The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

  “This break-away sect, they had these things they called Goyath-lay’s Throat, long clay tubes, about two feet long, real old. Ancient. Connie said they were turned on a wheel in the same tent where old Goyathlay would have his sing during the Peyote ceremony. She really believed that, you know, she revered this thing just like a Bible Belter would revere the personal pickled pecker of Jesus muff-ucking Christ himself. Anyway this clay tube she had, it was a gift from a roadman—a priest of her kin clan—”

  “Did she tell you his name?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I was surprised that Connie was telling me all this, but it had to do with something she had seen going on at her company. She worked as an acoustic laser technician at Red Shift. Far as I could tell from what she told me—she was given to prattle, the dizzy old bint—anyway, Red Shift techies was trying to figure out what sort of coating would work to stop laser surveillance from

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  reading what was being said inside a room. You know, it reads these tiny variations in the movement of the window, from a thousand yards, and it can hear what’s being said. So Red Shift had come up with this film, looked like ordinary window tint, but it prevented all kinds of gear from peeping in on secret meetings. It’s on the Pentagon glass right now, why it looks green.”

  Dalton waited her out, sipping at the rum, savoring the rich, dark tang of it. She had excellent taste in liquor, he decided.

  “What this had to do with Goyathlay’s Throat, she got it into her head that since this cylinder had been cast right in the same tepee as old Goyathlay was living in, then it stood to reason that the sound waves from Goyathlay’s actual voice would sink into the wet clay as it was being turned on the wheel. You know about Hatshepsut’s Tomb, over there on the banks of the Blue Nile?”

  A hard left turn, but since he’d flown in from Greybull with a pilot who flew the way Barbra Goldhawk talked, he stayed in his seat. “Not really. What about it?”

  “There’s a big picture on the wall there, painted two thousand years before Christ, and it shows the Ka, the soul, of Amun himself, being turned on a potter’s wheel by the ram-headed god Chin-um. Right there next to a portrait of old Queen Ahmose. Interesting, isn’t it? So this is sorta like what Connie and her clan believed. That the soul, the voice, of Goyathlay himself had seeped right into the walls of this cylinder.”

  She stopped short, and went a long way inside herself, her skin going blue-white and her cheeks flushing.

  “Get me my puffer, will you, son?” she said, after a long silence.

  “Where is it?”

  “In the bedroom ...table...by...the...”

  He stumbled to the back of the trailer, scattering kittens and cats, and found the blue plastic ventilator on a TV tray by her cot. She had her hands out as he came down the hall and stuffed the mouth-

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  piece into her tracheal tube, pressing down on the plunger. After a few gasping heaves her skin grew less deathly and the flush faded from her cheeks.

  “Sorry. Not smoking enough, I guess. Say it’ll kill me, but it hasn’t yet. Pass me a cigarette, will you?”

  “Maybe you should hold—”

  “Maybe you should hold your tongue, kiddo. Pass me a smoke.”

  Dalton reached for the Marlboros, pulled one out. He even held the lighter like a gentleman as she sucked the cigarette alight through her tracheal implant. She laid her hand on top of his and flashed him a ghastly coquettish leer as she did so.

  “Okay ...now...what all this has to do with Red Shift is that Connie Goliad figured—this was back in early ninety-seven—that if she could find some reason to stay late a couple nights (she sorta ran her own bench with nobody over her shoulder so long as she got her reports in), then she would have access to this top-secret laser scanner thingy that could read the most minute variations in the surface of things. She figured if she set this Goyathlay’s Throat thing into the machine, she could find out if there really were sound waves embedded in the clay.”

  “And were there?”

  “Hard to say. She got a lot of random variations that the machine translated as white noise. Tried the same thing with the cylinder spinning at the same rate as it would have spun while it was being made, and she did get some weird rhythmic sounds out of it, kind of a droning singsongy sound, sorta like somebody tuning a church organ. She played me a tape of it and it did sound sorta like chanting. But that’s not what her real beef was. While she was there in the lab running this stuff, her husband, Héctor, he was a pilot trainer in the Mexican Civil Air Patrol, he was wandering around the lab, waiting to drive her home, and he happens to be sitting at this computer trying to make it access the Net, when he looks up and he sees through

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  the window that the manager’s computer has turned itself on. All by itself. You follow?”

  Dalton said nothing, although the idea that a computer would turn itself on in the middle of the night did not, in this Microsoft world, strike him as more sinister than his McAfee program doing exactly the same thing at four in the morning to a billion other computers.

  “So he calls across to Connie, who goes into the office. Security there was lousy. And she sees that this remote computer is talking to the manager’s machine. She pings the remote and sees all these interval linkages come up. Well, here she told me a lot of technical bull crap that she might as well have told to old Woodstein over there— for Chrissake leave off lickin’ your dick, Woodstein, ’fore you wear it to a nubbin! But it seems like she was able to determine that some machine in Paris, France, belonging to an Anglo-French consortium called FrancoVentus Mondiale—she Googled them and found out they designed turbojet engines—she realizes that this machine was exchanging what looked to her like encrypted technical data with the Red Shift mainframe.”

  “Did she think this was routine?”

  “No. And it damn well wasn’t either. She knew the entire Red Shift client list backward, and besides, Red Shift had what she called an Umbra-level security wall that directly forbade them from having any direct Internet linkage with any foreign firms. It was designed to prevent the illegal transfer of technology that might end up in the wrong place, North Korea or China for instance.”

  “I know something about it.”

  “I’ll bet you do. So do I. It’s called Echelon, isn’t it? Run by the NSA. Don’t bother shining me on with those movie-star looks. I know a con artist when I see one. Anyhow, Connie decides that the security of Red Shift has been broken. They been hatched into by a hatcher—”

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  “A hacker?”

  “Hatcher, hacker, tallywacker. Some freaky-geeky spy boys of some sort. Her husband agrees with her, and they, being poor ignorant beaners and redskins and not knowing Penobscot from the Pentecost, well don’t they get all patriotic and call up the Red Shift chief of security, this Latino ex-FBI dorkwad named Zigismond D’Escarpa—known in the Red Shift cafeteria as Sigmoid O’Scopa, because he was always looking up somebody’s ass for security breaches. There’s a good one in there somewhere. Security breaches. Security britches. Well, when it comes to me, I’ll call you. Anyway, Sigmoid, he comes down on them like a ton of bricks.”

  “Not grateful?”

  “Grateful? It was all Connie could do to hold on to her job. Tampering with the mainframe. Use of company facilities without permission. Breach of confidence. Espionage—”

  “They didn’t believe her?”

  “No. Sigmoid and the techies ran a complete hard-drive scan and rechecked all the traffic logs going back six years. Turned Red Shift upside down for three and a half months, during which she was suspended without pay and her husband had to go back to training pilots in Guaymas to pay the mortgage. In the end it all came to nothing: they declared that there had been no breach and they told Connie to just forget all about it. Even let her come back to work.”

  “And that was the end of it?”
<
br />   Goldhawk sent him a look. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” she beeped at him in that robot voice. “ ’Long with Héctor, who has himself a— But I’m getting ahead of myself. More rum.”

  Dalton filled her up again and took a sip of his own while she gathered her narrative line again, her wrinkled old face bright with cheerfully malicious intelligence.

  “Thanks. Smackety-smack, eh? Nice stuff. One-fifty proof too,

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  goes down smoother’n an altar boy on the Bishop of Nîmes. Where

  was I?”

  “They let Consuelo Goliad go back to work?”

  “So they did, and for a time it looked like that was all there was to it, except that she started to have problems at the bank. All of a sudden her line of credit is being ‘reconsidered’ by the bank and a couple of her cards are called. Short story is she realizes that the Red Shift management is trying to destroy her. Héctor gets demoted down there in Guaymas from flight instructor to maintenance pilot, all these little things going wrong, and she figures, okay, this is a covert thing here. The brass at Red Shift, the manager anyway, is a spy. She figures he’s selling critical defense data to these folks at Franco-Ventus in Paris—”

  “Why them?”

  “They’re frogs, aren’t they? Cheese-eating surrender monkeys. So bent they can piss around corners. All that European Union crap, standing up to the good old United States of America? Like I said, she was a true patriot, the sap. So she figures she’s gonna take this to another level. Screw the Feebs, she’s gonna do a Bunny Berrigan—”

  “Bunny Berrigan?”

  “The rogue priest who stole a bunch of government secrets and took them to the press. The Pentagon Papers? Like that.”

  “Bunny Berrigan was a band leader. I think you mean Daniel Ellsberg?”

  “There you go. So she’s gonna do an Ellsberg, take this to the press, like, so she comes to me with the whole sorry sack of grief.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “That’s my point. I was working up the pitch to my editor, getting my sources nailed down, and checking Connie’s story. Much as I could: Red Shift wouldn’t even return a phone call. Then I get this message from Connie: her husband Héctor, he’s flying a check-out

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  night mission on some kinda single-prop job they use for skimming the grow ops they got down there along the border outside of San Ysidro. What you call an instrument flight? Whammo! He flies right into a transmission tower outside of Ojos Negros and gets fried like a jumbo shrimp. You ever wonder why they call ’em jumbo shrimp? I mean, a shrimp is supposed to mean tiny, right. Like a shrimp, but then they—”

  “When was this?”

  “When was what?”

  “When was Héctor killed?”

  “Wednesday, October twenty-nine, 1997. Well of course Connie’s hysterical. She’s convinced that the Red Shift boys have somehow rigged this thing. And she’s sure she’s next. Now I’m trying to calm her down. I need her to hold her act together, because my editor is saying he won’t print word one until he meets with Connie up close and personal. Says this story could sink the Clarion. But Connie can’t be gentled up on this. She says she’s got all the papers, got the proof right there, and she’s gonna hightail it up to Comanche Station and go to ground there.”

  “Consuelo was part of the Goliad clan in Timpas, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s right. And that part of Colorado is wide-open grassland with nothing but other Comanche clans around. She figured she’d be safe there, stay low and let me work out the tactics here in Simi Valley....”

  Her buzzing narrative trailed off and her skin color changed from a hectic flush to a shiny yellow like old parchment.

  “Are you okay? Can I get you something?”

  She looked at him for a while through her thumb-stained glasses and Dalton could see that her eyes were welling up.

  “I’ll tell you something, son, I was a good reporter. I may not look it now, but I took my job for real. I know I was just a small-timer for a sellout rag, but this story meant something to me. Story

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  like this comes along maybe once in your whole career, and this one was mine, and I liked Connie. Not just as a source, but for what she was. She cared about her work. She loved her country, and she come to me looking for justice. And all I did was get her killed. Course they made it look like an accident, a big pileup in the snow over there on I-25. Her Jeep rolls over and she breaks her neck. But it was a killing, plain and simple.”

  “Who was behind it?”

  She rallied a bit, wiping her eye with a tissue and then balling it up and throwing it into a corner.

  “Who you think? Those sons a bitches at Red Shift. They killed her, sure as gnats got nits. Set her up neat as napkins. In the doing of it the careless pricks also killed five innocent people and left three others crippled for life. Got their names by heart too. Wanna hear ’em?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  Let’s see ...Aside from Connie Goliad, dead at the scene, there was Alice Conroy, twenty-nine, research doctor on her way to Denver for a new job in advanced pediatric oncology. God knows how many lives she mighta saved if she lived. And in the red Fiat with her a guy named Declan Hearne, a thirty-five-year-old ski instructor she was engaged to marry. And Jewel Escondido, thirty-six, along with her one-year-old daughter Amber, they were in a pickup got pushed right off the bridge and fell a hundred feet into the Purgatoire—”

  “Jewel Escondido?”

  “Yeah. Escondido. She was a bank teller from Pueblo, on her way down to Raton to visit her mother, who was in a cancer hospital down there.”

  “You happen to recall what her mother’s name was?”

  “Jeez . . . it’s in my files. She was at the funerals. I’d have to—”

  “It wasn’t Ida, was it?”

  “Ida? Ida ...Ida... yeah, it could have been Ida. Why?”

  “No reason. Just trying to make it real.”

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  Barbra gave him a hard look then, her eyes narrowing, and opened her mouth as if to push the question, but she let it pass.

  “Oh it was real enough. Little baby Amber fell all the way to the river’s edge still tied up in her car seat. Hit facedown. I saw the shot from when the state boys turned the carrier over. Little girl’s face was so much raspberry jam. One of the cops threw up, so they told me. And another woman—odd name, Silken Kir—she went into a coma on her way to the hospital and died six weeks later. She left three kids under ten and an unemployed husband who had both legs amputated after his combat patrol took a mortar round in Basra. Crippled for life were Tadeo Hiruki and his father Takeo, along with an old priest from Mission San Labré out in Montana. All that grief, you know? All of it going out in ripples, like. Kills me to think of it, even now. They got clean away with it too, those shits at Red Shift. Still have, all these years later. You go on over to Tierra Rejada Road and see for yourself. Can’t miss it. This big mission-style bunch of buildings all done in adobe like they was the Alamo. Sixteen miles of razor wire all around it and you can’t even drive up the road to the gate without a big old Hummer stuffed with pumped-up yard bulls cuts you off sharp and asks you to state your fucking business. No, they killed her, sure as death and taxes.”

  “Didn’t you follow up?”

  “Didn’t I follow up? I called the FBI, I called the CIA, I even called The New York Times. Never even got a call back. Not one. You know how I know they killed her? She had all her papers sent along to FedEx? Everything she had printed out from Red Shift, records of this remote computer in Paris, the whole shebang, with the instructions to hold on to the packet until she gave instructions on where it was supposed to go. The Colorado cops jerked it away from FedEx and put it in storage, all righty-tighty. In January of ninety-eight Red Shift filed a claim to recover the documents, but I raised a lotta hell, called the court clerks so often the judge t
old the

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  deputies to keep her stuff in storage until the ownership could be decided. And in February of ninety-eight the place was robbed. All her documents, everything that was in her Jeep? It was stolen. Nobody was ever caught. Stuff was never seen again. If that doesn’t sound like an inside job, I don’t know cat piss from soda pop. No, you run it all together, look at the timeline, you see it plain for what it was.”

  “An assassination?”

  “Yep. To cover up a spy operation right spang in the middle of one of America’s most important high-tech sectors. Right here in Simi Valley. And I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

  “You could have written the story anyway?”

  “Tried, didn’t I? Tried my damnedest. Editor said without the witness, without the papers, it was too risky. He was right too. Anyway, after that, I sorta lost heart. I was being audited by the feds by then, like I told you, and the editor was hired away to work for the L.A. Times. The Clarion got new owners. Things started to slide for me personally. I got fired for drinking, or so they said, although I never missed a deadline. Well, I suppose the biggest news story of my life just fizzled out. Which is the story of my actual real life too, I guess.”

  Here she came to a natural pause and sat back, exhausted by her story and by the excitement of his visit, by the chance that after all these years vindication had come calling. She drained off her glass, set it down on the desk, placed the little pistol beside it, and buzzed at him.

  “So what you gonna do with all I told you, son? You really gonna get the CIA off its ass? It’s not too late, you know. I could let you have my files. They’re all on this CD here. Everything there is to know about that accident, personnel records from Red Shift. You could take it all to Langley. Nail those treasonous bastards.”

  She held up the CD, breathing hard, and Dalton knew the book

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