Stallworth’s battered face softened as he took a few moments to adjust to the question, considering a variety of answers. “That’s the name of your guy in Venice, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, I ran it last night, myself. It was a cover name used by somebody attached to a part of the Echelon operation.”
“You know the guy’s real name?”
“No. That’s an archive file now and they’re very restricted.”
“Can you get it?”
“Not likely. Data like that gets dumped from the After Action summary before it goes to Archives. You know about Echelon?”
“Everybody knows it. It’s an NSA operation. Monitoring the trade in technical data, jet engines, metallurgy, communications gear, seeing to it that nothing of strategic importance gets sent to the wrong country. It’s strictly passive. No metal-and-meat function. Right?”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“So what about the Sweetwater link? Could just be a coincidence?”
Stallworth frowned. “Don’t like coincidences.”
“Neither do I. What part?”
Stallworth blinked at him. “What part of what?”
“You said Sweetwater was the name attached to a part of the Echelon operation. What part?”
Stallworth blinked some more. “I meant attached to it. It was part of the Echelon operation.”
Dalton was picking up some evasion.
He marked it and filed it. “Okay. Sweetwater. What do you want me to do about it?”
Stallworth flipped a file across the table. “Cather handed me this, asked you to look into it.”
Dalton picked up the file, scanned it. “Who’s Willard Fremont?”
“Willard Fremont was attached to the Echelon program a few years back. Retired for substance abuse, but he was a good man. I knew him from Guam. Wild man, but a great contract freelancer. I got a call from the FBI last week. He’s in a federal lockdown out in Coeur d’Alene. Seems he went all batshit a couple weeks ago, barricaded himself into a military-style stockade up in the Rockies, a few miles out of some backwater called Sandpoint, just south of the Canadian border. Shot at a postal worker trying to deliver a registered letter from the IRS. The Feebs took him down and now they got him in a lockup near Coeur d’Alene and he’s using our name in vain.”
“The Agency?”
“Yeah.”
“What does this have to do with the guy who did Naumann?”
“You know where this Pinto guy is right now?”
“No. I was in the middle of that when Cather shut me down.”
“Cather thinks this Fremont guy is where you should start looking.”
“That makes no sense. No sense at all. I’ve got a photo ID on Pinto, and a sheet as long as my dick—”
“You’re gonna need more than that.”
“I’m trying to put him in London around the time Naumann’s family got hit. I know I can put him in Venice and Cortona when Naumann got killed. I say we put him out all over the grid, get a location, and go nail his tongue to a door.”
Stallworth shook his head. “Cather says no. He says you stay strictly continental.”
“What? Why? No overseas? Why the fuck—”
“You want it straight? Medical. This salvia shit. You’re not going global, Micah, and that’s the name of that game. You follow? Cather’s putting Serena Morgenstern on this Pinto guy. She’s going to be—”
“Serena! Serena Morgenstern is a fucking infant, Jack!”
“She’s twenty-nine. And she’s a good street agent. Cather’s giving her Mandy as field liaison. They’re already out looking, Micah.”
Dalton stared hard at Stallworth, who returned it just as flat.
“Jack. I told you I was okay.”
“And we believe you. We just want you to stay inside the borders for now.”
Dalton stared down at the file folder in his hands.
“This Fremont file, this is bullshit, Jack.”
Stallworth shrugged that off as well. “Cather doesn’t think so.”
“Cather doesn’t run your unit. And Serena’s not a cleaner.”
“He’s 2IC to the director of operations, and Operations controls the cleaners. And Serena’s a cleaner now.”
“She is?”
“As of eight A.M. London time.”
Dalton shut his mouth so hard it made his teeth hurt. He turned in the chair and stared out Stallworth’s window at the atrium garden. Lots of activity for a Saturday. The begonias were being taken out.
“They’re taking out the begonias, Jack.”
“Fucking right they are. Come on, Micah. You’re still operational. No section eight. You’re just working a little closer to home. For now. Do this right and you’re back in London Station.”
Time passed. The begonias were plucked out one by one and thrown onto a cart. There really wasn’t much that Dalton could do about any of this anyway. After a while, his breathing returned to normal.
“Mandy’s working with Serena?”
“Yep.”
“Not alone? Not out in the street?”
“No. Serena will have some muscle with her. Mandy’s strictly liaison and computer backup. Searches, reporting. Once again, whatever she and Serena get, it comes straight to me. They’ve got your workup on this Pinto guy. They’ll get him. You pull this end of it.”
“I’ve never known you to keep such a tight hand on the wheel before. What’s so special about this one?”
“It’s not special. It’s just policy. I told you—”
“Cather’s policy.”
“Yeah. Cather’s policy. You don’t like it, he’s in his office right now. How about I give him a ring, you express your strong disapproval of all his works and days? Huh?” Stallworth lifted the phone up, held it in the air, raised his eyebrows at Dalton, waiting.
Dalton put his head back, stared at the ceiling.
Sighed.
“I would like to see some mountains again.”
“Mountains? You just came back from mountains, didn’t you?”
“Not like the Rockies. I was down in Tucumcari, at my uncle’s ranch. But I was in Spokane last August—”
“Yeah. I remember. What was his name?”
“Bob Cole. Burned himself to death in his own garage.”
“Yeah. Sad case. Ever find out why?”
“Money troubles, we figured. Couldn’t find a note. Body was burned beyond recognition. Not even dental work. He used an accelerant. Burned white hot. We arranged for a pension for his girlfriend and their kid. I sent you the work sheet.”
“My job is not to get bogged down in details. That’s why they sent me over from the NSA back in ninety-five. CIA in those days was like that black guy on that ship, you know, admiring his own reflection in a bailing bucket while the whole damn boat sinks underneath him.”
Dalton blinked at Stallworth, trying to work that statement out. He discarded several interpretations as simply too damn ridiculous before settling on one that was just plain loopy.
“You’re not talking about The Nigger of the Narcissus, are you?”
“Yeah. That’s right. The Conrad story.”
There was just so much wrong with that literary reference that Dalton saw no easy way to untangle it. He sat for a time, in silent admiration of Stallworth’s near-perfect ignorance on any subject other than rare orchids and complex international intelligence operations.
“Don’t give me that look, Micah. Make a decision here. Willard Fremont. You want him? Go out there? See if he connects to Naumann. If he doesn’t, you can always shut him up.”
“Shut him up? You mean whack him?” said Dalton, trying for levity, still internally far off his balance.
“Man. First it’s cowpoke stuff. Now you’re Joe Pesci. No I don’t want you to whack him. I mean, fly out there, see what his grievance is. If there’s a link to Naumann, to this Pinto guy, find out what it is and tell no one but me. If the Echelon thing is just a coincidence, then do your cleaner gig. Cool him out. Smooth him down. Get him to stop flapping away like a broken fan belt, make him happy, even if it means springing him on a 62–14 and getting him down to the safe house in Anaconda. This is a very bad time for one of our old freelancers to go all Woodward and Bernstein on our collective ass. If you do have to yank him out of lockdown, babysit him for a few days in Anaconda and see if we can find a way to make him gurgle. Anyway, it’s easy duty and you could use the rest yourself. Take him fly-fishing. Go for beers. Hire some hookers and catch a nice dose of chlamydia.”