After America (39 page)

“I have a few of the usual suspects to see. I’ll join you in the briefing room,” said Dalby, excusing himself from the scarred Formica table and the trifling remains of a plate of fries—hereabouts known as chips—lying in a puddle of dark brown gravy. Dalby ate his chips with a knife and fork, which Caitlin also filed under Q, for quirk.

They shook hands, the Englishman being a stickler for the formalities. Indeed, the word “stickler” could have been invented just for him. Caitlin picked up her backpack and followed the younger officer out of the staff canteen and into a long corridor lined with closed doors and blacked-out windows. Somewhere nearby a man, or possibly a woman, was crying. Walking behind her escort, she noted that his hair was slightly longer than normal and his chin more heavily stubbled. She wondered if he had just come in from the field—unlikely, given the lowly nature of his duties today—or whether, like everyone else, he was feeling the hardships of the ration system. She was certainly missing the small luxuries of home life at the farm: the fresh eggs and milk, a loaf of bread baked in the wood-fired oven. And Bret and Monique, of course. She couldn’t stop wondering how they were faring and how long it might be before she would see them again. Would the baby even recognize her? On cue, her leaky breasts began aching dully.

“Knock it off, asshole,” she muttered to herself before mommy guilt could run away with her.

“Excuse me, marm?” asked the suit, turning his head as he continued to stride down the hallway.

“Don’t sweat it.” She smiled. “Talking to myself. First sign of madness.”

“Very good, marm.”

They reached a set of stairs at the end of the hall and descended three flights, which would have put them well below the river. The cinder block walls leaked moisture and in places had sprouted cancerous-looking growths between the bricks. Some of the lightbulbs had burned out, making the staircase something of a darkened well. At the very bottom they pushed through a pair of heavy rubber doors into a workshop, an area much better lit by fluorescent tubes and long-life bulbs. Dehumidifiers labored to suck the dampness out of the space with limited effect. The cement floor still had a moist color to it.

Workers in coveralls bent before workbenches laden with the tools of war. Racks of M16s lined the far wall where a couple of men were working with a larger rifle barrel. Probably something that would increase the punch of the pathetically underpowered round. On other workbenches, innocent-looking civilian devices were being stripped down to their component parts and remodeled with secret compartments, special packages, and, in some cases, explosives. Surrounded by the whine of power tools and the scent of machine grease, Caitlin thought it was the sort of place her father would have loved even though he wasn’t a gun nut.

The suit handed her off to a middle-aged woman, a short, squat specimen with an enormous mole on one of her nostrils.

“Hiya, Gerty.” Caitlin smiled. “Long time.”

“‘Ello, pet.” The woman grinned back, displaying an alarming mouthful of decaying teeth. “Sending you out again, are they? A woman in your condition; it’s a disgrace is what it is, pet. An absolute disgrace. You should be at ‘ome with your young one and that lovely man of yours. Sorry to ‘ear about ‘im, I was, luv, I hope he’s resting well. Typical of the Wallies running this place, I tell you. Still, beggars and choosers, eh? Mister Dalby said you’d be needing all your kit ‘n’ caboodle, then. A lovely chap that Dalby, a gent of the old school, too. So, whereabouts are we off to this time, you poor girl you?”

Gerty’s delivery was uninterrupted by the need to draw breath or apparently to pause while injesting the sodden biscuit she dunked into a cup of tea before pushing it into that mouth full of broken tombstones.

“I’m off to Germany, Gert,” said Caitlin. “Probably fly out later today.”

“Oh, dear,” cooed the armorer. “Nothing good ever comes of intrigues with those sausage-eating bastards. They did for my old granddad, you know, Miss Cait. A Stuka got him at Dunkirk. A terrible shock it was to old nan Dorothy, too. And she with her dicky heart an’ all. It’s a wonder the family line didn’t die out there and then.”

The woman put one warm, meaty hand through the crook of Caitlin’s arm and drew her deeper into the workshop. A few men and women, mostly men, huddled around machine tools, fiddling and adjusting levers and dials. One manned a lathe from which poured a shower of bright, white sparks and a high screeching sound.

“So will you be giving the bally Hun a stand-up floggin’, then, Miss Cait? Or doing him quietly with a bit of shiv work and piano wire?”

Caitlin grinned.

“I’ll be going into the shariatowns, Gerty …”

“Oh, Gawd …”

“So discretion will be my friend, but …”

They finished the old routine together,
“A sodding great shooter couldn’t hurt, neither.”

“All right, then,” Gerty said as they came to her personal office, an isolated workbench in the center of the shop. “I understand that discretion may well be the better part of valor, but there’s nothing quite so discreet as forty grains of hollow-point silenced by one of these spankin’ new Reflex Suppressors we’ve just ‘ad in. It’s the very thing to give one of those mad Turks over there pause to think that perhaps he might have misinterpreted the Prophet’s teachings about the relative relations between the sexes, not that they’re not always thinking about the sexes’ relations of course, because if you ask me, that’s what’s behind most of this argy bargy and ranting on about bloody jihad and all that rubbish. Not nearly enough of the horizontal hokey-pokey for your beardy nutters, Miss Cait, and rather too much time spent fiddling about with livestock behind the woodshed is all I’m saying, it’s not natural, is it, wrapping women up in those bloody great bedsheets.”

She handed Caitlin a black rubberized nine-inch-long tube that was obviously meant to fit over the business end of a firearm. “Expansion chamber’s sleeved back over the first six inches of the barrel on a long arm,” Gerty explained, “and they come in these lovely miniatures for a variety of sidearms work. We’re issuing the Kimber
ICQB
pistols at the moment. Got a very generous shipment of them from your homeland awhile ago on an exchange deal of some sort. Here, look at this. There’s such lovely workmanship in this gun, Miss Cait. You won’t regret slipping it into your purse with the lippy and a couple of clips of h-tipped.”

The armorer paused for just a moment to favor Caitlin with a crooked grin.

“But I can see from your slightly disappointed look,” she continued, “that you were hoping for something a little more … daring.”

Caitlin picked up the Kimber and tried it for heft. It was a beautifully balanced handgun with a great feeling of density and solidity that spoke of real care in the design and manufacture. She assumed that Gerty’s stash had to have come from a stockpile somewhere, as the original manufacturer had Disappeared.

Maybe a good backup
, Caitlin thought,
but not a primary.

“It is a beautiful gun, Gerty. I’ll give you that. But if I had to clear a room, I’d be standing there pulling the trigger over and over again. I’d get bored, you know. Or possibly shot. One or the other. Neither good.”

Gerty grinned hugely, a distressing sight for the unprepared.

“Oh, you always were a kidder, Miss Cait. But point taken. Point very much taken, dear. If you ‘ave to pull a gun on one filthy blagger, you might as well ‘ave at the lot o’ them. I ‘ad a good long think about your special needs when Mister Dalby sent through your resource request, an’ it’s a tad out of the ordinary, but I’d like you to think about carrying a couple of these little beauties.”

Gerty drew back a heavily soiled canvas rag to reveal a pair of black, spidery-looking machine pistols. They reminded Caitlin of the MAC-10 submachine guns that had been the rage in the agency back in the late eighties.

“Russian PP-2000s,” Gerty said. “We’ve ‘ad a lot of luck with this model since we took a shipment on trial from the manufacturer a few months ago. They provide a very high fire density at close quarters an’ all the way out to about two hundred meters. Come with an extra magazine on the shoulder rest. Ivan’s used a lot of high-end plastics in the assembly, which makes it very light an’ resistant to corrosion. Fewer moving parts than your P90s or MP7s, so it’s easier to maintain in the field. There is a silencer, but we’ve ‘ad the Reflex people do some bespoke work for us so we can fit one of their lovely tubes over the muzzle. The thing I do like about this model, Miss Cait, is the new Russian 7N31 P-class armor-piercing round. It’ll make short work of most vests, but without sacrificing any stopping power. Just the sort of thing for a young lady on her own in a bad neighborhood.”

Caitlin tried the nearest weapon for balance and weight. It didn’t have the same lavish feeling of overengineered luxury as the Kimber, but it did sit nicely in her hands, and like many Russian weapons, stressed function over form. Instinctively, she field stripped the weapon on the workbench and reassembled it while Gerty’s broken grin grew even wider. She sighted the weapon on the ceiling, brought it back in, and unfolded the stock before taking aim again. The pistol grip fit the palm of her hand perfectly, something she couldn’t quite say for the Kimber .45.

It felt like a weapon she could trust.

“Still got the touch, lass.” Gerty beamed.

“Rate of fire?”

“Six ‘undred to eight ‘undred rounds per minute,” Gerty said.

“I’ll need a lot of caps for this gun, then, Gerty. You got any harnesses for them?” Caitlin asked. “And maybe a sight?”

“Comes with a sight an’ a harness already made up in your size, pet. We’ll just need to do some adjusting in case you’ve put a bit a weight on with the baby, excuse my being so forward and all.”

“Oh, don’t beat yourself up, Gerty. My boobs are about three times bigger than they used to be. Bret’s gonna be pissed if I’m away too long and they shrink again.”

“Oh, I know, dear,” Gerty said. “I remember by the time I ‘ad my fourth I ‘ad to design a special sling to keep the bloody things from dragging along the ground between my legs. And then Hubby made me wear it for years after I’d done with the breast-feeding anyway. Said it made him right jumpy down in the pants, it did.”

Caitlin kept her face as neutral as possible. It was a big ask, as the Brits liked to say.

She caught up with Dalby again up on second floor, where they stored the prisoners undergoing interrogation after deciding to go with both the 2000 and the Kimber. It never hurt to have a backup weapon, and Gerty assured her that Berlin Control would issue a shotgun and sniper rifle on request.

Richardson was somewhere up here, Caitlin knew, although he remained indisposed due to his injuries.

“I’m afraid he’s a little too delicate for the sort of debriefing session we’d like to put him through,” said Dalby. “But Mister Forbes here did manage to garner a few more tidbits before the
CMO
intervened.”

Forbes was sitting across the table from them in an otherwise empty conference room, running one corner of a yellow manila folder under his thumbnail. He looked to be about fifty years old, with a shock of white hair thinning considerably on the top of his head. The only other notable things about him were the white lab coat he wore over a brown suit and the stethoscope that hung from his neck.

Caitlin raised an eyebrow by way of inviting him to elaborate on Dalby’s introduction.

“Thank you, sir, ma’am,” he said. Another of the marm brigade, then.

“Upon receipt of the prisoner we subjected him to a controlled course of
anatinus
venom to obtain a modulated hyperalgesic effect and—”

Caitlin shook her head and held up one hand.

“Whoa, sorry, Doc, I bombed out of premed before switching my major to state-sponsored murder. You did what?”

Forbes looked most put out by the interruption, but Dalby nodded at him to explain.

“Platypus venom, Ms. Monroe,” he said. “A new trick. From our Australian colleagues. In the correct dose it causes excruciating pain, but without the associated necrotic effect of the snake and spider venoms. A small dose can last for weeks, sometimes months. A fact of which Mister Richardson has been apprised.”

“I see,” Caitlin said, not really caring much about Richardson’s inconvenience, but similarly not really caring for the clinical manner in which Forbes discussed his work, either.

“And the tidbit haul?”

Forbes opened the folder and consulted a page of handwritten notes.

“Before the neuralgia grew too intense—” He looked up from the notes. “—the subject’s wounds did not help in that regard, I might add …”

Caitlin pulled a face at Dalby as though they were naughty schoolchildren caught out on a lark.

Forbes pointedly ignored her and continued. “Before the subject’s trauma-related and toxin-enhanced neuralgia rendered him insensible, the debriefers were able to elicit some new intelligence, not all of which concerns you.”

“Because?” Caitlin asked, putting an edge on the question.

“Because the information concerned the subject’s criminal networks in ways that do not intersect with your case.”

“
Our
case, you mean.”

“Semantics, Ms. Monroe. At any rate, what would be of interest to you was confirmation of the fact that Richardson believed his contact had arrived in London from Berlin at a time that our checks have confirmed Baumer traveled from Tempelhof using the Tariq Skaafe passport.”

Dalby interrupted at that point. “A cover that the Germans have origin traced on our behalf to Neukolln. Mister Baumer’s home turf. The biometrics on the passport chip are his.”

Caitlin folded her arms and took in a breath to give herself time to think. The air in the room was antiseptic and cold, and the only light came from two bare long-life bulbs hanging from electric wires. She let her chin rest on her chest for a moment. It was a given that Baumer was out, released by the French for whatever reason. Or released by the local authorities in Guadeloupe, at any rate. She had to concede that it didn’t necessarily have to involve the Elysee Palace. The world had spun apart at a dizzying rate the last four years, and lines of authority did not run as clearly as they might once have. What was that quote from Yeats? The centre cannot hold. Somebody important had said that to her once. Had it been Wales, perhaps?