“And if that failed?”
Fremont shrugged. “Like I said. We were the remedial arm. We’d set them up for the FBI, or for the local cops, and put them out of business entirely, find some way to frame them on other charges. Used the IRS sometimes, the way they got Capone. Most times the targets would never know why they were set up — the real reason, I mean. But we did what was necessary. Get them in prison if we could, but anyway stop them from selling critical technology to our enemies. Whoever was involved. Directly, culpably involved, I mean. Root and branch, like cancer surgery. However far down it went, we sliced it out.”
“By any means necessary? Short of outright murder?”
“Damn right,” said Fremont, his face hardening. “And I’d do it again tomorrow. This is a great nation. It deserves to be defended. I have nothing to apologize for. I’d still be doing it if… if I could.”
“I didn’t think you needed to apologize. And I agree with you. How many guys were in your unit?”
“Globally, I have no idea. Might have been a hundred separate units around the world, doing the same kind of work for the NSA. Our guys, our unit, we were six guys, and we were mainly responsible for the Southwest. We handled anything that came up from Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado. We were based in Lordsburg mainly, but we went anywhere we had to go. We were a tight crew too, all real good guys. Al Runciman you heard about. And Milo Tillman, who we lost in the high desert in ninety-seven—”
“The guy you think might still be alive. Drunk in Tularosa.”
“Yeah,” said Fremont, looking a little uncertain.
“Who else?”
“Crucio Churriga. But you can write him off.”
“Why?”
“Crucio’s dying of cancer. Got it from sticking that Skoal tobacco snuff under his lip. He’s in a… what do they call it? Where you go to die and they give you painkillers and aromatherapy massages and shit but you better not adopt a kitten or buy any green bananas?”
This took awhile to decode. “You mean palliative care?”
“Yeah. That’s it. Palliative care, last I heard, in a clinic in Butte — just down the Interstate from us. There’s not much point in going to see him, though. He can’t even talk. They took most of his lower jaw off. And he’s in a kind of self-induced coma most of the time. They got him on one of those computerized drip things so he can control the amount of morphine he’s getting. So he takes all he can handle. Which is funny, since Crucio was a major doper when we were in the unit. Me and Crucio, we used to…”
Fremont’s voice trailed off and he looked down at his coffee cup, his eyes hooded. Dalton didn’t push it.
“Anyway, then there’s Pershing Gibson, named after the general. He was our shooter, our main guy with weapons. Big guy, over six feet, very strong, an ex-Marine. Sorta scary. We used to call him Moot, on account of him always saying that something was a moot point.”
“A shooter? A long-range sniper?”
Fremont, anticipating the drift, shook his head. “No way. Moot’s no back-shooter. If he wanted me dead, it’d be easier to invite me to his ranch in the Bighorn Valley, bust my skull with a rock. He’s got a spread out there, right next to the Jim Bridger Trail, high desert so flat you can watch your dog run away for three days, Rockies a hundred miles off in the west, the Bighorns fifty miles in the northeast. Got a pack of feral dogs who howl down the blood moon if they smell a live man walking. Moot’s safe enough, I guess.”
“Moot Gibson? Like Hoot Gibson, back in the twenties?”
“Yeah. Cute, huh?”
“And he’s still alive?”
“So far. He retired from active duty with our unit seven years ago. He’s real hard to reach, hates technology, went deep into this kind of Indian spirit stuff years back, stays far away from people. Very tough, very vengeful guy. Scary if you got him real pissed off. Good with guns, good with a knife. I figure, of all of us, Moot’d be the hardest guy to kill.”
“Al Runciman, dead in Mountain Home. You. Crucio Churriga — dying of cancer in Butte. Milo Tillman, who’s been missing since…?”
“Ninety-seven. Drove into a snowstorm and never came out.”
“Milo Tillman, and this Moot Gibson guy. That’s five.”
“Last unit guy is Pete Kearney. Also retired. Got a place not all that far from Moot’s ranch, only on the eastern edge of the Bighorns. A little cabin on an outcrop overlooking Ranchester, right where the Tongue runs down into the Powder River country south of Sheridan. Got a cliff at his back and a view out his front window that goes all the way to South Dakota. Not even your friend Porter could sneak up on him. Pete’s family goes way back down there. His great-grandfather was Phil Kearney, the cavalry general. From the porch of his cabin Pete can see the site of his great-grandfather’s fort, Fort Phil Kearney, right down there by the Bozeman Trail. Pete was our wrangler. Anything to do with horses, he’s your man. He’s my age now, but in great shape. What they call a real range cowboy. A hardhanded man. Know what I mean?”
Dalton did. He thought of the scene in Joanne Naumann’s bathroom. That was range work, something done by a range cowboy. On the other hand, fifty thousand cowboys lived within five hundred miles of this safe house in Missoula.
“And these guys — Moot Gibson, Crucio Churriga, Pete Kearney — they’re all still alive?”
“I haven’t talked to Pete or Crucio in weeks, but if something had happened to either of them, I’m pretty sure I would have heard. Crucio’s got all the nurses charmed in his ward and one of them woulda called me. And Pete, he’s no hermit, not like Moot. He’s got lots of friends in Ranchester and Dayton. Somebody would check on him. Far as Moot’s concerned, I know he’s still alive because he’s still using his ATM card.”
“His ATM card? How do you know that?”
“Moot used to have a much bigger ranch, out there near Hardin, a ways past Billings, a real sweet spread. Took his retirement in one go and poured every dollar he had into this horse-breeding operation. Down in Custer country, near where the massacre happened, but Moot went bankrupt two years ago, after that big drought. Could have stayed on his feet, the creditors were all willing, but the IRS forced him into selling everything. Moot took it pretty hard — he truly loved his horses, and most of them went to slaughter. He took it especially hard after all that ‘service to his country’ stuff at his retirement party. We’d used the IRS to break a target so many times that he saw the IRS as just another branch of the CIA. He even asked the Agency to help him out with the IRS, and they did try, but there was no calling those dogs off. They went for his blood and by God didn’t they get it, too. Ruined him.”
It struck Dalton that Moot’s grudge against the IRS could, in a bloody-minded man, easily expand into a generalized rage. “But he still has a place in the Bighorn Valley, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah. I helped him out there. I been bankrupt myself, so I knew how to work it out that you got to hide some of your assets, whatever you could keep from the feds. I put Moot onto a guy named Dick Poundmaker, he was my bankruptcy trustee, half-Yakima Indian and crookeder than a sink trap. Dick had worked out this cheat system for probably a hundred of his clients. Dick gets hired as the guy’s trustee, and the guy — in this case Moot — promises Dick a cut of every thing he’s got left, medical disability checks, welfare, investment property, whatever the guy has managed to hide. Since Dick’s acting in the name of the guy’s creditors — in Moot’s case the IRS — he sends the creditors a couple bucks to keep them happy, puts the principal into one of a whole bunch of different bank accounts he’s got set up under his own name in Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, Seattle, all over the Northwestern seaboard. Dick’s client gets an ATM card linked to one of these accounts, and he takes out his cash whenever he needs it. If it weren’t for Dick Poundmaker, Moot wouldn’t even have his little old ranch in the Bighorn Valley. I talked to Dick when I was in the holding pen in Hayden Lake and he said Moot was still drawing cash money out his special account as of last Friday.”