The Echelon Vendetta (28 page)

Dalton read the word twice. “Synapse” was an old Agency code for a major, a critical, security breach, now out of common use but current when Fremont was on the job. He rubbed the faint markings away using the tip of his thumb. Nothing remained but a grubby smear when he put the book back down on the table. In Fremont’s eyes there was a piratical gleam, almost triumphant, and his face was slightly flushed. Dalton stood up and walked over to the bars. He reached through and slammed a hand on the steel door behind it. At once a Judas gate opened, showing one pale-brown eye.

“What?”

“I need to talk to the key holder.”

“Why?”

Fremont was still in his chair, leaning back now, arms folded, his dog-eared copy of
Heart of Darkness
shoved deep under his belt.

“I’m taking this man out of here.”

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“TAKING THIS MAN OUT OF HERE”
required a great deal of urgent and occasionally heated cross talk in the office of the lockdown chief—a pale, scholarly looking man with a shock of white hair and a general air of resignation who was nevertheless capable of summoning up whole armies of argument against moving Willard Fremont so much as an inch, let alone entrusting him to the single custody of one purported CIA agent, no matter how impressive his credentials. It took a callback from Stallworth and a follow-up encrypted e-mail from the Intelligence branch of the FBI to convince the officials to let their prisoner change into civilian gear and shuffle out—still in leg irons and a waist restraint—through the sliding glass doors and into the back of the waiting Crown Victoria.

This time Dalton got in behind the wheel, after telling the old marshal that his vehicle was being commandeered in the name of Homeland Security, which was not well received.

“How the hell do I get home?”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” said Dalton.

Willard Fremont was still chuckling over that when Dalton finally found his way out of the backwoods around Hayden, but he was sound asleep by the time Dalton got them onto Interstate 90 eastbound, Missoula, Montana, a hundred miles ahead of them and the CIA safe house near Anaconda another hundred miles beyond Missoula.

Dalton settled in at a steady 75, wheeling through the climbing passes with the Rockies rising up all around them, the police radio set to scan the state police frequencies. Near the little mining town of Wallace—marooned in a great dark valley between jagged granite peaks that fenced off the sky, their pinnacles dusted with the first of the coming winter snows, the little wooden town itself bisected by the sweeping ramps of the elevated Interstate—Fremont came strug

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gling up from an uneasy sleep as they were climbing the final curve of a twenty-mile-long winding five-thousand-foot ascent that led to the crest of Lookout Pass. Not so much waking, that is, but jerking bolt upright with a gasping cry and sweat on his face despite the chill of the air-conditioning.

For a moment, lost in his nightmare, he stared around the car with real fear in his white face, his breath rasping in his throat.

Dalton, watching him in the rearview, thought at first that the man was having a heart attack, and asked if he was all right, but Fremont shook his head, bending down to rub his forehead with one tightly shackled hand.

“No. I’m okay. Just a bad dream. Comes and goes.”

Dalton noticed that the farther away from Coeur d’Alene they got the less the man played the redneck hillbilly banjo-picker. His accent was flat, slightly nasal—Midwestern, possibly Kansas—but in no way raw or as uneducated as he wished strangers to believe. He left the man to his night terrors, having had enough of his own to know the devastating effect they had.

He kept the pedal down, turned the radio to a classical station, to the music of a piano sonata. The highway revealed itself to them in mile after mile of wide sweeping curves edged by shattered rock faces and pine thickets, the road soaring majestically upward as if on a course laid out by a condor, and the big Ford engine labored painfully as it hauled them up and up into the chill and thinning air.

In a while, soothed by Chopin, Fremont had repaired himself enough to straighten up, and now looked around him in a far more human way, curiosity slowly replacing the fading horror of his dream.

“Where are we?”

“Just coming up on Lookout Pass.”

As he spoke they crested the craggy pass and drove under a large overhanging sign that read welcome to montana.

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This seemed to comfort Fremont. “Good bye, Idaho. I thought you guys would never show up.” “
Somebody
was coming. You made sure of that.” “I needed to get into a safe place,” said Fremont, speaking more

to himself than to Dalton. “That was the only way.” “You made a real production out of it. Why not just come to us?” Fremont sat back and studied Dalton’s face in the mirror. “Yeah? To who, exactly? I needed a fixer, a guy who could roll

with deeply weird shit. That’s why I asked for Stallworth.” “How do you know Stallworth?” “I used to be a mechanic for one of his NSA field teams in Guam.

He’d come into the metal shop now and then, not too proud to talk to the hired help. I kept him in the back of my pocket. I was ever in a spot, I figured I could go to him. Everybody knows Stallworth ran his own field ops when he was with the NSA. He wasn’t even in the CIA until a few years back. Tell you the truth, Stallworth’s the only guy I trust.”

Fremont’s voice trailed away and he said nothing for a long time. He sat slumped in the rear seat, fiddling with his wrist shackles, staring out at the deep pine forest racing by his window.

Finally, “Look, you’re
really
with Jack, right?” “For my sins.” “Tell me something about him. Describe him.” “He’s bald, round, and as mean as a warthog. He’s uglier than

an elephant’s knee but he thinks the office chicks really dig him. Ignorant as a stump about anything but his work.” This description, which would not have delighted Stallworth, did

seem to satisfy Fremont’s lingering suspicions. “Yeah. That’s our Jack. Can I really trust you?” “I don’t know. You can’t trust me to do anything that will com

promise either me or my boss or my unit or my country. You can trust me to keep you safe and reasonably well fed until you make up your mind what you’re gonna do with what’s left of your time.

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Stallworth sent me out here to smooth you out and to see if you had a problem that we could help you with. That’s why I’m here.”

Dalton left out the part about Sweetwater and whether or not Fremont’s worries had anything at all to do with Porter Naumann’s death. Fremont, shaken and off-balance, inclined to chatter, would get there on his own, if there was anywhere to go in the first place.

“That’s what you do? Solve problems?”

“Stallworth runs the cleaners for inland work. And please don’t tell the FBI. They think they’re the only hard cases in America.”

“Cleaners? I heard of you. Sometimes you just erase people.”

“If I was supposed to erase you I’d have done it while you were twitching away in the backseat. You’d be floating facedown in a canyon creek right now, all your troubles at an end. You used the synapse code. That means—that used to mean—a security breach. A dangerous threat of some sort. How about you explain that part?”

Fremont worked that through, his thin lips moving as if counting off the odds in some obscure game of chance. Which in a way he was.

“All right. What else am I gonna do, anyway? Here’s the thing. I’m being hunted. By somebody good. A contract guy. A pro. For over a month now, at least since the beginning of September. For a while I wondered why. I asked around, nobody could tell me anything. Finally, I figured out that the only thing that made me worth killing—I mean, by a solid professional shooter—was what I knew about Echelon. Echelon was the only really high-level outfit I ever got involved with. I figured somebody high up in Echelon, somebody right at the top, was sanitizing the record before he handed the operation over to a successor and took his retirement. Getting rid of the freelancers, the lowlifes like me, guys who never went to Choate. That way we never pop up in the news later to embarrass the guy in front of his golfing buddies.”

Dalton, who had tried to get more up-to-date on Echelon before

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flying out, could not see the bureaucrats and forensic accountants and plodding computer dorks who currently ran it sending an assassin out to kill minor field hands like Willard Fremont, but he kept his mouth shut.

“Anyway, whoever the shooter is, the guy made two passes at me while I was taking a sorta vacation in a friend’s cabin up in Bonners Ferry. Sniper shit, both near misses, big magnum. First time, September third or maybe the fourth, I’m fishing on Upper Priest Lake, I bend over to gaff a pike—zoot!—round goes right by my ear, I roll out, and I’m in the water, swimming for my life. Second time, three days later, the seventh, I’m in the outhouse, communing with Mother Nature, this great big round punches straight through, hums by my ear like a bumblebee. Please don’t ask me where I was hiding when the shooter came down to check out the privy.”

“Did you see his face?”

“Where I was, a patch of white with two wide blue eyes looking up would sort of stand out. No sir. I kept my head down and dug in as deep as I could go. Heard him walking around up there for another forty minutes. Then nothing. Then gas and flames. He set the privy on fire.”

“How’d you get out of that?”

“Contrary to what you may have been told, sewage doesn’t burn. It kind of bakes, though, which I do not want to get into either. He made another, the last—most recent, I mean—when I was over the border into British Columbia. Got a smoke?”

Dalton fished out the Marlboros, lit one, leaned back over the seat, and placed it in Fremont’s mouth. He sucked on it until the tip glowed like a firefly and a cylinder of ash fell onto his shirt.

“Thanks. Anyway, I mean, I’m in
Canada
for Christ’s sake, land of the eco-weenie-pansy-pacifist Birkenstock-wearing furry-legged hippity-dippity crap they believe in up there. I figured I was safe. I

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was wrong. It was in later September. Make it Monday the seventeenth, which means if it was the same guy who took that last run on me in Bonners Ferry on the seventh, it only took him
ten days
to find me in Canada. And I’m a guy really knows how to flee. Fleeing is kinda my military operational specialty. So I’m now laying way low, on my guard, dog-sitting for a friend who was doing a hitch for armed robbery down in Winnemucca, real nice out-of-the-way cabin up in the Canadian Rockies. Dog goes nuts one night—a big bitch mastiff named Trudy. I go out for a walkabout with my sidearm. When I come back in, Trudy’s dead on the carpet—ear-to-ear, almost decapitated. The cutter took her
eyes
out, man. That part really freaked me. I mean, who would
do
that?”

The same kind of guy who would string up three women and gut them, thought Dalton, wondering how the hunt for Pinto was going. But he just nodded. The world was full of sicko killers. Too full.

“I just turned on my heel and bolted,” said Fremont, coming back from a dark memory. “Got into the woods and spent three days with him right on my case. Never saw him, but I knew he was out there. Made it to the Interstate and hooked a ride with the first truck I saw. Slid back into Idaho, got myself bunkered up in that old fort around the eighteenth of September. Figured at least I’d see him coming.”

“Wearing a post office uniform?”

Fremont grinned at that, a rueful twist.

“Yeah. Sorry about him. I’d been up there for two weeks, talking to nobody but my dogs, and even they were starting to avoid me. I saw the movement along the perimeter and fired away at it. Don’t know how I missed him either. Two rounds and no kill. Not like me at all. When I heard the postie on the scanner, squealing for a chopper and sobbing like a girl, I knew I’d gotten my ass into it. I figured, let the Feebs come and get me. Either they’d kill me, in which

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case my troubles are over, or they’d take me alive and put me in a lockdown where I’d be safe for long enough to contact Stallworth and ask him for help.”

“Any idea who this guy is?” “Don’t know. But like I said, he’s good.” “You don’t have
any
idea what he looks like?” “No idea. I didn’t know everybody in Echelon. It’s a big outfit.

Hell, to be honest, I don’t even know if this has anything at all to do with Echelon. I made some enemies on my own. But like I said, nobody with this kind of skill set. Guy may not be a perfect shooter— missed me twice—but my how he likes to work in close. You should have seen what he did to Al Runciman, down in Mountain Home.”

“Who’s Al Runciman?” “You don’t
know
him? You don’t know what happened to Al?

What’s your name again?” “Micah. Micah Dalton.” “Micah? Not Michael?” “Micah. As in Formica. I was conceived on a bar top.” “Listen,” said Fremont, breaking off, “is Stallworth gonna be

there? I really need to see him. Did he say he was coming?”

“He said to get you to the safe house. That’s all I know. How do you know the guy who was after you is the guy who killed Runciman?”

Fremont gave him a sideways look. “We were both with Echelon. It was the only thing that linked us, the only operational thing we had in common.”

Operational? thought Dalton. Echelon isn’t operational. It’s strictly forensic accounting attached to data-mining surveillance software.

“Man, everybody in our district knew Al Runciman. He was famous, one of the very first Echelon contractors, before they ever set