Judas Horse

Sixteen

It is a common American farmhouse, with a wraparound porch supported by spindle posts and decorated with carvings of Victorian lacework — the kind of house a young man rolling off a freight train from Missouri in 1898 would have said looked just like home. For a hundred years, it has survived searing valley summers and the creeping moisture of the winter with the worn-down crankiness of an arthritic farmer’s wife.

Waiting on the front steps beside Darcy DeGuzman’s knapsack, I am trying to make friends with the house, now that I have come to stay, but it keeps shrugging me off with discomforting distractions: rotted floorboards, sinks rusting in the weeds, a pen with two goats and the three surviving ducks, a lidded cardboard box on the porch with mysterious scratching inside.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Megan tells me, lots of faraway places were starting to look like home, because factory-made houses could be sent across the country on the railroads. Megan’s grandfather did not have to crawl very far down the tracks to find a hog operation in the Willamette Valley remarkably like the one he’d just blown off in Jefferson City, Missouri. After a few thousand miles and a broken leg sustained in the decisive leap off the boxcar in which he had stolen a ride, this simple two-story homestead must have seemed like heaven to the boy when the farmer who owned the land pulled him from a ditch, dehydrated, two days later. At age fourteen, Megan’s grandfather apprenticed himself to the farmer on the spot, in the hope — like many of us have — that one day he would get back exactly what he had left behind.

That is how Megan’s family came to own the place, and why it is a sanctuary to this day. Because of the kindness of that anonymous farmer, Megan believes this land is blessed, and she will not refuse shelter to animals or humans in need. That is the history anyway. The story she tells. Knowing that she and Dick Stone have shared a secret life on this overgrown, isolated property, undisturbed all these years, suggests another reason to hold on to Grandpa’s goods.

The scratching in the box is making me edgy. Carefully, I open the lid, to discover half a dozen abandoned baby rabbits. I lift one out, holding the warm, soft body in my cupped hands as we share a wordless consolation.

It’s sad in this world without a mom.

A white pickup pulls into the driveway and Megan waves. I put the quivering bunny back.

“Welcome to the lost farm,” she says cheerfully, carrying bags of groceries. “Whatever nobody else wants ends up here. Can you believe someone left these babies at the dump?” “What will happen to them?”

“They’re ours.”

“You have a big heart, Megan.”

“I never had children, so I have animals. My neighbor once asked me to watch her llamas — she left to visit her sister and came back two years later.” Two years? My bullshit detector has started to ping, but Megan is laughing. It’s a joke. Loosen up. Megan is loose, in baggy work pants and an oversized orange linen shirt. Following her through the door, I see that since I last saw her at the BLM corrals, she has put streaks of raspberry and crimson in her ropy gray hair.

Inside the farmhouse, the hot, dead air smells like the acres of clothes in the old bomb shelter, in the subbasement at Quantico, where we chose our costumes for the Bureau’s tireless mind games.

“You will be observed for signs of deceit that suggest you’re not who you say you are.” Here, also, time has a smell, and the smell has accumulated in the mismatched cushions and Oriental rugs and curtains of gold lamé, and it is gripping me with vivid awareness.

I have penetrated someone’s inner world.

I revel in the treachery, experiencing the same satisfaction Darcy would have felt hacking into the biotech company’s computer system. Fact or fiction, I discover there is a tasty thrill in crossing the line. I am elated not to be who I say I am.

“Can I make you a cup of tea?”

“That would be lovely.”

Megan goes, and I want to twirl around the room, a treasure trove of clues, although you would need a team of investigators to comb the layers of cozy kitsch — ashtrays, lamps, Depression glass, doilies, tin trays, detective magazines — everything carefully arranged and dusted.

On the wall is an authentic DeKalb barn sign — the flying corn with the wings — the same deliberate symbol of the Midwest as on Dick Stone’s cap. Well, folks, we’ve already deciphered that one. On the wooden mantel is a collection of clocks, new and old, all of them accurate. Again, the scent and feel of time, bottled and corked — like their twenty-year outlaw run?

There is a gentle clicking sound. I look up from the broken-down sofa where I have sunk to my hips, surprised to see a stunning young woman enter through the swaying bones of bamboo.

She is the same rescuing angel I saw when I first came to the farm, yet the appearance of Sara Campbell from the same curtain through which Megan Tewksbury vanished, bearing the tea that Megan promised, seems a mocking transformation of the older woman; as if Megan, with her boozy sentiment and half-dyed dreadlocks, had been banished to the drudgery of the kitchen so this radiant being could emerge.

Not that the girl is scornful in any way. She is a barefoot geisha in blue jeans, back straight, kneeling gracefully to set the teacup down.

“Hi.” She smiles uncertainly.

“I’m Darcy. We met when I brought the ducks.” “That’s right. The sick one died. It was awful.” She has long, thin arms and legs, and blond hair so fine and cropped so short, it lays like a halo around her head.

She eases down, sitting cross-legged on the rug.

“Megan says you’re committed.”

“I am.”

“So am I.”

“That’s good.”

“We all are.”

“Who is?”

“Everyone who lives here.”

Sara’s face has become serious. Her grave composure clutches at your heart. Barely out of her teens, her impeccable beauty, like that of the wild horses, arises from genuine innocence. Looking up, her eyes are winsome and unself-conscious, and the curve of her temple is enough to make you want to pick up a pen and draw.

“And that would be?”

“Well, it’s me, Megan, Slammer, and Julius. And the animals.” Take it slowly.

“Julius — he mainly takes care of the orchard?” “The trees are his passion. I guess he’s the one who turned this place around.” “You guess?”

“I’ve only been living here three months.” “And Julius?”

“He and Megan have been together for a while. I’m not really sure.” “He told me he was a bandit.”

Sara laughs. “Julius has a wonderful sense of play.” “‘Play’?”

“He’s just messin’.”

“How did you all”—I make a motion, like stirring a pot—“meet?” Sara draws her legs up. She turns her head and lays a cheek on her knees. I can see her wistful look reflected in the large round mirror of a dressing table. Throughout the rooms, there are thrift shop Art Deco dressing tables with big round mirrors. You turn a corner and catch a shocking glimpse of yourself in the circular glass, as if the house is watching you with many eyes.

“It was Julius,” she says, sighing, “who saved us from the streets.” And she’s in love with Daddy?

“Slammer and I were squatting with a family under a bridge in Portland. Not your normal family — everyone was a runaway. The oldest guy, SB, was in his twenties. There were a lot of drugs, a lot of violence, but what made me want to leave was the way people turned on each other, just because SB told them to.

“His name was really Satan’s Boy. It was really Duane, or whatever. There was this one girl who was mentally retarded — we used to call her Bubbles — and one day SB accused her of lying to him…. You know what?” She stops. “That’s negative energy, and I’m here now.” “Did something bad happen to Bubbles?”

Her face closes up and she presses her lips against her knee, then sinks her teeth into her own skin and chews on it in order to keep from seeing it again, the bad thing that happened to Bubbles.

“You don’t have to do that.” I gently touch her hair. “It’s okay.” She stops and turns her face away. The sun raises a soft orange corona along the ridge of her bare shoulders. She is wearing two fraying tank tops, one over the other, and a heavy silver pendant of three interlocking triangles.

“Megan has the same necklace,” I observe.

She sniffles. “It’s a valknot.”

“Nordic, right?”

“There was a king in the seventh century.” She turns her head and lifts wet, translucent eyes. “King Odin. It represents his powers — to bind or to open our minds. It means ‘knot of the chosen.’” “Cool. Can I get one?”

“Only if you’ve taken the vows to follow the Allfather,” she says cautiously.

“Is Julius the Allfather?”

She nods.

“And the vows?”

“I can’t talk about that.”

I grin. “Well, I guess we’re all chosen. For something. Like you guys winding up here together.” I make the stirring motion again. “Slammer, huh? What’s his story?” “Survival.”

“Got it. Did you two run away together?” She laughs a little and wipes her eyes. “Are you kidding? We’re from totally different backgrounds. Where my parents live, he couldn’t get past the gate.” “Your parents must be looking for you.”

She shrugs. “They gave up on me in high school. They are not in my life. In the squat, Slammer and I made a pact to stick together, so when Julius showed up and said he could live on the farm, Slammer said if I couldn’t go, he wouldn’t go, either.” Dick Stone cruises the underbelly of Portland, recruiting street kids — young and vulnerable and not easily traced.

I sip the tea. It tastes like twigs.

“I left home, too. Moved to Portland from Los Angeles.” Sara is bemused. “I can’t see you on the street,” she says, which I find vaguely insulting. “Don’t ever go to Pioneer Square at night. You can’t imagine how those kids are living.” Her eyes fill again. “It’s so sad.” I give her a moment and ask, “Where are you from?” “Dirt,” she says, floating to her feet as Megan comes back through the curtain.

“Let’s get you settled.”

The three of us climb the dark-wood staircase to the attic room the girl and I will share. The wallpaper is fragile and old-fashioned, sweetheart roses, original to the house. I pick out the daily life of this jerry-rigged clan from the smells that have risen up the staircase on strata of hot air: cat food, musty rugs, herbal shampoo, sage incense, and weed.

“Where is Julius?”

“Out on his tractor,” Megan replies. “He’s always on his tractor.” And I hear it through the window on the landing before I can see Dick Stone through the panes of glass, a small figure in a straw hat on a red machine, going up and down the rows with unwavering resolve.

At the turning of the stair, directly on the wall in front of us, is yet another timepiece, an antique wall clock in a simple wooden case, hands as thin as pencil lines, trembling past the hour. The steady drone of the tractor goes back and forth, a rhythm of comfort and plenty, in harmony with the swaying of the pendulum of the clock and the roses on the wall, and the scent of baking piecrust blooming up the stairs — promising to fill you up, whatever your emptiness may be.

Seventeen

Herbert Laumann’s sick baby is up two or three times in the night, so they take her into their bed. She is finally asleep, a soft, warm weight on her father’s chest, when he is forced by the alarm to face the dawn. From the quality of light peeping underneath the Roman shades, he knows the sky will be clear. No rain.

Ambition, that indefatigable gear, gets the priority of the day turning in Herbert Laumann’s sleep-deprived brain. The priority is water. As deputy state director, the continuing drought in the eastern part of the state is first thing on his mind these days. It means he’ll keep on hearing complaints — from ranchers as well as his own district managers — because nothing has changed out here in the West in the past two hundred years. It is still the cattlemen versus the farmers in the fight for public lands and water, only now you’ve got the radical element mixed in.

Guys like Laumann are in the middle, trying to balance the politics of multiple use; doing the eight-to-five civil servant bit because it’s better to be wearing a shirt and tie and commute and have the weekends on the boat with your family than be driving a rig through alfalfa and timothy grass like your father did 24/7, cracked red hands blown up like balloons, the inhaler always in the bib pocket.

Being allergic to your life’s work is a tragedy.

Still in bed, he reaches for cigarettes and gets one lit without singeing his baby’s hair or waking up his still-fat and irritable wife. He does not have to worry about waking Alex. On the cusp of being a teenager, the boy could sleep until noon.

The first nicotine rush of the morning is like God’s own inhale before He blew life into the creatures of the earth. Laumann savors a divine pause. A lot of people would run from this FAN thing, afraid of becoming a target for extremists just for doing the job you were hired to do. There are lunatics everywhere; you have to stand up to them.

Laumann replays his triumph at the animal rights convention. It pumps him up, gets him going: how he ignored the intimidation of four hundred people booing and hissing and got up on that stage; how he put that punk away with the courage of a father defending his children, just as every day he goes into his office and defends our precious public lands. Those accusations of him allegedly buying horses and selling them — to a slaughterhouse? Bumbled paperwork! Never happened! A deplorable and false personal attack, he insisted to the crowd. Then, a brilliant diversion: He invited the whole rowdy bunch to go out to the corrals and see how the horses are treated. Understand the BLM is the good guy, doing the right thing. At the end? He got applause! And the punk, Fontana? Thoroughly deballed.

“Don’t blow smoke on Rosalie!” complains his wife without opening her eyes.

“You take her,” he replies.

Not even halfway out of his arms and the kid is screaming. The wife unbuttons her nightgown.

Laumann pulls a plaid wool shirt over his pajamas and goes down the stairs, which smell of the new navy blue runner. He likes the feel, like walking barefoot on a carpet of lichen. Already he has lit a second cigarette, hit the coffee machine, the weather station on a small TV, and picked up the newspaper, running his eye over the headlines. He has to focus on these things before the other thing, the uneasiness, kicks in.

He forces his gaze from the garden window. A cup of Irish vanilla, and he is at the computer, fully charged. He’ll send an e-mail to his district managers and drum up support for building that reservoir out near Steens Mountain, where the drought is impacting the rangeland. FAN will make noise about it. Screw them. These amateur thugs do not have what he has: the big picture.

Laumann’s wife is running downstairs with the baby wrapped in a blanket. The baby’s face is pomegranate red and she is making rasping coughs.

“Croup,” she says. She is a nurse; she knows.

“Get her in the shower.”

“I did. We have to go to the emergency room.”

“What about Alex?”

“Drop me and come back for him. Remember to take his tennis bag — he’s got a tournament.”

Laumann stops typing mid-sentence, reaches for his car keys, lopes up the navy blue stairs, pulls on pants, runs downstairs, runs upstairs again for the car keys he left on the bed, checks on Alex, beautiful and asleep, runs downstairs, to find his wife already out, the back door banging behind her.

They’ve been through this twice before, and each time the panic is the same. That is the real uneasiness. Damn it to hell. Rosalie’s tiny lungs. Damn, it almost makes him cry. Which impurities of the modern world are making her sick? What weakness did his father pass along? He stumbles through the early-morning air, icy cold, like mountain water, and thinks irrationally, I must provide.

The Explorer pulls out of the driveway and accelerates fast.

There is a pause, ten seconds of negative time, long enough for the dust to settle, and then a hard percussive shot and one side of the Laumann house volcanoes out, spewing lumber and new carpeting with orange fire-tongued breath, raining down the unspeakable.

Eighteen

The screen door in the kitchen opens hard, banging against the wall.

“Attack of the vegetables!” Slammer shouts, lunging through with the energy of an entire basketball team. “Destroy all humans!” He is carrying crates of fresh-picked produce, wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off to show a colorful swirl of tattoos on both arms, as if he dipped them up to the elbows in Easter egg dye.

Sara takes the weight of one of the crates, heady with damp earth fragrance, and looks past his shoulder to the organic garden, where the sun has deepened the morning shadows. She stays a foot against the screen door, gazing at the beds of violet-tipped lavender. Her breath forms in the cold country air.

“What?” Slammer asks.

“Reminds me of home.”

“Your parents must live in a pile of goat shit.” She smiles ironically. He stamps his filthy boots. Draping an arm over my shoulders, he whispers, “The feds are here.” “Really? Where?”

“Look.”

Peering through the kitchen window, we can see the utility truck. A repairman is up in a cherry picker.

Slammer had a good look when he went into the garden.

“The feds wouldn’t be that stupid,” I say.

“They’re on to us. The BLM dude’s house got vaporized, dog.” “Yeah, but why would they care about us?”

He grins. “We blow shit up.”

Me, innocent: “Did we blow up Laumann’s house?” The bomb was detonated by a cell phone. Same as the device that killed Steve. Herbert Laumann and his wife and baby escaped by minutes. Twelve-year-old Alex, asleep in bed, sustained third-degree burns. He is expected to survive. Angelo considers Bill Fontana and Dick Stone both suspects in the bombing. Fontana is in custody. The motive would be murderous rage. No question the hero of the movement was humiliated when the deputy state director invaded the stage.

“I didn’t do that bomb,” Slammer says warily.

“Was it FAN?”

“We are FAN,” Sara says, wanting my attention. “But so are a lot of people.” I have noticed sibling rivalry never ends, even when you’re not related.

“Allfather says they’re tapping our phones,” she jabbers on. “I hear clicking all the time when I’m talking, don’t you?” Yes, and that’s why we’re up in the cherry picker for the second time this week. Why can’t they get it right?

“Sometimes I say, ‘Hey, Fed? Are you listening?’” I chuckle, but my throat is dry. “Make sure you only talk about embarrassing personal stuff.” Slammer, teasing: “Not Sara. Sara’s a little prude.” Sara’s cheeks turn pink. “You suck.”

He gives an evil grin and snaps a carrot between his teeth. Completely the opposite of ethereal Sara, who could float away on the steam drifting out of the kitchen, Slammer (aka Jim Allen Colby) is always banging and stomping, eager to destroy whatever’s standing still, usually with a dim-witted expression of glee.

The prominent ears sit equidistant between a fringe of light hair and a long chin, directly in line with the fair eyebrows and narrow eyes that appear to have been passed down through generations of con artists and thieves. His nose is flat and his lips are full (actresses would pay a lot of money for those plump lips), but on Slammer, they seem childlike, on the verge of lying — or, if that doesn’t work, blubbering.

Megan describes Slammer as “a feral animal” when Dick Stone recruited him from under the bridges of Portland. The boy, if you believe him, is a warrior without a soul. His mission is to “expose cowards.” Incorrigible since he was kicked out of day care for attacking other children, he set fire to his father’s house and ran away from a detention center at age fourteen, pissing all over a lumber town up in the state of Washington, for a half-starved squatter’s life with a street family of violent youth — exactly the kind of hot-blooded seventeen-year-old you want in your army.

And he is still uncontainable, shooting off guns, setting pesky little fires, stealing from the drugstore when they take him into town, flying down the sidewalk on a skateboard with his neck chains and do-rag and baggies that are halfway down his ass, a black-garbed neo-pirate, jumping the curb and flipping the bird to drivers too stupid to stop.

Sara goes back to kneading whole-wheat dough. It is 10:30 in the morning and we are starting dinner. It takes a while when you bake your own bread and extract your own almond milk. For some families, I guess, food is a pleasant ritual; on the lost farm, it is another form of slavery.

Everything is strictly vegan, and to Dick Stone’s specifications. The first night, I cut up sweet potatoes to be roasted in the oven, but Megan made me take them out, still sizzling with hot oil, and make the wedges smaller, because that’s the way Allfather likes them. The scorched fingertips were part of the initiation.

Yesterday, we had to hand-rake every twig and piece of bird dropping from the orchard floor, which must be kept “smooth as a pool table,” according to Stone, because when the nuts drop, you don’t want chaff in the harvester. That’s fine, except hazelnuts don’t drop until September, and it’s barely June. Abruptly, he told Slammer he did not appreciate his “work ethic,” and made us all run twenty laps around the trees in the afternoon heat.

Sara, not in any kind of shape, was struggling hard. Her legs were slow and rubbery and her face was hot pink.

In undercover school, they would have asked, “What is the lesson learned?” “Sara’s getting heatstroke,” I told Stone on the pass. “She’s had enough.” He put out his foot and tripped me.

The earth under my knees and in my mouth was soft. I got up and kept on running, so he could not see the look on my face. That was a killer moment, the hardest so far. To put aside your core values in order to accomplish the mission. I had to spit it out. I had to think about justice for Steve Crawford’s family. About the day the sky will be filled with helicopters, and Dick Stone will be in prison the rest of his life.

I stare at the zucchinis with distrust. They are fat as blimps. I will need a computer model to figure out how to dice them into the tiny squares that Megan demands. I sharpen the ancient blackened carbon steel knife for the umpteenth time.

“What’s up with Megan?” Slammer is asking. “Why is she in the basement all the time?” Megan has been working on her quilt, stretched on a frame that takes up almost the entire room. Since the action at the BLM corrals, which she calls “a total disaster,” she has abandoned the kitchen to the children, and we have heard raised voices behind the closed door of the master bedroom.

“She’s sad.” Sara picks up the dough and slams it. “She thinks it’s our fault the cop died at the corrals.” “That’s so weak? The pigs were waiting in ambush. Fuck them. They brought it on themselves.” Slammer’s sitting on a kitchen chair, knees splayed, flicking bits of dough on the floor.

“Stop that!” I snap.

I am not going to make it if I have to chop zucchini and babysit a couple of spoiled, ignorant, hormone-deranged teenagers for the next six months, waiting for something that might not ever happen.

Angelo Gomez warned about this very moment: “You’re driving yourself deeper,” he said of one of his own undercover assignments that lasted thirteen months. “Losing your identity and becoming part of the criminal element. I looked bad, smelled bad. I had a big beard all filled with food and crap. I lived a lie. I was a lie. I wore this big gold cross, and that’s what saved me. I’d lean against the bar so the cross would press against my chest, and something inside would keep me going.” “Look,” says Sara. “The pig’s still there.”

The lineman’s truck has moved down the road, but he is still up in the cherry picker, a splotch of blue overalls below the branches of a pine tree, face hidden in the green. He seems disembodied — a faceless man in a generic uniform, the top of his body gone.

The smell of burned brake lining seems to rise from the pots on the stove. I cannot look again, because I know it will be the face of the police detective that I shot, suspended between heaven and hell. Like a clumsy drumroll, my heart skips a beat and hits race pace in three seconds. The ghost outside the window, ordinary as a telephone repairman, splits my mind.

Who owns me?

“The cross would press against my chest,” Angelo said. “And I’d remember, There’s something else in life besides what I’m doing.” A crimson trail is crawling down the sink.

I’ve sliced my finger and it won’t stop bleeding.

Dick Stone lumbers into the kitchen, boots unlaced after the morning’s work.

“I found this.”

He shows us Darcy DeGuzman’s cell. He’s gone through my stuff.

“Thanks.” I reach for it.

He swallows the phone in one big hand. “No personal cell phones allowed.” “Nobody told me.”

Slammer and Sara have become alert. Suddenly, the boy is busy helping form the whole-wheat loaves.

“No wallets.” Stone is holding the one he has confiscated from my pack. “No watches, either.” I remove my watch and smile feebly. “My time is your time.” He drops my things into the bib of his overalls. Tension crawls into the kitchen and hisses.

Dick Stone waits, eyeing us.

Megan is downstairs, unable to intervene.

He raises an arm and presents a neon orange daypack.

“Who wants to test this out?”

“Me!” Slammer shouts.

The bandit considers. “I want Darcy to do it,” he says, and you can see the hurt cross Slammer’s face.

“Okay with me if Slammer really wants to.” I am pressing a paper towel around the finger cut.

Stone, quietly: “I said Darcy.”

Under a tree away from the house, Stone orders Slammer to help me put the backpack on. It weighs maybe fifteen pounds.

“What does it do?”

“Blows shit up,” Slammer replies. “You pull that cord.” “I don’t think so.”

I try to wriggle out, but he’s latched the buckles.

“No big deal. Just a little pop and red stuff sprays all over the place.” “Another blood bomb? Like the one at the school?” “New prototype,” Stone says briskly. “Ten times more powerful. For the Big One.” He adjusts something sticking out of the pack.

“What’s the Big One? Hey, what are you doing?”

He has flipped open my cell phone and is scrolling through the numbers.

“Where is area code five six one?” he calls, backing away.

“West Palm Beach, Florida.”

“Nervous, Darcy?”

“Not at all. Are you?”

“My heart is going pitty-pat.” He reads a number. “Whose is this?” “My dad’s.”

“Pull the cord!” Slammer yells.

Sara’s beside him, arms crossed over her chest.

“Should I hit redial and find out?” Dick Stone asks. “You tell me.” Is this another head game? He was undercover. Does he know how the phony phone numbers work? Did the FBI use the same technique in the seventies?

“Go ahead and hit redial. Say hi to my dad.”

The relays worked at the off-site, but they haven’t been tested since.

Why does Stone hesitate, staring at the phone?

Slammer: “Pull the cord, dingdong!”

Now I see. Stone has rigged the cell so it will detonate the bomb inside the backpack — just like at Herbert Laumann’s house. Just like with Steve. A seven-digit key code on an FBI phone is about to make another undercover go up like a roasted guinea pig.

What a turn-on for him.

“You are such a chicken shit,” Slammer yells, and rushes me, roaring like a linebacker. I run, but he makes the tackle. We both go down and roll as Dick Stone warns, “I’m hitting redial,” and Slammer gropes for the cord and pulls.

The sharp report of a firecracker. The world goes silent. Burning vapor stings my legs, and in an instant we are both covered in slime, staggering in the center of a perfect twelve-foot circle of blood.

Dick Stone whoops with delight. “It works! The Big One, man!” Sara is bent over, laughing at our crimson horror-mask faces. “Look at you!” Stone lumbers toward me, giggling, the phone outstretched.

“Sorry, darlin’. Dad’s not home.”

This sounds extremely funny to Sara and Stone.

I put the phone to my ear.

“This is George DeGuzman. I can’t get to the phone right now—” The voice is familiar: George DeGuzman, Darcy’s dad, as played by SAC Robert Galloway.

Backstopping.

A screen door between the truth and me.

My fingers are trembling and slippery. It is hard to keep a grip. The phone wants to leap out of my hand.

Megan appears on the front steps, breathless from the run up the basement stairs at the sound of the explosion. She stares at the ludicrous scene, like a postmodern take on hell, Slammer and I swathed in bloody stigmata, blinded souls in a Day-Glo ring of red.

“Are you all out of your minds?” she says.

Sara and Stone are helpless, holding on to each other, wiping tears of manic laughter.

“We’re having some fun,” he manages to reply.

Nineteen

“He’s on to us.”

“Calm down.”

“He found the cell phone. Went through the numbers, like he knew exactly what he was looking for — a leak. A mistake.” “Were there? Mistakes?”

“No, but Mike, he took my wallet and watch. Removed all contact with the outside world. He’s watching me.” “Of course he’s watching you. He’s protecting the cult. Besides, he’s a raging paranoid. Reality check: You’re talking to me, so he has failed. Where is he now?” “Flailing.”

“Sailing?”

I have no patience. “He is flailing—pulling a rotor to clear the vegetation between the trees.” Dick Stone has not discovered the tiny Oreo phone, hidden in the barn under a heavy tack box. I volunteer to feed the animals at first light because it is the only time to be alone. I put on sweats and clogs and hurry across the yard, past the rabbit pen (their numbers dwindling — another one stolen or escaped) before the others wake. The worn barn boards ring with a note of optimism. Here is grain. Here a warm muzzle. The clang of the bucket, the needy cry. In the quiet, the dualities that shout inside my head like opposing political commentators settle down to nothing but the hollow thump of hindquarters on wood, the chesty cough, the uneventful silence in between.

At this same hour in a gated community of postmodern homes in Simi Valley, California, family life is stirring. A grueling commute to Westwood lies ahead for Mike Donnato, who takes my reports while getting dressed and his three sons off to school.

I go on to tell Donnato about the punishment in the orchard — being tripped up when I defended Sara, and the bullying with the loaded backpack.

“He was testing a blood bomb — more powerful — for what he calls ‘the Big One.’” Donnato considers. “Dick Stone is sounding like another David Koresh.” “Please God, no!”

Koresh, who believed he was the incarnation of Jesus Christ, was the leader of the Branch Davidians, a religious group that went down in flames during a suicidal standoff in Waco, Texas. It was another government debacle, as tragic and deluded as the FBI’s confrontation with Native Americans at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where Jack Coler and Ron Williams were killed. In Waco, seven hundred agents and law-enforcement personnel, including Delta Force, attacked with Bradley fighting vehicles and tanks, recklessly shooting tear gas into the compound and causing an inferno. Koresh and some eighty of his followers killed themselves or were burned to death, including children.

Here on the lost farm, birds are singing their hearts out and wind ruffles the big-leaf maples. In the distance, cars begin their noisy claim to the country roads, and deep in the valley, a chain saw. Closer, there is the scrape of hooves on the old planks, and the faint ringing of chains in the cross ties. As I gaze through the wide doorway of the barn at the placid Victorian farmhouse, half-sunk in coronas of lavender, my stomach churns. The Branch Davidians believed their spread was a sanctuary, too.

“What’s the mood?”

“Megan is depressed, Stone is high. The kids are staying out of the line of fire.” “What’s going on with Megan and Stone?”

“She wanted to return these beautiful horses to freedom, and it all turned to shit.” “Sounds like an opening.”

“She’s a lot more practical. He’s all Action Jackson, flies off the handle.” “If there’s a wedge between them, drive it.” “Roger that.”

“Hold on a minute—”

I overhear Donnato speaking sharply to his wife, Rochelle, and wish I hadn’t. It’s the kind of talk that other people shouldn’t hear — the phone tap that blows the cover. If I were married to him, we would sound like that sometimes, too, which kind of kills the fantasy. On the other hand, would I rather be in an air-conditioned bedroom, arguing with a good-looking man in his underwear, or standing in a pile of horse manure?

I turn for solace to Sirocco, a pretty mustang mare with buckskin coloring and a white blanket with black spots on her rear. Three months ago Megan rescued her from a racetrack where she had been a companion horse to Thoroughbreds. She had fallen on the track and broken her hip. She was pregnant at the time and lost the baby. Now she is unrideable, suited only for a pet or the slaughterhouse.

Sirocco is patient with amateurs like me and doesn’t kick while I hide out in her stall. From here, I have good sight lines through the barn doors. Across the road, the tops of the hazelnut trees are still in darkness, but as the sun rises, golden light begins to play across the orchard floor, each rut and groove struck visible, as if a ghostly herd had left a thousand hoofprints filled with shadow. The crows are making a racket, pierced by the engine of Stone’s tractor starting up with an aggressive whine.

“Now is not the time,” Donnato tells his wife. “Can’t you take the kids to school?” Then to me: “Hi, I’m back.” “What’s the matter, pal?”

“Pressure.”

“How’s her dad?”

“Not good.”

I can hear his tension, but it is nothing compared to the sound of the tractor, like a raging alarm through my nervous system. I am pacing, keeping a lookout through the open doors in both directions. Stone, wearing the battered straw hat, keeps on going back and forth.

I don’t like it. I don’t believe it. Why would Stone give it all up to plod the same rectangle day after day? Why, after those mint-issue Los Angeles mornings, when everything is possible, would you cut yourself off from success? Twenty-five years old, freshly shaven, wearing a starched white shirt and tie, he had to have felt like a hero about to be made — the Smith & Wesson in the shoulder holster, draping his coat on the seat back, Mr. Cool, hanging the handcuffs over the brake pedal in case he had to make a quick move out of the Bu-car.

Why did Dick Stone, “eager to be led in the right direction,” renounce it all and quit, so bitter he went over to the other side? Catching sight of the rig, precisely arcing in the turning space beyond the trees, I am certain of one thing: A cop does not surrender his weapon. Not ever.

“Mike? Are you there?”

Donnato and Rochelle are still squabbling. “All right, I’ll take them. Do they have their lunches?” Sirocco’s head is hanging lax, eyes shut. I brush her back. Dust rises. My eyes are on the furrows made by the bristles, the way the buckskin hairs line up glossy and flat; I’m concentrating my impatience on this small but solvable task. Faintly, a screen door slams. Inside the house, they are awake and moving.

“Damn it, Mike! I am in a covert situation here.” Sirocco wakes up and shimmies her neck like a dog with fleas. She stamps and backs up quickly, squashing me against the corner of the stall. Over her spotted rump, the shape of Dick Stone is looming against the light.

“Who are you talking to?”

I flip the Oreo phone shut and enclose it in the palm of my hand.

“Sirocco,” I say, petting her. “Right, girl?” Dick Stone’s face is sweaty and his breath comes hard. Pieces of straw and a fine spray of dirt he must have kicked up marching through the barn at the sound of my voice are floating in the backlight. I can’t believe I was not alert to the fact that the drone of the tractor had cut off. It is quiet now all right.

“You scared her,” I say.

Drawing the brush along Sirocco’s spine the way Megan showed me, maintaining contact with my hands on her coat, I slip around to the other side, keeping her body between us, and slide the phone into my underpants and, with one quick thrust, up into that place where the sun don’t shine — well, not usually.

Stone, mocking: “I scared her?” “Coming up suddenly like that.”

Sirocco’s ears flick and she swings her hindquarters.

Dick Stone levels a dead-on stare into my eyes. Alone and close, his male scent is strong, like my grandfather’s, like the old-fashioned Vitalis that Poppy used to put in his hair.

“Where’d you grow up, Darcy?”

I squeeze my thighs in order not to drop the phone.

“Southern California.”

“Where?”

“The Valley.”

“Are you with someone?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I was.”

“Ever been married?”

“Nope.”

“No exes? No boyfriends?” He appraises me. “I can’t believe that.” My mouth is dry as the straw dust suspended in the air. “Yes, boyfriends. But I left them in L.A.” “Don’t you have anyone in the world?” he presses. “Besides your dad, who lives in Florida?” I pay attention to the distrust spreading through my body, core to fingertips.

Go on the attack. Get right back in their face.

“Why are you so interested in my dad? You want to send him a Father’s Day gift?” “Up to you.”

What does that mean, Up to you?

“Where is your father living?” I counter. “I’d like to send him a card.” Dick Stone’s left eyelid twitches. “I haven’t thought about my father in forty years. I can’t remember the sound of his voice.” “Tell me.”

He snorts derisively. “About my father?” You are pushing it. Get him out of here.

“You know what I did with all that?” Stone continues bitterly. “Wrapped it up in plastic, looped it around with tape, tied it up with rope real good, and shipped it the hell out of here.” He turns, expecting me to follow, but I have picked up a broom.

“I’ve got to finish.”

If I move, I’ll give birth to a communications device.

Dick Stone walks out of the barn. But then, in the wide square of daylight, he turns.

“Why’d you come here, Darcy?”

“To kick the government’s ass,” I say while holding my breath. “I came for action, not sweeping up horse shit.” “Uh-huh. Well you just muck out the stalls and feed the rabbits, and we’ll see about action.” “We lost another rabbit—”

Shut up and let him go.

“I saw this morning,” I continue perversely. “I can’t figure how they’re getting out.” “Nobody locks the cage,” says Stone.

Twenty

I am awakened by gunfire. Crossing the rough floorboards of the attic room I share with Sara, I snap the roller shade. The tattered paper rises lazily, enough to let in a warm current of air perfumed with blackberries that hits me like the delighted slap of a baby on both of Mommy’s cheeks. My brain lights up like a scoreboard. The sharp cracks coming from a distance are definitively shots. Who is killing whom in this pastoral psycho ward?

After feeding the animals that morning, I lay down again and fell into a doze. Now everyone is gone, I discover on this gorgeous summer morning as I hop around the house, pulling on shorts and sandals. Stone and Megan may have gone over to the grange, I remember; if so, they’ve taken Slammer to help load the hay. Sara’s bed is empty.

Dick Stone has bad habits. If he’s not out on the tractor, he’s generally asleep. He has a lot of ailments. Megan keeps a slew of Chinese herbal remedies for his back, knees, and spleen. In the murky hours of the afternoon, after his morning nap, he will hobble downstairs and someone will be waiting to try to talk him out of his usual lunch of sweet rolls and cheap champagne.

But Stone is not in the disheveled bedroom, or the orchard, and the crackling shots have started up again.

I follow the sound, going out the kitchen door, past the rank old goats, the rabbits and ducks, into the barn to retrieve the Oreo phone, then out the back, running through high grass bordered by rampant blackberries. There is a vineyard of dead vines with unkempt half-assed spurs, and stakes in the ground that mark an abandoned garden. Watch out for the hose and rusty wires. Dick Stone keeps his orchard groomed; but behind the house, where nobody can see, everything runs wild.

Breaking into open field, I sprint past a marsh with a silver oval of groundwater in which you can just make out the vertical stance of a great white heron. Megan says that in her grandfather’s day the acreage was used for wheat. She has given it back to migrating birds. I’ve found a trail through the cottonwoods and speed-dial Donnato in Los Angeles, wanting him to know I am heading into an uncertain situation. The sky is clear and the clouds are white and racing — there should be good reception, but the screen says, No Service. Even Rooney Berwick isn’t perfect.

There’s a streambed and I stumble through it, thrashing up the other side. I cannot say I am a woods person; always seem to pick the route with the most thorns. But now I’ve hit a maze of dirt roads and the going is easier and the shots are nearer. Tall cottonwoods have given way to a wasteland of scrub manzanita, crossed by an overhead grid of high electric wires. I’m in some kind of power station. The air changes. Fetid. Septic. Flies are buzzing an overflowing garbage can of trash — beer bottles and a recently disposed-of diaper.

Coming around a curve, I see a new half-ton Silverado, obsidian black, parked at the edge of the clearing. Beside it are a beach chair and a picnic cooler, and an old-fashioned portable radio playing country music, which you can’t really hear over the exploding rounds. Straight ahead, his back to me, a white man of medium build is firing at silhouette targets on wire pulleys a hundred yards away.

The sleeves of his T-shirt are rolled up, James Dean — style, exposing gleaming muscles, and damn if he doesn’t have a pack of cigarettes tucked in the fold. Out near the tree line, below the targets, are some sorry shot-up benches and piles of broken glass and rusted debris accumulated over the years, where the locals have been having a grand time blasting the hell out of innocent objects, like a refrigerator. Amazingly, a posted sign declares we’re in a bird sanctuary.

I’m starting to get mad. Maybe it’s the diaper.

“Hold your fire, please. Would you mind holding fire? Do you know this is a wildlife sanctuary?” The man lowers the weapon and turns, squinting into the blinding sun.

“I ain’t botherin’ the birds.”

“You could, though,” I shout. “You could shoot one by accident. I just saw a bald eagle.” Okay, a heron. “You realize you can go to jail for killing an American bald eagle?” The rifleman says, “I think I know a target from a bird.” One hand shading his eyes, the man is peering at me with slow astonishment, as if I’d landed on his picnic table and swooped the hot dog off his plate.

“This land is protected! There are all kinds of life-forms here that shouldn’t be destroyed. That’s why we have laws, and why the signs are posted!” I am delivering the rap with a passion that does not come from playing the undercover role, but from a deeper shift in my awareness. Remembering how it feels to run my fingers over the sore spots on Sirocco’s back, I think maybe caring for another species is the most important thing that we can do. This is a new idea. Is it dangerous? Enlightened? Does it mean I am slipping over to the other side?

The Oreo phone is vibrating — Donnato returning the call. I guess there is intermittent service here, but suddenly I don’t need it.

The man cradles the rifle so the barrel points up. It is a.308, common to every weekend shooter. He comes closer, until I notice the pointy toes of the worn cowboy boots in a peculiar shade of red, crunching over a carpet of spent casings, and the bandy legs in jeans.

His sunburned face has broken into a wide, sassy grin. “I sure hope you’re not gonna call the police.” “I’m thinking about it.”

“Truly. I would never shoot a protected animal.”

“I already know how you feel about wild horses.”

It is the wrangler from the BLM corrals.

He digs into his ears and removes two soft plugs. “What is that you’re saying, ma’am?” I am staring at him sternly, one hand on a hip. “Why are you following me?” “No problem, ma’am. I’ll go.”

He may be using an ordinary hunting rifle, but nobody except an FBI agent calls anyone “ma’am.” The bastards have put a tail on me.

“We’ve met, remember? My name is Darcy.”

He wears a Nomex flight glove on his left hand and extends the right, the rest of his lean body shyly arching backward in an irritatingly boyish way.

“Sterling McCord, ma’am. Pleased to meet you again.” “What are you doing out here?”

“Just gave a shooting lesson. Ever fire a gun?” He smiles wickedly. There’s a gap on the side of his mouth where a tooth is missing. “I bet you’d like it.” “Come on, Sterling, if that’s really your name. I saw you at the BLM corrals, and now you’re here, a mile from where I happen to be living on a hazelnut farm, which is not my usual territory, but you know all that, don’t you?” Sterling shakes his head.

“Sorry to bust your bubble, Darcy, but I had no idea I would have the pleasure of meeting you again. I’m just following the work, that’s all. Doing some cowboyin’.” “For who?”

“Oh, a fella named Dave Owens, owns a little ranch just up the road.” “Uh-huh. What kind of work are you doing for Dave?” “All kinds. Just drove a trailer full of cattle down from Idaho. Dave has cutting horses; I work them with the cows. You know cutting horses? Well, they’re big money these days. Big show prizes. Dave’s a good boss, but he’s never there. He’s in the insurance business, down in San Francisco.” “And this is your idea of ‘cowboyin’?”

McCord cocks his head away. “Truthfully, I don’t want to be a hand anymore. I want to be a horse trainer.” “Sounds like a cover to me.”

“Cover for what?” Puzzled, he opens the lid of the cooler, offers a Corona. “Refreshment?” “Guns and alcohol don’t mix.”

“I’m done. Sun’s hot.”

“All right.”

“Thank you,” he says mockingly. “Score one for my side.” I accept a cold beer and reject a packet of fried pork rinds. My eye, drawn to the red boots (Are they ostentatious or not?) falls to the gleaming litter of spent casings on the ground. Lying in the carpet of brass, two or three of an unusual caliber stand out. Most commonplace rifles, like McCord’s, use.30-caliber bullets, but the shell I’m looking at is.50-caliber — harder to find because they are mostly used by Army snipers to knock out tanks.

And to kill cops.

Somebody out here has been taking shooting practice with the same unusual-size bullet that killed Sergeant Mackee.

While Sterling McCord pulls in the targets, I scoop two.50-caliber casings into the pocket of my shorts.

Silhouette targets are unusual, too, as most marksmen use bull’s-eyes. And this guy is consistently scoring body shots, which shows a fair level of skill.

“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

“U.S. Army, Delta Force.”

The openness of the answer is not what I expected.

“Delta Force? Isn’t that an elite”—I want to say unit—“thing? How do you get to do something like that?” “You have to be invited” is all McCord says.

You have to have ten years’ service, be smart, have sniper-level skills with a rifle, and endure an eighteen-day selection course of physical deprivation and mental hardship that makes undercover school look like a sunny day in Tahiti.

“Is being in Delta Force like the movies? Secret missions, all that jive?” “I don’t know about that. Delta Force was good to me, but right now, I’m going back to the only thing that makes sense, which is horses.” I watch him clean the weapon. He is meticulous, patiently running a bore brush and guide rod from the back of the barrel toward the front. That’s how the pros do it.

“You ask about cowboyin’?” he says, concentrating on the gun. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s livin’ in some itty-bitty trailer on the back of someone’s property out near the dump, being treated like dirt, getting into a fight with the boss because he’s some rich guy who doesn’t know dog doo about cutting horses, and then moving on after six months. But I figure whatever low-rent job they throw at me, I’ll do it if it makes me a better horseman.” “I’m taking care of a horse.”

“Is that right?”

“Just learning how. I live on the hazelnut farm. Do you know Megan Tewksbury and Julius Emerson Phelps?” He loads the cooler into the truck.

“No, but I heard the names from that other little girl lives over there.” “Sara?”

He is latching up the doors of the Silverado.

“That’s right. She’s the one I was teaching how to shoot.” “How do you know Sara?”

“Seen her around town. Told her my sorry story, just like I told you.” He shrugs. “And she says she wants to learn about guns.” “She say why?”

“I never asked.”

“We’re…political, you know.”

“Not my business. So maybe we’ll meet up again. Stranger things have happened.” I hesitate. “Did I say thank you, Sterling?”

“For what, Darcy?”

“Saving my life.”

“Back at the corrals? Nah, you were fine. Horses don’t generally want to kill you, if they can avoid it.” McCord’s got the door open and one boot up on the running board.

He waits. Again, the patience as one wrist in a tight copper bracelet rubs at the back of his sweat-stained neck. His hair is spiky and dirty blond; his eyes, like the bracelet, are rimmed with copper, green at the centers.

“Can I give you a ride?” he asks as someone shouts, “Sterling! Wait!” Sara Campbell, in a pair of cheeky cutoffs and a scant top, charges around the curve in the road, running in her awkward knee-knocking gait. Her face is flushed persimmon. She falters.

“Sara!” he calls. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh my God!” she sobs.

We both run toward her. I’m thinking, Dehydration! And, with a jealous edge, Something’s going on between these two.

She is panting. “I was hoping you’d still be here.” “What’s the matter, hon?”

“On my way back, I saw a baby horse. It’s in the bushes — hurt really bad — and there’s sickening blood just pouring everywhere.” “Blood where?”

She screws up her face. “Coming out of his eyes.”

“Get in the truck,” says McCord.

Twenty-one

The terrain rises and the vegetation becomes sparse as we roll out of the power station toward the mountains. Looking back from higher ground, you can see the cat’s cradle of high-tension wires and transformers enclosed by manzanita, like an alien marker on a planet made of sand; only in America could there exist a sanctuary both for birds and bullets.

Wheeling the vehicle with the palm of one hand, McCord swerves off-road to the riverbed where Sara saw the foal, east of where I crossed the wooded stream. The bulky black machine raises veils of dust as it lurches over the sandstone grist of an ancient floodplain, no doubt fertile as a jungle a million years ago.

“What does it mean if a horse bleeds from the eyes?”

“Snakebite,” says McCord. “The venom is an anticoagulant. They bleed out from everywhere.”

“Can they die?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Down there!” cries Sara.

McCord brings the truck to the edge of a ridge. We scramble out, into the kind of baking heat you feel with all the skin on your body all at once. A sun-dark lizard skitters at our feet. Below, a stand of cottonwoods marks the trail the river took, but since the drought, it has not passed this way in years. Birds with different voices are hidden everywhere; some sweet, some warning.

“Look! Underneath the branches.”

A slender tree with a network of smooth willowy branches, bending to the ground like an old woman where the water used to flow, seems to gesture toward the body of a white baby horse lying on its side. All four legs kick out in a spasm that breaks my heart.

Coils of heat bake the sweat off my bare shoulders. The foal, where it lies, is fully exposed to the sun.

“Let’s see what we got,” says McCord. “Quietly. The wind’s comin’ that way. Don’t want him to smell us and get aroused.”

He motions that we get down into a squat and crab-leg it slowly toward the animal, stopping every ten feet to test the wind. Finally we are close enough to see it clearly in the lee of the branches. Its muzzle is swollen twice the normal size and bright red blood has covered its face, attracting glittering swarms of greenflies.

McCord reaches toward the chalky, almost translucent coat. It is not pure white; you can see dark clouds of pigment underneath, like a stormy desert sky. He runs his fingers along the neck, below a two-inch strip of bristly silver mane, and down the long and fragile legs, rosy with sores. In response, the baby tries to lift its head. Its face is long and delicately etched. The eyes are crying tears of blood. Pink-rimmed, with thick white lashes, they are opaque spheres of shiny blackened indigo.

“Shh now, just lie still.”

Sara, whispering: “Was he just born?”

McCord is checking the scrawny ribs. “He’s one month old and just about starved.”

“Is he wild?”

“Probably got loose from a ranch. Looks to be part Arab. The mom either took off somewhere or she’s dead. Anyone have a cell phone?”

Sara and I stare at each other, helpless and ashamed.

“We’re not allowed to have cell phones on the farm,” she says.

“Why’s that? So you can’t talk to your boyfriends?”

“We just can’t.”

I look at the ground and say nothing. My fingers clutch the Oreo phone in my pocket.

“Will this little guy live?”

“Depends if the toxin’s already in the bloodstream. We got to call the vet.”

I am about to curl up and die with guilt. I cannot make the call. To pull out the tiny phone now would be to expose myself.

You cannot blow a half-million-dollar operation on one stray horse.

“Don’t get near his face. It’s sore and we don’t want him to move or raise his head. Damn. Everybody in the world has a damn cell phone. I left mine at the damn house.”

“Why don’t you get in the damn truck and get help?”

McCord holds his answer. He climbs up the embankment with long strides.

The girl is standing with her arms and feet all crossed up. She looks anxiously toward the truck. “Is he just gonna leave us here?”

I’m running my hand down the thin, pale throat of the foal, feeling the shuddering nerves.

“Touch him. He’s soft.”

“I don’t want to. It’s disgusting.”

“Scary, huh?”

“Not at all,” says Miss Nothing Affects Me. “I just don’t enjoy watching something die, okay?”

“Then why were you taking shooting lessons?”

“Shooting lessons?” she says, as if she’d forgotten. “I don’t know. He was coming on to me at the ice-cream store, so I said to myself, ‘Okay, this is different.’ He’s cute, but kind of old.”

McCord skids back down the hill on his heels, carrying a bottle of water and an old shirt.

“Keep him quiet. Sponge him down to cool him off. The rattler’s most likely still around, so watch where you step.”

“Shit,” says Sara, jerking her feet.

“What’s wrong with his eyes?” Flies are walking on the darkened pupils.

“Oh,” says McCord matter-of-factly. “This little baby is blind.”

My stomach lurches. “Are you sure?”

McCord replies, “Yeah,” and passes a hand before the dark violet eyes of the horse, which do not blink. “Could be why he was abandoned. I’m going for the vet.”

McCord turns, but Sara grabs his arm.

“Just shoot him.”

The world goes silent, except for the clicking of crows and the dry maraca rattle of insects in the grass.

“Shoot him,” she insists.

McCord is astounded. “He’s not my horse to shoot.”

“He’s nobody’s horse. Scary, isn’t it?” she taunts, mocking me. “Why not? You have guns in the truck.”

McCord and I find each other’s eyes, if only to affirm that we’re the grown-ups here, not about to be manipulated by an overly indulged runaway brat. What, exactly, does she wish to kill? And what does she know about the acrid smell of the aftermath?

“Taking a life is serious business,” says McCord, and then I am certain of what I have suspected: that he’s been the places I’ve been.

“The horse is going to be blind the rest of its life,” says Sara with disdain. “What’s the point?”

The look between us deepens, not over the suffering of the child or the animal, but something much more tender and sad. McCord and I both know that way out here in the wash there are no landmarks beyond a yellow fire hydrant and a concrete bunker with some pipes in a mesh cage. This is where your heart is exposed, or where it’s buried.

He does not wait, but climbs the ridge.

“Sara!” I am giving orders now. “Get in the truck and go with Sterling.”

McCord looks down from the top of the embankment.

“Sara? Come on now. Come with me.”

And he holds out his hand patiently until she finally scrambles up. He pulls her over the top and the truck disappears.

Space unrolls in every direction. I take a breath full of sage. I sit beside the foal and sponge the blood off its face. Please don’t be in pain. Please forgive me.

The bees hum like a plucked string. I sit beneath a dead oak, against a mud bank where the broken root system is exposed. There are holes and burrows in the mud and it is stained with dried-out algae, like the cross section of a melted civilization. The smell of deadness is rank. The sky is white and far away, the sun a burning locus. Here at the bottom of the riverbed, the lives of the foal and I are as inconsequential as the flash of a mirror in a very great plain.

Hundreds of miles to the north, across a harsh volcanic basin, wild mustangs forage freely, fight, and play — until they are betrayed by the Judas horse for a bucket of grain. I remember how the captured mares would circle the corral, lost in silence, all the subtle scent and body messages with their babies and the stallions snapped.

Beneath my hands, the tiny horse is laboring to breathe. I stay with him, dabbling water with the blood-soaked cloth, as if I could accompany his sightless soul into the greater darkness. I feel a deep and wordless kinship, as if we are bound by some transparent force of kindness. I will not abandon you.

Am I the Judas horse, cynical and beaten? Or the innocent foal?

After a very long time, the amber lights of the veterinarian’s truck show above the ridge.

Twenty-two

July. Intruders are everywhere.

False dandelion invades the perfectly swept orchard floor, no matter how often Stone drives the flail, or makes us rake by hand. We are halfway through the development of the hazelnuts, and tiny larvae of the leaf-roller moth have appeared on the new clusters. Bad news. The larvae cause nut abortions, not a pretty sight. In the still heat of the afternoon, I am up on a ladder setting insect traps, using the work as a cover to check in with Donnato.

I have discovered that poking around the topmost branches of the hazelnuts is an excellent way to conduct a covert conversation. For one thing, it’s great up there. You see things differently, like opening a secret hatch to a world of sky. Rooftops and mountains become your ground — and unlike hiding out in Sirocco’s stall, if Dick Stone ventures into the orchard, you would be the first to know.

“The fifty-caliber casings you found are a match to the slug that killed Sergeant Mackee,” Donnato is saying from L.A. “The shooter is the same as the one at the BLM corrals.” “What about the Native American we took into custody?”

“He had a pretty good alibi. At the time of the shooting, he was in a local emergency room being treated for ulcers. Now we need the weapon.” “The sniper rifle that matches the casings,” I agree, watching a white butterfly skimming perfectly through the leaves.

“Stone has it somewhere. Make a search,” he tells me, “room by room.” “Got it,” I say without enthusiasm.

“You should be ecstatic.”

“About the casings? Yeah, it’s cool.”

“What’s up?”

“Just be straight, okay?”

“Always, buddy, you know that.”

“Do you have an agent tailing me? Because I can’t function that way, and frankly, I resent the hell out of it.” “A federal agent?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“The cowboy? Come on. Good-looking, mid-thirties? He shows up at the corrals, working on the gather? Then he appears again, a mile from the farm, hitting targets like a pro?” “At the same shooting range? You’re kidding. What kind of gun?” “Don’t get excited. It was a hunting rifle, a.308.”

Your handler doesn’t tell you everything. While you’re alone and isolated undercover, the Bureau will be working things from the other end, putting operatives in place you don’t know about. They’ll say it’s for your safety, but it can make you paranoid fast.

“If you don’t like this guy, check him out,” Donnato says.

“I don’t like him,” I reply.

“Search his vehicle, for a start.”

“That would be difficult,” I say. “He’s riding a horse.” Because there, in the heaviest torpor of the day, when stubborn fever becalms the air and the stringed vibration of the bees hits an even riper pitch, Sterling McCord is riding slowly down the sun-soaked lane on a bay, leading the white foal on a halter rope.

It’s the bay mare who rescued me, loaded up with the same silver-encrusted western saddle, but this time walking leisurely at loose rein with head low, flicking her ears at the flies. McCord’s posture is identical to when they were at full gallop, head tipped forward and shoulders relaxed, as if he is half-asleep.

He is wearing the high red-tooled boots and spurs, jeans, a clean white shirt, and the Stetson with the vintage cowboy crease. As the lazy clomping of horseshoes passes below me, I can see the tight copper bracelet on one strong wrist, a braided leather one on the other, and I have a clean downward angle of vision on the squarish hands with wide finger pads resting on the horn of the saddle — manly and competent hands you would entrust to complete the mission.

Whatever the mission might be.

I stay silent until he passes. Does he know without looking that I am here — the way Dick Stone knew when I first arrived?

“There’s something about this guy,” I tell Donnato. “He’s not who he appears to be.” “What name does he use?”

“Sterling McCord.”

“We’ll check him out.”

I cannot tell if my partner of twelve years is telling the truth.

That is what I mean by paranoid.

Megan and Sara have gathered around the horseman in the shaded driveway.

“Look at that sweet thing,” Megan says, crooning over the foal. “You’re our new baby.” McCord tips his hat. “Good afternoon, ladies.”

His eyes remain hidden in the shadow of the brim, but his skin seems to have acquired a darker tan, with deeper leathery lines, and the blond sideburns have grown long and rough. It occurs to me that in his outdoor life, he, too, is a creature of transforming elements, same as the eroding granite outcrop; unlike city folks, he wouldn’t try to put the brakes on aging, and he wears it well. He’s dropped the reins and the horse dozes beneath him. I like this touch: a knife in a leather sheath buckled to his thigh.

The foal has gained weight. Its sculpted head is up and alert, the bristly mane long enough to flop over, and the small pinkish hooves strike the dirt inquisitively. But the dark violet eyes are empty as mirrors.

“Does he have a name?” Megan asks.

“Geronimo.”

“You are cute as the dickens!” she tells the foal, and actually kisses it on the nose.

“Sara,” McCord calls from the saddle, “look at your boy.” “He’s not mine.”

She is wearing skintight jeans that hit below her slack hipbones, and a gingham top somewhere between a bra and a bib.

The foal’s dark muzzle has shrunk to normal size, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, which it explores with eager lips.

“Sorry, big guy.” I laugh. “I don’t have anything for you.” “He wants to suck,” Megan explains plaintively.

McCord’s attention is still on Sara. “What do you think?” “He looks all right.”

“He is all right,” McCord replies, cheery.

Megan: “Will he ever get his sight back?”

“Afraid not, Miss Tewksbury. The vet says it’s difficult to determine exactly the cause of the blindness, but the corneas are permanently scarred.” “Poor sweetheart.”

“He’ll do fine with the right care. You’d have to keep his environment consistent, in a corral where he always knows where’s his water and feed. But his other senses will become more accurate, and he’ll be able to get around, maybe as a companion animal to another horse.” “Like Sirocco?” Megan gazes up at McCord with the expectant look of a wife who really wants that washing machine.

“That’s what I was thinking. How long since she lost her baby?” “She had that accident on the track and came to us…maybe three months ago?” “Then she could still lactate.”

“Really? Nurse Geronimo?”

“It’s possible.”

He slides off his horse.

“So, Sara, do you like him?” he asks.

She shrugs. “He’s cute.”

“Like to keep him?”

“Keep him?”

“Look after him awhile, you and Sirocco, help him along. He needs a lot of TLC, and Dave Owens’s barn is full.” Sara blushes. Her shoulders collapse with doubt. “Me?”

“You’re the one who found him. In my book, that gives you claim.” McCord offers the rope.

Lifelong skepticism does not allow me to believe that Sterling McCord has traveled down the road this dusty summer afternoon simply to give Sara Campbell exactly what she needs, but as he patiently holds the lead out to her, whatever dark possibilities I conjure just don’t seem to hold. Whether McCord is an FBI agent on my tail or a cowboy doing a job, he is offering the girl what has been missing from her life.

Something to love.

Sara reaches out and her fingers close around the rope. The blind foal’s head comes up to her chest and his spindly legs match hers. She tentatively strokes his neck and fingers the fluff hanging off his chin.

“Let’s take him to Sirocco,” Megan says hopefully. “See if she’ll nurse.” We walk in procession toward the barn — McCord leading his horse, Sara and the herky-jerky foal, Megan and I — passing the white cat, the ducks, and the wire cage, now empty.

Someone has stolen all the rabbits.

“We’re having a party,” Megan tells McCord. “A midsummer festival. Please come. I’d like to buy you a drink for taking care of Geronimo.” “Not necessary but much appreciated. Especially if this lovely young lady’s gonna be there.” He is talking about Sara.

Sirocco is standing placidly in the pasture when Megan leads the foal inside. She unsnaps the lead rope and withdraws, latching the gate. They approach and sniff each other. Sirocco dodges away. The baby chases her, and she wheels in the dust. He follows, absolutely desperate, but she won’t let him near, making little nips and kicks. Abruptly, when she’s ready, she just stops, and after a moment, he finds the teats.

Megan, leaning on the fence, quietly thumbs the tears from her eyes.

The gun that killed Sergeant Mackee is a single-shot bolt-action sniper rifle about fifty inches long, weighing between fourteen and eighteen pounds. Not the kind of thing you can hide in a sugar bowl.

Every day, with quiet urgency, I search another part of the house. Every night, lying in bed, I perform a mental inventory of the rooms, noting anything missing or out of place. I visualize the porch. Grasses have grown tall around the rusted sink. Thick stands of lavender and wild daisies remain unbroken around the crawl space underneath the steps, and the basement windows show an untouched glaze of dust, meaning nobody’s been creeping around down there, hiding weapons. The narrow windows at ground level look in on Dick Stone’s workshop, which is always locked, and I have never rubbed the dirt away to spy inside. Stone is likely checking his own inventory every day.

The front hall is a staging area of floating possessions — jackets, umbrellas, junk mail, Slammer’s skateboard — but there is also a closet jammed with vacuum cleaner parts, tennis rackets, rain gear, and brooms, at the back of which is a latched door. Hurried inspection with a flashlight reveals the door and latch have been thickly painted over. Probably leads to a crawl space beneath the stairs.

The kitchen, to the left of the entryway, is a public space that would be hard to use for hiding contraband. The living room is a challenge. There are so many collections of tiny things, it is a perplexing game of Memory to place every piece of Depression glassware and each china cat. I have moved them just to see if Megan will move them back. She does.

In the living room, the TV is always playing, even in the daytime semi-darkness. At night, we assemble on the caved-in couch grooved with body imprints, like any other cobbled-together American family, placing our heels on the coffee table precisely in the spaces between the old wine bottles and bowls of dried-up guacamole, watching cop shows or a movie from Dick Stone’s collection of tapes. He has become obsessed with Apocalypse Now.

Also, he has begun to get in shape.

Stone is jogging ten miles in the mornings, a major change, which gets my attention. Offenders have rituals. They will alter their looks, get high, call Mom, or rob a store before they’re ready to go out and execute a major crime.

Like the Big One.

Along with a dedicated running schedule, he has been screening this movie regularly — once or twice a week — all of us saying the dialogue out loud like a gospel choir. Stone is as fussy about his tapes as Megan is about the candy dishes — he always keeps Apocalypse Now on the fourth bookshelf, at eye level, between The Deer Hunter and Taxi Driver.

One day, I noticed his favorite cassette was missing. It stayed missing for seventy-two hours; then it was back in the same place. Had he lent it? Is he playing with my head?

The sewing room is a drafty screened-in porch with tilting bamboo shades and bolts of discount cloth infested with earwigs. I call it the “Room of Unfinished Dreams.” An old Singer sewing machine is the island in the storm, black lace panties caught in its teeth, as Sara comes in here to sew her samples of lingerie — original designs that she claims she’ll sell one day to big department stores. There’s a dressing table with a big round mirror, drawers stuffed with Megan’s bags of yarn. The white cat likes the rattan love seat in the morning sun.

Lying in bed at night, I float inside my head like a dreamer to the upper limits of the sewing room, recollecting that the dropped ceiling tile showed no signs of removal (for illicit storage in the space above); then my inner eye travels up the stairs, past the German wall clock, to Stone and Megan’s bedroom, and the mondo mess of pills and herbal remedies in the master bath — including the heavy-duty antipsychotics Mellaril and Haldol, and benzodiazepines for anxiety, Ativan and Librium. It would be excellent to trace the doctor who wrote the prescriptions, but they are all generic, from Mexico. Megan, who did a stint as an aide in a psychiatric facility, has apparently been playing amateur shrink with Dick Stone’s brain.

Every day, I inspect Slammer’s room, the outbuildings, and of course the attic, and in every night’s review so far, this aging Victorian dame of a farmhouse has convinced me that she has herself in order — nothing wanton, nothing to hide.

The only place I have yet to search is Dick Stone’s locked workshop.

I was in there only once, on the pretext of going down to the basement to get laundry detergent.

Megan had been working on her quilt. A Christian station played on the radio. Megan likes that because it reminds her of her childhood. She was the eldest of five, growing up in an austere minister’s home in snowy northern Michigan. All the other siblings took up charitable work. One of her sisters was killed on a mission to Africa, but Megan doesn’t say how.

The large frame that holds the quilt barely leaves enough space for a couple of hanging bicycles and metal shelves with household supplies — canned food and bleach. In an L-shaped room beyond, they have installed an industrial stove for the seasonal chore of making hazelnut brittle.

It was damp in the basement and Megan was wearing a plum red shawl over an Indian blouse with fringes at the hem, a peaceful look on her face as she sewed patches on the quilt. I noticed a glass and half-empty bottle of wine on the floor. The door to Stone’s shop was open, yellow light spilling out. It was almost romantic to imagine them on winter nights, pursuing their rustic hobbies side by side.

I filled the canister from a bin of laundry detergent, then wandered over to the woodworking shop, where Stone was applying lacquer to a cross section of tree trunk perched on a pair of sawhorses.

“What are you making?”

“A table.”

“What kind of wood is that?”

“Douglas fir.”

“It looks like marble.”

Quickly, I advanced through the doorway, sucking in the details like an alien invader: Table saw. Drill press. High window at ground level. Built-in cabinets, home-improvement clutter.

“Thirty coats of varnish. That’s how I get it to look like marble.” Jars, tiny drawers of screws and nails; pliers, drills, drill bits, chisels. A pair of steel storage cabinets with a padlock.

“The grain is beautiful. How do you know where to cut it?” “You have to read the wood.” He dragged a blackened fingertip across the polished slab. “See that darkness? That’s when the tree began to die.” I saw a black cloud, like a squirt of ink, spreading V-like through the amber rings of growth.

“That’s death. You’re looking at it,” Dick Stone said.

He keeps the guns in the locked cabinets.

At that moment, in the workshop fragrant with cedar dust and hard work, he could almost pass for exactly what he seemed: a hazelnut farmer with eager, skilled hands, awed by the inevitability of nature.

But then I saw the videocassette of Apocalypse Now on the workbench. I was certain I had just seen it, moments before, upstairs.

“You must really like that video to have two copies.”

Dick Stone said briefly, “It’s the greatest movie ever made.”

I cannot get into the workshop again until one rare morning when they’ve all gone into town and Dick Stone has left for a run. I wait fifteen minutes after he’s gone, and then hustle down the basement steps, clutching the set of lock picks delivered earlier by an FBI agent posing as a U.S. postal worker. In undercover school at Quantico, we ran time tests for defeating dead bolts; Stone’s workout has handed me at least an hour.

It takes only five minutes to blow Operation Wildcat sky-high.

Twenty-three

Inserting a tension wrench into the keyhole of the cylinder and then alternating several picks, I finally find the one with the right angle to lift each pin. The plug rotates and the lock opens.

The door to Dick Stone’s woodshop swings wide. I hesitate, as if someone is waiting in ambush. Sterling McCord, maybe. He has a way of appearing when you least expect him. But there is nothing. Dead air. I pull out a penlight and aim it at the floor.

As the light passes the legs of the sawhorse that holds the fir table, a wastebasket flips, and brown mice scatter. The scent of orange peel rises from the garbage. I right the wastebasket. My heart is racing and I have to pee. The smell of resin and lacquer in the enclosed space is dizzying.

I seriously hope there are no more mice.

The cone of light walks up the tall steel cabinet and stops at the padlock that secures the handles. This one is a common tumbler lock, using wafers instead of pins, and can be picked the same way. I’m getting good at this. The tumbler clicks and the hasp slides open.

Alone at the bottom of the quiet house, I insert the penlight between my teeth and open the cabinet doors, anxious to reveal Stone’s secret arsenal — expecting to find the sniper rifle, automatic weapons, Tovex explosives.

Instead, I am looking at a four-split television monitor.

In each corner of the screen is a different view of the empty house: living room, kitchen, sewing room, stairs.

It is an arsenal all right: a sophisticated wireless surveillance system, including a high-sensitivity receiver, whip antenna, and down converter.

Before I can begin to think of a way to cover up this horrendous breach of Stone’s security system, I notice the cassette of Apocalypse Now is resting on the upper shelf of the cabinet. I know he loves the movie, but why hide it in here?

The moment I pick it up, the quadrants on the TV monitor flip to four different views — driveway, bathroom, attic, inside the cabinet—and there is Special Agent Ana Grey, staring into the camera like a bonehead tourist. As I move the cassette, my image on the split screen moves accordingly.

Stone has hidden a tiny camera in the spine of Apocalypse Now. He kept the camera aimed from the shelf in the living room, but he must have switched it for the real videotape when I noticed there were two. He has the whole place under constant surveillance. I can see from the monitor there is even a covert camera inside the German wall clock, keeping watch on who’s going up the stairs. And who’s been searching the house.

The apocalypse is looking at me now, through the pinhole of a live camera, less than an eighth of an inch in diameter.

My nose, on the screen, is as big as the snout of a moose.

That night at 1:00 a.m., a flashlight shines in my face.

“Get up,” says Stone.

I am already up, speed-dialing a thousand explanations. I have avoided him all day.

“You broke into my shop.”

“What are you talking about?”

I swing out of bed, but he pushes me down, his hand squarely on my chest.

“You broke into my workroom and my personal cabinets.” “Why would I do that? It’s the dumbest thing in the world.” “It’s all on tape, Darcy.”

I say nothing.

Neither affirm nor deny.

“Yeah.” He nods, reading my face. “That’s right. You’re toast.” I notice Sara is not in her bed. He has me alone. He has set the stage for — what?

“All right!” I shout, and surprise him by lunging for the wall switch, defiantly flicking on the light, making him squint.

“I did break into your shop, and I’ll tell you why I—” “Is that so?”

He sits beside me and the mattress sinks. Again, that scent of male, and the threat of two hundred pounds of leaned-out muscle and bone. He’s wearing a loose rayon shirt and jeans, long, hairy toes blackened with sawdust gripping the shower thongs that pass for slippers. He must have just come from the basement, checking his daily surveillance tapes.

“Everything around this place is a huge big secret,” I rant on. “I’ve been here weeks, and you still don’t trust me? Now I find out you’re spying on us? Your own people, who live in your house?” “It’s for everyone’s protection.”

“What if those tapes wind up on the Internet? Or maybe this whole operation is some kind of a setup.” “Setup for what?”

“Maybe you’re working for the cops.”

“Why would I?”

“To destroy the movement from the inside. They pull that shit, you know.” Dick Stone rubs his forehead, shiny from the warmth of the night.

“No need to freak, little sister. I came up here just to say ‘Right on.’” What is that in his amber eyes — besides middle-aged fatigue, glazed by the lateness of the hour? Something I haven’t seen before: Amusement?

He lays a heavy arm across my shoulders.

“Darcy, I would have done the same damn thing. Looked through Daddy’s drawers when the folks weren’t home. You know, I did that once when I was a kid, and guess what I found? In my father’s nightstand? A heap of condoms and a huge fucking kitchen knife he kept right by the bed. That was a shocker.” “Which? The condoms or the knife?”

“The knife, man. What was he thinking?” Stone shakes his head.

“Protecting the family, just like you.”

“We lived in suburban Connecticut.”

“Gotta watch out for those serial stockbrokers.” Dick Stone snorts with laughter. “You’re not far wrong. He was a competitive old bastard.” “You’re not mad about the cabinets? I see a lock, I can’t help thinking there must be something righteous inside, worth protecting.” He nods. “I dig it. You’ve got skills, girl.”

“Used to be a pretty good thief. Got busted for stealing data, served my time, but a regular padlock — that’s just too tempting.” Dick Stone’s face is now so close, I can see the tiny bristles on his cheeks.

“One question. Where did you hide the tools? You can’t just pick a lock.” “Have you been going through my stuff?”

“Regularly.”

“That’s why I kept moving them.”

I reach under the bed, pull out a small bundle that was duct-taped to the frame, and toss it over.

This open display stops him. Could anyone actually be so guileless?

I’ve pasted on a casual smile but I think I’ve stopped breathing. For several long seconds I watch Dick Stone waver, like a high school coach who discovers his best starting pitcher smoking weed in the locker.

Screw it. He likes the kid.

“Darcy,” he says slowly, “you’re okay. You’re the same as me. All you want is to have some fun. You like to start little fires, don’t you?” I rest for a moment in enormous relief. He hasn’t made a move on me, hasn’t doubted my story. And there is truth in what he says — sitting butt-to-butt on the edge of the bed, seemingly at ease in the heart of the night like father and daughter, or supervisor and agent, we recognize something inside the other that is the same.

A paradox is unfolding. The longer I stay under, the larger Dick Stone becomes. Rather than working his way into ordinariness through everyday contact, he grows more vivid, and my own sense of self-cohesion fades. The boundaries between Darcy and Ana seem inconsequential, not worth defending, as we are swept toward the Big One by some inner momentum of Stone’s that the meticulous procedures of the Bureau are powerless to stop. Donnato’s voice on the Oreo phone and my former life in Los Angeles dwindle and disappear like radio signals moving out of range.

The first time I drove through the Marine base at Quantico as a new agent, there was that orgasmic surge of ecstasy: This is what I’ve always wanted! Now, out of this cozy intimacy with Stone, the same words echo, but with a newly ominous tone: This is what I wanted, going undercover, isn’t it? To forget the past and my mistakes and the larger-than-life figures who dominated, even as the realization creeps at the edge of my mind that I have replaced one despot with another.

There is no retribution here. Dick Stone believes what he has said — that he and I are somehow the same — and now that he is done saying it, he simply gets up and leaves.

And the Darcy part of me experiences a rush of feeling for the old bandit that Ana, still the FBI agent, could never admit: Affection.

Twenty-four

The panic in Donnato’s voice brings Ana Grey back instantly.

“You breached Stone’s security system?”

“I was looking for the sniper rifle.”

“What’d he do?”

“He laughed.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“He likes me, or he’s nuts.”

“Or he’s made you and is playing for time.”

My stomach flips. “I have no way of knowing, do I?”

Neither of us speaks. I am up in the hazelnut trees again, fussing with the traps for moths, and not liking the symbolism one bit.

“This is not a disaster,” Donnato muses, as if to assure himself. “We can piggyback on his wireless signal. Hear everything going on inside the house.”

“If he made me, he wouldn’t let you do that,” I remind him.

“Tell me this — where does he go every morning?”

“He started running and lost fourteen pounds. I told you, it’s a new ritual. I think he’s preparing for the Big One.”

“Does he always go by the front door?”

When I first came to the lost farm, the agent in the cherry picker who was dressed like a repairman, aside from wiretap devices, installed cameras on the telephone poles. Command center in Portland can see everything that comes and goes.

“Because we don’t always get a visual until he’s a quarter mile away from the house,” Donnato says. “How does he get out? Suddenly he pops on-screen, heading north. We don’t know how he gets there or where he’s going. Find out.”

At 7:45 a.m. the next day, Stone, wearing a fluorescent yellow Grateful Dead T-shirt, running trunks, and a belt holding a water bottle, heads out through the kitchen door. No big mystery about that. I watch from the second-floor window — careful to stay beyond the range of the camera installed in the German clock — as he jogs twice around the soft track of the orchard, then veers into the wooded parcel behind the house.

I’m out the kitchen door, across the overgrown garden, and on the trail, keeping a hundred yards between us. As we move through the woods, I can see his shirt flashing up ahead. Then I lose him, but he has to stay on the trail or run through scrub. When we come out at the cottonwood trees, I duck below the wash. Now he’s in open territory, looking like any other fitness runner, tuned in to his iPod, dark stains on the T-shirt, churning muscular calves. The music keeps him focused — eyes ahead, not even thinking of watching the rear — so I stretch out and match his pace as we come up to the muddy tracks of the wildlife sanctuary.

Against the sky, the matrix of power wires becomes more defined as we draw close. To my right is the plain where the blind foal was found. As Stone keeps on moving through the maze of manzanita, an epiphany of logic breaks over me like a cold shower: He’s heading for the shooting range where I found the.50-caliber shell.

This is where he practices shooting his weapons. Including the sniper rifle that killed Sergeant Mackee.

I am getting excited now. I wish to call Donnato, but I know there is no cell phone service here. The hard-furrowed roads are hazardous for turned ankles, and Stone is slowing down. No shots echo — it’s too early for your ordinary amateur shooter. I take a spur trail and circle around to where I suspect he’s going, accelerating to beat him and duck into a concealed position behind the Dumpsters overflowing with trash and flies.

He stops in the center of the firing range, heaving and throwing drops of sweat. He swigs water and spits it out while turning around in a 360, checking the perimeter.

Where does he hide the guns? A chest buried somewhere? A cave in the wash?

Now he slides a black-and-silver phone from the belt holding the water bottle and glances up at the sky, moving until there are no power lines above him. The phone is way too big to be a cell. I can make out the profile of an antenna, like a little finger pointing up. He is using a satellite phone to get past our wiretaps.

You can only use a satellite phone outside, with a clear view to the sky. That is why he comes to the shooting range.

“Gemini? It’s Taurus. What have you got? You’re the expert. You’re the one with access to intel, the off-site, the whole deal. Don’t leave me hanging out here with my pants down, buddy.”

He waits. I wait. My breath comes fast.

“You said you could get past the SAC. I’m counting on it.”

The cold shower of logic becomes a deluge of ice. It is unmistakable. Dick Stone is talking to someone inside the Bureau.

On an untraceable satellite phone.

Twenty-five

Once again, I am a passenger in the dark, being driven along unknown roads to an uncertain destination — just like in undercover school. As in undercover school, I have made the strategic decision to imbibe an illegal substance, meaning I am as stoned as the rest of them on some awesome weed.

That night, before I could alert Donnato to the discovery of the satellite phone, we learned through a posting on the FAN Web site that Lillian, the sweet old bird-watcher rescued from the mustang corral, was dead.

Dinner was quesadillas, and Megan was quiet.

“What happened?” Sara said. “I thought she was okay.” “She’d just had a heart-valve replacement and it got infected.” “Too bad,” said Stone with a mouth full of cheese.

“It was a direct result of the action,” Megan snapped. Her face looked slack, darkness beneath the eyes. “She was traumatized, and then she’s taken to a bad hospital in a piss-poor excuse for a town.” Slammer was jamming green apple halves and carrots into an industrial juicer.

“Do you have to do that?” Sara asked.

“Fiber, man.”

The juicer must have been outfitted with a jet engine.

Megan told Stone she was leaving for two days.

“Why?”

“Lillian’s memorial service.”

The juicer howled.

“Where?”

“San Jose.”

“Turn that thing off,” Stone shouted. “Fuck your fucking fiber.” The motor ticked to a stop. Slammer had extracted a quarter cup of amber-colored juice.

Megan put her head in her hand. I laid my arm around her shoulders.

“Megan’s upset. She saw the whole thing at the corral.” “Never should have happened,” declared Stone.

“The lady was too old to go on something like that,” Sara added.

“It wasn’t her being old.” Megan raised her burning eyes. “It’s us who were arrogant. We were breaking the law when—” “What’s the law anyway?” asked Stone. “Whatever the government decides. Arbitrary bullshit.” “I’ll be back late Sunday,” Megan said tiredly.

“You’re not going. It’s a trap. The feds will be there.” Megan stood. “That’s crazy!” She had gone shrill. “I am so sick of your paranoid fantasies. The world is fucked and we can’t save it. We’ve been living in fantasyland all these years, without one normal day. Without peace of any kind. Without family.” “We could have had a family.”

“All I ever wanted was a baby.”

“You could have had a baby.”

“No! I couldn’t! We were always on the run.”

“Hush up now!” Stone said menacingly.

“I won’t! This is my house.”

“You want me to leave? Because I’ll leave,” said Stone.

“Thank you,” Megan said. “After you have ruined my life.” And she walked out of the room.

We waited in silence until Sara and I got up to collect the dishes.

Stone told us to sit down.

We sank back into our seats.

“This is a tragic situation that did not have to happen,” Stone repeated in a hurt voice. “Nobody would have had to get messed up with wild horses if it hadn’t been for Herbert Laumann. He is the oppressor. He is the United States government. Megan has a right to be angry. A lady is dead who didn’t have to be.” He was good. Low-key and light on the rhetoric. You could feel him gathering up the fractured energy left in the room, wrapping it ever so piteously around himself.

Hours later, Megan was gone and Stone roused the household — Sara, Slammer, and me.

“We’re gonna have some fun,” he promised. “Gonzo political action.” Now, miles away from the lost farm, we are squeezed into the white truck, and Dick Stone is singing Otis Redding: “They call me Mr. Pitiful. That’s how I got my fame—” He keeps switching songs, genres, decades. Inside his head must be some crazy mix of rhythm and blues and screaming black-leather motorcycle metal. In a fraction of a second that goes on for eternity, he can hear Blue Oyster Cult expanding like the day of reckoning since 1975.

“Music is consciousness; it never dies,” Stone proclaims. “Music exists forever, somewhere in the universe.” “If it never dies,” Slammer apes, “where was it born?” “In a thirty-twoer laced with windowpane.” Dick Stone grins.

Rewind.

We are forty minutes outside Portland. Real time. It is way past the midnight hour, and this, in the grand saga of injustice and revenge, is what Dick Stone has been given: two kids passing a joint as if they are on a lark, the boy running his mouth about his wicked life, the poor little rich girl without a clue; and the pretender, the eager stranger with wild dark hair and shifty eyes, slouching in the seat beside him.

But he is pleased with the discipline of his rock ’n’ roll commando unit. Under his leadership, they have put together a goody bag of plastic squeeze bottles you would use for catsup, now filled with hydrofluoric acid; cans of red, white, and blue spray paint; a video camera; and Molotov cocktails made with the bandit’s signature Corona beer bottles.

Still the original, still the best.

For no discernible reason, he jerks the joint from Slammer’s mouth and flicks it out the window.

“What the fuck?” The boy laughs uneasily.

The bandit punishes him with silence.

Sara is all of a sudden in a fit of giggles, rolling on her back in the rear seat, long, thin arms and legs kicking out at funny angles.

“You’re a little butterfly.” Dick Stone looks in the rearview mirror. “Just like Megan, back in the day.” It was Megan, he tells us, who shared that thirty-twoer of psychedelic malt liquor in the Civic Auditorium down in San Jose, when BOC was at the height of their satanic debauchery; the concert from which he never came back. Like the apparition of young, idealistic Megan (aka Laurel Williams, the environmental scientist at Berkeley), Sara, he intones, is a butterfly who alights on your hand, revealing magic yellow granules of powder on its wings. Why would such a vision be given to you?

Meanwhile, the new one, Darcy, keeps to herself, staring at the suburban night. Dick Stone smiles at some reverie and rolls his window down, dropping an arm out of the truck, letting the cigarillo hang, wasting good Dominican smoke as a rush of air tears hot embers off the tip, leaving a trail of extinguishing sparks. It satisfies him, like pages burning in time.

“Hey now,” says the boy, “what’s that asshole doing?” Slammer jumps up and hits the horn and a van in front of us swerves to a stop. The driver of the van throws the door open, shouting in Farsi.

Stone turns his head very slowly toward the boy. His graying stubble looks Halloween raspberry in the cold red intersection light.

“Don’t…do…that.” He accelerates, but not too fast.

“I really feel like slapping someone right now.” Slammer pounds a fist hungrily. “I really feel like getting into a fight.” Dick Stone ignores him.

“That’s what I mean!” Slammer agrees, as if the old dude had said anything. “There’s two chicks in the car, know what I’m saying?” “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

“We should hit ’em.” The boy is pointing and alert. “McDonald’s, man.” The drive-thru is bright as an alien spaceship. There is a line of cars.

The bandit asks, “Why?”

“Babylon profits by killing animals,” Slammer chirps. “Why not?” The bandit sighs. “It’s a cliché.”

I guffaw. He cocks an appreciative eye. He loves Darcy for being a little rebel, and right now, stoned as the rest of them, Darcy loves him.

Sara sits upright in the backseat. “McDonald’s is too corporate. Too big.” Slammer scowls. “You’re a freak.”

Kindergarten.

The bandit makes a U-turn and heads out of town.

“Sara has a point,” he instructs, and pulls out a well-worn piece of rhetoric: “Evil needs a face.” The road becomes a country lane, no lights. The houses are spread farther apart. Only by slowing down and scanning the fences caught in the hard white headlights do we notice a small metal sign that says THE WILKINS. Stone turns down a road that bisects a pasture and leads to a newly constructed four-bedroom home with a spindle-post porch — just the kind of hypocritical western touch that ticks the bandit off.

He pulls off the road, beneath a stand of juniper trees, and cuts the lights.

“That’s the target.”

“Who are the Wilkins?”

“Our friend BLM Deputy State Director Herbert Laumann’s in-laws. The government whore is mooching off the grandparents now.” Because someone destroyed his house and his kid is still in the hospital.

My stomach tilts with the sickening recognition that old obsessions die hard.

Slammer whispers, like he’s seen a prophetic city: “Babylon.” Beneath the dashboard the prudent bandit has mounted a sophisticated scanner that picks up encrypted radio signals used by law-enforcement agencies. He fiddles, listens to the static. Nothing threatening on the airwaves.

The bandit holds up the bag of tricks. “Who wants it?” Slammer: “Me!”

Perversely, Stone hands the bag to Sara instead, watching the disappointment grow once again in Slammer’s face. But then, another whiplash turn of mood, and he offers the boy a Colt.45 pistol.

Like the scenario in undercover school, reality shifts to a perilous key. A screaming siren wakes me from this loopy daze. The kid is armed.

Slammer handles the gun. “What am I supposed to do?” “Figure it out, genius.” Stone gives me the video camera and unlocks the doors. “You have three minutes. Go.” We scamper down the driveway, past a couple of bicycles and a redwood tree house with swings, along a path to the backyard. A raccoon darts from the shadows. The yard is open, no cover. We hunker against the garage wall.

Sara, indignant: “Why’d he give you the gun?” “Because you’re a pussy.”

You can see the weed shining through Sara’s huge eyes. “He wants you to shoot Laumann?” “Let’s do it.” Slammer pushes unsteadily off the wall.

I grab his arm. “No! They have an alarm system,” I say, pointing to random telephone wires.

But Slammer is hyped. “Two more minutes! All we’ve got!” Absurdly, he gets on his belly and combat-crawls across the lawn. Seems like a plan, so I follow. Sara’s behind us, dragging the bag of tricks. This is good. We’re leaving loads of evidence — footprints, fibers off our clothes. Then the lights go on and figures appear in the downstairs windows.

“Freeze!” Slammer hisses.

We are too far away to make the people out.

“Get the video!”

Lying down in the sharp, wet Bermuda grass, zooming in on Herbert Laumann’s family through the camera lens, we discover a mother, father, and baby girl. The baby is sleeping on the mother’s shoulder. She walks up and down as the father yawns, rubbing his temples with two flat palms. They are all wearing nightclothes. The mother has a towel over her shoulder, on which the infant’s cheek is resting, blue-eyed slits staring into babyland.

Slammer says, “Babylon nation, prepare to die.”

The mother sits slowly at a table, balancing carefully to keep the baby still, as the father talks. His ordinary white bureaucratic all-American face — the face of evil — looks collapsed with exhaustion. He reaches out to touch the baby’s head — a cupped hand, a blessing.

“Are you really going to do it?” Sara whispers, mesmerized by the family on the tiny video screen, like a snow globe showing a scene of mystery and magic. In its light, a tiny floating square of light in acres of pitch-black farmland, the youngsters without a home and the spy with a soul of ash are watching transfixed, through a secret window, the simple arithmetic of two loving parents and a child. You would think they had never seen such a thing.

Prone, Slammer tries to sight the gun on wobbling elbows. He should take a lesson from Sterling McCord. The gun quivers.

“Wait!” I say, allegedly watching through the camera. “You don’t have a shot.” “I have it,” he grunts, but he lays the gun down to wipe his sweating palms on the wet grass.

I am a millisecond from disarming him.

He picks up the weapon but doesn’t shoot. The gun is shaking wildly. Comically. This is not surprising. In real wars, there are troops on the battlefield who refuse to fire, because they can’t. Unlike the movies, it doesn’t come naturally, killing another human being.

“Three minutes are way up,” I say gently. “We’re out of here.” Slammer slumps down to the grass and sobs. Helpless, deep, undifferentiated sobs. I lift the gun away.

Sara strokes his bristly head, then kneels and awkwardly puts her arms around his shoulders, laying her cheek on his back.

“Allfather will be mad,” she whispers.

“He can fuck himself,” Slammer replies.

I erase the videotape.

Twenty-six

The following day, Slammer walks into the kitchen, to find Dick Stone sitting at the sloping counter with the broken tiles, reading the daily fish report — how many chinook salmon and steelhead have passed through the bypass systems of the lower Columbia River dams — and holding the Colt.45.

The gun is aimed at the doorway. At the next person to walk through the doorway, who would be Slammer, back from the grocery store.

The devil boy stops in his tracks.

“What up?”

“You tell me.”

The gun is pointed at Slammer’s belly.

“What?” Slammer shrugs and grins foolishly, as if missing the joke. “Can I at least put the groceries down?”

Slammer notices his voice has grown small. Besides the black hole of the barrel, Dick Stone is showing him the Look. Slammer, Sara, and I have talked about the Look. You can’t see his eyes when he does it: narrows them to a pair of emotionless chinks that the angry part of him seems to be just gazing through, like the faceless column of light that pulses behind the crack in the TV cabinet where the doors don’t shut. You have no idea what’s on. When Stone hunkers in like that, the worst part is the excruciating silent anticipation, because you know he’s slowly taking in your worthless mistakes and calculating the punishment. “The tax,” he likes to say.

Slammer lowers the grocery bags, shoulders aching, as if he’d been holding sacks of rocks.

“What’d I do?”

Slammer is drowning in panic. He is seventeen years old, a long way from last night’s tears, but the memory of terror is right there.

“Just tell me what I did wrong, okay? So we can talk about it maybe.”

The terror comes from Slammer’s incarceration in the Mississippi Training School, the type of state-run correctional institution for juveniles where they strip you naked and throw you in a freezing cell, hogtie you, and withhold medical care. Slammer had a toothache so bad and so unattended, the abscess ate into his jaw. He was put there in sixth grade for being chronically late to his regular school. This was because his birth mother was an alcoholic and slept all day. When he was released, he hitchhiked west to live with his father. The Mississippi Training School is currently under federal investigation.

“You did not complete the mission,” Stone replies, “you ungrateful little shit.” Now his eyes seem pinched and tired.

“I am grateful. You got me off the streets, man.” He bounces around the kitchen, flinging his arms.

“I gave you a job, to kill Herbert Laumann,” Stone says philosophically. “You failed.”

“Hey, I’m still up for the Big One.”

Slammer thinks he is showing loyalty by endorsing the bandit’s mysterious plan—“the Big One” that will “bring down the house.” Now he takes up another of the bandit’s themes.

“I didn’t do it because the FBI is watching us, dude. They’re tapping our phones, following us around—”

“Someone surely is. But the larger point I’m trying to get at,” Stone says, “is that people around here do what I tell them to.”

Discipline.

“Of course. That’s a given.” Slammer smiles with fine white teeth. The sight of his smile is beautiful and rare, like an eagle in flight. “You’re the Allfather.”

“I gave you a gun,” he says. “I gave you my trust. You abused it.”

“They weren’t home!” Slammer protests, thick lips blubbering. “I would’ve done it — but they weren’t home!”

“Come with me. I am the tax collector,” Stone says.

“Hey, what about the ice cream?”

“Put the ice cream away.”

Slammer may be wildly thinking of attack or escape, but in the end, he goes quietly. The bandit did not even have to show the gun.

It is dark when Sara and I get back from picking Megan up from the airport after Lillian’s memorial service. We took along a new black-and-white kitten we’d adopted in order to cheer Megan up. I am driving. I take my eyes from the road for an instant — to smile at Sara’s pretty profile as she teases the little guy with a tassel on her bag — when she looks up and shrieks, “Oh my God!” and I slam the brakes.

The tires kick up gravel and the pickup fishtails to a stop. In the white glare of the headlights we see Slammer’s head sticking out of a hole in the ground, in which Dick Stone is burying him up to the neck.

Slammer’s garish face is red and contorted and stained with tears. At eye level with the chassis of the truck, he has been screaming for us to stop.

We rush out of the car like fiends let loose, washed out almost to transparency by the hot light, all three of us shouting and reaching through ribbons of iridescent dust to stop it, stop him.

“What’s wrong with you?” Megan bellows at Stone as I grab for the shovel.

“He’s a traitor.”

We wrestle for the handle, and he’s strong, flailing wildly, like someone beating at the bars that imprison them.

“I gave him a gun. He didn’t do the job.”

“What job?” Megan cries, pulling futilely on his shirt. “What job? What job?”

“The boy has turned on me,” says Stone. “The FBI is all around us. What is he? A cocksucking little wimp ass piece of shit.”

“Talk to me, Julius,” I gasp, watching Sara emerging from the dark with a heavy pitchfork. “What do you want?”

Stone’s voice has dropped to a mocking growl. “Tell them about the atrocities. Tell them about the lies.”

“Help me,” Slammer sobs, twisting futilely in his grave.

Sara tries to dig the hard-packed dirt.

Megan is still tugging on Stone’s shirt, sliding her arms around him from behind. “It’s safe,” she croons. “We’re here on the farm and we’re safe. Let’s calm down.”

Stone’s is the grating voice of madness, coming from a hollow gourd: “Direct action is nothing to take lightly. Government lackeys have to die.”

My hands still grip the shovel. “Government lackeys like Herbert Laumann?”

“I want Laumann to die like a pig. Cut his throat, cut it like a pig’s—”

“He can’t hear you,” Megan gasps, wild-eyed.

Stone’s manic desperation short-circuits my ability to think. I have to fix it, take it in, do what it takes to relieve his confusion and pain, as I always did with my grandfather, Poppy.

“All right, all right. You want Herbert Laumann dead. You’re mad at Slammer because he didn’t kill him. It’s not his fault. Leave the kid alone. He can’t do it, but I can. I’ll do it for you, Allfather. I will shoot the guy, okay? I’ll shoot him fifty-two times, until he’s dead, really dead, okay? Give it to me! I can do it.”

He jerks the shovel away from me and raises it to strike, throwing Megan back.

“Darcy, watch out!”

“You’re a liar, too!” Stone tells me.

“I will. I promise! I know what it’s like. I once killed a man.”

Panting, we eye each other in the screaming headlights.

“And I’ll tell you something else!” I’m pointing the finger, dancing with a kind of hysteria. “You think Slammer betrayed your trust? You are not the only one, pal. I know what that’s like, too. When someone you are stupid enough to fall in love with turns on you and completely undermines you and destroys your life and there’s no way back and you have to kill him.”

Even through the blinding paranoid rage, he can see the truth of what I’ve done. What Darcy’s done. Stone lets the shovel drop.

“Come on, baby,” Megan whispers. “I have you, safe and sound. Come on now. You’re with me,” and she guides him through the shadows.

Sara and I dig Slammer out. Encrusted in damp earth for long, torturous hours, he has fouled himself.

We help him to his feet.

Sara is crying. Slammer’s arms are around us both, leaning heavily on our shoulders. As he walks, he sheds loose rocks and torn roots, a man so debased, he is made of dirt.

“We can’t stay here,” Sara whispers, but then she hears the kitten crying from where it is hiding under the truck, and thinks of the orchard of hazelnut trees, and the rescued ducks and goats, and Sirocco and the white foal, Geronimo, all living peacefully on the farm. She can’t understand the contradictions.

“God — I’m so sorry — I couldn’t see you until the last minute.” My voice is genuinely shaking. “What was he doing?”

“He said it was a test. Of fire and ice.”

A light is on upstairs. We move toward the house.

Twenty-seven

A trial of fire and ice. That’s the way you might describe my grandfather’s visit, when he flew out from California to attend my swearing-in as a new agent from the FBI Academy. Steve Crawford and I were in the same graduating class, of course, and had naïvely planned to announce to our families that we were getting married, anticipating that our excitement, on top of graduation, would make it one hell of a bang-up weekend celebration for all.

My grandfather was booked into the Days Inn at the very same mall where I would play out Darcy’s first contact with the counterfeiters when I returned more than ten years later for undercover school. Back when Poppy stayed there, the motel was newly built and did not smell of urine under the stairs, and behind the property there was just the Dairy Queen, where I would devour that memorable double cheeseburger — not a full-blown shopping strip with a multiplex and gym.

I spotted Poppy from the pool area, striding along the upper deck of the motel. You could tell he was in law enforcement by his sporty disregard of the surroundings (I’m here; get out of my way), an authority he always carried, licensed or not in that particular locality, as if the special nature of his calling extended worldwide supremacy to Everett Morgan Grey. Never mind the only felons were shrieking boys, cannonballing into the pool with huge atomizing splashes; my grandfather’s eyes were fixed on the door of his room with intention to prevail. He wore a white Panama hat, a brown suit, and a sport shirt open at the neck, exposing a freckled chest. His ham hand swung my mother’s old lacquered suitcase as lightly as if it still held dresses for my dolls.

The boys charged off the edge of the pool, gleaming bellies white as those of frogs. I did not jump up and wave at my grandfather. I did not want to leave that lawn chair, ever. It wasn’t just the considerable fear of telling him about Steve, which, by extension would be a statement that I’d actually had sex with a man and was continuing to do so. Even though I had barely left the grounds of the Academy, I realized there in those hothouse corridors, I had finally seized on a clear identity, and in that clarity was liberation. I was free to fall in love, to make mistakes, be harangued and harassed, but they never shut me down. Just the sight of my grandfather threatened my new pride in being Ana; I knew he would turn my achievements into competition with him. Already I was looking back on new agent training as a bright moment of independence, in whose light I was able to shine because I had been on the other side of the country, away from Poppy.

There was a kamikaze scream and tepid water rained on my sandals. You did not just enter Poppy’s world. You surrendered to it. I forced myself out of the chair and headed for the pool gate.

“No running,” I told the boys.

I knocked. The curtain peeled back and there was the man who had raised me, not giving anything to the steamy morning light but a glimpse of grizzled cheekbone and a shank of nose, squinting between the brown folds of fabric like the beat cop he had been forty years ago, cagey as ever.

But then the door opened wide and the sun found his quick blue eyes.

“Annie!” He grinned and crooked an elbow around my neck, pulling me close. His leathery skin smelled of barbershop spice.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Goddamn airlines” was his reply.

The door swung shut. He had not turned on the lights, and the suitcase sat unopened on a shiny quilted bedspread the color of ripe cherries. It occurred to me I had never been in a hotel room with my grandfather.

“Want some ice?”

“What for? It’s cold as a witch’s tit in here.”

“Poppy. Don’t. That kind of talk exploits women,” I announced crisply.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It didn’t matter; I liked the sound of my brave new voice. I had endured. I was almost an FBI agent. I could make pronouncements now.

“You sure you don’t want something from the soda machine?” “What’s the hurry? Take a load off.”

I plunked down on the bed. The frame wobbled like Jell-O, dipping me up and down as Poppy unpacked the old suitcase that had belonged to my mother, Gwen. It matched a makeup case she used to own, “a train case,” they called it, with unfolding trays that would rise up and present their treasures as you opened the lid. She died of liver cancer when I was fourteen. My father was an immigrant from El Salvador, a man I barely knew. I remember my mom as a passive and defeated person, but she must have had moxie to fall in love with a brown-skinned man in the 1960s. It would be years before I understood the circumstances under which my father, Miguel Sanchez, disappeared.

At a moment like this, you crave completion — parents, aunts and uncles and cousins, noisy and embarrassing, to shower you with affirmation and envy. Steve had a ton of family coming down from West Virginia; it was unsettling to be in that ice-cold motel room with Poppy, alone.

“So,” I asked him, “any words of wisdom as I go out into the big bad world?” He considered. “My father always told me, ‘Wear a rubber.’” “Nice.”

“What’s the matter?” he teased. “Does that exploit women, too?” Just outside the window was a poisonous-looking tree with ugly hanging clusters of lavender blossoms and long green pods — something that belonged in a swamp, something out of a southern horror story, whose evil perfume had the power to put you in a stupor.

Maybe that was it.

“That advice sure comes in handy with my new little artist friend from Venice,” he mused, not wanting to let it go.

“You have an artist friend?”

“Very friendly,” Poppy insisted. “But she dropped me because she wanted a younger guy. Can you believe that?” Poppy laid a hand towel on the sink and carefully set out the double-edged razor that screwed open, a shoehorn, and the black leather brush that strapped into the palm of his hand, with which he curry-combed his immaculate white crewcut.

I watched sulkily.

A few weeks before, at midnight, the supervisors had rounded up the new agents and led us to a room lit only by candles. We stood in a silent circle, sweating it out. They pulled that stuff all the time: We know, and you don’t. A supervisor wearing black stepped to the center of the circle and ceremoniously drew a dagger from his belt. A second supervisor was handing out sealed envelopes. There was an ominous pause. Now what? Kill your partner? As the dagger passed from hand to hand, we were allowed to open our envelopes — and cheers and shouts filled the room. It had been the Bureau’s memorable way of letting us know our first field assignments.

“I’ve been assigned to Los Angeles,” I told Poppy finally.

He did not acknowledge the joy of having me close to home. “Do whatever it takes to get on the bank robbery squad,” he advised. “Hottest spot in town.” “I know.” I took a very deep breath. “The only problem is, my boyfriend has been assigned to Miami, so we don’t know what to do.” “You have a boyfriend?”

I broke into a great big smile. “Yes, his name is Steve.”

“Do I have to meet this cracker?”

I had not yet understood that the more I wanted love from Poppy, the more he would withhold it.

“Steve is not a cracker. He’s very intelligent.”

“What about common sense?”

“He has that, too.”

As a lieutenant with the Long Beach police department, Poppy had liaisoned with the Bureau on hundreds of bank heists. Now he was hanging his full-dress lieutenant’s uniform on the rod that passed for a closet.

“Is that what you’re going to wear to the graduation?”

I couldn’t help it. I was touched.

“Damn right. Show those FBI bastards where you come from,” he said.

When we arrived on campus, he was curious about everything.

“Why do they have a bust of Jefferson? When did you say these buildings were built?” He took pictures of the brick corridors. He took a shot of the grass where our groundhog lived. He stood a long time by the wall commemorating FBI service martyrs. He read every one of their plaques.

“Those are the real heroes,” he whispered reverentially, too awed to encroach upon their dignity with a photo flash.

The Academy had shed its austerity to become a college campus on visiting day, where awkwardness and pride prevailed. We who wore the uniform (same old tactical pants and polo shirts) beamed at one another in fraternal spirit. Traffic in the hallways puddled and slowed. You could no longer charge around the corners, there were too many soft-bellied moms and dads wearing bad clothes. Civilians. I felt a sloppy love for all of them — these were my people now, whose freedom I would soon swear to give my life to protect.

Out of the dark, frigid motel room, out now in the mix, I was able to recover the sense of myself that had been growing steadily those past fourteen weeks, and here it was: I had been inducted into the elite. The brothers and sisters with whom I had shared the crucible were at that moment closer than blood. We had secret ceremonies and hidden powers those innocent visitors crowding the steamy glass atrium for coffee and cookies knew nothing about. All of them — including Poppy — were outside the cult. I was glad of it. I forgave them for it. And I was filled with happiness.

“Here he is!” I exclaimed as Steve Crawford, ramrod straight and youthfully muscled beneath the tight polo shirt, emerged from the crowd. I introduced him as “my boyfriend,” which sounded soft and girlish and out of sync in that military environment.

Steve and I smiled at each other encouragingly. I had tried to prep him, but my convoluted descriptions of Poppy’s hot-and-cold behavior only made him totally uptight, afraid to step on a land mine. As a result, Steve drew up tall and presented as a locked-jaw FBI newbie — exactly the kind of condescending fed who rolled over Poppy on the job.

I noticed I had stopped breathing when they shook hands.

“My folks don’t get here until tomorrow. Let me treat you to dinner, Lieutenant Grey,” Steve offered.

“My treat. You two are the star graduates,” my grandfather added resentfully, eyeing us back and forth.

It was early evening when we pulled into Fredericksburg, the sun a fireball behind the hickory trees. We crossed a bridge where flame-tinged water dragged over shallows of black stones.

I had been to town only once, for somebody’s birthday, even though it was just twenty minutes from the Academy. We had so much studying, we rarely left. The Board Room, a cafeteria by day, became a full-on bar at night, in order to minimize the need for outside contact.

The tidy Colonial churches and side-gabled homes in the historic district of Fredericksburg were enchanting — until you got out of the car and staggered through the lifeless heat. All the quaint little stores were closed. Poppy, Steve, and I moved at half speed, but not fast enough to avoid a plaque at the site of a famous five-and-dime store, where, back in the sixties, a young African-American woman had been the first to sit at a white’s-only lunch counter.

My stomach was hurting even before Poppy went into a tirade about “good-for-nothing blacks.” I prayed none of the midwestern tourists, materializing slowly out of the spongy air, could hear his words.

But Steve did.

“If you don’t mind, sir, I don’t appreciate that kind of talk. I have a cousin married to an African-American doctor, and he’s a terrific guy.” “I used to be like you,” my grandfather replied, “until I was a patrol officer in the worst neighborhood in Los Angeles.” “We don’t want to hear it, Poppy,” I said.

I was only in my twenties, not far removed from a childhood that had been dominated by his self-important anger. It buffered him from fears and losses too astringent for his macho taste — instead, the acid curled inside my gut. I had become so entwined in his emotions as a child that my role in life had been fixed as the vessel for holding the things that he despised and cast away.

There, on that brick sidewalk in Fredericksburg, Virginia, secretly brushing hands with the first young man for whom I’d had real feelings, I hated my grandfather. I hated to be stuck in this world with him. I felt ridiculous. At the Academy, I was myself, big and three-dimensional and real; now I was stuck on this historic street in someone else’s history, three figures in a sweltering diorama, a shoe-box Colonial miniature like you make in school.

Steve raised an eyebrow and gave a grim shrug. Poppy seemed unaware. He was looking in the window of the Scottish Center, where stuffed cats were wearing kilts. Nothing affects him, I thought bitterly. When I looked again, he had wandered down the street to some god-awful military store. Headless torsos were dressed in U.S. Army uniforms. There was a Life magazine from 1945 featuring Audie L. Murphy.

“See this guy? He did his part.” Implying that we didn’t?

“Audie Murphy was the most decorated soldier in the U.S. forces,” Steve agreed, mustering respect.

Poppy turned away, somehow offended.

I looked at my watch. It was barely 5:30. Time had slowed in the impassive heat.

“I think the restaurant is open now.”

On the advice of a middle-aged Academy librarian, who seemed, in her silk bow-tie blouses and wool skirts, closest to Poppy’s aesthetic, we had chosen La Petite Auberge. Inside, it was cool and dark, the air-conditioning a sensual pleasure. There were silver candle lamps with fluted glass shades, white latticework walls, and oil paintings of dogwood trees. Half a dozen well-heeled couples had come in for the early specials. They all knew the waiters; it was, after all, a living small town. Now we were like them — three people seated at a table in a nice French restaurant, none of whom can fathom why they are together.

Steve and I ordered Cokes, which came with lime and lots of ice in a narrow bar glass that contained the sweet carbonation perfectly. The dinner rolls were soft and fluffy white. Things were looking up. Steve’s thigh, hard inside the perfectly creased dress slacks, edged reassuringly close to mine.

Poppy decided the following day would be an excellent time to visit Manassas National Battlefield Park, forty miles away.

I protested. “Tomorrow is graduation.”

“Not until three-thirty in the afternoon, according to the schedule.” “I have to get ready.”

“How long does it take you to get ready?”

“I want to take the morning off, and pack, and take a shower and—” “I came all the way out to the other side of the country to find Joseph Grey.” “Is he a relative?” Steve asked genially.

“A dead one. Poppy thinks he has a great-great-uncle who fought for the Union and died in the first battle of Manassas. So he wants to go there.” I rolled my eyes.

“Can’t you find old Joseph on a computer?” Steve suggested.

“A computer is not the same as being present on a field of honor. What is wrong with you?” “Sorry, sir.”

“No need to be sorry,” I murmured as a waiter in a white dinner jacket offered the appetizers.

I took a glistening bite of a farm-fresh tomato with onions and tarragon.

“How about we drive up to Baltimore and see the Orioles instead?” “No, ma’am,” Poppy replied. “We are on a mission.”

I groped Steve’s hand under the table. It was damp.

“Sir, you should know that Ana and I are serious.”

“Serious what?” He scraped the bottom of his bowl of mushroom soup.

“We care for each other and we want to get married.”

Poppy shocked me by simply asking, “When?”

It threw us both off. “Well,” said Steve, coloring red, “we don’t know exactly when. We just haven’t set a date. One day, I’ll wake up and I’ll turn to Ana and say, ‘Let’s get married.’” “So in the meanwhile, you’re shacking up, is that what you’re saying?” “No, sir—”

“We’re planning to get married in the chapel at the Academy,” I interjected quickly.

“Aren’t you the one who said that soon-to-be Special Agent Crawford has been assigned to Miami and you’ll be in L.A.?” “Yes, but—”

“I’m just a dumb cop, so explain to me. Exactly which bed is it where Special Agent Crawford turns to my granddaughter and says, ‘Let’s get married’? Because I can’t figure anything but a Motel 6 in the middle of Texas.” “One of us will be reassigned.”

“And that’ll be who?”

“We don’t know who,” I said.

“It’ll be you, that’s who,” said Poppy. “When it comes down to it, he’ll be like any man; he’ll say, ‘My job is more important. You’re only the wife.’” “So what?” Steve said angrily. “If we love each other.”

“You’d ask me to give up my career?”

“Not give it up.”

“But — what?”

“We’ll work it out,” said Steve.

“How?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t know.

My mouth had set in that shut-down way. Steve was watching with distaste. He’d never seen that expression on my face. It made me look like Poppy.

And I had never seen the cold, self-centered steel in his character.

“You’re over twenty-one,” my grandfather said. “You can do as you damn well please.”

The morning of graduation, I picked Poppy up at the Days Inn (he was waiting outside — camera in hand, wearing Bermuda shorts, high socks, an FBI T-shirt and FBI cap) and we headed north. It was 10:00 a.m. and already we were drowning in the muggy, listless air.

Avoiding a revisit of last night’s dinner — how we ate quickly and skipped dessert, how it was endured in tense silence except for an argument about which exit Steve’s family should take from the airport — Poppy posed one of his “educational” questions: “What is Bull Run?” “It refers to an Indian chief whose tribe was massacred by U.S. troops and who tried to run away. They thought he was a coward, but history proves he was outnumbered.” Poppy was incensed. He liked to run these quizzes to demonstrate my stupidity, but there was a limit.

“Bull Run is a stream!” he shouted. “The rebels were hiding in the woods along the banks of Bull Run and the Yankees were trapped. They couldn’t get across and they couldn’t go back. There were no goddamn Indians in sight. Goddamn it, Annie, don’t they teach anything in school?” “I guess I was thinking of Sitting Bull.”

“I’ll tell you what’s bull.”

I smiled with evil satisfaction for having provoked him. Manassas had a haunting sound, like a sultry breeze sweeping high dry grass. I knew it was the first major battle of the Civil War, a catastrophic fiasco, which is why I was struggling to maintain respect as we inched through choking traffic at Manassas Mall.

It was ugly.

“Imagine what lies beneath all this crap,” I said.

“What?”

“Bodies. History.”

“The battle was fought over here.” He stabbed impatiently at a map. “Not at the mall. What’s the matter with you? Turn right after the overpass. Battle View Parkway, that has to be it.” The rental car was overheating, so I turned right. Battle View Parkway had no view of the battleground. It was an access route to an industrial development that ended in a cul-de-sac.

“Well that just tears it.”

Poppy folded his arms, as if perversely satisfied by yet another example of the failure of the world to see it his way.

“What I don’t understand is the disrespect.” He shook his head. “Using the sacrifice of our war heroes to name a street that goes nowhere.” It occurred to me that I had never heard my grandfather admit that he was wrong.

We came upon a split-rail fence that bordered a grassy hillock. The driveway rose and passed a spreading locust. Beneath its canopy, on the near horizon, were framed the crisp black silhouettes of half a dozen cannons. Instantly, my restlessness was stilled. My grandfather removed his FBI cap. The gravity of war seemed to toll the stagnant air, just as it had, hour by hour, the past 130 years. A taste came to the tongue — iron bitterness, like blood.

The car doors slammed and we stood in silence, looking over the rolling countryside, which had once been marked by tree lines, groves, a small white house — each a key location as the advantage of battle whipped from one side to the other like a thrashing snake. Now it was all open fields, and a tractor slowly worked the hay. Small groups of visitors paused here and there. The day was glaring, hazy. An American flag was drooping — limp as the flags that stultifying afternoon, July 21, 1861, when the grass was as high as the chests of seventeen-year-old boys, who fired on their own troops because they couldn’t tell the color of the standards they were carrying.

But that sort of thing was just a stitch in the whole mad carnality of it all, a hideously misjudged engagement, in which nearly five thousand naïve volunteers from both sides were killed or wounded. The red-soaked earth that day was strewn with body parts. In the makeshift hospitals, stacks of arms and legs and hands and feet were described as looking like piles of shucked corn.

The slaughter ended only when the Union retreated in terror, a disintegrating mob stampede. The politicians in Washington, D.C. — the Peter Abbotts of the past century — had promised “a great and glorious Union victory” in a week.

We paid ten dollars for a computer search for Joseph Grey or Gray, who could not be found. Poppy was in a swoon, taken with every detail he could swallow of the massive hand-to-hand encounter. Heroes abounded.

By then I was impatient with his petty chatter and eager to get back to the base and take an ice-cold shower. It was time.

“You never said what you think of Steve.”

“I didn’t like his eyes.”

“You don’t like his eyes.”

“They’re small.”

“I see.”

“They’ve got that hooded, criminal look.”

I turned toward his stringent profile. “Can I ask you something, Poppy? Are you and I on the same planet?” “You’re not going to marry that cracker.”

“You can’t stop us.”

“I wish I were that all-powerful,” he said ruefully.

But he was. And I didn’t marry Steve. I met his parents only briefly, after the ceremony. There were polite excuses for us not to get together — too many relatives, not enough time. We never made our announcement. He went to Miami. I went to Los Angeles. We wrote letters. We phoned. In six weeks, it faded to nothing. It never had a chance. Stillborn.

“We have to leave in fifteen minutes,” I told my grandfather, and left him in the gift shop.

Outside, the sounds were vivid — the call of birds and children’s voices shouting “Eee-ha!” as they scrambled over the barrels of the cannons. Fat black gnats flew in my ears and up my nose. And there was the slow, mysterious grinding of cicadas, like a mechanical toy winding and unwinding. Winding and unwinding, like an old lady rocking on a porch.

In the white house in the center of the green battlefield, there had, in fact, lived a lady named Mrs. Judith Carter Henry. Her pretty china dishes were preserved in the museum. Eighty-five years old, a widow, she refused to leave the safety of her bed, even when Union sharpshooters took over the house. The Confederates fired back with howitzers and Mrs. Henry was mortally wounded. Some say she took more than twenty hits. Sources vary.

By then I knew enough about the movement of the battle to see it play out vividly in the still, hot fields. I thought of Poppy, traveling all over the map, California to Colonial Virginia, in search of a hero to heal his wounded heart. Would I ever be that hero in his eyes?

In a few hours, I would become a federal agent of the United States government, bound to carry the shield of core values upon which I, good soldier, was about to swear. Us and them. Black and white. Law and order. It was the defining moment. I was about to become Special Agent Ana Grey, for good. I wonder now, Would Darcy have let Steve Crawford go?

A tractor slowly rolled the hay. The fields fell off toward the north, toward the glittering haze of Washington, D.C., from whose alabaster domes I would receive my orders.

I heard the cicadas singing. Their musical clicks went up and down.

Far away, in the white house, Mrs. Henry was rocking.

This had been her property. It had been a farm.

Twenty-eight

Special Supervisory Agents Angelo Gomez and Mike Donnato are waiting at a rest stop on the I-5 when I pull up in Darcy DeGuzman’s Civic. My cover is an appointment with a local dentist at a phony number manned by an FBI agent in L.A.

“Guys? This was bad.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

Donnato indicates a picnic area behind the brick restrooms, not visible from the freeway.

“Let’s go around back.”

They have dressed down for Oregon — polo shirts and jeans — but I’ve been up here long enough to make them for out-of-staters, by their clean shoes and precision haircuts. We swing our legs over the seats as they set their supersize coffee cups on the weathered redwood table.

“Dick Stone just about buried the kid alive!” I am still incredulous. “And he sets it up, the bastard, so I almost run over the kid’s head.”

“Was Megan part of this?”

“No, she was in the car with us. Sara and I were just bringing her back from the airport. Mom leaves, and Stone runs amok. She was panicked. Even she couldn’t calm him down. I’m feeling completely degraded by this guy. No matter how much backup and surveillance you provide, I still have to live in that house and play by his rules, and he keeps changing them.”

Donnato: “No control.”

“Over what Dick Stone is going to do? You can’t predict his crazy shit.”

“Okay, hold it.” Angelo leans forward on the picnic table, Mr. Stability and Reason. “Remember the scenarios in undercover school, where they kept on changing the framework, so you didn’t know if it was day or night, or what was real and who was on your side?”

“Yes, the counterfeiters turned into drug dealers, shot a couple of their own — very convincingly — and held a gun to my head.”

“What’d you do?”

“I did the cocaine. Just like I smoked the weed when we were out having some fun with a Colt.45 at Herbert Laumann’s in-laws’ house.”

“You survived and Laumann survived,” Angelo says. “That was the lesson learned.”

“Living inside the criminal mind…” adds Donnato. “The best we can do is stay with it, and you did.”

I exhale deeply and fluff through my hair with both hands, trying to release the tension in my scalp.

“Right.”

“Try to put a finger on it. Why is this different from training?” Angelo asks.

I think about it. “Because this wasn’t me, a paid U.S. government agent, who was put in harm’s way. This was a seventeen-year-old boy, who’s already suffered unbelievable abuse in some awful state-run institution, and on the streets, and now he’s been traumatized to the point where he might never come back, because we screwed up.”

Angelo looks puzzled. “How did we screw up?”

“We should have had a covert team sweep the house for electronic surveillance devices before I even moved in.” I look at Donnato. “Am I right?”

“Peter Abbott vetoed the expense,” he says quietly.

“What is in his head?” I exclaim.

“That’s a management issue,” Angelo cautions.

“When I get off this case, I’m writing a complaint about—”

“You sound bitter.” Angelo’s observing me with that cockeyed look.

“I am bitter. Peter Abbott swoops in from headquarters like some kind of god, doesn’t know the first thing about life on the ground, in the real world, and, as far as I’m concerned, has already made some ill-informed decisions. You have to ask yourself what Abbott’s doing commanding this operation. He’s about to retire and become a political honcho.”

Angelo’s got his cop face on and fingers laced with deceptive calm on top of the table.

“Are your feelings about Peter Abbott making it difficult to continue in the undercover role?”

Donnato shoots a look toward Angelo. His eyes tell me: Warning.

I got that.

“I don’t have feelings for Peter Abbott, I just want the latitude to do my job. Look, Angelo, I want to nail Dick Stone. After what he did to Slammer, more than ever.”

“Because you’re sounding awfully bitter,” Angelo repeats.

I glance at Donnato. “Just blowing off steam.”

“Talk about it with the shrink,” he says.

“Do I have to?”

“You’ve been under almost three months.”

He is talking about a psychological evaluation with a therapist when you’ve been undercover a certain amount of time. It’s required. No way out. Just like critical-incident training. I’m looking forward to it about as much as a body scrub with a vegetable grater.

“I am committed to the operation, and I’m fine,” I say. “But I’ll tell you what I am worried about. The satellite phone. Stone is talking to someone inside the Bureau, and we have no way to trace it.”

The moment the words are out, the world begins to waver with vertigo and distrust. Have I said too much? What if the spook inside is Angelo? Or could it be Donnato? No, not possible. I wish I had said nothing about satellite phones, that I’d waited until I had more information. Or gone straight to Galloway. Can I trust him, either? How alone can you be?

“No way to trace it,” Angelo agrees, “unless we involve NSA, and that’s a whole other thing.”

He stands and tosses his coffee cup into the trash.

“We should at least put it on a three oh two to headquarters,” Donnato suggests.

But I object. “What if someone at headquarters is involved?”

“Okay, let’s not go further with this until we have something solid,” Angelo says. “Ana’s intel is noted.”

Is this a reasonable conversation, or are they covering up?

I focus on the reality of what I can actually see, at the rest stop, here and now. Nobody else is around except a couple of red squirrels, squawking on a swaying branch. The noonday forest radiates a lazy, sun-filled, pine-scented heat. Beyond the parking lot, the highway is a searing blur of semi-trailers and logging trucks rattling along at eighty.

They could shoot me in the rest room and be back in L.A. for dinner.

Donnato: “We haven’t addressed the problem. Ana has breeched Dick Stone’s security system. He has pinhole cameras hidden everywhere — in videocassettes, in pencil sharpeners, in the clocks. What if he’s made her, and he’s just waiting?”

“Nah,” counters Angelo. “If he suspected she was FBI, he’d have blown her to bits like Steve Crawford.”

“Always a comfort.” My partner sighs.

Angelo shrugs. “You want me to lie?”

Okay, stop. Collect your mind. These are your buddies.

My head clears. “Why don’t we arrest Stone now?”

“We don’t have the whole picture. Especially if he’s talking to someone else. We get much more if we wait.”

“It’s hard to read this guy,” Donnato agrees. “Stone’s been running his game so long, he’s lying when he says hello. We’d pull you out if we thought you were in danger. You do know that?”

“It’s not my personal safety. It’s about blowing the operation.”

It is a fear I have been carrying, not of physical danger, but worse — the fear of total humiliation. That you have ruined the operation—you, single-handedly responsible for destroying everything everyone has worked for, like dropping the fly ball on the third out of the last game of the World Series.

Angelo pauses in his pacing, standing against a backdrop of pines. Sunlight pours on his slick wavy hair and tiny gnats pinwheel the shimmering air.

“There are contingencies. If Dick Stone gets too close to you.”

He sits back at the table and we follow.

“Does Stone still have that schmuck Herbert Laumann in his sights?”

“Yes, he does. To get Stone off the kid, I promised I would murder Mr. Laumann. I hope that’s okay.”

Donnato raises an eyebrow. Angelo frowns.

“What is his state of mind?”

“Laumann’s state of mind?” echoes Donnato, as if it were obvious. “Scared to death. Terrified for his family. He’s had enough of being a rock star. He wants out of the spotlight.”

Angelo: “Then let’s take him out.”

I am sitting on top of the picnic table, listening with admiration and relief as Angelo and Donnato plot Laumann’s murder. I scold myself for mistrustful thoughts. These two are pros.

“You’re saying we should take Herbert Laumann out of the picture?”

“If we don’t,” Angelo says, “Stone will have it done.”

“Headquarters will have to authorize the hit. Something this sophisticated would go to the director and the attorney general. It could take weeks.”

Angelo is dismissive. “Someone at headquarters will have to bite the bullet.”

“I know what they’ll say.” For some reason Donnato won’t let it go. “‘What is L.A. trying to pull off now? It’s another argument to stay in longer. What’s the Big One? What the hell does that mean? What are you creating just to keep the operation going?’ Peter Abbott will have to weigh in, and that’s a crapshoot.”

“I don’t give a good goddamn,” Angelo snaps. “What the hell do I care? This will prove her loyalty beyond a doubt. Ana? Are you with us?”

“No screwups,” I say. “No budgetary crap.”

Angelo waves a hand and the sapphire ring glints pink.

“Done it a million times. The Hollywood studios are good at this; they love to help us out. They can do it so it looks like the guy is dead and we fed him to the sharks. You walk up, shoot the victim at close range. He’s got squibs inside his clothing, it’s a big bloody mess, he dies an agonizing death, and we relocate him and his family in the witness protection program. No worries, and Dick Stone thinks you’re the greatest thing since sliced cheese.”

“Believe me,” says Donnato, warming to it, “Laumann will go — happily. But we have to put a fence around the family. They need to be protected twenty-four/seven.”

My mouth has become dry as the pine needles. The hot bleached sky seems to swirl.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Angelo asks, reading me perfectly. “I mean, we all know what you’ve been through.”

The shooting incident.

“I think I have a fairly good handle on reality, Angelo. This is acting. The bullet is a blank.”

But my thinking mind goes vacant as my senses seem to cut off one by one — except for the slight scent of burning brake lining, and a high-pitched chatter, like headphones at full volume pressed against my ears.

Angelo consults his watch. His voice sounds faint. “We can catch the three forty-five to L.A. if we leave right now.”

As they head back toward the car, Donnato says something about scheduling the psychological evaluation.

“You’re going to fake a killing, and I’m the one who needs to see a shrink?” I say, managing a grin through the deafening clamor of the two red squirrels, jumping branch to branch.

Twenty-nine

Cars are parked way up the road. It is the midsummer festival at Willamette Hazelnut Farm. Megan is sticking close to Stone, who presents himself tonight in a neatly pressed western shirt, the red suspenders, and a crisp straw farmer’s hat — your happy host to the alternative lifestyle, urging people to gather in the large bubble shed, where a borrowed sound system plays a cheerful band out of Austin, Texas. Stone told me they had poured the concrete floor just for dances, which sounded pretty goofy, but with the silver blow-up panels animated by moving shadows and the doors thrown open, warm yellow light tumbles across the gravel road, illuminating the American flag, and you can believe in country music.

It is an eclectic blowout — a mix of neighboring farmers, “kindreds” from the pagan community, straitlaced hazelnut distributors from Portland, and random tourists from the local B and Bs, all happily passing the traditional Asatrú libation, great huge horns of beer.

Slammer is standing on the roof of the farmhouse with the local boys, totally hammered on rum. That has pretty much been his MO since the burial attempt, despite empty threats to beat the crap out of Allfather, which came in a whispered confab with Sara. They were huddled like frightened children at the foot of the stairs as Slammer struggled out of his filth-encrusted clothes. Sara quickly balled them into her arms, as if to shrink an unthinkable humiliation down to the size of a load of laundry.

“You can’t let him do that to you.”

“That’s him, dog.”

“We should get out of here. We should call the cops.” “Are you serious? You want to go home?”

“No, but…He scares me.” Sara flushed pink and began to hiccup with tears.

“Poor little princess.”

“Guys!” I stepped between them. “Don’t get on each other.” Sara had dropped the clothes and was staring at me defiantly.

“Slammer, you have every right to call the police,” I said. “Is that what you want to do?” Slammer’s eyes went vacant. “Actually,” he said, “I’m kind of hungry.” After that, you could hear pickups burning rubber at two o’clock in the morning and raucous male shouting as Slammer came and went with the locals. Nothing changed on the farm. Maybe Stone had made his point. Maybe he was waiting to make another.

I see Sterling McCord has arrived and is talking to Sara, who doesn’t want to stand still and listen. He’s been on her case about Geronimo — how it would do her good to care, really care, for an animal, get up at dawn and muck the dung, not just mouth off about it — but she’s laughing, tossing it off, flirting instead. Incapable, is more like it. Meanwhile, McCord has the loosest pelvis on the planet. He’s standing tilted back on his heels, as if in the saddle at a trot. He’s wearing a silver conch belt and his usual washed-out jeans, a midnight blue shirt open at the chest.

I have noticed that you can’t go wrong on wardrobe if you’re a cowboy.

The sorting equipment and red tractor have been moved outside, so there is room for line dancing. The song is something about “old Amos.” I draw back from the doorway and the shining, eager faces go past the American flag and into the colder shadows. Sara and McCord are free to get it on — but me, I’m on the job. Undercover work — this is how it gets to you. The loneliness digs down like fast-growing roots and cracks your resolve. This is exactly when you are supposed to call your contact agent. Dose of reality. Remember who you are. It is 9:36 p.m. and Donnato is most likely home with his family.

Candles are still burning in jars on a half-cleared table near the orchard, illuminating a forest of smudgy fingerprints on abandoned wineglasses. An older couple is camped out at one end, picking at brownie crumbs in an aluminum pan. I move past, fishing out the last Heineken from the frigid waters of the cooler.

“Looks like Noah’s ark,” Sterling says from behind.

I turn toward the lighted shed and smile.

“They’ve got all the animals, right?”

“And they’re all gonna be saved. Any more beers?”

I give him the Heineken and pull out a Coors.

“I could use a set-down,” he suggests. “How about yourself?” At the other end of the table, in the half dark, an enormous white man is holding forth to a slight man of color — the first black face I’ve seen in Oregon. As we sit, I recognize the voice: like a sixteen-wheeler groaning uphill in second. That’s when I realize the fuzzy shape in the diffuse light is Mr. Terminate.

“John! It’s Darcy! From Omar’s bar.”

The other couple take a good look at John and decide to get out of there, leaving us with the dour biker, massive thighs dwarfing a folding chair, clutching a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He has left the black top hat at home, revealing long, thin tresses trailing off a half-bald dome.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Crashin’ the party.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Toby Himes,” says the black man, extending his hand.

In the rural crowd, Toby Himes is a standout, neatly dressed in pressed slacks and a windbreaker. He keeps his hands inside his pockets while surveying the scene. He sports a tweed snap-brim cap and a white goatee, and takes his time, not intimidated. At first, I make him for another cop.

Because it takes a minute to dial it in. The biker and the black man, having a drink in the dark? This isn’t random. They know each other. And Mr. Terminate is not eating ashtrays, or washing his hands in someone’s pitcher of suds.

He is calm, like Vesuvius on a good day.

This is so inconsistent with John’s attitude toward the darker nation that the hair goes up on the back of my neck and I hook a leg over the bench, curious to find out why.

I introduce McCord as the wrangler who saved me from the wild horses, tell them the story of the arrests at the BLM corrals and try to draw them in.

“Should we all go out and save the wild horses?”

“I’ll tell you about horses,” wheezes Mr. Terminate, and begins a tale that has nothing to do with horses. “Up in Colorado, some of the fellas came into a load of computer stuff.” “Just dropped from the sky, did it?” Toby Himes laughs and takes a sip of beer. “I know how that is.” “You know bull crap. Excuse my French, but this is top secret shit, vital pieces of our national defense system.” “A vital piece of our defense network is missing?” McCord says. “John, you know, that really helps me sleep at night.” “How’d they steal it?” I ask.

Mr. Terminate shakes his head and pours a little Jack into a plastic cup.

“That I cannot say. But I do know this.” He points a pinkie with an inch-long curved fingernail, a built-in spoon for snorting coke.

“Those computers were sold to the Indians for a shitload of silver and turquoise.” We are openmouthed. Toby Himes giggles.

“And then,” whispers Mr. Terminate dramatically, “they buried it.” Pause.

“Who buried it?”

“That I cannot say.”

But he furrows his eyebrows menacingly, as if telling a ghost story, which he probably is.

Toby Himes: “Get the story straight. The bikers buried it, or the Indians buried it?” Mr. Terminate looks confused. “The way I heard it from Julius is the Indians buried it. After they stole it back.” “The Indians stole it back?”

“The Indians damn right stole it back. Now, the fellas I know—” “You mean Hell’s Angels?”

“That’s a dated concept, darlin’. We are businessmen.” Another sip of Jack. “The fellas I know, that knew where the turquoise was buried, when it was buried on the reservation, happened to be in prison at the time. But before they got murdered, they got word to the outside.” Another dramatic pause.

“So,” ventures McCord after this baffling recitation, “did your boys ever find the turquoise?” Mr. Terminate chuckles. “Rest assured it is buried in a very safe place. You think I’m fibbing? You ask Julius. He’s the one got custody of it now.” “We’re asking you.”

“They say it’s buried beside a pipe.”

“A peace pipe!” echoes McCord with a straight face.

“All’s I know, there’s a marker, and it’s yellow. And a cage of wild beasts guarding it. But don’t go running out there.” “Don’t worry. We won’t.”

“Because the turquoise is guarded by an ancient Umpqua Indian curse!” “Thanks for the warning, John.”

When Toby Himes is ready to leave, I claim that nature calls and follow him up the road and get the tag number on his 1995 Dodge pickup. I figure if his talking to Mr. Terminate is nothing, it’s nothing. If it’s something, then it is.

Sterling McCord is waiting with two fresh beers, as I somehow knew he would be. We go a couple of rows back into the orchard and sit on the clean-swept dirt and lean our backs against a tree. We can hear the music clearly. The crescent shed still rocks with talk and laughter.

“What do you think?” he asks.

“About the turquoise?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I think John was making it up as he went along.”

“I heard the same story,” McCord tells me, “from an old-timer, works in town at the Seed N’ Feed. The curse, the same darn thing.” Against the current of two beers, the nearness of a tightly knit male body, and a summer night crazy with lavender, a nebulous connection forces itself to focus. Rosalind, administrative assistant and keeper of the family flame down in Los Angeles, told me Dick Stone worked undercover on a case called Turquoise. And now he allegedly has possession of so-called buried treasure. Is it real, or does turquoise have a double meaning? Some other layer of deception Stone has embroidered over the past, like the flying corn on his cap?

“There was a yellow fire hydrant out in the wash. Where we ran across the foal. Maybe that’s the marker.” McCord nods, chugging beer. “I saw it.”

“You did not.”

“I might look like a dog-eared fool, but occasionally I do pay attention.” He takes his time to grin real slow. I wish he didn’t have that brown spot on his gum where the tooth is missing.

“But why should I share the treasure with you?” he asks.

“Because you like me.” I notice that sparkly feeling creeping up from where it hides, damned if I’m on the job. “Let’s be honest. You liked me from the very first time you were rude to me.” “When was that?”

“When you saved my life. You said, ‘Hey. You shouldn’t be messing with wild animals.’ Hell of a thing to say to a lady in distress.” “That wasn’t rude, ma’am. That’s a fact.”

“What’s a fact?”

“I am never rude to beautiful ladies. Let’s go find the turquoise.”

The luxe interior of the Silverado softens the wallop of rocks and crevices along the access road leading out of the power station. The first time we drove it in the noonday sun, with Sara, panicked, between us, clouds of dust rose in our wake, and they may be rising still, but in this blackness it is impossible to see anything except what is pinned by the headlights.

McCord eases the truck off the road and cuts the engine. This time I am shivering as we stand at the edge, and not just from cold. Behind us, the power station, illuminated by security lights, looks like a futuristic prison. McCord, holding a flashlight, leads down the embankment, following something — an instinct or a trail — searching for the riverbed where we found the foal, but nothing looks familiar in the half-light. No old-woman tree. No ancient streambed with banks of dying roots. But alive inside of me, that complex delta twists and turns with desire, as if all the tiny sparks in this dark landscape had been melted together to form a glittering molten river of light, aching for the release of the sea.

Across the low terrain we can hear the distant party on the farm, like voices from a speaker in an old wrecked car. A lone wind thrums through my earrings as a drowsy voice argues the lessons learned: Never sleep with a suspect. But McCord isn’t a suspect. Is he?

“Where was it?” he asks.

I remember that as I sat by the foal and cooled its body with a rag, a small concrete bunker rose from the wheatlike grass. When McCord’s flashlight sweeps across it, I direct him that way. Climbing through an oak grove and then coarse shrubs with leathery leaves, we discover the bunker and a wire cage built over it.

“There’re your wild animals guarding the treasure,” McCord says dryly, running the beam over a gate valve with screw wheels enclosed in the cage.

“What is it?”

“Flood control.”

We stand there like two idiots, staring in silence at the work of some engineering drone twenty years ago.

“Nice,” I say.

“Thought you’d like it.”

“Give me dried hoofprints and the smell of old manure any day.” McCord laughs. At least he has a sense of humor about himself. I can feel the giggles rise like bubbles…. Maybe that’s how it will begin.

“One thing about wranglers,” he says. “We take you to the best places.” “Really? I thought you were interested in Sara.”

“Sara’s hot but way too young.”

“That’s what she said about you. The opposite. In reverse.” I snicker self-consciously. Awkward, too, he kicks at the wire cage covering the pump. It moves. It is not secured by the rusted lock, only looks that way.

Wordlessly, we catch our fingers in the wire mesh and pull. It comes off easily and we set it aside.

“Someone’s been messing with this, for sure.”

We squat closer. The flashlight reveals a hole in the iron plate that is fitted around the pipe assembly. A hole for lifting.

McCord checks with me. “Are you ready?”

“Go for it.”

He hooks a finger in the hole, but it is hard to lift. No hinge — it just sits in the square opening.

“Need a crowbar. Got one in the truck.”

“I’m not staying here alone.”

“No problem.” McCord finds a heavy stick. “I’ll lift, you get the stick under there and pry.” “Ready.”

“Wait a minute!”

“What?” I whisper with alarm.

“Watch out for that Indian ghost,” he hisses. “If he comes charging out of here, I’m gone.” “Don’t make me laugh!”

“This is serious stuff. Indian lore. Buried treasure.” “Just lift.”

“You know the old Indian chant—”

“Just do it before I pee my pants!” McCord hooks his finger firmly, sets his back, and lifts. I push the stick underneath the edge and we slide the plate to one side of the hole and shine the light inside.

I scream like a madwoman. “Close it! Close it quick!” Inside the culvert, four feet down, is a nest of rattlesnakes.

“Just stand still.”

“Oh my God, Sterling—”

“Don’t move. They’re cold. They’re resting. This is not their time of day.” Resting? The slow, slithering mass is pit-of-the-stomach hell. McCord keeps his flashlight on the entwined bodies — big ones, inches thick, with long rattles and darting wedgelike heads.

“These guys are old,” McCord observes, “and full of venom. If one of these daddies bit that little horse, it’s amazing that he lived.” “They’re waking up—”

Like the Indian curse.

Their eyes glint. The rattling, faint at first, is quickly becoming deafening, like medicine men hallucinating wild dreams.

“Put the cover on,” I plead.

McCord whistles and bends closer. I grab his belt, terrified he’s going to fall in.

“Look at this!”

I cannot look any longer at the glistening knot of reptiles.

“What is it? Is it the turquoise?”

“I don’t see no turquoise,” McCord drawls, “but there’s a hell of a lot of guns.” Now I do look, and carefully. The rattlesnakes are crawling over a pile of semi-automatic weapons and boxes of grenades.

McCord ticks them off: “You got your Heckler & Koch MP5s, a Berreta Model 12, a couple of Ingrams, and your basic Makarov handguns, extremely popular in the Arab world. It’s a global terrorist barn dance down there.” And a.50-caliber McMillan M87, heavy sniping rifle, made in the USA.

Just like the rifle that killed Sergeant Mackee.

Careful. What would Darcy say?

“All this stuff is worth money.”

McCord shoots me a look too quick to read in the dark. “Seen enough?” “Wait!”

Scattered across the cache of firearms, like offerings in a tomb, are the skeletons of tiny animals.

“What are those?”

“Looks like rabbit bones,” says McCord.

“The baby rabbits,” I whisper. “Stolen from the farm. Do you think someone’s been feeding them to the snakes?” “They sure didn’t hippity-hop down there on their own,” says McCord.

We drag the lid over the seething pit.

Thirty

Some very unlucky FBI agents (I hope it was the dopey duo from Portland who brought the ducks) dig through the rattlesnakes guarding the cache and replace the.50-caliber M87 sniper rifle with an identical model, sealing everything back the way it was. Forensics determines the gun found in the pit is, in fact, the same one that fired the round that killed Sergeant Mackee. Dick Stone’s fingerprints are all over it.

As a result, a horrendous argument breaks out in the conference room in Los Angeles.

“We have the cop killer,” Galloway says right away. “Case closed.” “Dick Stone is more than a killer.” Angelo has loosened the Rolex and is spinning it around his wrist. “He’s an anarchist who hates the FBI.” Donnato: “That’s why we bust him and get Ana out.”

“What are we in there for?” Angelo yells. “FAN!” “Stone is moments away from making her. If he hasn’t already.” Angelo: “We don’t want to blow the operation on a lousy murder charge.” Donnato gets up from the table to confront him. “Killing an officer gets Stone the death penalty.” Angelo shrugs. “Stone being dead is not the mission.”

“What is the mission? Remind us.”

“Stone giving up his contacts.”

“He’ll talk when he’s in prison.”

“A former FBI guy? How does that work?”

“He gets protective custody.”

“Peter Abbott wants the big picture,” Angelo says impatiently.

“Peter Abbott sits at a desk in Washington while Ana Grey is at risk. He’s exactly the guy we should be worried about.” Donnato is incredulous. “Whose side are you on?” “You’re asking me that? You are really asking me that? Think twice about walking to your car alone, buddy.” Donnato: “Is that a threat?”

“I see we are taking our testosterone pills this morning,” says Galloway by way of warning.

They back off, but only to regroup.

“Anybody remember a case in the seventies called Turquoise? Ana flagged it from a conversation with Rosalind, who subsequently provided me with confirmation and pulled the abstract. We connected the Weathermen to a string of armored car robberies taking place in Arizona. Dick Stone went in as the undercover. Ana says there’s talk of some kind of buried turquoise up in Oregon. She’s wondering if there’s a connection with Stone and the old Turquoise case.” “In reality?” Angelo says. “Or in his head?”

Galloway: “Pull up the complete files and court transcripts.” He mouths the dead cigar. “Let’s review. Angelo’s feeling is that whatever is taking place in the here and now, Dick Stone isn’t pulling this off alone. The cache of weapons indicates international connections. He’s up there on the food chain but answering to a higher power.” “The higher power is someone in the Bureau,” Donnato says, barely keeping a lid on it. “Given the Toby Himes revelation, we’d better look closely at who’s in charge and why.” They don’t tell me until later, but as a result of running his license plate at the midsummer festival, Toby Himes has become a “person of interest” to Operation Wildcat. More, the star quarterback. He lives in Stevenson, a tiny river town on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, where he is employed as the town engineer. If he had come from there the night of the midsummer festival, it would have been almost a three-hour drive to see Mr. Terminate at Dick Stone’s farm. The black man and the biker didn’t meet to discuss hazelnuts.

Even more compelling: Toby Himes, the recipient of a Purple Heart, served in Vietnam in the same unit as Peter Abbott. Himes’s specialty was ordnance. Like Stone, he was trained to blow things up. A trap placed on Toby’s phone shows calls made to Peter Abbott’s private number.

Three names on the table and they all connect: Dick Stone, domestic terrorist, former FBI; Toby Himes, former military with training in explosives; Peter Abbott, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the fast track to a political career.

The Abbott link is way too hot for an SAC in a field office to handle alone. But Galloway knows if he is going to follow this trail, it will have to be solo. And extremely treacherous. His equanimity in that meeting is a façade.

“What about our request for the hit on Herbert Laumann?” “Not a word.”

“We knew it would take weeks,” Angelo grumbles. “Some low guy at headquarters has to write a document and get it to the attorney general, then back to the director, and back on down. What’s your problem, Mike?” Donnato: “At this point, we have to ask: Do you trust the chain of command? Why does Toby Himes, a known associate of terrorists, have the private number of the number-two man in the FBI?” Galloway tries again.

“Let’s stay on track. One scenario is for Ana to hang in there until Stone shows his cards — who he’s working for, and to what end. Until he slips up.” Donnato: “Stone ain’t gonna slip.”

“Operations are fluid,” Angelo argues reasonably. “We started out looking for one thing; now we’ve got two focuses: Stone and FAN.” Donnato: “They’re the same.”

With the good side of his face, Angelo agrees. “Stone is running a cell of FAN. We have an operative in deep cover; this thing is going where we want it to go. At this point, it’s real simple: Watch the boat.” “While we’re watching, he buries Ana Grey up to the neck like that kid.” “What does Ana want?” Galloway asks.

“She wants to stay in,” Donnato replies. “She wants to be a hero.” Galloway considers his cigar.

“Does she know what it means to be a hero? A hero is a picture in somebody’s office.” There is a prolonged silence.

Finally, it’s Galloway, his voice reluctant and low, who says it: “Do we have a problem in-house?” From the look on the faces of his two trusted agents, veterans whose combined service records add up to almost forty years, Galloway can no longer ignore the elephant in the room.

“Approach Peter Abbott like you would any other bad guy. This stays with us. For her own security, keep Ana out of the loop.” They nod.

Around a conference table in Los Angeles, in complete secrecy and at great personal risk, three men who put loyalty above all else agree to launch a clandestine investigation to determine whether the deputy director of the FBI is aiding and abetting a group of domestic terrorists.

Thirty-one

“Get out of my way.”

Stone rummages through the kitchen drawers and then moves to the front closet as Megan follows him from room to room.

“Julius — what are you doing?”

“You should know.”

“I have no idea!”

From the safety of the landing on the staircase, beneath the eye of the pinhole camera inside the German clock, the black-and-white kitten cries, one paw curled. Sitting there and stroking him, I try to fathom Dick Stone’s state of mind. He seems possessed, as if powerful aromas are assaulting him from every side. As he pushes Megan aside, his body seems to be aflame with irritation.

“The whole superstructure of this country is collapsing,” he says, charging upstairs. “There’s downward pressure on everything.” “Including me,” she replies, exasperated, as they pass.

I take the kitten in my lap and watch from a child’s point of view as the arguing parents thunder by. Stone’s boots raise dust on the runner tacked along the treads — which I remember checking out, piece by piece, for false compartments beneath the stair. That was before the discovery of the arms cache — before I knew that Daddy stole the bunnies that were rescued from starvation at the dump, in order to feed the rattlesnakes that were guarding Daddy’s guns.

“It’s everywhere,” Stone is lecturing. “Even for people who are medium well-off. Nobody can make it anymore.” “Could the apocalypse wait until Saturday? I’ll drive you wherever you want to go after the market.” “You?” He laughs as they disappear inside the bedroom.

“Oh, stop being silly,” clucks Megan, but a few minutes later she is heading back downstairs with a purpose.

I find her in the dining room, digging through the sideboard until she has what she is looking for — two bankbooks I have already examined. Neither shows a balance of more than fifteen hundred dollars.

“Phew!” She uses them to fan herself dramatically. “Last time he was in a mood like this, he took out three hundred dollars with no memory of what happened to it.” “He doesn’t remember? Really?”

She slips the bankbooks in her pocket.

“We have ‘happy Julius days,’ ‘depressed Julius days,’ and ‘just plain crazy.’” “How can you stand it? I thought when you left for Lillian’s funeral, you might not come back.” “We fight, but that’s the way it is. We’ve been together a long time, Darcy.” “That’s what women say whose husbands beat them up.” Mistake!

Megan’s eyes narrow, defending her man.

“Julius has never laid a hand on me. Or any woman.” Stuttering, I say, “I didn’t mean to say Allfather was like that.” “It has gotten worse.” She considers me with an insinuating stare. “Actually, a lot worse since you arrived.” Sticking an agent under his nose, as we might have learned from the Steve Crawford tragedy, only succeeds in aggravating the paranoia of a person like Dick Stone. His behavior has become irrational, and Megan is close to stating the truth: Once again, the FBI is responsible for letting the genie out of the bottle.

“I used to be able to talk him down. But what he did to Slammer…” Her voice breaks. “He was gone. He couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t physically stop him.” We hear Stone stomping around upstairs.

“Where is he going?”

“To see his friend Toby,” she replies fretfully. “All of a sudden he’s got to see Toby, the most important thing in the world. The single day I have to go to Portland, and it’s a long drive in the opposite direction.” “Why don’t I go along and keep an eye on him, Megan?” Her eyes rise to the old beamed ceiling and her lips pinch.

“I wish I could get him to stay on his meds, but he refuses. Stubborn man.” She looks at her watch.

“What time do you have to be in Portland?” I ask helpfully.

Megan hesitates. It is clear she’ll never make it to the market to sell her hazelnut brittle unless somebody volunteers to babysit Stone.

“Go with him,” she says, “but if he’s still like this, promise me you will not let him drive.”

Clouds of fog lie in the valleys, and the hills are saturated black. It stays that way, everlasting twilight. Nothing moves beside the houses and fences that blur the edge of our vision except the suddenly peaceful bandit, who seems to be flying past at eighty miles an hour, as if without benefit of a vehicle, like one of those maharishis known to levitate cross-legged over the mountains of India.

No way was he going to let me drive. He is the center. He is on the flight deck. He checks the green dials pulsing at the changes in the atmosphere — changes I imagine that he needs to know. Green dial faces are loyal. Amber ones are false. The amber ones do not worry him because he knows the truck is secure. As we crossed the misty yard, he called to me to make sure the engine hoses were clamped tight and there were no explosives hidden under the seat.

Now he is just steering the truck, maybe wondering what in hell made him so touchy when, in fact, he has everything! They tried disinformation, but he knew the game. They sent a provocateur, whom he skillfully disabled. His euphoria is rising. He feels like Jesus Christ — in a good way.

“Careful,” I say for the second or third time. “Who is this guy Toby Himes? I saw him at the festival.” “Old pal of mine. He’s selling a boat. Check it out.” He pats his stomach. “Lost four more pounds.” “Good for you.”

Then Dick Stone decides to drive for a while in the opposite lane.

“Let’s get there alive, if you don’t mind.”

He laughs until he can’t stop laughing, swerving back across the road.

No soldier at a reckless gallop, no jet pilot screaming upside down, no Navy Seal in dead of night, mad junkie, murdering, thrill-seeking sadistic monster; no hero under fire or Purple Heart, adrenaline-locked-eighteen-year-old-joyful-virgin-fucker; no one-eyed god, no God-drunk raven razoring the most primitive chartreuse skies of perpetual black rain was ever as purely out-of-body high as Dick Stone is now.

And he is like this recently, a lot.

The two-lane blacktop rounds a curve and we are afforded an inspirational view of mountains meeting mountains, whispering to the horizon beyond the wide green water of the Columbia River. There are a preposterous number of waterfalls in the mountains along this road, and we are passing yet another, a needle-thin cascade that falls maybe two hundred feet, raising clouds of mist that blanket stands of wildflowers — white anemones, Dick Stone has said.

“Beautiful.”

“That’s the spirit of Bob Marley, right there.”

“Bob Marley? Are you a fan of reggae music?” I ask just to say something.

“Major fan. He had it right about Babylon nation.” “What is Babylon nation? When Slammer was going on about it, I figured he was just stoned.” “Babylon is the Vampire. The inability of the white race to live in the natural world without destroying it. Babylon System is America, the whore of nations, gorged on luxury and fornication — but remember, that’s before Armageddon.” “Gotcha.”

“See these waterfalls? A gargantuan river of melted ice comes raging down from Canada, fifty miles an hour, a thousand feet deep, gouging through those cliffs.” Stone is in a kind of rapture. “You want to talk cataclysmic?” “All because of the white man.”

He disregards my wit. “It’s coming.”

“What is?”

“The Big One.”

“Another cataclysm?”

“Of major proportion.”

“What is the Big One, Julius?”

“The end of arrogance and superiority.”

“That could mean the Yankees. Come on, give me something to work with.” “Funny girl.”

“What’s going on, Julius? Are we — the people at the farm — are we involved in something a lot more violent than I think?” He smiles slyly. “I wouldn’t want to freak you out.” “I can guess.”

“What?”

“You’re going to blow something up with a blood bomb.” Somehow, this flatters him. He settles back in the seat. “A long time ago, before I switched careers to filbert farming, I firebombed a power tower.” “Really? Cool! Where was this?”

“Ski resort.”

“Why? You didn’t like waiting on the lift?”

Stone chuckles. Today he is allowing me to tease him. It’s like scratching a pit bull behind the ears.

“The neat part was that all we had to bring the thing down were a couple buckets of fuel, a kitchen timer, and an igniter they use for model rockets. You should have seen that thing keel over — power lines, trees, man, that was a tangle — tipping, tipping…tipping… into twelve feet of pure virgin snow.” “Because?”

“Somebody was pissed off about endangered cats. I can’t remember what kind.” Caution. No, it’s okay. Darcy, the activist, would know.

“Were they lynx?”

He looks pleased. “That’s right.”

Ecoterrorism. Vail, Colorado. A wave of unsolved fire bombings the Bureau has been chasing since the early nineties.

“That was impressive. Nobody ever took credit.”

He slaps my thigh in a friendly way. “Now you know.” I can get anything I want from him now. What a feeling! It’s exciting. Tremendous! This is the good thing about penetrating without an informant: Nobody can snitch off you; nobody can compromise you. If we had tried to flip Megan, I’d never be where I am at this moment, confident and relaxed, riding up front with Stone. It’s as if you’ve stepped through the danger and you’re actually being sheltered by the source. The real source, which is Stone’s mind, a mandala of private symbols and pulsing hurts, in which the figure of Darcy DeGuzman has come to stand as a trusted ally. I see why guys like Angelo are addicted. It’s the greatest high in the world, to carry the shield you swore upon, to be representing the good people of this country, and the innocent, to be their emissary, to have the ability to talk with somebody who actually wants to harm you — talking to that person’s heart.

“This was in your badass revolutionary days.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Who said they’re over?”

I can barely control the eagerness. Everything seems so close. So possible.

“Does Toby have something to do with all this? You seem hell-bent on seeing him today.” “He found the kind of boat I need.”

“For the Big One? Tell me.”

Now he is teasing. “Mmm, I’m not sure you’re ready to know.” “Why not?”

Another trial of fire and ice?

“You promised to do something for me.”

“Off Herbert Laumann? I said I’d do it and I will.” He assents in a fatherly way. That’s all for now.

“Be at peace and know that everything is unfolding as it should.” “Swell. I’m in nirvana. When is lunch?”

When do we get approval from FBIHQ for the hit? What will it take to get the accountants off the dime? Because that’s the way it always is — the criminal side of the house versus the bean counters, leaving undercovers stranded on a seductively beautiful road like this one, guessing which fork leads to paradise, and which one to perdition.

We are edging along the Lewis and Clark Trail. In pictures you always see the explorers pointing, and with good reason. Imagine if you had discovered this plentitude of lumber and the riches of the salmon run. Not anymore, as Dick Stone vehemently points out, since a chain of hydroelectric dams has displaced the chinook’s ancient pathways to the sea.

“Look at those monstrosities, totally fucked the river. They are everything that’s wrong with big business and the U.S. government.” “Without ’em, we wouldn’t have electric lights.”

“Fascist pigs,” Stone growls. “Monuments to ego.” I stare at the dams going by — colossal concrete bunkers crested by powerhouse electric grids — remembering the surveillance photo of Megan, aka Laurel, confronting Congressman Abbott somewhere along this river, and that Dick Stone would have been there, too, but there is no credible way to bring it up. Below the spillways, where tons of water empty downstream from the dams, colorful windsurfers flick about the anthracite surface of the water, scraps in the bottom of a chasm.

“What did you do before you blew up that tower?”

“I was in the FBI.”

I just about eject through the roof of the truck.

“And I was in the CIA,” I say calmly.

“Don’t believe me.”

“You’re just playing.” Pause. “Am I right?”

At that moment, two sheriff’s cars pass at normal speed. What is this? A signal?

This can’t be happening. He can’t be telling me this now.

Dick Stone replies amiably, “What’d you think? Can you see me wearing a suit, in the FBI?” “Suits with guns?”

He laughs. “Guys in suits, with no sex life, who fight alien life-forms.” “Yeah.” I grin. “That’s you.”

But Stone is deliberating something. “Do you remember the Weather Underground?” “That was a little before my time, but yeah, they were anarchists who were against the Vietnam War.” “‘Bring the war home,’” Stone says grimly. “That was the slogan.” “They set off bombs, right?”

“Three of them blew themselves up trying to build a bomb in a town house in Greenwich Village.” “I vaguely remember.”

Memorized the files.

“What about the Weather Underground?” I prompt. “Were you part of it?” “Me?” He dismisses the thought. “Hoover’s gangsters really fucked those people. Destroyed their lives. Hard times comin’, no matter which side you were on,” he says. “Sad. Really sad.” The truck window is down and a river wind is washing Dick Stone’s commanding profile clean, blowing his long blond hair back over the built muscles of his neck, so a tuft of white in the honey-colored sideburns is revealed. In the deep lines of the forehead, and the clenched brows trying to grip whatever vision keeps eluding him at the far side of the journey, I see a middle-aged man asking if his life has been a fake.

Then he attempts to discard it, the past thirty years of it, with a rapid shake of the head, but a long silence follows as the road climbs the dark pine highlands, and we exit, loop up and back toward a spectacular gleaming bridge that leads to the Washington side of the river, as if leaving one fairy-tale kingdom of spells and lies for another.

From the bridge, a hundred feet above the Columbia River, the vault of space the water carved is enormous, enough to contain the talk of all this history and more; it’s as if you could lift off the railing and lie in the hammock of the wind, out of time, like the hawks.

But as we cross the bridge, I feel the threads of my connection to the Bureau tug and unravel. Dick Stone’s aborted confession hints at more than what management has been telling me. I know this because of the transparency of the way we are together in the car. I know because he’s dropped the craziness he cultivates with Megan, as if he’s aching to find someone with whom he can come clean. For the moment, Dick Stone trusts me enough to take a brief ride on the violent currents of the past — entwined and gone, and constantly renewed, like the twisted air.

“What the fuck is that?”

We have crossed into the state of Washington, passing sunny fields of yellow mustard. Ahead we can see flashing lights and backed-up vehicles surrounding a traffic accident. I spot unmarked vans and the same cars from the sheriff’s department that passed us an hour ago, and wonder if it’s a trap.

Stone’s paranoia is infectious. Have the orders come through from Washington? Is a SWAT team waiting to rush the car?

Not now. Not yet.

“Let’s avoid this, go left,” I vamp, and we turn sharply, ending up on a long private drive that leads to a contemporary lodge of huge logs and flower-covered walkways, something out of a Swedish Western. We double back, avoiding the accident by a couple of miles, and take the first fork east.

Not to perdition, or to paradise.

To a river town called Stevenson.

Where Dick Stone’s pal Toby Himes wants to sell a boat.

Thirty-two

We enter the town by crossing an old railroad bridge, which runs into a nostalgic street of local businesses — your time-honored pharmacy and coffee shop, picture gallery and independent bookstore — and stop for gas across the street from the Dough Folk bakery.

Dick Stone sends me inside to get crullers. “Best in the world,” he says.

I wait while a pair of elderly sisters, both wearing overcoats and high socks in the summer heat, order biscuits and gravy to go. Across the street, Dick Stone is putting gas into the white truck. Engaged in this most American moment, he seems to be an ordinary, slightly grizzled outdoorsman who takes his freedoms for granted.

The sun is shining and someone has driven by towing six canoes.

The white truck pulls to the curb and waits.

A hot breeze scented with cinnamon-sugar follows me as I hurry out the screen door of the bakery. Clutching a box of fresh fried crullers, I walk around the truck and slide into the front seat.

“Aren’t these great?” Stone wolfs one.

He smiles with pleasure at the old-fashioned taste of crisp dough and powdered sugar. We pass an inlet where a kayaker drifts in ripples of blue. Mountain buttercups are blooming in the new grass all along the road to Toby Himes’s house — an orderly house in a spick-and-span town.

Northwest tidy, you might say, like the ubiquitous trimmed mustaches and khaki shorts: a clapboard cottage painted buttermilk with pumpkin trim, a concrete slab for a porch where a golden chow sleeps beside a pot of geraniums. There are two cobalt blue metal chairs, the Dodge pickup in the driveway, along with a small powerboat on a trailer hitch, and a muddy ten-speed bike, unsecured, near a vegetable patch.

Toby Himes opens the door and the men embrace, Toby patting Stone on the back with thin, nervous fingers and calling him “Doctor.” He seems to match the clean and fluffy dog, and the neat yard. He is even more tailored than at the midsummer festival: a tall black man with glasses, white hair, and a neat white goatee, wearing a pressed shirt, slacks, and moccasins.

Not your image of a wacked-out Vietnam vet.

Toby Himes, who has an engineering job with the town of Stevenson, is still the only person of color I have seen. He must be Dick Stone’s age, but he is willowy and thin, whereas Stone has bulked out. The courtly manners and soft accent feel like the Old South, but in these austere bachelor chambers, there is no trace of a likewise genteel woman. One room is entirely bare except for free weights and Chinese drawings depicting the poses of kung fu.

Stone has made himself at home in a recliner with a glass of orange juice. A golf tournament is playing on TV. Toby is reluctant to take his eyes from the screen. During the commercial he asks Stone what he’s been up to.

“Messing with people’s minds again?”

Stone grunts, satisfied. “We had some fun. Tell Toby how we got right into the face of evil at the BLM.” I describe the midnight raid on Herbert Laumann’s family as Stone’s buddy listens politely, big brown eyes alert behind the glasses.

“This dude Laumann is a bureaucrat,” Toby concludes. “He’s got no say whatsoever over the wild horses — that’s policy out of Washington, D.C. He can’t do anything about it, so why are you busting his chops?” “Laumann is a symbol,” Stone replies testily. “Symbols are important in political work.” “To hell with politics!” Toby smiles and waves a spidery hand. “Right, Darcy? Tell me, what do you think of boats?” I used to live in Marina del Rey, California, with a view of three thousand sailboats.

“Never thought much about them.”

Toby slaps his knees conclusively. “Doctor? What do you say we initiate this young lady in the pleasures of cruising our beautiful river?” Death by drowning. In those rapids, all it would take would be a nudge over the side.

“No thanks, Toby. I get seasick. It’s embarrassing.” Dick Stone stretches out his legs and leans back in the reclining chair. “The boat looks fine.” “‘Fine’?” Toby clowns, popping his eyes. “How can you tell?” “Saw it in the driveway. It’s fine.”

Toby shakes his head. “Julius, my friend, you are full of surprises.” “Always.”

I’m looking around, sniffing the air. It is a comfy masculine nest, with a worn leather couch in front of a river-stone fireplace, kindling neatly stacked in a brass pot, driftwood and candles arranged on the mantel. A homosexual liaison between these two is not out of the question. A maple bookshelf holds magazines in plastic holders: Western Gunsmithing and Guns & Ammo.

“Quite a collection.”

“I don’t like guns,” Toby jokes. “I love them.” “Well then, you’re the one to tell me — what kind of a gun would you use to shoot somebody?” “Why would you ask that?”

“Because I’m going to kill that guy, Herbert Laumann. I said I’d do it for Julius.” Toby: “He’s one convincing dude.”

“She can use my Colt.45.”

To Toby: “Is that a good choice?”

“It’ll do the job. Just make sure you’re close.”

“Contact shot.” Stone nods, eyes closed.

“Well then, no problem.”

“How do you know so much about guns?”

Toby grins charmingly. “I’m an old soldier. A tired old soldier.” He sits slowly on the leather couch. “Hear those old bones crack?” Dick Stone gets up and goes into the kitchen.

Toby leans forward and confides: “He doesn’t like me to talk about Vietnam. He flips out, like he’s back in the jungle with us, which he never was. Julius has a way of appropriating other people’s stories.” “What do you mean by ‘us’?”

“Me and his little brother, Colin. The boy died over there.” “Julius has a brother who died in Vietnam?”

Toby nods. “There’s a park back east, named for his brother and his battalion.” I fumble, trying to assess what this means. Stone must have joined the FBI at the same time Colin enlisted. Both young men were patriots — too young to imagine such a thing as death by idealism, or the bitter, vengeful burden for the one who survives.

I need air.

“Nice view of the river.” I crane toward the windows. “Mind if I go down and look?” “You go on. I’m gonna see what our friend is up to in the kitchen.” I smile nicely and pull on the back door a couple of times until it becomes unstuck. Outside, the breath of the river is humid and fresh. My shoulder blades are tight as screws. Despite the coziness, there is a stale repression in Toby’s cottage. I look back at the pumpkin trim and perfectly pruned impatiens. What is going on in the kitchen? A gravel walk leads to a garage. There’s a stylish lantern mounted above a side entrance, indicating use. I open the door and wander in.

The sharp smell of cordite grabs me like an old friend. I am back in the basement shooting range at Quantico; in the gun vault at the L.A. field office. Toby’s shop is basically a Peg-Board and a bench, but at a glance, it has everything the recreational gun owner might need, including the wardrobe, all the clothes neatly hung: camo jacket, wind vest, rain togs, and polished black patrol boots.

There’s a rack of common hunting rifles—7-mm ones and.308s, like the one Sterling McCord was using on the shooting range. The bench is organized for reloading cartridges — bright red cans of rifle powder, a mounted powder measure, a fancy single-stage press, and sets of dies, punches, lifters, wad guide, drop tube, the whole extravaganza for making your own bullets. The dies are organized according to size. A quick glance reveals.30-to.40-caliber ones, neatly stacked. God bless Toby’s obsessive-compulsion: at the bottom of the pile, exactly where it belongs — except it does not belong — is a die for making.50-caliber bullets.

A highly unusual size for your average hunter.

The same-size bullet that killed Sergeant Mackee.

The same-size bullet that matches Dick Stone’s rifle.

Toby appears at the door.

“I see you found my love.”

He offers me a glass of iced tea.

“I didn’t mean to pry. It just looked so interesting in here.” Toby picks up a shotgun and handles it well. “I hope you weren’t touching anything.” “Of course not.”

“Accidents do happen with firearms.”

His big brown eyes are soft and slightly insane.

“I’m getting some weird vibes, know what I mean? Like you’re prancing around in here, trying to pretend to be something you’re not.” “I’m not pretending anything.”

“You’re not some prissy white girl,” he says. “What are you?” “Half Salvadoran. Got a problem with that?”

“Yes, I do. My problem is this: What’s a homegirl doing way up here, no brown faces in the whole damn state?” I hold his look.

“I could ask the same question.”

“I got a job with the town,” says Toby Himes.

“And I’m on a visit with Julius.”

“You gonna shoot someone, just for kicks? Just because Julius says?” “For the movement. For the sake of animals.”

“If you’re the Man,” he says, “I’ll kill you.”

The chow is barking. Outside, there is commotion and the sound of voices and heavy boots on the gravel walk.

“Whenever.”

“You tell me.”

Mr. Terminate crashes open the screen door of the ammo shed and marches through, along with another squinty two-hundred pounder with a full beard and red-checked shirt I call Mountain Man.

“…You can use it underwater,” Mountain Man is saying.

“Why in hell would anyone care? Hey, Toby.”

“Afternoon.”

“Hi, John.” Mr. Terminate ignores me.

“It’s stable,” Mountain Man insists. “Safe to transport.” “Seriously, you don’t want to be around that shit.” “Me? I don’t want to get anywhere near that shit.” “Julius knows you can’t get that shit. The only place you could get that shit is the armory out on the base.” This is it. This is the Big One: They’re talking about meth. They’re running a methamphetamine operation out of a military base.

I am beginning to get excited, when Toby Himes breaks in.

“I guarantee what the Doctor has in mind is strictly MOS.” And then, as we say in the Bureau, the hair goes up on the back of my neck, and I know what I know. In the language of bomb experts, MOS stands for military occupational specialties.

The Army Corps of Engineers, whose job it is to locate land mines.

Mr. Terminate, Mountain Man, Toby Himes, and Stone are not working some ordinary drug deal.

They are talking about military-grade explosives.

Thirty-three

Donnato is waiting at the usual rest area off the interstate at the time of another of my alleged appointments with the dentist.

“If the suspects were talking about explosives you can only get from military occupation specialists, it means they’re dealing in very powerful, restricted material. What the bomb techs call ‘high explosives’—dynamite, plastics, TNT, ammonium nitrate — stuff that can shatter things and move things around, like rocks and trees, which is how they use it in the Army, clearing landing zones.” I have brought a cooler this time, and we sit at the same picnic table around back — just a couple of tourists eating tuna sandwiches.

“But those kinds of explosives don’t fit the signature.” “No.”

“The devices that blew up Laumann’s house and killed Steve weren’t military-grade.” “Correct. Now we’re thinking your friends at Toby’s were talking about a special order. For a special mission.” “I don’t like it.”

“Neither does headquarters. Toby is obviously the link. He’s the reloader who made the bullet that killed Sergeant Mackee. He’s the munitions expert getting ready for the Big One. We’ve installed a listening device at his house and put the other individuals under surveillance. Agents are visiting explosives manufacturers in the region, asking for cooperation in reporting anything gone missing.” “How do the bad guys get restricted matériel?”

“Steal it from the base and collect it over time.” I nod. “That sounds like Stone. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s been planning the Big One since he split the Bureau.” “I really wish you’d been wearing a wire when he handed you that jive. I’d give anything to hear his version of events.” “Here’s what I think: We drove him crazy.”

Donnato believes I’m joking and cracks another potato chip.

“We didn’t know our ass from our elbow, and the country was in a revolution. Dick Stone is a casualty of war.” “I’m glad you’re not wearing a wire.” “Is it treason to tell the truth?”

An immaculate RV has pulled up, and a portly gentleman wearing a bow tie has disembarked, along with two magnificently groomed Cardigan Welsh corgis, who hop down the ladder like a pair of princes. Show dogs, rehearsing their stuff. The trio trots ludicrously around our table, the dogs keeping stride with their master’s swaying gut.

As they pass, Donnato switches to upbeat gossip.

“Kyle Vernon’s son is moving back from Virginia.” My mood perks up, hearing of old buddies on the bank robbery squad.

“Didn’t his son just graduate from UVA?”

Donnato nods. “He’s moving to California. Looks like he sold a script to the movies about a black kid whose dad is a black FBI agent….” We sit for a while at the weathered picnic table under the shimmering boughs of pine, while the dogs rebelliously bark at squirrels, and Donnato does his job of bringing me out of the dream I’ve inhabited on the farm, back to my grounding in the Bureau family.

“Your friend Barbara Sullivan is pregnant again. They did the test. It’s another girl.” “That’s great. Will she quit?”

“It’s doubtful she’ll come back from maternity leave. You two ever talk?” I shake my head. This will be our final passing. Barbara Sullivan will retire just as I reenter the Bureau, and we will let each other go.

The RV pulls away. I get up from the table, but Mike Donnato stays where he is. He is looking at his fingers, which are peeling the bark off another twig. I notice there’s a pile of naked twigs on the ground between his feet.

“What’s the matter?”

“We have a situation, Ana.”

I sit back down.

“I had lunch with Rosalind.”

“Oh, really? Where’d you go?”

“Factor’s Deli.” He squints in the wash of sunlight. “Do you have to know what we ordered, too?” “I know what you ordered. A grilled chicken sandwich.” Donnato goes on, beleaguered. “Rosalind had good information. Dick Stone had a brother who died in Vietnam.” “I know. I’m a few steps ahead of you, bud.”

“What you don’t know is that Toby Himes and Peter Abbott served together in Vietnam. We were going to tell you.” No need to answer that.

“Rosalind said Dick Stone’s brother served on the same squad as Himes and Abbott. All three of them. Only two made it back.” “Does Peter Abbott know that Toby Himes is a person of interest to Operation Wildcat?” Donnato hedges. “He reads the reports young Jason Ripley sends out.” “Why didn’t Peter Abbott tell us about the link between himself and Himes and Dick Stone’s brother? Why’d we have to find it out from a secretary?” “Believe me, Galloway is asking the same questions.” Donnato finally reveals their suspicions. They put a trap on the deputy director’s phones and discovered Toby Himes has been calling Abbott on his private number. This is so explosive that neither of us moves. My partner remains seated at the table, elbows on knees, in profile. The sun glints off the top of his wavy hair and the short curve of his forehead.

“Stone’s a former agent; I know his game. But Abbott scares me. What’s he up to, and on what level?” “I promise we’ll find out. Let us face the task before us. I’m here to tell you that headquarters has authorized the hit on Herbert Laumann.” “How can I go through with it after what you’ve just said?” I lower my voice. “That the boss could be involved in a conspiracy?” “You’ll have full backup. I’ll be there, Ana. I’ll be running the show.” But deep uncertainty has hit me in the gut. Not just about them but about myself, too. My ability to pull the trigger. Already I am feeling queasy. I kick at a mound of sawdust at the base of a tree stump, chewed up by bugs. It takes a moment to refocus.

“Laumann. Okay.”

“You specified a Colt.45?”

“Stone’s gun, right.”

“Jason got this for you.”

Donnato fishes inside his pocket. A family with three little kids comes screaming toward the restrooms.

“How good a shot are you?” he asks, his voice clear despite their earsplitting shrieks. “Because the first bullet in the chamber will be live.” He holds out his hand. I hold out mine. Our palms touch in slow motion, and the magazine for a Colt.45 is transferred. I slip it smoothly into my pocket.

Jason provided a magazine filled with blanks. When Dick Stone gives me his gun, I will switch magazines. But the gun will have already been loaded, one live bullet already ejected into the chamber, requiring my first shot to be precisely accurate. When I approach Herbert Laumann — on whatever darkened street, or maybe in the middle of the day — I must hit him squarely in the bulletproof vest.

The parking lot in the rest area seems filled with smoking vehicles, each exuding a black cloud of burned brake lining. The noise of the engines is raw. The tuna fish was bad; it’s making me sick. The sun is hot; it’s making me weak. My mind unhooks and ruminates on the detective I shot. The world fragments and he is everywhere. My heart pounds. The magazine of blanks in my pocket is heavy as the weight of original sin. Donnato is throwing the garbage away. I’m back in the spinning car, bloody and gruesome, looking at the detective’s unseeing eyes. The blind foal is nursing. Sirocco’s tail whips the flies and the pasture vibrates with bees. The cicadas are singing on the battlefield.

When young boys came home from the Civil War and lay at night in the safety of their featherbeds, their pulses would still race unaccountably. It was a condition doctors recognized, even way back then, as “soldier’s heart.” No bad judgment.

No mistakes.

No cowgirl stuff.

Thirty-four

On his last day on earth as BLM deputy state director, before a radical animal rights activist named Darcy DeGuzman murders him in front of his own house, Herbert Laumann is still fighting the fight — not just the massive traffic over Portland’s Broadway Bridge but also call after call through the headset as the droning voice of his assistant bombards his brain with end-of-day problems at the office. Idling on the bridge at rush hour, trucks and buses blocking the river view, he must be wondering if the FBI, an agency he believes in, is leading him into an even worse predicament.

Can he trust anyone? He must be insane. Yes, that’s fine. Walk up and shoot me, whatever fits your bill. But he has no right to question. He has failed to protect his family. He is a hollow man in the wrong skin — his son’s skin — that has become a searing penance, night and day. It was the promise of world-class medical treatment for Alex that sealed the deal with the all-too-understanding FBI men. But they still won’t say which burn center he will be admitted to, in which part of the country. Or what type of new job Laumann will be given.

They keep promising a painless death and peaceful afterlife.

Maybe secretly he wishes the bullets would be real.

We, the assassins, follow.

Dick Stone, down to fighting weight and back on his meds, is a force of nature, like those glacial rivers roaring down from Canada. I never saw until today how the fragments come together — the loyalty that made him an FBI agent, and the demonic intelligence that opens the soul’s unwilling gate to murder.

Stone has never been more lucid. Even his skin looks baby soft and shaven. His hair is clean and straight; the summer sun has made it more blond than gray. He is back to the agreeable persona of the lawyer of the people, a northwest professional in a denim shirt and tie, moving confidently through the city.

“Nervous?” he asks.

“Terrified.”

He makes me recite it again. We drive up. We wait. At 8:00 p.m., Laumann comes out of the house and walks down the driveway. He plays tennis at the club on Thursday nights. His court time is always 8:30. We put on the ski masks. I get out of the car. Stone keeps the engine running. I walk up to the target. I make my speech and empty the gun into his chest.

“Less than a minute,” Stone promises.

“I’m still nervous.”

“You can’t miss at point-blank range.”

And I’ve been practicing. Not just shooting Stone’s pistol up at the range but figuring out how to switch the magazines — the blanks that Jason provided, for the live ones in the gun — in two swift moves.

“I’ve been thinking about his wife and kids.”

“Don’t. Focus on the target. You’ve done it before, or so you say,” Stone comments.

“That was emotional. This is cold.”

“You’re paying the tax, as promised,” he says flatly. “The tax on Slammer’s foolishness.”

“Okay, and then?”

“After you do this, the tax will be repaid.”

“And the family will be okay?”

“Everyone in the family will be okay.”

I pop a mint. No bad tastes, no bad associations. I’m not going to be suckered into the past.

As we follow him across the bridge, through the prism of stacked-up car windows, I get a glimpse of the victim’s neck. Just like any other commuter’s neck.

“You have to put the good round into him. You have to shoot him squarely in the vest. The adrenaline will be pumping,” Donnato warned.

“I’ll be prepared.”

“Get close. Knock him flat. He knows what’s coming, although I didn’t go into detail about the first shot.”

“Right!” I laughed a high and desperate cackle that was sounding more and more like Stone’s. “Who in their right mind would agree to be a walking target?”

Donnato: “A man with a guilty conscience.”

Waiting makes the tension in my chest unbearable. We sit in the truck, watching the dashboard clock. Dick Stone is running his game, and we are running ours. There are agents in the in-laws’ house and in the house next door. Those females with the empty strollers are undercovers.

I study the Wilkins’ house, the tacky hacienda that we raided in the dark, marking the curve in the bushes where I’ll make the switch. I fix it in my mind. For reassurance, I think about Donnato calling the shots from the stakeout. Stone is calmly smoking a cigar. He’s been on stakeout, too.

At 8:06 p.m. Laumann appears at the front door. A light goes on above it, signaling all is ready. He is carrying a tennis racket and wearing white. This is going to make a big mess. Stone and I pull on our woolen masks. He hands me the Colt.45 and I unlock the car door.

With a thousand hidden eyes upon me, I have never felt so alone. I walk half a dozen steps and start up the driveway, everything still and glittering and clear. My heart is hammering — more than hammering: It’s closing off my mind. I pass the crucial point in front of the bushes. I turn to block Stone’s view and switch the magazines, slipping the live one into the pocket of my black cargo pants, while all the time my legs keep marching forward, and Laumann in his whites keeps coming toward me in the precise evening light, floating, as if he is already dead.

His eyes meet mine. Behind the glasses, there is nothing but terror. They had to shove him out the door. Both of us have been pushed together by our respective sides — the bride in black and the groom in white — to meet in middle of this surreal driveway, a doomed blood wedding.

“ANIMAL KILLER!”

My voice comes from some distant gravel pit. I raise the gun with both hands, plant my knees, sight, and fire.

The first shot throws him backward. He’s down. I run up close. The shot was good; he is unhurt, squinting his eyes and twitching and stuttering, “No, no, no, no!” as I stand over him and fire. Two, three, four, five. The squibs inside his clothes go off, red fountains against the white.

Dick Stone’s blood bomb is a wee-wee compared to this.

I am busting back toward the getaway car, but here comes Stone, running hard, passing me in the opposite direction.

“What the hell?”

“Get in!”

I continue toward the car. Stone is in the driveway. He’s going to finish him off! But on cue, there are screams and people running. Now Stone is back, the car door slams, and we’re gone.

I’m shouting, “What the hell? What was that?”

He coolly steers around the corner. “A good shooter never leaves his brass. You can only make that mistake once.”

Stone opens the fingers of his right hand to reveal the five bullet casings that were ejected from the pistol.

An ambulance driven by FBI agents has pulled up and loaded the blood-soaked deputy state director onto a gurney. At the same time, agents are storming the back door, getting the family out. There will be TV news stories, an obituary, and a funeral, but by then the Laumann family will be safely relocated in the witness protection program, where they will live undercover for the rest of their lives.

Everything goes like clockwork.