Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (45 page)

The timer beeped on the ballistic gel mould. She gave it another thirty seconds, just to be safe, before opening the little unit and removing the small, yellow, thumb-sized gel disc. The rubbery blob was about the size of a slightly elongated dime. Caitlin held it up to the light to check the impression.

Perfect.

She now had Ty McCutcheon’s thumb-print, lifted from his bourbon glass in the bar the previous evening. Securing the print had been a matter of little concern. Musso had arranged the staff roster and spoken to their waitress before she’d come on duty. The woman, an army comms specialist in her day job, kept Caitlin’s glass topped up with iced tea instead of Highland Park, and had whipped away McCutcheon’s smooth-sided tumbler, securing it in a Ziploc bag as soon as he’d finished his first Maker’s Mark.

Caitlin stowed the thumb-print away in a small plastic container that she snap-closed and zipped into the pocket of her leather jacket. Low clouds scudded across the sky outside the window of the empty room on the top floor of the Kyle Hotel. She had a good view across downtown from here, a vantage point that let her to appreciate how much the tiny federal settlement resembled a village carved from a deep forest. Just a block or two back from the cleared streets, Temple was reverting to nature. Head-high razor grass grew thick and wild, and small stands of trees obscured the roof lines of low-set buildings that had not burnt or collapsed. A thick, dark cloud, a flock of birds, lifted off from the forest canopy a few streets away, startled by something on the ground perhaps. A feral cat? A dog pack? She’d heard plenty of both the previous night.

The higher floors of the Kyle Hotel were unoccupied. A short jog up the fire escape put her well beyond the reach of the bugs in her room. Her cell phone, a late-model Siemens, confirmed that. Thicker and heavier than it should have been, tightly packed with augmented technologies, including the RFID interceptor she’d used in McCutcheon’s office, the handset’s scan function continually sought out anomalous electronic signatures within a ten-metre radius, but had found nothing here. This room was clean.

She flipped open the cell and keyed in her code to access the Echelon network. It took a little longer than usual to acquire the satellite, but less than a minute later she had a secure channel to Vancouver. The overwatch desk put her through to Larrison immediately.

‘Hey, Wales, it’s me, your favourite.’

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting to hear from you. I have a message from Jed Culver to forward to Colonel Murdoch from a Special Agent Dan Colvin in KC.’

‘What’s Colvin say?’

The deputy director’s reply came back squashed and a little delayed by the encryption software.

‘He says he got the phone data you were after. From that hit-and-run you thought was more hit than run. The Mexican farmer and his girlfriend. One of the cells was a burner, completely untraceable. But Colvin got lucky, or the other guy got lazy, with the second phone. It’s a high-end satellite unit. Explains why he was using it in KC, I guess, because of the shitty local network.’

‘Yeah,’ said Caitlin. ‘Colvin told me that if you don’t have access to the federal system, your phone’s basically bricked. So what did he get?’

‘Sat phone was registered to a ghost, which isn’t surprising. But it was being used right at the moment your man Pieraro was run down. And then the call terminated.’

‘Our spotter?’

‘Almost certainly. Satellite logs traced the phone out to the spot where the KC cops found the burnt-out vehicle.’

She paced the empty room, ending up near the window, where she was able to gaze out over the streets of Temple again. A bus pulled up at the Federal Center, unloading what looked like a party of homesteaders on their way to the Mandate. They stretched their legs as they took a break on the lawn in front of the old city building.

‘So no ID on either the spotter or the driver?’

‘No, but they found the driver. Or somebody they’re pretty sure was the driver.’

‘Deader than Elvis, I’ll bet.’

‘And then some. The body was burnt. The hands cut off, and for bonus points somebody ran over the head a couple of times.’

‘Huh. Thorough.’

‘Not so much. Because whoever this spotter is, he’s still using the satellite phone.’

Her laugh was short and humourless. ‘Stupid. Mother. Fucker.’

Caitlin shook her head as she watched a group of children playing tag in front of the Federal Center. She was pretty sure she recognised Sergeant Milosz down there, in uniform, watching over them while enjoying a cigarette. Occasionally he would dart into the pack of children, grabbing one who was proving difficult for the others to catch, and holding the struggling, laughing child upside down by the ankles.

‘So what do we have on them?’ she asked.

The time delay caused Wales’s earlier reply to run over the question.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Natural selection at work.’

There was a moment of confusion while he disentangled her question from his reply, before he continued. ‘Here’s the thing, Caitlin. The sat phone was picked up by DSD on a programmed sweep by Darwin Station.’

‘Defence Signals Directorate? He’s down under?’

‘In Darwin. The Deadwood of the new millennium. Been there just over two days. Allowing for flight duration, must’ve lit out from KC directly. I asked our local franchise to follow up on it. The connections are starting to go fractal but I think they’re worth following. The Aussies are happy enough to look into it. They don’t want a freelance hitter on their turf, especially not in Darwin with all the Chinese and Indian players they have going through there. There’s even a trade mission from the Federation in town this week. Probably nothing to do with our hitter, but you can imagine how Echelon station in Sydney was all over it once we told them. Put one of their best guys on it. He’s already got some good intel.’

‘Anything for me?’ asked Caitlin, who hadn’t expected any joy from Special Agent Colvin, and now found herself more confused by the meaning of Pieraro’s killing. If indeed it had any meaning.

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Wales told her. ‘Random cross over.’

She concentrated hard, trying to recall the case notes she’d studied in Kansas City. It wasn’t easy. There had been so much data to take in. She thought she remembered that the Pieraros had spent time in the refugee camps in Australia, before being accepted into a homesteading program in the Federal Mandate. But whether that was significant, she couldn’t say.

There was nothing for it but to press on with those things she could control.

‘Okay, thanks for that, Wales,’ she said. ‘If anything else turns up, especially from Darwin, I’d like to know. And if someone could pass Colonel Murdoch’s thanks on to Colvin, that’d be good. He put himself out for us. I have no idea what it all means, but Darwin’s a hell of a long way from Fort Hood. Even further from Kansas City. And I’m going to need your help here in the next couple of hours.’

‘Just give me a second,’ he said. ‘I’ll get my paper and pencil and get started on the laundry list.’

*

‘You’re sure about this?’

Concern furrowed the brow of General Tusk Musso, USMC (retired). His office was much less grand than that of his opposite number over in the Hood. Unlike in Blackstone’s lair, there was no sign he had ever served in the military. Just pictures of his family on the desk. A woman and two boys Caitlin knew had Disappeared.

‘The sooner I do it, the sooner I can get out of this graveyard and go home, General.’

Musso sat back and regarded her with a contemplative air. ‘So your home isn’t here anymore? America, I mean – not Temple, of course.’

‘It’s where the heart is, sir,’ she said, being careful not to stare at the pictures of his dead family, even though, as the only adornment in the spartan office, their images drew the eye. She wondered if a day went by when he didn’t think of them. The same way she didn’t think of Bret or Monique.

Probably not. Musso seemed like a good man, and he had probably been a much better father than she was a mother.

‘Can’t argue with that,’ he agreed, apparently speaking to her private thoughts. ‘Are they letting you stay in camp over at the Hood?’

‘As if I’d want to,’ she replied. ‘They might have some surveillance rigs over there actually worth the money they spent on them.’

Her Siemens handset lay on Musso’s desk, the screen lit up, displaying an image of one of the bugs in her room. It sat squatting between them like a poisonous metal spider. The director of the Federal Center couldn’t stop his gaze drifting back towards it. Even though Caitlin had used the cell phone to scan his office, and declared it clean, she could tell that the former Marine had been rocked by the revelation of a traitor somewhere within his command. He was being very circumspect now, as if he thought Mad Jack Blackstone himself was listening to every word. Caitlin. however, had more faith in her equipment and in TDF security’s general lameness.

‘I’ll have more freedom of action if I’m not right under their noses,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of accommodation in Killeen. I’ve asked them to find me a room over there.’

‘They’ll be all over you like a cheap Chinese suit,’ he said, frowning at the cell phone.

‘Just a day at the office, sir, and hopefully it won’t even be necessary, except as cover. If I can get in and out tonight, Colonel Murdoch will be on a scheduled flight three days from now, with McCutcheon and Blackstone waving her off at the airport.’

‘And if that doesn’t pan out?’

Caitlin paused. Just long enough to feel her heart beat once.

‘I’ll get out, with the data.’

Musso leaned back in his chair, looking tired. ‘In a way, I hope you fail,’ he said.

She looked at him, tilting her head in an unspoken query.

‘I think Blackstone is genuinely seeking rapprochement,’ he explained, eyeing the file that filled his in-tray.

In there was everything McCutcheon had on the South American Federation’s op in Florida. Or at least, everything he said he had. There may have been intelligence he’d held back to avoid exposing any further TDF ops outside Texas. Nonetheless, Blackstone had agreed to hand over the captured infiltrators to a team of federal marshals who were scrambling to fly down from KC by the end of the day.

‘I can’t say I’m happy about this other bullshit,’ Musso said, nodding at her cell phone. ‘But I can understand it. Mad Jack seems genuine in his paranoia about Morales. He’s going to want any kind of leverage he can get with Seattle’s man, or woman. You being Echelon, I’m sure you’d understand.’

Caitlin smiled. ‘My first field assignment was bugging the French and EU trade ministers at a GATT meeting. Long time ago. In a galaxy far, far away.’

‘Yeah,’ grunted Musso. He pointed at the Siemens. ‘I’m still going to have to deal with this. Bring in the FBI, I suppose. But I’ll leave it until you’re gone.’

‘That’d be a big help, sir. And if you could organise my stunt double too?’

‘No problem. We can use Amy, the waitress from the other night. She did good with McCutcheon and I trust her. She fought in New York. Re-enlisted right after, when the TDF recruiters were really trawling for custom. Sign-on bonuses, free houses, transfer of benefits, everything. But she’s a believer.’

‘You don’t have to sell me,’ she said. ‘Before I used her on McCutcheon, I had Vancouver run her through the filter. She’s clean, as far as they could tell.’

At this, one of Musso’s eyebrows climbed towards the ceiling. ‘I see. And did you run me through your filters as well?’

‘You bet. I’d run everyone, if I had the time and resources. But I don’t. And so this shit happens.’ Her turn to nod towards the augmented phone she’d used to sniff out the bugs in her quarters when she first arrived.

Musso appeared to take no lasting offence at having been vetted by Echelon. Caitlin found him an easy man to work with. A lot of military people held her profession in low regard, but Tusk didn’t seem to be the sort to judge.

‘I’m going to have to revise your final report,’ he said. ‘Colonel Murdoch’s, that is. I don’t think Blackstone is right about Morales being an immediate threat. But I think maybe we do have to take him a little more seriously. That Federation special forces team in Florida wasn’t an invading horde, but it’s a factor we need to plug in. I’m afraid the President needs to know about that, and that Governor Blackstone has his own SF teams wandering around the countryside too.’

‘If you tell him now, you blow my cover,’ she said, suddenly worried that Musso’s boy scout gene was going to bring them all undone.

‘No, not necessarily. After all, it’s my job to act as liaison to Fort Hood. This is exactly the sort of information I’m supposed to pass back. It would draw more attention if I didn’t and Mad Jack decided to get on the phone and yell at the President for ignoring him again.’

‘So you’re going to lie?’

‘I’m going to tell the truth, but not the whole truth. In my experience the President cares little for briefings by military officers. He can hardly keep their ranks in his head, let alone their names. He just wants the job done. I’m sure I can shade Colonel Murdoch into insignificance for now. But I can’t make this Florida thing go away. Not with it sending the Governor bugshit.’

Musso shook his head and looked as though he was disgusted with himself.

The great game, Caitlin. It never ends, does it? We have our own people sniffing around the Federation all the time, I’m sure.’

She maintained a studied neutrality at that.

‘Who knows,’ he continued, ‘even if it’s paranoid bullshit, it might be enough for Mad Jack and Kipper to put aside their differences. The enemy of my enemy might just make us friends. Something like that. I’ve already sent a preliminary briefing note through to Jed Culver and he’s on my case for more detail. And your report.’

A headache began to form behind Caitlin’s eyes.

‘That could be tricky. Seeing as how I’m not really a USAF colonel.’