Jules muttered her agreement, preferring to concentrate on not tripping and further injuring her arm. They climbed over the windowsill of the nearest shop front, a gutted homewares store, and navigated their way to the rear of the building, first by the light of the fires and then by means of a torch the Rhino clipped onto one of the machine guns. A jet screamed overhead while they searched for a rear exit, chased by the thump-thump-thump of a big antiaircraft cannon. She’d heard of the pirates mounting such things onto pickups but had wondered at the truth of such rumors. Surely the city’s road network was too locked up with the rusted remains of all the vehicles that had crashed after losing their drivers.
“Here we go,” said her companion as the thin beam of torchlight picked out a heavy metal security door. “Stand back, Miss Jules.”
She did as she was told while he pressed down the locking bar and tentatively pushed open the door. No gunfire greeted the movement, and the Rhino slid through.
“Clear,” he announced a few seconds later, and she followed him through, emerging into the cold, gritty rain that pattered down into the space between those buildings fronting Mercer and the ass-end of their counterparts on the next block over. She tried to remember which street ran parallel on that side but came up blank. The back alley, as always, was much less disordered than the main streets. There were a few vehicles parked here and there, but they had been parked back in ’03 while their drivers ran deliveries to the businesses on either side. The smugglers had learned very quickly, right back at Duane Street, in fact, that such hidden, disused passages were safest when one was trying to traverse the contested island.
She recalled this as they sloshed through three inches of rancid, stagnant groundwater collected in the artificial valley between the two terraced rows of buildings on Mercer and whatever streets. Rats the size of small dogs swam away from the thin shaft of torchlight, trailing V-shaped wakes.
Didn’t there used to be alligators in the New York sewers?
“Rhino,” she said lightly. “Do you recall whether the Wave disappeared crocodiles and suchlike?”
He halted in front of her and turned around, keeping the torch pointed down to avoid dazzling her.
“Crocodiles? You mean gators?”
“Yes,” she said, trying to sound casual.
“No idea, Miss Julianne. What is it they reckon now? It took humans and most of the higher primates. Chimps and apes and so on. And killed about half of anything that had a spinal cord. But not so as you could predict what was gonna get zapped beyond people and apes.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, feeling rather foolish.
The Rhino sketched a devilish grin.
“Do gators have spinal cords? Or do they just like to eat them? Hmm. Do you know, Miss Jules?”
“Shut the fuck up and keep moving,” she scolded, waving him forward.
The Rhino sniggered and turned back to resume sloshing through the filthy watercourse. The grumble of bomb bursts and far-off cannon fire rolled around the empty chasms of the city, but hidden away in their own deep concrete valley and with a cold rain pressing down, the fighting sounded muted and far away. Jules kicked away a rat that ran across her boots, sending it into a rack of old dresses still waiting to be delivered. They were covered in plastic bags; she wondered idly if any might still be wearable but scoffed at the thought. They’d be moldy and chewed to rags by moths and grubs after so long. After squeezing through a narrow space where the corners of two buildings almost met, they followed the passageway up to the rear of a two-story shop dwarfed by a much larger buildings on either side. The door was jammed open by a large cardboard box that was halfway to total disintegration. The Rhino tried to pull it out of the way, but it came apart in his hands and spilled its contents with a harsh clatter of metal and crashing glass.
“Shit,” the Rhino said. He kicked a path through the refuse. As Jules stepped forward, she realized she’d stood on the remains of whoever had been carrying the box and felt an absurd reflex need to apologize. Hurrying to keep up with the bobbing torchlight, she tried to make out what sort of store it might have been, but the best she could come up with was “eclectic.” Clothes. Knickknacks. Hideously expensive objets d’art. There were examples of all those in the small, neat space.
Spring Street, onto which the shop fronted, apparently had reverted to its original form as a stream. At least a foot of brown swiftly running water gushed past outside, lapping at the bottom of the shop’s front door, pouring in underneath. The Rhino was less concerned by that than by the chance they might be spotted as they left the cover they had so far enjoyed.
“Why don’t we just kick our way into the place over the road?” Jules suggested. “See if we can cut through the block like we just did?”
“That’s my plan, too,” he replied. “But I’d just like to check the water before I go dipping my toes.”
He turned around and smiled wickedly.
“Gators, you know.”
19
Salisbury Plain, England
Richardson broke just after four in the afternoon. He lasted much longer than Caitlin had expected, but she had watched better men than that try to resist torture before. She had even broken some of them herself with nothing more than a sanitary napkin smeared with pig’s blood. Everyone had a weakness, some deep fear that could be exploited if one was given time. If time was an issue, there was always the proper amount of pressure, applied in controlled doses. Everyone broke sooner or later. The wonder with Richardson was that he held on for so long, but as Dalby pointed out, it wasn’t for the sake of honor or duty.
“I believe he was quite terrified,” said the man from the Home Office. “And not of us.”
“Not at first,” Caitlin corrected.
Dalby seemed to give her comment more consideration than it was really due, sipping contemplatively at his cup of tea before dunking a cookie—or, rather, a biscuit—into it. He stood aside to let the guards drag Richardson’s unconscious body past him. The criminal’s dark skin was spotted with burn marks and torn by small, bleeding lacerations, hundreds of them, some crusted with salt. He reeked of sour sweat and the stink of his own urine and feces. As Caitlin kept her nose close to the coffee mug, attempting to block out the worst of the smell, she was reminded of a figure from history who used to carry a hollowed-out orange filled with perfume. He would sniff the orange to keep the miasma of the unwanted masses away.
What was that guy’s name? She had heard it in some history class eons ago. She couldn’t even remember the last time she had seen an edible orange.
Stop it, she told herself. Jesus Christ but her mind was not as sharp at it had been before the tumor. It seemed to wander so much now.
The smell didn’t seem to bother Dalby in the least, but he was sensitive enough to her discomfort to move out of the room when the path was clear.
“Lads, why don’t we pack our guest off to London?” Dalby said. “For a spell in the Cage.”
“Yes, sir,” one of the guards said. “Very good, Mister Dalby. We’ll see to it.”
The funk inside the small cell must have been especially thick, because the air in the musty, enclosed space of the main keg room tasted as sweet as an alpine forest when she was able to breathe freely once more. Caitlin did not tell the Englishman that Richardson’s interrogation had brought back some deeply traumatic memories of her own treatment at the hands of al Banna, but Dalby would have been familiar with her file, and he had offered a number of times to take on the responsibility for the hostile debriefing alone.
She’d refused. Richardson and his crew had come after her through Bret and Monique. She wouldn’t leave the room until he broke and told them why. Indeed, she believed her presence had probably contributed to undermining his will. He’d seen her execute his comrades, some of them in cold blood, and she gave him no reason to believe that she wouldn’t be just as ruthless with him.
“Still and all, he did give a good accounting of himse
lf in there, didn’t he?” said Dalby as they reached the foot of the ladder leading up to the old barroom. “That was quite a job of work getting him to talk. Your Mister Baumer really knows how to put the frighteners on a chap.”
Caitlin shook her head in disgust.
Bilal Baumer. Al Banna.
She thought she’d seen off that worthless blood clot years ago. But here he was, back in her face, even if it was only through the agency of cutouts and dupes like Richardson. She finished the dregs of her coffee before pulling herself up the old wooden ladder hand over hand. She was amused and a little touched to see that Dalby made a conspicuous effort not to stare at her butt as it swayed past his eyes.
He was good guy, old Dalby, she had decided, even if he was a little too ready with the shaving razor and the Zippo during interrogation. He followed her up the ladder and directed her through the small pod of desks, where the typist she had met earlier was having a late-afternoon tea, nibbling a jam-covered scone and reading an old gossip magazine. Not that there were any new gossip mags being published. Not in paper form, anyway. After all, a big swag of the world’s celebrity supply had disappeared back in ’03, but more important, the all-powerful Ministry of Resources had deemed august journals such as Hello! and OK! “surplus to the national emergency requirements,” making them prohibitively expensive to publish. Like most of the print media, they had downsized and gone online, where they scrabbled over some very meager pickings from advertising and subscriptions.
“This way,” Dalby said, using a key to open a door at the far end of the room. The day had grown even gloomier while they’d been downstairs, and outside it was so dark with the lowering clouds and rain that she could barely see beyond the windows. Springtime in England, she thought gloomily. A log fire burned in the center of the old barroom, providing welcome light and warmth, but fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling shone with a much harsher effect, laying a flat white light over everything. Caitlin tailed Dalby into the room, which looked like it might have been the pub manager’s office at one time. It was furnished in the same spare utilitarian style as the main area, but he had softened the space with a few amateurish oil paintings and a potted fern, which he sprayed with water from a plastic bottle before sitting down. There were three framed pictures sitting on his desk, which was otherwise free of clutter. She assumed they were of his family but could not see from her side of the room.
“Sit down, sit down. That’s the comfier perch,” he said, indicating a very tired-looking leather armchair in a corner behind her. It sat next to a gray metal bookcase that was mostly filled with government documents and a few nonfiction books: The Legacy of Jihad, Bravo Two Zero, The Disappeared. There were two novels there, however, lying face up on the top shelf: a well-thumbed copy of The Cruel Sea and what looked like an unread science fiction title, Tearing Down Tuesday. She assumed it was sci-fi because of the green robot on the cover. She was probably sitting in Dalby’s reading chair, she realized. It was, as he had said, a rather comfortable perch.
“I must apologize for the unpleasantness downstairs, Caitlin. It did get rather fraught once or twice.”
“Big boys’ rules,” she said casually.
“Indeed. Which brings us to the question of which rules we’re now playing by as regards Mister Baumer.”
Caitlin shifted her position slightly in the chair. The mention of Baumer’s name upset her more than she would care to admit. She could not avoid the image of her husband and child, her precious family, lying dead in a field had she not been there. And where was she now? Not by their side, that was for …
She forced her mind to stop rambling.
“I thought he was supposed to be chained up at the bottom of some hole in Guadeloupe, helping the gendarmes with their inquiries.”
“Indeed,” Dalby said with a quirk of the lips that might have been rueful or wryly amused.
“Our last information had him so situated. But that was a year ago, and I’m afraid that communications between metropolitan France and the territoires d’outre-mer are not what they might be. Frankly, Mr. Baumer was no longer an active concern of ours once it became obvious that we were never going to be given unfettered access to him. Or any access at all, beyond furnishing the DST with a list of questions they might just pass on to the Directorate of Military Intelligence, which took control of him back in 2003.”
“So, what, all of our work on him was for nothing? Or was it because we were asking. Rather than MI6 or the Yard?”
“Could be,” Dalby conceded with a wave of one hand. “We’re not flavor of the month in the Elysée Palace. Never have been, which is only reasonable, I suppose, given our brief. Frankly, I would rather that Echelon had remained a private affair and hence deniable rather than declaring our hand as we did after the Vancouver Conference. I really don’t think your Mister Kipper did us any favors there.”
Caitlin leaned forward and placed her hands on her knees, locking her elbows straight, imitating her father without realizing she was doing so. She agreed with the Englishman but could not get worked up over it in the same way. Echelon had worked very well in the old world as a secret arrangement among the Anglophone powers to divide up responsibility for spying on the rest of the world. And it wasn’t as if the rest of the world didn’t know about them. Compromised elements of the DGSE in France had been able to roll up most of Echelon’s network there in the first days of the intifada.
“That’s all politics, Dalby. And history now. Fact is, we are in the open, we are declared players, and the French are going to have to give up whatever they know about Baumer. This guy is out, and he’s running assets again, on our turf, against me.”
“You really think it’s personal?” Dalby asked. He sounded skeptical.
Caitlin threw her hands into the air. “Richardson was paid by a man called Tariq Skaafe, also known as Terry Skaafe, one of Baumer’s old aliases. He was contracted to drive up here and put a hit on my family. He got a bonus payment if he managed to drive back to London with me in a bag. It sounds personal, dontcha think? The guy’s been sitting in a fucking hole in Guadeloupe for two or three years, eating his craw, stewing on the infidel bitch who put him there. Fuck knows how he got out, but if Sarko doesn’t really control the external territories anymore—and who does have a handle on the fucking Carribean these days?—then it’s entirely fucking possible that Baumer got sprung from his spider hole for a packet of fucking cigarettes and a handjob!”
Caitlin, who had leaned far forward in making her case, fell back into the chair, annoyed with herself for losing control in front of Dalby, for losing control at all. If Baumer really was on the loose and coming after her, she was going to need to stay frosty until she could reach into his fucking chest and rip his heart out herself just to make sure the fucker was really dead.
Dalby nodded sympathetically and opened a drawer behind his desk. “Do you mind?” he asked, taking out a pipe. “Helps me to think things through. And I received a new bag of tobacco the other day. From Missouri.”
“Knock yourself out, Sherlock,” she said, smiling an apology. “I’m sorry to rant, but it’s not just about me, you know. Those assholes this morning came after my husband and my kid. It doesn’t get any more personal than that.”
Dalby tamped down the small bowl full of brown leaf and lit up with the same lighter he’d used to extract the information about “Terry Skaafe” from Richardson. “You know this al Banna chap better than anyone,” he said as he drew in the first puffs. “Do you think there’s a chance he’s still in the country?”
Caitlin shook her head. “None at all. He’d have moved in and out very quickly. The Skaafe cover was a good one. He didn’t use it when I was trailing him. We only found out about it afterward. A solid jacket as a Kurdish-Austrian businessman working in medical supplies. That would have got him all the travel stamps from the Resources Ministry. He was on a clean EU passport, Austrian nationality. Gave him a free pass at border control. Richardson too
k the job from him six months ago. Paid by small multiple Web transfers into his betting account. He came, he went, he’s gone.”
Dalby took a long draw on the pipe and closed his eyes, obviously enjoying the indulgence. The smoke had a whiff of port and old leather about it. Rain pattered at the single pane of glass between the office and the training area beyond. A chopper passed by, the hammering blades audible some distance away. It could lull you to sleep if you didn’t mind yourself, Caitlin thought.
Dalby was quiet for so long, with his eyes shut and his head bobbing slightly, that she was beginning to wonder whether he might have fallen asleep when he spoke again.
“And so where to for Mister Baumer, assuming you’re correct?”
She relaxed slightly, relieved that they were moving forward again. She wanted this dealt with so that she could get home.
“Well, not metro France, that’s for damn sure. Paris isn’t Guadeloupe, and old Sarko runs a pretty hard-hitting crew nowadays, at least in the parts of the country he controls. He’s got the migrant ghettos sewed up pretty tight, too. If I had to make a guess, I’d say we’d need to start looking for Baumer in Neukölln, where his mom lived. Still might, if she’s alive. Germans didn’t go in for the whole ethnic cleansing thing. And they took in a shitload of refugees from France after the war. From here, too, after the Tories took over. A third world shariatown like Neukölln would be a good place for Billy to hole up. He knows the place inside out, and it’s crawling with his sort of people. Lots of new faces, too. Makes it hard for the Germans to keep track of the talent. Not that they have time anyway with the Poles and the Russians keeping them busy.”
She sighed and shook her head. “What a world, Dalby.”
He had the pipe running hot now. Caitlin didn’t smoke, but she appreciated the strong, earthy odor after the stink of the interrogation room.
After America Page 20