Angels of Vengeance

‘I imagine you’re correct,’ Musso replied.

For a second she thought McCutcheon might be about to leave them alone in his office while he tended to cake and coffee orders. Not that she would’ve been so foolish as to attempt to crack open his lappy and take a peak while he was doing that. McCutcheon didn’t make such a rookie error, or attempt such an obvious entrapment. Instead he simply used the phone to order up the refreshments.

‘Bathroom’s through there if and when you need it,’ he told them both, jerking his thumb over towards the far side of the room, where a door opened up onto a small kitchenette, and beyond that into a washroom.

‘I think I might, if you don’t mind,’ said Musso heading in that direction. ‘Too much damn coffee.’

Blackstone’s aide waited until the general had left before speaking again.

‘I’m sorry things haven’t worked out so well between us and Seattle, Kate,’ he said, while working through the same elaborate procedure as before for unlocking the briefcase. ‘The old man, you know, he was fairly cut up about what happened back there after the Wave. Particularly Kipper’s role. He thought they’d worked together pretty well to pull that city through, so it was a bit of a shock to turn around and find he’d been stabbed in the back like that. You can understand the man would have difficulties working with the President again.’

Caitlin’s care factor was zero. Her one brief encounter with James Kipper, a difficult satellite call from the back of a C-130 just before she parachuted into New York, hadn’t made her a fan. But then Kipper had not been found to have an undeclared arrangement with Ahmet Ozal, one of Baumer’s closest allies. The man who had freed Baumer from prison in Guadeloupe, before joining him in New York as one of his senior lieutenants.

‘Ty,’ she replied, deliberately using his first name, ‘as I said before, the politics are of no interest to me. Even if I hadn’t spent the last couple of years exiled in England, they still wouldn’t interest me. I can appreciate their importance to you, but this is what’s important to me. I can promise you I will take a fair appraisal of what I find in here back to Jed Culver. You convince him, you’ve convinced the President.’ She held up the file he had just handed her.

‘Fair enough,’ said McCutcheon. ‘I’m just hoping this visit might be a chance for us to start over again. The old man too. Sincerely. I don’t mind telling you, he’s freaked by Morales. He really sees him as a little Hitler. Like Saddam could’ve been if the Israelis hadn’t taken care of business. The way Roberto’s pulled things together down there after the total collapse … you have to admit, he seems to know what he’s doing.’

Caitlin couldn’t help thinking about the half-assed theatre of the absurd she’d encountered in Uruguay. As vicious a little prick as Morales undoubtedly was, he had a long way to go before graduating from puffed-up gang lord to genuine threat. It didn’t mean everybody shared her perception, however. And if Blackstone was shifting his animus away from Kipper and onto Roberto, who was she to discourage him?

‘We’re all trying to do our best for the country, Ty,’ she said. ‘It would be unusual, and probably unhealthy, if we didn’t differ about what we thought was best. But you’re right about this development in Florida. The President does not care for foreign powers meddling within our borders. He didn’t care for it in New York. He didn’t care for it in Alaska. I can assure you he won’t care for it in Florida. This will be answered.’

Musso returned at that moment, just as the coffee and cake arrived.

‘Outstanding,’ declared McCutcheon.

*

The file review took an hour and a half. Caitlin found it professionally interesting, and asked all of the questions expected from her, but she allowed Tusk Musso to make most of the running. She could see that he’d been blind-sided by the intelligence out of Florida, and was having to recalibrate his threat detectors as regards the Federation, but the former Marine lawyer remained sceptical, and he’d not let go of his displeasure with Texas for pushing into areas of the country that were none of its concern. He didn’t climb aboard Blackstone’s bandwagon, but he proved himself willing to change his mind about whether a problem existed in the first place.

Caitlin excused herself after an hour to use the bathroom. While in there, she checked her equipment. Two of the three miniature microphones embedded in her uniform had failed, but the third had picked up the subtly changing tones of the PIN code McCutcheon had entered into the antique keypad controlling the infra-red and pressure pad systems in his room. The scanner embedded deep within the guts of her Siemens phone had intercepted and stored his RFID tag as soon as he’d sent it to the proximity sensor designed to create an exclusion zone around his laptop.

An anxious moment passed while the Echelon agent checked that she had captured the data, but this was not something she could leave until they’d returned to the safety of Temple. Had all three of her microphone pick- ups failed, she would’ve needed to manufacture another reason to return to McCutcheon’s office with him later in the day to have another attempt at collecting his PIN.

No problemo, she told herself, letting go of a breath she hadn’t even realised she was holding.

Back in the office, the two former military officers had sidetracked into a discussion of power projection capabilities. Musso remained underwhelmed. McCutcheon tried to sell him a story about Morales seeking out a number of surviving former Argentine military types with experience of the failed Falklands invasion.

‘Why would he even be doing that, Tusk? Who cares what those old losers think? Unless he’s trying to avoid making the same mistakes they did, right?’

‘I can see that he has sought them out,’ the other man conceded, waving a piece of paper that must have confirmed the fact. ‘But you have to remember that he’s trying to build, or rebuild, a military force, a Frankenstein’s force in many ways. Stitched together from the body parts of half-a-dozen militaries that were dismembered during the collapse. Those Argentine officers are the only men anywhere on the continent with actual command-level combat experience of state-on-state conflict. Why wouldn’t he seek them out?’

‘So what, we just ignore it?’

‘No, I’m not saying that, but it doesn’t mean we rush to conclusions either.’

McCutcheon didn’t look like he was getting angry, but he was deeply invested in his theory, and he wasn’t about to abandon it to undergraduate scepticism. For Caitlin, and Colonel Murdoch for that matter, it was irrelevant.

‘Gentlemen,’ she said riding in over the top of them, ‘you are both confusing data with meaning. It is an occupational hazard of intelligence analysis.’

She took the piece of paper from Musso, and scanned it quickly.

‘What we have here, is data. President Morales summoned a cadre of retired officers from the former Argentine military to his palace in Santiago. Five of the six officers stayed on in the capital. They have since been observed working at the Federation’s directorate of naval intelligence.’

She put the paper down, and looked from one man to the other.

‘That is information, gentlemen. Verified. And nice work, by the way,’ she added, nodding to McCutcheon. ‘The NIA will be thrilled to discover that Texas has its own foreign intelligence service, and that they’ve been scooped.’

‘Whatever. We don’t like to brag, Colonel.’ The aide gave a shrug.

‘Uh-huh. Moving right along … But the meaning of this information is not yet established. I could suggest any number of interpretations of the data. You have suggested one. General Musso has suggested another. I’m going to recommend that this matter be put into the channel. You said before that you hoped our current visit might provide an opportunity for a new start between the two administrations. If you mean that, a team of federal marshals could be here tomorrow morning to take custody of the prisoners, and you could nominate some of your people who had carriage of Florida and your surveillance operation in Santiago to return to Seattle, and maybe on to Vancouver, to debrief Defense, NIA and Echelon.’

Both of them looked surprised, but it was McCutcheon who spoke first.

‘I don’t know that the Governor would be very happy about involving a lot of foreigners in this, Kate.’

‘It’s not my call to make,’ said Caitlin. ‘We have responsibility for this region under the Vancouver agreement, and that will necessarily involve Echelon. Sooner rather than later.’

‘But still …’

‘Still nothing,’ she countered. ‘If you want to make Morales a priority, and particularly if you want to get to the bottom of what he’s doing raking over the coals of the Falklands with the Argentinians, then Echelon will have a stake. It may be nothing to do with us, Ty. Did it ever occur to you, to either of you, that the meaning of this information is what it is? That Morales is looking to grab up the Falklands and their offshore deposits? If that were so, there would be no avoiding Echelon’s involvement. Because the Brits would need to know.’