‘I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead, Caitlin,’ said the American. ‘But Dalby and I were on our way back early from something at Salisbury Plain, and I just couldn’t forgive myself if I hadn’t taken the opportunity to call in and say hello. It’s been too long.’
She aimed a sceptical frown at the gifts he was carrying.
‘I didn’t know that London Cage had opened up a Toys ‘R’ Us franchise,’ she said dryly. ‘Just picked those up on the way, did you?’
Wales had the good grace to look a little embarrassed. ‘Well, I was always going to be dropping by,’ he replied. ‘So it seemed a good idea to have them with me. An American Girl doll for Monique. They’re making them again, you know. And Lego Star Wars for young Harry.’
Her scepticism grew even more pronounced. ‘So you’ve been talking to Bret, then, I see.’
‘Perhaps just a little,’ Francis Dalby admitted. ‘That wine looks damned inviting. I notice your five years in this country have not softened your manners any, young lady. Perhaps you would like to invite your old friends and employers in.’
‘Or perhaps not,’ she mocked, turning around and walking back into the house, waving them along behind her. She could hear the bath running upstairs, and the children laughing as they splashed about in it.
‘Bret,’ she called up, ‘it’s Dalby and Wales. Are you going to come down for a drink when you’re finished up there?’
‘Sorry, I knew they were coming,’ he called back. ‘They said they’d torture me if I let on.’
‘Sounds about right,’ Caitlin muttered as she led her guests through to the kitchen. A pot of osso buco in the oven was about twenty minutes away from being ready, and the places were already set for dinner. Four plates at the big table and two at the smaller children’s table, where Monique and Harry ate most of their meals. Bret had used the royal wedding plates he’d insisted on buying last week. His idea of irony.
‘Your field craft is getting rusty down here,’ said Dalby.
‘It’s sharp enough for dealing with country vicars and village aldermen,’ she replied. ‘Sit down. I’ll open a new bottle. We had half of this last night and it’s oxidised. Life in the boonies, what can I say?’
‘Well, you could say how happy you are to see us,’ said Wales, teasing her.
‘I am, Wales. As long as you’re not here to try to talk me back into the office. I’m retired now. A lady of leisure.’
She uncorked a bottle of Cotes du Rhone and poured a generous measure into two clean glasses.
‘You’re not completely retired, Caitlin,’ Wales pointed out. ‘Dalby here tells me you’re kicking ass as a guest lecturer down at the college in London. And you’re not averse to doing a bit of consultancy here and there.’
She smiled. ‘Paperwork, Wales. I read papers and I write them. That’s all I do these days. When I’m not looking after the children. Or riding shotgun on the preparation for the crucial contribution of our little village to the wedding of the fucking century. Which is all the time.’
‘Wales and Dalby!’ boomed her husband, who had reappeared at the kitchen door with a glass in hand and a guilty look about him.
‘You could’ve at least given me enough warning to let me get changed out of my shit-kickers,’ she scolded him.
Bret looked sheepish but basically unapologetic. ‘Lego Star Wars buys a lot of silence.’
They finished the bottle of red wine before serving dinner, and another one with it. The children took themselves off to bed with dire warnings that their new toys would Disappear if they weren’t asleep within ten minutes, while the men finished off all the osso buco, which Caitlin had hoped would last for a couple of days. She returned from tucking in Harry and Monique to find the three of them gathered around a newly opened bottle of Highland Park, courtesy of Dalby, discussing the prospects for the US with Kipper’s second term drawing to an end, and Sandra Harvey and Sarah Palin looking like the front runners to punch it out in the big vote.
By the time they’d accounted for most of the whiskey, sitting by the fireplace in the lounge room after dinner, Caitlin had decreed that the visitors would have to stay the night.
‘Be just like you two to survive a lifetime of fucking villainy only to do yourselves in driving pissed at night. You’d probably get lost and end up back on one of the live firing ranges on the Plain.’
It was well after midnight before Bret and Dalby crashed out, leaving Caitlin curled up in a lounge chair in front of the hearth talking to Wales.
‘We would have you back in a New York minute, you know,’ he told her. ‘I wouldn’t want you to die wondering about that.’
‘Wales, I was in New York for a minute or two in April ‘07, you might recall,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel the need to go back. I’m out of it, Wales. I push a shopping trolley around the local supermarket now and my idea of adventure is when Harry wets himself in that trolley and he’s not wearing a nappy.’ She shook her head at that unpleasant memory.
Wales Larrison, these days the global director of Echelon, didn’t smile. He sized her up as though she were a challenging puzzle.
‘Do you remember the young girl you brought to us, just before you left and came home, here?’ he asked, waving a hand to take in the lounge room and the farm beyond it.
‘Sofia,’ said Caitlin. ‘Of course I do. How’d she work out? She’d have been in the field for a few years by now.’
Larrison took his time again.
‘As always,’ he said eventually, ‘you’ve done well for us, Caitlin. She was a good find. We haven’t had an asset as good as her since … well, since you left, to be truthful.’
‘That’s very flattering, Wales. But I left. And I’m not coming back.’
The scar tissue just under her hairline, where they’d opened her up to remove the tumor back in ‘03, was throbbing. It did that at times.
‘She wasn’t just good for us, for the office,’ Wales continued, swirling his whiskey before holding the tumbler up to the firelight. The flames threw long, snaking shadows across the room. ‘I still believe, Caitlin, that there was a chance your last mission in Texas could have ended very differently. There was a good chance that if Blackstone had lived, and if Kipper moved against him with the information you took, I think there was a very good chance he would have tried to take Texas out of the union. It could have meant civil war. Sofia Pieraro averted that outcome when she put him down. Those three IDs she left at the scene, the road agents, they helped us sell the story of Blackstone’s death as a bandit raid.’
Caitlin took a sip on her drink. Unlike the others, she had switched to mineral water hours ago.
‘Funny thing about those guys,’ she said. ‘They belonged to Blackstone. They were in McCutcheon’s files. That never came out, did it?’
‘It didn’t need to,’ replied Wales. ‘She gave us more than enough to start spinning up the myth that Jackson Blackstone was a murdered patriot. And you gave us her.’
‘Yeah. A patriot. Nicely fucking done, Wales.’
Larrison finished his drink and put it aside. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And she’s done very well for us ever since.’
‘How did Sofia take to that? The idea that Blackstone gets to go down in history as a martyred hero.’
The smile on Wales’s long, deeply lined face was wintry. ‘Like you, Caitlin, she’s a realist these days. Or she would be …’
‘I sense there’s a “but” coming.’
‘But,’ nodded Larrison, ‘now she has disappeared for real.’
Caitlin said nothing, but Wales seemed disinclined to add anything to his statement.
‘That’s too bad,’ she eventually replied. ‘But what does that have to do with me?’
‘You spent a lot of time with Sofia, staying low after Fort Hood,’ said Larrison. ‘You got to know her at a very vulnerable time. You probably know her as well as anybody in the agency, including her mentor. On all of her profiles and evaluations, she identified you as a significant figure in her salvation.’
‘It’s late, Wales. Really late.’
‘I’d like you to come back, Caitlin. I need you to find Sofia Pieraro. She’s somewhere in the South American Federation. She was working deep inside Roberto’s regime for us. And then she went dark. The same way you went dark after Fort Hood. We need you back, Caitlin. We need to know what’s happened down there. What might be about to happen.’
Larrison held up one hand before she could reply. ‘I don’t want you to answer me now, because I know what
