“A massed conventional bombing run would certainly break the will of the irregular forces we face there. The pirates and whoever has been coaching them. Also, it would place the rest of the world on notice that whether or not we actually stand on a given piece of U.S. territory, it is ours and we will do whatever it takes to keep everyone else out.”
“Cost,” Culver chimed in. “Just how much will this bombing run cost us? In human and capital terms.”
“Well, you do the job properly and you’ll kill everyone needs killing, Mister Culver. Thousands of them. As for damage, the areas targeted will look a lot like pictures you may have seen of cities that were bombed during World War Two. If you like, I can have a member of my staff send over a brief.”
“Jesus, we’d be better off just throwing a nuke at the place,” Culver said to himself mordantly.
“To borrow a line from history, we will have to destroy part or all of the city in order to save it,” Franks said. “New York is too valuable as a port of entry and a strategic location on the eastern seaboard to let anyone else take over there, even if we cannot take full advantage of it. Mister President, we have to give serious consideration to the reality on the ground. We can retake this city, hold it, restore it, but it won’t be the New York we remember.”
Kipper leaned back in his chair and stretched his back, which was feeling cramped. He poured himself a glass of water and pondered the options.
He knew as a basic tenet of his profession that occasionally you had to demolish something in order to rebuild. But such demolitions were neat, orderly affairs and never hurt anyone. Not on purpose, at any rate. Over the last four years he had proved, he hoped, that he wasn’t squeamish about killing America’s enemies when necessary, but the senseless destruction of all that property … New York City had such a long history … museums, galleries, Central Park, buildings that had a story, each and every last one of them. They were going to destroy so much of their heritage if they did this.
“Let me think on it, Tommy,” Kipper said. “In the meantime, I authorize you to begin redeployment of the marines you mentioned to New York.” A door knock behind them drew Kipper’s attention, and he saw a young woman tapping her wristwatch apologetically.
“Mister President, we’re about to lose the link.”
He mouthed “thanks” at the woman and apologized to Franks for the interruption.
“Thank you, General. We’re about to lose the satellite. Please, rest assured, I’m not going to dick around with this decision. You’ll have word very soon about …”
But the screen where Franks had been sitting was already full of white noise.
Kipper and Jed sat in silence in the hot, oppressive room. For once his chief of staff seemed to understand that he did not want to be talked at. He most wanted just a few moments of quiet to think things through. The president tried to put himself in the place of all those men and women he had ordered to New York, at first assuming he was sending them on nothing more than a brief policing operation. The pirates, after all, were little better than glorified criminals, looters. They were a problem all over the country, not just in New York, and as well armed as they were, they had never presented as anything other than a rabble, until now.
And now?
He had no idea. There just wasn’t enough information. How he envied his predecessor in this job. Bush had enjoyed almost infinite resources, the all-knowing intelligence agencies, the all-seeing spy satellites, vast networks of spies. Kipper often found himself having to put aside an almost childish jealousy when he thought of how much information Bush must’ve had as he prepared to go to war in Iraq. If only he now had but one-tenth of those resources available to him.
Instead he had imperfection, uncertainty, doubt. And fear. The fear that every decision he made was wrong, disastrously so. Every judgment in error. His reasons ill founded.
“Jed, I don’t know what to do,” he said hoarsely. “I never seem to get it right.”
Culver reached across and squeezed his arm.
“No, Mister President, you do get it right more often than not. But you forget that the world is not an engineering problem, sir. You’re not dealing with elegance and balance and discretely measurable artifacts. You’re dealing with people. Flawed, imperfect people. You can never set right human affairs the same way you can square off a right angle in a technical drawing. Neither the virtues nor the malevolent rottenness of the human soul can be specified to millimeter tolerances. You can only do the best you can.”
Kipper let his head fall forward into his hands. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, which were throbbing painfully.
“Jesus, Jed, way to cheer a guy up,” he said.
He knew the TV screens in front of them were still running loops from the fighting in New York. He did not need to look at them. He would always be haunted by what he had seen there and, even worse, what he had imagined. Crowding out all those hellish images, however, was the woman he had visited in the hospital, the woman whom he had sent into battle and who had come back a broken and incomplete remnant of everything she once was and might yet have been.
The president of the United States of America let his hands fall slowly away from his face. He turned to his military aide, Colonel Ralls, who was standing quietly off to one side as always.
“Mike, can you get General Franks back for me?” he said. “A phone line will be fine. I’ve made a decision.”
40
Berlin
Caitlin did not follow the woman immediately. Fabia Shah was on her lunch break and would not venture far. She disappeared around the corner about a hundred yards down the street, marching the whole way, stopping to talk with nobody. Caitlin and Mirsaad finished their meals with a couple of very short, strong Turkish coffees before leaving to spend a few hours working on the reporter’s behalf. Having found Baumer’s mother where she expected, Caitlin could pick up her tail later in the day. Meanwhile, Mirsaad moved about Neukölln, and Caitlin tagged along with him, dutifully playing the obedient intern as he drove from one appointment to another, interviewing the imam of a small reformist mosque that had taken over a Chinese Christian church on Werbellinstrasse, the local welfare officer for the city’s Islamic Federation, and the director of a women’s shelter operating about a mile north of the shariatown.
As the light began to fail, they headed back into Neukölln’s dense warren of faded identikit apartment blocks, the ranks of grimy whitewashed four-and five-story tenements recalling for her a line she’d read sometime in her college years. Aesthetically worthless rent slabs. Caitlin struggled for a second to recall where she’d seen such an evocative description. She frequently had trouble recalling little things like that after the operation to remove her tumor. She knew the line wasn’t written about this section of Berlin but was struck by how apt it was.
“This woman you are looking for …”
“Not looking for, Sadie. We found her already. I just needed to confirm she was still here in Neukölln. Do you think you could head over to Mahlower; it’s the next right.”
They motored through a big intersection on Hermannstrasse and made the turn she had pointed out. Mahlower was relatively short and home to just six apartment blocks, three on each side. Caitlin had him pull over and park.
“This woman we saw today, she is somehow connected to the attack on you, on Bret?”
Caitlin shook her head. “No. Not directly. But she knows somebody who almost certainly was, and for now she’s the best link I have to him. He came back here when he got out of jail awhile ago. I’m willing to take a bet she’s either seen him or heard from him. It’s a start. That’s all.”
“She is his girlfriend?” he asked dubiously. “Such arrangements are frowned upon here, you know.”
“No,” Caitlin said. “His mother.”
“Ah, I see.”
Mirsaad seemed satisfied with that. After all, it wasn’t too far removed from the way he might go about tracking a diffic
ult contact for a story. If you can’t find them, find the people around them.
“So should we not we go back to the café and follow her?” he asked.
Caitlin smiled.
“No. I have the last known addresses for her. Residential and work. That office has moved, but she moved with it. She was living in a council flat down the end of this street as of three years ago. My best information is that she’s still there. Makes sense. She hasn’t gone anywhere else. She’ll walk past in a few minutes if she is there. Fabia is a tough old bird, but even she won’t linger long after dark on her own. We can wait. Besides, there’s not really enough road traffic to hide in if we had to follow her.”
Caitlin dimly registered a call to prayer somewhere outside, muted by the closed windows of the little Lada. Here and there she could see groups of people, some small gatherings and others quite numerous, making their way into local prayer rooms. When she had last stalked Baumer, she’d built up an encyclopedic knowledge of Neukölln’s ethnic and religious topography. But she had enjoyed much greater freedom of movement back then, and so many things had changed in the intervening time. Thousands more residents had flooded in, for a start, refugees from both France and the charred wastelands of the Middle East, making the already cramped suburb almost intolerably overcrowded. There was very little chance that Fabia would have given up her small but precious council flat.
“So why not just talk to her now, when she walks past?” Mirsaad asked.
“Now is not the time, Sadie. I just need to confirm she’s here. Then we’re going back to your place. You have my thanks and your marching orders. I’m afraid when I come back in here tonight, I’ll be coming on my own.”
“But this is madness,” he protested, turning his body toward her in the cramped confines of the car. He had to release the seat belt to do so. “You have seen how it is here. You cannot hope to move around unaccompanied. For you it will end badly. Very badly.”
“Not for me, buddy,” she assured him as movement in her peripheral vision caught her attention. It was Fabia, walking with a woman who was wrapped up in a dull gray ankle-length coat and escorted by a middle-aged man in a baseball cap. They paid the Lada no heed as they walked past, deep in conversation, and Caitlin held up her hand to forestall a question from Mirsaad. The presence of the other two might prove an inconvenience if Fabia Shah had taken in lodgers or had family staying. It was very common for extended families to squeeze themselves into the tiny one-and two-bedroom apartments. But they stopped and said their good-byes about fifty yards down the street as the man and woman disappeared into a large whitewashed apartment block on the left. Fabia waved them off and resumed the marching stride Caitlin had noted earlier in the day. A forceful gait from a woman emanating a very strong “don’t-fuck-with-me” vibe.
Good for you, Mrs. Shah, she thought to herself.
Mirsaad watched her, too. A professional in his own right, he said nothing until the woman had entered her tenement at the far end of the street.
“Okay,” Caitlin said. “That’ll do us for now. Let’s get you safely home.”
He started the car and drove toward Fabia’s place, looking for a spot to perform a U-turn, but a line of angle-parked cars ran the length of the street, blocking the maneuver. It did give Caitlin a chance to scope out the target address as they drove past. Another blank-faced, grimy tenement looking out on the world through small square windows, about half of them dark.
Mirsaad took them around to the left at the end of the road, and another quick left took them back up to Hermannstrasse, the main road back toward the Jordanian’s apartment. Within a minute they were approaching the lines of stalls and makeshift markets through which they had driven that morning. The place still hummed with the same level of energy, but it was now all directed toward breaking down and putting away displays, trestle tables, racks of clothes, and piles of cardboard boxes. Street vendors pushed handcarts through the controlled chaos, calling their wares, pushing for a few last euros before their customers finished packing and took themselves off to worship.
“Caitlin, please,” said the reporter. He was almost pleading with her now. “I would ask you to reconsider your plan to come back alone. Bret will never forgive me if anything happens to you. There are bands of young men who rove these streets at night. Dignity Patrols they call themselves. They are looking for women just like you. Women they would teach a lesson to.”
The car passed out of the oppressive patchwork quilt of tenements and into the small green belt to the south of Neukölln at last. Caitlin turned in her seat to face Mirsaad.
“Sadie, I’m not going to bullshit you. What I have to do tonight is going to be dangerous. But you have to believe me when I tell you it’d be worse if you came along. I know what I’m doing. This is where my talents shine, buddy. But if they shine too brightly, people get burned. I don’t want you to get hurt. You’ve done me a great favor today. I needed you. But now I need you to back off and trust me, in fact, to forget about me and this day altogether. Like I was never here.”
Mirsaad frowned as they passed by an Islamic culture center between Thomasstrasse and Jonasstrasse. From the uncovered heads of the many unaccompanied women gathering on the footpath outside, laughing and talking happily, it was most likely a reformist operation. He shook his head sadly.
“I fear, Caitlin, that you are much more than a police officer.”
She said nothing. An eloquent response in itself.
“Well, you have my number. If you need help, please do not give it a thought. Just call me and I will come as quickly as I can, but … you know, with the children and my wife to think of …”
“It’s your children and wife I am thinking of,” Caitlin said.
By eleven-thirty in the evening the streets were almost empty. Caitlin parked in a deserted multilevel garage a good five miles from Neukölln. She hauled a smart phone out of her kit and spent some time typing up a report for Dalby, which she dispatched via an encrypted link to Berlin Control. The file wiped itself from the phone after transmission. Her own mission brief she covered quickly, noting that she had located Baumer’s mother and would question her at the first opportunity. The bulk of her transmission, however, detailed her impressions of how much the economy of the shariatown relied on goods obviously looted from the United States. Given the fighting in New York and the resources Echelon and the other agencies were devoting to anti-piracy operations, she knew it would be of interest.
So much interest, it turned out, that the phone buzzed in her jacket pocket about ten minutes after she’d zapped off the data package. Caitlin keyed in the security code and waited while the device exchanged encryption sets with the retransmission facility at Berlin Control. After a final series of bleeps and bloops she heard Dalby in the earpiece.
“Got your message,” he said. “Most interesting, I must say. We knew a lot of the product you saw was available on the continent, but not in the significant concentrations you found. Any chance you might look further into the relevant supply chains for us?” he asked. “At your end, I mean.”
Caitlin frowned. “I could do that,” she said, taking care to remain aware of her surroundings while she spoke in vague generalities with her handler. The call was encoded with military-grade encryption, but there was no sense taking chances. “I do have other purchases to make while I’m here, though. They remain my top priority.”
“Of course. Of course,” Dalby said. “It’s just that we’ve been asked to pay particular attention to this market, given what’s happened of late, and you are well positioned to do that for us. Management and our offshore partners insist.”
“I see,” said Caitlin. “I’ll do what I can, then.”
“Good lass,” Dalby replied. “Talk soon.”
The connection was severed at his end. Caitlin sat there, fuming and trying to get her anger under control. They had sent her out here, undeclared, a deniable asset, and now they wanted to retask her onto a basic intellig
ence-gathering job that some desk Johnny from the embassy could handle. She was so pissed off that she had to remind herself not to lose situational awareness. The parking garage was empty and looked like it had not been used in a long time, with a lot of rubbish and dead leaf matter lying in pools of dank water all around her car. But that did not mean she was alone there.
She checked her watch. Coming up on midnight. Time to move. Were she in London, she could have relied on the curfew to keep any innocent bystanders out of harm’s way. But in Berlin, even though it was eerily quiet compared to her memories of the city, there were still a few groups of young people here and there, and she couldn’t immediately mark them all down as hostile. She took a long, looping approach to Fabia Shah’s apartment, driving out to the eastern edge of the airport and creeping into Mahlowerstrasse via a street lined with dead trees that ran past a sports field at the northeastern corner of Tempelhof. Like most open spaces in Berlin, it had been dug up and converted to market gardens, with rows of tomato stakes and cornstalks poking up through a light ground mist, contrasting with the stark, leafless branches of all the trees that had died in the pollution storms back in ’03.
She parked the BMW under an elm with at least some scattered surviving foliage and killed the engine. She was dressed as before, mostly in black, but had discarded the head scarf borrowed from Mirsaad. A few lights burned here and there and the flickering blue-green shadow play of television screens illuminated a few more windows, but given the two thousand or more people all living within a minute’s walk of Fabia Shah, the place was deathly quiet. Just how the Dignity Patrols liked it, she supposed.
Caitlin waited ten minutes behind the X5’s tinted glass, one of the Russian machine pistols within easy reach on the passenger seat. A couple of lights flicked out while she maintained her vigil, and one of the late-night TV addicts finally gave up and went to bed. Just after twelve-thirty she moved, holstering the automatic with its twin in the combat harness under her leather jacket and taking a set of lock picks from the small storage bin between the front seats. She set the car’s defenses and stepped out onto the grass footpath, closing the door softly behind her. Less than a minute later she was through the front door of the block where Fabia had been living four years ago, and within another a minute she had picked the lock on the letter box bearing a small handwritten name tag: SHAH.
After America Page 43