The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

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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 sto
od 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.

  There was a kind of galley kitchen—surprisingly, quite spotless and clean—and beyond it, dimly seen through the haze, a narrow bedroom with a well-made bed and clothes hanging in orderly rows in an open closet. The entire front section of the trailer, and the only part of it in any kind of disarray, was taken up with a long table covered with stacks and heaps of paper: reports, drafts, letters, computer printouts, in the midst of which sat a brand-new pearl-gray Dell Inspiron laptop.

  In front of the Dell was an old wooden office chair excessively padded with ripped and yellowing foam rubber. An ashtray beside the laptop was overflowing with stubbed-out butts and tubes of gray ash. A greasy tumbler half-filled with some amber liquid sat next to a large black cat with a chewed left ear, sitting on top of a stack of books and licking itself—a strong, lushing sound—with the kind of contemptuous disregard that only cats can convey.

  The tomcat paused for a moment to consider—and disapprove of—Dalton, with one green eye and one yellow eye over a vertical hind leg, and then went back to his business, pink tongue rolling. Barbra Goldhawk put a finger to her voice box and buzzed at him.

  “Fuck off, Woodstein. Company’s come.”

  The cat straightened up, flared out, bared his oversized yellow fangs, hissed at her, and then flowed down off the desk, scattering her papers across the threadbare carpet. She dragged her little blue

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  and-silver oxygen tank behind her—Dalton had a fleeting image of what R2D2 would be doing after he retired—and set it upright next to her chair, where, through a series of practiced gyrations, she got herself safely sat down without strangling herself on the oxygen tube. She leaned back in the chair, lips smacking, looking like a grizzled old Munchkin Madame about to broker a deal for a kinky night with Dorothy—Toto ten francs extra—staring at him through her glasses, her huge brown eyes blinking ...blinking... blinking...

  Dalton looked around for a chair, saw a milk box full of newspapers, dragged it over, and sat down.

  “Writing a book,” she buzzed at him. “Sorry for the mess. Beer’s in the icebox, if you want one.”

  “No, thanks,” said Dalton. “I appreciate your taking the time to see me. What’s the book about?”

  “You boys. Spooks. What complete fuckups you are.”

  “Can I help? I know a lot about fucking up. It’s my life’s work.”

  She blinked at him awhile, trying to figure out if he was being saucy, and decided that he was. She showed him her unnaturally even Chiclet-size teeth and clacked them at him again.

  “Funny. I guess you were doing your stand-up routine in Vegas while those raghead muff-uckers were taking their flying lessons.”

  It took Dalton a few seconds to successfully decode “muff-uckers” and one more second for him to conclude that whatever else Barbra Goldhawk was, she was no Paphiopedilum sanderianum.

  “No. I was in the Poconos. Got a publisher yet?”

  “Yes. Me. I’m doing it myself.”

  She pushed some papers aside and showed Dalton a shiny computer CD.

  “Seven hundred and sixty-three pages of pure muff-ucking Pulitzer. Unless you’re here to try to stop me, son. Don’t even try.”

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  She leaned down and reached into the wastebasket, coming up with a small stainless-steel Llama .32 pistol with ivory grips and a gold-plated foresight. Dalton felt his vitals retracting as he stared down into the unwavering black dot of the muzzle.

  “Not at all,” he said, in an unsteady voice, thinking that if he died this way they’d bury him with his ass in the air and a plastic daisy stuck where the sun, in any decent, God-fearing world, ought never to shine.

  “Good,” she buzzed, lowering the muzzle and resting the little pistol in her lap. She crossed her legs and took a pull at her cigarette. “Well, what do you want? This about Connie Goliad?”

  “Yes. Consuelo Luz Goliad. Died—” This triggered a long dissertation in that electric buzz. “Consuelo Goliad. Died in a multiple-car crash while traveling

  northbound on Interstate 25 near the town of Trinidad, Colorado, on Monday, November seventeen, 1997, at approximately five forty-five Mountain Time. I know her. I know a lot more than you think I do. And I got it filed away where you can’t get it too.”

  “Look, Miss Goldhawk—” “Call me Barbra, like the singer.” “Barbra—” “You like Streisand, son?” “Well...” “Me neither. You ever hear of a place called Red Shift Laser

  Acoustic?” “No. What is it?” “It’s a tech business, laser research, big outfit over there on

  Tierra Rejada Road, on the way to Ventura. They do government

  work, laser analysis. Pour me some of that Jamaica there, will you?” Dalton looked around for the bottle. “In the icebox,” she buzzed at him, shaking her head sadly.

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  He opened the refrigerator and saw a half-full bottle of 150proof black Jamaica rum lying on its side in a nearly empty fridge that gleamed as if brand new. He pulled it out and poured her a tumblerful. She found another tumbler on the floor beside her and offered it to Dalton, who filled it to the very brim.

  She took a long, loving sip, smacked her lips, clacked her teeth together again—Dalton was going to pay for her implants out of his own retirement if he ever had to talk to her again—and then leaned back into the creaking old chair, gathering herself. Dalton lifted his own
tumbler to his lips and took a tentative sip.

  “Okay,” she croaked, crackling a bit, “Red Shift Laser. Short story, they do real high-tech stuff, contracted out to Lawrence Livermore, CalTech. If you’re really CIA you know exactly what I’m talking about. I was working for the Clarion at the time and this Consuelo Goliad calls me up one day—I was the feature reporter and I’d just done a big series on how screwed-up the security was at Livermore—which by the by the networks stole from me...”

  She stopped to pull in some air and recharge.

  “. . . which they . . . stole from me . . . so Consuelo figured I’d be interested in what she had. Wanted me to meet her at some motel way out on the coast. I drove out there, she was this heavyset matron-looking woman with all this Navajo silver on her—a real Comanche she was, honest-to-God Indian—well, she was real upset...”

  A gasping sigh . . . another... please God don’t let her die yet.

  “. . . and I figured, well here’s another one, you know, one of these cranks with a bug up her ear, all this la-di-da about government conspiracy, but I stayed to hear her out. You ever hear of Goyathlay’s Throat?”

  She might have been far older and even less redeemable than the glory of old France, as well as four-fifths into the crypt, but she was a reporter and she knew a poorly suppressed reaction when she saw it.

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  “I see you do. I find that interesting. I find that illuminating as all hell. Well, long story short, Connie Goliad was a member of this church, called the Native American Church—”

  “I know it.”

  “Yes, I expect you do, if you know about Goyathlay’s Throat. Anyway, not the regular branch of this church, but what you might call a breakaway sect. She didn’t tell me all this at once, mind—I sorta got it outta her—but talking makes me tired. I had more stamina before the Internal Revenue folks cleaned me out.”

  “They did?”

  She shot him a hard, cold look. “You know damn well they did,” she buzzed at him. “And it was no muff-ucking coincidence neither. Happened right after I got onto the Goliad story—all of a sudden I’m being audited, three years in a row. They force me to go back nine years, nine muff-ucking years, young man. They bankrupted me, they ruined my ...Anyway, that’s all over with now, another sorry-ass old-broad story.