down. To all of the possibilities, she assigned a rough probability.
And then she moved - sweeping into the larger open space, terribly exposed to an attack that might or might not come.
Using the heavy wooden desks as cover, Caitlin advanced across the killing ground with her senses opened to the flood of stimuli pouring in. A fan turning slowly from a ceiling mount, the protests of the prisoners, the buzzing of flies around a plate of beans and sausages abandoned on a desk … But no sign of Facility 183’s deputy commander.
The Echelon agent took a few moments to make sure she hadn’t missed him. But the very fact that she was still breathing, that nobody had fired on her, told Caitlin he wasn’t in this part of the building.
The door to the prison cells stood firmly closed and mute in front of her. In her peripheral vision she could see the legs of a man she had shot down in the road, out front. The stench of his death, an animal stink of voided bowels, was much stronger over here by the main entrance.
Caitlin did not have time to weigh up all of the imponderables; there were too many of them. She detached a couple of flash-bangs from her webbing and advanced on the door leading to the cells. There was no way of telling what lay immediately on the other side. A constricted passageway or more open space? Perhaps even another office. The
She noted from the lack of hinges that the door opened inwards, making her next move just slightly easier. Filling her lungs with air, she pulled the pins on the two stun grenades, then timed a powerful side kick to crash through the obstacle a second before the grenades were primed to detonate.
As the door smashed inwards, she lobbed them down a short dark stairway, diving to her right, still out in the reception area, while a short burst of gunfire exploded up out of the shadows. Part-way through her flight, Caitlin grunted with shock and pain as a bullet struck her body armour a glancing blow, turning her as though she’d been roundhouse-kicked. She went with the movement - spinning out of the doorway before the grenades went off, the detonations following one after the other so quickly, they rolled into a single clap of thunder and a flash of strobed lightning.
There was no time to pay heed to her injuries, or the fact that she was winded so badly, she couldn’t breathe. Caitlin threw herself back into the dimly lit stairwell area and down the short set of steps, her senses questing for the last man she had to kill. She knew he had to be within reach as soon as her boots hit level ground.
There was no light down here, and thick acrid smoke from the flash-bangs burned her eyes. She could not risk firing her weapon yet, for fear of hitting Luperico, but she had to clear a path ahead. All of her nerve endings sang with the knowledge that even though she couldn’t see him, the deputy was staggering around, disoriented by the stun grenades, not more than a few feet away.
Caitlin twisted her torso and swept her left leg up in a powerful crescent kick that swished through the air directly in front of her, but connected with nothing. She heard the man cough and gag - so close now - and poured more energy into the momentum she had generated with the first kick, turning and spinning as she lashed out with the other foot. This time, connection was made: soft tissue, at about head height.
A male voice screamed and a single shot crashed out in the semi-darkness, ricocheting dangerously around in this closed stone room. Then Caitlin heard the unmistakable sound of a human body dropping to a hard surface. A sick, crunching thud.
She sunk to the floor, too. Although by her count she had now taken care of all the militia men, there was no guarantee more guards weren’t stationed down here. The intelligence data sets were never perfect and there was always a chance she missed someone in her surveillance. She heard movement and a slight groan to her left, where she had dropped the deputy.
Caitlin rolled, drawing her Gerber combat knife as she went, mounting the man’s chest and slitting his throat in one efficient movement. The groan became a wet gurgling sound that persisted for a few seconds as he struggled desperately for air. When all of the life had run out of his body, she relaxed fractionally.
‘Are there any more guards down here?’ she called out in Spanish.
The confusion of voices that came back at her was practically impossible to decipher. They begged for release, for mercy, for the indulgence of their gods.
Rolling off the dead man, she asked again, more loudly this time: ‘Are there any more militia down here?’
‘
‘No, no more guards,’ replied one cracked and faltering voice. ‘He was the only one. He hid down here when the shooting started.’
Caitlin’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the low-light environment, but she took a moment to fit her NVGs and power them up. The scene resolved itself into opalescent green, fogged by the residual smoke from the stun grenades. The body of the deputy commander, lying next to an old World War I vintage rifle, was bleeding out on the flagstone floor. A line of four cells ran away from her down one side of a long rectangular room; a bare wall faced them. Material she took to be heavy black plastic had been taped up over the high window openings she’d noted during her surveillance that morning. All the better to disorient the prisoners, of course; to create the impression that time had no meaning down here. She would’ve bet good money that the officer she had just killed was responsible for this innovation. It was almost sophisticated.
The man in the cell directly in front of her was not Ramon Luperico. He looked about twenty years too old, and fifty pounds too heavy. He was a jabbering mess and had wet himself.
The prisoner in the next cell down was older still. A thin, hatchet-faced character, Caitlin could see him straining to make her out in the gloom. He’d pinned himself up against the bars, as if he might push himself through them by sheer force of will. As she moved further down the long room, he listened intently, hoping to fix her position. Once she was within arm’s reach, he lashed out with one hand, hoping to grab her. Almost absent- mindedly, she slashed off two of his fingers with her combat knife before moving past his cage while he shrieked in shock and outrage.
Luperico was in the third cell. He too was standing near the bars, attempting to pick her out in the gloom. But unlike the man she had just cut, her target remained out of reach, about a foot back behind the safety of the dark iron bars.
‘Stand back, Luperico,’ she said in French. ‘I am here to get you out.’
She saw him jump with surprise.
‘You are French, then? But why … why would you come here for me?’
‘To get you out. Now stand back,’ she repeated, again in French rather than her native language. All the better to muddy any trail by convincing Luperico’s cell-mates he’d been released by the agency of some meddling European power.
The former jailer did as he was told, carefully shuffling backward to the rear of his cell. Caitlin had a quick look around on the floor, on the walls, for any keys, but found nothing. She moulded a small lump of plastic explosive to the lock and retreated to the end of the hallway, warning Luperico to shield himself.
The tiny blast still made her ears ring in the constricted space, and caused the prisoners to cry out in distress. Well, most of them anyway. The guy whose fingers she’d just hacked off had other things to worry about.
Her man was disoriented and greatly unsettled, but he responded as best he could when she ordered him - still in French - out of the cell and up the stairs. They had to get away now, as quickly as possible.
‘What about us?’ cried one of the other prisoners.
She did not answer him.
9
DEARBORN HOUSE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
The colour did not entirely leech from Sarah Humboldt’s face when Jed sidled up to her in Kip’s office at the end of the Garage Cabinet, to gently take her by the elbow and ask for a few minutes of her time. But she did lose a few shades of colour. She had blind-sided him on the detainee question, after all, and he’d spent quite some time polishing his reputation as a man one did not fuck with.
