“I’m sorry …” he croaked. “Couldn’t …”
The room blurred in front of her as the tears came, and she shushed him again, this time with one finger on his lips. They were swollen and cracked, and half of his face was mottled with bruising. One leg was fully bandaged and held aloft with a complicated series of wires and pulleys. He would be limping again, perhaps forever. She’d often teased him about the jagged scar where the combat support hospital in Kuwait had dug an old piece of wood from his ass. Bret usually responded by farting on cue, chasing her out of the bed briefly while she waved away the stench. Laughing at the crude absurdity, she would come back to the bed and find something else to tease him about.
It didn’t seem so funny now.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “You did great, sweetie. Five guys with guns. You were unarmed, yet you protected Monique and you both got out. That’s all that counts.”
Bret pressed his lips together and squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head once, emphatically.
“I should have had a—”
“Hush now.” She softly stroked his thick brown hair, blinking away her tears. “This is no time for beating yourself up. If I’d married any other man, I’d be a widow now and my daughter would be gone along with my husband. You did an amazing job to get her away from them.”
“But we didn’t get away,” he croaked. “And if you hadn’t come along …”
Caitlin shook her head.
“You know better than that, Bret. We don’t do what-ifs in our line of work. Or mine, anyway. You’re a farmer and a daddy now, and that’s the most important thing. To me and the baby. You need to rest and get better and look after our little girl. And you need to let me worry about these bastards. Can you do that, Bret? Can you leave them to me?”
“Hooah,” he whispered. “Leave them to you.”
The effort of talking seemed to have exhausted him, and he nodded weakly as a long ragged breath leaked out between his lips with a wheezing sound. He groped for her hand and squeezed it.
Caitlin leaned forward and kissed his forehead.
“I love you,” she said quietly. “And I promise you this will never happen again.”
Still in her bloodied running gear, Caitlin followed Dalby to his vehicle, an unmarked gray Mercedes W203 sedan. A small window tag displayed the logo of the British Home Office, promising to build a “safe, just, and tolerant society.” Clouds obscured the sun, snuffing out what little warmth had been left in the day, and she was grateful when Dalby turned up the heat as he started the car.
“Perks of the job,” he said. “It often seems this car is the only place where I can escape the chill these days. Bloody weather, being all over the shop.”
Caitlin nodded without a word. Even with the resources of her own farm and the indulgences of the government, her family still felt the privations of the rationing system.
“We’ll move your family to one of our secure estates,” Dalby said as they drove away from the hospital, heading south toward the highway. The effort was slow going as he worked his way around a pod of cyclists and a horse-drawn cart. None of the bike riders were wrapped in Lycra. They weren’t pedaling for their health. Dalby’s was the only car on the road.
Caitlin watched the sides of the road, scanning for anything unusual.
“You won’t have to worry about them,” Dalby assured her. “We have secured the area.”
Caitlin shook her head. “I can’t help worrying, Mister Dalby. They’re everything I have now.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He seemed to open almost every sentence with an apology. “I meant that we will take care of them. And the farm. We’ll keep Mister Melton and your little one under our wing while this situation gets sorted, and a manager has been sent to your estate at Mildenhall. One of our men. A good chap with the right background. His family has farmed this area for many years. But no, of course I didn’t mean that you would feel no worry. That would be most insensitive.”
“So Echelon sent you? Not the Home Office,” Caitlin said, forcibly dragging her thoughts away from the hospital room as they entered the M4, heading west. That surprised her. She had been expecting to go to London.
“It’s an interdepartmental issue. The lines of authority are somewhat blurred. Intentionally so,” Dalby said as he maneuvered them onto the all but deserted highway. A few army trucks—lorries they called them—and two green-painted buses with British Army markings and steel mesh on the windows were the only vehicular traffic she could see. Dalby was finally able to tap into the power of the car, accelerating away from Swindon.
“So those fuckers this morning, what was their story?” If her cursing bothered Dalby, he gave no sign of it. His face remained impassive.
“Well, to state the obvious, they came for you. But why, we’re not certain yet. Mister Richardson, the lone survivor, has only just begun the initial stages of what shall probably be a very long debrief at Salisbury. We’re having to go lightly for now because of his injuries.”
There was no tone of reproach in his voice that Caitlin could make out. Dalby was simply stating a fact. And if Richardson was being held at Salisbury, that explained why they were heading west rather than back toward the capital.
“But you’ve identified them. That must be leading us somewhere.”
“It could be leading us down a garden path for all we know, Ms. Monroe. Richardson had a record as an armed robber, quite heavy stuff. He had served time for firearms offenses, grievous bodily harm, and his charge sheet ran to six pages. The Met almost had him for witness tampering a few years ago, but, well … the witnesses disappeared.”
“I see,” Caitlin said as Dalby accelerated past the army trucks. The day was dark with storm clouds now, with bruised gray thunderheads building up over the horizon in front of them, leaching the color from the fields and forests on either side of the M4. Blurs of people working in their market gardens began to gather up their implements and return to their homes. Caitlin watched for the ones who did no such thing, half expecting to see a sniper rifle or someone holding the cell phone that would set off a roadside bomb. When she glanced at Dalby, he showed no obvious effort at scanning the roadway.
“So you’ve run his associates both in and out of prison?” she asked.
“Yes. We’ve had some interesting names popping up, too, but one in particular rang some bells, given your case history. He did a stretch in Wormwood Scrubs for a shotgun stickup on a betting shop in Liverpool back before the Disappearance, and he fell in with a Hizb-ut-Tahrir group there.”
Caitlin’s ears pricked up immediately.
“Were they the genuine article or just a bunch of beardy shitheads?” she asked
“Oh, the genuine article,” Dalby said. “Prayed five times a day, proselytized throughout the nick, did a lot of conversions among the young lads from the subcontinent. Governor quite liked having them there, he said. Insisted they calmed things down.”
“Splendid,” Caitlin said. “How nice for the governor.”
“Indeed.”
Rain began spotting the windshield, and Dalby flicked on the wipers.
“Well, Richardson didn’t strike me as one of the Prophet’s nutters,” Caitlin said. “Looked more like a gangbanger really, more Rasta than anything.”
“Protective coloration.” Dalby shrugged. “Since the French Intifada, foreign Johnnies in caftans haven’t been entirely welcome in our green and pleasant land, have they?”
“No.”
Caitlin was glad to have missed most of the mass deportation period while in the hospital. It had been pretty fucking ugly by all accounts. It had started simply enough with a curfew in some of the areas most affected by post-Wave rioting, but when that failed to calm the situation, when the riots spun out of all control, the government began arresting thousands of people on a secret “watch list” it had maintained since the Twin Towers attack all the way back in 2001. Ancient history, thought Caitlin, whose own agency had helped
maintain that list. When France imploded, it was a matter of almost no moment to move from preventive detention to outright expulsion, even of second- and third-generation citizens, most of whom were forcibly relocated to one of Britain’s fourteen remaining overseas territories and barred from returning to the newly promulgated “metropolitan area”—Greater Britain and Northern Ireland, in not so many words.
Most of the territorial administrators, such as the military commander of the British base on Cyprus, a major relocation hub, had simply moved them on again, at gunpoint if necessary.
“So what’s the current thinking?” she asked. “Richardson was a sleeper, a stay-behind? Or his jailhouse conversion was just a convenience while he was inside?”
Dalby eased back on the gas as the downpour grew heavier, exhibiting the first hint of emotion since she’d met him. If she didn’t know better, she could have sworn that he was disappointed. He flicked the wipers to a faster setting and turned on his headlights, although the road remained largely empty.
“We have no preconceived ideas,” he said, hunching slightly over the wheel. “But we very much like this Hizb connection as an explanation for why he’d be looking for you—and how he came to get his hands on a couple of prestige motors, a book of petrol coupons, and the small arsenal they were carrying. There is no common or garden-variety criminal angle to this as far as we can tell. But Richardson and his crew taking on a contract job for Hizb ut-Tahrir? That all clicks together very nicely.”
“Well, not really,” she protested. “I can’t imagine the Hizb have much of a network left here since the deportations. Who would have handled Richardson for them?”
“A cutout?” Dalby suggested. “They don’t need a full beard to issue the orders. Just someone reliable to pass them along and run the logistics. There’s still plenty of villains about, and pickings have been very thin for them the last few years what with all the extra security and rationing and so on. One of the advantages for Hizb in having been so active in the prison system is the number of contacts it gave them with handy infidels, like Richardson’s crew.”
“None of them flagged as converts?” she asked.
“No. But they’d all done time in prisons with a Hizb presence. Richardson would not have had to sell them a line about doing God’s work. All he had to do was tell them he had a paying job. And this job did pay well. Once we had confirmed IDs, the Met raided the last known addresses of the four men you killed, well, three of the four. For one we had no known address. They found envelopes with two and half thousand in euros at two of the flats. At the third, they found a party in progress. Seems young Ed McConaughy’s girlfriend couldn’t wait for him to get home.”
“McConaughy?”
“The nasty little carrot top. I believe you shot him in the face.”
“Oh, him. So, two and a half up front. And two and a half at the back end? Plus a bonus for Richardson, an executive fee for running the show?”
“Certainly. Plus the equipment, the cars and guns and so on. And travel passes. They were valid, so that involved a payoff somewhere along the line. We’ll know more about that when Special Branch gets back to us. All in all, though, Ms. Monroe, somebody spent a pretty penny to send these villains after you.”
Caitlin stared out her window. The rain was heavy enough now to have obscured visibility beyond about fifty yards. The world outside the car had been reduced to formless gray and green shadows.
“So why, if you’re going to all that trouble …”
“Do you send a bunch of bloody amateurs like these?” Dalby finished for her.
Caitlin nodded. It made no sense. There had to be better crews around than Richardson’s. Professional hitters who could have taken her out from a hilltop with a long barrel. Snatch teams that could have disappeared her from the face of the earth without a trace. Yet somebody had sent a bunch of half-wits and morons who’d been incapable of catching her husband on his bicycle.
And, with the exception of Richardson, their putative leader, they were all dead. Almost as if that was the point of the exercise.
13
Texas, Federal Mandate
Crows and magpies, carrion birds, screeched nearby as the little caravan emerged from the northern edge of the forest through wispy drifts of cold rain. A thin, straggling line of poplars wound away to the north like a green river through the fields of beans and spinach irrigated from a couple of human-made lakes. The sun cracked through the clouds as Miguel rode past the nearest garden beds, and an automatic sprinkler system engaged with a click and a whoosh, creating a small field of rainbows in the arcs of jetting water. Blue Dog, an Australian blue heeler, barked in surprise but settled with a warning glance and whistle from his master. His littermate, a red heeler inventively named Red Dog, appeared to throw a contemptuous glance at her brother. She stuck close to Sofia’s horse, a station from which she had not strayed since the girl had released both dogs from the barn back at the farm.
Miguel watched Sofia closely from a few yards behind, where he was leading a string of three more horses. Great storms of emotion swirled and clashed within him, but he ignored them as best he could, focusing his concern on his surviving daughter. She rode tall in the saddle; that was normal enough. The problem was that everything and anything seemed to spook her. Her eyes were constantly darting over every possible place where danger might lurk. He was worried that she would focus so much on what frightened her that she might tumble from her mount like a rag doll. Sofia’s agitated mood was easily read by her horse, which in turn grew increasingly twitchy and nervous. Red Dog trotted alongside her, looking up and whimpering occasionally.
They stuck to the tree line even though it doubled the distance they had to cross, winding back east for a few hundred yards, then switching north again before the ground began to rise and the cultivated fields gave way to larger patches of old-growth forest, thick with chalk maple, hackberry, and white ash. The road agents had not appeared again, but Miguel had no doubt the towering pillar of black smoke rising from his homestead would be enough to draw them back to investigate what had happened to their missing comrades. He wanted to put some hard ground between them and his daughter as quickly as possible. The patch of uncleared forest they were headed for would be impenetrable to motor vehicles of the sort the road agents were driving. Indeed, within minutes both he and Sofia were forced to dismount and lead the horses on foot. Blue Dog trotted ahead, sniffing at tree roots and occasionally snapping up a bug. Red Dog stayed close to Sofia, nudging at her leg every now and then.
They bore away from Bald Prairie and the homesteads Miguel knew were a few miles to the north. He did not think it likely the agents would attack those farms. They were home to white families from Seattle, and Miguel believed with all his heart that the road agents were Blackstone’s men, and so would do the governor’s bidding. That meant driving off beaners like his family even if they were within the Federal Mandate but leaving the right sort of settlers in place. He was confident the forest would keep him and Sofia hidden for most of the next twenty or thirty miles, until the patches of woodland grew thinner and eventually petered out short of Leona. There was nobody up there. It was a pissant little burg that had mostly burned out after the Wave and never been reclaimed. If they could make it by nightfall, it was certain they’d find shelter there, but no sign of the agents or the TDF, he hoped. The Texas Defense Force was supposed to protect settlers from the likes of the road agents, but in Miguel’s experience people like him needed protecting from them.
The path widened as the forest thinned out again, and within a few minutes they were able to remount. Following the heavily wooded line of Larrison Creek, they rode in silence for nearly two hours, the only sounds the snuffling of the dogs and the muted footfalls of their mounts on the soft leaf litter of the forest floor. At one point, just after three o’clock, he called a halt for ten minutes after hearing the thudding beat of a helicopter somewhere to the south, but it never moved any closer while he
sat quietly, chewing a couple of Mariela’s cookies and sipping at a water bottle. Sofia refused the offer of something to eat, but he was relieved to see she took a drink from her canteen. Red Dog growled at the distant noise, but Miguel shushed her immediately.
The first real challenge to their getaway came a short time later when they had to cross the wide-open lanes of Route 21. Emerging from the tree line near the rusting hulk of a pickup that had veered into the ditch and rolled, presumably when its driver had Disappeared, Miguel gave himself a minute.
“Sit and stay,” he ordered, and the two cattle dogs dropped onto their haunches as he listened to the world around them.
Sofia unslung her Remington and laid it across her lap, and that unsettled him. She was just a little too quick to reach for her rifle, and he considered taking it from her more than once. However, he couldn’t leave her defenseless, and it was better that she be alert than lethargic.
“Is something wrong?” Sofia asked, looking around. “Do you see those men?”
He shook his head but gestured with a hand for her to be quiet while he listened. But there was nothing.
No helicopters.
No aircraft.
No traffic.
Just the rustle of a chilling breeze through the wet leaves of the forest patch from which they had come.
After America Page 13
