by April Smith
“It’s stable,” Mountain Man insists. “Safe to transport.” “Seriously, you don’t want to be around that shit.” “Me? I don’t want to get anywhere near that shit.” “Julius knows you can’t get that shit. The only place you could get that shit is the armory out on the base.” This is it. This is the Big One: They’re talking about meth. They’re running a methamphetamine operation out of a military base.
I am beginning to get excited, when Toby Himes breaks in.
“I guarantee what the Doctor has in mind is strictly MOS.” And then, as we say in the Bureau, the hair goes up on the back of my neck, and I know what I know. In the language of bomb experts, MOS stands for military occupational specialties.
The Army Corps of Engineers, whose job it is to locate land mines.
Mr. Terminate, Mountain Man, Toby Himes, and Stone are not working some ordinary drug deal.
They are talking about military-grade explosives.
Thirty-three
Donnato is waiting at the usual rest area off the interstate at the time of another of my alleged appointments with the dentist.
“If the suspects were talking about explosives you can only get from military occupation specialists, it means they’re dealing in very powerful, restricted material. What the bomb techs call ‘high explosives’—dynamite, plastics, TNT, ammonium nitrate — stuff that can shatter things and move things around, like rocks and trees, which is how they use it in the Army, clearing landing zones.” I have brought a cooler this time, and we sit at the same picnic table around back — just a couple of tourists eating tuna sandwiches.
“But those kinds of explosives don’t fit the signature.” “No.”
“The devices that blew up Laumann’s house and killed Steve weren’t military-grade.” “Correct. Now we’re thinking your friends at Toby’s were talking about a special order. For a special mission.” “I don’t like it.”
“Neither does headquarters. Toby is obviously the link. He’s the reloader who made the bullet that killed Sergeant Mackee. He’s the munitions expert getting ready for the Big One. We’ve installed a listening device at his house and put the other individuals under surveillance. Agents are visiting explosives manufacturers in the region, asking for cooperation in reporting anything gone missing.” “How do the bad guys get restricted matériel?”
“Steal it from the base and collect it over time.” I nod. “That sounds like Stone. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s been planning the Big One since he split the Bureau.” “I really wish you’d been wearing a wire when he handed you that jive. I’d give anything to hear his version of events.” “Here’s what I think: We drove him crazy.”
Donnato believes I’m joking and cracks another potato chip.
“We didn’t know our ass from our elbow, and the country was in a revolution. Dick Stone is a casualty of war.” “I’m glad you’re not wearing a wire.” “Is it treason to tell the truth?”
An immaculate RV has pulled up, and a portly gentleman wearing a bow tie has disembarked, along with two magnificently groomed Cardigan Welsh corgis, who hop down the ladder like a pair of princes. Show dogs, rehearsing their stuff. The trio trots ludicrously around our table, the dogs keeping stride with their master’s swaying gut.
As they pass, Donnato switches to upbeat gossip.
“Kyle Vernon’s son is moving back from Virginia.” My mood perks up, hearing of old buddies on the bank robbery squad.
“Didn’t his son just graduate from UVA?”
Donnato nods. “He’s moving to California. Looks like he sold a script to the movies about a black kid whose dad is a black FBI agent….” We sit for a while at the weathered picnic table under the shimmering boughs of pine, while the dogs rebelliously bark at squirrels, and Donnato does his job of bringing me out of the dream I’ve inhabited on the farm, back to my grounding in the Bureau family.
“Your friend Barbara Sullivan is pregnant again. They did the test. It’s another girl.” “That’s great. Will she quit?”
“It’s doubtful she’ll come back from maternity leave. You two ever talk?” I shake my head. This will be our final passing. Barbara Sullivan will retire just as I reenter the Bureau, and we will let each other go.
The RV pulls away. I get up from the table, but Mike Donnato stays where he is. He is looking at his fingers, which are peeling the bark off another twig. I notice there’s a pile of naked twigs on the ground between his feet.
“What’s the matter?”
“We have a situation, Ana.”
I sit back down.
“I had lunch with Rosalind.”
“Oh, really? Where’d you go?”
“Factor’s Deli.” He squints in the wash of sunlight. “Do you have to know what we ordered, too?” “I know what you ordered. A grilled chicken sandwich.” Donnato goes on, beleaguered. “Rosalind had good information. Dick Stone had a brother who died in Vietnam.” “I know. I’m a few steps ahead of you, bud.”
“What you don’t know is that Toby Himes and Peter Abbott served together in Vietnam. We were going to tell you.” No need to answer that.
“Rosalind said Dick Stone’s brother served on the same squad as Himes and Abbott. All three of them. Only two made it back.” “Does Peter Abbott know that Toby Himes is a person of interest to Operation Wildcat?” Donnato hedges. “He reads the reports young Jason Ripley sends out.” “Why didn’t Peter Abbott tell us about the link between himself and Himes and Dick Stone’s brother? Why’d we have to find it out from a secretary?” “Believe me, Galloway is asking the same questions.” Donnato finally reveals their suspicions. They put a trap on the deputy director’s phones and discovered Toby Himes has been calling Abbott on his private number. This is so explosive that neither of us moves. My partner remains seated at the table, elbows on knees, in profile. The sun glints off the top of his wavy hair and the short curve of his forehead.
“Stone’s a former agent; I know his game. But Abbott scares me. What’s he up to, and on what level?” “I promise we’ll find out. Let us face the task before us. I’m here to tell you that headquarters has authorized the hit on Herbert Laumann.” “How can I go through with it after what you’ve just said?” I lower my voice. “That the boss could be involved in a conspiracy?” “You’ll have full backup. I’ll be there, Ana. I’ll be running the show.” But deep uncertainty has hit me in the gut. Not just about them but about myself, too. My ability to pull the trigger. Already I am feeling queasy. I kick at a mound of sawdust at the base of a tree stump, chewed up by bugs. It takes a moment to refocus.
“Laumann. Okay.”
“You specified a Colt.45?”
“Stone’s gun, right.”
“Jason got this for you.”
Donnato fishes inside his pocket. A family with three little kids comes screaming toward the restrooms.
“How good a shot are you?” he asks, his voice clear despite their earsplitting shrieks. “Because the first bullet in the chamber will be live.” He holds out his hand. I hold out mine. Our palms touch in slow motion, and the magazine for a Colt.45 is transferred. I slip it smoothly into my pocket.
Jason provided a magazine filled with blanks. When Dick Stone gives me his gun, I will switch magazines. But the gun will have already been loaded, one live bullet already ejected into the chamber, requiring my first shot to be precisely accurate. When I approach Herbert Laumann — on whatever darkened street, or maybe in the middle of the day — I must hit him squarely in the bulletproof vest.
The parking lot in the rest area seems filled with smoking vehicles, each exuding a black cloud of burned brake lining. The noise of the engines is raw. The tuna fish was bad; it’s making me sick. The sun is hot; it’s making me weak. My mind unhooks and ruminates on the detective I shot. The world fragments and he is everywhere. My heart pounds. The magazine of blanks in my pocket is heavy as the weight of original sin. Donnato is throwing the garbage away. I’m back in the spinning car, bloody and gruesome, looking
at the detective’s unseeing eyes. The blind foal is nursing. Sirocco’s tail whips the flies and the pasture vibrates with bees. The cicadas are singing on the battlefield.
When young boys came home from the Civil War and lay at night in the safety of their featherbeds, their pulses would still race unaccountably. It was a condition doctors recognized, even way back then, as “soldier’s heart.” No bad judgment.
No mistakes.
No cowgirl stuff.
Thirty-four
On his last day on earth as BLM deputy state director, before a radical animal rights activist named Darcy DeGuzman murders him in front of his own house, Herbert Laumann is still fighting the fight — not just the massive traffic over Portland’s Broadway Bridge but also call after call through the headset as the droning voice of his assistant bombards his brain with end-of-day problems at the office. Idling on the bridge at rush hour, trucks and buses blocking the river view, he must be wondering if the FBI, an agency he believes in, is leading him into an even worse predicament.
Can he trust anyone? He must be insane. Yes, that’s fine. Walk up and shoot me, whatever fits your bill. But he has no right to question. He has failed to protect his family. He is a hollow man in the wrong skin — his son’s skin — that has become a searing penance, night and day. It was the promise of world-class medical treatment for Alex that sealed the deal with the all-too-understanding FBI men. But they still won’t say which burn center he will be admitted to, in which part of the country. Or what type of new job Laumann will be given.
They keep promising a painless death and peaceful afterlife.
Maybe secretly he wishes the bullets would be real.
We, the assassins, follow.
Dick Stone, down to fighting weight and back on his meds, is a force of nature, like those glacial rivers roaring down from Canada. I never saw until today how the fragments come together — the loyalty that made him an FBI agent, and the demonic intelligence that opens the soul’s unwilling gate to murder.
Stone has never been more lucid. Even his skin looks baby soft and shaven. His hair is clean and straight; the summer sun has made it more blond than gray. He is back to the agreeable persona of the lawyer of the people, a northwest professional in a denim shirt and tie, moving confidently through the city.
“Nervous?” he asks.
“Terrified.”
He makes me recite it again. We drive up. We wait. At 8:00 p.m., Laumann comes out of the house and walks down the driveway. He plays tennis at the club on Thursday nights. His court time is always 8:30. We put on the ski masks. I get out of the car. Stone keeps the engine running. I walk up to the target. I make my speech and empty the gun into his chest.
“Less than a minute,” Stone promises.
“I’m still nervous.”
“You can’t miss at point-blank range.”
And I’ve been practicing. Not just shooting Stone’s pistol up at the range but figuring out how to switch the magazines — the blanks that Jason provided, for the live ones in the gun — in two swift moves.
“I’ve been thinking about his wife and kids.”
“Don’t. Focus on the target. You’ve done it before, or so you say,” Stone comments.
“That was emotional. This is cold.”
“You’re paying the tax, as promised,” he says flatly. “The tax on Slammer’s foolishness.”
“Okay, and then?”
“After you do this, the tax will be repaid.”
“And the family will be okay?”
“Everyone in the family will be okay.”
I pop a mint. No bad tastes, no bad associations. I’m not going to be suckered into the past.
As we follow him across the bridge, through the prism of stacked-up car windows, I get a glimpse of the victim’s neck. Just like any other commuter’s neck.
“You have to put the good round into him. You have to shoot him squarely in the vest. The adrenaline will be pumping,” Donnato warned.
“I’ll be prepared.”
“Get close. Knock him flat. He knows what’s coming, although I didn’t go into detail about the first shot.”
“Right!” I laughed a high and desperate cackle that was sounding more and more like Stone’s. “Who in their right mind would agree to be a walking target?”
Donnato: “A man with a guilty conscience.”
Waiting makes the tension in my chest unbearable. We sit in the truck, watching the dashboard clock. Dick Stone is running his game, and we are running ours. There are agents in the in-laws’ house and in the house next door. Those females with the empty strollers are undercovers.
I study the Wilkins’ house, the tacky hacienda that we raided in the dark, marking the curve in the bushes where I’ll make the switch. I fix it in my mind. For reassurance, I think about Donnato calling the shots from the stakeout. Stone is calmly smoking a cigar. He’s been on stakeout, too.
At 8:06 p.m. Laumann appears at the front door. A light goes on above it, signaling all is ready. He is carrying a tennis racket and wearing white. This is going to make a big mess. Stone and I pull on our woolen masks. He hands me the Colt.45 and I unlock the car door.
With a thousand hidden eyes upon me, I have never felt so alone. I walk half a dozen steps and start up the driveway, everything still and glittering and clear. My heart is hammering — more than hammering: It’s closing off my mind. I pass the crucial point in front of the bushes. I turn to block Stone’s view and switch the magazines, slipping the live one into the pocket of my black cargo pants, while all the time my legs keep marching forward, and Laumann in his whites keeps coming toward me in the precise evening light, floating, as if he is already dead.
His eyes meet mine. Behind the glasses, there is nothing but terror. They had to shove him out the door. Both of us have been pushed together by our respective sides — the bride in black and the groom in white — to meet in middle of this surreal driveway, a doomed blood wedding.
“ANIMAL KILLER!”
My voice comes from some distant gravel pit. I raise the gun with both hands, plant my knees, sight, and fire.
The first shot throws him backward. He’s down. I run up close. The shot was good; he is unhurt, squinting his eyes and twitching and stuttering, “No, no, no, no!” as I stand over him and fire. Two, three, four, five. The squibs inside his clothes go off, red fountains against the white.
Dick Stone’s blood bomb is a wee-wee compared to this.
I am busting back toward the getaway car, but here comes Stone, running hard, passing me in the opposite direction.
“What the hell?”
“Get in!”
I continue toward the car. Stone is in the driveway. He’s going to finish him off! But on cue, there are screams and people running. Now Stone is back, the car door slams, and we’re gone.
I’m shouting, “What the hell? What was that?”
He coolly steers around the corner. “A good shooter never leaves his brass. You can only make that mistake once.”
Stone opens the fingers of his right hand to reveal the five bullet casings that were ejected from the pistol.
An ambulance driven by FBI agents has pulled up and loaded the blood-soaked deputy state director onto a gurney. At the same time, agents are storming the back door, getting the family out. There will be TV news stories, an obituary, and a funeral, but by then the Laumann family will be safely relocated in the witness protection program, where they will live undercover for the rest of their lives.
Everything goes like clockwork.
PART FOUR
Thirty-five
Four pug puppies will always cause a hullabaloo, even in West Hollywood. When Rooney Berwick takes his babies walking, some tourist will always shout, “How cute are they? I have a pug, too!” What are you supposed to say to that?
Across from the cobalt blue shell of the Pacific Design Center is a neighborhood park with a small open field that provides a clear patch of sky — not an easy spot t
o find in the heart of L.A. So if you saw a loner — late fifties, wearing a black T-shirt, pants with a lot of pockets, and thick-soled combat boots — camped out in the middle of the field, pouring water into a collapsible bowl for four panting pugs, that would be Rooney Berwick, getting ready for a call on the satellite phone to his old buddy Dick Stone.
Dead cases are kept in a room-size automated drum in the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard. For two days Mike Donnato moves files around a track, like the clothes at your dry cleaner’s, grabbing at whatever fragments might remain of a case in the seventies codenamed “Turquoise.” It was a failed operation, in which the Bureau targeted a series of armored car robberies thought to be linked to radical students at the University of Arizona who were allegedly part of the Weather Underground. Dick Stone was the rookie uc — short hair and creases in his jeans — who infiltrated the campus coffeehouse. Strangely, none of the radicals, who nicknamed him “the Fed,” wished to share their plans for the revolution.
The Bureau went high-tech, bringing in another young buck from Los Angeles, a whiz-kid technician named Rooney Berwick (the photo ID shows him thin-faced and detached, a hundred pounds lighter), who installed listening devices on the armored cars. Three weeks later, arrests were made of two drivers with unchecked criminal records, who had conspired to stage “robberies” with the local bad guys.
The Weather Underground had nothing to do with it.
Intrigued, Donnato runs the full sweep on Rooney: personnel reports, bank accounts, phone records, traffic tickets, pharmacy prescriptions. A picture emerges of a highly intelligent, socially isolated individual, who lives with his mother in the same Hollywood apartment complex in which he grew up, apparently addicted to painkillers, which he has been getting from five different doctors.
Donnato looks at Rooney’s recent cases. His latest assignment was to turn sand into gold. (If I could do that, I wouldn’t be in this rat hole, I can hear Rooney say.) The target was a ring of thieves in Brazil, with ties to U.S. organized crime, that was selling counterfeit nuggets. The Bureau’s undercovers would pose as manufacturers of counterfeit gold. Rooney’s mandate was to make fake nuggets as good as the thieves’.
