‘And you were supplied with a line of credit and introductions so that you might raise whatever support you would need here in Darwin, is that correct?’
Again the prisoner did his best to agree without moving his head in any way that would cause his nose to end up on the floor. Shah waved his fingers and the knife withdrew. Parmenter wheezed out a ragged sigh.
‘The men you hired for today’s operation,’ said Shah. ‘Where did you find them? Who gave you their names?’
The fear was back in Parmenter’s eyes and he shook his head in short, jerky motions, spraying droplets of bright red blood in a fan in front of him.
‘Come along now, Mr Parmenter. I can understand your being nervous. The men you dealt with were undoubtedly dangerous and unpleasant. But you are here with us now.’
He paused a beat.
‘And we can also be very dangerous and most unpleasant. And, in contrast with your hirelings, who are all now dead, our competence is not in question. So, Mr Parmenter, I ask you again, in this quiet room, where nobody in the world knows you to be, and immediately outside of which the bodies of your accomplices are stacked like cordwood, whom did you go to for your hired help?’
‘Whom?’ asked Pappas, in a jolly tone. ‘Are you sure it’s not “who”?’
‘No,’ said Jules, playing along. ‘Definitely “whom”.’
Parmenter’s face was a mask of blood below the line cut into his forehead. It made it difficult for Julianne to be certain, but she thought he may have lost much of his colouring.
‘You must have heard my friend say we are on rather a tight schedule here this morning,’ Shah went on, his tone conversational. ‘It would be of no moment for us to add one more body to those we have piled up outside. And in a minute, I am afraid, we may have to. Unless you are able to satisfy my curiosity. Who, Mr Parmenter, put you in touch with your subcontractors? You must have had references. You have not long been in Australia. So who is your local contact?’
‘Oh, come on! I thought we’d settled on “whom”,’ joked Pappas.
Parmenter began to shake. The slightest of tremors at first, but building quickly to such an intensity that the chair began to rattle against the floor. Shah held out his hand for the kukri dagger.
‘Sandline, it was Sandline,’ said Parmenter, as though coughing up a furball. ‘I got in three days ago and went straight to Sandline. Rubin made the introductions.’
The name dropped like a cannonball at their feet. Cesky had somehow linked up with one of the biggest private military companies and security contractors working in the Northern Territory.
‘Well, that could be tricky,’ said Pappas. ‘What do you want to do about that?’
Shah smiled. ‘For now, I will do nothing. If one stands by the bank of the river long enough, the severed heads of one’s enemies will float by. So for now, I will stand by the river.’
Pappas checked his watch. ‘Well, time to hit the frog and toad, my friends,’ he said. ‘What do you want to do with this criminal mastermind?’
Parmenter fixed him with an expression of woebegone helplessness. ‘You have to let me go,’ he pleaded, directing his words at Jules. ‘It’s nothing personal, ma’am. Weren’t nothing personal when you killed my guys today. Same thing for me. I just took a job, and believe me, I’m happy to walk away from it. Your friend, Ross, the big guy, I’m sorry about that. I -‘
She took one step forward and swung the base of her pistol grip into his face with as much force as she could, connecting with his cheekbone and shattering it. The dull, wet crack sounded like a tree branch breaking and Parmenter went over with the inevitability of a rotten oak falling to the woodsman’s axe. As he crashed to the ground, Jules drove a kick into his face, smashing his nose flat. None of the men moved to stop her.
‘Who else?’ she shouted. ‘Was there anyone else besides the Rhino and me? Did you have any other contracts from Rubin?’
She didn’t see much point in asking him about Cesky. It would only confuse him.
‘Julianne?’ said Pappas, but she ignored him.
The SIG Sauer was still warm from the rounds she had fired downstairs. It was in her hand, pointing at the man on the floor before even she knew what she was doing. Jules fired one shot and Parmenter’s kneecap exploded in red ruin. He screamed and she stamped down on the joint she had just destroyed.
‘Who else, you manky little cunt? Who else have you killed?’
‘Just the Lebanese guy,’ he wailed. ‘Zood. His stupid fucking name was Zood.’
She almost relaxed at that. Her body, which had tightened itself into a giant fist, almost unclenched.
‘And a Mexican,’ Parmenter hurried on to add, in case she thought he was trying to hide something from her. ‘Just a Mexican. After I did Zood, they said I did good,’ he blabbed, snorkelling air in through a thick soup of mucus and blood. ‘So they sent me to Kansas City. It was just a few days ago, and …’
Julianne felt her blood running cold down to the core. Her entire universe narrowed in on this bloody-nosed, half-scalped bag of pus.
Baran ducked left. It was his only option.
The gun fired three times in quick succession. Every shot into Norman Parmenter’s guts before she pumped a fourth into his sternum. Before she could regret it. And before the others could stop her. Each time the SIG Sauer kicked in her hand, she pulled the trigger again, the report drowning out her own shrieks of rage. Each spent brass casing sailed over her head, tracing a trail of smoke in a lazy arc through the air.
Miguel. Oh, Miguel …
Cesky had killed her friend. And maybe his family. And Cesky had been able to send this worthless shitbag to do that because she’d been so wrapped up in her own problems, she hadn’t made an effort to warn him, after Galveston, after Sydney.
A dark fog descended on the disused office, as though the blood pouring from Parmenter’s wounds had blinded her too. Hot gusts of fury blew through her mind and she became lost, detached from the world. She was distantly aware of insensate anger exploding from deep within her soul, emerging into the world in the form of a terrible violence. No one made a move for her until she’d emptied her entire clip into the mashed ruin of the killer’s shattered skull. Only after the third click did anyone attempt to restrain her.
She was kicking a corpse. No longer feeling even the slightest discomfort from her injuries. Just kicking and kicking the dead weight, feeling bones crack and skin tear. Until she was wailing like a little girl lost. Enfolded in Shah’s massive arms. Pouring oceans of tears into his shirt front. Falling and turning and reaching for something to hold on to.
But finding nothing.
50
FORT HOOD, KILLEEN, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION
Midnight in Blackstone’s Texas.
Once onto 27th Street, Caitlin did her best to look like she belonged. While there was not a great deal of pedestrian traffic so late at night, it wasn’t uncommon to see troopers in uniform and civvies moving about post. Vehicles passed her without slowing down. She had a moment of anxiety, when a Fort Hood police cruiser stopped at the intersection of 27th and 761st Tank Battalion Avenue, but after a short delay, they rolled on down the road.
Probably checking they got the right donuts, she thought.
In uniform, Caitlin was just scenery, part of the Fort Hood landscape. She wondered whether Milosz had finished his mandarins yet. He wasn’t far away, laid up in one of the hundreds of empty tract houses that lay between Robert Gray air base and the fort, waiting to meet up with her again when she was done. She had no concerns on his behalf. As with Corporal Summers, she’d run Milosz through the Echelon data-core, a process that also plugged into the FBI and NIA mainframes. He being a foreign national who’d been cleared to join the US Army as a special operator, the return on his query was extensive. Service in Iraq and New York, as he had said; but decorated twice in the latter theatre, which he hadn’t mentioned. She was confident that the kung fu of Master Sergeant Fryderyk
Milosz, formerly of GROM, was more than a match for the TDF.
She just wondered whether she was.
Checking her Siemens phone, she calculated that she was too far away to walk to III Corps. Milosz dropped her as close as he dared, but that was not very close. She would need wheels. The free buses weren’t running, although she did see a cab pass through every so often, usually loaded up with a squad of drunks trying to get back to the barracks. Proceeding west down 761st, she looked around for a vehicle.
She gave a beat-up-looking Honda Civic some thought - easiest car in automotive history to boost - before catching sight of a Hummer parked in front of an office building girded up with scaffolding. Chalk blocks behind the tyres and its windows all zipped up told her the vehicle was parked for the night, or until someone needed it.
The bumper number meant nothing to her. She couldn’t fit it into her understanding of the TDF’s order of battle. In the pre-Wave days, she would’ve snapped a digital shot and sent it to Echelon for enquiry. She was a completist like that. Her husband could probably read its meaning, but he wasn’t here. And if he had been, Bret would’ve just boosted it. ‘Static,’ he would tell her. ‘Just so much static. Take the thing and be done with it.’
Caitlin looked up and down the street, checking it was clear, before she opened the plastic-canvas door and scoped the padlocked cable holding the steering wheel in place. A few minutes of effort with her pick set, and she’d popped the lock. After removing the chalk blocks, she flipped the starter switch, waiting for the warm-up light to fade out before cranking the beast up. Soon she was cruising down 761st Tank Battalion Avenue with enough gas to carry her to San Antonio if she wanted. Keeping an eye out for MPs, civilian police or TDF security, she watched the barracks, field houses and shops of Fort Hood pass behind her as she drove through the night.
Caitlin ditched the vehicle at the old headquarters building for the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division. It was a good place to leave a stolen Hummer. When the Cav came back from the Middle East, they’d ended up crammed onto Fort Hood along with a lot of other assets awaiting reassignment or demobilisation. There were over a hundred of the same squat, blocky vehicles parked in a lot, still awaiting new homes within the United States military. Or export to any foreign power willing to pay the asking price maybe. Her briefing notes had made it clear that the Hood did a roaring trade in surplus weapons and equipment, despite Blackstone’s protests regarding Seattle’s own military surplus sales.
Working her way across 761st from the north-west, she approached III Corps Headquarters on foot. While it was brightly lit, there were no guard towers, no spotlights, no razor wire or ravenous dogs. It could have been any business park in the pre-Disappearance US. It was just an office complex, really. Not the Death Star.
She opened a link back to Echelon Prime and sent an encrypted data burst from her cell. Just under three thousand kilometres away, a systems operator in the Technical Services directorate received the message he’d been waiting for.
A single keystroke was all that was required to unleash the malware that had been reformatted to attack a specific server in the IT section at Fort Hood. Triple-masked infiltrators, buried within standard data-matching protocols, were now insinuating themselves into the control schemata for the relevant sectors. A micro-second of static and white noise would mark the instant at which local control failed and a remote authority took over. With that, the first layer of defence had fallen. Eight monitors, taking feeds from a random cycle of CCTV cameras around the Territorial Capital Building of Texas, would now have begun playing cached data looped from their own hard storage. The two security guards working the graveyard shift, who wouldn’t have noticed the split second of flickering disturbance on their monitors in the reception hall, no doubt continued their discussion of the best pre-Wave titty bars in Houston, without breaking stride.
Back in the field, the operative’s cell phone vibrated silently to confirm the subversion as she approached Blackstone’s headquarters. Pulling out her lock-picking equipment from a breast pocket - a nine-piece set, strictly old school - Caitlin went to work on a door at the rear of the complex. There was nothing special about the lock on the fire escape she had chosen, and the two sets of pins separated after a few minutes’ painstaking work. Then came the moment she always dreaded when relying on off-site intervention and back-up. If Technical Services hadn’t subverted the building’s layered defences, she would trip an alarm in the next two seconds.
Caitlin carefully pushed open the door …
She couldn’t hear any alarms, but that didn’t mean that red lights weren’t flashing and buzzers sounding somewhere else. She doubted the local security chimps would have had the wit to tackle her quietly. They’d arrive with lights twirling and sirens blaring in the night. But having them arrive at all would still constitute an epic fuck-up.
She closed the door behind her.
Almost no natural light penetrated beyond a few steps into the internal corridors. A pair of night-vision goggles, set to low-light amplification, took care of that detail. Besides allowing her to navigate with confidence, the LLAMPS headset would let her pick out the telltale filigree of laser-based tripwire systems. She hadn’t seen any when she’d passed through here during the day, but that wasn’t to say that there were none on site.
Caitlin moved as quickly as she could, wary of raising the alarm via a clumsy footfall that would echo around such an empty building. She had plotted out a course avoiding the front desk, where she knew the two nightwatchmen were now on duty. But, naturally, there was no guarantee the guards weren’t stalking the halls at the same time as her. If they were any good at their job, they’d be doing so at random intervals.
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 in
side 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.
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