Without warning

by John Birmingham

  Two other rooms remained on this level. According to the building plans, they were larger, possibly capable of taking more than one small bed. Caitlin moved to the door through which she could hear the loudest snoring.

  She sniffed and caught the faintest trace of an earthy, familiar smell… Kif. A highly concentrated cannabis resin, popular among North African fighters. That was enough for her to take a calculated risk, unshipping the fibre-optic set and sliding the wire under the door for a quick scan of the room.

  Inside she found three men, all asleep on the floor. There being no beds or other furniture, they had balled up clothes or used their bags to serve as pillows. Caitlin observed them until she was certain they were deeply asleep. She withdrew the surveillance device, and then quietly swapped out her mag, which unfortunately only ran to six rounds. It was one of the drawbacks of using the bespoke no-name handgun.

  This time, however, she kept the goggles powered up as she eased through the door and closed it behind her, covering the three prone forms all the time. A damp towel lay on the floor and she carefully toed it along the gap between the bottom of the door and the floorboards.

  Then she quickly and methodically executed every man in the room.

  Only the last one came awake, and then only enough to prop himself up one elbow and squint into the darkness. His sudden movement put her aim off and the first bullet struck him in the throat. Caitlin took two silent steps towards him and cut off his gargling death rattle with her last shot.

  A hard, steel spike of pain was drilling into her head from a point about an inch behind her left eye, intensifying her nausea and giddiness. She took a precious minute to centre herself, to breathe deeply and detach from the barbed emotional tendrils of her bloody work.

  The last of her six-shot magazines went into the pistol and she replaced the suppressor with a new one taken from a slot on her belt. The silencers, unique to Echelon wetwork cells, relied on a customised combination of austenitic nickel-based superalloy baffles, foam wipes and carbon nanotube mesh to reduce the sound of weapon fire by diverting and cooling the hot, rapidly expanding gases created by the detonation of the gunpowder. After she had burnt out this one, she would have to rely on her knife for silent killing.

  She drifted to a halt in front of the next door. Another darkened room, outside which she waited for a minute before threading through the optical fibre again. When the display lit up this time, her heartbeat jumped.

  She could see Baumer, asleep on a mattress on the floor. Lying next to him was a woman she did not recognise. The woman had one leg draped over his thigh and a thin arm lay across his chest.

  Billy, Billy, Billy, she thought. Monique was too good for you, buddy.

  Caitlin removed a one-use syringe from a leather pouch at her hip, uncapped the needle-point and pressed the plunger until a small stream of fluid squirted out.

  Lacan was talking downstairs. In French now, cursing Sarkozy as a fascist and a half-Greek Jew, a comment that gave rise to an animated rant by one of his companions about the Jewish state and the revenge that was coming its way.

  Seizing the opportunity, she entered the room, and came face to face with the woman, who had awoken and sat up. Her wide eyes searched the darkness, bulging when she saw Caitlin’s outline: a silhouetted figure in black overalls, wearing night-vision gear and carrying a weapon. She was dead before she could scream, two bullets taking the top of her skull off and painting the wall behind them.

  Baumer came awake instantly and rolled out from under the falling corpse, crying out as he did so. He launched himself at Caitlin’s knees and knocked her back off her feet with a crash. She drove the syringe into his neck and squeezed, smashing the butt of her pistol up against his head for good measure. It didn’t knock him out, but it stunned him enough to allow her to piston a boot into his chest and push him away from her.

  ‘Crusaders,’ he shouted. ‘Hurry, they’re here!’

  He tried to launch himself at her again, but the fast-acting drug had already robbed him of any coordination and he fell like a drunk into a heap at her feet.

  ‘Not so tough now, are you, you rapist motherfucker?’ she said before hitting the FTT button on her headset and speaking loudly. ‘I’m blown, Rolland. I got Baumer. Third floor, first room on the left coming up. Possible civilian above us, armed. Hostiles below. Lacan is awake and unsecured.’

  ‘You…’ muttered Baumer mushily as he collapsed into a drugged stupor.

  Caitlin heard the French commandos open fire on the ground floor. The guard out the front would be dropping to the ground, dead before he hit. Below her, the sounds of riot and tumult erupted as men awoke and reached for their guns, unsure of what was happening, but certain they were in mortal peril.

  She holstered the silenced pistol and pulled her personal weapon around on its strap, an HK MP5. Feet thundered up the staircase below her and she darted from the room, all concern at stealth now departed. The house had no power, but torches and electric lamps dazzled in her NVGs. She loosened off two bursts from the submachine-gun down the stairs at the bobbing, moving sources of light. Two of the torches tumbled back down, while the third stopped and dropped as the man carrying it let go.

  Fire came back up at her, automatic and single shot, describing beautiful emerald traces in her enhanced night vision. She stripped a hand grenade from her belt, while firing one-handed down the staircase, pulled the pin with her teeth – painfully cracking a filling as she did – and tossed the small bomb into the maelstrom below. She closed her eyes, backing away and firing blindly.

  The grenade exploded with a roar, causing the spike of pain already drilling into her head to grow cruel thorns that raked at the back of her eyes and drove jagged spears deep into her brain stem.

  Caitlin pitched over and vomited. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she grunted, struggling to regain her feet.

  The volume of fire downstairs was deafening, drowned out only by the deep bass percussion of exploding grenades on the ground floor. The boards beneath her shook and shuddered so much she feared they might collapse. And still she couldn’t get up. Her head spun as though she’d stepped off a fairground ride, and she could not control her weapon anymore. Two figures appeared at the top of the stairs, one of them the squat, powerful outline of the man she called Dr Noo.

  He raised his weapon at her, a FAMAS assault rifle, and cried, ‘Allahu Akbar!’ - just before his face exploded and he toppled backwards onto the man behind him.

  ‘Quick, come with me!’

  A voice, coming from above her… It was unfamiliar, but unmistakably American.

  ‘Who the fuck…?’ She gagged and choked again on a mouthful of bile, toppling sideways as she tried to stand. ‘Can’t go,’ she protested. ‘My target.’

  ‘Leave him!’

  The stranger, the man upstairs, leapt down beside her, stripped the MP5 from her grip and wrested a fresh magazine from the utility belt. He swapped out the mag in the dark without any trouble and moved over to the stairs to fire down on any approaching attackers. Three more grenades exploded in close succession and the uproar of automatic fire became unbearable.

  Caitlin felt herself falling away into darkness.

  * * * *

  50

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  No civilised man should ever be awake at this hour, thought Jed, as he waited in the darkened office for his last meeting of the night. Not unless he had a bottle of good champagne in one hand and a couple of exotic dancers in the other.

  He stayed away from the window by habit now, but there wasn’t that much to see. The downtown city centre was in darkness, save for a few buildings running on generators, one of them his own hotel, a few blocks away to the south. The never-ending caucus would still be in session there, his delegates – he did think of them as his now – working the phones and counting heads as they attempted to stave off defeat in the morning’s vote.

  But they would be defeated. Jed Culver had stolen enough votes in his
time to know when the situation was hopeless. The Putsch were going to get their amendments up. They were going to turn the United States Government into something like a third-world junta. He shook his head at his own incompetence in not foreseeing this and aborting it at conception. But, looking back, he could understand. He’d been so focused on his own, much humbler agenda that he simply hadn’t been prepared for the depth of feeling, the visceral fear that had infected everything here in a way it hadn’t back in Hawaii. That was understandable. You couldn’t see the Wave in Hawaii; you didn’t live every minute with the prospect of it moving and just eating you alive. He should have factored that in.

  ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men,’ he muttered to himself, ‘which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune – but omitted, and all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.’

  ‘What’s that, Jed?’

  Culver turned around to the doorway and was surprised to find a thin man standing there, silhouetted by the light of a small hand-held phone. Two larger companions, instantly recognisable as bodyguards, loomed a discreet distance behind him.

  ‘Just mangling the bard, Bill,’ the lawyer replied. ‘It always helps me when creeping murmur and the pouring dark fill the wide vessel of the universe.’

  Bill shrugged. ‘Me, I like to read or play bridge. Golf’s pretty good too. But not at this time of night.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Culver, who hadn’t been expecting anyone like this. The others he’d met tonight had all been anonymous people. Quiet men and women. ‘So… er…’

  The figure chuckled in the gloom. ‘I really threw you for a doozey, didn’t I? Coming here, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Culver admitted. ‘I was expecting someone… lower down the food chain.’

  ‘Someone expendable?’

  ‘If you like.’

  The man walked into the room while his bodyguards remained in the corridor. ‘This is important, Jed,’ he said. ‘I have a lot invested in this venture. We all do. If it fails, we’re sunk. If it plays out, who knows, maybe people will remember us hundreds of years from now. Assuming there’s anybody left, of course.’

  The lawyer shrugged. ‘People would remember you anyway, Bill.’

  ‘Not for something as cool as this, though, Jed. This is the sort of thing that ends up in oil paintings. Like Paul Revere’s ride. It’s that important.’

  Culver couldn’t argue with that.

  ‘You did bring your phone, right?’ asked Bill.

  Jed pulled it out of his suit pocket and handed it over. The man’s face was underlit by the glow of the screen as he keyed in a series of codes.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, as the smart phone beeped. ‘The network is active.’

  ‘And secure?’

  ‘And secure.’

  Culver thanked him as he took the phone back. He opened the message window and pressed a few buttons.

  And with that, a single hard-encrypted message beamed out across the city to hundreds of identical devices.

  ‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘It’s happening.’

  * * * *

  Most of the delegates at the convention had succumbed to the lack of air-conditioning and removed their jackets; ties were loosened and, in some cases, dispensed with altogether. The atmosphere in the auditorium was sour, hot and rank, although partly that had to do with the split on the floor that was threatening to tear the whole process apart. James Kipper pressed his lips together in an effort to maintain his calm as some asshole from Spokane attempted to tell him how to do his job.

  ‘This isn’t how we would run things, let me tell you, Kipper. We’d have had this show wrapped up days ago, and there wouldn’t have been any of this school-camp bullshit with lights out and no air, either. How the hell do you expect people to make decisions under these conditions? It is impossible.’

  Kipper’s jaw moved like he was chewing gum, which he wasn’t. It was simply an old habit. He folded his arms and resisted the urge to tell this… Malcolm Vusevic, according to his name-tag – that he was full of shit because Spokane, lying behind the Wave, wouldn’t be organising anything ever again.

  He kept his mouth shut, because, in his experience, people who’d hailed from the dead zone tended to be a little sensitive about it, which was only reasonable. What wasn’t reasonable was the delegates demanding that they get special treatment over and above what the rest of the city could expect.

  ‘Not gonna happen, sir,’ said Kip, resolutely shaking his head. ‘Redmond, Finn Hill and North Creek are all on their allotted power-ups at the moment. If you want to turn up the air-con here, it means diverting grid power from those folks. I’m not going to do it. Not on your say-so.’

  ‘Well, on whose then?’ Vusevic demanded to know. ‘Would an order from General Blackstone do it for you?’

  ‘Nope.’ Kipper shook his head equably. ‘I work for the city, not the military. At least not yet.’

  He instantly regretted the indiscretion as Vusevic’s eyes lit up in triumph. ‘Oh, I see… one of those anarchists, eh? You’re just doing this to delay the inevitable. Whatsa matter, buddy – don’t like losing a vote? Can’t handle democracy?’

  Kipper’s shoulders and arms ached with the tension building up in them as he restrained a violent urge to beat this idiot into a pulp. ‘It’s none of my business, sir,’ he replied flatly. ‘City utilities are my business. And you’re not getting any extra power.’

  With that he turned and walked away from the delegate from Spokane, wondering how the fuck anyone from Spokane got a ticket here in the first place. All Vusevic represented was a burnt-out ruin of urban wasteland.

  ‘Whoa there, Nelly! You’re gonna throw a shoe, stomping off like that.’

  Kipper pulled up at the sight of Jed Culver, who’ d just emerged from the crush around the refreshments table. He seemed to live there, and it was taking its toll. The guy looked like he hadn’t slept. His face was puffy and dark bags hung under his eyes.

  ‘Sorry, Jed. Not today, man. I’ve got a world of fucking hurt on my shoulders.’

  ‘Who doesn’t, Kip, who doesn’t? Just a word in your shell-like. Won’t take a minute.’

  Kipper frowned at the odd phrasing, until he remembered that Culver had worked in London for a couple of years. Or he said he had. Sometimes with Jed you were never quite sure when he was feeding you a line. The engineer sighed, exhausted. He really was buried by work, and being called down to the conference floor to get reamed out over the air-conditioning hadn’t improved his mood. He hadn’t slept last night, after the Gestapo, as Barb called them, had left. Partly because Barney Tench had stayed until just before dawn, attempting to win him over to the cause. His friend had left in a police cruiser of all things. ‘Not everyone in uniform wants to be the Fuhrer,’ Barney had explained, winking.

  Kip shook off Culver’s guiding hand and continued on his way to the exit. The lawyer fell in beside him, not saying anything. Just grinning and waving at the other delegates as he passed them, even those who Kip knew for a fact he hated. How the hell he did that was a mystery for the ages. When James Kipper didn’t like someone they didn’t die wondering.

  ‘You going back up to your office?’ Jed asked, as they left the auditorium behind.

  ‘Yes, I am, but…’

  ‘Great. I’ll come with you. Come on.’

  ‘Don’t you want to be here for the vote?’ the engineer enquired. ‘It’s on soon, isn’t it?’

  ‘Already lost that one, Kip. So no, I have other plans, my friend. Come on.’

  He reluctantly allowed Culver to tag along with him, mostly because he knew the man was congenitally incapable of taking no for an answer. Kip could have blown him off, but he knew that by the time he reached his office many floors above, this expensively suited fixer would most likely have been waiting in his chair with a big dumb grin on his face.

  ‘That doesn’t sound like you, Jed, giving up because you can’t win.’

  ‘Who sa
ys I’m giving up?’ Culver asked in reply.

  Kipper spared him a glance and was disturbed by the wolfish smile he found there. ‘What’s happening, Jed? This really isn’t the morning for it.’

  ‘No, that’s where you’re wrong, Kip. This is very much the morning for it. This is the morning the American people – what’s left of ‘em, God help us – take back their government.’