This description, which would not have delighted Stallworth, did seem to satisfy Fremont’s lingering suspicions.
“Yeah. That’s our Jack. Can I really trust you?”
“I don’t know. You can’t trust me to do anything that will compromise either me or my boss or my unit or my country. You can trust me to keep you safe and reasonably well fed until you make up your mind what you’re gonna do with what’s left of your time. Stallworth sent me out here to smooth you out and to see if you had a problem that we could help you with. That’s why I’m here.”
Dalton left out the part about Sweetwater and whether or not Fremont’s worries had anything at all to do with Porter Naumann’s death. Fremont, shaken and off-balance, inclined to chatter, would get there on his own, if there was anywhere to go in the first place.
“That’s what you do? Solve problems?”
“Stallworth runs the cleaners for inland work. And please don’t tell the FBI. They think they’re the only hard cases in America.”
“Cleaners? I heard of you. Sometimes you just erase people.”
“If I was supposed to erase you I’d have done it while you were twitching away in the backseat. You’d be floating facedown in a canyon creek right now, all your troubles at an end. You used the synapse code. That means — that used to mean — a security breach. A dangerous threat of some sort. How about you explain that part?”
Fremont worked that through, his thin lips moving as if counting off the odds in some obscure game of chance. Which in a way he was.
“All right. What else am I gonna do, anyway? Here’s the thing. I’m being hunted. By somebody good. A contract guy. A pro. For over a month now, at least since the beginning of September. For a while I wondered why. I asked around, nobody could tell me anything. Finally, I figured out that the only thing that made me worth killing — I mean, by a solid professional shooter — was what I knew about Echelon. Echelon was the only really high-level outfit I ever got involved with. I figured somebody high up in Echelon, somebody right at the top, was sanitizing the record before he handed the operation over to a successor and took his retirement. Getting rid of the freelancers, the lowlifes like me, guys who never went to Choate. That way we never pop up in the news later to embarrass the guy in front of his golfing buddies.”
Dalton, who had tried to get more up-to-date on Echelon before flying out, could not see the bureaucrats and forensic accountants and plodding computer dorks who currently ran it sending an assassin out to kill minor field hands like Willard Fremont, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Anyway, whoever the shooter is, the guy made two passes at me while I was taking a sorta vacation in a friend’s cabin up in Bonners Ferry. Sniper shit, both near misses, big magnum. First time, September third or maybe the fourth, I’m fishing on Upper Priest Lake, I bend over to gaff a pike — zoot! — round goes right by my ear, I roll out, and I’m in the water, swimming for my life. Second time, three days later, the seventh, I’m in the outhouse, communing with Mother Nature, this great big round punches straight through, hums by my ear like a bumblebee. Please don’t ask me where I was hiding when the shooter came down to check out the privy.”
“Did you see his face?”
“Where I was, a patch of white with two wide blue eyes looking up would sort of stand out. No sir. I kept my head down and dug in as deep as I could go. Heard him walking around up there for another forty minutes. Then nothing. Then gas and flames. He set the privy on fire.”
“How’d you get out of that?”
“Contrary to what you may have been told, sewage doesn’t burn. It kind of bakes, though, which I do not want to get into either. He made another, the last — most recent, I mean — when I was over the border into British Columbia. Got a smoke?”
Dalton fished out the Marlboros, lit one, leaned back over the seat, and placed it in Fremont’s mouth. He sucked on it until the tip glowed like a firefly and a cylinder of ash fell onto his shirt.
“Thanks. Anyway, I mean, I’m in Canada for Christ’s sake, land of the eco-weenie-pansy-pacifist Birkenstock-wearing furry-legged hippity-dippity crap they believe in up there. I figured I was safe. I was wrong. It was in later September. Make it Monday the seventeenth, which means if it was the same guy who took that last run on me in Bonners Ferry on the seventh, it only took him ten days to find me in Canada. And I’m a guy really knows how to flee. Fleeing is kinda my military operational specialty. So I’m now laying way low, on my guard, dog-sitting for a friend who was doing a hitch for armed robbery down in Winnemucca, real nice out-of-the-way cabin up in the Canadian Rockies. Dog goes nuts one night — a big bitch mastiff named Trudy. I go out for a walkabout with my sidearm. When I come back in, Trudy’s dead on the carpet — ear-to-ear, almost decapitated. The cutter took her eyes out, man. That part really freaked me. I mean, who would do that?”
The same kind of guy who would string up three women and gut them, thought Dalton, wondering how the hunt for Pinto was going. But he just nodded. The world was full of sicko killers. Too full.
“I just turned on my heel and bolted,” said Fremont, coming back from a dark memory. “Got into the woods and spent three days with him right on my case. Never saw him, but I knew he was out there. Made it to the Interstate and hooked a ride with the first truck I saw. Slid back into Idaho, got myself bunkered up in that old fort around the eighteenth of September. Figured at least I’d see him coming.”
“Wearing a post office uniform?”
Fremont grinned at that, a rueful twist.
“Yeah. Sorry about him. I’d been up there for two weeks, talking to nobody but my dogs, and even they were starting to avoid me. I saw the movement along the perimeter and fired away at it. Don’t know how I missed him either. Two rounds and no kill. Not like me at all. When I heard the postie on the scanner, squealing for a chopper and sobbing like a girl, I knew I’d gotten my ass into it. I figured, let the Feebs come and get me. Either they’d kill me, in which case my troubles are over, or they’d take me alive and put me in a lockdown where I’d be safe for long enough to contact Stallworth and ask him for help.”
“Any idea who this guy is?”
“Don’t know. But like I said, he’s good.”
“You don’t have any idea what he looks like?”
“No idea. I didn’t know everybody in Echelon. It’s a big outfit. Hell, to be honest, I don’t even know if this has anything at all to do with Echelon. I made some enemies on my own. But like I said, nobody with this kind of skill set. Guy may not be a perfect shooter — missed me twice — but my how he likes to work in close. You should have seen what he did to Al Runciman, down in Mountain Home.”
“Who’s Al Runciman?”
“You don’t know him? You don’t know what happened to Al? What’s your name again?”
“Micah. Micah Dalton.”
“Micah? Not Michael?”
“Micah. As in Formica. I was conceived on a bar top.”
“Listen,” said Fremont, breaking off, “is Stallworth gonna be there? I really need to see him. Did he say he was coming?”
“He said to get you to the safe house. That’s all I know. How do you know the guy who was after you is the guy who killed Runciman?”
Fremont gave him a sideways look. “We were both with Echelon. It was the only thing that linked us, the only operational thing we had in common.”
Operational? thought Dalton. Echelon isn’t operational. It’s strictly forensic accounting attached to data-mining surveillance software.