April Smith - Judas Horse

“You’re a good person. You know how I know? Because you didn’t kill Herbert Laumann when you had the chance. There is good in you, Slammer. It shines. You’ve had a real hard time of it. People haven’t let you be good. But I know you are. I wouldn’t be risking my life if I didn’t think your life was very important. More important than the fish. Come on, dude.” “Stay back,” he says.

“No. I’m coming to help you.” I take a step closer.

“Why should I believe you ever again? You think I’m that incredibly stupid?” I stop just short of tackling distance. Slammer’s eyes are glassy and big, and he’s chewing indecisively on those childlike lips. We face each other in a standoff as the human crowd recedes like a tide, leaving the windswept concrete walkways quiet except for the peeping song of the ospreys patrolling low over the water.

“I trust that you’re not going to do this, Slammer, because you’re smart enough to know you’ve been set up by Allfather. He’s the one who was lying to you.” “It’s another test,” he decides. “Of fire and ice.”

And then he jerks the cord.

In one stupefying moment, I grope for a lifetime of reconciliations. A series of pop-pop-pop explosions blows me backward and knocks Slammer to his knees as red dye fumes and spurts in all directions. While it continues to spray like a fireworks sparkler gone wild, he wrestles the backpack off and throws the whole thing into the fish ladders, and the water turns blood red.

Just like Stone’s test run.

And that’s the extent of it.

Slammer can’t stop laughing for joy, even as a pile of agents brings him down.

“I believe in Allfather!” He keeps on snickering. “I belieeeeve, oh yesss!” Stunned, the bruised shoulder searing with pain, I wipe at the splattered dye on my face. The wind off the river is icy. The helicopters keep circling. Radios crackle, and SWAT reinforcements overwhelm the top level.

My hair is whipping across my eyes. From the catwalk is a panoramic view of the river. Below, fish continue to flop over the weirs, the big clock of nature ticking placidly along, but now I am listening to a different buzz in a higher key. All the craft on the water have been diverted, except for one that has torpedoed through: a small powerboat heading in a perfectly straight line toward the dam.

I grab a pair of binoculars from one of the SWAT guys.

It is the boat I saw at Toby Himes’s. The wheel is tied down. Otherwise, the boat is empty.

Except for large plastic barrels that contain military-grade explosives.

Mountain Man must have sent it on the final voyage. Slammer and the red dye were a diversion. The real attack bears down on us now on an automated suicide mission at eighty miles an hour, loaded with enough high explosives to blow a crater in this concrete monolith, where hundreds of agents, police, and tourists have massed — powerful enough to cause the river to overflow its banks, flood towns, destroy farmland, shut down the Northwest power grid. It is what terrorism experts call “a secondary explosion,” the dual purpose being to inflict the greatest human casualties on responding personnel.

“INCOMING!” I scream. “THE BOAT IS ARMED.”

Orders are relayed and everything starts moving backward. Ambulances screech off the road. Police units back out of the parking lot. Fire trucks and panicked tourists push toward the woods. Only the military helicopters swing forward in unison, flying low over the water, gunners leaning out the doors, firing.50-caliber automatic weapons at the boat, intercepting its kamikaze mission a scant two hundred yards before the target. The choppers jam it, up and away, as an orange ball of fire explodes out of the water. The boom echoes off the riverbanks, and every living creature along the Columbia River Gorge quakes.

The catwalk shakes under the confident steps of Peter Abbott. The SWAT gear he wears looks more like a costume now, his bearing that of a civilian, with a civilian’s priorities of personal gain and comfort, not justice; no longer one of us. Tall and balding, glasses blank as coins, he fairly bounces with authority.

“Give me the data.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Toby Himes reported that he saw Dick Stone hand it to you.”

“Good old Toby.”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

“What happened at the farm?”

“It’s gone,” says Abbott impatiently. “Everything burned to the ground.” “The barn and the orchard?”

“Orders were to destroy everything.”

“They were your orders. You assassinated an unarmed woman.”

“She was not the primary target. But she was a terrorist.”

“And you burned the trees. Why did you burn the trees?”

“Calm down. You are not in control of yourself.”

“Did you kill the little horse, too? Did you mow him down, just for the hell of it?” “Give me the data, and let’s go inside.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the device that Stone gave you.”

“Why? What did Dick Stone have that brings you here, way out on a limb? We know he had an inside source. So? Ah well, you’re right. You never could tell what was real with him anyway. But what about you, sir? Which side are you on? Was Toby Himes relaying information on criminal activity in the Northwest…or was he your lackey to get to Stone?” “Toby Himes is a loyal patriot,” Abbott replies swiftly. “And you are done, Agent Grey. Your picture was posted on the Internet by Stone’s accomplice.” He describes Rooney Berwick’s personal Big One. The suicide. The photo ID of Darcy DeGuzman. “Your identity has been exposed. Your career as an agent is over. Let’s go out like a hero.” We are standing alone on the narrow walkway that spans the fish ladders. Water rushes in shallow channels under our feet. What are my options? The rampant power of the river is far beyond the concrete decks and barbed-wire gates.

“If I give you the data, what are you going to do for me?”

Abbott rubs his nose disdainfully.

“You’ve been down in the muck too long. This is not a negotiation.”

“Everything is negotiable.”

“You can walk off this ramp whole.”

“No censure? You won’t make me look bad?”

He shifts on his feet. What a girlie question. “No censure.”

“All right, fine.”

I show him the device in my hand. “Here’s the data,” I say, and rocket the thing in a fine sparkling arc, high over the fences and deep into the wild green-white current of the river, where it is sucked into the giant turbines.

Abbott laughs and a stray wisp of setting sun lights his face.

“You look relieved,” I say.

“Oh, I am. And you are under arrest.”

Inside the control room of the dam, long, curving banks of computers trigger the gates of the navigation locks and release the spillways. You can sense the rumble and hear the huge weight of water as it spumes out of the downstream side. The techs have been evacuated except for one nervous shirtsleeved supervisor behind the main desk. Two baby sheriff’s detectives allegedly guarding the rogue FBI agent are perched at workstations, nosing through other people’s personal stuff. The cold air smacks of the bloody ice of a fish market. We’ve been contained here for hours.

SAC Robert Galloway nearly blows the door off its hinges as he bursts inside, ordering everyone else out.

“What the hell are you thinking?”

I cradle my left arm in its sling. “I could ask the same of you.”

“You flat-out defy the deputy director.”

“He set me up and you know it.”

Galloway staggers slightly backward, as if stunned by the accusation. “You better slow down.” “Abbott had me pegged from the beginning. He had read my file before that first meeting in L.A. He knew I had been diagnosed with PTSD, but he overrode the doctor’s recommendation, because he wanted me on this case.” Agitated, my boss sits on the edge of a rolling chair. “You tend to think a lot of yourself, Ana, but many agents could have done this job.” “I happened to suit his needs. Abbott had a personal interest in reining in Dick Stone, going back to when his family was involved in building the powerhouse for the Bonneville Dam. The one we’re sitting in right now. Remember that photo of Megan wrapped in the American flag? This is the project she tried to kill. Abbott put an end to that by adding her to the ‘dirty hippies’ list. Dick Stone imploded and they went underground.” “And what about you?”