widgets had never much interested this daughter of English nobility, and mobile phones in particular set her teeth on edge. She assumed the government could probably track you via your SIM card or the phone’s chip, or whatever, which meant she rarely carried a mobile. On those rare occasions, she’d use a throw-down, a cheap prepaid or stolen handset, and always kept the thing switched off until the very moment it was needed, after which she’d toss it immediately.
There were three numbers saved in the phone Pappas had given her. One for the burly SAS veteran, one for Shah and the last for their lawyer friend. A little more fiddling around brought up an electronic map of the city, with the location of the Coonawarra Base Hospital highlighted by a ridiculous cartoon paperclip that jumped up and down while pointing at the relevant location.
‘Right, right, I fucking get it, okay?’ she muttered at the annoying screen icon. ‘Jesus, how do you turn the stupid thing off …’
Before she could work it out, the pedicab had pulled up in front of the Banyan View Lodge. Jules thanked the driver, who was slick with sweat, but breathing normally. She paid him with a plastic ten-dollar banknote, and checked to see whether they’d been followed, before hurrying inside.
As she had expected, the room was stifling. She flicked on the primitive air-con, which rumbled into life without much promise of relief. For a few seconds, it felt as though the temperature actually increased, before blessed cool air started to fall from the ceiling vents.
Jules unclipped the holster and began undressing. When she was down to her underwear, she stopped, bleeding off heat as the climate control system laboured heroically to dump a little arctic goodness into her room. She had no idea what time it was in the American Midwest, but found herself pondering on something else about Pappas’s text. He’d located Miguel in Kansas City … Now, that was odd. The way Julianne understood it, Miguel had taken Mariela, Sofia, little Maya, Grandma Ana and all the others over to the US after qualifying for the resettlement scheme, or homestead thingy, or whatever the hell the Yanks called it. So why would he be in Kansas City now and not out on a farm somewhere in Texas?
She remembered KC vaguely, having stopped there with Rhino early in the year to arrange transport to New York City. They never made it into the city itself, staying instead at some mouldy hostel a block away from the airport. A joyous time spent trying to sleep through the sound of planes, trains and Rhino’s titanic snoring before getting the hell out for points east.
Jules set her mind back to the task of working out what time it was over there. Early afternoon in Darwin now, so that would’ve made it … what, sometime late at night, yesterday evening, where he was? The phone had a web browser and she thought about doing a quick MSN search, but impatience forced her to just call the number anyway. Given her limited experience with mobile phones, and especially with the keypad-less variety like this Nokia, it took her a while to work out that she only had to touch the number Nick had entered in its long form.
An annoying ear worm of a jazz tune about Kansas City began to run on a loop in her mind. She frowned it away.
Jules heard a faint buzzing as the connection went through. A phone was ringing somewhere. She worried that she might be waking Miguel or the kids, but smiled at the prospect of Mariela waking up beside her husband and demanding to know the identity of this strange
After standing there near naked under the air-conditioner for almost a minute, she began to suspect that no one was home. Jules was surprised at just how disappointed she felt. She had no good news for Miguel, just a warning. To watch out for Henry Cesky’s goons. But she’d been looking forward to the conversation. Now she was left hanging on the line in this shitty motel room, wondering whether maybe she’d ended up dialling the wrong number or something. When the call cut out, she tried again, without any great hope and, eventually, with the same non-result. She bit down on her frustration. Not even an answering machine.
‘Bugger.’
She accepted defeat, for now. Delving into the largest of the two carrier bags, Julianne pulled out the business suit and started getting dressed once more, hating the feel of the anonymous office clothes. There was nothing to be done about it, though. She wanted so much to see the Rhino, and if she wanted to see Rhino, she had to play along.
43
FORT HOOD, KILLEEN, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION
Fingerprint lock.
McCutcheon’s office was protected by the same array of security measures as those guarding Blackstone’s, but with an additional tweak. Caitlin and Musso stood behind him as he laid his thumb on the glass plate of a Krupp Systems Dynalock TRS-5 fingerprint scanner. Reputed to be the best in the world. Released into the wild by Krupp only three months earlier. Beat that and you would gain access to the office within, where you could then trip the pressure pad just behind the door, the passive IR sensors mounted in the corner of the room, or the proximity alarm sitting atop his desk, next to a laptop that was disconnected from the building’s intranet.
‘If you wouldn’t mind averting your eyes for a second, folks.’
‘Of course, Ty,’ said the always cooperative, always security-conscious Colonel Katherine Murdoch.
‘Oh, so we
Caitlin smiled, conceding his point. ‘Perhaps just friendly colleagues,’ she volleyed back.
She then looked away so he could enter the PIN to deactivate two of the three security systems within the room. The pressure pad and the infra-red sensors. The proximity alarm, which sat on his desk looking like a stainless steel egg, he deactivated with an RFID tag on his key ring. She caught Musso’s concerned expression as they stood there with their backs turned. He was obviously thinking ahead, assuming she would want to gain entry to this office without the permission of its occupant. With McCutcheon standing a couple of feet away, Caitlin could hardly reassure Seattle’s main man in Texas that it wasn’t going to be a problem, so she let it slide.
‘All righty, we’re good to go,’ McCutcheon announced. ‘Secret trapdoor to the piranha pool has been closed. Laser-beam chainsaws deactivated. Hoo and aah!’
She had a momentary vision of Bret saying the same thing the last morning they had spent together.
This office was nearly as large as Blackstone’s, but with none of the triumphalist personal touches. A single framed photograph of an older woman who bore an unmistakable family resemblance to McCutcheon sat on his desk next to a signed baseball. A large Ansell Adams print of winter in Yellowstone Park hung from one wall in front of a nest of lounge chairs. Otherwise nothing. Not even a view. Ty McCutcheon’s office had no windows. It was cut off from the outside world. Caitlin felt … not so much the thrill of vindication. Rather, the cold comfort of a wager with herself that had just paid off. There may well have been other treasure troves in which she could dig for the secrets of Jackson Blackstone, but she’d almost certainly find buried treasure right here.
She took in every detail of the space as she followed the two men over to the lounge area, which reminded her of a display setting in a furniture store. As if it was meant to be admired rather than used. Unlike his boss’s desk, which looked like it might’ve come off one of Lord Nelson’s warships, McCutcheon worked on a glass-top table, to which there was nothing beyond the thick sandwich of opaque green glass and two Z-form metal trusses serving as legs. No networking cables ran to the laptop, not even a power cord. The computer was a stand-alone system, save for the ugly steel chain that secured it to one of the table legs.
There were no filing cabinets in the room. No bureau within which documents might be stored. The files they were about to read must have come from a repository elsewhere in the building, probably from TDF’s intelligence division. That was fine. What she wanted was access to the drive on that laptop.
What she got, for the moment, was an offer of more coffee and cake. McCutcheon confessed to a weakness for cake in the morning, a legacy, he said, of a German grandmother. Caitlin turned down both offers, but Musso surprised her by volunteering for a second breakfast.
‘Well, I like cake,’ he said, in response to her quizzical look.
‘I wouldn’t trust a man who didn’t, Tusk,’ said McCutcheon, who was making himself very comfortable again with everyone’s first names. ‘So, I’ll let you read up on the doings and the goings-on over in Florida. And then we can talk through any questions you might have. I imagine you’ll also want to expedite the rendition of the prisoners to Seattle, so that NIA and Defense Intelligence can have a piece of them.’
