Judas Horse Read online

  And nobody knows?

  “In the crater we found pieces of the box that held the components. The lab has identified the explosive…. There were traces in the clothes.”

  “Clothes?”

  Galloway makes a sign with thumb and forefinger: this big.

  I am without words. My sight falls, unseeing, on Galloway’s collection of New York City police department souvenirs. Only he could get away with the alleged scalp of a drug dealer, and the Empire State Building wearing a brassiere.

  “The debris field was extensive, but we did okay. Parts of a battery, parts of a cell phone detonator. Alligator clips, a leg wire, toggle switch. Steve must have walked right into it.”

  I may appear rational, but the world is falling away from under my feet, like being lifted straight up in a helicopter.

  “I know he was a friend of yours,” says Galloway.

  I murmur something about Steve having been a great guy.

  “Steve Crawford should have had this chair. He would have, one day.” He kicks the chair away and unlocks a credenza.

  “So what do we think?” I begin in a professional manner. “He was hiking alone in the woods when he encountered a booby trap, some psychopathic piece of shit—”

  “We think it’s domestic terrorism.”

  Galloway drops four heavy documents on the desk. The impact rattles the bones in my neck. They are three inches thick, government-printed, with red covers—the result of a years-long investigation of a well-known radical group called FAN.

  Galloway closes the door. The silence throbs in my ears.

  “Steve was working undercover,” Galloway says.

  Like everyone else, I believed Steve was on vacation. That’s the way it is with undercover work.

  “This is classified. How Steve died”—he waves a hand, erasing everything he has just told me—“we still don’t know. And we’ll never know.”

  “Understood.”

  “He was working a FAN cell. The explosive that killed him is a water-based gel called Tovex—the same type of explosive used in the O’Conner Pharmaceuticals bombings two years ago.”

  FAN is an invisible group of anarchists that operates behind the façade of Free Animals Now—bland enough to attract the liberals and provide a front for the hard-core element. Interchangeable in tactics with ecoterrorists like ALF and ELF, the level of violence in their attacks is on the rise. They used to glue locks and liberate research animals; now it’s firebombing. There are dozens of unsolved cases in the Northwest attributed to FAN—which some investigators argue does not exist at all, but is a cover for a mixed bag of disenfranchised extremists.

  “FAN is on the short list for Steve Crawford’s murder,” Galloway says. “We’re going back in. It took some arm twisting, but headquarters finally approved. You fit the profile to take Steve’s place.”

  “Why?”

  “Right age. Right background.”

  “Because I’m mixed race?”

  Galloway seems surprised that I would bring that up.

  “I know you’re half Latina, but the way you present is ethnically ambiguous. You could be white, or something more exotic.”

  “And that’s supposedly good?”

  “Might be an asset.”

  I have always found my heritage a puzzle. I was raised in whiteness by my grandfather “Poppy” Everett Morgan Grey a relentless racist, who tried to bury the El Salvadoran side of me. He did such a thorough job of biasing me against my own tradition that whenever I manage to dig it out, I find something tarnished by his scorn.

  “Actually,” says Galloway, “I was talking about your skills as a profiler and background in crisis negotiation. It’s a deep-cover operation, six months to a year. Interested?”

  Shocked. It is like going up in a helicopter and being handed the controls.

  I say, “Yes.”

  There is a pause.

  “Anything that would keep you in Los Angeles?” he asks.

  “Nothing but regret.” I smile poorly.

  Galloway holds my gaze. “How are you around the incident?”

  He means the shooting incident.

  “It doesn’t get easier.”

  It is coming on again, the sour tightening of the throat.

  He is watching me.

  “I’ve been approved for duty. Or I wouldn’t be here. But you know that.”

  “Undercover is different. It’s about developing relationships and then betraying them.”

  “Which makes me perfect for the job?”

  “I know it’s been hard, but the way you’ve come back from the incident makes me think you have the personality type that would be resilient to the stress of working undercover.”

  “What’s the real reason?” I joke. “You want me out of L.A.?”

  “On a personal level, I think it would be very good for you to get out of L.A.”

  Supervisors don’t often admit to thinking about you on a personal level, or having your best interests at heart. I blush with gratitude.

  “The director has formed a multiagency task force that will function here and in Portland, Oregon.” Galloway nods sagely. “A major undertaking. We’re calling it ‘Operation Wildcat.’ What do you think?”

  “It sells.”

  “All you have to do is go through undercover school at the Academy and get certified.”

  All I have to do is swim to Alcatraz and back.

  “It’s the toughest training in the Bureau, am I right?”

  “Brutal.” Galloway smiles. “Two weeks, twenty-four/seven, designed to stress you out emotionally and physically and put you in intensive role-play operations to simulate realism. Remember the ‘agony tree’?”

  The agony tree is a big old pine at the start of the running course at the Academy. Over the years, folks have covered it with signs like SUCK IT IN; HURT; LOVE IT; PAIN; 110%.

  “In undercover school maybe one in five makes the cut,” he informs me. “The rest are still hanging from the tree.”

  Galloway opens the door and the world of the FBI comes back—the talk, the hustle of important work, sunshine falling across the bright maroon-and-navy furniture that has recently sprung up around the office.

  “Thank you for this,” I tell him.

  “Don’t thank me. There are grander themes to respond to.”

  I grin, amused by Galloway’s quirky philosophizing. “What are the grander themes?”

  “I want the idiots who killed Steve Crawford to cry on the stand,” my boss says softly. “I want them to roll on the floor like pill bugs.”

  I stop grinning. “What if I don’t pass undercover school?”

  “It won’t affect your job, or the operation. Someone else will qualify. And you’ll come back and go on being Ana.”

  He pats my arm reassuringly, as if that would be perfectly okay.

  Three

  The road to undercover school cuts a straight line through a hundred square miles of dense Virginia forest. The raw-faced young Marines who stand in the rain, M16s over their shoulders, have zero tolerance for speeding, so I keep the rental car to thirty-five miles per hour—although my heartbeat is racing with the same giddy excitement as the first time I made this drive, when I arrived for training as a new agent, twelve years before.

  This is everything I’ve ever wanted! That’s how I was thinking way back then, until the road went on and on at the same monotonous crawl, and a deep apprehension grew. What am I doing? Why did I leave home? The force of life is greedy here. Oak and hickory crowd the macadam, and the tall, wet grass is heavy with ticks. Drawing closer to the FBI Academy at the heart of the base, you come to the uneasy realization there is nothing else around you—no houses, no gas stations, no options—just deep fields with rifle targets and Quonset huts set far away in the smoky mist. It seems as if you are in danger of being swallowed up by your own dream.

  I met Steve Crawford on the same driver-training course I am now passing, where they taught us how to sto
p a felon. We drove safety cars with popped-out wheels. All the guys love this part, but Steve was an ace. In the Board Room cafeteria, a bunch of us rookies sat around drinking beer, and Steve said if he did become an FBI agent, he’d have to sell his 1978 Mustang GT. Not likely he’d be drag racing anymore. He’d just painted it a “raspberry and gold dust color,” which sounded kind of luscious. This was before I had bought my ’71 Barracuda, but I piped up about loving muscle cars. He told how he’d hang out in a parking lot in San Bernardino, listening to the old guys talk hot rods; how he’d raced the Bonneville salt flats. By midnight, we were back at the driver-training course, testing out the fast track.

  We were two Southern California kids crazy for cars and baseball, high every day on the adrenaline of being at the Academy, working our butts off, entwined in a heroic vision of serving a better world. Made for each other, it seemed.

  A sudden coldness hits the rental car and I put on the heat. As I pass the final Marine checkpoint, a thunderstorm that has been on my tail since the D.C. airport breaks with almost comic intensity. Rain plays on the windshield like a cuckoo Caribbean band of tin pots and garbage cans. Cold fog curls up close and puts its lips on the window glass. When lightning forks across the lurid purple sky, again and again, I laugh out loud, for the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover must surely be upon me.

  The old man has been dead for decades, but down in Quantico it’s still “Get off Hoover’s grass,” as if he owns our souls in perpetuity. All that stuff about him running around in a woman’s red dress and heels, that’s nonsense, although Hoover did make a fetish out of “cleanliness”—of body and mind, supposedly—fashioned after his own psychosexual obsessions. What a way to run a company.

  Hoover liked white shirts, but he did not like homosexuals (although he almost certainly was one). Secretaries could make the coffee, but it was indecorous to be seen carrying a naked coffee cup across the office, so they would place the steaming mugs inside those wooden boxes made for index cards, pretending it was not coffee they were delivering to their white-shirted, not-gay bosses.

  Laugh about it now (we don’t), but how far is a mad secret coffee ritual from compliance in a cover-up of dirty tricks? Or a bollixed siege? Hoover’s drive to avoid any sort of personal or bureaucratic shame created a culture of repression and fear that haunts us still. As I pull into the austere brick complex stained dark by the rain, I hear the grim, omniscient voice of the director, years ago embedded in my head: “Never embarrass the Bureau.”

  The groundhog! I just remembered! He used to live in a grass quadrangle outside the administration building. Steve and I would set out crackers while pretending to study and he’d taunt me about shooting it on sight, detailing the effect of different-caliber bullets. It was considered good luck if you happened to spot the little guy from one of the glass passageways that connect the towers. We called them “gerbil cages,” scurrying to our classes through the glass tunnels like scores of frantic mice. For fourteen weeks, we lived inside a sealed environment with no fresh air and people always getting sick. That is why we went gaga over the groundhog: He was our brother, and he was free.

  Now as I enter the lobby, water tracking from my soaking shoes, something clicks inside my chest, as if Steve is saying, as he always said, You’ll be great, and I have answered, This is for you, buddy.

  The rooms in the dorm are spartan and smaller than I remember—still no recreation areas, one TV to a floor. An hour after checking in, I am back in training uniform—stiff cargo pants, boots, short-sleeved polo shirt with the FBI seal, and a thick belt made of saddle leather better suited for a horse—falling in with identically dressed crowds of muscular men and women powering through the gerbil cages like rush hour in the Tokyo subway.

  All sizes and ethnicities, we are the law-enforcement elite—plucked from the Bureau or police departments around the world for advanced courses like undercover school, wearing the same rictus smiles and carrying backpacks like aging college students, snobbishly throwing them in piles on the floor. There is plenty of eye contact, at once smug and scared. We have been invited to the rush—but will we make the fraternity?

  When they cut you, they do it fast, anytime, anyplace, even the last night of training. By dinnertime, everyone has heard about the “adios speech,” in which a counselor dressed in black takes you aside and basically says, “Thanks for coming and trying out. Just because you didn’t make it doesn’t mean you’re not still an agent, and being an agent is the greatest thing in the world. Have a good trip home.”

  Have a good time in the trash heap of failure the rest of your life.

  Just go on being Ana.

  My roommate’s name is Gail Washburn. We are in a class of seventeen. She is maybe thirty-five, from the Chicago field office, African-American, with sly, narrow eyes like an egret and short hair twisted and pinned into two tiny pigtails. I discover her unpacking a bag of mini doughnuts, and like her immediately. She is an upbeat lady, married to another agent, funny about “my black ass,” which could mean her deepest sense of self or athletic rump; teases me about being a “venti cappuccino ass” when I say I am half Salvadoran—“with whole milk, baby”—referring to my pure white skin. It is a promising friendship, but way too brief, as I will end up knowing Gail Washburn less than twelve hours.

  By 9:00 p.m. on the same day as my arrival from Los Angeles, we are deeply into a “7-Eleven scenario” in Hogan’s Alley, a phony Main Street, like a movie set, with false storefronts, apartment buildings, a bank and café. We are to assume an undercover identity, enter the convenience store, and purchase a loaf of bread. That’s it. We are armed with paint-ball guns and wear protective gear. We do not know that the counselors, playing customers and clerks, will turn the scene into a violent hostage situation when the owner of the store is held at gunpoint by a shopper.

  One by one, we enter the store and play it out. Some of us are shot by the bad guy, some—oops!—kill the victim, some blow their cover and yell, “Freeze! FBI!” but most take correct action, which is to do nothing and be a good witness. We are not told the results, just shunted out the back and warned that we have thirty minutes to file a report.

  Gail has already gone through the test when I dash back to our room and find her staring at the computer in bewilderment.

  “The system went down.”

  I pound the keys. The screen is frozen with green hieroglyphics. Gail hands me the bag of doughnuts and we share a moment of sugary dread.

  “I’ll bet this is part of their damn game,” she whispers.

  “They shut the system down on purpose? Even for the Bureau, that’s perverse.”

  “Real life, girl. What do you do in a hostage situation when Rapid Start crashes?”

  “Sister, I don’t know what’s real.” I am starting to feel flushed and panicky. “But we have fifteen minutes to get our shit over there.”

  We start scribbling by hand in spiral notebooks and ripping out the pages. Pounding at the door! We both jump. It is spooky all right: Standing in the hallway is a training counselor wearing black—even a black hood—with a knife at the belt. He has a trimmed white beard and compact wrestler’s body, and is not smiling. He looks like the Agent of Death.

  “Agent Washburn?” he says. “Talk to me.”

  Gail and I look at each other. Is this some code? Another scenario entirely? She thrusts her report at me.

  “Take it!” she says. “Run like the wind.”

  I run my cappuccino ass back to the command post—over a road and up a hill—in under four minutes. I am not the only one jack-rabbiting it with a flashlight. Damn if Gail wasn’t right. They’d shut the damn computers down.

  I deliver the reports and burst back into our room, sweating and exhilarated, to find her sitting on the bed, sobbing.

  “I’m going home,” she gasps. “They cut me.”

  “Why?”

  “He wouldn’t say. I don’t understand. I have never failed anything in my life! Oh sweet Lord, my
husband’s not gonna believe this.”

  Even as a kid, Gail was always a standout—basketball, track, National Merit scholar. A poster girl for the FBI, she’s already been promoted to supervisor. Why wouldn’t they say how she messed up? Are we back to Hoover-era punishment?

  “They’re wrong,” I say helplessly.

  Fifteen minutes later, she is packed up and gone.

  Next morning, 7:00 a.m. Sixteen of us now. We take our assigned seats in a lecture hall that smells like a chemistry class. Coffee is still steaming from paper cups and people are talking in shocked whispers about what happened to Gail, when Ring Diestal, LL.D., Ph.D., a broad-shouldered hulk in a tweed coat and tie, with luxurious gray hair and eyebrows thick as scrubbing brushes, mounts the podium and starts sprinting through the attorney general’s guidelines for FBI undercover work.

  Backpacks unzip and notebooks open in a flurry. Three pages of text have flashed across the screen and there is no going back. Dr. Diestal is going at breakneck speed through the situations in which an undercover agent is justified to participate in illegal activity, like smoking weed and buying guns—important stuff on how not to get your case thrown out in court—but I am so burned-out from jet lag and freaked by the way my roommate vanished in the night, I can only stare in a haze at the empty chair that still bears the name Gail Washburn.

  They keep it empty, and keep her name tag on it.

  Remembering her wounded indignation—“I have never failed anything in my life!”—I am still fighting a sense of outrage that blocks my mind like the condensation on the windows as a cold fog settles over the campus.

  “Nothing in the guidelines stops you from taking reasonable measures in self-defense,” Dr. Diestal explains. “But there is a tipping point. How quickly does self-preservation kick in? How smoothly can you shift your sense of what’s right in order to do what is required to complete the mission?”