Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [60]
The relays worked at the off-site, but they haven’t been tested since.
Why does Stone hesitate, staring at the phone?
Slammer: “Pull the cord, dingdong!”
Now I see. Stone has rigged the cell so it will detonate the bomb inside the backpack—just like at Herbert Laumann’s house. Just like with Steve. A seven-digit key code on an FBI phone is about to make another undercover go up like a roasted guinea pig.
What a turn-on for him.
“You are such a chicken shit,” Slammer yells, and rushes me, roaring like a linebacker. I run, but he makes the tackle. We both go down and roll as Dick Stone warns, “I’m hitting redial,” and Slammer gropes for the cord and pulls.
The sharp report of a firecracker. The world goes silent. Burning vapor stings my legs, and in an instant we are both covered in slime, staggering in the center of a perfect twelve-foot circle of blood.
Dick Stone whoops with delight. “It works! The Big One, man!”
Sara is bent over, laughing at our crimson horror-mask faces. “Look at you!”
Stone lumbers toward me, giggling, the phone outstretched.
“Sorry, darlin’. Dad’s not home.”
This sounds extremely funny to Sara and Stone.
I put the phone to my ear.
“This is George DeGuzman. I can’t get to the phone right now—”
The voice is familiar: George DeGuzman, Darcy’s dad, as played by SAC Robert Galloway.
Backstopping.
A screen door between the truth and me.
My fingers are trembling and slippery. It is hard to keep a grip. The phone wants to leap out of my hand.
Megan appears on the front steps, breathless from the run up the basement stairs at the sound of the explosion. She stares at the ludicrous scene, like a postmodern take on hell, Slammer and I swathed in bloody stigmata, blinded souls in a Day-Glo ring of red.
“Are you all out of your minds?” she says.
Sara and Stone are helpless, holding on to each other, wiping tears of manic laughter.
“We’re having some fun,” he manages to reply.
Nineteen
“He’s on to us.”
“Calm down.”
“He found the cell phone. Went through the numbers, like he knew exactly what he was looking for—a leak. A mistake.”
“Were there? Mistakes?”
“No, but Mike, he took my wallet and watch. Removed all contact with the outside world. He’s watching me.”
“Of course he’s watching you. He’s protecting the cult. Besides, he’s a raging paranoid. Reality check: You’re talking to me, so he has failed. Where is he now?”
“Flailing.”
“Sailing?”
I have no patience. “He is flailing—pulling a rotor to clear the vegetation between the trees.”
Dick Stone has not discovered the tiny Oreo phone, hidden in the barn under a heavy tack box. I volunteer to feed the animals at first light because it is the only time to be alone. I put on sweats and clogs and hurry across the yard, past the rabbit pen (their numbers dwindling—another one stolen or escaped) before the others wake. The worn barn boards ring with a note of optimism. Here is grain. Here a warm muzzle. The clang of the bucket, the needy cry. In the quiet, the dualities that shout inside my head like opposing political commentators settle down to nothing but the hollow thump of hindquarters on wood, the chesty cough, the uneventful silence in between.
At this same hour in a gated community of postmodern homes in Simi Valley, California, family life is stirring. A grueling commute to Westwood lies ahead for Mike Donnato, who takes my reports while getting dressed and his three sons off to school.
I go on to tell Donnato about the punishment in the orchard—being tripped up when I defended Sara, and the bullying with the loaded backpack.
“He was testing a blood bomb—more powerful—for what he calls ‘the Big One.’”
Donnato considers. “Dick Stone is sounding like another David Koresh.”
“Please God, no!”
Koresh, who believed he was the incarnation of Jesus Christ, was the leader of the Branch Davidians, a religious group that went down in flames during a suicidal standoff in Waco, Texas. It was another government debacle, as tragic and deluded as the FBI’s confrontation with Native Americans at Pine