'Well, we don't know that she'll be a rocket scientist,' she said. 'But she is pretty.'
'Like you,' Bret said as he leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead.
'Guess I could have had my coffee, after all,' she said.
'Take mine,' he offered. 'I don't mind milk and honey.'
'I can't do that. You're down to half a bag of beans.'
He shrugged. 'You'll get more. You are still going to the city, aren't you?'
She nodded, a little distracted. She was already planning her morning run. Maintaining her fitness was not negotiable. Bret did not bother as much now that he was a self-proclaimed househusband, although farmwork kept him fit and strong enough. Caitlin, however, had no choice. She still answered to her old paymasters even though she was no longer on field duty.
She had run five miles just a couple of days after Monique had been delivered by elective cesarean. (And hadn't there been some tut-tutting from the midwitches over that.) A week further on and she was back in the gym she and Bret had set up in a sunroom overlooking the swimming pool. And yes, she had been more than a little surprised to find a working English farmhouse with a heated in-ground swimming pool, but that had been one of the things that had attracted them to the property. That and the peppercorn rent paid to the government, an indulgence in return for her services as a 'consultant' to Echelon.
Bret stood by the window, silhouetted by the rising sun, causing Caitlin a momentary rush of blood. There had been a time in both their lives when they would have instinctively avoided exposing themselves in such a manner. Her husband had been able to get over it.
She hadn't.
Arguably, Caitlin did not need to maintain her combat readiness and field craft the way she did. Her consultancy consisted almost entirely of analytic and training work, and having hunkered down here in the heart of the English Home Counties, they could hardly be more secure. Bret had tried to get her to ease up, but her Echelon training had taken hold down at a cellular level. She could not stop being who and what she was. Looking at her husband, she often envied his ability to simply walk away from his army past.
Monique stirred and grumbled in her mother's arms, perhaps disturbed by her dark shift in mood. Bret turned away from the window where he was watching the workers' camp come to life and offered to take the baby. His limbs were all heavily muscled, and the small swaddled infant disappeared into the crook of one arm without waking. He started to pat her lightly on the back, rocking her gently and humming an old Willie Nelson standard. 'My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.' The song never failed to have a magical, soothing effect on the baby, and Caitlin could tell that Monique was falling more deeply asleep in her father's arms.
She stepped back into their bedroom and quickly changed into her running gear: black Lycra leggings, an old T- shirt of Bret's, and a Berreta M9 pistol in a specially fitted holster at the small of her back. Her husband didn't give it a second glance. He had spent his adult life around weapons and knew his wife well enough to understand why she would never stop carrying one.
'Are you riding up to Swindon today to that GM crop briefing?' she asked. 'I'll just tell the stable guys is all, if you're gonna need one of the horses.'
Bret eased the baby back into her crib and stood up, stretching his back with an audible cracking of bones. Like her, he carried a good deal of scar tissue and old injuries.
'Thought I might take the mountain bike up if you don't mind,' he said quietly. 'I could do with the cardio workout.'
'You could,' she teased him, grabbing for a fold of skin at his belly. He wasn't carrying any fat, but he batted her hand away defensively anyway.
'Hey, you squeeze it, you buy it, lady.'
'Really?' she said, closing on him.
When she grabbed at him this time, he didn't resist. An hour or so later, jogging on the spot to keep her heart rate elevated, Caitlin enjoyed taking in a deep draft of chilly morning air and shooting one last glance at her home before plunging back into a long cross-country run. Thick tendrils of coal smoke were creeping out of the kitchen chimney, where Bret would be preparing hot drinks for the foremen before briefing them on the day's work. They'd be plowing the new GM soy into the eastern paddock today, half a mile up the road toward Stitchcombe, and without a gasoline ration, as usual these days, it would all be done by hand. Most of the camp would turn out for that, although a smaller number would be at work in the southern fields, scattering a new weed-n-feed mix as part of a trial for the Resources Ministry. They were being paid in fuel coupons for letting the government's eggheads conduct field tests on their property.
She shook her head at that again.
Their property.
The previous owner, a minor Saudi prince, had lost the farm during the 'resettlement' period in the year after the Disappearance. Caitlin's mouth quirked downward at the bloodless euphemism. 'Pogrom' would be more accurate: ethnic cleansing on a scale to put into the shade the earlier atrocities in the Balkans. The prince had not complained, however. He'd been at a wedding in Damascus when the Israelis nuked the city.
She shook off the grim memories and took off again, shortening her stride as she dropped down a hillside where long summer grass covered the tangled roots of chestnut and elm and holly oak trees. She didn't need a sprained ankle or worse to teach her not to run blindly over treacherous ground. Small families of birds took flight at her approach, starlings and robins as best she could tell. They'd experienced something of a population boom earlier this spring, rebounding from the collapse of their populations after the pollution storms. Turning onto Thicketts Road, which wound down through the hills toward the village of Mildenhall, Caitlin settled into a long, loping stride. She felt good this morning and decided to add another couple of miles to her course by circling the village a few times. That way she might even catch Bret and Monique on the way home if he was cycling up to Swindon as planned. She played her thumb over her wedding ring. It was still so new, she hadn't built up a callus on her palm beneath it. Just as her mother and father had. She remembered the feeling of their hands as though she had just let go of them, a tactile memory so sharp that she had to wonder whether it had anything to do with the tumor that had been cut out of her brain. The doctors had said there would be side effects from the treatment.
She pushed away the troubling idea that her mind was not quite right and never would be again, preferring to concentrate on her breathing and balance as she powered along the country road.
She and Bret would build up their own calluses, their own family history, here or back home in America, with Monique and any more children who came after her. She knew they would. There would be a long time ahead of them for all that.
4
New York Culver took a spot at the back of the press conference in Castle Clinton, the old sandstone fort at the northern end of Battery Park. It was possible, standing on the freshly raked gravel and staring over the heads of the reporters, to look at the skyline of Lower Manhattan and imagine that not much was wrong in the world. You merely had to ignore a few scorch marks and broken windows, maybe squint your eyes a little to fuzz up the details, and you could have been standing in the New York of old, with life teeming around you, ten million people, seemingly twenty million cars, the subway rattling and roaring underfoot as you walked downtown, the smoky, earthy fragrance of frying meat from a hundred street carts, the clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages around the park. It was almost as though he could close his eyes and be back there, strolling up to Redeye, his favorite bar and grill, for a perfectly cooked fillet of Chilean swordfish with San Moriglio sauce.
Instead, the thump of two Blackhawk helicopters circling the southern tip of the island drowned out what little ambient noise there was, mostly distant gunfire or the crash, rumble, and grind of salvage work.
The White House chief of staff folded his arms and pushed the pleasant daydreams away. It would be a long time before anyone in this country could indulge in daydreams again. While Karen Milliner warmed up the audience by taking questions on the issues of the moment-Jackson Blackstone's antics down in Fort Hood, the Indo-Pakistani wars, and the congressional hearings on the Lands and Homesteading Act-Culver contented himself with scoping out the scene. The colonnaded cloisters of the roughly circular fort were deep in shade with the sun climbing high overhead, and he could make out Secret Service details stalking through the shadows, ever watchful. The reporters
