The Echelon Vendetta (45 page)

“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?”

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 told 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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she was going to write was never going to happen. He took the CD from her skeletal fingers and she closed them over his hand, pressing hard.

“You’re more than just a pretty boy, else I would never have blabbed on like I did this afternoon. This thing here, it’s all I have left to give to anybody. Kids don’t call. Friends all dead. I’m in the end of days here. I was gonna win ...a Pulitzer....”

She released his hand and fell back into her chair, her eyes closed, wheezing through her trachea implant. Woodstein jumped up on her desk and stared at her for a while before turning his impassive gaze onto Dalton.

“Barbra...?”

She opened her eyes, waved him away, and went deep inside herself again. A hot wind stirred the drapes and the cooler ticked away like an old clock in the corner. Her lips were blue and her eyes, when closed, looked purple and sunken. The image of death itself was almost visible there, just beneath her skin, like a face rising in a pool.

Dalton pulled her laptop around, placed the CD inside the slot, put a blank disk in the burner, copied it, and placed the original on the pile of papers in front of her. He reached out and stroked Woodstein a couple of times. The cat arched, pressing against him, and then pulled away. The cat crept slowly into her lap, she placed one bony hand on his back, and in a moment they were both asleep. Dalton turned the fan on them, touched her cheek with the tips of his fingers, and left.

AIRBORNE AGAIN,
rising up over the Rockies with the sunset a thin turquoise band far behind them, Irene staring out the porthole as the earth turned beneath them like a whale sounding in a limitless ocean of the purest blue, Dalton put Barbra’s CD into his laptop and opened it up.

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It was all there: her notes, scanned in and perfectly organized, cross-references, websites noted, copies of transcripts, letters, all of the material laid out and charted through a general menu.

Clearly she had been—still was—a great investigator, and given any chance at all she would have made this story a national sensation. But of course she never had any real chance at all, because the entire intelligence community was lined up against her.