Judas Horse

One

I am standing in the middle of nowhere, eating an oatmeal cookie, when the word comes down the hallway like an ill wind that SAC Robert Galloway wants to see everyone in his office. I glance at the TV monitors — no airplane crashes — and figure this would be Galloway announcing with his usual gloomy hysteria that some honcho is coming from FBI headquarters, or maybe, because of budget cuts, we all have to bring our own copy paper.

The boss is waiting behind his desk, eyes downcast, fingertips tapping the blotter, and he does not speak or look up until the office is jammed with agents in shirtsleeves and wide-eyed administrative assistants. Cautious silence settles in.

“Another blow,” he says, because there are all kinds of blows, all day long.

The silence twists tighter.

“Special Agent Steve Crawford is dead.”

A collective gasp of shock. Some of us clutch, as if kicked in the gut.

“We have a positive ID on his remains.”

“How?” someone finally asks.

Galloway clears his throat. Everybody knows Steve Crawford was his golden boy and heir apparent.

“A hiker found a piece of jaw with a couple of teeth in a stream close to where Steve disappeared.” He takes a breath. “The forensic dentist matched the root furcation on the X-rays.”

“Cause of death?”

Galloway rubs his forehead. “He was an experienced hiker. A fall? Hypothermia? We don’t know. He was hiking alone. It’s a remote location. You have big animals, little animals; they’re dragging pieces hither and yon. The coroner says the manner of death is a very difficult call, based on the evidence and the length of time Steve was out there.”

It is like losing Steve all over again. Like those stomach-churning hours thrashing through the soaking undergrowth up in Oregon just days after I’d come back from administrative leave. I get sick just thinking about the empty yelping of those dogs.

When Steve had failed to call his wife, Tina, from a solo hiking vacation in the Cascades, his abandoned SUV was discovered at a trailhead. Four hundred volunteers scoured the national park, casting a net of inquiry from Eugene to Bend. Everyone from the Los Angeles field office went up on their own time to knock on doors. Worse, indescribably worse, were the visits to Steve and Tina’s house down here in Gardena — a dining table of foil-covered casseroles, two dazed grandmas from out of town, a couple of sisters, the scent of baby powder from the children’s room.

Standing now in Galloway’s superheated office, I do not want to hear the aren’t-I-smart questions. What does it matter if the molars have fillings or not? After weeks of uncertainty, there is no doubt. Steve is dead; at least his family has something to bury.

Seven months before, a crazed detective on a suicide mission tried to drag me into his car, and I shot him.

When you are involved in a shooting incident, they take away your weapon and credentials. You are no longer identified as a federal agent, no different from any bozo who cannot get past the metal detectors. There is an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility and what we call “critical incident training,” psychoanalyzing with other agents who have been through a life-changing trauma. When they decide you are ready to come back, the tradition is that another agent waits downstairs to “walk you in.”

Steve Crawford was waiting in the lobby of the federal building when I returned after seven insomnia-racked months on administrative leave. In the FBI family, Steve and I were closer than most, having graduated in the same class at the Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Those who go through new agent training together are eternally bonded in young blood. We had shared many defining moments, but that image of Steve in the lobby is especially vivid, not only because of his kindness to me on that first awful day back but also because later, when he disappeared, I struggled to enhance every memory of him in the days before, in search of a detail that might explain why.

A tall drink of water with ash-blond hair, thirty-eight at the time, he was leaning on a counter with a distracted look, wearing a nylon strap around his neck with a clip on the end for ID tags and keys. We each have one, personalized with goofy stuff. His was red, white, and blue, studded with pins from police departments around the country and two teddy bears — representing many cases, years of work, and becoming a new dad. The lobby was crowded with civil servants and foreign nationals, but in the light streaming down through the atrium, all I saw was that strap, glinting with honor, and I was hungry for it.

“Everything all right?” he asked, touching my shoulder.

We were in the elevator. I stared at the floors ticking by.

“Why am I nervous? It feels like the first day of school.”

“You have plenty of friends on the playground,” Steve assured me.

After he got a law degree, and before he joined the Bureau, Steve played outfield during two seasons of minor-league baseball. He was the real thing. He knew all about disappointment and bone-wearying hard work. Sometimes I’d ask, “How many times in your life do you think you’ve swung a bat?” and he’d deadpan, “Not nearly enough.” No question he had the talent. If he’d wanted to make the majors and cash out, he would have. It was just that Steve Crawford cared more about helping people than he did about himself.

The elevator doors had opened and we stepped into a hall. Steve swiped his card. I followed through the secure door, fighting an embarrassing impulse to hold on to his hand. He got me through those first brutal hours; got my old handcuffs back, the weapon in its clip, the case in black dress leather that holds credential and badge. There was a drawer full of clean new key straps. I chose red, white, and blue.

“Take a breath,” he said. “You’ll be great.”

Just as I was getting my feet back on the ground, Steve Crawford was on his way to infinity.

The U.S. Federal Office Building on Wilshire Boulevard, isolated in a flat grass tract behind a queue of concrete bunkers, is a soulless tower meant to keep excitement out. If you had business here this morning, you might wonder at the numbers of dark-suited judges, cops, and politicians gathered beneath the breezy portico, and the white chairs set in rows. You might notice the Marine honor guard, and the guy in the kilt with the bagpipes, and figure out this is to be the annual FBI memorial service.

You could not know that SWAT is patrolling the perimeter, or, from the chatter, that emotions are tender, because in this year’s program book there appears a handsome new face, that of Special Agent Steve Crawford, beside the tough-guy G-men who died in the thirties, and the earnest boys wearing skinny ties, forever frozen in the fifties.

It is by now just a few weeks past the official identification of his remains. Tina is seated with their children in the front row, wearing the same black silk dress and shiny black straw hat she wore to the funeral, as if she has never taken off her widow’s weeds.

It would be nice, before stepping into the merciless sunshine, to rest for a moment in a circle of colleagues and let the feelings flow. I notice my former best friend, Barbara Sullivan, the bank robbery coordinator, commiserating with a couple of gals on her squad. They are whispering about Tina, and how she has still not been able to clean out Steve’s closets, trading stories about going through your childhood stuff and selling the house when your last surviving parent has died.

As I approach, they stop talking.

“Tough morning,” I say.

“Very sad.”

Nobody says anything.

“Steve loved the mountains,” I remark. “I hope they talk about that.”

“You knew him,” Barbara replies accusingly, as if it is my fault he went to the mountains and met with a fatal accident.

“Yes,” I say. “I miss his smile,” and I walk away in a backwash of silence.

When you are involved in a shooting incident, the Office of Professional Responsibility talks to all your friends. During my investigation, rocks were overturned concerning Barbara Sullivan’s handling of bank robbery witnesses who had been waiting to be polygraphed. Instead of placing the witnesses in a secure area, she had allowed them to wait in the hall. It was a meaningless oversight that had nothing to do with my case, but with typical Bureau anality, they could not let it go, and Barbara Sullivan, a working mom who puts in twice as much as everyone else, received a reprimand. Not my fault, but that kind of thing accumulates nasty gossip, like a snowball in dirt.

Even though OPR found my case to be a righteous shooting — that the detective was a disturbed individual and the choice was either his life or mine, with a good chance he might have taken out a couple of civilians, as well — I had become tainted meat and nobody much wanted me around. Behind my back, Barbara called me “a cowgirl,” and it stuck. The word was I had tried to be a hero and lost all judgment. Who wants to partner up with that?

Don’t be stupid; this isn’t high school. But at the memorial service, I sit well away from Barbara and her friends in their identical black trouser suits, white shirts, and flat rubber-soled shoes.

If this isn’t high school, why do they all have to be blond?

Over the roar of the nearby 405 freeway, I listen to the Bureau chaplain honor our dead: “True heroes live a life of goodness, and enter the battle between good and evil to make the world a better place. These are not just names on a piece of paper. These are people just like us, who put themselves in harm’s way, knowing each day could be their last, whose loved ones were sometimes afraid to kiss them good-bye in the morning…until the day they made the supreme sacrifice. They gave the last measure of devotion to defending freedom.”

The roll call procession has begun. A bell tolls for every name that is read, and a photograph of each fallen agent is carried by an honoree who also bears a yellow rose. There had been a spat about who should carry Steve’s memorial, but it went to Jason Ripley, because he is the newest agent.

I am battling for control. My facial muscles are twitching and hot tears threaten to break. This is the task: Never let it show. Rows of graven faces reveal nothing but discipline.

I have noticed that as you get older, you do not regret the affairs you’ve had, but the ones you didn’t have. What nobody here knows is that Steve and I were not just buddies who met as kids in our twenties at the Academy and went through new agent training together. We did exactly what new agents are not supposed to do: We fell in love. And despite the prohibitions of the time, we were going to get married. The painful circumstances that tore us apart hit me all over again as Jason Ripley passes, bearing a large color photo of Steve’s earnest all-American face — a testament, in so many ways, for so many people, to what might have been.

Jason, a twenty-eight-year-old skinny farmer’s son from Illinois, is doing a credible job of appearing not to be terrified. It must scare the heck out of him, standing in for a dead man; called upon to demonstrate the egalitarian nature of death, along with other agents and support staff (each carrying a photo and one yellow rose), hauled out of the faceless building and exposed in full daylight, made to walk in a single line at the same funereal pace — the alert, the self-conscious, the burdened, the humble, the casual, the aggressive, the broken.

For months after the shooting incident, I had headaches and malaise. I was on every type of med but still couldn’t make it through the night without sweating through at least one pair of pajamas. I’d get up and read in the living room — one light burning, a desert wind rattling the empty garbage cans, a storm of tiny flowers driven off the pittosporum trees — and like the homeowner who has iced an intruder, or a soldier who destroys a tank, I gained the special knowledge only righteous shooters share: Even the most selfless action, even the defense of your country, doesn’t mean a happy ending. They save the worst for the so-called hero.

I killed somebody.

Who am I?

Two

Galloway calls me into his office again. This time, it is just the two of us. I find him tilted all the way back in his chair, as if he is going to take a nap. His hands are clasped over his chest and his eyes are looking somewhere through the wall. He seems almost peaceful, snuggled up in his customary black turtleneck.

“Steve Crawford was murdered,” he says.

“No. How?”

“He was pretty much blown to bits.”

“In the woods?”

Galloway agrees it sounds improbable. “Figure the odds.” When the molar in the jaw fragment married up to that of a missing federal agent, a crack team of investigators from the Portland police department and Oregon state police immediately returned to the site. SAC Galloway was there, along with the ASAC from the FBI’s Portland division. Galloway brought his green tactical parka and heavy boots; the locals wore windbreakers and jeans. As they tromped up the trail, two forensic anthropologists were arguing about whether or not the best way to clean bones is to boil them. You’d think science would have come up with the answer to that one by now.

The team had been formed in order to search for more remains. Cause of death was still unknown. It was a clear, cold day and the woods were dazzling under three inches of new snow. Conditions were judged to be good because the sun was out and the ground was already bare in spots. Might be a long shot, but you could get lucky. If you delayed until spring, the remains would migrate even farther. Besides, emotionally, nobody could wait.

When they reached the spot in the stream where the hiker had found the human jaw, they stopped and caught their breath. The thermos bottles and PowerBars came out. There were a lot of organized people trying to organize one another, so Galloway wandered off alone, climbed an outcrop, got up high, and wrapped an arm around a tree to steady himself on the slippery granite. He stared at the ice-colored water riding through the gorge.

His feet were cold and his thoughts morose. He was back in his childhood home in Brooklyn, New York. Cold linoleum, cold sheets, even the wall against his bed felt frigid. Seven years old, watching a blizzard whipping and wailing through the bars of the window guard, he was certain it would blow the brick apartment building away.

The sun was in his eyes now, reflecting off the placid snow that quilted the forest. Snow was different in the country. To his parents, “in the country” meant Westchester. He recalled a wooded place like this on a wintry day—Was it a Sunday? A botanical garden? — and him sledding on a found piece of cardboard. His parents had moved off behind a barren tree. There he saw his father open his mother’s coat, lift her sweater, and put his hand over her breast.

Galloway was lost in reverie about this particular image and why it was making him queasy, while a different part of his brain was seeking information about a depression it had noticed in the newly fallen snow: a space that resolved with more and more urgency as it began to melt away; a small, clearly defined circle in a cluster of young saplings; a sparkling white crater.

Galloway pauses at his desk to chew an unlit cigar and muse on the oddity of perceiving such an important piece of evidence at the same time he was experiencing disturbing memories of his father’s hand on his mother’s large and conical breast. I do not remark on the oddity of him telling me. Galloway is a New Yorker. He has no boundaries.

The impression in the earth was the seat of an explosion.

“You did a postblast crime scene?”

“No, we all went out for sushi.”

I cannot believe it. A force that powerful in the middle of nowhere? Animals or no animals, you’d need fifty pounds of explosives to blast a human body into the pieces that remained of Steve. And why isn’t everybody talking about it?

Galloway puts the cigar away and swings the chair upright. “We pulled the bomb techs from the Portland division. Nobody knows about it down here.” There had to have been fifteen or twenty people involved. You had photographers, guys with shifting screens and shovels, teams marching the quadrants shoulder-to-shoulder, someone with a global-positioning system mapping the site to within a tenth of a millimeter of an inch. You had, in other words, a lot of jokers all dolled up in Tyvek suits — big rubber body condoms — walking around a national forest.

And nobody knows?

“In the crater we found pieces of the box that held the components. The lab has identified the explosive…. There were traces in the clothes.” “Clothes?”

Galloway makes a sign with thumb and forefinger: this big.

I am without words. My sight falls, unseeing, on Galloway’s collection of New York City police department souvenirs. Only he could get away with the alleged scalp of a drug dealer, and the Empire State Building wearing a brassiere.

“The debris field was extensive, but we did okay. Parts of a battery, parts of a cell phone detonator. Alligator clips, a leg wire, toggle switch. Steve must have walked right into it.” I may appear rational, but the world is falling away from under my feet, like being lifted straight up in a helicopter.

“I know he was a friend of yours,” says Galloway.

I murmur something about Steve having been a great guy.

“Steve Crawford should have had this chair. He would have, one day.” He kicks the chair away and unlocks a credenza.

“So what do we think?” I begin in a professional manner. “He was hiking alone in the woods when he encountered a booby trap, some psychopathic piece of shit—” “We think it’s domestic terrorism.”

Galloway drops four heavy documents on the desk. The impact rattles the bones in my neck. They are three inches thick, government-printed, with red covers — the result of a years-long investigation of a well-known radical group called FAN.

Galloway closes the door. The silence throbs in my ears.

“Steve was working undercover,” Galloway says.

Like everyone else, I believed Steve was on vacation. That’s the way it is with undercover work.

“This is classified. How Steve died”—he waves a hand, erasing everything he has just told me—“we still don’t know. And we’ll never know.” “Understood.”

“He was working a FAN cell. The explosive that killed him is a water-based gel called Tovex — the same type of explosive used in the O’Conner Pharmaceuticals bombings two years ago.” FAN is an invisible group of anarchists that operates behind the façade of Free Animals Now — bland enough to attract the liberals and provide a front for the hard-core element. Interchangeable in tactics with ecoterrorists like ALF and ELF, the level of violence in their attacks is on the rise. They used to glue locks and liberate research animals; now it’s firebombing. There are dozens of unsolved cases in the Northwest attributed to FAN — which some investigators argue does not exist at all, but is a cover for a mixed bag of disenfranchised extremists.

“FAN is on the short list for Steve Crawford’s murder,” Galloway says. “We’re going back in. It took some arm twisting, but headquarters finally approved. You fit the profile to take Steve’s place.” “Why?”

“Right age. Right background.”

“Because I’m mixed race?”

Galloway seems surprised that I would bring that up.

“I know you’re half Latina, but the way you present is ethnically ambiguous. You could be white, or something more exotic.” “And that’s supposedly good?”

“Might be an asset.”

I have always found my heritage a puzzle. I was raised in whiteness by my grandfather “Poppy” Everett Morgan Grey a relentless racist, who tried to bury the El Salvadoran side of me. He did such a thorough job of biasing me against my own tradition that whenever I manage to dig it out, I find something tarnished by his scorn.

“Actually,” says Galloway, “I was talking about your skills as a profiler and background in crisis negotiation. It’s a deep-cover operation, six months to a year. Interested?” Shocked. It is like going up in a helicopter and being handed the controls.

I say, “Yes.”

There is a pause.

“Anything that would keep you in Los Angeles?” he asks.

“Nothing but regret.” I smile poorly.

Galloway holds my gaze. “How are you around the incident?” He means the shooting incident.

“It doesn’t get easier.”

It is coming on again, the sour tightening of the throat.

He is watching me.

“I’ve been approved for duty. Or I wouldn’t be here. But you know that.” “Undercover is different. It’s about developing relationships and then betraying them.” “Which makes me perfect for the job?”

“I know it’s been hard, but the way you’ve come back from the incident makes me think you have the personality type that would be resilient to the stress of working undercover.” “What’s the real reason?” I joke. “You want me out of L.A.?” “On a personal level, I think it would be very good for you to get out of L.A.” Supervisors don’t often admit to thinking about you on a personal level, or having your best interests at heart. I blush with gratitude.

“The director has formed a multiagency task force that will function here and in Portland, Oregon.” Galloway nods sagely. “A major undertaking. We’re calling it ‘Operation Wildcat.’ What do you think?” “It sells.”

“All you have to do is go through undercover school at the Academy and get certified.” All I have to do is swim to Alcatraz and back.

“It’s the toughest training in the Bureau, am I right?” “Brutal.” Galloway smiles. “Two weeks, twenty-four/seven, designed to stress you out emotionally and physically and put you in intensive role-play operations to simulate realism. Remember the ‘agony tree’?” The agony tree is a big old pine at the start of the running course at the Academy. Over the years, folks have covered it with signs like SUCK IT IN; HURT; LOVE IT; PAIN; 110 %.

“In undercover school maybe one in five makes the cut,” he informs me. “The rest are still hanging from the tree.” Galloway opens the door and the world of the FBI comes back — the talk, the hustle of important work, sunshine falling across the bright maroon-and-navy furniture that has recently sprung up around the office.

“Thank you for this,” I tell him.

“Don’t thank me. There are grander themes to respond to.” I grin, amused by Galloway’s quirky philosophizing. “What are the grander themes?” “I want the idiots who killed Steve Crawford to cry on the stand,” my boss says softly. “I want them to roll on the floor like pill bugs.” I stop grinning. “What if I don’t pass undercover school?” “It won’t affect your job, or the operation. Someone else will qualify. And you’ll come back and go on being Ana.” He pats my arm reassuringly, as if that would be perfectly okay.

Three

The road to undercover school cuts a straight line through a hundred square miles of dense Virginia forest. The raw-faced young Marines who stand in the rain, M16s over their shoulders, have zero tolerance for speeding, so I keep the rental car to thirty-five miles per hour — although my heartbeat is racing with the same giddy excitement as the first time I made this drive, when I arrived for training as a new agent, twelve years before.

This is everything I’ve ever wanted! That’s how I was thinking way back then, until the road went on and on at the same monotonous crawl, and a deep apprehension grew. What am I doing? Why did I leave home? The force of life is greedy here. Oak and hickory crowd the macadam, and the tall, wet grass is heavy with ticks. Drawing closer to the FBI Academy at the heart of the base, you come to the uneasy realization there is nothing else around you — no houses, no gas stations, no options — just deep fields with rifle targets and Quonset huts set far away in the smoky mist. It seems as if you are in danger of being swallowed up by your own dream.

I met Steve Crawford on the same driver-training course I am now passing, where they taught us how to stop a felon. We drove safety cars with popped-out wheels. All the guys love this part, but Steve was an ace. In the Board Room cafeteria, a bunch of us rookies sat around drinking beer, and Steve said if he did become an FBI agent, he’d have to sell his 1978 Mustang GT. Not likely he’d be drag racing anymore. He’d just painted it a “raspberry and gold dust color,” which sounded kind of luscious. This was before I had bought my ’71 Barracuda, but I piped up about loving muscle cars. He told how he’d hang out in a parking lot in San Bernardino, listening to the old guys talk hot rods; how he’d raced the Bonneville salt flats. By midnight, we were back at the driver-training course, testing out the fast track.

We were two Southern California kids crazy for cars and baseball, high every day on the adrenaline of being at the Academy, working our butts off, entwined in a heroic vision of serving a better world. Made for each other, it seemed.

A sudden coldness hits the rental car and I put on the heat. As I pass the final Marine checkpoint, a thunderstorm that has been on my tail since the D.C. airport breaks with almost comic intensity. Rain plays on the windshield like a cuckoo Caribbean band of tin pots and garbage cans. Cold fog curls up close and puts its lips on the window glass. When lightning forks across the lurid purple sky, again and again, I laugh out loud, for the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover must surely be upon me.

The old man has been dead for decades, but down in Quantico it’s still “Get off Hoover’s grass,” as if he owns our souls in perpetuity. All that stuff about him running around in a woman’s red dress and heels, that’s nonsense, although Hoover did make a fetish out of “cleanliness”—of body and mind, supposedly — fashioned after his own psychosexual obsessions. What a way to run a company.

Hoover liked white shirts, but he did not like homosexuals (although he almost certainly was one). Secretaries could make the coffee, but it was indecorous to be seen carrying a naked coffee cup across the office, so they would place the steaming mugs inside those wooden boxes made for index cards, pretending it was not coffee they were delivering to their white-shirted, not-gay bosses.

Laugh about it now (we don’t), but how far is a mad secret coffee ritual from compliance in a cover-up of dirty tricks? Or a bollixed siege? Hoover’s drive to avoid any sort of personal or bureaucratic shame created a culture of repression and fear that haunts us still. As I pull into the austere brick complex stained dark by the rain, I hear the grim, omniscient voice of the director, years ago embedded in my head: “Never embarrass the Bureau.” The groundhog! I just remembered! He used to live in a grass quadrangle outside the administration building. Steve and I would set out crackers while pretending to study and he’d taunt me about shooting it on sight, detailing the effect of different-caliber bullets. It was considered good luck if you happened to spot the little guy from one of the glass passageways that connect the towers. We called them “gerbil cages,” scurrying to our classes through the glass tunnels like scores of frantic mice. For fourteen weeks, we lived inside a sealed environment with no fresh air and people always getting sick. That is why we went gaga over the groundhog: He was our brother, and he was free.

Now as I enter the lobby, water tracking from my soaking shoes, something clicks inside my chest, as if Steve is saying, as he always said, You’ll be great, and I have answered, This is for you, buddy.

The rooms in the dorm are spartan and smaller than I remember — still no recreation areas, one TV to a floor. An hour after checking in, I am back in training uniform — stiff cargo pants, boots, short-sleeved polo shirt with the FBI seal, and a thick belt made of saddle leather better suited for a horse — falling in with identically dressed crowds of muscular men and women powering through the gerbil cages like rush hour in the Tokyo subway.

All sizes and ethnicities, we are the law-enforcement elite — plucked from the Bureau or police departments around the world for advanced courses like undercover school, wearing the same rictus smiles and carrying backpacks like aging college students, snobbishly throwing them in piles on the floor. There is plenty of eye contact, at once smug and scared. We have been invited to the rush — but will we make the fraternity?

When they cut you, they do it fast, anytime, anyplace, even the last night of training. By dinnertime, everyone has heard about the “adios speech,” in which a counselor dressed in black takes you aside and basically says, “Thanks for coming and trying out. Just because you didn’t make it doesn’t mean you’re not still an agent, and being an agent is the greatest thing in the world. Have a good trip home.” Have a good time in the trash heap of failure the rest of your life.

Just go on being Ana.

My roommate’s name is Gail Washburn. We are in a class of seventeen. She is maybe thirty-five, from the Chicago field office, African-American, with sly, narrow eyes like an egret and short hair twisted and pinned into two tiny pigtails. I discover her unpacking a bag of mini doughnuts, and like her immediately. She is an upbeat lady, married to another agent, funny about “my black ass,” which could mean her deepest sense of self or athletic rump; teases me about being a “venti cappuccino ass” when I say I am half Salvadoran—“with whole milk, baby”—referring to my pure white skin. It is a promising friendship, but way too brief, as I will end up knowing Gail Washburn less than twelve hours.

By 9:00 p.m. on the same day as my arrival from Los Angeles, we are deeply into a “7-Eleven scenario” in Hogan’s Alley, a phony Main Street, like a movie set, with false storefronts, apartment buildings, a bank and café. We are to assume an undercover identity, enter the convenience store, and purchase a loaf of bread. That’s it. We are armed with paint-ball guns and wear protective gear. We do not know that the counselors, playing customers and clerks, will turn the scene into a violent hostage situation when the owner of the store is held at gunpoint by a shopper.

One by one, we enter the store and play it out. Some of us are shot by the bad guy, some—oops! — kill the victim, some blow their cover and yell, “Freeze! FBI!” but most take correct action, which is to do nothing and be a good witness. We are not told the results, just shunted out the back and warned that we have thirty minutes to file a report.

Gail has already gone through the test when I dash back to our room and find her staring at the computer in bewilderment.

“The system went down.”

I pound the keys. The screen is frozen with green hieroglyphics. Gail hands me the bag of doughnuts and we share a moment of sugary dread.

“I’ll bet this is part of their damn game,” she whispers.

“They shut the system down on purpose? Even for the Bureau, that’s perverse.” “Real life, girl. What do you do in a hostage situation when Rapid Start crashes?” “Sister, I don’t know what’s real.” I am starting to feel flushed and panicky. “But we have fifteen minutes to get our shit over there.” We start scribbling by hand in spiral notebooks and ripping out the pages. Pounding at the door! We both jump. It is spooky all right: Standing in the hallway is a training counselor wearing black — even a black hood — with a knife at the belt. He has a trimmed white beard and compact wrestler’s body, and is not smiling. He looks like the Agent of Death.

“Agent Washburn?” he says. “Talk to me.”

Gail and I look at each other. Is this some code? Another scenario entirely? She thrusts her report at me.

“Take it!” she says. “Run like the wind.”

I run my cappuccino ass back to the command post — over a road and up a hill — in under four minutes. I am not the only one jack-rabbiting it with a flashlight. Damn if Gail wasn’t right. They’d shut the damn computers down.

I deliver the reports and burst back into our room, sweating and exhilarated, to find her sitting on the bed, sobbing.

“I’m going home,” she gasps. “They cut me.”

“Why?”

“He wouldn’t say. I don’t understand. I have never failed anything in my life! Oh sweet Lord, my husband’s not gonna believe this.” Even as a kid, Gail was always a standout — basketball, track, National Merit scholar. A poster girl for the FBI, she’s already been promoted to supervisor. Why wouldn’t they say how she messed up? Are we back to Hoover-era punishment?

“They’re wrong,” I say helplessly.

Fifteen minutes later, she is packed up and gone.

Next morning, 7:00 a.m. Sixteen of us now. We take our assigned seats in a lecture hall that smells like a chemistry class. Coffee is still steaming from paper cups and people are talking in shocked whispers about what happened to Gail, when Ring Diestal, LL.D., Ph.D., a broad-shouldered hulk in a tweed coat and tie, with luxurious gray hair and eyebrows thick as scrubbing brushes, mounts the podium and starts sprinting through the attorney general’s guidelines for FBI undercover work.

Backpacks unzip and notebooks open in a flurry. Three pages of text have flashed across the screen and there is no going back. Dr. Diestal is going at breakneck speed through the situations in which an undercover agent is justified to participate in illegal activity, like smoking weed and buying guns — important stuff on how not to get your case thrown out in court — but I am so burned-out from jet lag and freaked by the way my roommate vanished in the night, I can only stare in a haze at the empty chair that still bears the name Gail Washburn.

They keep it empty, and keep her name tag on it.

Remembering her wounded indignation—“I have never failed anything in my life!”—I am still fighting a sense of outrage that blocks my mind like the condensation on the windows as a cold fog settles over the campus.

“Nothing in the guidelines stops you from taking reasonable measures in self-defense,” Dr. Diestal explains. “But there is a tipping point. How quickly does self-preservation kick in? How smoothly can you shift your sense of what’s right in order to do what is required to complete the mission?” My head jerks. Did I actually fall asleep? Did he see? But Dr. Diestal is already on to “authorization for purchase of contraband goods”—meaning when is it okay for an undercover to purchase drugs from a suspect? I sit up straight and reach for the coffee.

I’ll catch up later.

But there is no catching up. Just before dinner, they come for me.

I am on my way to the library when a counselor calls my name. I think twice before answering — yes, I am still Ana Grey.

“Sir?”

He gestures with his chin that I should follow.

“You are going into an undercover role-play,” he says.

“Now?”

Okay, that’s obvious.

We are winding quickly through the gerbil cages, in the opposite direction from the Board Room cafeteria, where I had been looking forward to the roast beef and mashed potato dinner I’d seen on the chalkboard that morning. There had been no break for lunch.

“May I ask what the operation is, sir?”

“It’s a counterfeiting case. The bad guys are printing U.S. currency using a high-tech copy machine. No inks, no plates, and therefore no evidence of what the machine is being used for. Your job is to catch them in the act.” “Isn’t counterfeiting a crime that comes under the Secret Service?” “Very good, Agent Grey.”

Right answer. Still alive.

“For the purpose of the exercise, let’s say it’s a joint undercover operation with the Secret Service. All you need to know is that you’ll be confronting someone who will be asking questions about you in your undercover role, and you will be observed for signs of deceit that suggest you’re not who you say you are.” We get off the elevator at a subbasement. I follow the counselor down cinder-block corridors — near the indoor range, heavy with the smell of cordite — still trying to figure out what in hell he’s just said. We pass trolleys of laundered towels and stop at a pair of metal doors framed by girders of steel. The rivets are as big as saucers.

It is an old bomb shelter, the counselor tells me, built in the fifties to save our nation’s politicians. In case of nuclear attack, they were all supposed to get in their cars and drive down I-95.

I am too afraid to laugh.

The vault smells like a thrift store, like acres of musty crinoline, packed with racks of clothing for men and women. There are even a couple of dressing tables with mirrors framed in bulbs.

“Have a ball,” he says. “Create a person you’re not. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.” “And then what?”

“You will be challenged to demonstrate a lesson learned.”

And he leaves.

What is the “lesson learned”? I have been up almost thirty-six hours, am ravenously hungry, and tired of being hazed. Can’t we all be grown-ups? What is the point of not even telling us the rules? I stare at the racks. I am at a loss. The amber light is faint. Suits, dresses, handbags, hats — each piece of clothing holds a thousand identities.

And that, I realize finally, is the point. During the 7-Eleven scenario, the undercover identity Gail Washburn had cooked up for herself was “Ramona,” a working-class ghetto mom. She was tested on her hold over that identity, and she failed. When she walked out the door, they called, “Hey, Gail?” “Yes, sir?” “Good job.” And they cut her. The mistake was answering to “Gail.” She should have responded to “Ramona,” no matter what. She thought the gig was over, but that was not for her to judge. Believing it is over can get you killed. That is the lesson of the empty chair and the internal warning that caused me to think before answering to my own name. Gail’s mistake was a result of arrogance; an error made by a person who has always been a superstar and believes that she controls the game.

But uc work is different. It is the kind of game that possesses its own spontaneous intelligence. That is why they cannot tell you the rules. You make a move; the schematic changes. You change it. It changes with you. No past to revise, no future to predict, everything takes place in present time. Fluid. Treacherous. Addictive.

Hanging on a rack is a beat-up leather jacket from the sixties. Originally, it was a designer piece — creamy yellow, square pockets and a belt — but now it looks like Jackie Kennedy on the skids. Who would wear this jacket? From a single clue, I have seven minutes to invent another persona — someone criminal, the shadow side of me. Okay. She bought the jacket in a thrift shop. She doesn’t give a damn about the rules. Hates authority. Steals. She’s a soft touch for animals because she is a stray herself.

And more. She grew up in one of the older tracts in Long Beach, California (not far from Ana Grey) — cheap housing built in the forties for oil refinery workers, now a mixed ghetto of the unemployed. Her name is Darcy DeGuzman. Darcy because it is innocent and bouncy, although she is driven by the ruthlessness of a starving child. That’s the DeGuzman part. Ethnically ambiguous. (Filipina? Spanish?) Deserted by her parents, a pair of depressive alcoholics. Growing up, it was necessary to perform favors for boys. She learned how to use people. She’s streetwise and impulsive, lonely, young and foolish, and somewhere in a violent past, in a crumbling neighborhood where the working class has become obsolete, she killed somebody.

I slip my arms through the cool satin lining of the sleeves.

But I know it fits before I even have it on.

They put me in a van with blacked-in windows. We leave the Marine base and follow curving roads until we are at an outdoor mall. They give me forty dollars, a phone number, and an empty pistol secured with a plastic tie so it can be drawn but not fired.

I walk past a drugstore and a food mart. Normal citizens are wheeling carts filled with groceries, little kids in tow. It is 8:35 p.m. I intercept a pair of girls on their way into a fried chicken restaurant.

“I’m all turned around. How far is D.C.?”

“Oh,” says one, giving the stained-up jacket a stare, “you’re an hour and a half from D.C. If you exit here and go right, you’ll be on I-95.” I have my bearings. I’ve been deposited about thirty miles south of Quantico. Beautiful.

I sit outside a Dairy Queen and devour a milk shake and a double cheeseburger. A sign claims this franchise sells the most ice-cream cakes in Virginia.

I am having a wonderful time.

Two hours later, the mist has settled in but good, and I am shivering in a stupid tank top and miniskirt torn at the hem, which I chose to wear under the thin leather jacket. I cannot see anyone observing me, but the parking lot has been busy. Now it is deserted and everything has shut down except a twenty-four-hour gym. I walk over there and sit on a bench. I go in and use the restroom. I sit on the bench some more.

A woman trainer comes out of the gym. I noticed her when I ducked inside; she was working out with a man with a shaved head. The trainer is wearing a pink sweatsuit and carrying a workout bag. Black ponytail, military posture. An alarm goes off: She’s fit. She’s alert. She’s an agent.

“You haven’t seen a white truck circling around, have you?” she asks with a nasal twang.

“Haven’t seen one.”

“My husband’s supposed to pick me up.”

I nod. “I think I’m supposed to meet you.”

“Meet me for what?”

I don’t answer right away. We walk together.

“What’s your name and where are you from?” she asks.

I say it out loud for the first time: “Darcy, from California.” “California?” Her voice drops. “What are you doing here?” “Staying ahead of the cops.” I am making this up as I go along.

She seems to know it. “Crap,” she says.

“Why?”

She looks around nervously. I follow her gaze. A minivan of off-duty Marines has pulled into the entrance of the Days Inn motel. My grandfather stayed there when I graduated from Quantico as a new agent. As far as I knew, it didn’t have hookers cruising the parking lot then.

“You’ve come all the way from the West Coast? Where’s your car?” Car!

“I got a bunch of different rides.”

She lowers the bag between her feet, starts redoing her ponytail. A signal? I glance at the parking lot, but there is no movement.

“I know you’re not for real,” she hisses. “And life’s too short, honey.” It scares me. I feel Darcy falling away.

“There’s my husband,” she says, and now comes the white truck.

“We can do business.” I step along eagerly. “We’re here to do business, right?” “Give me a break,” she says contemptuously, and calls, “Lloyd!” as the truck noses up to the curb. “We can go now.” Game over?

Be cut? Never find the trash that killed Steve Crawford?

Not until they tell me to have a good trip home.

“Hey, bitch,” I call.

And Darcy DeGuzman, my new undercover identity, is born.

The woman turns on a dime, feet planted like a fuzzy pink ninja.

“Excuse me?”

“Get over here.”

“What?”

A shaved head sticks out of the truck. “Jennifer? We got a problem?” Right on cue. They’re wearing hidden microphones.

“Tell your old man to chill.” I swagger up to where she stands in the fluorescent wash of the drugstore window. “This is what I’m talking about.” I flash a twenty from the money I have been given, pretending it is counterfeit.

“So, Jennifer?” I say. “You got copies good as this? I know a buyer.” I feel ridiculous, acting out a role in the middle of real America. But she takes the bill and examines it closely. Maybe she is giving me a chance to be creative. Or, hell, maybe it really is counterfeit.

“Jennifer!” calls the guy in the truck.

The woman in pink raises her eyes and searches mine.

“I don’t know,” she says warily.

Great acting.

“I need a million dollars.” My confidence is building. “Top-quality.” Jennifer nods slowly. “I have a friend.”

I press the advantage. “One condition. I have to see the operation.” “No way. Are you nuts?”

I shrug. “That’s what my boss wants. He said to check out the source, make sure the bills aren’t traceable.” “They’re not traceable.”

“I can’t take your word.”

I give her apologetic. She understands. We are both in the same fix: men.

She shakes her head. “They’d never agree to something like that.” “Ask. Nicely.”

She hesitates. “Wait here.”

She confabs with the guy in the truck and comes back and tells me the “friend” wants $100,000 in cash, for the million in fakes.

We are inching toward a deal, but where to get the money? There is one more clue, waiting in my pocket.

I say I have to make a call.

She accompanies me to a pay phone, where I dial the number I was given in the van. A voice I do not recognize says, “Yeah?” I do not break character as I tell my “contact” to bring a hundred grand in cash to the mall. Twenty-five minutes later, a low-rider Chevrolet, driven by a black man I have never seen, pulls up and parks away from the lighted rim of stores. A hip-hop bass seems to fill the empty space of the parking lot.

“Be right back,” I tell Jennifer, aware that I am approaching an unknown individual alone.

The window is down. He watches with glittering eyes, fingers flicking the wheel. He is thirty, taut, wearing a do-rag and chewing gum. When I get close, I see his nose is running, and his hand trembles as he draws it across chapped lips.

“You it?” he says.

“Guess so.”

“You guess? Who sent you?”

He is out of the car. So we were to play another scene for Jennifer and her husband?

“Hey, motherfucker,” I muster. “What’s your problem?”

He is wired and I am slow. He slams my chest against the door and cracks my neck in a reverse chokehold.

“No disrespect,” I gasp.

“Don’t make me nervous.”

“It’s cool, it’s cool.”

I am feeling nauseous, seeing sheets of light.

His cell phone goes off. He glances at the number. “Fuck!” He lets me go, spins back inside the car, and hands a gold-embossed Gucci briefcase through the window.

“You best not be fucking with us.”

“No way, bro.”

My throat aches from where he brutally compressed the trachea. When I get back to the Academy, I am going to find out who this asshole is.

“It better be righteous blow, or I’m coming to get your kids.”

Blow? Wait a minute. The deal is counterfeit money, not cocaine. Wrong scenario. Right?

I stare at him.

“I know where you live.”

Then he is gone.

So are Jennifer, the white truck, and the man with the shaved head.

I stand in the middle of the deserted shopping center, gripping the Gucci briefcase the brother thrust at me, which is allegedly stuffed with cash. I’m hatching a brand-new plan: I will hop a ride down the highway and disappear into the Blue Ridge Mountains, marry a coal miner with large spadelike hands, and live in a hollow with a clan of hill people, who distrust and despise the U.S. government almost as much as I do.

My head is swimming with fatigue. What is the “lesson learned”? Did I learn it yet? From deep in the gnarly undergrowth surrounding the now-dead shopping center comes the croaking of toads. No counselors have stepped out of the shadows to bring me in. The game is on. Pick up the thread. Find Jennifer. Connect with the counterfeiters.

I go back to the pay phone, but nobody answers the number I just dialed.

Someone taps my shoulder. “Darcy?”

I take my time responding because I have to run a mental check and the gears are running slowly. Yes, I am Darcy. Darcy from California. A criminal — remember that.

I turn to face Jennifer. “Where the fuck were you?” “I wasn’t a hundred percent about your nigger friend,” she replies.

You redneck jerk! But, no. She’s pushing my multiracial buttons. Fight it.

“That fool is down.” I pat the Gucci case. “It’s all here.”

Then we are in the cab of the truck, with me between the two of them.

“Open it,” suggests the man with the shaved head. (Forty, weathered — Special Ops?) Jennifer has trained him well; his shoulders and biceps are huge, neck tattoo, and he must be local, because all he has on in the misty cold is a “wife beater” undershirt.

I flip the catch. The case appears to be filled with packets of real hundred-dollar bills. I smile complacently, but my heart is pumping. A narrow miss. I should have checked it right away; we could be looking at Monopoly money.

We pick up an access road that parallels the highway, then turn off, heading east through a maze of country lanes. The windows are tinted, but we seem to pass a development of modest homes separated by swatches of black woods before the truck pulls into the graveled driveway of a house with a sign that says NOTARY PUBLIC. Mr. Bodybuilder gets out fast.

“Make it quick.”

In the blur, I notice a magnetic picture stuck on the dashboard: a shot of Jennifer and three young children. “I’m coming to get your kids,” the black man said. Was he a real drug dealer who had gotten our phony identities mixed up?

Before I can ask about those kids, I am taken around the back and hustled down some steps to a basement where a counterfeit-printing operation is in full display.

They have a sweet high-definition laser color printer turning out leaves of counterfeit checks. There are shrink-wrapped packages of birth certificates and marriage licenses, piles of magazines in brown paper. For a moment, I am genuinely elated, as if we have actually busted a big interstate operation.

The guy who allegedly runs the show looks like a nerdy bean counter; he is wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a saggy red cardigan sweater. Balding. Potbelly. Sallow face moist with sweat.

Jennifer says, “This is Darcy, from California.”

He scans my getup, says in a taunting voice, “You look like shit from California.” A couple of lowlifes working the copier snicker.

“How about the bogus?” I ask impatiently.

Nobody answers. I notice Jennifer becoming agitated. She is stamping her foot and redoing the ponytail.

“We’re out of here,” says the man with the shaved head.

“Relax.”

“Sure.”

He exchanges a look with Jennifer.

Something has changed. Some note of tension has started to wail.

Addressing her, I say, “What’s the deal?”

But the guy with the shaved head answers. “Jennifer has to get home to the kids.” “Past their bedtime,” I agree. It is 3:00 a.m. “Can we cut to the chase?” The accountant indicates plastic bins lined up against the wall. A million bucks takes up a lot of room. I can tell just by looking they are down by half.

“You’re a little short there, dude.”

“When we finish this job, we’ll print more,” he assures me. “That’s the beauty of it. Sit down. This is pure Colombian. Free samples, limited time only.” The plastic bag is out. He cuts some lines on the cover of a pornographic magazine.

“Oh man.” I laugh. “I just did some.”

“More is better.”

“Go for it,” I say. “I’m done.”

“Bullshit,” he replies. “You’re a cop.”

“Get a life.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

I stare at the lines of coke. What is the parameter for—“Just because I politely decline your hospitality doesn’t mean I’m a cop. I hate cops.” Jennifer says, “Just do it, honey.”

— illegal activity?

“See,” I vamp, “we just met. So how do I know it’s not rat poison?” The accountant snorts a line and offers up the rest.

If I do it, will I be breaking the law?

“My boyfriend said I gotta keep my head clear—”

Will that invalidate — what did Diestal say about authorizing — The accountant whips a.38 automatic from an ankle holster and holds it to my head.

“Fuck you. I’ve never seen a cop do dope. You’re a cop.”

The hammer pulls back with a sound like rolling thunder. The steel barrel presses against my brain stem and at that moment I stop trying to figure out who is who, and what is true, and why I am falling through this cruel labyrinth.

Enlightenment at gunpoint.

“Jesus Christ,” pleads Jennifer.

“I’m doing it, okay?”

Cocaine — real cocaine — burns the lining of my nose and drips down my throat, and shortly my mind begins to hum a distracted tune while my heartbeat soars into the red zone: dreaming in bed and sprinting to the finish line at the same time.

Things have shifted again. Is it the drug, or is everyone else melting down also? I see a briefcase open on top of the copier. It is empty. But it is not the briefcase I brought. I hear the guy with the shaved head trying to explain.

“Look, we have a problem. There’s been a mistake, but don’t blame Jennifer,” he says.

“I never said I knew her!” Jennifer is shouting.

“She ripped us off.” The husband shrugs.

The accountant scratches his ear. I notice he is still holding the gun.

“So what happened?”

“We picked up the wrong person,” says Jennifer. “I had a bad feeling about it when that ghetto car drove up—” “No way.” I swim toward the briefcase. “There was a hundred grand.” Well, there isn’t now.

“That’s not my briefcase. That’s not the one I came in with,” I blurt. This one is cheap plastic. “I had a Gucci.” It echoes strangely. Gucci? Is that a real word?

“What are you trying to say?” asks the accountant calmly.

I catch Jennifer’s panicked look and switch direction as best I can.

“I don’t know,” I say, “but something’s…messed up.”

He fires the gun at close range into the chest of the man with the shaved head, who lifts up off the floor and flies backward, blood splattering the wood-paneled walls. Jennifer screams, “No, please God, no, no, no—” and he shoots her, too, and she jerks over a chair and sprawls on the floor, the pink sweatsuit staining red. The lackeys start dragging cartons containing freshly minted contraband away from a spreading pool of blood.

The accountant is breathing hard. “I don’t like that kind of shit,” he says.

Undercover operative may be authorized pursuant to section four — I have to save my own life.

“They switched the briefcases,” I tell him. “They double-crossed us. You and me.” “You and me?”

“You and me,” I insist. “We have to get rid of the bodies.”

“Is that what they taught you in cop school?”

He turns toward me and his eyes are tiny dots behind the glasses.

“I’m going to help you,” I say. “Get some of that plastic and we’ll put these losers in the truck.” “I’ll tell you who’s a loser.”

He shoves me into a windowless bathroom and locks the door. The bathtub is stained with old brown blood. Chains are embedded in the walls, handcuffs looped around the rusty pipes. Everywhere there are bunches of human hair. I think it’s called primal fear.

I am imprisoned by a backwoods mental case.

I listen to muffled voices. Someone curses and rattles the lock, but then the banging stops. It stops for a long time.

Soon there is daylight under the door. I turn the knob and it opens. The room is deserted, the printer quiet, the bogus gone, blood splatters still on the walls.

I crawl out of that basement into the dawn, like the lone survivor of a nuclear holocaust, to discover that I am on a deserted lane in a perfectly preserved little town. I am back on Main Street, in Hogan’s Alley, at the FBI Academy. The misty light and cold, wet air, the fake buildings, they are at that moment no more surprising than finding myself alive.

I walk down the center of the street, past the Biograph Theater, perpetually playing Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable and Myrna Loy, and the neat brick Bank of Hogan. A family of real live deer has wandered into the dewy grass of the city square.

I cross the road that runs through the Marine base and climb the hill to the agony tree, where a counselor is waiting, dressed in a black watch cap and heavy jacket against the chill.

“You lost two informants,” he says, “but otherwise you did pretty well. You never broke cover and stayed on point. It’s okay,” he adds softly.

“What’s okay?”

“It’s okay to cry.”

Breakdown of the ego by sleep-deprivation, humiliation, and abuse is a well-known brainwashing technique. It renders the individual compliant, and eager to serve the cult.

“Everyone cries,” says the counselor. “But nobody tells.”

Four

It is Easter Sunday when I leave Los Angeles for Portland, Oregon, three weeks after being certified at undercover school. People in dark clothes holding babies are lined up in front of churches, and on the airplane, stewardesses are wearing rabbit ears. Yellow flowers grow wild between the runways. Despite the urgent beating of my heart, I have the extraordinary feeling that everything is all, all right.

It is right to be ascending on this day of holy mysteries. Somewhere in the clouds, a silent transformation will occur. When we land, Special Agent Ana Grey will be gone from the world, and a fictional person named Darcy DeGuzman will walk off the airplane in her place.

Two days before, sometime before dawn on Good Friday, animal rights terrorists smashed the windows of a butcher store in southeast Portland, spray-painting the word Holocaust on parked cars. Moments later, a firebomb exploded at Ernie’s Meats, a wholesaler on the docks. Three employees were injured by shrapnel.

Operation Wildcat took off.

As we fly over the snow-pocked ridges of Yosemite, I go through Darcy DeGuzman’s backpack, to get the feel of her personal objects, provided by the backstopping team at the Bureau’s secret off-site in Los Angeles. Besides a phony driver’s license, credit cards, and bank statements, there is a copy of Animal Liberation by Peter Singer that was run over by a car to make it look used, and keys to a rented apartment in Portland.

The off-site is concealed in the midst of a raucous Central American nation of street vendors and discount malls opposite the green ice towers of downtown. We’d practically lived there the past few weeks, concocting scenarios aimed at infiltrating Darcy DeGuzman into the FAN organization. On Good Friday morning, five weeks ahead of schedule, I climbed out of the Crown Vic and never looked back.

The gates swung closed. Cameras scanned a crowd of Spanish workers waiting for the morning bus, for whom the aging industrial building was just another unremarkable front for an indiscernible business.

I found myself before a black steel door, fumbling at the Cyber Lock, messing up twice inputting my code. The numbers loomed like kabbalistic signs: LAST CHANCE TO STAY IN LA! BUY A CONDO! MEET A MAN! But when the green light flashed, there was liberating happiness, as when a tiresome family member finally leaves.

Ana Grey was free to go, and take her baggage with her.

For decades, the place had been a state unemployment office, and the Bureau had not done much to change it. I badged the on-duty, who buzzed me into a vestibule that smelled of old guns and wet plaster. Tired fluorescents cast a sallow patina along empty corridors that were laid forty years ago with sea green linoleum, now worn to the floorboards.

Special Supervisory Agent Mike Donnato appeared wearing a trim charcoal suit, making things look a little less like a mental institution. Donnato, my old mentor on the bank robbery squad, had been pulled off his cases to act as contact agent, or handler, for Operation Wildcat. Management knew that Donnato and I make a formidable battery, like a pitcher and catcher who work together to control the game. This was no time to be fooling around with rookie matchups.

He turned a corner and we fell into step, instantly in psychic sync. That’s the way it is with partners.

“We finally got my father-in-law into rehab,” he said.

“You’re a good man.”

Donnato looked skeptical. His father-in-law is difficult.

“The way you take care of him,” I insisted. “You’re responsible; you visit all the time—”

“He had a catheter,” said Donnato dryly. “So it pops out.”

“The tube?”

“His penis.”

Partners. No topic in the world, no place inside the other individual that you cannot reach out and touch.

“Rochelle’s trying to help the nurse out,” he said of his wife. “Fussing with the sheets and stuff, and suddenly it’s right there.”

I started to giggle. “What does she do?”

“Her eyes get real big and she says, I just saw my father’s penis!”

I lost it. Must have been stress. Donnato shook his head with wry despair. He enjoys getting a reaction from me. “We didn’t need that, I’ll tell you.”

SAC Robert Galloway joined us.

“The team is meeting downstairs. They want Ana to get her driver’s license first,” Galloway said. “Go see Rooney Berwick.”

The brick exterior of the old unemployment office is just a shell for a top-secret laboratory in the center of the building, where Rooney Berwick and his cohorts manufacture high-quality, indisputable lies.

The Rooneys of this world are shy. They never have a date for the movies; they work the concession stand. They are collectors. They store data banks in their heads. Ask them what year Samuel Colt patented the revolver. They shop for groceries at two o’clock in the morning, are semi-intimate with a couple of oddball associates, live in a garage apartment across from Mother, who still makes dinner for them every night. They are fifty-eight years old and their pants don’t fit, and they haunt comic-book conventions because they are lonely for a hero; the kind of loneliness that never bottoms out.

Rooney Berwick may have been all those things, but on home turf in the FBI lab, sporting multiple ID tags, key rings, and belt-mounted eyeglass cases, he projected a kind of arrogant underground status. He had stringy white hair and an ovoid belly that bulged out of a black button-down shirt tucked into dusty black jeans as he sat on a bench with big boots planted, threading a flex light down the barrel of a gold-plated AK-47.

He looked up. “Can I help?” he asked gravely.

I told him I was a new undercover and needed a driver’s license. I asked what he was looking for inside the machine gun.

“Trying to see the rifling.” He cocked an eye down the shaft. “Take a look?”

“I’ve seen rifling, thanks,” I replied, referring to the spiral marks left by exiting bullets.

“She isn’t loaded, don’t worry.”

“It creeps me out to see anyone looking down a gun.”

“Just trying to keep busy. My mom is dying. They’re not saying that, of course. She’s in the hospital, but it doesn’t look good.”

When strangers stun you with this kind of stuff — when you’re waiting on line, or in an elevator — it derails you in the headlong rush to get somewhere, forcing you to see their anguish leaking over everything, like accident victims, beyond propriety. I was touched by Rooney Berwick’s confession. Why would he say this to someone he scarcely knew, except that we are all part of the Bureau family?

“I’m so sorry.”

“She has cancer.”

I hesitated. “That is rough.”

“What they put her through. They keep doing tests, just to justify their existence.”

“I hope they’re making her comfortable.”

“What does that mean?” he asked rhetorically.

“Well,” I said, fumbling, “at least no pain.”

“Uh-huh.”

We abided for a time in the quiet of the lab.

Finally, he smiled crookedly and latched and unlatched the magazine. “What’s the matter? You don’t like my toy? That’s real gold on there.”

“A collector’s item,” I agreed. “I wish I could talk more, but I’ve got to get to a meeting.”

“Everybody’s got a meeting,” Rooney said with spite.

He gave up the weapon, moving heavily, like everything in his soft, bruised body hurt.

“The uc name is Darcy DeGuzman,” I told him gently.

Beyond the quickies we came up with in training, a deep-cover identity is carefully constructed, like a computer-generated creature in a special-effects studio, with input from FBI psychologists and experts in terrorist organizations. You’re trying to create a three-dimensional character that will credibly blend with the target; whose believability will withstand whatever they throw at you. The identity of Darcy DeGuzman, born in a slash of light off a Rexall window in a Virginia mall, had been refined by the focus of a dozen minds to fit the profile of a drifter looking for a cause; someone ripe to be recruited by FAN.

No more blow-dried hair and prim Brooks Brothers suits. Darcy has dark wild curls and an old purple parka that looks as if it has seen many bus stations and campouts. After an abusive childhood in the ghetto tract in Long Beach, she made her way to the Northwest, “where people are real and care about the environment.” Because of her politics, she’s had trouble holding jobs. She was fired from a biotech company for hacking the system when she learned they wrote programs for cosmetic testing on rabbits. She was booked for assault on an employee of the City of Los Angeles Animal Services during a demonstration outside the shelter. It’s all on phony police records for anyone to verify. With the recession going on, things haven’t worked out, and right now the money’s almost gone; Darcy is single, desperate, and emotionally needy.

Rooney Berwick was waiting impatiently behind the ID machine.

“It’s a California license,” I said helpfully. “Darcy DeGuzman just moved up to Oregon.”

“Got it right here.” Rooney Berwick tapped some papers. He knew his damn job. “Look at the little babies now.”

Tacked to the wall was a snapshot of four pug puppies with walleyed faces scrambling to get out of a cardboard box.

“Are those your puppies?”

“Please hold still, Miss DeGuzman.”

The camera strobed.

Rooney said, “Pick it up when you leave.”

But I could not just leave. Searching for his eyes I said, “I’m really sorry about your mom.”

He looked away and mumbled, “Have a great day” in the burned-out monotone of mid-level technical services personnel who inhabit the hidden compartments of the Bureau: doing it thirty years and never seen daylight. Their ideas, and their expertise, make other people famous. Nobody cares about the grunts.

I joined the team in a damp wood-paneled alcove in the basement. Coffee cups, water bottles, and documents marked OPERATION WILDCAT — TRUSTED AGENTS ONLY littered the table.

“The firebomb that blew up Ernie’s Meats is consistent with the explosive that killed Steve Crawford,” Special Supervisory Agent Angelo Gomez told us. “The bomb techs are calling it a signature device.”

Angelo Gomez is a legendary undercover investigator who favors the narco look — slicked-back hair, earring, mustache, Hawaiian shirt (to cover the gun), two-ton Rolex, and chubby pink sapphire ring. One eye is smaller than the other and set at a skewed angle. A kiss from a bullet, rumor goes. Angelo is the case agent, running the show from Los Angeles. Mike Donnato will fly up to Portland as needed.

“How are the bombs the same?” my partner asked.

“Both built the same way, by someone with skills, using the explosive Tovex. Just like in Steve’s case, the TPU was built with everyday materials — cell phone, digital clock, batteries — connected with alligator clips.”

“The alligator clips,” I remarked, “are worthy of note.”

Galloway was looking through files and doing something with a calculator, but he was listening. He had taken the supervisory position on the case because Steve Crawford meant that much to him.

“What’s the significance of alligator clips?”

“It means he’s a lazy bomb builder,” I replied. “Wants to build it fast. Confident, not a perfectionist, doesn’t have to have the wire wrapped just so — just wants to get the job done.”

“What’s the profile?”

“Off the top of my head? He’s a white heterosexual male. The way he builds his TPUs — the alligator clips and ordinary wire — says he’s not high-tech, goes with the classics.”

“Older?”

“Maybe. We can eliminate vandalism or experimentation as a motive. This guy is on a mission.”

Galloway nodded. “Ideology. That’s what our pals at FAN stand for — Free Animals Now.”

“Don’t let the soft and furry animal rights bullshit melt your heart,” Angelo agreed. “These are criminals, bad as Timothy McVeigh. Their end goal is to change society — into what, who knows or cares — but the immediate goal is to put fear in people. Chaos and destabilization — that’s their stock-in-trade.”

I reached past Donnato to sneak a corner of the blueberry muffin he was delicately breaking into crusts. Automatically, he slid it toward me — one of many small, endearing moves during a long partnership in which we often found ourselves sharing the same thought: Doesn’t matter what the boneheads call themselves. They killed Steve.

“What’s on your mind?” Galloway asked, seeing my frown.

“Opening-night jitters.” I shrugged.

Never let it show.

“Afraid you won’t know your lines?”

“I’ll figure it out. I’ve read every transcript of every intercept.”

“Anarchists don’t care about the issues,” Galloway reminded us. “Don’t feel you have to spout the rhetoric. The cause is never the cause.”

On the laptop, Angelo had pulled up surveillance photos taken at demonstrations throughout the Northwest. They were mainstream protesters — do-gooders and tree-huggers — mostly middle-aged, plus the requisite young and hairy types. “Free the mustangs.” “Milk is torture.” “McDeath to McDonald’s.” “All meat is murder.” “Dairy is rape.”

What does an anarchist look like?

“Not so easy to connect the dots,” observed Galloway. “FAN has no central leadership. It’s structured like an international terrorist group engaged in net war.”

Net — or network — war is the war of the future, an agile system of “committees” or “cells” that seem to act invisibly, strung together by the braided cables of money and belief. Armies based on infantries are about to become obsolete.

“Where do I start?”

Angelo hit the laptop. “Herbert Laumann.”

Galloway: “Who is Herbert Laumann?”

“Some penny-ante bureaucrat at the Bureau of Land Management,” I replied. I’d seen the files. “The idiots are really after this dude. They call him ‘the face of evil.’”

A photo of Herbert Laumann filled the screen. The “face of evil” looked like the manager of an electronics store — the Joe in the tan shirt and brown tie who scurries out of the back when the wide-screen TV you ordered two months ago has disappeared off the delivery list — pouchy cheeks, line mustache, thinning hair.

“Our latest intel indicates the movement is going to target wild mustang horses,” Angelo said.

The Wild Horse and Burro Program is mandated by federal law to protect the last remaining herds of free-roaming mustangs in the United States. These are the pure and graceful descendants of horses that were brought over by the Spanish explorers and then mated with hardy U.S. cavalry mounts. Along with a lot of other folks, Congress felt the mustangs are part of our unique western heritage and should be scientifically preserved in their natural habitat. The weaker ones may be put up for adoption by the public, but wild mustangs can never be sold or slaughtered.

“The herds are protected by federal law,” Angelo went on, “but the goofballs don’t like the way the government is doing it. Laumann is in charge of the Wild Horse and Burro Program in Oregon. He’s already been harassed. We think FAN infiltrated the group.”

Donnato: “Ana hits the ground. She finds a wild-horse protest. She works her way into a FAN cell.”

Galloway held up a finger. “Patience,” he advised. “The hardest part is waiting to see whether your uc identity is taking effect or not. It’s the loneliest time.”

While I was absorbed in this, Angelo had come up behind. Now he cuffed me hard across the head.

“Darcy! What are you doing up in Portland?”

Instantly, I am Darcy and he is FAN. We have these fire drills often. They make your adrenaline rock. There is no transition, isn’t meant to be.

In undercover work, it is always midnight in the universe, and you are always alone.

“I got fed up with the anti-life corporate agenda,” I said. “I quit my job in L.A.”

“That’s bullshit. We checked, and you never worked in a biotech company in L.A.”

Galloway was watching this improvisation with folded arms.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I protested.

“Why do you keep going down to L.A. when you don’t work there?”

“Why don’t you come with me one time and I’ll show you? Jesus Christ.” I smiled with feigned exasperation. “What’s wrong with you guys? I’m starting to get paranoid.”

“Darcy would not say Jesus,” Donnato murmured.

I muttered, “Yes, she would.”

Angelo circled my chair. Leaning close, his distorted upper face was beginning to look like a malevolent Picasso mask. He yanked me to my feet by my hair. The chair tipped over.

“What’s the problem, bro?”

Donnato: “She wouldn’t say bro.”

Angelo, moving like a snake, had my arms pinned and a nasty little knife, which he had been secreting just for that moment, flat against my throat.

“We’re all a little paranoid at FAN,” he whispered into my burning ear. “Spies like you know the reason why.”

Panic. I needed to pee. I wanted to yell “Time out!” What would Darcy say? I didn’t know. I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t think.

Never hesitate. Get back in their face.

“I came here to save animals,” I shouted. “I’m on your side.”

He tightened his forearm across my neck, half-lifting me off the ground.

“If you are who you say you are, show us your driver’s license.”

“No problem.” I groped on the table and came up with the waxed muffin wrapper. “Here it is!”

“Really?” Angelo snapped the paper, testing it, and growled, “Bullshit!”

Then, in a normal voice, he said, “You’re dead,” and let me go.

I was breathless, flummoxed. “Why?”

“Never give them anything physical. Anything they can check.”

“Okay, it’s a muffin thing, but in real life I’ll be backstopped with an untraceable ID—”

“I said anything physical.” He crumpled the paper for emphasis.

In undercover school, I had learned never to argue with an instructor.

“Okay.”

I was sweating. They could cut me now, halfway through, anytime, just like my roommate at Quantico. I looked toward Donnato for help.

“I liked the fed-up-with-corporate-America concept,” he offered.

Angelo was wired. “The false documents we give you will be as good as it gets, but backstopping is only a screen door we put between you and the truth. If you stand back, it looks solid. If you walk up close, you’re going to see through the holes. Don’t let them touch the screen, or they’ll know it’s a story. A story that isn’t true. And then you’ll be toast.”

It was searing and unpleasant to stand there with head bowed while Angelo berated me with stuff I already knew.

I swallowed the humiliation.

I believe in this work.

The plane banks, revealing the snow-covered Olympian bulk of Mount Hood. I try to relax and let the power of the engines carry me, but I can feel that searing mortification even now. A vapor of jet fuel leaking up through the floor is smelling a lot like the smell of burning brake lining that swamped my senses during the shooting incident. I pop a mint as the landing gear unfolds.

Take all your greens from the crayon box and color in a patchwork of moss and olive and sage, and that is Portland. What a tidy city, I think as the airplane passes over neat rows of houseboats on a sparkling river, then curves, delivering a spectacular view of three or four intricately wrought iron bridges.

Despite everyone’s gloomy talk of rain, it is seventy-three degrees and sunny when we land. On the ground, girls are wearing halter tops, and grandmas flowered pants, and there are hugs and chocolate bunnies for Easter Sunday.

I am not met at the airport. There can be no risk of Ana Grey/ Darcy DeGuzman being seen in the company of law enforcement. Rehearsal’s over. I’m walking alone onstage, backpack over my shoulder. The glass doors swing wide. Outside, the air smells sweet as cotton candy.

I find Darcy’s banged-up Civic waiting for me in the parking lot. The freeway is empty under an eggshell blue sky and everywhere there are flowering trees.

So this is what people who don’t live in Los Angeles call spring.

I leave the quiet of the holiday freeway and wind through the southeast part of town, until the road becomes a two-lane blacktop fronted by clapboard duplexes and airless Victorians with weed-strewn yards. A person in transit would live in a transitional neighborhood, we figured, where radicals mix in with blue-collar families on the scrubby streets.

I park in the long light of a late northwest afternoon, pulling up in front of a small four-story brick building built a century ago. Darcy’s rental apartment is on the top floor. I stare at the empty windows.

The loneliest time.

Five

The lights of downtown Portland beckon like a seaport in the mist, gently bobbing through the rain-streaked windshield as the Civic bumps along. Beside the Burnside Bridge, homeless men are scrabbling through a glistening mountain of garbage bags left over from the food and crafts market, held on weekends under the shelter of the iron span. Bent-over figures dragging bundles and wet cardboard cartons stop in front of the men’s rescue mission to trade cigarettes in the rain. They look impossibly old to be foraging on the skids.

Over the course of my second day in town, the crystalline weather had given way to tiers of clouds, moving and melding, waiting and cruising. As drops of rain tapped the windows of Darcy’s apartment, I watched the street and waited for nightfall. Within a block of her building, there was a mom-and-pop grocery with psychedelic flowers painted on the windows, and an Asian market where you could get live chickens. There were peeling cottages with bay windows curtained by cut lace beside postmodern town houses. There was a hip designer resale store, as well as a Laundromat and a fifties coffee shop that was now a vegan restaurant called the Cosmic Café. The sidewalks were overgrown with marigold and outlaw mint.

What did Darcy DeGuzman think, looking out the window?

I could have a life here.

The furnished apartment, with its wicker bookcases and new TV and nesting aluminum pots under the sink, smelled like the musty fake storefronts in Hogan’s Alley at the FBI Academy. This, too, was a stage set — but the action was real and I was working to weave it all together in the existent world: How did Steve Crawford’s last known location at a downtown dive called Omar’s Roadhouse tie in with a radical group that likes to play with explosives?

I wondered if rain was falling on the bare steaming backs of wild mustangs in the high desert to the east; and if the ultimate sacrifice that Steve Crawford made would turn out to be a small and hollow loss in a larger war to defend their freedom.

The person who knew was Marvin Gladstone.

“Aw hell,” said Donnato the day Galloway introduced us to Gladstone at the off-site. “Do we have to talk to Marvin?”

Special Agent Marvin Gladstone had the ill luck of having been Crawford’s handler, the last person to see him alive.

He was sitting on a folding chair outside the dank little room in which we were meeting, looking like the last man on earth. He was wearing a windbreaker and visitor’s tags — the former employee who was no longer part of the working world. Since his abrupt departure, he had puffed up twenty pounds. With his crew-cut gray head downcast, pink jowls lax, and hands in his lap, he was the picture of middle-aged male depression.

As a handler, you can’t do worse than losing your undercover, and Marvin, no way around it, had lost Steve. Stricken with grief, he’d resigned from the Bureau the day Steve’s remains were identified. In doing so, he gave up his pension.

When Galloway called out to him in the hall, Marvin straightened up and walked into the room with an attempt at Navy pride. He did not remove his windbreaker but reached into a pocket for a road map of Oregon. Poignantly, he had brought a map, as if to show us all the stations of his shame.

“I’ve been thinking it would make sense for the next undercover to start by picking up the trail where Steve left off.”

Galloway’s tone was mocking. “Good plan, Marvin. Steve was one of the finest agents to come through here. You think we’re going to cock around?”

“No, sir.”

Donnato and I did not like having Marvin Gladstone in the room, either. It was as if minutes before boarding our flight we had met a pilot who had been in a plane crash. Would you really want to strike up a conversation? Gladstone’s breath as he leaned over the desk smelled like old library books, like what is dead and gone.

“The trail stopped at an anarchist hangout in downtown Portland called Omar’s Roadhouse.” Marvin pointed to the map with a stubby finger. “Crawford’s last known location. The last place he called me from.”

“What was your last conversation like?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“What was Steve doing there?”

“Watching a basketball game. After that, no communication.”

“Why Omar’s Roadhouse?”

“Omar’s is a marketplace for illegal goods. You have your bikers, your druggies, your interstate theft. Steve had a theory that FAN was being financed by methamphetamine labs and that the dealers went to Omar’s to do business. They’ve got a lot of those labs in the mountains.”

“Is that why he went into the national park?”

“I’m sorry,” Marvin said. “I can’t tell you.”

“Steve deserves better,” Galloway reminded him.

“I’m not making excuses, but it was not unusual for Steve to drop off the radar. I tried to rein him in, but sometimes he’d go dark for a couple of days. I should have done a better job,” he added, and stood there like a prisoner with his eyes out of focus.

By that time, I had run out of what remained of my sympathy for Marvin Gladstone. Steve had been a pro — if he’d needed reining in, it was for a reason, and the old codger should have found out why.

“What’s the place like?” I asked with false politeness. “Omar’s Roadhouse? Because I’m going there.”

Marvin woke up. “You?” He looked at me — five four, 112 pounds — and then he looked around the room. “Alone?”

“Ana is the undercover,” Galloway explained.

“I’m here to tell you.” Marvin’s eyes were wide. “Omar’s is rough trade.”

Now it is night and I am driving alone, past the men’s rescue mission, down a dark cobblestone lane once lined with shipping companies and foreign brokerage houses. At the turn of the last century, they called this street the “gateway to the Orient,” but tonight it is another deserted business district in twenty-first-century global America — vintage stone-and-brickwork buildings overwhelmed by tall black boxes made of glass, and not a mariner in sight.

Trolley tracks, gleaming dully, curve into the diminishing light, where between two seedy parking lots a nondescript tavern of red timber, punched out with a row of small and unfriendly windows, identifies itself as one of those everlasting beacons of alcoholic wretchedness that through the ages have drawn the outcasts of the world — those who suffer, shuffle, buy or sell.

Steve Crawford’s last known location.

I park in a smattering of broken glass.

Six

Like many of us, Omar’s Roadhouse has two sides.

There are two separate entrances to help you choose between Omar’s Café and simply the bar. Inside, the common air is infused with cigarette smoke, the division between the two just a booth with a maple-stained partition, as if to prove the boundary between criminal and not is as makeshift as a quarter-inch piece of plywood.

On the brighter side of the partition, two clean-cut African-American men in Polartec vests and corduroys are eating meatballs and spaghetti off paper plates, and there is pickled cauliflower in the salad bar. But here in this murky pool of bottom-feeders, blue light pours from an ancient cigarette machine and the brightest eyes are in the heads of the deer, elk, raccoon, bobcat, fox, and wolverine set up in rows above the redwood paneling like a mute jury. Decor is simple: a flag with a skull and crossbones, big enough for a coliseum.

I settle at an L-shaped bar, going slow with a Sierra Nevada pale ale. How did Steve Crawford, on the same assignment, play this scene? I can picture his lanky body wrapped around a bar stool. A washed-up hippie? Meth addict? Lost businessman? Sloppy drunk? I really don’t know. They did not share his uc identity. Although we’d been colleagues for a decade since those days as naïve rookies, so high on the Bureau that we wanted to be married in the chapel at the Academy, I never saw the undercover side of him and he never saw the Darcy part of me.

Would he have loved me anyway?

I make an effort to look uneasy and forlorn in Omar’s swamp dive, paying particular attention to the 250-pound bruiser with a full dark beard down to his waist at the other end of the bar. It took him a long time to grow that beard, I reflect, and therefore he must mean it, or whatever it stands for, which cannot be pleasant.

He is wearing an entertainer’s tall black top hat and mirrored sunglasses, and rings on every finger — skulls and swastikas, it looks like from here. No shirt, just a vest showing massive biceps no doubt hardened by lifting motorcycle parts. He could carry me out of the place under one arm, like a baguette. Embroidered across the vest are the flowered words Terminate the helmet law.

Although his bulk dominates like Mount Hood, Mr. Terminate is not the only major bonehead on the horizon. The area where Steve Crawford was murdered is known for meth kitchens and marijuana farms. Drug wars are fought in our national forests; left-wing anarchists and redneck Klansmen trying to blow each other up, and bikers after the spoils. On the face of it, each patron at Omar’s would fit one or more of those profiles. The one thing you could probably say about everybody in this bar is they all hate the United States government.

Rough trade.

Marvin Gladstone got that right.

It is 10:00 p.m. on a Monday night and this must be the crossroads of criminal activity in Washington County. Two fat truckers and two even fatter hookers are squeezed rump-to-rump, pitcher-to-pitcher at a table littered with pizza and chips, openly popping pills. Mexican gangbangers hover near a TV showing the fights, palming nickel bags of coke, muttering and complaining, flicking butts, grinding the worn heels of their western boots to jukebox Santana. The female neo-Nazis are big into black eyeliner and leather halters that show off their breasts, but I am wearing one of Darcy’s yellow oxford shirts with a collar, jeans with a belt, and beat-up Timberlands. (“Bad guys don’t have good boots,” Angelo warned.) The only woman at Omar’s less conspicuous than I am seems to be the lady in a calf-length denim skirt with a flounce, who is standing at my left, patiently waiting for the bartender’s attention. She has been there long enough, and close enough, for me to pick up her scent, like fresh almond soap, underneath the bitter stench of cigarette smoke. And then I notice the sheaves of richly colored gray-and-silver hair caught up in barrettes and falling past her shoulders, and that the woman, although twenty-some years older than I am and as many pounds heavier, radiates the sturdiness and ease in her body of someone who labors outdoors; her finely creased skin seems to hold the moist glaze of cold and foggy mornings.

The bartender darts his chin at her as he blows by. “Give me a sec, Megan.” “Sure thing.”

“You’ve been waiting a long time,” I observe.

“The waitress is busy,” the woman replies without a trace of resentment, and there is an eager jolt as I recognize this person shows an inherent sympathy for the underdog — such as a lonely stranger in a new city?

Opening move: “I love your necklace.”

A heavy silver pendant of interlocking triangles rests upon her pillowy chest.

“A valknot. Ever heard of it?”

I shake my head.

Megan answers with a forgiving smile. “A Nordic symbol for the three aspects of the universe.” “Now,” announces the bartender, sweating from his shaved head, “what can I get for you, Megan?” He pours white wine and mixes up a Salty Dog with fresh grapefruit juice and premium gin while Megan stares across at Mr. Terminate. And Mr. Terminate glares right back at her.

“You know that guy?” I ask.

“That’s John. I think he likes you.”

“No.”

“Yes. He’s looking right at you,” she says without moving her lips.

“He’s looking at you.”

It is hard to tell what is going on underneath the top hat and mirrored sunglasses.

“He knows better than to mess with me,” Megan says lightly.

Mr. Terminate has picked up an ashtray. It is a white ceramic ashtray, like the one in front of us, and it says Coors.

Megan says, “Uh-oh.”

“What’s he doing?” I ask, alarmed.

“If you’re wearing a leg holster for a primary weapon, you’re an idiot,” Angelo always says, but for the second or third time that evening, I wish Darcy DeGuzman were carrying a.45 automatic.

I have noticed we are often burdened by our own creations.

“Look out,” Megan warns.

“Why?”

Instead of answering, she starts to back away from the bar.

Mr. Terminate is examining the ashtray closely, hefting it in his hand as if it were an apple.

Then he eats it.

He chews it, and chomps it with his back teeth, and there is an extraordinary sound, like marbles grinding against one another in a soft cloth bag. A pause, then he spews a great shower of white shards and pink-flecked foam across the bar. He picks the remaining pieces out of his beard, and then, with a meaningful look at me, lifts his glass and drinks the rest of the whiskey down.

Nobody bats an eye. The bartender is there with a rag.

I turn to the woman in disbelief. “What was that?”

Megan is matter-of-fact. “That’s John.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

Megan’s answer encompasses the feminine dilemma, and seems to draw us both together in it.

“It’s what we’ve known since seventh grade,” she says. “Boys are stupid.” A wild laugh escapes me, while Mr. Terminate remains impassive, body language boulderlike and calm, as if he has not just eaten a glass ashtray and spit it out in our faces. He is waiting for an answer, but the question remains — What is the question? Is this some kind of brain-dead buffalo love, or has he made me, in the same way he might have made Steve Crawford for an undercover cop?

The bartender finally sets down the white wine and Salty Dog but waits a moment longer, keeping his hands on the drinks.

“What can I get your friend?” he asks Megan.

“We don’t really know each other,” I explain.

“Well, you should. Two beautiful ladies?”

I introduce myself as Darcy DeGuzman and it rolls right off my tongue. Her name is Megan Tewksbury, and she would like to pay her bill. But the bartender lingers, drawing things out.

“So, Darcy, another beer?”

White, built, maybe forty — he’s giving me a very friendly look. Is he trying to pick me up? It’s my lucky day. His black T-shirt says Does Not Play Well with Others. His lip is pierced, and he sports a bearded braided thing hanging off his chin.

The Darcy part likes it that some oaf is looking at me. I hope he makes a move, just to see what it would be like. This never happens in normal life, when I am Special Agent Ana Grey. Even on a weekend, even at a car wash, looking like everybody else in a tank top and shorts, my first reaction to a guy staring is, What are you up to? Not exactly a turn-on.

Megan: “What do I owe you, Rusty?”

“No worries. I’ll just run a tab.” To me: “What’re you doing here, girlfriend?” “I must have read the guidebook wrong,” I say, flirting.

Rusty grins. “Don’t fret. We get a lot of nice folks stopping in après the market. Megan has a booth there. She’s a regular. Guess what she’s sellin’?” Megan carries the drinks away. “Nothin’ you’ll ever afford.” “She sells homemade hazelnut brittle!” Rusty shouts. “She’s a nut.” He winks. “Lives on a nut farm, along with some goats and about a hundred cats and dogs. Got a whole thing going where she rescues animals.” “She’s an animal lover?” My head swivels back toward the woman, who is now sitting at a table with the man who ordered the Salty Dog.

“Who is she with?”

“That’s the boyfriend. His name is Julius Emerson Phelps.” Broad-shouldered, six three, hard-built but with enough gut to put him over two hundred pounds. It would be difficult to pinpoint his age. Young girls would find the implication of sexual mastery in his craggy smile and wish for his attention, while men of my grandfather’s generation would resent having to relinquish their grip on the world to a male who still looks young. I make him for a middle-aged farmer with a ponytail; he must be some type of an agro guy, because there’s a flying ear of corn on his cap.

Above the rows of liquor bottles, in a mirrored sign for Becks, I watch Megan Tewksbury drape a possessive arm over Julius’s shoulders. They are talking cheek-to-cheek without really looking at each other, eyes scanning the room. I am surprised to see myself in the mirror — looking happy. My cheeks are flushed from the heat and noise and sexual signals snap-popping off the crowd. I’m feeling all warmed up, looking for a friend. Someone local, who would be a way into the community. Megan? Approachable?

Not while they’re nuzzling. I nip at the mug and observe. The beer is cold, and after a while I realize that it has been going down nicely with the wigged-out nasty metal guitar band coming from the jukebox.

The mirror shows it is Julius Emerson Phelps who has changed the music. He is holding on to both sides of the machine, bent over the glass as if in a trance. The heavy ridges of his face are colored blue by the jukebox lights, a handsome face that has gone to seed. He wears a worn-out denim shirt and blondish hair that, if unloosed, would fall below the shoulders. But here’s what really dates him: an improbable pair of frayed red suspenders only old hippies can pull off.

I choose to steal what you choose to show

And you know I will not apologize

“Anybody know what that is?” I ask in general.

“‘Career of Evil,’” rasps Mr. Terminate, like he’s still got pieces of ashtray stuck in his throat. “Blue Oyster Cult.” “Weren’t they big in the seventies?”

But Mr. Terminate goes stone-cold silent.

I slide off the stool and meander to the jukebox.

“Blue Oyster Cult,” I say. “Weren’t they big in the seventies?” Julius’s eyes are slow coming out of the trance.

“You are way too young to know about Blue Oyster Cult.” “That’s the only song of theirs I recognize.” I smile truthfully.

He straightens up. There’s a silver loop in one ear. I like earrings on men. I like the kind of face that knows you’re looking at it.

He indicates the lighted selections. “One song left. You pick.” “Jackson Browne.”

He approves. I move closer, so now we’re peering over the titles together. The heat of the machine jumps up.

“I like your friend, Megan.”

“Good lady.”

“You come here after the market?”

“She sells her hazelnut brittle. I grow ’em, she sells ’em.” “I just moved to Portland. I haven’t been to the market, but I hear it’s awesome.” “You should go,” Julius says.

We listen to the piano riff at the opening of “Fountain of Sorrow.” The mood shifts, low-key and melancholy.

“Why do you have a flying corn on your hat?”

Reflexively, as if to be sure it’s there, Julius touches the red-and-green ear of corn with wings that adorns the cap.

“DeKalb,” he explains.

“What’s DeKalb?”

“DeKalb, Ohio. Corn-seed capital of the world.”

“What does corn seed have to do with hazelnuts?”

“I was born there,” the big man tells me. “Picked corn when I was in high school, lying on my back on this very uncomfortable contraption, a mattress they put on wheels—” Megan is on her way. She’s had enough of us talking. She slips two fingers in the waistband of Julius’s jeans, sliding him close.

“I was just telling this young lady about Ohio.”

“Is he boring you with his life story?” she asks.

“Yes,” replies Julius, glad for the intrusion.

“Your friend, Rusty, at the bar, he was saying that you rescue animals? At the hazelnut farm?” Julius’s attention snaps back. “Rusty said that?”

“Why not?” says Megan. “It’s true.”

“I’m a total animal person,” I say, boasting. “I once got arrested for getting into a fight with a dude at a shelter who euthanized this cat I was going to adopt. Because I was fifteen minutes late.” “That’s awful. Where are you from, Darcy?” Megan asks kindly.

“Southern California. Don’t ask.”

“Heat, traffic, smog?”

“And the most repressive attitude toward animal rights. We have to fight for every soul.” “Are you in the movement?” she asks.

“I show up. Done a lot of cat and dog adoptions. Can I come to the farm and see your operation, maybe help?” Megan hesitates. “We don’t encourage visitors. It upsets the animals.” “But don’t you want to adopt them out?”

“Once we get ’em, we keep ’em. We’re not open to the public,” Julius says abruptly, and downs a beer.

Regroup.

“I’ve been reading in the Oregonian about the wild mustangs,” I say barreling on. “I think it’s terrible what the government is doing to them.” “Infuriating,” Megan agrees.

“Ever heard of FAN?”

“Are you a member of FAN?” she whispers conspiratorially.

“Me?” I strike my heart with surprise. “No, are you?” “No,” she says slowly. “But I don’t condemn what they do. Especially concerning Herbert Laumann,” she adds bitterly.

My stomach goes whoa! Angelo’s intel just paid off.

“The deputy state director of the BLM? What’s he up to now?” “Killing horses.”

“They can’t be killed; it’s the law.”

“He steals them.”

“Steals them?”

“He’s been stealing the horses he’s supposed to protect. Since he’s been deputy director, Herbert Laumann has supposedly adopted one hundred and thirty-five mustangs.” “What?”

“This is a guy who lives in the suburbs.” Megan nods, disbelieving. “Where is he going to put a hundred and thirty-five horses?” “The man’s a scumbag,” Julius says, scanning over people’s heads. Waiting for someone?

“Know what he’s been doing?”

I shake my head. My eyes are wide.

Megan’s voice is rising. “Government employees aren’t allowed to bid on the mustangs that are up for auction. So Laumann adopts them illegally under his relatives’ names.” Her cheeks are pink. “Then he sells them to a slaughterhouse in Illinois, where the horse meat is packed and shipped for human consumption in France.” “They eat horses, don’t they?” comments Julius, not taking his eyes from the crowd.

The scam sounds too bizarre to be radical propaganda.

“Why isn’t this front-page news?”

“It will be. FAN discovered the paper trail and leaked it to the press. It’ll be up on their Web site.” Two or three Mexican gangbangers jump the bar. Glass shatters with earsplitting blasts as bottles fly off the wall. Omar’s quiets down and roars at the same time — women freeze; men cheer the fight — as Rusty, the friendly bartender, is tossed hand to hand and then trammeled below the mahogany.

“What are they doing?” Megan gasps.

Julius restrains her. “Stay out of it.”

“No! How can you stand there?”

Three on one? My blood is roaring; I’m out of my body with outrage. But this is training: I do not yell “Freeze! FBI.” I do not speed-dial 911. I am a witness.

I see that neither Mr. Terminate nor Julius makes a move to intervene, but watch with calm and unworried expressions, as if this were a regularly scheduled TV show.

Sickening thuds. Someone’s turned up the music.

“This is revolting,” Megan says, breaking from her aging boyfriend and elbowing through the crowd, which has gone frenetic, standing on tables, laughing girls waving beer bottles perched on the shoulders of burly guys, like the place is about to erupt in a massive game of chicken. I scramble along with Megan as she pushes her way behind the bar.

Rusty’s arms are pinned and they’ve got his head in the ice bin. They pull it out by his chin hair, repeatedly smash his nose against the chrome, then plunge him into the ice again. His face is a mass of bruises and splintered bone, teeth are gone, and the ice cache has become a hemoglobin cocktail.

Megan is screaming, “Leave him alone,” trying to pry the Mexicans away. A small one jumps on her back and clings.

I’m saying, “Chill out, brother,” but they laugh, so I get the little monkey dude in a rear chokehold and pull him off Megan and maneuver his flailing body around until I can flip him flat onto the wet wooden joists of the catwalk behind the bar. He lies there, stunned as a fish.

There’s a baton Rusty keeps near the cash register. I’ve got it ready for counterattack, when a big warm hand grabs my wrist. Julius has put himself between them and me.

“Don’t worry yourself. Rusty had it coming.”

I stare at the destroyed face of the barely conscious human being slumped in Megan’s lap on the floor, where she kneels in a nest of broken glass. Her shirt is soaked with his blood. The space looks like Laumann’s mustang slaughterhouse — blood on the mirrors, blood in the drains. The attention of the crowd has shifted to the cash register.

“What’d he do?” I shout.

“He’s a cop,” Julius says, and Rusty awakens just enough to roll an eye toward me, piercing as the bloodred sun.

Seven

My grandfather Poppy taught me that everything must be earned. As a lieutenant in the Long Beach police department, he believed in progress through the ranks. But his black-and-white view of the world carried beyond the patrol car, right into our kitchen, where he would subject my young mother and me to sadistic quizzes on current events, or rate her cooking as if he were a restaurant critic.

“Dry as dust,” he’d proclaim about her roast turkey. “You’re stupid,” he’d say, frowning when I failed to name the secretary-general of the United Nations. Give him a sweater for Father’s Day and his face would go into a soft paralysis and his eyes would drift, and he’d give you a neutral “Hmmm.” He literally did not know what to do with a gift.

If you did something bad, like flooding the garage with a garden hose, there would be punishment — washing your mouth out with soap, or making you stand in the scary backyard at night in your pajamas. Like Darcy, I did bad things anyway. Things that tested Poppy’s love against Poppy’s rules. When I was a child, a vein of longing wound through my body, like coveting those ribbons of marshmallow set in chocolate ice cream, and just because he knew I wanted it more than anything, Poppy would never let me have it — no matter how many chances I gave him to say “I was only kidding. You really are okay. Here’s my love, with whipped cream on top.” Screw you, Grandpa.

The girl who used to stand in awe of you was Ana.

At Omar’s Roadhouse, I was Darcy, acting out like crazy. Darcy, all Darcy.

And I liked it.

Donnato tugs his tie loose and drops into a chair. We have met at a seedy motel near the Portland airport.

“Why wasn’t I told there was a Portland police detective working undercover?” “Don’t yell,” he says with a sigh. “I just found out myself. They know Omar’s is a nexus of criminal activity. They’ve had undercovers embedded for years—” I’m pointing a finger, an aggressive habit.

“Goddamn it, I should have been told!” “Look, Ana, it’s the same old tune. The local cops want our assistance on a task force, and then resent the hell out of it when we show up. The cop goes down,” he says tiredly. “And you throw money?” “They smashed the cash register, so I grabbed a couple of handfuls. It was a diversion. If anyone asks, ‘Who is this new girl in town named Darcy?’ they’ll have an answer. ‘She’s the one who got up on the bar and started throwing cash to the crowd.’ I gave a handful to Megan for the horses.” “Don’t try so hard is what I’m saying.”

“That’s the juice, Mike. Darcy being out there, that’s the key to this new identity. Will Rusty live?” “Yes. Was he helpful?”

“Before he almost died of internal injuries? Yes, he put me in bed with Megan Tewksbury. He knows she’s an activist. That’s why he made a big point of introducing us, even though I had no clue what he was doing at the time. He must have thought I was a real lamebrain fed—” “He accomplished the mission. Calm down. I got Salvador Molly’s.” Donnato opens a fragrant bag of Caribbean takeout. “Have an empanada.” I do not calm down. “What’s going on? You look wasted.”

There are bruised dark circles beneath his eyes, sweat stains on his white shirt. We have met in a neighborhood of unreconstructed streets, dotted with bakeries and thrift stores, in a working-class part of Portland. The Econo Lodge, situated on a gritty avenue of easy-credit used-car lots, is a stucco relic of the sixties weathered to the color of a strawberry milk shake, a couple of salesmen’s hatchbacks parked outside.

You always have to worry about countersurveillance, so I trudged to the top floor carrying an empty suitcase, and casually unlocked room 224. Using an old FBI maneuver, Donnato was set up two doors down in 228. That way, nobody could put us as meeting together. The average bonehead would not realize the rooms were adjoining, because the Bureau had rented all three.

The connecting doors are still open, creating a triplet of empty cubes identically stocked and sanitized, down to the crispy tissue-wrapped plastic cups. Even the daylight looks dry-cleaned.

“My father-in-law threw a blood clot and had another stroke.” “I’m really sorry, Mike. How is he?”

“Back in the hospital. It’s touch and go. We’ve been up all night.” He draws the curtains to discourage telephoto lenses from neighboring rooftops, and turns the clock radio to NPR. Not because he likes their politics but because at this hour they provide a screen of background jabber so nobody can hear us through the walls. With the curtains closed, the place is dark as a theater. Weak pools of light drop from the table lamps like halos.

“I don’t know if we’ve got a cult here, or what,” I tell him. “The female was wearing a triangular silver necklace called a valknot.” “Asatrú,” says Donnato.

“God bless you.”

“Don’t push it,” he warns.

“What’d I say?”

“Asatrú is a modern-day religion based on ancient Norse beliefs.” He reaches for a habanero and cheese fritter. “Its adherents practice a pagan philosophy that talks about preserving nature. The white supremacists have adapted a form of it and switched it around to justify their views.” “There were neo-Nazis at the bar.”

“What were they doing?”

“One of them was eating an ashtray.”

This doesn’t register as anything strange.

“Barriers are coming down,” Donnato muses without missing a beat. “Interesting alliances are starting to form between terrorist groups. Right there you have a potential affinity between environmentalists and right-wing thinking. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that these groups could get together. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’” “You have blood enemies at Omar’s who should be tearing each other’s throats out.” “It’s called business.”

“You can buy anything there. Hookers, dope, hazelnut brittle—” “Hazelnut brittle? Pretty damn subversive. That’s it. Now I’m hooked.” He rolls his eyes.

“Shut up. Megan Tewksbury is our way in. She will lead us to FAN.” “Why?”

“She’s accessible. Funny. Openhearted. I liked her.”

“She is not supposed to be your mom.”

“I know that.”

“It’s my job to remind you that in isolation the bad guys can start looking pretty good.” “That’s not it. Look.”

I flash him the latest issue of Willamette Week, a liberal throwaway I snagged at the vegan Cosmic Café. There were piles of it near the bulletin board, underneath an unpleasant chart of a side of beef. The whole front page of the newspaper is a poster in the style of the Old West: WANTED — FOR GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER, with a photo of BLM’s deputy state director, Herbert Laumann.

“Megan gave me the heads-up that FAN would break the story, and here it is. Laumann has been illegally adopting mustangs under his relatives’ names and selling them to a slaughterhouse in Illinois.” Donnato studies the paper.

“She rescues animals on a farm; she’s hooked in. They don’t like visitors, which is an excellent reason for me to get my butt out there and see what’s going down.” He still doesn’t like it.

“Sounds weak. We commit the resources, and your friend Megan turns out to be a housewife who likes cat calendars.” Donnato brushes his tie of crumbs. He is maddeningly fastidious about his Calvin Klein suits and fine tasseled loafers, even in a sleazoid motel. But today his meticulous mannerisms are pissing me off.

“What would be solid enough for you?”

“Give me Bill Fontana.”

Bill Fontana is a leader in the movement who did two years in prison for setting fire to 250 tons of hay in an animal-husbandry building at UC Davis. Fontana is a scrawny, bright-eyed kid, still winning hearts and minds with his “fearless saboteur” shtick. The prison sentence only added to the mythology.

“Wonder Boy Fontana is speaking here at a big animal rights convention. I met with the Portland task force that has been assigned to FAN—” “Wait a minute,” I say stubbornly, interrupting him. “Can we go back to Megan? We’re looking for me to make my bones. This is a legit way in. Megan is a can-do person, the type who gets things done. I’m telling you, she’s good.” “She may be good, but Angelo will say she’s weak.”

I don’t like the innuendo. Weak because we’re talking about the two of us establishing a female relationship? Weak because she doesn’t fit the prototype of the male junkie informant guys like Angelo understand?

I lift my chin. “I’ve identified a true believer and I’m getting close to her. That’s procedure, absolutely! I need your help to find a way of getting out to that farm.” Donnato stands, thoroughly irritated.

“Tell me something, Ana. Why is it always your agenda?”

I am dumbfounded. “My agenda?” “You are fixated on this woman, and I know why. Not because it’s a knockout idea, but because it’s yours. Yours against mine. You against the badass bureaucracy. It’s been that way as long as I’ve known you.” My fastidious partner has never attacked me like this before. “What is wrong with you? I thought I was the one with the hormones. You’ve been touchy since I walked in the door.” Men hate it when you use the word hormones.

“Omar’s Roadhouse was Steve Crawford’s last known location,” Donnato insists. “And we still don’t know why he was there, and why he was not following procedure.” “Who said he wasn’t?”

“Marvin Gladstone.”

“You believe that? Marvin’s just covering his ass.”

“Why wasn’t Steve checking in?”

I shrug. “He was running his own game. The old-timer couldn’t keep up.” “What game?”

I snort slowly through my nose. I become aware of afternoon traffic. I wish we had some beer. Okay, I’ll be the one to say it.

“Maybe he was meeting a woman.”

Now Donnato is incensed. “Steve was a good father and a good man! What on earth would make you say something like that?” “It’s an idea,” I protest. “I don’t like the implications, either, but I throw it out for discussion, like any other case, and you go off on me. We all love Tina and Steve. Nobody’s trying to stir something up. Him getting it on with someone else — it’s just a theory. Why does it bug you so much?” The two of us arguing about Steve’s marriage in a sterile box in the middle of a strange city is suddenly absurd and strangely familiar. It reminds me of undercover school, and the dead-serious games they forced us to play. It is almost as if, against our wills, Donnato and I have been cast as a pair of ridiculous personages — I a naïf named Darcy, and he all buttoned up in the Bureau uniform.

Or is it failure of will that has ignited Donnato? Could the true source of his distress be the unbearable frisson (God knows, I’m feeling it) of a man and woman who have worked together twelve years, alone in the late afternoon, in not one but three empty motel rooms? No, no — of course we have a lid on it. Donnato is back with his wife after yet another separation. Isn’t he?

If we continue to look at each other in this pleading way a minute longer, one of us will drift over the line, and that will tick off the obsession, and then we will be back in that sweet morass. We have been successful in avoiding it for years now, clean and sober despite the ache. It happened only once, and for good reason, in a wet field of strawberries, beneath the shuddering bellies of helicopters patrolling a military base — the kind of memory you can put on the wall and be happy just to look at for the rest of your life. He was going to leave his wife; then he wasn’t. Finally, we had to put an end to the possibility and soldier on. It is an adjustment we have learned to make, swiftly and silently, a dozen times a day, often right under the noses of our instinctively suspicious FBI colleagues. Nobody is watching us now, which makes it imperative that I sit down in a chair as far away as possible.

“I take it back,” I say, crossing my legs primly. “Steve was not meeting a woman.” Donnato accepts the move without a blink. “Steve was meeting someone, but he misjudged them badly and—” His Nextel buzzes. It is Special Agent Jason Ripley, calling from L.A. Odd to look at, because his strikingly milky skin and white-blond coloring are like some kind of an albino rose, Jason remains to the bone the lanky son of a Midwest farmer who was raised to behave deferentially around his elders yet give no ground to wickedness or sin. He is, in the FBI garden of belief, a perennial.

Donnato and I are both patched in on our cells to L.A.

I start the debrief. “Julius Emerson Phelps was born in Ohio—” Donnato: “Based on what evidence?”

“There was a flying ear of corn on his cap. I learned in uc school that when you see a flying ear of corn, ask.” “Was it red and yellow, with wings?” Jason pipes up.

“How do you know?”

“That’s an old barn sign. The DeKalb Company is a big seed grower. The flying corn is the logo; it used to be on barns all over when I was growing up. But DeKalb is based in Illinois.” “No,” I say patiently. “The subject plainly stated that he was born in DeKalb, Ohio, and picked corn when he was in high school. He provided a detailed description of lying on a mattress on a contraption with wheels—” This being his first counterterrorism case, Jason is anxious to make everything right on the status report he will send to headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“Sorry, ma’am, but it doesn’t track.”

“Which doesn’t?”

“He might have picked corn in Ohio, but the DeKalb Company is based in Illinois. They have a corn festival every year. I won the Diaper Derby when I was two years old.” Donnato and I exchange a look and say nothing.

Jason fumbles. “I know. The Diaper Derby. It’s kind of embarrassing.” Another pause.

“Ana?” Donnato asks finally. “Are you sure you heard Mr. Phelps correctly?” I glare at him.

“I heard it right.”

“Run Megan Tewksbury and Julius Emerson Phelps through NCIC,” Donnato instructs the kid. “Search the databases for birth certificates, Social Security numbers, driving records, military records, and arrests for Phelps in Illinois and Ohio.” We hang up and sit in silence in the motel room, where the once-savory remains of Caribbean takeout are starting to smell like a back street in the Yucatán.

“I need you to trust me,” I say after a while. “Why do you second-guess me in front of a rookie?” “I’m not second-guessing you.”

“You are. Not only on Megan as a source but on a simple piece of intel, too. Did the subject say Ohio or Illinois?” My voice is rising. My heart is beating fast.

“Look—” He takes off his reading glasses and rubs his forehead.

“Here’s the thing—”

“I know the thing. You shot a guy. A lot of people didn’t share that judgment call, or the way it worked out with OPR. So you’re feeling…scrutinized.” “But not by you?”

“Not by me,” says my partner, and his eyes are soft.

Eight

Against a wash of middle-aged do-gooders perking along through the lobby of the convention hotel, with their important name tags and goodie bags of giveaways, radical leader Bill Fontana stands out like a gangsta hit man.

He has shaved his head since our most recent surveillance photos, which makes his cheekbones seem wider, and ears, with multiple earrings, stick out like a Chihuahua’s. Tall and muscle-bound, he is dressed in black, with heavy work boots meant to rip the shit out of laboratory doors. Despite a throng of groupies, he looks less like a media star and more of what he really is — an ex-con. You can spot it a mile away. He’s got what they call a “joint body”—the overdeveloped torso, the bullying prison strut.

I am not here alone. Undercover detectives from the Portland police department have mixed with the crowd, some posing as reporters to document the faces. You can bet if these good liberals knew they were being covertly photographed, they’d scream violation of civil rights. To protect my identity, the local cops do not know I exist; if my face surfaces in their reports, we’re doing something right. Donnato, disguised by a couple of days’ worth of beard, gold-rimmed glasses, and a beat-up denim jacket, is somewhere nearby.

This is not one of your great moments in espionage. All we did was walk through the door. The hotel is on a strip near the airport. You go up the escalator to the convention suite and buy a ticket for thirty bucks. If it’s easy for us, it is easy for FAN, whose members, you can bet, are also working the room.

These people — excuse the expression — are sitting ducks for recruitment by terrorists. The affable retirees with big bellies and gray beards are not likely to be fashioning Molotov cocktails in their home entertainment centers during the commercial breaks, but the young guard, the lean and hungry male youth who gather around Fontana, with thin grasping fingers, and tattoos, and “I’ve-been-up-on-speed-for-thirty-six-hours” hair, just want to be bad — any kind of bad. Well, so does Darcy DeGuzman in her ratty purple parka.

“I’m a great admirer of yours,” I tell Fontana, shaking his hand. “Going to prison, that was really brave.” “It isn’t brave. It’s the only choice. The earth is our only home and fighting for its constituency is a sacred war.” I give him a bedazzled smile and hold his brown eyes. “Bill, tell me how to fight and I’ll do it.” “Create chaos,” he advises. “On the edge of chaos, that’s where change begins.” I’m glad that I am close enough to get a good look. His eyes are at once vacant and hostile.

“Radical resistance comes in lots of ways,” he says. “Walk through these halls.” He indicates the booths for farm sanctuaries, and organizations that save ducks from having their livers turned into foie gras. “You’ll find your path.” Not surprisingly, given his glib style, Bill Fontana has a handler, a pretty Asian woman in a nice suit, who maneuvers him toward a couple of print reporters who ask about the story in Willamette Weekly about corruption at the BLM.

“Our wild horses are not for sale for the personal profit of government drones,” Fontana says as their pens fly. “We refuse to allow free spirits of nature to become pawns in an elitist scheme to benefit the corporate ranching interests.” Donnato must be watching, because my cell vibrates.

“Fontana’s on in fifteen minutes and the ballroom’s packed,” he reports.

“How’s the crowd?”

“Tense. Something’s up. I’m hearing Herbert Laumann from the BLM is going to show.” “Why?”

“He wants to debate. About the wild horses.”

“That’s not smart.”

“Your hazelnut friends are in the food aisle,” Donnato says, and we click off.

In spite of myself, the fragrance of rice soup and fried lentil crackers draws me to the food concessions. Among them is a booth for Willamette Hazelnut Farm, and sitting at the table behind golden piles of hazelnut brittle is Megan Tewksbury, stacking flyers.

“Megan! It’s Darcy!”

She glances up and breaks into a smile. Then a big warm hug.

“You were awesome at Omar’s the other night,” she gushes. “That was thinking on your feet. You liberated over three hundred dollars.” “Hey, the cash register was open.”

“The mustangs will benefit, I promise you that.”

“What are you doing?”

“Organizing. Julius is too impatient for this kind of stuff.” Megan is more fluffed up than she was at the bar, wearing her business attire: a white shirt with an Indian vest embroidered with tiny mirrors, her hair loose and frizzy, lots of chunky silver jewelry.

I pick up a flyer. “Save Our Western Heritage” appears above a photograph of the most stirring animal I have ever seen, “Mesteno, legendary Kiger stallion.” His ears are erect, his neck strong, and he has a fine muzzle and intelligent eyes. He is dun-colored, with darker legs, and the musculature of his body is athletic. His long flying mane and tail remind me of a children’s book illustration.

“This is a mustang? He is stunningly beautiful.”

“That’s because he’s free.”

I have fallen in love with a horse. It is peculiar as hell.

“We’ve forgotten what freedom is,” Megan goes on. “Mesteno is saying, This is the way it’s supposed to be.” Something inside me melts. “It breaks your heart,” I say, not quite understanding why.

“It softens your heart,” Megan replies, correcting me. Her moist green eyes hold mine. “Will you come to our rally? We want to call attention to the deputy state director of the BLM slaughtering these animals. And profiting from it.” “Where?”

“At his son’s school. When all the kids are getting out.”

“I don’t know. What about the son?”

“Nothing to do with him — nobody wants to hurt a child. We’ve been tracking Laumann. We know his routine and when he’s there.” “Okay, I’m in. Hey, Bill Fontana’s speaking. Are you going?” “If Julius ever stops jabbering. He admires Fontana, and he wants to get over there. Just never ask him a question about the law.” The big man is holding forth with another guy his age. He is wearing a fresh pinstriped shirt and jeans, the frayed red suspenders, and a beanie over his ponytail because of the air-conditioning. His pal has asked if the school can legally force his daughter to dissect a frog. Now he’s listening to Julius’s answer with acute concentration, arms crossed, one hand thoughtfully pressed against his cheek. I can see why. Julius Emerson Phelps’s intelligence is a breath of clarity in a sea of nutcakes.

“If your daughter is averse to cutting up a frog in biology class,” Julius is saying, “I’m afraid she’s on her own, Ralph.” Ralph ponders. “Can we argue it’s against her religious beliefs?” “Great thought, but there’s no legislation in place to protect that belief when it comes to student dissection. Trust me. I have written model laws regarding alternatives to dissection in the classroom, but to my knowledge, no statute has ever been enacted.” He checks his watch. To Megan: “We’d better head over to the ballroom. It’s going to be a showdown.” “I’ll close up,” she says. “You get seats.”

Julius, still lecturing, hurries off with his friend.

“Julius is a lawyer? I thought he was a farmer.”

“He went to law school, but he doesn’t practice. He helps folks out for free. Figures the advice is worth what they pay for it.” My cell phone buzzes.

“Just got a call from L.A.” Donnato’s voice is urgent. “Where are you?” “At the hazelnut booth.” I smile at Megan. She is locking the cash box.

“We have a situation,” Donnato says. “Julius Emerson Phelps is an alias.” “That’s interesting. I can’t wait to talk to you about it.” “When the status report went to headquarters — bingo — the alias hit the computers. Julius Emerson Phelps was an infant who died of meningitis in DeKalb, Illinois, in 1949. This guy is an imposter who has taken on the name.” I watch the big man disappear down the hall. The last I heard, Ralph was asking for free counsel on his divorce.

“At this time we don’t know who Phelps really is, or why he’s living under an assumed identity. Exercise caution.” “Okay, Dad,” I say cheerfully. “See you there.”

I close the phone.

“That’s my dad. He loves hazelnut brittle. Could I get a couple of pounds?” Megan has already shouldered her handbag.

“You’re packing up,” I say apologetically, pocketing a card with the farm’s phone number.

“Chocolate or regular?”

“Regular. Thank you.”

She puts her bag down.

“I know we’re in a rush, but — sorry — would you mind wrapping it up with some ribbon?” “For a friend of the horses? Of course,” Megan says graciously, and unrolls the cellophane.

Her fingerprints will be all over it.

Nine

A weighty mist invades the city, rain without really raining, beading up in beards and hair. The deserted streets are mirrorlike and slick. We, the protesters, are staked out for the anti-BLM rally in an artsy, mixed-race neighborhood dominated by gangs; even at 2:30 in the afternoon, the place feels edgy. A dozen of us huddle in a staging area beneath the defunct neon marquee of the Excelsior Theater, a plaster-work movie castle built in the twenties, long boarded over.

Megan is on the cell, listening to Julius track the target.

“There he goes. It’s Laumann!” she reports excitedly as a burgundy government sedan sweeps by.

For a moment, we glimpse a profile of the BLM’s deputy state director, a thin fortyish white male wearing a tan raincoat — like a character actor in a supporting role, cast because his unremarkable looks will not draw attention from the leading man. But, of course, all he desires is to be the leading man, which is why he squared off with Fontana at the convention. You can see it in the tense shoulders and self-important squint, like he’s driving a vehicle of distinction, and, as the taillights flash in a spray off the road, in the decals that declare his support of the sheriff’s office, the police and fire departments.

Herbert Laumann travels in the brotherhood of heroes.

“Where’s he going?” I ask. “The school is the other way.”

“He’ll park in the red zone at the coffee place. He stops there every day, and every day he gets a refill of Irish vanilla,” Megan replies. “Then he jumps back in the car and makes it over to the school just in time to cut a few people off and get a good spot in the car-pool line.”

“You know his pattern.”

“Julius taught us to do our homework.”

“It was so easy,” mocks a young man with a long neck and heavy black-framed glasses. “Laumann always gets a refill in his Bureau of Land Management nifty commuter mug.”

Other protesters giggle and snort.

“To show he cares about the environment?”

“Because he’s such a good guy.”

I smile and nod approvingly. What a bunch of dipshits.

“What’s the plan?”

“When Julius tells us, we head up the hill. St. Luke’s is on the right. The kids will just be getting out.”

“Is there security at the school?”

“This is Portland, Darcy.”

“Okay, but what about Laumann’s son?”

“Alex?” Megan says the name as if she’s somehow claimed it.

“How’s he going to react?” I ask eagerly.

Darcy craves action. Excitement. Blood on the walls.

“Nobody wants to hurt a child, but hopefully Laumann will be so humiliated in front of his son that he’ll finally get the message.”

Her cell again. She looks up with eager eyes. “Julius is at the school. It’s a go.”

A swell of anticipation sends people rushing to their cars to retrieve homemade signs and lock up watches and rings and wallets in the unlikely event of arrest.

Laumann rolls down a fogged-up window and sets the hot coffee mug in the cup holder. He makes sure to flash the BLM logo every place he gets a refill, eager to set an example of earth-friendly recycling. As deputy state director, he is the government — not an easy role these days.

Just this week, the psychos at FAN accused him on its Web site — and it made the legitimate press — that he has been stealing the horses he’s supposed to protect. Since then, the phone and fax lines to his office have been jammed with threats of violence against anyone who supports the Wild Horse and Burro Program — including secretaries, suppliers of tack and hay, even veterinarians. He thinks he kicked that poser Bill Fontana’s ass pretty good at the animal rights convention, calling the story “a fabricated radical conspiracy,” but in truth, Herbert Laumann needs the money. His civil service pay grade is way out of line with tuition for a private Catholic school, and Laumann and his wife want the boy to have a good education, and to be safe. Even in this transitional neighborhood, where angry white youth patrol the streets, Laumann (who grew up in a farming community) believes his son is less likely to come into harm’s way than in the public schools.

St. Luke’s is on a hill, protected by wrought-iron gates — a shabby plot of dull redbrick buildings and a couple of elms. The bright spots on campus are a Romanesque Church built in 1891 and the indoor tennis courts. Laumann’s twelve-year-old son is a talented player, and St. Luke’s has a good team, which makes it almost worth the price tag. Waiting for scrawny, long-legged Alex to come through the gates in his blue plaid uniform, toting his racket in a junior varsity bag, yakking it up with scores of red-cheeked, cheerful friends, allows Laumann to believe, for fifteen minutes in the car-pool line, that his insanely overstressed, overburdened, slightly criminal life might be worth something.

Carrying signs but silent still, we reach the entrance to the school. The gates pull back automatically, right on time, and the sidewalk becomes alive with the random energy of a couple hundred bouncing children in blue plaid uniforms. The engines in the line of waiting cars fire one by one, and Laumann sits up with anticipation. They have a new baby girl at home who isn’t doing well — respiratory problems, underweight, and waking in the night. Whenever he stops moving, even for a minute, he falls into an exhausted daze. The weather is still soupy and the wipers make it worse, so Laumann hasn’t turned them on. Looking through the watery glass, he never sees us coming.

At first, we mix in with the crowd — all of us with the same greasy hair, grungy denim, and attitude as the neighborhood types. Many of us are not much older than the miscreants on the corner, or the seniors at St. Luke’s. Moving in clusters of three and four, we wave our banners: MURDERER! WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER!

The schoolchildren slow down.

“Save the wild horses!”

“Save our American heritage!”

Chanting in unison, we, the protesters, bulldoze through the students, whose faces have softened with confusion and fear.

My heart is beating hard. The adrenaline rush has hit both sides. Parents are getting out of cars and clogging the sidewalk. Laumann jumps into the role of deputy state director, striding through the scene with cell phone to his ear, reporting the action to 911. He has been through this before, and means to assert his authority, but then on the police recording, later, in the midst of a calm recital, you will be able to hear his naked panic: “They’re going after my son!”

Two agitators have surrounded Alex, chanting, “Your daddy kills horses!”

Alex’s blue eyes are wide as he stares at one angry face, then another.

“Your daddy kills horses!”

Louder, closer, not giving way. One of them, a girl with a couple of nose rings, tries to force Alex to take a stuffed horse, dripping red.

Harassing a twelve-year-old was not the game plan.

Nobody wants to hurt a child.

But Darcy is committed to the cause.

“Free the horses!” I shout.

“Fuck you, motherfucker,” the boy yells, and hits the girl with the nose rings in the knees with his tennis racket and keeps on swinging.

Laumann’s running through the mob, awkward in a business suit and the raincoat, face contorted with desperation, screaming at someone behind me to stop. I turn and catch sight of a streaking figure — a young man wearing a backpack and a denim jacket with neo-Nazi ornamentation. I had not seen him in the staging area under the marquee, but now he is barreling like a missile directly for Alex. POP! Like a firecracker, and the child staggers, eyes in shock, splattered with blood.

The small explosion triggers utter terror. Parents there to pick up their children find themselves grabbing them and rolling under cars, or dragging them away, running wildly.

I stay where I am for one slow-motion fraction of a second as Laumann gets to his son.

“Alex, are you shot? Show me where!” he cries, frantic hands all over the boy, who is breathing hard but standing on his feet.

“I’m okay, Dad — they didn’t do anything.”

“Didn’t do anything?”

Laumann pulls Alex — he’s walking — out of the crowd. The white shirt of his school uniform is streaked with crimson, which has grotesquely stained the sidewalk, along with Laumann’s raincoat and Alex’s pale and freckled cheeks.

“I’m o-kay!” He twists away from his father’s anxious touch. “Leave me alone! It wasn’t a gun; it’s just red paint.”

But where Laumann grew up, you slaughtered your own meat, and he knows the slippery consistency and sickly iron smell. It’s blood — real cow’s blood. Filthy, unclean putrescence, degrading innocent children.

The father’s hands become fists. “They’re dead,” Laumann vows. “They are dead. Come with me; let’s wipe this off.”

Someone has found a water bottle, and now Laumann attempts to soak a tissue and cleanse his son’s face, but his hands are shaking and the tissue dissolves.

“Dad, you have to chill,” instructs his twelve-year-old soldier.

Laumann wipes his own wet eyes and whispers hoarsely, “Where are the police?”

Ten

Waiting by the window, I keep watch for the connect. Moonlight decants through the slats of the blinds the way I remember moonlight as a child — so steady and substantial, it seemed as if you could wash your face with it, a potion of radiance that seeped through the drowsing windows of the brick house in Long Beach, penetrating the gloom of my grandfather’s world.

From Darcy’s window, I can see two girl punkers with hair like crested Gila monsters locking up the Cosmic Café. Terribly young and terribly thin, one of them is pregnant. Doo-wop resounds from the African drumming center. The girls put their arms around each other, matching steps along the darkened avenue.

The war is escalating in our little world. The techs are calling the attack on twelve-year-old Alex Laumann a “blood bomb.” The best evidence for this comes from analysis of the bloodstain patterns — the “spines” of the splatter pattern on the sidewalk and on the clothing of the victim, which tell you the amount of energy transfer. The smaller the droplets, the greater the force that projected them. The force of cow’s blood as it spat out of the backpack was created by a small amount of gunpowder, detonated by the attacker as he approached the child.

We are back to the signature device that killed Steve Crawford, which is tied to the firebomb that blew up Ernie’s Meats on the docks of Portland, and possibly other unsolved attacks over the past years credited to FAN: a fire at a genetic-engineering company that resulted in fifty thousand dollars’ worth of damage; two explosive devices using Tovex that went off at 3:00 a.m. at the construction site of a new pharmaceutical facility, destroying three concrete trucks and causing the abandonment of a twenty-million-dollar project.

Megan Tewksbury had to have known about the blood bomb and the mysterious young man, which is, finally, the best argument for infiltrating her. At last, the Operation Wildcat team agrees with what I’ve been saying all along — until we can ID the person using the alias Julius Emerson Phelps, Megan is our best way in.

A black van pulls up and double-parks in the street below, taillights blinking. Angling sideways at the window to get a better view, I see two figures emerge and open the rear doors. This is the unit I have been waiting for. I am at the door to the apartment even before there is knocking, urgent and sharp, like the Gestapo in the night.

“Darcy? Are you in there? Darcy DeGuzman! Open the door.” I unlock the door. “People are sleeping!”

Two shaggy hipsters stand in the hall. One is a white male with silver earrings and baggy India-print pants. The other is a gregarious African-American female whose long cornrows are woven with beads. Both wear heavy rubber boots. Their faces are sweaty and streaked with mud. The stench of hay and dead things is a sharp hit to the nose.

“Are you Darcy DeGuzman?”

“Who are you?”

They show their creds. FBI, Portland field office.

“We have your ducks.”

The male agent drags a plastic bin over the threshold. It contains four confused white ducks.

“I didn’t think it would be ducks.” “Those were the orders.”

“Get them out of here. I can’t deal with this.”

“We just stole ’em,” says the female. “No way we’re taking ’em back. I’m not crawling through bird poop again in this lifetime.” “Wait a minute. What’s wrong with him?” One of the ducks is lying down in the bin.

“It’s sick.”

“Why’d you take a sick one?”

“What’s the difference? They’re all gonna die.” He points to green circles drawn around their necks. “That means they’re marked for slaughter.” Okay, this is absurd.

“What am I supposed to do with a sick duck?”

The female yawns. “Call your supervisor.”

“That is incredibly unhelpful, ma’am.”

“Sorry we woke you up,” she snaps. “We enjoy doing the shit work for Los Angeles.” And they’re sure to slam the door.

Three ducks are wandering around the apartment. The worst part is, it was my dumb idea to use rescue animals in order to get closer to Megan. I was thinking more along the line of puppies, but I know why Angelo authorized the poultry heist — to make it look like the work of dedicated radicals.

To get foie gras, a gourmet pâté, you force-feed the birds until their livers swell. French farmwives have been stuffing ducks and geese for hundreds of years, but it’s not so quaint when they’re kept in electrified metal cages with tubes down their throats. Activists have long been onto it as a rallying point. Foie gras is gruesome. It’s elitist. It’s what keeps people like Megan Tewksbury up at night.

I call her at Willamette Hazelnut Farm, using the number on the card. It is five o’clock in the morning. The apartment already smells like the monkey house at the zoo.

“Friends of mine broke into a poultry farm last night—” “What friends?” Megan is on it. She must get these wake-up calls often.

“Freedom fighters, let’s just say. They had no place to take them, so they left them with me. What do I do with a bunch of ducks?” “This is not an easy time,” Megan says warily. “Are you on a cell phone?” “Yes.”

“We have to hang up.”

“Okay, but listen — here’s why I’m calling — one of the ducks is sick!” “What’s it doing?”

“Lying down. I think it’s throwing up.”

“Are there whole regurgitated kernels?”

“Seems like.”

There are shifting sounds, as if she’s getting out of bed. The phone cuts out and then comes back.

“I’m very worried about this.” I can hear it in her voice. “We need to find an avian vet.” I didn’t even know such people existed. “Where?” “How soon can you get down here?”

Back in L.A., Donnato does not answer his cell. I leave a message that I am heading south with a carload of ducks.

Those patches of green I saw from the airplane turn out to be fields of rye slashed by the interstate. They claim this is the “grass-seed capital of the world,” and I can feel the pollen stinging my eyes. For another hour, there is nothing but sheep and rain. The ducks, of course, immediately climbed out of the bin and are now floating around the car like unruly balloons. One of them is flapping away in the passenger seat, and I am getting strange looks from other drivers.

As we pass a massive plywood plant, the cedary scent of sawdust fills the car, and I’m starting to feel relatively optimistic about pulling this off — until catching sight of a large mocking clown face, like the head of a court jester who failed to amuse, stuck on a pole at the entrance to an RV park.

The RV park is ominously called Thrillville.

I turn off the highway onto slick blacktop — another forty miles of vineyards and pastureland, fairgrounds and farm-equipment rentals, into the hills, past lonely ranch houses and ramparts of woods, down a couple of forking unmarked dirt roads, and finally a driveway that bumps into a shabby farmstead.

The two-story house is so deeply settled into the grassy overgrowth, it appears to have absorbed groundwater up the walls and across the roof. Brown rot grows across the siding and spreads along the junction of the gabled dormers, where old shake shingles are peeling up.

I stop the car on a patch of gravel in a light mist, wary of the country quiet. I did not imagine the place would be this isolated. The immense time and distance between here and backup is almost palpable.

The house is neglected, but the farm seems functional. There are red barnlike outbuildings and a large silver greenhouse made of inflated plastic sections, a tractor, buckets, ladders, an old steel swing set, a limp American flag on a pole stuck in a bunker of crumbling concrete.

A fat white cat is ambling across the grass, so I make sure the ducks are safely in the car, careful not to close the door on their silly feet. The effort to contain them, and the long drive with zero sleep, is making me really, really want to hand them off to Megan.

The scent of lavender grows stronger and more alluring as I walk down the drive. There, lurking behind the house, is the hazelnut orchard, squatty trees with short trunks and thin branches, planted with mathematical precision, file upon file, clean as a mechanical drawing, every specimen eerily alike.

I see a large man in a blue jacket moving in and out of the rows, carrying something — pruning shears.

He disappears. I follow into the trees.

Julius Emerson Phelps snips a bright green sucker. He moves deliberately through the trees, parade perfect and silent. The jaws of the shears snap precisely.

Overcast days like this are flat. They narrow the perspective, as if each of us has been made in two dimensions, like that painting of the lion and the brown-breasted girl with the guitar. Heat rises from the earth and the mind hums with emptiness, like the intervals between the trees, like the leafy spaces through which the sunlight will penetrate, all the way to the ground. That is the tree farmer’s job right now — to thin and sculpt — so the foliage will grow back thickly, so if you stood beneath these canopies four months from today, 100 percent of the sky would be obliterated.

Julius Emerson Phelps is the general, and the young trees are in training. They are training to widen the spread of their branches like bowls to catch the sun. As he leaves a trail of sprouts on the ground like casualties, his face recalls the trancelike look he wore at the jukebox back at Omar’s, lost in the taunting sleaze of Blue Oyster Cult, until suddenly he straightens up. The crows are talking to him no doubt.

Maybe he noticed the nondescript car parked beside the house, a red 1993 Civic, one he has never seen before, with Oregon tags. The lady seems to go with the car — disheveled but clean, long, curly dark hair, a pleasing face, faintly exotic-looking, almond skin (Italian? Spanish?), average frame, or maybe smaller than average, but carrying forward with a confident stride. His eyes drop to the boots: worn. He withdraws behind another row. Observes. The pruning shears are weighty in his hands.

I step through his silent cathedral like a tourist, staring up.

He comes on me from behind.

“You’re trespassing.”

“Sorry! Didn’t see you.”

“Sure you did.”

“I’m Darcy. We met at the bar. I was also at the rally at the school.” “I have no memory of meeting you anywhere.”

The moment he steps from the trees, a sexual force springs off him like slow claws down your back.

“Really? I’m hurt. What kind of trees are these?” “Ornamental filberts.”

“Megan said they were hazelnuts.”

“Hazelnuts are filberts,” he says impatiently. “One and the same. We just don’t use the word filberts anymore. People don’t like the sound of it.” “Kind of like ‘You’re trespassing’?” I smile. “That doesn’t sound very friendly.” “How do I know you’re a friend?”

I give him flirty. “I can’t believe you don’t remember — I stole three hundred bucks from the till and gave it to the cause, when I could have gone shopping.” I pretend to be entranced by the willowy branches just sprouting tiny leaves. “This is amazing. How do you do it? Every tree is the same.” His big developed shoulders shrug. His hair is in a dirty rat tail down the back. He wears a T-shirt under a grimy hooded sweatshirt, and a blue nylon jacket with a stripe down the arm. It was cold this morning. His light-colored jeans are dirt-stained at the knees.

“That’s the way my mind works,” he says.

I let him watch as I take in his eyes. I see a luminous intelligence. Seeking. Perching at a distance. Holding back.

“I brought the ducks.”

“What ducks?”

“They were stolen from a foie gras farm last night. Megan is expecting me.” “When?”

In the muffled silence of the orchard, our voices are undistorted and strangely intimate.

“She said as soon as possible. One is sick. She was going to get a vet.” His eyes skim my unzipped windbreaker.

“I need to pat you down.”

“Excuse me?”

“Security check. In case you’re wearing a wire.” “A wire?”

Electric shock goes through me, as if I really am wearing a listening device and he can tell. I stare at the crows walking cocksure across the rows and shrug with absolute wonder.

“What am I, the bird police? Why would I wear a wire? I wouldn’t even know how.” Don’t make a thing out of it.

“Give me your backpack.”

“Megan didn’t say I’d have to go through a metal detector.” “Megan likes to think the world’s a happy place.” He finds a wallet. “Darcy DeGuzman?” “Yes.”

He finds my cell phone and slips it in his pocket.

“Hey! I drove down here in the frigging middle of the night! Megan’s very upset, in case you didn’t know. There’s a sick bird in the car!” “Open your arms and legs.”

I comply, but if my heart keeps going like this, it will kill me.

“May I ask what you’re doing?”

“I’m just an old bandit,” he says. “Just doing my thing. If I touch you inappropriately, you have permission to kick me in the balls.” “If I have permission, it won’t be any fun.”

His hands are expert, like I’m a perp spread-eagled on the hood of a car.

“Are you done?” I ask Julius. “Okay?”

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“You can leave the animals and go.”

“I need my cell phone back.” I stamp my foot.

He replies with a sardonic smile. If I’m reading it right, the subtext is, I could have you right now in the dirt.

“Let me tell you something, darlin’. I am not the one who made me paranoid.” An instinctive part of him was watching from the moment I drove down the road. And it did not have to be his eyes.

I am not the one who made me paranoid. Then who did?

He flips my cell phone open.

A screen door slams and Megan strides angrily across the yard, followed by a tall young woman in hip-sucking jeans, with a perfect face and boyishly cut blond hair.

“Where are they?” Megan demands.

Julius’s smile fades. “She says in the car.”

“Why are you standing around playing games?”

“We don’t have a clue who she is.” He’s scrolling through my cell phone.

Megan rips it from his hands and gives it back to me. “Oh please. We have an emergency.” “Watch your mouth,” Julius says, his voice hard. “Before you say something we all regret.” “I could give a damn,” Megan mutters, already pulling at the door of my car. “Thank you for doing this, Darcy. Sara, help me out here.” Sara, the long-legged rescuing angel, shoos the ducks out of the car as Megan lifts the bin. The sick one is too weak to raise its head.

“I am really, really afraid for this one,” Megan says.

The girl strokes it. “He’s not going to make it, is he?” The screen door slams again, and a young man about seventeen, a baby neo-Nazi with a buzzed head, appears holding a shotgun.

It’s the kid who streaked through the rally carrying the blood bomb.

“What the fuck?” he announces.

“Slammer!” Julius says. “Get back in the house.” Lower the gun, knucklebrain.

“Thought you needed help,” he says.

“I’ll tell you when I need help, pal.”

In response, Slammer fires the gun into the trees. It is as if every living being on the farm is hit with the reverberation. Ducks flee in panic, dogs bark insanely, and I have the impression a herd of cows is trying to get out of the barn.

Sheared-off branches fall onto the roof, then drop to the garden in slow motion.

“He didn’t mean it,” Sara says, shaking visibly.

Megan puts the bin with the dying duck on her hip, an arm around the girl, and walks them both away.

Julius has taken the gun from Slammer, who surrenders it with a smirk.

“We have a visitor,” he says quietly. To me: “You can leave now.” “What about the vet?”

Julius’s voice is military, clipped. “Get back on the road and forget how you got here.” The inside of the car smells like a sour old pillow. Pinfeathers and droppings are everywhere. I turn on the engine and wobble off. Less than a quarter mile from the farm, I hear the chilling echo of a second shot. I could assign importance to it, or accept that I will never know.

I am still reeling with a kind of exhilaration, still dumbly clutching the cell phone, when it vibrates in my hand.

“You’re not there yet, I hope,” Donnato says.

“Where?”

“The farm.”

“On my way back. Why?”

He curses urgently. “Headquarters did not want you to make contact at this time.” “Headquarters?” My stomach lurches. “How did I mess up now?” My fingers tighten on the wheel in anticipation of the chastising to come. The mocking clown head on a stick is out there, a couple of miles down the road.

Thrillville.

“We have identified Julius Emerson Phelps,” Donnato says. “We believe his real name is Dick Stone. And he’s one of us. A former FBI agent who went bad in the seventies. If this is the guy, we have a potential problem.”

Eleven

Everyone sits down in a conference room in Los Angeles. It is a discreet briefing, with shades lowered. The major players in Operation Wildcat have been assembled, including the FBI’s second in command from Washington, Deputy Director Peter Abbott. All of FBIHQ reports to him. Son of a former congressman from Oregon, a decorated Vietnam veteran with a degree in international law, he’s the guy who travels in an armored limousine, ready to assume authority if the director takes a bullet. From the sound of him, he can hardly wait. Beneath the crisp gray suit and red silk tie, you can almost hear the purring motor of ambition.

The deputy director seems to have a personal interest in Operation Wildcat. The Abbotts are a founding Portland family that made a fortune in railroads and diversified to construction and technology. Over the past thirty years, their real estate holdings in the Northwest have skyrocketed by developing the right-of-ways for defunct train tracks. Institutions like the Abbotts find it bad for the business climate when insurgent ecoterrorist groups blow up concrete trucks and laboratories. Almost as long as Peter Abbott has been with the Bureau, his family has pressured Washington to deal with FAN and ELF. Now that he is Washington, you can imagine the tone of drinks with Dad on the deck of the summer compound in the San Juan Islands.

But the younger Abbott’s obligatory interest turned ravenous when we uncovered Dick Stone.

“He is a traitor. To his country. To his fellow agents,” he says emphatically. “Make no mistake. He is not one of us.” “We’ve got a former FBI agent who’s bad,” Galloway agrees, “with federal warrants outstanding. He could have robbed banks and set up killings in other states. The dilemma is, when do we get Stone? Now, and blow the operation? Or do we play along with him and hope to get the bigger thing, which is FAN?” “I know this man,” Peter Abbott says. “I was his supervisor out here in the seventies when we were going after the Weather Underground. Stone started out all bushy-tailed, got hooked on drugs and liberated women, and went over to the other side. Years of living with scum have made him one of them.” “We were wondering why you’re here, sir,” Angelo interjects. He has not changed his Hawaiian shirt getup for the visitor. “There wasn’t a hell of a lot of interest in FAN from headquarters when Steve Crawford was killed. L.A. had to fight for Operation Wildcat. What made you get on a plane?” “I was deeply saddened by that agent’s death,” Abbott intones on key, “but enraged by the fact that a man I trained was responsible. He threw all our principles right out the window. Simply put, the identification of Dick Stone has caused us to reframe the mission. Stone is a dangerous fugitive who may have ties to international terrorism. The purpose of Operation Wildcat has shifted.” Nobody disagrees. We are all in awe of being in the same room with the adviser to the next Republican presidential candidate. Rumor is that Peter Abbott will resign from the Bureau to run the national campaign.

Charisma. Conviction. Peter Abbott has both. You wouldn’t think so from the cherubic face and well-fed cheeks, the big sloping forehead and close-cut hair that starts halfway down his skull. Besides, I never trust people from Washington who wear those rimless glasses that try to make it look as if they aren’t wearing glasses at all.

I have been lounging at the end of the conference table, wearing the ragged-out purple parka, dirty jeans, and work boots, insolently spinning a pen across the polished wood. For a dozen years, I have appeared in these halls perfectly put together in a pressed suit and laundered blouse, with manicured nails and polished shoes. Just off the plane from the clean air of Oregon, I haven’t washed my hair since yesterday, and I find it unacceptable to listen to the politicking in this suffocating room.

There are grander themes to respond to.

The wild mustangs, for example. Mesteno, the legendary Kiger stallion — who here gives a damn about him?

Darcy DeGuzman.

“I understand the case turned on a single fingerprint off some…hazelnut brittle?” Abbott raises an ironic eyebrow. “My North Carolina grandma used to make brittle. I haven’t thought of that in years.” Appreciative chuckles.

“I understand Agent Grey did some quick thinking and snagged the suspect’s prints.” I sit up, surprised to find him studying me with penetrating sea blue eyes.

“Good job.”

“Thank you, sir.”

And not only that; he also reads verbatim of my role in identifying Dick Stone. How Megan’s fingerprints on the hazelnut wrapper caused a hit off the NCIC data bank. How Megan Tewksbury turned out to be an alias and that the fingerprints of the woman using that name matched those of Laurel Williams, a young environmental scientist at UC Berkeley who disappeared in the seventies. Laurel was arrested during a protest march, and while in the custody of the Oakland police, she vanished. There was an investigation and the family sued the police department, but she never turned up. Nobody could explain how the young woman had escaped. If she’d escaped. A left-wing conspiracy theory persists that Laurel Williams was beaten to death in custody and disposed of in San Francisco Bay.

Abbott produces a surveillance photo from an environmental protest that took place on the Columbia River Gorge in the early seventies. Against a haze of wooded cliffs, a young lady with a heartrendingly unspoiled face is engaged in an angry shouting match with a fortyish white male in a suit. I can see in her righteousness the same woman who tried to stop the fight in the bar. The confrontation here is on the edge of violence. Professor Laurel Williams has literally draped herself in an American flag, looking like an avenging Statue of Liberty — and even in black and white, the senior Abbott, sporting a curly ’fro, is red in the face. Protesters surge toward the podium, fingers stretching in the peace sign. Somewhere in the crowd is our young undercover agent Dick Stone.

“Is that the esteemed congressman from Oregon?” Angelo asks.

Abbott nods. “That’s my father. Nice sideburns, Dad.” He waits for the laugh. “Thanks to Ana Grey’s outstanding work, we now know that Laurel Williams and former FBI agent Dick Stone are alive and well and living under assumed identities. When I was supervisor, Dick Stone was working undercover up in Berkeley to infiltrate the Weather Underground, a bunch of radicals who wanted to bring the Vietnam War home — literally blow up the government. Then he drops out of sight. There was speculation that Stone joined the subculture—” “Speculation?” Angelo scoffs. “The Bureau’s always made him out to be disloyal, violent hippie scum.” “We believed he might have been involved in bank robberies and bombings along with the Weathermen,” Abbott says. “He was trained in munitions in the Army. But how did you tie Dick Stone to Laurel Williams?” he asks, still looking at me.

“Special Agent Dick Stone was the last one to sign out the prisoner, Laurel Williams, in order to accompany her to court in San Francisco for arraignment,” I say. “Neither one showed up. At some point, he took the name Julius Emerson Phelps, who was an infant who died in DeKalb, Illinois, in 1949.” “You and I might be the only ones old enough to remember”—Galloway shamelessly ogles Abbott for attention—“but that’s how the Weathermen went underground. They’d go to the graveyard, find babies who died the same year they were born, and apply for that baby’s birth certificate, saying it was theirs and they’d lost it. Then they could get a driver’s license and Social Security card. In those days, there was no correlation between birth and death certificates. No tracking system.

“Stone told Agent Grey that he was born in Ohio as a deliberate misdirection so that if anybody checked, they would not find Julius Emerson Phelps in that state and maybe just give up. It was another layer of deception. One more possible escape route.” Peter Abbott nods and opens a file. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” “It’s a love story!” I announce to a dozen sets of startled eyes. “The greatest love story ever told! She’s a radical professor; he’s an undercover FBI agent. They fall in love. He busts her out of jail and they join the revolution. Now they’re old and gray, still together, still fighting for the cause.” Peter Abbott sends me a squinty, patient smile and drinks some water. There is a moment of silence.

“We have a former agent who flipped.” Galloway waves an unlit cigar impatiently. “That’s the whole deal right there.” He taps Stone’s rookie ID photograph, which shows a handsome, square-jawed young man wearing a white shirt and a suit with narrow lapels and a skinny tie. He has the steely, unspoiled look of a new cadet. Invincible confidence.

It stops my mind to imagine that the same hazelnut farmer who builds bombs and gets off on Blue Oyster Cult went through the Academy in Quantico, just like I did. That once upon a time, we shared the same ideals.

“That’s the way my mind works,” he said of the hazelnut trees.

Military discipline and control.

“He was a silver-spoon kid from Connecticut with a law degree from Yale,” Galloway raps out. “Gung ho on the Bureau, wanted to be led the right way and do the right thing. He starts out on a moral crusade but gets corrupted by the forces he’s mingling with — drug dealers, radicals. Apparently, he had a powerful father on Wall Street.” “It’s always about the father.” Angelo winks grotesquely at Peter Abbott with his bad eye.

“Maybe part of it was rebellion,” Galloway says, “but we didn’t have undercover school and contact agents back then. These single guys had no support system, nothing to pull them back to our side. The subculture was their best friend. Stone was in his twenties, let’s remember, living with the hippies and vulnerable to their influence. They told him America was wrong. Capitalism was wrong. The war in Vietnam was wrong. Marxism was right. Law enforcement meant working for the Establishment. Does that jibe with your impression of Stone at the time?” he asks Abbott.

“He was stubborn. Not a team player.”

“Agent Grey worked up a profile of the bomber who made the signature device that killed Steve. Older. Impatient. Practical. Doesn’t care about perfection.” Abbott: “I’ve read it.”

Galloway nods. “There are still some people in the Bureau who think Stone got a bum deal.” “From us?” Abbott asks incredulously.

“That he took the fall for our failed policies. Spying on civilians did not turn out to be a popular song.” People shift uncomfortably, loyalty prickling. We give it our all, every day. Don’t ask us to justify the past.

Galloway shrugs. “There was no understanding of the psychological vise you put someone in when they go deep cover. It’s not easy to assimilate back.” Angelo: “At this point, what does headquarters want?”

“We want Stone.”

Galloway: “Do we walk in with federal warrants and blow the operation? Or do we see where this is going? This could be bigger than Stone. We don’t know. We’re just getting our arms around it.” “I’ll tell you one thing.” Angelo is leaning forward, elbows on the table. It is interesting that he in his narco threads and I in my Oregon grunge have cornered one end of the table: two actors still in wardrobe; street players in a room of merchants. “We should install a listening device in Omar’s bar. Put undercovers there around the clock. If that’s where Stone hangs out, and where they buy and sell, it’s likely he gets his explosives there, and Steve Crawford was following the trail.” “Done,” says Abbott. “I understand Agent Grey is embedded in the cell?” “I’m not in bed with them yet, sir.”

Galloway shoots me a warning look, but Abbott only chuckles.

“Stone won’t let her on the farm,” Galloway explains. “His paranoia is aroused. She’s got to make her bones with the organization.” “We’ve been kicking around a sting operation.” I sense Abbott’s support and decide to cash in the chips. “The BLM is doing its annual roundup of the wild horses. They cull the weak ones from the herd, put them up for adoption, and send the rest back to the wild. It’s called ‘a gather.’ We don’t like it.” “We?”

“Me and my homies in the movement. The BLM uses helicopters to run the horses down. We think it’s cruel. Megan Tewksbury, aka Laurel Williams, told me right before I came down here that they’re organizing to free the mustangs as soon as they’re in the corrals. If I get myself arrested, it would prove my commitment. Get me access to whatever’s going on at the farm.” “We’ve got the tech support in motion for deep cover,” Donnato says. “They should be bringing Ana up a secure phone.” Peter Abbott addresses me carefully. “You will be up against a skilled undercover operative with a long-simmering grudge against the U.S. government.” “I know.”

“Do you have any doubts about continuing?”

“Why would that even cross my mind?”

Abbott’s expression is predatory, like that of a tiger carefully placing one paw after the other in a nest of snakes.

What does he want?

“I understand you’ve gone through critical-incident training.” I stand, parka flying, looking like a raving homeless person among the suits. “What are you implying, sir?” Donnato: “Take it easy.”

Abbott: “I’m wondering about your emotional stability.”

“Not an issue. I’ve been certified for duty. I’ve been living with the bad guys, taking calculated risks every day, and it’s paying off. I know the territory. Let me get in and I’ll get this guy.” Peter Abbott doesn’t lift that wise, prowling stare from my face.

“Remaining undercover, knowing who he is, will be difficult. The mission has changed,” he reiterates evenly. “We are asking you to occupy close quarters with an agent that you know has gone milk-sour. It’s a psychological minefield.” “I am able and committed.”

He folds his clean white fingers.

“Thank you, Agent Grey. Would you mind stepping out of the room?” “A covert operation is still the way to go,” I insist. “I formally request to stay on as the undercover—” “He realizes that,” says Galloway, interrupting me.

I have noticed a good boss knows when to save you from yourself.

I gather my stuff and leave. Donnato, playing with his handcuffs, does not look up. He’s on the boys’ team now.

Exiting the intensity of the conference room to the quiet bull pen, I walk an aimless circle, lost in the desert. Rosalind, an administrative assistant who has worked at the Bureau for more than thirty years, gets up from her desk and pads over like a little engine, huffing and puffing with asthma.

“Hot in the kitchen?” she inquires gently.

“Like walking on coals. I think I’m out.”

I set my backpack down and unscrew a jar of oatmeal cookies, inhaling the calming scent of raisins and brown sugar. I suppose the two of us make a funny pair commiserating at the coffee machine — me all wired, down a few pounds, wearing scuzzies, Rosalind wizened and round, in a black dress with cheap gold buckles, sporting processed hair. She can hardly walk on her swollen ankles, but even the Bureau wouldn’t dare let her go.

“Don’t let them get to you, honey. The men like to pretend they know what’s going on, but it’s barely controlled mayhem. You should have seen them with their tails between their legs whenever the director came out.” “J. Edgar Hoover came to Los Angeles?”

“Oh, yes,” says Rosalind, fishing a vanilla wafer from a bag. “When the director was coming, you had to paint the whole office all over again.” “No kidding.”

“I got sent home one time because I was wearing pants.”

“You couldn’t wear pants?”

“Uh-uh. Ladies could wear a pants suit. That was okay, but not a pair of slacks. No way. That’s how it worked. That’s the way things got done. Now, everything’s a mess.” I feel uneasy, shifting in my boots. Already I have missed this place. I almost never feel this connected anywhere else. Rosalind’s stories are gems in the repository of family history, and usually when she starts talking this way, it’s the high point of the day. But in Darcy’s clothes, through Darcy’s ears, the Bureau sounds nothing but repressive, misogynous, sterile, and dangerous.

I wonder if Dick Stone felt the same strange dissociation when he first checked in as an undercover agent, with long hippie hair and a stud in his ear, having seen things and done things with nubile hippie chicks that would cause straight-arrow agents to fall on their knees and pray for his counterculture-corrupted soul.

It’s not easy to assimilate back.

“You miss the long-timers?”

“We were young,” Rosalind says. “We had fun with the agents. Well, you had to call them ‘Mr.’ They called us by our first names, of course, but I had a lot of respect for those young men. And they all smoked like chimneys! But they were good family men,” she pronounces. “They were nice.” She clucks her tongue and sweeps a dismissive hand. “Not like now. You can keep that Peter Abbott.” “Tell me about it. He’s the one who grilled me.”

“Back in the seventies, when we were into the security stuff, he was a supervisor, yes, on the beard squad. That’s what we called it. The young agents who went after the draft dodgers and the hippies. You should have seen Peter Abbott when he first came out to the West Coast. Green as the grass and twice as bristly.” “Why bristly?”

“Acting like he’s royalty. Never let us forget his dad was on a high committee in the Justice Department. Congressman Abbott he calls his dad, Congressman Abbott decides what toilet paper we get and how the Bureau wipes its behind, so you-all keep in line. When the truth is”—she lowers her voice—“Congressman Abbott was investigated for taking bribes.” “Anything come of it?”

Rosalind scoffs. “Too well-connected. His son comes out here and gets a free pass right to Hollywood. Well.” She chuckles. “You know how they love G-men in the movies. The stars like a fella who carries a gun. And there was that show on TV about the FBI back then. The movie people wanted their favors and privileges, and they came to the new guy, and young Peter Abbott, he was so excited, he just went off on a tangent.” I laugh. “Who was it?”

“Not like an actress in particular. It was poker games with entertainment lawyers. Tennis games with the famous movie directors. He got on great with the big shots but had problems managing the gentlemen working underneath him,” she recalls. “The street agents.” “Like Dick Stone?” I ask quickly. “He was on the beard squad.” Rosalind’s large watery eyes show recognition. “I remember him. He was straight as an arrow until he started working on that squad. Comes back to the office all scuzzy, with a scarf around his head, and the agents, they didn’t know what to do with him.” “Why?”

“He was bitter. He would sit on the floor, like the hippies used to do? Staring up at us with a cockeyed look, probably high. I believe they wanted to bring him out, but like a lot of them, he had a hard time accepting the FBI philosophy. I’ve seen some of those guys; they were so lost, they would cry.” She clucks, remembering. “Oh Lord, he used to sit on the floor and chant ‘Hari Krishna.’ No wonder they sent him away.” “To a drug program?”

“Nobody knew about drug programs. No, honey, back to the street. They just turned him around and spun him out of here. Out of Los Angeles, to Santa Barbara, Berkeley — they had him on something called ‘Turquoise’ in the Southwest, I believe.” “Was it concerning the Weathermen?”

“Everything was a radical conspiracy. If you sneezed, it was the Weathermen.” The door to the conference room opens and the players start filing out.

“Ana?”

It is Donnato, indicating I should take a walk with him.

“I’m off it, right?”

“No. You’re in. They want to amp up Operation Wildcat. Get you into Stone’s face. ‘Up his ass’ is the way Abbott phrased it.” “Really?”

It’s like hearing you’ve been designated the leadoff hitter.

“He agreed to the sting at the BLM corrals,” Donnato says. “You got the nod. Big-time.” “I was shocked the assistant director even knew my name.” “He was very familiar with your background. I get the feeling he was waiting to meet you to seal the deal. You got the part, kiddo. You go up there and get yourself arrested. It will be a controlled operation using SWAT, the county sheriff’s department, every redneck lawman in the West.” “I like it.”

“Good.”

“Mike?”

“Yes?”

“What else went on in there?”

“Sports talk. Dirty jokes.”

“What are you not telling me?”

“Nothing. Go. They’ve got you on the six-forty-five p.m. flight to Portland.” “Do something for me? Take Rosalind to lunch.”

“Why, is it Mother’s Day or something?”

“Ask her about the beard squad and a case called Turquoise. She knows where the bodies are buried.” As we head toward the stairwell, Rooney Berwick is coming out. He wears the same black jeans and black shirt as at the off-site when he fabricated Darcy’s driver’s license. His boots ring off the floor and the keys and tools and stuff on his belt still clatter, but the arrogance is missing. He looks thinner and gray in the face.

“Rooney!” exclaims Rosalind from behind us. “How you doin’?” She trundles up and hugs him like a favorite nephew, two long-timers who have been through it.

“I miss you, friend. We used to run into each other all the time when the lab was in this building,” she explains. “Didn’t we?” “They keep me in the rat hole,” Rooney mumbles. “Never see daylight.” The truculent techie can barely look at her.

Rosalind’s eyebrows pinch. “Something wrong?”

“My mom just passed away,” Rooney says, and my heart squeezes tight.

“Just?” she asks, alarmed.

“Last week. The funeral was yesterday. It was nice, but not too many people came.” I feel a pensive guilt, as if, absurdly, I should have been there.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone? Now that just makes me mad,” says Rosalind.

Donnato and I murmur awkward condolences. The queasy shock of it is very like the moment Rooney first disclosed his mom was terminally ill, out of the blue, in the midst of disassembled laptops and humming spectrograph machines, a hermit enthroned by the power of gizmos; how he poked down the barrel of a gold-plated assault rifle as if to impress me, as if to say he could handle anything. As if the world he had been pushing away all his life had not just collapsed in on him.

Rosalind chides him gently. “Can’t you reach out, just a little? Don’t you know we are family? My Lord, this young man has been here since Stone was,” she adds, turning to us.

Rooney: “Who is that?”

“Dick Stone,” Rosalind prompts.

“You’re talking about him?” Rooney asks with surprise.

Donnato and I stiffen. Our interest in Stone is privileged information we do not want to spread.

“His name came up in a meeting,” I say abruptly.

“I remember Dick Stone. He always liked my pugs.”

Rosalind smiles kindly. “How are those pug dogs? You still raising ’em?” “Third generation.”

Let’s cut off this discussion now.

“Did you have something for Operation Wildcat?” Donnato asks.

“Yeah, the phone.”

Rooney opens a palm to reveal a secure phone that looks like a mini Oreo.

“There are a couple of settings.” He rotates two black disks. “One direct to your case agent and one to the supervisor. It works on a scrambled signal, almost anywhere in the world.” The thing is weightless. I ooh and aah at Rooney’s genius and pocket the device, telling him how we appreciate his work, especially with things being so tough with his mom. As he and Rosalind move toward the bull pen, Donnato steers me out the secure door, the very one Steve Crawford walked me in.

“You be careful,” Donnato says. “Dick Stone is smart. How he survived, he probably created several false ID packages for himself. He jumps from cause to cause, like stepping-stones. He’s in the Weather Underground, and then he’s ELF, and now he’s an animal rights activist — he pulls an identity he has off the shelf, making sure to stay two or three times removed. He’s learned how to live like an outlaw. If he gets close, get out.” Inside my knapsack, Darcy’s cell phone is ringing.

“Hi, Megan!” I say brightly, nodding affirmatively toward my partner. “What’s up?” Megan Tewksbury is calling from the farm to tell her friend Darcy the secret location of the action to free the wild mustangs. On the first day of the gather, protesters from across the Northwest will meet in a campground behind a grocery store, at an old stage stop in the high desert of eastern Oregon.

I promise to be there.

Closing the phone, I grin at Donnato. “I can walk on water with these people.”