Judas Horse

Thirty-five

Four pug puppies will always cause a hullabaloo, even in West Hollywood. When Rooney Berwick takes his babies walking, some tourist will always shout, “How cute are they? I have a pug, too!” What are you supposed to say to that?

Across from the cobalt blue shell of the Pacific Design Center is a neighborhood park with a small open field that provides a clear patch of sky — not an easy spot to find in the heart of L.A. So if you saw a loner — late fifties, wearing a black T-shirt, pants with a lot of pockets, and thick-soled combat boots — camped out in the middle of the field, pouring water into a collapsible bowl for four panting pugs, that would be Rooney Berwick, getting ready for a call on the satellite phone to his old buddy Dick Stone.

Dead cases are kept in a room-size automated drum in the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard. For two days Mike Donnato moves files around a track, like the clothes at your dry cleaner’s, grabbing at whatever fragments might remain of a case in the seventies codenamed “Turquoise.” It was a failed operation, in which the Bureau targeted a series of armored car robberies thought to be linked to radical students at the University of Arizona who were allegedly part of the Weather Underground. Dick Stone was the rookie uc — short hair and creases in his jeans — who infiltrated the campus coffeehouse. Strangely, none of the radicals, who nicknamed him “the Fed,” wished to share their plans for the revolution.

The Bureau went high-tech, bringing in another young buck from Los Angeles, a whiz-kid technician named Rooney Berwick (the photo ID shows him thin-faced and detached, a hundred pounds lighter), who installed listening devices on the armored cars. Three weeks later, arrests were made of two drivers with unchecked criminal records, who had conspired to stage “robberies” with the local bad guys.

The Weather Underground had nothing to do with it.

Intrigued, Donnato runs the full sweep on Rooney: personnel reports, bank accounts, phone records, traffic tickets, pharmacy prescriptions. A picture emerges of a highly intelligent, socially isolated individual, who lives with his mother in the same Hollywood apartment complex in which he grew up, apparently addicted to painkillers, which he has been getting from five different doctors.

Donnato looks at Rooney’s recent cases. His latest assignment was to turn sand into gold. (If I could do that, I wouldn’t be in this rat hole, I can hear Rooney say.) The target was a ring of thieves in Brazil, with ties to U.S. organized crime, that was selling counterfeit nuggets. The Bureau’s undercovers would pose as manufacturers of counterfeit gold. Rooney’s mandate was to make fake nuggets as good as the thieves’.

Under pressure, Rooney was working the graveyard shift. On a scarred desk in the faceless JR Trading Company, in the midst of the displaced Hispanic nation, he set out rows of shiny rocks, ranging in quality from the real stuff to the Brazilian counterfeits. He knew they were melting authentic gold and mixing it with water and sand — but how much of each? His notes say he sectioned a Brazilian nugget and examined the slices under the microscope at fifty times normal magnification.

Skimming the phone log attached to the lab records, Donnato sees that a call came in on Rooney’s private line that morning at 5:48 a.m.

From an area code in Oregon.

Rooney had probably been counting gold globules when he decided to take a break and work on one of his subversive little projects that turned up later — a digitalized photo of himself shaking hands with President Bill Clinton. It was another phony, but at least it was his phony, which is why, when the phone rang, he was in a bad mood about being interrupted and answered with annoyance, which he would immediately regret.

All calls to the off-site are recorded in the archives. You just have to lean on the right person.

“City morgue, George Romero speaking.” “Hey there, champ.”

It was the voice of Dick Stone.

Rooney reacted with silence. Stone: “Is this phone secure?” “Not entirely.” Rooney was testy. “But it’s six in the morning. Nobody’s here. Just me and the skeletons in the closet. It’s been a while. Where are you?” “I’m a farmer. Do you believe that?”

Rooney chuckled. “The number-one cash crop in California?” “Nothing illegal, my friend. I grow filbert trees. I’m an arborist.” “Sounds fancy. Making a living?”

“Occasionally. But that’s beside the point.”

“Not for those of us in perpetual slavery.”

“How is Ruby doing?”

“It’s nice of you to think of Mom.”

“How could I forget the Ambrose Dairy and your mom at the window making soft-serve cones? Dipped in chocolate? Oh my Lord.” Mrs. Ruby Berwick had been a jolly fixture at the famous drive-thru Ambrose Dairy, one of those iconic Los Angeles landmarks with a twelve-foot milk bottle perched on top, where you could get icy bottles of cream and homemade cottage cheese without leaving the car.

“How many times was I over at your mom’s apartment, eating Polish, playing with the pugs?” “You haven’t heard the news. Mom passed on not too long ago.” “I’m really sorry to hear that, pal.”

“I miss her every day. She never hurt a soul.” “What was it?”

“Cancer of the esophagus. Skip it if you can. My brain-dead supervisor keeps saying shit like, ‘It’s for the best.’ People are ignorant. Makes you want to put your fist through a wall.” There was inaudible scratching and scuffling. Rooney’s voice emerged: “…The Bureau’s going through changes, but they’re still after your ass.” “How do you know?” asked Stone.

“Saw your name on some lists.”

“What kind of lists?”

“I don’t play politics; you know that. That’s me, flying below the radar. But you still have supporters in this organization, myself foremost among them, who have always felt you got one raw deal. They trashed your reputation, went around saying you’d gone over — based on what?” He was getting worked up. “They never had proof; they were using you as a scapegoat for their dumb-ass mistakes. Justice was not served by the Justice Department.” “Don’t stress. The intelligence you have provided over the years about my former friends has been very useful.” “That’s something.

Stone, upbeat: “Still have the pugs?”

Rooney might have glanced at the photo poster above the ID machine.

“Brand-new litter. Three girls and a boy. Mom would get a kick out of ’em. They were her ‘grand-dogs.’” Both men were breathing audibly into the phone, cautious, psyching each other out.

“Is that a rooster I hear up on the old farm? Cancel that,” Rooney said quickly. “Don’t say what you don’t need to say.” “I am feeling a little paranoid these days. Got a sixth sense about the Bureau.” “They’re heeeeere!” Rooney could be unbelievably juvenile.

“Up close and personal,” Stone agreed. “Can you do me a favor and check it out?” “Anytime I can say fuck you to management, I am there.” “See what they’ve got going in the Northwest. There’s something else. Soon I’ll be digging up the turquoise. It’s time to move on. You’re entitled to your share.” Rooney choked up. “You got out, but still, after all these years, you remembered?” “You trusted me, so I’m keeping my word. Some things are simple. What are your plans?” “Plans?” Rooney’s voice deflated. “I have nobody left. What would I do?” “Anything you want, buddy.”

Uncertain: “I guess I’d have to take the dogs.” “You could buy a whole kennel.”

“I wish Mom were here.”

“She would want you to be happy.”

“How do we do this?”

“I’ll be in touch.”

There are no records of them talking again. Once they started using the satellite phone, Rooney would take it to the park. It was probably there that he blew the whistle.

Thirty-six

“This is a waste of time. I don’t need to be here.” “How are you feeling? What’s your mood?” “Right now? I’m buzzed, thinking of a million things, like how long we are going to be sitting in this motel. When my partner is coming to get me. How long I can hide out in Portland. How to keep all the balls in the air.” “You’re good at it? Keeping balls in the air?” “Have I dropped any lately that you know about?” “The FBI doesn’t tell me the details of their cases.” “That would be messy.”

“I’m a psychiatrist; I’m hired as an independent contractor. My concern here is only about you — your mental health, how you’re handling the pressures and demands they put you under.” “This is a standard evaluation, right? Like they do for all our undercovers?” “Tell me what’s been going on.”

“I’ve been in deep cover, in an extreme situation, for about three months. I’m living on a Podunk farm with a bunch of violent anarchists who could pop at any minute.” “Stressful?”

“Kind of.”

“How do you handle the stress?”

“By having chest pains, what do you think?” “When was that?”

“About a week ago. I was watching TV.”

“No unusual exertion? No change in medication? Just watching TV?” “Yes. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.” “Would this TV watching be normal for someone working undercover?” “Umm. Yes and no. Depends.”

“Do you like TV?”

“Yeah, I love it. I’m addicted to stupid, mind-numbing crap.” “I’m wondering if you use it as a way to deal with stress.” “I don’t watch the shows. I only watch the news.” “You watch the news.”

“There’s really only one story I’m interested in.” “Which is what?”

“It’s a local story. There’s a guy named Herbert Laumann, from the Bureau of Land Management, who was killed recently.” “Yes, he was gunned down in his driveway by some animal rights fanatics. I’m afraid there are a lot of them up here.” “You saw it?”

“It was all over the papers.”

“I did that!”

“You did it?”

“I shot the dude. The whole thing was staged. But it looked real, didn’t it? It was perfect. He and his family are in the witness protection program now. Isn’t that cool?” “This is when you started having chest pains?” “After it was over.”

“So you’re watching the news stories about the so-called murder.” “Obsessively. I have it on tape. All the national coverage, everything from the local stations, and a close-up of the animal rights movement they did on 20/20. My story was the lead.” “You sound proud.”

“It wasn’t easy to pull it off.”

“I’m sure. So you’re watching the tapes, over and over. Are alcohol or drugs involved?” “A little weed. A little beer. That’s how we do it on the farm.” “Okay, you’re getting high and watching how this man died. The one you supposedly killed.” “In the line of duty.”

“I understand. You say the operation went well?” “Very well.”

“And your superiors are pleased?”

“Yes, because now I’m really tight with the bad guys.” “I’ve got a note here that your communication with the FBI has lagged.” “Who said that?”

“Do you think you’ve been communicating with your office less than usual? Are you feeling withdrawn from the Bureau?” “No, it’s just a hassle. I have to get up early and hide out in the barn, or up in the trees. Right now, there’s not that much to say.” “The important thing, in your view, is that you’ve been initiated into this group — kind of like being a ‘made man’ in the Mafia. And the tapes of the news stories — they’re fascinating to you.” “Because I did such a…a really good job.” “Here. You’re feeling some emotion.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What’s going on right now, Ana? Take your time.” “I don’t know why I should be upset. I did a really good job. Does it say in there — Do you know my history?” “What do you mean?”

“Does it say that I once shot a police detective at point-blank range?” “Yes, I know.”

“Okay. That’s all.”

“Do you think about that incident a lot, Ana?” “All the time.”

“Can you describe your thoughts?”

“Like a track playing in the background.” “Do specific images and ideas intrude into your daily activities?” “Yes.”

“How often?”

“All the time.”

“How’s your mood lately?”

“Sad.”

“Ever since this second shooting?”

“No, because I’m bored! The case is going nowhere; there’s nothing to do. We’re waiting for the harvest — we grow hazelnuts — and for the leader of the group to make another move, but all he does is read the fish reports.” “He’s a fisherman?”

“No, he reads the fish counts in the paper. Out loud, every morning. How many salmon went through the fishways at the Bonneville Dam. It’s nuts.” “Well, they’re spawning. Some people think it’s a big deal.” “Like I care.”

“Are you more irritable lately?”

“Obviously. More like numbed out.”

“Remind me — how long ago did you go through critical incident training at the FBI?” “A couple of months after the shooting incident. It’s standard before they let you back to work.” “Did you receive a diagnosis at that time of PTSD?” “Post-traumatic stress disorder? Yeah, we all had it; that’s why we were there.” “I’m curious—”

“You’re curious about a lot of things.” “Did you have follow-up with a psychologist? PTSD usually takes more than a few sessions to improve. But it can improve. Dramatically.” “Well, a woman doctor in Los Angeles evaluated me — I forget her name, but she’s the one who approved me for duty.” “I’m not sure that she did.”

“I’m confused.”

“Let me try to clear up the confusion. You fit every criterion for a diagnosis of PTSD. You’ve had life-threatening trauma, resulting in intense fear and horror. Your current symptoms include mental replay of the trauma, numbing, avoidance, intrusive thoughts…. And all of this has been going on since your evaluation, months ago. Frankly, I can’t see why they put you on this case.” “I fit the profile.”

“Hundreds of other young female FBI agents fit the profile, too. Let me explain. I’m retired from private practice, Ana. I own an office building in downtown Portland and property in Seattle. I have a very nice life and I don’t need the money. I’m an old lefty, and I don’t give a damn if I’m fired by the FBI or if they screw with my tax returns, or whatever. You’re smiling.” “We don’t do that, but go ahead.”

“I do this to keep my hand in, and because I want to be of service. So I can be objective, and say, objectively, that there’s been an egregious error.” “You think they know about the PTSD?”

“Any examining doctor would have recommended that you not serve undercover.” “The SAC and the assistant director approved me.” “Then somewhere along the line, the doctor was overruled.” “Are you saying they put me on this case on purpose? Hoping I would crack?” “I’m strongly suggesting that there has been an error — error, not malice — because I would like to believe that no ethical commander would intentionally send a disabled soldier back into battle.” “Unless he wanted you to fail.”

“That has not been my experience of the Bureau.” “Do you know Peter Abbott?”

“The son of the congressman from Oregon?” “Yes, well, now Peter Abbott is a deputy director of the FBI. My boss believes he is trying to undermine this case. Or at least bend it his way. We don’t know why. It all started out so crystal clear, but now I couldn’t tell you who is running their game on whom. This is exactly where you’re not supposed to be, and it’s pissing me off.” “You’re an excellent foot soldier, Ana, and you have extraordinary qualities of persistence and dedication, but you’re still coping with long-term effects of the shooting incident. It’s like telling someone with pneumonia, ‘Go swim the Atlantic.’ I’m going to recommend that you’re removed from this case.” “No! You can’t do that! I’m fine. I’ll take back everything I said!” “I am deeply concerned about your safety. What would you like me to do?” “I need to talk to my contact agent, Mike Donnato. He’s the only one I trust.” “What do you mean, the only one you can trust?” “I wasn’t feeling crazy before I came here, but I’m sure feeling crazy now. Do all your patients say that? Doctor? That was a joke. Look, I have to go. My partner is meeting me downstairs. I’ll talk to him, and then — can I call you?” “Please.”

“As I said, it will probably be from a hazelnut tree.” “I’ve had stranger phone conferences. Are you okay to wait alone?” “Yes.”

“Let me hear from you.”

The dusky street smells of falafel and pigeons. The city has a faraway look as seen through a fishbowl. Disoriented by the flash-bang of cars and urban walkers, I realize my perceptions are confused. I am trying to understand what the psychiatrist said, but it is hard to think clearly. I am waiting for Donnato. When he arrives, it will make some kind of sense.

“Get in the car,” Mr. Terminate says.

The biker’s wrenchlike fingers close around my arm. A gun presses my ribs. We are in an alley and I don’t know how we got there, but with the full force of his body, he twists my shoulder and pops me like a cork into the open door of the car, where Mountain Man is waiting behind the wheel.

Thirty-seven

When we arrive at the farm, the thermometer on the barn reads 110 degrees — candy-apple red and about to burst. Unlike the dry heat of Los Angeles, a sultry fever rises from the earth, with a smell like roasting barley and manure. It hangs there, baking you to a stupor. The coolest spot in the valley is the hazelnut orchard. When Mr. Terminate and Mountain Man deliver me from Portland, Dick Stone is sitting on a beach chair set in its oasis of shade.

Old-timers say the first nut drops on the first of September. Those late-summer days, each of us on the farm seemed suspended in a kind of waiting. Sara and I would climb the ladders in 106-degree heat to count the dried-up moths in the traps, then spend the rest of the day reading fashion magazines. Nobody cooked anymore. The vegetables were sold, allegedly to help pay for the Big One. Despite the abundance of the garden, we were living on pancakes.

Slammer was so creepily polite to Megan and Stone, I thought one day he’d go berserk and kill them with an ax. But Mom and Dad kept him busy, preparing for the harvest. Inside the steamy shed, Slammer and Stone labored over the homemade nut sorter, a ludicrous contraption of green scrap metal, gas motors and exhaust pipes, rusty conveyor belts, and plywood hammered together with no apparent logic. I was really looking forward to what happened when they turned it on.

In the heat, brushfires kept breaking out among the troops.

“He’s lying,” I heard Slammer whispering to Sara. “He’s flat-out lying when he says the Big One’s coming. It’s just to keep us here.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s him. He’s a liar. Don’t defend him, ’ho.”

“I’m not defending him, and don’t you dare call me that. It’s like nobody cares what I’m going through. Nobody cares if I walk out the door into the middle of the freeway.”

“If nobody gives a shit, why don’t you do it?”

Megan and I weren’t getting along, either. To prepare for brittle making, she had me disassemble and clean every part of the industrial stove in the sweltering basement. She kept hauling out giant spoons and candy thermometers, and I dreaded the hellish days and nights when we would have to keep pots of scalding sugar syrup boiling around the clock.

Indications are the harvest will be good, and standing in the full-blown orchard, I can’t help feeling pride in our fake little farming family. Stone’s prudent trimming has created thick new growth. Underneath the leafy canopy is an Alice-in-Wonderland world of cool shadows and secret whisperings. The cries of blue jays pierce the murky gloom, and the smooth orchard floor is chilly as marble.

“You wanted to talk to me?”

Stone avoids my eyes. Instead, he rises, turns his back, and wanders toward a tree, fingering the sprouts at the end of a twig. I wait in silence while he inspects the new green buds.

“How much do you know about the sex life of filberts?” he asks at last.

“Got to be more interesting than mine.”

“It’s one of the stranger perversities of nature. Filberts require cross-pollination from two different plants. Their sexual fulfillment depends on the wind.”

“I can identify.”

“That’s why we cultivate both the Ennis and the Butler variety.” He indicates two trees, which look the same. “The Ennis is the germinator and the Butler is the pollinator.”

“Let me guess: male and female.”

“Yes, but which is which?”

I squeeze a little green bean hanging off a shoot.

“Male. The flower is called a catkin.”

This is the value of high school biology.

Stone nods in a distracted way, the weary science teacher.

“Despite the lateness of the season, some of the female flowers are still rudimentary. This is the ovary.” He rolls a bud between his fingers and then crushes it beneath a thumbnail. “It hasn’t developed and it never will.”

“I see that.”

“I know who you are,” says Stone.

Very slowly, he turns his face. The seething rage echoes the time at the traffic light when the rock ’n’ roll commandos were on our way to off Herbert Laumann the first time. Stone’s half-bearded cheeks glazed in the red stop light. Three measured words to Slammer when he honked at the Iranians in the van. “Don’t…do…that.” And Slammer didn’t.

The hot breath of summer puffs against my clammy forehead. My palm goes involuntarily there, like a woman about to faint. Crows are barking in the far branches.

“Which of us is more pathetic?” The pain in his eyes is like a hot flash of metal.

“What do you mean?”

“You were duped by the Bureau, just like me. Skip the humiliating dance, Ana.”

“Why do you call me that?”

“I like you, Ana. Don’t blow it by being stupid.” He sinks back into the beach chair, rubbing his meaty cheeks like Don Corleone.

“You’ve been initiated into this group — kind of like being a ‘made man’ in the Mafia,” the psychiatrist said.

“I’d play it the same way,” he says, “so you don’t have to. I have an excellent source. As you no doubt learned way back, there are different kinds of sources. There are longtime sources and open sources, both on the Bureau’s payroll, and ‘pocket sources’—personal connections who won’t take money because they think cooperating with the FBI is the American thing to do…. But this old friend of mine, he’s impeccable. He is an inside source. Someone who’s been ripped off by the Bureau culture and is only too happy to fuck someone else in return.

“This impeccable source of mine, he tells me an agent named Mike Donnato is working the national security side of the house. He describes how Special Agent Ana Grey was outfitted with the cover of Darcy DeGuzman in order to penetrate FAN. We’re the terrorist cell and I’m the big bad guru.” He touches his chest softly. “I told you. I’m not the one who made me paranoid.”

He hasn’t killed me yet, so maybe there still is a way.

An image comes to mind from a documentary movie, in which a mountain climber falls through the snow into a bottomless crevasse and clings to an ice shelf 150 feet down. No way can he climb up. His only choice is to descend into the unknown — go deeper into the vertical shaft and hope to find a way out.

Keep making decisions. Even if they’re wrong.

Go deeper.

“You’re right. I am an agent. And you’re a former agent who dropped out in the seventies.”

“They’re still after me.” Stone allows a smug smile.

“Yes, they are.”

“More than thirty years later. The incompetence is really something. No wonder we’re losing the war on terror.”

“This impeccable inside source you describe. We thought there was a leak, but that it came from higher up.”

“Uh-uh. Bottom-feeder. Rooney Berwick is the name.”

But you won’t live to tell.

“What tipped you off to me?”

Dick Stone fishes around in the pocket of his shorts and shows me the five shell casings he picked up in Laumann’s driveway.

“Never leave your brass at the shooting scene. I made that mistake with the cop on the roof. Otherwise, I’m a pretty good sniper, because I’m a tight-ass finicky bastard. I always use the same brand — Remington. But there was only one Remington on the ground, the live round I loaded into the gun. The other four are Winchester. See?”

The tiny etching on each copper jacket says WIN-45.

“You switched the magazine for blanks, didn’t you, darlin’? Very slick, but the Bureau screwed up. The dummy bullets should have been Remington.”

Jason Ripley secured the blanks.

“A rookie,” I say bitterly. “He wasn’t thinking.”

“What do you expect?” Stone claps my shoulder sympathetically. “They’re not all as good as you and me.”

“I wasn’t that good, apparently.”

“You were doing fine. Until I talked to Berwick. The arrows started lining up.”

“Frankly, Dick, it’s a relief. I couldn’t have kept it going.”

“Enlighten me, Ana Grey. What were they thinking?” He removes the Colt from a holster under a loose guayabera shirt and holds it in both hands. “They already sent one of their clowns.”

Indignation flares and I don’t try to stop it.

“If you’re talking about the agent you murdered with a bomb, he had a name — Steve Crawford. He left a wife and children, and he was a friend of mine.”

“You think he was a together guy? He came across to me as a real asshole.”

“That was his cover,” I say angrily.

“Nope, sorry, that was him. He’s supposed to be dealing methamphetamine, but he’s wearing a Harvard University ring, for Christ’s sake. And nice-looking boots.”

Stone is busy unscrewing the top of a water bottle, then soaks a red bandanna inside. He ties it tightly over his head, gangsta-style. Water drips along the pink flush in his neck.

“Your buddy Steve was pushing too hard. He comes in way too fast and fancy. You’re thinking, Man, what is this? You know what was the tell? He’s cheap. He acts like a high roller, but he doesn’t tip well, like a person on an expense account trying to shave a little. Working people know that barmaids have to make a living. That was paltry.”

“So you lure him into the woods and blow him up?”

“Why do that? Why off an agent and send the whole world up here? He blew himself up. He hears a rumor I’ve got a buried fortune in stolen turquoise and silver, and he decides, I’m going to do something about this kingpin. I’m going to take the turquoise. Because I’m the government, and the government can do anything. He out-and-out threatens me, just like any crooked scumbag cop. He says, ‘I’m going to take the goods off you. I’m gonna steal it because it’s stolen anyway. If you don’t cooperate, I’ll have you arrested.’ So I told him where it was.”

Then it collapses, like a sand castle undercut by waves. “That’s not the guy I knew.”

“I’m amazed you didn’t see through the act.”

“Did you tell him what the turquoise is? Don’t say Indian jewelry.”

Dick Stone smiles. “I like symbols. I like the great western myths — like preserving the freedom of the wild mustangs — it stirs people’s loyalty. There’s an open secret — one I’ve cultivated for years, like the orchard — that I have the means to finance operations. Otherwise, nobody would pay attention.

“No, it’s for real. Back in the day, I was working a deal we had going in Arizona, called Turquoise. Case closed, bad guys in jail, and Berwick the techie and I find ourselves alone in a garage, disabling the crap he’d installed on this armored car, and sweet Jesus, there is a bag with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the bottom of the trunk. It was nowhere on our inventory. Nobody knew it existed. The Bureau was acting like I was an orphan child they’d disowned, so screw it. We took the cash. Berwick was scared, so I kept his share for him. Then some dudes from the Paiute Nation got ripped off of a load of semi-precious gems, and thus a legend was born.

“Don’t lose sleep over your buddy. He was just another insignificant, corrupt little Bureau shit, who only made my life that much harder. And then there was you.”

He shakes his head, then pulls out a joint and lights it, carefully extinguishing the match against the sole of his sandal. Despite the coolness beneath the trees, heat is shooting through my body.

“Ana, I cannot express to you the depth of my disappointment and sorrow. I would never have said it to him, your friend, the father of two—‘Prove your loyalty and I will share my treasure.’” His eyes bulge as he holds the smoke. “But I would have said it to you.”

“I can help you out.”

“How is that?” asks Stone.

“I feel you, brother.”

Stone doubles up laughing, spewing fragrant smoke.

“You’re kidding, right?”

I’m speed-talking, careening into street jive.

“No, dig it, look. You come into the FBI all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a well-educated attorney, a patriot like your brother, who made the sacrifice in Vietnam, and all you want is to follow the rules and do your duty, and look how you were treated. Sent undercover with no protection, no support. So here’s me. Female, biracial, and it’s the same tune. They throw me into this situation here and walk away. My supervisor is a jerk. He doesn’t care about my safety; he’s just worried about his career. I’m the way he’s going to advance, no matter how the case turns out with Dick Stone.”

Stone exhales a cone of smoke. “So I’m preaching to the choir?”

“I can’t argue with the evidence. The bullet casings? Berwick on the inside? What’s my choice? What would you do? You’d do the smart thing, too. You’d flip. It’s a no-brainer. I’ll come over and help you out.”

Stone extinguishes the joint. His tone is magnanimous.

“You can flip all you want. You can flop around like a goddamned salmon. But one day, I will take your life. In spite of the fact you’re good. Or maybe because you’re good. It completes a certain cycle of nature. You like science? I like science, too. No worries, Ana. It won’t be a surprise.”

“They know where I am and they’ll come and get me.”

“Yes, they will, but not before the Big One. After that, darlin’, it won’t matter much to either one of us.”

A task force of Bu-cars and tech vans moves in formation across the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles. Lanes of traffic give way to the flotilla of black vehicles as it passes the Staples Center and the painted eyes of the twelve-story violinist on the famous mural, which are following the caravan with subtle surprise.

Curving down an exit and underneath the freeway, maintaining the speed limit, it moves with the precision of a fleet of Hornet warplanes. Entering the Central American nation, it slows for pushcarts selling ices and throngs of women and children shopping the mercados and botanicas in the early-morning particulate dust. The security gates roll back and the lead sedan, in which SAC Robert Galloway is riding, enters the secure lot of the JR Trading Co.

The sweep is a total surprise. The task force invades the ancient hallways, charging past the cubicles of the defunct unemployment office, where bewildered agents sit before computer screens, to the innermost heart of covert operations — the secret laboratory — securing doors and exits in less than four minutes.

Nobody is going home today.

Stone walks me out of the orchard. Like Slammer to his burial, I go willingly. He doesn’t have to show the gun.

We probably look like hippie father and daughter, or master and acolyte, strolling past the dusty blackberry bushes laden with ripe fruit and bees. It probably looks like everything’s okay in the heartland of the USA. In the center of a small ring, willowy young Sara is reluctantly learning to lunge Geronimo. Sterling McCord is teaching her how to exercise him, standing close behind her, spooning almost, with that uninhibited pelvis, as he reaches around to guide her hands on a long lead rope and whip. Just a whisper on the hindquarters, and the little white horse starts up a trot.

Like figures on a music box, the cowboy and Sara revolve in tiny steps together, guiding the foal with the lead and the whip in sprightly circles around the ring.

I cannot hide the bitter envy. “Isn’t it pretty?”

Little Geronimo gets frisky and kicks up his heels, hitting a hind leg against the rail. A smack rings out and the wood vibrates. Sterling halts the lesson.

Everyone who works at the off-site is herded into the central lab. Restrooms are searched. The roof is secured. Galloway addresses the crowd.

“There has been a breach of security at this facility. A suspect is being apprehended. Our purpose right now is to evaluate the viability of this workplace. You will be required to take a polygraph. We are counting on your patience and understanding in getting everyone through this as quickly as possible.”

When Mike Donnato discovered the tape of the phone conversation with Stone, and realized that Rooney Berwick had failed to report for work the past three days, the off-site was put under lockdown, and L.A. County sheriff’s deputies dispatched to his residence.

The Villa de Andalusia on Harper Avenue in West Hollywood is one of those garden courtyard apartments built in the 1920s. It would seem romantic if you were a nineteen-year-old would-be actress just off the bus, until you met your neighbors — a bleached-blond lesbian bartender and Rooney Berwick.

The bartender has a soulful, heart-shaped face, is covered below the neck with body tattoos, and is also nine months pregnant. She illegally sublets apartment 1A, Mrs. Berwick’s old place, while Rooney lives over the garage. Neither one of them would loan you a cup of sugar.

Nobody is answering in the garage apartment, so the deputies pound on 1A. The tattooed bartender comes out snarling and refuses to unlock the metal security door.

“Ruby Berwick?”

“Not in a million years.”

“Do you know where she is, ma’am?”

“She doesn’t live here.”

“What about her son, Rooney Berwick?”

“He says he works for the FBI, but that’s too weird for words.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“I don’t have a fucking clue.”

The deputy thanks her and walks past a fountain holding pools of scummy water to join his partner on the landing outside the cheaply built garage apartment. The door is locked. A bundle of mail is stuck in the slot, yellowed by the sun. Forced entry is required.

A couple of jabs with a crowbar splinters the thin veneer of the door, and then the entire lock assembly gives way with a groan. There seems to be weight on the other side, like sandbags, preventing them from opening it. Old people drop while answering the bell…. Sick people collapse before getting help…. But as they push against the door, a tearing sound like bandages from skin alerts the officers to the disturbing fact that it has been sealed with duct tape from the inside.

When they enter the grubby studio apartment, the deputies notice the temperature is elevated to over ninety degrees. All the windows are shut and there’s an ominous smell. Propped on a chair where nobody could miss it is a three-foot drawing of a skull on poster board, with handwritten words that say DANGER! CARBON DIOXIDE! RUBY “MOM” BERWICK, REST IN PEACE.

A Superman comic book from 1965 is taped open to a page on which the Man of Steel is spiraling into space, fist raised. “He knows what he must do!” the caption reads. An empty vial of Percocet and cans of beer have been discarded on the floor.

The bathroom door is locked, and again taped from inside. Once they gain entry, the deputies see the amber plastic doors that enclose the shower-tub have also been sealed, along with the bathroom window. Clearly, the intention was to create an airless chamber. But what of the two mysterious blue plastic milk cartons stamped AMBROSE, with a clock and a partially burned candle set on top?

Inside the tub is the fully clothed body of a decomposing white man, about 190 pounds, long white hair, lying in a fetal position on its side. Near the feet are the bodies of four pug dogs in similar states of decomposition. Fluid has collected in the bottom of the tub.

These five beings died together from lack of oxygen — but how? Sealing a chamber and burning a candle doesn’t suck the air out of a room. After the origin of the milk cartons has been identified as the Ambrose Dairy, where, it is learned, the deceased’s mother worked for thirty years, the coroner will rule that death resulted from environmental hypoxia caused by exogenous carbon dioxide exposure: dry ice.

Rooney Berwick had returned to the landmark drive-in dairy and purchased two blocks of dry ice (frozen CO2), commonly used to handle milk products. As a tech, he knew carbon dioxide vapor would drift toward the ground, and therefore he placed the blocks of dry ice inside the tub. Then he got high, laid back, and watched the clock as the blocks smoked and shrank, disappearing into an invisible toxic gas.

Eventually, deprived of oxygen, his heart would stop. The props he used from the Ambrose Dairy to effect his death expressed, with subconscious elegance, the attachment and rage he felt for his mother. At the last, he might have been quite comfortable lying down with his dogs, entombed by loneliness that had finally become a rock-hard cocoon.

But the genius part of Rooney’s suicide was not the methodology. The genius part was to be found on the computer, left in screen-saver mode on Mrs. Berwick’s Formica and chrome dining table, no doubt where little Rooney used to eat his mom’s kielbasa and cabbage.

Staring at the deputies is the FAN home page with a brand-new link—“In Memoriam — Ruby Berwick, Beloved Mother, and Rooney Berwick, Son”—which takes the visitor to pages and pages of classified documents on Operation Wildcat, stolen by the deceased and put on the Internet for all the world to see.

Even more brilliant was to post the ID picture Rooney took that day at the off-site: “Darcy DeGuzman, aka FBI Special Agent Ana Grey.”

He burned the Bureau but good.

Galloway’s response was unhesitating: “Get Ana out now.”

Thirty-eight

In Quantico, Virginia, the hostage rescue team is put on standby. Out at Andrews Air Force Base, a CF-5 is loaded up with helicopters and light armored vehicles to be on scene within twelve hours.

Local FBI SWAT teams from Salt Lake, Seattle, and Los Angeles are called up as a west regional asset. Donnato, Galloway, and Angelo are on a commercial flight, and Peter Abbott on a jet from D.C. to Portland, where, in the Operation Wildcat command center, agents monitoring Dick Stone’s surveillance system are carefully watching the movements of those in the house, waiting to see if Special Agent Ana Grey has holed up in the sewing room — the Room of Unfinished Dreams — signaling an emergency.

Within hours, warrants for the search and seizure of unregistered automatic weapons have been signed by a local magistrate, giving probable cause to investigate Dick Stone, living at Willamette Hazelnut Farm under the false identity of Julius Emerson Phelps, for firearms violations.

If you are serving a warrant for guns, you want to isolate the suspects from the location and their access to those guns. At the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, the ATF did not intercept the key players while they were away from the compound, which led to catastrophe. The Bureau would not want to repeat that mistake; on the other hand, in hours of watching the surveillance cameras, it becomes clear not only that nobody is about to leave the farm for a trip to Wal-Mart but that two other hulking players have arrived — Mr. Terminate and Mountain Man — which indicates that while Stone is preparing for his Big One, the Bureau had best get ready for its.

Under cover of darkness, a perimeter is established around the farm. Snipers are out there gathering intel, reporting on movement, describing the buildings and their entry and exit points. Beyond the perimeter, in vans equipped with monitors that show the same surveillance images as at the command center, SWAT team leaders huddle over drawings of the interior Ana Grey had made for Donnato, revising the scenario for a controlled dynamic entry — contingency planning that had been in place since the very day she walked in and activated when it became clear that she had disappeared somewhere between the psychiatrist’s office and the pickup by her handler in Portland. By first light, the snipers have found their final positions of cover and concealment, and an SOG helicopter is readied for takeoff in a distant field.

The scene in the kitchen could not be more domestic. Every box of cereal in the pantry has been taken out and lined up on the counter, and Megan and I are mixing lurid rainbows of flakes and chips and marshmallow bits like kids at a sundae bar. It’s either Armageddon or a sleepover. Stone has been studying the fish report in the newspaper, as usual.

“‘Yesterday five hundred and twelve chinook salmon moved through the fish ladders in an hour,’” he reads. “That’s the highest count all summer. Having fun undercover, Ana Grey?” I give him a grimace. I spent a sleepless night on the couch guarded by Mr. Terminate, who stayed awake doing coke, an AK-47 across his knees. But this morning, he and Mountain Man were gone.

“I’m glad we’ve all come clean,” Stone says. “So we can trade war stories. I remember one time undercover on the beach in northern California with a dozen naked hippies, all tripping on acid, entwined in a mound like a bunch of seals, like something dumped out of the sea. And here we are, right back to it.” He fingers the Colt in the holster. “Just like the old days, minus the pussy — no offense.” “I was there, darlin’,” Megan deadpans.

Stone laughs as Sara comes downstairs wearing flannel drawstring pants and a lingerie top without a bra, still all soft focus from sleep.

“Where’s Slammer? Did he already eat?”

Dick Stone informs her that Slammer has left.

“Left where?”

“Left the farm. He’s gone. Just took off. Said he couldn’t take it here anymore. Because I’m a prick, evidently.” “What?” Sara is disbelieving. “He wouldn’t just split like that. Without telling me? Darcy, did you see him go?” I shake my head. “First I’ve heard of it.”

Sara flushes pink. “What did you do to him?”

“Nothing. Left of his own free will.”

Megan: “He walked out wearing his backpack. Check his room; you’ll see it’s gone.” “I don’t believe you. What is going on?”

“Well,” says Megan, “for one thing, Darcy here is a fed.”

“A what?”

“She’s a cop. A spy. It’s a brand-new day, Sara,” Stone announces.

Sara’s look goes blank and her delicate face shuts down.

Unreachable.

“I’m with the FBI and I’ve been working undercover to infiltrate FAN. This is what it really looks like when your cover has been blown,” I say, waving a spoon toward the collection of fluorescent cereal boxes with cartoon characters flying spaceships and riding tricycles.

The gesture takes in the superior look on Dick Stone’s face, Megan’s “I knew it all along” coolness, the hazelnut trees, lost animals, and, just beyond the cottonwood trees, hopefully, a hostage rescue team assembled from three states.

Her eyelids flutter.

“Did my parents send you?”

Ignoring Dick Stone’s chuckle, I say, “No, Sara, I was sent by the U.S. government to destroy a terrorist cell. These people have broken the law and they are going to jail. When the time comes, do what I tell you, and you will be safe with me.” The chuckle again. He’s enjoying this.

“What about Slammer?”

Stone touches her wrist. “Don’t let it break your heart.”

“He wouldn’t leave me. We’re friends.”

“He’ll show up again. You know how he is.”

The girl still can’t make sense of it. “Slammer just left — on foot?”

“John and his buddy gave him a ride.”

“Where to?”

“The bus station.”

My gut tightens. The fact that Stone has disclosed Slammer left with the goons is ominous. Maybe Slammer became too rebellious, too much of an obstacle, like me. “The bus station” could mean the Dumpster at the shooting range. Alerted by the sound of heavy tires on gravel, we watch as McCord’s Silverado turns into the driveway. Sara runs toward the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Sterling’s here. He’s got the wraps for Geronimo’s leg.”

“What happened to Geronimo?”

“He banged his leg against the rail yesterday. It’s all swollen.”

“Go,” says Megan with a tired wave. “Take care of the baby.” Her eyes have reddened and pooled.

Stone allows Sara to leave.

Stone fills a small enameled pot with water. He turns the knob on the stove until the electronic igniter clicks. He waits for the flame. With smooth, familiar movements, he pops the scarred white cabinet open, removes a paper box, and holds it against his belly while choosing a packet of red bush tea. He slaps the door shut.

The tension at the kitchen table is like waiting for a hurricane. We are losing the sun and palm trees are blowing inside out; traffic lights swing wildly on their cables. The storm shutters are up and the house is sealed, but within the hour we will be beset by knocking winds like a thousand screaming inmates.

Stone sits down and stares into his cup. A sightless maroon surface stares back at him.

“I’d talk about the philosophical aspects of these people I was living with,” he says, “but all the FBI cared about was ‘Where are the fugitives? If they’re not planning to blow something up, we’re not interested.’ There was no intelligence gathering. My supervisor wasn’t listening. ‘Where are the fugitives? Where are the fugitives?’

“They were trapped inside their own box. It was Hoover’s dirty little war and the Weathermen were the guerrillas. They knew the land. They had allies. It’s amazing how many well-to-do, educated people helped them out.” “That’s how pissed off everyone was about Vietnam,” Megan says.

“Then I go back to the office and get shit from the straight agents. So now I’m bitter toward the Bureau. Now it’s really them and us. Except I don’t fit in anywhere. Hoover’s saying hippies are filthy and depraved, but that’s the only place people like me are comfortable. The only folks who’ll shelter us. I would cry. I’d sit in my apartment in Venice and get high and eat nothing but candy for the sugar rush, and cry.

“And they knew it. The Bureau knew I was going wack but they did just the opposite — sent me back in. ‘This guy is good. He’s done it. He got himself accepted. Let’s send him back.’ Which really fucked me up. I shifted up to Santa Barbara, lived in a tepee in a public park. Looked like a radical, hair down to here. Smoked dope, engaged in group sex. I knew Vietnam vets who threw their medals away. We tripped out together, cried for our brothers. I remember lying in a park on the grass and letting my tears go into the ground, like they were mixing with every casualty that ever was. The country was blowing apart. Our government was killing millions of civilians in Vietnam. The war drove everyone out of their minds.

“This is not how I was raised. My family had decorum. My father was a deacon of the church. But I’m still carrying the flag, tattered as it is, so I go up to Berkeley and do my thing. Agitate. Penetrate. Lie to the college kids who smoked my dope and were my friends. Sleep with chicks, big ones, ugly ones, lesbians—‘Put a flag over her face and do it for Old Glory,’ the Bureau used to say. ‘Get information and move on.’ Things were so volatile that before I took the assignment, I went back home to say good-bye to my parents, because I thought I might get killed on the job. I couldn’t tell them what I was doing, but I wanted them to know it was for the right reasons.

“But, yeah. The right reason. Agents I came up with, my own buddies, we would raid a suspected Weather collective in an apartment building in east Los Angeles and hang people outside the windows upside down by their ankles. I did that. True. We’d rob their houses, intimidate their families, spread false rumors about them at work, because our government said that was the way to win hearts and minds, remember?

“Here I am, living on campus, stoned out of my mind, getting down with the folks while trying to hold on to my Bureau identity—really holding on—believing we had right on our side and this scum had to be caught and put in jail because they were criminals, because they were blowing up the Capitol Building and the Queens Courthouse and Gulf Oil. See, darlin’? Anarchy is nothing new. But then the Bureau fucked with Megan, and I told them not to—and I couldn’t hold it together any longer. This thing split inside me. The job itself was blowing me apart.” “What did they do to her?”

“They spread disinformation. I was a Communist and a slut,” Megan says. “They got me fired from my job at Berkeley.” Stone takes her hand.

“She was a hot, sexy, rebellious professor, and I was a student radical supposedly taking her class. A little old for the part, although I was a lot skinnier — and I had this cornball alias, ‘Aquarius Bob’—but she liked me anyway. They arrested her at a demonstration on phony, cooked-up charges, I signed her out of jail, and we never looked back. Both our careers were over, so what the fuck? The Bureau went ballistic. They sent guys to my old apartment in Venice, and all they found was an empty wreck. Clothes on the floor, nothing washed, nothing put back in drawers, fast food and candy wrappers — as time went by, the layers just piled up. They let it drop, ever so subtly to everyone in L.A., that I’d flipped out and gone over to the other side, when for all they knew, I could have been living on the beach in Hawaii. They totally trashed me.” “He was a beautiful young man.” Megan is suddenly self-conscious, eyes downcast. “He was motivated by ideals, even though they were different from mine. But that’s why I fell in love with him. He was a lanky, serious guy who kind of stumbled over the rhetoric. For all his conservative outlook, there was something edgy and unsafe about Julius, more dangerous than the most radical hippies.” “Because I was playing both sides. It’s a high. Right, Ana?”

“We were young, ready to take on the world. I didn’t know he was an agent until he showed up at jail. He looked completely different. He’d cut his hair and put on a suit. He brought me these horrible clothes! Where did you get those clothes? I looked like a school-teacher, but it got us to Canada.” I smile sadly. “I knew this was a love story.”

But there is bitterness, too. “What did we have?” Megan asks. “Nothing but sex. I mean, literally, nothing. But at the time, it was the only thing that seemed to matter: Making love was the ultimate political act. As if two people in bed could change the world. Then it got cold and winter came and we were sick all the time, living as fugitives until the movement started to eat its own tail.” “You wanted out.”

“Where could we go with no résumés and no work histories that matched our ages, except the abandoned family farm that nobody wanted? We pulled out the old u-pick peach orchard and planted hazelnuts. He went back to school and learned tree farming and became a pillar of the community, and by then, well, there was no chance of children, but that’s okay, because we had our rescue animals.” “When I went home that final time,” says Stone, “and said good-bye to my parents, I wanted them to know I wasn’t taking a top secret assignment to cause them more hurt, but of course it did, because they never saw either one of their sons again, after my brother was killed. Some days I can put a good face on it. To their dying hour, they could hold my brother up as a hero. He was a hero, but I’ll always be a criminal. If Ana Grey and friends have anything to say about it.” “I have nothing to say.”

They all were criminals. In the late seventies, Acting Director L. Patrick Grey III and two other highly ranked FBI officials were indicted for violating the constitutional rights of relatives of the Weatherman fugitives.

“I’ll tell you what’s worse,” Stone goes on. “I tried to go public. I talked to Jimmy Breslin—” “Stop it now,” Megan says. “Enough.”

But Stone is on a hectic roll.

“He wanted proof. Where was the proof? I’ll tell you. In forty-seven drawers of files on deep-cover operatives that the Bureau destroyed. See, that was a violation of me. Of my history. My sacrifice. My rights as a human being. And hers. I knew everything they did to Megan Tewksbury, play by play. I went to my supervisor, another sidewinder, Peter Abbott, and I said, ‘This woman is entitled to free speech. She is not a national security threat, nor is she a whore. Leave her alone.’ I was in love with her and that’s why he wouldn’t stop. Just to test me. Mess with my head.” “That’s not the only reason,” Megan says crossly. “You forget. I was speaking out against the power companies that were destroying the West, one of which was owned by the Abbott family.” I remember the surveillance photo Peter Abbott displayed at the conference table in Los Angeles. Megan, wrapped in an American flag, was shouting nose-to-nose with his congressman father at the building site of a dam along the Columbia Gorge.

Nice sideburns, Dad.

“They were given a free pass to own the Northwest electric grid by destroying the natural rivers. People in the movement knew it. Knew it was totally corrupt. They used every obscene trick in the book to persecute us, and eventually, sickeningly, we gave up and ran.” Stone’s voice is rising. “I warned him when he was my supervisor: If he didn’t lay off you, I’d bring him down. The yachts, the mansions, the whole damn empire—” Megan is scornful. “Yachts? Now you’re talking nonsense.”

And Stone’s eyes take on a vacant look, meaning that he’s shifting gears. Even his voice is throaty when he says, “I’ve got the goods on Abbott.” I ask, “What goods?”

“Illegal contracts.”

“How?”

“Pay attention. I said I had an impeccable source on the inside.”

“Rooney Berwick? He works in the lab.”

“He’s a computer wonk, a master hacker. It’s a game to him: Beat the assholes. It took us years.” “This impeccable intel — where is it?”

“Buried. For now.”

“You always go too far,” Megan scolds. “You get stuck on these obsessions, and what good does it do?” Stone is conspiratorial. “Megan Tewksbury wasn’t her real name. It was Laurel Williams.” Megan begins to cry. “Oh my God. I haven’t heard that said out loud in thirty years.” There is a sick lump in my throat. Dick Stone takes off his glasses and rubs his small damp eyes. After a while he says, “It’s time.” Megan looks over from the sink, where she has splashed her flaming cheeks.

“Are you still with me?” he asks her with a heart-wrenching look of disembodied loneliness.

Megan reaches for a dish towel and dries her hands. She rests in that gesture of finality, fingers kneading the cloth.

The white cat stalks along the windowsill, neatly avoiding the plants. Stone sits with his eyes out of focus and shoulders slumped, a mountain of weightiness. I look back and forth between them. The limpid light from the window washes over us with incongruous peace.

When I was in college, I once stayed up all night, driving the Pacific Coast Highway with a wealthy girlfriend who owned an MG convertible. We forced ourselves to stay awake because neither of us had ever actually seen the dawn. We wanted to mark the very instant the darkness crossed that line in the sky into day.

I learned that night there is no marker, no precise delineation for change, but as the sun rose over the red tile roofs of Santa Barbara, I witnessed for the first time how the world slowly blushes open, the way it has just now, in this long moment of disengagement — without words and without a look — as Megan and Stone have begun their good-byes to a long shared life on the run.

When the service of the warrant and the assault begin, Sara and McCord are still in the barn.

“This is an ice boot.” He secures the neoprene wrap around Geronimo’s leg. “You keep it in the freezer, then it goes on the swelling.” Sara kneels beside him in the straw. “How come you know everything?”

“Because I care. I make it my business. Just like I care about you and your welfare.” “You do?”

“You’re a good kid. Just in with the wrong folks.”

She glances furtively toward the house. “Something’s going on.”

“All right.”

“I don’t understand it. This morning, Slammer disappeared without telling me where he was going.” Sirocco is pawing and pulling violently on the cross ties. The baby’s ears are up. Alerted, McCord glances through the open barn doors.

“Get out, now,” he says and hauls Sara to her feet.

They reach the yard as the surveillance helicopter breaks over the trees. McCord has only time to grab an aluminum suitcase from the Silverado before pushing Sara through the back door and into the kitchen, where all of us are craning to look through the windows.

“Who is it?”

“FBI,” McCord tells Stone.

“Bitch!” he shouts, and backhands me across the face. I reel against the sink as red drops from a split lip find the drain.

McCord: “What’s that about?”

“She’s a fed,” Sara announces breathlessly.

Pressing my hand to my mouth, I see Sterling McCord make an adjustment. He straightens his back and regards me in a different way, as if an entire sequence has locked into place for him.

“In that case, we use her as a bargaining chip. They’ll attempt to negotiate.” “I know exactly what they’ll do,” growls Stone.

Sara goes spacey and begins to wander off, but Megan pulls her back. “Stay away from the windows.” McCord: “You two go down to the basement.”

“What about you?” Sara cries.

“We’re going to talk to the feds,” replies McCord.

“Like fuck we are,” says Stone. “And who the fuck are you?”

McCord shows his palms in deference. “Your house, your call. But can we agree to get the women out of the line of fire?” “Except Ana Grey.”

McCord, bemused: “Is that your real name?”

I nod yes.

The helicopter swoops low and deafeningly loud, most likely checking our positions with infrared devices. They’ve already got a pretty good picture from listening in on Stone’s surveillance system. When the chopper fades, an amplified voice from somewhere out there begins calling us out.

“This is Deputy Director Peter Abbott with the FBI. We have a warrant to search the premises. Please come out with your hands up.” None of us in the kitchen moves. Stone is leaning against the counter, head down, staring at his bare crossed ankles.

“They sent the brass,” he says sarcastically.

“Megan Tewksbury? Laurel Williams?”

Megan startles, as if hit with a cattle prod. “What the hell?”

“I believe you’re innocent. I know you’ve been coerced. This is a dead end. Don’t put your life in danger.” Her eyes go wild. “Why me?”

“They’re trying to drive a wedge,” I say.

“If I go out there, they’ll shoot me.”

“No, they won’t,” says McCord. “They want you out of here. One less potential casualty.” “Megan, Laurel, step outside the door.”

Megan is red-faced, confused as a girl. “What should I do?”

Stone says, “Go on.”

“Without you?”

“All I’ve ever done is bring you down. They’ll cut you a deal. Sara, too.” Sara has begun to quiver.

McCord says, “Go ahead. You’ll be safe, little girl.”

Megan extends her hand and Sara takes it.

“You stay here,” Stone tells me, unholstering his gun.

Megan and Sara, holding hands, walk awkwardly to the front door. Megan glances back at us, then opens it a slice. Somewhere out there is the supreme warrior-bureaucrat, the man who took away her freedom, offering it back.

“What do you want?” Megan shouts.

“I promise you safe passage. We don’t want you to get hurt. Tell Dick Stone to let you go.” “I am my own person!” Megan declares melodramatically. “I am free to go or stay. I have someone else with me. A girl. Sara.” “Good. Where is Agent Grey? Is she hurt?”

“She’s in the kitchen. She’s fine.”

“You and Sara come out now. Everything will be okay.” We cannot see what Megan sees through the crack of the door, but I doubt it is the guns that frighten her. Or the aftermath of surrender, too unimaginable to grasp. She hesitates on the threshold between two men, two lives, and maybe it’s the distance that decides it — not more than fifty yards from the porch to the road, but a still, wavering sunlit space of almost four decades too charged with passion to be dismissed in a banal gesture. Megan slams the door and locks it. Dragging Sara, she hurtles back through the dining room to the kitchen and stands before Dick Stone, who opens his arms and takes her in.

With a sigh, the refrigerator shuts down.

Stone tries the stove. No electric click. The faucets spew air.

“They cut the water and power.” He picks up the receiver. “But not the phone.” When night falls we will be trapped in darkness, while they will follow every move with night-vision. They have the jump, and he knows it. All that firepower, but all they have to do is wait — days, months — who cares? Why provoke a siege? When dehydration and the stink of our own filth have fully driven us insane, they can simply pluck us out of here.

Megan and Sara are down in the basement with the cats, while Stone, McCord, and I sit around a table littered with cereal bowls and used cups as the kitchen warms to medium rare in the midday sun. Already we look like renegades, haggard and rank. Sometime after noon, an armored robotic vehicle crawls across the yard and delivers a throw phone to the front steps.

“All we’re asking is to talk,” says a new voice on the bullhorn. “Please open the door and take the phone. We guarantee your safety.” Through a swollen lip, I offer to open the door and retrieve the phone.

“You know what this will become,” says Stone. “A slow, protracted crisis-negotiator scenario.” “What’s the alternative?”

In answer, McCord slaps the battered aluminum suitcase down on the table.

“They send in counterterrorist assault teams trained for close combat,” he says. “They move fast and use extreme violence. They know it’s just you and me. For them, it’s a walk in the park.” McCord unsnaps the suitcase and opens the lid. Stone and I both gasp. The case is custom-fitted with a collection of handmade weapons I have never seen before except in kung-fu movies: double-bladed knives, with one curved blade and one straight; throwing stars like giant jacks with lethal barbs, meant to blind an enemy in pursuit; miniature razor-sharp scythes.

Stone has his arms crossed and is chuckling again.

“Special Ops?”

“Delta Force. Now I do it for money.”

It is my turn to reel, unable to make sense of it. “You’re a mercenary?” “We don’t particularly like that word. I am a soldier for hire by a private military company. Outsourcing, ma’am. We run every war that’s taking place in the world right now.” “Were you in Pakistan? I’ve seen those there,” muses Stone, pointing to a machete with a rawhide-laced grip.

“Peshawar.”

“I was, too. Many years ago.”

“We must have people in common.”

“Are you two going to start exchanging recipes now?” I say sardonically.

“What’s your problem, Ana Grey?” Stone loves to taunt me with the name.

I stare hard at McCord. “I don’t like being lied to is all.”

Stone guffaws and the so-called cowboy hides a smile. I am furious with the pretender, and the attraction that I felt for him, but why should it matter? He is just another player in this depressing endgame.

“You’re a hired killer!”

“First of all, I never fight for Communists,” McCord explains pleasantly. “Second, it’s not like being a hired gun in the Old West. Some guys are trigger-happy, but they don’t last. The long-timers know how to protect the client’s interests without the use of force. There’s always the fine art of negotiation. But I wasn’t lying to you, ma’am.” “How is that?”

“I believe I did say that I am a professional wrangler. I was raised with cutting horses in Kerrville, Texas. And that’s the truth.” “Meaning what?”

He shrugs. “Nothing to hide is all.”

“You can hide in plain sight,” I snap.

“This is the FBI. Please take the phone into the house. It is very important that we contact former agent Dick Stone.” Stone has been sitting calmly, hands on knees.

“I’ve decided to talk to them. I have only one demand. If they give me what I want, this will resolve. If they don’t, this will be the worst day in the history of the FBI.” That’s what David Koresh said before the siege at Waco. And he was right.

“You,” orders Stone. “Miss Secret Agent. Get on the phone.”

McCord: “What do you want me to do?”

“Hang tight. There will be compensation.”

Without a flicker, McCord says, “Good enough,” and snaps the suitcase shut.

Stone stays close as I call 911 on the house phone and ask to be connected to the sheriff’s department.

“This is Special Agent Ana Grey with the FBI. I’m inside the farmhouse.” “How many with you? Is anyone hurt?”

“We demand to talk to the lead negotiator.” I hold Stone’s shrunken red eyes and repeat his message word for word: “No lackey Bureau assholes. I will open the door and pick up the phone. That’s all.” We go to the front of the house. Using my body as a shield, Stone crooks a forearm tightly around my throat while holding the Colt.45 to my head. I try to stay loose, a compliant dance with his. I reach for the knob and open the door. Outside, the wide world shouts. A quick scan reveals no snipers; they are hidden on higher ground. Afternoon heat hits our faces as we bend together, and my hands reach out to pick up the phone.

We retreat and slam the door.

No shots are fired.

Then he brings Megan and Sara up from the basement and orders me to help them prepare for evacuation.

We pull everything out of the front closet, dragging the vacuum cleaner and its attachments, and all the attachments from the previous vacuum cleaners, too, the unstrung tennis rackets and stiff yellow rain suits, and toss them out of the way. Megan insists on sweeping the floor, painstakingly digging a mouse corpse out of the corner.

All that’s left is the naked closet — wire hooks and pegs, a single lightbulb on an old chain fixture — and the painted-over inner door: the one I discovered while searching for the gun that killed Mackee.

Megan runs upstairs and returns with several backpacks already loaded for an emergency getaway.

Sara is trembling. “I don’t want to go.”

The two anguished women stare at each other and embrace.

“We can’t leave the animals,” Megan says, sobbing along with her. “Geronimo is just a baby.” “We don’t have to!” Sara cries. “We don’t have to go! We can make it a condition. They have to take care of the animals, and then we’ll surrender.” Megan and Sara are clinging to each other, keening like widows.

I crawl inside the closet. The painted seal is already breeched. The inner door has recently been chiseled open.

McCord is suddenly crouched behind me. “What is it?”

“It’s a tunnel. Stone’s secret escape route.”

How he avoided the cameras. How he spirited Slammer and the goons away.

I push on the hobbit-size door. Doom. It is doom to look through such an opening into absolute darkness. Nobody should do it. Nobody should have to look. A draft of cold, unworldly air unwinds through the overheated closet, as if the house had been waiting to release its death rattle.

“Listen to me, Ana,” McCord whispers urgently, close to my ear. “We’re both on the same side.” I turn to him, annoyed. “Are you a merc? Or what?”

“I am a contract soldier for a private military company based in London. We don’t just fight wars”—he sneaks a backward look through the door—“we protect private interests. We find people. Like Sara Campbell.” “Sara?”

“The girl has run away a dozen times. I was hired by her parents to find her and bring her home.” “She says she comes from ‘dirt.’”

“Well, it’s pretty rich manure. Her dad is president of an oil company. We provide protection for American executives in Saudi Arabia; that’s how he got to me.” “Does she know?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve been easing in gently. Working from the edges.” “When you showed up at the BLM corrals and at the shooting range — you weren’t following me; you were tracking Sara.” “I thought she’d show up at the protest.” He smiles. “But it was no hardship running into you.” “That’s why you gave her the foal.”

“Workin’ on trust. She’s bolted before. She’s tried suicide. The parents and the shrink all said to go slow.” I glance back through the open closet door. The hallway is empty.

“Sterling,” I whisper. “We can take Dick Stone down. You have his trust. Your weapons are right there in the kitchen.” “Not my job.”

“Then I’ll do it.”

“Can’t let you.” He restrains my arm. “I was hired to protect the girl. If things go south, she’ll be put in harm’s way.” “Are you crazy? This place will blow any minute. If Stone is dead, the game ends and nobody else gets hurt.” “I won’t risk it.”

“You are a royal pain.”

“Just so you know, when it comes down, I will get Sara out.” “All right,” I hiss. “The sewing room is the designated safe room. The rescue team will deploy through the screened-in porch.” We crab-crawl backward out the closet door.

Stone is shouting into the secure phone, “Nothing changes with you people. Listen to what I say. I want it printed in every newspaper. I want it read on TV. My true manifesto! The truth of what the American people need to know about the fascist abuses of the FBI. I have it all right here.” Megan and Sara enter the kitchen, tear-stained, clutching the dusty emergency backpacks. McCord is plucking weapons from the suitcase of horrors.

Megan says, “Are we out of here?” as Sara shouts, “Oh no!”

Through the window we can see the small white horse has wandered from the barn. He is thirty yards from the house, tearing the leaves off tomato plants.

“Screw me. We left the damn stall door open,” says McCord.

“What about Sirocco?”

“She’s still tied.”

Megan is transfixed by the stranded foal. “The baby.” She drops the backpack.

“Leave him be,” warns McCord. “He’s fine where he is.”

Dick Stone slams down the phone. “Lying bastards.”

With a high, piercing whistle, the window implodes, and flash-bangs pop all around. The acrid choke of tear gas sends us crawling from the room.

I push Sara into McCord’s arms. She is stunned, resisting.

I’m screaming, “The safe room!” but they can’t hear me, and I can’t see through swollen eyes.

More shrill canisters. More lightning bangs.

McCord has overpowered the girl and is dragging her toward the Room of Unfinished Dreams as a huge explosion throws everyone in the house to the floor.

Someone says in a faraway voice like a tinny old recording, “The barn’s on fire!” Where is Stone? Where is Stone?

The floor is hot. I grope forward, trusting that McCord and Sara have made it to the sewing room, where SWAT will breech the windows and the twisted bamboo blinds at hostage-rescue speed.

Where is Stone?

Peering through the smoke I find the wretched shapes of two older, slower people feeling their way through the fractured debris of the front hall. Behind them is the closet and the tunnel of escape. Ahead, through gaping holes where the front door used to be, helixes of orange flame are exploding from the outbuildings. The white foal is zigzagging blindly through the yard in terror.

Megan is struggling to get out. She has to save the foal. Stone pins her arms and drags her backward. She kicks at him. They fall over the heap of junk from the closet, sprawling on top of each other. She fights free and crawls toward the open hole, turning her head to shout something at Stone. Her hair has begun to smolder. A curtain of heavy charcoal smoke falls between us. Scraps of incinerated paper fly on whirls of heat like fiery demons. Stone is up, hopscotching across the gently burning floorboards, bellowing at Megan, who is just out of reach. The faraway old-fashioned voice says, “The baby,” and she stumbles through the shattered opening into the fresh air, Dick Stone close behind.

My guess is there was never going to be negotiation. And this wasn’t another mistake like Waco. The mission was to massacre every living being on the farm. The tactical commanders took orders from Deputy Director Peter Abbott, who was willing to risk scrutiny to be certain the terrorists — and everything they knew — were eliminated.

Snipers are trained to cultivate patience. They are told, “You have one opportunity. Make it count.” A team of two elite shooters with tripod-mounted AR-10s had the front door sighted up the past five hours, their breath moderated like one wave after another in a tide that never breaks, still as the leaves, infinitely enduring. When Dick Stone reels into the luminous circles of their scopes scuttling with Megan in the shattered doorway, they take the shot, a calm, straightforward release of two high-powered bullets. At the same instant, Megan pops up in front of Stone and inadvertently becomes the target. The two bullets simultaneously penetrate her left cerebral hemisphere.

Just like that. The heavy guns, familiar as big brothers, kick hard into the curve of their shoulders, but the shooters are braced to absorb the shock, unlike Megan’s skull, which instantly fractures in radiating spiderweb patterns, likely the only sting she feels, as the brain has no pain receptors, along with awareness of some sort of impact that might have registered a second or two before she loses consciousness, the bright library of a lifetime gone.

Stone ducks back into the house, from which we stare at Megan’s body, lying prone in the blasted doorway, appearing to be smoking like the fallen timbers swollen with heat that are crumbling around us, a century of farm life hissing away in vapors. Dick Stone’s mouth howls in anguish like the silent cavernous winds of hell; a meaty arm hooks my neck and does not let go as we stagger away, conjoined like primordial brutes as a savage twister of coal black smoke drives us away from daylight.

Thirty-nine

We drive to a turnout where a chain hangs across a dirt road. When we emerged from the tunnel, we ran across a hundred yards of open wash beyond the perimeter, clouds of ink black smoke roiling behind us. We kept on going — a call on the satellite phone to an associate of Mr. Terminate — and then a grandma biker chick right out of Omaha, a wrinkled witch a hundred years old, met us and took us to a safe house in a trailer park, where we were given a stolen car. We drive for ninety minutes into the national park. Only when we passed a green sign for the parking lot for the Hard Edge Trail do I realize that our destination is the place where Steve Crawford died.

Stone gets out and unhooks the chain, gets back in and drives the sedan over it. Branches sweep the windshield as we ascend a rutted fire road. The Northwest fir is as impenetrable as the Virginia woodland surrounding Quantico; voracious organisms choking one another out for the sun.

At times the car is almost engulfed by closely growing colonnades of young Douglas fir, and I am gripped with a claustrophobic unease, as sickening as having crawled through that tunnel. Spring rains cut deep gullies in the moist terrain and now our heads hit the inside roof of the car as we launch out of our seats. Ten miles an hour seems way too fast.

“Watch out!”

“Got it,” Stone mutters, slowing to a stop before a huge tree felled across the road.

We stare at an impassable tangle of branches and fine sprays of dark green needles spewing out in all the wrong directions. Nothing looks more like a forbidding mistake than a huge horizontal tree lying across your path.

“We’re not that far,” Dick Stone says, arming himself with the Colt, a Commando submachine gun, three hundred rounds of ammunition, and a collapsible snow shovel.

We climb around the tree and follow the road on foot. During the drive, we gained altitude, and the mountain air is pure and chill.

“I’ve been in some odd situations, Dick, but this is one of the strangest. Ever zoom out of yourself? All the way out, so you’re looking down from somewhere else?” “Not sober.”

“What are we doing in the woods? I don’t even like the woods. There’re ticks and poison oak.” The road is wide enough to walk side by side, but sometimes one of us will walk ahead, over gullies cut by cascading rocks, sometimes along the lip of the road. We continue that way, flowing around each other, as Stone twirls the shovel lightly over one shoulder.

“Why are you and I always digging another man’s trenches?” I muse.

“Some of us are soldiers. Born that way.”

We are walking single file where the road washes out. At the bottom of a huge rounded boulder split by a tree, Stone takes a turn onto the well-kept Hard Edge Trail. A Forest Service sign points back to the parking lot at 5.7 miles.

We continue up, retracing Steve Crawford’s steps.

We crest a ravine and look down at the creek where the hiker found the remains. I recognize the rock formations from the postblast photos.

“Good God!” says Stone. “What are you two doing here?”

Toby Himes and Mr. Terminate are sitting on a fallen log. Toby, always appropriately dressed for whatever occasion, wears an impeccable hiker’s outfit — clean boots, wind-resistant pants, lightweight black quilted vest, orange hunter’s cap. Mr. Terminate, wearing a T-shirt with a faded message that has to do with sucking, is smoking a cigarette, the AK-47 cradled in his arms. His presence is so improbable that it instantly reframes reality.

Before, the forest was treacherous.

Now, it is incendiary.

“Figured you wouldn’t leave town without saying good-bye.”

“Course not,” says Stone, climbing down the slope. “I owe you, big.”

“No problem, it was a lot of laughs,” says Mr. Terminate. “I see you still got your shadow.” “Hi, John,” I say, just so he can ignore me one last time.

Stone bums a cigarette and puts one foot up on the log.

“Megan is dead.”

“Really? Oh shit! Oh man!” Toby’s eyes grow round in surprise. “Deepest condolences, my friend. What happened?” “They mowed her down. About how many bullets would you say she took, Ana Grey?” “I don’t know, Dick.”

“When I was on the Los Angeles bank robbery squad, we ambushed a gang of bandits in an alley. The guy driving the getaway car — it was a convertible — took a hundred thirty-two hits. He was hamburger. Those were the good old days, am I right? I’ll make them suffer a thousand times worse. A hundred thousand. I should have followed the very first rule: Never negotiate with terrorists. It’s the Bureau I’m talkin’ about.” “We know exactly what you’re talkin’ about.” Toby lays trembling fingers on his friend’s arm.

“But, no,” says Stone, squeezing his face up. “I talked to them, and she walks into an assassination.” I stare at the thick bed of mulch under my feet. I am thinking how many papery layers of brown oak leaves have been laid down over how many centuries and with what patience, and about the beetles gnawing dumbly through the fertile dregs.

“Make no mistake,” says Mr. Terminate, his growl downshifting to first. “She was a good lady.” Stone smokes some more.

“Anything I can do?” the biker asks.

“I have some thoughts.”

Mr. Terminate nods. A switchblade appears like the tongue of a snake from his hand.

“Then we split the turquoise. Three ways.”

Stone sighs. “There is no turquoise. It’s just a rumor, John. A story I made up to mess with their minds.” “I knew it.” Toby slaps his own leg.

Mr. Terminate is not convinced. “Why are you carrying a shovel?”

“To cover up…whatever.” He jerks his head toward me.

Whatever’s left.

Mr. Terminate considers. He gets up from the log. Yeah, okay. He walks toward me, the knife held low.

“It’s cash,” I say.

“Come again?”

“Dick calls it ‘the turquoise,’ but that’s a cover, so he can cheat his best friends. He stole a hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the FBI, and it’s buried right there.” Mr. Terminate squints at Stone. “You wouldn’t cheat me.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake!” cries Stone, fed up and totally frustrated. “This is the turquoise!” And he pulls the PalmPilot from his pocket. In the sage forest light, the plastic cover sparkles like sea green semi-precious gems.

“O-kay,” says Mr. Terminate slowly.

Toby blinks. “It’s blue.”

“You dumb fucks. This is my manifesto. This is the truth. This will sink the FBI. Names, records, and documents going back to the seventies, when they fucked Megan and they fucked me, and who was in charge of the undercover operation? My own boss. Peter Abbott. I’ve got his signature on memos that approved the whole damn bag of dirty tricks. But that’s nothing. That’s just the warm-up. I’ve got the drop on his fucking corrupt father, too.” Mr. Terminate has planted his feet like a gunslinger.

“I stood by you. All these years, I delivered the goods.”

“I’ll get you the money,” Dick Stone says impatiently. “After we take care of business.” Mr. Terminate isn’t stupid. “You didn’t have to bring her all this way to do the deed.” “I came to collect some papers I’ve got stashed. Buried in a metal box. I’ll show you.” “Papers?”

“Travel documents.”

“Cash! He’s lying to you, John. He’s a psycho liar.” “I’ll bet it’s over here,” says cocky Mr. Terminate as he heads for a boulder veined with rose quartz. The rock is standing in a growth of chokecherry. The distinctive glassy pink markings make it look as if it had been rolled there to mark the spot. And he’s right. A trip wire — thin as a spider’s web — glints in the underbrush. It is the same kind of setup Steve Crawford must have walked into when he was looking to rip off a stolen fortune.

Stone yells, “Don’t!” as Mr. Terminate lumbers toward it.

The shock wave of the explosion pummels my body, arms wind-milling backward, then slams me up short against a granite outcrop, loose earth like burning sparks raining in my hair. The force of it crunches my left shoulder at a bad angle against the rock and I feel that sickening snap, when you know something has dislodged somewhere important.

As I stumble forward, a big inhale of chemical smoke causes me to choke and cry. Mr. Terminate’s disarticulated body parts have been launched in a radius fifty feet wide. Coming to rest within my view is a facial fragment containing a partial set of bloody teeth, and a hand still wearing the silver rings. Above the blasted ridge of rock, a rhododendron bush has silently caught fire. Everything is silent because my eardrums have gone numb.

A tall, thin figure stumbles across the orange backdrop of burning trees and kneels beside Dick Stone, who was knocked down flat on his back.

“Doc!” I’m hearing as if underwater. “It’s Toby, brother.”

Thick wine-dark blood has pooled beneath Stone’s body. Toby kneels and cradles his head.

“He’s got a skull fracture. Small hole you can just stick your finger through.” Toby wipes brain matter on his jeans.

“For God’s sake, don’t touch it!”

Dick Stone’s face is pale and shocky, but he’s still breathing. He opens dull and searching eyes.

“Get me up.”

The fire is dancing across the highest canopy of branches. Black smoke boils and intense heat presses against our skin. In moments we will be trapped inside an inferno.

Stone’s lips say, “Water.”

Toby has a bottle in the pocket of his vest. Carefully supporting Stone’s wounded head, he maneuvers on his knees to wet his mouth.

“What are you up to now, you crazy coot? Is this the famous Big One?”

“It’s happening,” Dick Stone murmurs. “The salmon are running.”

I’m trying to lift Stone’s shoulder over mine. “Let’s get out of here.” The choice is get him up or let him burn to death. We lift, but then Stone’s heavy legs give out and he ends up sitting. His bloody head lolls forward. My heart contracts with dread.

Toby shakes him. “Stay awake. Help us out.”

Dick Stone relaxes back toward the ground. A mischievous smile plays around his lips. To the last, I don’t know what he’s playing.

“Dying’s no big deal,” he says quite clearly. “People who get upset about it haven’t lived their lives the way they wanted to.” “Medics!” Toby yells. “Code blue! Abort!”

He looks around, but nothing happens.

“Where are you?” he shouts.

I think that he’s gone nuts, flashing back to a burning jungle in Vietnam, but then SWAT advances from the forest like surreal toy soldiers in Nomex battle gear, with automatic weapons drawn.

Stone is whispering and motioning for me to hear. I bend close to his bloodless lips. He gropes for my shirt. Although our faces are almost touching, Stone’s roaming eyes cannot find me.

“He has taken advantage of all I stand for.” Dick Stone must have realized with his dying thought that beneath the tidy hiking gear, Toby Himes is wearing a bulletproof vest. And a wire.

“But you…” His voice trails off. He presses something into my hand. It is the PalmPilot. “Take this.” Angelo and Donnato, festooned with earphones, ID tags, and gun belts, wearing bright blue FBI windbreakers, emerge from the blur, shouting questions.

I find that I am holding Dick Stone’s hand, and I place it gently on his chest while slipping the device into my pocket. There is nothing more to be learned from the half-open eyes of the dead.

I get to my feet. A malevolent presence fills the sky. The sun looks distorted through an atmosphere of brown, an orange-red alien disk. Black smoke billows toward the north, but ash is falling like the frozen drops of hail that tapped against our parkas on a turbulent day last spring as we waited in the lee of a volcanic plain to save the last free wild horses in the West.

“Who the hell is Toby Himes?”

Donnato takes my elbow, but I jerk away.

“Who is he? Is he an agent? He’s wired, he’s wearing a vest, and I’m playing it out. I’m for real. I’m involved with these people, and he’s—” “I hear you.”

Which is difficult, because I’m blubbering and trying to keep my mouth clamped shut at the same time.

“It’s been tough on him, too.”

“Tough on him?”

Donnato maneuvers so he’s blocking my view; his face is all I see. “Toby Himes is a source.” “A source?”

“He is Peter Abbott’s pocket source.”

“The deputy director of the FBI has a pocket source? He’s been off the street for years.” “Toby Himes has been Peter Abbott’s unpaid informant, pretty much since they came back from Vietnam. We’ve known they were talking. We thought Abbott might be involved in a conspiracy. We ran an investigation under Galloway’s command. Abbott finally gave it up that Mr. Himes has been providing him with intel on criminal activity in the Northwest for years. Himes is nowhere on the books because he refuses to take money or be acknowledged. He’s an unsung hero. Doing the right thing for his country. When he told us Stone had recently acquired half a dozen cast boosters, we knew it was on.” “What are you talking about?”

“High-energy explosives. They provide the initiation you need to ignite a major amount of Tovex. Do serious damage. We knew Stone was onto the Big One.” Angelo approaches, having grabbed Toby Himes.

“A Highway Patrol officer picked up the APB on Jim Allen Colby, also known as Slammer, getting off a Greyhound bus in Cascade Locks. What does that mean, Mr. Himes?” Toby replies, “That’s the Bonneville Dam.”

We should be running for the helicopters, but instead we are drawn to watch in respect as the paramedics strap Dick Stone’s heavy body onto a gurney.

Toby Himes’s face is tight. “Why did you wait and let him die?”

“We thought he might say something important. You did right,” Angelo assures him.

“It speaks to what we do to ourselves,” says the former Marine, and he walks away.

Sadness is rising. I swallow hard. An empty space is opening up, much like the empty space around my grandfather. Disappointment, mostly, in what might have been.

As for Darcy DeGuzman, without Dick Stone, she is lost.

Good-bye, soldier, Darcy thinks, and dies there, too.

Slammer gets off the fourth bus of the day at the Bonneville Lock and Dam, a National Historic Landmark. What a complete and total pain in the butt — but still, he is happy to have been chosen, back in the good graces. The old dude better appreciate this, hours and hours of waiting in stinky old bus stations in nowhere towns, and it’s late in the day and it’s cold and he’s starving.

Slinging the backpack, he crosses the parking lot toward the visitors area and picks up a brochure, as instructed. This thing is huge. It spans the river a mile wide, connecting the states of Washington and Oregon. The powerhouses are kind of scary, huge networks of high-tension wires and transforming stations that produce electricity from turbines deep inside the dam — enough to power the entire city of Portland, it says.

He opens the map and locates the Fish Viewing Building.

Two huge luxury tour buses have pulled up to the entrance, and quicker than you’d imagine, hordes of white-haired old folk have disembarked in a parade of walkers and wheelchairs, limping through the glass doors. Slammer holds the door politely for a chalk-faced living corpse attached to an oxygen tank, then heads for the elevators, totally freaked by the guy at the desk — an old fart from the Army Corps of Engineers wearing a black eye patch, who is staring directly at him with one lucid eye.

But it’s a great day for the fish. The Visitor Center is filled with tourists. The benches in front of the underwater window are crowded with kids and strollers, in a claustrophobic room that smells of old radiators and cafeteria lunch. Slammer stares through the glass at the silver forms flying by as they climb the fish ladders that get them over the dam — hundreds per hour. Some old lady is standing in a booth, clicking each one off by hand. People are staring at her like she’s another exhibit.

Okay, he’s seen enough. He can’t wait to drop the dye. Man, it would be cool to see it happen from this window as the water slowly fills with red like a slasher movie. Better than blood and harmless to the fish, Julius promised. He checks his watch. Allfather said to pull the cord at precisely 4:15. It is 4:10 now.

Slammer takes the elevator to the top level, where you can walk outside and have a view of the whole river, and get close to the salty smell of the fish ladders, which are basically steps flowing with water. You think of a dam like something out of a children’s book, all neat and sparkly, but when he looks around, he decides the place looks more like a prison. There are high barbed-wire fences to keep people away from the banks of the river. If you somehow fell in, you’d be swept into the rotor blades of giant turbine engines. The skies are gray and the water dark. He trudges up to the top of the weirs, out onto a catwalk where a toddler is squatting and pointing to the water.

He fingers the rope dangling from the backpack. Remembering the small explosion of gunpowder bound to occur when he pulls the switch, he moves away from the family.

“Don’t let the little dude fall in,” he advises.

“Slammer. Stop.”

Still smiling, he answers to his name, and there’s the chick from the farm coming toward him. She looks all different. She’s got on a baseball cap and a vest that says FBI, and she’s walking funny, tilted over to one side.

My left shoulder is bandaged up underneath the blastproof vest, but the pain is breathtaking.

“What are you doing?” Slammer asks.

“Don’t move. Do not pull that cord.”

“How’d you get here?”

Military helicopters fill the skies. On the shore, a fleet of cop cars and ambulances is lining up along the road.

I keep a distance.

“Slammer, please don’t move. Do you know what’s in that backpack?”

“Nothing is going to happen. It’s just dye, to stop them from destroying the salmon runs.” “That pack contains explosives. Not just a blood bomb. Something a lot more powerful.” “Why?” the boy asks, confused.

There is a ripple of anxiety in the crowd that moments ago had been peacefully watching the fish jump through the roaring water. SWAT teams in combat gear are quickly moving families away, while moon men in bomb suits and helmets with built-in microphones direct a score of firemen ready with hoses. The woman with the toddler picks him up and carries him away, staring at Slammer with hate.

“Julius wanted to blow up the dam. To get revenge on the U.S. government, and because he was a sick individual. A lot of innocent people could get hurt—” Alarmed, he says: “Where is Allfather?”

“He’s dead. There was a fire at the farm. Everyone is dead except for Sara. She’s okay; you can see her as soon as we resolve this. Right now, it’s very important for you to listen to me. Do not move. The bomb squad will remove the backpack.” Slammer laughs. “No way he’d do something like that. Besides, one little bomb can’t blow up all these tons of concrete. He wouldn’t send me here just to blow myself up? For a couple of fish?” “We’re not going to let anything bad happen to you.”

“You’re trying to trick me.”

“I’m trying to save your life. I did that once before, when he buried you alive, remember?” “You’re a liar!” Slammer screams. “You sold us out! You’re a fed! You’re a liar! You deserve to die!” “I do care, Slammer. That’s why I’m standing here. These guys could take you out in a heartbeat.” Slammer glances above him; the snipers are set up on the roof.

“You’re a good person. You know how I know? Because you didn’t kill Herbert Laumann when you had the chance. There is good in you, Slammer. It shines. You’ve had a real hard time of it. People haven’t let you be good. But I know you are. I wouldn’t be risking my life if I didn’t think your life was very important. More important than the fish. Come on, dude.” “Stay back,” he says.

“No. I’m coming to help you.” I take a step closer.

“Why should I believe you ever again? You think I’m that incredibly stupid?” I stop just short of tackling distance. Slammer’s eyes are glassy and big, and he’s chewing indecisively on those childlike lips. We face each other in a standoff as the human crowd recedes like a tide, leaving the windswept concrete walkways quiet except for the peeping song of the ospreys patrolling low over the water.

“I trust that you’re not going to do this, Slammer, because you’re smart enough to know you’ve been set up by Allfather. He’s the one who was lying to you.” “It’s another test,” he decides. “Of fire and ice.”

And then he jerks the cord.

In one stupefying moment, I grope for a lifetime of reconciliations. A series of pop-pop-pop explosions blows me backward and knocks Slammer to his knees as red dye fumes and spurts in all directions. While it continues to spray like a fireworks sparkler gone wild, he wrestles the backpack off and throws the whole thing into the fish ladders, and the water turns blood red.

Just like Stone’s test run.

And that’s the extent of it.

Slammer can’t stop laughing for joy, even as a pile of agents brings him down.

“I believe in Allfather!” He keeps on snickering. “I belieeeeve, oh yesss!” Stunned, the bruised shoulder searing with pain, I wipe at the splattered dye on my face. The wind off the river is icy. The helicopters keep circling. Radios crackle, and SWAT reinforcements overwhelm the top level.

My hair is whipping across my eyes. From the catwalk is a panoramic view of the river. Below, fish continue to flop over the weirs, the big clock of nature ticking placidly along, but now I am listening to a different buzz in a higher key. All the craft on the water have been diverted, except for one that has torpedoed through: a small powerboat heading in a perfectly straight line toward the dam.

I grab a pair of binoculars from one of the SWAT guys.

It is the boat I saw at Toby Himes’s. The wheel is tied down. Otherwise, the boat is empty.

Except for large plastic barrels that contain military-grade explosives.

Mountain Man must have sent it on the final voyage. Slammer and the red dye were a diversion. The real attack bears down on us now on an automated suicide mission at eighty miles an hour, loaded with enough high explosives to blow a crater in this concrete monolith, where hundreds of agents, police, and tourists have massed — powerful enough to cause the river to overflow its banks, flood towns, destroy farmland, shut down the Northwest power grid. It is what terrorism experts call “a secondary explosion,” the dual purpose being to inflict the greatest human casualties on responding personnel.

“INCOMING!” I scream. “THE BOAT IS ARMED.”

Orders are relayed and everything starts moving backward. Ambulances screech off the road. Police units back out of the parking lot. Fire trucks and panicked tourists push toward the woods. Only the military helicopters swing forward in unison, flying low over the water, gunners leaning out the doors, firing.50-caliber automatic weapons at the boat, intercepting its kamikaze mission a scant two hundred yards before the target. The choppers jam it, up and away, as an orange ball of fire explodes out of the water. The boom echoes off the riverbanks, and every living creature along the Columbia River Gorge quakes.

The catwalk shakes under the confident steps of Peter Abbott. The SWAT gear he wears looks more like a costume now, his bearing that of a civilian, with a civilian’s priorities of personal gain and comfort, not justice; no longer one of us. Tall and balding, glasses blank as coins, he fairly bounces with authority.

“Give me the data.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Toby Himes reported that he saw Dick Stone hand it to you.”

“Good old Toby.”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

“What happened at the farm?”

“It’s gone,” says Abbott impatiently. “Everything burned to the ground.” “The barn and the orchard?”

“Orders were to destroy everything.”

“They were your orders. You assassinated an unarmed woman.”

“She was not the primary target. But she was a terrorist.”

“And you burned the trees. Why did you burn the trees?”

“Calm down. You are not in control of yourself.”

“Did you kill the little horse, too? Did you mow him down, just for the hell of it?” “Give me the data, and let’s go inside.”

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

“I’m talking about the device that Stone gave you.”

“Why? What did Dick Stone have that brings you here, way out on a limb? We know he had an inside source. So? Ah well, you’re right. You never could tell what was real with him anyway. But what about you, sir? Which side are you on? Was Toby Himes relaying information on criminal activity in the Northwest…or was he your lackey to get to Stone?” “Toby Himes is a loyal patriot,” Abbott replies swiftly. “And you are done, Agent Grey. Your picture was posted on the Internet by Stone’s accomplice.” He describes Rooney Berwick’s personal Big One. The suicide. The photo ID of Darcy DeGuzman. “Your identity has been exposed. Your career as an agent is over. Let’s go out like a hero.” We are standing alone on the narrow walkway that spans the fish ladders. Water rushes in shallow channels under our feet. What are my options? The rampant power of the river is far beyond the concrete decks and barbed-wire gates.

“If I give you the data, what are you going to do for me?”

Abbott rubs his nose disdainfully.

“You’ve been down in the muck too long. This is not a negotiation.”

“Everything is negotiable.”

“You can walk off this ramp whole.”

“No censure? You won’t make me look bad?”

He shifts on his feet. What a girlie question. “No censure.”

“All right, fine.”

I show him the device in my hand. “Here’s the data,” I say, and rocket the thing in a fine sparkling arc, high over the fences and deep into the wild green-white current of the river, where it is sucked into the giant turbines.

Abbott laughs and a stray wisp of setting sun lights his face.

“You look relieved,” I say.

“Oh, I am. And you are under arrest.”

Inside the control room of the dam, long, curving banks of computers trigger the gates of the navigation locks and release the spillways. You can sense the rumble and hear the huge weight of water as it spumes out of the downstream side. The techs have been evacuated except for one nervous shirtsleeved supervisor behind the main desk. Two baby sheriff’s detectives allegedly guarding the rogue FBI agent are perched at workstations, nosing through other people’s personal stuff. The cold air smacks of the bloody ice of a fish market. We’ve been contained here for hours.

SAC Robert Galloway nearly blows the door off its hinges as he bursts inside, ordering everyone else out.

“What the hell are you thinking?”

I cradle my left arm in its sling. “I could ask the same of you.”

“You flat-out defy the deputy director.”

“He set me up and you know it.”

Galloway staggers slightly backward, as if stunned by the accusation. “You better slow down.” “Abbott had me pegged from the beginning. He had read my file before that first meeting in L.A. He knew I had been diagnosed with PTSD, but he overrode the doctor’s recommendation, because he wanted me on this case.” Agitated, my boss sits on the edge of a rolling chair. “You tend to think a lot of yourself, Ana, but many agents could have done this job.” “I happened to suit his needs. Abbott had a personal interest in reining in Dick Stone, going back to when his family was involved in building the powerhouse for the Bonneville Dam. The one we’re sitting in right now. Remember that photo of Megan wrapped in the American flag? This is the project she tried to kill. Abbott put an end to that by adding her to the ‘dirty hippies’ list. Dick Stone imploded and they went underground.” “And what about you?”

“I’m getting to me. Stone took thirty years to implement the Big One, his ultimate revenge on Peter Abbott and the federal government that abandoned him. If anything makes him a terrorist, that’s it: the patient planning, the fixed beliefs. He used his influence with the vulnerable Rooney Berwick to uncover illegal deals with the Abbott family. Stone always said that symbols are important, and destroying the dam was a good one. What is it except a massive monument, literally, to power?” Galloway has been sitting forward, hands on the armrest. His body has become still, but his worried eyes take everything in.

“And you?”

“Me? Well, I was the perfect dunce for Peter Abbott. Good enough to get Stone, and then totally disposable. He wasn’t worried about family dirt coming out, because that could be manipulated. You could blame it on the source. The undercover was unstable. Disturbed. Am I sounding a lot like Dick Stone? And if the deputy director was very lucky, I might go over the edge and identify with the suspect, and die in a tragic shoot-out.” “That’s a stretch, Ana.”

“I could easily have been the first one out that door, Robert.”

Galloway’s expression goes from cautious listening to pissed as hell. “This is terrific.” He gets up so abruptly, the chair scoots backward. The hostile Brooklyn accent hits like a bludgeon.

“We did everything possible not to let this happen. Despite training and supervision, you allow yourself to get in too deep, and let a nutcase, someone out for nothing but sick personal revenge, destroy your career.” “Are you talking about Abbott or Stone?”

“Lady, you are cruising. You defied the deputy director during a tactical operation.” “I made the determination he had something to hide.”

“So you toss crucial evidence into a river. In a case of domestic terrorism.” “I didn’t want him to have it.”

“How stupid can you be?”

“I guess that’s obvious.”

“This is big-time stupid. I am here to tell you that Peter Abbott is charging you with treason. Destroying evidence in a terrorism investigation is a treasonable act.” Lights blink. Computers tick along, mockingly doing their job. There is hydropower to output! Fish to manage! But you are trapped inside a concrete bunker ten feet thick and you will never see daylight!

The future will be this: imprisonment in a stale progression of lawsuits and appeals, maybe even jail time, until my vitality is sapped.

Just go on being Ana Grey.

I notice Galloway has been watching me during this brief meditation, jacket open, fists on hips, totally perplexed.

“I have something to tell you, too,” I say. “About Steve Crawford.”

“What about Steve?”

“He wasn’t who we thought he was. Going in, you couldn’t have asked for a more loyal friend, a more good-hearted person, but when nobody was looking, he got hungry.” “Is that so?”

“That’s right. The most talented agent to come through L.A., isn’t that what you said? The golden son? Steve knew that Stone had a valuable stash and figured to steal it, but the thing blew up in his face. He wasn’t killed by an act of terrorism. It was greed.” I watch Galloway’s face as the shadow of uncertainty deepens.

“Or, you could say, it was due to the stresses and strains of undercover work. He was a casualty of war. Like a lot of us.” I take a ragged breath. “I’m just as devastated as you are. I loved the guy.” Galloway’s hands fall to his sides.

“I choose not to believe it.”

“Lucky you.”

Donnato escorts me out of the powerhouse and into a black sedan. He maneuvers through the remaining rescue vehicles and news vans and hits the darkening road. The locks on the doors go down.

“Did they really burn down the farm?”

“Yes.”

“Did they kill Geronimo?”

“Who is Geronimo?”

“The blind baby foal, goddamn it—”

“I think he’s fine.”

“You think? Don’t lie to me.”

“I have never lied to you.”

“All right.”

“Are you okay?”

“I want that horse to go to a good home.”

“Don’t get teary. Jesus, what’s the matter?”

“Promise me. It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of you.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I have the data.”

“No you don’t. You threw it in the river.”

“That was Darcy’s cell phone. She didn’t need it anymore.”

In the dashboard light I see Donnato’s face squinching up.

“Don’t be telling me this.”

I reach inside the sling where I have secreted the PalmPilot from the clumsy searches of baby deputies and the sharp eyes of my SAC.

“Dick Stone gave me his testament.”

“What’s on there?”

“The manifesto. What he wanted to be printed in the newspapers. What he said the American people need to remember.” Scrolling past planting schedules and shopping lists, I discover a file called “Career of Evil.” “This is it! Memos dated 1972 to 1974, signed by Peter Abbott, authorizing illegal phone taps against ‘suspected student radicals.’” “Keep looking.”

The screen is filled with numbers.

“Fish statistics. Great.”

And then a map. “A map of Bonneville Dam. Hey, wow. It’s a schematic.”

Donnato looks over. “Detailed?”

“The building plans for the dam. What Stone must have used to plot the bomb attack. There were several contractors.” I’m punching buttons, enlarging the type on the plans. “Hamilton, Meizner, Adams-Vanguard—” “Adams-Vanguard is one of Abbott senior’s shell companies.”

“So Peter’s father, the congressman, was lining his pockets with a multimillion-dollar contract.” “I’ll bet if we had another twenty-four hours, we could come up with a link between the builders of the powerhouse project and contributions to young Peter Abbott’s political career,” adds Donnato. “But we don’t have twenty-four hours.” I hold it out to him. “You do.”

“It’s collateral,” Donnato says. “It was Stone’s collateral; now it’s yours.” “He wanted to cash it in. He wanted Abbott to roll on the floor like a pill bug.” I press the device into Donnato’s hand and find that mine is trembling.

“Get him,” I whisper.

“Roger that.”

I realize that I am becoming incoherent.

“Where is Galloway sending me? Why would he burn me? I’m a hero. Aren’t I?” “Shhh. You’re valued. Believe me, at the highest level.”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

“If you knew everything, you wouldn’t do the job. These aren’t the days of Dick Stone. The tentacles were working — all those people behind the scenes, helping to protect you until the case came together. The supporting elements of the undercover are like your crystal ball — we see your future and help you dodge it.” He kicks it up to eighty on the country road.

“What is my future?”

I watch a big green freeway sign for Portland snap backward into the dark.

“Aren’t we going to the county jail?”

Donnato does not reply.

“But I’m in custody.”

Donnato’s voice is breaking. “You just have to trust me.”

We drive in silence through the poignant end of day. The little road is sweet, the way it flows between the silver river and vertical slopes of scree, where multiple waterfalls sport like nymphs. It is the same drive I made with Stone when he began to tell his story of betrayal by his own people; we are simply going in the other direction. Stone wasn’t asking for trust or belief. He wasn’t asking for anything when he told it. But Donnato’s tone is full of pleading.

A rusted shell of a gas station and a neon sign half-buried in leaves that says MOTEL put you in mind of 1940s detective stories, where scheming lovers escape to a motor court out in the boonies with a million bucks in cash — only to discover the final, bitter twist.

There is always a double cross.

How far would the Bureau go?

In the car, my teeth are chattering with cold. We turn down a short road and past a restaurant. The restaurant is closed, but as we swing around, I see it is adjacent to a private airfield. If you sat on the patio, you could watch the planes. They look thin and flimsy, like scraps of paper.

The tower is lighted. A small jet waits on the tarmac, engines running. The door is open and the stairs are down.

“It’s best if you leave the country,” Donnato says.

I reel out of the car. The air is freezing and my shoulder is stiff. The sky has dropped to deep and final lavender.

“It’s waiting for you,” he says. “Go on.”

“Go on? To where?”

“I have no need to know.”

“You have no need? You can’t just dump me here.”

“Ana, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

“What’s hard? Knowing nothing? Leaving everything? The Bureau,” I whisper, almost ashamed. “The Bureau is my family.” He grips my arms. “I wouldn’t have been able to bring you here without cooperation on the highest level. From Galloway,” he adds, relenting. “Do you understand?” “Come with me,” I say desperately. “You once said you loved me.”

“I love you completely.”

“I love you, too.” I hold on to him. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.” “You’ll be flying into a private airport where there will be no customs. No questions asked.” “How is that possible?”

“Sara Campbell’s parents sent a private plane to pick her up. The mercenary, Sterling McCord, is bound to deliver her back into their hands. He was kind enough to say he would help get you out of the country.” I pull away and look into his eyes.

“Mike, he wasn’t just being kind.”

Donnato says, “I know.”

“What are you doing, baby?”

I search his face. The face I’ve loved and relied on every day of my life in the Bureau.

And then there is no hope for it. We kiss, just once, but so much so that when we stop and I open my eyes, everything — the airfield, the plane, the silhouettes of trees so full of life — looks washed with blue, as if the retina screens in the backs of my eyes have gone out of whack and I can no longer reliably describe the world.

My partner says, “You have to go.”

We grip each other until he releases me and walks to the Bu-car and does not look back.

I move numbly toward the plane. Sterling McCord is waiting at the stairway. A uniformed steward hesitates in the lighted door.

“You have a real good friend. He always will be.”

I have no answer but the ache in my heart.

“Sara’s inside. We better take off before she does. Would you like a hand?” he asks, and offers his.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll know when we get there,” he says, and guides me up the metal steps.

I follow, like a blind horse being led out of the flames.