by April Smith
“Look, we have a problem. There’s been a mistake, but don’t blame Jennifer,” he says.
“I never said I knew her!” Jennifer is shouting.
“She ripped us off.” The husband shrugs.
The accountant scratches his ear. I notice he is still holding the gun.
“So what happened?”
“We picked up the wrong person,” says Jennifer. “I had a bad feeling about it when that ghetto car drove up—” “No way.” I swim toward the briefcase. “There was a hundred grand.” Well, there isn’t now.
“That’s not my briefcase. That’s not the one I came in with,” I blurt. This one is cheap plastic. “I had a Gucci.” It echoes strangely. Gucci? Is that a real word?
“What are you trying to say?” asks the accountant calmly.
I catch Jennifer’s panicked look and switch direction as best I can.
“I don’t know,” I say, “but something’s…messed up.”
He fires the gun at close range into the chest of the man with the shaved head, who lifts up off the floor and flies backward, blood splattering the wood-paneled walls. Jennifer screams, “No, please God, no, no, no—” and he shoots her, too, and she jerks over a chair and sprawls on the floor, the pink sweatsuit staining red. The lackeys start dragging cartons containing freshly minted contraband away from a spreading pool of blood.
The accountant is breathing hard. “I don’t like that kind of shit,” he says.
Undercover operative may be authorized pursuant to section four — I have to save my own life.
“They switched the briefcases,” I tell him. “They double-crossed us. You and me.” “You and me?”
“You and me,” I insist. “We have to get rid of the bodies.”
“Is that what they taught you in cop school?”
He turns toward me and his eyes are tiny dots behind the glasses.
“I’m going to help you,” I say. “Get some of that plastic and we’ll put these losers in the truck.” “I’ll tell you who’s a loser.”
He shoves me into a windowless bathroom and locks the door. The bathtub is stained with old brown blood. Chains are embedded in the walls, handcuffs looped around the rusty pipes. Everywhere there are bunches of human hair. I think it’s called primal fear.
I am imprisoned by a backwoods mental case.
I listen to muffled voices. Someone curses and rattles the lock, but then the banging stops. It stops for a long time.
Soon there is daylight under the door. I turn the knob and it opens. The room is deserted, the printer quiet, the bogus gone, blood splatters still on the walls.
I crawl out of that basement into the dawn, like the lone survivor of a nuclear holocaust, to discover that I am on a deserted lane in a perfectly preserved little town. I am back on Main Street, in Hogan’s Alley, at the FBI Academy. The misty light and cold, wet air, the fake buildings, they are at that moment no more surprising than finding myself alive.
I walk down the center of the street, past the Biograph Theater, perpetually playing Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable and Myrna Loy, and the neat brick Bank of Hogan. A family of real live deer has wandered into the dewy grass of the city square.
I cross the road that runs through the Marine base and climb the hill to the agony tree, where a counselor is waiting, dressed in a black watch cap and heavy jacket against the chill.
“You lost two informants,” he says, “but otherwise you did pretty well. You never broke cover and stayed on point. It’s okay,” he adds softly.
“What’s okay?”
“It’s okay to cry.”
Breakdown of the ego by sleep-deprivation, humiliation, and abuse is a well-known brainwashing technique. It renders the individual compliant, and eager to serve the cult.
“Everyone cries,” says the counselor. “But nobody tells.”
Four
It is Easter Sunday when I leave Los Angeles for Portland, Oregon, three weeks after being certified at undercover school. People in dark clothes holding babies are lined up in front of churches, and on the airplane, stewardesses are wearing rabbit ears. Yellow flowers grow wild between the runways. Despite the urgent beating of my heart, I have the extraordinary feeling that everything is all, all right.
It is right to be ascending on this day of holy mysteries. Somewhere in the clouds, a silent transformation will occur. When we land, Special Agent Ana Grey will be gone from the world, and a fictional person named Darcy DeGuzman will walk off the airplane in her place.
Two days before, sometime before dawn on Good Friday, animal rights terrorists smashed the windows of a butcher store in southeast Portland, spray-painting the word Holocaust on parked cars. Moments later, a firebomb exploded at Ernie’s Meats, a wholesaler on the docks. Three employees were injured by shrapnel.
Operation Wildcat took off.
As we fly over the snow-pocked ridges of Yosemite, I go through Darcy DeGuzman’s backpack, to get the feel of her personal objects, provided by the backstopping team at the Bureau’s secret off-site in Los Angeles. Besides a phony driver’s license, credit cards, and bank statements, there is a copy of Animal Liberation by Peter Singer that was run over by a car to make it look used, and keys to a rented apartment in Portland.
The off-site is concealed in the midst of a raucous Central American nation of street vendors and discount malls opposite the green ice towers of downtown. We’d practically lived there the past few weeks, concocting scenarios aimed at infiltrating Darcy DeGuzman into the FAN organization. On Good Friday morning, five weeks ahead of schedule, I climbed out of the Crown Vic and never looked back.
The gates swung closed. Cameras scanned a crowd of Spanish workers waiting for the morning bus, for whom the aging industrial building was just another unremarkable front for an indiscernible business.
I found myself before a black steel door, fumbling at the Cyber Lock, messing up twice inputting my code. The numbers loomed like kabbalistic signs: LAST CHANCE TO STAY IN LA! BUY A CONDO! MEET A MAN! But when the green light flashed, there was liberating happiness, as when a tiresome family member finally leaves.
Ana Grey was free to go, and take her baggage with her.
For decades, the place had been a state unemployment office, and the Bureau had not done much to change it. I badged the on-duty, who buzzed me into a vestibule that smelled of old guns and wet plaster. Tired fluorescents cast a sallow patina along empty corridors that were laid forty years ago with sea green linoleum, now worn to the floorboards.
Special Supervisory Agent Mike Donnato appeared wearing a trim charcoal suit, making things look a little less like a mental institution. Donnato, my old mentor on the bank robbery squad, had been pulled off his cases to act as contact agent, or handler, for Operation Wildcat. Management knew that Donnato and I make a formidable battery, like a pitcher and catcher who work together to control the game. This was no time to be fooling around with rookie matchups.
He turned a corner and we fell into step, instantly in psychic sync. That’s the way it is with partners.
“We finally got my father-in-law into rehab,” he said.
“You’re a good man.”
Donnato looked skeptical. His father-in-law is difficult.
“The way you take care of him,” I insisted. “You’re responsible; you visit all the time—”
“He had a catheter,” said Donnato dryly. “So it pops out.”
“The tube?”
“His penis.”
Partners. No topic in the world, no place inside the other individual that you cannot reach out and touch.
“Rochelle’s trying to help the nurse out,” he said of his wife. “Fussing with the sheets and stuff, and suddenly it’s right there.”
I started to giggle. “What does she do?”
“Her eyes get real big and she says, I just saw my father’s penis!”
I lost it. Must have been stress. Donnato shook his head with wry despair. He enjoys getting a reaction from me.
“We didn’t need that, I’ll tell you.”
SAC Robert Galloway joined us.
“The team is meeting downstairs. They want Ana to get her driver’s license first,” Galloway said. “Go see Rooney Berwick.”
The brick exterior of the old unemployment office is just a shell for a top-secret laboratory in the center of the building, where Rooney Berwick and his cohorts manufacture high-quality, indisputable lies.
The Rooneys of this world are shy. They never have a date for the movies; they work the concession stand. They are collectors. They store data banks in their heads. Ask them what year Samuel Colt patented the revolver. They shop for groceries at two o’clock in the morning, are semi-intimate with a couple of oddball associates, live in a garage apartment across from Mother, who still makes dinner for them every night. They are fifty-eight years old and their pants don’t fit, and they haunt comic-book conventions because they are lonely for a hero; the kind of loneliness that never bottoms out.
Rooney Berwick may have been all those things, but on home turf in the FBI lab, sporting multiple ID tags, key rings, and belt-mounted eyeglass cases, he projected a kind of arrogant underground status. He had stringy white hair and an ovoid belly that bulged out of a black button-down shirt tucked into dusty black jeans as he sat on a bench with big boots planted, threading a flex light down the barrel of a gold-plated AK-47.
He looked up. “Can I help?” he asked gravely.
I told him I was a new undercover and needed a driver’s license. I asked what he was looking for inside the machine gun.
“Trying to see the rifling.” He cocked an eye down the shaft. “Take a look?”
“I’ve seen rifling, thanks,” I replied, referring to the spiral marks left by exiting bullets.
“She isn’t loaded, don’t worry.”
“It creeps me out to see anyone looking down a gun.”
“Just trying to keep busy. My mom is dying. They’re not saying that, of course. She’s in the hospital, but it doesn’t look good.”
When strangers stun you with this kind of stuff — when you’re waiting on line, or in an elevator — it derails you in the headlong rush to get somewhere, forcing you to see their anguish leaking over everything, like accident victims, beyond propriety. I was touched by Rooney Berwick’s confession. Why would he say this to someone he scarcely knew, except that we are all part of the Bureau family?
“I’m so sorry.”
“She has cancer.”
I hesitated. “That is rough.”
“What they put her through. They keep doing tests, just to justify their existence.”
“I hope they’re making her comfortable.”
“What does that mean?” he asked rhetorically.
“Well,” I said, fumbling, “at least no pain.”
“Uh-huh.”
We abided for a time in the quiet of the lab.
Finally, he smiled crookedly and latched and unlatched the magazine. “What’s the matter? You don’t like my toy? That’s real gold on there.”
“A collector’s item,” I agreed. “I wish I could talk more, but I’ve got to get to a meeting.”
“Everybody’s got a meeting,” Rooney said with spite.
He gave up the weapon, moving heavily, like everything in his soft, bruised body hurt.
“The uc name is Darcy DeGuzman,” I told him gently.
Beyond the quickies we came up with in training, a deep-cover identity is carefully constructed, like a computer-generated creature in a special-effects studio, with input from FBI psychologists and experts in terrorist organizations. You’re trying to create a three-dimensional character that will credibly blend with the target; whose believability will withstand whatever they throw at you. The identity of Darcy DeGuzman, born in a slash of light off a Rexall window in a Virginia mall, had been refined by the focus of a dozen minds to fit the profile of a drifter looking for a cause; someone ripe to be recruited by FAN.
No more blow-dried hair and prim Brooks Brothers suits. Darcy has dark wild curls and an old purple parka that looks as if it has seen many bus stations and campouts. After an abusive childhood in the ghetto tract in Long Beach, she made her way to the Northwest, “where people are real and care about the environment.” Because of her politics, she’s had trouble holding jobs. She was fired from a biotech company for hacking the system when she learned they wrote programs for cosmetic testing on rabbits. She was booked for assault on an employee of the City of Los Angeles Animal Services during a demonstration outside the shelter. It’s all on phony police records for anyone to verify. With the recession going on, things haven’t worked out, and right now the money’s almost gone; Darcy is single, desperate, and emotionally needy.
Rooney Berwick was waiting impatiently behind the ID machine.
“It’s a California license,” I said helpfully. “Darcy DeGuzman just moved up to Oregon.”
“Got it right here.” Rooney Berwick tapped some papers. He knew his damn job. “Look at the little babies now.”
Tacked to the wall was a snapshot of four pug puppies with walleyed faces scrambling to get out of a cardboard box.
“Are those your puppies?”
“Please hold still, Miss DeGuzman.”
The camera strobed.
Rooney said, “Pick it up when you leave.”
But I could not just leave. Searching for his eyes I said, “I’m really sorry about your mom.”
He looked away and mumbled, “Have a great day” in the burned-out monotone of mid-level technical services personnel who inhabit the hidden compartments of the Bureau: doing it thirty years and never seen daylight. Their ideas, and their expertise, make other people famous. Nobody cares about the grunts.
I joined the team in a damp wood-paneled alcove in the basement. Coffee cups, water bottles, and documents marked OPERATION WILDCAT — TRUSTED AGENTS ONLY littered the table.
“The firebomb that blew up Ernie’s Meats is consistent with the explosive that killed Steve Crawford,” Special Supervisory Agent Angelo Gomez told us. “The bomb techs are calling it a signature device.”
Angelo Gomez is a legendary undercover investigator who favors the narco look — slicked-back hair, earring, mustache, Hawaiian shirt (to cover the gun), two-ton Rolex, and chubby pink sapphire ring. One eye is smaller than the other and set at a skewed angle. A kiss from a bullet, rumor goes. Angelo is the case agent, running the show from Los Angeles. Mike Donnato will fly up to Portland as needed.
“How are the bombs the same?” my partner asked.
“Both built the same way, by someone with skills, using the explosive Tovex. Just like in Steve’s case, the TPU was built with everyday materials — cell phone, digital clock, batteries — connected with alligator clips.”
“The alligator clips,” I remarked, “are worthy of note.”
Galloway was looking through files and doing something with a calculator, but he was listening. He had taken the supervisory position on the case because Steve Crawford meant that much to him.
“What’s the significance of alligator clips?”
“It means he’s a lazy bomb builder,” I replied. “Wants to build it fast. Confident, not a perfectionist, doesn’t have to have the wire wrapped just so — just wants to get the job done.”
“What’s the profile?”
“Off the top of my head? He’s a white heterosexual male. The way he builds his TPUs — the alligator clips and ordinary wire — says he’s not high-tech, goes with the classics.”
“Older?”
“Maybe. We can eliminate vandalism or experimentation as a motive. This guy is on a mission.”
Galloway nodded. “Ideology. That’s what our pals at FAN stand for — Free Animals Now.”
“Don’t let the soft and furry animal rights bullshit melt your heart,” Angelo agreed. “These are criminals, bad as Timothy McVeigh. Their end goal is to change society — into what, who knows or cares — but the immediate goal is to put fear i
n people. Chaos and destabilization — that’s their stock-in-trade.”
I reached past Donnato to sneak a corner of the blueberry muffin he was delicately breaking into crusts. Automatically, he slid it toward me — one of many small, endearing moves during a long partnership in which we often found ourselves sharing the same thought: Doesn’t matter what the boneheads call themselves. They killed Steve.
“What’s on your mind?” Galloway asked, seeing my frown.
“Opening-night jitters.” I shrugged.
Never let it show.
“Afraid you won’t know your lines?”
“I’ll figure it out. I’ve read every transcript of every intercept.”
“Anarchists don’t care about the issues,” Galloway reminded us. “Don’t feel you have to spout the rhetoric. The cause is never the cause.”
On the laptop, Angelo had pulled up surveillance photos taken at demonstrations throughout the Northwest. They were mainstream protesters — do-gooders and tree-huggers — mostly middle-aged, plus the requisite young and hairy types. “Free the mustangs.” “Milk is torture.” “McDeath to McDonald’s.” “All meat is murder.” “Dairy is rape.”
What does an anarchist look like?
“Not so easy to connect the dots,” observed Galloway. “FAN has no central leadership. It’s structured like an international terrorist group engaged in net war.”
Net — or network — war is the war of the future, an agile system of “committees” or “cells” that seem to act invisibly, strung together by the braided cables of money and belief. Armies based on infantries are about to become obsolete.
“Where do I start?”
Angelo hit the laptop. “Herbert Laumann.”
Galloway: “Who is Herbert Laumann?”
“Some penny-ante bureaucrat at the Bureau of Land Management,” I replied. I’d seen the files. “The idiots are really after this dude. They call him ‘the face of evil.’”
A photo of Herbert Laumann filled the screen. The “face of evil” looked like the manager of an electronics store — the Joe in the tan shirt and brown tie who scurries out of the back when the wide-screen TV you ordered two months ago has disappeared off the delivery list — pouchy cheeks, line mustache, thinning hair.
