Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [15]
The Rooneys of this world are shy. They never have a date for the movies; they work the concession stand. They are collectors. They store data banks in their heads. Ask them what year Samuel Colt patented the revolver. They shop for groceries at two o’clock in the morning, are semi-intimate with a couple of oddball associates, live in a garage apartment across from Mother, who still makes dinner for them every night. They are fifty-eight years old and their pants don’t fit, and they haunt comic-book conventions because they are lonely for a hero; the kind of loneliness that never bottoms out.
Rooney Berwick may have been all those things, but on home turf in the FBI lab, sporting multiple ID tags, key rings, and belt-mounted eyeglass cases, he projected a kind of arrogant underground status. He had stringy white hair and an ovoid belly that bulged out of a black button-down shirt tucked into dusty black jeans as he sat on a bench with big boots planted, threading a flex light down the barrel of a gold-plated AK-47.
He looked up. “Can I help?” he asked gravely.
I told him I was a new undercover and needed a driver’s license. I asked what he was looking for inside the machine gun.
“Trying to see the rifling.” He cocked an eye down the shaft. “Take a look?”
“I’ve seen rifling, thanks,” I replied, referring to the spiral marks left by exiting bullets.
“She isn’t loaded, don’t worry.”
“It creeps me out to see anyone looking down a gun.”
“Just trying to keep busy. My mom is dying. They’re not saying that, of course. She’s in the hospital, but it doesn’t look good.”
When strangers stun you with this kind of stuff—when you’re waiting on line, or in an elevator—it derails you in the headlong rush to get somewhere, forcing you to see their anguish leaking over everything, like accident victims, beyond propriety. I was touched by Rooney Berwick’s confession. Why would he say this to someone he scarcely knew, except that we are all part of the Bureau family?
“I’m so sorry.”
“She has cancer.”
I hesitated. “That is rough.”
“What they put her through. They keep doing tests, just to justify their existence.”
“I hope they’re making her comfortable.”
“What does that mean?” he asked rhetorically.
“Well,” I said, fumbling, “at least no pain.”
“Uh-huh.”
We abided for a time in the quiet of the lab.
Finally, he smiled crookedly and latched and unlatched the magazine. “What’s the matter? You don’t like my toy? That’s real gold on there.”
“A collector’s item,” I agreed. “I wish I could talk more, but I’ve got to get to a meeting.”
“Everybody’s got a meeting,” Rooney said with spite.
He gave up the weapon, moving heavily, like everything in his soft, bruised body hurt.
“The uc name is Darcy DeGuzman,” I told him gently.
Beyond the quickies we came up with in training, a deep-cover identity is carefully constructed, like a computer-generated creature in a special-effects studio, with input from FBI psychologists and experts in terrorist organizations. You’re trying to create a three-dimensional character that will credibly blend with the target; whose believability will withstand whatever they throw at you. The identity of Darcy DeGuzman, born in a slash of light off a Rexall window in a Virginia mall, had been refined by the focus of a dozen minds to fit the profile of a drifter looking for a cause; someone ripe to be recruited by FAN.
No more blow-dried hair and prim Brooks Brothers suits. Darcy has dark wild curls and an old purple parka that looks as if it has seen many bus stations and campouts. After an abusive childhood in the ghetto tract in Long Beach, she made her way to the Northwest, “where people are real and care about the environment.” Because of her politics, she’s had trouble holding jobs. She was fired from a biotech company for hacking the system when she learned they wrote programs for cosmetic testing on rabbits. She was booked for assault on an employee