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Never hesitate. Get back in their face.

“I came here to save animals,” I shouted. “I’m on your side.”

He tightened his forearm across my neck, half-lifting me off the ground.

“If you are who you say you are, show us your driver’s license.”

“No problem.” I groped on the table and came up with the waxed muffin wrapper. “Here it is!”

“Really?” Angelo snapped the paper, testing it, and growled, “Bullshit!”

Then, in a normal voice, he said, “You’re dead,” and let me go.

I was breathless, flummoxed. “Why?”

“Never give them anything physical. Anything they can check.”

“Okay, it’s a muffin thing, but in real life I’ll be backstopped with an untraceable ID—”

“I said anything physical.” He crumpled the paper for emphasis.

In undercover school, I had learned never to argue with an instructor.

“Okay.”

I was sweating. They could cut me now, halfway through, anytime, just like my roommate at Quantico. I looked toward Donnato for help.

“I liked the fed-up-with-corporate-America concept,” he offered.

Angelo was wired. “The false documents we give you will be as good as it gets, but backstopping is only a screen door we put between you and the truth. If you stand back, it looks solid. If you walk up close, you’re going to see through the holes. Don’t let them touch the screen, or they’ll know it’s a story. A story that isn’t true. And then you’ll be toast.”

It was searing and unpleasant to stand there with head bowed while Angelo berated me with stuff I already knew.

I swallowed the humiliation.

I believe in this work.

The plane banks, revealing the snow-covered Olympian bulk of Mount Hood. I try to relax and let the power of the engines carry me, but I can feel that searing mortification even now. A vapor of jet fuel leaking up through the floor is smelling a lot like the smell of burning brake lining that swamped my senses during the shooting incident. I pop a mint as the landing gear unfolds.

Take all your greens from the crayon box and color in a patchwork of moss and olive and sage, and that is Portland. What a tidy city, I think as the airplane passes over neat rows of houseboats on a sparkling river, then curves, delivering a spectacular view of three or four intricately wrought iron bridges.

Despite everyone’s gloomy talk of rain, it is seventy-three degrees and sunny when we land. On the ground, girls are wearing halter tops, and grandmas flowered pants, and there are hugs and chocolate bunnies for Easter Sunday.

I am not met at the airport. There can be no risk of Ana Grey/ Darcy DeGuzman being seen in the company of law enforcement. Rehearsal’s over. I’m walking alone onstage, backpack over my shoulder. The glass doors swing wide. Outside, the air smells sweet as cotton candy.

I find Darcy’s banged-up Civic waiting for me in the parking lot. The freeway is empty under an eggshell blue sky and everywhere there are flowering trees.

So this is what people who don’t live in Los Angeles call spring.

I leave the quiet of the holiday freeway and wind through the southeast part of town, until the road becomes a two-lane blacktop fronted by clapboard duplexes and airless Victorians with weed-strewn yards. A person in transit would live in a transitional neighborhood, we figured, where radicals mix in with blue-collar families on the scrubby streets.

I park in the long light of a late northwest afternoon, pulling up in front of a small four-story brick building built a century ago. Darcy’s rental apartment is on the top floor. I stare at the empty windows.

The loneliest time.

Five

The lights of downtown Portland beckon like a seaport in the mist, gently bobbing through the rain-streaked windshield as the Civic bumps along. Beside the Burnside Bridge, homeless men are scrabbling through a glistening mountain of garbage bags left over from the food and crafts market, held on weekends under the shelter of the iron span. Bent-over figures dragging bundles and wet cardboard cartons stop in front of the men’s rescue mission to trade cigarettes in the rain. They look