The Echelon Vendetta (27 page)
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“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.”
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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.”
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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
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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
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surely slow them down a tad. The postie hit the dirt face-first and belly-crawled the quarter mile back to his 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
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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.”
“Roger that, niner one zero” came the munchkin-voiced response, and the steel door went up with a joyless noise, revealing a set of lime-green bars opening onto a steel-walled room—windowless— a stainless-steel table, two sheet-metal chairs on either side of the table, and the person of one Willard Fremont, clad in bright-pink paper overalls and wearing what looked like lime-green shower flip-flops.
Willard’s head was down, his balding crown reflecting the light from a single overhead bulb in a wire guard, and he appeared to be reading a book from which the spine had been ripped.
“How long you want?”
“Give me an hour.”
The guard closed the steel door behind Dalton and stalked away up the long dark hall. Willard never looked up from his book as Dalton came across the floor.
“Reading,” he said. “Screw off.”
Dalton tried to pull the chair out from the table, realized it was bolted down, and sat down opposite Fremont, folding his arms across his chest.
