He logged on to Military Records, typed in Pinto’s service number — 2543-773-010 — and the Naumann file immediately went totally weird.
FILE NOT FOUND
File not found?
Had to be a mistake.
He typed in it again, number by number, and hit Enter:
FILE NOT FOUND
And again:
FILE NOT FOUND
Oh yeah? “File Not Found” or “File Deleted by Yellow Rat Bastards Who Don’t Want Anybody Finding Out About This Guy”?
Fine.
Our guy was in the Marines, but there was no official record of his service. In the brig at Parris Island for outrages unknown. Sent to Deer Lodge as an accessory to a possible triple homicide. And then released into an unsuspecting world over a year and a half ago.
In the back of his mind there was an uneasy feeling that he was poking around in somebody else’s territory and if he did it long enough he’d attract some unhealthy attention.
On the other hand, the hell with them.
He was an agent of his government. He had every right to all the information he could locate, and if some pencil-dick bureaucrat in D.C. wanted to make a fight of it, he would be only too happy to oblige.
On the lower left of the Bureau of Prisons page there was an icon that read, Release Photo.
Dalton clicked on the Print icon under it.
The entire screen went blank, which sent a paranoid flash through his mind, but the page came back in a moment, the same prison record sheet, but this time there was a color photo in the center of the screen, the full-face and profile of a pockmarked, heavily tanned man with shoulder-length silver gray hair. In the head-on shot he was staring straight into the camera with what could only be called a killing stare, the dead-flat predatory regard of a bull shark, emotionless, yet full of malice, cold rage, and a terrible animal vitality.
It was the very same look that had been in his eyes in that Police Intake shot taken of a young Comanche boy charged with three counts of aggravated assault. Dalton felt a surge of triumph ripple through him. This was that same man, altered and brutalized by several decades of dangerous living. His face was full of angular planes and sudden cuts, as if it had been hacked out of a single slab of weathered mahogany by someone using an ax and a blowtorch.
Underneath his photo was his prison number: 8929-030. In the profile shot, his long silver hair had been pulled back to show the side of his face. Nailed you, thought Dalton, exultant.
There it was again.
The identical ear — small, flattened back onto his skull — and in it the same silver earring, or its exact likeness, the crescent over the cross. This was the man he had seen at Carovita, the man who was going by the name of Sweetwater.
Daniel Jeremiah Escondido, AKA Pinto.
Born in the town of Timpas, Colorado, on November 10, 1931.
Of the Escondido clan.
Of the Apishapa Comanches.
And the United States Marine Corps.
He looked at the picture of the man, a picture he had worked so hard to get, and decided to double his chances of keeping it long enough to run an Entries face scan for the London area.
He hit Print Screen, and while his printer chattered off a color shot of Pinto Escondido, he got up from his desk and stepped across to the box that Mandy had prepared for him last night.
He found the digital camera that Forensics had used to take pictures of the Naumann crime scene, pushed the ON button, and snapped a screen shot of Pinto’s release photo.
All right.
Now he had a name and a head shot to hang it on and he was only a facial scan away from putting this same man in London on or about the time that Joanne Naumann and her daughters had been killed.
His only concern — and this was based on nothing more substantial than the kind of institutional paranoia that infected everyone in the intelligence game — was whether his fox-trot through the various Intel Link databases waving the Pinto flag had drawn any unhealthy attention from other agencies, perhaps from the people who had erased the links to this man’s military records.
Well, it was too late to worry about that now.
If he did draw some bureaucratic fire, Stallworth would run interference for him. Stallworth bitterly resented any attempt to rein in one of his own men, especially an authorized cleaner running a high-priority search.
He used Edit to copy the digital shot of Pinto’s release photo and pasted it into his Entries database scanner, cued it up, and keyed the Search for Matches button, using a time frame from October 3 to October 6.
And he got… nothing.
Some POSSIBLES that when examined in Zoom looked nothing like him, or who did not match the other physical parameters, or who could be disqualified on other grounds, such as solid-citizen IDs or — in one case — because he was a member of the British Labour Party.
Zip nada bupkes, as Sally Fordyce liked to say.
Okay. Not in London, or at least not seen to be in London in the time frame required. The next step was to try to find out if Pinto had traveled to Europe, especially Italy, in the last few weeks.
He logged back into the Portals database.
Since the man had been traveling under the name Sweetwater, Dalton entered that into the Scan parameters, along with the pasted-in prison shot of Pinto and the man’s basic physical description.
He hit Scan and sat back, a wave of fatigue washing over him. He rubbed his face with his hands, stretched, never taking his eyes off the screen. All around him in the large darkened room other terminals blipped and beeped, and from somewhere down the outer hall he could hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner running. He glanced at the time marker in the lower right-hand corner of the computer screen.
3:12 AM
He had been up now for over twenty-nine hours straight.
The screen flickered, and then went blank, a flat screen of blue, with one row of red letters in the middle.
SESSION TERMINATED
Terminated! Session terminated!
Terminated by whom?
He leaned forward and typed in a string of letters.
Query termination order/root level/execute.
Nothing happened for a time. Then he got
GO HOME MICAH
IT’S LATE
Dalton stared at the screen for a while, and then typed in
Jack, is that you?
NO
Who are you?
DEACON CATHER
GOOD NIGHT, MICAH.
His machine whirred and clicked and the screen went black.
Dalton stared at it for a long time, and then he went home.
He was back in Stallworth’s office at 0900 hours sharp on Saturday morning.
“Cather?”
“Cather.”
“He was monitoring your search?”
“I don’t know, Jack. I know he ended it. Have you talked to him?”
“Yeah. He never mentioned dogging your search string.”
“What’d he say?”
Stallworth shrugged. “He says you did good work.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.”
“Jack, can I ask you something?”
Stallworth’s expression was closed and guarded. He spent some time sipping his coffee while Dalton twitched in his chair. “Sure.”
“Have you ever heard of a CIA operation called Sweetwater?”