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“I miss you, friend. We used to run into each other all the time when the lab was in this building,” she explains. “Didn’t we?”

“They keep me in the rat hole,” Rooney mumbles. “Never see daylight.”

The truculent techie can barely look at her.

Rosalind’s eyebrows pinch. “Something wrong?”

“My mom just passed away,” Rooney says, and my heart squeezes tight.

“Just?” she asks, alarmed.

“Last week. The funeral was yesterday. It was nice, but not too many people came.”

I feel a pensive guilt, as if, absurdly, I should have been there.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone? Now that just makes me mad,” says Rosalind.

Donnato and I murmur awkward condolences. The queasy shock of it is very like the moment Rooney first disclosed his mom was terminally ill, out of the blue, in the midst of disassembled laptops and humming spectrograph machines, a hermit enthroned by the power of gizmos; how he poked down the barrel of a gold-plated assault rifle as if to impress me, as if to say he could handle anything. As if the world he had been pushing away all his life had not just collapsed in on him.

Rosalind chides him gently. “Can’t you reach out, just a little? Don’t you know we are family? My Lord, this young man has been here since Stone was,” she adds, turning to us.

Rooney: “Who is that?”

“Dick Stone,” Rosalind prompts.

“You’re talking about him?” Rooney asks with surprise.

Donnato and I stiffen. Our interest in Stone is privileged information we do not want to spread.

“His name came up in a meeting,” I say abruptly.

“I remember Dick Stone. He always liked my pugs.”

Rosalind smiles kindly. “How are those pug dogs? You still raising ’em?”

“Third generation.”

Let’s cut off this discussion now.

“Did you have something for Operation Wildcat?” Donnato asks.

“Yeah, the phone.”

Rooney opens a palm to reveal a secure phone that looks like a mini Oreo.

“There are a couple of settings.” He rotates two black disks. “One direct to your case agent and one to the supervisor. It works on a scrambled signal, almost anywhere in the world.”

The thing is weightless. I ooh and aah at Rooney’s genius and pocket the device, telling him how we appreciate his work, especially with things being so tough with his mom. As he and Rosalind move toward the bull pen, Donnato steers me out the secure door, the very one Steve Crawford walked me in.

“You be careful,” Donnato says. “Dick Stone is smart. How he survived, he probably created several false ID packages for himself. He jumps from cause to cause, like stepping-stones. He’s in the Weather Underground, and then he’s ELF, and now he’s an animal rights activist—he pulls an identity he has off the shelf, making sure to stay two or three times removed. He’s learned how to live like an outlaw. If he gets close, get out.”

Inside my knapsack, Darcy’s cell phone is ringing.

“Hi, Megan!” I say brightly, nodding affirmatively toward my partner. “What’s up?”

Megan Tewksbury is calling from the farm to tell her friend Darcy the secret location of the action to free the wild mustangs. On the first day of the gather, protesters from across the Northwest will meet in a campground behind a grocery store, at an old stage stop in the high desert of eastern Oregon.

I promise to be there.

Closing the phone, I grin at Donnato. “I can walk on water with these people.”

PART TWO

Twelve

In the high desert, where winters are cold and dry and spring winds whip across the flats, evaporating moisture from the earth, herds of wild horses roam free.

This is the big country, where you can drive for hours on empty road and never turn the wheel. The gently rolling hillsides covered with silver sage are speckled with hard chunks of snow—a painted pattern in which pronghorn antelope, rattlesnakes, quail, and pinto mustangs can easily disappear. Gray mist overhangs the rim rock to the east, silhouetting pointed junipers in a shifting white glow; to the west, the sun is bright and there are fluffy clouds.

You are traveling across an ancient lake bed of frosty green that is hundreds of square miles wide. Beyond it