After America (16 page)

“Well, when are you getting out of there, Kip?” his wife asked. “It’s not safe.”

He resisted the urge to tell her that was exactly why he had to come out to the East Coast, as a first step to making it safe again, but he knew Barb wouldn’t be impressed by that sort of BS.

“You know I can’t give you exact details of my movements, honey,” he said. “Just know I am safe and I will be home soon.”

Her reply was lost in static, but it didn’t sound very encouraging. Kipper thought he saw one of the techs fiddling with some of the cables on the radio.

“I’m sorry, Barb, what was that?”

“... back … sorry …”

The connection dropped out, and one of the soldiers began stabbing at buttons and muttering an apology.

Kipper reached over and patted him on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry, son. I think you just saved your commander in chief from some world-class ass whuppage.”

Swindon, England

A man from the Home Office was waiting for her at Swindon’s Great Western Hospital, a cream-colored modernist structure on the southwestern edge of the town. The man was an unremarkable type, medium build with light brown hair cut short and a well-made but not too expensive gray suit. Caitlin picked him out as her handler, or minder as they said here, as soon as she hurried in through the automatic doors to the reception area. He favored her with a half-raised eyebrow and came gliding over, juggling a document wallet from one side to the other, allowing him to extend a hand in greeting. He smelled of aftershave and pipe tobacco. She noted that although he looked every inch the gray bureaucrat, his grip was strong and his hand was hardened by the same sort of calluses that scarred her own.

“Ms. Monroe, my name is Dalby,” he said. “The office sent me from London to help out with your spot of bother.”

Still jittery with the adrenaline backwash, Caitlin could not help herself.

“Spot of bother? They tried to kill my fucking family,” she snapped back.

“Indeed. I am sorry,” Dalby said. “Sometimes understatement gets the better of me.”

His speaking manner was an odd mix, a rough-working class accent bundled up in a very polished and, she thought, practiced form of expression. Caitlin made a conscious effort to calm herself and brushed off his apology, “I’m sorry. Please excuse me, Mister Dalby. It’s been a hell of a morning. I just want to see my family, if that’s okay.”

“Of course,” he said. “If you’ll follow me.”

The hospital seemed quiet even for a midweek morning, with only a few people in the waiting area for accident and emergency and no sense of the barely controlled mayhem that characterized most public health facilities in her experience. Caitlin had half expected some sort of delay at the front desk, but Dalby handed her a clip-on badge and indicated that she should follow him by pointing toward a pair of heavy plastic swinging doors that led into the building’s interior. None of the staff questioned them or tried to interfere, and she could only surmise that the Home Office man had already established his credentials as somebody not to be fucked with. Not that anyone fucked with the Home Office these days.

“So, you had any luck putting names to the bodies?” she asked as they hurried down a wide corridor past assessment and treatment rooms, most of them empty.

“I have some briefing notes for you,” Dalby said. “All of your villains returned positive IDs from the national database, and we had further hits off the Yard and the Home Office’s own restricted lists.”

“They were professionals?” Caitlin asked.

“That would be overly generous.” Dalby snorted. “Three very low-rent criminals and two from a little further up the evolutionary ladder, probably to run the operation, such as it was.”

Again, Caitlin found herself intrigued by his voice. He had a definite strain of East London in his flat, nasal tone but spoke as though he’d been coached in elocution at an expensive boarding school. “They were well resourced, though,” she cautioned, thinking of the cars and guns, neither of which were easy to come by in the United Kingdom now. Both tended to be assets of the government, not the private citizen.

“Indeed,” Dalby said, as they turned a corner into a corridor off which a number of semiprivate wardrooms were accessible. Caitlin noted four beds in each room, about half of them occupied, although mostly by young people. A few years ago she’d have expected to see a good many wrinklies and fatties and chronically unhealthy specimens in a place like this, living off the public tit. No longer. From a few cursory glances she confirmed her suspicion that most of the bedridden were trauma cases, broken limbs and crushed bodies, almost certainly from the many farms in the district just like hers, where strong backs and straining muscles were the order of the day. Her mind wandered briefly, dwelling on the growing demand for horses in the district. She was on a waiting list herself. Caitlin shook the errant thought from her mind.

“Do we know who sent them?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Dalby admitted. “Although the chap you left alive is helping us with our inquiries.”

“When you say ‘us,’ you mean …”

“Our office,” he answered. “Yours.”

“Okay,” Caitlin admitted. Dalby was here on Echelon business.

“Here we are, then,” he announced as they made one final turn and fetched up outside a private room. Another man in a suit with a bulge under his jacket, much larger and more imposing than Dalby, nodded to them and opened the door.

“I’ll give you a minute,” Dalby said quietly. “I understand your daughter is asleep and Mister Melton has been lightly sedated.”

Caitlin thanked him and pushed past the guard with her heart beating noticeably harder. The room was large and well lit, with a couple of windows looking out over plowed fields to a small lake a mile or two to the west. Monique was asleep, as she’d been told, but Bret blinked groggily and tried to smile at her. She shushed him quickly with a finger to her lips, indicating the sleeping child. A cursory examination showed that the baby was largely unharmed save for a few scratches on her face. Her husband, in contrast, looked terrible. The scars from Iraq, the stitches where they sewed up his shoulder, and his missing finger had new companions. Remnants of his ranger regiment tattoo provided a stark contrast to his pale, pasty complexion. He had lost a lot of blood back in the field and looked drained. Caitlin’s stomach was clenched, and she felt a coppery taste at the back of her throat.

“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.