Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [112]
Rooney Berwick had returned to the landmark drive-in dairy and purchased two blocks of dry ice (frozen CO2), commonly used to handle milk products. As a tech, he knew carbon dioxide vapor would drift toward the ground, and therefore he placed the blocks of dry ice inside the tub. Then he got high, laid back, and watched the clock as the blocks smoked and shrank, disappearing into an invisible toxic gas.
Eventually, deprived of oxygen, his heart would stop. The props he used from the Ambrose Dairy to effect his death expressed, with subconscious elegance, the attachment and rage he felt for his mother. At the last, he might have been quite comfortable lying down with his dogs, entombed by loneliness that had finally become a rock-hard cocoon.
But the genius part of Rooney’s suicide was not the methodology. The genius part was to be found on the computer, left in screen-saver mode on Mrs. Berwick’s Formica and chrome dining table, no doubt where little Rooney used to eat his mom’s kielbasa and cabbage.
Staring at the deputies is the FAN home page with a brand-new link—“In Memoriam—Ruby Berwick, Beloved Mother, and Rooney Berwick, Son”—which takes the visitor to pages and pages of classified documents on Operation Wildcat, stolen by the deceased and put on the Internet for all the world to see.
Even more brilliant was to post the ID picture Rooney took that day at the off-site: “Darcy DeGuzman, aka FBI Special Agent Ana Grey.”
He burned the Bureau but good.
Galloway’s response was unhesitating: “Get Ana out now.”
Thirty-eight
In Quantico, Virginia, the hostage rescue team is put on standby. Out at Andrews Air Force Base, a CF-5 is loaded up with helicopters and light armored vehicles to be on scene within twelve hours.
Local FBI SWAT teams from Salt Lake, Seattle, and Los Angeles are called up as a west regional asset. Donnato, Galloway, and Angelo are on a commercial flight, and Peter Abbott on a jet from D.C. to Portland, where, in the Operation Wildcat command center, agents monitoring Dick Stone’s surveillance system are carefully watching the movements of those in the house, waiting to see if Special Agent Ana Grey has holed up in the sewing room—the Room of Unfinished Dreams—signaling an emergency.
Within hours, warrants for the search and seizure of unregistered automatic weapons have been signed by a local magistrate, giving probable cause to investigate Dick Stone, living at Willamette Hazelnut Farm under the false identity of Julius Emerson Phelps, for firearms violations.
If you are serving a warrant for guns, you want to isolate the suspects from the location and their access to those guns. At the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, the ATF did not intercept the key players while they were away from the compound, which led to catastrophe. The Bureau would not want to repeat that mistake; on the other hand, in hours of watching the surveillance cameras, it becomes clear not only that nobody is about to leave the farm for a trip to Wal-Mart but that two other hulking players have arrived—Mr. Terminate and Mountain Man—which indicates that while Stone is preparing for his Big One, the Bureau had best get ready for its.
Under cover of darkness, a perimeter is established around the farm. Snipers are out there gathering intel, reporting on movement, describing the buildings and their entry and exit points. Beyond the perimeter, in vans equipped with monitors that show the same surveillance images as at the command center, SWAT team leaders huddle over drawings of the interior Ana Grey had made for Donnato, revising the scenario for a controlled dynamic entry—contingency planning that had been in place since the very day she walked in and activated when it became clear that she had disappeared somewhere between the psychiatrist