Judas Horse ag-3

by April Smith

  “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 Kerrv
ille, 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.