The Echelon Vendetta (23 page)

the Chesapeake. “Let me do a workup on this Sweetwater guy.” Stallworth’s expression changed in some indefinable but de

tectable way. He held Dalton’s gaze but in his eyes there was this...

absence. An opaque quality. “Sweetwater?
That’s
the guy you like for Naumann?” “And his family. How about it?” “Why are you calling him Sweetwater?” “It was the name he used himself. In Venice.”

“Sweetwater?”

“Yeah.” Stallworth’s face clouded up. “Man, this stuff is wack.”

Wack?

“Micah. Micah, you coulda kept me better informed, you know.” “You
told
me: Nothing written. Person to person only.” “I did?” “Yeah. You said it was policy. Straight from the Vicar.” Stallworth pushed his chair back, set his feet on the desk, templed

his fingertips, stared at Dalton over the top of his reading glasses. Dalton thought the look needed a pipe but he kept his mouth shut. After a long while, Stallworth nodded slowly.

“Okay. I’ll give you that. You stay in-country, right? No fucking off in the middle of the night to go to Serbia and start a firefight?”

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david stone

“Scout’s honor. Can I use the cubicle next to Sally?” “Yeah. Mickey’s in Gitmo. When do you want to do this?” “Right now.” “Forget it. You look like a bucket of bat boogers.” “Jack, for the love of God...” “Well, you
do
look like hell. You got a room?” “I’ve got a suite reserved at the Regis.” “Jeez. A suite! At the Saint Regis? We’re paying you too much.” “Nah. I put it on the Agency.” “When you wanna come in? Tomorrow?” “I’ll check in, get a shower, have dinner. How about later

tonight?” “It’s
Friday
night, Micah.” “So go home to your greenhouse. I want to get this started.” “Okay. Your life to piss away. You’ll have the entire section to

yourself. What kind of access you think you’ll need?” “Need? I’ll need
everything.
” “You’re not cleared for
everything.
” “Okay. Give me everything except that.” “That? What
that
?” “
That
being whatever part of everything I can’t have. Got it?” “I got it,” said Stallworth, looking over at his orchid. His eyes

grew soft and his face changed. He seemed to drift. After a while, he looked back at Dalton. “You still here?”

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friday, october 12 copper kings palliative care center butte, montana 8 p.m. local time

rucio Churriga’s dying body was laid out in a hospital bed, the only occupied bed in an underused four-bed ward in the Bridger Wing of the Copper Kings center on Continental Drive on the eastern edge of Butte. Outside the window a blue shadow was crawling up the side of the Elk Park Pass, and the big white statue of Our Lady of the Rockies, her arms outspread as if she were about to take flight, was the only thing still illuminated by the setting sun.

Beside the bed a steel rack full of machinery pumped and whirred. A black plastic remote control lay in Crucio Churriga’s upturned palm, his fingers lightly curled around it because, even in his deepest sleep, this remote was above all things precious and dear to him.

The remote controlled the IV drip of morphine that he needed to keep his skull from cracking open from the pain of the cancer that was eating his face off inch by inch under the wad of bandages that covered most of the right side of his head.

He had once been handsome, dark-skinned and sharp-featured with pale-brown eyes, rich black hair, and strong even teeth that made the ladies smile. But none of that had survived the thing that was eating him alive. His body was rack-thin, and under the pink sheet his ribs stuck out like a wrecked rowboat in a low tide. Crucio’s body was in Butte, but Crucio’s
mind
...his mind was far, far away.

In his dreaming mind he was standing on a white sand beach that curved around a mile-long bay and disappeared into a blue haze of low mountains on a distant curve of the ocean. Above him, rising up like the prow of a ship cutting into the shining blue haze of the Pacific, was Point Reyes Lighthouse, and down on the beach in front of him a young woman in a flower-print sundress was walking barefoot along the shoreline, the sun strong on her form, her full, ripe body visible as a shadow under the thin cotton of her dress. High above him gulls soared and dipped and the wind off the sea was clear, tangy, cooling his skin.

He came to this place as often as he could, borne to it on a river of morphine, and it was on this perfect crescent of sand and shimmering sea that Crucio Churriga hoped to spend his last days, waiting for death. He closed his eyes and felt the sun warm on his forehead, let the surging of the sea fill his senses.

He began to drift into sleep.

A sharp guttural cry from above; his eyes opened and he saw a large black crow strike at one of the gulls. It plummeted from the sky and landed at his feet, its throat ripped open.

Its head was nearly off.

Thick blue blood ran from the dying bird.

Crucio stepped back away from the dead gull and looked down the beach; the girl in the flower-print dress was gone, and in her place was a tall black figure walking toward him. The glimmer of the great booming ocean surrounded this figure, but he looked familiar.

In his dreaming mind Crucio raised his right hand to shade his

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eyes as he squinted into the glare off the water, trying to make out the features of the big man walking toward him.

He was wearing cowboy boots and a long black range coat and a Stetson with silver conches around the brim.

A name came to him.

“Moot?” Crucio heard himself saying. “Moot, is that you?”

The man came closer, and as he did so he held out his hand, palm out, showing Crucio what was in it.

“Where did you get that?” Crucio asked.

The man said nothing. He just looked down at it and then up at Crucio. He smiled. The smile was very strange, because although he knew he was looking at Moot, the smile on Moot’s face did not belong to Moot; it belonged to a dead thing.

Now that Moot was here on the sand beside him, close enough to touch, Crucio could see that Moot’s eyes were gone—there was nothing in the sockets but blackness.

Crucio decided that he didn’t like this dream anymore.

Back in the ward in Butte, Montana, the body of Crucio Chur-riga began to move restlessly in the bed and his right hand closed over the remote.

The remote that was not in Crucio’s right hand.

Back on Point Reyes Beach, back in Crucio’s dream, he was standing before the tall man in black who was almost but not quite Moot. Crucio looked at the thing that was in the man’s hand; it was the remote control that Crucio used to regulate the morphine drip, the remote that was his only reason for still being alive.

The remote that when he pressed the button would send a warm rushing river of ease and peace and joy and contentment flowing into his arm and from there out into all the rivers and streams and oceans of his body until he was floating, floating over the mountains, floating on a river that carried him all the way to the Point Reyes Lighthouse.

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david stone

“That’s
mine,
” hissed Crucio, feeling the first stirrings of resentment. “Give it to me.”

The man shook his head slowly, still smiling that cold smile.

The shadows of crows flitted around on the sand at the man’s feet. He looked up to see a flock of crows wheeling in and around the gulls. A second gull fell from the sky and struck the sand to Crucio’s right, hitting so hard its gray, speckled body split open and spilled pink intestines out into the sand. The blood ran into the sand and dried as it ran, leaving a dry lake of black beads that looked like shards of coal.

Crucio stepped back from the dead bird and looked up at the man who now stood in a cloud of flying crows. He reached behind his back and pulled out a long ivory-handled stiletto, turned the blade in the light. The glitter off the silvery tip lanced into Crucio’s eyes. The light bit deep into his eyes and a red glow started up behind them.

The red glow turned into heat and the heat moved down the side of his face until it reached his jaw, reached where his jaw would have been if the surgeons had not sliced it off along with much of his upper palate and right cheekbone.

In the hospital room Crucio’s right hand flexed and his fingers clutched at the remote that was never going to be there.

“Man, I
need
that remote. Please.”

The man who wasn’t Moot shook his head, and the leer spread across his face like an old wound opening up, showing stained brown teeth.

Crucio’s rage had always been a few inches under his surface and now it boiled up like lava; he lunged at the man, who stepped easily to the right and plunged the tip of the stiletto deep—deep—into Crucio’s cancerous jaw. The blade punched through the thick bandages and went in so deep that Crucio felt the tip scraping along the flat bone of his upper palate. The pain in his skull went from a red glow to a blue-white star that exploded behind his eyes.

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He fell backward into the sand. The blue sky above him faded to white and the crows whirled around his head in a rattling, croaking swarm. He felt the ground as it slammed hard into his back.

He lay there for a time, gasping, staring up at a blazing match-head sun that bored into his eyes, the pain in his skull a white-hot blaze that seared through his mind.

A tall black shadow fell across him, cutting off the sun.

He saw a shape bending over him, reaching down toward him. The blade...Crucio’s eyes snapped wide open.

He was back in his hospital room.

Sweat covered his wasted body.

The pain in his jaw was ...immense. Like no pain he had ever felt in his long life. He could hear the beep of machinery off to his left. On the ceiling above him bars of dying yellow light glowed.

The remote.

Where was the remote?

His right hand probed the sheets beside him, fingers wide, his breath coming in short, sharp explosions.

Not there!

Not there!

He cried out in a slurred, mutilated voice. “Alice! Alice, where are you!”

Silence in the room. No whisper of rubber soles coming down the hall. The machinery beeping. The bars of sunlight inching across the ceiling. The pain
growing
...

He would have to get up and find the remote.

He set himself, sat up, his balance reeling, the IV stretching as he did so, the tall stand rattling. He swung his long hairless legs to the right and pushed himself to the edge of the bed, slipped forward on the edge; his bony bare feet touched something soft.

Warm.

He looked down.

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david stone

Alice, the duty nurse for the six-to-twelve shift, was lying on the floor beside his bed, on her back, staring up at the same slow golden bars of yellow light that were inching across the ceiling of Crucio’s hospital room in Butte, Montana.

She was not seeing them.

Her throat had been opened like the lid of a jewel box, showing a trove of rubies. Her eyes had been scooped out, and from underneath the fan of her white-blond hair a lake of bright-red blood was spreading outward. Crucio looked out at the open door into the hallway. Another nurse was lying there, her legs splayed open, thighs streaked with red, blood running from underneath her skirt.

Crucio recoiled, pulling himself back into the bedcovers. The phone. He moved to his left, reaching out for the phone.

There was a dark shape sitting in the chair in the corner of the room. In the half-light Crucio could see the phone in the man’s lap. His leathery hands were folded over it. On his right wrist he wore a turquoise bracelet. His legs were crossed. He wore black jeans and cowboy boots tipped with silver. His face was in the shadows.