After America

by John Birmingham

  There was no sign of any woman who might be Sally Gray. Jenny had said she was in a storeroom, but there was no such area off this corridor. He could see three camp whores from his vantage point, easily discerned by their sluttish mode of dress. Two were dead, and one was firing a carbine out into the street. Indeed, the agents were putting out such a volume of fire that he had to worry about Aronson and the others. Had they found cover before coming under fire?

  How many were alive?

  Was it even worth continuing the search for Miss Gray?

  Papa should be out of there by now, Sofia thought. She had given up any pretense of hiding at the edge of the battle, crossing the street a block up from the Hy Top. Rifle fire popped around her, but she did not pay it any mind. The adrenaline was flowing through her, giving her a rush that was far more intense than the flush of deer hunting. She worked around to the back of the Hy Top.

  “Don’t shoot me, please!”

  The Mormon girl, about the same age as Sofia, fell down in front of her. She ran up to the young woman and knelt down. Adam caught up with them seconds later, his weapon leveled on Sofia until realization took hold.

  “Holy hell, Sofia! Your father is going to be furious with you,” he said.

  “Where is he?” she asked. “He should be out by now.”

  “Still in the Hy Top,” Adam said, bringing her up to speed.

  “Anything left in that rifle?” she asked, pointing at the M16 Adam carried.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve not even fired it yet.”

  “Give it to me,” she said.

  “I think not,” he said, trying to summon up all the dignity his few months of added maturity might lend him—without any luck. “Your father—”

  Adam didn’t complete the sentence. She butt swiped him across the face with the flat of her rifle stock. It made a pretty good club.

  “Here.” Sofia handed her Remington to the crying woman. “What’s your name?”

  “Jenny,” she said.

  “I’m not going to kill you. Do you know how to use this?”

  Jenny nodded.

  “Fine,” Sofia said, collecting Adam’s M16. “Stay here. I’m going after my father.”

  Miguel dismissed the unworthy option of cutting and running without a second thought. He had promised Adam that he would do his best to rescue the girl, and even if he hadn’t, that did not change the fact that she was a good woman—he assumed—being held captive by the worst sort of men. Were it his daughter and another man had turned away from a chance to save her, what would he think of such a worthless cur?

  Not much, after killing him.

  Miguel settled on what he had to do and determined to see it through, no matter what. He took a moment to examine the room again, taking care this time to commit to memory as much detail as he could: the positions of the agents firing into the street and those of the dead and the wounded, the cover he might use, the paths he might take through the chaos. He did not have perfect vision of the room, far from it. But life was not perfect, and God expected his children to be about his business anyway.

  He checked the Winchester one last time as he walked on a few paces to a door that would surely have to give on to the barroom.

  Seven rounds of 30.30 smokeless in the tube.

  He made the sign of the cross.

  Kissed the small locket hanging around his neck.

  Jacked a round into the chamber and stepped into the room.

  Working from left to right, Miguel punched 170 grains of 30.30 deer killer through the back of the first man’s neck at 2,227 feet per second. The agent crouched next to him lost the top of his head as he turned slightly to see what had happened to his comrade. Miguel worked the lever action and put his third round into the back of the next man in line, who was taking cover behind a structural beam as he fired out into the street. The woman, the camp whore, who had been firing her carbine blindly over the window ledge reacted with catlike speed and managed to turn toward him, cry out a warning over the clamor and tumult, and even squeeze off a couple of rounds. But they hit the ceiling, bringing down a shower of dust and particleboard before her face exploded when hit by his fourth shot. Blood and gray matter spattered the face of the man next to her.

  “Dixie!” he cried out, turning on Miguel. “Fucker, you ki—”

  Dixie’s boyfriend died of a bullet through the heart, and before Miguel could finish the last of them, the final agent, an older man, threw his weapon down and put his hands up.

  “Whoa, pardner, don’t shoot me! I fucking surrender!” the graybeard said.

  Miguel covered him with the rifle, advancing cautiously through the room, still hunched over slightly and flinching as fire from the Mormons outside continued to smash into the building. All of his senses were singing; light and sound and the reek of gunpowder and death flooded in as time seemed to stretch out forever—as though he might walk across this room, surrounded by the dead and dying, from this moment until the ending of the world.

  Something was behind him. He whipped out his Lupara.

  A burst of rifle fire cut the shape down before Miguel could pull the trigger. He caught the briefest hint of the agent’s head disintegrating in a shower of blood and bone before blessed silence fell and all that remained was the ringing in his ears and the wailing of a woman somewhere in the dark. The man who had been coming at him from a doorway to his left fell facedown onto the floor.

  Sofia stood behind the man, an M16 in her hands.

  “Papa,” she said sheepishly.

  31

  Berlin

  As she’d expected, the BMW was an older model, an X5 from 2002. The Bayerische Motoren Werke hadn’t gone under like so many other automakers, but it had shrunk enormously and had not released a new line beyond the 2003 models. Still, this X5 from Berlin Control was a pretty good SUV crossover. A little stiff in the handling for her taste, but powerful and kitted out with the balance of her equipment in a sealed diplomatic box in the back. No Landespolizei patrols would be pulling her over and poking around in her unmentionables.

  Caitlin blinked away the fatigue of a long day’s travel. She had risen before dawn in London, and it was coming up on midnight. Six lanes of the A100 ribboned away in front of her, sweeping past the radio tower on her left, lit from below by golden lights. It would have been an almost cheery sight after the drab gray Orwellian tones of London, but she was too tired to care. She was also lonely, an unusual, almost unknown state for her. She’d tried to phone Bret before flying out, but the guard at the safe house had told her that both he and Monique were asleep, and she hadn’t wanted to wake either of them. Her breasts felt heavy and ached from not having fed her baby in so many hours, but there was nothing to be done about it. It wasn’t like she could express milk in the field, after all. Soon enough her milk would dry up, anyway. She felt an irrational flicker of resentment at that, as if it was the worst thing Baumer had done. Caitlin flicked the air vents to keep the uncomfortably cold AC blowing into her face, warding off drowsiness.

  She regretted not bringing a couple of CDs. German pop and rock music made her brain hurt. After flitting around the dial for half a minute she found a local news radio station halfway through a quarter-hour update. Her German-language comprehension was good, but she was a little rusty with the spoken word and practiced by repeating the bulletin after the newsreader.

  “Fighting continues in New York, while the British Security Cabinet holds crisis talks with the U.S. Defense minister. NATO ministers meeting in Brussels are expected to release a statement later tonight condemning state-sponsored piracy but urging the Kipper administration to show restraint …”

  Caitlin snorted and rolled her tired eyes.

  “Enough of that shit,” she said, trying a few more stations until she lucked onto a talk radio host ranting about an upcoming vote in the Bundestag to recognize sharia law, applied by mandated local communities as binding in certain classes of civil action. The five-minute tirad
e was enormous fun to bluster along with, and the callers provided her with an eclectic mix of accents and vocal styles to parrot. It was also a reasonable backgrounder on the sort of suburb she was headed into. Neukölln wasn’t a closed community like some of the shariatowns in the east of Germany or the remaining Enclosures in London, for that matter, but it was enclosed in all but name. She, a blond American woman, would have no freedom of movement there. She’d need an escort, someone she trusted, but not a local stringer for Echelon. As Dalby had made clear, this op was deniable. There was a good chance it was going to get bloody.

  She yawned and shivered as the X5 hummed past miles of closely packed, low-rise apartment blocks. Unlike London, Berlin had no curfew or travel restrictions, and traffic was noticeably heavier than she’d experienced in the British capital, especially at this time of night. Gas was much cheaper, probably because it wasn’t controlled by anything like the Brits’ Ministry of Resources. Even so, the city was noticeably quieter than when she’d last been stationed there, working up the brief on al Banna at the start of the decade. The German economy, like Britain’s, was much smaller than it had been, and few people had the means to keep a car on the road.

  Another ten minutes took her past Tempelhof Airport, where she could see a few stripped and gutted jetliners in the livery of American Airlines and Delta Airlines parked on the apron to the north of the two runways. Shortly afterward she turned left at Britzer Damm and motored quickly past long rows of shuttered shops. Many of them looked as though they hadn’t opened in years. The footpaths and gutters were littered with rubbish and scraps of paper gathered into drifts and whipped up in small eddies by her speeding passage. The streets were darker than she recalled, but then they would be, with every second light turned off by the city authorities. Here and there groups of young men clustered together, some of them watching her with sullen expressions as she drove past. Immediately after crossing the rail line at the Hermannstrasse station, she turned left into Emser Strasse and drove for two blocks past whitewashed four-and five-story apartment buildings. Away from the main strip, with its scattering of mean little bars and greasy spoons around which tribes of young men would gather, Emser Strasse was quiet. Many cars were parked neatly by the curb, but even in the dark Caitlin could tell most of them had not been driven in a long time. They were dusty, and more often than not rotting banks of leaf matter were piled up against deflated tires. The GPS module beeped triumphantly.

  She was there.

  A new, unusued phone came out of her leather jacket, and she keyed in the number taken from Bret’s diary back at the farm. A man answered in a voice fogged with sleep.

  “Hello? Sayad al Mirsaad.”

  “Hey, Sadie. It’s Caitlin Monroe. Bret Melton’s wife. We met at the wedding. I know he was always threatening to visit you, buddy, but I’m afraid you’re shit outta luck. It’s just me.”

  The apartment was small: two bedrooms and a single living area that contained a kitchen, dining nook, and sitting room. Mirsaad, the journalist who had rescued her wounded husband from the epic clusterfuck of Iraq, lived there now with his wife and four children, who were all mercifully asleep. His wife, Laryssa, a German national, was standing in the door, clutching a bright pink dressing gown across her chest when Caitlin stepped out of the third-floor elevator door. She was not giving off happy vibes. Her husband looked exhausted, and peering behind Laryssa into the cramped confines of the flat, Caitlin understood why. All the paraphernalia of a newborn was there to see: changing table, bassinet, baby bottles on the kitchen counter. Caitlin regretted calling them without first checking, but she hadn’t wanted to let anyone know where she was headed. When it came to Baumer, she had learned the hard way in France to work on her own.

  “I’m sorry, Missus Mirsaad, I really am, but I just flew into Berlin and I needed to get in contact with Sadie.”

  “You could not have waited until morning?” Laryssa asked. It sounded more like a demand than a question.

  “Look, I’m sorry about that. Really. I understand. I have my own little one at home. About the same age by the look of things.”

  She gestured over the woman’s shoulder to indicate all the equipment she’d briefly seen.

  “We know about little Monique,” Mirsaad said in a more conciliatory tone. “Bret sent us photos by e-mail. But what are you doing here, Caitlin?You surely cannot be working. Not with the baby so young.”

  Mirsaad’s wife, whose red hair and pale skin spoke of a long local family lineage, glared at him for that, but the reporter extended a hand and drew Caitlin gently by the elbow into their main room. The baby was asleep in a crib, which had been pushed into one corner near the changing table. Caitlin’s experienced eye immediately recognized the cloth diapers piled up underneath.

  The small room reeked of lanolin, disinfectant, milk, vomit, and baby shit.

  “Bret told me about you,” the woman said, almost accusingly. “He said you were a soldier, like he was once. But you stayed in longer than him.”

  Caitlin nodded noncommittally.

  “Something like that. Soldier for a while. More of a police officer after that. That’s why I’m here, Sadie. Bret and Monique have been hurt. Someone attacked them.”

  Mirsaad lost the last vestiges of sleepiness as his eyes widened in shock.

  “Caitlin, I am sorry. Are they all right? I did not know. We hadn’t heard. I work for a community radio station here now. I’m afraid it’s all very parochial. Was it criminals? I understand there is a lot of crime in England now.”

  “It didn’t make the news, and they’re fine. Bret’s a little scratched and dented, but not much more than before. And our baby is safe. It was criminals, but not like you think. They were hired by a man from a place near here. Someone with a grudge. They were after me, but I’m afraid they tried to go through my husband and daughter to get to me.”

  Laryssa Mirsaad glanced involuntarily at the door through which Caitlin had entered. A glimmer of maternal concern clouded her features, quickly turning to anger.

  “And you came here?”

  Her tone was accusing now. No doubt about it. Caitlin couldn’t blame her.

  “Don’t worry,” the American assured her. “I didn’t call you about my coming because I wanted to be sure nobody else knew. I wasn’t followed or tracked. Everything’s cool. But I could use your help, Sadie. If you’re up for it. And if Laryssa agrees, too, of course.”

  “What did they do to your family?” Laryssa asked.

  “Tried to kidnap them, we think. There was … some shooting,” Caitlin said.

  “Oh, my God. What happened? Did the men who did it get away? Were they captured?”

  “They’re dead,” Caitlin said.

  It was Mirsaad’s turn to look worried.

  “Oh, my. Is Bret okay? Really?”

  “A few wounds, but he’s fine. He’s being looked after. Look, I don’t want to intrude on your family here. Sadie, is there somewhere we could talk, where we’re not going to wake your kids? If that’s okay, Laryssa.”

  Caitlin had quickly scoped out where resistance was going to come from in this arrangement. The German woman looked like it was a thousand miles from okay, but Mirsaad, who had completely regained his faculties, simply nodded.

  “Laryssa,” he said in a very serious voice. “These people helped us after the war. I would not have escaped the Middle East were it not for Bret Melton interceding on my behalf.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “And you, too, I suspect, Caitlin. You are something more than a police officer, are you not? You are someone with influence inside the British government quite obviously. And with Seattle, too. While Bret, like me, is a mere journalist. I doubt his lobbying alone would have secured my transit out of Kuwait after the Holocaust.”

  She smiled, tired. “Sadie. You did my husband a big favor once. That means I owed you one as well.”

  “And so now I am in your debt,” Mirsaad said in a tone of voice that signaled he would not be dissuad
ed. “Laryssa, mind the children. I will not be long. We shall discuss what help I might be to Caitlin. We shall be down in Ahmet’s.”

  His wife’s threat detectors were all pinging wildly, but before she could object and turn it into a marital issue, the baby stirred and began to cry.

  “Oh, just go and don’t be more than fifteen minutes,” she said.

  “It will take me three minutes to change and five for us to walk there. I shall be back soon,” he said.

  But Laryssa had turned away and was lifting the child from the crib.

  Ahmet’s was a small coffeehouse and smoking room on the same block as Mirsaad’s apartment. Caitlin left the X5 in the basement garage of Sadie’s building, secure in the knowledge that Echelon’s unique antitheft technologies were more than a match for any would-be carjackers. Even so, she checked the LED on her key ring before they left Emser Strasse just to be sure she’d be alerted if anyone attempted to interfere with the vehicle. The tiny light was glowing green, powered up and hotlinked.

  Ahmet’s was a brief walk though an unseasonably chilly night, although the weather was so unpredictable these days that the idea of seasons had little meaning. Caitlin maintained her situational awareness, scoping out the street and the surrounding buildings as they walked. Emser Strasse had been blessed with good tree cover once, but the canopy had apparently not recovered from the pollution storms in ’03. The trees, which should have been lush with early summer foliage, were still looking sick and straggly. Not unlike Mirsaad himself.

  “I’m sorry to turn up unannounced like this, Sadie. But it’s better, believe me.”

  The reporter frowned and burrowed further into the old brown coat he had donned for the brisk walk.

  “There will be a price to pay for this with my wife, but for Bret I am willing to pay. For you, too, if it is true you helped get us all back here. He intimated as much at your wedding. For which invite I must thank you. It is a lovely farm you have there, and we were made very welcome. Laryssa was worried.”