by David Stone
He leaned back, breathing hard, and considered the flat ceiling above him. Fremont said the roof was steel plate, and flat to catch the rainwater. As dangerous as that 50 was, there was still only one of them out there, which meant that if he could get out by the defilade side and climb onto the roof, he could at least see where the rounds were coming from, and with the Remington he had a fighting chance of taking out the shooter.
It took him three minutes to get Irene into the root cellar and himself up onto the roof. He belly-crawled over to the western side and raised his head to look over the shallow concrete lip.
He got a brief glimpse of the flat plain in front of him, glowing in the starlight, the black mountains a sawtooth line against the stars, a soft wind playing in the brush.
He saw a flicker of bright white light at the top of a shallow defile about three hundred yards out. He cradled the Remington and rolled to his right as a heavy round smacked into the ledge, blasting out a hole the size of a rain bucket.
He set himself up, moving fast, laid the Remington on the lip, got the crosshairs centered on that distant point, and fired off three quick rounds, working the bolt, feeling the rifle kick, sighting in again.
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The rounds kicked up bits of stone and gravel in a tight circle around the spot where he had seen the muzzle flash.
Ten yards to the left of this spot he saw another white flare.
Moot had rolled away as soon as he had fired but it had taken him a few extra seconds to steady that oversized gun. The incoming round blew up a section of concrete about a foot from Dalton’s head. The distant rumble of the rifle shot rolled across the plain.
Then silence again.
The wind sighing in the brush, and Irene howling below.
No more rounds from Moot’s position, and therefore no returning fire from Dalton.
Given the tactical situation, the terrain, the absence of suppressing fire, Moot could not close in for a kill without exposing himself, could not fire without revealing his location, and could not stay where he was for long, since he had every reason to believe that Dalton would call for reinforcements.
In combat, a defender has the advantage, so long as he has food and water, morale, and ammunition. To attack requires three men for every single defender. Similar but not identical tactical problems now confronted Dalton.
Stalemate.
TIME PASSED.
The last glow of sundown faded away behind the Rockies. No more rounds came streaking in. No more cracks of distant thunder rumbled across the Bighorn Valley. Dalton stayed in place until it was completely dark, and then he climbed down off the roof and went in to comfort Irene, who had not ceased to howl since the firing had begun.
He showed a target, deliberately, to draw fire, if fire was to come,
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but in his heart he knew that Moot had pulled out a long time ago, probably a half hour after their final exchange of fire.
They came out of the house like the last two survivors of a plague, glad to be alive, afraid of what they would see, ashamed to be living among so many undeserving dead.
Irene, who seemed to be more of an optimist than Dalton, trotted over to Fremont’s crumpled body and began to lick his upturned face.
If Fremont had been alive when he hit the ground, Dalton thought, then the last thing he would have seen was that fading sunlight high up in that deep violet sky. The idea gave him some comfort, although it in no way masked his pervading sense of complete and utter failure, his bitter realization that he had been outthought, outfought, outmaneuvered, and that he had not only failed in his original mission, which was to keep Willard Fremont alive, but that he had managed to contrive the senseless and pointless death of two more good men at the same time.
Delroy Suarez was lying on his left side, a heap of distorted limbs in a lake of thickening blood, just to the right of the door. The wall had been spattered with what had been inside his chest and neck when the enormous round plowed through faster than the speed of sound. He reached out and touched Suarez on the shoulder.
Suarez was still blood-warm, which meant that he had probably died about an hour after he was hit, which was quite an achievement for a man who had just taken a .50-caliber round.
Behind him Irene lifted her head to the sky and began to howl at the gliding crescent moon. She was still howling when Dalton threw the first shovelful of gravel onto Willard Fremont’s upturned, staring face a long time later.
He buried Fremont and Suarez together, under the shade of the creosote shrub, and while he was doing it he took some grim satis
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faction in the three solid hours of brute suffering it required to open the stony ground deep enough and wide enough to keep the two men from being dug up and defiled by coyotes and crows, or worse.
He did not put up a marker, and he disguised the graves as well as he could. If he lived through the rest of the week, he’d know the place when he came back.
If he didn’t, he wanted to keep them safe from Moot Gibson.
After a rest, and a brief search, he found Nicky Baum’s body under a stunted sage about twenty feet away from his sniper position.
His throat had not been cut.
He had been shot in the back of the head from some distance away, a single tiny entrance wound just where the spine meets the brainstem. No exit wound.
Probably a silenced subsonic single-shot long-barreled .22 pistol (the Agency favored the Ruger Mark 2) firing a hollow-point round, a classic covert-ops weapon. Although Dalton scoured the area in a fifty-yard radius, he never found a piece of brass.
It took a long time to bury Nicky Baum where he lay.
The Barrett was gone. There were some slight scuff marks in the soil, but Dalton was no tracker. All he could say for sure was the shooter had been alone, he was a very big man, he moved lightly, he wore cowboy boots, and the heel on the left boot was worn down on the outward side, which meant the man had an ankle problem and his gait was slightly pronated.
The same pronated left heel mark that Captain Bo Cutler of the Montana Highway Patrol had seen in the hillside outside Crucio Churriga’s window in Butte last Saturday.
He followed the tracks backward to a hide about two hundred yards from Baum’s body, a hollowed-out trough roughly the size of a big man. Cut sage branches had been set aside, and there were signs—including human scat, a urine-scented shrub, ashes from a
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cigarillo, and the traces of a small grain meal eaten cold—that told him the man had been lying in this position for two, perhaps three days.
In precisely the right position to counter the tactical plan that Dalton had laid out. Moot had seen it all coming: the placement of a long-range sniper in a spot where he would be firing out of the sun, the slow infiltration required to put two more men in blocking positions, and of course the need for an entry team to make the final assault.
It showed a professional grasp of small-unit tactics, and it also showed cold calculation; the Sterno cans in the truck and the fireplace, to fool overhead sensors, either satellite or light plane or a rifle-mounted infrared scope: drawing them in, setting them up.
Dalton stood looking down at this shallow gravelike depression and thought about what kind of man would lie in such terrible ground, tormented by every crawling thing, baking in the sun and freezing in the long starry night, cradling his covert .22 and feeding himself on crazy hate. What would drive such a man, what he would not expect, how he might be killed. The man’s tracks faded into hardpan a few yards to the west, in the general direction of Meeteetse. There was no point in trailing him in the dark. Dalton would just wander into a trap and die like a hapless fool. And although he felt that this would only be what he deserved, he now wanted to kill Moot Gibson far more than he wanted to assuage his guilt at still being alive.
Dalton policed up the spent Barrett casings, collected Baum’s Beretta
and his ID and what few personal effects he had brought to Wyoming, added them to his expanding collection of similar relics of the recent dead in the sack, picked up the framed drawing, shouldered the Remington, and walked away in the direction of the Grey-bull River.
Irene watched him go for about fifteen minutes, until he was lit
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tle better than a darker shadow on a dark land. Then she looked around at the place, shook herself violently, and trotted off in the same direction. Irene was walking slowly behind him, her head down and her tail lowered, when Dalton reached the Greybull River. The car was still there. So were the keys. He had no idea why this should be so. He decided it was obvious that he was intended to live, and to go where he was led, for reasons that seemed right and fitting to Pershing “Moot” Gibson. This is called “hubris,” after the Greek, and it is often fatal.
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wednesday, october 17 greybull motel greybull, wyoming 8 a.m. local time
he phone woke him from a dreamless sleep, a black coma, jerking him upward from the blessed dark into a sun-filled motel room with a bilious shag rug and an ancient Admiral television put high up out of harm’s way on a rusted metal shelf bolted to a dun-colored concrete wall. He rolled over a large shapeless breathing mound as he picked up the handset and sat on the side of the bed, staring dully out through the blinds at a pale, winter-colored sun.
“Dalton here,” he croaked. “Micah. It’s Sally.” “Hey . . . Sally.” Irene pushed her blood-matted shark-shaped head out from un
der the lime-green comforter, licked her lips, and whimpered at him. “Is someone there with you?” “Yes. Her name’s Irene.” “Oh, Micah...”
“She’s a wolf-shepherd cross. She didn’t want to stay out at Moot’s place. I guess she’s sided with me. Have you talked to Jack?”
“No, and I haven’t heard from him since the day you left for Idaho. I’m beginning to worry about him. I’ve tried his beeper, his cell, I even called his ex-wife. Did you know her name is Peach? She is not at all a peach, by the way. I’m thinking I should bring in Security—”
“Don’t do that. Not yet.”
“Why?”
“Because either Jack or Deacon Cather is playing some kind of game here. I know it. Jack set me up with Willard Fremont and now he’s holed up somewhere hoping I’ll take care of the problem.”
“You’re not saying that Jack has gone off the reservation?”
“No. But he’s running me somehow. Who’s in our loop on this?”
“Nobody. Other than Losses. For now...”
There was a long taut silence while she gathered her attention and forced her tears down. There would be grieving and recriminations and consequences—but not yet. Not quite yet.
“Well...sorry I’m snuffling ...this is so hard. We haven’t told the families yet. Nicky Baum was separated from his wife. Del’s parents are in Tuscany right now, but we’re not going to tell them what happened until we can figure out what did happen. Officially, I mean. This will all go to Losses and there’ll be a hearing on it. Fremont was a bolt-on but Nicky and Del were fresh out of the Snake Eaters, and what happened to them will end up going all the way to the director of operations. But not yet, not as long as it’s still an ongoing action. I told the duty desk that Jack Stallworth was running this from the road. I have no idea why. I guess I wanted you to have a free hand.”
Dalton was grateful that Sally had not added the obvious “for all the good you’ve done with it.”
“So this is still between you and me?”
“And Jack, when I reach him. Yes. Just the three of us.”
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“Do you still have those letters that Gibson wrote?” “Yes. I do. They’re right here.” “Can you dig them out for me?” “Sure ...just a minute...okay. Got it.” “In the final letter, you said Gibson was basically sending these
incoherent scrawls, but you also said there were phrases. Names. Can
you read them off for me?” “I can fax the whole thing, if you want.” Dalton looked down at the desk phone, saw a sign for in-house
fax service. “Yes, fax it to me here. You have the number. In the mean
time, can you look up something for me?” “Sure.” “It’s a phrase. Write it down. ‘To get the answer, you must sur
vive the question.’ Got that?” “I do. What is it? Sounds like the Spanish Inquisition. You know, getting put to the question?”
“Yes. It does. Can you run it by someone in the geopolitical section? One of their cultural analysts? Someone with a good background in Native American religious beliefs?”
“Sure. I think Zoë Pontefract is in today. Vassar class of ninety-
seven. She did her postdoctorate in Meso-American Studies.” “Perfect. Send her the drawing too.” “I will. And I’ll fax the letter right now. Where will you be?” “Here for another half hour. I have to shave, get some breakfast,
figure out what to do with this dog here.”
Irene, hearing the tone if not the reference to her, blinked at him expectantly, as if she understood. Or maybe she just knew what was usually meant by the word “breakfast.”
“Then what? Because I hope you’re not going—”
“Not directly at him, no. I need to find out what’s in his head. What he’s doing makes perfect sense to him, the way it does to most people who are insane. Killing Fremont, Runciman, what he did to
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Pete Kearney and Crucio Churriga, probably the murder of Milo Tillman, all these acts have been highly organized, not the work of a disorganized schizophrenic. There’s a map in his head. I want to be able to read it. If I can, then the next time we run into each other, I’ll be there first, waiting for him.”
“Why alone?”
“Because Gibson wants me alive. He’ll kill everyone else.”
“Why does he want you alive?”
Dalton had a brief flash of Pete Kearney’s ruined face, the sockets of his eyes seething with squirming life, the walls of his cabin crawling with bloated flies in all the colors of spilled gasoline.
“I’ll make it a point to ask him. Send the fax, Sally.”
IT ARRIVED AT THE front desk of the Greybull Motel ten minutes later. The young Eastern Shoshone girl running the machine stared at it as she handed it across to Dalton, obviously curious and quite unashamed to show it. She actually craned her neck to look at it as Dalton held it in his hands. Dalton, his attention fixed on the letter, missed her intense interest. Although the letter was exactly as Sally had described it, what had been missing from the description was the violence of the line, the coarse brutality of the letters, the way the words had been carved, gouged into the paper itself.
“That’s a weird drawing,” she said, smiling at him, her broad, dark-skinned face and high cheekbones framing lively gray-green eyes.
Dalton looked up at her and realized that he had been lost in the letter. “Yes. Damn weird.”
“Are you a sociologist?”
“A sociologist? Why do you ask?”
“I’m working for my degree in Bozeman. We had eight units in cultural anthropology and the professor was a sociologist. He looked just like you. He was interested in the Native American Church too.”
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“Was he? And how did you make that connection?”
She touched the center of the fax page.
“That’s the symbol for Peyote, the Messenger. I mean, not the whole drawing, and it isn’t very well done. Normally the roadman— he’s like the priest? He does a very careful drawing of the god Peyote, sometimes in the sand. See there, it’s just a kind of flower-looking thing and it’s supposed to be a button. That’s the button of Peyote. It’s placed on a cross—I guess that’s what this thing here is supposed to mean—but the cross is leaves of sage. The button and the cross of sage are placed on this—the crescent shape here. That’s the altar. The alt
ar is always shaped like a crescent. Then Peyote is covered with a scraping gourd, because Peyote likes the sound. Don’t you already know this stuff ?”
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“No. I had no idea. What about the rest of this? Does it mean anything to you?”
She considered the scrawled words, the lines and arrows, chewing the inside of her plump cheek. She smelled of mint toothpaste and green-apple shampoo and he had a vision of Cora Vasari pushing her hair back from her fine-boned face as she counted his shaky drug-addled pulse in her villa in the Dorsoduro.
“Nope. Although I guess the stuff about answer, and question, and atonement, that would be part of the ritual. That’s at the heart of the Native American Church, the ceremony of atonement.”
“You mean, like a confession?”
“Sort of, but not like in the Catholic Church. In the Peyote ritual the priest hears your sins, each one, and for each one he ties a little knot in a piece of string. One sin, one knot. As many as it takes. The idea is you have to speak your sins out loud, in front of the others at the ceremony. That means you are releasing the evil spirit that lived in that sinful act. The sin goes into the string, and then they burn the string in a bowl. They call it asking the question, and if you answer falsely, then Peyote will punish you. If you want to hear Peyote’s answer, you have to be pure, to have made your confession and to promise atonement, or you will not survive the question. Not like you’ll explode or anything. But you could have a very bad experience under the influence of the drug itself, if Peyote is not pleased with you, or if you are false in your confession. But people usually pass this test—unless they’ve done something very, very evil—because Peyote, the Messenger, is a loving god. Then you’re ready to hear Peyote’s words, his message, as a new soul, someone without sin. But first you must confess and atone.”
“Atonement is different from confession?”
“Oh yes. Confession is simply to declare your sins, whatever they are, no matter how terrible. Atonement means to try to make things