‘Did you see the news this morning?’ she asked. ‘Henry made the news. The real news, I mean, not just the blogs.’
‘Don’t have much time for the news these days,’ he said. ‘Just the weather and the fishing reports, and I can get those by sticking my head out the window or hobbling down to the coffee shop.’
She took a piece of folded newsprint from the pocket of her shorts. It was damp and frayed, but still legible. Both of his hands were bandaged, and one of them was missing three fingers. Jules unfolded the clipping and held it out for him to read.
‘Presidential confidant Cesky to face consecutive life terms,’ he quoted from the headline. A smile formed at the edge of his mouth, but died there. ‘That’s good news, I suppose,’ he said. ‘If they convict him. If I had my way, though, he’d a-been thrown to the sharks. Worthless motherfucker.’
He read the rest of the report while she held the piece of paper as steadily as she could in the breeze. She was done with crying. She’d emptied herself of tears back in Darwin.
‘Still no sign of his daughter, then? Little Sofia,’ he said quietly after finishing the story.
Julianne didn’t reply. Miguel’s daughter had disappeared soon after his murder. The police and the FBI had listed her as a missing person, but she doubted they were doing much to find her. America was full of missing people.
‘Do you think Cesky got her?’ Jules asked.
‘I hope not,’ the Rhino said. ‘For Miguel’s sake, I would hope not. That poor family, they were good people. They deserved none of it.’
‘This life,’ sighed Jules. ‘Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.’
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Surfers, joggers and bush walkers passed by them in both directions.
‘Good of Shah to let you have his place down here,’ she said after a while, for want of anything better to fill the space between them.
‘Another good man,’ said the Rhino.
‘You think you’ll go back to Darwin when you’re better? Shah says there’s a job for you anytime you want.’
The Rhino leaned forward and rested his chin on the handle of his walking stick. ‘Yeah, I know. Piloting an armed cruiser for him off Bougainville. The big copper mine up there has had some problems with pirates and gun-runners. It wouldn’t be a million miles away from the work I used to do for the Coast Guard.’
She closed her eyes and let the sun play over her face. ‘You wouldn’t be working for yourself though, would you, Rhino?’ she asked, reading his mind. ‘Wasn’t that always the plan?’
‘That’s the thing about plans, Miss Jules. They almost never survive contact with the enemy.’ He plucked a flower and sniffed it before tossing the bright orange bloom into the undergrowth behind them. ‘And what about you?’ he asked. ‘I don’t see you working as a delivery girl in the long term.’
She opened her eyes again and smiled. ‘No, neither do I. I had thought I might try my luck back in the States, you know, after they got hold of me to testify against Cesky. Bloody video link put paid to that idea, didn’t it.’
The Rhino nodded. He’d given his initial deposition from a hospital bed in Darwin. Like her, he’d been raped by Cesky’s lawyers.
‘Come on,’ he grunted, pushing himself up off the bench, ‘walk back with me. We’ll have an early lunch.’
They started back down the trail. Jules was forced to fall in behind him every time they passed somebody heading up towards the headland.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘What now for Lady Julianne Balwyn? Back to the ancestral estate, perhaps? I hear the new feudalism is all the rage in old England. Or is it the cruel sea for you again, m’lady? High adventure? Fortune and glory?’
She laughed. Not loudly and not for long, but she did laugh.
‘No, Rhino,’ she said. ‘An early lunch is what now for Lady Julianne. And maybe a nap in the afternoon.’
ONE YEAR LATER
The inauguration was a simple ceremony, at Kipper’s insistence. He knew Jed had wanted something a little grander, something more significant, as a way of reassuring people that not everything was lost. And there were times when Kip almost gave in to it, but in the end he went with his gut. That the country was best served by a return to basics. After being sworn in for a second time, President James Kipper gave a brief speech in the drawing room at Dearborn House, before hosting a reception for two hundred guests, all of whom he had personally chosen.
There were no invites for any of his supporters from ‘the Machine’, as Jed used to call the political movement that had evolved out of the resistance to Jackson Blackstone - a strictly ironic turn of phrase. Jed Culver had not thought much of the Machine. Even though it had delivered two presidential elections.
His supporters were all hitting it hard at a warehouse party on the other side of Seattle. He’d send a video message later, but he made it clear that as a working parent he wouldn’t be turning up to tie one on. Instead he circulated among the guests at Dearborn with a beer in hand, and an ear for their stories. From the veterans of New York. Militia men and women from the frontier forts. Workers from the railway projects and power plants. Teachers. Farmers. Two hundred Americans, young and old, whose lives, every day of them, were devoted to rebuilding the Republic. His only real concession to politics in this - and something that Jed would have approved of - was making sure that at least half of the guests came from Texas, including the new Governor, an altogether easier-to-deal with retired general by the name of Murphy. Newly returned from a short stint in Vancouver.
Well, the Texas delegates weren’t his only concession to politics, he had to admit. There were three guests at the reception whose presence was purely political; a statement from James Kipper that he stood by the legacy of his Chief of Staff.
‘Thank you, Kip,’ said a quiet and restrained Marilyn Culver. ‘Jed would’ve loved this.’ She gestured around the room with her champagne glass. She’d hardly touched a drop in over an hour.
‘No, Marilyn, he wouldn’t,’ replied Kipper. He too scanned the roomful of ordinary people, none of them donors or players or significant for any reason beyond their humble contribution to the life of the nation. ‘He would have wanted to know what these assholes could possibly do for us.’
He finished by leaning towards her and speaking quietly in a passable imitation of Culver’s Louisiana drawl. A few people, standing close by, trying not to be obvious about eavesdropping, turned towards him. But people, especially in Seattle, were well used to the President’s informal manners. Marilyn squeezed his forearm in thanks.
‘It’s still nice for the kids to be here,’ she said. ‘They had a very hard time of it after their father died. Some of the things people were saying about him. The most terrible lies, Kip. You know how kids can be, how they take these things to heart.’
Kipper fixed Culver’s widow with his sternest, most presidential look.
‘Marilyn,’ he told her, ‘you are to pay no heed to any of that bullshit. Jed had enemies because he sought them out. He was a guy who knew right from wrong and he wasn’t afraid to act on that knowledge. A guy like that, he gets people offside. But he does it for the right reasons. A lot of the things Jed did for this country, people will never know about. You and the kids will never know either. That’s just the way it has to be. But what people can know is that I thought Jed Culver was a good man, and he did the right thing.’
He had to hug Marilyn then, because she teared up and all but fell into his arms.
‘Oh God, Kip. I miss the Jedi Master,’ she said, her voice muffled by tears and the lapel of his suit where she’d buried her face.
Kipper caught his wife’s eye across the drawing room. Barb sent him an unspoken query, asking if he was all right. Did he need her to come and rescue him? The President of the United States shook his head and patted down Marilyn Culver’s hair.
‘It’s okay, buddy,’ he said. ‘You let it all out.’
&
nbsp; He had to fend off his protocol chief with a fierce glare at one point, but most people were cool enough to give them some space, even in a very crowded reception room. These were all good people, thought Kip. Real people. The country could do no better than to entrust its future to them.
He felt ashamed about having to lie to them about what had happened in Texas, and the role his main fixer had played down there. But as he stood comforting Jed’s wife, and he thought of how badly things could’ve gone, James Kipper reconciled himself to the necessity of doing wrong for the greater good.
Jed Culver would have been proud of him.
TWO YEARS LATER
‘This is the first and final boarding call for all passengers travelling on Japan Airlines flight 16, Sydney to Tokyo, code shared with our One World partners British Airways and Qantas.’
‘At last,’ said Sofia as she gathered up her magazine and water bottle from the coffee table in the Qantas lounge, stuffing them into the small backpack she would take with her on the plane.
‘What, you’re that keen to be shot of us, are you, mate?’
‘Oh, piss off,’ she replied, but without malice. She had grown used to the Australian sense of humour. ‘You just can’t wait to get rid of me so you can get down the pub early.’
Her Echelon mentor repaid the quick comeback with a smile. ‘You know me too well, Mariela,’ he said, using her cover name. ‘Come on, I’ll walk you down to the gate. Reckon you’ve been just about my worst student ever. Wouldn’t surprise me if you got lost between here and the plane. Fuck knows what’s gonna happen when you get to Tokyo.’
‘Ha. I’ll be unpacking truly epic amounts of awesome and win, that’s what. Probably so much that they’ll just give me my black belt as soon as I turn up at the dojo.’
‘More like they’re gonna hand your arse to you on a sushi platter,’ he said.
‘They’re gonna try,’ she laughed. ‘Caitlin told me all about it.’
Nick Pappas, Echelon’s station chief in Sydney, nodded at that. ‘You’d do well to listen to her advice, Sofia.’
They walked out of the club lounge and joined the flow of foot traffic through Sydney’s international terminal towards the departure gate. Neither of them spoke again for a minute. After eighteen months of training at Echelon’s remote Snowy Mountains campus, Sofia Pieraro was entirely comfortable with the exchange of secrets that could be loaded into an unspoken conversation. She was also more familiar with the woman who had saved her from certain capture and execution in Texas. The woman she had possibly saved when she stormed into Blackstone’s residence, intending to die if it meant a chance to settle the blood debt he owed her.
Caitlin Monroe had been generous about that. Sofia knew her now as both a friend and, somewhat problematically, as an Echelon legend. Almost a figure of mythology. Her own controllers, her trainers and even Pappas - her last mentor and probably her first overwatch controller when she returned from Japan and began to earn her place in the organisation - they had all scoffed at the idea that she’d rescued the infamous Caitlin Monroe. ‘Just got in her fucking way, more likely,’ as Nick had put it. ‘Probably stopped her killing everyone five minutes earlier.’
Sofia had bristled at first. She was a proud if profoundly damaged young woman when they spirited her away from America, disappeared her as effectively as the Wave had taken hundreds of millions of souls five years earlier. She had done something as a mere girl that the mighty Echelon had dispatched and nearly lost its champion to achieve. She had laid a hard vengeance upon Jackson Blackstone for his crimes in Texas and New York.
Although, at the time, she hadn’t given a shit about anything but the blood on his hands from the murder of her family and, she’d presumed, her father. Nick Pappas had set her straight on that. She knew it was a purely calculated move by Echelon, assigning him to mentor her through reception and early training. He had witnessed the death of the man who actually had taken Papa’s life, and who had put poor Maive Aronson into a coma, where she still lay.
Sofia had needed many months to get past the idea that Blackstone had nothing to do with her father’s murder, that it had been this Cesky creature whom Papa had beaten down for causing trouble with Miss Julianne, all those years before in Acapulco. She still remembered very fondly the kind and pretty English lady from the yacht on which they’d all escaped la colapso. For a long time she had wanted to grow up to be just like her. And she still marvelled at the idea that Miss Julianne had killed this Parmenter, shot him and kicked him to death right in front of Pappas, before bringing down the man who had sent him and an unknown number of other assassins out into the world to exact his own petty revenge on those he thought had slighted him.
The idea that a friend of Papa’s, indeed the original saviour of the Pieraro clan, had exacted their revenge for her finally reconciled Sofia to letting go.
She would do now what Miguel Pieraro had always wanted. She would live, and eventually the family would grow again through her. But first she had a debt to pay off. Having been delivered from evil that night in Fort Hood, Sofia had been given to understand, and she accepted without demur, that a responsibility had been laid upon her by that salvation. The premise sat easily with a Catholic. She would devote this first part of her new life to the fight against evil, raking for it where it had always lain, in the hearts of men.
But not men like her father, or Nick Pappas, who guided her now through the crush of the terminal with a paternal hand on her shoulder. They had grown very close. The last time she had spoken with Caitlin, when her saviour had visited the campus in the Snowy Mountains, she’d told Sofia that would happen. Echelon was a family, said Agent Monroe, and in Pappas, of whom she knew and approved, Sofia could be assured that she had somebody she could trust as if he were her own father.
Nick would never replace her papa of course, but Caitlin had been right. As a mentor, he had taken on many of the responsibilities she now understood Miguel Pieraro had carried on his own from the day their family had been taken from them in Madison County. To keep her safe. To protect her from evil. And to prepare her to go out into the world and to fight the good fight.
Sofia was ready.
‘I’ll see you in a year,’ said Pappas, when they reached the gate. He put out his hand, rather formally and uncomfortably, as though forcing restraint on himself.
‘Not if I see you first,’ she replied, grinning and standing on tiptoe to quickly kiss him goodbye on the cheek.
FOUR YEARS LATER
The last refugee family departed from Melton Farm a week before Monique’s fifth birthday. Caitlin and Bret had planned to celebrate the occasion with a small party, but as so often happens with working parents, time got away from them. The animals, as always, needed tending. The Ministry of Resources chose that week to send through a survey team to inspect the progress of their latest GM oat crop. Monique was about to start her prep year of primary school. Her little brother, Harry, was acting out his separation anxieties during his first week at kindergarten. And Caitlin had no idea when she volunteered to sit on the village’s royal wedding committee that the meetings would prove as frustrating and nearly as murderous as the long search for Bilal Baumer had been. So in the end they marked the departure of their last American refugees with a glass of wine on the front porch at the end of a long summer’s day.
‘We’ve still got Monique’s birthday party next week,’ said Bret. ‘Half the village will be along for that, anyway. We could do something then.’
‘I suppose so,’ replied Caitlin without any great enthusiasm.
She was underwhelmed by the idea of hand-to-hand battle at home with the vicar and Mrs Dingley about fucking Will and Kate’s wedding. The sleep-deprived mother of two was just contemplating a second glass of wine when Bret pointed out the vehicle, a white Peugeot by the look of it, coming over the rise and down the long unsealed road to the farmhouse.
‘Government car,’ he said, with confidence.
‘I think
so,’ Caitlin agreed, suddenly aware of the pistol in the holster at the small of her back. She still carried it everywhere. The Kimber Warrior was so much a part of her that mostly she forgot it was there. It had now been, what, nearly four years since she’d last pulled the trigger on a man.
‘Maybe you should get the kids inside, and run the bath, honey,’ she suggested. ‘It might be for me.’
Her husband gave her a measured look before staring long and hard at the approaching car again. ‘Those days are over,’ he said before disappearing inside. ‘Monique! Harry! Bath time, let’s go!’
She heard the squeals and thunder of children running to attend to their father’s command. Outside the farmhouse, training, imprinted at the molecular level, caused her to scan her surroundings for any obvious threats, and then for any non-obvious ones.
Nothing.
The car bore HM Government licence plates. As it turned off the approach road and onto the driveway, which wound in through a stand of apple trees before looping around a small, broken fountain in front of the farmhouse, she recognised the occupants. And smiled.
‘Dalby and … Oh my God, Wales!’ she beamed. ‘This must be bad news.’
Her two favourite former overwatch controllers returned the friendly greeting, crunching over the gravel to say hello, to shake hands, and in Wales’s case to wrap her in a bear hug, a manoeuvre made difficult by the presents he was carrying for the children.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead, Caitlin,’ said the American. ‘But Dalby and I were on our way back early from something at Salisbury Plain, and I just couldn’t forgive myself if I hadn’t taken the opportunity to call in and say hello. It’s been too long.’
She aimed a sceptical frown at the gifts he was carrying.
‘I didn’t know that London Cage had opened up a Toys ‘R’ Us franchise,’ she said dryly. ‘Just picked those up on the way, did you?’
Wales had the good grace to look a little embarrassed. ‘Well, I was always going to be dropping by,’ he replied. ‘So it seemed a good idea to have them with me. An American Girl doll for Monique. They’re making them again, you know. And Lego Star Wars for young Harry.’
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