Without warning

by John Birmingham

  ‘Man,’ said Caitlin. ‘This sucks. We should have masks. Let’s get going. I want to find us a car with good filters.’

  A week ago Monique would have protested and held them up. Now she nodded sombrely and hurried to keep up with her companion. Avoiding the birds, many of which still twitched and flapped feebly with the last sparks of life, slowed them down somewhat, and the noxious ether quickly burned their lungs and air passages. Caitlin had chosen an apartment in the 17th Arrondissement, north-west of the city centre, where the working-class tenements of Place de Clichy edged into the red-light district of Pigalle. There was still an abundance of smaller, cheaper rooms to be had in the area, one of the most densely populated in the capital. The brothels and strip clubs, the unlicensed bars and underground gaming halls all helped to create an outre environment where the police and other, more dangerous state actors were unwelcome.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Caitlin?’ Monique asked as they walked. ‘Why are you helping? Surely you could move more quickly on your own. You must still have friends left in the city, or on the continent? You could disappear.’

  ‘My friends have been disappeared already, Monique. My network’s been rolled up. Remember those guys at the first apartment I tried to take us to? They were turning it over. My controller should have been there, to get me out. Maybe he was and they grabbed him, maybe he wasn’t, but I haven’t been able to contact him or anyone. The numbers I had, the internet addresses – they’re all dead. And the net’s useless anyway. It’s falling apart. The people are gone, if they were back home, and missing, if they were here. But mostly they’re gone. And I have to assume that all of my contacts have been compromised. I’m on my own, and in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a cot case. An invalid.’

  They stopped outside a patisserie. It should have been open by now but the shopfront remained closed and the blinds were shut.

  ‘I could sell you some line of bullshit, darlin’. That was a specialty of mine. You might not believe it, but I’m a bit of an empath. I have no trouble putting myself in somebody else’s shoes. Just before I kill them, or arrange to have someone else kill them.’

  Monique blanched and moved on, picking her way through more dead birds. Caitlin stepped up beside her, scanning the streets ahead for a vehicle. In this part of town, however, few people drove, and cars were few and far between. The streets were narrow and there was no garaging available for them. Everyone took the Metro or walked.

  Caitlin went on. ‘But there’s no point shitting you, is there? You know the deal already. What I am, what I was doing.’

  ‘Old,’ shrugged Monique.

  ‘Bottom line is, I need you. I’m fucked up with this… tumour. The effects come and go. I’m fine right now but I still feel like shit. And I can never tell when I’m gonna lose it – fall on my ass, pass out, who knows what? So I could give you a line about how I’m responsible for you, how I got you into this mess and how honour demands I get us both out. But fact is, I’m fucked and I need your help. I have nobody else in what’s left of the world.’

  They came around a bend in the street and spied a minibus up ahead. A man was loading his family into it, with about a month’s worth of supplies by the look of all the boxes and bags of food he was manhandling into the cabin. Monique caught Caitlin scoping them out and was about to object but the assassin smiled crookedly.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not about to wax a bunch of kids and steal their ride. You have to have more faith in me. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but people like that – normal, decent folks – in the end they were my mission. Protecting them.’

  Monique examined her with wry detachment, almost tripping on a dead pigeon from not watching her footing. ‘Not them so much, Caitlin,’ she replied. ‘They are French, and you are not. I know enough now about your world to understand what that means. You told me about Noisy-le-Sec, remember. And this Echelon is no secret. There have been books and news stories written, and a French government investigation. I read about it in Le Monde. Not so secret, no? It is a well-documented conspiracy of the English-speaking world.’

  Caitlin smiled. ‘There are knowns and there are unknowns, Monique. But you’re right in one sense. Sometimes governments, agencies, whatever, they might set themselves against each other, but I’m talking about the wider picture. People like that…’ – she nodded ahead at the family now loading the last of their number into the bus – ‘people who want nothing more than to go about their own business, raising their kids, keeping them safe, giving them whatever chances they can to do better. The world they want to make is worth fighting for. They are worth defending.’

  ‘Against my boyfriend?’ asked Monique, giving full vent to her sarcasm.

  Caitlin stopped and held her gaze. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Merde dors…’

  They started moving again. Monique’s shoulders had hunched forward and she was holding her arms stiffly by her sides. Caitlin recognised it as one of her tells: she was furious again.

  She sighed. ‘Bilal Hans Baumer,’ she said, and immediately caught Monique’s attention.

  ‘You know his full name?’ She looked both surprised and wary.

  ‘Of course I know his name, darlin’. He was my target.’ She dropped into her best Schwarzenegger. ‘I haaf extensiff files.’

  The French girl didn’t get the reference. Caitlin pushed on regardless.

  ‘Bilal Hans Baumer. Born 5 May, 1974 in Hamburg, Germany. Parents, separated. A German auto mechanic, Hans Baumer, and Turkish mother, Fabia Shah. His father named him Wilhelm, but Hans was a drinker and abandoned the family after losing his job in 1978. His mother was a reformist Muslim. Her brother Abu came to act as a surrogate father for the boy after Hans took off. Abu had always called him Bilal instead of Wilhelm. The name stuck – don’t stop walking. Come on, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.’

  Monique had come to a halt just metres from the back of the minibus. The father, who’d been about to climb into the driver’s seat, caught her eye. He looked guilty, as though she had found him out doing something shameful. Monique favoured him with a shaky smile, and he nodded, taking in their backpacks and the appearance of flight that hung about them.

  ‘Bonjour,’ said Caitlin as they passed. ‘Bon chance.’

  ‘Bon chance, mademoiselles,’ he nodded back, before climbing in and closing the door with a slam. Caitlin scanned the back of the van, thinking of asking for a lift, but it was crammed full with children, adults, boxes, suitcases and food.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Monique as the minibus pulled away.

  Caitlin kept walking. ‘Through his uncle, Abu, Bilal came to meet other lost boys, most of them the products of failed unions between German men and migrant women. His mother stills lives in Neukцlln in the council flat where he grew up. She works for the Berlin City Council records department. She is inordinately proud of his achievements. He is one of the few young men in the neighbourhood to finish school, let alone university. He has a real job, and would have represented Germany in volleyball at the Athens Olympics.’

  A few people were beginning to show up on the streets now, some of them also dressed for hiking. Another family emerged from an apartment block just across the street. The children were crying, complaining about the way their eyes stung and how it hurt to breathe. A young man rode past on a bicycle, wearing goggles and a painter’s disposable mask. He rang his bell as he passed them, fluttering his eyebrows. It drew a brief smile from Caitlin, made her feel a little better. But still she continued.

  ‘Bilal is tall and rangy with light olive skin and thick, wiry hair, coloured darker, almost caramel blonde. He has wide shoulders, long well-muscled arms and legs. No fat. Deep brown eyes, so brown they almost appear black from more than a few feet away. A ready smile that seems to spark off a high level of nervous energy. He rarely sits still for more than a moment and is given to little jumps and skips when he’s excited. He talks with his hands.’

&nbs
p; Monique was staring at her now, almost walking into a pole at one point. Her eyes were wide, and anxious. As far as she knew Caitlin had never met Bilal, of course, but she had just described him perfectly.

  ‘Uncle Abu encouraged him to remain in school and proceed to university while many of the young men around him had simply gone onto welfare. Abu funded the boy’s education and supported his mother. As Bilal Baumer, he studied the German equivalent of sports science and became a qualified personal-fitness instructor, first working for a health insurance company, providing physiotherapy and rehab training for older clients, and later moving to a gym, where he proved very popular with the female clientele. I believe that is how you met, in fact, when he took you for a complimentary training session at a women-only gym in Berlin. When you were in the city eight months ago.’

  Monique now looked physically ill, but Caitlin gave her no respite.

  ‘Bilal took up beach volleyball after a trip to Sardinia in 1995 and became a German regional champion with his partner Jurgen Mьller. Their run to the Olympics was cut short by Mьller’s acceptance into the Deutsche Marine.’

  They had stopped walking again, and now stood on the edge of the gutter while Caitlin quickly checked up and down the street for any signs that they were being followed. It seemed clear. She spoke without emotion, simply recalling the facts from the dossier she had committed to memory as soon as her case controller had handed her the file on the al-Qaeda recruiter known as al Banna.

  ‘He grew up in Neukцlln, in south-east Berlin, where migrants form just under half of the total population. Three generations of Turks are mixed in with Eastern Europeans and some North Africans. Most of the Turks don’t speak German or even go to school. Unemployment is at eighty per cent and the city spends three-quarters of its budget on welfare. Baumer has German citizenship because of his father. His mother retains hers because they are not lawfully divorced. Most of the migrants in Neukцlln live in fear of immigration raids, which are hugely violent events.’

  ‘Stop it, please. Just stop,’ begged Monique. ‘What is the point of all this?’

  ‘The point, Monique, is that Bilal Baumer is not your boyfriend. Do you know why he has never agreed to move to be closer to you?’

  ‘His work, he…’

  Caitlin smiled gently. ‘His work, or at least the job he uses as a cover, his personal training, could follow him anywhere. He’s good at his job, his cover job, and has EU citizenship. The health funds who employ him would do so anywhere. You know all this. You’ve always known.’

  Caitlin stepped closer, moving into Monique’s personal space. Her voice, which she had kept flat and free of emotion while reciting from her memory of the target file, now grew softer, more understanding. ‘Like a lot of women, you don’t have perfect self-esteem. You could not believe that such a good-looking, intelligent, caring man, a good man, would be attracted to you. Part of you always believed you didn’t really deserve somebody like Billy, and you assumed, possibly without ever thinking it aloud, that he was keeping his distance until someone better came along.’

  Monique’s eyes had filled with tears and she was shaking her head in jerky little spasms. ‘No.’

  ‘So you wore all his bullshit excuses about work and his mother and needing to stay in contact with his community. You were pathetically grateful when he travelled to see you, but you covered most of the miles in that relationship, didn’t you, honey? And you had to wonder sometimes, when he was away with a client, or travelling for work, whether there might be some other girl he was stringing along – because he was a catch and a half, wasn’t he?’

  A nod this time, just the smallest movement, but a crucial acknowledgement that Caitlin wasn’t entirely wrong. She could have said something about how Monique was also drawn to Bilal because he was simultaneously dangerous and safe. A young man from a Muslim background, politically aware if not active, but fiercely secular in his outlook. Not at all like the bearded wingnuts whose medieval views on women would’ve made it impossible for an enlightened feminist like Monique Duroc to have had anything to do with them. But of course, to lay it out as brutally as that would break the tenuous connection she had established.

  ‘Monique, you were right,’ the American continued. ‘You were not his only one.’

  A small groan escaped the throat of the distressed young woman.

  Judging the time to be right, Caitlin reached into her jacket and produced the envelope she’d removed from the folder hidden under the floorboards back at the apartment. She shook out a handful of surveillance shots, good-quality hi-def colour photos of Baumer entwined with two separate women. The date stamps marked them as having been taken in the last six months.

  ‘He also successfully targeted a Belgian student,’ said Caitlin as Monique took the photographs with a shaking hand. ‘Anya Delvaux, a part-time canvasser for Greenpeace in Brussels, and Sofia Calderon, an activist documentary-maker from Barcelona.’

  Monique had started to sway on her feet and her face grew blotchy, with irregular patches of high colour fading quickly into bloodlessness. ‘An auteur?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, a would-be auteur. Sofia’s posted a few vids on the net, entered a competition or two, but she stills pays the bills as a waitress.’

  The first photograph showed Baumer and the Spaniard, a tall, rather extravagant beauty, dry-humping each other in a park. Monique’s tears were flowing freely now, but silently, as she attempted to control her free-falling emotions. ‘You… you seem to know them well, these women.’ She leafed through the other photographs with an unsteady hand, blinking large tears onto them and gasping at some of the more intimate encounters.

  ‘Oh my god,’ she said in a tiny voice. ‘You must have similar photographs of…’

  ‘Of you,’ Caitlin finished for her. ‘I’m sorry, but yes, I do. Or I did. When I selected you as my objective, my target, I filed them.’

  The effort to dam up her feelings failed at last, and with a series of hitching sobs, Monique came apart, wailing and crying like a child who suddenly realises she is lost and alone. Caitlin placed a hand on her elbow and steered her through the carpet of twitching birds towards a side street, which was still deserted. The avenue on which they stood was beginning to come to life. It was nowhere near as busy as it would have been on a normal day, but here and there individuals were venturing out.

  The photos spilled from Monique’s fingers, falling into the contaminated mud and refuse of the street. Caitlin was forced to bend over and pick them up. It saved her life.

  * * * *

  22

  US ARMY COMBAT SUPPORT HOSPITAL, KUWAIT

  Everything came back slowly, from a great distance. Awareness, senses, memory – and pain. Oh yeah, there was plenty of that. Everything was so dim and far away that the actual transition to consciousness was not immediately real and for an age he hovered on the far side of a morphine dream unable and unwilling to pull himself back to reality. In the end, the pain made it impossible to hide. Whatever drugs he’d been given were beginning to wear off and Bret Melton had a dizzying, sick-making instant of realisation that he was in pain. Real pain, seated in more places throughout his broken body than he cared to catalogue.

  ‘Goddamn,’ he muttered.

  ‘Hurts like a bitch, don’t it, sir?’

  The voice was loud and obnoxiously cheerful. Familiar too, in its smooth rap cadences. But he felt as though everything in his head, every thought and memory, had been violently jostled out of place by the explosion that must have put him here.

  Where?

  His eyelids were gummy and difficult to force open, but force them he did, blinking and raising a hand to rub away the crust that had formed while he slept. Or at least he tried to. His shoulder throbbed abysmally, as though he’d reinjured the old wound picked up so many moons ago at Ranger parachute school. ‘Damn!’

  ‘Yeah. You’ll want to lie still, until the nurse comes to get you. Don’t go getting no ideas, though – it�
�s a male nurse. Skinny, ugly little fucker too. He’ll jam a bedpan sideways up your ass if you give him any stick.’

  ‘Corporal Shetty?’

  ‘Uh-uh. What’s left of me.’

  Their surroundings slowly came into focus. Melton was lying on a cot in a tent. On either side of him lay more men in uniform, some heavily bandaged, some apparently undamaged, at least on the outside. A fine layer of sand covered the plywood floors, and through a flap a short distance away he could see the fierce white light of the desert. He noticed the thrum of a heavy-duty air-con unit, keeping them cool. It looked as hot as a furnace outside. He slowly turned his head towards Shetty’s voice, noticing immediately that the corporal was short one limb. His left arm had disappeared just above the elbow.

  ‘Yeah, gonna have to work extra hard scratching my ass now,’ he said. ‘And that was my natural ass-scratching hand, too. Least I still got an ass, though. And my nuts.’ He gave his groin a reassuring squeeze with his remaining hand.