Two muted clacks, almost like a stapler, and the subsonic.300 Whisper rounds left the muzzle of the weapon at about 980 feet per second, slowing only fractionally as they entered his brainpan and scattered the contents all over the room.
She swept the space automatically, but already knew it to be empty. A quick puff to blow out his candle, after which she pulled the door closed and turned down towards the next lighted room.
This one was silent. No muttering. No page turning. Again she waited.
Closer to the stairwell this time she could hear at least three voices down on the ground floor. Two spoke in rapid-fire Arabic; one was slower, polished, but heavily accented. Lacan.
Okay, that was a bitch. She’d been hoping to find him in bed, but filtering out his voice, she did determine that Baumer’s German accent was not part of that conversation, which was the only talking in the house at the moment.
Caitlin returned to her vigil at the door. The flutter of a light leaking out told her there was a candle inside. She concentrated, leaning her ear to the wooden panelling, and waiting. After three minutes she was rewarded with a brief snore.
No jet fighters conveniently appeared to cover the sounds of murder this time. But when the voices downstairs rose and broke into laughter, she was able to repeat her actions of a few minutes earlier. Coolly opening the door, lining up a head shot, and double-tapping her victim – a slightly overweight, balding man who had fallen asleep with a pair of headphones plugged into an iPod. His body shuddered violently as the 250-grain bullets shredded his neocortex. Dousing this second candle, she plunged the floor back into darkness before refitting the NVGs.
Two other rooms remained on this level. According to the building plans, they were larger, possibly capable of taking more than one small bed. Caitlin moved to the door through which she could hear the loudest snoring.
She sniffed and caught the faintest trace of an earthy, familiar smell… Kif. A highly concentrated cannabis resin, popular among North African fighters. That was enough for her to take a calculated risk, unshipping the fibre-optic set and sliding the wire under the door for a quick scan of the room.
Inside she found three men, all asleep on the floor. There being no beds or other furniture, they had balled up clothes or used their bags to serve as pillows. Caitlin observed them until she was certain they were deeply asleep. She withdrew the surveillance device, and then quietly swapped out her mag, which unfortunately only ran to six rounds. It was one of the drawbacks of using the bespoke no-name handgun.
This time, however, she kept the goggles powered up as she eased through the door and closed it behind her, covering the three prone forms all the time. A damp towel lay on the floor and she carefully toed it along the gap between the bottom of the door and the floorboards.
Then she quickly and methodically executed every man in the room.
Only the last one came awake, and then only enough to prop himself up one elbow and squint into the darkness. His sudden movement put her aim off and the first bullet struck him in the throat. Caitlin took two silent steps towards him and cut off his gargling death rattle with her last shot.
A hard, steel spike of pain was drilling into her head from a point about an inch behind her left eye, intensifying her nausea and giddiness. She took a precious minute to centre herself, to breathe deeply and detach from the barbed emotional tendrils of her bloody work.
The last of her six-shot magazines went into the pistol and she replaced the suppressor with a new one taken from a slot on her belt. The silencers, unique to Echelon wetwork cells, relied on a customised combination of austenitic nickel-based superalloy baffles, foam wipes and carbon nanotube mesh to reduce the sound of weapon fire by diverting and cooling the hot, rapidly expanding gases created by the detonation of the gunpowder. After she had burnt out this one, she would have to rely on her knife for silent killing.
She drifted to a halt in front of the next door. Another darkened room, outside which she waited for a minute before threading through the optical fibre again. When the display lit up this time, her heartbeat jumped.
She could see Baumer, asleep on a mattress on the floor. Lying next to him was a woman she did not recognise. The woman had one leg draped over his thigh and a thin arm lay across his chest.
Billy, Billy, Billy, she thought. Monique was too good for you, buddy.
Caitlin removed a one-use syringe from a leather pouch at her hip, uncapped the needle-point and pressed the plunger until a small stream of fluid squirted out.
Lacan was talking downstairs. In French now, cursing Sarkozy as a fascist and a half-Greek Jew, a comment that gave rise to an animated rant by one of his companions about the Jewish state and the revenge that was coming its way.
Seizing the opportunity, she entered the room, and came face to face with the woman, who had awoken and sat up. Her wide eyes searched the darkness, bulging when she saw Caitlin’s outline: a silhouetted figure in black overalls, wearing night-vision gear and carrying a weapon. She was dead before she could scream, two bullets taking the top of her skull off and painting the wall behind them.
Baumer came awake instantly and rolled out from under the falling corpse, crying out as he did so. He launched himself at Caitlin’s knees and knocked her back off her feet with a crash. She drove the syringe into his neck and squeezed, smashing the butt of her pistol up against his head for good measure. It didn’t knock him out, but it stunned him enough to allow her to piston a boot into his chest and push him away from her.
‘Crusaders,’ he shouted. ‘Hurry, they’re here!’
He tried to launch himself at her again, but the fast-acting drug had already robbed him of any coordination and he fell like a drunk into a heap at her feet.
‘Not so tough now, are you, you rapist motherfucker?’ she said before hitting the FTT button on her headset and speaking loudly. ‘I’m blown, Rolland. I got Baumer. Third floor, first room on the left coming up. Possible civilian above us, armed. Hostiles below. Lacan is awake and unsecured.’
‘You…’ muttered Baumer mushily as he collapsed into a drugged stupor.
Caitlin heard the French commandos open fire on the ground floor. The guard out the front would be dropping to the ground, dead before he hit. Below her, the sounds of riot and tumult erupted as men awoke and reached for their guns, unsure of what was happening, but certain they were in mortal peril.
She holstered the silenced pistol and pulled her personal weapon around on its strap, an HK MP5. Feet thundered up the staircase below her and she darted from the room, all concern at stealth now departed. The house had no power, but torches and electric lamps dazzled in her NVGs. She loosened off two bursts from the submachine-gun down the stairs at the bobbing, moving sources of light. Two of the torches tumbled back down, while the third stopped and dropped as the man carrying it let go.