The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

  We also have a fragment of pottery that the tech guys dated at around a hundred years old, possibly turned by Comanche, Apache, or Kiowa potmakers. That bit of data strengthened Dalton’s hunch that the man he was looking for was a Native American.

  Possibly Kiowa or Comanche or Apache.

  Timpas, Colorado, come to think of it, is Comanche territory.

  Utah is largely Ute, which makes sense, since that’s why they named the place “Utah.” They also had some Yakima and Nez Percé clans. But Colorado, certainly southeastern Colorado, is definitely Comanche country, as any number of slaughtered cowboys and butchered cavalrymen could tell you, if their mouths weren’t stuffed up with two yards of prairie dirt.

  Okay. A Native American male between sixty and seventy-five years of age—Dalton’s subjective but professional estimate—with a connection to the world of intelligence and possibly from one of these five places in the United States.

  How about we run a LexisNexis search? Dalton typed in a search string for intelligence and native american and timp ball park utah or timpie utah or timpas colorado or timpanagos river park utah and seco kentucky and hit Enter.

  The screen blipped and he was looking at a string of useless hits, but one of them tagged a mention in a Pueblo paper called The Colorado Miner. He punched it up and got this:

  NATIVE AMERICAN WINS SILVER STAR

  December 21, 1952: A Timpas, Colorado, native was awarded

  the prestigious Silver Star for his service with the United

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  States Marine Corps in Korea. This native Apishapa Comanche has served with a secret intelligence unit of the USMC. The exact circumstances of his award cannot be released at this time. Even his Marine Corps name has been suppressed, since Indian intelligence operatives must operate in highly dangerous forward positions. The award was accepted in a private ceremony in Korea and word of it only reached this paper because his clan sister spoke of it to a reporter who later verified some of the basic details with the Public Affairs Office of the USMC. The man’s family has refused to comment.

  Somebody spoke out of school, thought Micah.

  Probably another member of the same Marine combat unit, perhaps another Comanche serving in the same area of operations.

  Okay. Progress.

  Next, let’s assume that this particular guy—we’re still calling him Sweetwater—had been in a Marine Corps intelligence unit. Operating in a forward area. Put together “Native American” and “Military Intelligence” and it added up to—and this was only a guess, but it felt right to Dalton—it added up to Code Talkers.

  Code Talkers, their very existence, had been one of the best-kept secrets of the Second World War. Dalton had no idea if they’d been used in the Korean War as well. But it stood to reason. What would work against the Japanese would certainly work against the North Koreans and the Chinese Communists. Whoever let that covert dog run loose had probably been promptly fired for the lapse. If not jailed.

  But was this guy his guy?

  Military intelligence was a great talent pool. It was entirely possible that a decorated Marine combat vet serving as a Code Talker would get a recruitment visit from an agent in the U.S. government. Probably

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  the Defense Intelligence Agency, but not necessarily. Still, this defi

  nitely connected to Dalton’s unknown target.

  Okay. Back to LexisNexis:

  comanche and clan names and apishapa.

  Back came a string of about six separate clan names, all of them connected to the Apishapa tribal subgroup. Not one of them was Sweetwater. He had Knife, Escondido, Goliad, Red Bird, Sand Walker, and Horsecoat. But no clan with the Sweetwater name. That made sense. If his unknown target had actually been a Code Talker, then the Corps would have given him a cover name. He looked back at the list of clan names, and one jumped out at him.

  Horsecoat.

  The image on the fragment of scorched paper included the word “seco.” Did that fragment form part of the word “Horsecoat”?

  To be safe, he ran a LexisNexis search on all the clan names in the list. It took him another five minutes, his fingers flashing over the keyboard, each search cross-referenced to military service and colorado miner articles. He got several hits.

  One of the Knife clan members had joined the Army in 1967. Two kids from the Escondido clan had gotten scholarships from ROTC on the Denver State campus in 1971. One had died in some place called Anh Khe, which Dalton vaguely recalled was an Air Cav base in the highlands of central Vietnam. A Goliad clan member by the name of Consuelo had been killed in a multiple-car accident near the town of Trinidad, Colorado, back in 1997. Consuelo Goliad had been predeceased, in the charming obituary phrase, by her husband, Héctor Rubio González, a member of the Mexican Air Force Reserves.

  A Red Bird clan woman had been found murdered in her double-wide outside Pueblo; the boyfriend, an AWOL Mexican soldier, had

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  been indicted later. A Horsecoat clan member, first name Wilson, described in a back-page article under the heading “Crimes and Misdemeanors” as a “youth,” was charged in 2004 with weapons dangerous and Possession for Purposes of Trafficking—disposition ROR, Released Own Recognizance.

  And on April 9, 1948, a seventeen-year-old Timpas boy named Daniel Jeremiah Escondido, a clan member also known as “Pinto,” had been charged with three counts of assault during a fight with three Air Force men from Schriever AFB in a bar outside Trinidad, Colorado.

  This article carried a Colorado State Police Intake photo, a crisp black-and-white shot of a hard-looking slab-faced Native American boy with a bull neck and long silky black hair worn down to his shoulders. In the full-face shot, his small black eyes, deep-set in a blunt, angry pockmarked face, stared straight out at the camera as if he were trying to figure out the best way to skin, gut, and eat the cop behind it.

  In the profile shot he had a prominent hatchet nose, a broad thrusting chin, an irregular blotch of pale pink skin showing just above his collarbone (source of the nickname Pinto?), and very small ears.

  In the visible ear—he was facing to his left—he was wearing a small silver earring, a crescent over an iron cross. Exactly the earring that the old man calling himself Sweetwater had been wearing in Carovita, and, now that he was looking at it again, a design very similar to the crude drawing that the killer had left on the mirror in Joanne Naumann’s bathroom, missing only the flowerlike scrawl above it. Dalton picked up the little digital camera and found the image again.

  Whatever the significance of the scrawl, the design of the earring was too close and far too unusual to ignore it as a coincidence. And the boy’s face did radiate, in a much cruder and more latent form, the same kind of malice, of brooding power that had surrounded Sweet

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  water in Venice. The similarity of the silver earring to the crude scrawl in Joanne Naumann’s bathroom, that was too much to disregard.

  As he looked at the boy’s face, Dalton’s doubt, his investigative skepticism, his unwillingness to be led astray by a false lead, all of this slowly eroded in the presence of that flat reptilian glare, until his intuitive sense hardened into a moral certainty.

  This was the man.

  Daniel Jeremiah Escondido.

  Known as Pinto.

  To nail it down, he still needed a much more recent shot. Since this Pinto kid had already tangled with the law back in 1948, Dalton was prepared to bet it wasn’t his last go-round. He logged onto the Bureau of Prisons database and typed in:

  Escondido, Daniel Jeremiah, AKA Pinto

  Born Timpas Colorado DOB Unknown

  The BP mainframe seemed to take forever. Then the screen flickered and he was looking at a single closely typed page that seemed to be the record of a prisoner named Daniel Jeremiah Escondido, AKA Lucha, AKA Pinto Escondido, AKA El Cuchillo, file number 8929-030, a Comanche who had been convicted of dru
g trafficking and multiple homicides—three DEA agents had gone missing

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  in southeastern Colorado and he had been implicated in the disappearances. Pinto had been convicted and sentenced to twenty years at hard labor in the Montana State Prison Facility at Deer Lodge.

  When did he go in?

  Date of incarceration: February 19, 1986

  Released / time served: March 20, 2006

  He’d been out in the world for over a year now, time served, no parole, no supervision. Gone. The man had simply sunk back into the great American desert like water from a busted canteen.

  Daniel Jeremiah Escondido, commonly known as Pinto, had been born into the Escondido clan of the Apishapa Comanche nation near the town of Timpas, Colorado, on November 10, 1931, which put him well past the far end of Dalton’s estimated age range.

  According to his prison background file, he joined the United States Marine Corps in 1949. Service number 2543-773-010. He served with the Marines all through Korea. Awarded a Silver Star for conspicuous bravery at the Reservoir. Mobbed out in 1965 at the age of thirty-one with the rank of gunnery sergeant, and according to the IRS files, his last active service location with the Marines was in the brig at Parris Island, where he was apparently a guest of the Corps for three years before his—get this—his Dishonorable Discharge in sixty-five.

  Dishonorable?

  How does a Marine combat vet, a gunny with a Silver Star and twelve years of peacetime service, get himself an additional three years busting his hump at Parris Island before being tagged with a Dishonorable and tossed out onto civvie street in 1965?

  Not surprisingly, there was no mention in the files of what his duties had been during those twelve years, where he had served them,

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  in what capacity, connected to what unit. Or why he ended up in the brig. But the Code Talker Military Operational Specialty did bring him deep into the orbit of covert ops. It was time to look up his service records.

  He logged on to Military Records, typed in Pinto’s service number—2543-773-010—and the Naumann file immediately went totally weird.

  FILE NOT FOUND

  File not found?

  Had to be a mistake.

  He typed in it again, number by number, and hit Enter:

  FILE NOT FOUND

  And again:

  FILE NOT FOUND

  Oh yeah? “File Not Found” or “File Deleted by Yellow Rat Bastards Who Don’t Want Anybody Finding Out About This Guy”?

  Fine.

  Our guy was in the Marines, but there was no official record of his service. In the brig at Parris Island for outrages unknown. Sent to Deer Lodge as an accessory to a possible triple homicide. And then released into an unsuspecting world over a year and a half ago.

  In the back of his mind there was an uneasy feeling that he was poking around in somebody else’s territory and if he did it long enough he’d attract some unhealthy attention.

  On the other hand, the hell with them.

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  He was an agent of his government. He had every right to all the information he could locate, and if some pencil-dick bureaucrat in

  D.C. wanted to make a fight of it, he would be only too happy tooblige. On the lower left of the Bureau of Prisons page there was an icon

  that read, Release Photo.

  Dalton clicked on the Print icon under it.

  The entire screen went blank, which sent a paranoid flash through his mind, but the page came back in a moment, the same prison record sheet, but this time there was a color photo in the center of the screen, the full-face and profile of a pockmarked, heavily tanned man with shoulder-length silver gray hair. In the head-on shot he was staring straight into the camera with what could only be called a killing stare, the dead-flat predatory regard of a bull shark, emotionless, yet full of malice, cold rage, and a terrible animal vitality.

  It was the very same look that had been in his eyes in that Police Intake shot taken of a young Comanche boy charged with three counts of aggravated assault. Dalton felt a surge of triumph ripple through him. This was that same man, altered and brutalized by several decades of dangerous living. His face was full of angular planes and sudden cuts, as if it had been hacked out of a single slab of weathered mahogany by someone using an ax and a blowtorch.

  Underneath his photo was his prison number: 8929-030. In the profile shot, his long silver hair had been pulled back to show the side of his face. Nailed you, thought Dalton, exultant.

  There it was again.

  The identical ear—small, flattened back onto his skull—and in it the same silver earring, or its exact likeness, the crescent over the cross. This was the man he had seen at Carovita, the man who was going by the name of Sweetwater.

  Daniel Jeremiah Escondido, AKA Pinto. Born in the town of Timpas, Colorado, on November 10, 1931.

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  Of the Escondido clan.

  Of the Apishapa Comanches.

  And the United States Marine Corps.

  He looked at the picture of the man, a picture he had worked so hard to get, and decided to double his chances of keeping it long enough to run an Entries face scan for the London area.

  He hit Print Screen, and while his printer chattered off a color shot of Pinto Escondido, he got up from his desk and stepped across to the box that Mandy had prepared for him last night.

  He found the digital camera that Forensics had used to take pictures of the Naumann crime scene, pushed the ON button, and snapped a screen shot of Pinto’s release photo.

  All right.

  Now he had a name and a head shot to hang it on and he was only a facial scan away from putting this same man in London on or about the time that Joanne Naumann and her daughters had been killed.

  His only concern—and this was based on nothing more substantial than the kind of institutional paranoia that infected everyone in the intelligence game—was whether his fox-trot through the various Intel Link databases waving the Pinto flag had drawn any unhealthy attention from other agencies, perhaps from the people who had erased the links to this man’s military records.

  Well, it was too late to worry about that now.

  If he did draw some bureaucratic fire, Stallworth would run interference for him. Stallworth bitterly resented any attempt to rein in one of his own men, especially an authorized cleaner running a high-priority search.

  He used Edit to copy the digital shot of Pinto’s release photo and pasted it into his Entries database scanner, cued it up, and keyed the Search for Matches button, using a time frame from October 3 to October 6.

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  And he got . . . nothing.

  Some possibles that when examined in Zoom looked nothing like him, or who did not match the other physical parameters, or who could be disqualified on other grounds, such as solid-citizen IDs or— in one case—because he was a member of the British Labour Party.

  Zip nada bupkes, as Sally Fordyce liked to say.

  Okay. Not in London, or at least not seen to be in London in the time frame required. The next step was to try to find out if Pinto had traveled to Europe, especially Italy, in the last few weeks.

  He logged back into the Portals database.

  Since the man had been traveling under the name Sweetwater, Dalton entered that into the Scan parameters, along with the pasted-in prison shot of Pinto and the man’s basic physical description.

  He hit Scan and sat back, a wave of fatigue washing over him. He rubbed his face with his hands, stretched, never taking his eyes off the screen. All around him in the large darkened room other terminals blipped and beeped, and from somewhere down the outer hall he could hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner running. He glanced at the time marker in the lower right-hand corner of the computer screen.

  3:12 AM

  He had been up now for over twenty-nine hours straight.

  The screen flickered, a
nd then went blank, a flat screen of blue, with one row of red letters in the middle.

  SESSION TERMINATED

  Terminated! Session terminated!

  Terminated by whom?

  He leaned forward and typed in a string of letters.

  200 | david stone Query termination order/root level/execute.

  Nothing happened for a time. Then he got

  GO HOME MICAH IT’S LATE

  Dalton stared at the screen for a while, and then typed in

  Jack, is that you?

  NO

  Who are you?

  DEACON CATHER GOOD NIGHT, MICAH.

  His machine whirred and clicked and the screen went black. Dalton stared at it for a long time, and then he went home.

  HE WAS BACK IN Stallworth’s office at 0900 hours sharp on Saturday morning.

  “Cather?”

  “Cather.” “He was monitoring your search?” “I don’t know, Jack. I know he ended it. Have you talked to him?” “Yeah. He never mentioned dogging your search string.” “What’d he say?” Stallworth shrugged. “He says you did good work.”

  “He said that?” “Yeah.”

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  “Jack, can I ask you something?” Stallworth’s expression was closed and guarded. He spent some

  time sipping his coffee while Dalton twitched in his chair. “Sure.” “Have you ever heard of a CIA operation called Sweetwater?” Stallworth’s battered face softened as he took a few moments to

  adjust to the question, considering a variety of answers. “That’s the

  name of your guy in Venice, isn’t it?” “Yes.” “Yeah, I ran it last night, myself. It was a cover name used by

  somebody attached to a part of the Echelon operation.” “You know the guy’s real name?” “No. That’s an archive file now and they’re very restricted.” “Can you get it?” “Not likely. Data like that gets dumped from the After Action

  summary before it goes to Archives. You know about Echelon?”

  “Everybody knows it. It’s an NSA operation. Monitoring the trade in technical data, jet engines, metallurgy, communications gear, seeing to it that nothing of strategic importance gets sent to the wrong country. It’s strictly passive. No metal-and-meat function. Right?”