'Fine,' Sofia said, collecting Adam's M16. 'Stay here. I'm going after my father.' Miguel dismissed the unworthy option of cutting and running without a second thought. He had promised Adam that he would do his best to rescue the girl, and even if he hadn't, that did not change the fact that she was a good woman-he assumed- being held captive by the worst sort of men. Were it his daughter and another man had turned away from a chance to save her, what would he think of such a worthless cur?
Not much, after killing him.
Miguel settled on what he had to do and determined to see it through, no matter what. He took a moment to examine the room again, taking care this time to commit to memory as much detail as he could: the positions of the agents firing into the street and those of the dead and the wounded, the cover he might use, the paths he might take through the chaos. He did not have perfect vision of the room, far from it. But life was not perfect, and God expected his children to be about his business anyway.
He checked the Winchester one last time as he walked on a few paces to a door that would surely have to give on to the barroom.
Seven rounds of 30.30 smokeless in the tube.
He made the sign of the cross.
Kissed the small locket hanging around his neck.
Jacked a round into the chamber and stepped into the room.
Working from left to right, Miguel punched 170 grains of 30.30 deer killer through the back of the first man's neck at 2,227 feet per second. The agent crouched next to him lost the top of his head as he turned slightly to see what had happened to his comrade. Miguel worked the lever action and put his third round into the back of the next man in line, who was taking cover behind a structural beam as he fired out into the street. The woman, the camp whore, who had been firing her carbine blindly over the window ledge reacted with catlike speed and managed to turn toward him, cry out a warning over the clamor and tumult, and even squeeze off a couple of rounds. But they hit the ceiling, bringing down a shower of dust and particleboard before her face exploded when hit by his fourth shot. Blood and gray matter spattered the face of the man next to her.
'Dixie!' he cried out, turning on Miguel. 'Fucker, you ki-'
Dixie's boyfriend died of a bullet through the heart, and before Miguel could finish the last of them, the final agent, an older man, threw his weapon down and put his hands up.
'Whoa, pardner, don't shoot me! I fucking surrender!' the graybeard said.
Miguel covered him with the rifle, advancing cautiously through the room, still hunched over slightly and flinching as fire from the Mormons outside continued to smash into the building. All of his senses were singing; light and sound and the reek of gunpowder and death flooded in as time seemed to stretch out forever-as though he might walk across this room, surrounded by the dead and dying, from this moment until the ending of the world.
Something was behind him. He whipped out his Lupara.
A burst of rifle fire cut the shape down before Miguel could pull the trigger. He caught the briefest hint of the agent's head disintegrating in a shower of blood and bone before blessed silence fell and all that remained was the ringing in his ears and the wailing of a woman somewhere in the dark. The man who had been coming at him from a doorway to his left fell facedown onto the floor.
Sofia stood behind the man, an M16 in her hands.
'Papa,' she said sheepishly.
31
Berlin As she'd expected, the BMW was an older model, an X5 from 2002. The Bayerische Motoren Werke hadn't gone under like so many other automakers, but it had shrunk enormously and had not released a new line beyond the 2003 models. Still, this X5 from Berlin Control was a pretty good SUV crossover. A little stiff in the handling for her taste, but powerful and kitted out with the balance of her equipment in a sealed diplomatic box in the back. No Landespolizei patrols would be pulling her over and poking around in her unmentionables.
Caitlin blinked away the fatigue of a long day's travel. She had risen before dawn in London, and it was coming up on midnight. Six lanes of the A100 ribboned away in front of her, sweeping past the radio tower on her left, lit from below by golden lights. It would have been an almost cheery sight after the drab gray Orwellian tones of London, but she was too tired to care. She was also lonely, an unusual, almost unknown state for her. She'd tried to phone Bret before flying out, but the guard at the safe house had told her that both he and Monique were asleep, and she hadn't wanted to wake either of them. Her breasts felt heavy and ached from not having fed her baby in so many hours, but there was nothing to be done about it. It wasn't like she could express milk in the field, after all. Soon enough her milk would dry up, anyway. She felt an irrational flicker of resentment at that, as if it was the worst thing Baumer had done. Caitlin flicked the air vents to keep the uncomfortably cold AC blowing into her face, warding off drowsiness.
She regretted not bringing a couple of CDs. German pop and rock music made her brain hurt. After flitting around the dial for half a minute she found a local news radio station halfway through a quarter-hour update. Her German-language comprehension was good, but she was a little rusty with the spoken word and practiced by repeating the bulletin after the newsreader.
'Fighting continues in New York, while the British Security Cabinet holds crisis talks with the U.S. Defense minister. NATO ministers meeting in Brussels are expected to release a statement later tonight condemning state- sponsored piracy but urging the Kipper administration to show restraint…'
Caitlin snorted and rolled her tired eyes.
'Enough of that shit,' she said, trying a few more stations until she lucked onto a talk radio host ranting about an upcoming vote in the Bundestag to recognize sharia law, applied by mandated local communities as binding in certain classes of civil action. The five-minute tirade was enormous fun to bluster along with, and the callers provided her with an eclectic mix of accents and vocal styles to parrot. It was also a reasonable backgrounder on the sort of suburb she was headed into. Neukolln wasn't a closed community like some of the shariatowns in the east of Germany or the remaining Enclosures in London, for that matter, but it was enclosed in all but name. She, a blond American woman, would have no freedom of movement there. She'd need an escort, someone she trusted, but not a local stringer for Echelon. As Dalby had made clear, this op was deniable. There was a good chance it was going to get bloody.
She yawned and shivered as the X5 hummed past miles of closely packed, low-rise apartment blocks. Unlike London, Berlin had no curfew or travel restrictions, and traffic was noticeably heavier than she'd experienced in the British capital, especially at this time of night. Gas was much cheaper, probably because it wasn't controlled by anything like the Brits' Ministry of Resources. Even so, the city was noticeably quieter than when she'd last been stationed there, working up the brief on al Banna at the start of the decade. The German economy, like Britain's, was much smaller than it had been, and few people had the means to keep a car on the road.
Another ten minutes took her past Tempelhof Airport, where she could see a few stripped and gutted jetliners in the livery of American Airlines and Delta Airlines parked on the apron to the north of the two runways. Shortly afterward she turned left at Britzer Damm and motored quickly past long rows of shuttered shops. Many of them looked as though they hadn't opened in years. The footpaths and gutters were littered with rubbish and scraps of paper gathered into drifts and whipped up in small eddies by her speeding passage. The streets were darker than she recalled, but then they would be, with every second light turned off by the city authorities. Here and there groups of young men clustered together, some of them watching her with sullen expressions as she drove past. Immediately after crossing the rail line at the Hermannstrasse station, she turned left into Emser Strasse and drove for two blocks past whitewashed four-and five-story apartment buildings. Away from the main strip, with its scattering of mean little bars and greasy spoons around which tribes of young men would gather, Emser Strasse was quiet. Many cars were parked neatly by the curb, but even in the dark Caitlin could tell most of them had not been driven in a long time. They were dusty, and more often than not rotting banks of leaf matter were piled up against deflated tires. The GPS module beeped triumphantly.
She was there.
A new, unusued phone came out of her leather jacket, and she keyed in the number taken from Bret's diary
