‘Without a fucking doubt,’ agreed Granger.
He pointed the car west for the drive to the waterfront. The driver seemed to appreciate that his passenger was not in much of a mood for any conversation.
Julianne closed her eyes and concentrated on not seeing visions of the Rhino lying comatose, crippled and burnt in a hospital bed. She found she had no choice, though. She couldn’t stop thinking about the Rhino. So she forced herself to remember him in some of his better moments. Lecturing her about boutique beer in New York, for instance. Smoking Greg Norman’s cigars with Miguel on board the yacht. Flirting outrageously with Fifi while grilling out on deck …
Good times. Amazingly good, considering how they’d come about.
Jules was almost smiling when the other car hit them.
45
TEMPLE, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION
The timer beeped on the ballistic gel mould. She gave it another thirty seconds, just to be safe, before opening the little unit and removing the small, yellow, thumb-sized gel disc. The rubbery blob was about the size of a slightly elongated dime. Caitlin held it up to the light to check the impression.
Perfect.
She now had Ty McCutcheon’s thumb-print, lifted from his bourbon glass in the bar the previous evening. Securing the print had been a matter of little concern. Musso had arranged the staff roster and spoken to their waitress before she’d come on duty. The woman, an army comms specialist in her day job, kept Caitlin’s glass topped up with iced tea instead of Highland Park, and had whipped away McCutcheon’s smooth-sided tumbler, securing it in a Ziploc bag as soon as he’d finished his first Maker’s Mark.
Caitlin stowed the thumb-print away in a small plastic container that she snap-closed and zipped into the pocket of her leather jacket. Low clouds scudded across the sky outside the window of the empty room on the top floor of the Kyle Hotel. She had a good view across downtown from here, a vantage point that let her to appreciate how much the tiny federal settlement resembled a village carved from a deep forest. Just a block or two back from the cleared streets, Temple was reverting to nature. Head-high razor grass grew thick and wild, and small stands of trees obscured the roof lines of low-set buildings that had not burnt or collapsed. A thick, dark cloud, a flock of birds, lifted off from the forest canopy a few streets away, startled by something on the ground perhaps. A feral cat? A dog pack? She’d heard plenty of both the previous night.
The higher floors of the Kyle Hotel were unoccupied. A short jog up the fire escape put her well beyond the reach of the bugs in her room. Her cell phone, a late-model Siemens, confirmed that. Thicker and heavier than it should have been, tightly packed with augmented technologies, including the RFID interceptor she’d used in McCutcheon’s office, the handset’s scan function continually sought out anomalous electronic signatures within a ten-metre radius, but had found nothing here. This room was clean.
She flipped open the cell and keyed in her code to access the Echelon network. It took a little longer than usual to acquire the satellite, but less than a minute later she had a secure channel to Vancouver. The overwatch desk put her through to Larrison immediately.
‘Hey, Wales, it’s me, your favourite.’
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting to hear from you. I have a message from Jed Culver to forward to Colonel Murdoch from a Special Agent Dan Colvin in KC.’
‘What’s Colvin say?’
The deputy director’s reply came back squashed and a little delayed by the encryption software.
‘He says he got the phone data you were after. From that hit-and-run you thought was more hit than run. The Mexican farmer and his girlfriend. One of the cells was a burner, completely untraceable. But Colvin got lucky, or the other guy got lazy, with the second phone. It’s a high-end satellite unit. Explains why he was using it in KC, I guess, because of the shitty local network.’
‘Yeah,’ said Caitlin. ‘Colvin told me that if you don’t have access to the federal system, your phone’s basically bricked. So what did he get?’
‘Sat phone was registered to a ghost, which isn’t surprising. But it was being used right at the moment your man Pieraro was run down. And then the call terminated.’
‘Our spotter?’
‘Almost certainly. Satellite logs traced the phone out to the spot where the KC cops found the burnt-out vehicle.’
She paced the empty room, ending up near the window, where she was able to gaze out over the streets of Temple again. A bus pulled up at the Federal Center, unloading what looked like a party of homesteaders on their way to the Mandate. They stretched their legs as they took a break on the lawn in front of the old city building.
‘So no ID on either the spotter or the driver?’
‘No, but they found the driver. Or somebody they’re pretty sure was the driver.’
‘Deader than Elvis, I’ll bet.’
‘And then some. The body was burnt. The hands cut off, and for bonus points somebody ran over the head a couple of times.’
‘Huh. Thorough.’
‘Not so much. Because whoever this spotter is, he’s still using the satellite phone.’
Her laugh was short and humourless. ‘Stupid. Mother. Fucker.’
Caitlin shook her head as she watched a group of children playing tag in front of the Federal Center. She was pretty sure she recognised Sergeant Milosz down there, in uniform, watching over them while enjoying a cigarette. Occasionally he would dart into the pack of children, grabbing one who was proving difficult for the others to catch, and holding the struggling, laughing child upside down by the ankles.
‘So what do we have on them?’ she asked.
The time delay caused Wales’s earlier reply to run over the question.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Natural selection at work.’
There was a moment of confusion while he disentangled her question from his reply, before he continued. ‘Here’s the thing, Caitlin. The sat phone was picked up by DSD on a programmed sweep by Darwin Station.’
‘Defence Signals Directorate? He’s down under?’
‘In Darwin. The Deadwood of the new millennium. Been there just over two days. Allowing for flight duration, must’ve lit out from KC directly. I asked our local franchise to follow up on it. The connections are starting to go fractal but I think they’re worth following. The Aussies are happy enough to look into it. They don’t want a freelance hitter on their turf, especially not in Darwin with all the Chinese and Indian players they have going through there. There’s even a trade mission from the Federation in town this week. Probably nothing to do with our hitter, but you can imagine how Echelon station in Sydney was all over it once we told them. Put one of their best guys on it. He’s already got some good intel.’
‘Anything for me?’ asked Caitlin, who hadn’t expected any joy from Special Agent Colvin, and now found herself more confused by the meaning of Pieraro’s killing. If indeed it had any meaning.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Wales told her. ‘Random cross over.’
She concentrated hard, trying to recall the case notes she’d studied in Kansas City. It wasn’t easy. There had been so much data to take in. She thought she remembered that the Pieraros had spent time in the refugee camps in Australia, before being accepted into a homesteading program in the Federal Mandate. But whether that was significant, she couldn’t say.
There was nothing for it but to press on with those things she could control.