‘Vacation’s over, Mr Director,’ Jed snapped. ‘Get Musso out of bed, and get their asses on the road. Now!’
‘With all due respect, sir, we don’t even know if Agent Monroe is under duress.’
‘When people say “With all due respect”, Mr Larrison, in my experience they mean anything but. So I’m not going to bother. You tell me she went in, under cover. She cracked their system, uploaded the data, and now she’s gone offline, but you can track her, or at least her handset, to Blackstone’s residence. I know you intelligence types hate to make assumptions, but I think we can safely jump to the conclusion that the brown stuff has well and truly hit the fan and we have a limited amount of time to clean this shit up before we’re all covered in it.’
To Larrison’s credit, he didn’t back down. ‘If that is so, Mr Culver, sending a stick of Rangers in to kick down the Governor’s door isn’t going to help. But it will surely escalate the problem. I would suggest that if we must intervene, we maintain the minimum possible profile. Sergeant Milosz is awaiting a signal to extract Monroe. We do not have a secure channel to him, but we can still contact him. By telling him to find a safe channel and briefing him in. It will take time we may not have, but I guarantee it’s a better idea than starting a civil war.’
A worsening headache added to Jed’s misery. A steady, growing pain that felt like somebody boring a knuckle into his temple. His hands shook and six slices of four-cheese pizza sat heavy in his gut, leaving him feeling clammy and nauseous.
‘Right,’ he said, exhaling sharply. ‘I’m not going to tell you how to do that. Just get it done. And you’re right, of course. I’m sorry. Kicking in the fucking door and killing every motherfucker inside probably isn’t going to help. No matter how satisfying it might be to contemplate. My apologies, Larrison. I just …’ he fought back the urge to vomit and a painful surge of indigestion, ‘it’s just that we’re so close to nailing this I don’t want it to fall apart at the last moment. So let’s get on it.’
Culver hung up the phone without saying goodbye. Dizziness almost knocked him back to the mattress when he tried to stand, forcing him to lean against the wall and suck in a couple of long draughts of air. When the dark blurs at the edge of his vision receded, he pushed himself off into the small en-suite bathroom and ran a hot shower. He needed to clear his head and think. And maybe throw up properly.
Fucking pizza, he thought. I’ve got fucking food poisoning from that four cheese son of a bitch. He leaned against the sink and struggled to draw in a lungful of air. His reflection in the mirror looked wretched. He was positively green, and dark black pouches stood out under his eyes. He shook off his own problems, however. He had more important things to deal with.
Incomplete information. That was the problem.
Monroe had done her job. She had punched through Blackstone’s defences, and although Jed had not seen the data, Larrison assured him it was enough to bring down the Governor for good. So there was that. It wouldn’t be a matter of just dropping the file on his desk and telling Mad Jack that he was going down. It would have to be handled with some finesse. It might even mean giving the bastard a way to escape honourably. As much as Jed seethed with a hunger to revenge himself on this cocksucker for all of the trouble he caused, he also recognised there were larger questions in play. There was no point taking Blackstone down if he pulled down the temple around him.
And there was still Monroe to consider. They had no idea why Monroe, or at least the locator chip tracking her handset, had suddenly crossed Fort Hood and come to rest in Blackstone’s residence.
A terrible thought occurred to Jed. Terrible, and yet heavy with possibility. It brought his acid reflux surging up painfully, all but unbearably.
If Monroe had proven to herself that Blackstone’s link to Baumer was not just incidental, might she have decided to settle any perceived personal debt with Mad Jack, in spite of his own direct order to the contrary?
He actually laughed at that as he stepped into the shower and let the hot water play over his head; an unkind, braying bark that did as little to improve his mood as the shower did to make him feel any better physically. He was really suffering. It was starting to worry him. But not as much as Agent Monroe.
Had she done to him what he’d done to Kip? Namely, acting with a semblance of obedience for the sole purpose of arranging events to suit herself.
He scrubbed at his scalp as the stinging hot water battered away at the edges of his hangover and his illness. He was having trouble swallowing, and wondered whether he might be coming down with the flu. There was a monster flu bug getting around Seattle right now, like something out of Stephen King. Be just his fucking luck to get it when he could least afford to. He leaned both hands against the wall and let the hot water massage the back of his neck. His belly hung huge and low over his thighs.
He was going to have to get back into shape when this was done. Been promising Marilyn for months that he would do something about his weight and his fitness, but there was always some reason, some excellent excuse for not taking that first step. Another meeting, another crisis, another fire to put out. How the hell was he supposed to look after himself when he spent every waking hour, and then some, looking after the country. And if a guy couldn’t reward himself at the end of the day with a decent drink and a lousy fucking pizza … well, fuck. What was the point?
His stomach rolled over again. He gritted his teeth and promised himself he would do something as soon as he could. Marilyn was right. He’d really let himself go.
First, however, first he had to finish Blackstone, and deal with whatever Monroe had set in train down there. Maybe Kipper had been right about her. Maybe she was the wrong tool. A tactical nuke, when a stiletto was more appropriate.
She’d done something similar in the Federation, he recalled, after breaking Luperico out of that detention centre. Caitlin Monroe had taken what she needed for her mission, in that instance, and then taken a man’s life of her own accord.
How would she play this one? he wondered.
54
FORT HOOD, KILLEEN, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION
She launched herself at him.
Even with her hands cuffed behind her, Caitlin flew at Baumer in a blur, as straight and swift as an arrow. An armchair stood in the way, a deep, club chair, clad in dark brown leather and studded with burnished brass stud buttons. She mounted it as though running up a set of steps, kicking off as she pivoted on one foot and lashed out with the other, aiming a flying side kick at his throat. She meant to crush his larynx with the blade of her foot.
Baumer was ready for her, and had begun to dodge the impact even as she mounted the chair. He slipped sideways, executing a creditable sidestep that she noted as having all the hallmarks of some karate training. Caitlin turned the pile-driver of her flying yoko geri into a vicious roundhouse snap aimed at his head. Baumer, already raising his hands to deflect the attack, switched to a stopping block but didn’t focus the technique in time. Caitlin’s mawashi geri crashed through his defence. He cried out in pain as she shattered his forearm, snapping the ulna like a dry twig.
Even so, the broken bone absorbed enough of the blow to ward off the worst of the impact on his skull. She felt a glancing, dissatisfying impression of her steel-capped boot cracking his cheekbone, but before the energy could transfer itself into his brainpan, he had spun to the floor. Baumer, she knew, had some hand-to-hand skills - basic attack and defence methodology stolen, ironically enough, from the Israeli-developed krav maga combat system, and polished to a pretty high sheen. But his training was straightforward and practical. Good enough for somewhere like New York. Hers had been obsessive and refined. And all but pointless in the circumstances she now found herself in.
Pain, a bright white neutron star of pain, exploded in her chest, as McCutcheon kicked her away from the man she intended to kill. He appeared within her peripheral vision just as she thudded down on a thick Persian rug, after executing the attemp
ted kick to Baumer’s skull. Caitlin landed on her side, exhaling, dropping as much hip and shoulder as she could into the fall; but she remained at a disadvantage to a man on his feet, with the length of a whole room to line up his attack. McCutcheon drove a snap kick into her centre body mass and she flew into the bookshelf, grunting as it forced the last of the air from her lungs.
‘Enough!’ he barked, quickly backing away, holding a gun on her.
‘I probably wouldn’t have done that in your position, Miss Monroe,’ said Blackstone. ‘After all, you’ll be leaving with young Billy Bob in a few minutes. And now you’ve simply exacerbated the bad blood between you.’
‘What the fuck …’ said Caitlin.
Blackstone shook his head. ‘Please, harsh language isn’t necessary. Ty, could you attend to Mr Baumer? I suspect he’s going to need a medic. If you pass me your gun, I’m sure I can persuade Miss Monroe to behave herself.’
The appearance of six TDF troopers at the French doors drew Caitlin’s attention away from her long-time nemesis.
The men looked anxious, uncertain as to whether to come barging in or to wait outside when they saw Blackstone holding the pistol and obviously still in control.
‘Might be an idea if we had the fellows wait in here for a few minutes,’ said the Governor. ‘Miss Monroe has a reputation as a difficult woman. I can see it’s well deserved.’
His aide nodded before limping over to the doors to let them in. He’d hurt himself kicking her. But he’d hurt Caitlin even worse. She could feel a couple of cracked ribs grinding against each other as she found her feet.
Baumer looked ashen, his previous confidence entirely gone. He fixed her with a glare, suffused with murderous intent.
‘Gonna pay for that, whore.’
‘Now then, where were we?’ said Blackstone. ‘Oh yes, you were traducing my honour, my patriotism and my judgment.’
He shot her in the leg.
She registered the roar of the handgun before the shock of the bullet tearing into her thigh. Caitlin screamed an obscenity as she went down, the leg snatched away from beneath her as if by a giant hook. She had been shot before, but it never got any easier. The pain and trauma and sense of violation were new, every time. Still, her training ran deep, and she controlled her collapse towards the floor, screaming to empty the air from her lungs, again, and tucking both arms around her wounded ribs and her chin into her chest to save herself a concussion should her head hit the floor. The impact wasn’t so bad. The bullet had stunned her nervous system and she was still numb. It would be a few seconds before she felt the real pain.
Echelon’s senior field operative found herself down at the same level as Baumer, who was still struggling to recover from the kick to his face. His arms seemed weak and rubbery as Ty McCutcheon, having returned from opening the doors, bent down to support him, and haul him back to his feet. If Caitlin could have dragged herself over to put out his eyes and choke the life from his body, she would have. But she knew that Mad Jack would put a bullet in her head before she got close. The debilitating rage of being so close to the man who had sent killers after her husband and child, of being within killing distance herself, but being unable to act, was nearly as crippling as her wound.
Then the shock of the bullet gave way to floods of pain coursing through her body. She sucked in a mouthful of air, tasting blood and bile as she propped herself up against a dark leather couch, the companion piece to the single-seater she’d used as a platform to fly at Baumer just now. The lounge was covered in lush, ornate splatters of her blood. Shining in the light of a low-hanging chandelier, smelling of earth and copper and corruption.
She was the only thing moving in the room. The TDF squad had entered and now stood gawping at the scene. Baumer leaned against the bookshelf, waves of loathing coming off him like heat. Blackstone sat like a fat, aged monarch in his dressing gown, holding McCutcheon’s pistol on her. Nine men watched the sole woman in the room without comment as, grinding her teeth against the agony, she contorted her lower body to slip her good leg, then her injured limb, through the handcuffs. Her head swam and dark red spots filled her vision as she did so. She moved slowly, and nobody tried to stop her. A childhood memory arose, of a small dog, its back legs and half its spine crushed by a car on the road in front her house on another military base. Edwards AFB, where her father was stationed when she was six. The neighbourhood kids all stood there silently, watching the dog as it struggled to drag itself off the tarmac, unable, in the end, to escape the anchor of its crushed innards holding it in place. Surrounded by armed and hostile men, she felt like that poor animal.
Twenty-five years ago, Caitlin Monroe had walked through the ranks of mute, staring children and crushed the head of that little dog with one, fierce stomp. She was crying as she did so, distraught that such a hard mercy should fall to her when larger, older children stood by, doing nothing.
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.
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