“Watch out for that Indian ghost,” he hisses. “If he comes charging out of here, I’m gone.” “Don’t make me laugh!”
“This is serious stuff. Indian lore. Buried treasure.” “Just lift.”
“You know the old Indian chant—”
I scream like a madwoman. “Close it! Close it quick!” Inside the culvert, four feet down, is a nest of rattlesnakes.
“Just stand still.”
“Oh my God, Sterling—”
“Don’t move. They’re cold. They’re resting. This is not their time of day.” Resting? The slow, slithering mass is pit-of-the-stomach hell. McCord keeps his flashlight on the entwined bodies — big ones, inches thick, with long rattles and darting wedgelike heads.
“These guys are old,” McCord observes, “and full of venom. If one of these daddies bit that little horse, it’s amazing that he lived.” “They’re waking up—”
Their eyes glint. The rattling, faint at first, is quickly becoming deafening, like medicine men hallucinating wild dreams.
“Put the cover on,” I plead.
McCord whistles and bends closer. I grab his belt, terrified he’s going to fall in.
“Look at this!”
I cannot look any longer at the glistening knot of reptiles.
“What is it? Is it the turquoise?”
“I don’t see no turquoise,” McCord drawls, “but there’s a hell of a lot of guns.” Now I do look, and carefully. The rattlesnakes are crawling over a pile of semi-automatic weapons and boxes of grenades.
McCord ticks them off: “You got your Heckler & Koch MP5s, a Berreta Model 12, a couple of Ingrams, and your basic Makarov handguns, extremely popular in the Arab world. It’s a global terrorist barn dance down there.” And a.50-caliber McMillan M87, heavy sniping rifle, made in the USA.
“All this stuff is worth money.”
McCord shoots me a look too quick to read in the dark. “Seen enough?” “Wait!”
Scattered across the cache of firearms, like offerings in a tomb, are the skeletons of tiny animals.
“What are those?”
“Looks like rabbit bones,” says McCord.
“The baby rabbits,” I whisper. “Stolen from the farm. Do you think someone’s been feeding them to the snakes?” “They sure didn’t hippity-hop down there on their own,” says McCord.
We drag the lid over the seething pit.
Thirty
Some very unlucky FBI agents (I hope it was the dopey duo from Portland who brought the ducks) dig through the rattlesnakes guarding the cache and replace the.50-caliber M87 sniper rifle with an identical model, sealing everything back the way it was. Forensics determines the gun found in the pit is, in fact, the same one that fired the round that killed Sergeant Mackee. Dick Stone’s fingerprints are all over it.
As a result, a horrendous argument breaks out in the conference room in Los Angeles.
“We have the cop killer,” Galloway says right away. “Case closed.” “Dick Stone is more than a killer.” Angelo has loosened the Rolex and is spinning it around his wrist. “He’s an anarchist who hates the FBI.” Donnato: “That’s why we bust him and get Ana out.”
“What are we in there for?” Angelo yells.
“What is the mission? Remind us.”
“Stone giving up his contacts.”
“He’ll talk when he’s in prison.”
“A former FBI guy? How does that work?”
“He gets protective custody.”
“Peter Abbott wants the big picture,” Angelo says impatiently.
“Peter Abbott sits at a desk in Washington while Ana Grey is at risk. He’s exactly the guy we should be worried about.” Donnato is incredulous. “Whose side are you on?” “You’re asking me that? You are really asking me that? Think twice about walking to your car alone, buddy.” Donnato: “Is that a threat?”
“I see we are taking our testosterone pills this morning,” says Galloway by way of warning.
They back off, but only to regroup.
“Anybody remember a case in the seventies called Turquoise? Ana flagged it from a conversation with Rosalind, who subsequently provided me with confirmation and pulled the abstract. We connected the Weathermen to a string of armored car robberies taking place in Arizona. Dick Stone went in as the undercover. Ana says there’s talk of some kind of buried turquoise up in Oregon. She’s wondering if there’s a connection with Stone and the old Turquoise case.” “In reality?” Angelo says. “Or in his head?”
Galloway: “Pull up the complete files and court transcripts.” He mouths the dead cigar. “Let’s review. Angelo’s feeling is that whatever is taking place in the here and now, Dick Stone isn’t pulling this off alone. The cache of weapons indicates international connections. He’s up there on the food chain but answering to a higher power.” “The higher power is someone in the Bureau,” Donnato says, barely keeping a lid on it. “Given the Toby Himes revelation, we’d better look closely at who’s in charge and why.” They don’t tell me until later, but as a result of running his license plate at the midsummer festival, Toby Himes has become a “person of interest” to Operation Wildcat. More, the star quarterback. He lives in Stevenson, a tiny river town on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, where he is employed as the town engineer. If he had come from there the night of the midsummer festival, it would have been almost a three-hour drive to see Mr. Terminate at Dick Stone’s farm. The black man and the biker didn’t meet to discuss hazelnuts.
Even more compelling: Toby Himes, the recipient of a Purple Heart, served in Vietnam in the same unit as Peter Abbott. Himes’s specialty was ordnance. Like Stone, he was trained to blow things up. A trap placed on Toby’s phone shows calls made to Peter Abbott’s private number.
Three names on the table and they all connect: Dick Stone, domestic terrorist, former FBI; Toby Himes, former military with training in explosives; Peter Abbott, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the fast track to a political career.
The Abbott link is way too hot for an SAC in a field office to handle alone. But Galloway knows if he is going to follow this trail, it will have to be solo. And extremely treacherous. His equanimity in that meeting is a facade.
“What about our request for the hit on Herbert Laumann?” “Not a word.”
“We knew it would take weeks,” Angelo grumbles. “Some low guy at headquarters has to write a document and get it to the attorney general, then back to the director, and back on down. What’s your problem, Mike?” Donnato: “At this point, we have to ask: Do you trust the chain of command? Why does Toby Himes, a known associate of terrorists, have the private number of the number-two man in the FBI?” Galloway tries again.
“Let’s stay on track. One scenario is for Ana to hang in there until Stone shows his cards — who he’s
