“Do you actually have these letters?”
“I do. I have the whole stack right here. The tone of these letters is very odd. They start out calm, polite, reasonable, and then they gradually go totally mad. Spelling deteriorates. He starts writing in big block capitals. Then these drawings start to appear. By the last one, that’s all there is. Scrawls. Doodles. I’d say the guy was slowly going mad. If I had been getting letters like this, I’d have called in the FBI.”
“Did anybody?”
“I guess it got referred back to our own security people here, because somebody in HR sent Gibson’s file over to the Vicar.”
“Cather? Cather got a bullet?”
“Yes. Why?”
Stallworth’s office, last Saturday morning.
Jack and Dalton.
“You know where this Pinto guy is right now?”
“No. I was in the middle of that when Cather shut me down.”
“Micah, you still there?”
“Yes, Sally. Sorry. Anything come back from Cather?”
“Not on paper. But then if the Vicar’s unit took care of it, it wouldn’t exactly make the Times, would it?”
“Christ, I don’t want to go poking around in Cather’s crypt.”
But you are, aren’t you, Micah?
“Me neither, sweetie.”
“So what you’re saying is—”
“I think we can agree that Gibson’s an unstable freakazoid who was in England and Italy around the time you and Porter were there. I mean, we can’t prove Italy, but England’s right across the channel.”
“Any sign that he crossed?”
“If he did, he didn’t do it as Pershing Gibson.”
“How else would he clear the borders?”
“There are no borders. There’s the EU. And he’s a CIA-trained field man. That’s what you guys do. Frankly, I’m a little surprised he used his own passport to get into England in the first place. Micah, can I ask you a question?”
“I’m holding my breath.”
“Are you going to go over to Greybull and take this guy on?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“No. I’ve got Willard the Bold, my trusty sidekick.”
“Great. Where’s Pal the Wonder Dog?”
“He called in sick. Did we hear from Stallworth?”
“No. But the day’s not over yet. Where are you now?”
“Coming in to Billings.”
“How did it go in Butte?”
“It was ugly.”
“How’s Willard doing?”
“Better than expected.”
He glanced over at Fremont, who was staring straight ahead, unseeing, his mind back in that hospital room in Butte.
“Micah, if you’re going to Greybull, will you let me call in some reinforcements? Nicky Baum and Delroy Suarez are in Lawrence, Kansas. They can get on a jet and meet you in Greybull. I checked, there’s an airport there. Long enough to land one of our Gulfstreams.”
“You talked to them?”
“Not yet.”
“What are they doing in Kansas?”
“Taking a course. At the university there.”
“What’s it called?”
“Motifs of Moral Decay in the American Espionage Novel.”
“You’re making that up.”
“I wish I were.”
“I sure don’t want to drag them away from that. But it’s nice to know they’re close. Have them stand by in case I change my mind.”
“I’ll do more than that. I’m sending one of the Gulfstreams to Topeka. It’ll be there for Del and Nicky if you want them in a hurry.”
“Stallworth will freak. That’s very big money.”
“Jack’s not here. I am.”
“You watering his plants?”
“With my very own tears.”
Around noon, the sun high overhead in a cloudless sky, they were rolling southward as the Interstate curved down-country beyond Hardin, and at a little past twelve-thirty they reached the town of Crow Agency. The land around them was open grassland with here and there a few stands of cottonwoods and poplars.
On their left as they passed Crow Agency the grassy hills rose up into a rounded crest, where a tall stone cairn stood above a long rectangle of golden sweetgrass marked off by a low wrought-iron fence. Scattered down along a falling slope that led into a wandering river valley thick with cottonwoods stood a collection of white marble gravestones, some of them single, most in groups of two or three, while inside the iron fence there were sixty or seventy gravestones gathered into a tight formation.
A warm wind stirred the tall sweetgrass, moving in wavelike ripples across the low hills and shallow valleys. Both men fell silent as the car raced past this little cemetery where George Armstrong Custer and the men of the Seventh Cavalry had died in less than thirty minutes of savage hand-to-hand fighting against over six thousand Sioux and Cheyenne warriors.
Fremont craned his neck to take in the battlefield as the car sped southward down the highway, the mounded blue domes and the purple valleys of the Bighorn Mountains becoming more visible along the southwestern horizon. In the end, as the low bank of golden hills dropped out of sight behind them, he turned back with a long sigh.
“Bad business, that” was all he said.
“Worse if you were taken alive,” said Dalton, thinking about the charming old Sioux custom known as kakeshya. “You remember what Kipling said?”
“I do,” said Fremont. “When you’re down and wounded on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up your remains…”
“Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains…”
“And go to your God like a soldier.”
“Amen,” said Dalton.
Neither man spoke for another fifty miles, each man thinking of what might be waiting for them at Pete Kearney’s cabin high up in the eastern ledges of the Bighorn Mountains. The feeling of moving deeper into history, deeper into the still-surviving remnants of an ancient and unending war between the whites and the Plains Indians, oppressed both men, and they had little to say to each other until they crossed the border into Wyoming. The mood in the car rose once they were well into the lush rolling terrain of the Powder River country, and in a while they turned west off the Interstate, heading west toward the supply town of Dayton, sitting on a big slow bend of the Tongue River, in the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains.
Fremont directed them to a squat square building, made of cinder blocks, sitting on the western edge of the town. A hand-painted sign over the sagging wooden doors read, incongruously, HANOI JANE’S. They parked the car in the meager shade of a dried-out two-hundred-year-old cottonwood and walked up the rickety wooden stairs. Inside the deserted bar, in the dank gloom and the smell of spilled beer and old cigars, they paused to let their eyes adjust to the darkness, and then they crossed the creaking floor of rough hand-sawn planks and sat down at a battered mahogany bar, into the surface of which had been set at least five thousand silver dollars.
Behind the bar was a tall antique sideboard groaning with dusty liquor bottles. A large stainless-steel cooler clattered and wheezed in a corner, next to a bank of new-looking video poker terminals. Other than the moronic electronic tweedling coming from these machines, and a distant radio scratching out a country-and-western tune, the place was silent. Above the bar fifty different versions of the Vietnam-era Huey chopper, each one made out of a different brand of beer can and strung up on fishing line, turned and bumped lazily in the dusty wind off the street. In an ornate Victorian frame next to the antique sideboard there was a copy of a black-and-white photo of Jane Fonda, wearing a North Vietnamese helmet — badly — and giggling away like a complete horse’s ass in the gunner’s chair of a North Vietnamese antiaircraft piece, a profoundly vapid and arguably treasonous stunt that if pulled by a North Vietnamese woman visiting America during the same war would have resulted in the immediate slaughter of her entire village.