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.
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.
Fire came back up at her, automatic and single shot, describing beautiful emerald traces in her enhanced night vision. She stripped a hand grenade from her belt, while firing one-handed down the staircase, pulled the pin with her teeth – painfully cracking a filling as she did – and tossed the small bomb into the maelstrom below. She closed her eyes, backing away and firing blindly.
The grenade exploded with a roar, causing the spike of pain already drilling into her head to grow cruel thorns that raked at the back of her eyes and drove jagged spears deep into her brain stem.
Caitlin pitched over and vomited. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she grunted, struggling to regain her feet.
The volume of fire downstairs was deafening, drowned out only by the deep bass percussion of exploding grenades on the ground floor. The boards beneath her shook and shuddered so much she feared they might collapse. And still she couldn’t get up. Her head spun as though she’d stepped off a fairground ride, and she could not control her weapon anymore. Two figures appeared at the top of the stairs, one of them the squat, powerful outline of the man she called Dr Noo.
He raised his weapon at her, a FAMAS assault rifle, and cried,
‘Quick, come with me!’
A voice, coming from above her… It was unfamiliar, but unmistakably American.
‘Who the fuck…?’ She gagged and choked again on a mouthful of bile, toppling sideways as she tried to stand. ‘Can’t go,’ she protested. ‘My target.’
‘Leave him!’
The stranger, the man upstairs, leapt down beside her, stripped the MP5 from her grip and wrested a fresh magazine from the utility belt. He swapped out the mag in the dark without any trouble and moved over to the stairs to fire down on any approaching attackers. Three more grenades exploded in close succession and the uproar of automatic fire became unbearable.
Caitlin felt herself falling away into darkness.
50
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
