The Echelon Vendetta (24 page)

“Moot?”

The figure raised the phone and used a long-bladed, ivory-handled stiletto to slice the line. Then he stood up and stepped into what was left of the dying sunlight.

“Please. I need the morphine. I
need
it bad.”

The black figure spoke to him, a whisper, hoarse and low. “Trinidad, Crucio. Do you remember Trinidad?”

“Trinidad? No. I don’t remember Trinidad.”

“You
will
remember it, Crucio. I will help you.”

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friday, october 12 cia hq, langley, virginia butte, montana

10 p.m. local time

WARNING ANYONE ACCESSING THIS SYSTEM CONSENTS TO MONITORING

alton sat back in Mickey Franco’s chair in one corner of the huge cubicle-crowded Cleaners’ Sector, sipping a black coffee and staring at the entry screen warning on his computer. He had decided to begin with facial-scan records of arrivals in London on or about the third of October, looking for anyone remotely resembling Porter Naumann. Although he knew in his gut that Porter had not killed his family, even the
remote
possibility had to be eliminated.

He brought up a full-face of Porter from his ID packet, and hit the scan button on the Entries portal. Fifteen minutes later he hit End Scan and logged out. Naumann had not arrived in any formal entry port anywhere in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Wales from the third of October until the seventh, and on the seventh he was dead in Cortona. That was at least some comfort.

If not Naumann, how about this old man in black going by the name of Sweetwater? With neither a face nor, in Dalton’s view, a reliable name to start with, he had to narrow his search field.

Since Dalton’s inquiry involved locating an individual who was possibly implicated in the death of a senior field officer, he felt reasonably justified in going into the IRS mainframe. He set up search parameters for a male, late fifties to early eighties, six feet or better, no obvious disabilities, typed in the name “Sweetwater” and hit Enter.

The mainframe response a few moments later surprised him. There were 1,638 living males in the age range selected going by the Sweetwater name, all of them scattered across the Great Plains states and down into the American Southwest. Rather than dig through the particulars of each case, he punched in a search for each subject’s SSN card and waited for the mainframe to retrieve them. Each SSN card was linked to a digitized photo of the taxpayer in question. The sources for these were varied and often came from state driver’s licenses or passport shots: it had been his experience that the shots were often out-of-date, but it was the best way he knew of to search for the face of a U.S. citizen, far better than the Department of State or each of the fifty-two state motor vehicle mainframes, because every taxpayer in America was in the IRS files. Not even God kept better records than the IRS. It occurred to Dalton that if the IRS

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had been tracking terrorists instead of taxpayers, the World Trade Center would still be standing.

While he waited for the shots to come up, he was painfully aware that he actually had no clear idea what his target looked like, having never gotten a good look at his face. Still, he had a gut feeling he’d know the man when he saw him. The screen flickered and he was looking at hundreds of digital shots, arranged by state and county.

He looked at every damn one; it took him forty-three minutes. None of them looked even remotely similar to his target. He had no idea why he was so certain he hadn’t found the man’s

face somewhere in these shots, since he had never actually seen his

target’s face. But something was missing in all of these men. Intensity. Malice. Some indefinable but unmistakable quality of latent aggression

that the man in Carovita had radiated in his solitary silence, a quality that these men lacked.

Okay, thought Dalton, speaking half-aloud, let’s take a look at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. See if they have any Sweetwaters on file. And they did. They had all 1,638 of them.

Useless. Utterly useless. Now what? The guy was going by the name of “Sweetwater.” But neither the

IRS nor the BIA had any record of him. Yet Dalton was morally convinced the guy was a Native American. From the States, not Mexico or Central America.

And if this really was the guy who had shown up at Joanne Naumann’s town house in Belgravia last week, he was also a pathological sadist.

It was true that most stone-cold killers are born that way. But the good ones, the ones who last, get training, they find some discipline

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and control, or it gets pounded into them by other equally hard men, either in the armed forces or the cops or in a federal prison. If they don’t get discipline, they get caught and killed long before they reach seventy years. So perhaps our guy was either in prison or in the military.

He minimized the BIA and IRS search pages and logged on to the Military Service Records database. He typed in a search string for a Sweetwater, male, with an age-identifier range of sixty-five to seventy-five.

FILE NOT FOUND

Fine.

Not the military. The cops?

He logged over to the city, county, state, and federal law-enforcement personnel database and tried again.

FILE NOT FOUND

How about prison?

He logged onto the National Corrections database, which included state and federal prison records for the entire country.

FILE NOT FOUND

He
really
needed a picture, damn it! If he was going to run a facial scan through the Entries portal, he need a full-face shot of a series of suspects. Without a picture, he hadn’t a hope.

It was possible the man did not
officially
exist. Not under that name, anyway. Yet he had used the name in Italy. Why was he using
that
name in the first place? Would the name carry some kind of special significance for the man? Or for his victim?

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Naumann was a CIA employee.

Start there.

The CIA internal database carried a list of personal and operational names, often code names randomly generated by a mainframe in Langley, code names that were sometimes used for various operations around the world. Sometimes for foreign agents. Perhaps the name would ring a bell inside the Intelligence community. Unlikely, but worth a try. He went back to the Intel Link home page, logged on to the Umbra program, and typed in Sweetwater.

NAME RETIRED

Retired?

Retired!

That could only mean that at some point in the past, possibly the very distant past, the code name Sweetwater had once been an
ac
tive
Agency name, a name used in a previous operation of some sort.

Then why was an old Indian in Venice using the name out loud.

Coincidence?

A message?

A message to whom?

To the CIA itself, of course.

Coincidences did happen in Intelligence, but nobody liked them very much. Let’s review: Naumann is a CIA agent. He has possible contact with a man calling himself Sweetwater.

Now he’s dead. Really quite sincerely dead.

Then Micah Dalton, another CIA agent, has probable contact, extremely memorable probable contact, with a man using the name Sweetwater, and he almost dies himself. This Sweetwater guy was becoming more interesting by the second. But he still needed to narrow this field. So how?

He reached down beside the desk and lifted up his suitcase.

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Hazmat had left it in Sally’s office for him, tagged with a cleared sticker and a list of the remaining contents.

Section of burned raffia cord—fourteen cm—clean Dried moonflower petals—traces of SUBSTANCE UK present (Neutralized—Inactive—see Hazmat report) Organic material—seven pieces focaccia bread (Neutralized) Multiple sections of clay cylinder—terra-cotta (Mineral scan—American Southwest—age indeterminate—less

than one hundred years—hand-turned pottery— Comanche/ Apache/Kiowa style) Burned paper items—Italian-made—grocery receipts, bus

tickets, etc. Fragment of carbonized paper milled in Omaha Nebraska. Fragment of carbonized U.S. stamp present—franked. Electron scan of carbonized paper fragment shows following

image:

seco Timp

A fragment of burned paper. With traces of a U.S. stamp. Was he looking at what was left of an address? If what he was

looking at was part of the
recipient’s
address, wouldn’t it have some recognizable traces of letters that would be found in Cora’s Dorsoduro flat in Venice? Calle dei Morti? Dorsoduro? Venice?

Actually, no, Micah. There was no special reason to think so, other than wishful thinking. The letter—if that’s what it actually was— could have been in Sweetwater’s possession for any amount of time.

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There was no rational basis for believing that the image the techs had found would have any connection to Cora’s apartment.

A dead end. But the image was all he had. Either his conjectures were on the point or they weren’t. So give it a shot. Let’s assume that “seco” and “Timp” form part of a
return
address. An address somewhere in the United States, since the techs seemed to believe that the stamp was American. This was all pretty slim, but it was something to run with, the only thing he had. He dug out a CD of Microsoft Streets and Trips and looked up every city, town, and county name in the continental United States that began with those letters.

He started with s, e, c, and o. He expected to get fifty variations. To his relief and delight, he got only one.

Seco, Kentucky

How about “Timp”? His luck was holding. He got four.

Timp Ball Park, Utah Timpie, Utah Timpas, Colorado Timpanagos River Park, Utah

All right.

What do we have? We have a Native American Indian. Let’s agree that his
real
name is unknown right now. We can reasonably assume that he has a background of violence.

With a possible connection to the United States government. Why do we think
that
? Because he’s running around using an operational name that was

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at some time in the past activated by an unknown branch of the American intelligence community. Weak, weak as cold tea, but so far his guesses were turning out to be more useful than his certainties.