The Echelon Vendetta (29 page)

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up shop in Lordsburg. I met him the week I got taken on, we

worked together a whole five years out of the Lordsburg office—”

Lordsburg? Echelon is in Lordsburg?

“—covered the whole of New Mexico down to the border, most of eastern Colorado, even got into the Four Corners a few times, if the business required—”

What the hell was Fremont talking about?

“Anyway, Al was one of the best carjackers I’d ever seen. Also good with any lock, even better with alarm systems. Great cook too, which counts if you’re wintering in a safe house up in the Absarokas. He was as good a saucier as ever popped a cork. A friend too. I hadn’t heard from him in over two weeks—”

“How’d he communicate?” asked Dalton, plucking the burning cigarette butt from Fremont’s lips just before it scorched his nose.

“MSN chat. Through a cloaked server. His persona was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. New name every week. Tell you the truth, Al was kind of a free spirit. His off-duty hobby was trolling the Web for Short Eyes. Half his in-box was chat messages from pedophiles. He’d string them on for weeks, months, then arrange a meeting in some out-of-the-way place somewhere.”

“He beat them up?”

“Al wasn’t a mean guy, ’less you pushed. No, he’d mark them.”

“Mark them? How?”

“In Lordsburg me and Al came up with this spray, only showed up in certain kinds of light—laser, some ultraviolet, certain fluorescents. We used it to tag containers, freight cars, trucks. We had laser sensors installed at rail yards and truck stops and we’d kind of keep an eye on individual shipments. It was great stuff. Permanent. Bonds on a molecular level. You get it on your skin, it’s worse than a tattoo. You have to peel the skin off right down to the fat to get rid of it. I mean, radical cosmetic surgery. Nothing else works.”

He raised his hands against the restraints, wiggled his fingers.

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“I got it on my fingertips. You need a black light to see it. Anyway, Al’s sister had a daughter, eleven, she was stalked and raped by one of these Internet cockroaches. Guy got two years, gets out, six weeks later he’s at it again. Lures this thirteen-year-old boy into a meeting and just goes all medieval on his . . . well, it was real bad. Boy lived, in a way, but he eventually hung himself in his bedroom. So Al thinks there’s gotta be a way to tag these creeps for life. We had access to NCIC in those days, so Al would search out all the guys who were registered offenders—all this in his spare time—find his MSN chat name, set him up, take him down in a park, the woods, an alley, coldcock him, strip him naked, truss him up, and use this adhesive latex stencil he had worked up to mark the guy’s forehead with i am a convicted child molester. U.S. Army–style letters. Guys came to, all they’d know is that they’d been mugged. Wouldn’t know what was on their foreheads until they went into a bar or someplace that had the right kind of lighting. Peeler bars. Laser tag places. Airport security. Dentists’ offices. Any bathroom with old fluorescent lighting. But when that tag lit up, you should have seen their faces. Al tagged nineteen repeat sex offenders before he had to stop.”

“And why did he have to stop?”

“Al was a great guy, but he could show you a mean streak if you pissed him off. He turned up one guy who he’d tagged once already. The guy was right back at it, surfing the Web. So Al gelded him.”

“Castrated him?”

“Yeah. The whole apparatus too. Steve
and
the Twins, all at once, Bob’s your uncle. Guy didn’t feel a thing. At least, not until he woke up, anyway. I guess it woulda smarted a bit then. Al wore surgical gloves, had everything sterilized like it was an operation. He used a real honest-to-God sheep-gelding tool on him. He said the wound bled way less than if you used a razor or a knife. Said it was more humane. Anyway, off they come, snippety-snip. Fed the guy’s

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dick to a dog and threw the guy’s orchids into a bark-chipper.

Didn’t want to leave a mess.”

“I think body parts are biodegradable, Willard.”

“So I’m told. Anyway, Al didn’t want to kill him. He just wanted to relieve him. Of his sex drive. Which this procedure usually does. Al’s mistake was letting his sense of fun get loose. He left a business card pinned to this guy’s shirt.”

“
His
business card?”

“No. No, from a veterinarian’s office in Twin Falls. Dr. Franz Kaltvasser. He’s a real guy too. Al stole a pile of his cards from his front office a long while back, when he had to take his dog in for surgery. Kaltvasser was a horse doctor, specialized in gelding stallions. His slogan was ‘The Kindest Cut.’ Al thought the cards were a hoot, he used to hand them out at bars, pretend he was the guy, just to see the looks on people’s faces. He’d tell ’em to just call him Fritzie, go into detail about all these horses he’d gelded, play it real straight, string the folks along. Got himself too famous, and since what Al did to this molester—guy actually kind of died, not from the gelding but from a clot a week later, which Al figured any ER doc could have prevented with some heparin—well, it was too much for the Idaho Staties.
Tagging
the perps was okay, but gelding them was kind of bad PR for the law-enforcement side of things. The Agency got him off the manslaughter charge, but Al had to promise to retire his hobby. Like I said, Al was kind of a free spirit.”

“What happened to him?”

“Over two weeks go by and no MSN message. It wasn’t like Al. I was in that cabin up near Bonners Ferry—this was before I knew I was in the shit, before the shooter made his first run on me. I was worried about Al a little. He’d been drinking, kinda running to seed. I figured I owed him a drop-around, at least.”

Fremont’s voice trailed away.

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“And?”

“And I found him in his double-wide on the outskirts of Mountain Home, laid out on the fold-down table. Dead maybe a week. Skinned alive. You can tell. Gutted. Al died hard, from the look on his face, which I’ll take to my grave. Walls all covered with graffiti. Damnedest thing I’d ever seen. Nothing I could do for him but to torch the place, give him a Viking funeral you know, and run like the hounds of Hell was on my heels.”

His voice trailed off and Dalton heard him moving around in the backseat with an audible clinking sound.

“Look, I don’t mean to complain, but these shackles are chafing me fierce. Okay if we slip ’em off ? I’m not going anywhere.”

Dalton, caught up in the Al Runciman saga, had completely forgotten that Fremont was still bound up in irons and a waist belt. He looked up the road. They were passing through a deep granite defile blasted through the living rock and just passing a slow-moving RV in the curb lane. There was a big green road sign just ahead, which Dalton strained to read.

“Christ. Yes. I think there’s a rest stop a mile up. We’ll pull over and get them off. Sorry. I forgot all about them. What’d you do about Runciman?”

“I told you. I torched his trailer and ran like hell.”

“You didn’t wonder who killed him? Tortured him?”

“Sure I did. But what was I gonna do, on my own?”

“You coulda gone to the cops.”

Fremont was silent for a time. “Yeah. You’re right. I coulda. Maybe I shoulda.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. Look, this is no excuse. But it’s an answer.”

“I’m listening.”

“Covert. We were all covert. Our unit. Going to the cops, that’s not your first instinct when you’re off the grid. You get a man down,

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doctrine says you put some distance between you and your guy. Way

Al died, it looked like . . . like vengeance. Retribution.”

“You have a guilty conscience, Willard?”

“Don’t you?”

Dalton had no answer for that, other than silence. The silence ran on. Fremont was right, about the doctrine. Covert operators didn’t work for justice; they worked for government, a very different thing. And Fremont had been right to run, as it turned out, since a short time later someone had spent most of September trying to kill him.

Fremont, his early adrenalized chatter having burned him into a daze, as Dalton had expected, lapsed into a reverie, and neither man said anything else for the next few minutes, staring out the window at the canyons and valleys rushing by as they plummeted down the eastern slopes of the Bitter Root range, hypnotized by the stream of SUVs and RVs they were passing. At the next stop they got Fremont out of his shackles and squared away—they both did what was necessary in the rank, dank echoing urinals—and in a few minutes they were back out on the Interstate, both men having fallen into a thoughtful silence, immersed in entirely separate worlds, worlds that were related only by the enigmas that bound them together.

The big car wound its effortless way through Lolo National Forest with the sun slipping down into a turquoise evening sky behind the black peaks of the western Rockies, long purple shadows crossing the road, the slender needles of lodgepole pines pricking the narrow gap of twilit sky above them, an eagle circling lazily far above, the liquid gold of the setting sun bright on its motionless wings, the tires drumming on the blacktop, the radio hissing and popping with cross talk from the state patrol cars as they moved into and out of range. The easy rhythm of driving, the sense of being in a timeless middle passage with the road uncoiling ahead took them both deep into their separate minds.

As they swept in a wide arc of Interstate around the tableland that

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held Missoula, Fremont’s head, nodding these last ten miles, sagged forward onto his meager chest. His breathing grew deep and regular, tidal. Dalton glanced at him from time to time, feeling a certain kinship: the man was under a terrible strain, living with the fear of death for weeks, but for the moment, this brief moment, here in this drumming silence, Fremont was at peace.

Dalton envied him.

THE “SAFE HOUSE” WAS
a rambling post-and-beam construction set far up an unmarked and well-camouflaged dirt lane that led, through a thick screen of blue fir and cottonwood, into a broad upland valley in which a meandering tributary of the Clark wound a snakelike path. Its stony riverbanks were choked with bending reeds, nameless wild birds wheeling above, bats flitting in the violet half-light under a few cold stars. In the far north a pale-yellowish aura marked the lights of the hardscrabble old mining town of Anaconda.

Their heels crunched in pea gravel as they stepped out of the car, their breath frosting in the chill mountain air. The house itself was low-roofed and dark, with a long veranda running the entire width of the front, the windows shuttered with heavy planks, the thick oaken door fortified with iron bands.

Fremont got his bag out of the trunk and shuffled up the steps, his head turning this way and that, as nervous and wary as prey, not taking a breath until Dalton got the door opened, led him inside, barred and bolted it shut again. Even then, Fremont stood with his back against the door and waited while Dalton, a big Colt Python in his hand, did a walk-about through the entire Mission-style ranch house.

He came back and flicked on the lights, revealing a large main room lined in pine, a massive fieldstone fireplace, the fire set and waiting for a match, three big plaid couches and matching plaid armchairs, a braided rug on the stone floor by the fireplace—a warm,

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comforting room done in the Santa Fe style favored by Hollywood stars who move to Montana and try to pass for normal in towns like Livingston and Bozeman.

“Nice place,” said Fremont, sitting down in one of the chairs while Dalton lit the fire. There was a high-mountain frost in the night air and it had seeped down into the bones of the house, which had been shut up unused for over six months.

Dalton, watching the tender shoots of flame beginning to spread out in the dried thatch, felt himself drawn into the fire. The smell of pine smoke filled the room, and white smoke began to billow outward from the fire.

“Jiggle the flue,” said Fremont.

Dalton twisted the wrought-iron handle set into the stones just under the mantel. There was a puff of in-drawing wind and the fire flared up, pulling the smoke back in and sending it up the chimney. Dalton got up, dusting his palms, picked up his luggage, and walked over to the huge pine sideboard along the interior wall.

He pulled out his laptop, opened it, and plugged a DSL cable into a wall jack. The screen cycled up, and after a few clicks he was looking at a computer-generated video schematic of the safe house and the surrounding woodlands. In the bright field of green-and-blue detail, the rectangle of the house itself glowed a warm yellow, and inside the rectangle there were three vivid red objects, a few feet apart, one rounded and indistinct, the other two man-shaped; the thermal images of Dalton, Willard Fremont, and the open fire.

Dalton looked at the rest of screen, the green-and-blue area. A few small pale red objects drifted through it, and one larger shape, glowing a deeper red. A small foraging bear, from the shape, and two smaller red blobs, probably her cubs, about a hundred and fifty yards northeast of the house, heading down a long treed slope toward the deep silvery-blue thread of the Clark Fork.

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Dalton clipped a remote alarm beeper to his belt and opened the pine cabinet, looking at the interior, bottles of scotch, bourbon, a built-in fridge stocked with mixes, cold beer.

Fremont had gotten up while Dalton was setting up the laptop, and now he was standing beside him, staring down at the screen with envy but also with the professional appreciation of a skilled technician. “What kind of perimeter controls do you have?”