After America (42 page)

Something was behind him. He whipped out his Lupara.

A burst of rifle fire cut the shape down before Miguel could pull the trigger. He caught the briefest hint of the agent’s head disintegrating in a shower of blood and bone before blessed silence fell and all that remained was the ringing in his ears and the wailing of a woman somewhere in the dark. The man who had been coming at him from a doorway to his left fell facedown onto the floor.

Sofia stood behind the man, an M16 in her hands.

“Papa,” she said sheepishly.

Berlin

As she’d expected, the
BMW
was an older model, an X5 from 2002. The Bayerische Motoren Werke hadn’t gone under like so many other automakers, but it had shrunk enormously and had not released a new line beyond the 2003 models. Still, this X5 from Berlin Control was a pretty good
SUV
crossover. A little stiff in the handling for her taste, but powerful and kitted out with the balance of her equipment in a sealed diplomatic box in the back. No Landespolizei patrols would be pulling her over and poking around in her unmentionables.

Caitlin blinked away the fatigue of a long day’s travel. She had risen before dawn in London, and it was coming up on midnight. Six lanes of the A100 ribboned away in front of her, sweeping past the radio tower on her left, lit from below by golden lights. It would have been an almost cheery sight after the drab gray Orwellian tones of London, but she was too tired to care. She was also lonely, an unusual, almost unknown state for her. She’d tried to phone Bret before flying out, but the guard at the safe house had told her that both he and Monique were asleep, and she hadn’t wanted to wake either of them. Her breasts felt heavy and ached from not having fed her baby in so many hours, but there was nothing to be done about it. It wasn’t like she could express milk in the field, after all. Soon enough her milk would dry up, anyway. She felt an irrational flicker of resentment at that, as if it was the worst thing Baumer had done. Caitlin flicked the air vents to keep the uncomfortably cold AC blowing into her face, warding off drowsiness.

She regretted not bringing a couple of CDs. German pop and rock music made her brain hurt. After flitting around the dial for half a minute she found a local news radio station halfway through a quarter-hour update. Her German-language comprehension was good, but she was a little rusty with the spoken word and practiced by repeating the bulletin after the newsreader.

“Fighting continues in New York, while the British Security Cabinet holds crisis talks with the U.S. Defense minister.
NATO
ministers meeting in Brussels are expected to release a statement later tonight condemning state-sponsored piracy but urging the Kipper administration to show restraint …”

Caitlin snorted and rolled her tired eyes.

“Enough of that shit,” she said, trying a few more stations until she lucked onto a talk radio host ranting about an upcoming vote in the Bundestag to recognize sharia law, applied by mandated local communities as binding in certain classes of civil action. The five-minute tirade was enormous fun to bluster along with, and the callers provided her with an eclectic mix of accents and vocal styles to parrot. It was also a reasonable backgrounder on the sort of suburb she was headed into. Neukolln wasn’t a closed community like some of the shariatowns in the east of Germany or the remaining Enclosures in London, for that matter, but it was enclosed in all but name. She, a blond American woman, would have no freedom of movement there. She’d need an escort, someone she trusted, but not a local stringer for Echelon. As Dalby had made clear, this op was deniable. There was a good chance it was going to get bloody.

She yawned and shivered as the X5 hummed past miles of closely packed, low-rise apartment blocks. Unlike London, Berlin had no curfew or travel restrictions, and traffic was noticeably heavier than she’d experienced in the British capital, especially at this time of night. Gas was much cheaper, probably because it wasn’t controlled by anything like the Brits’ Ministry of Resources. Even so, the city was noticeably quieter than when she’d last been stationed there, working up the brief on al Banna at the start of the decade. The German economy, like Britain’s, was much smaller than it had been, and few people had the means to keep a car on the road.

Another ten minutes took her past Tempelhof Airport, where she could see a few stripped and gutted jetliners in the livery of American Airlines and Delta Airlines parked on the apron to the north of the two runways. Shortly afterward she turned left at Britzer Damm and motored quickly past long rows of shuttered shops. Many of them looked as though they hadn’t opened in years. The footpaths and gutters were littered with rubbish and scraps of paper gathered into drifts and whipped up in small eddies by her speeding passage. The streets were darker than she recalled, but then they would be, with every second light turned off by the city authorities. Here and there groups of young men clustered together, some of them watching her with sullen expressions as she drove past. Immediately after crossing the rail line at the Hermannstrasse station, she turned left into Emser Strasse and drove for two blocks past whitewashed four-and five-story apartment buildings. Away from the main strip, with its scattering of mean little bars and greasy spoons around which tribes of young men would gather, Emser Strasse was quiet. Many cars were parked neatly by the curb, but even in the dark Caitlin could tell most of them had not been driven in a long time. They were dusty, and more often than not rotting banks of leaf matter were piled up against deflated tires. The
GPS
module beeped triumphantly.

She was there.

A new, unusued phone came out of her leather jacket, and she keyed in the number taken from Bret’s diary back at the farm. A man answered in a voice fogged with sleep.

“Hello? Sayad al Mirsaad.”

“Hey, Sadie. It’s Caitlin Monroe. Bret Melton’s wife. We met at the wedding. I know he was always threatening to visit you, buddy, but I’m afraid you’re shit outta luck. It’s just me.”

The apartment was small: two bedrooms and a single living area that contained a kitchen, dining nook, and sitting room. Mirsaad, the journalist who had rescued her wounded husband from the epic clusterfuck of Iraq, lived there now with his wife and four children, who were all mercifully asleep. His wife, Laryssa, a German national, was standing in the door, clutching a bright pink dressing gown across her chest when Caitlin stepped out of the third-floor elevator door. She was not giving off happy vibes. Her husband looked exhausted, and peering behind Laryssa into the cramped confines of the flat, Caitlin understood why. All the paraphernalia of a newborn was there to see: changing table, bassinet, baby bottles on the kitchen counter. Caitlin regretted calling them without first checking, but she hadn’t wanted to let anyone know where she was headed. When it came to Baumer, she had learned the hard way in France to work on her own.

“I’m sorry, Missus Mirsaad, I really am, but I just flew into Berlin and I needed to get in contact with Sadie.”

“You could not have waited until morning?” Laryssa asked. It sounded more like a demand than a question.

“Look, I’m sorry about that. Really. I understand. I have my own little one at home. About the same age by the look of things.”

She gestured over the woman’s shoulder to indicate all the equipment she’d briefly seen.

“We know about little Monique,” Mirsaad said in a more conciliatory tone. “Bret sent us photos by e-mail. But what are you doing here, Caitlin?You surely cannot be working. Not with the baby so young.”

Mirsaad’s wife, whose red hair and pale skin spoke of a long local family lineage, glared at him for that, but the reporter extended a hand and drew Caitlin gently by the elbow into their main room. The baby was asleep in a crib, which had been pushed into one corner near the changing table. Caitlin’s experienced eye immediately recognized the cloth diapers piled up underneath.

The small room reeked of lanolin, disinfectant, milk, vomit, and baby shit.

“Bret told me about you,” the woman said, almost accusingly. “He said you were a soldier, like he was once. But you stayed in longer than him.”

Caitlin nodded noncommittally.

“Something like that. Soldier for a while. More of a police officer after that. That’s why I’m here, Sadie. Bret and Monique have been hurt. Someone attacked them.”

Mirsaad lost the last vestiges of sleepiness as his eyes widened in shock.

“Caitlin, I am sorry. Are they all right? I did not know. We hadn’t heard. I work for a community radio station here now. I’m afraid it’s all very parochial. Was it criminals? I understand there is a lot of crime in England now.”

“It didn’t make the news, and they’re fine. Bret’s a little scratched and dented, but not much more than before. And our baby is safe. It was criminals, but not like you think. They were hired by a man from a place near here. Someone with a grudge. They were after me, but I’m afraid they tried to go through my husband and daughter to get to me.”

Laryssa Mirsaad glanced involuntarily at the door through which Caitlin had entered. A glimmer of maternal concern clouded her features, quickly turning to anger.

“And you came here?”

Her tone was accusing now. No doubt about it. Caitlin couldn’t blame her.

“Don’t worry,” the American assured her. “I didn’t call you about my coming because I wanted to be sure nobody else knew. I wasn’t followed or tracked. Everything’s cool. But I could use your help, Sadie. If you’re up for it. And if Laryssa agrees, too, of course.”

“What did they do to your family?” Laryssa asked.

“Tried to kidnap them, we think. There was … some shooting,” Caitlin said.

“Oh, my God. What happened? Did the men who did it get away? Were they captured?”

“They’re dead,” Caitlin said.

It was Mirsaad’s turn to look worried.

“Oh, my. Is Bret okay? Really?”

“A few wounds, but he’s fine. He’s being looked after. Look, I don’t want to intrude on your family here. Sadie, is there somewhere we could talk, where we’re not going to wake your kids? If that’s okay, Laryssa.”

Caitlin had quickly scoped out where resistance was going to come from in this arrangement. The German woman looked like it was a thousand miles from okay, but Mirsaad, who had completely regained his faculties, simply nodded.

“Laryssa,” he said in a very serious voice. “These people helped us after the war. I would not have escaped the Middle East were it not for Bret Melton interceding on my behalf.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “And you, too, I suspect, Caitlin. You are something more than a police officer, are you not? You are someone with influence inside the British government quite obviously. And with Seattle, too. While Bret, like me, is a mere journalist. I doubt his lobbying alone would have secured my transit out of Kuwait after the Holocaust.”

She smiled, tired. “Sadie. You did my husband a big favor once. That means I owed you one as well.”

“And so now I am in your debt,” Mirsaad said in a tone of voice that signaled he would not be dissuaded. “Laryssa, mind the children. I will not be long. We shall discuss what help I might be to Caitlin. We shall be down in Ahmet’s.”

His wife’s threat detectors were all pinging wildly, but before she could object and turn it into a marital issue, the baby stirred and began to cry.

“Oh, just go and don’t be more than fifteen minutes,” she said.

“It will take me three minutes to change and five for us to walk there. I shall be back soon,” he said.

But Laryssa had turned away and was lifting the child from the crib.

Ahmet’s was a small coffeehouse and smoking room on the same block as Mirsaad’s apartment. Caitlin left the X5 in the basement garage of Sadie’s building, secure in the knowledge that Echelon’s unique antitheft technologies were more than a match for any would-be carjackers. Even so, she checked the
LED
on her key ring before they left Emser Strasse just to be sure she’d be alerted if anyone attempted to interfere with the vehicle. The tiny light was glowing green, powered up and hotlinked.

Ahmet’s was a brief walk though an unseasonably chilly night, although the weather was so unpredictable these days that the idea of seasons had little meaning. Caitlin maintained her situational awareness, scoping out the street and the surrounding buildings as they walked. Emser Strasse had been blessed with good tree cover once, but the canopy had apparently not recovered from the pollution storms in ‘03. The trees, which should have been lush with early summer foliage, were still looking sick and straggly. Not unlike Mirsaad himself.

“I’m sorry to turn up unannounced like this, Sadie. But it’s better, believe me.”

The reporter frowned and burrowed further into the old brown coat he had donned for the brisk walk.

“There will be a price to pay for this with my wife, but for Bret I am willing to pay. For you, too, if it is true you helped get us all back here. He intimated as much at your wedding. For which invite I must thank you. It is a lovely farm you have there, and we were made very welcome. Laryssa was worried.”

“Because of you?”

“Because of the government. This Howard fellow is very hard line, no? Much harder than Blair was.”

Caitlin rubbed her hands together against the cold as her breath plumed white in front of her. It was hard to believe the weather was still fucked up so long after the Wave. She had indeed been instrumental in clearing Mirsaad’s passage to the EU from Kuwait, back to his wife and two children, as they were then. Even though he was married to a German national, there was no guarantee he’d have been allowed back in during the insane time after the Disappearance. And Bret had been insistent that they help him after the Jordanian had done so much to pluck him to safety from the chaos of the American retreat. But of course, mere philanthropy and favor trading would not have been enough for Caitlin to secure the Jordanian’s travel permits. Not in the toxic atmosphere of 2003. She had lobbied on Mirsaad’s behalf because she knew there was a chance that one day he might be useful as an asset.