Caitlin didn’t bother reading the transcripts. As Colonel Murdoch, she was willing to take McCutcheon’s word for the gist of the document.
‘That didn’t work for Baumer and Ozal in New York,’ she said, curious to see whether either man would react to the two names. They didn’t, for which she had to credit them. ‘Surely New York disabused Morales of the idea he could just wander in here and plant his flag?’
Blackstone seemed pleased to have been asked that one. ‘That’s where Morales has proven himself to be smarter than Powell,’ he replied. ‘Predictably enough for a former gang leader. You would expect him to understand turf wars. What he learned from New York was modesty. When you sit down and read the transcripts, and I don’t expect you to do so now, you’ll see the Federation takes away from New York a realisation not to challenge us openly, head on. There’s no military component to what they were planning in Florida, apart from the special forces doing advance reconnaissance. They intend to set up small, discrete civilian colonies, to grow them quietly, until the point where the colonies would declare themselves for the South American Federation, rather than us. At that point, it would actually benefit Morales if we responded in the way we did in New York. They could then sweep in and portray themselves as the protector. Any civilian casualties would count against us. The settlements would beg for protection from the imperialist gringos. Roberto could move some of his better assets up here, to shield them, and unless Seattle is willing to spill a lot of supposedly innocent blood, he gets to hold on to his gains. He gets a continental foothold on the edge of a very empty continent. Or that was the plan, anyway. Until we caught his special operators.’
‘They weren’t that special, as it turned out.’ McCutcheon grinned.
‘We’ll need to debrief the prisoners ourselves,’ said Musso, who appeared to be trying to keep an open mind.
‘Not a problem,’ the aide shot back. ‘Well, sorry … there is a problem with one of them. He didn’t survive the initial debrief. But the other three are just raring to go, Tusk.’
Musso sent a withering look his way, although Caitlin could see the former Marine had been thrown by the unexpected development. As much by Fort Hood’s activities in Florida as by Roberto Morales, she imagined. She purposely closed the folder and returned it to the table.
‘This is interesting, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘And I mean that. The Chief of Staff, and I imagine the President, will be both interested and grateful to see this. It will go into my report.’ She glanced over at General Musso. ‘But given that we’ve caught this so early, do you really think it’s necessary to reassign scarce military resources when we could achieve the same result, scaring him off, with a quiet, diplomatic word?’
‘Ty? Would you?’ Blackstone asked, nodding towards the pastry tray.
‘Sure,’ said his aide, standing up to retrieve a danish.
‘I suppose we could do that, Kate,’ said Blackstone. ‘Me, I’m an old-fashioned guy. I’d just nuke the son of a bitch. You take this information back to Seattle, you might even find that James Ritchie agrees with me for once. After all, he tossed off a couple at Chavez on Musso’s behalf.’
The federal officer shrugged off yet another dig at his Guantanamo record. ‘This does need to be dealt with,’ he began, holding up one of the interrogation transcripts. ‘But Colonel Murdoch is correct. You caught this early. It’s a little problem, needing little effort to address. Especially since we have the prisoners. There’s no explaining them away.’
At that, Blackstone mulled so long that Caitlin started to wonder whether he intended to simply ignore Musso’s words. He did reply, eventually.
‘One way or another, we have to address this. Not so much the immediate question, I agree. Morales won’t be setting up any wildcat colonies now that we’ve tumbled his scheme. But everything I said before about reaching a discontinuous moment in history, Kate, I stand by,’ Blackstone said, returning his attention to her quite pointedly. He accepted a pastry from his offsider, but didn’t eat it straight away. ‘There was a time when no power on earth would have dared contemplate a claim on this continent. Now, there are days I wonder which of them wouldn’t. You know, Governor Palin can see Russia from her front porch, and she tells me they seem to be getting closer every day.’
Caitlin put down her coffee cup and uncrossed her legs, making as if to stand up.
‘Gentlemen,’ she said again. ‘You will understand that before saying anything else I would like to examine these documents in detail. I’m happy to go with Mr McCutcheon to do so, if you don’t want to release them into our custody.’
Blackstone looked like he was about to answer, when his fixer spoke up. ‘We had these copies made up for you. But if you’d like some time to study them, I’m happy for you to use my office, Colonel Murdoch.’ McCutcheon raised an eyebrow at Blackstone. ‘Perhaps an hour’s break, Governor?’
‘An hour sounds about right. If you’d like to take carriage of our guests, Ty?’
‘Be a pleasure, sir.’
Caitlin stood up, hoping her impetus would draw Musso along behind her. She had what she wanted. McCutcheon’s documents were interesting, but what she really needed was access to his office. That was where they obviously kept the administration’s sensitive files.
42
DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY
It was an unsettling experience, shopping while being stalked by your would-be murderer. An experience made worse by Nick Pappas’s recommendation yesterday of a rather depressing-looking department store in the centre of the old town as the place where Julianne might get herself suitably attired for her second cameo as a junior with Downing, Street and Kemp.
This part of Darwin did not look as deeply changed by the enormous volumes of money that had flowed into the city over the last few years. Two new high-rise towers were emerging from holes in the ground that covered entire blocks, but most of the old streetscape remained unaffected. The city had been rebuilt in the late 1970s following Cyclone Tracy, and the aesthetically worthless architecture of that period was everywhere. It rather did Jules’s head in, seeing the many global-brand boutiques, all sparkling and shining like exquisite jewellery boxes, trading within the tatty shells of these buildings. While some outlets, one being the department store towards which she was walking now, were obvious diehards from an earlier era, the long unbroken stretches of high-street retail, expensive cafes, bistros and bars all evidenced a rapid shift away from a utilitarian CBD towards something more akin to a playground for super-rich outcasts. She didn’t recognise many of the fashion names and could only assume they were the local franchises of start-ups from Chinese city states.
It would be lovely, she thought, to have been the mistress of some obscenely wealthy mining magnate who was only around to bother you one week out of every two or three months. In which case, she’d probably have spent a few days swanning around this strange, isolated mini Monaco, melting her sugar daddy’s plastic with some gold-medal-standard shopping.
On the other hand, not getting sniped at from a rooftop or run over while crossing the street was a reality she could live with, too.
Julianne did her best to try to pick out Shah’s men from the crowded footpath, and thought maybe she caught a glimpse of somebody who looked like a Gurkha, across the road. But then, in Darwin, you could quickly amass examples of people from all over the world. Her best estimate was that maybe a third of those teeming through this part of town had grown up here. The rest were new arrivals and, specifically, members of the city’s new, arriviste class. Wealthy, displaced and not a little anxious to embed themselves as deeply as possible in their new home. For all the fuck-off money and ostentatious display of significance here, as a child of one of the oldest surviving aristocratic lines in the world (even if, or perhaps because, her own family’s position in that line had come a cropper), Jules was aware of a low-grade, sub-aural hum vibrating just under the surface of things in this place. Status anxiety. The gnawing fear that having survived one cataclysmic break-up of the established order, one might find oneself at the pointy end of any subsequent reordering, no matter how much smaller in scale.