“Do you? You’d have to justify the tuition.”
“Trust me. I can justify it.”
Something in that tone, a note of resentment, of loss, caught Dalton’s ear. He looked at Fremont for a while in silence and decided that the big ears and the red-eyed hillbilly dullness would make an ideal cover for a field agent; who would look for subtlety, for intelligence and operational skill, in such a weak, sour old man?
“Who’s Verloc?” said Dalton, just to check his theory out. Verloc was the main bad guy in Conrad’s The Secret Agent.
And Fremont knew it. He’d read it.
So this was no shoeless Okie fresh from the swamp. A look of instant recognition, a fleeting glimpse of his internal life, even of clear brilliance, a strong native intelligence, and then the dullness, the fixed flat eye, the veil came back down like a glaucoma. “Verloc? Don’t know the guy.”
Without moving his head, Fremont flicked his eyes around the room again; they came back to settle, steadily and without emotion, on Dalton’s face. They were being monitored, the clear implication.
Dalton inclined his head once, conveying understanding; he’d assumed there would be mikes, and with that sign Fremont seemed to relax slightly, the stiffness, the braced quality, leaving his upper body.
He settled into his steel-backed chair, and a small smile played for a minute across his pinched, sunken features. Dalton, who was still holding Fremont’s copy of Heart of Darkness, the only object that had been exchanged between them, opened the book where a folded corner had marked Fremont’s place. The note written there was extremely faint, a feather-light shadowy script in very soft penciclass="underline"
synapse
Dalton read the word twice. “Synapse” was an old Agency code for a major, a critical, security breach, now out of common use but current when Fremont was on the job. He rubbed the faint markings away using the tip of his thumb. Nothing remained but a grubby smear when he put the book back down on the table. In Fremont’s eyes there was a piratical gleam, almost triumphant, and his face was slightly flushed. Dalton stood up and walked over to the bars. He reached through and slammed a hand on the steel door behind it. At once a Judas gate opened, showing one pale-brown eye.
“What?”
“I need to talk to the key holder.”
“Why?”
Fremont was still in his chair, leaning back now, arms folded, his dog-eared copy of Heart of Darkness shoved deep under his belt.
“I’m taking this man out of here.”
“Taking this man out of here” required a great deal of urgent and occasionally heated cross talk in the office of the lockdown chief — a pale, scholarly looking man with a shock of white hair and a general air of resignation who was nevertheless capable of summoning up whole armies of argument against moving Willard Fremont so much as an inch, let alone entrusting him to the single custody of one purported CIA agent, no matter how impressive his credentials. It took a callback from Stallworth and a follow-up encrypted e-mail from the Intelligence branch of the FBI to convince the officials to let their prisoner change into civilian gear and shuffle out — still in leg irons and a waist restraint — through the sliding glass doors and into the back of the waiting Crown Victoria.
This time Dalton got in behind the wheel, after telling the old marshal that his vehicle was being commandeered in the name of Homeland Security, which was not well received.
“How the hell do I get home?”
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” said Dalton.
Willard Fremont was still chuckling over that when Dalton finally found his way out of the backwoods around Hayden, but he was sound asleep by the time Dalton got them onto Interstate 90 eastbound, Missoula, Montana, a hundred miles ahead of them and the CIA safe house near Anaconda another hundred miles beyond Missoula.
Dalton settled in at a steady 75, wheeling through the climbing passes with the Rockies rising up all around them, the police radio set to scan the state police frequencies. Near the little mining town of Wallace — marooned in a great dark valley between jagged granite peaks that fenced off the sky, their pinnacles dusted with the first of the coming winter snows, the little wooden town itself bisected by the sweeping ramps of the elevated Interstate — Fremont came struggling up from an uneasy sleep as they were climbing the final curve of a twenty-mile-long winding five-thousand-foot ascent that led to the crest of Lookout Pass. Not so much waking, that is, but jerking bolt upright with a gasping cry and sweat on his face despite the chill of the air-conditioning.
For a moment, lost in his nightmare, he stared around the car with real fear in his white face, his breath rasping in his throat.
Dalton, watching him in the rearview, thought at first that the man was having a heart attack, and asked if he was all right, but Fremont shook his head, bending down to rub his forehead with one tightly shackled hand.
“No. I’m okay. Just a bad dream. Comes and goes.”
Dalton noticed that the farther away from Coeur d’Alene they got the less the man played the redneck hillbilly banjo-picker. His accent was flat, slightly nasal — Midwestern, possibly Kansas — but in no way raw or as uneducated as he wished strangers to believe. He left the man to his night terrors, having had enough of his own to know the devastating effect they had.
He kept the pedal down, turned the radio to a classical station, to the music of a piano sonata. The highway revealed itself to them in mile after mile of wide sweeping curves edged by shattered rock faces and pine thickets, the road soaring majestically upward as if on a course laid out by a condor, and the big Ford engine labored painfully as it hauled them up and up into the chill and thinning air.
In a while, soothed by Chopin, Fremont had repaired himself enough to straighten up, and now looked around him in a far more human way, curiosity slowly replacing the fading horror of his dream.
“Where are we?”
“Just coming up on Lookout Pass.”
As he spoke they crested the craggy pass and drove under a large overhanging sign that read WELCOME TO MONTANA.
This seemed to comfort Fremont.
“Good bye, Idaho. I thought you guys would never show up.”
“Somebody was coming. You made sure of that.”
“I needed to get into a safe place,” said Fremont, speaking more to himself than to Dalton. “That was the only way.”
“You made a real production out of it. Why not just come to us?”
Fremont sat back and studied Dalton’s face in the mirror.
“Yeah? To who, exactly? I needed a fixer, a guy who could roll with deeply weird shit. That’s why I asked for Stallworth.”
“How do you know Stallworth?”
“I used to be a mechanic for one of his NSA field teams in Guam. He’d come into the metal shop now and then, not too proud to talk to the hired help. I kept him in the back of my pocket. I was ever in a spot, I figured I could go to him. Everybody knows Stallworth ran his own field ops when he was with the NSA. He wasn’t even in the CIA until a few years back. Tell you the truth, Stallworth’s the only guy I trust.”
Fremont’s voice trailed away and he said nothing for a long time. He sat slumped in the rear seat, fiddling with his wrist shackles, staring out at the deep pine forest racing by his window.
Finally, “Look, you’re really with Jack, right?”
“For my sins.”
“Tell me something about him. Describe him.”
“He’s bald, round, and as mean as a warthog. He’s uglier than an elephant’s knee but he thinks the office chicks really dig him. Ignorant as a stump about anything but his work.”