Judas Horse

Twelve

In the high desert, where winters are cold and dry and spring winds whip across the flats, evaporating moisture from the earth, herds of wild horses roam free.

This is the big country, where you can drive for hours on empty road and never turn the wheel. The gently rolling hillsides covered with silver sage are speckled with hard chunks of snow — a painted pattern in which pronghorn antelope, rattlesnakes, quail, and pinto mustangs can easily disappear. Gray mist overhangs the rim rock to the east, silhouetting pointed junipers in a shifting white glow; to the west, the sun is bright and there are fluffy clouds.

You are traveling across an ancient lake bed of frosty green that is hundreds of square miles wide. Beyond it is another ancient lake, and another, and in between, great volcanic buttes of obsidian and cracked basalt, witness to unthinkable power. Time is also a kind of power in the big country. It suspends the human brain in wonder.

By afternoon, when the temperature has dropped to thirty-five degrees and the sporadic sun has given way to sleet, three small armies — the wranglers, the radicals, and the law — have mobilized in the struggle for the destiny of the wild horses, because genuine wonder — full-blooded and pure — is a rare and valuable commodity.

The wrangler outfit is a contractor hired by the BLM. They bring their own helicopter. The law is made up of undercover cops from the county sheriff’s department and the Portland police, supervised by the FBI. The radicals are a group of maybe fifteen — mainstream true believers from rescue groups all over the state; you’d have to be, to drive almost to the freaking border of Idaho.

We, the radicals, arrive within the hour and park our vehicles at a stage stop built in 1912, now a tiny grocery store where you might get a packet of trail mix, if the snaggletoothed proprietress doesn’t shoot you first. She doesn’t like strangers, and she sure as hell doesn’t like them using the privy, a hole in the ground out front, with a hand-lettered sign that advises, succinctly, CLOSE DOOR — KEEP OUT SNAKES.

The wind is cutting as the rescuers of lost animals gather around a picnic table adjacent to the parking lot. I scan the reddened faces squinting against splatters of rain. These are your good citizens, eminently sane. They believe in the sanctity of life. They want to be seen as compassionate. Middle-aged and mostly female (two lesbian couples), they are “guardians”—not owners — of hordes of abandoned dogs and cats, lizards and rabbits, and their phone numbers are always the ones on the oil spill emergency list. There are graying braids and nose rings, hiking boots and ponchos. You have to like a bosomy grandma wearing a cap that says Meat-free zone.

The dangerous element is Bill Fontana. Even in the stormy desert his lean figure — the stomp-ass boots, a camouflage parka and watch cap — radiates a concentrated black energy. He works the eclectic crew gathered around the picnic tables with a sense of his own celebrity, shaking hands and kissing cheeks. I want to say, Ladies, he is not worthy of you. But he plays to their vanity, and they adore him like a son.

“We stand for the essence of nonviolence.”

Fontana speaks intimately, drinking in eye contact with each one. “This is an evolutionary moment. To make nonviolence an organizing principle. We are the people. This is the time.” I wish I could turn away. I have read so many transcripts of taped phone conversations of Fontana spreading the gospel that I know the rhetoric by heart. But I am nodding gravely, pitying the well-intentioned troops about to be led into a trap. They must know they cannot get away with this.

There are no cars on the highway. Probably none for fifty miles. You can hear the drops of ice plinking softly on woven nylon hoods and shoulders. Behind the stage stop the proprietress keeps an aviary of chicken wire and tin. Red-and-yellow house finches hop and dive. Unsmiling, she flicks a pan of scraps into the snow.

“You found it!” whispers a familiar voice, bringing with it the scent of almond soap.

I turn to see that it is Megan, hurriedly zipping up a yam-colored parka. Flakes of frozen rain have gathered in her silver hair.

“Hi!” I squeal. “Great to see you.”

She gives me a motherly hug. “I’m glad I’m not late.” “No, we’re just getting started.” I look around. “Where is Julius?” “He drove to the preserve to scout out the horses.” “What about Slammer and Sara?”

“Someone has to watch the farm.”

“Are you scared?” I ask, lowering my voice.

“Bill just said this is a nonviolent action.” “It’s just that I’m tired of empty gestures,” I say. “I want to do something that will make an impact.” Megan puts the collar of the parka up and snaps it into place. The wind blows her turquoise earrings. Her look becomes distant as she gazes toward the flatland.

“You should be careful.”

“Why?”

“The FBI is here.”

“Are you sure?”

Megan: “Count on it.”

“Seriously?”

“They keep files on us. They come to our conventions, too. They think we don’t know who they are.” A strange paralysis kicks in, like hearing two radio stations at once. Which one to listen to? I become momentarily unbalanced. This is not playing a role in a bar. I am alone, in a windblown god-awful patch of nowhere at the end of time, eye-to-eye with someone who has placed her trust in me.

“The FBI had someone spying on Julius,” she says.

“I don’t believe it.”

“He came up to Julius at the bar at Omar’s — this was months ago — a guy nobody ever saw before, and tried to sell him drugs. Julius said he should have had a sign on his back that said ‘Pig.’” Skeptically, I say, “How could Julius know he was from the FBI?” “The guy was an obvious asshole.”

Acid burn creeps through my gut, like when you hear someone slur your religion.

“Then what happened?”

“He kept hanging around,” she says incredulously. “Julius wouldn’t talk to him. Nobody would. So I guess he left. Listen.” Fontana is giving orders: “We don’t want a lot of cars, so you’ll have to buddy up. Dress warmly and make sure you wear gloves. Eat. Rest. Meditate. Pray. We go in after dark.” I take in a draft of dry, cold air. It comes out as a sigh.

“It’s all a game, isn’t it?”

“No,” says Megan. “It’s a difficult and spiritual calling. To care about another species is the hardest thing to do.” Water drips off the tin roof of the aviary. The red-and-yellow finches peck in the snow.

Thirteen

Dick Stone has them in his sights. Hard to discern in the distance in a basin of bunchgrass. So far, he’s had no luck — the brown dots he spotted through the Army-issue field glasses turned out to be cattle. But these, at the limit of his vision, move like horses.

He swerves off the highway into a gravel turnout, gets out of the truck and opens a gate in the barbed-wire fence that leads to hundreds of thousands of federally protected acres.

He loops the gate closed and drives a slow half mile past markers that warn RESEARCH AREA — NO TRESPASSING, where he cuts the engine and eases the door shut. A ground squirrel streaks by. The quiet is a muffled roar, tangible, as if he’d plugged his ears with silence. Soon the crunching of the bandit’s boots on the granular volcanic dust becomes not his; nor does he care if the white wool Pendleton jacket with the colorful Navajo design draws attention from some nervous BLM patrol. It is not likely that they’d throw him against the hood of the Suburban, pat him down, and find the Colt.45 where he’s holding it right now, deep inside his jacket pocket.

He trudges uphill through a valley framed by dark gray magma cliffs, some uplifted, some half-sunken in a spectacular collision ten thousand years ago. He has to watch his footing. The porous rocks are sharp. He’s lost the horses in the folds of the hills, but he knows they like to shade up under the junipers, where he saw them through the field glasses. When he gains the rise, he sees their colors in the bluebunch wheatgrass a hundred yards away. He smiles at their placid grazing and begins to circle slowly upwind.

He spirals closer. His training as a sniper in the Army keeps him low. In the deep spaces of the canyon, the animals must seem to jump-cut to a larger size with every turn — from tiny toys to very large and present as he drops behind the willows and observes. The weather is changing fast. Over the butte to the west, a pulsing cloud like a black jellyfish is trailing dark ribbons of rain. The wind has shifted and the mustangs know he is there; finely muzzled heads rise and point alertly in his direction. He has come upon a band of thirty or forty — pintos, duns, and chestnuts, with half a dozen foals. Every individual is strong and perfectly formed, the essence of natural beauty.

Or maybe he is thinking about bloodshed. Dinnertimes at the farm he would lecture us assembled radicals on how the Spanish horse — the bloodline of these mustangs goes back to the legions of Rome — defined the history of the New World. How the stamina of the Spanish breed was the means by which Cortés destroyed the Aztecs, Coronado fought the Shoshone, the Shoshone conquered its neighboring tribes and then, in grand restitution, wiped out the Spanish settlers on Deadman’s Trail.

Horses, he would remind us, have made war possible on an increasingly staggering scale, just part of the continuum that led to Vietnam and beyond. And everyone knows the way those grandiose engagements always end — piles of body parts in a decimated field, the arrogance of politics, the incompetence of rank. What he withheld from us then was how he had been a victim, too, of smug and inept leadership in the FBI. Now he touches the gun inside his pocket like a talisman to calm the vengeful scenarios.

Freed of the perversities of humankind, horses are peaceful and curious. If you show patience, they will accommodate your presence. He was certain the wild herd would spook, but they just look at him and go about their business, thirty yards away. They have relationships. They play, they fight, and they communicate. Let’s go over there, they seem to say. A spotted baby trots behind its mom. Another sits on long folded legs in the grass. A mare suddenly charges two others, neck twisted and teeth out. Without judgment, with no malice, the interactions of the horses ebb and flow as ribbons of snow begin to stream across the valley. And now a brown and white pinto stallion has trotted close enough to check the bandit out. Neck arched, ears up, its eyes and nose are pointed at him with otherworldly focus.

Pinned. He is pinned by the stallion’s gaze and made to see himself alone and out of place, trespassing once again. The stallion gallops indifferently away. The bandit hugs his knees and huddles on the ground, shamefully human.

He loses sense of time.

He becomes a Buddha under a willow tree, surrounded by four-legged gods — now twenty, now ten yards away. For the first time in his life, he experiences unconditional acceptance. He knows what freedom is. Their freedom is his freedom, too. His heart softens toward the cities beyond the silent rim of the mountains, a roar he cannot remember or imagine. Out there is a world of hurt, and all balled up inside it are the bad and evil things he has done. He listens to his own breathing, close in his ears. The horses, moving through the sage, are uncannily silent. The trouble is that the absence of sound itself is elastic, and it caroms off the basalt cliffs, hitting him with a thousand stinging thoughts. One of them might be repentance.

The helicopter explodes above the ridge like thunder. The man in the Navajo jacket on the ground cries out and rolls, hands to ears, rocking like a child against the scream of annihilation. He is blasted by a turbulence of dry leaves and razor-sharp black stones and curls up to protect his eyes, and then, when it passes, he struggles to his hands and knees to survey the empty grass where the horses had been — with love and grief as profound as if he were a refugee returning to his childhood home, only to find it burning to the ground.

The horses are running. Dick Stone is running with them, gunning the pickup along a parallel dirt road that climbs through the preserve. As the ridge falls away, he can see the entire Catlow Valley and the brown and white and buckskin-colored animals, led by the pinto stallion, fanning out before the helicopter, which is like a monstrous green bottle fly with ferociously buzzing wings, biting at their flanks no matter how adroitly they crisscross the salt flats, bearing down relentlessly until their coats turn dark with foam.

The mustangs have galloped almost twenty-five miles without stopping, even the little ones. He thinks about their beating hearts and the working of their lungs. And now the black jellyfish cloud is loosing sleet, which hits the bandit in the face as he leans out through the open window to track the herd, because it is suddenly important that he not lose contact.

Out of the foothills, wranglers in bright yellow rain gear ride from their hiding places on obedient quarter horses, and the bandit, having pulled up to the last overlook before the road turns east, stands in the freezing rain and watches as they channel the mustangs through a set of camouflaged fences that lead toward the corrals. The pilot of the chopper circles low. On its signal, an air horn blasts the valley, and the bandit sees another yellow-coated cowboy standing up in the sage, holding the lead of an unsaddled dun-colored mare with a black mane and tail.

The cowboy releases her and the mare takes off eagerly, going at tremendous speed, because she has been trained to run for a grain bucket hanging at the end of the capture funnel. The tired herd sees her and follows. For several heart-stopping minutes she takes the lead. Then she flies down the chute neatly as an arrow, and the mustangs trample behind her into captivity.

The bandit lowers the fogged-up field glasses with disgust. He hates the dun mare and her handlers. He has always reserved his deepest contempt for spies, for collaborators who can be bought for a bucket of grain.

The cowboys have a name for the single animal that betrays the herd. They call it the “Judas horse.”

Fourteen

I am using the Oreo cell phone that works on a scrambled signal, sitting in the Civic outside the Big River Stage Stop with the heater going, watching tiny beads of hail popping off the windshield, grateful to Rooney Berwick, deep in the warren of the lab, for fashioning this invisible lifeline to my partners in the real world. The vehicles belonging to the radicals are scattered around the rest stop. Most of us have spent the rainy afternoon in our cars. It is 5:00 p.m., still hours before dark, and the turbulent early-spring weather continues to swing between boiling black cloud and seas of pearl blue.

“What are you doing?” Donnato asks.

“Well, right now watching it hailing. So far, we’ve had rain, sleet, sunshine, and snow — all at the same time. How is it where you are?”

“Clear and cold. Looks like we’ll have good visibility tonight.”

Donnato is speaking from the sheriff department’s county jail, the command center for the stakeout at the horse corrals. The department is headquartered in a flyspeck of a town twenty-five miles from the Big River Stage Stop. The town grew up around a massive lumber mill, but when it shut down, the place curled up and atrophied to empty taverns and one wind-busted main street where the last survivors are a decrepit movie house and a dilapidated Chinese restaurant.

“The strategy for tonight has changed.” I’m looking at a hand-drawn map Bill Fontana has given us. “We’re taking three vehicles and leaving them in a turnout at Needle Gorge, highway marker two twenty-four, just east of the corrals.”

“I’ll inform the SWAT team. Don’t worry. Once you’re in, nobody’s getting out of the compound,” Donnato assures me. “Be safe.”

“You, too.”

“Roger that.”

I haul out of the Civic and for the second or third time during that long day wander into the Big River Stage Stop and poke through cans of motor oil and beef stew on the sparsely stocked shelves.

There are many interesting things to look at, such as three different color portraits of John Wayne, and a collection of old snow globes with dried-up brown insides — a gorilla, a golfer, a steamboat. In a booth at the rear I find Megan and two other activists — Lillian, a seventyish bird-watcher, and her friend Dot. They are now stripped of their thick parkas, and their mousy white hair and plain wire glasses, their thin shoulders and veined hands reveal two elderly women, defenseless as nuns. How will they keep up with us in the dark?

I wait for some acknowledgment in order to join them. They are talking about migrating birds. Spread across this surreal landscape, there are wetlands that provide sanctuary for hundreds of species. I hover at the edge of the conversation, drawn back to the banishment from the pack by my former friend Barbara Sullivan at the Los Angeles field office; boys may be stupid, but girls rip the heart out of you. Or is it that our hearts are already broken by the clumsy swipes of careless mothers? The undercutting remark, the florid slap across the face. Too jealous, too deranged, or, like my own mother, gone too early to make repairs.

When the bird-watchers report they have seen three trumpet swans sailing along by the side of the road, I jump in with “Oh my God, how exciting!” and am finally invited to sit down.

Now they are talking about rocks. Lillian and Dot turn out to be retired high school teachers with a lot to say — not only about birds but also about the joys of collecting minerals. Underneath her yam-colored parka, Megan is wearing a fuzzy sweater knitted with ropes of purple; her hair bursts out from tortoiseshell clips. Her eyes are bright and interested. The proprietress brings four coffees. When she is gone, Megan reaches into her knapsack and pulls out a silver flask. Dot reacts, all fluttery, but Lillian is eager and Megan matter-of-fact. I think about the empty wineglasses that littered the table at Omar’s.

Megan pours a dark liquid into my cup. “Going to be cold out there tonight.”

It is bourbon.

“Wow, this helps,” I say gratefully. “I am so stressed.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Lillian says. “Whatever you do, when they arrest you, don’t resist.”

Dot taps her teeth. “The police broke my bridge in Atlanta.”

I swallow the bourbon-flavored coffee. “No, not about freeing the horses. I mean I’m stressed about my life. I’m being kicked out of my apartment in Portland. I have to find another place.”

Angelo said, “Make sure they know Darcy needs a place to stay.”

Lillian laughs and waves her wrinkled fingertips. “Vasanas,” she says dismissively.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a Sanskrit word for things of this earthly life,” Lillian says. “Bad habits. Mental bondage.”

“Well, excuse my French.” I pout, and Lillian pats my hand.

We pull into the total darkness of the turnout at Needle Gorge. The weather has cleared and it is as if the curtains of civilization have been drawn aside to show us the stars, lush and impenetrable, as they looked 200 million years ago from this same naked plateau. Our breath forms as soon as we are out of the cars. Immediately, there is giggling. Someone has to go to the bathroom. Someone else flicks on a small red beam to check the map.

We follow the highway. I wonder what Fontana’s alibi would be if a sheriff saw us walking along in the dark single file. But for Darcy, this is the most thrilling thing she has ever done. I grip the sleeve of the conspirator in front of me with exhilaration. “Your first time?” whispers the woman kindly. “Stay by me. You’ll be okay.”

We shuffle down a steep driveway, causing a small slide of pebbles. Two lights are shining from posts near the entrance to the site. Between them is a gate secured by a circle of heavy chain. Fontana snips the links with a pair of bolt cutters and we’re in.

No more giggling now. Ahead is the compound of corrals, lit by a single lamp over the barn. I am shivering with cold, small tremors close to the bone. Suddenly, a spotlight appears above us, a circle of white around a huge fat owl in a tree. Its markings are beautiful, the eyes glossy black. There are shushes and rasping shouts. “Great horned owl!” And the flashlight snaps off. Lillian and Dot. The bird-watchers. Oh my God.

The wide barn door is open. Inside, it smells of horse stink and hay. We creep past a system of green metal chutes, and then a box stall in which a spotted mustang mare and her foal are resting on a bed of straw. Even in the dimness, the up-close colors of their coats — their wild aliveness — makes your heart beat faster. There are muffled gasps from the group. The foal’s front legs are wrapped in bloody bandages from being run by the helicopter over the coarse gravel plain. Determinedly, we urge one another on, not suspecting this touching nativity scene may have been set up for that very purpose.

We hurry through another open doorway and find ourselves in a maze of log railings twelve feet high, way over our heads. The lengths of the runs and the height of the fences are much greater than they looked on Fontana’s sketch. You can feel a ripple of uncertainty: This is the United States government. We are small; this is big — maybe overwhelming. The lighting is poor. The far corrals blend into country darkness. Our boots sink into dry mulch that muffles sound. And then we see the horses.

The mustangs are completely silent. They circle their enclosures like fish, heads low, shoulder-to-shoulder in slow undulating patterns of chestnut and dun. A few break off and form other groups, and then they all flow together again. There is no nickering, no alarm at being captive, no rebellious kicking of heels — because the stallions and foals, I learn, have been separated from the rest. Leaderless, childless, the silence of the mares is haunting: a plaintive, voiceless female rebuke. Heard by whom?

Heard by us.

We surge forward to our assigned corrals to wait while Fontana moves down the line with the bolt cutters. It is hard to gain traction in the mulch and I feel like I am running in slow motion, but that is also because I am aware of other forces at play in the wings of darkness — armed officers speaking softly into body mikes, and invisible snipers on the barn roof. I jog past Megan, already posted at pen number four, where twenty or thirty slack-necked mares slink unconcerned toward the center. I am climbing the logs of the gate to grasp the padlock with stiff, cold fingers. I’m about ten feet up when the crack of a rifle shot echoes off the mountains.

I think it is Fontana, gone crazy, but then I realize the shot came from the darkness to the east, and Fontana is standing frozen like everyone else in the middle of the runs, having whipped around toward frantic shouts from the barn. My first thought: Where is Donnato? Is he in the line of fire? From my vantage point halfway up the fence, I see a black-suited SWAT officer toboggan sideways down the corrugated iron channels of the roof, then drop off the edge.

The SWAT team answers with automatic weapons and the horses spook in a thousand directions, hurtling against the rails, which are shimmying violently, as if about to blow apart. A muscular chest rams my toes and a huge equine head with bared teeth and rolling eyes sweeps over mine as I am flung off backward, hitting the ground and rolling and snapping my forehead on the foot of another post. Spitting hay and who knows what else, I get to my feet and see nothing but chaos up and down the track.

We head for the barn but are thrown back by deputies with assault rifles and in full riot gear. Two, now three and four are tackling Fontana. Some of us try to escape by straddling the railings, pinned at the top by the cops on one side and the skittish haphazard movement of the heavy-boned horses on the other. Someone is calling instructions over a bullhorn, while another numbskull has turned on the flashers of every sheriff’s vehicle in the county, surrounding the compound in strobing red.

Where is Donnato?

I have to fight my own instincts and training and wrestle back into Darcy’s identity, and continue to run, disoriented, like everybody else. Then Megan has me by the jacket, pulling and screaming incoherently, and we trip over each other and sprawl together in the dust and straw.

Megan is crying, “We have to get her out!”

White-haired Lillian is standing in the middle of a corral in her wilted, filth-encrusted blue parka, completely encircled by panicked animals. Her eyes are shut and she is standing absolutely still, as if some divine column of light will protect her from being trampled.

“Get out, Lillian! Get out!” Megan is pleading, and I find myself scaling the gate. My mind flips to an unaccountably quiet scene: After inching through a massive traffic jam on the Santa Monica freeway, I came upon the accident. Highway Patrol officers were guiding motorists in slow and silent procession around the victim — a well-dressed African-American male who was lying in the middle of the road in the fetal position. His body was intact; a briefcase lay twenty feet away. There were no crushed vehicles, no cars involved at all. How did he get there? Did he think he could run across six lanes of traffic?

“Lillian!” I shout. “Look at me! Look at my eyes. I’m coming!”

Her face is shut down. She is praying, or dead standing up. The horses are running in random circles; the patterns that kept them bonded and calm now completely shattered. That’s okay. I’ll focus on Lillian and the divine light will guide me, and the raging waters will part.

But inside the pen, it is as if fear has shape-shifted into raging horses, attacking chaotically like a cavalry possessed. Pinned against the railings, I wait until the surge flows in the opposite direction, then dash across the mulch to drag Lillian to safety, but she can’t seem to move.

“Lillian, run. Run with me. I’ve got you—”

Like a sharp wind whipping back, the horses reverse direction and angle toward us. I see it in their shining dark eyes, which in my enlarged perception seem wise and close: the simple, unemotional impulse to flee. They’re going to trample us and break through the fence. Scores of deputies have massed at the fence. And then Lillian goes limp and collapses.

I grab at the fake fur neck of the parka before she goes down, cutting a gash in her neck with the zipper, then hoist the body in two beats — one, against my knees; two, into my arms — and stand in the midst of that ring of fire, holding the old woman aloft like some awful pietà, fingers probing the flesh of her throat for a carotid pulse as the gate opens and a cowboy on a paint bursts through at full gallop. The gate is closed, locking us into a surreal rodeo, a daring ballet in which the cutting horse, outfitted in silver, plunges fearlessly through the roiling mass, its body coiled to match, movement for movement, a mirror image of each individual animal, herding the mares one at a time into a tight bunch in the eastern quadrant of the circle, and keeping them there as the long-legged wrangler, wearing a beat-to-shit suede jacket and a battered, yellowed western hat, sits perfectly still, hands low and head tipped forward, as if he isn’t doing anything at all.

While the mares are held back, two paramedics enter the ring at assault speed, take Lillian from my arms, and carry her out of there in about fifteen seconds. At the same moment, the paint lets go of its position and prances backward in tiny steps until the cowboy reins it around on a dime. They’re leaving me here. What the hell?

But before the mares can break across the ground like billiard balls, he’s galloping right at me, hanging off the side of the horse like he’s about to scoop a bandanna out of the dust, but it’s me he’s aiming for, and I am lifted off the ground in the crook of an arm of steely strength, lifted into the air, and swung into the hard leather cradle of the saddle, the cowboy riding behind me now on the bare rump of the horse, and someone has opened a narrow passage in the gate. We canter out, as if passing through the eye of the needle.

His chest is pressed against my back. I’m smelling chewing gum and sharp male sweat, and although I’m bouncing wildly, staring at a careening world through the terrifying space between the horse’s ears, his suede-fringed arm remains strong and steady, and I feel the anchoring motion of his hips in rhythm with the horse. He won’t let you fall.

We come to a halt and I manage to slip off, completely dazed. Staring up at a man on a horse — rugged-looking, mid-thirties, five ten, 140 pounds, with stick-thin legs that jeans are made for and red leather cowboy boots you know he wears every day of his life — who has just saved your life can have that effect.

“Thank you, sir.” I offer my hand. “Darcy.”

“Sterling McCord.” He leans in the saddle to shake. “You okay?”

“Yes. Wow,” I say breathlessly. “That was quite a ride.”

“When are you people gonna get it? Messin’ with wild animals is not a hot idea.”

His rebuke is stern; more like a cop than a cowboy.

“I’m sorry. I guess you’re used to it.”

“I don’t like to see anyone get hurt.”

“I understand.”

“Hope your friend’s all right. You take care, now, Darcy,” he says, and canters toward some other pandemonium.

Over by the barn, the whirling lights of an ambulance illuminate a knot of paramedics around the SWAT team officer on the ground; a gurney waits, riderless.

Fifteen

Mike Donnato is waiting inside an interrogation room the size of an organic lentil. He wears a windbreaker with FBI across the back and greets me gruffly. The two grim sheriff’s deputies, who marched me over from the jail where we, the radicals, were held overnight, do not know I am undercover. The iron grip on my biceps makes that clear. Donnato instructs them to unlock the handcuffs, and we sit down and face each other across a small table as they pocket the keys and leave.

“We didn’t get breakfast,” I say right off. “And there are folks who need medical attention.” Donnato just rubs his reddened eyes.

“These boondocks deputies are real redneck pigs. I saw them shove an old lady and withhold water when we repeatedly asked for some. It’s bullshit, Mike—” “The officer who was shot last night died at the scene,” he says heavily. “His name was Todd Mackee, a sergeant on the Portland SWAT team. Single shot to the throat.” “I’m so sorry.”

“Took his head right off.”

I wet my lips. “Must have been one monster bullet.” Donnato nods. “Fifty-caliber. Not your average shooter.” I resist the urge to say how relieved I was last night, in my panic at hearing the shot, to realize Donnato would be here at the command center and not with the tactical team at the barn.

“Makes you sick,” he says.

“Oh God.”

I’m losing my resolve. Between the primacy of the mission and the bond I’ve made with Lillian, Dot, Megan, and the others, I’m done. After a sleepless night crammed four to a cell and with zero food, I have a killer headache and my breath could melt steel.

“This was supposed to be a controlled operation. To lose a life—” I clamp both hands over my face. “I want to go home.” “I didn’t hear that.”

I raise my eyes. “Lillian had a heart attack.”

“Who’s Lillian?”

His ignorance inflames me.

“The lady who got trapped in the corral!” I snap. “Elderly, a bird-watcher? You don’t know about Lillian?” He shrugs. “I heard something about a protester being taken to the hospital.” “But you were more concerned with Officer Mackee.” Donnato’s eyes grow hard. “Frankly…yes.”

“Let me tell you about Lillian.” Finger pointing again. “She’s close to eighty. She had a heart-valve replacement, but she didn’t tell anyone because she was afraid they wouldn’t let her come.” “Good idea.”

“Mike! She risked her life for the horses!”

Donnato settles into himself. “Ana,” he says very carefully, “you’re sounding a lot like the other side.” “I was on the other side, and I think the deputies responded with unnecessary force.” He waits.

“Think again.”

He doesn’t want to report what I’m saying.

“Mackee was one of those guys, ‘proud as hell to be a cop,’” Donnato says. “The one who organizes the department trip to Kodiak Island to fly-fish for salmon, know what I mean?” I nod, understanding the message.

“Three children, ages six through eight, and a wife of ten years who’s a parole officer for juvenile offenders.” “Always the good people,” I murmur, and lay my head on the table, completely dissipated. “SWAT had to respond. You’re right. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Exhaustion.” “Want some coffee?”

“Just shoot it in my arm.”

He opens the door and speaks to the deputies, giving them the message the suspect is at that point where the thing could turn on a friendly cup of joe. He comes back in and touches my shoulder, a signal to get it together.

“I’m okay.” I sit up, resuming the posture. “I’m past it.” My partner nods. Will he ignore the lapse?

“We located the shooting site beyond the perimeter,” he continues matter-of-factly. “It was a heavy sniper rifle, an M93, something like that. You can tell from the blast-pattern plume it left in the dust. It’s a sniping rifle, not for antipersonnel use, but antimatériel. They used them from fixed positions in the Vietnam War.” “Why so heavy? It must be a bitch to break down and carry.” “What the shooter had. How he was trained.”

“In the Army?”

“Maybe. Army snipers shoot from a tripod. This joker shoots off a pack. There was a depression on the ground and a trail in the dirt where he dragged it behind him. Still, it was a hell of a shot. Correcting for drop and wind? A thousand yards away in the dark? This is someone with the training and resolve to sit out there and make the shot.” “Dick Stone?”

“Or,” says Donnato, “someone hired by Stone. Except he didn’t get his money’s worth. A good sniper never leaves his brass behind. And this guy did. We recovered the bullet casing.” “That was a mistake.”

“Big-time. We have the slug from the roof. All we need is the weapon it came from. A suspect is in custody. Barnaby Nuñez, Native American, thirty-eight years old, priors for DUI and domestic abuse. Picked up three miles from the corrals. Fired from working at a filling station, claimed racial discrimination, arrested for trespass and making threats against the manager. Theory is, he uses the mustang protest as a way to make things right. Former Marine, which fits.” The deputy brings coffee for the prisoner, hot and black as road tar.

When he’s gone: “Did you get anything in the cell from Megan?” “Nothing hard. I wonder if she knows what Dick Stone’s really up to.” Donnato sips the coffee. “Will she flip?”

“They’re in love.” I blush for no apparent reason. “Here’s what she told me in the lockup: ‘I don’t have a thing about cops. They’re human beings doing their job. But when they get into our face, they have to be stopped. We have a constitutional right to express our opinions without being spied on.’ She said there was ‘a fed’ hanging around Omar’s, but that Julius was ‘on to him’ and he stopped showing up.” Donnato and I are silent, holding each other’s eyes. The heart-heavy sorrow I felt hearing of Steve Crawford’s death comes over me again.

“Dick Stone made Steve Crawford for an undercover,” Donnato says quietly.

“Megan says he did. But the way she makes it sound, Steve blew it from the start by coming on too strong.” Troubled, I add, “He knew better. He would not have been that sloppy.” “You’re right — Steve knew what he was doing. He was like a low-flying missile when he was on to something. Remember the money he raised for Jane Doe?” I remember looking up to find Steve Crawford bending over my desk with that look of earnest resolve. He was collecting money for a funeral. The funeral was for a little girl he’d never known, a Jane Doe, who wore teddy bear pajama pants and a T-shirt with sparkles. The remnants of a woven friendship bracelet circled the bones of her wrist.

She was badly decomposed. It took a team of forensic experts to reconstruct her age — between ten and fifteen years old. She was healthy and well fed, no drugs, strangled with a nylon rope. Steve Crawford and I were on the kidnap squad at the time. We worked with the Glendale sheriff’s department and NCIC and our own cold-case files, but we never got a hit. Nobody claimed the body.

Steve Crawford did not discover Jane Doe in a cardboard box in a hospital parking lot in Glendale, but he was the one who took her into his heart. He and Tina had just had their first baby, and here was a child abandoned, in the cruelest way. The idea of her being buried as an unknown in a common crypt ate at him. “She suffered enough,” he said, and took it upon himself to go from door to door, house to house, desk to desk to raise money to lay her to rest with dignity. Word spread through the media. Strangers donated more than eight thousand dollars.

Six of us from the office attended the funeral. It was pouring rain and the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. We lined up in our polished Bu-cars behind a donated hearse that held a small white casket. The Glendale police and fire departments followed in slow parade, and Jane Doe was buried under the epitaph “Here lies a child of God.” Is it the caffeine from the sour jailhouse coffee kicking in that makes me flush with restless torment? I remember Steve’s look of disturbed satisfaction as he stood at the grave. Despite the clouds, he wore black wraparound sunglasses. The wind blew his blond hair, but the muscles of his face were motionless; a military stillness that said, I will stand. I will stand for this little girl. I will make it right.

Did Stone kill him? We don’t know. Climbing through the forest, nothing would have given Steve a clue that things were far from right. The fern glen that exploded into a debris field, and later became a field of snow, must have been silent. Steve would have had every reason to believe he was alone, but in fact he was being set up for an ambush — exactly like FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams in the mid-seventies, ambushed while driving a dirt road on a South Dakota Indian reservation. The siege by Native Americans at Wounded Knee was over, the FBI humiliated by an unwinnable takeover from which they had to withdraw, but a month later the two agents on patrol were gunned down with semiautomatics, because they were symbols of the U.S. government.

“The danger is high,” says Donnato. “You understand that, right? If Stone makes you, he will escalate fast.” “Like he escalated when he made Steve.”

That is the nasty irony: By placing an undercover in Dick Stone’s orbit, not only did we wake the beast but we armed him with righteous fury, too.

“I have to tell you, as your contact agent, that it’s your choice as the undercover to decide whether or not you feel comfortable with the level of safety we can provide.” Donnato’s look is deeply still and troubling. Feeling seems to overflow his eyes.

My head clears. Despite the fatigue, I find myself in a manic state of bungee-jump excitement. I want to get back — to the suspects, the drama, my role in it — to the roller-coaster ride. This is rapture, and there is no way back.

“It’s a go.”

“Then nail it,” Donnato says. “The prisoners are being released. Make sure you go home with Dick Stone.” It is 112 degrees in the tiny interrogation room. As we haul to our feet, Donnato surprises me with a daringly swift kiss on the mouth, leaving the sweet salt taste of apprehension and longing.

The ragged activists are standing in the blustery sunlight outside the facility that houses the county sheriff’s department and jail. All the prisoners have been released on bail except for Bill Fontana, who is still being held for questioning. We gather in groups, our hair matted and our clothes mud-stained, survivors trading stories.

Megan hugs me good-bye.

“This is not the end of it,” she vows. “We’ll be back.” “You will,” I say forlornly. “I have no idea what I’ll be doing. Maybe living in a crapped-up town like this.” The sandstone building that houses the jail blends into a residential area, the single part of town that does not appear to have been completely desolated by the closing of the mill. There is a brick library and a new high school, where male youth wearing baggy pants and sporting goatees linger along the fence, glued to their cell phones, like everywhere else.

“What do you mean?” Megan asks.

She doesn’t have to turn around to sense that Dick Stone is standing now beside her, backlit, every thread on the shoulder of his white Navajo jacket magnified by the cold light. She reaches for his hand and their fingers entwine.

“Ready to get out of here?” he asks.

“Just a sec. What are you going to do, Darcy?”

“I don’t know, Megan. I’m totally screwed. My landlord’s kicking me out. The cops impounded my car because it was parked overnight at the rest stop. It’ll cost a hundred and twenty-five bucks to get it back, and I don’t have a job right now; plus, I’ve been arrested again, so that’s on my record. And guys like Laumann get off scot-free.” “Be at peace and know that things are unfolding exactly as they should,” Dick Stone says enigmatically. He ties a bandanna around his big head. His tanned skin looks vibrant, as if it belongs in the daylight of the high desert; like he’s going out for pancakes, not as if he might have killed a man last night.

Wind slices our faces, bringing genuine tears.

“Really? The cops pulled my records. They saw I was arrested once before, for hacking a computer system down in L.A. They took me in for questioning and it got scary. They said if I didn’t want a felony charge, I’d have to give up names.” The wind cuts like diamonds.

“Names?”

“In the movement. Don’t worry. I didn’t.”

A pause. They believe me.

“You should have seen her last night, Julius, when she jumped into the middle of the horses to save poor Lillian. You were so determined, Darcy. I was so proud of you! You were utterly selfless,” Megan says. “You have a calling for this work.” We stand in silence in the shifting air. A big, fat, hairy tumbleweed gets stuck against the fence of the high school, where two kids are lighting cigarettes.

I hope they don’t set that thing on fire.

Dick Stone is watching me. I squint at his face in the billowy light but catch only the tail end of the look in his eyes, like the whisper of a closing door.

He knows.

“Could I crash with you guys? Just for a couple of days?” “Stay as long as you like,” Megan says.

“I hate to ask. This wasn’t the game plan.” My eyes are watering from the wind and an insane euphoria.

“She can share a room with Sara,” Megan’s telling Stone.

“I have skills,” I offer, although not too fast. “This thing isn’t over. Not until we free the horses for good.” “See?” says Megan.

Dick Stone doesn’t answer. He doesn’t argue, but he doesn’t agree, either, just squeezes Megan’s shoulder and fishes around in the big square pocket of the woolen Navajo jacket for the keys to the white truck. I pretend not to glimpse the butt of the Colt.

Patience. It’s important in our line of work.