He pulled in a deep, silent breath and let it out through his nose, clearing his mind and readying himself. The bass organ sound was very close now, and he could see a great formless shape moving between the glowing trees. He raised the Colt, lined up the three red glowing dots in a level row, and laid them over the pale-green luminous blob that was now moving out from the shelter of a fallen cottonwood.
The shape hesitated at the edge of the clearing, pulsed in place for a while as the vibration changed into a slower, deeper note. Then it moved out again, entering the clearing, now less than thirty feet away and still coming directly toward his position.
“I see him,” whispered Fremont. “He’s close, man. Real close.”
In Dalton’s outstretched hands the Colt was steady, his grip firm, but he could see the effect of his breathing, his rapid heartbeat, in the way the three red dots were pulsing, the two dots on his rear sight moving into and out of line with the single dot on his foresight blade.
What he really wanted to do was to turn and run, keep running until he could run no more, roll over and lie there in the dark — disgraced, ashamed, alive. In a hidden place in his heart he hated his sense of duty, hated his suicidal sense of honor, and he hated Willard Fremont for needing his protection and devoutly wished him dead.
The figure was fifteen feet away and the humming vibrato was in the air all around him. He tightened his finger on the trigger, feeling the sear deep in the frame as it ticked across the oiled and polished surface of the hammer, the straining of the hammer spring, the incremental motion of oiled steel on steel. He stared into the cloud and saw a distinct shape, a solid central form, tall, perhaps six feet tall, broad as a barrel, wrapped inside the shifting, flowing cloak that surrounded it.
Although the humming was in him now, a deep vibration in his chest, in the electric air he breathed, he willed his world into silence, forcing his rising panic down, easing his adrenaline rush until his mind was still and he could see nothing but that hard dark-green shape deep in the heart of the swirling light-green cloud, hear only his heartbeat, feel only the gridwork of engraved lines on the broad blade of the trigger. The three red lithium dots were rock steady, lined up and centered over the heart of this solid shape.
Ten feet away, and as if he had sensed Dalton’s presence, the figure had stopped moving. Dalton slipped off his goggles: the muzzle flare would blind him for thirty seconds if he kept them on.
He blinked as his vision adjusted to the sudden dark, centering his sights on the target, now only barely visible as a moving black shadow in the pale starlight. The bass organ sound increased, driving into Dalton’s mind like a dentist’s drill. The sear inside the frame of the Colt ticked another micron across the surface of the hammer cog.
And another, a steely heartbeat deep inside the revolver.
The figure hesitated, and then came rapidly forward, a sudden gliding advance straight at Dalton.
The idea of taking this man alive, if man it actually was, seemed quite suicidal at this taut moment, so he fired, three quick rounds in succession, each one a distinct earsplitting thunderclap, the big gun jerking as the round exploded out the muzzle, the red bloom of the muzzle flare lighting up a churning seething mass of tiny glistening forms, the world snapping into darkness again, the image still burning on his retina, the trigger pull harder now that he was back in double-action. A tiny metallic click as the sear released and the spring drove the hammer down. Another booming flash. In his eyes the same cloud of glistening red-tinted particles, shards of shiny black mica in a breaking beach wave. He pulled the trigger one last time. The Colt jumped in his hands. The solid cloudlike shape broke into a million particles, reformed itself like liquid mercury, and rose straight up into the night, a writhing tornado of spinning, buzzing particles, spreading itself out across the tops of the trees.
Then fading, dissolving, disappearing against the stars.
For a time, Dalton could hear a distant vibration, receding, dying gradually away into nothingness. Then silence, complete, deep, stunned, nothing but the sound of his own rasping breath, his carotid pulsing in his throat, and a high-pitched incessant ringing in his deafened ears.
“Honeybees?” said Fremont. “A swarm of honeybees? Nuts. Couldn’t be. They don’t travel at night. Anyway, it’s too damn cold.”
“I’ve seen it before,” said Dalton, wrapping his fingers around his cup of coffee, inhaling the rich, deep scent. “Sometimes if a grizzly breaks a nest open, the main queen gets alarmed, she’ll swarm them up like an army and they’ll move just this way. Even at night.”
“Bees,” said Fremont, shaking his head. “Scared the—”
“Me too.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t swarm you. They can kill a man.”
“I saw a swarm kill a young Kodiak once, when I was a kid in Tucumcari. They got into his muzzle, blinded him, smothered him.”
“Yeah. Ugly way to die.”
“Very.”
Behind Fremont’s shoulder the light was changing in the eastern windows of the house, going from milky gray to pale pink. Fremont followed Dalton’s look, then turned back to his fried eggs and bacon. “Morning soon.”
“Yeah. Long night.”
“I kind of wish it hadn’t been bees.”
“Why?”
“If it had been the guy who was trying to kill me, maybe we mighta found out something. We’re still in the dark.”
“Any more thoughts? On Echelon?”
“Yeah. Quite a few. I think this has to be about Echelon. Echelon was the only intelligence op I was ever on that had any real importance. Micah, I’m a small-time field man. Married. Divorced. A bankrupt. If it isn’t Echelon, who is it? My ex-wife’s lawyers? My bookie? My creditors?”
Dalton sensed a building panic in the man and decided that now was a good time to see if he could be led around to the delicate subject of Sweetwater. He poured himself another cup, offered the pot to Fremont. “I thought Echelon was just a technology-monitoring operation. What the hell were you guys doing for the NSA, anyway?”
“Okay, we were what the NSA called ‘the remedial arm’ of Echelon. You’re right. Echelon’s brief was — still is — to monitor all kinds of communications worldwide, looking for a lot of things, but in our case it was mainly the illegal movement of prohibited international technology. Weapons-grade electronics. Advanced jet-propulsion systems capable of being reverse-engineered into engines that could drive a nuclear missile. Anything contrary to our national security, our military superiority. Although we were technically CIA, we were kind of seconded to the NSA. Anytime they detected a company, a person, a charity, a political organization, any entity that was trying to move prohibited technology to an enemy, they sent us in. We were the ones who got our hands dirty.”
“Like what? Assassination?”
“No. Hell no. At least not intentionally. This was years before September eleventh. We lost some people accidentally — foul-ups, civilians wandering into a running op — but nothing on purpose. Mainly we set up complicated stings, false networks, suckered the target into showing his play, and then we took him down hard. Al Runciman and I also did detailed surveillance, basic financial workups, got the domestic life of the target figured out, searched out the background of the company. We managed the gear, the electronics; whatever needed to be specially built, we’d fabricate it ourselves. It was a great outfit, like the special-effects unit on a film crew. We had a string of major successes. One way or another, the leak would get plugged, the technical exchange derailed. Sometimes the people trying to get the prohibited technology out would never even know where it was really going — the end user — or why the deal never got done.”