‘I suppose it couldn’t hurt,’ she said, opting to cover both bases. ‘Mister Culver is very interested in the security situation down in the Mandate. As you’d know. I can’t say if this plays into that in any way, but if he wanted you to reach out to me, I guess I need to take a look at what you have. I’ll be down in the foyer in a minute or two.’
‘Oh, that’s fine. I’m on my way out the door now. See you in five.’
He broke the connection. Caitlin forced herself to make one last check of the room before putting a call into the security detail to let them know she was leaving. Two uniformed Protective Service officers appeared at her door less than a minute later. Their ready-room was just down the hallway. She handed over her pass and confirmed the presence of the files in the safe before she left.
The same two air force men - officers, as it turned out - she’d seen in the gym the previous night were waiting at the elevator when she arrived.
‘Think we’ll get to fly this month?’ one asked the other.
His friend shook his head. ‘Nope. Shot our wad over New York. I reckon that was the last flight of the Buffs for a while.’
Caitlin took the information in without comment as they all stepped into the lift. Probably pilots from Whiteman on a pass. She turned up the frost on her stone face to its most glacial. The ride down to the lobby was excruciating.
‘Dyke,’ one of them muttered as she strode out through the sliding doors.
Almost certainly the guy who had tried to catch her attention over by the treadmills. An egomaniacal man-child. It was a pity she had no compelling reason to engage them in character as Colonel Murdoch. Could’ve been useful practice, tearing this asshole a new one.
She turned into the marble lobby. At least it looked like marble; it could just as likely have been some sort of veneer, she wasn’t sure. The whole place had been completely refitted during reclamation. As she wheeled her luggage over to the counter, Caitlin passed a dark spot scoured onto the otherwise smooth, creamy surface. She wondered if she’d just passed over the final resting places of one of the Disappeared. Screens above the desk ran news feeds, the local weather radar and flight information for Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport. She considered buying a trinket from the gift shop to take home to Monique, before thinking better of it.
Best to cut that shit off now, sister.
She dropped her keycard off at the desk and made her way over to the entrance to wait for Dan Colvin. She wasn’t sure what, if any, meaning she should look for in the killing of the homesteader. There was no obvious connection to her primary interest, namely Baumer, Ozal, and the undeclared salvage contract the latter’s company, Hazm Unternehmen, had obtained down in Texas. And it wasn’t as though settlers didn’t have it tough on the frontier anyway. There were more than enough real pirates and banditos out there.
Just as she was shaking her head at the muddy, opaque nature of it all, she recognised Special Agent Colvin coming towards her through the revolving doors. A black, GSA 2002 Chevy Suburban sat idling outside for them.
‘Colonel Murdoch,’ he said, offering her a smile. Dressed in jeans and an anonymous sports coat, he looked like any other government contractor. Apparently there was not much call for the suit-and-tie look of the Hoover era these days.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said.
‘De nada.’ He took her suitcase without preamble and wheeled it out towards the car. ‘Where are you flying off to?’
‘Just the next stop on my never-ending End of the World Tour,’ Caitlin replied.
If Special Agent Colvin was sufficiently alert to have noticed she hadn’t answered him, he was also good-mannered enough to make nothing of it. He took care when hoisting her luggage into the back of the Suburban. Although there was nothing breakable in there, Caitlin appreciated the thought nonetheless. She couldn’t help noticing a number of foreign-language books piled up in a plastic bin in the trunk, among them The Complete Idiot’s Guide to French and a similar Spanish title. A third book looked like a text from the now defunct Defense Language Institute.
She indicated the collection with a tilt of her head. ‘How many languages do you speak?’
He didn’t seem the type to puff up his chest and brag about himself. ‘Oh, three if you count Arabic. How about you?’
‘None,’ she lied. ‘I have a hard enough time with English.’
She picked up a manila folder from the passenger seat, Miguel Pieraro’s name handwritten on its cover in thick black ink. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked as they strapped themselves in.
‘Sure, knock yourself out, ma’am.’
He put the Suburban into gear, before navigating his way around the potholes, following a route that took them east towards the Chouteau Trafficway. There was no light to wait for at any of the intersections. He simply stopped long enough to avoid a pair of Hummers leaving the militia substation at the Chouteau Bridge, before proceeding north to the ramp for Highway 210.
Traffic was pretty thin on 210, with a few people on horseback as they turned westbound. On her right the Cerner Campus was a hub of activity, with soldiers running their morning PT and vehicles moving out into the city. Towering over the campus, a short way from the road, was the rechristened North Kansas City Federal Medical Center. An army Black Hawk emblazoned with the Red Cross lifted off from a helipad beyond her line of sight, to travel to points unknown.
As they moved closer to North Kansas City proper, the already-light vehicular traffic began to thin out further. KC didn’t really have a peak hour anymore. Most people seemed to get about by bus, the service for which was regular enough that there were always one or two commuter shuttles in view. The remainder of the traffic consisted of government and military vehicles, and a hefty spread of civilian ones featuring the logo of Cesky Enterprises, the biggest reconstruction contractor in town.
‘Now, what you’ve got there,’ said Colvin, nodding towards the folder in her hands, ‘is basically everything the accident investigators and Homicide guys have so far.’
‘This Aronson woman,’ she asked, turning over a page, ‘what shape is she in?’
‘She’s seen better days, poor woman. She’s in a coma up at the hospital. Doctors can’t say yet whether she’ll come out of it. So she’s not going to be much help.’
Caitlin grunted, already distracted by the details in the file. The accident investigation squad had concluded very quickly that the hit-and-run was no accident. The assailant’s vehicle, a blue Toyota pick-up, had accelerated quickly from a standing start, driven in an almost perfectly straight line, until a few metres out from where it had struck the victims; at that point, it had swerved to line them up with the centre of its bull bars. Pieraro had been struck first, and his body flew into Aronson, protecting her from the worst of the impact. The Toyota had stopped in a controlled fashion a little further down the road, the report went on. There, it picked up a passenger - a large male, judging by the boot prints he’d left preserved in the snow. The investigators had been able to track the vehicle for a short distance because of the same snowfall that had provided them with such a rich haul of evidence at the site of the incident.
Caitlin looked up to collect her thoughts as they passed by an old burnt-out McDonald’s on the right-hand side of the road. The familiar feel of suburban sprawl, with a slight edge of the End Times. She couldn’t help thinking, given his effectiveness when steering his charges to safety amid the road-agent gangs of Texas, that Miguel Pieraro would somehow have sensed a vehicle approaching in this environment.
‘I seem to recall hearing that Thursday was blown out by a blizzard,’ she said eventually.
‘It was, later on,’ explained Colvin. ‘But we got lucky with the weather. There was a light fall on Thursday morning. And then an hour-and-a-half hiatus during which the temperature really fell away, but before the big dump came on. One of the first people onto the scene was a city road worker. He’d cleaned up after a few accidents in the past and knew to prese
rve the scene at this one. Accident investigators got there inside of ten minutes when he called it in. Sometimes the stars align.’
‘Not for Pieraro.’
‘No,’ said Colvin quietly. ‘I suppose not.’
‘Any sign of the vehicle?’
‘Yeah, you’ll find something about three-quarters of the way through.’ He waved a hand, indicating the file again. ‘Doused with gasoline and burnt down to its axles, about thirty miles outside of town.’
‘Oh, that’s not suspicious.’
‘Nope. Happens all the time.’
She fell silent again, hurrying to absorb all the information before they reached her destination. She was hoping for something about the identity of the driver and the man - they were all assuming it was a man - who had got into the vehicle further down the road. The Chevrolet passed under I-35 as Highway 210 transformed itself into a four-lane thoroughfare. Not too far down the highway, she could make out a nine-storey, red-brick building. It dominated the local landscape. The perfect place for a sniper, if you had good intel ahead of time … A spotter maybe?
‘How’s cell phone coverage in KC, Colvin?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Like, for normal folk.’
He shook his close-cropped, rather boxy head as the tall brick building swept by. ‘If you don’t have access to the federal network, you’re pretty much fucked. Capacity is very limited. But having said that, demand is low. Most people do hard, physical work, from sun-up to sundown, usually on the government dollar. Sitting on their butt all day, surfing around on the net, or calling a friend to meet up for coffee at Starbucks, just isn’t that common anymore. Why d’you ask?’
Caitlin held up a couple of crime-scene photographs. ‘Somebody’s probably thought of this already,’ she offered up-front, ‘but the second man looks like a spotter to me. You know - like a second pair of eyes for a sniper. Or a forward air controller.’
‘I do,’ said Colvin, glancing over. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘The angles. If I had time, I’d drive over there and take a look for myself, but from these photographs it seems to me like the guy on the street had a good angle to watch Pieraro and Aronson as they approached. The driver of the vehicle didn’t. But the tyre marks, the almost perfect timing, even the way he veered just a little bit at the end to line them up with his hood ornament - it all looks like somebody was guiding him in. Like a FAC will talk close air support in on top of a target. You pull the cell phone records for that area at that time, and you’ll probably get the call. Especially if you check for sat phones. Might’ve been made on a burner, of course. Did they find any melted cell phone components inside the burnt-out wreck?’
The FBI man shook his head uncertainly. ‘I’m not sure. I have to confess, I’m not fully up to speed on this one. I just picked this up because it was flagged as being of interest to Jed Culver’s office. But if there’s no note there about cell phones, I’m sure I could get the local guys to look into it. Or I could probably pull the logs myself, if you want. Is there some way I can contact you when you leave KC?’
She could see Colvin was intrigued. She had to admire the guy. He was an investigator; it must’ve been driving him bat-shit. Particularly why she’d been interested in the homesteader before he was killed. You had your mysteries, wrapped in your enigmas, dropped into a bottomless black hole, and he wasn’t allowed to even strike a match and chuck it in there. She could imagine the bumper crop of rumours that would spring up after she’d left. Probably all swirling around the possibility of an armed Federal intervention down in the Mandate.
‘Thank you, Agent Colvin,’ she said as graciously as she could manage on three hours’ sleep. ‘I’m in transit for the next few days but I’ll have Mr Culver’s office get in contact with you. They can handle anything you turn up about those phone logs. I really do appreciate your help on this.’
‘I’m a people person.’ He gave a shrug, accompanying the movement with a goofy grin. ‘I live to help out.’
She closed the file and reached around to drop it on the back seat. There wasn’t much else in there for her. But what she’d seen was worthy of note. Caitlin turned to gaze out the window once more, looking for some perspective.
Northtown was a faithful copy of Norman Rockwell’s small-town America. The road had compressed down to two lanes here, with angled parking spots on both sides, most of which were empty of any vehicles. Wrought-iron benches that no one had time to sit in anymore poked through the snow every block or so. One shopfront featured a marquee advertising the latest Bond film, with the new guy.
Clusters of early morning commuters trudged down the sidewalks towards a bus station in front of an old drugstore, with their hard-hats and safety vests in hand. Probably on their way to scoop up the Disappeared. Bundled up against the cold as they were, Caitlin noticed that most of them were white, with a sprinkling of African-Americans and Hispanics thrown in. No sign of the many Indians she knew to be resident here. KC was dividing itself into camps, or ghettos.
After they’d turned onto Burlington, Colvin accelerated southbound. ‘Got more twists and turns than a pretzel factory out here,’ he said. ‘At least you don’t have to go out to the international airport. In this weather, we’d be looking at an hour-long drive.’
Caitlin nodded, still lost in her thoughts. A pair of F-16s with wing tanks howled into the air on the other side of the railway tracks, en route to patrol the southern approaches to Kansas City.
She was certain that Pieraro’s death had no connection to Ozal and through him to Baumer, so in that sense she had no dog in this fight. But she’d agreed to take on the job in Texas because there was at least a prima facie case linking Ozal - however indirectly - to Blackstone. And for Caitlin, that was motivation enough to maintain a watching brief on the matter of Miguel Pieraro. It was a loose thread, worth pulling.
After the long series of twisting streets and hairpin bends through a part of Northtown that Colvin called Harlem, they arrived at Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport. Such as it was. The main terminal building dated back to the 1930s and resembled a cross between a Quonset hut and a postmodern eco-home. A trio of C-130s sat on the flight line near the brown-brick building of the former TWA headquarters. Someone had told her on the ride into Harrah’s that Howard Hughes’s ghost haunted the place. As far as Caitlin was concerned, this whole country was haunted. The sooner she got on the plane and got this done, the better.
The flight was a regular military shuttle, but there were no other passengers. Still, she didn’t like to keep people waiting. When Colvin pulled into the drop-off zone, the Echelon agent turned down his offer to wait with her, but did so in as polite and friendly a manner as possible.
‘I’ll chase those phone logs up for you,’ he said over his shoulder, while extracting her suitcase from its place beside his container full of books.
‘If you could, that would be great,’ she replied. ‘Mr Pieraro had a daughter. She will want to see somebody punished for this.’
Colonel Katherine Murdoch waved goodbye, and walked into the departure lounge.
30
NORTH DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY
Julianne changed motel rooms after the interview at the police station, a precaution, and an easy one. She was travelling light. She arrived outside Shah’s house in The Palms as the sun was dropping low over a wide bay, in which a few dozen sailboats and larger yachts lay at anchor. The burnt orange light of sunset had already coloured the green waters to a sparkling copper sheet.
Looking up from the street at the modern pole-and-beam home, Jules couldn’t help thinking that a spectacular view awaited her on the open-plan area that defined the upper storey, where a few people were already enjoying drinks and chatting in small groups. She’d been expecting a quiet family dinner, with perhaps Birendra or even Downing in attendance. But it seemed that a cocktail party was underway.
She guessed that the interior of the house opened up onto a vast, shaded platform enjoying clear vie
ws across an undeveloped strip of coastal scrub. From down here at street level, however, she couldn’t tell where the inside became the outside. But there was no mistaking the scar left behind on the footpath by the attempted bombing. A patch of grass, roughly six or seven feet across, had been charred down to burnt red earth on the verge in front of the post box. Or what had been the post box. The blast had torn huge chunks out of the sandstone plinth that served as a mailbox.
The killing heat of the afternoon no longer hammered down out of a hot, grey sky. But stepping out of her air-conditioned taxi onto the dark scab of scorched earth where Shah’s would-be assailants had fumbled their package and destroyed themselves, Jules still felt the crush of hot, moist tropical air. Her light silk shirt, the one she had borrowed from Ashmi, was sticking to her back by the time she’d walked up the driveway to the front door. Shrapnel from the explosion, stone chips and small pieces of metal, still pitted the dark wooden double doors. She was reaching for an antique iron knocker when the door opened and Shah greeted her, smiling effusively.
‘Come in, come in, Miss Julianne. The others are already here, having a drink upstairs. It is not a very large gathering, just some friends, people we can trust. And there’s somebody I want you to meet. He may be able to help.’
Unsettled for a moment - she hadn’t expected to have to socialise - Jules apologised for not bringing anything with her. ‘Oh Shah, if you’d said something, I would’ve picked up some wine.’
The host dismissed her concerns. ‘Pah! I shall not have you placing me further in your debt, Miss Julianne, when I already owe you so much,’ he said. ‘Come through, please. As I recall from our time on the golfer’s boat, you were always fond of bubble drink, and I have some very good French champagnes in my cellar downstairs. I always wanted a cellar, and now I have one. Let me send one of the girls down to fetch you something. Do I remember correctly, Pol Roger was your favourite? … Ah, here is my wife, Pasang. Please, say hello.’
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