Judas Horse (11 page)

What does he want?

“I understand you’ve gone through critical-incident training.”

I stand, parka flying, looking like a raving homeless person among the suits. “What are you implying, sir?”

Donnato: “Take it easy.”

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

“Not an issue. I’ve been certified for duty. I’ve been living with the bad guys, taking calculated risks every day, and it’s paying off. I know the territory. Let me get in and I’ll get this guy.”

Peter Abbott doesn’t lift that wise, prowling stare from my face.

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

“I am able and committed.”

He folds his clean white fingers.

“Thank you, Agent Grey. Would you mind stepping out of the room?”

“A covert operation is still the way to go,” I insist. “I formally request to stay on as the undercover—”

“He realizes that,” says Galloway, interrupting me.

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

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

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

“Hot in the kitchen?” she inquires gently.

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

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

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

“J. Edgar Hoover came to Los Angeles?”

“Oh, yes,” says Rosalind, fishing a vanilla wafer from a bag. “When the director was coming, you had to paint the whole office all over again.”

“No kidding.”

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

“You couldn’t wear pants?”

“Uh-uh. Ladies could wear a pants
suit.
That was okay, but not a pair of slacks. No way. That’s how it worked. That’s the way things got done. Now, everything’s a mess.”

I feel uneasy, shifting in my boots. Already I have missed this place. I almost never feel this connected anywhere else. Rosalind’s stories are gems in the repository of family history, and usually when she starts talking this way, it’s the high point of the day. But in Darcy’s clothes, through Darcy’s ears, the Bureau sounds nothing but repressive, misogynous, sterile, and dangerous.

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

It’s not easy to assimilate back.

“You miss the long-timers?”

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

“Tell me about it. He’s the one who grilled me.”

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

“Why bristly?”

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

“Anything come of it?”

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

I laugh. “Who was it?”

“Not like an actress in particular. It was poker games with entertainment lawyers. Tennis games with the famous movie directors. He got on great with the big shots but had problems managing the gentlemen working underneath him,” she recalls. “The street agents.”

“Like Dick Stone?” I ask quickly. “He was on the beard squad.”

Rosalind’s large watery eyes show recognition. “I remember him. He was straight as an arrow until he started working on that squad. Comes back to the office all scuzzy, with a scarf around his head, and the agents, they didn’t know what to do with him.”

“Why?”

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

“To a drug program?”

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

“Was it concerning the Weathermen?”

“Everything was a radical conspiracy. If you sneezed, it was the Weathermen.”

The door to the conference room opens and the players start filing out.

“Ana?”

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

“I’m off it, right?”

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

“Really?”

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

“He agreed to the sting at the BLM corrals,” Donnato says. “You got the nod. Big-time.”

“I was shocked the assistant director even knew my name.”

“He was very familiar with your background. I get the feeling he was waiting to meet you to seal the deal. You got the part, kiddo. You go up there and get yourself arrested. It will be a controlled operation using SWAT, the county sheriff’s department, every redneck lawman in the West.”

“I like it.”

“Good.”

“Mike?”

“Yes?”

“What else went on in there?”

“Sports talk. Dirty jokes.”

“What are you not telling me?”

“Nothing. Go. They’ve got you on the six-forty-five p.m. flight to Portland.”

“Do something for me? Take Rosalind to lunch.”

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

“Ask her about the beard squad and a case called Turquoise. She knows where the bodies are buried.”

As we head toward the stairwell, Rooney Berwick is coming out. He wears the same black jeans and black shirt as at the off-site when he fabricated Darcy’s driver’s license. His boots ring off the floor and the keys and tools and stuff on his belt still clatter, but the arrogance is missing. He looks thinner and gray in the face.

“Rooney!” exclaims Rosalind from behind us. “How you doin’?”

She trundles up and hugs him like a favorite nephew, two long-timers who have been through it.

“I miss you, friend. We used to run into each other all the time when the lab was in this building,” she explains. “Didn’t we?”

“They keep me in the rat hole,” Rooney mumbles. “Never see daylight.”

The truculent techie can barely look at her.

Rosalind’s eyebrows pinch. “Something wrong?”

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

“Just?” she asks, alarmed.

“Last week. The funeral was yesterday. It was nice, but not too many people came.”

I feel a pensive guilt, as if, absurdly, I should have been there.

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

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

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

Rooney: “Who is that?”

“Dick Stone,” Rosalind prompts.

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

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

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

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

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

“Third generation.”

Let’s cut off this discussion now.

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

“Yeah, the phone.”

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

“There are a couple of settings.” He rotates two black disks. “One direct to your case agent and one to the supervisor. It works on a scrambled signal, almost anywhere in the world.”

The thing is weightless. I ooh and aah at Rooney’s genius and pocket the device, telling him how we appreciate his work, especially with things being so tough with his mom. As he and Rosalind move toward the bull pen, Donnato steers me out the secure door, the very one Steve Crawford walked me in.

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

Inside my knapsack, Darcy’s cell phone is ringing.

“Hi, Megan!” I say brightly, nodding affirmatively toward my partner. “What’s up?”

Megan Tewksbury is calling from the farm to tell her friend Darcy the secret location of the action to free the wild mustangs. On the first day of the gather, protesters from across the Northwest will meet in a campground behind a grocery store, at an old stage stop in the high desert of eastern Oregon.

I promise to be there.

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

PART TWO

Twelve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We stand for the essence of nonviolence.”

Fontana speaks intimately, drinking in eye contact with each one. “This is an evolutionary moment. To make nonviolence an organizing principle. We are the people. This is the time.”

I wish I could turn away. I have read so many transcripts of taped phone conversations of Fontana spreading the gospel that I know the rhetoric by heart. But I am nodding gravely, pitying the well-intentioned troops about to be led into a trap. They must know they cannot get away with this.

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

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

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

“Hi!” I squeal. “Great to see you.”

She gives me a motherly hug. “I’m glad I’m not late.”

“No, we’re just getting started.” I look around. “Where is Julius?”

“He drove to the preserve to scout out the horses.”

“What about Slammer and Sara?”

“Someone has to watch the farm.”

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

“Bill just said this is a nonviolent action.”

“It’s just that I’m tired of empty gestures,” I say. “I want to do something that will make an impact.”

Megan puts the collar of the parka up and snaps it into place. The wind blows her turquoise earrings. Her look becomes distant as she gazes toward the flatland.

“You should be careful.”

“Why?”

“The FBI is here.”

“Are you sure?”

Megan: “Count on it.”

“Seriously?”

“They keep files on us. They come to our conventions, too. They think we don’t know who they are.”

A strange paralysis kicks in, like hearing two radio stations at once. Which one to listen to? I become momentarily unbalanced. This is not playing a role in a bar. I am alone, in a windblown god-awful patch of nowhere at the end of time, eye-to-eye with someone who has placed her trust in me.

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

“I don’t believe it.”

“He came up to Julius at the bar at Omar’s—this was months ago—a guy nobody ever saw before, and tried to sell him drugs. Julius said he should have had a sign on his back that said ‘Pig.’”

Skeptically, I say, “How could Julius know he was from the FBI?”

“The guy was an obvious asshole.”

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

“Then what happened?”

“He kept hanging around,” she says incredulously. “Julius wouldn’t talk to him. Nobody would. So I guess he left. Listen.”

Fontana is giving orders: “We don’t want a lot of cars, so you’ll have to buddy up. Dress warmly and make sure you wear gloves. Eat. Rest. Meditate. Pray. We go in after dark.”

I take in a draft of dry, cold air. It comes out as a sigh.

“It’s all a game, isn’t it?”

“No,” says Megan. “It’s a difficult and spiritual calling. To care about another species is the hardest thing to do.”

Water drips off the tin roof of the aviary. The red-and-yellow finches peck in the snow.