by April Smith
“Our latest intel indicates the movement is going to target wild mustang horses,” Angelo said.
The Wild Horse and Burro Program is mandated by federal law to protect the last remaining herds of free-roaming mustangs in the United States. These are the pure and graceful descendants of horses that were brought over by the Spanish explorers and then mated with hardy U.S. cavalry mounts. Along with a lot of other folks, Congress felt the mustangs are part of our unique western heritage and should be scientifically preserved in their natural habitat. The weaker ones may be put up for adoption by the public, but wild mustangs can never be sold or slaughtered.
“The herds are protected by federal law,” Angelo went on, “but the goofballs don’t like the way the government is doing it. Laumann is in charge of the Wild Horse and Burro Program in Oregon. He’s already been harassed. We think FAN infiltrated the group.”
Donnato: “Ana hits the ground. She finds a wild-horse protest. She works her way into a FAN cell.”
Galloway held up a finger. “Patience,” he advised. “The hardest part is waiting to see whether your uc identity is taking effect or not. It’s the loneliest time.”
While I was absorbed in this, Angelo had come up behind. Now he cuffed me hard across the head.
“Darcy! What are you doing up in Portland?”
Instantly, I am Darcy and he is FAN. We have these fire drills often. They make your adrenaline rock. There is no transition, isn’t meant to be.
In undercover work, it is always midnight in the universe, and you are always alone.
“I got fed up with the anti-life corporate agenda,” I said. “I quit my job in L.A.”
“That’s bullshit. We checked, and you never worked in a biotech company in L.A.”
Galloway was watching this improvisation with folded arms.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I protested.
“Why do you keep going down to L.A. when you don’t work there?”
“Why don’t you come with me one time and I’ll show you? Jesus Christ.” I smiled with feigned exasperation. “What’s wrong with you guys? I’m starting to get paranoid.”
“Darcy would not say Jesus,” Donnato murmured.
I muttered, “Yes, she would.”
Angelo circled my chair. Leaning close, his distorted upper face was beginning to look like a malevolent Picasso mask. He yanked me to my feet by my hair. The chair tipped over.
“What’s the problem, bro?”
Donnato: “She wouldn’t say bro.”
Angelo, moving like a snake, had my arms pinned and a nasty little knife, which he had been secreting just for that moment, flat against my throat.
“We’re all a little paranoid at FAN,” he whispered into my burning ear. “Spies like you know the reason why.”
Panic. I needed to pee. I wanted to yell “Time out!” What would Darcy say? I didn’t know. I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t think.
Never hesitate. Get back in their face.
“I came here to save animals,” I shouted. “I’m on your side.”
He tightened his forearm across my neck, half-lifting me off the ground.
“If you are who you say you are, show us your driver’s license.”
“No problem.” I groped on the table and came up with the waxed muffin wrapper. “Here it is!”
“Really?” Angelo snapped the paper, testing it, and growled, “Bullshit!”
Then, in a normal voice, he said, “You’re dead,” and let me go.
I was breathless, flummoxed. “Why?”
“Never give them anything physical. Anything they can check.”
“Okay, it’s a muffin thing, but in real life I’ll be backstopped with an untraceable ID—”
“I said anything physical.” He crumpled the paper for emphasis.
In undercover school, I had learned never to argue with an instructor.
“Okay.”
I was sweating. They could cut me now, halfway through, anytime, just like my roommate at Quantico. I looked toward Donnato for help.
“I liked the fed-up-with-corporate-America concept,” he offered.
Angelo was wired. “The false documents we give you will be as good as it gets, but backstopping is only a screen door we put between you and the truth. If you stand back, it looks solid. If you walk up close, you’re going to see through the holes. Don’t let them touch the screen, or they’ll know it’s a story. A story that isn’t true. And then you’ll be toast.”
It was searing and unpleasant to stand there with head bowed while Angelo berated me with stuff I already knew.
I swallowed the humiliation.
I believe in this work.
The plane banks, revealing the snow-covered Olympian bulk of Mount Hood. I try to relax and let the power of the engines carry me, but I can feel that searing mortification even now. A vapor of jet fuel leaking up through the floor is smelling a lot like the smell of burning brake lining that swamped my senses during the shooting incident. I pop a mint as the landing gear unfolds.
Take all your greens from the crayon box and color in a patchwork of moss and olive and sage, and that is Portland. What a tidy city, I think as the airplane passes over neat rows of houseboats on a sparkling river, then curves, delivering a spectacular view of three or four intricately wrought iron bridges.
Despite everyone’s gloomy talk of rain, it is seventy-three degrees and sunny when we land. On the ground, girls are wearing halter tops, and grandmas flowered pants, and there are hugs and chocolate bunnies for Easter Sunday.
I am not met at the airport. There can be no risk of Ana Grey/ Darcy DeGuzman being seen in the company of law enforcement. Rehearsal’s over. I’m walking alone onstage, backpack over my shoulder. The glass doors swing wide. Outside, the air smells sweet as cotton candy.
I find Darcy’s banged-up Civic waiting for me in the parking lot. The freeway is empty under an eggshell blue sky and everywhere there are flowering trees.
So this is what people who don’t live in Los Angeles call spring.
I leave the quiet of the holiday freeway and wind through the southeast part of town, until the road becomes a two-lane blacktop fronted by clapboard duplexes and airless Victorians with weed-strewn yards. A person in transit would live in a transitional neighborhood, we figured, where radicals mix in with blue-collar families on the scrubby streets.
I park in the long light of a late northwest afternoon, pulling up in front of a small four-story brick building built a century ago. Darcy’s rental apartment is on the top floor. I stare at the empty windows.
The loneliest time.
Five
The lights of downtown Portland beckon like a seaport in the mist, gently bobbing through the rain-streaked windshield as the Civic bumps along. Beside the Burnside Bridge, homeless men are scrabbling through a glistening mountain of garbage bags left over from the food and crafts market, held on weekends under the shelter of the iron span. Bent-over figures dragging bundles and wet cardboard cartons stop in front of the men’s rescue mission to trade cigarettes in the rain. They look impossibly old to be foraging on the skids.
Over the course of my second day in town, the crystalline weather had given way to tiers of clouds, moving and melding, waiting and cruising. As drops of rain tapped the windows of Darcy’s apartment, I watched the street and waited for nightfall. Within a block of her building, there was a mom-and-pop grocery with psychedelic flowers painted on the windows, and an Asian market where you could get live chickens. There were peeling cottages with bay windows curtained by cut lace beside postmodern town houses. There was a hip designer resale store, as well as a Laundromat and a fifties coffee shop that was now a vegan restaurant called the Cosmic Café. The sidewalks were overgrown with marigold and outlaw mint.
What did Darcy DeGuzman think, looking out the window?
I could have a life here.
The furnished apartment, with its wicker bookcases and new TV and nesting aluminum pots
under the sink, smelled like the musty fake storefronts in Hogan’s Alley at the FBI Academy. This, too, was a stage set — but the action was real and I was working to weave it all together in the existent world: How did Steve Crawford’s last known location at a downtown dive called Omar’s Roadhouse tie in with a radical group that likes to play with explosives?
I wondered if rain was falling on the bare steaming backs of wild mustangs in the high desert to the east; and if the ultimate sacrifice that Steve Crawford made would turn out to be a small and hollow loss in a larger war to defend their freedom.
The person who knew was Marvin Gladstone.
“Aw hell,” said Donnato the day Galloway introduced us to Gladstone at the off-site. “Do we have to talk to Marvin?”
Special Agent Marvin Gladstone had the ill luck of having been Crawford’s handler, the last person to see him alive.
He was sitting on a folding chair outside the dank little room in which we were meeting, looking like the last man on earth. He was wearing a windbreaker and visitor’s tags — the former employee who was no longer part of the working world. Since his abrupt departure, he had puffed up twenty pounds. With his crew-cut gray head downcast, pink jowls lax, and hands in his lap, he was the picture of middle-aged male depression.
As a handler, you can’t do worse than losing your undercover, and Marvin, no way around it, had lost Steve. Stricken with grief, he’d resigned from the Bureau the day Steve’s remains were identified. In doing so, he gave up his pension.
When Galloway called out to him in the hall, Marvin straightened up and walked into the room with an attempt at Navy pride. He did not remove his windbreaker but reached into a pocket for a road map of Oregon. Poignantly, he had brought a map, as if to show us all the stations of his shame.
“I’ve been thinking it would make sense for the next undercover to start by picking up the trail where Steve left off.”
Galloway’s tone was mocking. “Good plan, Marvin. Steve was one of the finest agents to come through here. You think we’re going to cock around?”
“No, sir.”
Donnato and I did not like having Marvin Gladstone in the room, either. It was as if minutes before boarding our flight we had met a pilot who had been in a plane crash. Would you really want to strike up a conversation? Gladstone’s breath as he leaned over the desk smelled like old library books, like what is dead and gone.
“The trail stopped at an anarchist hangout in downtown Portland called Omar’s Roadhouse.” Marvin pointed to the map with a stubby finger. “Crawford’s last known location. The last place he called me from.”
“What was your last conversation like?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“What was Steve doing there?”
“Watching a basketball game. After that, no communication.”
“Why Omar’s Roadhouse?”
“Omar’s is a marketplace for illegal goods. You have your bikers, your druggies, your interstate theft. Steve had a theory that FAN was being financed by methamphetamine labs and that the dealers went to Omar’s to do business. They’ve got a lot of those labs in the mountains.”
“Is that why he went into the national park?”
“I’m sorry,” Marvin said. “I can’t tell you.”
“Steve deserves better,” Galloway reminded him.
“I’m not making excuses, but it was not unusual for Steve to drop off the radar. I tried to rein him in, but sometimes he’d go dark for a couple of days. I should have done a better job,” he added, and stood there like a prisoner with his eyes out of focus.
By that time, I had run out of what remained of my sympathy for Marvin Gladstone. Steve had been a pro — if he’d needed reining in, it was for a reason, and the old codger should have found out why.
“What’s the place like?” I asked with false politeness. “Omar’s Roadhouse? Because I’m going there.”
Marvin woke up. “You?” He looked at me — five four, 112 pounds — and then he looked around the room. “Alone?”
“Ana is the undercover,” Galloway explained.
“I’m here to tell you.” Marvin’s eyes were wide. “Omar’s is rough trade.”
Now it is night and I am driving alone, past the men’s rescue mission, down a dark cobblestone lane once lined with shipping companies and foreign brokerage houses. At the turn of the last century, they called this street the “gateway to the Orient,” but tonight it is another deserted business district in twenty-first-century global America — vintage stone-and-brickwork buildings overwhelmed by tall black boxes made of glass, and not a mariner in sight.
Trolley tracks, gleaming dully, curve into the diminishing light, where between two seedy parking lots a nondescript tavern of red timber, punched out with a row of small and unfriendly windows, identifies itself as one of those everlasting beacons of alcoholic wretchedness that through the ages have drawn the outcasts of the world — those who suffer, shuffle, buy or sell.
Steve Crawford’s last known location.
I park in a smattering of broken glass.
Six
Like many of us, Omar’s Roadhouse has two sides.
There are two separate entrances to help you choose between Omar’s Café and simply the bar. Inside, the common air is infused with cigarette smoke, the division between the two just a booth with a maple-stained partition, as if to prove the boundary between criminal and not is as makeshift as a quarter-inch piece of plywood.
On the brighter side of the partition, two clean-cut African-American men in Polartec vests and corduroys are eating meatballs and spaghetti off paper plates, and there is pickled cauliflower in the salad bar. But here in this murky pool of bottom-feeders, blue light pours from an ancient cigarette machine and the brightest eyes are in the heads of the deer, elk, raccoon, bobcat, fox, and wolverine set up in rows above the redwood paneling like a mute jury. Decor is simple: a flag with a skull and crossbones, big enough for a coliseum.
I settle at an L-shaped bar, going slow with a Sierra Nevada pale ale. How did Steve Crawford, on the same assignment, play this scene? I can picture his lanky body wrapped around a bar stool. A washed-up hippie? Meth addict? Lost businessman? Sloppy drunk? I really don’t know. They did not share his uc identity. Although we’d been colleagues for a decade since those days as naïve rookies, so high on the Bureau that we wanted to be married in the chapel at the Academy, I never saw the undercover side of him and he never saw the Darcy part of me.
Would he have loved me anyway?
I make an effort to look uneasy and forlorn in Omar’s swamp dive, paying particular attention to the 250-pound bruiser with a full dark beard down to his waist at the other end of the bar. It took him a long time to grow that beard, I reflect, and therefore he must mean it, or whatever it stands for, which cannot be pleasant.
He is wearing an entertainer’s tall black top hat and mirrored sunglasses, and rings on every finger — skulls and swastikas, it looks like from here. No shirt, just a vest showing massive biceps no doubt hardened by lifting motorcycle parts. He could carry me out of the place under one arm, like a baguette. Embroidered across the vest are the flowered words Terminate the helmet law.
Although his bulk dominates like Mount Hood, Mr. Terminate is not the only major bonehead on the horizon. The area where Steve Crawford was murdered is known for meth kitchens and marijuana farms. Drug wars are fought in our national forests; left-wing anarchists and redneck Klansmen trying to blow each other up, and bikers after the spoils. On the face of it, each patron at Omar’s would fit one or more of those profiles. The one thing you could probably say about everybody in this bar is they all hate the United States government.
Rough trade.
Marvin Gladstone got that right.
It is 10:00 p.m. on a Monday night and this must be the crossroads of criminal activity in Washington County. Two fat truckers and two even fatter hookers are squeezed rump-to-rump, pitcher-to-pitcher at a table littered with p
izza and chips, openly popping pills. Mexican gangbangers hover near a TV showing the fights, palming nickel bags of coke, muttering and complaining, flicking butts, grinding the worn heels of their western boots to jukebox Santana. The female neo-Nazis are big into black eyeliner and leather halters that show off their breasts, but I am wearing one of Darcy’s yellow oxford shirts with a collar, jeans with a belt, and beat-up Timberlands. (“Bad guys don’t have good boots,” Angelo warned.) The only woman at Omar’s less conspicuous than I am seems to be the lady in a calf-length denim skirt with a flounce, who is standing at my left, patiently waiting for the bartender’s attention. She has been there long enough, and close enough, for me to pick up her scent, like fresh almond soap, underneath the bitter stench of cigarette smoke. And then I notice the sheaves of richly colored gray-and-silver hair caught up in barrettes and falling past her shoulders, and that the woman, although twenty-some years older than I am and as many pounds heavier, radiates the sturdiness and ease in her body of someone who labors outdoors; her finely creased skin seems to hold the moist glaze of cold and foggy mornings.
The bartender darts his chin at her as he blows by. “Give me a sec, Megan.” “Sure thing.”
“You’ve been waiting a long time,” I observe.
“The waitress is busy,” the woman replies without a trace of resentment, and there is an eager jolt as I recognize this person shows an inherent sympathy for the underdog — such as a lonely stranger in a new city?
Opening move: “I love your necklace.”
A heavy silver pendant of interlocking triangles rests upon her pillowy chest.
“A valknot. Ever heard of it?”
I shake my head.
Megan answers with a forgiving smile. “A Nordic symbol for the three aspects of the universe.” “Now,” announces the bartender, sweating from his shaved head, “what can I get for you, Megan?” He pours white wine and mixes up a Salty Dog with fresh grapefruit juice and premium gin while Megan stares across at Mr. Terminate. And Mr. Terminate glares right back at her.
