The Echelon Vendetta (44 page)

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.

“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.”