She had just resolved to give the guards another hour when the portico’s heavy wooden door creaked open and two of them emerged, smoking and laughing. She recognised both characters from earlier on: the latte sippers. The pair walked around to the motor pool and took one of the muddy pick-ups parked there before driving away to the south. They certainly didn’t look like men with an important mission hanging over them. More like errand boys sent out to fetch tobacco and cerveza.
The front door remained open. Caitlin withdrew into the forest, fading back into the gloom until she was sure she could move without being seen. She then shifted position round to the south before creeping forward again. With a better view through the open door, she could make out more details.
The reception area did indeed appear to give onto an open-plan office, leading back to the annexe where she had noted the chimney, a kitchen of sorts. With the two men just gone, she was able to mark three other militia: two of the guards and what looked like an older, fatter man in an officer’s uniform, but he was not nearly as well turned out as his deputy. For Caitlin was sure now that the more impressive-looking funcionario was actually Facility 183’s second-in-command. Only a boss hog could get away with such a slovenly ‘tude around a martinet like that.
After a few minutes she withdrew into the brush again, the germ of a plan having formed as she observed them. She would need luck. If the coffee-and-cigarillo twins had driven away at the end of their shift or gone off to fetch more personnel, this wouldn’t work. Not if they returned in a number of vehicles. If, however, they’d simply fucked off to the small village about twelve miles down the road for more supplies, as the Echelon agent suspected, she had a good chance.
Caitlin took a moment to study the digital map in the Navman unit on her forearm. The road curved gently for a mile before climbing into a series of switchbacks as it approached the small hilltop community. There wasn’t much to the place: a cluster of mud-brick huts, a cantina, a chapel, a couple of stands where the local farmers sold produce in the mornings. Her briefing set hadn’t included any more data. The village was tiny and poor, but this had undoubtedly protected it as la colapso took down one South American government after another. It was so small and isolated, the murderous anarchy unleashed in the wake of the Disappearance had largely passed it by. The daily lives of the inhabitants there were probably little different as the loyal subjects of Roberto Morales, el Presidente por Vida, compared to what they’d been as loyal subjects of the long line of Latin brutocrats stretching back centuries before him.
The electronic map together with some quick and dirty math indicated she had about half an hour to get into position at the base of the climb, to catch the two guards on their return journey. Caitlin could run the mile there in much less than that if she took the road, but that would be ill-advised. She could be seen anywhere along that long, gentle curve. There was nothing for it but to cut a path as fast as she could through the thinner scrub at the road’s edge.
She made slow but steady progress, sometimes being able to dash forward through shaded patches of trees and brush. Only once did a vehicle pass by - an old Chevy, with what looked like close to a thousand goats crammed in the back. It didn’t slow down.
Caitlin made it to her ambush point with a notional five minutes to spare. The terrain rose steeply from the river basin here, climbing nearly three hundred yards up to the plateau where the village lay. She made a brief study of the area before deciding to lay up inside a curving U-shape formed by the thick root system of an ancient hardwood tree. It gave her a clear line of fire into the second-last switchback before the road levelled out. The ground fell away steeply into tangles of liana on the open side, while a small creek gave her an escape route if needed.
She prepared her main weapon, the HK-417, before pulling out the hand-tooled flash suppressor from her pack. She screwed the black, foot-long tube tightly into place on the barrel. The suppressor wouldn’t completely eliminate the sound of gunfire, but it would muffle things considerably. The forest would do the rest. She checked her mags, lined up a spare and pulled the charging handle, racking a round into the chamber.
She then settled her cheek against the cool, plastic stock of the German-made assault rifle. With the grip seated firmly in the palm of her hand, she thumbed the selector switch from safe to auto. She waited over iron sights. No need for fancy optics this time.
Birdsong, the buzz of insects, the gurgling of the stream behind her, all seemed to grow louder as she ignored the torrid humidity. Caitlin listened for the sound of an approaching engine. She thought she heard one, but the drone, somewhere far off in the distance, faded away. Her webbing and equipment weighed her down and chafed wherever they happened to rub against her skin. Sweat trickled down her legs inside the trousers she had bloused into her boots to prevent stingers crawling inside. She took a sip from the camel-back water bladder just as the unmistakable sound of a vehicle grinding through its gears reached her. Whoever was coming was having trouble negotiating the steep descent.
Good. Hopefully they’d be travelling with care, moving slowly and attending to the road.
She wiped a slick of perspiration from her face, not wanting to be inconvenienced by the sting of sweat in her eyes at the wrong moment.
The engine strained and misfired, just once, as the truck - it sounded like a truck - negotiated the twisting road above. All the while, she didn’t flinch or take her focus off the hairpin bend she had chosen. About a minute later the old pick-up inched its way around the turn. Caitlin took a half-second sight picture of the driver and passenger, laying the gun’s front sight post on the driver first. Having confirmed them as her guys, she settled into a slightly more comfortable shooting stance - bending her knees fractionally, breathing out, bracing her core muscles to accept the recoil.
As the truck turned towards her, giving the assassin a clear view of the cabin, she squeezed the trigger once, twice, a third time. One, two, three bursts down-range.
The driver slumped forward. His passenger reached for the wheel as Caitlin shifted just a notch, laying the sights on his right temple.
Repeat. One, two, three more bursts of automatic fire.
Nine rounds, from the twenty-round mag. A mix of armour-piercing and hollow-point, and a tracer for every third shot. The bullets exited the small, black hole in the business end of the suppressor in a fraction under one second, with a rapid thrumming noise. Their impact was less than discreet, shattering the windscreen of the aged Ford and tearing into the occupants like the threshing claws of some terrible, unseen carnivore. The men were dead before the vehicle veered slowly off the road and crashed down the hillside into the safety net of a dense strand of thorny vines. The engine coughed and stalled.
Caitlin swapped out her magazine for a new clip. This time, a fifty-round drum mag, in the same arrangement she had just used. Before turning back towards the old police station, she shouldered the 417, unholstered her pistol and half slid, half jumped down the wide path cut through the brush by the uncontrolled passage of the vehicle. She knew both men had taken at least one round to the head, but she was nothing if not thorough.
Reaching the cabin of the trashed utility, she swung into an awkward shooter’s stance on the steep incline, pointing the Kimber Custom pistol at her targets. The windshield had deflected her rounds a bit, but no coup de grace was necessary.
Caitlin knew of men and a few women in her profession who marked every kill with ceremony. Some were religious, others merely cruel. A couple were borderline psychotic. It wasn’t a need she had ever felt.
She didn’t pause to consider the life paths that had led these men to their deaths at her hand. Nor that they may’ve had full, even worthy lives outside of the hours each day when they wore the uniforms in which they’d died.
She merely killed them and moved on.
5
CENTRAL SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES
Jules scoped the hitter well before he made his move. She caught h
im watching her in the mirror behind the bar of the small neighbourhood dive. At first she thought he was just an old perv, eyeballing her in her fabulous new silk shirt. She had tied her dark hair, recently dyed black, into a ponytail, and he wasn’t the only man whose attention she’d caught. His was definitely unwanted, however.
She’d been drinking here at the Idler Bar for the past three weeks and had come to know most of the regulars, at least on a nodding basis. It was a local haunt, the clientele drawn from the warren of streets and back alleys of The Rocks, all within a five-minute walk: Australians, younger Brits and other travellers who’d overstayed their visas after the Wave had hit in March ‘03 and who’d lucked in when the government granted an amnesty a few weeks later.
And there were Americans, of course. Everywhere she went here, always Americans. Enough of them that Sydney was now the third largest American city in the world. Bigger even than Darwin. That’s why her Romanian hitman stood out. She recognised the fierce guttural accent when he demanded the waitress bring him a glass of Palinca, cursing the poor girl when she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
Displaced Europeans were not uncommon in Sydney, but they tended to come from the older EU countries, bearing professional qualifications and bags of money. She knew of a small Russian enclave out at Bondi Beach - an unusual mix of businessmen, academic refugees and gangsters - but apart from them and the city’s original, thoroughly assimilated postwar Slavic migrants, refugees from Eastern Europe were thin on the ground. Especially those from collapsing shitholes like Romania. The Australian Government may have thrown open the floodgates to certain types of migrants and refugees after the Disappearance, but to others the way to the great southern sanctuary was irrevocably closed. The best an illegal could hope for if they were caught was a couple of years on a government prison farm before being deported.
Not her problem. As a subject of Her Majesty, Lady Julianne Balwyn was free to come and go as she pleased from the antipodes, and for the moment it pleased her to stay exactly where she was, in a quiet bar where nobody knew her real name. The Idler was a small, cosy, almost domestic space; it looked very much as though somebody had thrown open the downstairs rooms of their home to passing drinkers. Because they had. The proprietors had converted the bottom floor of what had been a private residence into a bar, completing the circle of life for this 160-year-old building, which had been built as a pub in the former slum district back when some of the older residents could still boast of having arrived in the colony in the holds of convict transports.
Jules liked the Idler because it felt like some of the old drinking holes she remembered from her college days. Right down to the Home County accents. Fitting in here was not a problem for her. The Romanian, on the other hand, stood out like tits on a bull. A cheap leatherette jacket, two sizes too big and way too heavy for the humid, summer evening; a bright Hawaiian shirt, shiny pants and slip-on shoes - the only reason he’d got past the bouncers was because the Idler didn’t have any. It was a cool place that relied on its patrons’ good manners.
The Romanian caught her eye when she was halfway through her second gin and tonic, and deep in conversation with a young American couple who’d got out of Acapulco a day before she had. She’d actually been enjoying herself here. Relaxing for the first time in weeks. Spending some of her stash. The Americans, Donna and Jeff, were on their second bottle of chardonnay and Jules had fallen so easily into chatting with them that she’d finished her first drink before she picked up on the warm, but unmistakably sexual vibe coming off the woman. Jules smiled, a little flattered that they were trying to pick her up and … Well, what the hell. It’d been a long time. The hot night, some very chilled tunes, the mellow warmth of candlelight flickering on the bare sandstone walls of the bar … it all put her in a generous, open frame of mind.
That is, until she caught a glimpse of the man in the heavy imitation-leather jacket regarding her with the cold, flat stare of a snake sizing up a newly hatched chick. His eyes flicked away as soon as she’d made him. He shifted in his seat, pretending not to have noticed her. The nasty, ill-fitting jacket grabbed under his armpit, outlining something there. A gun, she was certain.
A chain-mail fist clenched just under her heart and all of the warm, mellow feeling she had been enjoying sluiced out of her in an icy rush.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Donna, reaching over and lightly running her fingertips down Jules’s forearm. A few minutes earlier it might have elicited a tingle of sexual response. Now, she felt nothing.
‘Sorry. I have to go.’
‘Hey,’ said Donna’s boyfriend, ‘is everything okay? Did we …?’
The Englishwoman regarded him kindly, but with detachment. She could’ve told them that there was a man in the bar who may have been paid to kill her. But Jeff would likely get himself hurt, or worse, by fronting the guy. And if she left with them now, they’d either get in the way of what she had to do or get themselves killed. There was nothing for it. She had to shut them down.
‘Sorry,’ she repeated. ‘Gotta go.’
Julianne pushed away the unfinished drink, picked up her bag and left without another word. Estimating there might only be a few moments before the Romanian followed her (and assuming she wasn’t being a paranoid head case, of course), she hurried away from the small tavern.
The streets were still busy. The Rocks, which had once been one of the most densely populated slums in Sydney, was crowded again, with long terraces of old stone houses playing host to the latest wave of migrants adding to the city’s human alloy. It was common to find a dozen or more of them bedding down under one roof, hot bunking in many cases - one mattress shared between somebody working night shift and another who worked days. Sometimes even couples or whole families took turns like that. It was a curious ghetto, however, given the money the displaced had brought with them. Poor refugees could not afford to stay in the city. Most lived in the outer suburbs, where jobs could be found at the industrial parks, or on the work farms beyond the mountains. Closer to the harbour, life was still pressured, but more pleasant, as it had always been.
Small knots of drinkers stood about on the footpath in front of micro-bars like the Idler. Others weaved along the pavement, singing and laughing as they moved between venues. She could hear the distant, sibilant roar of the crowd down at nearby Circular Quay, but instead of heading towards them, Julianne set her course for the shadowed, less populated streets on the far side of the rocky headland. There were many paths down to the wharf district, but Ferry Lane, a paper cut through the massive sandstone ridge overlooking Walsh Bay, was the one she needed.
On her first night in Sydney, an old sea-dog propping up the bar at the Hero of Waterloo had told her that Ferry Lane was the site of a bubonic plague outbreak back in 1901. Said the first victim had been a drinker at the Hero, and was one of the few who contracted the disease and survived. ‘Thanks to his medicine,’ the old coot had added with a grin, hoisting up a pint of dark bitter. Not really caring whether the story was true or just a tale to entertain a pretty girl, Jules had wandered down there the following day and noted that the cottages lining the ancient passage were all empty, undergoing renovation by the Department of Housing. It was one of the few streets in the centre of Sydney that wasn’t seething with life. That made it perfect for her purposes now.
The revelry faded quickly as she hurried on. From the unseen docks up ahead, the sound of shipping containers impacting on steel decks boomed up through the winding, narrow streetscape. She was pretty sure she had a follower.
At the next turn Jules increased her pace, giving her some distance but, as she’d intended, not enough to shake the tail. Another turn, a burst of speed, a few more metres between them, and then she was into Ferry Lane - thankful she had worn her Doc Martens instead of the Fendi FMBs she’d earlier considered. The heels would’ve been murder on the cobblestone surface. Instead, sure of her footing, she raced now, counting her steps, before taking cove
r behind a huge metal skip full of trash from the building site. From her shoulder bag she retrieved an M26 mil-grade taser and crouched down out of sight, gathering a handful of pebbles while she waited.
He was not long in coming. She heard his footsteps crunching towards her as he hurried to catch up, undoubtedly surprised that she’d slipped ahead of him. He faltered momentarily at the laneway entrance, before continuing.
Julianne counted his footsteps, compensating for the longer strides she had taken when running. When she judged him at range, she tossed the pebbles off to her left, where they plinked against a broken window. Not waiting to see if the distraction had worked, she committed herself to action. Standing. Levelling the weapon, and triggering it as soon as she recognised the squat outline of the man in the leather jacket.
For a half second she panicked, worried that his poxy pretend-leather coat might shed the prongs. But she needn’t have. The charge from the M26 could arc through two inches of clothing. And anyway, he was reaching for the pistol in his shoulder holster, exposing most of his centre mass. The darts struck him in the chest and channelled a solid hit of high-voltage arse kicking directly into his body.
The effect was … well, electric.
The Romanian grunted and dropped to the road surface, falling heavily onto broken bricks and rusted steel pickets. Jules had paid nearly five hundred bucks to have the M26 modified, removing the five-second limit on the charge. She let him have a good, long taste of the juice until she was certain she’d crippled him, at least temporarily. His gun had clattered to the ground and lay somewhere underneath him; a small problem she solved by hitting him again with brief bursts from the taser, interspersed with solid kicks into the back of his head. It was enough, after a few seconds, to move his body clear of the weapon. Jules stunned him once more as she darted in to retrieve it.
Holding the gun on her would-be assailant, the Englishwoman suffered just a second’s doubt. What if she had just zapped a completely innocent man?
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