Judas Horse

“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?”