Angels of Vengeance

the cold darkness as evening closed in. Dropping the room lights so that not even a fragment of her silhouette would show, she indulged herself in a moment of sightseeing, peeking out through a gap in the drapes.

For the most part, it was pitch-black out there. Her window looked towards the south-east, over the Missouri River. She thought she could make out the lights of the recently restored Hawthorne power plant in the distance. Somewhere near that location was a truck stop and travel plaza where convoys and buses readied for their journey across a landscape deserted by all but the most desperate or antisocial types. Caitlin closed the curtains before the void out there sucked all the joy from her soul.

She had never been to Kansas City before, but she’d learned from her briefings as Colonel Murdoch that it hadn’t changed much since being reclaimed as the US Government’s principal settlement centre in the Midwest. Her first few hours in the city, however, had confirmed what she’d been told about the great demographic changes resettlement had wrought here. The city’s population was still only half of its pre-Wave size, and just over fifty per cent of the current residents were migrants, many of them from India, working on the railroads, and many from China labouring on the government’s huge collective farms. It wasn’t yet public knowledge, but KC was also slated to take the lion’s share of the displaced aliens currently being detained on the East Coast.

She scoffed at that. Such a move would surely drive more people to Blackstone’s standard. On the rare instances when she allowed herself to ponder such things, she wondered what was in the water in Seattle. There had to be something, or perhaps it was the coffee. Again, not her problem.

The displaced aliens were the women and children of the jihadis she’d fought in New York. Chief of Staff Culver had thought she should understand what Seattle had planned for them before she committed to the job in Texas. Not that she gave a shit if Kipper wanted to reward his enemies by handing over the very thing they’d tried to take by force. She was just gonna kill whoever needed killing, and then she was outta there.

Peeping through the curtains again, Caitlin could see that large areas of the city remained in darkness, yet to be reclaimed. Some of them, she knew, had not even been cleared of the remains of the dead. When she first arrived in this hotel room, she spent an unpleasant minute or two looking for the telltale stains of the Disappeared. Only once she’d noticed the fresh paint throughout and new carpet did she relax just a bit. The lingering presence of the Disappeared was something she found … unacceptable, even uncomfortable, and it surprised her.

Most of her adult life had been spent in an intimate correspondence with death. She had thought herself inured to it. And yet she could not deny a sort of spiritual nausea at the idea of being surrounded by hundreds of millions of vanished souls. She had first experienced it in New York, and the longer she remained on this continent the stronger the feeling grew. As soon as she could walk away from death, she would.

Not being able to account for the fate of Bilal Baumer was frustrating, even worrying to the part of her that had been trained at a cellular level to confirm a kill. But Caitlin was also aware that sometimes you just didn’t know. In her world, the only real certainty was your own eventual negation. Culver was almost certainly right. The air force had probably killed him when they demolished the Rockefeller Center. Still …

Her laptop chimed. She abandoned thoughts of the haunted city and crossed the room in five long strides to sit at the large, curvilinear executive workstation. Glorified civil servant she may have been, but at least she wasn’t travelling cattle class. Seattle had leased the hotel to what remained of the Starwood chain, but had reserved suites on the top floor for its own use. Hers was more like an apartment than a hotel room and Caitlin wished that Bret could’ve been here to enjoy a bit of luxury with her. Then again, she could think of about a thousand places she would rather have taken him than Kansas-fucking-City. Perhaps that was what they would do when this was all over: just disappear for six months with Monique. Cash out some of her black funds and visit a few places where they could kick back and not worry about having to outrun a bullet.

After checking the cable connection on the laptop, she plugged the one-time digital key into a USB port and entered her code. A small window appeared on screen, a progress bar. It moved painfully slowly as her machine reached out through a dedicated fibre-optic link to the National Intelligence Agency server at Cerner, from where her comms protocols were forwarded as flash traffic across the Vancouver Alliance military satellite network on a stand-alone channel dedicated to Echelon data.

Thousands of miles away, on a scarred kitchen table that had entered its second century the year Queen Victoria ascended the throne, another laptop encased in its own formidable digital armour shook hands with hers. A second later her husband winked into existence on the screen in front of her. He was holding the baby, asleep, against his shoulder. Caitlin’s heart lurched when she saw how much Monique had grown. She was a baby no longer.

‘Oh, honey, oh my God! Look how big she is! Is she walking yet?’

Her question was accented with a faintly distressed note. The child was living another life, growing up in a world far removed from the one in which she moved. Caitlin was not an automaton, but, while familiar with fear, she had learned to control it. Fear was a variable, something to be used. But now she felt fear as a runaway horse. Her daughter was growing up without her, not knowing her. Caitlin’s stomach clenched. What the hell was she even doing here, playing charades and dress-ups for Jed Culver? She should’ve been at home.

‘Not walking, no,’ smiled Bret, who hadn’t picked up on her sudden spiral into maternal shame and panic. ‘But it won’t be long before she’s crawling, I reckon. I’ve already moved everything up off the bottom shelves.’

And what had Caitlin done while Dad had been readying the family home for the day their daughter was able to crawl off her play mat for the first time? Killed half-a-dozen men down in South America, that’s what. Some of them undoubtedly fathers like Bret.

And now she had assumed yet another identity, preparing to infiltrate a potentially hostile regime on the soil, the scorched earth, of her homeland. Or was it her former homeland? She couldn’t be sure of anything now, other than the pain she felt just under her ribs when looking at her husband and child.

‘And how are you, honey?’ asked Bret. He knew better than to ask her any specifics about where she might be, what she was doing, or even when she might be home. The reassuring banalities of everyday life, the cushion of normality on which the relationships of real people rested. But not Caitlin Monroe’s. He had no idea he was talking to Colonel Katherine Murdoch, for instance. He had no need to know.

‘I’m a little tired,’ she said. ‘Been moving around a bit with work.’

Or: I blew a man’s brains out the other day, darling. He was indirectly responsible for the attack on you and Monique. So I hunted him down and put a bullet between his eyes after he’d told me what I needed to hear. Oh, and the sort of ammunition I used created a vacuum wave inside his collapsing skull. Turned his brain to hot mush and sucked it out behind the bullet as it left the back of his skull. Hey, did I mention the ejecta - that’s what we call the shit that comes out of an exit wound at high speed - did I mention that it was black with crawling ants before it had stopped steaming? No? Oh, that’s right - I don’t talk about my work.

She tried to make out some details of the kitchen behind Bret. She wondered what he’d had for dinner, whether he fed Monique from a bottle or spooned out baby food for her. She obviously wasn’t sleeping through yet. It was even later in Scotland - about two in the morning, she thought shamefully - and the little webcam he was using wasn’t good enough to display much in the gloom behind him. She was just able to pick out some lonely- looking Christmas decorations, which made her feel even worse, as he spoke to her from shrouded darkness.

‘I’m not doing anything exciting at the moment,’ she reassured him. ‘Just lots of reading and talking to people.’

I’ve just been reviewing a case about a Mexican man named Miguel Pieraro. He and his teenage daughter escaped from Texas last spring after witnessing the massacre of their loved ones. It’s hell down there, my love. A madman has taken dominion. These poor people saw their whole family cut down. They believe the madman was ultimately responsible. And so do I.

‘Well, we saw the Loch Ness monster the other day, didn’t we!’ said Bret, patting their daughter gently on her back. ‘Daddy and some of the men from Mommy’s work went for a long drive. We visited the special farms where they make the firewater around these parts. And we went to the lake where they have the monster. But all we got was this …’

He held up a cuddly stuffed toy, which he had obviously meant for Monique to show her, before she’d fallen asleep. Caitlin had to force herself not to upbraid him for giving away operational security. He shouldn’t have been discussing his movements or mentioning a security detail, even on a scrambled link.

Fuck, Caitlin thought, rebuking herself instead. What the fuck am I thinking? They just had a nice day out, for a change. A tour of some fucking distilleries. It’s not like they’re trying to avoid a Stasi wetwork squad, for fuck’s sake.