Longmont, Virginia

Longmont, Virginia, serves as Cap Hollister’s office and decision center when the Shop’s operation at the Manders farm collapses into public, violent disaster. News reaches him through a relayed radio report; from there, he begins coordinating the agency’s response while still insisting that the girl can be contained and brought under its control.

Setting and Communications

The report reaches Cap through a chain of relays. Scratched, muddy, and barely able to walk on his injured ankle, Orville Jamieson speaks by walkie-talkie from beside Baillings Road, about half a mile from the Manders farm. His message travels to a temporary command post in a van on the main street of Hastings Glen, then through a New York City relay station to Longmont, Virginia, where Cap listens in his office. The scrambled transmission and powerful equipment carry the field report to the Shop’s leadership, but cannot soften its implications.

The Farm Report and Cap’s Response

The scale of the failure shocks Cap. The report describes four to six men dead, other agents scattered into the woods, half a dozen cars burning, and a house destroyed by fire. A wounded civilian is also likely to tell anyone who will listen that men he described as neo-Nazis arrived without a warrant and tried to abduct a man and a little girl who had invited them to lunch. Jamieson does not deliver a composed account: after finishing the report, he begins repeating himself in a state of near-hysteria.

Cap sits in his swivel chair and tries to think, comparing the operation’s failure to the Bay of Pigs and emphasizing that this disaster has occurred on American soil. As the office darkens, he refuses to take calls, then orders his secretary, Rachel, to arrange an immediate conversation with Jamieson once he can be flown in. He also requests an A-one-A-priority call with General Brackman in Washington and a meeting with all six subdirectors at nineteen hundred hours. He wants to speak with the New York State police chief as well: the police had participated in the search, and Cap intends both to shift blame if necessary and to seek a united front that might limit the damage to everyone’s reputation.

Containment and Narrative Significance

The crisis does not dislodge Cap’s central objective. He wonders whether Charlie can still be controlled and considers methods of containment; the disaster has changed the immediate circumstances, not his determination to possess her. The McGee files remain on a library cart in his office, turning the family’s records into a tangible focus for his restless review. He also wonders where John Rainbird is, a question that points beyond the immediate management of the raid toward the Shop’s continuing pursuit of the girl. Longmont is thus presented less as a neutral place than as the institutional vantage point from which a failed covert operation becomes a communications, political, and containment crisis.