The Echelon Vendetta (36 page)

There’s every reason to believe that Gibson was, at the very least, in

England around the time that Porter’s family got killed.” “I knew it. Thank you, Sally. Thank you.” “Well, let me lay it out for you. I checked his passport records

and he flew United coach from Denver to Gatwick and was entry-stamped there by the Brits on October second. From there he passes out of mortal ken until he resurfaces back in Greybull, Wyoming, on October eleventh. Four days ago,” she added, helpfully.

“Anything since then?” “He withdrew a thousand over two days in Greybull. That’s the

end of the records. I pulled his file from Personnel.” “Any contact with Porter?” “None on the records. Most of the stuff in it is all about his beef

with the IRS. He wrote fifty-six letters over a two-year period, starting in oh three. They went out to various honchos at the NSA,

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State, even wrote a few congressmen and the junior senator from Wyoming. The last one was written about three months ago, and it’s mostly scrawled gibberish. Across the top he’s written ‘culebra’ and ‘purgatoire,’ on the bottom he’s written ‘atone,’ references to something hidden, to a struggle—‘die born’—what looks like a

U.S. flag with a skull—‘snake eater’—all of this in block capitals—the word ‘messenger,’ and it’s all clustered around this weird drawing...”

“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.”