The Echelon Vendetta (43 page)

“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

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right, sometimes through your own suffering, or sometimes by going to the people you have hurt in your life and trying to undo that hurt. I guess whoever made this drawing wants to make things right.”

Dalton stared at the young girl as a passing eighteen-wheeler drowned out all possibility of conversation. There is a hidden rose by every dusty mile of road, he thought, deciding not to actually kiss her.

“Well,” he said, folding up the letter, “I learned a lot here. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

“You’re not a sociologist at all, are you?”

“No. Just a tourist.”

She shook her head, smiling at him.

“No. Not a tourist. You have a shadow around you. You have been with darkness. Perhaps you are a policeman. Can I say something to you? It’s none of my business, but I think you should know.”

“Sure. Anything.”

“This drawing at the top here, the word ‘culebra’ with those arrows pointed at it? That’s called ‘sign.’ The arrows mean that there is danger, and what the arrows point at is the source of that danger. ‘Culebra’ means ‘snake’ in Spanish, so the danger comes from a snake, which could be a man or an animal—but the sign definitely means danger. Like, mortal danger, you understand?”

Dalton, who knew what “culebra” meant, had not known the meaning of the arrows, although the entire page literally shrieked of lunatic killing rage. She drew back and regarded him with a gentle but searching expression on her round, intelligent face.

“Well, I’ve said enough. I don’t get a good feeling from that drawing. There’s stuff in there that goes way beyond the Native American Church. I’m not a member. Shoshone are plains people. We were in Montana long before the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and those ugly Arapaho ever got there. We do the Sun Dance. Peyote belongs

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to the Kiowa, the Apache, the Comanche. Many of these folk have maggots in their heads. You need to be careful around them.”

HE WAS IN THE ROOM,
packing, remembering the last time someone had used the term “maggots in the head,” while Irene rapidly devoured a plate full of
huevos revueltos
and a side of refried beans.

He was trying to get the plate away from her before she ate that too, getting an accusatory look from her as he did it, when the phone rang again. It was Sally.

“I talked to Zoë Pontefract. She tells me the central drawing is the symbol for the god Peyote. He’s the—”

Dalton stopped her, with some effort: she had done a lot of work and was not happy to be robbed of the chance to lay it out for him. He managed to fill her in on what the Shoshone girl had told him.

“Was she pretty?”

“Stunning. Did Zoë come up with anything beyond that?”

“Essentially, no. Although the ceremony your Shoshone girlfriend describes varies quite a bit from the chronicles of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, who studied the Chichimec and Toltec versions—”

“But she would agree with what this girl is saying, basically?”

“I got the impression that Zoë thought the person who did the drawing was crazier than a bog rat. And I wanted to remind you, in case you have also forgotten, that this reference to ‘snake eater’ on the upper left? That’s the Army term for Special Forces. You were one yourself, weren’t you? So think hard about what that means. And Zoë says that the Native American Church does not encourage ‘atonement’ but only the forgiveness of sins and peaceful coexistence with your neighbors. Peaceful coexistence does not strike me as Moot Gibson’s personal creed. Now what? Do you have to go join a Peyote cult?”

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“What did she make of the stuff about Purgatoire and Culebra? Why is Purgatoire in French, for one thing?”

“She noticed that. She thinks the word refers to a river called the Purgatoire, which is in southeastern Colorado. The funny thing about the name is—”

“Where in southeastern Colorado?”

“Where? It starts in the Rockies, down by the New Mexico border, ends in the town of Lamar, up by the Kansas border; it flows mainly northeast through the Comanche National Grassland—”

“But this is where
Pinto
lived.”

“Yes. That’s right. As a matter of fact, the Purgatoire runs sort of parallel to the Timpas River, which runs parallel to a little creek called the Apishapa—”

“This is right in the
middle
of Pinto’s territory.”

“Yes, I think we’ve already established that. You may recall that we’ve also established that the Coroner of Munchkin Land, who thoroughly examined him, says he’s not only really dead, he’s really quite sincerely dead. Pinto, I mean. Not the coroner. Anyway, as I was saying, the Purgatoire runs northwest through the town of Trinidad—”

“Trinidad. One of Fremont’s unit guys got lost in a storm in the hills around Trinidad. Milo Tillman. This is all
connected.
I know it.”

“Connected to what?”

“These names. Trinidad. Goliad. The Purgatoire.
Horsecoat.
Wilson Horsecoat. He did the ID on Pinto’s body, didn’t he?”

“Wait a minute . . . yep. Wilson Horsecoat and Ida Escondido.”

“These names. They fit together. Somebody with the Horsecoat name was writing letters to Sweetwater when he was in Italy. Trinidad. Goliad. I’ve seen them somewhere else. They’re . . . damn, I can’t
remember.
”

“Micah, if you think this is vital, I can run a search string.”

“Can you? Can you do it now?”

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“Sure. I’ll run the name Goliad, cross it with Trinidad.”

“I need this right now, Sally.”

“And you’ll have it. Goliad . . . how do you spell it?”

Dalton spelled it out for her, and waited, staring absently, unseeing, down at Irene, who was staring right back up at him while using all of her considerable powers of telepathy to convey three simple words to Dalton:

Must.

Go.

Out.

The phone beeped and crackled for a time, and he could hear Sally’s fingers on the keyboard, rapid-fire, staccato, and the rustle as she picked up the handset again.

“Okay. Maybe this is it. Dateline Monday, November seventeen, 1997: at five forty-five local time in eastern Colorado, a Consuelo Luz Goliad, age forty-nine, was killed in a multiple-car crash while traveling northbound on Interstate 25, near the town of Trinidad. Does this mean something?”

“Yes. I just don’t know what.”

“Well, there’s a cross-reference to an article in ...in the
Simi Valley Clarion
. . . by somebody named Barbra Goldhawk. Dated June fifteenth, 1998. I can only get the extract—wait—okay, this Goldhawk person was calling for the FBI to investigate what she was calling the suspicious deaths of Consuelo Luz Goliad and her husband, Héctor Rubio Goliad, who was a pilot in the Mexican Air Force. Any more? No, that’s it. Nothing else. No FBI follow-up. And this Goldhawk woman is never heard from again, according to this.”

“Simi Valley? That’s near Los Angeles, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Can I borrow something?”

“Sure. Name it?”

“The Gulfstream?”

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friday, october 19 friendly village mobile home park 689 ridge view drive simi valley, california

5 p.m. local time

he brown-and-cream double-wide trailer was studded with large wooden butterflies the size of pterodactyls and was surrounded by a white picket fence made entirely out of recycled plastic. The creaking gate opened onto a large concrete rectangle painted lime green, along the edges of which sprouted dusty, faded bunches of plastic daisies and tulips and begonias and a flight of steps made of stacked blocks painted orange that led up to a rusted screen door with pink flamingoes for a frame. From inside the darkened interior he could hear a tinny radio playing “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller.

As he stood there listening, a large calico cat oiled up to his leg and began rubbing herself against him. Dalton was not fond of cats and he wished that he had brought Irene with him instead of leaving her back at Van Nuys Airport with the ex-Marine pilot who had made the flight from Greybull so gosh-darn memorable that, at several points en route, Dalton had considered shooting him in the back of his skull.

He gave the cat a not-so-discreet shove that lofted her into a patch of plastic petunias. Turning to face the door again, he found himself staring up into the disapproving glare of an age-spotted woman wearing a very loud Hawaiian shirt in coral and powder blue, pale pink terry-cloth short shorts, a hunchbacked crone with a corona of bright pink frizz around a thin liverish face deeply marked by sun damage, a face out of which shone two small black eyes bright with intelligence and ill-will.

She had a clear plastic oxygen tube that was looped around both ears, the tube running under her nose and down into a portable oxygen canister on rollers, and she had a raw-looking trachea implant that was partially covered by a filthy white neckerchief.

She glared down at him through the screen, raised a clawlike hand in which burned a Marlboro, stuffed the cigarette into her trachea implant, sealed her lips, pinched her nose shut with the other hand, and pulled a long lungful into her through the trachea port, doing so with obvious relish and clearly enjoying the effect this performance was having on her visitor. Then she exhaled it through her trachea tube again, a plume of pale-blue tobacco smoke that poured out through the screen and wandered off on the hot dry wind out of the nut-brown slopes of the Santa Susana Range far away in the northeast.

“Miss Goldhawk? I’m Micah Dalton.”

She pressed a spiky knob-knuckled index finger against some sort of device attached to her tracheal implant and emitted a droning buzz that Dalton realized was electronically synthesized speech.

“You the spook? Let me see some ID.”

Dalton showed her the impressive-looking ID the Agency gives you to show to people to whom the Agency does not want you to show your not-quite-so-impressive actual ID.

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She had a pair of glasses—huge pink plastic ones with green parrots sitting on palm trees forming the frames—hanging from an amber-beaded necklace. She finally got them fixed in place and blinked down at his folio ID with rheumy eyes. She grunted and shoved the screen door open.

Dalton followed her into the cool, dank dark of her double-wide— a long barren room furnished in garage-sale odds and ends, smelling badly of the hanging stink of her Marlboros.