road.
She wiped a slick of perspiration from her face, not wanting to be inconvenienced by the sting of sweat in her eyes at the wrong moment.
The engine strained and misfired, just once, as the truck - it sounded like a truck - negotiated the twisting road above. All the while, she didn’t flinch or take her focus off the hairpin bend she had chosen. About a minute later the old pick-up inched its way around the turn. Caitlin took a half-second sight picture of the driver and passenger, laying the gun’s front sight post on the driver first. Having confirmed them as her guys, she settled into a slightly more comfortable shooting stance - bending her knees fractionally, breathing out, bracing her core muscles to accept the recoil.
As the truck turned towards her, giving the assassin a clear view of the cabin, she squeezed the trigger once, twice, a third time. One, two, three bursts down-range.
The driver slumped forward. His passenger reached for the wheel as Caitlin shifted just a notch, laying the sights on his right temple.
Repeat. One, two, three more bursts of automatic fire.
Nine rounds, from the twenty-round mag. A mix of armour-piercing and hollow-point, and a tracer for every third shot. The bullets exited the small, black hole in the business end of the suppressor in a fraction under one second, with a rapid thrumming noise. Their impact was less than discreet, shattering the windscreen of the aged Ford and tearing into the occupants like the threshing claws of some terrible, unseen carnivore. The men were dead before the vehicle veered slowly off the road and crashed down the hillside into the safety net of a dense strand of thorny vines. The engine coughed and stalled.
Caitlin swapped out her magazine for a new clip. This time, a fifty-round drum mag, in the same arrangement she had just used. Before turning back towards the old police station, she shouldered the 417, unholstered her pistol and half slid, half jumped down the wide path cut through the brush by the uncontrolled passage of the vehicle. She knew both men had taken at least one round to the head, but she was nothing if not thorough.
Reaching the cabin of the trashed utility, she swung into an awkward shooter’s stance on the steep incline, pointing the Kimber Custom pistol at her targets. The windshield had deflected her rounds a bit, but no coup de grace was necessary.
Caitlin knew of men and a few women in her profession who marked every kill with ceremony. Some were religious, others merely cruel. A couple were borderline psychotic. It wasn’t a need she had ever felt.
She didn’t pause to consider the life paths that had led these men to their deaths at her hand. Nor that they may’ve had full, even worthy lives outside of the hours each day when they wore the uniforms in which they’d died.
She merely killed them and moved on.
5
CENTRAL SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES
Jules scoped the hitter well before he made his move. She caught him watching her in the mirror behind the bar of the small neighbourhood dive. At first she thought he was just an old perv, eyeballing her in her fabulous new silk shirt. She had tied her dark hair, recently dyed black, into a ponytail, and he wasn’t the only man whose attention she’d caught. His was definitely unwanted, however.
She’d been drinking here at the Idler Bar for the past three weeks and had come to know most of the regulars, at least on a nodding basis. It was a local haunt, the clientele drawn from the warren of streets and back alleys of The Rocks, all within a five-minute walk: Australians, younger Brits and other travellers who’d overstayed their visas after the Wave had hit in March ‘03 and who’d lucked in when the government granted an amnesty a few weeks later.
And there were Americans, of course. Everywhere she went here, always Americans. Enough of them that Sydney was now the third largest American city in the world. Bigger even than Darwin. That’s why her Romanian hitman stood out. She recognised the fierce guttural accent when he demanded the waitress bring him a glass of Palinca, cursing the poor girl when she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
Displaced Europeans were not uncommon in Sydney, but they tended to come from the older EU countries, bearing professional qualifications and bags of money. She knew of a small Russian enclave out at Bondi Beach - an unusual mix of businessmen, academic refugees and gangsters - but apart from them and the city’s original, thoroughly assimilated postwar Slavic migrants, refugees from Eastern Europe were thin on the ground. Especially those from collapsing shitholes like Romania. The Australian Government may have thrown open the floodgates to certain types of migrants and refugees after the Disappearance, but to others the way to the great southern sanctuary was irrevocably closed. The best an illegal could hope for if they were caught was a couple of years on a government prison farm before being deported.
Not her problem. As a subject of Her Majesty, Lady Julianne Balwyn was free to come and go as she pleased from the antipodes, and for the moment it pleased her to stay exactly where she was, in a quiet bar where nobody knew her real name. The Idler was a small, cosy, almost domestic space; it looked very much as though somebody had thrown open the downstairs rooms of their home to passing drinkers. Because they had. The proprietors had converted the bottom floor of what had been a private residence into a bar, completing the circle of life for this 160 -year-old building, which had been built as a pub in the former slum district back when some of the older residents could still boast of having arrived in the colony in the holds of convict transports.
Jules liked the Idler because it felt like some of the old drinking holes she remembered from her college days. Right down to the Home County accents. Fitting in here was not a problem for her. The Romanian, on the other hand, stood out like tits on a bull. A cheap leatherette jacket, two sizes too big and way too heavy for the humid, summer evening; a bright Hawaiian shirt, shiny pants and slip-on shoes - the only reason he’d got past the bouncers was because the Idler didn’t have any. It was a cool place that relied on its patrons’ good manners.
The Romanian caught her eye when she was halfway through her second gin and tonic, and deep in conversation with a young American couple who’d got out of Acapulco a day before she had. She’d actually been enjoying herself here. Relaxing for the first time in weeks. Spending some of her stash. The Americans, Donna and Jeff, were on their second bottle of chardonnay and Jules had fallen so easily into chatting with them that she’d finished her first drink before she picked up on the warm, but unmistakably sexual vibe coming off the woman. Jules smiled, a little flattered that they were trying to pick her up and … Well, what the hell. It’d been a long time. The hot night, some very chilled tunes, the mellow warmth of candlelight flickering on the bare sandstone walls of the bar … it all put her in a generous, open frame of mind.
That is, until she caught a glimpse of the man in the heavy imitation-leather jacket regarding her with the cold, flat stare of a snake sizing up a newly hatched chick. His eyes flicked away as soon as she’d made him. He shifted in his seat, pretending not to have noticed her. The nasty, ill-fitting jacket grabbed under his armpit, outlining something there. A gun, she was certain.
A chain-mail fist clenched just under her heart and all of the warm, mellow feeling she had been enjoying sluiced out of her in an icy rush.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Donna, reaching over and lightly running her fingertips down Jules’s forearm. A few minutes earlier it might have elicited a tingle of sexual response. Now, she felt nothing.
‘Sorry. I have to go.’
‘Hey,’ said Donna’s boyfriend, ‘is everything okay? Did we …?’
The Englishwoman regarded him kindly, but with detachment. She could’ve told them that there was a man in the bar who may have been paid to kill her. But Jeff would likely get himself hurt, or worse, by fronting the guy. And if she left with them now, they’d either get in the way of what she had to do or get themselves killed. There was nothing for it. She had to shut them down.
‘Sorry,’ she repeated. ‘Gotta go.’
Julianne pushed away the unfinished drink, picked up her bag and left without another word. Estimating there might only be a few moments before the Romanian followed her (and assuming she wasn’t being a paranoid head case, of course), she hurried away from the small tavern.
The streets were still busy. The Rocks, which had once been one of the most densely populated slums in Sydney, was crowded again, with long terraces of old stone houses playing host to the latest wave of migrants adding to the city’s human alloy. It was common to find a dozen or more of them bedding down under one roof, hot bunking in many cases - one mattress shared between somebody working night shift and another who worked days.
