Howard Longstreet

Howard Longstreet is the Executive Associate Director for Intelligence for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He is responsible for overseeing the FBI's Directorate of Intelligence, and is by all accounts a legend in the bureau.

Appearance and Mannerisms
Longstreet is a thin six feet, seven inches tall, with long gray hair and black eyes beneath a deep, craggy brow.

History
Before joining the Bureau, Longstreet served in the military, including a stint with the legendary—and legendarily secretive—Ghost Company, where he commanded a group of elite operatives that included Aloysius Pendergast and Mike Decker. When the Ghost Company was dissolved, Longstreet, along with Decker and eventually Pendergast, joined the FBI. Longstreet rose quickly through the Bureau's ranks, ultimately finding himself with a twenty-third floor office at 26 Federal Plaza as the Executive Associate Director for Intelligence.After Decker was killed during the events of Dance of Death, Longstreet assumed the responsibility of protecting Pendergast from the FBI's bureaucracy and politics. He continued Decker's practice of giving Pendergast free rein to pick and choose the cases that interested him, and also of shielding the unorthodox agent from official repercussions when possible.

When it became clear that Diogenes Pendergast had murdered Decker, Aloysius persuaded Longstreet to abandon the investigation into Decker's death, and accept that Diogenes was dead and the blood oath had been fulfilled.When Pendergast apparently drowned near Exmouth, Massachusetts, the FBI sent a field team to investigate. While they found no sign of the missing special agent, they did find prints that matched Diogenes.

Longstreet sat in on the briefing of the strike team assembled by the New York field office to help Pendergast, and quickly took over the direction of the negotiations. When Pendergast eventually returned safely, Longstreet privately confronted him about Diogenes, reminding him of their blood oath. He appeared satisfied by Pendergast's explanation of Diogenes' survival, and the two began working to locate and eliminate Diogenes for good. Longstreet brought his considerable resources to bear throughout the U.S. intelligence community, coming up empty. Meanwhile, Pendergast's own investigations turned up an accomplice named Flavia Greyling and a Manhattan apartment with a disturbingly clear view of his own Riverside Drive residence, but there the trail grew cold, until a grisly double murder in Florida required Longstreet's attention. After examining the bodies and discovering a peculiar mutilation of disturbing familiarity, Pendergast confided to Longstreet the full story of Antoine Pendergast, the arcanum, and Constance Greene, who appeared to have been abducted by Diogenes. As they continued to track Diogenes through a maze of aliases and disguises, including convincing the Miami field office's SAC to allow them unrestricted—and unsupervised—access to the PRISM unit, Longstreet trusted Pendergast's instincts and watched in amazement as the agent soon pinpointed Diogenes' location to a small island in the Florida Keys.

It was only then that Longstreet checked his old friend, overriding Pendergast's demand that the two of them handle the covert operation themselves. Instead, Longstreet insisted that a federal SWAT team accompany them to the island to ensure that Diogenes was indeed killed. Convinced that a large assault would play directly to Diogenes' strengths, Pendergast elected to slip away during the planning and staging process of the operation and headed to Halcyon Key to confront his brother alone. Longstreet, who had seen Pendergast's freelancing tendencies in the Ghost Company, continued with the assault, bringing a Zodiac and two helicopters full of agents. Soon after their landing, Diogenes detonated a large explosive, destroying one of the choppers, injuring several men, and throwing the operation quickly into disarray. Longstreet pushed on, tracking and killing Greyling, and finally coming face to face with the Pendergast brothers and Constance Greene.

As Longstreet raised his gun to kill Diogenes, he found himself suddenly at odds with Constance and Pendergast, who assured him that Diogenes would disappear and never be heard from again, to the point of promising suicide if Diogenes were to die—all while Diogenes himself was begging Longstreet to kill him. Longstreet finally relented, watching contemptuously while Pendergast uncuffed his brother and released him back into the world. When Diogenes had gone, Longstreet promised Pendergast that their relationship was over, having been forced to violate both his blood oath and sworn duty as a federal officer. A man of his word, however, he stuck to their cover story that Diogenes had perished in the explosion during the opening moments of the raid.Longstreet's "punishment" for Pendergast's actions during the events of The Obsidian Chamber was to begin assigning him to seemingly banal cases, until one such assignment became the first of a peculiar series of killings involving decapitations. As Pendergast's investigation into the suddenly high-profile case continued, Longstreet's icy posture toward him began to soften. Ultimately, after watching Pendergast masterfully navigate a joint meeting with a particularly inhospitable Anton Ozmian, Longstreet pronounced his longtime friend "officially out of the doghouse."

Their restored relationship was short-lived, however; the Decapitator, as the media had taken to calling the killer, lured Longstreet and Vincent D'Agosta to an abandoned psychiatric hospital on Long Island, where they were bound, beaten and bloodied, then recorded as bait for Pendergast. When the special agent finally arrived at the derelict structure, he found an unbound but unresponsive Longstreet waiting for him in a chair; when Pendergast tried to rouse him, he watched horrified as Longstreet's severed head fell from his body.