The Echelon Vendetta (15 page)

8 p.m. local time

he shadow of the Bighorns had stretched out across the rolling brown hills of the Powder River country 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 Parliament 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?”

“Hot and hot, Mr. Dalton. In the cooler. There’s some doughnuts if you want them. And some crisps.”

Dalton, who knew what vile threats the English intended by the word “doughnut,” settled for a tall cup of strong black coffee poured straight from the pot. He leaned back again and watched the late-night strollers walking along the shops and pubs of King’s Road. He observed them with a detached out-of-body feeling, as if what was going on out there beyond the glass of the Benz was a hand-tinted film of a time long gone, all the people in it dead and their old bones burned.

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Cup listing perilously in his lap, he was asleep by the time Serena pulled the limousine to a halt in front of Porter Naumann’s London town house at 28 Wilton Place in Belgravia, a four-story neoclassical town house with a white stone lower façade, a black spear-tipped wrought-iron fence surrounding a garden with two very large urns holding tall spiked dracaena, a black lacquered door between stained-glass lights, a polished brass plaque and three bricked upper floors, and tall sash windows neatly ordered row upon row, and all around the white-stone façades floated the settled comfortable air of compound interest and dependable stocks.

All the lights were on—on every floor—and the interior of the house seemed to glow with rose and the half-seen reflections of polished brass and antique silver. The heavy wooden door opened before Dalton could touch the gilt handle and one of the station heavies— a black man in civvies whose name he could never recall and who looked in silhouette like an industrial freezer—snapped out a Marine Corps salute, which Dalton returned so crisply that the neck wrench brought his headache right back.