Downing leaned forward too, thus forming a quiet conclave over the expensive glass coffee table. Jules began to wonder just how expensive.
‘I need you to understand, Ms Balwyn, that power in this city is a fickle beast. The men we will talk to are agents of the state. But the state is not a unitary concept here. The Wave, everything that has come after it, smashed all that, washed it away. Given the nature of your recent tribulations, you must always bear this in mind. Power is not settled here. It is restless and seething and often wont to turn back on itself.’
The lawyer’s voice was so soft now that Jules found herself drawn forward until his face seemed mere inches from hers. Close enough so that she could see where he had missed a spot while shaving that morning.
‘This is the new world,’ said Downing. ‘Born of chaos and madness. Remember that, if nothing else.’
Before she could reply, a door opened to her left, next to the reception counter, and a large, immaculately dressed man in a business suit stood looking at her.
‘Detective Palmer!’ boomed Piers Downing. ‘Always a pleasure.’
27
NORTH KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
For the purposes of her first special clearance mission within the borders of the United States, Caitlin Monroe became Colonel Katherine Murdoch, USAF (Reserve), special advisor to the White House Chief of Staff on military liaison with the Texas Defense Force. The TDF was what happened when perfectly good National Guardsmen fell under the control of a disgraced former general with a Caesar complex and robust levels of popular support – or populist support, Caitlin corrected herself – among a significant minority of a traumatised, deeply riven survivor population.
The TDF was part genuine kick-ass military force, part state militia, and part Praetorian Guard for the Emperor of Fort Hood. Disgruntled veterans from the federal forces, many of them forcibly demobilised and slated for resettlement in Alaska before the Wave lifted in March 2004, had rallied to Blackstone’s standard. It wouldn’t have been Caitlin’s first choice in that situation, but then she had options that these soldiers did not. If you had a family to feed and no money or food to put on the table, a spot in the Texas Defense Force was certainly an improvement over crumbs and cold, empty promises in the Alaskan wastes.
Patronage. It worked for the Romans, and Blackstone was making it work for him.
At least he hasn’t gone the full Caligula on us yet, Caitlin thought, as she sat up on the bed. ‘Colonel Murdoch’ took a room here at the former Harrah’s Casino Hotel, fresh in from Vancouver, before heading out to the Cerner Corporation Campus for an intense afternoon and early evening of presentations from Mr Culver’s ‘people’. Now, just on nine o’clock, Caitlin had retired to the solitude of her hotel room to review her briefing package before flying out to Texas tomorrow.
She hadn’t much bothered with domestic politics before the Disappearance. The endless pig circus had been largely irrelevant to her concerns, and it felt even more pointless in the years since. Especially once she’d settled into life on the farm with Bret and Monique. To be honest, there had been times when she’d imagined herself never setting foot in America again. Caitlin used to simply tune it out. Care factor zero, she said. Until now.
Bret, on the other hand, couldn’t give up his old habits as a former combat journalist. He’d been a good one. Indeed, many of the reports on the TDF in her mission brief were freelance articles filed by none other than Bret Melton. He kept pretty close tabs on the plight of the demobilised veterans, particularly since some of them were peeps he’d met over in the desert. At night he would sit up with Monique in his arms, holding a bottle, listening to the BBC reports.
She ate her dinner – chicken salad without dressing, washed down with spring water – while committing the TDF’s order of battle to memory.
The Texas Defense Force drew upon the infrastructure left over from two active-duty army divisions and a National Guard division. All three of those divisions were ‘legacy forces’, designed to fight a conventional combined-arms war against a conventional enemy. In many cases, their Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles would have required a fair amount of refit before returning to service. No doubt that was what new inductees spent a lot of their time doing.
Blackstone had re-formed these forces into brigade combat teams with a full strength of close to three thousand effectives per team. On paper, Mad Jack could draw on six brigades with armour, infantry and artillery battalions. They were supported by two aviation brigades equipped with the latest Apache gunships. As impressive as the full combat teams sounded, however, they were rarely concentrated at brigade strength. Many of his units were scattered about as battalion-size task forces.
A good sixty per cent of that combat power was oriented along the northern approaches to Texas, ostensibly on internal security patrols for criminal elements and the like. No one in Seattle believed that story, and nor did Caitlin. The remaining forty per cent was evenly divided between the so-called Panamanian Expeditionary Force and the Gulf coastline, backed up by a small collection of patrol boats and a pair of destroyers, which combined to form the naval component.
Once you tossed in a number of squadrons drawn from air force F-16s and navy F/A-18 Hornets, she concluded, what you had was a first-order military power within US territory. And she hadn’t even reached the reserve structure table of organisation yet. In theory, every citizen in Texas could be mobilised for active duty. With one-quarter of the current US population living in the Lone Star state, that number could top out at three to four million.
She shook her head. Blackstone would never need that many. The campaign in New York had left most of the remaining federal ground forces a complete wreck. It would take years, perhaps decades, for them to recover. The only elements receiving full funding were the naval and Marine forces attached to the Combined Fleet. Everything else was falling apart due to a lack of financial resources.
As accustomed as she’d become to the changed world, Caitlin Monroe still struggled to accept the idea of a rival power establishing itself on the North American continent. Because that’s what Blackstone’s regime was starting to look like. Putting aside her own privileged access to information, there was simply no avoiding the conclusion that he was preparing for a confrontation with Seattle, either to break them or to break with them. That was hardly white-hot raw intelligence. The old media and the new filled up miles of on-screen real estate yammering on about it every day.
As always with politics, Caitlin just didn’t care. It might’ve been something more than sound and fury, signifying nothing. But to her, for now, the deepening cold war within the United States was just an operational parameter. She still drew a pay cheque from Echelon, but that was a multinational concern now. The old order, where the US had been first among equals – she couldn’t help but smile at that polite fantasy – had been swept away. Seattle was just a spear carrier these days. The America she had once defended was gone.
When she was done with Blackstone, and when she had confirmed to the best of her abilities that al Banna was dead, she would be gone too. Gone from this open-air mausoleum, gone from the continent of the dead, gone from Echelon, gone from the world of her past. Gone to her future.
At the thought of her husband and child, Caitlin checked her watch again. Another three minutes until she would be able to make a secure connection. She put aside the various briefing papers now to finish her dinner. She didn’t want to be shoving food in her mouth while talking to Bret and Monique.
Taking the salad bowl with her, she walked over to the window, where she had drawn the curtains against the cold darkness as evening closed in. Dropping the room lights so that not even a fragment of her silhouette would show, she indulged herself in a moment of sightseeing, peeking out through a gap in the drapes.
For the most part, it was pitch-black out there. Her window looked towards the south-east, over the Missouri River. She thought she could make out the lights of the recent
ly restored Hawthorne power plant in the distance. Somewhere near that location was a truck stop and travel plaza where convoys and buses readied for their journey across a landscape deserted by all but the most desperate or antisocial types. Caitlin closed the curtains before the void out there sucked all the joy from her soul.
She had never been to Kansas City before, but she’d learned from her briefings as Colonel Murdoch that it hadn’t changed much since being reclaimed as the US Government’s principal settlement centre in the Midwest. Her first few hours in the city, however, had confirmed what she’d been told about the great demographic changes resettlement had wrought here. The city’s population was still only half of its pre-Wave size, and just over fifty per cent of the current residents were migrants, many of them from India, working on the railroads, and many from China labouring on the government’s huge collective farms. It wasn’t yet public knowledge, but KC was also slated to take the lion’s share of the displaced aliens currently being detained on the East Coast.
She scoffed at that. Such a move would surely drive more people to Blackstone’s standard. On the rare instances when she allowed herself to ponder such things, she wondered what was in the water in Seattle. There had to be something, or perhaps it was the coffee. Again, not her problem.
The displaced aliens were the women and children of the jihadis she’d fought in New York. Chief of Staff Culver had thought she should understand what Seattle had planned for them before she committed to the job in Texas. Not that she gave a shit if Kipper wanted to reward his enemies by handing over the very thing they’d tried to take by force. She was just gonna kill whoever needed killing, and then she was outta there.
Peeping through the curtains again, Caitlin could see that large areas of the city remained in darkness, yet to be reclaimed. Some of them, she knew, had not even been cleared of the remains of the dead. When she first arrived in this hotel room, she spent an unpleasant minute or two looking for the telltale stains of the Disappeared. Only once she’d noticed the fresh paint throughout and new carpet did she relax just a bit. The lingering presence of the Disappeared was something she found . . . unacceptable, even uncomfortable, and it surprised her.
Most of her adult life had been spent in an intimate correspondence with death. She had thought herself inured to it. And yet she could not deny a sort of spiritual nausea at the idea of being surrounded by hundreds of millions of vanished souls. She had first experienced it in New York, and the longer she remained on this continent the stronger the feeling grew. As soon as she could walk away from death, she would.
Not being able to account for the fate of Bilal Baumer was frustrating, even worrying to the part of her that had been trained at a cellular level to confirm a kill. But Caitlin was also aware that sometimes you just didn’t know. In her world, the only real certainty was your own eventual negation. Culver was almost certainly right. The air force had probably killed him when they demolished the Rockefeller Center. Still . . .
Her laptop chimed. She abandoned thoughts of the haunted city and crossed the room in five long strides to sit at the large, curvilinear executive workstation. Glorified civil servant she may have been, but at least she wasn’t travelling cattle class. Seattle had leased the hotel to what remained of the Starwood chain, but had reserved suites on the top floor for its own use. Hers was more like an apartment than a hotel room and Caitlin wished that Bret could’ve been here to enjoy a bit of luxury with her. Then again, she could think of about a thousand places she would rather have taken him than Kansas-fucking-City. Perhaps that was what they would do when this was all over: just disappear for six months with Monique. Cash out some of her black funds and visit a few places where they could kick back and not worry about having to outrun a bullet.
After checking the cable connection on the laptop, she plugged the one-time digital key into a USB port and entered her code. A small window appeared on screen, a progress bar. It moved painfully slowly as her machine reached out through a dedicated fibre-optic link to the National Intelligence Agency server at Cerner, from where her comms protocols were forwarded as flash traffic across the Vancouver Alliance military satellite network on a stand-alone channel dedicated to Echelon data.
Thousands of miles away, on a scarred kitchen table that had entered its second century the year Queen Victoria ascended the throne, another laptop encased in its own formidable digital armour shook hands with hers. A second later her husband winked into existence on the screen in front of her. He was holding the baby, asleep, against his shoulder. Caitlin’s heart lurched when she saw how much Monique had grown. She was a baby no longer.
‘Oh, honey, oh my God! Look how big she is! Is she walking yet?’
Her question was accented with a faintly distressed note. The child was living another life, growing up in a world far removed from the one in which she moved. Caitlin was not an automaton, but, while familiar with fear, she had learned to control it. Fear was a variable, something to be used. But now she felt fear as a runaway horse. Her daughter was growing up without her, not knowing her. Caitlin’s stomach clenched. What the hell was she even doing here, playing charades and dress-ups for Jed Culver? She should’ve been at home.
‘Not walking, no,’ smiled Bret, who hadn’t picked up on her sudden spiral into maternal shame and panic. ‘But it won’t be long before she’s crawling, I reckon. I’ve already moved everything up off the bottom shelves.’
And what had Caitlin done while Dad had been readying the family home for the day their daughter was able to crawl off her play mat for the first time? Killed half-a-dozen men down in South America, that’s what. Some of them undoubtedly fathers like Bret.
And now she had assumed yet another identity, preparing to infiltrate a potentially hostile regime on the soil, the scorched earth, of her homeland. Or was it her former homeland? She couldn’t be sure of anything now, other than the pain she felt just under her ribs when looking at her husband and child.
‘And how are you, honey?’ asked Bret. He knew better than to ask her any specifics about where she might be, what she was doing, or even when she might be home. The reassuring banalities of everyday life, the cushion of normality on which the relationships of real people rested. But not Caitlin Monroe’s. He had no idea he was talking to Colonel Katherine Murdoch, for instance. He had no need to know.
‘I’m a little tired,’ she said. ‘Been moving around a bit with work.’
Or: I blew a man’s brains out the other day, darling. He was indirectly responsible for the attack on you and Monique. So I hunted him down and put a bullet between his eyes after he’d told me what I needed to hear. Oh, and the sort of ammunition I used created a vacuum wave inside his collapsing skull. Turned his brain to hot mush and sucked it out behind the bullet as it left the back of his skull. Hey, did I mention the ejecta – that’s what we call the shit that comes out of an exit wound at high speed – did I mention that it was black with crawling ants before it had stopped steaming? No? Oh, that’s right – I don’t talk about my work.
She tried to make out some details of the kitchen behind Bret. She wondered what he’d had for dinner, whether he fed Monique from a bottle or spooned out baby food for her. She obviously wasn’t sleeping through yet. It was even later in Scotland – about two in the morning, she thought shamefully – and the little webcam he was using wasn’t good enough to display much in the gloom behind him. She was just able to pick out some lonely-looking Christmas decorations, which made her feel even worse, as he spoke to her from shrouded darkness.
‘I’m not doing anything exciting at the moment,’ she reassured him. ‘Just lots of reading and talking to people.’
I’ve just been reviewing a case about a Mexican man named Miguel Pieraro. He and his teenage daughter escaped from Texas last spring after witnessing the massacre of their loved ones. It’s hell down there, my love. A madman has taken dominion. These poor people saw their whole family cut down. They believe the madman was ultimately r
esponsible. And so do I.
‘Well, we saw the Loch Ness monster the other day, didn’t we!’ said Bret, patting their daughter gently on her back. ‘Daddy and some of the men from Mommy’s work went for a long drive. We visited the special farms where they make the firewater around these parts. And we went to the lake where they have the monster. But all we got was this . . .’
He held up a cuddly stuffed toy, which he had obviously meant for Monique to show her, before she’d fallen asleep. Caitlin had to force herself not to upbraid him for giving away operational security. He shouldn’t have been discussing his movements or mentioning a security detail, even on a scrambled link.
Fuck, Caitlin thought, rebuking herself instead. What the fuck am I thinking? They just had a nice day out, for a change. A tour of some fucking distilleries. It’s not like they’re trying to avoid a Stasi wetwork squad, for fuck’s sake.
‘Have you had any word from the farm?’ she asked. Her brain wanted to seize up, having to talk in these dull and meaningless generalities, at the same time as she longed to be able to live a life with Bret where she could be bored by the little things.
‘Spoke to someone from the Ministry of Resources,’ he replied. ‘Another two families moved on last week. Took places on the Nimitz, I think, going back to the US. Good luck to them. I hope it works out. Otherwise, same old same old. Apparently the GM crops are doing well.’
And I spoke to someone today, husband. A very senior someone. The President’s sword and shield. He wants me to infiltrate the camp of this madman. To go into that heart of darkness, earn their trust and, of course, betray them. I’ll do it too, sweetheart. Because that’s what I am. An infiltrator. A betrayer. A killer.
A peace-keeper also, she tried to reassure herself. But she was just so damned tired of keeping the peace.
‘That’s good news,’ she said. ‘I’m really looking forward to coming home, Bret. I miss you guys, every day.’
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