Caitlin Monroe was refusing to break, simply because that’s all she had left. The only choice that remained in her life was how she left it.
She released a lungful of infected breath, carefully, so as not to set off another round of racking coughs. Slowly breathing in, she kept her eyes closed and tried to imagine that the harsh, fluorescent light hanging from the bare stone ceiling of the cell was the sun. Her myriad agonies she repackaged as the well-earned scars of a hard day’s surfing over some exposed reef in the Mentawis. She’d been there not twelve months ago, on a two-week vacation with her brother and some of his college friends. They had surfed for eight hours a day and she’d been pounded without mercy. Caitlin projected herself back there. She did not attempt to recall the entire trip, only one perfect ride, which she reconstructed from fragments of memory, recalling the kiss of warm tropical water flowing through her toes as she paddled out, the heat of the sun on her back, burning through a UV shirt, the salt spray in her mouth as she duck-dived through one broken wave after another, the tickle of bubbles she blew out through her nose while under the water, the -
‘Dreaming of your mother’s apple pie, Caitlin?’
She was too nerve-dead and exhausted to startle. But inside she fell through negative space, tumbling end over end. She knew who it was before opening her eyes. Her target. Bilal Baumer.
Al Banna.
* * * *
‘Are you an assassin, Willard?’
‘What the fuck?’
‘It’s my Brando doing Colonel Kurtz,’ laughed Baumer, a rich, stagy laugh that bounced off the damp, mouldy ceiling of her cell. He repeated the quote, amping up the grinding, nasal impersonation. ‘Are you an assassin, Caitlin?’
Okay. Just go with it… She indulged him. ‘I’m a soldier.’
‘You’re neither.’ He smiled, dropping out of character, but staying with the quote. ‘You’re an errand girl sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.’
She smiled back at him, all bloody teeth and cold eyes, a feral creature that had learned the trick of imitating a human being. ‘Yeah,’ she sneered, ‘and you’ll pay in full.’
‘I don’t think so.’ It was Reynard. He had changed into a fresh shirt and now stood behind Baumer, regarding her with restrained enmity. ‘These theatrics, they weary me, Miss Monroe. As they must weary you too, non? It is time, don’t you think, that we shook off our roles. Me, the nameless interrogator -’
‘“Reynard” will do fine…’
‘You, the lone wolf, the hunter, who will never give in. It is all bullshit. You have nothing to fight for.’
‘I didn’t pick the fight,’ she said, suddenly angry. The sight of Baumer had brought back memories of Monique, and a more painful moral sensibility, a recognition of her abject failure to protect the girl. ‘You sent your people in after me. I don’t know why. Or I didn’t, until he showed up.’
‘You still do not understand,’ Reynard told her.
‘What? That he belongs to you – he’s a double? Big fucking deal.’
‘No,’ said Baumer. ‘I am not one of his.’
Caitlin levered herself up a little further, and fought down an urge to shield her naked body from Baumer. It would be an acknowledgement of weakness. She raised her cuffed hands to rub at her eyes. Her wrists were bound by plastic zip ties that had cut deeply into the skin. The wounds were raw in places, crusted over in others. Just another locus of pain to put in a box and hide far away at the back of her mind.
Her voice was faint and croaky, but she put as much strength into it as she had. ‘Okay, so you’re telling me ol’ Reynard here really is a cheese-eating surrender monkey. He’s sold out to Osama, right?’
‘No.’
‘You mean he doesn’t like cheese?’
The Frenchman squeezed his eyes shut and sucked air in through his teeth. ‘I have brought Bilal here to show you the futility of resistance,’ he explained. ‘The war you were fighting is over. Your country didn’t lose – you lost your country. What is the point in clinging to ideas and loyalties that no longer exist? It is the definition of madness, Caitlin. Just tell us what you can of Echelon’s operational structure in France and you can go. We understand you were no longer hunting Bilal. You are a stateless refugee. You need help. But we cannot do that until you help us.’
Caitlin sucked her bruised and broken lower lip. ‘Yeah, look, about that, weren’t you the guy torturing me the last few weeks? Why would I help you, exactly? And why would you let me go, if I did?’
Reynard sighed. ‘Caitlin, you are not an imbecile. Stop pretending otherwise. We are all serious people, and the work we do, the measures we must all take, they are serious too – non? You killed three innocent people during your cowboy shoot-out. You did not know that, did you? No, of course not, you could not know. But the post-mortems put your bullets inside them, not ours.’
She shrugged. He could be lying, probably was.
‘Caitlin, we need to know what you know about Echelon,’ he went on. ‘I understand you work in cells, and I am not expecting you to give me details you cannot provide. But even the most mundane of details might mean something to us while possibly meaning nothing to you. You have to understand, Caitlin, that your fellow agents are rogue operators now. They are more dangerous than ever. The situation outside is stable, but critical. There has been much unrest, much distrust between peoples, even bloodshed. Things have settled now, due to a great deal of effort and goodwill by all parties, but just one of your colleagues carrying forward a single mission, hitting just one target, they could bring everything down. You must understand this. They must be stopped, for everyone’s sake.’
Bilal moved closer to the raised slab of concrete on which she lay. He seemed tired and stressed out, but he retained much of the easy, feline grace that she recalled from pre-op surveillance. He looked in much better shape than Reynard. An immature, irrational part of her wished that Monique could see him now, and could see that she had not been lying.
‘Like you, Caitlin, I am merely a messenger,’ he said, sitting himself down carefully on the edge of the concrete surface, keeping his eyes on her face and away from the bruises and wounds that covered her body. ‘I obey a Lord who is compassionate, who will make you a partner in peace or war.’
Her mouth curved up in a vulpine sneer. ‘Well, Billy, if you knew your Ibn Ishaq as well as your Coppola, you would know the full context of that reference. That before whispering sweet nothings about peace and mung beans, the Prophet’s companion, Ubayy ibn Ka’b, first spoke of settling matters with the sword at Khaybar, where the faithful would bring death to those who struggled against them. Or something like that. Maybe I’m getting confused with Conan the Barbarian. That was a great flick.’
She had hoped to unsettle him, but Baumer nodded as though agreeing with her. He seemed almost pleased. ‘So not just an errand girl, then,’ he replied. ‘A scholar of the book, no less. In which case you would also know that Ishaq was not just a historian, but almost a prophet of sorts. A small “p” prophet, if you like. What prescience he must have had, Caitlin, to write “Evil was the state of our enemy so they lost the day. We slew them and left them in the dust. Those who escaped were choked with terror. A multitude of them were slain. This is Allah’s war in which those who do not accept Islam will have no helper.’”
He reached out and brushed away a few matted strands of filthy hair that had fallen over her eyes. ‘I understand you were a warrior, Caitlin Monroe. And you remain one. It is an honourable calling. But there is a time for war, and a time to put aside our swords and shields. The world has been wounded and it suffers gravely, Caitlin. We are all God’s subjects and we must bind up those wounds together. But we cannot do so without trust. That is why I am here, why “Reynard” has invited me here – to make peace with my old enemies.’
Her feet and hands were still bound, but if she could lock her arms around his head, she might still have a chance, with one wrenching pull, of separating his head
from his spinal column…
‘I can trust you, Caitlin, because I know you,’ Baumer continued. ‘Just like you know me. I know you must be calculating the odds of lashing out at me now. You must be measuring your strength against the damage and pain you have endured in here for the last three weeks, perhaps weighing up what residual skills you retain from all your years of training, what strength of will you possess, even after Reynard has tried to break that will.’
He grinned and flicked one eyebrow up in a gesture of camaraderie.
Then his hand shot out in a blur and he gripped one of hers, turning it back on her cuffed, bleeding wrists so quickly that a spike of pure white fire ran up her arms. She almost screamed, biting deeply into the inside of her cheek in a desperate attempt to draw her mind off the agony of the wrist lock.
The holy warrior known as al Banna let her go. ‘So, shall we stop fucking around?’
He drove a fist squarely into her face, a blow that detonated inside her head like shellfire. As the back of her skull hit the hard concrete slab, she felt his iron grip on her arms again, wrenching her bodily over onto her stomach.
‘Or shall we begin?’ he snarled.
She tried to lash out with a feeble kick but only scraped more skin off her legs. Another punch on the back of her neck stunned her and she came to understand just how weakened she was by weeks of torture and illness. His hands clawed at her hips, dragging her towards him, confirming the worst.
* * * *
When Caitlin was a girl, maybe nine or ten years old, her family had travelled to California for a holiday, driving all the way from Charleston AFB in South Carolina, where her daddy had been stationed with an airlift squadron. They did all of the family things you do in California – visiting Disneyland, Hollywood, the beaches. But for her the standout memory had been climbing the bell tower on the Berkeley campus, just before the clock struck ten in the morning. The pealing of the bells was frighteningly loud, much louder than she had imagined it would be. She not only heard the thunderous clanging, she felt it, inside her chest and stomach, reverberating right down through her feet. The sensation, which was entirely unpleasant, remained with her ever after.
The rape lasted only a few minutes, but she was still shaking hours later.
Lying on her slab, under a harsh, flat white light in her cell at Noisy-le-Sec, she felt a powerful psychic echo of that same deep body shock.
Her limbs quivered and shook, sometimes so violently that she resembled a victim of late-stage Parkinson’s disease, but it was inside that she felt herself being torn apart by a quaking, shuddering violence that was entirely psychological.
Nobody had entered the room since her violation. In her rational, calculating mind, the cold, mechanical killer’s mind that had been honed to such a dangerous edge, she knew that was just part of ‘the tactical questioning phase’. But she could not rid herself of the burning shame and humiliation she felt. As hard as she tried to control herself, the awful, nauseating tremors reminded her of that day in the bell tower, which naturally led to thoughts of her family, especially her father, and with them came more unutterable shame.
She tried to focus on something simple, some goal she might start working towards – like driving a stiffened sword hand-strike into Baumer’s throat at the first opportunity. But that only reminded her of how weak and unable to resist him she had been in the first place.
She was curled into a tight, shivering foetal ball when the lights went out.
It was so unexpected that Caitlin suffered a moment of total disorientation. She had been kept for so long in this cell flooded with bright, artificial light that the sudden fall of darkness was terrifying, as though her eyes had been put out. She squirmed far back into the corner of her cell, without being consciously aware she had done so. And then she heard something so familiar, but, like the sudden inky darkness, so unexpected it made her mind seize up for an instant.
Gunfire.
It was muted at first, far off in the distance somewhere in the underground maze of Noisy-le-Sec’s interrogation cells. But it soon grew louder, and with it came other sounds. Boots running. Men cursing. More gunfire, the ripping snarl of automatic weapons and the crash of large-bore, single-shot rifles and pistols. A grenade exploded with a deafening roar in one of the enclosed tunnels outside her cell. She could see the flashes in the dark now and pick out individual voices; none of them familiar, all of them French.
Men ran past the heavy iron cage door that locked her in. One stopped, briefly, and fired in through the bars. A short wild burst that largely missed her, although a ricochet did rake a painful burning graze along one hip. She groaned and rolled off the slab, letting herself fall as a deadweight to the floor. In the pitch-blackness of the cell, nobody could see her, and whoever had stopped to finish her off rushed on. Muzzle flashes soon accompanied the crash and zip of bullets, which reached a crescendo as more men rushed past her cell, carrying their fight deeper into the prison complex.
In the darkness, Caitlin crawled into a blind corner, where she just might avoid getting shot, if she was lucky. She huddled there, naked, bleeding, and all alone, for what felt like a long time.
* * * *
36
PACOM HQ, PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII
‘My God, it looks like the seventh level of hell down there.’
‘Down there’ meant the Valley of the Nile, for thousands of years a seat of human civilisation, and now an eerie wasteland of oozing, radioactive mud dotted with the stubs of a few scattered ruins, both modern and ancient. To Jim Ritchie, it looked like nothing more than an endless sea of black garden mulch littered with tens of millions of corpses being picked over by every vulture in north-east Africa. The few American recon teams that had ventured in there described the buzzing of flies as being unbearably loud, something akin to a bandsaw. There were a handful of crazed survivors, one-in-ten-million lottery winners, of a sort. They were all, without exception, insane. The population of Egypt had been reduced to a few oasis dwellers deep in the Western Desert, and some wandering Bedouin, all moving south.
Ritchie stood grim-faced in front of the multi-panel displays, many of them recently arrived from Qatar, from the former headquarters of the Coalition. The Pacific Command’s war room was fully engaged monitoring the dozen or more chaotic conflicts now scattered across Ritchie’s theatre. This temporary facility had been constructed to maintain an overwatch of the former CENTCOM area, the nuclear wastelands of the Middle East. And as bad as the apocalyptic desolation of Egypt may have looked through the cameras of the two Global Hawks slowly circling above the Nile Valley and Delta, it was by no means the most horrifying vista arrayed in front of him.
On other screens, smaller, more intimate and, in a way, more dreadful images played out. In Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran, thousands of burnt and wounded victims of the atomic strikes had swarmed out of the charred husks of their cities and fallen upon the rural hinterlands. With no reliable supplies of fuel, power, or water in many areas, and with practically no functioning transport system to speak of, the farming lands of those countries, already poisoned by fallout, had since suffered an almost total collapse in their productivity. Whatever little edible stores the smaller settlements had, they now needed to be defended against the hordes falling upon them.
Ritchie had ordered that the worst of the footage not be allowed to run as a live feed. There was no tactical reason for having such grotesquery on display. But as the senior officer, he still had to view the edited intelligence take, which more often than not featured surveillance cover of village-level fratricide. It was heinous and terrible, disturbing at a cellular level, and it was repeated over and over again until he no longer possessed any moral capacity to react to the horror. It was all just pixels.
‘Okay, I’ve seen enough,’ General Franks told him.
The two men turned away as half of the video wall blinked out and switched over to standby feeds.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ritchie as t
hey left the room, dragging a short tail of aides behind them. ‘Short of nuking the Israelis themselves, I didn’t see what I could -’
‘Forget about it,’ growled Franks. ‘They blindsided you. Me too. The warning I passed on to Tehran just made it worse for them, meant they lost everything to the EMP. I guess we can count ourselves lucky they didn’t fry us as collateral damage.’
‘There would have been consequences for that, Tommy.’
‘Yeah,’ Franks agreed. ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference to my guys, though, would it? And that bullshit target list – brilliant really. But now the Israelis have to live with what they’ve done, and they know they can’t do it again. The Russians will nuke ‘em, and we won’t lift a finger in their defence.’
Ritchie said nothing to that. Three days after Armageddon, as the one-sided atomic war of March had been christened by the Western press, an emergency session of the reconstituted UN Security Council in Geneva had passed a unanimous resolution authorising member states to use ‘all necessary means’ to respond to any further nuclear strikes. In contrast to the usual ambiguity surrounding such things, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors had made it clear that this meant a massive nuclear attack on Israel. No other states had demurred.
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