by April Smith
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 th
e 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.
Thirty-nine
We drive to a turnout where a chain hangs across a dirt road. When we emerged from the tunnel, we ran across a hundred yards of open wash beyond the perimeter, clouds of ink black smoke roiling behind us. We kept on going—a call on the satellite phone to an associate of Mr. Terminate—and then a grandma biker chick right out of Omaha, a wrinkled witch a hundred years old, met us and took us to a safe house in a trailer park, where we were given a stolen car. We drive for ninety minutes into the national park. Only when we passed a green sign for the parking lot for the Hard Edge Trail do I realize that our destination is the place where Steve Crawford died.
Stone gets out and unhooks the chain, gets back in and drives the sedan over it. Branches sweep the windshield as we ascend a rutted fire road. The Northwest fir is as impenetrable as the Virginia woodland surrounding Quantico; voracious organisms choking one another out for the sun.
At times the car is almost engulfed by closely growing colonnades of young Douglas fir, and I am gripped with a claustrophobic unease, as sickening as having crawled through that tunnel. Spring rains cut deep gullies in the moist terrain and now our heads hit the inside roof of the car as we launch out of our seats. Ten miles an hour seems way too fast.
“Watch out!”
“Got it,” Stone mutters, slowing to a stop before a huge tree felled across the road.
We stare at an impassable tangle of branches and fine sprays of dark green needles spewing out in all the wrong directions. Nothing looks more like a forbidding mistake than a huge horizontal tree lying across your path.
“We’re not that far,” Dick Stone says, arming himself with the Colt, a Commando submachine gun, three hundred rounds of ammunition, and a collapsible snow shovel.
We climb around the tree and follow the road on foot. During the drive, we gained altitude, and the mountain air is pure and chill.
“I’ve been in some odd situations, Dick, but this is one of the strangest. Ever zoom out of yourself? All the way out, so you’re looking down from somewhere else?”
“Not sober.”
“What are we doing in the woods? I don’t even like the woods. There’re ticks and poison oak.”
The road is wide enough to walk side by side, but sometimes one of us will walk ahead, over gullies cut by cascading rocks, sometimes along the lip of the road. We continue that way, flowing around each other, as Stone twirls the shovel lightly over one shoulder.
“Why are you and I always digging another man’s trenches?” I muse.
“Some of us are soldiers. Born that way.”
We are walking single file where the road washes out. At the bottom of a huge rounded boulder split by a tree, Stone takes a turn onto the well-kept Hard Edge Trail. A Forest Service sign points back to the parking lot at 5.7 miles.
We continue up, retracing Steve Crawford’s steps.
We crest a ravine and look down at the creek where the hiker found the remains. I recognize the rock formations from the postblast photos.
“Good God!” says Stone. “What are you two doing here?”
Toby Himes and Mr. Terminate are sitting on a fallen log. Toby, always appropriately dressed for whatever occasion, wears an impeccable hiker’s outfit—clean boots, wind-resistant pants, lightweight black quilted vest, orange hunter’s cap. Mr. Terminate, wearing a T-shirt with a faded message that has to do with sucking, is smoking a cigarette, the AK-47 cradled in his arms. His presence is so improbable that it instantly reframes reality.
Before, the forest was treacherous.
Now, it is incendiary.
“Figured you wouldn’t leave town without saying good-bye.”
“Course not,” says Stone, climbing down the slope. “I owe you, big.”
“No problem, it was a lot of laughs,” says Mr. Terminate. “I see you still got your shadow.”
“Hi, John,” I say, just so he can ignore me one last time.
Stone bums a cigarette and puts one foot up on the log.
“Megan is dead.”
“Really? Oh shit! Oh man!”
Toby’s eyes grow round in surprise. “Deepest condolences, my friend. What happened?”
“They mowed her down. About how many bullets would you say she took, Ana Grey?”
“I don’t know, Dick.”
“When I was on the Los Angeles bank robbery squad, we ambushed a gang of bandits in an alley. The guy driving the getaway car—it was a convertible—took a hundred thirty-two hits. He was hamburger. Those were the good old days, am I right? I’ll make them suffer a thousand times worse. A hundred thousand. I should have followed the very first rule: Never negotiate with terrorists. It’s the Bureau I’m talkin’ about.”
“We know exactly what you’re talkin’ about.” Toby lays trembling fingers on his friend’s arm.
“But, no,” says Stone, squeezing his face up. “I talked to them, and she walks into an assassination.”
I stare at the thick bed of mulch under my feet. I am thinking how many papery layers of brown oak leaves have been laid down over how many centuries and with what patience, and about the beetles gnawing dumbly through the fertile dregs.
“Make no mistake,” says Mr. Terminate, his growl downshifting to first. “She was a good lady.”
Stone smokes some more.
“Anything I can do?” the biker asks.
“I have some thoughts.”
Mr. Terminate nods. A switchblade appears like the tongue of a snake from his hand.
“Then we split the turquoise. Three ways.”
Stone sighs. “There is no turquoise. It’s just a rumor, John. A story I made up to mess with their minds.”
“I knew it.” Toby slaps his own leg.
Mr. Terminate is not convinced. “Why are you carrying a shovel?”
“To cover up…whatever.” He jerks his head toward me.
Whatever’s left.
Mr. Terminate considers. He gets up from the log. Ye
ah, okay. He walks toward me, the knife held low.
“It’s cash,” I say.
“Come again?”
“Dick calls it ‘the turquoise,’ but that’s a cover, so he can cheat his best friends. He stole a hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the FBI, and it’s buried right there.”
Mr. Terminate squints at Stone. “You wouldn’t cheat me.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake!” cries Stone, fed up and totally frustrated. “This is the turquoise!” And he pulls the PalmPilot from his pocket. In the sage forest light, the plastic cover sparkles like sea green semi-precious gems.
“O-kay,” says Mr. Terminate slowly.
Toby blinks. “It’s blue.”
“You dumb fucks. This is my manifesto. This is the truth. This will sink the FBI. Names, records, and documents going back to the seventies, when they fucked Megan and they fucked me, and who was in charge of the undercover operation? My own boss. Peter Abbott. I’ve got his signature on memos that approved the whole damn bag of dirty tricks. But that’s nothing. That’s just the warm-up. I’ve got the drop on his fucking corrupt father, too.”
Mr. Terminate has planted his feet like a gunslinger.
“I stood by you. All these years, I delivered the goods.”
“I’ll get you the money,” Dick Stone says impatiently. “After we take care of business.”
Mr. Terminate isn’t stupid. “You didn’t have to bring her all this way to do the deed.”
“I came to collect some papers I’ve got stashed. Buried in a metal box. I’ll show you.”
“Papers?”
“Travel documents.”
“Cash! He’s lying to you, John. He’s a psycho liar.”
“I’ll bet it’s over here,” says cocky Mr. Terminate as he heads for a boulder veined with rose quartz. The rock is standing in a growth of chokecherry. The distinctive glassy pink markings make it look as if it had been rolled there to mark the spot. And he’s right. A trip wire—thin as a spider’s web—glints in the underbrush. It is the same kind of setup Steve Crawford must have walked into when he was looking to rip off a stolen fortune.
