Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (2 page)

She advanced in a creeping crouch, her knees bent, her thigh muscles and core strength tested by the weight of her equipment and the unnatural movement. Her body had recovered well from pregnancy and childbirth, however, and from the rigours of hunting and fighting in the huge, open mausoleum of New York last spring. Three months back home with Bret and Monique had helped with that. Three months in which she regained her strength, and bound it tightly with new layers of resolution, and a fierce will to lay her hands on the man she blamed for nearly destroying her family.

Bilal Hans Baumer. Al Banna.

Or whatever he was calling himself these days. In Manhattan he had been known as the Emir. Now he was ‘the target’. Her target. As he had been for a year before the old world had fallen.

The barrel of Caitlin’s 417 swept back and forth in a tight arc as she moved up the creek like some nightmare black arachnid. The burbling splash of the stream covered the sound of her boots. She took care to step where the flow of water would quickly erase any sign of her passage. Mosquitoes hovered around her in a cloud, drawn by the opportunity to feed, but thwarted at the last moment by the odourless insect repellent she wore. As the environment adapted to her presence, it also disguised her advance, enfolding her in the shrill, creaking chirrup of a billion insects, the shriek of bats and nocturnal birds of prey, the rustle of larger animals moving through the undergrowth, and once, as she ducked under the limb of a half-fallen tree, the dry hiss of a viper slithering languidly along.

Caitlin dropped a hand to the knife at her hip and, with one fluid motion, threw it at the snake, spearing it to the branch. While it was fixed in place, she crushed the skull with a swift stroke of the Heckler & Koch’s butt stock. Pythons didn’t worry her, but vipers were incredibly foul-tempered. Best not to take chances.

After forty minutes the Navman on her forearm began to vibrate ever so slightly, warning her that the stream was about to veer away from her intended heading. She slowed to a stop and took her time absorbing the signs . . . She listened for the slightest fluctuation in the wall of sound thrown up by the insects in her immediate vicinity, the splash of water across the creek-bed, slightly rockier here. Her eyes took in the noticeable brightening of the world in her goggles under a thinner canopy, as a strengthening breeze opened a hole in the silver-grey cloud cover to let moon and star light spill through.

But nothing human.

Still she waited. The slight delay gave her an opportunity to measure her endurance against the task at hand. She ignored the humidity, which lay on the landscape like a wet woollen blanket, making breathing difficult and leaving her with a clammy sweat on the back of her thighs. No one in their right mind would’ve been out in this, Caitlin realised – but it was a thought that neither eroded her attention to detail nor made her lower her guard, even marginally.

Satisfied she remained alone, the Echelon agent moved off, carefully climbing the northern bank of the stream. Old mineral survey maps had indicated that the soil was thinner here and the vegetation less dense. It was still thick enough to slow her progress. With no natural track for her to follow, she was forced to push and occasionally hack her way through, while trying to keep all noise to a minimum. As much as she could, she traded caution for speed, keen to make as much ground as possible on her objective before the sun climbed over the horizon.

*

Screaming.

The screaming began sometime before dawn as a feeble, plaintive wailing, a trembling warble of utter hopelessness. Caitlin recognised the exhausted protests of a man who thought he was close to the limit of what he might endure. She knew from personal experience that he was wrong. In the hands of a capable torturer, you could endure far beyond the point where you’d first thought you wanted to die to escape the pain and humiliation.

The humiliation of torture was the surprise for most people. They expected the pain, at least intellectually – although, unless they’d been trained for it, the shock was still enough to send most over the edge very quickly. The humiliation and shame, however, clung to them for years after the pain had subsided. And that was the jangling note she recognised in the screaming: the shame of someone who’d already broken and given up whatever they had, to no avail. The torture had continued.

It was no concern of hers, save from a tactical viewpoint. She didn’t want her target, Ramón Lupérico, checking out before she’d had a chance to interrogate him.

She exhaled slowly, took a sip from her camel-back, and peeled the wrapping from a mocha-flavoured protein bar. Breakfast of champions.

The detention facility – a grand name for an adobe hut at a straggling, muddy crossing of the two main local roads – was a single-storey, off-white building fronted by a slumping, shaded porch. A high stone wall ran around a compound at the rear. From her position on a small hill two hundred metres back into the woods, overlooking the site, Caitlin couldn’t see the prisoners’ enclosure, but she’d studied the satellite images closely at the pre-op briefing. A well appeared to provide drinking water, and a beaten-down path marked the circuit the inmates were allowed to walk during their exercise each day.

Assuming they were allowed any, of course. She’d half expected to see wooden poles driven into the earth for the traditional blindfold and last cigarette, complete with bloodstains from the coup de grace, but there were none. The guards most likely executed their victims in the cells and ordered any surviving captives to clean out the mess.

The wailing spiralled up through the old familiar stages.

Horror.

Denial.

Rejection.

Pleading.

Shock.

Then the abject surrender.

All in less than two minutes.

There was no way of knowing if the screamer was Lupérico. A quick recon of the former police station confirmed the position of two guards outside: only half dressed in uniform, sipping some sort of drink – probably coffee – under the portico. She thought she could even smell the brew.

Hard to get good coffee these days . . .
She made a note to snag a bag of beans if the opportunity availed itself. Black tea with milk and sugar at four in the afternoon with a fistful of cucumber sandwiches just didn’t cut it. She was sure the guys on her extraction chopper wouldn’t object to a little extra cargo.

So, two men outside, at least four inside. Possibly six. Plus the three prisoners that intel said were inside, only one of whom was of interest to her.

All of Caitlin’s training, all of her experience, everything told her to wait this out, to lay up until nightfall, then strike under the cover of darkness. But she had reason to ignore the training and experience. Somewhere down there was Ramón Lupérico, the man who had released Baumer from imprisonment in Guadeloupe. A prisoner now himself, it was a righteous certainty he could tell her how al Banna had effected that release from his custody, possibly even how he then came to control the pirate gangs and jihadist militia that had infested Manhattan back in April ’07.

She did not fool herself that Lupérico would know how or why Baumer had chosen to reach out and lay his malign touch on her family, but that hardly mattered. She was here because Echelon had tasked her with securing whatever information she could extract from the target. The coincidence of her personal and professional interests created an impetus towards immediate action.

The South American Federation was little better than a mafia state, but it was the only reliable authority south of the Panama Canal Zone. It would no sooner collaborate with Seattle than its self-proclaimed President for Life, Roberto Morales, would present himself in The Hague to answer the many charges of crimes against humanity that now stood against his name. In the anarchic, violent world that arose in the wake of the Disappearance, such diplomatic impasses proved less frustrating than they had once been. The states that survived tended to be those that acted to secure their interests directly, expediently and swiftly. It was a perfectly complete return to Hobbes’s
s
tate of nature, and Caitlin Monroe, a survivor and a killer, was an instrument of that universe.

She crouched down, motionless and unseen in her hiding spot on the small rise overlooking the crossroads, and resolved to give herself one hour to gather as much intelligence about the situation on the ground here as she could. And then she would act.

‘Drinking coffee? Perhaps the least of your sins, woman! But Elohim punishes all, and you have given him –’

Whatever the man had intended to say was choked off as Miguel Pieraro’s fingers closed around his throat. With one thrust of an arm, the former
vaquero
threw Maive Aronson’s tormentor from the stoop. A thin, wiry man, with the severe intensity of a fanatic sustained almost entirely by his beliefs, the Mormon witness flew backward on a slight angle – luckily for him. His bony ass landed on the soft turf bordering the hard concrete path that wound from East 23rd Street up to the front door of Maive’s small home.

‘Oomph!’

The impact punched all the air out of him and rolled him onto the grass in a tangle of muddied elbows and knees. Miguel moved quickly to drive a boot into his guts, intending to kick him a considerable distance back towards the pavement from where he had come to torment the poor widow.

‘Miguel, no,’ she said in a sharp voice. ‘You’ll hurt him.’

‘Yes, I shall,’ he replied. But Maive had him by the arm, digging her fingernails into his bicep, pulling him back towards her.

She seemed unsure of what to do with the cup of coffee she’d been drinking when the witness knocked on the front door. Miguel hoped she might throw it over him now, scalding the crazy bastard, but that was not her way. Once the Mexican had made it clear that he was not about to launch himself at this fool, Maive carefully balanced the cup on the wooden rail running around the small, decorative porch. She left Miguel on the top step, clenching and unclenching his fists, as she hurried down to help the man to his feet and out of the gate.

The Mormon doorknocker shrugged her off, cursing her sinfulness, her muddy lawn, her coffee and her offer of help. He scowled briefly at Pieraro and looked as though he might like to curse him too, but the prospect of more rough handling saw him scurrying down the path and out onto the street.

A light rain was starting to fall, beading icily on Miguel’s face. The cowboy watched him make his way towards North Kansas City High School, just a block down the road. Once the man had disappeared around the corner, he relaxed a little, although the high school did remind him of another difficult matter, prompting his temper to flare again.

Sofia.

It took him another deep breath of cold morning air to douse the fire in his breast.

Maive stood with her back to Miguel, watching the Mormon go. Her shoulders began to hitch and he could hear her fighting for breath as the tears came. He wanted to place a hand on her shoulder, merely so that she might feel the reassurance of human contact. But it would not be right. Not with both of them still mourning. Instead he clasped his hands together and stood on the ridiculously small front porch waiting for her to regain her composure. He felt hemmed in here, and awkward, as though he might knock something over at any moment. The lack of space was made worse by a wheelchair ramp that Maive obviously did not need. It had probably been fitted for the benefit of the previous occupants. There was barely room for the two of them to stand in the drizzle and wind. He could see fog condensing on the window behind the screen door, a sign of the warmth awaiting them inside.

The day had dawned bitterly cold, although ‘dawn’ was a poor way to describe the wet, freezing, almost funereal grey shroud that seemed to blanket Kansas City in the morning at this time of year. Dawn here did not feel like the start of something new and vital; more like a case of the night having simply exhausted its darkness and passed.

Miguel was dressed for the damp chill that pressed against him like a blade. He’d arrived not long before the Mormon caller. It was almost as if the man had been waiting, watching. He was most unlike the Saints he and Sofia had travelled with through Texas. Altogether more . . . what was the word? Biblical – that wasn’t right, and yet it seemed right.

With his sunken, staring eyes and haggard demeanour, the man looked like some sort of disturbed prophet from the Old Testament. He had been hounding Maive Aronson for the better part of a week now, wearing her down. Miguel was furious when he’d found out just yesterday, and had reacted with intemperate rage at the first opportunity. That is, a minute earlier, when he’d first laid eyes and hands on the
parásito
.

There were more of these Mormons in town every week, as they made their way to Kansas City to reclaim lost land and property. Maive told him the community in KC had been second only to Salt Lake City for her people. That was a pity, he thought, very quietly. Not all of her fellow worshippers that he’d encountered of late seemed to have the same, good common sense of Cooper and Maive Aronson, William D’Age, Ben Randall and the others. So many were like the fool he had just ejected from her stoop. Touched by fervent madness.

Gooseflesh stood out on Maive’s unprotected arms while she sobbed and hugged herself in front of the little house the government had let her move into.

‘Maive, you should come inside now,’ said Miguel. ‘It is too cold to be standing out here. Forget that crazy man. Come inside and have your coffee, warm up.’

She hugged herself a little tighter and bobbed her head up and down a few times before spinning around; her chin tucked down into her chest so she wouldn’t have to look Miguel in the eye as she hurried past him. She forgot the cup she’d perched on the handrail. He retrieved it for her, not surprised that the coffee had lost most of its heat in the brief minute they had been outside. Kansas City was like that, a place of . . . what was the word again? Fickle? Yes, fickle extremes. Like a difficult woman, it was only predictable in the way that you knew things would get worse.

He was certain he hated this city. Surely Seattle had to be a better place, even with the rain, but the resettlement authorities rarely let anyone move there from the frontier lands.

Miguel followed her through the door, careful not to crowd the widow, giving her enough space and time to compose herself. Eight months after losing her husband and most of her friends in that flash flood on the Johnson Grasslands of northern Texas, she was still subject to unpredictable mood swings and periods of terrible sadness. There were days where she seemed to be healing, but it didn’t take much to set her back. Still, he did not judge. His own wounds and losses remained open and raw.

The home provided by the settlement authorities was an old bungalow, with dark wooden floors, plaster ceilings, and some fine carpentry that Miguel admired very much. Window seats, book shelving, a particularly impressive-looking mantelpiece above a fireplace in the living room, all spoke of a home that had been built by craftsmen who cared that their work would outlive them by many years, possibly centuries. It was not a large house by American standards – only three bedrooms, and two of them quite small, obviously meant for children – but it was very comfortable and well insulated. Miguel did not concern himself with the fate of its previous occupants. They had obviously Disappeared.

He’d wondered initially whether the very simple furnishings and effects such as linen and cutlery had belonged to those same unfortunate people, but then he discovered upon being placed in his own residence that such things were drawn from one of the city resource stores scattered throughout the reclaimed areas. All one had to do was present a copy of their housing assignment and they would be allowed to wander through and select the basics. There were even food vouchers for those who agreed to scour the unclaimed areas for useable materials on behalf of the city, and for a week or so, Miguel and Sofia had worked on that detail until they found better employment. He didn’t miss that job at all. It was just one step above shovelling up the remains, sometimes dried, sometimes still thickly gelatinous, of the Disappeared.

People, it turned out, did not like to be surrounded by the leavings of the dead whose homes they had taken. Although, when he thought about it, the clean sheets and towels and simple items of clothing provided by the
federales
had almost certainly come from dead people as well, even if they were simply the owners of department stores whose stocks had been salvaged.

‘Thank you, Miguel,’ said Maive, so quietly that he had to strain to hear her as he followed her into the kitchen at the rear of the house.

‘It is okay,’ he replied. ‘It is lucky I had come around, I think.’

The kitchen was warm and smelled of wood smoke from an old-fashioned stove. It was too dangerous to operate the gas lines, and electricity supply could be sporadic. Wood stoves replaced electric in many homes. If there was one thing Kansas City was blessed with, it was wood. A city in the forest.

Maive had been baking. A tray of muffins sat cooling on a scarred wooden table, resting atop a folded tea towel. She gestured for him to sit down while she splashed some water on her face, drying off with an apron hanging from the handle of the kitchen cupboard. Miguel considered the cup of lukewarm coffee he still held in his hands: the beans were carefully rationed and very expensive, and he didn’t like the idea of it going to waste. All the same, he poured out the dregs, rinsed the cup and set it in the drainer.

‘I’m sorry . . . my manners,’ she said. ‘Please sit down, and let me pour you a hot drink. I could do with one myself.’

‘So you will not be attending to the advice of your friend, about the sinful coffee?’

Maive answered that with a sour grimace. ‘He’s no friend of mine. He only turned up here after I registered with the tabernacle. They’ve had trouble with him too. Harassing people, new arrivals mostly. I suspect he has a mental illness.’

She poured him a mug of coffee, offered cream and sugar, both of which he declined. After retrieving her own cup from the sink, Maive poured herself a full measure, took a sip to taste, and topped it up with another slug, as if to make a point.

‘Cooper never was one for superstitions,’ she said, struggling somewhat. ‘His faith was . . . practical. My husband just wanted to help people. That was his idea of how to live your life the right way. I’m sorry . . .’ Her face suddenly folded into contrary panes of anguish as grief threatened to get the better of her again.

‘You have nothing to apologise for, Maive,’ he said in a gentle voice. ‘I, on the other hand, should not be so quick with my fists. This is your home. I am sorry if I was too rough with him. Do you mind? These look very good . . .’ He indicated the tray of muffins, trying to change the subject.

‘Not at all,’ she sniffed. ‘I baked them for you and Sofia.’

He teased one of the golden-brown treats from the tray. She had topped them with crumble and brown sugar, creating a hard, sweet crust that he very much enjoyed. It was all Miguel could do to resist dunking the muffin top into his coffee. His beloved Mariela used to scold him for such poor manners, and he couldn’t imagine Maive Aronson would approve of it either.

‘I am afraid Sofia is not very happy with me at the moment, Maive. The school has suspended her for fighting again and I have grounded her.’ He really wasn’t very happy with her either. He had been called during his shift at the stockyards in the West Bottoms to deal with it, which meant losing a day’s pay while he took the city bus to the high school at Northtown.

Throwing caution to the wind, he broke off a large chunk of crusty muffin top and dunked it quickly into his coffee. The glazed crumble retained its crunch while the cakey centre soaked up the warm liquid, becoming almost liquid-soft itself. Maive did not approve, but she seemed more concerned about Sofia.

‘Oh, I am sorry to hear that, Miguel. I thought she was past the acting-out phase.’

He put more food in his mouth, chewed and swallowed mechanically, before taking another sip of coffee. All to give him time to think. It was difficult. He knew how his daughter felt, just how much pain she was in every day. But he also knew she could not allow that suffering to take over her life, and she could not take it out on other people. And yet . . .

There was a part of Miguel Pieraro that remained fiercely proud of his daughter and her refusal to bow under the heavy burden fate had laid upon her. Witness to the murder of their family in east Texas; survivor of a journey that took the lives of so many others, Cooper Aronson among them, of course. And a fighter, an avenger indeed. One who had saved his life during the gunfight at Crockett, when they’d rescued Maive and her five female companions from the depredations of the road agents. Sofia had grown up beyond her years on the trail. And he could not deny that, in many ways, although young, she was now a formidable woman in her own right.

‘I do not know what to do, Maive,’ he admitted finally. ‘Honestly, some days it seems beyond me without the help my wife.’

Mentioning Mariela aloud was enough to tighten the band of grief that seemed to sit permanently around his chest. He felt his throat closing on a lump that had not been there a few seconds ago. Another sip of coffee and a deep breath were what he needed to regain the reins on his feelings. Maive, who had no children of her own, but who had mothered and, yes, loved his daughter and the other youngsters on the long exodus from Texas, reached across the table and gave his arm a reassuring squeeze. Unlike him, she seemed to have no compunction about reaching out and touching people.

‘You are a good father, Miguel. You would give up your life for her. She knows that. And you will not let her give up on her own. She knows that too.’ The Mormon woman smiled, but not happily. ‘That’s why she knows she can test you, and push you, and drive you mad.’

He stood up to rinse out his coffee cup, determined to avoid the temptation of another sugary treat. Since they had come off the trail, he had put on a few too many pounds.

‘It is hard,’ he said. ‘I must punish her because the school requires it. I understand that. I have been a boss of the
vaquero
– I understand the need to maintain your rule. And yet, I do not think she was wrong. I understand why she was fighting. She was insulted. Our family was insulted. By some dog, some . . . boy, at the school. The son of a man who is too important to upset.’