She would be damned if she’d die crippled and immobilised. If Blackstone wanted her to stop, let him finish it with a bullet. Once she had her hands in front of her again, she tore one of the sleeves from her uniform to fashion a bandage.
The gunshot had torn a chunk of flesh from her thigh about the size of half a tennis ball. She could see bone lying white in a crater of shredded muscle and meat. Dark, swirling whirlpools tugged at her consciousness, trying to drag her under, but Caitlin swore under her breath and poured all of her will into not passing out as she tended to the wound. She was intimate with pain and fear in a way that most human beings were not. She held the moment close to her, controlled it. She was pain. She would become death. This was life in the raw. Existence itself. Unyielding, unforgiving and inescapable. She knew that endurance was a matter of degrees, of inches, of pushing herself for a few more breaths, or heartbeats. All would pass.
‘Outstanding!’ cried Blackstone, clapping loudly in approval. ‘By God, that’s the spirit! Honestly, Caitlin, if only we had more Americans like you.’
‘There’d be fewer Americans like you,’ she said through clenched teeth, continuing to bind her wound, staunching the blood flow.
His laughter was rich and generous.
‘Maybe so, maybe so. But that’s not how this is going to be. You’ll leave in a few minutes with our other guest. Frankly, I’ll be glad to see the back of you both. Mr Baumer has had me at a significant disadvantage since he and Ozal duped us into supporting what I thought was a perfectly reasonable chance to inconvenience Kipper in New York. As far as I knew, Ozal was an honest pirate. He promised to tie up Kipper while we consolidated during a difficult interlude down here. I’m afraid I am as much a victim of Mr Baumer as you.’
‘So why don’t you just shoot him and do us all a favour?’ Caitlin seethed. She was shivering and sweating as she tightened the bandage on her wounded leg. ‘Or even better, give me the gun and I’ll do it. Promise.’
She levelled a glare at Baumer loaded with almost as much violence as the kick that shattered his cheekbone. His face was swelling, one eye socket disappearing behind a mound of bruised flesh. Like her, however, he was regrouping and found it within himself to sneer back. She could tell from the way his eyes twitched that the gesture hurt him.
Blackstone chuckled indulgently. ‘I’m sure you would. And don’t believe that part of me wouldn’t enjoy watching you. Right before you turned the gun on me. But I need Mr Baumer alive. Unlike you, he has proven himself to be competent. Not so much at running a holy war, but certainly at covering his ass afterwards. I’m afraid he has a small mountain of incriminating documents, unlike you, and they are protected by a dead man switch. If he should expire, the documents would be released into the wild. And we couldn’t have that. It would prove fatally embarrassing.’
Inwardly, Caitlin was recalculating her chances. This loser obviously had no idea she’d successfully sent the data to Wales. She might well be better off leaving with Baumer. She had his measure.
‘So you’ve been protecting him since New York?’ she said, stringing out the encounter as she turned over all the options, working the possible angles and combinations like a Rubik’s cube.
She and Baumer exchanged another look of mutual loathing.
‘He has not been protecting me,’ said the jihadist. His voice was muffled by the injury and swelling. ‘He has been protecting himself.’
‘And what, you’re going to give up your hold on Blackstone for passage out of here with me?’
Baumer carefully constructed a grin from the remains of his face. It was a tenuous thing, held together by force of will. ‘Not just out of here, but out of America. With you, Caitlin. And with Mr McCutcheon, who will take possession of the New York documents when I am safe.’
‘Road trip.’ McCutcheon’s motor mouth was back. ‘Gonna be fun.’
‘You gotta be fucking kidding me,’ said Caitlin. ‘You got suckered by this whackjob in New York and now you’re trusting him again? Fuck me.’
‘Maybe later,’ replied Ty. ‘Clocks a-tickin’ right now, though. Governor?’
‘We’re not trusting him, Agent Monroe,’ Blackstone said, ignoring his aide for the moment. ‘But, yes, we are dealing with him. And he with us. Sometimes in war, you have to make alliances, however temporary, with one enemy while you face another.’
For a second or two, she was blank. She had no idea what he was talking about. And then . . .
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake . . . Morales? You’re still obsessing about that bean-eating fuckwit?’
‘Not obsessing, Agent Monroe. Preparing.’
She shook her head, convinced now beyond doubt that she was talking to a madman.
Blackstone started to respond but he didn’t get a chance. His next words were cut off by the deafening trip hammer of a machine gun fired from just outside.
Training and instinct took over as Caitlin rolled for cover behind a large leather couch. She heard glass shattering. Wood splintered. Men screamed and died in a storm of automatic fire. Ignoring the shrieking agony in her wounded leg, she crawled away from the sound of the gun, scuttling after Baumer, who had dropped, like her, at the first report. He was heading for the door of the library, towards the hallway. She moved slowly, constrained by the handcuffs and her leg wound. Even the grating of her cracked ribs added to the pain and difficulty.
Confusion and riot was all around. Caitlin could no longer place anyone in the room. Baumer. McCutcheon. Blackstone. Or any of the TDF troopers who had been standing by the French doors. In her memory, she saw a stuttering replay of at least three soldiers dancing a disjointed, bloody jig as dozens of rounds chewed through them. The staccato uproar of an AK-47 unloading an entire magazine on automatic drowned out the screaming.
At the end of the lounge she stopped. McCutcheon was crouched behind another chair on the far side of the room. She locked eyes with him for half a second before he moved, launching himself towards the exit through which Baumer had just disappeared.
The gun roared. She saw McCutcheon’s head fly apart in a kaleidoscope of blood and horror. A handgun fired unsteadily, coughed back weakly at the snarl of the Kalashnikov. Blackstone firing uncontrolled, emptying his clip, but to no effect. Caitlin could not see him directly without exposing herself to the shooter, but she could make out the Governor’s reflection in a window on the far side of the room. He had been hit, like her, in the leg. But the round that had taken him was larger and travelling much faster. He groaned pitiably as he tried to lever himself up out of his chair.
Then the firing stopped, and the whole world changed in just seconds.
Caitlin heard the metallic chunking sound of somebody swapping out a magazine. She risked a furtive peak over the furniture. The arms of the lounge chair were split and torn. Stuffing spilled from them like yellow fairy floss. As she pushed herself up, the gun fired again and an evil wind swept over Blackstone, shredding his dressing gown, punching huge gobbets of meat and gore out of his body, and throwing him backwards into his bookshelf.
The girl.
Caitlin found herself struck dumb and paralysed by the shock of recognition.
She knew this girl. Knew of her anyway.
The Mexican refugee. From the murdered settler family. In the madness of death and violence, Caitlin couldn’t remember the name of the girl’s father. The man who’d been run down in Kansas City. But she thought she recalled the daughter’s name.
‘Sophie. Sophie, don’t shoot!’
The teenager turned the muzzle of the gun on her, and Caitlin recognised the fugue state of close-quarter battle in her eyes. She was gone, lost in the killing.
‘Sophie. I came for your father,’ Caitlin shouted. ‘For . . . for Manuel.’
The gun stopped tracking in her direction. The girl looked confused and then upset.
‘Miguel,’ she said in a small voice. ‘My father was Miguel Pieraro. He was a good man. And this . . . this . . . Blackstone kille
d him.’
The hard lines and planes of the teenager’s face collapsed. It was like watching a burning tower go down. She was a pyre of vengeance and lone justice, and then it all fell in on itself, and Sofia Pieraro was a little girl in a room full of dead men and shredded bodies.
She gasped and dropped to the floor.
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
Jed grunted as his face struck the wet tiles of the bathroom. His arm was on fire, burning as though held in a furnace. A great crushing weight bore down on his chest as he gagged and struggled to draw air into his lungs. With his good hand, he raked at the breast bone, as though he might be able to tear through and wrench out his own heart. Fling it from his body before it betrayed him completely.
It was killing him, just when he needed to be at his strongest.
Another pile-driver slammed into his chest and he moaned as bubbles of spit foamed on his blue lips. The phone was close. He could see it, as though through a long tunnel. But in his rational mind, as clouded as it was by a descending premonition of doom, he knew, he absolutely knew, that it was within reach. If he could just get to it. Dial emergency. But he couldn’t move. Giant rubber clown hands had seized the base of his spine and started to squeeze. The grotesque sensation felt like a python running up his back, accelerating as it raced for the base of his neck. He felt the spasms close up his throat as though he were being strangled. Jed worked his jaws, as if to protest, but no sound came out, save for a gurgling moan.
Even in this extremity, his reptilian cunning did not desert him. For as dark wings folded over Jed Culver, he wondered, should he survive, whether having suffered a massive heart attack might count in his favour, win him a few sympathy points, when Kipper was deciding just how high to hang him.
*
Caitlin held up her cuffed hands where Sofia Pieraro could see them. She advanced, slowly, cautiously, even though every nerve in her body compelled her to turn and chase after Baumer.
‘It’s okay, honey. He’s gone. They’re all gone. You did well. You just need to put the gun away. Or give it to me. There’s another man here we need to get. Somebody working with Blackstone.’
The carnage and destruction were hellish. The girl had unloaded the better part of two clips into her targets at close range. The fresh, barnyard stench of slaughter, so familiar to Caitlin, was still so dense and surprising it caused her to gag. Blood, chunks of flesh, bone shards and viscera were all mixed in promiscuously and sprayed around the room as if thrown from buckets.
‘You’re done here. You have to come with me, now,’ said the Echelon agent, injecting as much authority into her voice as she dared. This girl could flip either way, dropping into catatonia, or turning the last of her ammunition on Caitlin and then herself.
She limped past the corpse of Jackson Blackstone. His dressing gown had come open, spilling the contents of his stomach over his pyjamas.
‘Can you give me the gun, Sofia?’ Caitlin asked softly. She listened for the howls of approaching sirens. It wouldn’t be long. Holding up both hands, still cuffed, out to the Mexican girl, she said, ‘I can get us out of here, Sofia. But we need to go, now.’
The teenager seemed to reach a decision. She snatched the AK-47 close to herself.
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘This is mine. I keep the gun.’
‘Fair enough, then. But we have to get going. Follow me.’
‘Okay,’ the Pieraro girl said, seeming not to care what happened now as long as she had the gun. Before she moved towards Caitlin, however, the young woman took something from her pocket – three polaroids, it looked like – and dropped them on Blackstone’s corpse.
Caitlin didn’t bother to limp over and find out what sort of calling card she’d left. This chick was fucking crazy.
She did almost stop to pick up the handgun that Blackstone had used to wound her, until she remembered him firing without result at Pieraro. Emptying the magazine. She checked to see if the girl was wounded, but she appeared to have escaped without a scratch. Caitlin wasn’t surprised. It had been a long time since the Governor had seen combat, and he was firing wildly.
‘Why don’t we just go this way?’
Pieraro had stopped following her, and had turned back towards the French doors, and the darkness outside.
‘There is another man here,’ replied Caitlin. ‘We have to get him. He was a road agent,’ she added, improvising from her sketchy recall of the Pieraro file. The mere mention of the words ‘road agent’ galvanised a response from the teenager. Her face hardened and she strode up beside Caitlin, taking her by the arm and supporting her as the American hobbled along trying to keep up.
‘Be careful,’ Caitlin warned as Sofia led the way out of the library, into a hallway in the centre of the house. It was well lit, making good targets of both of them.
A blood trail led towards the front door, which stood open.
‘Oh no. You. Fucking. Don’t,’ growled Caitlin. She set her course for the exit and accelerated as best she could. Every step drove white-hot spikes of pain through her leg, arcing up her spine and into her head. To her surprise, Sofia ran ahead of her and loosed a short burst of fire out of the open doorway just before she ran though.
Nice moves, kid, thought the veteran field operator.
‘You! Stop now!’ cried the Mexican girl.
Another short, rattling bark from the AK-47 lit up the night outside as Caitlin hurried after the younger woman. She feared that after running from light into dark her night vision would be ruined, but she needn’t have worried. Sofia Pieraro stood on the front deck, levelling the assault rifle at Bilal Baumer, who had both hands in the air and was staring at her as if pursued by an apparition from the seventh level of hell. Porch lights bathed him in a soft, yellow glow. He looked slow, disoriented. Possibly concussed. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and that side of his face looked grossly misshapen. When he saw Caitlin emerge from the house, he started to move again, only stopping when the gun roared and plowed up the earth around his feet.
Caitlin pushed past the civilian and charged at Baumer, advancing on him in great, lopsided strides. He smiled.
She caught a glimpse of porch light on the blade that appeared in his right hand.
‘I will shoot him,’ cried Sofia.
‘No! Don’t!’
Caitlin put herself between them deliberately. Turning slightly side-on to Baumer, she faced him with her injured leg to the fore, placing most of her weight on the rear foot. Her hands came up in a guard position, using the chain-link of her handcuffs to ward off the knife, which came flashing in at her as Baumer cried out, ‘Allahu Akbar!’
She was ready for his feint, and did not commit her block until he had switched the arc of his attack at the last moment, turning a backhanded slash into an overhead stab, aimed at the base of her neck. She pivoted on her good leg, keeping the turning circle as small as possible, parrying the stroke, and whipping her elbow back into his broken cheekbone.
Crack!
He cried out in shock and pain. Caitlin reversed the flow of her defensive sweep, channelling her ki through her forearms and into a looping shield that landed concussive hammer fists on his face, shredding his lips and breaking his nose.
Holding her body close to his, jamming his knife between them so that he had no chance to use it, she raked the handcuffs down the length of his arm until she had proper control of the weapon hand. After keeping most of her weight off the injured leg until the last possible moment, she gritted her teeth and stepped through, absorbing the pain as she dragged his hand across the front of her body and down towards his hip. Reversing the direction of her attack as she brought the captive limb up, Caitlin fed Baumer’s arm into a figure-four entanglement. A downward sword-slashing move broke his arm in three places.
As he screamed, she pistoned up on her good leg, groaned as she transitioned briefly to the other, then leapt high, pulling him backward with the handcuffs as she swept them over his head and around his throat. P
ivoting again on her good leg, she dropped into a half-hip throw, taking him over fast and hard. His spine snapped a fraction of a second before she twisted, screamed with her own pain one last time, and shattered the vertebrae in his neck. Caitlin came down on top of his limp, twitching body.
She was crying. Crying with pain, and rage, and relief, and horror, when the young woman appeared by their entwined bodies.
‘I know you,’ Caitlin said, expecting to die. ‘I knew of your father. A good man. I know what they did to your family.’
She waved a hand weakly back in the direction of Blackstone and his men. It was all she had.
Sofia Pieraro was shaking. She tried to smile, but her face was twitching and rubbery and the effect was perverse.
Caitlin awkwardly disentangled herself from Baumer’s body. ‘If you want to help me, you can give me a hand up,’ she said. ‘We still need to get out of here.’
She could hear sirens coming closer. Boots pounding up a gravel path.
‘Miss Kate. Miss Kate. Are you in there?’
A familiar voice. A Polish accent.
‘It is Milosz. Of GROM.’
‘Come with me,’ said Caitlin. ‘Come quickly, if you want to live.’
TWO MONTHS LATER
‘The big bastard? The Rhino? He’s about ten, maybe fifteen minutes up the track that way,’ said the park ranger.
‘You know him?’ asked Jules.
He grinned. ‘Everyone knows the Rhino. Up that way,’ he pointed along the track that crawled uphill, skirting the edge of the Noosa National Park.
It was crowded with tourists and locals. The latter were easy to pick in their bare feet and board shorts, most of them carrying short boards around the headland to a surf break that was far enough off the tourist trail to discourage daytrippers. The tourists were just as easy to spot. Pink-skinned English backpackers, Chinese tour groups, small pods of fair-haired Swedes and Germans. And Americans, of course. There was no missing them; the loudest, most colourful diaspora in the world.
Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 Page 55
