Judas Horse

by April Smith

  Stone exhales a cone of smoke. “So I’m preaching to the choir?”

  “I can’t argue with the evidence. The bullet casings? Berwick on the inside? What’s my choice? What would you do? You’d do the smart thing, too. You’d flip. It’s a no-brainer. I’ll come over and help you out.”

  Stone extinguishes the joint. His tone is magnanimous.

  “You can flip all you want. You can flop around like a goddamned salmon. But one day, I will take your life. In spite of the fact you’re good. Or maybe because you’re good. It completes a certain cycle of nature. You like science? I like science, too. No worries, Ana. It won’t be a surprise.”

  “They know where I am and they’ll come and get me.”

  “Yes, they will, but not before the Big One. After that, darlin’, it won’t matter much to either one of us.”

  A task force of Bu-cars and tech vans moves in formation across the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles. Lanes of traffic give way to the flotilla of black vehicles as it passes the Staples Center and the painted eyes of the twelve-story violinist on the famous mural, which are following the caravan with subtle surprise.

  Curving down an exit and underneath the freeway, maintaining the speed limit, it moves with the precision of a fleet of Hornet warplanes. Entering the Central American nation, it slows for pushcarts selling ices and throngs of women and children shopping the mercados and botanicas in the early-morning particulate dust. The security gates roll back and the lead sedan, in which SAC Robert Galloway is riding, enters the secure lot of the JR Trading Co.

  The sweep is a total surprise. The task force invades the ancient hallways, charging past the cubicles of the defunct unemployment office, where bewildered agents sit before computer screens, to the innermost heart of covert operations—the secret laboratory—securing doors and exits in less than four minutes.

  Nobody is going home today.

  Stone walks me out of the orchard. Like Slammer to his burial, I go willingly. He doesn’t have to show the gun.

  We probably look like hippie father and daughter, or master and acolyte, strolling past the dusty blackberry bushes laden with ripe fruit and bees. It probably looks like everything’s okay in the heartland of the USA. In the center of a small ring, willowy young Sara is reluctantly learning to lunge Geronimo. Sterling McCord is teaching her how to exercise him, standing close behind her, spooning almost, with that uninhibited pelvis, as he reaches around to guide her hands on a long lead rope and whip. Just a whisper on the hindquarters, and the little white horse starts up a trot.

  Like figures on a music box, the cowboy and Sara revolve in tiny steps together, guiding the foal with the lead and the whip in sprightly circles around the ring.

  I cannot hide the bitter envy. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  Little Geronimo gets frisky and kicks up his heels, hitting a hind leg against the rail. A smack rings out and the wood vibrates. Sterling halts the lesson.

  Everyone who works at the off-site is herded into the central lab. Restrooms are searched. The roof is secured. Galloway addresses the crowd.

  “There has been a breach of security at this facility. A suspect is being apprehended. Our purpose right now is to evaluate the viability of this workplace. You will be required to take a polygraph. We are counting on your patience and understanding in getting everyone through this as quickly as possible.”

  When Mike Donnato discovered the tape of the phone conversation with Stone, and realized that Rooney Berwick had failed to report for work the past three days, the off-site was put under lockdown, and L.A. County sheriff’s deputies dispatched to his residence.

  The Villa de Andalusia on Harper Avenue in West Hollywood is one of those garden courtyard apartments built in the 1920s. It would seem romantic if you were a nineteen-year-old would-be actress just off the bus, until you met your neighbors—a bleached-blond lesbian bartender and Rooney Berwick.

  The bartender has a soulful, heart-shaped face, is covered below the neck with body tattoos, and is also nine months pregnant. She illegally sublets apartment 1A, Mrs. Berwick’s old place, while Rooney lives over the garage. Neither one of them would loan you a cup of sugar.

  Nobody is answering in the garage apartment, so the deputies pound on 1A. The tattooed bartender comes out snarling and refuses to unlock the metal security door.

  “Ruby Berwick?”

  “Not in a million years.”

  “Do you know where she is, ma’am?”

  “She doesn’t live here.”

  “What about her son, Rooney Berwick?”

  “He says he works for the FBI, but that’s too weird for words.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “I don’t have a fucking clue.”

  The deputy thanks her and walks past a fountain holding pools of scummy water to join his partner on the landing outside the cheaply built garage apartment. The door is locked. A bundle of mail is stuck in the slot, yellowed by the sun. Forced entry is required.

  A couple of jabs with a crowbar splinters the thin veneer of the door, and then the entire lock assembly gives way with a groan. There seems to be weight on the other side, like sandbags, preventing them from opening it. Old people drop while answering the bell…. Sick people collapse before getting help…. But as they push against the door, a tearing sound like bandages from skin alerts the officers to the disturbing fact that it has been sealed with duct tape from the inside.

  When they enter the grubby studio apartment, the deputies notice the temperature is elevated to over ninety degrees. All the windows are shut and there’s an ominous smell. Propped on a chair where nobody could miss it is a three-foot drawing of a skull on poster board, with handwritten words that say DANGER! CARBON DIOXIDE! RUBY “MOM” BERWICK, REST IN PEACE.

  A Superman comic book from 1965 is taped open to a page on which the Man of Steel is spiraling into space, fist raised. “He knows what he must do!” the caption reads. An empty vial of Percocet and cans of beer have been discarded on the floor.

  The bathroom door is locked, and again taped from inside. Once they gain entry, the deputies see the amber plastic doors that enclose the shower-tub have also been sealed, along with the bathroom window. Clearly, the intention was to create an airless chamber. But what of the two mysterious blue plastic milk cartons stamped AMBROSE, with a clock and a partially burned candle set on top?

  Inside the tub is the fully clothed body of a decomposing white man, about 190 pounds, long white hair, lying in a fetal position on its side. Near the feet are the bodies of four pug dogs in similar states of decomposition. Fluid has collected in the bottom of the tub.

  These five beings died together from lack of oxygen—but how? Sealing a chamber and burning a candle doesn’t suck the air out of a room. After the origin of the milk cartons has been identified as the Ambrose Dairy, where, it is learned, the deceased’s mother worked for thirty years, the coroner will rule that death resulted from environmental hypoxia caused by exogenous carbon dioxide exposure: dry ice.

  Rooney Berwick had returned to the landmark drive-in dairy and purchased two blocks of dry ice (frozen CO2), commonly used to handle milk products. As a tech, he knew carbon dioxide vapor would drift toward the ground, and therefore he placed the blocks of dry ice inside the tub. Then he got high, laid back, and watched the clock as the blocks smoked and shrank, disappearing into an invisible toxic gas.

  Eventually, deprived of oxygen, his heart would stop. The props he used from the Ambrose Dairy to effect his death expressed, with subconscious elegance, the attachment and rage he felt for his mother. At the last, he might have been quite comfortable lying down with his dogs, entombed by loneliness that had finally become a rock-hard cocoon.

  But the genius part of Rooney’s suicide was not the methodology. The genius part was to be found on the computer, left in screen-saver mode on Mrs. Berwick’s Formica and chrome dining table, no doubt where little Rooney used to eat his mom’s kielbasa and cabbag
e.

  Staring at the deputies is the FAN home page with a brand-new link—“In Memoriam—Ruby Berwick, Beloved Mother, and Rooney Berwick, Son”—which takes the visitor to pages and pages of classified documents on Operation Wildcat, stolen by the deceased and put on the Internet for all the world to see.

  Even more brilliant was to post the ID picture Rooney took that day at the off-site: “Darcy DeGuzman, aka FBI Special Agent Ana Grey.”

  He burned the Bureau but good.

  Galloway’s response was unhesitating: “Get Ana out now.”

  Thirty-eight

  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.