Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3

by John Birmingham

  The Governor looked as though he was enjoying himself with his free-ranging lecture, right up until the point when Musso interrupted him.

  ‘Are we going somewhere today, Professor?’

  A hint of annoyance crossed his face but he composed himself. ‘Ever the literalist, eh Musso?’ he sighed. ‘A common failing of the Jarhead. A lack of imagination and a refusal to learn from history. My service commenced all the way back in Vietnam and you know what I learned there, Kate?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘The United States Marine Corps was the finest implement ever crafted for getting young American lads killed for no good reason at all.’

  She felt Musso radiate waves of hostility and sensed the tension that suddenly strained at every muscle in his body. Blackstone, meanwhile, seemed to be enjoying himself again, grinning like a cat in front of a big bowl of cream.

  ‘I learned lessons in Vietnam, Kate. But I learned even more later, including the most important – which was to never stop learning, to never stop questioning your basic assumptions. Colin Powell, God rest his soul wherever it may have been taken, used to be fond of lecturing us about the lessons of Vietnam and the limits of power. But he never questioned himself about whether those limits had changed in the years between our ignoble defeat in Vietnam – for that is what it was, and the revisionists be damned – and the moment of half-achieved victory he engineered in the First Gulf War. If he had asked himself that question, I don’t believe we would have been sitting in the desert in 2003, waiting to finish the job, when the Wave swept everything away.’

  ‘I don’t recall you being in the desert in ’03, Governor,’ said Musso, as though he was actually racking his memory. ‘Weren’t you in . . . Fort Lewis? Yes, that’s right. I seem to recall something about a military junta you were trying to impose there.’

  None of the anger she had seen flash in his eyes was evident in Blackstone’s reaction to the taunt. He laughed.

  ‘Indeed, I was not in the desert, Tusk. Nor you, as I recall.’

  Caitlin was certain this was a cue to revisit the subject of Musso’s surrender of Guantanamo to the Venezuelans, and prepared to intercede before the meeting descended into a shambles. But the Governor waved off Musso’s diversionary attack.

  ‘I suppose we should cherish the memory of Powell for not finishing the job the first time around. It meant we were lucky enough to have so many of our forces outside the Wave in March ’03. But what I really wanted to say, Kate, is that I believe we are living through a time of shattered, discontinuous history, and I have come to the conclusion that it will fall to us, as it fell to our grandfathers, to resist a tyranny, to prevent it establishing itself in our world.’

  ‘You see yourself as Winston Churchill, then, Governor?’ Musso deadpanned.

  ‘No, but I see us facing the same question Churchill faced in the years when he alone stood before the truth of what was coming.’

  McCutcheon returned with a steel briefcase before his boss could build up another head of steam. He placed it on the table around which they sat, careful not to scratch the surface. After entering separate combinations for both locks, he snapped open the lid and took out two folders, which he handed to Caitlin and Musso. Inside hers, Caitlin found transcripts of interviews and photographs of four men.

  ‘What you have here,’ said Ty McCutcheon, ‘is a record of the interrogation of the surviving members of a Federation special forces squad captured by long-range TDF patrols in central Florida –’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ protested Musso. ‘Florida?’

  ‘Hey, I said long range,’ McCutcheon replied.

  ‘You’re not supposed to be in Florida.’

  ‘Neither are they.’

  Caitlin could see the exchange getting off topic. This incident was obviously why Blackstone had sought to mend his fences with Seattle. This was why he thought he needed help. A point of weakness.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, in Katherine Murdoch’s best warning voice. ‘Perhaps you could give us the Reader’s Digest version, Mr McCutcheon?’

  Blackstone’s aide checked with his boss, who nodded.

  ‘These four men were captured in the St Teresa area, an hour south of Tallahassee. They were part of a six-man squad, but two of their number were killed during the encounter with our lurps.’

  Long-range recon patrols, Caitlin reminded herself. An old Vietnam term. Nowhere in her briefing papers had it mentioned the TDF pushing lurps all the way into the Florida panhandle. That was still pirate-controlled territory.

  ‘Long story short, Roberto knows it will be a good ten or fifteen years before he’s consolidated his power and built up his military forces to the point where he can go head to head with us,’ said McCutcheon. There was no trace of the drunken frat boy who had entertained everybody in the bar last night. Not much trace of a hangover either. ‘Our residual power is considerable, for now. Meanwhile, he’s trying to weld together a transnational force from the bits and pieces he cherry-picked from the carcasses of the South American states he took over.’

  Caitlin glanced across at Musso, who had lost interest in butting heads with Blackstone and was now immersed in the documentation.

  ‘But Morales understands that we are completely overstretched in the three areas we do control. The Pacific Northwest, the New York–New England enclave and Texas. From the debriefing of his special forces guys, we’ve ascertained that he is interested in seeding colony settlements well outside our area of influence and direct control. That’s what these guys were doing. Forward recon. The idea is they grab up the turf, establish squatters’ rights, and dare us to do something about it when we eventually discover them.’

  Caitlin didn’t bother reading the transcripts. As Colonel Murdoch, she was willing to take McCutcheon’s word for the gist of the document.

  ‘That didn’t work for Baumer and Ozal in New York,’ she said, curious to see whether either man would react to the two names. They didn’t, for which she had to credit them. ‘Surely New York disabused Morales of the idea he could just wander in here and plant his flag?’

  Blackstone seemed pleased to have been asked that one. ‘That’s where Morales has proven himself to be smarter than Powell,’ he replied. ‘Predictably enough for a former gang leader. You would expect him to understand turf wars. What he learned from New York was modesty. When you sit down and read the transcripts, and I don’t expect you to do so now, you’ll see the Federation takes away from New York a realisation not to challenge us openly, head on. There’s no military component to what they were planning in Florida, apart from the special forces doing advance reconnaissance. They intend to set up small, discrete civilian colonies, to grow them quietly, until the point where the colonies would declare themselves for the South American Federation, rather than us. At that point, it would actually benefit Morales if we responded in the way we did in New York. They could then sweep in and portray themselves as the protector. Any civilian casualties would count against us. The settlements would beg for protection from the imperialist gringos. Roberto could move some of his better assets up here, to shield them, and unless Seattle is willing to spill a lot of supposedly innocent blood, he gets to hold on to his gains. He gets a continental foothold on the edge of a very empty continent. Or that was the plan, anyway. Until we caught his special operators.’

  ‘They weren’t that special, as it turned out.’ McCutcheon grinned.

  ‘We’ll need to debrief the prisoners ourselves,’ said Musso, who appeared to be trying to keep an open mind.

  ‘Not a problem,’ the aide shot back. ‘Well, sorry . . . there is a problem with one of them. He didn’t survive the initial debrief. But the other three are just raring to go, Tusk.’

  Musso sent a withering look his way, although Caitlin could see the former Marine had been thrown by the unexpected development. As much by Fort Hood’s activities in Florida as by Roberto Morales, she imagined. She purposely closed the folder and returned it to the
table.

  ‘This is interesting, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘And I mean that. The Chief of Staff, and I imagine the President, will be both interested and grateful to see this. It will go into my report.’ She glanced over at General Musso. ‘But given that we’ve caught this so early, do you really think it’s necessary to reassign scarce military resources when we could achieve the same result, scaring him off, with a quiet, diplomatic word?’

  ‘Ty? Would you?’ Blackstone asked, nodding towards the pastry tray.

  ‘Sure,’ said his aide, standing up to retrieve a danish.

  ‘I suppose we could do that, Kate,’ said Blackstone. ‘Me, I’m an old-fashioned guy. I’d just nuke the son of a bitch. You take this information back to Seattle, you might even find that James Ritchie agrees with me for once. After all, he tossed off a couple at Chávez on Musso’s behalf.’

  The federal officer shrugged off yet another dig at his Guantanamo record. ‘This does need to be dealt with,’ he began, holding up one of the interrogation transcripts. ‘But Colonel Murdoch is correct. You caught this early. It’s a little problem, needing little effort to address. Especially since we have the prisoners. There’s no explaining them away.’

  At that, Blackstone mulled so long that Caitlin started to wonder whether he intended to simply ignore Musso’s words. He did reply, eventually.

  ‘One way or another, we have to address this. Not so much the immediate question, I agree. Morales won’t be setting up any wildcat colonies now that we’ve tumbled his scheme. But everything I said before about reaching a discontinuous moment in history, Kate, I stand by,’ Blackstone said, returning his attention to her quite pointedly. He accepted a pastry from his offsider, but didn’t eat it straight away. ‘There was a time when no power on earth would have dared contemplate a claim on this continent. Now, there are days I wonder which of them wouldn’t. You know, Governor Palin can see Russia from her front porch, and she tells me they seem to be getting closer every day.’

  Caitlin put down her coffee cup and uncrossed her legs, making as if to stand up.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she said again. ‘You will understand that before saying anything else I would like to examine these documents in detail. I’m happy to go with Mr McCutcheon to do so, if you don’t want to release them into our custody.’

  Blackstone looked like he was about to answer, when his fixer spoke up. ‘We had these copies made up for you. But if you’d like some time to study them, I’m happy for you to use my office, Colonel Murdoch.’ McCutcheon raised an eyebrow at Blackstone. ‘Perhaps an hour’s break, Governor?’

  ‘An hour sounds about right. If you’d like to take carriage of our guests, Ty?’

  ‘Be a pleasure, sir.’

  Caitlin stood up, hoping her impetus would draw Musso along behind her. She had what she wanted. McCutcheon’s documents were interesting, but what she really needed was access to his office. That was where they obviously kept the administration’s sensitive files.

  42

  DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY

  It was an unsettling experience, shopping while being stalked by your would-be murderer. An experience made worse by Nick Pappas’s recommendation yesterday of a rather depressing-looking department store in the centre of the old town as the place where Julianne might get herself suitably attired for her second cameo as a junior with Downing, Street and Kemp.

  This part of Darwin did not look as deeply changed by the enormous volumes of money that had flowed into the city over the last few years. Two new high-rise towers were emerging from holes in the ground that covered entire blocks, but most of the old streetscape remained unaffected. The city had been rebuilt in the late 1970s following Cyclone Tracy, and the aesthetically worthless architecture of that period was everywhere. It rather did Jules’s head in, seeing the many global-brand boutiques, all sparkling and shining like exquisite jewellery boxes, trading within the tatty shells of these buildings. While some outlets, one being the department store towards which she was walking now, were obvious diehards from an earlier era, the long unbroken stretches of high-street retail, expensive cafés, bistros and bars all evidenced a rapid shift away from a utilitarian CBD towards something more akin to a playground for super-rich outcasts. She didn’t recognise many of the fashion names and could only assume they were the local franchises of start-ups from Chinese city states.

  It would be lovely, she thought, to have been the mistress of some obscenely wealthy mining magnate who was only around to bother you one week out of every two or three months. In which case, she’d probably have spent a few days swanning around this strange, isolated mini Monaco, melting her sugar daddy’s plastic with some gold-medal-standard shopping.

  On the other hand, not getting sniped at from a rooftop or run over while crossing the street was a reality she could live with, too.

  Julianne did her best to try to pick out Shah’s men from the crowded footpath, and thought maybe she caught a glimpse of somebody who looked like a Gurkha, across the road. But then, in Darwin, you could quickly amass examples of people from all over the world. Her best estimate was that maybe a third of those teeming through this part of town had grown up here. The rest were new arrivals and, specifically, members of the city’s new, arriviste class. Wealthy, displaced and not a little anxious to embed themselves as deeply as possible in their new home. For all the fuck-off money and ostentatious display of significance here, as a child of one of the oldest surviving aristocratic lines in the world (even if, or perhaps because, her own family’s position in that line had come a cropper), Jules was aware of a low-grade, sub-aural hum vibrating just under the surface of things in this place. Status anxiety. The gnawing fear that having survived one cataclysmic break-up of the established order, one might find oneself at the pointy end of any subsequent reordering, no matter how much smaller in scale.

  She began to understand why Shah and his neighbours felt their positions were so tenuous. Nothing was settled here, in spite of the clean streets and the gleaming newness of everything. It was all still in furious motion. Convulsed. Deranged. And dangerous with it. As if to emphasise the point, she saw an armoured vehicle roll through an intersection further up the street.

  Jules hurried into the store, out of the heat, and sighed with relief after pushing through another super-chilled air curtain. She’d noticed the same effect at the Sirocco Café. It felt something like walking through a gentle waterfall, but it was a piece of technology she’d not encountered before then. Perhaps the design had been stolen from some Wave-washed laboratory in the US, where researchers were still puddled wherever they happened to have been standing. The market for Disappeared intellectual property had run white-hot for a while in ’04–05, until Seattle regained some semblance of control over its borders. She’d even considered getting into the game herself, except that the Rhino had been such a complete bloody Boy Scout over the issue.

  He still thought of himself as one of the good guys at heart, even with all the people smuggling, the stealing, and the murder on the high seas. Thoughts of her friend and former business partner brought with them a confusion of emotions. Fond recall. Concern for his wellbeing. And a rekindled anxiety about whoever might be trying to fuck with her own wellbeing. Jules reached around and lightly touched the SIG Sauer holstered in the small of her back. She could always feel the pistol was there, digging into her spine, but the gesture gave her some comfort anyway.

  The department store was doing its best, but it still looked shabby and somewhat down at heel compared to its newer, smaller rivals. There seemed to be more old-time locals shopping in here, though, she noticed. Sticking with the tried-and-true out of pure stubbornness, no doubt. It was the work of only a few minutes to find the womenswear department, where a question to a sales assistant – an Aboriginal girl – soon had her fingering through a carousel of off-the-rack business suits. She chose a conservative, lightweight navy-blue suit with matching pants, before wasting another hundred and fifty bucks on a
pair of cheap medium heels.

  God, it was like being back at college again – scrimping, saving, making do. How dreadfully fucking depressing this could get . . .

  As she was paying for the purchases, and holding back a creeping sense of ennui at having to wear them, the Nokia buzzed in her pocket. A text message from Pappas: the Rhino had been transferred to the Coonawarra Base Hospital, where she could find him in intensive care. Downing had contacted the hospital and told them that one of his juniors would be in to look after Mr Ross’s arrangements.

  At last, she could look in on him. Jules was comforted also by the knowledge that so many people were putting themselves out on her behalf. She doubted she’d have been as helpful as Nick and Piers if a complete stranger had bowled up to her in need of succour and protection. But, of course, she had Mr Shah to thank for that. She undoubtedly had Pappas to thank for the final piece of information, however.

  A phone number in America – for Miguel!

  She was so surprised and so grateful she almost forgot to collect her change from the salesgirl. Then she nearly left the two bags of shopping behind on the counter.

  After thanking the young woman, Jules hurried out of the store and flagged down a pedicab. She’d have preferred an air-conditioned taxi, but a quick check up and down the street confirmed there were none to be had. The pedicab driver, a thin wiry foreigner of indeterminate race, asked her where she wanted to go before quoting a price of ten dollars. Unsure of whether one was supposed to haggle, she agreed, keen to return to the motel and make contact with her dear old friends.