Without Warning (78 page)

A silenced handgun and a fighting knife appeared in her hands.

She glided over to the first door and inserted the fiber-optic wire through the old keyhole. The room appeared to be deserted. She turned the knob. Hinges creaked horribly and she sidestepped, bringing up the pistol. For two minutes she stood, ready to cut down anyone who appeared, but there was nobody inside.

She moved on and repeated the routine.

This time her pulse accelerated as the optic display unit showed her a low-light-amplified image of a man, crouched in the corner of the room, pointing a pistol at the door.

A large white male, with head and arm wounds field-dressed using torn bedsheets, if she was not mistaken. He seemed to be straining to hear any sound that might give away the position of someone in the corridor. Caitlin checked her exposure. Crouched low as she was, off to the side of the door, she was safely out of his line of fire. He was aiming for the center mass of anyone who walked through the door.

Fuck.

She had no idea who he was or what he was doing there. The man was a complication she did not need.

There was no going in and taking him down. This guy was primed for trouble.

She took a moment to examine him in the display screen again. He had a good firing position and held the gun as though it was an extension of his
body. He didn’t look nervous, self-conscious, or likely to hesitate if he needed to shoot.

He was clean-shaven, and wearing the sort of vest she’d often seen on press photographers. The image was not sharp, unfortunately, but she thought she could make out a notepad, some pens, and possibly a small Dictaphone in some of the pockets, the sort of thing that took little microcas-settes. If only she could see the back of his vest—there might be an identifying logo or something. A lot of reporters used reflective tape to spell out
PRESS
or the acronym of their media affiliates on their backs.

Caitlin thought that just made them easier targets, but journalists were weird. They had some fucked-up ideas.

She had to come to a decision quickly.

The man was almost certainly not part of the group downstairs.

He was trapped in the room, probably by their unexpected arrival.

There was probably no way of getting in there without him firing off half a mag at the door.

She decided to leave him in place.

He disappeared from the screen as she withdrew the fiber-optic wire.

For thirty seconds she crouched, waiting, but no sound or movement came from within.

That was actually kind of impressive.

This guy was no amateur.

But he was not necessarily an ally either, and she began to edge away, eventually making the stairs, where she stood, adjusting herself to the sounds, to the feel of the house. It felt like an inhabited dwelling, but that wasn’t down to any bullshit sixth sense. She knew the lower floors were occupied. What she didn’t know was where her targets were holed up.

She listened, willing her nausea to recede to the edge of consciousness, breathing as she had been taught to settle her nervous system.

She could hear the angry rumble of battle.

A jet aircraft shrieking low to the west.

The creaking and settling of the building as the ground underneath moved fractionally in response to the pounding of high explosives and the grinding of heavy armor through streets no more than a mile distant.

A radio, playing Arabic music.

Snoring. Some muttering, but not conversational, probably someone talking in their sleep.

A clink of china cups or glasses.

Quiet laughter.

A ringing in her ears, which had been constant for two weeks.

Her pulse and heartbeat.

The silent advance of the tumor that was eating her from the inside out.

Caitlin floated down the stairs, using a technique she had studied under the ninjutsu master Harunaka Hoshino, who had trained her to cross a nightingale floor with a minimum of noise. There was no way to eliminate the singing of the boards, but Hoshino taught her to quiet its chirping. The stairs of the old French residence were no challenge after that.

She paused on the second-to-last step. The house was dark, the power grid having failed long ago, but with her NVGs she could make out a weak, fluttering light emanating from under two of the four doors on this floor. She stilled herself, becoming as stonelike as a human being could, and opening all of her senses wide to let the world rush in.

She smelled old food. Meat gone cold. And coffee.

A body shifted and rolled over on the floor nearby, lifting slightly and settling back down with a light thump.

A sheet or blanket rustled.

A windup clock ticked.

In one of the lighted rooms a page turned.

Every hair on Caitlin’s body bristled, an ancient autonomic response to danger, a hangover from her animal ancestors.

She floated down the hallway to the door behind which she knew at least one man was awake and reading. Again she settled into stillness and allowed the life of the building, just a soft heartbeat and a murmured breath at this dead hour, to flow into her.

Another page turned and she heard mumbling in Arabic from the same room.

“O ye who believe! When ye meet the Unbelievers in hostile array, never turn your backs on them. If any do turn his back to them on such a day—unless it be in a stratagem of war, or to retreat to his own troop—he draws on himself the wrath of Allah and his abode is Hell, an evil refuge indeed.”

Caitlin visualized the small room on the other side of the door. A single bedroom, probably given to a child in happier days. A window overlooking the street behind. No connecting doors to any room on either side.

She examined the handle. An old-fashioned brass knob without a keyhole.

There could be a latch on the other side, but of that she could not be certain.

There was only one thing for it.

Caitlin sheathed her fighting knife.

Powered down and raised her night-vision goggles.

And waited.

The mumbling and page turning continued.

She stood motionless for six minutes, until her opportunity arrived.

Another jet, roaring close overhead within a mile.

As the whining howl reached its maximum intensity she calmly reached out, opened the door, got a sight picture of one man, young and shirtless, sitting up in a small bed, leaning against a pillow, reading and looking up at her, all innocence and dawning bewilderment as the assassin raised a hand-tooled, frequency-shifting silenced pistol and squeezed the trigger twice.

Two muted clacks, almost like a stapler, and the subsonic .300 Whisper rounds left the muzzle of the weapon at about 980 feet per second, slowing only fractionally as they entered his brainpan and scattered the contents all over the room.

She swept the space automatically, but already knew it to be empty.

A quick puff to blow out his candle and she pulled the door closed and turned down toward the next lighted room.

This one was silent. No muttering. No page turning. Again she waited.

Closer to the stairwell this time, she could hear at least three voices down on the ground floor. Two spoke in rapid-fire Arabic; one was slower, polished, but heavily accented.

Lacan.

Okay, that was a bitch. She’d been hoping to find him in bed, but filtering out his voice, she did determine that Baumer’s German accent was not part of that conversation, the only one in the house at the moment.

Caitlin returned to her vigil at the door.

The flutter of a light leaking out told her of a candle inside.

She concentrated, leaning her ear to the door, and waiting. After three minutes she was rewarded with a brief snore.

No jet fighters conveniently appeared to cover the sounds of murder this time, but when the voices downstairs rose and broke into laughter she repeated her actions of a few minutes earlier. Coolly opening the door, lining up a headshot, and double-tapping her victim, a slightly overweight balding man who had fallen asleep with a pair of headphones plugged into an iPod. His body shuddered violently as the bullets shredded his neocortex.

Dousing this second candle, she plunged the floor back into darkness and refitted the NVGs.

Two other rooms remained on this level. According the building plans they were larger, possibly capable of taking more than one small bed.

Caitlin moved to the door through which she could hear the loudest snoring.

She sniffed the faintest trace of an earthy, familiar smell.

Kif.

A highly concentrated cannabis resin, popular among North African fighters.

That was enough for her to take a calculated risk, unshipping the fiberoptic set and sliding the wire under the door for a quick scan of the room.

Inside she found three men all asleep on the floor. There being no beds or other furniture, they had balled up clothes or bags and used them as pillows. Caitlin observed them until she was certain they were deeply asleep. She withdrew the surveillance device, and quietly swapped out her mag, which unfortunately only ran to six rounds. It was one of the drawbacks of using the bespoke no-name handgun.

This time, however, she kept the goggles powered up as she eased through the door and closed it behind her, covering the three prone forms all the time. A damp towel lay on the floor and she carefully toed it along the gap between the bottom of the door and the floorboards.

Then she quickly and methodically executed every man in the room.

Only the last one came awake, and then only enough to prop himself up on one elbow and squint into the dark. His sudden movement put her aim off and the first bullet struck him in the throat. Caitlin took two silent steps toward him and cut off his gargling death rattle with her last shot.

A hard, steel spike of pain was drilling into her head from a point about an inch behind her left eye, intensifying her nausea and giddiness.

She took a precious minute to center herself, to breathe deeply and detach from the barbed emotional tendrils of her bloody work.

The last of her six-shot magazines went into the pistol, and she replaced the suppressor with a new one taken from a slot on her belt. The silencers, unique to Echelon wet work cells, relied on a customized combination of austenitic nickel-based superalloy baffles, foam wipes, and carbon-nanotube mesh to reduce the sound of weapon fire by diverting and cooling the hot, rapidly expanding gases created by the detonation of the gunpowder. After she had burned out this one she would have to rely on her knife for silent killing.

She drifted to a halt in front of the next door, another darkened room outside which she waited for a minute before threading through the optical fiber again. When the display lit up this time ice water sluiced though her bowels. She could see Baumer, asleep on a mattress on the floor. Lying next to him was a woman she did not recognize. She had one leg draped over his thigh, and a thin arm lay across his chest.

Billy, Billy, Billy,
she thought.
Monique was too good for you, buddy.

She removed a one-use syringe from a leather pouch at her hip, uncapped the needle point, and pressed the plunger until a small stream of fluid squirted out.

Lacan was talking downstairs. In French now, cursing Sarkozy as a fascist and a half-Greek Jew, a comment that gave rise to an animated rant by one of his companions about the Jewish state and the revenge that was coming its way.

Seizing the opportunity, she entered the room, and came face-to-face with the woman, who had awoken and sat up. Her wide eyes searched the darkness, bulging when she saw Cailtin’s outline: a silhouetted figure in black overalls, wearing night-vision gear and carrying a weapon. She was dead before she could scream, two bullets taking the top of her skull off and painting the wall behind them.

Baumer came awake instantly and rolled out from under the falling corpse, crying out as he did so. He launched himself at Cailtin’s knees, knocking her back off her feet with a crash. She drove the syringe into his neck and squeezed, smashing the butt of her pistol up against his head for good measure. It didn’t knock him out, but it stunned him enough for her to piston a boot into his chest and push him away from her.

“Crusaders,” he cried out in Arabic. “Hurry, they’re here.”

He tried to launch himself at her again, but the fast-acting drug had already robbed him of any coordination, and he fell like a drunk into a heap at her feet.

“Not so tough now, are you, you rapist motherfucker,” she said before hitting the PTT button on her headset and crying out.

“I’m blown, Rolland! I got Baumer. Third floor, first room on the left coming up. Possible civilian above us, armed. Hostiles below. Lacan is awake and unsecured.”

“You …” said Baumer, mushily as he collapsed into a drugged stupor.

Caitlin heard the French commandos open fire on the ground floor.

The guard out there would be dropping to the ground, dead before he hit. Below her the sounds of riot and tumult erupted as men awoke and reached for their guns, unsure what was happening, but certain they were in mortal peril.

She holstered the silenced pistol and pulled her personal weapon around on its strap, an H&K MP-5. Feet thundered up the staircase below her and she darted from the room, all concern at stealth departed. The house had no power, but flashlights and electric lamps dazzled in her NVGs. She loosed
two bursts from the submachine gun down the stairwell at the bobbing, moving sources of light. Two of them tumbled back down and the third stopped and dropped as the man carrying it let go.

Fire came back up at her, automatic and single shot, describing beautiful emerald traces in her enhanced night vision. She stripped a hand grenade from her belt while firing one-handed down the well, pulled the pin with her teeth, painfully cracking a filling as she did, and tossing the small bomb down into the maelstrom below. She closed her eyes, backing away and firing blindly. The grenade exploded with a roar that caused the spike of pain already drilling into her head to grow cruel thorns that raked at the back of her eyes and drove jagged spears deep into her brain stem.