Judas Horse ag-3

by April Smith

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 wa
sn’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.”