The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

“Okay, yeah. The name did freak me a bit. It was a cover name and we kept our cover names pretty close. Sweetwater. Yeah, one of the guys in our unit, he used the Sweetwater jacket. We all had legends. I was a guy named Fetterman—”

  “Who used the Sweetwater jacket?”

  “Before I tell you who, you saw this guy? Describe him.”

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  “He looked like a lot like an American Indian. He was tall, tanned, over six feet, heavy-built, with long silver hair all the way down to his shoulders. He wore lizard-skin cowboy boots and had a lot of heavy silver jewelry on him. He also wore an earring, a cross under a crescent moon. This sound like anyone you know?”

  “A silver earring? Real small, in his left ear?” “Yes.” “The guy you’re describing is Moot Gibson.” “And Gibson’s legend was Sweetwater?” “Yeah. It was.”

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  monday, october 15

  interstate 90 eastbound

  ten miles east of butte, montana117 a.m. local time

  hey had gotten out of the safe house before first light, a cold pink day with a hoarfrost on the cottonwood trunks and the windows of the Crown Victoria as delicately ice-etched as saloon glass. They were doing a steady 85 eastbound on I-90 as the first sliver of the rising sun cleared the eastern ridge of the Bridgers. The trunk was full of gear; Dalton’s briefcase and his laptop, a blue canvas Nike bag with what little clothes Fremont still had, the com sets, two Steadicam binoculars, rough-weather gear, the big Remington bolt-action, six big boxes of hollow-point rounds and the Leupold ten-power scope, Dalton’s Colt, and a 1911 collector’s-grade .45 semiauto with a gold frame and mint-fresh bluing that Fremont had claimed as his own as soon as he saw it in its hardwood case. They picked up fresh rounds for the .45 and a change of clothes for Fremont at a Conoco truck stop in Butte and pulled out of the realm of the Copper Kings with egg-salad sandwiches in their hands and steaming-hot coffee in the armrest cup holders between them.

  The Interstate was empty for a Monday, now and then an eighteen-wheeler rolling out of the Rockies on the long continental downgrade that runs from the eastern foothills of the Rockies all the way to the Minnesota border. A mile this side of Whitehall they passed a long lumbering train of slow-moving RVs with Alberta plates, their drivers goggling stupidly at the purple Rockies in the south, the ragged granite peaks tinted pink by the rising sun.

  Wearied by a night of bee swarms and tense inconclusive talk, neither man had much to say and a lot to think about as they squinted into the sun and listened to the police cross-talk on the radio.

  Dalton had been checking his cell phone for a connection. The screen had read no service ever since they left the safe house, but a few miles west of Bozeman he found he was getting a strong signal. He punched in Jack Stallworth’s number (it would be 9:45 on a Monday morning in Langley) and finally got through to Sally Fordyce after a long wait.

  “Sally, this is Micah. Jack there?”

  “Jack’s out of the office, sweetie.”

  “Where’s he gone?”

  “Didn’t say. Just told me he’d be unavailable for a couple of days. He left some information for you, and if you really need to speak to him he’s going to call in every evening for messages.”

  “This is a damned strange time for him to go dark.”

  “You know our Jack. He took your butt-kissing orchid with him, by the way. What a beastly thing, like a pug dog with the mange.”

  “Thanks. It only cost me four grand U.S.”

  “Want the info?”

  “Yes. Go ahead.”

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  “You’re not gonna like this, but the guy you think got to Porter and his family, this Pinto guy? Well, it looks like he’s more than slightly dead.”

  “Pinto’s dead ?”

  “Extremely dead. Dead enough to qualify for burial, which usually resolves any of those lingering ambiguities. Died near a place called Comanche Station, near Timpas, in southeastern Colorado.”

  “How long ago?”

  “About a month?”

  “About?”

  “Yes. As in ‘on or about.’ Serena and Mandy were doing a prelim search on the guy yesterday and they turned up his death notice. Called me from London. I called Colorado. According to the state troopers, he was found in a pickup parked way out in an area called the Comanche National Grassland. He’d been there for at least a month, but maybe even as long as six weeks, according to the local smokies. Pretty chewed up by the wildlife, and dried out like an old corn husk, according to this Captain Bondine guy. He’s the CO of the local Crowley County Sheriff ’s Office. They took the call from the state guys and went out there to police him up.”

  “What killed him?”

  “Bullet.”

  “Don’t go all laconic on me, Sally. You know what I mean.”

  “Bullet from gun.”

  “Sally.”

  “Sorry. I talked to this Captain Bondine for an hour yesterday afternoon. He talks like that, like he has to pay for every consonant he uses out of his own salary. Reminded me of Gary Cooper in High Noon. I kind of liked him. Captain Bondine says the autopsy showed a single entry wound in the left temple, a big round, from a brand-new forty-four-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver.”

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  “How’d they know that?”

  “Your good old-fashioned police work, plus the gun was still in the man’s lap, his left hand around the grip. Round blew his left eye completely out of the socket and ruptured his right. Most of his brains and a big section of the right side of his skull ended up on the passenger window, which also had a major hole in it.”

  “Suicide?”

  “You’re so good at all this manly spook stuff, aren’t you.”

  “How’d they know it was Pinto?”

  “They brought in people who knew him, a kid named Wilson Horsecoat, kind of a clan cousin of the local Escondido Comanches. And an aunt named Ida Escondido. They both made positive IDs. And the truck was registered to Daniel Escondido, which is Pinto’s real name. Had a wallet in his jeans pocket stuffed with ID, Bureau of Indian Affairs card. Colorado driver’s license with his picture. Patient card from a walk-in clinic in La Junta. Pictures all matched the shot you gave Jack before you left. But the main thing was a personal ID from two of his clan members.”

  “What did the guy look like?”

  “Before or after the crows got at him?”

  “Before.”

  “I’m looking at a coroner’s photo Bondine e-mailed to me right now. Hard Indian-looking face, what’s left of it, anyway, which is not much. Long gray hair down to his shoulders. Big man, over six feet tall, and real heavyset. Strong hands like a cowboy. Looks mean as a DI on a fifty-mile hump. Last meal was chiles rellenos and beer. Cowboy boots, silver jewelry. This your guy?”

  “It’s him exactly. Dammit. Did he have an earring?”

  “Let me see . . . yes. Small silver earring, through the left earlobe. Some sort of cross-shaped thing with a moon over it. A crescent moon.”

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  “But that’s the same earring I saw on the guy in Venice.”

  “I’m sorry I have to be the one to tell you this, Micah, but sometimes you’ll find they make more than one copy of an earring. They’ve even been known to make them in pairs, the cunning bastards.”

  “Why the clinic card?”

  “Captain Bondine called the clinic in La Junta. It seems Pinto was being treated for lung cancer. Had it bad, so I understand. Prognosis was real poor. Looks like he just decided not to wait for the cancer to kill him. This sounds like bad news.”

  “It is. Tell me, did Jack find out whether or not Pinto had traveled to Italy or England in the last few weeks?”

  “Man did not have a passport. You can’t travel very far in today’s world without a passport, even if you are a Marine.”

  “So no connection to Italy?”

  “He may have
ordered a pizza once.”

  “How about any linkage to intelligence ops?”

  “Now, that part was weird. I tried running a search on his military service and got a ‘file not found’ message. Yet he was carrying a Reserve card and Marine Corps ID.”

  “I ran into the same thing.”

  “Did you? So I pushed it a little further and called a guy I knew in Marine Corps Intelligence. He grumbled about it but after some digging he called me back to say that Pinto had been a Code Talker in Korea, so his records were suppressed. Routine.”

  “That was all?”

  “Yeah. They did it for all the Code Talkers. And the U.S. Army often firewalls the IDs of personnel who’ve worked in intelligence.”

  That was true; Dalton had requested that his own military records be sealed against all public inquiries, and then had them tagged with a silent Report All Hits alarm that would trigger an e-mail notice back to him if anybody asked about his records.

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  He should have figured that out for himself.

  “Thanks, Sally. So he was never into any intel work? I mean, after the war?”

  “Nope. I’ve got his printout here. Into the Marines at nineteen, Korea, Code Talker, Silver Star, in the brig, a three-year beef for unlawfully disassembling an MP in a bar fight. Pulls his time. Mobs out with a dishonorable in sixty-five, gets into drugs, using and dealing. Made a pile of cash and became a big deal around Comanche Station. Ran the local church, even. What you would call a religious leader. Very highly respected at Comanche Station, according to Bondine. The DEA launched an op against him in eighty-four. Something went very wrong and three of their agents disappeared. They made a circumstantial case against him for that, he was their last known contact, so in eighty-six he goes to Deer Lodge for twenty years. Got out in oh six, time served, no restrictions, moved back to Timpas last year. Lived a humble quiet life. In reward for changing his evil ways and becoming a pillar of the church, God gave him lung cancer and he shot himself in the head six weeks ago. Warms the cockles, a story like that, right?”

  “No connection to any American intelligence agency?”

  “Zip. Nada. Bupkes. Why is it so much fun to say ‘bupkes’?”

  “Not even as an informer? A freelancer?”

  “Sounds like you made the wrong man, Micah.”

  “You have a phone number for this Captain Bondine?”

  “Sure. Office line is 719-384-2525. If he’s out on the road they’ll patch you through. I told them they might be hearing from you. You going to go there, check it out?”

  Dalton wrote the numbers out on a section of napkin, holding the phone in the hollow of his neck.

  “Okay. Got it. I’m on the way to Colorado now. I’m eastbound on I-90. We’re going to a place called Cloud Peak, in the Bighorns.”

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  “If you’re headed to Colorado, that’s a little out of the way.”

  “There’s a reason. I also need you to go our personnel files and pull out anything you can get on a part-timer name of Pershing Gibson. He was in this Sweetwater unit with Willard Fremont. Also known as Moot. His DOB was...”

  “November thirteenth, 1939,” said Fremont, after a pause. “El Paso, Texas.”

  Dalton repeated the numbers, waited while Sally read them back, and said, “Gibson was in the Marines. So was Pinto. See if they ever served in the same unit, or even in the same AO. I need to know if they ever crossed paths. Basically I need everything you can get on Pershing Gibson. And another thing—”

  “I live to serve, sweetie.”

  “Cross-reference both these guys with everything we have on Porter Naumann. See if they intersect at any point.”

  “You really think any of this connects with Porter?”

  “I have no solid link yet. It’s just what I’m running into out here. If it’s a unicorn hunt for you, I’ll make it up any way I can.”

  “Promises. Promises.”

  “Have I missed anything?”

  “Do you have a current location for this Gibson person?”

  “Yes. He lives on a small ranch near Greybull, Wyoming. We’re going to head there after we talk to our man in Cloud Peak.”

  “Do you want me to ask the local SAIC to send a car out to Greybull and sit on this guy until you get there?”

  “The FBI? Jesus, no.”

  “How about the local state guys?”

  “Much as I admire the county constabulary, I think I’d like to leave this guy under the impression that all is right with his world. A couple of nineteen-year-old ex-linebackers cooping in a plain brown wrapper a half mile down the road from his ranch would mitigate against this blissful state of mind. Have I missed anything else?”

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  “Well, what I wore to bed last night was pretty spectacular.” Dalton snapped the phone shut. Fremont was shaking his head. “I keep telling you. Moot is not

  your guy.” “How do we know this?” “How do we know any guy? I worked with him, risked my

  life with him. And why would Moot want to kill the guy who put him in touch with Dick Poundmaker and saved his ass from the IRS?”

  “Do you have a number for this Poundmaker guy?” “Yeah. What time is it?” “Going on eight-thirty. Seven-thirty in Coeur d’Alene.” “Dick’ll be up. He plays the NYSE and he hates it that they have

  a three-hour lead on him. What do I want him for?” “Ask him if he can get a printout of Moot Gibson’s ATM use for

  the last thirty days. I need locations, specific bank addresses.” “Dick’s not gonna want to hand out that kind of info.” Dalton sent him a look. Fremont received it. “I’ll see what I can do.” “You do that.”

  IN THE END, Dalton had to get on the line and rain down holy federal thunder to convince Dick Poundmaker, Trustee in Bankruptcy, Attorney at Law, Holistic Surgeon, and Certified Doctor of Homeopathic Medicine, that his long-term financial interests, not to mention his choice of permanent residency, depended entirely upon a prompt and full disclosure of any and all banking records pertaining to the ATM usage of Pershing “Moot” Gibson that he could download and fax to a Sally Fordyce at CIA HQ in Langley—

  “The CIA in Langley?” bleated Mr. Poundmaker. “That’s where we keep it. Got doors and a roof and everything.”

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  “Yes sir. I’ll get on it as soon as we hang up.” “Excellent.” “May I speak with Willard?” “No.” “Will you kindly relay a message, then?” “Sure.” “Tell him I regret to inform him that we are no longer friends.” “I’ll do it, but it’ll break his heart.” “One more question—” “Shoot.” “Am I going to jail?” “Not if you do what you’re told.” “Will you report this to the FBI, Mr....” “Dalton. Micah Dalton. If those banking records are in Lang

  ley before I get to Billings, this will stay between us, Mr. Pound-

  maker.” “Where are you now?” “Bozeman.” “Dear God—” Dalton shut the phone off. “Jeez,” said Fremont. “Remind me not to piss you off.” “Just don’t kill a friend of mine.” “You really think Moot had anything to do with the suicide—” “The death.” “With Porter Naumann’s death?” “I can hardly wait to ask him. By the way, Dick asked me to tell

  you that he regrets to inform you that you are no longer his friend.” “He said that?” “His words precisely.” “Dick’s a dick.” “That was my impression.”

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  THEY WERE FORTY MILES farther east when Dalton’s phone rang. “Dalton.” “Micah, it’s Sally again.” “That was fast.” “This isn’t about the faxes. I’m still waiting for those. I was doing

  a run on the rest of the guys in Fremont’s unit and I turned up some

  thing.” Dalton gave Fremont a brief sidelong look. “Yeah?” “Your guy Fremont? He mention a Crucio Churriga?” “Yes.” “Where are you right now?” “Just coming up to Butte.” “That’s what I thought. You might want to stop in there.”
“Okay. Why?” She told him. He thanked her, shut the phone down, and then he told Fremont. Thirty minutes later, they were pulling off 90 and turning north

  onto Harrison. The old town of Butte was a tangled grid of dusty red Victorians that climbed up the ocher slopes of a ragged mountain, behind the crest of which lay an abandoned slag pit that was now the home of the world’s largest toxic-waste pond.

  Below the steep grade of the old town, spreading out into the valley to the south and west, ringed in by snowcapped peaks to the north and east, was the suburban sprawl of the new town, a maze of shopping malls and trailer parks and cardboard housing gnawed all winter by storms off the Rockies and baked all summer by a blistering dry heat. Back in the 1880s Butte had been the home of the Copper Kings. Now it was the home of the Burger Kings and any number of hardscrabble peeler bars with names like Double Deuce and Trigger Time. A gen-

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  eral air of resignation and gloom lay over the town, relieved from time to time by little explosions of domestic violence or clashes between what was left of the Indians and what was left of the miners. The patron saint of the town, and still its most famous son, was Evel Knievel, who honored his birthplace by getting out of town as fast as humanly possible—in his case on a Harley—and never going back.

  The Copper Kings Palliative Care Center on Continental Drive— so named because the Continental Divide was a few miles up the mountain ring, on the far side of Elk Pass—was a fairly new complex of low limestone blocks scattered about the stony hillside under the spreading arms of Our Lady of the Rockies.

  Dalton pulled the Crown Vic up under the portico and shut the engine down. A Montana state trooper pushed his way through the green-tinted double-glass doors and walked over to meet them. He was a big slope-shouldered man in his late fifties with a barrel chest, ruddy cheeks, careful blue eyes, and a snow-white handlebar mustache. His handshake was as hard as his face and his uniform would have made a Fort Bragg DI glow with admiration.

  “You’re Mr. Dalton?”

  “I am. This is my associate, Mr. Fremont.”

  Fremont shook the trooper’s hand, looking a little worried. The trooper gave Fremont a once-over, looking skeptical. A cutting wind carrying yellow dust was swirling around the entranceway, stinging their eyes.