The higher floors of the Kyle Hotel were unoccupied. A short jog up the fire escape put her well beyond the reach of the bugs in her room. Her cell phone, a late-model Siemens, confirmed that. Thicker and heavier than it should have been, tightly packed with augmented technologies, including the RFID interceptor she’d used in McCutcheon’s office, the handset’s scan function continually sought out anomalous electronic signatures within a ten-metre radius, but had found nothing here. This room was clean.
She flipped open the cell and keyed in her code to access the Echelon network. It took a little longer than usual to acquire the satellite, but less than a minute later she had a secure channel to Vancouver. The overwatch desk put her through to Larrison immediately.
‘Hey, Wales, it’s me, your favourite.’
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting to hear from you. I have a message from Jed Culver to forward to Colonel Murdoch from a Special Agent Dan Colvin in KC.’
‘What’s Colvin say?’
The deputy director’s reply came back squashed and a little delayed by the encryption software.
‘He says he got the phone data you were after. From that hit-and-run you thought was more hit than run. The Mexican farmer and his girlfriend. One of the cells was a burner, completely untraceable. But Colvin got lucky, or the other guy got lazy, with the second phone. It’s a high-end satellite unit. Explains why he was using it in KC, I guess, because of the shitty local network.’
‘Yeah,’ said Caitlin. ‘Colvin told me that if you don’t have access to the federal system, your phone’s basically bricked. So what did he get?’
‘Sat phone was registered to a ghost, which isn’t surprising. But it was being used right at the moment your man Pieraro was run down. And then the call terminated.’
‘Our spotter?’
‘Almost certainly. Satellite logs traced the phone out to the spot where the KC cops found the burnt-out vehicle.’
She paced the empty room, ending up near the window, where she was able to gaze out over the streets of Temple again. A bus pulled up at the Federal Center, unloading what looked like a party of homesteaders on their way to the Mandate. They stretched their legs as they took a break on the lawn in front of the old city building.
‘So no ID on either the spotter or the driver?’
‘No, but they found the driver. Or somebody they’re pretty sure was the driver.’
‘Deader than Elvis, I’ll bet.’
‘And then some. The body was burnt. The hands cut off, and for bonus points somebody ran over the head a couple of times.’
‘Huh. Thorough.’
‘Not so much. Because whoever this spotter is, he’s still using the satellite phone.’
Her laugh was short and humourless. ‘Stupid. Mother. Fucker.’
Caitlin shook her head as she watched a group of children playing tag in front of the Federal Center. She was pretty sure she recognised Sergeant Milosz down there, in uniform, watching over them while enjoying a cigarette. Occasionally he would dart into the pack of children, grabbing one who was proving difficult for the others to catch, and holding the struggling, laughing child upside down by the ankles.
‘So what do we have on them?’ she asked.
The time delay caused Wales’s earlier reply to run over the question.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Natural selection at work.’
There was a moment of confusion while he disentangled her question from his reply, before he continued. ‘Here’s the thing, Caitlin. The sat phone was picked up by DSD on a programmed sweep by Darwin Station.’
‘Defence Signals Directorate? He’s down under?’
‘In Darwin. The Deadwood of the new millennium. Been there just over two days. Allowing for flight duration, must’ve lit out from KC directly. I asked our local franchise to follow up on it. The connections are starting to go fractal but I think they’re worth following. The Aussies are happy enough to look into it. They don’t want a freelance hitter on their turf, especially not in Darwin with all the Chinese and Indian players they have going through there. There’s even a trade mission from the Federation in town this week. Probably nothing to do with our hitter, but you can imagine how Echelon station in Sydney was all over it once we told them. Put one of their best guys on it. He’s already got some good intel.’
‘Anything for me?’ asked Caitlin, who hadn’t expected any joy from Special Agent Colvin, and now found herself more confused by the meaning of Pieraro’s killing. If indeed it had any meaning.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Wales told her. ‘Random cross over.’
She concentrated hard, trying to recall the case notes she’d studied in Kansas City. It wasn’t easy. There had been so much data to take in. She thought she remembered that the Pieraros had spent time in the refugee camps in Australia, before being accepted into a homesteading program in the Federal Mandate. But whether that was significant, she couldn’t say.
There was nothing for it but to press on with those things she could control.
‘Okay, thanks for that, Wales,’ she said. ‘If anything else turns up, especially from Darwin, I’d like to know. And if someone could pass Colonel Murdoch’s thanks on to Colvin, that’d be good. He put himself out for us. I have no idea what it all means, but Darwin’s a hell of a long way from Fort Hood. Even further from Kansas City. And I’m going to need your help here in the next couple of hours.’
‘Just give me a second,’ he said. ‘I’ll get my paper and pencil and get started on the laundry list.’
*
‘You’re sure about this?’
Concern furrowed the brow of General Tusk Musso, USMC (retired). His office was much less grand than that of his opposite number over in the Hood. Unlike in Blackstone’s lair, there was no sign he had ever served in the military. Just pictures of his family on the desk. A woman and two boys Caitlin knew had Disappeared.
‘The sooner I do it, the sooner I can get out of this graveyard and go home, General.’
Musso sat back and regarded her with a contemplative air. ‘So your home isn’t here anymore? America, I mean – not Temple, of course.’
‘It’s where the heart is, sir,’ she said, being careful not to stare at the pictures of his dead family, even though, as the only adornment in the spartan office, their images drew the eye. She wondered if a day went by when he didn’t think of them. The same way she didn’t think of Bret or Monique.
Probably not. Musso seemed like a good man, and he had probably been a much better father than she was a mother.
‘Can’t argue with that,’ he agreed, apparently speaking to her private thoughts. ‘Are they letting you stay in camp over at the Hood?’
‘As if I’d want to,’ she replied. ‘They might have some surveillance rigs over there actually worth the money they spent on them.’
Her Siemens handset lay on Musso’s desk, the screen lit up, displaying an image of one of the bugs in her room. It sat squatting between them like a poisonous metal spider. The director of the Federal Center couldn’t stop his gaze drifting back towards it. Even though Caitlin had used the cell phone to scan his office, and declared it clean, she could tell that the former Marine had been rocked by the revelation of a traitor somewhere within his command. He was being very circumspect now, as if he thought Mad Jack Blackstone himself was listening to every word. Caitlin. however, had more faith in her equipment and in TDF security’s general lameness.
‘I’ll have more freedom of action if I’m not right under their noses,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of accommodation in Killeen. I’ve asked them to find me a room over there.’
‘They’ll be all over you like a cheap Chinese suit,’ he said, frowning at the cell phone.
‘Just a day at the office, sir, and hopefully it won’t even be necessary, except as cover. If I can get in and out tonight, Colonel Murdoch will be on a scheduled flight three days from now, with McCutcheon and Blackstone waving her off at the airport.’
<
br /> ‘And if that doesn’t pan out?’
Caitlin paused. Just long enough to feel her heart beat once.
‘I’ll get out, with the data.’
Musso leaned back in his chair, looking tired. ‘In a way, I hope you fail,’ he said.
She looked at him, tilting her head in an unspoken query.
‘I think Blackstone is genuinely seeking rapprochement,’ he explained, eyeing the file that filled his in-tray.
In there was everything McCutcheon had on the South American Federation’s op in Florida. Or at least, everything he said he had. There may have been intelligence he’d held back to avoid exposing any further TDF ops outside Texas. Nonetheless, Blackstone had agreed to hand over the captured infiltrators to a team of federal marshals who were scrambling to fly down from KC by the end of the day.
‘I can’t say I’m happy about this other bullshit,’ Musso said, nodding at her cell phone. ‘But I can understand it. Mad Jack seems genuine in his paranoia about Morales. He’s going to want any kind of leverage he can get with Seattle’s man, or woman. You being Echelon, I’m sure you’d understand.’
Caitlin smiled. ‘My first field assignment was bugging the French and EU trade ministers at a GATT meeting. Long time ago. In a galaxy far, far away.’
‘Yeah,’ grunted Musso. He pointed at the Siemens. ‘I’m still going to have to deal with this. Bring in the FBI, I suppose. But I’ll leave it until you’re gone.’
‘That’d be a big help, sir. And if you could organise my stunt double too?’
‘No problem. We can use Amy, the waitress from the other night. She did good with McCutcheon and I trust her. She fought in New York. Re-enlisted right after, when the TDF recruiters were really trawling for custom. Sign-on bonuses, free houses, transfer of benefits, everything. But she’s a believer.’
‘You don’t have to sell me,’ she said. ‘Before I used her on McCutcheon, I had Vancouver run her through the filter. She’s clean, as far as they could tell.’
At this, one of Musso’s eyebrows climbed towards the ceiling. ‘I see. And did you run me through your filters as well?’
‘You bet. I’d run everyone, if I had the time and resources. But I don’t. And so this shit happens.’ Her turn to nod towards the augmented phone she’d used to sniff out the bugs in her quarters when she first arrived.
Musso appeared to take no lasting offence at having been vetted by Echelon. Caitlin found him an easy man to work with. A lot of military people held her profession in low regard, but Tusk didn’t seem to be the sort to judge.
‘I’m going to have to revise your final report,’ he said. ‘Colonel Murdoch’s, that is. I don’t think Blackstone is right about Morales being an immediate threat. But I think maybe we do have to take him a little more seriously. That Federation special forces team in Florida wasn’t an invading horde, but it’s a factor we need to plug in. I’m afraid the President needs to know about that, and that Governor Blackstone has his own SF teams wandering around the countryside too.’
‘If you tell him now, you blow my cover,’ she said, suddenly worried that Musso’s boy scout gene was going to bring them all undone.
‘No, not necessarily. After all, it’s my job to act as liaison to Fort Hood. This is exactly the sort of information I’m supposed to pass back. It would draw more attention if I didn’t and Mad Jack decided to get on the phone and yell at the President for ignoring him again.’
‘So you’re going to lie?’
‘I’m going to tell the truth, but not the whole truth. In my experience the President cares little for briefings by military officers. He can hardly keep their ranks in his head, let alone their names. He just wants the job done. I’m sure I can shade Colonel Murdoch into insignificance for now. But I can’t make this Florida thing go away. Not with it sending the Governor bugshit.’
Musso shook his head and looked as though he was disgusted with himself.
The great game, Caitlin. It never ends, does it? We have our own people sniffing around the Federation all the time, I’m sure.’
She maintained a studied neutrality at that.
‘Who knows,’ he continued, ‘even if it’s paranoid bullshit, it might be enough for Mad Jack and Kipper to put aside their differences. The enemy of my enemy might just make us friends. Something like that. I’ve already sent a preliminary briefing note through to Jed Culver and he’s on my case for more detail. And your report.’
A headache began to form behind Caitlin’s eyes.
‘That could be tricky. Seeing as how I’m not really a USAF colonel.’
‘The tangled webs we weave, Agent Monroe.’
She breathed out heavily. Once this mission was done with, she planned to cut her entanglements, but it would be interesting to see what happened to Culver if she couldn’t give him Blackstone’s head on a plate. The Colonel Murdoch jacket wasn’t meant to be worn in earnest. It was thin cover for a quick and dirty job. And there was always Wales too, of course. Her former controller would go down with Jed Culver and that she did care about.
Musso was still talking, however, and she had to set aside these thoughts.
‘In many ways, Caitlin, if your mission is successful, you’ll set this country back on its heels for a decade. Or longer. Conceivably, you could even cause a complete break between Seattle and Texas. You could turn differences of opinion into a casus belli.’
Caitlin picked up her phone and stowed it away in a deep jacket pocket. She felt none of the bleakness of spirit that seemed to have taken hold of Musso.
‘But think about those differences, sir. They’re not cosmetic. It’s not just politics, or a personal feud. Culver and Wales briefed you before I came down. You know why I’m here. For New York. For what this asshole did to us in New York.’ And for myself, she didn’t add.
‘I do,’ he said, sounding very tired now. ‘I do. Some things you neither forgive nor forget.’
He stood up and reached his hand out to shake hers.
‘Good luck, Agent Monroe. Good luck to us all.’
46
DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY
She experienced a point of paralysing clarity just before impact. Sensing Granger’s sudden tension, Jules felt herself pressed back into the seat as he accelerated. Something large and dark and moving much too quickly loomed in her peripheral vision on the driver’s side of the car. That part of her mind – trained, as it had been, by years at sea to judge the lines of force conspiring to undo her while sailing small boats through the huge, angry seas – passed from slumber to full sentience in the space between instants. She registered the inevitability of a collision in the stuttering hundredths of a second before the hollow thunder of impact. The whole world, and them within it, lurched sideways as it broke apart in a bright, shattered mandala of atomised glass and shrieking, collapsing metal.
A blur of colour. A violent catherine-wheel of optics, stretching and encircling them at cyclonic velocity as the car spun around, tyres exploding like gunshots.
A small, almost abstracted part of her rational mind waited for the cab to flip over and over, for the roof to collapse and crush them. But after an eternity of splintered fractions and fragments of time, they came to rest with a slight jerk as inertia tugged back at the momentum of impact.
She heard Granger cursing, weakly, and became aware of blood everywhere, but whether hers or his, she could not be sure. After the savage, caterwauling din of the crash, the silence that followed seemed to roar in her ears like a force nine gale. But not so loudly that she couldn’t hear the tinkling of glass and the tortured creak of metal as the weight of the wreckage resettled itself.
The crunch of boots on gravel. Running. And men shouting.
Gunshots cracked and popped somewhere nearby, but muted, perhaps by distance, perhaps because her ears were full of blood. Granger cursed again, but he trailed off into a groan as he struggled to release himself, or to retrieve something from beneath his seat.
Jule
s could not put one thought after another in any sort of coherent fashion. She was annoyed at ruining the clothes she’d bought just hours ago, even though she hated them and would have thrown them away. She felt cool, despite the heat of the day pouring in through the damaged windscreen, which looked as though a giant had put his fist through it.
And still the gunfire popped and crackled. Until, without preamble, a single shot roared with the concussive power of a small bomb going off beside her head. Someone screamed – it was her, she was screaming – at a blast wave of mutilation. Blood, bone, skin, gore. And Granger yelling and roaring, and trying to push her head down between her knees as he fired out of his window with the cut-down shotgun.
Two bangs sounded next to her ear, followed by metallic crunching, and then her door was open and she caught a glimpse of a blade. She tried to cry out, to warn Granger of the threat. But he was snarling and shouting as he fired off round after round from the pump-action shotgun.
Julianne tried to sit up but this man was too strong. But then the blade was gone, and her seatbelt had been cut, and she was being dragged out of the vehicle and away. Away from the burning oil, the iron blood, the tangy aftertaste of gunfire. She fought to free herself until she recognised Birendra’s voice.
‘It is fine. It is good. You are safe, Ms Julianne. You are safe. Just come with us, we have to go. Now.’
Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 Page 47