by David Stone
He came to this place as often as he could, borne to it on a river of morphine, and it was on this perfect crescent of sand and shimmering sea that Crucio Churriga hoped to spend his last days, waiting for death. He closed his eyes and felt the sun warm on his forehead, let the surging of the sea fill his senses.
He began to drift into sleep.
A sharp guttural cry from above; his eyes opened and he saw a large black crow strike at one of the gulls. It plummeted from the sky and landed at his feet, its throat ripped open.
Its head was nearly off.
Thick blue blood ran from the dying bird.
Crucio stepped back away from the dead gull and looked down the beach; the girl in the flower-print dress was gone, and in her place was a tall black figure walking toward him. The glimmer of the great booming ocean surrounded this figure, but he looked familiar.
In his dreaming mind Crucio raised his right hand to shade his
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eyes as he squinted into the glare off the water, trying to make out the features of the big man walking toward him.
He was wearing cowboy boots and a long black range coat and a Stetson with silver conches around the brim.
A name came to him.
“Moot?” Crucio heard himself saying. “Moot, is that you?”
The man came closer, and as he did so he held out his hand, palm out, showing Crucio what was in it.
“Where did you get that?” Crucio asked.
The man said nothing. He just looked down at it and then up at Crucio. He smiled. The smile was very strange, because although he knew he was looking at Moot, the smile on Moot’s face did not belong to Moot; it belonged to a dead thing.
Now that Moot was here on the sand beside him, close enough to touch, Crucio could see that Moot’s eyes were gone—there was nothing in the sockets but blackness.
Crucio decided that he didn’t like this dream anymore.
Back in the ward in Butte, Montana, the body of Crucio Chur-riga began to move restlessly in the bed and his right hand closed over the remote.
The remote that was not in Crucio’s right hand.
Back on Point Reyes Beach, back in Crucio’s dream, he was standing before the tall man in black who was almost but not quite Moot. Crucio looked at the thing that was in the man’s hand; it was the remote control that Crucio used to regulate the morphine drip, the remote that was his only reason for still being alive.
The remote that when he pressed the button would send a warm rushing river of ease and peace and joy and contentment flowing into his arm and from there out into all the rivers and streams and oceans of his body until he was floating, floating over the mountains, floating on a river that carried him all the way to the Point Reyes Lighthouse.
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“That’s mine,” hissed Crucio, feeling the first stirrings of resentment. “Give it to me.”
The man shook his head slowly, still smiling that cold smile.
The shadows of crows flitted around on the sand at the man’s feet. He looked up to see a flock of crows wheeling in and around the gulls. A second gull fell from the sky and struck the sand to Crucio’s right, hitting so hard its gray, speckled body split open and spilled pink intestines out into the sand. The blood ran into the sand and dried as it ran, leaving a dry lake of black beads that looked like shards of coal.
Crucio stepped back from the dead bird and looked up at the man who now stood in a cloud of flying crows. He reached behind his back and pulled out a long ivory-handled stiletto, turned the blade in the light. The glitter off the silvery tip lanced into Crucio’s eyes. The light bit deep into his eyes and a red glow started up behind them.
The red glow turned into heat and the heat moved down the side of his face until it reached his jaw, reached where his jaw would have been if the surgeons had not sliced it off along with much of his upper palate and right cheekbone.
In the hospital room Crucio’s right hand flexed and his fingers clutched at the remote that was never going to be there.
“Man, I need that remote. Please.”
The man who wasn’t Moot shook his head, and the leer spread across his face like an old wound opening up, showing stained brown teeth.
Crucio’s rage had always been a few inches under his surface and now it boiled up like lava; he lunged at the man, who stepped easily to the right and plunged the tip of the stiletto deep—deep—into Crucio’s cancerous jaw. The blade punched through the thick bandages and went in so deep that Crucio felt the tip scraping along the flat bone of his upper palate. The pain in his skull went from a red glow to a blue-white star that exploded behind his eyes.
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He fell backward into the sand. The blue sky above him faded to white and the crows whirled around his head in a rattling, croaking swarm. He felt the ground as it slammed hard into his back.
He lay there for a time, gasping, staring up at a blazing match-head sun that bored into his eyes, the pain in his skull a white-hot blaze that seared through his mind.
A tall black shadow fell across him, cutting off the sun.
He saw a shape bending over him, reaching down toward him. The blade...Crucio’s eyes snapped wide open.
He was back in his hospital room.
Sweat covered his wasted body.
The pain in his jaw was ...immense. Like no pain he had ever felt in his long life. He could hear the beep of machinery off to his left. On the ceiling above him bars of dying yellow light glowed.
The remote.
Where was the remote?
His right hand probed the sheets beside him, fingers wide, his breath coming in short, sharp explosions.
Not there!
Not there!
He cried out in a slurred, mutilated voice. “Alice! Alice, where are you!”
Silence in the room. No whisper of rubber soles coming down the hall. The machinery beeping. The bars of sunlight inching across the ceiling. The pain growing ...
He would have to get up and find the remote.
He set himself, sat up, his balance reeling, the IV stretching as he did so, the tall stand rattling. He swung his long hairless legs to the right and pushed himself to the edge of the bed, slipped forward on the edge; his bony bare feet touched something soft.
Warm.
He looked down.
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Alice, the duty nurse for the six-to-twelve shift, was lying on the floor beside his bed, on her back, staring up at the same slow golden bars of yellow light that were inching across the ceiling of Crucio’s hospital room in Butte, Montana.
She was not seeing them.
Her throat had been opened like the lid of a jewel box, showing a trove of rubies. Her eyes had been scooped out, and from underneath the fan of her white-blond hair a lake of bright-red blood was spreading outward. Crucio looked out at the open door into the hallway. Another nurse was lying there, her legs splayed open, thighs streaked with red, blood running from underneath her skirt.
Crucio recoiled, pulling himself back into the bedcovers. The phone. He moved to his left, reaching out for the phone.
There was a dark shape sitting in the chair in the corner of the room. In the half-light Crucio could see the phone in the man’s lap. His leathery hands were folded over it. On his right wrist he wore a turquoise bracelet. His legs were crossed. He wore black jeans and cowboy boots tipped with silver. His face was in the shadows.
“Moot?”
The figure raised the phone and used a long-bladed, ivory-handled stiletto to slice the line. Then he stood up and stepped into what was left of the dying sunlight.
“Please. I need the morphine. I need it bad.”
The black figure spoke to him, a whisper, hoarse and low. “Trinidad, Crucio. Do you remember Trinidad?”
“Trinidad? No. I don’t remember Trinidad.”
“You will remember it, Crucio. I will help you.”
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friday, october 12 cia hq, langley, virginia butte, montana
10 p.m. local time
WARNING ANYONE ACCESSING THIS SYSTEM CONSENTS TO MONITORING
alton sat back in Mickey Franco’s chair in one corner of the huge cubicle-crowded Cleaners’ Sector, sipping a black coffee and staring at the entry screen warning on his computer. He had decided to begin with facial-scan records of arrivals in London on or about the third of October, looking for anyone remotely resembling Porter Naumann. Although he knew in his gut that Porter had not killed his family, even the remote possibility had to be eliminated.
He brought up a full-face of Porter from his ID packet, and hit the scan button on the Entries portal. Fifteen minutes later he hit End Scan and logged out. Naumann had not arrived in any formal entry port anywhere in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Wales from the third of October until the seventh, and on the seventh he was dead in Cortona. That was at least some comfort.
If not Naumann, how about this old man in black going by the name of Sweetwater? With neither a face nor, in Dalton’s view, a reliable name to start with, he had to narrow his search field.
Since Dalton’s inquiry involved locating an individual who was possibly implicated in the death of a senior field officer, he felt reasonably justified in going into the IRS mainframe. He set up search parameters for a male, late fifties to early eighties, six feet or better, no obvious disabilities, typed in the name “Sweetwater” and hit Enter.
The mainframe response a few moments later surprised him. There were 1,638 living males in the age range selected going by the Sweetwater name, all of them scattered across the Great Plains states and down into the American Southwest. Rather than dig through the particulars of each case, he punched in a search for each subject’s SSN card and waited for the mainframe to retrieve them. Each SSN card was linked to a digitized photo of the taxpayer in question. The sources for these were varied and often came from state driver’s licenses or passport shots: it had been his experience that the shots were often out-of-date, but it was the best way he knew of to search for the face of a U.S. citizen, far better than the Department of State or each of the fifty-two state motor vehicle mainframes, because every taxpayer in America was in the IRS files. Not even God kept better records than the IRS. It occurred to Dalton that if the IRS
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had been tracking terrorists instead of taxpayers, the World Trade Center would still be standing.
While he waited for the shots to come up, he was painfully aware that he actually had no clear idea what his target looked like, having never gotten a good look at his face. Still, he had a gut feeling he’d know the man when he saw him. The screen flickered and he was looking at hundreds of digital shots, arranged by state and county.
He looked at every damn one; it took him forty-three minutes. None of them looked even remotely similar to his target. He had no idea why he was so certain he hadn’t found the man’s
face somewhere in these shots, since he had never actually seen his
target’s face. But something was missing in all of these men. Intensity. Malice. Some indefinable but unmistakable quality of latent aggression
that the man in Carovita had radiated in his solitary silence, a quality that these men lacked.
Okay, thought Dalton, speaking half-aloud, let’s take a look at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. See if they have any Sweetwaters on file. And they did. They had all 1,638 of them.
Useless. Utterly useless. Now what? The guy was going by the name of “Sweetwater.” But neither the
IRS nor the BIA had any record of him. Yet Dalton was morally convinced the guy was a Native American. From the States, not Mexico or Central America.
And if this really was the guy who had shown up at Joanne Naumann’s town house in Belgravia last week, he was also a pathological sadist.
It was true that most stone-cold killers are born that way. But the good ones, the ones who last, get training, they find some discipline
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and control, or it gets pounded into them by other equally hard men, either in the armed forces or the cops or in a federal prison. If they don’t get discipline, they get caught and killed long before they reach seventy years. So perhaps our guy was either in prison or in the military.
He minimized the BIA and IRS search pages and logged on to the Military Service Records database. He typed in a search string for a Sweetwater, male, with an age-identifier range of sixty-five to seventy-five.
FILE NOT FOUND
Fine.
Not the military. The cops?
He logged over to the city, county, state, and federal law-enforcement personnel database and tried again.
FILE NOT FOUND
How about prison?
He logged onto the National Corrections database, which included state and federal prison records for the entire country.
FILE NOT FOUND
He really needed a picture, damn it! If he was going to run a facial scan through the Entries portal, he need a full-face shot of a series of suspects. Without a picture, he hadn’t a hope.
It was possible the man did not officially exist. Not under that name, anyway. Yet he had used the name in Italy. Why was he using that name in the first place? Would the name carry some kind of special significance for the man? Or for his victim?
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Naumann was a CIA employee.
Start there.
The CIA internal database carried a list of personal and operational names, often code names randomly generated by a mainframe in Langley, code names that were sometimes used for various operations around the world. Sometimes for foreign agents. Perhaps the name would ring a bell inside the Intelligence community. Unlikely, but worth a try. He went back to the Intel Link home page, logged on to the Umbra program, and typed in Sweetwater.
NAME RETIRED
Retired?
Retired!
That could only mean that at some point in the past, possibly the very distant past, the code name Sweetwater had once been an active Agency name, a name used in a previous operation of some sort.
Then why was an old Indian in Venice using the name out loud.
Coincidence?
A message?
A message to whom?
To the CIA itself, of course.
Coincidences did happen in Intelligence, but nobody liked them very much. Let’s review: Naumann is a CIA agent. He has possible contact with a man calling himself Sweetwater.
Now he’s dead. Really quite sincerely dead.
Then Micah Dalton, another CIA agent, has probable contact, extremely memorable probable contact, with a man using the name Sweetwater, and he almost dies himself. This Sweetwater guy was becoming more interesting by the second. But he still needed to narrow this field. So how?
He reached down beside the desk and lifted up his suitcase.
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Hazmat had left it in Sally’s office for him, tagged with a cleared sticker and a list of the remaining contents.
Section of burned raffia cord—fourteen cm—clean Dried moonflower petals—traces of SUBSTANCE UK present (Neutralized—Inactive—see Hazmat report) Organic material—seven pieces focaccia bread (Neutralized) Multiple sections of clay cylinder—terra-cotta (Mineral scan—American Southwest—age indeterminate—less
than one hundred years—hand-turned pottery— Comanche/ Apache/Kiowa style) Burned paper items—Italian-made—grocery receipts, bus
tickets, etc. Fragment of carbonized paper milled in Omaha Nebraska. Fragment of carbonized U.S. stamp present—franked. Electron scan of carbonized paper fragment shows following
image:
seco Timp
A fragment of burned paper. With traces of a U.S. stamp. Was he looking at what was left of an address? If what he was
looking at was part of the recipient’s address, wouldn’t it have some recognizable traces of lett
ers that would be found in Cora’s Dorsoduro flat in Venice? Calle dei Morti? Dorsoduro? Venice?
Actually, no, Micah. There was no special reason to think so, other than wishful thinking. The letter—if that’s what it actually was— could have been in Sweetwater’s possession for any amount of time.
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There was no rational basis for believing that the image the techs had found would have any connection to Cora’s apartment.
A dead end. But the image was all he had. Either his conjectures were on the point or they weren’t. So give it a shot. Let’s assume that “seco” and “Timp” form part of a return address. An address somewhere in the United States, since the techs seemed to believe that the stamp was American. This was all pretty slim, but it was something to run with, the only thing he had. He dug out a CD of Microsoft Streets and Trips and looked up every city, town, and county name in the continental United States that began with those letters.
He started with s, e, c, and o. He expected to get fifty variations. To his relief and delight, he got only one.
Seco, Kentucky
How about “Timp”? His luck was holding. He got four.
Timp Ball Park, Utah Timpie, Utah Timpas, Colorado Timpanagos River Park, Utah
All right.
What do we have? We have a Native American Indian. Let’s agree that his real name is unknown right now. We can reasonably assume that he has a background of violence.
With a possible connection to the United States government. Why do we think that ? Because he’s running around using an operational name that was
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at some time in the past activated by an unknown branch of the American intelligence community. Weak, weak as cold tea, but so far his guesses were turning out to be more useful than his certainties.
Note to self, thought Dalton: Find out what agency had run an op known under the code name “Sweetwater.”