The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

  “Describe it for me.”

  “Well, just a mad scrawl, but there’s a daisy, or some kind of flower, over a crescent moon and what looks like a cross. Now that I look at it, I guess they’re a lot like that earring you were talking about earlier, the silver earring?”

  “Do you actually have these letters?”

  “I do. I have the whole stack right here. The tone of these letters is very odd. They start out calm, polite, reasonable, and then they gradually go totally mad. Spelling deteriorates. He starts writing in big block capitals. Then these drawings start to appear. By the last one, that’s all there is. Scrawls. Doodles. I’d say the guy was slowly going mad. If I had been getting letters like this, I’d have called in the FBI.”

  “Did anybody?” “I guess it got referred back to our own security people here, be

  cause somebody in HR sent Gibson’s file over to the Vicar.” “Cather? Cather got a bullet?” “Yes. Why?”

  Stallworth’s office, last Saturday morning. Jack and Dalton. “You know where this Pinto guy is right now?” “No. I was in the middle of that when Cather shut me down.”

  “Micah, you still there?” “Yes, Sally. Sorry. Anything come back from Cather?”

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  “Not on paper. But then if the Vicar’s unit took care of it, it wouldn’t exactly make the Times, would it?” “Christ, I don’t want to go poking around in Cather’s crypt.”

  But you are, aren’t you, Micah?

  “Me neither, sweetie.” “So what you’re saying is—” “I think we can agree that Gibson’s an unstable freakazoid who

  was in England and Italy around the time you and Porter were there.

  I mean, we can’t prove Italy, but England’s right across the channel.” “Any sign that he crossed?” “If he did, he didn’t do it as Pershing Gibson.” “How else would he clear the borders?” “There are no borders. There’s the EU. And he’s a CIA-trained

  field man. That’s what you guys do. Frankly, I’m a little surprised he used his own passport to get into England in the first place. Micah, can I ask you a question?”

  “I’m holding my breath.” “Are you going to go over to Greybull and take this guy on?” “Yes.” “Alone?” “No. I’ve got Willard the Bold, my trusty sidekick.” “Great. Where’s Pal the Wonder Dog?” “He called in sick. Did we hear from Stallworth?” “No. But the day’s not over yet. Where are you now?” “Coming in to Billings.” “How did it go in Butte?” “It was ugly.” “How’s Willard doing?” “Better than expected.” He glanced over at Fremont, who was staring straight ahead, un

  seeing, his mind back in that hospital room in Butte. “Micah, if you’re going to Greybull, will you let me call in some

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  reinforcements? Nicky Baum and Delroy Suarez are in Lawrence, Kansas. They can get on a jet and meet you in Greybull. I checked, there’s an airport there. Long enough to land one of our Gulf-streams.”

  “You talked to them?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What are they doing in Kansas?”

  “Taking a course. At the university there.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Motifs of Moral Decay in the American Espionage Novel.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “I wish I were.”

  “I sure don’t want to drag them away from that. But it’s nice to know they’re close. Have them stand by in case I change my mind.”

  “I’ll do more than that. I’m sending one of the Gulfstreams to Topeka. It’ll be there for Del and Nicky if you want them in a hurry.”

  “Stallworth will freak. That’s very big money.”

  “Jack’s not here. I am.”

  “You watering his plants?”

  “With my very own tears.”

  AROUND NOON, THE SUN high overhead in a cloudless sky, they were rolling southward as the Interstate curved down-country beyond Hardin, and at a little past twelve-thirty they reached the town of Crow Agency. The land around them was open grassland with here and there a few stands of cottonwoods and poplars.

  On their left as they passed Crow Agency the grassy hills rose up into a rounded crest, where a tall stone cairn stood above a long rectangle of golden sweetgrass marked off by a low wrought-iron fence. Scattered down along a falling slope that led into a wandering river

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  valley thick with cottonwoods stood a collection of white marble gravestones, some of them single, most in groups of two or three, while inside the iron fence there were sixty or seventy gravestones gathered into a tight formation.

  A warm wind stirred the tall sweetgrass, moving in wavelike ripples across the low hills and shallow valleys. Both men fell silent as the car raced past this little cemetery where George Armstrong Custer and the men of the Seventh Cavalry had died in less than thirty minutes of savage hand-to-hand fighting against over six thousand Sioux and Cheyenne warriors.

  Fremont craned his neck to take in the battlefield as the car sped southward down the highway, the mounded blue domes and the purple valleys of the Bighorn Mountains becoming more visible along the southwestern horizon. In the end, as the low bank of golden hills dropped out of sight behind them, he turned back with a long sigh.

  “Bad business, that” was all he said.

  “Worse if you were taken alive,” said Dalton, thinking about the charming old Sioux custom known as kakeshya. “You remember what Kipling said?”

  “I do,” said Fremont. “When you’re down and wounded on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up your remains...”

  “Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains...”

  “And go to your God like a soldier.”

  “Amen,” said Dalton.

  Neither man spoke for another fifty miles, each man thinking of what might be waiting for them at Pete Kearney’s cabin high up in the eastern ledges of the Bighorn Mountains. The feeling of moving deeper into history, deeper into the still-surviving remnants of an ancient and unending war between the whites and the Plains Indians, oppressed both men, and they had little to say to each other until they crossed the border into Wyoming. The mood in the car rose

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  once they were well into the lush rolling terrain of the Powder River country, and in a while they turned west off the Interstate, heading west toward the supply town of Dayton, sitting on a big slow bend of the Tongue River, in the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains.

  Fremont directed them to a squat square building, made of cinder blocks, sitting on the western edge of the town. A hand-painted sign over the sagging wooden doors read, incongruously, hanoi jane’s. They parked the car in the meager shade of a dried-out two-hundred-year-old cottonwood and walked up the rickety wooden stairs. Inside the deserted bar, in the dank gloom and the smell of spilled beer and old cigars, they paused to let their eyes adjust to the darkness, and then they crossed the creaking floor of rough hand-sawn planks and sat down at a battered mahogany bar, into the surface of which had been set at least five thousand silver dollars.

  Behind the bar was a tall antique sideboard groaning with dusty liquor bottles. A large stainless-steel cooler clattered and wheezed in a corner, next to a bank of new-looking video poker terminals. Other than the moronic electronic tweedling coming from these machines, and a distant radio scratching out a country-and-western tune, the place was silent. Above the bar fifty different versions of the Vietnam-era Huey chopper, each one made out of a different brand of beer can and strung up on fishing line, turned and bumped lazily in the dusty wind off the street. In an ornate Victorian frame next to the antique sideboard there was a copy of a black-and-white photo of Jane Fonda, wearing a North Vietnamese helmet—badly— and giggling away like a complete horse’s ass in the gunner’s chair of a North Vietnamese antiaircraft piece, a profoundly vapid and arguably treasonous stunt that if pulled by a North Vietnamese woman visiting America during the
same war would have resulted in the immediate slaughter of her entire village.

  After a wait, during which the faint sound of the radio was suddenly cut off, Fremont rapped on the bar top and called out.

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  “Katie, you home?”

  “Hold your water” came a raspy female voice. In a moment a door at the rear of the bar slammed open, propelled by a kick, and a tall, thin woman in a cowboy shirt and black jeans came in carrying a case of Miller High Life. She banged the door shut behind her with a practiced boot heel and crossed over to the bar to set the box down, where, in the better light, they were able to make her out as a strikingly attractive, or rather a strikingly handsome woman. In her deeply seamed, fine-boned, and weathered brown face a pair of clear calm light-blue eyes looked out from a fan of wrinkles, considering Fremont through narrowed eyes.

  “Willard Fremont, in the flesh. You owe me forty-seven dollars and eleven cents.”

  “Katie, I want you to meet a friend of mine. This is Micah Dalton. Micah, allow me to introduce Katie Horn.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Katie, taking his hand in a steely grip and giving it a firm shake before spreading her hands out on the bar top and leaning on her braced forearms in the classic bartender pose.

  “What can I get you gentlemen, assuming that one of you boys can pay off Willard’s tab here first?”

  Dalton went for his wallet, grinning at Fremont, who laid a bony hand on Dalton’s arm and pulled out his own billfold. He extracted a large wad of cash, peeled off a faded fifty, and set it down on the bar top with a degree of smug satisfaction. Katie eyed it with some suspicion, picked it up, and held it under a black light just below the edge of the bar, and then showed them a set of brilliant white teeth as her face creased into a net of deep lines around her eyes.

  “Where’d you get all that cash?” she asked, with some affection.

  “Stole it from my young friend here,” said Fremont, giving voice to Dalton’s unspoken suspicion: Fremont had been dead flat broke when he pulled him out of the Hayden Lake holding center.

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  “Found it in the hall safe,” explained Fremont, “while you was out terrifying those poor unfortunate bees.”

  “The hall safe was locked and armed,” said Dalton.

  “So it was. Katie, my sweet desert rose, I believe I will have a long cold Stella. And my friend’s money is no good here.”

  “That is my money,” said Dalton, smiling at Katie.

  “It pleases my young friend to be jocular, Katie. Ignore him.”

  “He’s too good-looking to ignore,” she said, flirting openly.

  “I’ll have a Stella too,” said Dalton. She collected three from the wheezing old cooler, popped them in a graceful succession of practiced wrist flips, and poured them out with some ceremony in a neat row on the bar top. She set them down on flat cork disks with the phrase “God Created Men and Women but Sam Colt Made Them Equal” printed around the edge. They raised their glasses in mutual salute and set them down again, Dalton eyeing the framed shot of Jane Fonda. Katie followed his glance and grinned.

  “Named the place after her,” she said, a bit redundantly. “She and her husband at the time—that network guy, got close-set beady eyes—”

  “Ted Turner?”

  “They were looking to buy a spread over there near the Wagon Box fight.”

  “You figured naming the place after her would bring in the celebrity trade?” asked Dalton.

  “Hell no. But I figured it would sure keep her away.”

  “Katie’s husband was a chopper pilot in Vietnam,” said Fremont. The “was” needed no elaboration, and no one offered it.

  After a silence, Dalton made a point of admiring the Huey models over the bar, and Katie plucked one down and handed it to him, a large version of the Huey made out of what had at one time been a can of black powder.

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  “You can keep that one,” said Katie, finding much to approve of in Micah Dalton, her appreciation for him blatantly physical. “Maybe it’ll bring you back sooner. What brings you boys to Dayton, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “We were hoping to use your phone,” said Fremont. “We want to go up to see Pete, but we don’t want to just drop in unannounced. He won’t answer his phone unless he knows the caller ID, so we figure if—”

  Katie’s expression became uneasy, even guarded.

  “Pete’s lit out for the Territories, we figure. Nobody’s heard from him in two weeks. I got worried after calling him a few times, drove up to his cabin last Friday, place was deserted, doors locked down, windows shuttered. His truck is gone, and both his dogs too.”

  “When’s the last time you spoke to him directly?”

  But her suspicions had been aroused by the question. “You two don’t look so good. What’s up?”

  “We’re a little concerned—” began Dalton, but she raised a hand to stop him.

  “No offense, Micah, but I don’t know you real well yet. Willard, before you ask me any more about Pete, maybe you can tell me why you two look so damn worried about him?”

  Fremont looked at Dalton, who shrugged and said nothing.

  “We think Pete might be in some kind of trouble. It could be that somebody is looking for him, and we—”

  “The Indian?”

  Their reaction was impossible to miss, and she frowned at them. “Last time I saw Pete he was in here—maybe the second of October— had a couple of drinks, all cooped up in the booth at the back there, sitting with his eye on the door, and he was carrying that big old Ruger of his. He looked like he had a lot on his mind. I left him alone for a time, till the place emptied out, and then I sat down to have a beer with him. We talked about this and that and then he asks

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  me if I had seen anybody new in Dayton, was anybody asking for him? Nobody was and I told him so, but this didn’t seem to settle him. I asked him what kind of trouble he was in and he said it was no big thing but if I happened to see a big man, looked like an Indian, with long gray hair down to his shoulders and lots of Navajo silver on him, well he’d appreciate it if I were to give him a call up there in his cabin. Last time I talked to him, and that was”—she glanced at a calendar behind the bar—“that was thirteen days ago now. I called him a few times since but never got an answer. Left messages but he never picked up.”

  Fremont’s face had been closing down during this report, and Dal-ton’s passive expression did not hide his growing concern from her.

  “Okay, I said my piece. How about you two fill me in?”

  Fremont opened his mouth to speak but Dalton cut in.

  “You know anything about Pete’s past, Katie?”

  “I know he did government work. He never went into details. We don’t push people on their past around here. It’s not polite.”

  “It’s possible that someone from Pete’s working years has gone off the rails and it may be that he’s out looking for him. This man would be tall, well built, in his late seventies, a man who’s seen a lot of outdoor work, but he wouldn’t necessarily look like an Indian. He might look like retired military. Have you seen anyone like that?”

  “Without you narrow it down a bit, you just described half the old men in the Powder River country. But we know most of them. Wyoming’s only got one person for every five hundred square miles, so strangers get noticed. I talked to some of Pete’s friends around here, and he asked them the same favor, to let them know if they saw anybody like the man he described to me. Same man you described. But nobody has seen him. Just what is it you do for a living, Micah?”

  “I’m with the government.”

  “So’s my mailman. You look military, even though you got all that long lovely blond hair just like Jennifer Aniston. There’s some-

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  thing hard about you, and I know Willard here’s got a lot more sand than he wants you
to think he has. Also you’re both wearing sidearms and you look damned worried. So if it’s all right with you I think I’d like a better answer.”

  “I think you’ve got all the information you need.”

  Katie shook her head, as if Dalton’s answer had tipped a scale. She pushed herself off the bar, reached down under it, and came up with a gleaming Winchester carbine.

  “Yeah. I expect I do. Come on, help me lock up.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Fremont.

  “With you two. Up to Pete’s place.”

  “Sorry. There’s no way you’re coming with us,” said Dalton.

  “I’m not?” she said, smiling thinly at him. “Tell you what. You two go on out to your government car out there and get a head start while I call up a couple of Pete’s friends, and then we’ll see just how far up the highway you get without me. How’s that sound?”

  AT HER STRONG INSISTENCE, they took Katie’s sixty-two Lincoln Continental convertible, which had once been gleaming black and which had probably come out of Dearborn with a front windshield that did not have an unexplained large-caliber bullet hole through the passenger side. Katie was at the wheel, Dalton next to her, with Fremont rather grudgingly installed in the backseat, Katie wheeling the huge machine expertly through the long sweeping curves of the two-lane blacktop that led upward into the Bighorns.

  The road climbed, in a series of switchbacks and narrowing hairpins, past the tumbling waterfall that was the source of the Tongue River, past a valley strewn with limestone obelisks called the Fallen City, but climbing, always climbing, a rise of over six thousand feet above the sunlit valleys that fell precipitously away below them.

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  Dalton, trying to appear calm while Katie raced around a curve with a drop on his side of a thousand feet, stared back over the shrinking landscape of the Powder River country and realized that a thin greenish tint of uneven land at the farthest reaches of the eastern horizon could very well be South Dakota.

  The engine was laboring and the heat gauge was bumping against the red line when she made a hard right turn at a sharply inclined gravel road and headed up an impossible grade, a grade intended for horses, and sure-footed horses at that.