‘Come on, Caitlin. We better go see the old man and figure out exactly how much damage you’ve done.’
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
He thought at first that it was his bedside alarm. Jed Culver groaned until he realised the ring tone was wrong. He had a phone call.
He wasn’t ruinously drunk or hung-over. But the brandy and bourbons lay heavy on his brow as he struggled up out of a fitful slumber. His indigestion came roaring back too, courtesy of the four-cheese pizza. For a second, he couldn’t understand why Marilyn wasn’t in bed, then he remembered she was back home and he was crashed out in the townhouse. The entirety of the evening came rushing back in on him. The unpleasant surprise of discovering Kipper knew of Colonel Murdoch and her mission in Fort Hood, thanks to Blackstone and the Federation’s special operators, who’d turned out to be anything but special.
Jed’s voice was so croaky and thickened with alcohol and sleep that he couldn’t even get the words out at first. He coughed to clear his throat.
‘Culver,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
As soon as he heard the Echelon’s Deputy Director of Special Clearances on the line, all of his grogginess sluiced away on an adrenaline surge.
‘It’s Wales Larrison, Mr Culver. We have a problem. In fact, we have two of them.’
*
‘That trick you guys pulled breaking into our system, looping the security footage back over itself, that was fucking brilliant,’ raved McCutcheon.
He sat next to her in the back of a Humvee, both of them being driven across the base to Blackstone’s home residence. Caitlin’s hands were cuffed behind her back and the former air force man kept his gun trained on her midsection, while maintaining as much separation between them as he could. The driver’s head bobbed in time to the bass beat of a song he was listening to through earphones plugged into his Zune.
Little fucking Wayne, again. There was no escaping the guy.
‘A bit too brilliant, though,’ her captor went on. ‘We probably wouldn’t have noticed anything, except I was standing at the security desk with my boys when I saw myself walking down a corridor on the other side of the building. Whoops!’
Caitlin maintained the stillness and silence within which she had cocooned herself, ever since she’d handed over the cell phone and her Kimber pistol.
‘You’re like a Bond villain, you know that?’ said McCutcheon. ‘All of you spooks are the same. All so intent on getting your ninja merit badge, throwing your little smoke bombs, doing your Spiderman thing up on the ceiling, that you forget it would be simpler to just walk in through the front door! You probably could’ve hidden in a broom closet and not been caught.’
She ignored him and concentrated on her breathing. He seemed relaxed, which wasn’t surprising given that she was wearing the handcuffs and he was pointing a gun at her liver. But he shouldn’t have been relaxed. He should have been freaking. Because Caitlin hadn’t stored the data from his laptop on her augmented cell phone. Everything had been uploaded and transmitted back to Vancouver. Either he didn’t know that, or there was nothing on the laptop worth worrying about. She doubted the latter. Not with the lengths to which they’d gone to secure the thing from interference.
Unless, of course, that too had merely been a charade to entrap her.
Echelon’s senior field agent did not have enough information to reach a conclusion, and so she did not bother. What mattered now was waiting for an opportunity to reverse the flow of this encounter.
*
Culver pressed the phone so hard to his ear, it was starting to hurt his head.
‘How many dead?’ he asked.
‘Two here, that we are aware of. Down there, I couldn’t say.’
‘Jesus Christ, Larrison, how long does it take to do a simple body count?’
‘There’s nothing simple about this, Mr Culver. We have confirmation from Australia that Henry Cesky hired Parmenter to kill Pieraro and Zood here, and Ms Balwyn and Mr Ross in Darwin. And that was after hiring other contractors who failed in the same goals. Parmenter also appears to have killed his accomplice in Kansas City, but we have no idea who that was, yet.’
Jed rubbed at his temples, which were pounding with a headache. He felt ill and desperately wanted to hang up, vomit, and crawl back under the sheets.
‘And you’re telling me this is connected, but it’s not connected to what Agent Monroe is doing at Fort Hood?’
‘Only tangentially, sir. Our information is that Pieraro and his family were on the boat commandeered by Ms Balwyn. Pieraro attacked and humiliated Cesky in Acapulco while Balwyn was interviewing him for a place on board the yacht. Pieraro turned up on the margins of Agent Monroe’s mission because his was one of the four cases regarding attacks on homesteaders you’d flagged for her interest while she was in Kansas City. That’s the only connection.’
For one, brief, shining moment Jed had entertained the idea of possibly fitting up Blackstone for the Pieraro killing. Unfortunately, Larrison, like James Kipper, was not the sort of man to countenance villainy of that ilk.
A damn shame, thought Jed. If only I wasn’t surrounded by Boy Scouts.
He washed down a couple of painkillers with the cup of water he kept by the bed. When you were this deep in the briar patch, there was only one thing to do. Start hacking your way out.
‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘Thank you for informing me about Cesky. As soon as we’re finished here, call the FBI and have him picked up. The first thing the President will hear about it will be when he turns on his radio in the morning. We can’t have any suggestion of him knowing or doing anything about a case involving his biggest supporter.’
‘No sir, we can’t,’ agreed Larrison. ‘And Agent Monroe?’
*
‘Yes, what are we to do with you, Miss Monroe?’
Jackson Blackstone stood before her in a plaid dressing gown nursing a glass of warm milk. With floor-to-ceiling bookshelves behind him, and a golden retriever curled up on a leather couch, he looked like a greeting card granddad. His demeanour was disappointed, deeply disappointed, rather than enraged. She wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign.
Caitlin stood in front of him, dressed as one of his troopers, with her hands still cuffed behind her. McCutcheon was the only other person in the room. But two squads of TDF soldiers waited outside the Governor’s humble residence, leaned up against the Humvees, smoking and laughing quietly.
Still, she said nothing.
‘Been like this all night,’ McCutcheon chimed in. ‘Worst case of sour grapes I’ve ever seen.’
‘I’m curious about what you hoped to achieve,’ said Blackstone. ‘Does the President imagine I would submit to the indignity of being hauled up for impeachment on the basis of a couple of files illegally removed from my assistant’s office? Nothing you have on that device of yours is admissible in anything even resembling a court. What did you hope to achieve?’
On her phone. Blackstone thought the data was still on her phone.
‘Just the truth,’ she replied.
‘Hell’s bells, we can stop looking for the cat, Governor,’ quipped McCutcheon. ‘It doesn’t have her tongue after all.’
‘The truth is negotiable, Miss Monroe, easily moulded, pliable. Like the ballistics gel you used to defeat our fingerprint scanner. The truth can be shaped to take whatever form we need it to take.’
‘Did that little pecker-head send you down here because he’s still got his panties bunched up about the homesteaders?’ Blackstone asked. He took a sip of his warm milk. It left a noticeable milk moustache behind in the hairs of his actual beard. He sucked at them, a disconcerting sight.
‘I am sure the President would want to know why his homesteaders were being attacked, Governor, when yours weren’t. And why only some of the Mandate settlements were targeted by road agents.’
The aide answered this one. ‘Well duh, because we don’t want a lot of sand niggers, and wet-backs and crazy fucking worshippers of the six-ar
med elephant God moving in here and fucking everything up for us. Didn’t we make that obvious?’
Blackstone lowered himself into an armchair. ‘God dammit, Ty, I thought we made it obvious to everyone,’ he said with a grunt as he sat down. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Agent Monroe. I’m not one of these cranks who thinks the Disappearance was the vengeance of God laid upon us for our wicked, wicked ways. I have no idea what it was. Could’ve been a bunch of alien space bats throwing a big butterfly net over us to scoop up our souls and blend them into a really tasty breakfast shake. Who would know?’
Caitlin shifted slowly from foot to foot, working through an imperceptible series of isometric exercises to keep herself warmed up and ready to explode if and when she had the chance.
‘But I am a crank about some things,’ Blackstone continued. ‘About culture, for one thing. Not race, as everyone imagines. You all assume I’m some sort of racist, when I’m not. Allow me to make myself crystal clear, young lady. Race is a myth. It does not exist. Black, white, red, yellow, slant-eyed, nappy-haired, hook-nosed or whatever, we are all brothers under the skin. I really believe that.’
She allowed herself to look bored and frustrated. It gave her an excuse to take in her surroundings. They were gathered in Blackstone’s living room. The library and lounge where he was sitting was a modest but comfortable space. It led on to a dining room in one direction, and to an alcove overlooking the garden in the other. With three flutes and a piccolo resting on an occasional table, and a piano sitting against one wall, this small space appeared to be a music room opening onto the lawn through French doors. They were closed against the chill of the night, but through them she could still hear the soldiers.
The house was not what she had expected. Unlike his office, his private living space was quite restrained. He didn’t hide himself away within a compound, nor was his residence the finest property available within Fort Hood. A simple, two-storey home, it stood on the edge of a golf course on the eastern end of the small city.
‘I’m sorry, Ms Monroe, am I boring you?’
She turned her attention back to the old man in the dressing gown.
‘Yes.’
He smiled. ‘That’s too bad. You are a captive audience, after all. And it’s important you understand this, Agent Monroe. I think it’s important that we all understand it. Especially well-intentioned liberals like your President Kipper.’
‘He was your President too, last time I checked.’
‘Touché. You are correct. We respect the office, if not the man. Would you answer a question for me, Caitlin? I hope you don’t mind me calling you that. I feel that after a rocky start, we’ve come to know each other so much better this evening.’
It was her turn to shrug.
‘If I do not care about race – and truly, I don’t – what is it you think that separates my politics, my beliefs, from the President’s? No, don’t answer – it’s a rhetorical question. Allow me to answer. It’s culture. Like President Kipper, like most thinking people, I do believe all men are born equal. But they do not end their lives that way, do they? And the difference, Ms Monroe, is culture.’
He seemed to spot something of interest on the bookshelf.
‘Could you get me that copy of Ambrose, please, Ty? On the third shelf, next to Davis Hanson.’
McCutcheon was careful to keep his gun trained on Caitlin and to stay well away from her while he retrieved the book, which he passed to Blackstone. The old man searched for the passage he wanted. It didn’t take very long. The copy was well thumbed and dog-eared.
She had endured many forms of torture over the years, but had never been read to by a pompous blowhard while being held prisoner. For a moment, Caitlin thought she was about to log another unique personal experience in her long and varied career, until Blackstone merely smiled and closed the book up again. As though he had needed to remind himself of something.
‘This is an excellent book,’ he said. ‘Have you read it? Band of Brothers.’
‘No, but I think we have the video somewhere at home.’
‘Of course you do. The thing I like about Ambrose is the facility he has with both the big things and the little. Nowadays, I imagine we would say something like “the macro and micro”. Which is part of our problem. Brothers is a particularly fine piece of work because of the effort Ambrose took to follow those men from their first moments as soldiers through to the end of the war. It’s at the end of the war that he tells us a profound truth.’
Caitlin watched McCutcheon in her peripheral vision as he circled around to stand over by the French doors. She couldn’t keep an eye on him while Blackstone expected to have her full attention.
‘These men, from Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, had jumped into Normandy, toughed out the siege of Bastogne and muscled their way into Adolf Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. They had been tested. They had been scourged. They had reason to respect the Germans’ fighting abilities, but no reason to admire them as a people. They had suffered too much for admiration. And yet, when they found themselves in Germany at last, they also found themselves admiring the spirit and tenacity of the German volk.’
The Governor was warming to his topic now, reminding her of an eccentric professor rather than an ego-driven homicidal maniac. Caitlin had the impression that this was a lecture he had delivered many times before. She would’ve liked to have checked whether McCutcheon’s eyes were glazing over.
‘Their army defeated,’ continued Blackstone, really beginning to sound as though he was quoting himself, ‘their Reich in ruins, their most treasured myth of the Aryan superman torn apart by a mongrel alliance, the Germans nevertheless wasted no time in applying themselves to the mission of rebuilding and recovery. It was in such stark contrast to the French civilians the paratroopers had encountered earlier in the war that, in some ways, the men of Easy Company found the Germans to be more like them than the people they were fighting for.’
‘So, you’d like to be a good German?’ she asked.
‘No, I’d settle for being a good American. I’d settle for us all being good Americans. And I do believe that anyone can be a good American, as long as they commit to it. A commitment that asks more of us than simply memorising a cheat sheet for a citizenship test and learning how to fill in a welfare form.’
‘Look, I can see this is important to you, but it’s not to me.’
‘WELL, IT SHOULD BE!’
A few droplets of milk from the bottom of the glass splashed on his dressing gown as he roared at her. He brushed them off as he recomposed himself and the dog fled from the room.
She’d actually flinched a little bit when Blackstone exploded. But Caitlin used the opportunity to steal another glance at McCutcheon . . . Still standing by the windows. Still training his pistol on her.
‘I apologise,’ said Blackstone. ‘But it’s that sort of attitude which came so very close to laying us low before the Disappearance. The Germans, and for that matter the Japanese, whom we once considered to be an inferior race, did not create the miracle of their postwar reconstruction because of some genetic superiority. They did it because of cultural superiority. Some cultures, Miss Monroe, are meant to succeed. And some are meant to fail. Some cultures – and take a deep breath now, because I’m going to be controversial – are better. And that is where I part company with President Kipper. He will not acknowledge this basic truth. I do not believe he can even see it. And his policies are leading us into perdition because of that. I cannot control what happens in Seattle, or anywhere Seattle holds sway. Not yet. But by God, I can control what happens down here. And I will not allow this country to go down the toilet because of the weakness and self-indulgence of a man who cannot recognise a simple truth. Some cultures are strong. And some cultures are weak. And he is rebuilding this country from the wretched, cast-off failures of some of the most benighted cultures on the face of this planet. He will bring us to ruin.’
‘I really
wish you’d mentioned that this morning,’ said Caitlin. ‘When I had my Spy Girl outfit on. That was quite a rant. It’d go viral on MSN.’
*
‘Do we have any idea where she is?’ Culver asked, wondering if there might be a chance to avoid a second civil war. His head was completely clear. He felt absolutely wretched and sick, but his mind, at least, was moving.
‘If she’s with her personal data unit,’ said Larrison, ‘I’m afraid she appears to be at Governor Blackstone’s residence.’
Okay, thought Jed, we probably just crapped out on avoiding that whole second civil war thing.
‘Any way of confirming that, Mr Director?’
‘Not unless we can get eyes on the target. And right now we have none. Agent Monroe does have an extraction plan. Overwatch is attempting to open a secure comm channel to an effector, a Ranger non-com by the name of Milosz.’
‘Why can’t you get him now?’ asked Jed. ‘Surely he’s got a cell or something.’
‘I said we were trying to open a secure channel, Mr Culver. There’s no point telling Milosz to attempt a hostile extraction if they know he’s coming.’
Hostile extraction? Oh, sweet Jesus.
Jed tried to think it through. To calm the black panic gnawing at him. The situation wasn’t entirely bleak. Caitlin Monroe, it seemed, had done an extraordinary job. She had somehow obtained the entire contents of a computer used by Blackstone’s principal aide and delivered them safely to Echelon. Larrison’s people were going to be days unravelling the treasurer trove of data and documents, but already there were indications they had enough to charge Blackstone with everything from violation of federal occupational health and safety laws up to and including treason.
In that sense, it was all hookers and blow from here. Even the most shell-backed conservative could not support Mad Jack when they had a look at the New York files.
But it still left Culver exposed. He’d sought the dispatch of an Echelon agent on a mission for which the legal standing was questionable at best. More importantly, it was a mission the President had expressly forbidden. There was no parsing the language to obscure the fact that the Chief of Staff had disobeyed a direct order from James Kipper, and in doing so had probably broken enough laws to see him jailed until sometime after the heat death of the universe.
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