Judas Horse

by April Smith

  “A vital piece of our defense network is missing?” McCord says. “John, you know, that really helps me sleep at night.”

  “How’d they steal it?” I ask.

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

  “That I cannot say. But I do know this.”

  He points a pinkie with an inch-long curved fingernail, a built-in spoon for snorting coke.

  “Those computers were sold to the Indians for a shitload of silver and turquoise.”

  We are openmouthed. Toby Himes giggles.

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

  Pause.

  “Who buried it?”

  “That I cannot say.”

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

  Toby Himes: “Get the story straight. The bikers buried it, or the Indians buried it?”

  Mr. Terminate looks confused. “The way I heard it from Julius is the Indians buried it. After they stole it back.”

  “The Indians stole it back?”

  “The Indians damn right stole it back. Now, the fellas I know—”

  “You mean Hell’s Angels?”

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

  Another dramatic pause.

  “So,” ventures McCord after this baffling recitation, “did your boys ever find the turquoise?”

  Mr. Terminate chuckles. “Rest assured it is buried in a very safe place. You think I’m fibbing? You ask Julius. He’s the one got custody of it now.”

  “We’re asking you.”

  “They say it’s buried beside a pipe.”

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

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

  “Don’t worry. We won’t.”

  “Because the turquoise is guarded by an ancient Umpqua Indian curse!”

  “Thanks for the warning, John.”

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

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

  “What do you think?” he asks.

  “About the turquoise?”

  “Uh-huh.”

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

  “I heard the same story,” McCord tells me, “from an old-timer, works in town at the Seed N’ Feed. The curse, the same darn thing.”

  Against the current of two beers, the nearness of a tightly knit male body, and a summer night crazy with lavender, a nebulous connection forces itself to focus. Rosalind, administrative assistant and keeper of the family flame down in Los Angeles, told me Dick Stone worked undercover on a case called Turquoise. And now he allegedly has possession of so-called buried treasure. Is it real, or does turquoise have a double meaning? Some other layer of deception Stone has embroidered over the past, like the flying corn on his cap?

  “There was a yellow fire hydrant out in the wash. Where we ran across the foal. Maybe that’s the marker.”

  McCord nods, chugging beer. “I saw it.”

  “You did not.”

  “I might look like a dog-eared fool, but occasionally I do pay attention.”

  He takes his time to grin real slow. I wish he didn’t have that brown spot on his gum where the tooth is missing.

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

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

  “When was that?”

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

  “That wasn’t rude, ma’am. That’s a fact.”

  “What’s a fact?”

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

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

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

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

  “Where was it?” he asks.

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

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

  “What is it?”

  “Flood control.”

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

  “Nice,” I say.

  “Thought you’d like it.”

  “Give me dried hoofprints and the smell of old manure any day.”

  McCord laughs. At least he has a sense of humor about himself. I can feel the giggles rise like bubbles…. Maybe that’s how it will begin.

  “One thing about wranglers,” he says. “We take you to the best places.”

  “Really? I thought you were interested in Sara.”

  “Sara’s hot but way too young.”

  “That’s what she said about you. The opposite. In reverse.”

  I snicker self-consciously. Awkward, too, he kicks at the wire cage covering the pump. It moves. It is not secured by the rusted lock, only looks that way.

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

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

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

  McCord checks with me. “Are you ready?”

  “Go for it.”

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

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

  “I’m not staying here alone.”

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

  “Ready.”

  “Wait a minute!”

  “What?” I whisper with alarm.

  “Watch out for that Indian ghost,” he hisses. “If he comes charging out of here, I’m gone.”

  “Don’t make me laugh!”

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

  “Just lift.”

  “You know the old Indian chant—”

  “Just do it before I pee my pants!”

  McCord hooks his finger firmly, sets his back, and lifts. I push the stick underneath the edge and we slide the plate to one side of the hole and shine the light inside.

  I scream like a madwoman. “Close it! Close it quick!”

  Inside the culvert, four feet down, is a nest of rattlesnakes.

  “Just stand still.”

  “Oh my God, Sterling—”

  “Don’t move. They’re cold. They’re resting. This is not their time of day.”

  Resting? The slow, slithering mass is pit-of-the-stomach hell. McCord keeps his flashlight on the entwined bodies—big ones, inches thick, with long rattles and darting wedgelike heads.

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

  “They’re waking up—”

  Like the Indian curse.

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

  “Put the cover on,” I plead.

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

  “Look at this!”

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

  “What is it? Is it the turquoise?”

  “I don’t see no turquoise,” McCord drawls, “but there’s a hell of a lot of guns.”

  Now I do look, and carefully. The rattlesnakes are crawling over a pile of semi-automatic weapons and boxes of grenades.

  McCord ticks them off: “You got your Heckler & Koch MP5s, a Berreta Model 12, a couple of Ingrams, and your basic Makarov handguns, extremely popular in the Arab world. It’s a global terrorist barn dance down there.”

  And a .50-caliber McMillan M87, heavy sniping rifle, made in the USA.

  Just like the rifle that killed Sergeant Mackee.

  Careful. What would Darcy say?

  “All this stuff is worth money.”

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

  “Wait!”

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

  “What are those?”

  “Looks like rabbit bones,” says McCord.

  “The baby rabbits,” I whisper. “Stolen from the farm. Do you think someone’s been feeding them to the snakes?”

  “They sure didn’t hippity-hop down there on their own,” says McCord.

  We drag the lid over the seething pit.

  Thirty

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

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

  “We have the cop killer,” Galloway says right away. “Case closed.”

  “Dick Stone is more than a killer.” Angelo has loosened the Rolex and is spinning it around his wrist. “He’s an anarchist who hates the FBI.”

  Donnato: “That’s why we bust him and get Ana out.”

  “What are we in there for?” Angelo yells. “FAN!”

  “Stone is moments away from making her. If he hasn’t already.”

  Angelo: “We don’t want to blow the operation on a lousy murder charge.”

  Donnato gets up from the table to confront him. “Killing an officer gets Stone the death penalty.”

  Angelo shrugs. “Stone being dead is not the mission.”

  “What is the mission? Remind us.”

  “Stone giving up his contacts.”

  “He’ll talk when he’s in prison.”

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

  “He gets protective custody.”

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

  “Peter Abbott sits at a desk in Washington while Ana Grey is at risk. He’s exactly the guy we should be worried about.” Donnato is incredulous. “Whose side are you on?”

  “You’re asking me that? You are really asking me that? Think twice about walking to your car alone, buddy.”

  Donnato: “Is that a threat?”

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

  They back off, but only to regroup.

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

  “In reality?” Angelo says. “Or in his head?”

  Galloway: “Pull up the complete files and court transcripts.” He mouths the dead cigar. “Let’s review. Angelo’s feeling is that whatever is taking place in the here and now, Dick Stone isn’t pulling this off alone. The cache of weapons indicates international connections. He’s up there on the food chain but answering to a higher power.”

  “The higher power is someone in the Bureau,” Donnato says, barely keeping a lid on it. “Given the Toby Himes revelation, we’d better look closely at who’s in charge and why.”

  They don’t tell me until later, but as a result of running his license plate at the midsummer festival, Toby Himes has become a “person of interest” to Operation Wildcat. More, the star quarterback. He lives in Stevenson, a tiny river town on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, where he is employed as the town engineer. If he had come from there the night of the midsummer festival, it would have been almost a three-hour drive to see Mr. Terminate at Dick Stone’s farm. The black man and the biker didn’t meet to discuss hazelnuts.

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

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

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

  “What about our request for the hit on Herbert Laumann?”

  “Not a word.”

  “We knew it would take weeks,” Angelo grumbles. “Some low guy at headquarters has to write a document and get it to the attorney general, then back to the director, and back on down. What’s your problem, Mike?”

  Donnato: “At this point, we have to ask: Do you trust the chain of command? Why does Toby Himes, a known associate of terrorists, have the private number of the number-two man in the FBI?”

  Galloway tries again.

  “Let’s stay on track. One scenario is for Ana to hang in there until Stone shows his cards—who he’s
working for, and to what end. Until he slips up.”

  Donnato: “Stone ain’t gonna slip.”

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

  Donnato: “They’re the same.”

  With the good side of his face, Angelo agrees. “Stone is running a cell of FAN. We have an operative in deep cover; this thing is going where we want it to go. At this point, it’s real simple: Watch the boat.”

  “While we’re watching, he buries Ana Grey up to the neck like that kid.”

  “What does Ana want?” Galloway asks.

  “She wants to stay in,” Donnato replies. “She wants to be a hero.”

  Galloway considers his cigar.

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

  There is a prolonged silence.

  Finally, it’s Galloway, his voice reluctant and low, who says it: “Do we have a problem in-house?”

  From the look on the faces of his two trusted agents, veterans whose combined service records add up to almost forty years, Galloway can no longer ignore the elephant in the room.

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

  They nod.

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

  Thirty-one

  “Get out of my way.”

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

  “Julius—what are you doing?”

  “You should know.”

  “I have no idea!”

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