Again, she checked for evidence of Shah’s men following her, of anybody following her, but saw nothing. The pedicab was shaded but open to the elements, allowing the speed of their passage to create a breeze that offered scant relief from the heat of the afternoon. She wondered how her driver endured it.
She played with the phone, a model she’d never seen before. It had no keypad, an obvious omission that had thrown her for a second while trying to open the text. Apparently, the screen itself was the keyboard. Gadgets and widgets had never much interested this daughter of English nobility, and mobile phones in particular set her teeth on edge. She assumed the government could probably track you via your SIM card or the phone’s chip, or whatever, which meant she rarely carried a mobile. On those rare occasions, she’d use a throw-down, a cheap prepaid or stolen handset, and always kept the thing switched off until the very moment it was needed, after which she’d toss it immediately.
There were three numbers saved in the phone Pappas had given her. One for the burly SAS veteran, one for Shah and the last for their lawyer friend. A little more fiddling around brought up an electronic map of the city, with the location of the Coonawarra Base Hospital highlighted by a ridiculous cartoon paperclip that jumped up and down while pointing at the relevant location.
‘Right, right, I fucking get it, okay?’ she muttered at the annoying screen icon. ‘Jesus, how do you turn the stupid thing off . . .’
Before she could work it out, the pedicab had pulled up in front of the Banyan View Lodge. Jules thanked the driver, who was slick with sweat, but breathing normally. She paid him with a plastic ten-dollar banknote, and checked to see whether they’d been followed, before hurrying inside.
As she had expected, the room was stifling. She flicked on the primitive air-con, which rumbled into life without much promise of relief. For a few seconds, it felt as though the temperature actually increased, before blessed cool air started to fall from the ceiling vents.
Jules unclipped the holster and began undressing. When she was down to her underwear, she stopped, bleeding off heat as the climate control system laboured heroically to dump a little arctic goodness into her room. She had no idea what time it was in the American Midwest, but found herself pondering on something else about Pappas’s text. He’d located Miguel in Kansas City . . . Now, that was odd. The way Julianne understood it, Miguel had taken Mariela, Sofia, little Maya, Grandma Ana and all the others over to the US after qualifying for the resettlement scheme, or homestead thingy, or whatever the hell the Yanks called it. So why would he be in Kansas City now and not out on a farm somewhere in Texas?
She remembered KC vaguely, having stopped there with Rhino early in the year to arrange transport to New York City. They never made it into the city itself, staying instead at some mouldy hostel a block away from the airport. A joyous time spent trying to sleep through the sound of planes, trains and Rhino’s titanic snoring before getting the hell out for points east.
Jules set her mind back to the task of working out what time it was over there. Early afternoon in Darwin now, so that would’ve made it . . . what, sometime late at night, yesterday evening, where he was? The phone had a web browser and she thought about doing a quick MSN search, but impatience forced her to just call the number anyway. Given her limited experience with mobile phones, and especially with the keypad-less variety like this Nokia, it took her a while to work out that she only had to touch the number Nick had entered in its long form.
An annoying ear worm of a jazz tune about Kansas City began to run on a loop in her mind. She frowned it away.
Jules heard a faint buzzing as the connection went through. A phone was ringing somewhere. She worried that she might be waking Miguel or the kids, but smiled at the prospect of Mariela waking up beside her husband and demanding to know the identity of this strange mujer he was talking to so late at night.
After standing there near naked under the air-conditioner for almost a minute, she began to suspect that no one was home. Jules was surprised at just how disappointed she felt. She had no good news for Miguel, just a warning. To watch out for Henry Cesky’s goons. But she’d been looking forward to the conversation. Now she was left hanging on the line in this shitty motel room, wondering whether maybe she’d ended up dialling the wrong number or something. When the call cut out, she tried again, without any great hope and, eventually, with the same non-result. She bit down on her frustration. Not even an answering machine.
‘Bugger.’
She accepted defeat, for now. Delving into the largest of the two carrier bags, Julianne pulled out the business suit and started getting dressed once more, hating the feel of the anonymous office clothes. There was nothing to be done about it, though. She wanted so much to see the Rhino, and if she wanted to see Rhino, she had to play along.
43
FORT HOOD, KILLEEN, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION
Fingerprint lock.
McCutcheon’s office was protected by the same array of security measures as those guarding Blackstone’s, but with an additional tweak. Caitlin and Musso stood behind him as he laid his thumb on the glass plate of a Krupp Systems Dynalock TRS-5 fingerprint scanner. Reputed to be the best in the world. Released into the wild by Krupp only three months earlier. Beat that and you would gain access to the office within, where you could then trip the pressure pad just behind the door, the passive IR sensors mounted in the corner of the room, or the proximity alarm sitting atop his desk, next to a laptop that was disconnected from the building’s intranet.
‘If you wouldn’t mind averting your eyes for a second, folks.’
‘Of course, Ty,’ said the always cooperative, always security-conscious Colonel Katherine Murdoch.
‘Oh, so we are friends . . . Kate?’ he said, teasing her gently. ‘That’s how it works? I show you my nasties . . .’ – he held up the secured briefcase with the dossiers inside – ‘and you suddenly want to be friends again with old Tyrone McCutcheon?’
Caitlin smiled, conceding his point. ‘Perhaps just friendly colleagues,’ she volleyed back.
She then looked away so he could enter the PIN to deactivate two of the three security systems within the room. The pressure pad and the infra-red sensors. The proximity alarm, which sat on his desk looking like a stainless steel egg, he deactivated with an RFID tag on his key ring. She caught Musso’s concerned expression as they stood there with their backs turned. He was obviously thinking ahead, assuming she would want to gain entry to this office without the permission of its occupant. With McCutcheon standing a couple of feet away, Caitlin could hardly reassure Seattle’s main man in Texas that it wasn’t going to be a problem, so she let it slide.
‘All righty, we’re good to go,’ McCutcheon announced. ‘Secret trapdoor to the piranha pool has been closed. Laser-beam chainsaws deactivated. Hoo and aah!’
She had a momentary vision of Bret saying the same thing the last morning they had spent together.
This office was nearly as large as Blackstone’s, but with none of the triumphalist personal touches. A single framed photograph of an older woman who bore an unmistakable family resemblance to McCutcheon sat on his desk next to a signed baseball. A large Ansell Adams print of winter in Yellowstone Park hung from one wall in front of a nest of lounge chairs. Otherwise nothing. Not even a view. Ty McCutcheon’s office had no windows. It was cut off from the outside world. Caitlin felt . . . not so much the thrill of vindication. Rather, the cold comfort of a wager with herself that had just paid off. There may well have been other treasure troves in which she could dig for the secrets of Jackson Blackstone, but she’d almost certainly find buried treasure right here.
She took in every detail of the space as she followed the two men over to the lounge area, which reminded her of a display setting in a furniture store. As if it was meant to be admired rather than used. Unlike his boss’s desk, which looked like it might’ve come off one of Lord Nelson’s warships, McCutcheon worked on a glass-top table, to whic
h there was nothing beyond the thick sandwich of opaque green glass and two Z-form metal trusses serving as legs. No networking cables ran to the laptop, not even a power cord. The computer was a stand-alone system, save for the ugly steel chain that secured it to one of the table legs.
There were no filing cabinets in the room. No bureau within which documents might be stored. The files they were about to read must have come from a repository elsewhere in the building, probably from TDF’s intelligence division. That was fine. What she wanted was access to the drive on that laptop.
What she got, for the moment, was an offer of more coffee and cake. McCutcheon confessed to a weakness for cake in the morning, a legacy, he said, of a German grandmother. Caitlin turned down both offers, but Musso surprised her by volunteering for a second breakfast.
‘Well, I like cake,’ he said, in response to her quizzical look.
‘I wouldn’t trust a man who didn’t, Tusk,’ said McCutcheon, who was making himself very comfortable again with everyone’s first names. ‘So, I’ll let you read up on the doings and the goings-on over in Florida. And then we can talk through any questions you might have. I imagine you’ll also want to expedite the rendition of the prisoners to Seattle, so that NIA and Defense Intelligence can have a piece of them.’
‘I imagine you’re correct,’ Musso replied.
For a second she thought McCutcheon might be about to leave them alone in his office while he tended to cake and coffee orders. Not that she would’ve been so foolish as to attempt to crack open his lappy and take a peak while he was doing that. McCutcheon didn’t make such a rookie error, or attempt such an obvious entrapment. Instead he simply used the phone to order up the refreshments.
‘Bathroom’s through there if and when you need it,’ he told them both, jerking his thumb over towards the far side of the room, where a door opened up onto a small kitchenette, and beyond that into a washroom.
‘I think I might, if you don’t mind,’ said Musso heading in that direction. ‘Too much damn coffee.’
Blackstone’s aide waited until the general had left before speaking again.
‘I’m sorry things haven’t worked out so well between us and Seattle, Kate,’ he said, while working through the same elaborate procedure as before for unlocking the briefcase. ‘The old man, you know, he was fairly cut up about what happened back there after the Wave. Particularly Kipper’s role. He thought they’d worked together pretty well to pull that city through, so it was a bit of a shock to turn around and find he’d been stabbed in the back like that. You can understand the man would have difficulties working with the President again.’
Caitlin’s care factor was zero. Her one brief encounter with James Kipper, a difficult satellite call from the back of a C-130 just before she parachuted into New York, hadn’t made her a fan. But then Kipper had not been found to have an undeclared arrangement with Ahmet Ozal, one of Baumer’s closest allies. The man who had freed Baumer from prison in Guadeloupe, before joining him in New York as one of his senior lieutenants.
‘Ty,’ she replied, deliberately using his first name, ‘as I said before, the politics are of no interest to me. Even if I hadn’t spent the last couple of years exiled in England, they still wouldn’t interest me. I can appreciate their importance to you, but this is what’s important to me. I can promise you I will take a fair appraisal of what I find in here back to Jed Culver. You convince him, you’ve convinced the President.’ She held up the file he had just handed her.
‘Fair enough,’ said McCutcheon. ‘I’m just hoping this visit might be a chance for us to start over again. The old man too. Sincerely. I don’t mind telling you, he’s freaked by Morales. He really sees him as a little Hitler. Like Saddam could’ve been if the Israelis hadn’t taken care of business. The way Roberto’s pulled things together down there after the total collapse . . . you have to admit, he seems to know what he’s doing.’
Caitlin couldn’t help thinking about the half-assed theatre of the absurd she’d encountered in Uruguay. As vicious a little prick as Morales undoubtedly was, he had a long way to go before graduating from puffed-up gang lord to genuine threat. It didn’t mean everybody shared her perception, however. And if Blackstone was shifting his animus away from Kipper and onto Roberto, who was she to discourage him?
‘We’re all trying to do our best for the country, Ty,’ she said. ‘It would be unusual, and probably unhealthy, if we didn’t differ about what we thought was best. But you’re right about this development in Florida. The President does not care for foreign powers meddling within our borders. He didn’t care for it in New York. He didn’t care for it in Alaska. I can assure you he won’t care for it in Florida. This will be answered.’
Musso returned at that moment, just as the coffee and cake arrived.
‘Outstanding,’ declared McCutcheon.
*
The file review took an hour and a half. Caitlin found it professionally interesting, and asked all of the questions expected from her, but she allowed Tusk Musso to make most of the running. She could see that he’d been blind-sided by the intelligence out of Florida, and was having to recalibrate his threat detectors as regards the Federation, but the former Marine lawyer remained sceptical, and he’d not let go of his displeasure with Texas for pushing into areas of the country that were none of its concern. He didn’t climb aboard Blackstone’s bandwagon, but he proved himself willing to change his mind about whether a problem existed in the first place.
Caitlin excused herself after an hour to use the bathroom. While in there, she checked her equipment. Two of the three miniature microphones embedded in her uniform had failed, but the third had picked up the subtly changing tones of the PIN code McCutcheon had entered into the antique keypad controlling the infra-red and pressure pad systems in his room. The scanner embedded deep within the guts of her Siemens phone had intercepted and stored his RFID tag as soon as he’d sent it to the proximity sensor designed to create an exclusion zone around his laptop.
An anxious moment passed while the Echelon agent checked that she had captured the data, but this was not something she could leave until they’d returned to the safety of Temple. Had all three of her microphone pick-ups failed, she would’ve needed to manufacture another reason to return to McCutcheon’s office with him later in the day to have another attempt at collecting his PIN.
No problemo, she told herself, letting go of a breath she hadn’t even realised she was holding.
Back in the office, the two former military officers had sidetracked into a discussion of power projection capabilities. Musso remained underwhelmed. McCutcheon tried to sell him a story about Morales seeking out a number of surviving former Argentine military types with experience of the failed Falklands invasion.
‘Why would he even be doing that, Tusk? Who cares what those old losers think? Unless he’s trying to avoid making the same mistakes they did, right?’
‘I can see that he has sought them out,’ the other man conceded, waving a piece of paper that must have confirmed the fact. ‘But you have to remember that he’s trying to build, or rebuild, a military force, a Frankenstein’s force in many ways. Stitched together from the body parts of half-a-dozen militaries that were dismembered during the collapse. Those Argentine officers are the only men anywhere on the continent with actual command-level combat experience of state-on-state conflict. Why wouldn’t he seek them out?’
‘So what, we just ignore it?’
‘No, I’m not saying that, but it doesn’t mean we rush to conclusions either.’
McCutcheon didn’t look like he was getting angry, but he was deeply invested in his theory, and he wasn’t about to abandon it to undergraduate scepticism. For Caitlin, and Colonel Murdoch for that matter, it was irrelevant.
‘Gentlemen,’ she said riding in over the top of them, ‘you are both confusing data with meaning. It is an occupational hazard of intelligence analysis.’
She took the piece of paper from Musso, and scan
ned it quickly.
‘What we have here, is data. President Morales summoned a cadre of retired officers from the former Argentine military to his palace in Santiago. Five of the six officers stayed on in the capital. They have since been observed working at the Federation’s directorate of naval intelligence.’
She put the paper down, and looked from one man to the other.
‘That is information, gentlemen. Verified. And nice work, by the way,’ she added, nodding to McCutcheon. ‘The NIA will be thrilled to discover that Texas has its own foreign intelligence service, and that they’ve been scooped.’
‘Whatever. We don’t like to brag, Colonel.’ The aide gave a shrug.
‘Uh-huh. Moving right along . . . But the meaning of this information is not yet established. I could suggest any number of interpretations of the data. You have suggested one. General Musso has suggested another. I’m going to recommend that this matter be put into the channel. You said before that you hoped our current visit might provide an opportunity for a new start between the two administrations. If you mean that, a team of federal marshals could be here tomorrow morning to take custody of the prisoners, and you could nominate some of your people who had carriage of Florida and your surveillance operation in Santiago to return to Seattle, and maybe on to Vancouver, to debrief Defense, NIA and Echelon.’
Both of them looked surprised, but it was McCutcheon who spoke first.
‘I don’t know that the Governor would be very happy about involving a lot of foreigners in this, Kate.’
‘It’s not my call to make,’ said Caitlin. ‘We have responsibility for this region under the Vancouver agreement, and that will necessarily involve Echelon. Sooner rather than later.’
Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 Page 45
