James Burke - In the Moon of Red Ponies

I shuffled through the photos one by one. “No, I’ve never seen them,” I said.

“All of them are either professional intelligence operatives or assassins. I didn’t say mobbed-up button men. I said assassins.”

“They work for the government?”

“No, guys like me work for the government. These characters work for people in the government. At least that’s the distinction I’ve always tried to make. I want you to talk with Amber Finley and Johnny American Horse.”

“About what?”

“I believe Amber was with Lester Antelope and the other Indians who creeped that research lab down at Stevensville. The computer files in their possession are going to get each of them killed, in the same way Lester Antelope was killed, in a way nobody even wants to think about. Tell American Horse and the Finley woman to dump whatever they have. Now, not later. They can put it in a paper bag marked ‘FBI’ and drop it in a mailbox or tie a rock on it and throw it through a window glass in the Federal Building.”

“Who’s behind this, Seth?”

“That’s like asking how original sin got started. I did two tours in Vietnam. I believed in what we were doing there. Then I spent the next thirty-five years picking snakes out of my head. My dad had a great expression. He’d say, ‘Son, if everybody agrees on it, it’s wrong.’ ”

Seth’s eyes crinkled when he grinned.

I walked back downstream to my car. When I drove back out of the main dirt road, Seth’s Jeep was gone. For a moment I thought I saw a flash of light on metal or a pair of binoculars across the river. I stopped my car and stared at the trees on the opposite bank until my eyes burned, then told myself the sunlight was simply dancing on the early morning wetness of the trees and that my eyes and mind were playing tricks on me.

Temple called me at the office later in the day. “Karsten Mabus is the CEO of the parent company that owns Global Research,” she said. “He’s been in the biotech business for around twenty years. Owns homes in Arlington, Palm Beach, East Hampton, Santa Barbara, and a place he just built out on Highway Twelve. Has a degree in American Studies from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard. He never married, although he appears to be a ladies’ man. His estimated worth is over five hundred million.”

“How about a military record?”

“None.”

“Did he ever live in Texas?”

I heard her leafing through some papers. “He owns a company in Houston and one in Dallas,” she said.

“When he mentioned my father’s death, he said my father would be mighty proud of me.”

“Like he was home folks?” she said.

“That’s right.”

“According to a feature on him in The Washington Post, he was born in Minneapolis and grew up there and in Milwaukee. The article says his father was a hardware store owner and his mother a school-teacher. Except I couldn’t find any records on the family in either city.”

“What’s his connection to Finley?”

“A friend and campaign contributor, as far as I can see.”

“Do you have any idea what Global Research does?”

“They have lots of government contracts. Some of them have to do with genetically altered foods. Some of their other dealings are anybody’s guess. They’re a high-security outfit. It’s amazing their facility was successfully burglarized…Did you just hear something on your line?”

“Yeah, I think we’re tapped,” I said.

“Tapped?” she said.

“Tapped,” I said.

That same day Johnny American Horse and two of his workers were putting in a rail fence on a new dude ranch out on Highway 12, not far from the Idaho line, when a panel truck stopped in a rooster tail of dust and the driver, an unshaved man wearing aviator’s shades, slacks, and a dirty white shirt, got out and approached Johnny with a grin at the corner of his mouth. “Got some sportsman’s hardware to sell before I move out to California,” he said.

“Like what?” Johnny said.

The driver threw open the back door of the truck, exposing at least a dozen shotguns and rifles that were laid out on a blanket. “I’ll sell them individual or the whole bunch. Dirt cheap, brother. I’ll take pretty near any offer,” he said.

Johnny shook his head and went back to setting a post in a hole and packing crushed rock around it.

“How about you fellows?” the man asked the two white boys working with Johnny.

“Johnny doesn’t pay us that kind of money,” one of them replied.

The boys laughed. The driver of the panel truck picked up an AR-15 that was wrapped in an oilcloth, released the magazine, and pulled back the bolt to show the gun was empty. Instead, a shell ejected from the chamber. “Damn, my nephew left a round in there,” he said.

Johnny picked the shell out of the dirt and threw it inside the truck. The man held out the rifle for Johnny to examine it. “Three hundred dollars,” he said.

“It’s worth six, easy,” Johnny said.

“You know your guns.” The man tossed the rifle to Johnny.

Johnny caught it in one hand, then walked to the back of the panel truck and set the rifle down on the blanket. “I’ve said no to you once. Hate to say it again,” he said.

“No offense meant. A guy’s got to try,” the man said.

Johnny and his two employees watched the man drive away, the dust from the truck blowing across a field of timothy. The man stopped at a crossroads where several land surveyors were eating their lunch under a tree and began making the same presentation to them. Johnny lost interest in the gun seller and went back to work.

Two days later, a Thursday, Darrel McComb was in a bad mood. Wyatt Dixon had just checked himself out of the hospital, against medical advice, and the hospital had not informed Darrel, as it had been instructed. Also, Wyatt had continued to stonewall the investigation into the identity of his assailants, speaking in disjointed hillbilly song lyrics, treating the detectives to his idiot’s grin and feigning incredulity at the detectives’ wisdom.

The nurses and pink ladies puffed his pillows and brought him soft drinks and outdoor magazines from the gift shop and extra desserts from the dining room. In turn, he signed autographs for them as well as the plaster casts of other patients. Darrel tried to explain to the head nurse that Wyatt Dixon was a recidivist whose brain belonged in a jar of alcohol. She replied, “I don’t believe that at all. If he’s done anything bad, he’s already paid his debt to society. Why don’t you people leave him alone?”

Later that afternoon Darrel drove up to Dixon’s place on the Blackfoot, but no one was at home and Dixon’s truck was gone. The neighbor on the opposite side of the river said he believed Wyatt was at a revival up at the Indian reservation.

“Dixon at a revival?” Darrel said.

“That’s right.”

“This man is a criminal.”

“He’s a polite man who always tips his hat to my wife. Why don’t you flatfeet stop picking on him?” the neighbor said, and slammed the door in Darrel’s face.

Darrel drove up to the Indian reservation in the Jocko Valley. It wasn’t hard to find the revival. Between a grove of cottonwood trees and a small rodeo arena and pavilion where the annual summer powwows were held, a huge, open-air striped canopy flapped gently in the warm breeze, the mountains blue and jagged in the distance. Darrel parked his unmarked car in the shade of the cottonwoods and watched the people who were arriving for the revival. They were both Indian and white, poor, uneducated, with the distorted physiques of people who ate the wrong food and had the wrong habits. He wondered how people who had already been so badly treated by life could allow what little they had to be taken from them by charlatans.