Kipper flinched at her tone of voice. This wasn't going to be much fun.
'Well, thing is, I'm in New York…'
'What the hell are you still doing in New York City, James Everett Kipper? I swear to fucking God that you are dumb as a sack of hammers.'
The techs shrank at their posts and removed their headsets. The president reined in his temper before it got the better of him. 'Two things,' he said quickly. 'One, the airport we came in through wasn't safe anymore.' He didn't explain why. 'And two, those people you saw on the news, the ones who were hurt, I put them on my chopper to get them out of here and back to KC for treatment. They'd have died, all of them, if we'd waited.'
There was a momentary pause while Barb digested that. Kipper peered out the slits in the heavy steel doors on the back of the… the… damn, he didn't even know what kind of tank or armored car he was in. This military stuff just was not his thing. Outside on the street he could just make out figures in uniform flitting about and other vehicles moving around, some like his and some Humvees-at least he knew what a Humvee looked like.
'Well, when are you getting out of there, Kip?' his wife asked. 'It's not safe.'
He resisted the urge to tell her that was exactly why he had to come out to the East Coast, as a first step to making it safe again, but he knew Barb wouldn't be impressed by that sort of BS.
'You know I can't give you exact details of my movements, honey,' he said. 'Just know I am safe and I will be home soon.'
Her reply was lost in static, but it didn't sound very encouraging. Kipper thought he saw one of the techs fiddling with some of the cables on the radio.
'I'm sorry, Barb, what was that?'
'… back… sorry…'
The connection dropped out, and one of the soldiers began stabbing at buttons and muttering an apology.
Kipper reached over and patted him on the shoulder.
'Don't worry, son. I think you just saved your commander in chief from some world-class ass whuppage.'
12
Swindon, England A man from the Home Office was waiting for her at Swindon's Great Western Hospital, a cream-colored modernist structure on the southwestern edge of the town. The man was an unremarkable type, medium build with light brown hair cut short and a well-made but not too expensive gray suit. Caitlin picked him out as her handler, or minder as they said here, as soon as she hurried in through the automatic doors to the reception area. He favored her with a half-raised eyebrow and came gliding over, juggling a document wallet from one side to the other, allowing him to extend a hand in greeting. He smelled of aftershave and pipe tobacco. She noted that although he looked every inch the gray bureaucrat, his grip was strong and his hand was hardened by the same sort of calluses that scarred her own.
'Ms. Monroe, my name is Dalby,' he said. 'The office sent me from London to help out with your spot of bother.'
Still jittery with the adrenaline backwash, Caitlin could not help herself.
'Spot of bother? They tried to kill my fucking family,' she snapped back.
'Indeed. I am sorry,' Dalby said. 'Sometimes understatement gets the better of me.'
His speaking manner was an odd mix, a rough-working class accent bundled up in a very polished and, she thought, practiced form of expression. Caitlin made a conscious effort to calm herself and brushed off his apology, 'I'm sorry. Please excuse me, Mister Dalby. It's been a hell of a morning. I just want to see my family, if that's okay.'
'Of course,' he said. 'If you'll follow me.'
The hospital seemed quiet even for a midweek morning, with only a few people in the waiting area for accident and emergency and no sense of the barely controlled mayhem that characterized most public health facilities in her experience. Caitlin had half expected some sort of delay at the front desk, but Dalby handed her a clip-on badge and indicated that she should follow him by pointing toward a pair of heavy plastic swinging doors that led into the building's interior. None of the staff questioned them or tried to interfere, and she could only surmise that the Home Office man had already established his credentials as somebody not to be fucked with. Not that anyone fucked with the Home Office these days.
'So, you had any luck putting names to the bodies?' she asked as they hurried down a wide corridor past assessment and treatment rooms, most of them empty.
'I have some briefing notes for you,' Dalby said. 'All of your villains returned positive IDs from the national database, and we had further hits off the Yard and the Home Office's own restricted lists.'
'They were professionals?' Caitlin asked.
'That would be overly generous.' Dalby snorted. 'Three very low-rent criminals and two from a little further up the evolutionary ladder, probably to run the operation, such as it was.'
Again, Caitlin found herself intrigued by his voice. He had a definite strain of East London in his flat, nasal tone but spoke as though he'd been coached in elocution at an expensive boarding school. 'They were well resourced, though,' she cautioned, thinking of the cars and guns, neither of which were easy to come by in the United Kingdom now. Both tended to be assets of the government, not the private citizen.
'Indeed,' Dalby said, as they turned a corner into a corridor off which a number of semiprivate wardrooms were accessible. Caitlin noted four beds in each room, about half of them occupied, although mostly by young people. A few years ago she'd have expected to see a good many wrinklies and fatties and chronically unhealthy specimens in a place like this, living off the public tit. No longer. From a few cursory glances she confirmed her suspicion that most of the bedridden were trauma cases, broken limbs and crushed bodies, almost certainly from the many farms in the district just like hers, where strong backs and straining muscles were the order of the day. Her mind wandered briefly, dwelling on the growing demand for horses in the district. She was on a waiting list herself. Caitlin shook the errant thought from her mind.
'Do we know who sent them?' she asked.
'Not yet,' Dalby admitted. 'Although the chap you left alive is helping us with our inquiries.'
'When you say 'us,' you mean…'
'Our office,' he answered. 'Yours.'
'Okay,' Caitlin admitted. Dalby was here on Echelon business.
'Here we are, then,' he announced as they made one final turn and fetched up outside a private room. Another man in a suit with a bulge under his jacket, much larger and more imposing than Dalby, nodded to them and opened the door.
'I'll give you a minute,' Dalby said quietly. 'I understand your daughter is asleep and Mister Melton has been lightly sedated.'
Caitlin thanked him and pushed past the guard with her heart beating noticeably harder. The room was large and well lit, with a couple of windows looking out over plowed fields to a small lake a mile or two to the west. Monique was asleep, as she'd been told, but Bret blinked groggily and tried to smile at her. She shushed him quickly with a finger to her lips, indicating the sleeping child. A cursory examination showed that the baby was largely unharmed save for a few scratches on her face. Her husband, in contrast, looked terrible. The scars from Iraq, the stitches where they sewed up his shoulder, and his missing finger had new companions. Remnants of his ranger regiment tattoo provided a stark contrast to his pale, pasty complexion. He had lost a lot of blood back in the field and looked drained. Caitlin's stomach was clenched, and she felt a coppery taste at the back of her throat.
'I'm sorry…' he croaked. 'Couldn't…'
The room blurred in front of her as the tears came, and she shushed him again, this time with one finger on his lips. They were swollen and cracked, and half of his face was mottled with bruising. One leg was fully bandaged and held aloft with a complicated series of wires and pulleys. He would be limping again, perhaps forever. She'd often teased him about the jagged scar where the combat support hospital in Kuwait had dug an old piece of wood from his ass. Bret usually responded by farting on cue, chasing her out of the bed briefly while she waved away the stench. Laughing at the crude absurdity, she would come back to the bed and find something else to tease him about.
