The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

  “Why do you do that? You can’t taste anything?”

  “What?” said Cora, staring at him, but he was looking up at Naumann and did not hear her speaking. Naumann took his finger out and stared down at it with a thoughtful expression.

  “Like hell I can’t,” he said, licking his fingertip. “Who are you talking to?” asked Cora, in a soft voice.

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  “Sorry. Sorry, Cora, I guess I was thinking out loud.” “No. You were talking to...someone else.” “It’s the drug, I think. Last night I had a terrible time with it.” “More drugs? What drug did you take last night?” “I mean, I had a dream, a nightmare. Last night.” “What kind of nightmare?” “Nothing. I meant today. I meant to say today. That thing—

  whatever was in that pouch—it made me see things.” “For a CIA guy you are one lousy liar,” said Naumann. “Yes. But you knew them?” Cora persisted. “The images were fa

  miliar?” Dalton instinctively shied away from the question, but his face

  was answer enough for her. She was alarmingly bright. “Yes. They were . . . familiar.” “From your past?” “Yes,” said Dalton, and only because any attempt at a lie would

  have been detected at once. She looked as if she wanted to press for

  more, but then she let it pass. “I see. And did your Mr. Naumann also have bad memories?” “If you answer that,” said Naumann, “you’re a total putz.” “I don’t know.” “You do not know anything about your friend’s personal life?” “She’s shrinking you, buddy,” said Naumann. “Just shut up.” “Not much.” “His past?” “Nothing comes to mind.” “You lie easily, but not well. You shut me out. There it is. I do

  not care. But you should try to find out. Perhaps he was seeing a

  therapist. Psychological issues. There might be official records.” “Tell the little bitch to mind her own damn business.” Shocked, offended, Dalton sent Naumann a black look.

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  “Watch your mouth, Porter.”

  Cora was silent for a time, studying Dalton’s face while he tried to force his expression into what ended up as a twisted parody of innocence. She took his hand in hers, leaned forward.

  “Porter? You are talking now to your dead friend Porter?” “No.” “Your dead friend Porter is talking to you?” “No. Yes. Maybe. I think he thinks he is.” Cora blinked, sighed. “He is in this room? Now?” Naumann shook his head vigorously, holding his hands up.

  “Leave me out of this.” “He’s behind you,” said Dalton. “He’s leaning on the fireplace.” Cora turned and of course saw nothing at all. When she looked

  back at Dalton, her expression had softened and there was a worried look in her eyes.

  “You must let me take you to the clinic, Micah. I know the best people there. We need to make some tests. You might have some neurological damage. Truly, Micah. This is very dangerous for you. These ...these visions, they could come again. Without warning.”

  She spoke with such unshakable confidence, such searing professional certitude, that her words cut deep. He had a fleeting vision of Laura in her white room by the sea, the salt wind billowing the curtains as she stared dead-eyed into eternity.

  “Now you’re getting it,” said Naumann, his tone gentle. “I said

  this situation was dangerous. This is exactly what I meant.” Dalton took Cora’s hand. It was warm and strong. “Thank you, Cora. I promise that when I get back to London—” “I thought you were stationed here ? At the Consulate?” “My base is in London,” he said, glad that this at least was true. “Then you must go back tonight. I will go with you!” “I will go. Not tonight. But as soon as I can find out what hap

  pened to Porter.”

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  She withdrew her hand, her expression closing. “You’re an idiot,” said Cora. “I’m sorry. But it is true.”

  “Yes. I am.”

  She sat back and glared at him, her face reddening. “Fine. Basta. I don’t care. Who are you to me? I don’t even know you. It is ridiculous to care. I do not care.”

  She turned and looked behind her: by chance, she happened to be glaring right at Naumann, who stiffened, his ironic detachment vanishing.

  “And the same for you, Signor Spettro Cancrenato, mostra che divora i cadaveri, chi si diletta di orrori. Io ti caccio via! Ciao! ”

  Here a vulgar but classic Italian gesture—done with snap and fire—and then she rounded again on Dalton, her face flushed and her dark eyes glittering.

  “So. Dove conduce questa strada? Back to business. You are pleased to imagine that if this man, he wants to harm your friend, that he will do this by giving him this ...this drug?”

  “It’s a theory,” said Dalton, rattled by the intensity of her concern, and even more so by her unshakable conviction that profoundly ugly things awaited him in the medical line if he didn’t get to a hospital right now. “The catch is, there’s nothing to connect Porter directly to ...to this man. Other than a restaurant.”

  She hesitated. Dalton could see she was holding something back. He waited it out, saying nothing to distract her.

  “Yes. There is,” she said, at last, with a resigned sigh.

  “What is it?”

  “If I understand you, it is possible that this Mr. Sweetwater—this Indian man—was in Cortona. When your friend died.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She reached down and lifted up the paper bag with Mercato Via Gesa printed on the side.

  “This. It was in the refuse bin.”

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  “A shopping bag?”

  “It is not mine. The rooms are cleaned every day and all the garbage goes out. Every day. But today my woman was not able to come. So this bag was left by Mr. Sweetwater himself. And it is not old. A very new bag.”

  “I don’t understand.” “Mercato Via Gesa is a grocery store.” “Yes?” “It is a grocery store in Cortona.” Dalton’s cell phone rang, a high-pitched shriek that made them

  all jerk. An expression of fleeting resentment flashed across her face as she stood up and walked away to the windows, passing right through Naumann’s ghost on the way, her back stiffening reflexively as she did so and a tremble rippling down the length of her body. She stood at the open window and looked out at the spire of the Ognissanti basilica, her strong arms folded across her breasts and her expression closed, shuttered, cold.

  Dalton fumbled through his coat pockets, found his phone: “Hello. Yes?” “It’s Mandy. Where are you? I hope you’re still in Venice.” “Last chance to bail, Micah,” said Naumann. “From here on in,

  it’s all running with scissors.” “Mandy? Yes, I’m still in Venice. What’s the matter?” “Get to Marco Polo Airport. The company jet is waiting. You

  have to come back to London. You have to come back right now.” “Why? What the hell’s the problem, Mandy?” “You want it in the clear?” Naumann’s ghost was standing near to Cora as she stood by the

  window, her back to the room, staring out at the red-tiled rooftops and the spire of the Church of All Saints, at the clouds of swifts that swirled around the spire, crying and wheeling, rising in the wind. Naumann was looking at Dalton and the expression on his face was

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  closed, unreadable. After a moment, he shook his head slowly and

  turned away.

  “Yes, Mandy, I want it in the clear.”

  “Okay. It’s Joanne. And the girls.”

  “Yes. What?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Butchered, Micah. Slaughtered. It’s awful. They’re saying Porter did it. They’re saying he killed them. You have to come home.”

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  monday, october 8 the bighorn mountains eastern wyoming

  8 p.m. local time

  he shadow of the Bighorns had stretched out across the rolling brown hills of the Powder River countr
y as far east as Ranchester and a deep cobalt night was rising up out of Kansas when Pete Kearney came out to call for his dogs. Pete was tall and hard-looking, with a weathered mahogany face and deep-set black eyes. He stood on the porch of his cabin, his Winchester 94 in his left hand, and waited for a while in the twilight, watching the light changing on the plains far below the limestone outcrop on which he had built his home. In the stand of lodgepole pine beside the square-cut log cabin, a horde of crows had settled into the trees for the night, and the sound they made reminded Pete of dry corn husks rattling together. He pulled in a breath and whistled for the dogs again—three clear high-pitched tones, descending. The echoes of the whistle bounced off the limestone cliffs behind him and faded into the forest all around. Nothing.

  The dogs did not come.

  Pete frowned and stood a while in quiet consideration.

  This was not like Cisco, the wizened old blue tick, who in their sixteen years together had never missed the dinner bell, but it was like Brutus, the young piebald bull terrier who had come ambling out of the brush only six months back, black eyes full of fun, tongue hanging out, grinning like a crocodile, trailing a snapped leather leash. His paws were bruised and bloody and his muscular shoulders had withered from hunger. His ribs showed like barrel staves along his flanks. It had taken Cisco a while to warm to the young pit bull, but Pete had taken to the stray right off. Nobody had ever called to ask about a missing pit bull, and Pete never put it out that he had one, and in the eastern Bighorns people kept to themselves, so the time passed and it was just Pete and his dogs and the day-to-day of living in the half-wild.

  Until tonight.

  “Cisco! Brutus! Come on, boys! Dinner’s up.”

  The crows began to caw in the lodgepole stand, and a few flew up in a rattle of black feathers, settling again after a few wheeling turns. A dry wind stirred the pine needles and set up a dust devil in the clearing in front of the porch. A feeling got started in Pete Kearney’s belly. It slithered around his hips and started to crawl up his backbone and he lifted the Winchester, levered a 30-30 round into the chamber, and stepped down off the porch.

  His boots made a dry, scraping sound as he crossed the clearing and walked to the drop-off fifty yards ahead. He stood there for a while, looking out over the sweeping valley floor a thousand feet below, listening to the woods around him. The Winchester was heavy in his hand, and a cutting chill was in the wind off the eastern plains.

  He did not call for the dogs again. He walked to his left, moving as quietly as he could, keeping the ledge beside him, heading for the

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  turn in the drive. As he moved he looked at every bush and tree, looked down at his feet and up into the treetops, their branches swirling in the rising wind. The leaves began to hiss and bristle and rust-colored pine needles skittered across the stony ground. Pete reached the curve of the gravel drive and looked down the tree-branch tunnel as the road curved around and bent itself out of sight. Shadows grew along the edge of the road, and darkness welled up as if from out of the ground, like black water. Pete lifted the carbine and stared down the iron sights, traversing the road and the woods along its edges. It was the only way in here, and if someone was coming for him, this is where he would have to come from. This narrow gravel track was the only way in.

  Where were the dogs?

  His back was twisted tight and his belly muscles jumped as he stared out at the surrounding darkness with a flat wary look on his battered face. His cabin was hard to get to—built right at the base of a cliff that rose up another five hundred feet, sheer as a rock face.

  The outcrop was shaped like a big scythe, a flat crescent of yellow limestone that projected out over a cliff that fell away a thousand feet to the floor of the valley. The road was the only way in, and the dogs would have told him if anyone was coming.

  And nothing gets past the dogs.

  Ever. So ...where were the dogs?

  Pete moved into the brush on the cliff side of the road and walked slowly down through the grade, the carbine up and out. He was like a soldier walking point on hostile ground. About twenty feet down through the brush a scent came to him, and a sound like a clock ticking—a steady tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . the scent grew stronger.

  Something flashed down, a tiny red spark in what was left of the light: it hit a soft bed of pine needles about six feet in front of him, making a sharp ticking sound when it struck.

  Pete looked up into the lodgepole pine and saw a tawny blunt

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  shape in the twilight, about forty feet up the trunk. Brutus was hanging there, his stomach ripped open and his ropy guts looping down from his slit belly. He had a bright silver wire around his neck—it had cut almost through; his head was almost off. The other end of the wire was looped over a branch, from which it ran backward and down into a stand of trees about fifteen feet away, a thin silvery thread ending in a blackberry bush. The ground below Brutus was thick with blood. As he watched, another drop separated from a loop of the dog’s guts and fell down onto the nest of pine needles.

  Tick.

  Tick.

  Pete moved past the hanging dog, his mind quite still, his breathing steady, his senses fully awake. He felt no particular fear, and he was not angry in any use of the word that would mean something to a civilian. He was set.

  Focused on the outcome.

  Whoever did this was good, and clever, and artful in the woods, none of which would help him one damn bit, because he was going to die anyway. Pete was going to kill him. He’d killed many a man in the woods or in the jungles and later in the dry brown hills of Afghanistan.

  A few yards more and a much stronger smell of death—of sewage and fresh blood—was very close: he found Cisco dead in a tangle of pine boughs and ivy, his head twisted almost all the way around on his neck, his bowels having emptied as his spine snapped. His eyes were wide and the white showed all around. His pink tongue was out, and someone had sliced three inches off the tip with a very sharp knife.

  For amusement, it seemed.

  Pete looked around him and moved back into a stand of tall pine. He settled his back up against the rough bark of an old jack pine a

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  few yards away from Cisco’s body, placed the carbine across his knees, and stared out into the gathering darkness, breathing through his slightly open mouth, his breath curling in a blue frost in front of him.

  He had the cliff on his left and the tree at his back and the road in front of him and there was no way whoever was out there could get to him, unless he came straight in.

  Pete looked upward and saw through the black pine boughs far above him an arc of indigo sky with a few early stars glittering. The night wind was now rising off the Great Plains, and the deeper mountain cold was coming down. In the rolling valley far below him the lights of Ranchester glimmered in the darkness, and over the mounded shapes of the faraway hills he could see the yellow glow of Sheridan. The heavy barrel of the Winchester was cold in his hands.

  He looked out into the night, into the black forest all around him, the tall pines rising up, felt the soft carpet of needles under him. He wished Cisco and Brutus an easy run to green fields under a rolling sky with snow-peaked mountains in the far blue distance, and then he emptied his mind of all thought. His heart was beating slowly, his breathing was calm and steady, and when he exhaled he did it silently. The Winchester carbine had a big hollow-point round in the chamber and the hammer was cocked and the magazine held six rounds and he had ten more in his jacket pocket. Pete Kearney was ready.

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  tuesday, october 9 london, england 11 p.m. local time

  ondon in the great all-surrounding English dark, a gleaming galaxy

  of city lights rising up at him through the cloud-rack and the fumes of the sprawling city, the pearl-string of lamps that ran along the banks of the wide curving Thames, the Gothic façade of the Par
liament reflected in the broad run of the river by Westminster Bridge, the glittering disk of the Millennium Wheel slowly turning on the pier by the Jubilee Gardens as the shuddering Bell bore south for the Westland Heliport in Battersea, where a company driver—a woman named Serena Morgenstern, who looked to be about eleven— was waiting for him, leaning on a big blue Benz, her long black hair fluttering in the downdraft from the clattering machine, scraps of paper swirling into the cool weed-scented air, the lights of Chelsea across the river glimmering on the broad black waters of the Thames.

  “Sir,” said Miss Morgenstern, bowing, giving him a meaningful look as she held the back door open for him. Dalton—groaning only a little—melted into the plush black leather. She closed the door with a solid Teutonic whump, rocking the machine on its springs hard enough to rouse Dalton from his confusion. He ruefully contemplated the back of her head as his driver slipped in behind the wheel, and eventually recalled with horror that she had been the girl who, after the last Christmas bun-fight, he had taken back to his flat on Wilton Row, where he had then failed quite dramatically to follow through on the agenda so clearly laid out in the protocols for these encounters.

  As they rolled out onto Lombard heading for the Battersea Bridge, she confirmed his worst fears by giving him a raised eyebrow and an impish grin, which he found it possible—barely—to overcome thanks to a brutal hangover and the lingering effects of Cora’s Narcan shot. He put his head back into the rest and said, more to himself than to his driver, although she heard it anyway, and smiled when she did, “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.”

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  Dalton closed his eyes; his bones turned to lead and his blood to sand. Under the wheels the Battersea Bridge boomed with a deep metallic roar as Chelsea filled up the windshield. “Serena, got any coffee, at all?”