Musso was still talking, however, and she had to set aside these thoughts.
‘In many ways, Caitlin, if your mission is successful, you’ll set this country back on its heels for a decade. Or longer. Conceivably, you could even cause a complete break between Seattle and Texas. You could turn differences of opinion into a casus belli.’
Caitlin picked up her phone and stowed it away in a deep jacket pocket. She felt none of the bleakness of spirit that seemed to have taken hold of Musso.
‘But think about those differences, sir. They’re not cosmetic. It’s not just politics, or a personal feud. Culver and Wales briefed you before I came down. You know why I’m here. For New York. For what this asshole did to us in New York.’ And for myself, she didn’t add.
‘I do,’ he said, sounding very tired now. ‘I do. Some things you neither forgive nor forget.’
He stood up and reached his hand out to shake hers.
‘Good luck, Agent Monroe. Good luck to us all.’
46
DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY
She experienced a point of paralysing clarity just before impact. Sensing Granger’s sudden tension, Jules felt herself pressed back into the seat as he accelerated. Something large and dark and moving much too quickly loomed in her peripheral vision on the driver’s side of the car. That part of her mind - trained, as it had been, by years at sea to judge the lines of force conspiring to undo her while sailing small boats through the huge, angry seas - passed from slumber to full sentience in the space between instants. She registered the inevitability of a collision in the stuttering hundredths of a second before the hollow thunder of impact. The whole world, and them within it, lurched sideways as it broke apart in a bright, shattered mandala of atomised glass and shrieking, collapsing metal.
A blur of colour. A violent catherine-wheel of optics, stretching and encircling them at cyclonic velocity as the car spun around, tyres exploding like gunshots.
A small, almost abstracted part of her rational mind waited for the cab to flip over and over, for the roof to collapse and crush them. But after an eternity of splintered fractions and fragments of time, they came to rest with a slight jerk as inertia tugged back at the momentum of impact.
She heard Granger cursing, weakly, and became aware of blood everywhere, but whether hers or his, she could not be sure. After the savage, caterwauling din of the crash, the silence that followed seemed to roar in her ears like a force nine gale. But not so loudly that she couldn’t hear the tinkling of glass and the tortured creak of metal as the weight of the wreckage resettled itself.
The crunch of boots on gravel. Running. And men shouting.
Gunshots cracked and popped somewhere nearby, but muted, perhaps by distance, perhaps because her ears were full of blood. Granger cursed again, but he trailed off into a groan as he struggled to release himself, or to retrieve something from beneath his seat.
Jules could not put one thought after another in any sort of coherent fashion. She was annoyed at ruining the clothes she’d bought just hours ago, even though she hated them and would have thrown them away. She felt cool, despite the heat of the day pouring in through the damaged windscreen, which looked as though a giant had put his fist through it.
And still the gunfire popped and crackled. Until, without preamble, a single shot roared with the concussive power of a small bomb going off beside her head. Someone screamed - it was her, she was screaming - at a blast wave of mutilation. Blood, bone, skin, gore. And Granger yelling and roaring, and trying to push her head down between her knees as he fired out of his window with the cut-down shotgun.
Two bangs sounded next to her ear, followed by metallic crunching, and then her door was open and she caught a glimpse of a blade. She tried to cry out, to warn Granger of the threat. But he was snarling and shouting as he fired off round after round from the pump-action shotgun.
Julianne tried to sit up but this man was too strong. But then the blade was gone, and her seatbelt had been cut, and she was being dragged out of the vehicle and away. Away from the burning oil, the iron blood, the tangy aftertaste of gunfire. She fought to free herself until she recognised Birendra’s voice.
‘It is fine. It is good. You are safe, Ms Julianne. You are safe. Just come with us, we have to go. Now.’
The world was a red mask of death and chaos. Her eyes were tacky with blood. What little she could see and understand gave her to believe they had been rammed at an intersection and two more cars had blocked them in. Both of the blocking cars were burning, riddled with bullet holes. She and Granger had been ambushed and would have died, save for three carloads of Shah’s men who had materialised from the traffic flow.
Some of the attackers lay on the ground. One man in a pair of Levi’s cut-offs lay across the hood of the cab, still twitching from the last sparks of his neurons as they faded away.
The gunfire had ceased, she realised. It had stopped some unknown time ago. Her internal clock seemed to have been damaged in the crash. Had she been here for hours?
‘Come on,’ said Birendra. ‘We have to get you to a hospital. The others can chase them down.’
Although hardly able to stand, she still shook herself free of the Gurkha and the second man hurrying her towards their waiting SUV. Other vehicles in the Shah Security group pulled off down the road at high speed, in hot pursuit.
‘They’re getting away?’ she croaked. ‘No. We have to go now. I’m coming now.’
She reached around and flapped her hand at the small of her back. The SIG Sauer was still there, and for the first time she became aware of a burning pain at the base of her spine, as though she’d been punched there by a stone fist.
‘Come on then,’ said an exasperated Birendra. ‘We have to move quickly. There is no time.’
He hurried her gently, but firmly, over to the last SUV, a black Volvo XC 90. The endorphin rush her body had released immediately after the crash was wearing off, and she was waking into a world of pain. A radio crackled with reports of the chase.
‘In pursuit. Speed approaching a hundred and ten kilometres per hour. Taking intermittent small-arms fire.’
‘Hop in, Ms Julianne,’ came a familiar voice. She blinked away the thin crust of dried blood and found Shah patting the seat next to him in the rear of the vehicle. He didn’t seem to care that she was about to bleed all over his soft, cream-coloured leather. Brass casings had burnt small holes into the upholstery and carpet. She thanked him as he handed her an antiseptic wet wipe.
‘We must go now if we are to catch them,’ he told her, smiling.
A PKM very much like Fifi’s old machine gun rested on the wound-down car window. Shah pulled it inside and handed it off to one of his men in the back, in return for a more reasonable, G-36 carbine. Birendra helped Jules up before climbing into the front passenger seat. The driver reversed, slamming into another vehicle before snapping it into gear, jerking them around with almost the same amount of force as that created by the crash. Once they were straight and true, he stomped on the gas before the last door closed, launching them into the disrupted traffic stream.
Birendra grabbed the radio’s microphone. ‘Status?’
‘Speed now a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour. We’re eighty metres behind and closing. Still taking small-arms fire.’