She said nothing.
‘It was the old man who remembered you. Well, not you, but your husband. The Governor doesn’t wear the uniform anymore, of course. Wouldn’t be right. But he keeps up with the regimental news, makes sure to get along to the annual reunion. It’s good politics, if nothing else. We have a lot of Rangers down here. Soon as he met you, bells started ringing. You are a good-looking woman, Caitlin - the sort a man would remember. He had me scouring back issues of the newsletter, convinced he’d seen a story on you there. And he had. But not about Colonel Murdoch. No, the story he’d seen had been about the wedding of old-boy-made-good Bret Melton to a USAID staffer, Caitlin Monroe. And there you were, pretty as a picture. But really, Caitlin, a white dress? In your case, I think not.’
Still she gave him nothing. It wasn’t Bret’s fault. He’d sent a photo to an old army buddy, a guy who hadn’t been able to make it to the wedding. The way old buddies do.
‘I can see you calculating the odds and the angles, Caitlin,’ he said. ‘So if you want to unburden yourself of that awfully heavy handgun you’re carrying, and any USB sticks or data disks you might’ve used to copy my files, you’d make me feel a lot less like shooting you in the face.’
As she reached slowly for the weapon, all three men adjusted their stances. She slowly placed the pistol on the ground and kicked it over to them.
‘The phone is the data disk,’ she replied. ‘I’m sure you’ll want to pat me down. But it’s all in there,’ she lied. ‘Encrypted, I’m afraid.’
‘I’d love to pat you down, but I could do without the broken arm,’ McCutcheon said. ‘It’s a pity really. I was wondering last night at drinks whether your devotion to duty and country might let me score a free blow job from Colonel Murdoch. Now we’ll never know. And don’t sweat the phone. I’m sure we can find some redneck genius somewhere to figure out how your cell works. Don’t be too hard on yourself, by the way. Some of it was just bad luck. It’s a small world these days.
‘We didn’t clue in to who you were right away. The boss just had a feeling that he knew of you from somewhere, and not as an air force wingnut. Me, I’d never heard of a Colonel Murdoch. And the USAF, especially these days, it’s a small town, let me tell you. It was when you said you’d been exiled in the UK for a couple of years that the penny dropped. The Governor remembered the wedding story. Just one of those things. If you hadn’t mentioned it, you might not have jogged his memory about good old Bret and the newly minted Mrs Melton. That’s some tough shit, eh?’
McCutcheon did love the sound of his own voice. She didn’t bother feeding his ego with a reply. The way he was grinning now, it didn’t look like he needed it.
‘Come on, Caitlin. We better go see the old man and figure out exactly how much damage you’ve done.’
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
He thought at first that it was his bedside alarm. Jed Culver groaned until he realised the ring tone was wrong. He had a phone call.
He wasn’t ruinously drunk or hung-over. But the brandy and bourbons lay heavy on his brow as he struggled up out of a fitful slumber. His indigestion came roaring back too, courtesy of the four-cheese pizza. For a second, he couldn’t understand why Marilyn wasn’t in bed, then he remembered she was back home and he was crashed out in the townhouse. The entirety of the evening came rushing back in on him. The unpleasant surprise of discovering Kipper knew of Colonel Murdoch and her mission in Fort Hood, thanks to Blackstone and the Federation’s special operators, who’d turned out to be anything but special.
Jed’s voice was so croaky and thickened with alcohol and sleep that he couldn’t even get the words out at first. He coughed to clear his throat.
‘Culver,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
As soon as he heard the Echelon’s Deputy Director of Special Clearances on the line, all of his grogginess sluiced away on an adrenaline surge.
‘It’s Wales Larrison, Mr Culver. We have a problem. In fact, we have two of them.’
*
‘That trick you guys pulled breaking into our system, looping the security footage back over itself, that was fucking brilliant,’ raved McCutcheon.
He sat next to her in the back of a Humvee, both of them being driven across the base to Blackstone’s home residence. Caitlin’s hands were cuffed behind her back and the former air force man kept his gun trained on her midsection, while maintaining as much separation between them as he could. The driver’s head bobbed in time to the bass beat of a song he was listening to through earphones plugged into his Zune.
Little fucking Wayne, again. There was no escaping the guy.
‘A bit too brilliant, though,’ her captor went on. ‘We probably wouldn’t have noticed anything, except I was standing at the security desk with my boys when I saw myself walking down a corridor on the other side of the building. Whoops!’
Caitlin maintained the stillness and silence within which she had cocooned herself, ever since she’d handed over the cell phone and her Kimber pistol.
‘You’re like a Bond villain, you know that?’ said McCutcheon. ‘All of you spooks are the same. All so intent on getting your ninja merit badge, throwing your little smoke bombs, doing your Spiderman thing up on the ceiling, that you forget it would be simpler to just walk in through the front door! You probably could’ve hidden in a broom closet and not been caught.’
She ignored him and concentrated on her breathing. He seemed relaxed, which wasn’t surprising given that she was wearing the handcuffs and he was pointing a gun at her liver. But he shouldn’t have been relaxed. He should have been freaking. Because Caitlin hadn’t stored the data from his laptop on her augmented cell phone. Everything had been uploaded and transmitted back to Vancouver. Either he didn’t know that, or there was nothing on the laptop worth worrying about. She doubted the latter. Not with the lengths to which they’d gone to secure the thing from interference.
Unless, of course, that too had merely been a charade to entrap her.
Echelon’s senior field agent did not have enough information to reach a conclusion, and so she did not bother. What mattered now was waiting for an opportunity to reverse the flow of this encounter.
*
Culver pressed the phone so hard to his ear, it was starting to hurt his head.
‘How many dead?’ he asked.
‘Two here, that we are aware of. Down there, I couldn’t say.’
‘Jesus Christ, Larrison, how long does it take to do a simple body count?’
‘There’s nothing simple about this, Mr Culver. We have confirmation from Australia that Henry Cesky hired Parmenter to kill Pieraro and Zood here, and Ms Balwyn and Mr Ross in Darwin. And that was after hiring other contractors who failed in the same goals. Parmenter also appears to have killed his accomplice in Kansas City, but we have no idea who that was, yet.’
Jed rubbed at his temples, which were pounding with a headache. He felt ill and desperately wanted to hang up, vomit, and crawl back under the sheets.
‘And you’re telling me this is connected, but it’s not connected to what Agent Monroe is doing at Fort Hood?’
‘Only tangentially, sir. Our information is that Pieraro and his family were on the boat commandeered by Ms Balwyn. Pieraro attacked and humiliated Cesky in Acapulco while Balwyn was interviewing him for a place on board the yacht. Pieraro turned up on the margins of Agent Monroe’s mission because his was one of the four cases regarding attacks on homesteaders you’d flagged for her interest while she was in Kansas City. That’s the only connection.’