Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3

by John Birmingham

  ‘Stand back, Lupérico,’ she said in French. ‘I am here to get you out.’

  She saw him jump with surprise.

  ‘You are French, then? But why . . . why would you come here for me?’

  ‘To get you out. Now stand back,’ she repeated, again in French rather than her native language. All the better to muddy any trail by convincing Lupérico’s cell-mates he’d been released by the agency of some meddling European power.

  The former jailer did as he was told, carefully shuffling backward to the rear of his cell. Caitlin had a quick look around on the floor, on the walls, for any keys, but found nothing. She moulded a small lump of plastic explosive to the lock and retreated to the end of the hallway, warning Lupérico to shield himself.

  The tiny blast still made her ears ring in the constricted space, and caused the prisoners to cry out in distress. Well, most of them anyway. The guy whose fingers she’d just hacked off had other things to worry about.

  Her man was disoriented and greatly unsettled, but he responded as best he could when she ordered him – still in French – out of the cell and up the stairs. They had to get away now, as quickly as possible.

  ‘What about us?’ cried one of the other prisoners.

  She did not answer him.

  9

  DEARBORN HOUSE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  The colour did not entirely leech from Sarah Humboldt’s face when Jed sidled up to her in Kip’s office at the end of the Garage Cabinet, to gently take her by the elbow and ask for a few minutes of her time. But she did lose a few shades of colour. She had blind-sided him on the detainee question, after all, and he’d spent quite some time polishing his reputation as a man one did not fuck with.

  ‘Mr Culver,’ she said, making an effort to keep her voice neutral, ‘can I help you?’

  ‘Relax, Sarah,’ said Jed. ‘Because as a matter of fact you can. I could’ve brought it up during the meeting, except it wasn’t strictly an agenda item. Even though I think it is related to some of the problems we were discussing.’

  Humboldt managed to look both intrigued and relieved at the same time. She smiled at James Ritchie as he slowed down to pass by, reassuring him that she didn’t seem to be in trouble with the Chief of Staff. From the open doorway of the Oval Office, Ritchie and McAuley said their goodbyes and left to see whether their drivers were able to get them back to their respective offices, across town.

  The snowstorm had evolved very quickly into a reasonably intense blizzard. The President had no immediate responsibility for organising Seattle’s defences in such circumstances, but Jed could see the former city engineer’s mind already turning back to small-scale crisis management: clearing roads, keeping the power on, making sure all the kids who’d been dropped off at the city’s schools in the cold, if comparatively mild, weather that morning were going to be okay. It wasn’t the man’s job anymore, but for once Culver was happy to leave him to the distraction as, across the room from them, Kipper picked up the phone to check on the snowploughs.

  ‘Everything all right, Jed?’ he asked, standing up at his desk.

  He had picked up on the interchange between the two, but his attention was really focused on the storm. He just wanted to get on with sticking his nose in where it wasn’t really needed. President James Kipper could be quite the micro-manager where Seattle was concerned. The city authorities resented the interference, but happily accepted the federal government resources it delivered to them as well.

  ‘We’re fine, Mr President,’ said Jed. ‘There’s a few things I need to discuss with Sarah about this new job you’ve given us.’

  ‘Sarah, is that okay?’ asked Kipper.

  ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine, sir,’ replied Humboldt. ‘I don’t think he’s going to throw me down an elevator shaft, and we do have a lot to talk about.’

  Reassured that he wasn’t about to lose one of his top civil servants to Jed Culver’s legendary reputation for payback, Kip was already nodding and dialling out before she’d finished speaking.

  While the President’s private secretary fussed around them, clearing up the debris from the meeting – china cups, sandwich plates and some leftover cookies – Jed shepherded the Immigration and Customs Enforcement boss out through the anteroom, snaffling a couple of Barbara Kipper’s choc-chip and peanut butter heart stoppers as he went. Ronnie gave him the stink eye as he scavenged.

  ‘In case we get completely snowed in,’ he told her. ‘Emergency supplies.’

  ‘You’re worse than Barney. Get out,’ said Ronnie. ‘And don’t get crumbs all through your office either. You’ll be cleaning them up yourself.’

  He took his dressing-down with good grace. Besides Kip, Ronnie Freeman was probably the only person on staff at Dearborn House who could put him in his place. Bad things tended to happen to those who crossed her. For one, you might not get fed, which in Jed’s world was pretty bad. Or the food might be cold, or your coffee ration would magically disappear. Ronnie was on good terms with the army chefs who kept the kitchen running here. She too had a finely honed reputation as someone you just didn’t fuck with. With a bulk that matched Culver’s, she was likely to tackle you into a dark closet for what her father used to call ‘some wall-to-wall counselling’.

  No, Jed thought, best not to upset Ronnie.

  His office was only a few doors down from the President’s, and because of the antique layout of the old mansion, there was no separate room for his assistant, Ms Devers. She worked in the pool down the hall. He led Sarah Humboldt into his domain, a surprisingly small room for a man who was often thought of as the real power in the Kipper administration. A large wooden desk, carved from dark oak and topped with some sort of light brown leather, stretched two-thirds of the way across the width of the space. Bookshelves ran from ceiling to floor, crammed along their length with bound volumes of congressional proceedings, government reports and distressed, dog-eared buff-coloured folders fat with more paper. There were dozens of works of non-fiction, with a sizeable helping of biographies and history, including Bernard Bailyn’s work on the American Revolution and Forrest McDonald’s Novus Ordo Seclorum. As busy as he was, Culver did his best to get at least an hour of reading in a day. The latest book on the stack was going to require a lot of those single hours. He was just a hundred pages into the massive tome, Eric Foner’s Reconstruction.

  Brushing the Foner with one thumb as he flicked on the lights, Culver contemplated the book, and honestly wondered if it was worth his time. At least with it on his shelves no one could accuse him of taking the Dunning School too seriously. The room was dark and smelled slightly musty, for which he apologised. A large window behind his desk afforded a view into the gardens, but there was little to see at the moment, thanks to the snow plastered to the outside of the glass.

  ‘Sit down, Sarah,’ he said. ‘And relax. Please. I’m not going to go upside your head for that tag-team effort you and Ritchie laid on me back there. In a way, it was kind of admirable. The sort of thing I would do, since Kip was never going to go with my suggestion to just push them all off the end of a dock and tell ’em to keep swimming until they reach France. With that said, this settlement scheme you’ve got can probably be turned to our advantage, as long as I can sell the harsher, more punitive aspects of it.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s where you’ll shine,’ she replied, accepting his offer of a chair, one of two single-seater Chesterfields standing sentry in front of his desk.

  He closed the door and manoeuvred around the end of the long table into his own chair. It took some doing in the tight space.

  ‘The program will be fine,’ Jed said. ‘It’s just a matter of how we frame it. If we could choose a few diehards to expel from the country, or even better, to execute for crimes against humanity, it would show everyone we’re not a soft touch.’

  Humboldt shifted uncomfortably in her seat. ‘Well, I don’t know that I –’

  ‘Of course, you wouldn’t put it like that, Sarah. You’re
a nice person. Unlike me. You just want the best for everyone. I don’t, I want the best for this administration, because I think, most things being equal, that means getting the best for the country as well. Sometimes that’s going to mean hurting somebody’s feelings, possibly breaking a few heads – or even shooting a few guys in the back of the head. Guys who desperately need it, I’d add. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about today.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, with real relief. She had not been at all comfortable with the direction of his thoughts.

  Jed figured Ms Humboldt to be the type who lived in liberal blogistan and faithfully followed their constant bloviating about the conditions for detainees at Fort Leavenworth. Heaven forbid that we water-board anyone or use their holy book for cigarette papers. We couldn’t possibly sink to the same level as those guys, who saw off heads and put them up in streaming video feeds on the internet . . .

  Frankly, such people reminded him entirely too much of his grade-school teachers and their endless preaching about how violence never solved anything. It was a funny thing; they never seemed to mention the hundred or so historical examples he could think of right now where violence really did solve problems.

  He could have sighed. Sometimes it was a drag being the smartest guy in the room.

  Humboldt straightened herself in the armchair, gathering the courage to speak her mind. ‘Jed, I must say I find the way you characterise these things to be very unpleasant and often unnecessary.’

  ‘Unpleasant, I’ll give you. Unnecessary is a moot point. But since we are on the topic, I wanted to talk about the unpleasantness down in Texas. Specifically, about the attacks on some of our settler families in the Federal Mandate.’

  He could see he’d taken her by surprise. The incidence of settler families being run off their properties, and in some cases even murdered, wasn’t really high enough to have registered with the public, the efforts of the blogistan irregulars notwithstanding. Not when so many people had died in the Battle of New York. Not when a few thousand freebooters and pirates still roamed around the dead cities of the eastern seaboard, despite the efforts of the military and militias to drive them off. A family missing here, a homesteader there – it wasn’t much when laid against the butcher’s bill in Manhattan. Bloodshed was the one thing they had an ample surplus of and it saturated the media, numbing the much-reduced masses to anything but the most insensate savagery.

  ‘Do you propose to do something about the security arrangements?’ asked Humboldt. ‘My office has been arguing in favour of a Mandate militia for nearly two years.’

  Jed smiled grimly. Technically, they did have federal troops in Texas, elements of the regular army and air force. Their ability to act, however, was strictly limited to territorial defence only; they were not a police force or a militia. The responsibility for internal security lay squarely on the shoulders of Governor Jackson Blackstone, who simply claimed to be doing the best he could with what he had.

  ‘I totally agree with you, Sarah. If we had our own troops down there, instead of having to rely on the Texas Defense Force, I think you’d see these attacks drop away completely. There’d still be a few raids and even killings in some of the more remote locations, because a lot of genuine bandits come up north through Mexico. But make no mistake, I believe some of the bandits, particularly these road-agent gangs, are indulged by Fort Hood, even if they’re not directed by them. I know things aren’t as bad as they were last year, but these gangs still make life difficult for our people. They create a lot of fear and uncertainty in the Mandate, and that makes them a good thing in Blackstone’s book. It doesn’t take much effort to do nothing, after all, and that’s what he’s been doing on this issue. Sweet fuck-all.’

  He waited to see how she would react to such a bald-faced accusation of villainy. The Secretary for ICE nodded quietly, her lips pressed together.

  ‘That’s my understanding,’ she said. ‘It’s certainly the belief of those settlers we’ve already sent down there, and you’re right, it makes it very difficult to place suitable candidates into the settlement program for the Mandate. But I ask again, what are you going to do about it? A dedicated frontier militia would solve most of the problems overnight.’

  A sour expression creased the Chief of Staff’s features. ‘Agreed. But our memorandum of understanding with Fort Hood does not allow us to deploy militia into the Mandate. Blackstone only agreed to waive administrative control of that land when we agreed to leave policing the interior and securing the boundaries to the TDF.’

  ‘Oh my god, Culver,’ she replied, clearly exasperated. ‘We just spent the better part of two hours complaining about him not keeping to the letter of that agreement. Or the spirit of it. Or anything. If he doesn’t play by the rules, why should we?’

  He smiled like a mischievous child. It was amazing how someone like Sarah Humboldt would get upset about his way of describing things, demand that they do the right thing in a legal manner, and then advocate chucking the rulebook out the window when it suited her. A moralising, self-righteous, liberal hypocrite, Jed decided. At least they were far easier to manipulate into action than others.

  ‘Feel the power of the dark side, Sarah. I am with you one hundred per cent. But the President is a firm believer in best practices, and that does not include reneging on our agreements while we bitch and moan about other people not holding to theirs.’

  The wind shrieked louder for a second, smashing a tree branch into the highest pane of his window with such force that he thought it might break. It knocked free a large clump of snow, which fell to the ground outside with a muffled thump. Secretary Humboldt jumped a little in her chair. Opposite her, Jed pushed himself back from the desk so he could open one of the drawers and retrieve a folder. He dropped it on the desk and pushed it a little way towards her. He explained as she opened it.

  ‘I’ve been keeping tabs on the settler situation down in Texas. Just informally. I’m sure you have much better records. Statements of interview with survivors, crime-scene photographs, that sort of thing. I have a little bit of that, but mostly press reports. They’re pretty thin, as you can see. The frontier really is the great unknown again. We’re not quite back to the pony express, but it can still take a few days for news to get from the outlying homesteads back to one of our settlement centres. And, of course, very few media organisations have the resources to send their people that far out into the badlands. Not for an unremarkable story.’

  A deep crease appeared between Sarah Humboldt’s eyebrows. ‘I don’t know that I would call it “unremarkable”, Mr Culver,’ she countered. ‘Our people are being run off their land, and some of them are being killed. And I don’t know whether or not Fort Hood is conniving at this – that would be an extraordinary allegation – but they’re certainly not moving heaven and earth to stop it happening.’

  Culver dismissed her sense of outrage. ‘I’m afraid it is the very definition of an unremarkable story, Sarah. Not just compared to a bloodbath like New York, but to life anywhere else on the frontier. We have trouble securing the homesteads a hundred miles out from Kansas City – hell, we’ve even had raiders down in the Willamette Valley. You don’t get very far beyond the edge of Seattle or KC without stumbling into brute creation. This is a huge country and it’s mostly open for the taking. There’s still thousands of pirate raiders on the East Coast, thousands more up in Canada drifting down over the border as it suits them, and hordes of real bandits coming up from the south and the Caribbean. A couple of raids here and there in Texas might mean something to us, but it’s just a droplet in a fast-flowing fucking river of blood that’s running all over this country.’

  Frowning as she leafed through the folder he had given her, Humboldt calmed herself a little. ‘You didn’t invite me in here to complain about the world. What’s on your mind, Mr Culver?’

  He gave it a moment, as though thinking over what he might say next. But Jed had long ago made up his mind.

  ‘
I need information, Sarah. And please stop calling me “Mr Culver”. You make me feel like I’ve done something wrong.’

  She smiled, and he continued.

  ‘I need your files. Or copies of your files, at least. Everything you have on all of the attacks on our people down in the Mandate.’

  The confusion on her face was evident. ‘Well, those files are confidential,’ she began. ‘But if the President’s office requested them, I’m sure there’d be no problem making them available . . . Although I must admit, I’m confused as to why they’d be of interest now. The attacks have tapered off. Not entirely, but they’re not nearly as bad as in ’06 or early this year.’

  ‘I need them now because I have need of them now, Sarah. Simple as that,’ said Culver. ‘And the President’s office won’t be requesting them. Ever. I am requesting them. I need them, and I need to be sure that nobody ever knows I have had access to them. This is not an official request. Quite the opposite.’

  An old ship’s chronometer took up some of the space on the bookshelf to Jed’s right. Even with the sound of the storm, its solid tick-tock timekeeping seemed loud.

  ‘I see,’ said Humboldt.

  ‘No you don’t, Sarah. You never will. But if you want to secure the future of your settlements down in the Texas Mandate, and ensure that those responsible for attacking them in the past meet with some form of justice, this is what it will take.’

  ‘Might I ask why?’

  ‘It is best if you do not know,’ replied Jed Culver. ‘Trust me.’

  10

  NORTH KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

  She worried about the horses. The snow had been falling for hours and now lay in a thick, white shroud over the park. Sofia pressed her nose up against the enormous plate-glass window that formed one entire wall of their loft apartment, offering a view of the park across the road, where they kept the horses. One of her neighbours, a creepy-looking man with a long shaggy beard, coaxed his animals out of the herd with something in his hand. He hitched them to a wagon that had been made from tubes and steel mesh welded together over a pair of axles fitted with bicycle tyres. As the combination pulled away, Sofia was surprised that the horses hadn’t flipped the contraption. It had to be impossibly light.