Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (55 page)

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.’

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.

‘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.

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.’

Her scepticism grew even more pronounced. ‘So you’ve been talking to Bret, then, I see.’

‘Perhaps just a little,’ Francis Dalby admitted. ‘That wine looks damned inviting. I notice your five years in this country have not softened your manners any, young lady. Perhaps you would like to invite your old friends and employers in.’

‘Or perhaps not,’ she mocked, turning around and walking back into the house, waving them along behind her. She could hear the bath running upstairs, and the children laughing as they splashed about in it.

‘Bret,’ she called up, ‘it’s Dalby and Wales. Are you going to come down for a drink when you’re finished up there?’

‘Sorry, I knew they were coming,’ he called back. ‘They said they’d torture me if I let on.’

‘Sounds about right,’ Caitlin muttered as she led her guests through to the kitchen. A pot of osso buco in the oven was about twenty minutes away from being ready, and the places were already set for dinner. Four plates at the big table and two at the smaller children’s table, where Monique and Harry ate most of their meals. Bret had used the royal wedding plates he’d insisted on buying last week. His idea of irony.

‘Your field craft is getting rusty down here,’ said Dalby.

‘It’s sharp enough for dealing with country vicars and village aldermen,’ she replied. ‘Sit down. I’ll open a new bottle. We had half of this last night and it’s oxidised. Life in the boonies, what can I say?’

‘Well, you could say how happy you are to see us,’ said Wales, teasing her.

‘I am, Wales. As long as you’re not here to try to talk me back into the office. I’m retired now. A lady of leisure.’

She uncorked a bottle of Côtes du Rhone and poured a generous measure into two clean glasses.

‘You’re not completely retired, Caitlin,’ Wales pointed out. ‘Dalby here tells me you’re kicking ass as a guest lecturer down at the college in London. And you’re not averse to doing a bit of consultancy here and there.’

She smiled. ‘Paperwork, Wales. I read papers and I write them. That’s all I do these days. When I’m not looking after the children. Or riding shotgun on the preparation for the crucial contribution of our little village to the wedding of the fucking century. Which is all the time.’

‘Wales and Dalby!’ boomed her husband, who had reappeared at the kitchen door with a glass in hand and a guilty look about him.

‘You could’ve at least given me enough warning to let me get changed out of my shit-kickers,’ she scolded him.

Bret looked sheepish but basically unapologetic. ‘Lego Star Wars buys a lot of silence.’

They finished the bottle of red wine before serving dinner, and another one with it. The children took themselves off to bed with dire warnings that their new toys would Disappear if they weren’t asleep within ten minutes, while the men finished off all the osso buco, which Caitlin had hoped would last for a couple of days. She returned from tucking in Harry and Monique to find the three of them gathered around a newly opened bottle of Highland Park, courtesy of Dalby, discussing the prospects for the US with Kipper’s second term drawing to an end, and Sandra Harvey and Sarah Palin looking like the front runners to punch it out in the big vote.

By the time they’d accounted for most of the whiskey, sitting by the fireplace in the lounge room after dinner, Caitlin had decreed that the visitors would have to stay the night.

‘Be just like you two to survive a lifetime of fucking villainy only to do yourselves in driving pissed at night. You’d probably get lost and end up back on one of the live firing ranges on the Plain.’

It was well after midnight before Bret and Dalby crashed out, leaving Caitlin curled up in a lounge chair in front of the hearth talking to Wales.

‘We would have you back in a New York minute, you know,’ he told her. ‘I wouldn’t want you to die wondering about that.’

‘Wales, I was in New York for a minute or two in April ’07, you might recall,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel the need to go back. I’m out of it, Wales. I push a shopping trolley around the local supermarket now and my idea of adventure is when Harry wets himself in that trolley and he’s not wearing a nappy.’ She shook her head at that unpleasant memory.

Wales Larrison, these days the global director of Echelon, didn’t smile. He sized her up as though she were a challenging puzzle.

‘Do you remember the young girl you brought to us, just before you left and came home, here?’ he asked, waving a hand to take in the lounge room and the farm beyond it.

‘Sofia,’ said Caitlin. ‘Of course I do. How’d she work out? She’d have been in the field for a few years by now.’

Larrison took his time again.

‘As always,’ he said eventually, ‘you’ve done well for us, Caitlin. She was a good find. We haven’t had an asset as good as her since . . . well, since you left, to be truthful.’

‘That’s very flattering, Wales. But I left. And I’m not coming back.’

The scar tissue just under her hairline, where they’d opened her up to remove the tumor back in ’03, was throbbing. It did that at times.

‘She wasn’t just good for us, for the office,’ Wales continued, swirling his whiskey before holding the tumbler up to the firelight. The flames threw long, snaking shadows across the room. ‘I still believe, Caitlin, that there was a chance your last mission in Texas could have ended very differently. There was a good chance that if Blackstone had lived, and if Kipper moved against him with the information you took, I think there was a very good chance he would have tried to take Texas out of the union. It could have meant civil war. Sofia Pieraro averted that outcome when she put him down. Those three IDs she left at the scene, the road agents, they helped us sell the story of Blackstone’s death as a bandit raid.’

Caitlin took a sip on her drink. Unlike the others, she had switched to mineral water hours ago.

‘Funny thing about those guys,’ she said. ‘They belonged to Blackstone. They were in McCutcheon’s files. That never came out, did it?’

‘It didn’t need to,’ replied Wales. ‘She gave us more than enough to start spinning up the myth that Jackson Blackstone was a murdered patriot. And you gave us her.’

‘Yeah. A patriot. Nicely fucking done, Wales.’

Larrison finished his drink and put it aside. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And she’s done very well for us ever since.’

‘How did Sofia take to that? The idea that Blackstone gets to go down in history as a martyred hero.’

The smile on Wales’s long, deeply lined face was wintry. ‘Like you, Caitlin, she’s a realist these days. Or she would be . . .’

‘I sense there’s a “but” coming.’

‘But,’ nodded Larrison, ‘now she has disappeared for real.’

Caitlin said nothing, but Wales seemed disinclined to add anything to his statement.

‘That’s too bad,’ she eventually replied. ‘But what does that have to do with me?’

‘You spent a lot of time with Sofia, staying low after Fort Hood,’ said Larrison. ‘You got to know her at a very vulnerable time. You probably know her as well as anybody in the agency, including her mentor. On all of her profiles and evaluations, she identified you as a significant figure in her salvation.’

‘It’s late, Wales. Really late.’

‘I’d like you to come back, Caitlin. I need you to find Sofia Pieraro. She’s somewhere in the South American Federation. She was working deep inside Roberto’s regime for us. And then she went dark. The same way you went dark after Fort Hood. We need you back, Caitlin. We need to know what’s happened down there. What might be about to happen.’

Larrison held up one hand before she could reply. ‘I don’t want you to answer me now, because I know what your answer will be, now. Will you promise me you will sleep on it, though, and talk to Bret in the morning? And then talk to me. Morales is a problem we’ve never encountered before. Not since the Disappearance, anyway. A madman in charge of an emerging super-state. He’s already rattling the sabre over the Falklands. You know what that means, Caitlin. You know how far the consequences can run. How people like this can imperil innocents, even on the far side of the world.’

He didn’t do anything so gauche as letting his gaze drift upstairs to where her children were sleeping. He didn’t have to. He knew her too well.

Caitlin was quiet for a long time. Finally she pushed herself up out of her chair.

‘I’m going to bed, Wales. I’ll see you in the morning.’