It didn't seem so funny now.
'Don't,' she whispered. 'You did great, sweetie. Five guys with guns. You were unarmed, yet you protected Monique and you both got out. That's all that counts.'
Bret pressed his lips together and squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head once, emphatically.
'I should have had a-'
'Hush now.' She softly stroked his thick brown hair, blinking away her tears. 'This is no time for beating yourself up. If I'd married any other man, I'd be a widow now and my daughter would be gone along with my husband. You did an amazing job to get her away from them.'
'But we didn't get away,' he croaked. 'And if you hadn't come along…'
Caitlin shook her head.
'You know better than that, Bret. We don't do what-ifs in our line of work. Or mine, anyway. You're a farmer and a daddy now, and that's the most important thing. To me and the baby. You need to rest and get better and look after our little girl. And you need to let me worry about these bastards. Can you do that, Bret? Can you leave them to me?'
'Hooah,' he whispered. 'Leave them to you.'
The effort of talking seemed to have exhausted him, and he nodded weakly as a long ragged breath leaked out between his lips with a wheezing sound. He groped for her hand and squeezed it.
Caitlin leaned forward and kissed his forehead.
'I love you,' she said quietly. 'And I promise you this will never happen again.' Still in her bloodied running gear, Caitlin followed Dalby to his vehicle, an unmarked gray Mercedes W203 sedan. A small window tag displayed the logo of the British Home Office, promising to build a 'safe, just, and tolerant society.' Clouds obscured the sun, snuffing out what little warmth had been left in the day, and she was grateful when Dalby turned up the heat as he started the car.
'Perks of the job,' he said. 'It often seems this car is the only place where I can escape the chill these days. Bloody weather, being all over the shop.'
Caitlin nodded without a word. Even with the resources of her own farm and the indulgences of the government, her family still felt the privations of the rationing system.
'We'll move your family to one of our secure estates,' Dalby said as they drove away from the hospital, heading south toward the highway. The effort was slow going as he worked his way around a pod of cyclists and a horse-drawn cart. None of the bike riders were wrapped in Lycra. They weren't pedaling for their health. Dalby's was the only car on the road.
Caitlin watched the sides of the road, scanning for anything unusual.
'You won't have to worry about them,' Dalby assured her. 'We have secured the area.'
Caitlin shook her head. 'I can't help worrying, Mister Dalby. They're everything I have now.'
'I'm sorry,' he said. He seemed to open almost every sentence with an apology. 'I meant that we will take care of them. And the farm. We'll keep Mister Melton and your little one under our wing while this situation gets sorted, and a manager has been sent to your estate at Mildenhall. One of our men. A good chap with the right background. His family has farmed this area for many years. But no, of course I didn't mean that you would feel no worry. That would be most insensitive.'
'So Echelon sent you? Not the Home Office,' Caitlin said, forcibly dragging her thoughts away from the hospital room as they entered the M4, heading west. That surprised her. She had been expecting to go to London.
'It's an interdepartmental issue. The lines of authority are somewhat blurred. Intentionally so,' Dalby said as he maneuvered them onto the all but deserted highway. A few army trucks-lorries they called them-and two green-painted buses with British Army markings and steel mesh on the windows were the only vehicular traffic she could see. Dalby was finally able to tap into the power of the car, accelerating away from Swindon.
'So those fuckers this morning, what was their story?' If her cursing bothered Dalby, he gave no sign of it. His face remained impassive.
'Well, to state the obvious, they came for you. But why, we're not certain yet. Mister Richardson, the lone survivor, has only just begun the initial stages of what shall probably be a very long debrief at Salisbury. We're having to go lightly for now because of his injuries.'
There was no tone of reproach in his voice that Caitlin could make out. Dalby was simply stating a fact. And if Richardson was being held at Salisbury, that explained why they were heading west rather than back toward the capital.
'But you've identified them. That must be leading us somewhere.'
'It could be leading us down a garden path for all we know, Ms. Monroe. Richardson had a record as an armed robber, quite heavy stuff. He had served time for firearms offenses, grievous bodily harm, and his charge sheet ran to six pages. The Met almost had him for witness tampering a few years ago, but, well… the witnesses disappeared.'
'I see,' Caitlin said as Dalby accelerated past the army trucks. The day was dark with storm clouds now, with bruised gray thunderheads building up over the horizon in front of them, leaching the color from the fields and forests on either side of the M4. Blurs of people working in their market gardens began to gather up their implements and return to their homes. Caitlin watched for the ones who did no such thing, half expecting to see a sniper rifle or someone holding the cell phone that would set off a roadside bomb. When she glanced at Dalby, he showed no obvious effort at scanning the roadway.
'So you've run his associates both in and out of prison?' she asked.
'Yes. We've had some interesting names popping up, too, but one in particular rang some bells, given your case history. He did a stretch in Wormwood Scrubs for a shotgun stickup on a betting shop in Liverpool back before the Disappearance, and he fell in with a Hizb-ut-Tahrir group there.'
Caitlin's ears pricked up immediately.
'Were they the genuine article or just a bunch of beardy shitheads?' she asked
'Oh, the genuine article,' Dalby said. 'Prayed five times a day, proselytized throughout the nick, did a lot of conversions among the young lads from the subcontinent. Governor quite liked having them there, he said. Insisted they calmed things down.'
'Splendid,' Caitlin said. 'How nice for the governor.'
'Indeed.'
Rain began spotting the windshield, and Dalby flicked on the wipers.
'Well, Richardson didn't strike me as one of the Prophet's nutters,' Caitlin said. 'Looked more like a gangbanger really, more Rasta than anything.'
'Protective coloration.' Dalby shrugged. 'Since the French Intifada, foreign Johnnies in caftans haven't been entirely welcome in our green and pleasant land, have they?'
'No.'
Caitlin was glad to have missed most of the mass deportation period while in the hospital. It had been pretty fucking ugly by all accounts. It had started simply enough with a curfew in some of the areas most affected by post-Wave rioting, but when that failed to calm the situation, when the riots spun out of all control, the government began arresting thousands of people on a secret 'watch list' it had maintained since the Twin Towers attack all the way back in 2001. Ancient history, thought Caitlin, whose own agency had helped maintain that list. When France imploded, it was a matter of almost no moment to move from preventive detention to outright expulsion, even of second- and third-generation citizens, most of whom were forcibly relocated to one of Britain's fourteen remaining overseas territories and barred from returning to the newly promulgated 'metropolitan area'-Greater Britain and Northern Ireland, in not so many words.
Most of the territorial administrators, such as the military commander of the British base on Cyprus, a major relocation hub, had simply moved them on again, at gunpoint if necessary.
'So what's the current thinking?' she asked. 'Richardson was a sleeper, a stay-behind? Or his jailhouse conversion was just a convenience while he was inside?'
Dalby eased back on the gas as the downpour grew heavier, exhibiting the first hint of emotion since she'd met him. If she didn't know better, she could have sworn that he was disappointed. He flicked the wipers to a faster setting and turned on his headlights, although the road remained largely empty.
'We have no preconceived ideas,' he said, hunching slightly over the wheel. 'But we very much like this Hizb connection as an explanation for why he'd be looking for you-and how he came to get his hands on a couple of
