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“Swell. I’m in nirvana. When is lunch?”

When do we get approval from FBIHQ for the hit? What will it take to get the accountants off the dime? Because that’s the way it always is—the criminal side of the house versus the bean counters, leaving undercovers stranded on a seductively beautiful road like this one, guessing which fork leads to paradise, and which one to perdition.

We are edging along the Lewis and Clark Trail. In pictures you always see the explorers pointing, and with good reason. Imagine if you had discovered this plentitude of lumber and the riches of the salmon run. Not anymore, as Dick Stone vehemently points out, since a chain of hydroelectric dams has displaced the chinook’s ancient pathways to the sea.

“Look at those monstrosities, totally fucked the river. They are everything that’s wrong with big business and the U.S. government.”

“Without ’em, we wouldn’t have electric lights.”

“Fascist pigs,” Stone growls. “Monuments to ego.”

I stare at the dams going by—colossal concrete bunkers crested by powerhouse electric grids—remembering the surveillance photo of Megan, aka Laurel, confronting Congressman Abbott somewhere along this river, and that Dick Stone would have been there, too, but there is no credible way to bring it up. Below the spillways, where tons of water empty downstream from the dams, colorful windsurfers flick about the anthracite surface of the water, scraps in the bottom of a chasm.

“What did you do before you blew up that tower?”

“I was in the FBI.”

I just about eject through the roof of the truck.

“And I was in the CIA,” I say calmly.

“Don’t believe me.”

“You’re just playing.” Pause. “Am I right?”

At that moment, two sheriff’s cars pass at normal speed. What is this? A signal?

This can’t be happening. He can’t be telling me this now.

Dick Stone replies amiably, “What’d you think? Can you see me wearing a suit, in the FBI?”

“Suits with guns?”

He laughs. “Guys in suits, with no sex life, who fight alien life-forms.”

“Yeah.” I grin. “That’s you.”

But Stone is deliberating something. “Do you remember the Weather Underground?”

“That was a little before my time, but yeah, they were anarchists who were against the Vietnam War.”

“‘Bring the war home,’” Stone says grimly. “That was the slogan.”

“They set off bombs, right?”

“Three of them blew themselves up trying to build a bomb in a town house in Greenwich Village.”

“I vaguely remember.”

Memorized the files.

“What about the Weather Underground?” I prompt. “Were you part of it?”

“Me?” He dismisses the thought. “Hoover’s gangsters really fucked those people. Destroyed their lives. Hard times comin’, no matter which side you were on,” he says. “Sad. Really sad.”

The truck window is down and a river wind is washing Dick Stone’s commanding profile clean, blowing his long blond hair back over the built muscles of his neck, so a tuft of white in the honey-colored sideburns is revealed. In the deep lines of the forehead, and the clenched brows trying to grip whatever vision keeps eluding him at the far side of the journey, I see a middle-aged man asking if his life has been a fake.

Then he attempts to discard it, the past thirty years of it, with a rapid shake of the head, but a long silence follows as the road climbs the dark pine highlands, and we exit, loop up and back toward a spectacular gleaming bridge that leads to the Washington side of the river, as if leaving one fairy-tale kingdom of spells and lies for another.

From the bridge, a hundred feet above the Columbia River, the vault of space the water carved is enormous, enough to contain the talk of all this history and more; it’s as if you could lift off the railing and lie in the hammock of the wind, out of time, like the hawks.

But as we cross the bridge, I feel the threads of my connection to the Bureau tug and unravel. Dick Stone’s aborted confession hints at more than what management has been telling me. I know this because of the transparency of the way we are together in the car. I know because he’s dropped the craziness he cultivates with