‘Have you had any word from the farm?’ she asked. Her brain wanted to seize up, having to talk in these dull and meaningless generalities, at the same time as she longed to be able to live a life with Bret where she could be bored by the little things.
‘Spoke to someone from the Ministry of Resources,’ he replied. ‘Another two families moved on last week. Took places on the
A peace-keeper also, she tried to reassure herself. But she was just so damned tired of keeping the peace.
‘That’s good news,’ she said. ‘I’m really looking forward to coming home, Bret. I
‘We miss you too, honey. And we both love you and want you with us as soon as you’re finished over there.’
He carefully moved one hand from where he was supporting the baby, to blow a kiss, then took Monique’s hand gently between two fingers and made her wave in her sleep.
‘I love you too,’ said Caitlin as she felt the tears coming.
She felt herself adrift. She and Bret spun out the final few seconds of their time together repeating the same phrases. Miss you. Love you. Goodbye. Goodbye. And then he was gone. The brief window she had secured on Echelon’s dedicated channel closed.
Caitlin shut down the laptop and sat for a minute, staring at the drifts of paper over on her king-size bed. She still had so much work to review. More briefings on the TDF for her cover story. Backgrounders from Treasury explaining the fraught relations between Seattle and Fort Hood in terms of the fascinating history of post- Disappearance federal-state fiscal arrangements. There were ‘Top-Secret Absolute’ (read/erase) one-time files on the NIA server she had to take in before the morning. And case notes from Resettlement on fifty-four incidents in the Federal Mandate, ranging from forced repatriation of homesteader families to wholesale murder.
Too much. It was all too much. She needed to shake off her feelings of being buffeted by events, of reacting to the agendas of others. She had to refocus. Establish autonomy.
She changed into her gym gear and left the suite after keying the security system. The top floor of the hotel was secured, but Caitlin’s room was flagged for special containment. Before she had even made the elevators at the end of the corridor, a security man appeared, nodded to her, and moved to take up station.
‘Colonel Murdoch,’ he said.
She half acknowledged him as she swept past. He fell in behind her as she made her way to the elevators. There was a large fitness facility in one of the former convention rooms, just off from the pool and hot-tub area. It was tempting to default to the hot tub and simply soak her worries away. But Caitlin knew from experience that she would find no peace of mind or body without earning it. And besides, if she hit the tub alone she’d have to fend off any number of interested parties. No, the gym was the only answer.
She didn’t like to exercise so soon after eating, but the chicken salad had been small and light. Lean protein and leafy carbs made a good fuel. And if she started with some weight training after a moderate warm-up, she could burn it off before throwing herself into any high-intensity cardio. She knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the documents upstairs until she’d cleared herself of the emotional blockage that had built up during her conversation with Bret.
Her nose wrinkled when she hit the lobby. It always smelled of old socks and stale cigarettes, even though it was a no-smoking facility. And presumably the other guests used the laundry facilities. In the distance, she could make out the crunching noise of some raunchy dance tune, the clinking of glasses and silverware, the forced merriment of so many people trying to relieve themselves of the burden of living in a necropolis. She had no desire to explore whatever level of desperation waited in that direction.
Moving through the vaulted lobby, past the gift shop to her left and the pool to her right, she took a quick turn down the corridor leading to the hotel’s gym. It wasn’t crowded at this time of the night, but nor did she have it to herself. Two women were chatting while using the elliptical trainers, barely raising a sweat. In Caitlin’s opinion, if you had the breath to flap your gums you weren’t training hard enough. A couple of guys were pounding through the miles on the treadmills. She’d have picked them for military because of their haircuts and physique even if they hadn’t been wearing PT shorts with the emblem of the USAF printed on them. She was glad her own gym clothing was civilian. She didn’t fancy having to play the Murdoch role with those two. The other users down here she lumped into two broad groups: government and business travellers. All of them huffing and puffing in a desultory fashion, grinding through the same exercises they’d probably been doing for the past ten years. No doubt they’d train at half intensity for about a third of the time they actually needed to before rewarding themselves with a pig- out at the hotel buffet.
Still frowning and feeling bleak, Caitlin started her routine under the black cloud that had settled in over her. She began with a quarter-hour of dynamic stretching before taking the last of the cross trainers and blocking out the inane chatter of the women beside her. It would’ve been easier if she’d had a music player and some headphones, but she didn’t like the way it was possible to zone out when wearing those things. Zoning out was the enemy of situational awareness.
After half an hour she was sufficiently limber to attack the weight stations, which she did with a vengeance for the next hour and a half, mixing up weight training with bursts of high-intensity cardio intervals. One of the air force types did his best to attract her attention, but she froze him out. She wished she could’ve worn her wedding ring to warn these creeps off, but for a field agent, that telltale golden band screamed:
Isolation was her armour and Caitlin’s was restored by the time she’d finished and was heading back up in the lift, just after ten. Again, it would’ve been nice to have indulged in something as unremarkable as a hot tub, but she had no desire to have to shut down anybody foolish enough to talk to her. And she still had hours of work to get through before she could even think about sleep.
The same security man was standing outside her room, with his feet planted on the carpet like a statue personifying iron steadfastness. She’d have preferred it if he’d been moving around a bit rather than perfecting his North Korean border-guard stoicism. Less chance of boredom and vaguing out. But she thanked him anyway, and said goodnight once he’d supervised her entering the access code and voiceprint.
After a session in the room’s glass and marble shower unit, she was soon propped up in bed, in her dressing gown, ready to start work again. The first file she picked up was from the Inspector General of the Department of Reconstruction and Resettlement, bearing a title in bold red print -
She sighed. These poor bastards again.
This was exactly the sort of thing Caitlin had not wanted to deal with in her agitated state earlier in the evening. Jed Culver had red-flagged four files like this, where homesteaders had not simply been forced off their farms, but they’d been murdered also. Like the other three she had lined up to read, the Pieraro case was interesting because witnesses had survived. In all four instances, they spoke of attacks by ‘road agents’, who reminded Caitlin of the irregular forces used by third-rate villains like Slobodan Milosevic when they wanted to bring terror to bear, but with a convenient degree of separation from themselves. The road agents, unlike the Serbian militia she had encountered a couple of times, did not present as an irregular arm of state policy. Blackstone condemned them and occasionally even caught a few and executed them. But, she noted, those executions were always carried out summarily, in the field, far from independent verification. No road agent had ever faced trial in Texas, which amounted to a significant absence from the public record of Fort Hood’s oft-repeated insistence that it took the matter of banditry within the Federal Mandate seriously.
Caitlin sipped at her cool water. The Pieraro file was thick. Investigators had pored over everything except
