Without Warning (34 page)

“Against my boyfriend?” asked Monique, giving full vent to her sarcasm.

Caitlin stopped and held Monique’s gaze.

“Yes.”

“Oh for Chrissakes …”

They started moving again. Monique’s shoulders had hunched forward and she was holding her arms stiffly by her sides. Caitlin recognized the signal. She was furious again.

She sighed.

“Bilal Hans Baumer,” she said, and immediately caught Monique’s attention.

“You know his name!”

She looked both surprised and wary.

“Of course I know his name, darlin’. He was my target.”

She dropped into her best Schwarzenegger: “I haff extensiff files.”

The French girl didn’t get the reference. Caitlin pushed on regardless.

“Bilal Hans Baumer. Date of birth May 5, 1974. Hamburg, Germany. Parents, separated. A German auto mechanic, Hans Baumer, and Turkish mother, Fabia Shah. His father named him Wilhelm, but he was a drinker and abandoned the family after losing his job in 1978. His mother was a reformist
Muslim. Her bother Abu came to act as a surrogate father for the boy after Hans took off. Abu had always called him Bilal instead of Wilhelm. The name stuck. Don’t stop walking. Come on, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

Monique had come to a halt just meters from the back of the minibus. The father, who’d been about to climb into the driver’s seat, caught her eye. He looked guilty, as though she had caught him doing something shameful. Monique favored him with a shaky smile, and he nodded, taking in their backpacks and the appearance of flight that hung about them.

“Bonjour,”
said Caitlin as they passed.
“Bonne chance.”

“Bonne chance.”
He nodded back before climbing in and closing the door with a slam. Caitlin scanned the back of the van, thinking of asking for a lift, but it was crammed full with children, adults, boxes, suitcases, and food.

“Why are you telling me this?” asked Monique as the bus pulled away.

Caitlin kept walking.

“Through Abu, Bilal came to meet other lost boys, most of them the products of failed unions between German men and migrant women. His mother still lives in the council flat where he grew up. She works for the City Council records department. She is inordinately proud of his achievements. He is one of the few young men in the neighborhood to finish school, let alone university. He has a real job, and would have represented Germany in volleyball at the Athens Olympics.”

A few people were beginning to show up on the streets now, some of them also dressed for hiking. Another family emerged from an apartment block just across the street. The children were crying, complaining about the way their eyes stung and how it hurt to breathe. A young man rode past on a bicycle, wearing goggles and a painter’s disposable mask. He rang his bell as he passed them, fluttering his eyebrows. It drew a brief smile from Caitlin, made her feel a little better. But still she continued.

“Bilal is tall and rangy with light olive skin. Thick, wiry hair, colored a dark, almost caramel blond. He has wide shoulders, long well-muscled arms and legs. No fat. Deep brown eyes, so brown they almost appear black from more than a few feet away. A ready smile that seems to spark off a high level of nervous energy. He rarely sits still for more than a moment and is given to little jumps and skips when he is excited. He talks with his hands.”

Monique was staring at her now, almost walking into a pole at one point. Her eyes were wide and anxious. Caitlin had never met Bilal, but she had just described him perfectly.

“His uncle Abu encouraged him to remain in school and proceed to university while many of the young men around him had simply gone onto welfare
. Abu funded his education and supported his mother. As Bilal Baumer he had studied the German equivalent of sports science and became a qualified personal fitness instructor, first working for a health-insurance company, providing physiotherapy and rehab training for older clients, and later moving to a gym, where he proved very popular with the female clientele. I believe that is how you met, in fact, when he took you for a complimentary training session at a women-only gym in Berlin, when you were in the city eight months ago.”

Monique now looked physically ill, but Caitlin gave her no respite.

“Bilal took up beach volleyball after a trip to Sardinia in 1995 and became a German regional champion with his partner Jurgen Müller. Their run to the Olympics was cut short by Müller’s acceptance into the Deutsche Marine.”

They had stopped walking and now stood on the edge of the gutter while Caitlin quickly checked up and down the street for any signs that they were being followed. It seemed clear. She spoke without emotion, simply recalling the facts from the dossier she had committed to memory as soon as her case controller had handed her the file on the al-Qaeda recruiter known as al-Banna.

“He grew up in the Berlin suburb of Neukölln, where migrants form just under half the total population. Three generations of Turks are mixed in with Eastern Europeans and some North Africans. Most of the Turks don’t speak German or even go to school. Unemployment is eighty percent, and the city spends three-quarters of its budget on welfare.”

“Stop it, please. Just stop,” begged Monique. “What is the point of all this?”

“The point, Monique, is that Bilal Baumer is not your boyfriend. Do you know why he has never agreed to move to be closer to you?”

“His work, he …”

Caitlin smiled gently.

“His work, or at least the job he uses as a cover, his personal training, could follow him anywhere. He’s good at his job. His cover job. He has EU citizenship. The health funds that employ him would do so anywhere. You know all this. You’ve always known.”

Caitlin stepped closer, moving into Monique’s personal space. Her voice, which she had kept flat and free of emotion while reciting from her memory of the target file, now grew softer, more understanding.

“Like a lot of women, you don’t have perfect self-esteem. You could not believe that such a good-looking, intelligent, caring man, a good man, would be attracted to you. Part of you always believed you didn’t really deserve
somebody like
Billy
and you assumed, possibly without ever thinking it aloud, that he was keeping his distance until someone better came along.”

Monique’s eyes had filled with tears and she was shaking her head in jerky little spasms.

“No.”

“So you wore all of his bullshit excuses about work and his mother and needing to stay in contact with his community. You were pathetically grateful when he traveled to see you, but you covered most of the miles in that relationship, didn’t you, honey? And you had to wonder sometimes, when he was away with a client, or traveling for work, whether there might be some other girl he was stringing along, because he was a catch and a half, wasn’t he?”

A nod this time, just the smallest movement but a crucial acknowledgment that Caitlin wasn’t entirely wrong. She could have said something about how Monique was also drawn to Bilal because he was simultaneously dangerous and safe. A young man from a Muslim background, politically aware if not active, but fiercely secular in his outlook. Not at all like the bearded wing nuts whose medieval views on women would make it impossible for an enlightened feminist like Monique to have anything to do with them. But of course, to lay it out as brutally as that would break the tenuous connection she had established.

“Monique, you were right. You were not his only one.”

A small groan escaped the throat of the distressed young woman. Judging the time to be right, Caitlin reached into her jacket and produced the envelope she’d removed from the folder hidden under the floorboards back at the apartment. She shook out a handful of surveillance shots, good-quality high-def color photos of Baumer entwined with two separate women. The date stamps marked them as having been taken in the last six months.

“He also successfully targeted a Belgian student,” said Caitlin as Monique took the photographs with a shaking hand. “Anya Delvaux, a part-time canvasser for Greenpeace in Brussels, and Sofia Calderon, an activist documentary maker from Barcelona.”

Monique had started to sway on her feet, and her face grew blotchy, with irregular patches of high color fading quickly into bloodlessness.

“An auteur?”

“Well, a
would-be
auteur. Sofia’s posted a few vids on the Net, entered a competition or two, but she still pays the bills as a waitress.”

The uppermost photograph showed Baumer and the Spaniard, a tall, rather extravagant beauty, dry-humping each other in a park. The tears were
flowing freely now, but silently, as Monique attempted to control her free-falling emotions.

“You … you seem to know them well. These women.”

She leafed through the other photographs with an unsteady hand, blinking large tears onto them and gasping at some of the more intimate encounters.

“Oh, my God,” she said in a tiny voice. “You must have similar photographs of…”

“Of you,” Caitlin finished for her. “I’m sorry, but yes. I do. Or I did. When I selected you as my objective, my target, I filed them.”

The effort to dam up her feelings failed at last, and with a series of hitching sobs, Monique suddenly came apart, wailing and crying like a child who suddenly realizes she is lost and alone. Caitlin placed a hand on her elbow and steered her through the carpet of twitching birds toward a side street, which was still deserted. The avenue on which they stood was beginning to come to life. It was nowhere near as busy as it would have been on a normal day, but here and there individuals were venturing out.

The photos spilled from Monique’s fingers, falling into the contaminated mud and refuse of the street. Caitlin was forced to bend over and pick them up.

It saved her life.

Everything came back slowly, from a great distance. Awareness, senses, memory, and pain. Oh yeah, there was plenty of that. Everything was so dim and far away that the actual transition to consciousness was not immediately real, and for an age he hovered on the far side of a morphine dream, unable and unwilling to pull himself back to reality. In the end, the pain made it impossible to hide. Whatever drugs he’d been given were beginning to wear off and Melton had a dizzying, sick-making instant of realization that he was in pain. Real pain, seated in more places throughout his broken body than he cared to catalogue.

“Goddamn,” he muttered.

“Hurts like a bitch, don’t it, sir?”

The voice was loud and obnoxiously cheerful. Familiar, too, in its smooth rap cadences. But he felt as though everything in his head, every thought and memory, had been violently jostled out of place by the explosion that must have put him here.

Where?

His eyelids were gummy and difficult to force open, but force them he did, blinking and raising a hand to rub away the crust that had formed while
he slept. Or at least he tried to. His shoulder throbbed abysmally, as though he’d reinjured the old wound picked up so many moons ago at ranger parachute school.

“Damn!”

“Yeah. You’ll want to lie still, until the nurse comes to get you. Don’t go getting no ideas though. It’s a male nurse. Skinny, ugly little fucker, too. He’ll jam a bedpan sideways up your ass if you give him any stick.”

“Corporal Shetty?”

“Uh-huh. Bits of me.”

Their surroundings slowly came into focus. Melton was lying on a cot in a tent. On either side of him lay more men in uniform, some heavily bandaged, some apparently undamaged, at least on the outside. A fine layer of sand covered the plywood floors, and through a flap a short distance away he could see the fierce, white light of the desert. He noticed the thrum of a heavy-duty air-con unit, keeping them cool. It looked as hot as a furnace outside. He slowly turned his head toward Shetty’s voice, noticing immediately that the corporal was short one limb. His left arm had disappeared just above the elbow.

“Yeah, gonna have to work extra hard scratching my ass now,” he said. “And that was my natural ass-scratching hand, too. Least I still got an ass, though. And my nuts.”

He gave his groin a reassuring squeeze with his remaining hand.

“Where are we?” asked Melton. His voice was cracked and he reached for a squeeze bottle of water on the small stand next to his bed. It was warm and tasted slightly metallic, but still felt like sweet dew in his parched mouth.

“We scored an evac slot,” said Shetty. “Don’t know where from exactly. They’re not saying. But I’d bet Kuwait or Qatar if I had to … if I had any money. Germany is our next stop.”

Now fully awake, if still groggy at the edges, Melton found himself unpleasantly aware of just how much he hurt. His entire body seemed to ache, but here and there, more intense pain warned him of some very special hurts that he’d picked up. Shetty seemed to read his mind.

“You’re not doing too badly, Mr. Melton,” he explained. “Doc told me you lost a finger off your right hand. A big chunk of shoulder meat. You lost about half of your ranger tattoo. And you got peppered with shrapnel and one big hunk of wooden window casement. Had a splinter as big as Florida stuck in your ass, apparently. Doc said that hunk of wood coulda been a thousand years old. Said they shoulda had an archaeologist dig it outta your butt.”