Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3

by John Birmingham

  Pushing her senses out ahead of her, reaching for the finely balanced mental state that her teachers in Japan had explained to her as mind-no-mind, Special Agent Caitlin Monroe moved deeper into the heart of Blackstone’s keep.

  At one point she halted. The arrhythmic footfall of a man carrying a slight limp was moving towards her. A moment later, a flashlight beam stabbed out and played over a fire extinguisher at the T junction just ahead of her. She did not reach for her weapon, since it was unlikely that the man was aware of her presence. More likely, he was just ticking off a spot check. The flashlight seemed to cut out before she heard the faint click of the guard switching it off. His footsteps shuffled away.

  Her heart rate slightly elevated, she waited until she could be certain he was gone before resuming her intrusion.

  A simple laser trap guarded the next intersection, but she cleared the single line of light with a leap that mirrored a basic crescent kick with a midair twist. Again, she landed silently.

  Flitting past the door to Blackstone’s office, Caitlin catalogued the security fixtures. She had no intention of entering, but her training called forth the Pavlovian reaction.

  A few heartbeats later, she stood outside McCutcheon’s office. A small green LED confirmed Vancouver had subverted the PIN lock. Taking the gel-form thumb print, she pressed it against her own digit and laid both on the receiving plate.

  Nothing.

  She tried again.

  Nothing. Not even a red light to indicate a failed match.

  Frowning, she stared at the device as if to bid it to her will through sheer force of personality. Then a more rational response kicked in. She licked the gel, feeling the ridge lines of McCutcheon’s thumb print at the tip of her tongue.

  This time she was rewarded with a second green light. The thick metallic chunk of steel bolts disengaging sounded as loud as church bells. As she pushed open the door, she pointed her phone at the proximity sensor on his desk and zapped it with the RFID tag. The infra-red sensor flickered a red warning light, but nowhere in Texas. Over in Vancouver, a systems operator would be dunking his cheese cruller in a mocha latte, raising his coffee in salute to the unknown agent who’d just crossed the last threshold.

  Even though Caitlin knew the pressure pad just inside the door had been deactivated, she still manoeuvred around it, taking an exaggerated step to the right to avoid tripping the device. She closed the door behind her with one foot, looking for all the world like a ballerina as she did so. Or possibly a ninja who dabbled in ballet as a hobby.

  With the door closed, and the last of the sensors disabled, she moved quickly. Before turning on the laptop, she plugged in the unusually heavy Siemens phone and activated the software package she’d pulled down from the satellite before leaving Temple. Agent Monroe had attended a number of Technical Services training seminars over the years, where a number of excellent teachers had attempted to instruct her at a basic level in aggressive ELINT incursion programming. She had failed every course. Caitlin had no more idea of what was happening between the phone and the powered-down laptop than your garden-variety couch potato had of the magic that delivered their favourite cable shows. But she recalled enough of the general principles to know that, somewhere inside her very smart phone, a malign assortment of software sprites were arranging themselves into a formation designed to penetrate the in-depth defences of Tyrone McCutcheon’s ruggedised Toshiba.

  Complex multi-level passwords, dual factor authentication, full disk encryption and file protection were subjects she had never really understood. But she did understand that when the progress bar on the phone showed 100%, she was to turn on the laptop. Free-roaming software spiders poured out of the Siemens cell and into the target computer. As it woke up, the Toshiba’s operating system was decapitated and the disk began to boot from her phone. The digital swarm flowed over the machine’s primary defences, shutting them down before they could send out an alert to warn of unauthorised access. Utterly formidable digital ramparts crumbled as the Echelon malware interceded between the hardware’s microprocessors and the operating systems memory management unit, decoupling them, and eroding the fluid architecture before it had a chance to realise it was collapsing.

  Another person might have been tempted to go rooting around in the laptop’s directory to hunt for particular documents. Caitlin stood well away from the keyboard and resisted any such urges, however. She’d once turned off Bret’s Xbox while it was doing something not entirely dissimilar to the Siemens phone, dumping its system software and updating from a remote server. Or something.

  In the end, it was all about one machine butt-raping another. And she had learned from the unfortunate Xbox episode, if not from her instructors at Tech Services, to keep her fucking hands to herself while the machines got their awesome on.

  After seven-and-a-half excruciating minutes, the phone vibrated again. The data had been extracted and uploaded to the satellite. It was already unpacking itself into a dedicated directory on a dark server in Vancouver, where the same systems operator would be scanning it to check for exactly the sort of malevolent digital magic he had just wielded to extract the files. It was safe to disconnect.

  Caitlin unhooked her cell and waited until the suicide agents left behind by the phone had shut down McCutcheon’s computer, after obliterating all trace of their passage through its silicon hallways. The Toshiba winked off shortly afterwards.

  The room seemed preternaturally still and quiet.

  And then the door opened.

  51

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  The drive to Madison Park was too far, even with a government car and driver. Jed called Marilyn and told her he’d be staying in the townhouse for the night. She had a couple of friends over and was already three sheets into the wind, so at least he wasn’t in trouble there. Neither of the kids, Melanie and Roger, could tear themselves away from their games consoles to say goodnight. Jed didn’t much care by that point. He just wanted a shower, something to eat, and sleep. If he could sleep.

  It was a calculated gamble, turning somebody like Caitlin Monroe loose on Blackstone. He had no doubt that within a couple of days the impasse would be ancient history. But whether Monroe would deliver to him the information he needed to quietly remove the Governor of Texas, or whether they were hours away from some violent, nightmarish blood swarm, he couldn’t say. And not having control was killing him.

  He couldn’t control the fact that Blackstone had sent special operators to Florida and stumbled across an apparent piece of villainy by Roberto down there. Just as he couldn’t control the fact that a certain ‘Colonel Murdoch’ had now loomed into the President’s consideration.

  Kip had no idea who Murdoch was, of course. For James Kipper, one more military officer writing one more report was a matter of supreme indifference. For Jed, however, the President’s sudden, inconvenient awareness of the existence of ‘Murdoch’ was a source of diabolical uncertainty. It was just so frustrating having to wait on other people to finish something he had set in train. Especially since the end result could see him remembered as a national hero, or sent to jail.

  His indigestion felt like a fist squeezing tightly just below his rib cage. Pizza was the worst thing in the world for it, but pizza was what he felt like. And for the moment, at least, it was about the only thing in his life he could control. Plus, he knew that for half an hour or so, the food would be a blessed relief as it sopped up his stomach acids. After closing the door of the apartment behind him, and silently thanking Marilyn’s forgetfulness – she hadn’t turned off the heating system when she’d left for home – Jed dialled up for a four-cheese pizza from the place on the corner, and poured himself a double measure of Mylanta as an aperitif.

  He channel-surfed the news stations for a few minutes, but that did nothing to settle his stomach or his nerves. Fox News, as usual at this time of night, was taking its feed directly from Sky in the UK. The Greens leader, Sandra Harvey, was on MSNBC, causing h
im to rapidly surf away from that channel, and the local news station was still obsessing about the weather. In the end, he left it on a movie channel, where John Wayne was trying to remake his image in The Searchers. He had just enough time for a shower and one glass of Bulleitt Bourbon before his pizza arrived.

  Jed knew he shouldn’t have been inhaling so many tons of cheese and starchy carbs that late at night. Marilyn was already on his case about the extra weight he was carrying, and she had a point.

  ‘Soon as I put this asshole away,’ he promised himself as he levered out the first slice. ‘I will bury Mad Jack Blackstone, and then I’ll get myself back into shape. Maybe even go back to wrestling. But there’s not much fucking point pretending it’s going to happen before then, is there, Duke?’

  He saluted the TV with his drink.

  He probably should’ve had a glass of wine with the pizza, but he was on a roll with the bourbon and didn’t want to change drinks. It would just make for a worse hangover in the morning.

  After sluicing down the last piece with another slug of antacid, Jed washed his hands and took a legal pad and pencil to bed with him. There he began to sketch the outlines of the problems he was dealing with, and what if any solutions he might apply.

  ‘Blackstone, for now, I can’t do anything about,’ he said aloud. But he wrote down the name Murdoch, circled it, and penned a question mark.

  Of course, he had never intended for Kipper to find out about Agent Monroe’s mission in Texas. Since the President had expressly forbidden any such mission, there was a fair chance he would be unhappy to learn of it. Especially if he found out before Monroe was able to effect a result. Jed imagined she would do so quickly, but he would have to build a firewall around her to prevent Kip from having any contact with the fictional air force colonel. At least until she was done.

  Distraction.

  He wrote the word underneath the first entry and followed it up with another question mark.

  Prisoners.

  Jed had done some preliminary work on the question of what to do with the prisoners they still held from the fighting in New York. It was an issue the President wanted to deal with and move past. It was also an issue that spoke to the better angels of Kipper’s nature, unlike his own, and that made it ripe for exploitation.

  The next hour passed quickly as Culver mapped out a plan for dealing with the prisoners in a way he knew would appeal to Kip. As a bonus it would also meet with the approval of Secretary Humboldt, meaning that he should be able to whip up a small shit storm of enthusiasm for it in the short term. Like, tomorrow. Kipper’s natural inclination would be to let Tusk Musso make the running on any initial response to this bullshit in Florida. For once, Jed had reason to be grateful for Kip’s natural scepticism about national security issues. Give him the choice between dealing with a security issue and an engineering challenge, or a question of development or resettlement, and you would do your dough cold betting on the former.

  When he finally looked up from the legal pad, which he had filled with pages of scrawled notes and diagrams, it was after midnight. He wondered what might be happening in Texas, if anything, and resisted the urge to call Wales Larrison in Vancouver.

  He could talk to him first thing in the morning. No point waking the man up to deal with something over which he had no control. For the moment at least, the President remained unaware that Monroe was operating within the boundaries of the United States, in direct contravention of his wishes. Perhaps they could keep it that way.

  52

  FORT HOOD, KILLEEN, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION

  ‘Well, this is awkward.’

  ‘You could put the gun down, Ty. Might help.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, smiling disingenuously. ‘And if you could keep your hands where I can see them and stay out of striking range, which I presume to be considerable in your case, we’ll be cool.’

  He took a step back into the corridor, allowing her a better view of two security guards flanking him, both with their own handguns drawn and pointed none too steadily at her head. One of them moved towards her, reaching for a set of handcuffs.

  ‘Whoa. I really wouldn’t do that if I was you, Sam,’ said McCutcheon. ‘You don’t want to get too close to her.’

  Damn.

  The Governor’s main man grinned as though he’d just played the winning card. ‘Gee, this is a surprise, isn’t it? The international super-spy gets her ass handed to her by a bunch of hicks. Embarrassing much?’

  ‘A bit. But how?’ she asked. ‘Surely not the clowns you had monitoring my room back in Temple?’

  She had her hands up, and the night-vision goggles pushed back on her head. One of only two advantages she held at that moment. Another second and she would’ve fitted the NVGs, blinding herself when McCutcheon had thrown open the door and flooded the room with light.

  He laughed. ‘No. Rest assured, your surveillance shift is still listening to whoever you put in your room. I checked in with them earlier. She snores, which you don’t. Those boys are probably jerkin’ their gherkins right now while they tell each other exactly how many ways they’d fuck you from Sunday.’

  ‘Nice to know I still got it,’ said Caitlin.

  ‘Oh, you got it, baby. And I want it. Now hand it over.’

  He pointed his gun at her phone.

  ‘Just lay it on the floor and step away.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me how you blew my cover, Ty. You know, in the movies the super-villain has the decency to explain that sort of thing.’

  She crouched down and laid the cell at her feet, before backing away. McCutcheon sent one of the security guards through to collect it while keeping his gun aimed at the centre of her face.

  ‘I’m more of a senior henchmen than your actual super-villain,’ he replied. ‘But for what it’s worth, you can blame your husband. Well, if you ever get to see him again.’

  ‘Bret?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be too hard on old Melly. He meant well. He loves you, and he’s very proud of you. That’s why he sent a wedding photo to an old army buddy of mine, a Ranger too, who forwarded it to their regimental association, who then published it in their newsletter. Their electronic newsletter.’

  She closed her eyes.

  ‘Yes, you remember now? Hatches, matches and dispatches. That newsletter covers them all. And, of course, Bret was quite the fifteen-minute celebrity for a while there. Army Times correspondent, one of what, half a dozen who survived the Wave? He wrote some great dispatches out of Iraq. Pulitzer Prize-winning stuff, if there’d still been a Pulitzer Prize. So, yeah, when an old boy of the 75th Ranger Regiment makes good like that, and marries himself a pretty girl, it’s a feel-good story. The sort of thing that gets a good run in the old boys’ newsletter. You know – to lift the spirits. People have been so darn gloomy since the end of the world.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘It was the old man who remembered you. Well, not you, but your husband. The Governor doesn’t wear the uniform anymore, of course. Wouldn’t be right. But he keeps up with the regimental news, makes sure to get along to the annual reunion. It’s good politics, if nothing else. We have a lot of Rangers down here. Soon as he met you, bells started ringing. You are a good-looking woman, Caitlin – the sort a man would remember. He had me scouring back issues of the newsletter, convinced he’d seen a story on you there. And he had. But not about Colonel Murdoch. No, the story he’d seen had been about the wedding of old-boy-made-good Bret Melton to a USAID staffer, Caitlin Monroe. And there you were, pretty as a picture. But really, Caitlin, a white dress? In your case, I think not.’

  Still she gave him nothing. It wasn’t Bret’s fault. He’d sent a photo to an old army buddy, a guy who hadn’t been able to make it to the wedding. The way old buddies do.

  ‘I can see you calculating the odds and the angles, Caitlin,’ he said. ‘So if you want to unburden yourself of that awfully heavy handgun you’re carrying, and any USB sticks or data disks
you might’ve used to copy my files, you’d make me feel a lot less like shooting you in the face.’

  As she reached slowly for the weapon, all three men adjusted their stances. She slowly placed the pistol on the ground and kicked it over to them.

  ‘The phone is the data disk,’ she replied. ‘I’m sure you’ll want to pat me down. But it’s all in there,’ she lied. ‘Encrypted, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’d love to pat you down, but I could do without the broken arm,’ McCutcheon said. ‘It’s a pity really. I was wondering last night at drinks whether your devotion to duty and country might let me score a free blow job from Colonel Murdoch. Now we’ll never know. And don’t sweat the phone. I’m sure we can find some redneck genius somewhere to figure out how your cell works. Don’t be too hard on yourself, by the way. Some of it was just bad luck. It’s a small world these days.

  ‘We didn’t clue in to who you were right away. The boss just had a feeling that he knew of you from somewhere, and not as an air force wingnut. Me, I’d never heard of a Colonel Murdoch. And the USAF, especially these days, it’s a small town, let me tell you. It was when you said you’d been exiled in the UK for a couple of years that the penny dropped. The Governor remembered the wedding story. Just one of those things. If you hadn’t mentioned it, you might not have jogged his memory about good old Bret and the newly minted Mrs Melton. That’s some tough shit, eh?’

  McCutcheon did love the sound of his own voice. She didn’t bother feeding his ego with a reply. The way he was grinning now, it didn’t look like he needed it.