After America ww-2

by John Birmingham

  She checked her watch. Coming up on midnight. Time to move. Were she in London, she could have relied on the curfew to keep any innocent bystanders out of harm's way. But in Berlin, even though it was eerily quiet compared to her memories of the city, there were still a few groups of young people here and there, and she couldn't immediately mark them all down as hostile. She took a long, looping approach to Fabia Shah's apartment, driving out to the eastern edge of the airport and creeping into Mahlowerstrasse via a street lined with dead trees that ran past a sports field at the northeastern corner of Tempelhof. Like most open spaces in Berlin, it had been dug up and converted to market gardens, with rows of tomato stakes and cornstalks poking up through a light ground mist, contrasting with the stark, leafless branches of all the trees that had died in the pollution storms back in '03.

  She parked the BMW under an elm with at least some scattered surviving foliage and killed the engine. She was dressed as before, mostly in black, but had discarded the head scarf borrowed from Mirsaad. A few lights burned here and there and the flickering blue-green shadow play of television screens illuminated a few more windows, but given the two thousand or more people all living within a minute's walk of Fabia Shah, the place was deathly quiet. Just how the Dignity Patrols liked it, she supposed.

  Caitlin waited ten minutes behind the X5's tinted glass, one of the Russian machine pistols within easy reach on the passenger seat. A couple of lights flicked out while she maintained her vigil, and one of the late-night TV addicts finally gave up and went to bed. Just after twelve-thirty she moved, holstering the automatic with its twin in the combat harness under her leather jacket and taking a set of lock picks from the small storage bin between the front seats. She set the car's defenses and stepped out onto the grass footpath, closing the door softly behind her. Less than a minute later she was through the front door of the block where Fabia had been living four years ago, and within another a minute she had picked the lock on the letter box bearing a small handwritten name tag: SHAH.

  A gas bill and a flyer from a shoe shop personally addressed to Baumer's mother lay uncollected inside.

  Caitlin took a few seconds to listen to the building, sending her finely honed senses out along hard echoing corridors, up stairwells, past doors secured by metal grilles. She faintly heard two babies crying and a couple deep in argument. A television droned on somewhere. Repeats of Star Trek dubbed into German to judge by the faint strains of the famous theme music she was able to hear.

  But there appeared to be nobody moving about. Nobody lying in wait.

  She glided up a set of stairs to her left, empty-handed but ready to go gunshot. On the third floor, she ghosted along the hallway until reaching the right door. Heavy steel bars protected the entrance, but the lock was a primitive arrangement, easily neutralized in about a minute and a half. The cheap hollow-core wooden door behind it took less than half that time, but it was still an anxious interlude, kneeling in front of the handle with a tension wrench and half diamond and hook pick, obviously up to no good.

  She was glad to get through the locks and, after gently unlatching the front door, into the apartment. A short, darkened entry hall lay in front of her, with a doorway into a laundry and bathroom to her immediate left. She could smell detergent and the warm, almost comforting odor of tumble-dried clothes in there. Caitlin took a good two minutes to let her eyes adjust to the darkness. She had rejected the idea of using goggles for fear of being blinded should Fabia suddenly flick on a light.

  It did not take long to begin picking shapes and objects out of the charcoal gray dimness. A pair of windows in a lounge room directly in front of her appeared to open onto an internal courtyard. She unholstered one of the machine pistols and fitted the long rubberized tube of the specially designed Reflex Suppressor. With the stock unfolded and resting against her armpit, she felt confident enough to move into the main area of the flat.

  A small kitchen sat to the left, just beyond the laundry and looking out over a tiny open-plan living area. There were no more doors on that side and only one to the right. The bedroom. The assassin moved slowly, not even pushing dust motes in front of her. She controlled her breathing and allowed her senses to flow outward in a meditative technique she had learned while studying aikido in Japan. Rather than focusing attention down to a single point and letting the world fall away, she threw open the doors of all her senses and allowed everything to rush in. She could smell the meal Fabia had cooked for herself hours ago. Taste the spices at the back of her mouth. Hear a clock ticking and a woman breathing. Feel the thin, threadbare carpet beneath the soles of her boots. See all the depressing details of the flat's spartan furnishings and the slight phosphorescent glow of a small TV screen on a sideboard crowded with photo frames. She knew that if she took the time to inspect those photographs, she would almost certainly find in some of them, smiling and innocent, the younger face of the man who had raped her back in Noisy-le-Sec.

  She ghosted forward.

  One hand reached out for the door, and she carefully pushed it open, ready to shoot if necessary. Instantly she was struck by the scent of Baumer's mother. Cold cream. A harsh perfume. Soap. And perhaps an apple-scented shampoo. The woman's breathing did not falter. She snored slightly and ground her teeth together, but Caitlin could tell that she was truly asleep.

  She swept the muzzle of the suppressor across the room, but there was nowhere for anybody to hide. Fabia had no room for walk-in cupboards or closets, and just a few outfits hung from a wooden clothes rack pushed up against one wall.

  They were alone.

  Caitlin shouldered the machine pistol and took a small one-use syringe from her jacket.

  She uncapped the business end, flicked the chamber to force any air bubbles up, and squeezed off a small stream of liquid to clear them completely. She carefully crossed the floor to crouch by the bed and without preamble slid the syringe into the woman's neck, pressing down on the plunger. Fabia snorted and moaned slightly. She rolled away from Caitlin, forcing her to follow while she administered the last of the shot.

  When she could depress the plunger no farther, she withdrew the needle and waited, more than a little relieved that Baumer's mother had not woken up. With a few minutes to wait before the drug took hold completely, she withdrew from the room and checked the rest of the apartment again, spending some time with her ear to the front door, listening to the corridor outside.

  Nothing.

  She approached the bedroom with much less stealth this time, walking in and sitting on the mattress next to her mark.

  "Fabia," she said in a conversational tone, not too loud and softened with a hint of kindness. "Fabia, it's time to wake up."

  The woman stirred and gulped air. She stopped snoring but didn't rouse herself.

  "Fabia," Caitlin repeated. "Wakey wakey…"

  Jesus, she thought, I've been in England too long.

  "Fabia, wake up. We need to talk now. About Bilal. I need to find Bilal."

  "Bilal? Is that you?"

  "No, Fabia. I am a friend of Bilal's. I need to find him. He needs my help."

  The woman appeared to struggle against unconsciousness, lifting her head from the pillow, blinking her eyes slowly. She groaned and spoke in a slurred voice.

  "Too tired."

  "I know you're tired, Fabia. Just tell me where Bilal is and you can sleep. Is he here? In Neukolln?"

  "Bilal…"

  Caitlin suppressed her frustration. Questioning a drugged subject was never ideal, but Fabia would not raise an alarm and would remember this encounter only as a dream in the morning.

  "Fabia, I need to see Bilal. Where is your son? Where is Bilal? Do you know?"

  "Tired…"

  "Where is Bilal, Fabia? His friends need him. Where is Bilal?"

  "Not here," the woman said, speaking so faintly that Caitlin had to lean forward.

  "What did you say, Fabia? Is Bilal here? In Berlin?"

  "Bilal is gone," she said as the dru
g broke down more of her defenses. "He's gone away."

  "Where?" Caitlin asked, containing her impatience. "Where has Bilal gone?"

  "America."

  Caitlin's surprise was so total that she nearly missed the snick of the door latch in the entry hall.

  Baumer was in America.

  But where?

  The question answered itself.

  He had to be in New York.

  And how many possibilities opened up from that, like a poisonous flower budding in the dark? Fabia Shah mumbled on about Bilal and America and somebody called Abu, possibly Abu Bakr Shah, her brother, as Caitlin recalled from the al Banna case history.

  There was no time for contemplation or further questioning, however, because somebody was coming.

  Caitlin spun up from the bed, as silent as quicksilver, bringing the fat black silencer of the gun to bear on the bedroom doorway.

  Whispered voices, both male. Low and guttural.

  She stood with knees bent slightly, breathing in through her nose, out through her mouth. Centered. Waiting for it to happen.

  Behind her Fabia began to mumble about Bilal and America again.

  The voices stopped, and with them all movement in the apartment.

  No footfalls. No elbows brushing against walls. No creaking knee joints or the whisper of one pants leg against another.

  "Bilal is back but gone. Gone away," Fabia murmured.

  Caitlin resisted the urge to turn toward the only voice in the apartment. She kept the oversized suppressor targeted on the open doorway. She closed one eye as a precaution. Her night vision was dark-adapted so completely that simply flicking on a light would be enough to blind her.

  Fabia snored, a long and ratcheting hawking noise that ended with a gulp.

  Caitlin heard snickers from just outside the doorway.

  She heard a few muttered words in Arabic.

  "She is dreaming. There's nobody here. Abu smokes too much hash."

  "We need to check, anyway."

  The outline of a man appeared. Relatively young, she judged. Dressed in sports training gear. His eyes were drawn to the bed where the woman lay, and for a second he did not notice the assassin's form in the darkened room. Caitlin took in all she needed to know in less than a second. The man was carrying a blade and a pistol.

  As his partner moved into frame just behind him, she silently cursed herself. She had left the iron cage open at the front of the apartment and all but invited these two inside.

  At the very instant she made that judgment the first of them finally realized she was there. A jolt of surprise ran through his entire body, and he swore, back-pedaling into his partner, knocking them both off balance. Caitlin flared into action, closing the distance between them like a dark swift illusion, a flicker of malice. She pivoted on one foot, performing a nearly perfect spin en pointe, generating great centrifugal force as she whipped around in a tight circle, the outer edge of which was drawn with the muzzle of the heavy Reflex Suppressor. She smashed the improvised bludgeon into the temple of the nearer intruder, crushing the side of his skull like a chocolate egg. He grunted and dropped, a dead weight hitting the floor with a dense thud and metallic clang as the handgun struck ceramic tiles. Behind him the other man groaned, a small pathetic cry of abject fear, as he raised both hands in front of him to ward off the evil shadow that had just killed his partner. Caitlin pistoned out a front kick, driving it up into the man's groin and feeling a distinct pop as one of his testicles burst like a rotten grape. The pain was enough to cut off his strangled shriek as his body folded violently in half. Flowing forward with the momentum of her attack, she swung the machine pistol down on the back of his head as his body crumpled. Two vicious knee strikes into his face arrested the fall for just a split second as Caitlin swirled around him like a stream around a stone. Her free arm encircled his bloodied head, guiding his descent along the same circular path as her turn, until she savagely reversed direction and snapped his neck with a wet cracking sound.

  His body finally tumbled on top of the other.

  In the room next to them, Fabia snored again, deep in a drugged sleep.

  Shit.

  She needed a cleanup crew, now, but could not call on Berlin Control for backup.

  She would have to extract herself and sanitize the site, but first she had to find out whether these clowns had been working alone. From the snatch of conversation she had heard, she feared not. It seemed as though they'd been alerted to her presence by an observer.

  She tasted copper in her throat, and her heart accelerated noticeably. Was this some sort of trap? Had Baumer left people watching his mother, knowing that Caitlin would come looking for him? If he had, he'd chosen his men poorly. Or perhaps not. Perhaps these guys were the trip wire.

  A quick inspection revealed the gun to be none the worse for its brief use as an improvised club. She wiped off some torn patches of scalp and blood on the track suit of one of the men she had just killed before folding the metal stock away but leaving the suppressor in place.

  She checked the hallway through the small fish-eye lens in the front door. It appeared to be empty, but she stepped out with the gun raised, ready to fire.

  Clear.

  Caitlin spent a minute finding another stairwell that could take her down to the ground floor. She stopped at every level and checked for trouble. The building's occupants all seemed to be asleep now. Even the night owls and insomniacs had given up and shut down their televisions.

  Reaching the ground floor, she was painfully aware of just how much her combat fitness had been reduced by pregnancy and childbirth. Still stronger and faster than many world-class athletes, she was nonetheless well below her own peak levels of readiness. Her breasts throbbed and leaked abominably, and she felt as though she might have torn something inside. Nothing large or vital, but enough to need eventual treatment. Instead, if she was clear, she was going to have to drag two bodies out of Fabia's apartment and do a rough and ready disposal, all in the next five minutes.

  She peeked out onto the street, and the situation deteriorated immediately. Half a dozen youths, all of them dressed in flowing shirts and loose pants, some sporting black bandannas and some with baseball caps, were leaning against a brick fence about a hundred yards down the street.

  A Dignity Patrol, she assumed.

  But why would they be loitering in a quiet street with no passing traffic?

  A quick look reassured her that her car was parked out of their line of sight, but she was certain their appearance had to be related to the two idiots she had just encountered.

  Maybe they'd been tracking them, looking to impose a little jihadi-style vigilante justice. Or maybe the intruders were part of this crew. She simply did not have enough information, and there was almost no time.

  She hurried back up to the flat, less concerned with stealth than with speed now.

  Nothing had changed. The bodies lay where she had taken them down. Fabia still was snoring away like a buzz saw.

  She had neither the strength nor the opportunity to drag the men out of the building and into her car for safe disposal somewhere far away, and she could not leave them there for Shah to find when she woke up. Caitlin's intrusion would stay with her as a bad dream at worst, easily dismissed and forgotten in the light of day. Two corpses bleeding out on her cheap brown carpet would be more problematic.

  There was a quick and dirty solution, however.

  She took the uppermost body by the wrists and dragged it out of the apartment, careful not to let any more blood leak out onto the floor. The sensation of having a bad stitch in her guts was back, but she ignored it, pulling the dead man all the way down the corridor to a utility room at the far end. She was ready to whip out her lock pick tools, but it was unnecessary because the door was unlocked. Once the body was deposited, she returned to the flat and repeated the performance, bundling the remains of the second man on top of the first. A quick search of their pockets turned up no ID, but she d
id find something more useful: a set of keys. Caitlin latched and closed the door before jamming an ill-fitting house key into the lock and snapping it off. That should secure them for a couple of hours in the morning.

  A few blood smears marked the dirty tiled floor, but they weren't the only ones she could see. Just the freshest, and they would discolor quickly.

  She returned to the apartment and scanned it quickly for anything she might have dropped and left behind, but her training had taken hold at a cellular level and there was nothing beyond the bloodstains on the carpet, about which she could do little. The syringe she'd used on Baumer's mother was sitting snugly in a jacket pocket, recapped with its small orange plastic lid. She knelt down to see if the carpet was one of those old-style ones, laid down in squares that could be peeled up and moved around for occasions such as this-you know, when you've whacked a couple of dudes and don't want their brain fluids and blood on public display. But no, the carpet had been laid in one piece.

  She shrugged it off.

  It wasn't important because she would be gone from Berlin early the next morning.

  This time, when leaving the flat, she closed and locked the door and the security grille. She would have preferred to have taken Fabia into custody for a full debrief, but she was working dark and had to go with what she had.

  Baumer was in America.

  The light in the hallway seemed flat and harsh after the gloom of Fabia's apartment, hurting her eyes and even making them water a little with the contrast. She double-timed away from the flat, moving toward the staircase she had taken before, machine pistol at the ready, hoping to navigate her way to the rear of the building and slip out onto a side street where she might get away undetected.

  The two youths who emerged from the door at the end of the corridor deep-sixed that plan. They were obviously part of the group downstairs, dressed in white thobe shirts and loose-fitting cotton pants. They both carried whips, a little like South African sjamboks, but the first who emerged was also armed with a sawed-off shotgun. Caitlin did not falter in her approach as she saw them, but they did, obviously surprised to be confronted by a tall blond woman clad in black jeans and leather, covered in blood and advancing on them with murder in her eyes.