Caitlin softened her features and allowed some of the tension to run out of her posture. She had made her point.
‘Oh, Mr McCutcheon is a big boy, General. I’m sure a bit of rough play won’t put him off his game.’ She favoured McCutcheon with a smile of such beatific innocence that after the performance of the previous few minutes he could have doubted her sanity.
‘Why don’t you call me Ty,’ he suggested. ‘And you, Colonel, were you born with that rank?’ He managed to inflect his voice with an acknowledgment that he was pushing the boundaries, but he was still playing.
‘I’m sometimes known as Kate,’ she conceded. ‘When I’m off duty, and around friends like General Musso here.’
‘Welcome to Texas then, Kate.’
‘Thank you, Ty, it’s nice to be here,’ she replied, finally giving him something.
Musso blew out his cheeks. ‘Lucky thing we make everyone check their personal weapons at the front desk,’ he said. ‘Now, Mr McCutcheon …’
‘You too, General,’ he said, teasing. ‘We’re all new best friends now. How about you call me Ty, and I freshen up these drinks?’
The President’s official representative in Texas didn’t look wary so much as calculating. ‘I’m always happy to be friendly over a couple of beers … Ty. But Colonel Murdoch does have a point. It’s a lot easier to be friends with someone when they’re not trying to ass-fuck you on a daily basis.’
Tusk’s voice sounded reasonable enough, friendly even, but there was no mistaking the steel underlying his tone. It seemed to have no effect on McCutcheon. He caught the female soldier’s attention with a backward tilt of his head and signalled for another round before answering the general.
‘Look,’ he said, showing them his open, honest palms. ‘We got us a face-facts moment here. I can’t pretend relations between my boss and yours have been good. I can’t even pretend I’ve done anything to make that better until now. The two men have their history, and there’s probably no forgetting it. Hell, I was with General Blackstone in Seattle and I’ve been with him ever since. I can guarantee you there’s no forgetting what happened up there for him. And to be honest? There’s no forgiving either.’
Caitlin accepted the second drink when it arrived, but she put it aside. The background buzz in the room had come up again, but she was aware that their group was still the centre of attention. McCutcheon seemed to be aware of it too. She was certain he was playing to the audience, in fact.
‘But this isn’t 2003. Those days are gone, thank God, and we recognise there’s a whole new set of problems down here. Problems that are a hell of a lot bigger than any personal disagreements between the President and the Governor of Texas. We are willing to put all of that behind us, to admit we made mistakes. More than our fair share of them. And to move on with making up for those mistakes.’
Caitlin said nothing. She agreed with Musso that Morales simply wasn’t a major threat. On the other hand, that didn’t mean Blackstone didn’t see him as one. He might be a raging ego monster, but in some ways Mad Jack was also a very delicate soul. Ego monsters were often like that: hard but brittle. If she wanted to gain the former Ranger’s trust, appealing to his fears and indulging his delusions might just pay off. Across from her, however, leaning back deep into the embrace of a black leather club chair, with one foot propped up on the coffee table, General Tusk Musso appeared to be less inclined to let bygones be bygones. Perhaps he’d been inspired by Colonel Murdoch, the castrating bitch from central casting. Or perhaps he just felt like getting his own back for all the hours he’d spent trapped at McCutcheon’s roadblocks.
‘I would hope, Ty,’ he said, carefully enunciating each word, ‘that if you’re not just feeding us a line, if your boss is serious about a rapprochement, then it would extend to a lot more than simply coordinating deployments between your militia and the real military.’
If the old Marine Corps lawyer was trying to be elaborately offensive, McCutcheon wasn’t rising to the bait. He absorbed any insult and waited for Musso to continue.
‘Because, Ty, I don’t think I need to list my grievances with your administration. You would be well aware of them. Even disregarding the way you run things in the Hood, there is the matter of the security situation within the Mandate, which we very foolishly handed over to you. There’s the matter of the federal-state accords, the revenue-sharing deals, the contracts and treaties you’ve been signing ultra vires with foreign corporations and powers, and … Well, I’m sorry - I said I wasn’t going to list my grievances, but there, I went and did it anyway. Because they are grievances, Ty. Real and legitimate grievances. And I’m disinclined to trade favours over them, just because Blackstone has his pantaloons in a twist over Roberto.’
McCutcheon made an effort to interject but Musso waved him off.
‘The President takes the security of the nation very seriously. If he thinks there’s a threat from Morales, he will crush him like a bug. I guarantee that. But security doesn’t come from guns alone. The only thing that comes from the barrel of a gun is a fucking bullet, not security. If this country is ever to be secure again, it won’t be because of a president tossing a couple of regiments here and there, or moving the Lincoln out of the Pacific and into the Caribbean and the Atlantic. It will be because we all decide to work together to make ourselves strong again. Do you think we can do that, Ty? Do you think we can get past everything that happened in the last few years and work together?’
Caitlin took a sip from her single malt and regarded McCutcheon with a neutral expression. There was a reason why Blackstone had sent him into the enemy camp. He didn’t disappoint.
‘Can we kiss and make up? Fuck yes! We might have differences of opinion, but our interests are the same at heart. We just want the best for the country. Honest Injun now - if you can take just a couple of steps towards us, I know Jackson Blackstone will meet you halfway, sir.’
The moment hung suspended while everybody waited on Tusk Musso’s response. Caitlin could feel the sense of relief through her pores when he nodded and growled, ‘Okay then. Let’s try.’
Maintaining her cover, Echelon’s senior field agent displayed no reaction beyond taking another drink and watching McCutcheon like a hunter from the hide. Her stone face covered her own feelings of uncertainty. Had Musso planned to go off like that? Or had he been inspired by McCutcheon’s response to the uncompromising Colonel Murdoch? Even more intriguing, why had Tusk spoken in the anodyne euphemism about the security situation in the Federal Mandate? The question was at the forefront of her mind, she realised, thanks to the recent murder of Miguel Pieraro.
Lower-level bureaucratic harassment was one thing, amateur-hour genocide quite another. And from her reading of the Blackstone administration, they had some hard questions to answer about what had been happening to people like the Pieraro clan. She doubted that Blackstone possessed the means or even the base-level competence to have reached out and touched Pieraro in Missouri. But she had no doubt that the road agents had been able to run wild in Texas through an act of omission on his part, if not commission.
She placed McCutcheon’s new-best-friend routine firmly within the context of the listening devices she’d turned over in her room. To have planted them successfully, Blackstone must have turned at least one member of Musso’s staff, or somehow planted an agent here. Either operation would require a significant commitment of intelligence resources to the task of subverting Musso’s command. Tyrone and his boss were overreaching, but that just made them more dangerous.
Special Agent Monroe resolved then that although she would maintain her mission focus on establishing the meaning of the link between Blackstone and Ozal, and through him to Bilal Baumer, she would not lose sight of any opportunity to nail the motherfucker for the fate of anybody in the Mandate who may have lost their life on his say-so.