‘At last,’ said Sofia as she gathered up her magazine and water bottle from the coffee table in the Qantas lounge, stuffing them into the small backpack she would take with her on the plane.
‘What, you’re that keen to be shot of us, are you, mate?’
‘Oh, piss off,’ she replied, but without malice. She had grown used to the Australian sense of humour. ‘You just can’t wait to get rid of me so you can get down the pub early.’
Her Echelon mentor repaid the quick comeback with a smile. ‘You know me too well, Mariela,’ he said, using her cover name. ‘Come on, I’ll walk you down to the gate. Reckon you’ve been just about my worst student ever. Wouldn’t surprise me if you got lost between here and the plane. Fuck knows what’s gonna happen when you get to Tokyo.’
‘Ha. I’ll be unpacking truly epic amounts of awesome and win, that’s what. Probably so much that they’ll just give me my black belt as soon as I turn up at the dojo.’
‘More like they’re gonna hand your arse to you on a sushi platter,’ he said.
‘They’re gonna try,’ she laughed. ‘Caitlin told me all about it.’
Nick Pappas, Echelon’s station chief in Sydney, nodded at that. ‘You’d do well to listen to her advice, Sofia.’
They walked out of the club lounge and joined the flow of foot traffic through Sydney’s international terminal towards the departure gate. Neither of them spoke again for a minute. After eighteen months of training at Echelon’s remote Snowy Mountains campus, Sofia Pieraro was entirely comfortable with the exchange of secrets that could be loaded into an unspoken conversation. She was also more familiar with the woman who had saved her from certain capture and execution in Texas. The woman she had possibly saved when she stormed into Blackstone’s residence, intending to die if it meant a chance to settle the blood debt he owed her.
Caitlin Monroe had been generous about that. Sofia knew her now as both a friend and, somewhat problematically, as an Echelon legend. Almost a figure of mythology. Her own controllers, her trainers and even Pappas - her last mentor and probably her first overwatch controller when she returned from Japan and began to earn her place in the organisation - they had all scoffed at the idea that she’d rescued the infamous Caitlin Monroe. ‘Just got in her fucking way, more likely,’ as Nick had put it. ‘Probably stopped her killing everyone five minutes earlier.’
Sofia had bristled at first. She was a proud if profoundly damaged young woman when they spirited her away from America, disappeared her as effectively as the Wave had taken hundreds of millions of souls five years earlier. She had done something as a mere girl that the mighty Echelon had dispatched and nearly lost its champion to achieve. She had laid a hard vengeance upon Jackson Blackstone for his crimes in Texas and New York.
Although, at the time, she hadn’t given a shit about anything but the blood on his hands from the murder of her family and, she’d presumed, her father. Nick Pappas had set her straight on that. She knew it was a purely calculated move by Echelon, assigning him to mentor her through reception and early training. He had witnessed the death of the man who actually had taken Papa’s life, and who had put poor Maive Aronson into a coma, where she still lay.
Sofia had needed many months to get past the idea that Blackstone had nothing to do with her father’s murder, that it had been this Cesky creature whom Papa had beaten down for causing trouble with Miss Julianne, all those years before in Acapulco. She still remembered very fondly the kind and pretty English lady from the yacht on which they’d all escaped
The idea that a friend of Papa’s, indeed the original saviour of the Pieraro clan, had exacted their revenge for her finally reconciled Sofia to letting go.
She would do now what Miguel Pieraro had always wanted. She would live, and eventually the family would grow again through her. But first she had a debt to pay off. Having been delivered from evil that night in Fort Hood, Sofia had been given to understand, and she accepted without demur, that a responsibility had been laid upon her by that salvation. The premise sat easily with a Catholic. She would devote this first part of her new life to the fight against evil, raking for it where it had always lain, in the hearts of men.
But not men like her father, or Nick Pappas, who guided her now through the crush of the terminal with a paternal hand on her shoulder. They had grown very close. The last time she had spoken with Caitlin, when her saviour had visited the campus in the Snowy Mountains, she’d told Sofia that would happen. Echelon was a family, said Agent Monroe, and in Pappas, of whom she knew and approved, Sofia could be assured that she had somebody she could trust as if he were her own father.
Nick would never replace her
Sofia was ready.
‘I’ll see you in a year,’ said Pappas, when they reached the gate. He put out his hand, rather formally and uncomfortably, as though forcing restraint on himself.
‘Not if I see you first,’ she replied, grinning and standing on tiptoe to quickly kiss him goodbye on the cheek.
FOUR YEARS LATER
The last refugee family departed from Melton Farm a week before Monique’s fifth birthday. Caitlin and Bret had planned to celebrate the occasion with a small party, but as so often happens with working parents, time got away from them. The animals, as always, needed tending. The Ministry of Resources chose that week to send through a survey team to inspect the progress of their latest GM oat crop. Monique was about to start her prep year of primary school. Her little brother, Harry, was acting out his separation anxieties during his first week at kindergarten. And Caitlin had no idea when she volunteered to sit on the village’s royal wedding committee that the meetings would prove as frustrating and nearly as murderous as the long search for Bilal Baumer had been. So in the end they marked the departure of their last American refugees with a glass of wine on the front porch at the end of a long summer’s day.
‘We’ve still got Monique’s birthday party next week,’ said Bret. ‘Half the village will be along for that, anyway. We could do something then.’
‘I suppose so,’ replied Caitlin without any great enthusiasm.
She was underwhelmed by the idea of hand-to-hand battle at home with the vicar and Mrs Dingley about fucking Will and Kate’s wedding. The sleep-deprived mother of two was just contemplating a second glass of wine when Bret pointed out the vehicle, a white Peugeot by the look of it, coming over the rise and down the long unsealed road to the farmhouse.
‘Government car,’ he said, with confidence.
‘I think so,’ Caitlin agreed, suddenly aware of the pistol in the holster at the small of her back. She still carried it everywhere. The Kimber Warrior was so much a part of her that mostly she forgot it was there. It had now been, what, nearly four years since she’d last pulled the trigger on a man.
‘Maybe you should get the kids inside, and run the bath, honey,’ she suggested. ‘It might be for me.’
Her husband gave her a measured look before staring long and hard at the approaching car again. ‘Those days are over,’ he said before disappearing inside. ‘Monique! Harry! Bath time, let’s go!’
She heard the squeals and thunder of children running to attend to their father’s command. Outside the farmhouse, training, imprinted at the molecular level, caused her to scan her surroundings for any obvious threats, and then for any non-obvious ones.
Nothing.
The car bore HM Government licence plates. As it turned off the approach road and onto the driveway, which wound in through a stand of apple trees before looping around a small, broken fountain in front of the farmhouse, she recognised the occupants. And smiled.
‘Dalby and … Oh my God, Wales!’ she beamed. ‘This must be bad news.’
Her two favourite former overwatch controllers returned the friendly greeting, crunching over the gravel to say hello, to shake hands, and in Wales’s case to wrap her in a bear hug, a manoeuvre made difficult by the presents he was carrying for the children.
