Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (24 page)

The driver acknowledged the direction with a very military ‘Yes sir’ and fitted a hands-free earpiece to his mobile phone.

‘Birendra is still with you?’ asked Jules. ‘The same Birendra?’

He nodded. ‘Yes. He is my second here. A good man. Now, do you have any idea who Cesky is using? Does he have his own men or just contractors?’

‘Cut-outs, I’m sure,’ she replied as they swept onto the ring road that encircled New Town. The crowd on the edge of the red-light district was heaving now, spilling out on the road. ‘The guys who tried to take us in New York were hired out of Mexico. Or, you know, what was left of Mexico. That freakish Commando Barbie chick who saved our arses said they were hitters from one of the old cartels. In Galveston it was a couple of cashiered army guys, and the chap who tried to shiv me in Sydney last week was a Romanian. A nobody, really. Just some hard man providing muscle for the Russian maf down there.’

‘Not so hard now, however?’

‘No. Not so much. Dumb, and dead mostly. What about the guys who tried to hit you, Mr Shah? Any luck tracing them?’

He frowned. ‘I am afraid the men who planted the bomb at my home did not survive their incompetence. One died on the spot, the other in hospital. Not by my hand, I assure you. I wished very much to talk with them, but they were under guard. I assumed a business rival hired them, perhaps even a PMC – Sandline or one of Blackwater’s franchise operators. They have been pressuring smaller security firms like myself to fold our business into theirs. There has been violence, but nothing on this scale. I do not think the police would stand for it, even as powerful as the private contractors are. Until you contacted me, Miss Julianne, I would never have considered this Cesky character. To be truthful. I had forgotten him. After all, he did not make the voyage with us from Acapulco.’

‘And that’s his issue,’ said Jules. ‘Hard to believe a bloke who’s done so well out of the last few years would faff around like this just to settle an old score. But that’s his nature as I understand it and . . .’ She paused, wondering how best to put this.

‘Yes?’

The Land Rover grunted as Ganesh took them onto the Stuart Highway, heading north, and picked up speed as they passed the headquarters of the Free Port Development Authority, the real power in the city. A huge, soaring structure of blue and gold glass that was somehow narrower at the base than up on its top floors, it reminded Jules of a rolled-up newspaper.

‘He lost a daughter,’ Jules began. ‘She didn’t make it to Seattle.’

‘I see,’ said Shah, his face unreadable. ‘Did she die in Acapulco, in the collapse?’

‘No. They were on a refugee boat with about a hundred or so other Americans. It wasn’t much of a boat. Not like the
Aussie Rules
, I’m afraid. It foundered off the coast south of Washington state. A lot of people drowned, apparently. Cesky was lucky to get most of his family ashore, but his smallest girl didn’t make it.’

‘I see,’ Shah said again.

‘Oh God, Shah,’ she blurted suddenly. ‘You remember what it was like. We
couldn’t
have taken Cesky. He would have led a mutiny within a few days. That’s what –’

The former NCO held up one, huge brown hand.

‘You are not to blame for the death of the child, Miss Julianne. I remember discussing this Cesky with Mr Pieraro after we had escaped Acapulco. He told me he faced down Cesky because he knew the man would have brought us all to grief.’

‘Yeah – Miguel,’ sighed Jules. ‘He was a good bloke . . . Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’ve been so fucking selfish. Cesky will have Miguel at the top of his list. Unless he’s saving him until last. Shah, I have to warn him.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘I have absolutely no idea. I know he and his family were here for a while, in Australia. They were working on one of the government farms down south. I heard he’d applied to go back to the US, as a settler. Well, not
back
, you know, but . . .’

Shah grunted and lifted his shoulders as a signal that she should move on.

‘They’ve been in the US for a few years now. Homesteaders. Running cattle, of course. I wouldn’t know how to begin looking for him. It’s not like the old days. You can’t just open a phone book. It’s more like the really old days of the bloody Wild West. He’s probably on some ranch in the middle of an awful fucking cowboy movie somewhere. Contactable only by smoke signal and pony express.’

As she began to babble, Shah patted the air in front of him, making a shushing gesture. A couple of police cars screamed past, their blue lights and sirens going.

‘I have contacts in both Seattle and Fort Hood,’ he said. ‘They are both customers, although I must admit, Governor Blackstone is the more reliable. He pays in cash, whereas in Seattle they often try to haggle concessions on salvage as payment. It is most difficult. But I do have contacts. If Mr Pieraro is registered as a settler, I am sure I can find him and you can get a message to him.’

‘Thank you, Shah,’ she said, feeling some measure of relief for the first time that day.

The traffic thickened up but flowed more swiftly as they headed out towards the airport, leaving behind the stop-start driving of the city proper. For a while there was very little sign of the great changes that had remade the face of Darwin in the few years it had been operating as a tax-free entrepot and more recently as a home port for the Combined Fleet. The suburbs were older, more settled, with less evidence of rapid redevelopment. Out near Darwin International Airport, a long stretch of the highway was bounded on the southern side by light manufacturing and wholesaling businesses. A huge pornography supermarket painted bright yellow and pink nestled in next to rival pool-pump vendors and a piping supplier. Out of her window, on the northern side, Jules could see an enormously fat military plane parked on the tarmac at the airport. Light armoured cars bounced down a rear ramp while, in the background, giant bulldozers scraped away at the red earth to build the new, third runway.

‘It’s a pity about those morons blowing themselves up at your place, Shah,’ she said. ‘Not that I’d have wanted them to succeed, of course, but it would’ve been useful to have had a chat. Three times these buggers have had a go at me and I’ve never yet been able to confirm they were Cesky’s hires. Except for one idiot in New York who gave it away before Barbie slotted him.’

‘How so?’ asked Shah as they pulled up at an intersection. Two more Land Rovers pulled in and flanked them. Shah nodded to the drivers, his drivers, and Jules tried to spot Birendra, but he didn’t appear to be in the small convoy.

‘How’d she slot him? . . . No, sorry. Silly question. You mean how did he give it away? The cartel guys opened up on us as we were heading to a prearranged address, where our entirely fictional client had promised there was fortune and glory awaiting us if we could retrieve some documents from a safe in his apartment. Well, not
his
apartment. He was a lawyer supposedly representing a man called Rubin. Said Rubin had papers giving him drilling rights over some part of the Sonoma field, off the US West Coast.’

‘Did you investigate the claim?’

Jules smiled bitterly. ‘Our investigation consisted of sneaking into New York and getting our arses shot off. Look, I’ll admit, my due diligence wasn’t the best. But it was a plausible story. Establishing exactly who owns what in America right now is a nightmare. Anyway, long story short, we were duped into a free-fire zone by this Rubin character, or his pretend lawyer at least, and there was a team waiting for us near the apartment we were supposed to clean out. Neat, really. I mean, who’s going to notice two more dead bodies in New York? They could’ve dropped anvils tied to elephants on us from the top of the bloody Chrysler Building and nobody would’ve batted an eye. But anyway. They thought they had us and one of these losers called out, “Mr Cesky sends his regards!” Would have been all over red rover if Commando Barbie hadn’t stuck her psychotic, perky little nose in at that point.’

The car grunted forward again and they turned off the main strip into a warren of dusty streets, crowded with light trucks and four-wheel drives. It was a busy part of town, if not the most salubrious locale.

‘You mention this commando named Barbie, again,’ said Shah, looking intrigued. ‘Surely Barbie had a name tag if she was a soldier? A unit patch? Did Mr Rhino not take note of his rescuer?’

Jules smiled, but she was tired and distressed and the gesture faded before reaching her eyes. ‘Again, sorry, Shah. We’ve been picking it over for months now. “Commando Barbie” is just a nickname I gave her. I have no idea who she was, but I’d bet the family silver – if my family still had any – that she was no garden-variety squaddie. She was too good for one thing, and she was operating alone, deep in the badlands. She went through our would-be executioners like a dose of salts, and for a while I thought she might very well neck us too, just for the sake of convenience. No name tags. No unit patches. Just urban-combat battle dress and enough artillery to kit out the Brigade of Gurkhas, with a few whizz-bangs left over for shits and giggles. She never gave us a name, but in the helicopter I thought I heard one bloke call her Cate, or Katie, or something like that.’

The trio of Land Rovers rolled past the Winnellie Hotel-Motel, which seemed to be enjoying full occupancy, to judge by the car park full of pick-ups and utility vehicles, and then turned right into a dogleg corner. A high steel fence, topped by razor wire protected the compound into which they drove. A pair of armed guards, both of them looking like ex-Gurkhas as well, waved them in. The men wore kukri daggers at the hip, although the submachine guns both carried impressed Jules more.

‘The ruse of sending you to New York is interesting,’ said Shah. ‘Quite an elaborate cut-out scheme. If Cesky is behind this, he will be standing well behind. He has much to lose now, being such a prominent figure. I wonder who is acting as his agent, assuming a now respectable businessman would not hold meetings in his office with potential contract killers.’

Jules shrugged. ‘Couldn’t tell you. Maybe the same guy who fronted us on behalf of Rubin. Who knows? But Cesky’s not that respectable. He’s in construction, for God’s sake. My father dealt with a few of them, said they were all crooks. The unions, the bosses, the companies – all of them. And Cesky wasn’t shy about putting muscle on the street in Seattle when Kipper led his little people’s uprising back after the Wave. He made quite a show of it, I heard. Having dealt with him just briefly, Cesky didn’t strike me as being squeamish about using the strong arm to get his way.’

The three heavy vehicles pulled into parking bays on a dirty concrete slab outside a remarkable office that had been constructed from shipping crates. Jules had heard of apartments in Europe fashioned the same way before the Disappearance, but they were high-end architectural experiments. This looked like frontier engineering. Shah’s headquarters was literally pieced together from metal shipping containers like a giant’s Lego set. He’d had doors and windows cut out; one container had been dropped on top of another, which had been joined end-on-end with a third. The old Gurkha saw her examining the unusual arrangement and smiled.

‘We took over this lot when building materials were in very short supply in Darwin,’ he explained. ‘This was cheap and very easily run up. It works well, although the air-conditioning is a heavy power drain.’

‘I can imagine,’ she replied, as they stepped out of the chilled interior of the vehicle. The oppressive, damp heat of the tropical afternoon slammed down and wrapped itself around her in a heavy shroud. The compound covered a few hundred square yards, and three newer buildings, all sheds, were of more conventional appearance. She had half expected to find a small regiment of armoured cars, even tanks in here, but instead she saw only more off-road vehicles. Land Rovers, a few anonymous sedans, and flat-bed pick-up trucks loaded with crates and strongboxes. At least half of the personnel were Nepalese, like Shah, but the rest, maybe a dozen or so that she could see, were a mix of locals and imports.

‘Come through,’ said Shah, leading her towards the sliding glass door that gave entry into the reception area of his security firm. ‘We shall have some tea, and get properly reacquainted. We have had no chance to do so yet, with the rush of the day. And then we shall set ourselves to determining whether this Cesky creature truly is behind the attempts on our lives and what we might do about it.’

Jules followed him inside, where he was immediately besieged by members of his staff, all with urgent demands on his time. At least in here the air was noticeably cooler and drier.

‘Okay. I could murder a cup of tea,’ she said, more to herself than anyone else.

But beyond that, she had no idea of how to proceed. Henry Cesky might be a crazed revenger, but he was smart, rich and increasingly powerful. He was also a major and very public supporter of the President of the United States.

Jed Culver was surprised to find himself nervous. Not wetting-his-pants nervous, but more anxious about attending a meeting than he had been in a long while. He was not the sort of man who was prone to unproductive worry and doubt. When he found himself without information, he sought it out. In a situation where he lacked control, he would fight and scheme and work away until he had it. That was why James Kipper valued him as a sword and shield. He did not blanch from the hard necessities, yet as he hurried down the hallway, flanked by his aides, a feeling not unlike indigestion gnawed at him. He recognised it for what it was. Anxiety.

He told no one, of course. Allowed no sign to show on his face or interrupt his stride along the corridors of Echelon’s headquarters in Vancouver. The office was unremarkable, resembling any other civil-service facility. The accents were mainly Canadian and American, although leavened by occasional British and Australian voices and once the unmistakable strangled vowels of a New Zealander.

He was satisfied to see that some standards were maintained here, at least. Like him, everyone was dressed in proper business attire, the men in suits and ties, the women in a wider selection of smart office wear. Kip’s well-known preference for casual clothing hadn’t made much of an impact here, apparently, even though Vancouver and Seattle had grown so close as to become one, in many other ways.

‘Mr Culver.’

Jed looked up from the briefing paper he’d been skimming. One of the reasons Echelon ran such a tight ship was standing in front of him, waiting outside a conference room. Wales Larrison, Deputy Director, Special Clearances and Research.

‘Ah, Director Larrison.’

‘Glad you could make it, sir,’ said Larrison. ‘We don’t get many visitors from so far up the food chain dropping in on us.’

‘I hardly need to,’ Culver replied. ‘Unlike so many of my other charges, you don’t cause me problems. You solve them.’

‘We try.’ The director shrugged. ‘If you’ll follow me, we’re in here today. No staffers, of course.’

Jed felt, rather than saw, the way his two aides bristled at the dismissal. Even hailing from a much-reduced White House, the young men and women who fetched and carried for him were little different from their forebears. Their own importance loomed very large in their consideration.

‘Of course,’ said Culver, defusing any issue with a wave of his hand. ‘Mike, I’ll need the President’s revised schedule for his APEC trip by this afternoon, if you think you can shake that out of the trees over at State. Sally, you go too. It might need both of you yelling at them to wake someone up over there.’

The aides nodded and hurried away to tend to the very important business of making phone calls and establishing just how much more important they were than the people they were talking to.

‘That’ll keep ’em happy for hours,’ he said.

Larrison murmured something to his own aide, a young Welsh woman, to judge by her lilting tone. She made a few notes in a folder before gliding away to attend to whatever villainy her boss had just set in train. When the two men were alone, the Echelon spy chief used a magnetic key to open the solid-looking double doors to the conference room.

Jed set his features to disguise the acid burn in his stomach and stepped through to take his meeting with a killer. That wasn’t the reason for his anxiety. Rather, he knew that by being here he was disobeying a direct order from the President of the United States. He’d done as Kip had asked, by bringing the FBI in on the link between Ozal’s shipping company and Blackstone, but he hadn’t pressed the issue with them, hadn’t made it a priority. The Bureau didn’t have the resources to assign strike teams of special agents on the whims of a political operator like himself, and he trusted them to take their time, working slowly and methodically away at the documents he had provided.

In the meantime, the Chief of Staff would do what he’d always done. He would take control of events, even at risk to himself. He knew there was only one person he trusted to strike hard and fast at Blackstone’s newly exposed weak point. And she was the only person in the room when he and Director Larrison entered.

A young woman, maybe thirty – Jed was increasingly thinking of people in their thirties as young. Her features struck him as handsome rather than pretty. She wasn’t masculine but all the lines and planes of her face seemed very cut and angular, like an athlete who had stripped their body fat back to a single-figure percentage. He was aware of his own very generous belly pulling at the buttons of his waistcoat. He hated himself for doing it, but before he could stop himself, he’d tried to suck in his stomach.

‘Ms Monroe,’ he said, nodding as she looked up from the table, where she’d been reading through a sheaf of papers. Most normal people, he imagined, would’ve been drawn to the view outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Downtown Vancouver stretched away to the river and the North Shore Mountains in the distance and sparkled under a fierce winter sun. Monroe appeared to have drawn a curtain specifically to block the vista, or more likely to block any view from the outside, even though he knew the glass had been treated with a film that turned it into a mirror when viewed from the street.

Special Agent Monroe stood up, but waited for Culver to move towards her and extend his hand. Her grip was strong, but it was the rough, calloused texture of her palm that he noticed. It felt like he was shaking hands with a violinist whose second job was bricklaying.

‘Mr Culver,’ she said. Her voice put him right back inside the conversation she’d had with Kip as she flew into the Battle of New York, looking for Baumer. She’d been dressed in black combat coveralls and shouting over the roar of a C-130. She had been angry too, he recalled. Dangerously angry. In person, her voice was quite soft and she spoke with a distant, ironic tone that made him feel as though he’d already been judged.

‘How’s your family, Ms Monroe? Bret and . . . Monique, isn’t it?’

‘Do you care?’ she asked flatly.

‘Caitlin . . .’ growled Wales Larrison.

The assassin sketched a lopsided grin that went nowhere near softening her features.

‘I was just wondering.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Culver,’ said Larrison, frowning at his senior student. ‘Agent Monroe can be unusually and unjustifiably difficult at times.’

Jed blew them both off. His smile was genuine. The ‘you got me’ grin of an old-time grifter caught out by his mark.

‘No. It’s fair enough, Larrison. Like I give a fuck about her family. We all know I read the briefing sheet before coming over here, to give me some personal stake to play when we met. I care about Ms Monroe’s personal affairs as much as she cares about mine, no doubt – minimally, and only so much as it impacts on our business. So, Ms Monroe, how
is
your family? Are they safe?’

She unpacked a smile and handed it back to him, but with a touch less frost than before. ’They are safe, as you’d know, sir. The Brits have them tucked away on a farm up in Scotland. They have good people looking after them, and more taking care of our farm while we’re away. They’re not a distraction. They’re a motivation. Is that what you wanted to hear, Mr Culver?’

Jed nodded, just a slight bobbing of the head. ‘It’s good that you’re motivated,’ he told her, ‘because I have something to ask of you.’

‘You do?’ she shot back. ‘Or the President does?’

Larrison looked like he was preparing to get all stern and old school again, but Culver shook his head as if to say
Don’t bother
.

‘I’ll tell you straight, Ms Monroe. Caitlin. You mind if I call you Caitlin?’

‘The list of things I care about is very short.’

He took a seat in the nearest swivel chair and motioned for the others to do the same as he gazed out over the city. Before the Wave had swept away most of Canada’s population, Vancouver had been a small city. About half-a-million people, as he recalled. It was twice that now, swollen with Canadians and Americans returned from abroad, where they had avoided the fate of their compatriots. Crowded too with migrants, another quarter-million of them from China and the Punjab mostly, although a few neighbourhoods were solidly Vietnamese and, surprisingly, Japanese. For the capital of such an empty, haunted country, Vancouver was crowded. Evidence of new, unregulated building was everywhere. Office towers had been given over to residential use without much planning, and new developments were spreading out on the city’s edge. Jed crinkled his eyes against the glare of the winter sun before turning away from the view.

‘The President knows nothing of this meeting and never will,’ he said. ‘Unless I’m called to testify in my own criminal trial at some point in the future.’

Agent Monroe did not react. She simply waited for him to continue. He admired that. Jed Culver had never been one for hysterics and drama queens.

‘Frankly, I’d have been happy if any arrangement you and I might come to could’ve been settled without the involvement of your boss here. I see no need to involve Mr Larrison –’

‘Well, I can see plenty, Mr Culver,’ said the director. ‘Starting with the fact that my agents do not act without my say-so. I’ve reviewed your case and I agree there is a role for us to play – if Special Agent Monroe is willing. Operationally, she remains on secondment to the London Cage. But your concerns about Texas appear to overlap with unfinished business of ours. Perhaps they don’t, but the possibility that they do invites us to speculate and study the matter further. Agent Monroe is our in-house counsel on Baumer, to borrow a phrase from your former career. I also understand why the President needs to be kept out of it. From our perspective, sir, that is a matter of little import. Echelon is not an American agency. We answer to the Alliance Secretariat. But nor are we your Praetorian Guard, sir, nor Ms Monroe your personal emissary or executioner. If she runs with this, she does so on my dime.’

Jed conceded the point with a tilt of his head. ’You’ve read the brief, ma’am?’ he asked.

‘Yep,’ said Monroe.

‘And?’

‘What can I say? We’re already in motion. The French didn’t release Baumer. Ahmet Ozal got him out and Ozal had a connection to Fort Hood through that salvage contract for Hazm. Contract’s not even registered in Texas, as I understand it. Treasury got the information from Hamburg. Lupérico says –’

‘Wait a minute – Lupérico
says
? I thought he was dead,’ said Culver, suddenly concerned that perhaps Echelon had stashed him somewhere.

‘Sorry. Poor phrasing,’ replied Monroe. ‘Lupérico
is
dead.’

‘Okay. Because I understood it was only you and him at the end.’

‘That’s right. He told me what we needed and then I settled our personal account.’

‘Is that something you’re in the habit of doing, Ms Monroe . . . Caitlin?’ asked Culver. ‘Settling personal business on company time?’ He was still a little put out.

She shrugged. ‘Business and pleasure. It can be hard to tell them apart some days. If you don’t like it, get someone else. I’ve got diapers to change.’

She wasn’t smiling as she said it. Jed felt the need to test her further.

‘It didn’t occur to you that there was more we could’ve learned by debriefing him out of the field?’

‘My mission parameters covered a hostile, in-field debrief,’ she said, without emotion, as if that concluded the matter. ‘The subject was terminated at the end of the debrief.’

Culver regarded her with the same caution he’d give a coiled rattler. Monroe was both an anachronism and a harbinger of the changed world. Fashioned as a weapon long before the Disappearance, she had proven she could adapt to altered realities more swiftly and with less apparent disinclination than most of the people he worked with. In their own way, everybody seemed to be trying to hold on to how things had once been, even as that history cracked apart and broke up like a giant ice shelf.

He exhaled slowly. It was her world, not his. There would soon be more like her, rather than fewer. Jed pressed at his stomach and tried to control the boiling underneath his right-hand bottom rib. Quite honestly, he preferred Lupérico dead. The fewer loose threads to unravel, the better.

‘So you’ve read the brief, Agent. You know what we need.’

‘I read the summary. I only got it when I arrived. Ten minutes before you.’ There was no hint of accusation in her tone. Merely a statement of fact.

‘Well, read it all, before you agree to anything,’ he said. ‘Because in spite of what will undoubtedly be sterling efforts on your behalf from Mr Larrison here, you’ll have zero ass cover if this goes wrong. And it could go wrong about ten ways from Sunday.’

‘In my experience, Mr Culver, life can and does go wrong more often than not.’

He leaned forward. Not getting into her personal space, but approaching as near as he dared. ‘You’re a realist, Ms Monroe. That’s good. Because here’s the reality: this country is dying. The Wave ripped our heart out and we’re just staggering forward, carried along by our own momentum. We could be at war with Roberto’s little pirate kingdom within six months, and we could lose if it doesn’t go nuclear. If we’re not at war with him, we might just turn on ourselves. Mad Jack’s got his
Heart of Darkness
routine polished to an obsidian fucking sheen down there in Texas, and it’s getting to a point where even my boss, the sainted and peace-loving James Kipper, might just have to stand to his guns in response. You were in Manhattan, Ms Monroe. You know what that fight took out of us. We cannot win against Morales. And we probably can’t win against Blackstone either. Not that anyone ever really wins a civil war in any case.’

As the White House Chief of Staff spoke, his earlier anxiety at meeting this woman fell away, replaced by the fears that really underlay his nervous agitation. They were the fears of negation, of total collapse, and the return of a dark age that would envelop the whole world.

‘I need you in Texas, Ms Monroe,’ he went on. ‘In the belly of the beast. You are not going to find Bilal Baumer there. Frankly, I don’t think you’re ever going to find him. In my admittedly amateurish opinion, Mr Baumer was pulverised into pink rat giblets by the US Air Force when they knocked flat about ten blocks of New York around the old Rock last April. But the reason Baumer was there, the reason he nearly bled us out – and, incidentally, the reason your husband and daughter were nearly killed too –
that
I believe you will find in Texas. That’s why Director Larrison has agreed to assign you a special clearance to operate within CONUS. That’s why I’m willing to go against the wishes of my boss, and risk a good thirty years in the pen if it all goes wrong. That’s why I want you down in Tusk Musso’s office asap, by way of KC, where you can start doing some primary research on Governor Blackstone’s policies. Kansas City is our main forward base and my people there know more about the dark corners of Blackstone’s evil empire than most would care to. A day spent with them will help you adjust your perceptions.’