Musso laughed at that. ‘Yeah. They got some history, those two. Butted heads back in Seattle, during week one of the Disappearance. McCutcheon was Blackstone’s knife hand back then. Still is. He did a lot of the dirty work on the resistance in Seattle. Undercover stuff, black bag jobs. Kinda nasty, if truth be known. Lot of people got snatched out of their homes and beds because of Ty McCutcheon. He tried to monster Jed Culver into submission too. Didn’t work out so well for him.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Caitlin, with a thin, bleak facsimile of a smile. Culver might have looked like Mr Stay Puft, but the evil one, from Ghostbusters.
They pulled up in front of the Kyle Hotel. Built decades ago, but recently refurbished, it retained the stolid, immovable appearance of much of the city’s older architecture.
‘He’ll meet us here, your new home,’ Musso told her. ‘We rebuilt the old bar downstairs. Fitted it out with some of the best salvage we could pick up around town. It’s not a bad spot, even if I say so myself. Always wanted to run my own bar.’
‘And McCutcheon was happy to come over?’
He cranked on the handbrake and turned off the engine.
‘Yes. For two reasons. As I explained earlier, you have something they want. And as I explained to McCutcheon, Colonel Kate Murdoch is very easy on the eye. Sorry about that. He asked.’
Caitlin rubbed at her finger where her wedding ring should’ve been. ‘Great,’ she said wearily. ‘The mortal enemy of Mr Stay Puft is a pants man.’
*
The listening devices in her hotel room were of Israeli design, but at least five years old. That told Special Agent Monroe she wasn’t dealing with Mossad. Or the NIA. Or even with some embarrassing effort by Tusk Musso’s security team to monitor her presence in their midst. No, the Verint Systems bugs she found in the land-line phone, the alarm clock and the dead television set were the sort of cast-offs Tel Aviv would be happy to hand over to Blackstone’s security services as an unacknowledged part of the wider technology-transfer agreement he had with the Israeli Government. It took her less than ten minutes to sweep the room and locate them all.
No biggie, she thought.
She left the devices in place. No point tipping off anybody at Fort Hood. Colonel Murdoch wouldn’t have thought to look for such things. Not here in Temple, anyway. She re-examined and discarded the idea that Musso might’ve planted them. The tech wasn’t standard issue for the feds, and the chances of him acting so stupidly were as close to zero as made no difference. He was aware of her capabilities, at least in a basic sense. The only question she had was whether to inform him that his own security had been compromised.
Again. A no-brainer. She’d keep the information to herself.
A few hours stretched out ahead for Colonel Murdoch, before McCutcheon was due to arrive. She had her own traps and snares to put in place before the evening, in preparation for which she would need the help of Musso and at least one of his staff in the bar downstairs. That took all of ten minutes to organise, by which time the rain had eased off, allowing her the chance to explore the streets around the Federal Center and familiarise herself with what she thought of as her lay-up point.
There wasn’t much to see. The Corps of Engineers had done an excellent job of clearing the debris of apocalypse, large and small, from the neighbourhood. If it weren’t for the damaged shopfronts, the occasional burnt-out building shell and the large numbers of broken windows on the upper floors along Main Street, it could have been any small city on a wet public holiday. No traffic, very few people walking around, nothing open.
The Texas Administrative Division’s Federal Center was housed in the old town hall, a fine-looking building a few minutes’ walk down the street from the Kyle Hotel, where she and everyone else in Temple was staying. She had an office inside the Federal Center, where she would be expected to compile her report on the military capabilities and intentions of the South American Federation and what, if any, additional US military forces might be necessary to counter any threat from them. She was grateful to Musso for having seen to that already. It was a pain when you had to work as hard at the cover story as you did on the mission behind it.
It was telling though, she thought, that Blackstone took Roberto seriously enough to have approached Seattle on the matter. After spending the last couple of years making life as difficult as possible for the feds, it had to be significant that the Governor had now turned around and begged them to commit more forces to the southern flank, as he insisted on calling it. Having so recently been in the Federation herself, Caitlin had no illusions about the malignant nature of Roberto Morales’s regime, but nor could she see it as a credible threat. Assuming he even survived - el Presidente por Vida or not - Morales would need another five to ten years to consolidate his rule, after which there’d be an unknown amount of time before he was able to project power very far beyond the borders of his empire. If he did manage to pull all of that off, it would be quite the strategic challenge for the next generation of American leaders, dealing with a hostile super-state stretching from the Panama Canal to the southern tip of Chile. But that was a long way off in the future, and chances were it would never happen. If she had to put money on the barrel head, Caitlin Monroe would bet heavily against any sort of unitary state surviving down there. It was only the chaos of la colapso that had enabled the Colombian gang boss to gather so much power to himself, so quickly. Once the imperative of survival passed, Morales, like all dictators, would soon build up a complex of grinding fault lines and fractures within the structure of his regime. What the old Soviets used to call ‘inherent contradictions’. She had seen it time and again, before and after the Wave: the more oppressive the dictatorship, the more stable it appeared to be, right up until the moment it collapsed. And they all collapsed in the end. Closed, authoritarian systems simply could not regulate themselves. The complexities eventually undid them.
Did it mean that Blackstone was paranoid to be obsessing about the Federation? Had he transferred his irrational resentments and fears from James Kipper to Morales? Was that something she’d have to factor into her mission? Playing to the man’s neuroses could be a fast track into his trusted circle. Or it could make her look like she was patronising him.
After covering a couple of blocks around the old city office building and memorising the terrain, Caitlin turned around and headed back to the hotel. There were a few people out walking the streets, now that the weather had cleared up slightly. There was hardly a wealth of things to do in Temple, Texas, and she imagined that one could quickly go nuts cooped up in the Kyle. She wondered if the junior members of the mission were subjected to the same level of harassment as Musso had described. If so, it would certainly discourage them from heading over to Fort Hood during their down time, even though the recreational facilities out that way had to be so much better.
As she reached the corner of the block on which the hotel stood, she caught the eye of a man out walking by himself. He was thin, with a heavy black moustache, and seemly tightly wrapped up in himself, dressed in plain clothes, but with a soldier’s bearing and appearance, and something more with it.
‘Hello. Excuse me,’ she said as they drew level. ‘I just got into town. I was wondering if there was anywhere to eat besides the hotel?’
The man smiled and nodded, a strangely formal gesture. When he spoke, it was with a thick Polish accent.
‘I am afraid, madam, no there is not. It is a pity and inexplicable to me, Fryderyk Milosz, once of Polish GROM, now of US Army Rangers. When I accepted transfer here to be closer to brother’s family, who come to farm in the Federal Mandate, I did so on promise of posting where nothing happens and only danger I, Milosz, would face would be risk of growing dangerously fat on excellent barbecue foods.’