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“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