‘It’s Wales Larrison, Mr Culver. We have a problem. In fact, we have two of them.’
*
‘That trick you guys pulled breaking into our system, looping the security footage back over itself, that was fucking brilliant,’ raved McCutcheon.
He sat next to her in the back of a Humvee, both of them being driven across the base to Blackstone’s home residence. Caitlin’s hands were cuffed behind her back and the former air force man kept his gun trained on her midsection, while maintaining as much separation between them as he could. The driver’s head bobbed in time to the bass beat of a song he was listening to through earphones plugged into his Zune.
Little fucking Wayne, again. There was no escaping the guy.
‘A bit
Caitlin maintained the stillness and silence within which she had cocooned herself, ever since she’d handed over the cell phone and her Kimber pistol.
‘You’re like a Bond villain, you know that?’ said McCutcheon. ‘All of you spooks are the same. All so intent on getting your ninja merit badge, throwing your little smoke bombs, doing your Spiderman thing up on the ceiling, that you forget it would be simpler to just walk in through the front door! You probably could’ve hidden in a broom closet and not been caught.’
She ignored him and concentrated on her breathing. He seemed relaxed, which wasn’t surprising given that she was wearing the handcuffs and he was pointing a gun at her liver. But he shouldn’t have been relaxed. He should have been freaking. Because Caitlin hadn’t stored the data from his laptop on her augmented cell phone. Everything had been uploaded and transmitted back to Vancouver. Either he didn’t know that, or there was nothing on the laptop worth worrying about. She doubted the latter. Not with the lengths to which they’d gone to secure the thing from interference.
Unless, of course, that too had merely been a charade to entrap her.
Echelon’s senior field agent did not have enough information to reach a conclusion, and so she did not bother. What mattered now was waiting for an opportunity to reverse the flow of this encounter.
*
Culver pressed the phone so hard to his ear, it was starting to hurt his head.
‘How many dead?’ he asked.
‘Two here, that we are aware of. Down there, I couldn’t say.’
‘Jesus Christ, Larrison, how long does it take to do a simple body count?’
‘There’s nothing simple about this, Mr Culver. We have confirmation from Australia that Henry Cesky hired Parmenter to kill Pieraro and Zood here, and Ms Balwyn and Mr Ross in Darwin. And that was after hiring other contractors who failed in the same goals. Parmenter also appears to have killed his accomplice in Kansas City, but we have no idea who that was, yet.’
Jed rubbed at his temples, which were pounding with a headache. He felt ill and desperately wanted to hang up, vomit, and crawl back under the sheets.
‘And you’re telling me this is connected, but it’s not connected to what Agent Monroe is doing at Fort Hood?’
‘Only tangentially, sir. Our information is that Pieraro and his family were on the boat commandeered by Ms Balwyn. Pieraro attacked and humiliated Cesky in Acapulco while Balwyn was interviewing him for a place on board the yacht. Pieraro turned up on the margins of Agent Monroe’s mission because his was one of the four cases regarding attacks on homesteaders you’d flagged for her interest while she was in Kansas City. That’s the only connection.’
For one, brief, shining moment Jed had entertained the idea of possibly fitting up Blackstone for the Pieraro killing. Unfortunately, Larrison, like James Kipper, was not the sort of man to countenance villainy of that ilk.
He washed down a couple of painkillers with the cup of water he kept by the bed. When you were this deep in the briar patch, there was only one thing to do. Start hacking your way out.
‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘Thank you for informing me about Cesky. As soon as we’re finished here, call the FBI and have him picked up. The first thing the President will hear about it will be when he turns on his radio in the morning. We can’t have any suggestion of him knowing or doing anything about a case involving his biggest supporter.’
‘No sir, we can’t,’ agreed Larrison. ‘And Agent Monroe?’
*
‘Yes, what are we to do with you, Miss Monroe?’
Jackson Blackstone stood before her in a plaid dressing gown nursing a glass of warm milk. With floor-to- ceiling bookshelves behind him, and a golden retriever curled up on a leather couch, he looked like a greeting card granddad. His demeanour was disappointed, deeply disappointed, rather than enraged. She wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign.
Caitlin stood in front of him, dressed as one of his troopers, with her hands still cuffed behind her. McCutcheon was the only other person in the room. But two squads of TDF soldiers waited outside the Governor’s humble residence, leaned up against the Humvees, smoking and laughing quietly.
Still, she said nothing.
‘Been like this all night,’ McCutcheon chimed in. ‘Worst case of sour grapes I’ve ever seen.’
‘I’m curious about what you hoped to achieve,’ said Blackstone. ‘Does the President imagine I would submit to the indignity of being hauled up for impeachment on the basis of a couple of files illegally removed from my assistant’s office? Nothing you have on that device of yours is admissible in anything even resembling a court. What did you hope to achieve?’
‘Just the truth,’ she replied.
‘Hell’s bells, we can stop looking for the cat, Governor,’ quipped McCutcheon. ‘It doesn’t have her tongue after all.’
‘The truth is negotiable, Miss Monroe, easily moulded, pliable. Like the ballistics gel you used to defeat our fingerprint scanner. The truth can be shaped to take whatever form we need it to take.’
‘Did that little pecker-head send you down here because he’s still got his panties bunched up about the homesteaders?’ Blackstone asked. He took a sip of his warm milk. It left a noticeable milk moustache behind in the hairs of his actual beard. He sucked at them, a disconcerting sight.
‘I am sure the President would want to know why his homesteaders were being attacked, Governor, when yours weren’t. And why only some of the Mandate settlements were targeted by road agents.’
The aide answered this one. ‘Well duh, because we don’t want a lot of sand niggers, and wet-backs and crazy fucking worshippers of the six-armed elephant God moving in here and fucking everything up for us. Didn’t we make that obvious?’
Blackstone lowered himself into an armchair. ‘God dammit, Ty, I thought we made it obvious to everyone,’ he said with a grunt as he sat down. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Agent Monroe. I’m not one of these cranks who thinks the Disappearance was the vengeance of God laid upon us for our wicked, wicked ways. I have no idea what it was. Could’ve been a bunch of alien space bats throwing a big butterfly net over us to scoop up our souls and blend them into a really tasty breakfast shake. Who would know?’
Caitlin shifted slowly from foot to foot, working through an imperceptible series of isometric exercises to keep herself warmed up and ready to explode if and when she had the chance.
‘But I am a crank about some things,’ Blackstone continued. ‘About culture, for one thing. Not race, as everyone imagines. You all assume I’m some sort of racist, when I’m not. Allow me to make myself crystal clear, young lady. Race is a myth. It does not exist. Black, white, red, yellow, slant-eyed, nappy-haired, hook-nosed or whatever, we are all brothers under the skin. I really believe that.’
She allowed herself to look bored and frustrated. It gave her an excuse to take in her surroundings. They were gathered in Blackstone’s living room. The library and lounge where he was sitting was a modest but comfortable space. It led on to a dining room in one direction, and to an alcove overlooking the garden in the other. With three flutes and a piccolo resting on an occasional table, and a piano sitting against one wall, this small space
