“God knows I’ve done that before.”
“Tell you the truth, you’re right about the psych thing. I can’t afford to lose an operational guy without a damn good reason. I’m losing staff to Middle Eastern Operations every day.”
“I know. I was glad to rotate out of there. I hated it.”
“Me too. Remind me, next time we invade the Middle East, to just nuke the sons of bitches and call it a day. This whole War on Terror is sucking up resources, manpower, computer time — it’s cramping our global reach, and all so a pack of camel-porking dune buggers can go to Blockbuster and rent Jim Carrey movies. And all the time the Chinese are sitting like vultures all along our Pacific Rim.”
“September eleventh wasn’t a distraction, Jack.”
“I know it wasn’t. But these Islamic terrorists, they’ll always be with us. Like herpes simplex or Noam Chomsky. With them, it’ll always be one damn thing after another. In the meantime, we got China rising up out there in the Far East like a tsunami while we diddle around in the dunes playing Lawrence of Arabia. You know China is shopping around in the Third World looking for high-tech rocket engines?”
Dalton did; he read the Intel Link dailies too. But there was no stopping Jack Stallworth once he got into high gear.
“All around the world, the Chinks are hunting missile tech. And what are we gonna do when they got three thousand nuke-tipped ICBMs dug in around Manchuria, two thousand miles from the coast, all their infrastructure buried way deep, immune to air strikes? And all of these ICBMs capable of taking out our entire Western seaboard? You don’t think they’re watching everything we’re doing in the Middle East? What’ll we do if the Chinese lob a nuke-tipped cruise missile into one of our Pacific carrier groups? How about the Chinese arrange a proxy missile hit on Guam? The North Koreans already have it sighted in with two of their Dong Two ICBMs. Make it look like some terrorist plot? I tell you, Guam is the new Pearl Harbor, Micah. Am I ranting here? Is this a rant?”
“Sort of. A bit. Actually it’s more of a prolonged gripe, only your voice is real loud and your face is getting all red and sweaty and there’s this big bulgy vein standing out right in the middle of your forehead.”
Stallworth reached up and stroked his forehead absently.
“Yeah. I’m ranting. Sorry. I hate this war.”
“How’s Drew?”
“My son?”
“Only Drew I know.”
“He transferred out of the Horn this September.”
“He’s a good kid. I always liked him.”
“He’s no kid anymore. Neither are you, I guess. Micah, I let you go look into this Willard Fremont guy, you gonna be… stable, like?”
“I just want to get back in the saddle.”
“Cowboys again.”
Dalton grinned, his first real smile in over an hour. Stallworth felt his own heart lighten; what the hell, it’s a poor man who never rejoiceth. And maybe Micah would be okay. Maybe he’d even find a way to solve this Willard Fremont problem. Stallworth liked Dalton very much, and sincerely wished the best for him. As long as it didn’t damage the Agency. Or in any way threaten his own pension.
“I was speaking metaphorically,” said Dalton.
“You know I hate it when you start speaking metaphorically.”
“Bullshit. You do it yourself. All the time.”
“I do not,” he said primly. “Metaphors are prolapse, and prolapsity is the enemy of precision.”
“I think you mean prolix.”
“Micah, no offense, I need you to go away now.”
10
Dalton read Willard Fremont’s bulky jacket on the flight out, while thirty thousand feet below his porthole the landscape changed from a flat rolling sea of brown grasses to a wrinkled gray hide with here and there the silver thread of a river glinting in the sun, and then into a coat of dark-green lodgepole through which folded outcroppings and bare blunt teeth of granite thrust upward, and finally the cathedral spires and glittering snowcaps of the Rockies, rising up under the starboard wing. A hard landing in Spokane, and with the mandatory bong bong a galvanic, Pavlovian response rippled through the passengers; up before the plane had stopped rocking at the gate, butting into one another, shoving their elbows, their shoulders, their great corporate arses into Dalton’s left ear as they unlimbered their cumbersome drag-ons, and then standing in a glum row like discontented steers waiting for the slaughterhouse gates to open.
Dalton, staying in his seat until the plane cleared, reached the conclusion that Stallworth hadn’t been exactly correct when he called Willard Fremont “one of ours.”
Willard Fremont was what they called in the darker arts a “bolton,” a freelancer, attaching himself to one agency or another as the work offered, trading on personal references, a gypsy agent living the life of an underpaid and occasionally over-shot-at mercenary in the more disreputable outlying fringes of the intelligence community.
Now in his early sixties, Fremont had done a stint in the Navy. Mustered out as a loadmaster on the USS Constellation at the end of the Vietnam War. Spent some time in Guam, running his own machine shop and part-timing as an armorer for various intelligence agencies. Taken up full-time by the NSA in the late eighties as a kind of in-shop fabricator for various NSA units requiring special surveillance gear. Developed a kind of snap-on suppressor designed to work with subsonic rounds, got a patent on that, and then sold it to the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1992 — for a song, it looked like. Declared personal bankruptcy in 1993, married, promptly divorced, banged into a drug rehab facility in Spokane for six weeks. Discharged allegedly cured, worked for a while as a long-distance trucker in the mid-nineties. And then apparently back in harness for the Sweetwater unit operating out of Denver. Retired in 2002, and his pension checks were signed by the paymaster general of the General Accounting Office, a meaningless detail, since everyone who had ever been in intelligence long enough to get a pension got paid by the PG of the GAO.
The photo accompanying his jacket showed a reed-thin but wiry whipcord of a man with sunken cheeks, an out-thrusting, pugnacious jaw, red-rimmed blue eyes, indifferent teeth, large ears that stuck out from his bony skull, a close-cropped military Mohawk gone yellowish-white, big knotted and capable-looking hands with enlarged knuckles, long ropy forearms: a man who had once been hard and useful but who had now sunk into a general air of decrepitude, disappointment, decay.
The ride in from Spokane was in the back of a tan Crown Victoria driven by an elderly and dyspeptic U.S. marshal in a wrinkled blue suit and a dirty white collarless shirt open to the third button. As the valleys and crests of the Rockies rolled by outside his window and the city of Coeur d’Alene showed itself in glimpses through gaps in the surrounding mountains, Dalton read and reread the final report from the HRT commander who had led the assault unit that managed to pry this grumpy old crab from his shell-like private compound up near the Canadian border two weeks ago.