more challengers as she went.
They were already charging toward her, and these guys looked a lot more capable, all of them armed with hand cannons of some sort and moving as a fluid group, covering one another.
Two single shots crashed out, echoing and caroming off the steel handrail.
'Allahu akbar!'
'Oh, for fuck's sake,' she sighed.
She worked quickly, covering the flight below with the machine gun, squeezing out a few bursts as she used her free hand to haul out the cigarette pack in which Gerty had hidden the small but powerful binary explosive. Caitlin stripped off the lid, pushed in the tab that allowed the two elements to mingle, set the rudimentary timer for seven seconds, and then calmly walked down the steps, firing off fast irregular volleys from the Russian gun, keeping the heads of her targets down until she rounded the last landing and tossed the small package down among them. She ducked back behind the shelter of the thick concrete steps as the bomblet exploded with a titanic crash that shook the entire building.
All need for stealth and care now gone, she took out the second PP-2000 and advanced firing both weapons. The second, unsilenced gun roared with an earsplitting report that completely drowned out the sound of the first. As she swung around on the last flight of steps, she saw that two of the men had been caught by the explosion and killed instantly, one of them split from neck to groin as though gutted by a butcher and the other simply taken apart into four or five large pieces. A third man was crawling away from the shattered glass entry, and she stitched him up along the spine, finishing with a head shot as another bullet cracked past her ear.
The fourth and final target had made it halfway to the footpath and was firing wildly over his shoulder. Two more bullets fizzed close by before she could draw a bead on him with the silenced gun. Before she could pull the trigger, his head disintegrated and his lifeless body tumbled over.
She dived for the nearest cover, a concrete pillar.
She scanned the darkness for the second shooter and heard the unmistakable growl of her BMW as it suddenly appeared in front of Fabia Shah's building with Dalby at the wheel.
'Come on,' he called out. 'Get a bloody move on.'
She hurried down the steps as lights went on all over the street and a fire alarm wailed somewhere.
'What… fuck?' was all she could manage as she dived into the passenger seat through the door he had leaned over to fling open for her.
'Sorry,' Dalby said. 'Might have been fibbing about sending you out on your own.' 'What the fuck, Dalby!'
She waited until he pulled out of the street before punching him on the shoulder. The Englishman drove at the speed limit and was careful not to draw attention to them with any reckless maneuvers. He had mounted a scanner on the dashboard, and they could hear emergency calls going out to the police.
'I'm sorry, Ms. Monroe… Caitlin. But just as you were an undeclared asset, I'm afraid my presence here is, too. We're not inclined to take risks with our continental colleagues anymore.'
The shakes took hold of her as they drove along the street where she and Mirsaad had investigated the market stalls early that morning. No, she corrected herself. That was yesterday morning. She was having trouble keeping it all straight and was annoyed at her jittery unprofessional response to the ambush, or at least to the aftermath, including Dalby's unexpected intervention.
'Seriously, I mean it. What the fuck are you doing here, Dalby? And what was the story with all the Universal Exports doublespeak before? What the hell kind of double-blind bullshit operation is this? Do you want al Banna found? Are they fucking serious about tracing the supply chains through here? What the hell is going on?'
Dalby had the decency to look abashed as he drove them out of the shariatown on a heading for the airport. Caitlin could hear sirens as the first responders sped toward Neukolln.
'I apologize, I really do, Caitlin,' Dalby said. 'But needs must out when the Devil drives. I was not leading you astray when we spoke earlier, although I am sorry I could not reveal I was also in Berlin. We all have our histories, Caitlin, and I'm afraid I have quite a bit of history with this city. I'm not supposed to be here, ever.'
He didn't elaborate, and she didn't expect him to. They drove on as a fire engine and two ambulances sped past with sirens howling and lights flashing. Dalby ignored them and stuck to his route, which she was now certain was taking them in a great loop toward Tempelhof Airport.
'I volunteered as your overwatch officer because I suspected something like this might happen.'
Caitlin bristled. 'I do know how to do my job, you know, Dalby,' she said, but regretted her tone. The man had put himself at great risk to help her and probably remained at risk as long as he was in Berlin. 'Sorry,' she said. 'Can you just bring me up to speed with what's happening?'
'What's happening is a rather amateurish attempt at distraction,' he said. 'We are now of the opinion that the attack on your family was not really personal. It was meant merely to appear as such, to make us imagine that Baumer had returned to Germany after escaping his confinement in Guadeloupe. Attacking your family, then drawing you to Berlin, where you could be ambushed, would play out as a rather neatly packaged revenge scenario had Baumer been able to call on sufficiently competent help. Fortunately for you, he wasn't. Partly because we suspect that having rebuilt his networks quite quickly from the refugee cohort, which has arrived here in great numbers these last few years, he committed the best of his people to New York.'
Caitlin shook her head and blinked away a moment of dizziness and nausea as they traversed the northern boundary of Tempelhof.
'So what, you think he's gone into piracy now? That doesn't make sense. That's not the guy I went after back in 2003. He's a believer, not a crook.'
'Indeed he is,' Dalby agreed. 'And believers are always much more dangerous than your common garden- variety villains. That's why we've never lost interest in him. It's why, when he reached out to you through Richardson and his men, we were able to authorize this operation at such short notice and to resource it when there are so many calls on our resources because of New York. There are no coincidences, Caitlin.'
'You knew? All the time?' she asked quietly.
Any other man who knew her would have immediately sensed the danger. But Dalby showed no sign of feeling threatened. Only tired.
'No, we didn't. We had our suspicions. I certainly had mine. But suspicions are so common as to be a worthless currency in our trade, Caitlin. We can only know what we know, and until then anything is possible. Up until a few hours ago it was possible that you would actually be reassigned to the very, very important job of finding out where the street traders of Neukolln are sourcing their plentiful supplies of cheap toasters and Levi's jeans. It was only after you were ambushed that I was able to convince our lords and masters you had more important work to do.'
'In New York?' she asked.
'Yes,' he said as he turned off the main road and onto a disused concrete laneway that led to an open gate on the airport's northeastern fringe. A short distance beyond that a Gulfstream V stood ready on the tarmac with its engines spooled up and cabin lights dimmed. Dalby pulled up as a man popped his head out of the hatchway just behind the cockpit and waved to them.
'I'm sorry I couldn't give you all of the information to which I was privy, Caitlin,' he said. 'But I honestly did not have much, and information is one thing, meaning is another. We now have, I think, a much better understanding of the meaning of what has happened in New York and how it connects to what happened to you.'
'What is Baumer doing?' Caitlin asked as she struggled to maintain her temper.
'He has taken his people to the New World,' Dalby said. 'There to build a new world for them.'
Caitlin was quiet for a moment as she took it all in: the deceit, the betrayals, the shifting agendas and interests. As much as the lines and details shifted and blurred, however, one thing remained constant. She had but one interest, finding the man who had used her family. That was worse, much worse, than imagining he had come after them as part of some intensely personal vengeance trip. He hadn't cared at all. Killing them meant nothing. It was a tactic to buy time, and not much time at that.
'This plane is one of ours. It will take you to a small airfield in upstate New York, where you'll transition to a military craft for insertion into New York. You'll be jumping in, I'm afraid, hopefully just before dawn over there. You're rated for HAHO operations, as I understand. You'll find all of the equipment you need at the other end,' Dalby said.
'I won't need any equipment,' she said. 'I am going to kill him with the same hands that held my baby after he tried to take her from me.'
