‘We’ve put you up on the second floor,’ said Birendra. ‘Fewer lines of attack than the ground-floor apartment you were in. I hope that is okay.’
She laid her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. ‘It’s perfect, thank you.’
The wharves still rumbled with the noise of heavy construction work. It would continue through the night, but her eyes were drooping, filled with sand, and Jules didn’t think she’d even notice. She promised herself that, come morning, she would find some way of making contact with the Rhino. For now, she could barely walk in a straight line.
It did not occur to her to ask Birendra how he’d gained access to her room to move her bags into the new lodgings. Perhaps a bribe to the manager? Perhaps a spot of standover. She didn’t care. When she was alone again, after he had done a final sweep of the new room and left her to rest, Jules forced herself to have a shower, washing away the grime and sweat of a long and terrible day. By the time she crawled into a tee-shirt and then into bed - having carefully placed the shottie, pointing away from her, on the bedside table - she was struggling to remain conscious. She fell into a deep sleep within seconds of laying her head down.
34
TEMPLE, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION
Unlike the prim dormitory suburbs of Killeen, the ruination of Temple announced itself from a great distance. They approached from the south-west, sweeping up along Interstate 35, the wheels of the Humvee throwing up small fantails of water from the puddles that had gathered on the tarmac. Caitlin could tell from a few minutes out that large parts of the town had burned back in ‘03. The southern suburbs seemed to grin at her through the rain like shattered teeth in a skull. Thick stands of trees grew up through the foundations of houses that were now no more than blackened stumps and stagnant pools of run-off, festering in former cellars. The site reminded her of ruins she had seen in the jungles of South America and Asia.
‘Looks a little shabby,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t have tidied up before I got here?’
‘We really are a pretty minor operation here,’ replied Tusk Musso. ‘It’s just my eighty-seven staff, two platoons of army Rangers to provide security and a floating population of about a dozen ring-ins, who might be here at any time on temporary assignment.’
‘Rangers? That’s a little excessive for garrison duty.’
‘You’d think so, but a lot of my people are out in the field and they need class-A security out there. Standard procedure is to send a stick of Rangers out to scout ahead while another one rides shotgun over the resettlement teams.’
‘What’s your problem? Bandits? Road agents?’
‘Mostly both, yeah,’ said Musso. ‘But we’ve had to stand down the occasional TDF unit as well. Turf disputes. Misunderstandings about exactly how much autonomy federal officers have, even outside the Mandate. Some of these guys forget that Texas is still part of the US.’
They rolled through the remains of a former commercial precinct, or perhaps a light industrial neighbourhood, on the very edge of town. Weeds and saplings grew thick within the ruins.
‘So how much of the place burned?’ she asked, looking ahead out of the windshield.
‘A lot of the suburbs in the north, and maybe about a third here on the southern edge,’ he said. ‘The centre of town, where we are, isn’t as bad. There was some fire damage back on the day, but a lot of the commercial buildings were protected by their automated systems. There’s been some flash flooding in the intervening years, however. That messed up the road network worse than all the crashes on Wave Day.’
Some major ground-zero effects could be seen at the intersection of I-35 and a multi-lane loop road - the Dodgen Loop, if she recalled from the briefing notes. It looked like a couple of acres had been bulldozed. Musso saw her frowning at the devastation.
‘A total clusterfuck, Agent Monroe. Army engineers came through, demolished everything. It wasn’t just the usual automotive cataclysm. A tanker that had been circling to land over at the Fort on Wave Day decided to come down here instead when it lost its crew. It’s lucky the whole city didn’t go up, but the freeway acted as a firebreak and a line of storms passed through the same day, to damp everything down.’
Again, Caitlin had that weird, almost extrasensory, impression of thousands of ghosts pressing in on her. And hundreds of millions beyond them. Outside of New York, Seattle and most recently Kansas City, she hadn’t travelled at all in the US since returning here for the Battle of New York in April. Like everyone, she’d read a few articles about the ecological catastrophe that followed the Disappearance, and she and Bret had watched the David Attenborough documentary series on the BBC, Life After the Americans, about the natural world re-colonising the continent. Or at least they’d watched the first two episodes. While she found it fascinating, Bret was too upset to watch any more than that.
She craned her head around as the Humvee rumbled through the rebuilt intersection. She felt that for the first time she really had some idea of the magnitude of what had happened here in 2003. It wasn’t just the people who’d gone missing. The very land had violently and almost instantly begun to rearrange itself.
‘I’ve seen worse,’ said Musso, reading her thoughts. ‘Sometimes whole cities just gone, like photographs of Hiroshima after the bomb, but worse. You look at those old photos and they only ever show the city. I remember flying across the country when we were doing the first surveys, after I got back from Gitmo and they didn’t know what to do with me. I tell you, Caitlin, the things I saw. Scorched earth for hundreds of miles beyond the edges of some cities. Reminded me a bit of Iraq after Saddam lit off the oil wells that first time. Except much, much worse. Out in the desert, there was nothing to die under those clouds. Here it was different.’
The general’s face had a faraway look to it, and she wondered whether he was even aware he’d just called her by her first name. They continued up I-35 for a couple of minutes, until he took an off ramp at Lengfeld Drive, the primary route into the heart of Temple, by virtue of it being the only one that had been completely cleared. The gateway to the city consisted of a couple of rubble-strewn blocks, which looked as though the army’s Corps of Engineers had done as thorough a job on them as it had a little further back up the highway. Small mountains of concrete, twisted I-beams, bricks, car bodies, and the shattered frames of a couple of dozen small buildings had all been piled up like an offering to an angel of destruction.
‘Is that all left over from when you opened the place up?’ she asked him.
Musso threw off his distracted air. ‘Yeah. It was a real mess in there. And when we settled on Temple for the Federal Center, this road we’re on offered the best access for the smallest investment. Engineers just smashed a way through, built a big pile of crap at the nearest convenient dumping ground.’ The general waved a hand towards his window. ‘Most of the city hasn’t been cleared. The roads are still blocked with auto wreckage, and in the burnt-out sections, there’s whole forests grown up and over the street grid.’
She could see railway yards on the right as they approached the centre of town. A big diesel engine was chugging through at walking pace.
‘So it’s all about the railway line?’
‘No, it’s partly about the railway line. Partly about the highway. Mostly about the Hood. If they weren’t here, we’d have left this place to the coyotes and the vermin. But the road and rail links are important, and God knows if we ever sort out the politics, Temple will probably revert to its first life as a transport hub.’
As they entered the fringe of the old central business district, General Musso slowed down and waved to a foot patrol trudging through the drizzle. A small wedge of the city centre between Lengfeld and the Amtrak station had been cleared, but not reclaimed. The buildings looked woebegone. Many of the windows were broken, and here and there where a facade had collapsed, the debris had merely been pushed back off the footpath. Caitlin wondered whether the sticky, black puddles of grease that marked the last resting plac
e of the Disappeared had been cleaned out of them, or whether the buildings functioned as mausoleums. She thought the latter most likely. Even back in KC, large swathes of the city had not been cleared of the dead.
‘Looks a little gloomy, I know,’ said Musso dryly. ‘But in her defence, you did catch us on a wet Sunday afternoon. You wait till you see peak hour tomorrow morning. There can be upwards of half-a-dozen cars between the hotel and the municipal building. It can take the better part of a minute to drive between them.’
She allowed herself a smile. ‘I’ll make sure to set my alarm.’
‘Don’t make it too early,’ warned the former Marine as he turned onto Main Street and took them past the elegant old pile of the Municipal Building, which now housed the federal government in central Texas. ‘We’re having drinks tonight. I’ve set up a meeting with Blackstone’s right-hand man, Ty McCutcheon. Worked as Mad Jack’s aide when he was up at Fort Lewis. He’s Blackstone’s Jed Culver down here, you might say. A charming devil - emphasis on “devil”. Did Culver tell you much about him?’
‘Made it clear he didn’t like him much,’ replied Caitlin. ‘Told me not to trust him, but I filed that under “Well, duh”.’
Musso laughed at that. ‘Yeah. They got some history, those two. Butted heads back in Seattle, during week one of the Disappearance. McCutcheon was Blackstone’s knife hand back then. Still is. He did a lot of the dirty work on the resistance in Seattle. Undercover stuff, black bag jobs. Kinda nasty, if truth be known. Lot of people got snatched out of their homes and beds because of Ty McCutcheon. He tried to monster Jed Culver into submission too. Didn’t work out so well for him.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Caitlin, with a thin, bleak facsimile of a smile. Culver might have looked like Mr Stay Puft, but the evil one, from Ghostbusters.
They pulled up in front of the Kyle Hotel. Built decades ago, but recently refurbished, it retained the stolid, immovable appearance of much of the city’s older architecture.
‘He’ll meet us here, your new home,’ Musso told her. ‘We rebuilt the old bar downstairs. Fitted it out with some of the best salvage we could pick up around town. It’s not a bad spot, even if I say so myself. Always wanted to run my own bar.’
‘And McCutcheon was happy to come over?’
He cranked on the handbrake and turned off the engine.
‘Yes. For two reasons. As I explained earlier, you have something they want. And as I explained to McCutcheon, Colonel Kate Murdoch is very easy on the eye. Sorry about that. He asked.’
Caitlin rubbed at her finger where her wedding ring should’ve been. ‘Great,’ she said wearily. ‘The mortal enemy of Mr Stay Puft is a pants man.’
*
The listening devices in her hotel room were of Israeli design, but at least five years old. That told Special Agent Monroe she wasn’t dealing with Mossad. Or the NIA. Or even with some embarrassing effort by Tusk Musso’s security team to monitor her presence in their midst. No, the Verint Systems bugs she found in the land-line phone, the alarm clock and the dead television set were the sort of cast-offs Tel Aviv would be happy to hand over to Blackstone’s security services as an unacknowledged part of the wider technology-transfer agreement he had with the Israeli Government. It took her less than ten minutes to sweep the room and locate them all.
No biggie, she thought.
She left the devices in place. No point tipping off anybody at Fort Hood. Colonel Murdoch wouldn’t have thought to look for such things. Not here in Temple, anyway. She re-examined and discarded the idea that Musso might’ve planted them. The tech wasn’t standard issue for the feds, and the chances of him acting so stupidly were as close to zero as made no difference. He was aware of her capabilities, at least in a basic sense. The only question she had was whether to inform him that his own security had been compromised.
Again. A no-brainer. She’d keep the information to herself.
A few hours stretched out ahead for Colonel Murdoch, before McCutcheon was due to arrive. She had her own traps and snares to put in place before the evening, in preparation for which she would need the help of Musso and at least one of his staff in the bar downstairs. That took all of ten minutes to organise, by which time the rain had eased off, allowing her the chance to explore the streets around the Federal Center and familiarise herself with what she thought of as her lay-up point.
There wasn’t much to see. The Corps of Engineers had done an excellent job of clearing the debris of apocalypse, large and small, from the neighbourhood. If it weren’t for the damaged shopfronts, the occasional burnt-out building shell and the large numbers of broken windows on the upper floors along Main Street, it could have been any small city on a wet public holiday. No traffic, very few people walking around, nothing open.
The Texas Administrative Division’s Federal Center was housed in the old town hall, a fine-looking building a few minutes’ walk down the street from the Kyle Hotel, where she and everyone else in Temple was staying. She had an office inside the Federal Center, where she would be expected to compile her report on the military capabilities and intentions of the South American Federation and what, if any, additional US military forces might be necessary to counter any threat from them. She was grateful to Musso for having seen to that already. It was a pain when you had to work as hard at the cover story as you did on the mission behind it.
It was telling though, she thought, that Blackstone took Roberto seriously enough to have approached Seattle on the matter. After spending the last couple of years making life as difficult as possible for the feds, it had to be significant that the Governor had now turned around and begged them to commit more forces to the southern flank, as he insisted on calling it. Having so recently been in the Federation herself, Caitlin had no illusions about the malignant nature of Roberto Morales’s regime, but nor could she see it as a credible threat. Assuming he even survived - el Presidente por Vida or not - Morales would need another five to ten years to consolidate his rule, after which there’d be an unknown amount of time before he was able to project power very far beyond the borders of his empire. If he did manage to pull all of that off, it would be quite the strategic challenge for the next generation of American leaders, dealing with a hostile super-state stretching from the Panama Canal to the southern tip of Chile. But that was a long way off in the future, and chances were it would never happen. If she had to put money on the barrel head, Caitlin Monroe would bet heavily against any sort of unitary state surviving down there. It was only the chaos of la colapso that had enabled the Colombian gang boss to gather so much power to himself, so quickly. Once the imperative of survival passed, Morales, like all dictators, would soon build up a complex of grinding fault lines and fractures within the structure of his regime. What the old Soviets used to call ‘inherent contradictions’. She had seen it time and again, before and after the Wave: the more oppressive the dictatorship, the more stable it appeared to be, right up until the moment it collapsed. And they all collapsed in the end. Closed, authoritarian systems simply could not regulate themselves. The complexities eventually undid them.
Did it mean that Blackstone was paranoid to be obsessing about the Federation? Had he transferred his irrational resentments and fears from James Kipper to Morales? Was that something she’d have to factor into her mission? Playing to the man’s neuroses could be a fast track into his trusted circle. Or it could make her look like she was patronising him.
After covering a couple of blocks around the old city office building and memorising the terrain, Caitlin turned around and headed back to the hotel. There were a few people out walking the streets, now that the weather had cleared up slightly. There was hardly a wealth of things to do in Temple, Texas, and she imagined that one could quickly go nuts cooped up in the Kyle. She wondered if the junior members of the mission were subjected to the same level of harassment as Musso had described. If so, it would certainly discourage them from heading over to Fort Hood during their down time, even though the
recreational facilities out that way had to be so much better.
As she reached the corner of the block on which the hotel stood, she caught the eye of a man out walking by himself. He was thin, with a heavy black moustache, and seemly tightly wrapped up in himself, dressed in plain clothes, but with a soldier’s bearing and appearance, and something more with it.
‘Hello. Excuse me,’ she said as they drew level. ‘I just got into town. I was wondering if there was anywhere to eat besides the hotel?’
The man smiled and nodded, a strangely formal gesture. When he spoke, it was with a thick Polish accent.
‘I am afraid, madam, no there is not. It is a pity and inexplicable to me, Fryderyk Milosz, once of Polish GROM, now of US Army Rangers. When I accepted transfer here to be closer to brother’s family, who come to farm in the Federal Mandate, I did so on promise of posting where nothing happens and only danger I, Milosz, would face would be risk of growing dangerously fat on excellent barbecue foods.’
Caitlin opened her mouth, but he forged on. Apparently Fryderyk Milosz, once of Polish GROM, now of US Army Rangers, had a lot to get off his chest.
‘I fought with the pirate arsewits in New York, madam, and despite their best efforts, I survive, thanks to excellent GROM training and intervention of two crooked smugglers, who save Milosz from arsewits but not from disappointment which is another story, unrelated to immediate disappointment of barbecue. A quiet posting and too much barbecue, is that too much to ask? I fight for this country, now all I wish is pulled pork roll. Yes. Apparently it is too much. And so now I am deranged with hunger and disappointment. So much that I have neglected my manners. I am Master Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz, once of Polish GROM. And you are?’
She actually giggled, charmed by this old-world eccentric. ‘I am Colonel Kate Murdoch, Sergeant Milosz. United States Air Force.’
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