The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

  “Yeah. That’s right.” “So what about the Sweetwater link? Could just be a coincidence?” Stallworth frowned. “Don’t like coincidences.” “Neither do I. What part?” Stallworth blinked at him. “What part of what?” “You said Sweetwater was the name attached to a part of the

  Echelon operation. What part?” Stallworth blinked some more. “I meant attached to it. It was

  part of the Echelon operation.” Dalton was picking up some evasion. He marked it and filed it. “Okay. Sweetwater. What do you want

  me to do about it?”

  202 | david stone

  Stallworth flipped a file across the table. “Cather handed me this, asked you to look into it.”

  Dalton picked up the file, scanned it. “Who’s Willard Fremont?”

  “Willard Fremont was attached to the Echelon program a few years back. Retired for substance abuse, but he was a good man. I knew him from Guam. Wild man, but a great contract freelancer. I got a call from the FBI last week. He’s in a federal lockdown out in Coeur d’Alene. Seems he went all batshit a couple weeks ago, barricaded himself into a military-style stockade up in the Rockies, a few miles out of some backwater called Sandpoint, just south of the Canadian border. Shot at a postal worker trying to deliver a registered letter from the IRS. The Feebs took him down and now they got him in a lockup near Coeur d’Alene and he’s using our name in vain.”

  “The Agency?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does this have to do with the guy who did Naumann?”

  “You know where this Pinto guy is right now?”

  “No. I was in the middle of that when Cather shut me down.”

  “Cather thinks this Fremont guy is where you should start looking.”

  “That makes no sense. No sense at all. I’ve got a photo ID on Pinto, and a sheet as long as my dick—”

  “You’re gonna need more than that.”

  “I’m trying to put him in London around the time Naumann’s family got hit. I know I can put him in Venice and Cortona when Naumann got killed. I say we put him out all over the grid, get a location, and go nail his tongue to a door.”

  Stallworth shook his head. “Cather says no. He says you stay strictly continental.”

  “What? Why? No overseas ? Why the fuck—”

  “You want it straight? Medical. This salvia shit. You’re not going

  the echelon vendetta | 203

  global, Micah, and that’s the name of that game. You follow? Cather’s

  putting Serena Morgenstern on this Pinto guy. She’s going to be—”

  “Serena! Serena Morgenstern is a fucking infant, Jack!”

  “She’s twenty-nine. And she’s a good street agent. Cather’s giving her Mandy as field liaison. They’re already out looking, Micah.”

  Dalton stared hard at Stallworth, who returned it just as flat.

  “Jack. I told you I was okay.”

  “And we believe you. We just want you to stay inside the borders for now.”

  Dalton stared down at the file folder in his hands.

  “This Fremont file, this is bullshit, Jack.”

  Stallworth shrugged that off as well. “Cather doesn’t think so.”

  “Cather doesn’t run your unit. And Serena’s not a cleaner.”

  “He’s 2IC to the director of operations, and Operations controls the cleaners. And Serena’s a cleaner now.”

  “She is?”

  “As of eight a.m. London time.”

  Dalton shut his mouth so hard it made his teeth hurt. He turned in the chair and stared out Stallworth’s window at the atrium garden. Lots of activity for a Saturday. The begonias were being taken out.

  “They’re taking out the begonias, Jack.”

  “Fucking right they are. Come on, Micah. You’re still operational. No section eight. You’re just working a little closer to home. For now. Do this right and you’re back in London Station.”

  Time passed. The begonias were plucked out one by one and thrown onto a cart. There really wasn’t much that Dalton could do about any of this anyway. After a while, his breathing returned to normal.

  “Mandy’s working with Serena?”

  “Yep.”

  204 | david stone

  “Not alone? Not out in the street?”

  “No. Serena will have some muscle with her. Mandy’s strictly liaison and computer backup. Searches, reporting. Once again, whatever she and Serena get, it comes straight to me. They’ve got your workup on this Pinto guy. They’ll get him. You pull this end of it.”

  “I’ve never known you to keep such a tight hand on the wheel before. What’s so special about this one?”

  “It’s not special. It’s just policy. I told you—”

  “Cather’s policy.”

  “Yeah. Cather’s policy. You don’t like it, he’s in his office right now. How about I give him a ring, you express your strong disapproval of all his works and days? Huh?” Stallworth lifted the phone up, held it in the air, raised his eyebrows at Dalton, waiting.

  Dalton put his head back, stared at the ceiling.

  Sighed.

  “I would like to see some mountains again.”

  “Mountains? You just came back from mountains, didn’t you?”

  “Not like the Rockies. I was down in Tucumcari, at my uncle’s ranch. But I was in Spokane last August—”

  “Yeah. I remember. What was his name?”

  “Bob Cole. Burned himself to death in his own garage.”

  “Yeah. Sad case. Ever find out why?”

  “Money troubles, we figured. Couldn’t find a note. Body was burned beyond recognition. Not even dental work. He used an accelerant. Burned white hot. We arranged for a pension for his girlfriend and their kid. I sent you the work sheet.”

  “My job is not to get bogged down in details. That’s why they sent me over from the NSA back in ninety-five. CIA in those days was like that black guy on that ship, you know, admiring his own reflection in a bailing bucket while the whole damn boat sinks underneath him.”

  the echelon vendetta | 205

  Dalton blinked at Stallworth, trying to work that statement out. He discarded several interpretations as simply too damn ridiculous before settling on one that was just plain loopy.

  “You’re not talking about The Nigger of the Narcissus, are you?”

  “Yeah. That’s right. The Conrad story.”

  There was just so much wrong with that literary reference that Dalton saw no easy way to untangle it. He sat for a time, in silent admiration of Stallworth’s near-perfect ignorance on any subject other than rare orchids and complex international intelligence operations.

  “Don’t give me that look, Micah. Make a decision here. Willard Fremont. You want him? Go out there? See if he connects to Naumann. If he doesn’t, you can always shut him up.”

  “Shut him up? You mean whack him?” said Dalton, trying for levity, still internally far off his balance.

  “Man. First it’s cowpoke stuff. Now you’re Joe Pesci. No I don’t want you to whack him. I mean, fly out there, see what his grievance is. If there’s a link to Naumann, to this Pinto guy, find out what it is and tell no one but me. If the Echelon thing is just a coincidence, then do your cleaner gig. Cool him out. Smooth him down. Get him to stop flapping away like a broken fan belt, make him happy, even if it means springing him on a 62-14 and getting him down to the safe house in Anaconda. This is a very bad time for one of our old freelancers to go all Woodward and Bernstein on our collective ass. If you do have to yank him out of lockdown, babysit him for a few days in Anaconda and see if we can find a way to make him gurgle. Anyway, it’s easy duty and you could use the rest yourself. Take him fly-fishing. Go for beers. Hire some hookers and catch a nice dose of chlamydia.”

  “God knows I’ve done that before.”

  “Tell you the truth, you’re right about the psych thing. I can’t afford to lose an operational guy without a damn good reason. I’m losing staff to Middle Eastern Op
erations every day.”

  206 | david stone

  “I know. I was glad to rotate out of there. I hated it.”

  “Me too. Remind me, next time we invade the Middle East, to just nuke the sons of bitches and call it a day. This whole War on Terror is sucking up resources, manpower, computer time—it’s cramping our global reach, and all so a pack of camel-porking dune buggers can go to Blockbuster and rent Jim Carrey movies. And all the time the Chinese are sitting like vultures all along our Pacific Rim.”

  “September eleventh wasn’t a distraction, Jack.”

  “I know it wasn’t. But these Islamic terrorists, they’ll always be with us. Like herpes simplex or Noam Chomsky. With them, it’ll always be one damn thing after another. In the meantime, we got China rising up out there in the Far East like a tsunami while we diddle around in the dunes playing Lawrence of Arabia. You know China is shopping around in the Third World looking for high-tech rocket engines?”

  Dalton did; he read the Intel Link dailies too. But there was no stopping Jack Stallworth once he got into high gear.

  “All around the world, the Chinks are hunting missile tech. And what are we gonna do when they got three thousand nuke-tipped ICBMs dug in around Manchuria, two thousand miles from the coast, all their infrastructure buried way deep, immune to air strikes? And all of these ICBMs capable of taking out our entire Western seaboard? You don’t think they’re watching everything we’re doing in the Middle East? What’ll we do if the Chinese lob a nuke-tipped cruise missile into one of our Pacific carrier groups? How about the Chinese arrange a proxy missile hit on Guam? The North Koreans already have it sighted in with two of their Dong Two ICBMs. Make it look like some terrorist plot? I tell you, Guam is the new Pearl Harbor, Micah. Am I ranting here? Is this a rant?”

  “Sort of. A bit. Actually it’s more of a prolonged gripe, only your voice is real loud and your face is getting all red and sweaty and there’s this big bulgy vein standing out right in the middle of your forehead.”

  the echelon vendetta | 207

  Stallworth reached up and stroked his forehead absently. “Yeah. I’m ranting. Sorry. I hate this war.” “How’s Drew?” “My son?” “Only Drew I know.” “He transferred out of the Horn this September.” “He’s a good kid. I always liked him.” “He’s no kid anymore. Neither are you, I guess. Micah, I let

  you go look into this Willard Fremont guy, you gonna be...

  stable, like?” “I just want to get back in the saddle.” “Cowboys again.” Dalton grinned, his first real smile in over an hour. Stallworth felt

  his own heart lighten; what the hell, it’s a poor man who never rejoiceth. And maybe Micah would be okay. Maybe he’d even find a way to solve this Willard Fremont problem. Stallworth liked Dalton very much, and sincerely wished the best for him. As long as it didn’t damage the Agency. Or in any way threaten his own pension.

  “I was speaking metaphorically,” said Dalton. “You know I hate it when you start speaking metaphorically.” “Bullshit. You do it yourself. All the time.” “I do not,” he said primly. “Metaphors are prolapse, and prolap

  sity is the enemy of precision.” “I think you mean prolix.” “Micah, no offense, I need you to go away now.”

  208 | david stone

  saturday, october 13 hayden lake federal holding center coeur d’alene, idaho

  6 p.m. local time

  alton read Willard Fremont’s bulky jacket on the flight out, while thirty thousand feet below his porthole the landscape changed from a flat rolling sea of brown grasses to a wrinkled gray hide with here and there the silver thread of a river glinting in the sun, and then into a coat of dark-green lodgepole through which folded outcroppings and bare blunt teeth of granite thrust upward, and finally the cathedral spires and glittering snowcaps of the Rockies, rising up under the starboard wing. A hard landing in Spokane, and with the mandatory bong bong a galvanic, Pavlovian response rippled through the passengers; up before the plane had stopped rocking at the gate, butting into one another, shoving their elbows, their shoulders, their great corporate arses into Dalton’s left ear as they unlimbered their cumbersome drag-ons, and then standing in a glum row like discontented steers waiting for the slaughterhouse gates to open.

  Dalton, staying in his seat until the plane cleared, reached the conclusion that Stallworth hadn’t been exactly correct when he called Willard Fremont “one of ours.”

  Willard Fremont was what they called in the darker arts a “bolton,” a freelancer, attaching himself to one agency or another as the work offered, trading on personal references, a gypsy agent living the life of an underpaid and occasionally over-shot-at mercenary in the more disreputable outlying fringes of the intelligence community.

  Now in his early sixties, Fremont had done a stint in the Navy. Mustered out as a loadmaster on the USS Constellation at the end of the Vietnam War. Spent some time in Guam, running his own machine shop and part-timing as an armorer for various intelligence agencies. Taken up full-time by the NSA in the late eighties as a kind of in-shop fabricator for various NSA units requiring special surveillance gear. Developed a kind of snap-on suppressor designed to work with subsonic rounds, got a patent on that, and then sold it to the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1992—for a song, it looked like. Declared personal bankruptcy in 1993, married, promptly divorced, banged into a drug rehab facility in Spokane for six weeks. Discharged allegedly cured, worked for a while as a long-distance trucker in the mid-nineties. And then apparently back in harness for the Sweet-water unit operating out of Denver. Retired in 2002, and his pension checks were signed by the paymaster general of the General Accounting Office, a meaningless detail, since everyone who had ever been in intelligence long enough to get a pension got paid by the PG of the GAO.

  The photo accompanying his jacket showed a reed-thin but wiry whipcord of a man with sunken cheeks, an out-thrusting, pugnacious jaw, red-rimmed blue eyes, indifferent teeth, large ears that stuck out from his bony skull, a close-cropped military Mohawk

  210 | david stone

  gone yellowish-white, big knotted and capable-looking hands with enlarged knuckles, long ropy forearms: a man who had once been hard and useful but who had now sunk into a general air of decrepitude, disappointment, decay.

  The ride in from Spokane was in the back of a tan Crown Victoria driven by an elderly and dyspeptic U.S. marshal in a wrinkled blue suit and a dirty white collarless shirt open to the third button. As the valleys and crests of the Rockies rolled by outside his window and the city of Coeur d’Alene showed itself in glimpses through gaps in the surrounding mountains, Dalton read and reread the final report from the HRT commander who had led the assault unit that managed to pry this grumpy old crab from his shell-like private compound up near the Canadian border two weeks ago.

  It seemed that Willard Fremont, like Gollum, wearying at last of humankind, had retreated to a former Christian-Bible-school-turned-survivalist-camp and organized it into a no-go zone for all manner of living things.

  Fremont had instituted a liberal policy of equal-opportunity sudden death, firing with intent on anything that flew, stumbled, crawled, or loped across a four-hundred-yard-wide circle of chemical deforestation and razor wire that ran right around his post-and-beam cabin tucked high up on a cliff face, complete with its own spring and a hydroelectric generator. None of which would have provoked any particular comment in this demented belfry of northern Idaho if one of those unfortunate skinless bipeds who happened to stumble into Willard Fremont’s personal free-fire zone had not been an agent of the United States Postal Service trying to deliver a registered letter from Internal Revenue.

  For his troubles he got himself duly fired upon—neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers, et cetera, et cetera, but a couple of 30-30 rounds zipping by their earlobes will

  the echelon vendetta | 211

  surely slow them down a tad. The postie hit the dirt face-first and belly-crawled the quarter mile back to hi
s truck. Where, in a high-pitched shriek, he radioed out for the cavalry.

  After that, as these things do, one thing led to another: bullhorns, Black Hawk choppers, the media frenzy pouring kerosene on Willard Fremont’s burning resentments. The final federal ultimatum truncated by a burst of buckshot that took out the windshield of an FBI Hummer, the FBI’s prompt reply, consisting mainly of tear gas and stun grenades, the collateral damage, including three dead dogs, a raccoon with an intermittent nosebleed, and any number of deafened bald eagles. In due course Willard Fremont was dragged from his smoldering lair, howling imprecations, wild-eyed, shirtless, all of which was very satisfying to the news crews, who filed their video by Wi-Fi and then broke for drinks at the Muzzleloader Lounge in nearby Sandpoint.

  Once safely ensconced in the Hayden Lake Federal Holding Center—a squat limestone fortress surrounded by twenty-foot-tall steel fencing that was now filling up the forward windshield of Dalton’s tan Crown Victoria—Willard Fremont had, like the turtle, found his voice at last, and was telling every turnkey and yard bull stupid enough to adjust his gun belt anywhere near Fremont’s cage that he knew where every damn official secret since the Taft administration was buried and he by Thundering Jesus was going to lead the international media right straight to the Elephant’s Graveyard of the Black Arts if somebody didn’t call Langley and tell whoever answered that Willard Buckhorn Fremont was calling for Jack Stallworth.

  The Crown Vic rolled to a stop in front of the steel gates. No word of tearful parting from his chauffeur; as a matter of fact the old marshal hadn’t uttered a single phoneme—other than the ones required to burp up gas—during the entire trip.

  The gates rolled back, the Crown Victoria rumbled into the com

  212 | david stone

  pound, and the driver showed the uniformed guard his ID, then

  jerked his nicotine-stained thumb backward in Dalton’s direction.

  “This here’s the spook from D.C.” was all he said.

  The guard, wearing those eternal bug-eye glasses that make them all look like steroidal locusts, grunted a reply and said not very much at all to Dalton. Nor did he find anything further to add as he led him through the sliding bulletproof glass and down an echoing confusion of cement-block walls painted in the official federal hues of Baby Shit Yellow and Cancerous Kidney Green, the two of them arriving finally outside a steel door painted forest green, where the guard ported his bull-pup Heckler and stuck a miniature walkietalkie deep into his own ear: “Sector niner one zero. We’re here.”