by David Stone
“Like what? Assassination?”
“No. Hell no. At least not intentionally. This was years before September eleventh. We lost some people accidentally—foul-ups, civilians wandering into a running op—but nothing on purpose. Mainly we set up complicated stings, false networks, suckered the target into showing his play, and then we took him down hard. Al Runciman and I also did detailed surveillance, basic financial workups, got the domestic life of the target figured out, searched out the background of the company. We managed the gear, the electronics; whatever needed to be specially built, we’d fabricate it ourselves. It was a great outfit, like the special-effects unit on a film crew. We had a string of major successes. One way or another, the leak would get plugged, the technical exchange derailed. Sometimes the people trying to get the prohibited technology out would never even know where it was really going—the end user—or why the deal never got done.”
“And if that failed?”
Fremont shrugged. “Like I said. We were the remedial arm. We’d set them up for the FBI, or for the local cops, and put them out of business entirely, find some way to frame them on other charges. Used the IRS sometimes, the way they got Capone. Most times the targets would never know why they were set up—the real reason, I mean. But we did what was necessary. Get them in prison if we could, but anyway stop them from selling critical technology to our enemies. Whoever was involved. Directly, culpably involved, I
the echelon vendetta | 253
mean. Root and branch, like cancer surgery. However far down it
went, we sliced it out.”
“By any means necessary? Short of outright murder?”
“Damn right,” said Fremont, his face hardening. “And I’d do it again tomorrow. This is a great nation. It deserves to be defended. I have nothing to apologize for. I’d still be doing it if ...if I could.”
“I didn’t think you needed to apologize. And I agree with you. How many guys were in your unit?”
“Globally, I have no idea. Might have been a hundred separate units around the world, doing the same kind of work for the NSA. Our guys, our unit, we were six guys, and we were mainly responsible for the Southwest. We handled anything that came up from Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado. We were based in Lordsburg mainly, but we went anywhere we had to go. We were a tight crew too, all real good guys. Al Runciman you heard about. And Milo Tillman, who we lost in the high desert in ninety-seven—”
“The guy you think might still be alive. Drunk in Tularosa.”
“Yeah,” said Fremont, looking a little uncertain.
“Who else?”
“Crucio Churriga. But you can write him off.”
“Why?”
“Crucio’s dying of cancer. Got it from sticking that Skoal tobacco snuff under his lip. He’s in a ...what do they call it? Where you go to die and they give you painkillers and aromatherapy massages and shit but you better not adopt a kitten or buy any green bananas?”
This took awhile to decode. “You mean palliative care?”
“Yeah. That’s it. Palliative care, last I heard, in a clinic in Butte— just down the Interstate from us. There’s not much point in going to see him, though. He can’t even talk. They took most of his lower jaw off. And he’s in a kind of self-induced coma most of the time.
254 | david stone
They got him on one of those computerized drip things so he can control the amount of morphine he’s getting. So he takes all he can handle. Which is funny, since Crucio was a major doper when we were in the unit. Me and Crucio, we used to...”
Fremont’s voice trailed off and he looked down at his coffee cup, his eyes hooded. Dalton didn’t push it.
“Anyway, then there’s Pershing Gibson, named after the general. He was our shooter, our main guy with weapons. Big guy, over six feet, very strong, an ex-Marine. Sorta scary. We used to call him Moot, on account of him always saying that something was a moot point.”
“A shooter? A long-range sniper?”
Fremont, anticipating the drift, shook his head. “No way. Moot’s no back-shooter. If he wanted me dead, it’d be easier to invite me to his ranch in the Bighorn Valley, bust my skull with a rock. He’s got a spread out there, right next to the Jim Bridger Trail, high desert so flat you can watch your dog run away for three days, Rockies a hundred miles off in the west, the Bighorns fifty miles in the northeast. Got a pack of feral dogs who howl down the blood moon if they smell a live man walking. Moot’s safe enough, I guess.”
“Moot Gibson? Like Hoot Gibson, back in the twenties?”
“Yeah. Cute, huh?”
“And he’s still alive?”
“So far. He retired from active duty with our unit seven years ago. He’s real hard to reach, hates technology, went deep into this kind of Indian spirit stuff years back, stays far away from people. Very tough, very vengeful guy. Scary if you got him real pissed off. Good with guns, good with a knife. I figure, of all of us, Moot’d be the hardest guy to kill.”
“Al Runciman, dead in Mountain Home. You. Crucio Churriga— dying of cancer in Butte. Milo Tillman, who’s been missing since...?”
“Ninety-seven. Drove into a snowstorm and never came out.”
the echelon vendetta | 255
“Milo Tillman, and this Moot Gibson guy. That’s five.”
“Last unit guy is Pete Kearney. Also retired. Got a place not all that far from Moot’s ranch, only on the eastern edge of the Bighorns. A little cabin on an outcrop overlooking Ranchester, right where the Tongue runs down into the Powder River country south of Sheridan. Got a cliff at his back and a view out his front window that goes all the way to South Dakota. Not even your friend Porter could sneak up on him. Pete’s family goes way back down there. His great-grandfather was Phil Kearney, the cavalry general. From the porch of his cabin Pete can see the site of his great-grandfather’s fort, Fort Phil Kearney, right down there by the Bozeman Trail. Pete was our wrangler. Anything to do with horses, he’s your man. He’s my age now, but in great shape. What they call a real range cowboy. A hardhanded man. Know what I mean?”
Dalton did. He thought of the scene in Joanne Naumann’s bathroom. That was range work, something done by a range cowboy. On the other hand, fifty thousand cowboys lived within five hundred miles of this safe house in Missoula.
“And these guys—Moot Gibson, Crucio Churriga, Pete Kearney— they’re all still alive?”
“I haven’t talked to Pete or Crucio in weeks, but if something had happened to either of them, I’m pretty sure I would have heard. Crucio’s got all the nurses charmed in his ward and one of them woulda called me. And Pete, he’s no hermit, not like Moot. He’s got lots of friends in Ranchester and Dayton. Somebody would check on him. Far as Moot’s concerned, I know he’s still alive because he’s still using his ATM card.”
“His ATM card? How do you know that?”
“Moot used to have a much bigger ranch, out there near Hardin, a ways past Billings, a real sweet spread. Took his retirement in one go and poured every dollar he had into this horse-breeding operation. Down in Custer country, near where the massacre happened,
256 | david stone
but Moot went bankrupt two years ago, after that big drought. Could have stayed on his feet, the creditors were all willing, but the IRS forced him into selling everything. Moot took it pretty hard— he truly loved his horses, and most of them went to slaughter. He took it especially hard after all that ‘service to his country’ stuff at his retirement party. We’d used the IRS to break a target so many times that he saw the IRS as just another branch of the CIA. He even asked the Agency to help him out with the IRS, and they did try, but there was no calling those dogs off. They went for his blood and by God didn’t they get it, too. Ruined him.”
It struck Dalton that Moot’s grudge against the IRS could, in a bloody-minded man, easily expand into a generalized rage. “But he still has a place in the Bighorn Valley, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah. I he
lped him out there. I been bankrupt myself, so I knew how to work it out that you got to hide some of your assets, whatever you could keep from the feds. I put Moot onto a guy named Dick Poundmaker, he was my bankruptcy trustee, half-Yakima Indian and crookeder than a sink trap. Dick had worked out this cheat system for probably a hundred of his clients. Dick gets hired as the guy’s trustee, and the guy—in this case Moot—promises Dick a cut of every thing he’s got left, medical disability checks, welfare, investment property, whatever the guy has managed to hide. Since Dick’s acting in the name of the guy’s creditors—in Moot’s case the IRS— he sends the creditors a couple bucks to keep them happy, puts the principal into one of a whole bunch of different bank accounts he’s got set up under his own name in Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, Seattle, all over the Northwestern seaboard. Dick’s client gets an ATM card linked to one of these accounts, and he takes out his cash whenever he needs it. If it weren’t for Dick Poundmaker, Moot wouldn’t even have his little old ranch in the Bighorn Valley. I talked to Dick when I was in the holding pen in Hayden Lake and he said Moot was still drawing cash money out his special account as of last Friday.”
the echelon vendetta | 257
They fell into a thoughtful silence, considering the implications while Fremont brewed another pot of coffee. He set a full cup down in front of Micah, took his chair, and sat for a while, looking at the lines and creases in Micah’s face. The guy was older than he looked, or he was carrying some damn ugly memories. Either way, Fremont liked him.
“How you feeling? Seen your friend Porter, at all?” “No. Not a glimmer.” Fremont picked his coffee up, leaned into the creaking old ladder
back, tilted it up on its rear legs. It groaned under his weight but Fremont ignored it, grinning at Dalton over the rim of his cup. “Guess I oughta go into the exorcism business.”
“Maybe you should.” “Mind if I ask you a question?” “Ask me and I’ll tell you.” “You unnaturally prone to being haunted, at all?” “No. First time.” “You do understand the guy wasn’t real, don’t you?” “Yes, Willard. I do.” “Why do you think he went away?” “No idea. They say you can talk sense to a schizophrenic, if he
has a willing mind. And I was. God knows I need that problem gone.” “Don’t get mad if I ask if you do, ah, recreational drugs?” he
asked, his manner tentative. “Not unless we’re including champagne.” “Because in my troubled youth, I dabbled in that sort of thing.” “Seeking the path to enlightenment?” “That too, of course. But mainly to score with chicks.” “Sex can lead a man to enlightenment, or so I’m told.” “Well I can’t say the drugs improved my sex life much, but they
sure enlightened the hell out of my wallet. Reason I went bankrupt, in the end. But what I took, especially the hallucinators, acid, mush
258 | david stone
rooms, crystal—hell, even now, years and years later, I still get these
flashbacks. Your ghost, maybe it’s a flashback, a vision, like?” “No idea, but I think the same drug may have killed Porter.” “You said he committed suicide?” “It looked that way at the time.” “And he did it with a hat pin?” “I was just heating him up. Actually, it was real ugly.” “How ugly?” “You don’t want to know.” “Sure I do. I can take ugly.” Dalton told him. “Damn. That is ugly.” “Yes. It is.” “But now you’re not so sure? That it was a suicide?” “No. I have reason to believe that he was exposed to this drug.
The same drug I was exposed to, during my last job.” “What kind of drug was it?” “We didn’t know at the time. We sent it in to the Hazmat unit to
have it analyzed. It came back as a salvia derivative.” “Salvia? Never heard of it. And I know my mood-altering substances, my friend. No one knows ’em better.”
“Well, we think there was more to the mix than just salvia. But one of the effects of salvia is to effectively short out the cortex, and many times the effect is to induce a major psychotic break. The effects are instantaneous. I had a small packet of it explode in my face—”
“What? Like a booby trap?” “Yeah. It was inside a terra-cotta cylinder. Spinning. The noise it
was making was a lot like the sound we heard last night.” “Like a swarm of bees?” “Yes. Exactly. Only much louder, and with a strong underlying
rhythm to it.” “And the sound was coming from this spinning thing?”
the echelon vendetta | 259
“Yes. The cylinder turned on a big twisted sinew, wound up like a coiled spring, as thick as my wrist. The cylinder got shattered but the Hazmat boys rebuilt it, figured out how it would work. If it was set up in a strong wind, the holes and slits cut into the cylinder would act like a primitive flute. Out would come this sound—”
“Funny. What you’re describing, the materials involved, they sound prehistoric, but the mechanism, the idea of creating sound that way, that’s real advanced.”
“The Egyptians had primitive electric batteries. The Greeks knew what atoms were. The Vikings found the New World five hundred years before Columbus, and they did it without a compass. I think this cylinder started out as some kind of musical instrument. When you think of it, the sound it makes is a lot like throat singing.”
“You mean like the Indians? The Plains Indians?”
“Yeah. Exactly like that,” said Dalton, thinking of Pinto.
“Jesus. Fascinating stuff. I’d love to hear one of these things.”
“I hope I never hear it again.”
“Who made this thing?”
“I don’t know who cast it. I’m pretty sure that the guy who used it on me was a Comanche Indian from Timpas, Colorado.”
“Timpas, yeah. That’s Comanche country, all right. I knew a lot of Apaches when Al and Moot and the rest of us were working out of Lordsburg. Never met any Comanches, though. A touchy folk, the Apaches around Lordsburg. Come to think of it, drugs were a big part of their religious life down there. Drugs and chanting.. . .” Fremont trailed off into silence.
“Man. Goyathlay’s Throat. That’s what this sounds like. Goyath-lay’s Throat. You ever hear of the Native American Church?”
“Of course,” said Dalton. “It’s a big deal in the Southwest. Supposed to be over a quarter million members, all of them either Apache or Kiowa or Comanche. Started down in Central America about three thousand years ago.”
260 | david stone
“That’s right. Grew out of a thing called the Peyote Cult. For them, Peyote was a god, and the visions you had were supposed to clean your spirit, purge you of your sins. Show you the way to truth. Like I said, I had...an interest ...in the drug culture and some of the guys I knew were into all this Carlos Castaneda stuff. Remember him?”
“Yeah. Wrote a couple of books about Don Juan, he was supposed to be this Yaqui brujo, a sorcerer, who got Castaneda turned on to the Peyote Cult way back in the fifties. Pretty loopy stuff.”
“That’s the guy. Moot Gibson was really into Castaneda’s books, and he used to talk about this secret peyote ritual—a purification ritual. It involved a lot of prayers. Chanting. They used this kind of long clay tube, and he called this tube Goyathlay’s Throat. When Moot retired he got real involved in this spirit cult, adopted some Indian name, went completely native. He used to talk about Goyathlay all the time.”
“Goyathlay? Was he a god, something like that?”
“No. Goyathlay was the Bedonkohe Apache name for Geronimo. In Apache the name means ‘one who yawns.’ Geronimo was a big deal in the Native American Church. His spirit was supposed to speak out of this thing called Goyathlay’s Throat. I always figured it was just an expression—Moot and his Apache buddies sitting around chewing peyote and seeing visions of the infinite, like in that old movie, Altered States—but this spinning cylinder you’re talking about, maybe Goyathlay’s Throat was a real thing.”
“It sure as hell was real to me. I grew up in Tucumcari. They were mostly Kiowa around there, and they had these secret religious meetings too. When I was a k
id I tried to sneak into one, almost got my throat cut for it. They used the mescal button, I think, because peyote wasn’t found in those parts. It grows naturally down in northern Mexico, and the ritual required that the singers had to go out and find it themselves. But the Kiowa used to get it by mail order.”
the echelon vendetta | 261
“Mail order? Like from Sears?”
“No. From mescal growers. But it was legal to mail it—”
Dalton broke off suddenly, remembering the fragment of burned paper that the Langley techs had examined, the return address of Timpas. Was somebody named Horsecoat mailing the ingredients of Sweetwater’s drug to Venice?
“Anyway, from what I remember about their beliefs, the Native American Church was all about finding peace, with harmony and the purification of the spirit. I do admit I’d like to pay a call to the Horsecoat clan in Timpas and ask them how they happen to be mailing letters to a guy in Venice, Italy, calling himself Sweetwater.”
Fremont’s face changed, his features going slack. He looked up at Dalton with a narrow, pinched expression, a wary, hostile look. “Sweetwater? Where’d you get the name Sweetwater?”
Dalton leaned back and studied Fremont’s face.
“I may be a dried-out drunk,” said Fremont, standing up and bracing himself, “but I damn well won’t be handled.”
There was no sign that Fremont’s anger was in any way forced, and no indication that he was trying to hide anything. His reaction was straight and simple and it had the unmistakable ring of truth.
“Actually, I’ve been waiting for you to bring it up.”
“Me? Why?”
“Because I think there might a connection between this guy calling himself Sweetwater and what’s been happening to your unit.”
Fremont, his anger subsiding a little, sat back down in the chair and stared at the cup in his hand. After a time, he set the cup down.