Angels of Vengeance

have a future here. But that it’s our future, the one we envision, not some medieval theocracy they might’ve signed up for a year or two back. I’m not even going to pretend I know how to go about doing that, but then I don’t have to. That’s your job, Sarah. And yours, Jed.’

‘What?’

He nearly snorted fresh, hot coffee out through his nose. Humboldt looked just as surprised.

Kipper regarded him with a grin that was positively malign. ‘I can see they caught you with your pants down on this, buddy,’ he said. ‘And I know without even looking at you that you think the idea sucks dog’s balls. Excuse my French, Sarah.’

‘That’s okay, Mr President,’ she shot back. Ms Humboldt was still unsettled by the revelation that she’d be working with Jed Culver.

‘I know you’re already being tortured by nightmares about Mad Jack using this against us,’ Kipper resumed. ‘That’s why I want you to oversee the program for me. I have no doubt, Jed, you’ll come up with some way of making it look as though allowing these prisoners to stay is a punishment for them and a boon for us. I dunno, maybe you could find a genuine turncoat in there. Somebody who thought they had permission to wander into New York and take it over. And having been led astray by the devious Emir, he now burns with holy fire to wreak his vengeance and prove his loyalty to the country that gave him a chance and took him in, yada yada yada. You’ll work it out, I’m sure.’

‘But why, Kip?’ he said, perplexed that they would put themselves to so much trouble for no observable benefit. ‘Why help these bastards to get what they wanted in the first place? And after we spilled so much blood to deny them …’

Now the President favoured him with an almost indulgent smile.

‘I’m not going to patronise you by telling you it’s the right thing to do, Jed. By many folks’ way of figuring these things, it’s not. But I believe it is, not for the sake of those women and children, but for us. We have fallen, Jed. We have fallen far and hard, and we are hurting. It would be tempting - even more than tempting, it would be a terrible pleasure - to try to soften that hurt by laying it off on someone else. Particularly someone as deserving as a man who was trying to kill us not so long ago. But that way lies desolation, my friend. The madness of revenge-seeking is seductive, but it’s still madness. We can only think of ourselves as better than them if we really are better than them.

‘I’m not a child. I know a lot of those women hate us with a passion. Even before we took their men from them, they hated us. Or at least the idea of us. What they’d been raised to think of us, and, if truth be known, what they’re raising their children to think of us in the very camps where we hold them captive at the moment. But we can change that. Because we are better than their low opinion of us.’

Kipper’s words gave the impression of him becoming more intense as he spoke, but in fact he seemed to relax and grow almost abstracted. It was as if he was examining an engineering challenge, and because it interested him, rather than because some vital outcome rested upon his solving it.

‘Revenge is the pleasure of a small and feeble mind - I read that somewhere back in college. It rang true then, and even more now. Nothing good ever comes of it. How many of the true believers, the real holy warriors, who came here and died, did so to revenge themselves on an America that doesn’t even exist anymore? Where are they now? Are they an example worth following, do you think? No, let’s take these people in, the ones we have some hope of saving. And let’s have our revenge on them by turning them into something they once hated. Into us. Because we are better than them.’

Jed Culver found himself in an unusual position. He was lost for words.

4

FORMER URUGUAYAN-ARGENTINIAN BORDER REGION, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION

She had logged four guards now. Her two indolent latte drinkers still lounged under the thick portico of the former police station. They had switched from caffeine to cigarillos and appeared to be engaged in an argument about soccer. Every few minutes one of them would stand and laboriously work through a pantomime of some disputed passage of play, while the other theatrically dismissed his efforts with glorious excess, smacking hands over eyes, throwing arms into the air, and calling out ’!No no no!‘ so loudly she had no trouble hearing them. Two other guards wandered out at random intervals, the first to bum smokes, the second to watch the theatrics and add a few dismissive words of his own. None of them looked like A-listers, but she worried about the unseen men.

Her briefing notes were clear. This was a small detention facility, run by the local Federation militia. It was more of a way station, where prisoners were often held before transfer to the fleet base for interrogation by the Oficina Seguridad, Roberto’s personal gestapo.

The jail was staffed by a militia commander, a deputy and four other men. Given the air of neglect, the sloppiness and general dereliction of duty that seemed to characterise ‘Facility 183’, Caitlin did not imagine the commander to be a bright and shining star of the regime. It was unlikely he’d have adequate security in place, relying instead on the fearsome reputation of Roberto’s security apparatus to dissuade anyone from interfering with his little fiefdom. As a militia enforcer, he was probably a former gang member who’d thrown in his lot with Morales as the dictator grew ever stronger during the post-Wave chaos. La colapso, as it was now known across most of South America.

Chances were, the CO was the one wielding the blowtorch, tyre iron or whatever it was that had reduced the screaming man to such a pitiable state. Caitlin swallowed on a dry mouth as memories of her imprisonment and torture in Noisy-le-Sec tried to break out of a small, black box at the back of her mind. She attended to her craft, as she always did when needing to put aside unpleasant realities.

The Echelon agent reached into her khaki backpack and checked her notes of when the guards had appeared from inside the crumbling stucco building. No patterns. She scanned the entire compound again, using her binoculars, searching for entry and egress points, logging at least three. She plotted her approach: mentally rehearsing the stealthy advance down the hill, under the cover of the forest canopy; her emergence from the brush; the possible scenarios that might play out as she engaged the guards. She was particularly concerned about the thick, stone pillars holding up the red-tiled roof of the portico that shaded the front of the building. They would provide good cover to anyone firing at her. She spent some time pondering how to turn that tactical disadvantage to her favour.

She had no schematic of the building’s interior, but made her best guestimate of the layout based on what she could see of the rough, L-shaped block. The door through which the two wandering guards, the smoker and the soccer expert, sometimes appeared undoubtedly led into the facility’s reception area. Caitlin couldn’t make out any details through the windows at that end of the building, but the fact that the windows were glass and unsecured told her there were no cells behind them. There might be an open-plan office perhaps, like a detectives’ bullpen. There might be a warren of rooms. But the cells where she would find Luperico were undoubtedly at the other end of the structure. There, small, mean windows - just holes in the adobe no larger than a man’s head, all of them barred by iron grilles - looked out over a motor pool. Two of the vehicles there were civilian, but Caitlin noted an ancient-looking police car from the building’s previous life. The rust-streaked sedan had sunk down on deflated tyres and a thick bed of weeds. It obviously hadn’t moved in years.

As she took another sip of water, a new player appeared. His uniform was neat, and he moved with purpose and some grace. A thin man with a widow’s peak on a high forehead, he barked a few commands at the two guards on the front veranda. They scrambled from their chairs, one almost falling over as he lost his balance. Caitlin focused on the officer through her binoculars.

He was in an altogether different class from the men he was busy bossing around. She recognised the bearing of somebody used to giving orders and being obeyed, even feared. He lashed at his underlings with his voice, but never raised a hand in their direction. This guy was no former gang-banger, but he was a militia officer.

Ex-cop? Ex-military maybe?

She wondered if he was the facility’s commander or deputy. Or possibly an outsider come in to supervise the questioning of Ramon Luperico.