Judas Horse (29 page)

“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.

W
hen 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.

W
ith 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.

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