Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [127]
“She was not the primary target. But she was a terrorist.”
“And you burned the trees. Why did you burn the trees?”
“Calm down. You are not in control of yourself.”
“Did you kill the little horse, too? Did you mow him down, just for the hell of it?”
“Give me the data, and let’s go inside.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about the device that Stone gave you.”
“Why? What did Dick Stone have that brings you here, way out on a limb? We know he had an inside source. So? Ah well, you’re right. You never could tell what was real with him anyway. But what about you, sir? Which side are you on? Was Toby Himes relaying information on criminal activity in the Northwest…or was he your lackey to get to Stone?”
“Toby Himes is a loyal patriot,” Abbott replies swiftly. “And you are done, Agent Grey. Your picture was posted on the Internet by Stone’s accomplice.” He describes Rooney Berwick’s personal Big One. The suicide. The photo ID of Darcy DeGuzman. “Your identity has been exposed. Your career as an agent is over. Let’s go out like a hero.”
We are standing alone on the narrow walkway that spans the fish ladders. Water rushes in shallow channels under our feet. What are my options? The rampant power of the river is far beyond the concrete decks and barbed-wire gates.
“If I give you the data, what are you going to do for me?”
Abbott rubs his nose disdainfully.
“You’ve been down in the muck too long. This is not a negotiation.”
“Everything is negotiable.”
“You can walk off this ramp whole.”
“No censure? You won’t make me look bad?”
He shifts on his feet. What a girlie question. “No censure.”
“All right, fine.”
I show him the device in my hand. “Here’s the data,” I say, and rocket the thing in a fine sparkling arc, high over the fences and deep into the wild green-white current of the river, where it is sucked into the giant turbines.
Abbott laughs and a stray wisp of setting sun lights his face.
“You look relieved,” I say.
“Oh, I am. And you are under arrest.”
Inside the control room of the dam, long, curving banks of computers trigger the gates of the navigation locks and release the spillways. You can sense the rumble and hear the huge weight of water as it spumes out of the downstream side. The techs have been evacuated except for one nervous shirtsleeved supervisor behind the main desk. Two baby sheriff’s detectives allegedly guarding the rogue FBI agent are perched at workstations, nosing through other people’s personal stuff. The cold air smacks of the bloody ice of a fish market. We’ve been contained here for hours.
SAC Robert Galloway nearly blows the door off its hinges as he bursts inside, ordering everyone else out.
“What the hell are you thinking?”
I cradle my left arm in its sling. “I could ask the same of you.”
“You flat-out defy the deputy director.”
“He set me up and you know it.”
Galloway staggers slightly backward, as if stunned by the accusation. “You better slow down.”
“Abbott had me pegged from the beginning. He had read my file before that first meeting in L.A. He knew I had been diagnosed with PTSD, but he overrode the doctor’s recommendation, because he wanted me on this case.”
Agitated, my boss sits on the edge of a rolling chair. “You tend to think a lot of yourself, Ana, but many agents could have done this job.”
“I happened to suit his needs. Abbott had a personal interest in reining in Dick Stone, going back to when his family was involved in building the powerhouse for the Bonneville Dam. The one we’re sitting in right now. Remember that photo of Megan wrapped in the American flag? This is the project she tried to kill. Abbott put an end to that by adding her to the ‘dirty hippies’ list. Dick Stone imploded and they went underground.”
“And what about you?”
“I’m getting to me. Stone took thirty years to implement the Big One, his ultimate revenge on Peter Abbott and the federal government that abandoned him. If anything makes him a terrorist, that’s it: the patient planning, the fixed beliefs. He used his