Without Warning (57 page)

But the look on Reynard’s face was totally worth it.

The Frenchman did his best to hold his feelings in check, but she’d struck a nerve and his anguish spilled out in a slight downturn at the corners of his mouth, the merest pout of his lips, and a hollowing of the cheeks as he tilted his head back in an effort to disengage emotionally from his prisoner. He would not beat Caitlin for her insolence. The Algerian would be back later on to do that. Reynard—not his name, but he
looked
like a Reynard, like a hungry fox licking shit from a wire brush, as her old man would have said— he was too important to get her blood on his hands.

“The doctors tell me you are a very sick little girl,” he said in English. “We could help you. Your illness progresses, but it is not too late. Help us, so we can help you.”

She laughed, a wet rattling sound that ended in a string of explosive, searingly painful coughs. They felt like phosphorous burns in her chest. Small gobbets of blood flew out and spotted his shirt and tie.

“Sorry,” she said, and then added, “Red just isn’t your color, is it,
Reynard?”
before hawking up a mouthful of phlegm and blood to spit at him. She had given him the name as soon as she realized that he was not going to identify himself, not even with a false name.

It was a cheap trick to increase her feelings of powerlessness and one easily countered by simply calling him something and sticking to it.

Hawking up blood clots to spit at him helped a little, too.

He held up a clipboard to protect himself but she let fly anyway, hitting his fingers with a satisfyingly lurid chunk.

He cursed her in French and stormed out of the cell, dragging the door closed behind him. A heavy iron cage, it slammed shut with a deafening clang.

Caitlin closed her eyes and smiled. A small victory. Not so long ago Reynard would simply have absorbed the abuse and bored in on her, attempting to undermine her defenses, all the time reminding her how utterly alone she was in the world. Enraging him was a small win. Possibly Pyrrhic, but a victory nonetheless. She breathed in slowly. The air was stale and dank. She remembered her last stay in the cells beneath Noisy-le-Sec as being uncomfortable because of the cold. Her interrogators had maintained the temperature just above freezing, but on this occasion there had been no attempts to manipulate her environment. She put that down to power shortages. The lights flickered off and on irregularly, often going out for minutes at a time. The fort would have its own generator, but even so, the directorate would need to ration supply if the wider grid had gone off-line.

Really, though, she had no idea. She had been held incommunicado for a month, and her captors had told her nothing of the outside world save for those details that suited their ends, and, of course, she could not necessarily believe them anyway. She could only trust what few minuscule scraps of reality came filtering through their control.

Time. They had tried to disconnect her from the flow of time. To impress upon her that she was adrift on the seas of eternity, and completely within their control. They were good, too. She had been trained to listen for any clues in their conversation, to try to catch a glimpse of any timepieces or watches that might stray into her field of view. But Reynard and his men were good. On each of their wrists she found only a tan line, and for a long time, lost in the haze of beatings and interrogation, she did lose track of the days and weeks. But of course there was one thing they could not take or hide from her.

She was a woman, and three weeks into her capture, her period arrived, weak but unmistakable.

It had since passed, marking a month since Monique had been killed, and she had collapsed in the hallway of the apartment block back on the rue d’Asnières, betrayed by her own failing body. She kept the small morsel of knowledge, that she knew how long she’d been held, to herself. It was a small prize to covet in her ongoing battle with Reynard. And not the only one either. She knew things about him that he would not want her to know.

The Frenchman, for instance, was losing weight. She had taken note of where he notched his belt the first time he had interrogated her. It was two notches in from there now. At first, too, he had always been clean-shaven, and his suits freshly dry-cleaned and pressed. Recently, however, he had once or twice sported a five o’clock shadow, and she noted that his collars and cuffs were growing dark with grime. He, like her, was suffering. Dark bags had appeared under his eyes, and he had chewed the skin around his left thumbnail quite ragged.

She could not know what was happening in the city outside the fortress walls, she did not even know what was happening in the cells near her own, but Caitlin was willing to bet on systemic collapse. And so she taunted him along those lines, finally eliciting the angered reaction of a few moments past. She would wait now for her punishment. She composed herself, a task made somewhat easier because today she was able to lie flat on her slab. She was naked, but she had long since grown used to that. And most important they did not have her trussed into a stress position, sitting with her knees pulled right up and bound, and her hands cuffed behind her back. It was excruciating after a while, and they had forced her to maintain the posture by having two men stand over her with lengths of heavy rubber tubing to hand out a beating whenever she attempted to alter position.

After a few days of that, however, pressure sores covered her buttocks and had become infected. That bought her a few days’ respite while a medic treated her. After that they relented, in a fashion, resorting to a mix of stress positioning, waterboarding, and sensory bombardment, rotated in such a way as to maintain her torment without the inconvenience of needing to halt for treatment. It had almost broken her, but they had stopped after she sank her teeth into the wrist of a man who’d been attempting to place a hood over her head in preparation for another waterboarding session. Caitlin had bitten down as hard as she could, feeling the skin break, and hot, salty blood start flowing a split second before feeling the satisfying crack of a shattered bone.

The asshole had screamed a lot louder than she ever did, something she’d been quick to point out to Reynard. After that they had reverted to beatings for a couple of days.

Beatings she could handle, and she had even begun to goad them, holding
out the hope that somebody might lose control and kill her with an uncontrolled blow.

Because Reynard was right about one thing.

She was doomed. There was no point hanging on for the sake of the mission. There was no mission, and there would be no deliverance.

Caitlin was refusing to break simply because that was all she had left in the world. The only choice that remained in her life was how she left it.

She released a lungful of infected breath, carefully, slowly, so as not to set off another round of racking coughs. Slowly breathing in, she kept her eyes closed and tried to imagine the harsh fluorescent light hanging from the bare stone ceiling of the cell to be the sun. Her myriad agonies she repackaged as the well-earned scars of a hard day’s surfing over exposed reef in the Mentawais. She had been there not twelve months ago, on a two-week vacation with her brother and some of his college friends.

(All gone.)

They had surfed eight hours a day, and she had been pounded without mercy. Caitlin projected herself back there. She did not attempt to recall the entire trip, only one perfect ride, which she reconstructed from fragments of memory, recalling the kiss of warm tropical water flowing through her toes as she paddled out, the heat of the sun on her back, burning through a UV shirt, the salt spray in her mouth as she duck-dived through one broken wave after another, the tickle of bubbles she blew out through her nose while under the water, the …

“Dreaming of your mother’s apple pie, Caitlin?”

She was too nerve-dead and exhaused to startle. But inside she fell through negative space, tumbling end over end. She knew who it was before opening her eyes. Her target.

Bilal Baumer.

Al-Banna.

“Are you an assassin, Willard?”

“What the fuck?”

“It’s my Brando doing his Colonel Kurtz,” said Baumer with a rich stagy laugh that bounced off the damp, moldy ceiling of her cell. He repeated the quote, amping up the grinding, nasal impersonation.

“Are
you
an assassin, Caitlin?”

(Okay. Just go with it.)

She indulged him. “I’m a soldier.”

“You’re neither.” He smiled, dropping out of character, but staying with the quote. “You’re an errand girl sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.”

She smiled back at him, all bloody teeth and cold eyes, a feral creature that has learned the trick of imitating a human being. “Yeah. And you’ll pay in full.”

“I don’t think so.”

It was Reynard. He had changed into a fresh shirt and now stood behind Baumer, regarding her with restrained enmity.

“These theatrics, they weary me, Miss Monroe. As they must weary you, too,
non?
It is time, don’t you think, that we shook off our roles. Me the nameless interrogator …”

“Reynard’ll do fine …”

“You,
the lone wolf, the hunter, who will never give in. It is all bullshit. You have nothing to fight for.”

“I didn’t pick this fight,” she said, suddenly angry. The sight of Baumer had brought back memories of Monique, and a more painful moral sensibility, a recognition of her abject failure to protect the girl.

“You sent your people in after me. I don’t know why. Or I didn’t, until he showed up.”

“You still do not understand,” Reynard assured her.

“What? So he belongs to you. He’s a double? Big fucking deal.”

“No,” said Baumer. “
I
am not one of
his.
“

Caitlin levered herself up a little farther, and fought down an urge to shield her naked body from Baumer. It would be an acknowledgment of weakness. She raised her cuffed hands to rub at her eyes. Her wrists were bound by plastic zip ties that had cut deeply into the skin. The wounds were raw in places, crusted over in others. Just another locus of pain to put in a box and hide far away at the back of her mind.

Her voice was faint and croaky, but she put as much strength into it as she could.

“What, you’re telling me ol’ Reynard here really
is
a cheese-eating surrender monkey? He’s sold out to Osama?”

“No,” said Baumer.

“So, what, he doesn’t like cheese?”

The Frenchman squeezed his eyes shut and sucked in air through his nose.

“I have brought Bilal here to show you the futility of resistance,” he explained. “The war you were fighting is over. Your country didn’t lose. You lost your country. What is the point in clinging to ideas and loyalties that no
longer exist? It is the definition of madness, Caitlin. Just tell us what you can of Echelon’s operational structure in France and you can go. We understand you were no longer hunting Bilal. You are a stateless refugee. You need help. But we cannot do that until you help us.”

Caitlin sucked her bruised and broken lower lip.

“Yeah, look, about that, weren’t you the guy torturing me, the last few weeks? Why would I help you, exactly? And why would you let me go, when I did?”

Reynard sighed. “Caitlin. You are not an imbecile. Stop pretending otherwise. We are all serious people, and the work we do, the measures we must all take, they are serious, too.
Non?
You killed three innocent people during your cowboy shoot-out. You did not know that, did you? No, of course not. You could not know. But the postmortems put
your
bullets inside them, not ours.”

She shrugged. He could be lying, probably was. Maybe she’d tagged that cyclist, but that was all, as best she recalled.

“Caitlin, we need to know what you know about Echelon. I understand that you work in cells. I am not expecting you to give me details you cannot provide. But even the most mundane of details might mean something to us while possibly meaning nothing to you. You have to understand, Caitlin. Your fellow agents are rogue operators now. They are more dangerous than ever. The situation outside is stable, but critical. There has been much unrest. Much distrust between peoples. Even bloodshed. Things have settled now, due to a great deal of effort and goodwill by all parties, but just one of your colleagues, carrying forward a single mission, hitting just one target, they could bring everything down. You
must
understand this. They must be stopped. For everyone’s sake.”

Bilal moved closer to the raised slab of concrete on which she lay.

He looked tired and stressed out, but he retained much of the easy, feline grace that she recalled from preop surveillance. He looked in much better shape than Reynard. An immature, irrational part of her wished that Monique could see him now, and could see that Caitlin had not been lying.

“Like you, Caitlin, I am merely a messenger,” he said, sitting himself down carefully on the edge of her slab, keeping his eyes on her face and away from the bruises and wounds that covered her body. “I obey a Lord who is compassionate, who will make you a partner in peace or war.”

Her mouth curved up in a vulpine sneer.

“Well,
Billy,
if you knew your Ibn Ishaq as well as your Coppola you would know the full context of that reference, that before whispering sweet
nothings about peace and mung beans, the Prophet’s companion Ubayy ibn Ka’b first spoke of settling matters with the sword at Khaybar, where the faithful would bring death to those who struggle against them. Or something like that. Maybe I’m getting confused with Conan the Barbarian. That was a great flick.”

She had hoped to unsettle him, but Baumer nodded as though agreeing with her. He seemed almost pleased.

“So not just an errand girl, then,” he said. “A scholar of the book, no less. In which case you would also know that Ishaq was not just a historian, but almost a prophet of sorts. A small-‘p’ prophet, if you like. What prescience he must have had, Caitlin, to write ‘Evil was the state of our enemy so they lost the day. We slew them and left them in the dust. Those who escaped were choked with terror. A multitude of them were slain. This is Allah’s war in which those who do not accept Islam will have no helper.’ “