by, or converse with, the man to whom Sunstrom was talking on the tie-line phone to Washington, assistant to the Director of the FBI A. R. Roland.
    Jessup was the first of the group Strom summoned to the speaker box. Reading from his notes for Roland, Jessup recapitulated learning that the Prairie Port police had not told the FBI a robbery was in progress at Mormon State National Bank … how the police rushed the bank thinking the robbers were still inside … how nobody was found inside … how the vault sank into the concrete floor … how the top of the vault was blow-torched open … how nothing was seen