After America (34 page)

This trip they checked in well after midnight and left just after dawn, with Dalby brushing aside all the usual demands for travel warrants, internal passports, and itineraries with a brusque refusal to cooperate and an imperious flick of his ID badge into the bleary, sleep-deprived face of the night manager, who was still on duty at six in the morning.

“You know, sometimes I think we should be done with it and just get ourselves Gestapo outfits,” Caitlin said. “You know, some really spanking long black leather coats and dark fedoras. Then we wouldn’t even have to worry about badging people or waving Glocks in their fucking faces. Everybody would just know to
fear
us.”

Dalby gave her a quizzical look as they rode the elevator down to the car park.

“Sometimes with you Americans it is impossible to know whether you are being funny or simply far too enthusiastic.”

“Jeez, Dalby, and they reckon
we
don’t get irony.”

“Nobody gets irony anymore, Caitlin. We live in a post-ironic world.”

She slung her backpack, a small overnight bag really, into the back of Dalby’s precious little car and folded herself into the passenger seat. He turned on the radio after doing up his belt, locking the doors, and keying the ignition—the exact same sequence of actions he performed every time they climbed into the compact Mercedes. Caitlin wondered why he didn’t just leave the radio on, but she was coming to understand that Mister Dalby was a man of very particular habits. The only music he ever played in the car was a CD compilation of popular classics. And when he wasn’t playing that, he would listen to
BBC
Radio 4, which was what she would have called a news radio channel.

He flicked that on now as Caitlin ran her fingers through still-damp hair, tying it back with an elastic band. She’d had time for a quick shower this morning but not for much else in the way of personal grooming. At least the water had been reasonably hot this time. On her last extended trip to the Cage the hot water in the hotel had been out for two days, and when it did come back on, it smelled strongly of sulfur. Dalby drove out of the car park as Charlotte Green finished a report on trials of GM wheat and soy in Wiltshire.

“We were part of that,” said Caitlin. “Bret was supposed to go to a briefing up in Swindon before Richardson’s crew tried to hit him.”

Dalby turned onto Whitechapel Road before negotiating the turn onto the A13. Traffic was very light as always, just a few commercial vehicles and a bus coming in from the suburbs. It was three minutes before they saw another private car like their own. Most of the shops along the retail strip were still closed, many of them boarded up for good. Here and there, though, she did see a new cafe, and in one case a knitwear store had opened. So perhaps the chancellor of the Exchequer was not talking entirely through his ass when he spoke about a few “promising green shoots” poking through the ashen wasteland of Britain’s post-Wave economy. After all, they had been getting increasing orders for Bret’s farmhouse goat cheese these past three months, which was very much a luxury item, something he had begun pottering about with, in the English style, after reading an article on Britnet about artisan cheese making.

“Do you enjoy the farm, Caitlin? It’s not in your family history, is it? Farming, I mean. You were an air force child as I recall.”

She had never told him that, but she wasn’t surprised that he knew. As soon as Dalby had been given her case, he would have called for her personnel file and had probably even spoken to her old controller, Wales Larrison, who worked liaison in Vancouver these days. Thinking of Wales gave her an unexpected pang of homesickness.

“My grandparents on Mom’s side scratched at the Dust Bowl for a while in Oklahoma,” she said. “But not for long. So no, I wouldn’t say we were farming folk. But I do enjoy it, Dalby. It’s … peaceful, you know. Even getting out of bed at four in the morning to go fist some poor cow in a freezing barn … it’s better than being stuck in the cells at fucking Noisy-le-Sec, let me tell you.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” he said without elaborating.

The six o’clock bulletin came on, read by Alan Smith.

“Fighting continues in New York,” he announced, “after a failed attempt on the life of President James Kipper yesterday. U.S. forces press on with their counteroffensive to retake the strategic port against heavy resistance. Prime Minister Howard will call the Cabinet Security Committee together this morning to discuss what help might be offered the U.S. administration.”

“Do you really think that business was an assassination attempt on Kipper?” Dalby asked as they passed a small convoy of Ministry of Resources vans heading into town. “I mean, it seems a rather ham-fisted way to have at a chap, I would have thought. It’s not as though your Mister Kipper doesn’t present himself as a tempting target most days of the week, anyway, with this living among the people rubbish of his.”

“Why, Dalby,” Caitlin said in a delighted voice, “I do believe that’s the most disapproving tone I have ever heard from you. Not a Kipper man, then, eh?”

The Home Office man nearly blushed at his indiscretion.

“Oh, I’m sure I don’t have any opinion at all of U.S. politics, Caitlin. I find the plethora of new green parties and millennarian crazy men to be quite beyond fathoming. As I’m sure many of your country folk must long for the certainties of the old two-party system.”

“Like here?” She smirked.

“Point taken,” he muttered as they drove slowly past a minibus that had been pulled over by heavily armed special constables. The occupants were filing out, hands on heads, and lining up by the side of the road in front of a cash and carry and a money transfer bureau, apparently both owned by the same Indian family. A hand-painted sign hanging in the window of the money transfer announced “Fresh Basmati this Tuesday!” The minibus passengers looked like they were probably Pakistanis, or ‘deshis from the Enclosures in South London, being bused into the city for a work detail. They had a sullen, beaten-down air of resignation about them and paid no heed to the three Indian children who came laughing and spilling out of the shop to watch. One of the specials crouched down on one knee while keeping his MP5 trained on the detainees to exchange a joke with the smiling, chattering children. Caitlin wondered whether the detainees envied those on the watch list who’d been deported. The Enclosures was a very grim and isolated place.

And then they were past the scene. Alan Smith continued in his calm, almost sublime way, recounting tales of horror from the night. The firebombing of a Hindu corner store in Newham that had killed the family of eight sleeping in the rooms above. The famine in western China. And an Amnesty International report on death squads in President Morales’s South American Federation led into a final bookend report on Brazil’s resurgent nuclear weapons program.

Caitlin listened despondently, wondering whether there might be a lighter story at the end of the bulletin simply to lift the spirits. But before handing off to the sports desk, the newsreader finished with a reminder that government inspectors would be double-checking ration cards this week after a significant increase in the incidence of forgeries.

“Enough gloom for one morning, I think,” Dalby said, and he switched the audio to his classical compilation CD. The track that came on was Albinoni’s
Adagio in G Minor
, which to Caitlin’s way of thinking wasn’t exactly “Disco Inferno.” It was more “music to eat your pistol by,” and she did her best to block it out.

“Have you sent anything to Wales about Baumer yet?” she asked. “He’d want to know.”

“Mister Larrison, you mean? Yes. Vancouver liaison gets a routine weekly brief from the Cage on all of our doings and a-goings-on. And given your involvement, I sent an extraordinary update as soon as I had enough detail.”

Caitlin sat up in the passenger seat.

“So did Wales have a reading on it?”

Dalby frowned. “I’m afraid that with this business in New York all of your government’s intelligence resources have been retasked onto the pirate issue. Indeed, most of ours, too. A good deal of Echelon’s continental and African assets are now actively attempting to interdict the pirate traffic at the source. So although Mister Larrison was concerned and sent his best wishes, he was happy to leave the running on Mister Baumer to me and thee. Like you, he saw this as a personal vendetta and best dealt with … personally.”

Caitlin was a little pissed off that Dalby hadn’t told her about the contact with Wales, but he had been so good about everything else that she let it slide. After all, her old controller had effectively shined them on, and he would have been hell busy with New York.

Instead, she concentrated on the view outside. As bleak as that was, there were a few pleasant interludes. They stopped behind two buses outside a small park just after Wharf Lane. She could see a few families over the brick wall, laboring away at their vegetable plots while smaller children played in the trees. They had probably come down from the council flats behind the converted garden and seemed to be enjoying themselves tending the rows of carrots, peas, and potatoes. An older man, half stooped and white-haired, a geezer in the local parlance, shared a thermos of something hot with a large black man, a West Indian, she guessed, who wore the bright red patch of a London council auxiliary sewn on his sweater. He leaned on an ax handle while enjoying his “cuppa.” He would be there to discourage any raids on the site by gangs of chavs or munters who, in Caitlin’s opinion, could do with a bit of fucking Enclosures themselves.

By the time they had driven down as far as the All Saints station on the East India Dock Road, the residents of the flats that lined both sides of the street were beginning to shuffle out into the gray, wet morning to join lengthening queues for buses and trains. Dalby’s zippy German car attracted many envious looks as he subtly increased his speed through the area, and more than a few of the waiting commuters resentfully gave him the finger.

They drove for another twenty minutes, passing thousands of people trudging to line up for public transport into the city, if they were lucky. Many would have to make multiple transfers, and as much as everybody had once bitched about being caught in peak-hour traffic, it seemed much worse when there was no traffic at all save for the fleets of buses. It had never been an issue for Caitlin, of course, but she had read that it wasn’t unusual for people to spend up to four or five hours a day in transit, and she often wondered why they didn’t just move closer to wherever they needed to be.

They passed another park given over to agriculture, except this one was much larger than the little plot closer to the city. It looked big enough to have hosted a whole complex of sports fields at one time, and she could tell at a glance that the two tractors plowing the rich black soil were preparing it for a single seed planting. It must have been a ministry operation, as modest little council plots did not run to the sort of gas allowance one needed for tractor farming, although the small crowd she saw huddled at the rear of the field undoubtedly meant the actual planting would be done by hand.

“Must make you a bit homesick for your own place, then, eh?” said Dalby.

She sighed and shook her head, imagining how cold and miserable those people were going to be. They were probably on a work-for-the-dole scheme.

“I forget sometimes how good we have it down there, Dalby,” she said. “I mean, we have refugees and everything, and so you’re always reminded of how fucked things are for some folks. But even for them, it’s gotta be better than trying to scratch together a living up here.”

“Well, I imagine that’s why there is such a long waiting list to get onto farm stay programs like yours and Mister Melton’s. I cannot think I would remain long in London were it not for work.”

He swung off the A13 at River Road, just before the Lyon Business Park, where there wasn’t a lot of business being done. Indeed, half the premises seemed to be shuttered up, but Creekmouth wasn’t completely derelict. Trucks rumbled to and from the nearby gravel pits, and the sewage plant across Barking Creek was churning away as always. The Thames Cafe and Daddies Snack Bar were open, serving chip butties and sweet tea to a few hundred workers who had precious jobs in nearby metalworks and manufacturing plants. There was a surprisingly healthy marine engineering trade, an industrial cleaning plant, a wire factory, a joinery, and a food wholesaler. One of the largest, most modern facilities belonged to
DHL
, the courier company, a German engineering firm had just taken over six large factory buildings on Long Reach Road, and there was talk of them opening an engine plant for the new
BMW
compact under an EU redevelopment program. As far as Caitlin could tell, however, nothing had changed at the abandoned site beyond the erection of a high razor-wire fence.

Dalby drove past all this activity, carefully avoiding the jouncing trucks that rumbled along the crumbling, potholed road, spewing black diesel fumes and not much caring whether they sideswiped him. They carried on past the Crooked Billet pub, an honest drinking hole that smelled of stale food, refried grease, and cigarette smoke. Caitlin had lunched in there once and been taken by the stained-glass windows and an unusually large collection of Pat Benatar tracks on the jukebox but not so much by the grim Dickensian atmosphere and the openly lecherous stares of some of the factory workers nursing their pints and roll-yer-owns.

A minute on from the pub Dalby took a sharp turn just before the old power station and motored down a long driveway past a row of very obviously empty sheds and a large, quiet fenced-off area in which shipping containers were stacked three and four on top of each other. The Thames, gray and wind-flecked, flowed past a hundred meters away, where two men were unloading heavy boxes from a small boat tied up at the end of an old pier. They waved to Dalby as he pulled up and climbed out of the Merc, then went back to their work. The assassin and her handler took their luggage from the backseat and walked through a muddy parking lot in which sat more rusting shipping containers, piles of car tires, at least a dozen rotting wooden boats, and a few mounds of gravel covered in once-green tarpaulins that had been bleached nearly white by exposure to the elements. After a short passage through this junkyard, turning left and right as they threaded through the piles of rubbish, they came to an eight-foot-high electrified fence topped by more razor wire. A blockhouse where a young, well-built man in civilian clothes sat drinking from a paper cup guarded the entrance.