Without Warning Part 35

He cursed her in French and stormed out of the cell, dragging the door closed behind him. A heavy iron cage, it slammed shut with a deafening clang.

Caitlin closed her eyes and smiled. A small victory. Not so long ago Reynard would simply have absorbed the abuse and bored in on her, attempting to undermine her defenses, all the time reminding her how utterly alone she was in the world. Enraging him was a small win. Possibly Pyrrhic, but a victory nonetheless. She breathed in slowly. The air was stale and dank. She remembered her last stay in the cells beneath Noisy-le-Sec as being uncomfortable because of the cold. Her interrogators had maintained the temperature just above freezing, but on this occasion there had been no attempts to manipulate her environment. She put that down to power shortages. The lights flickered off and on irregularly, often going out for minutes at a time. The fort would have its own generator, but even so, the directorate would need to ration supply if the wider grid had gone off-line.

Really, though, she had no idea. She had been held incommunicado for a month, and her captors had told her nothing of the outside world save for those details that suited their ends, and, of course, she could not necessarily believe them anyway. She could only trust what few minuscule sc.r.a.ps of reality came filtering through their control.

Time. They had tried to disconnect her from the flow of time. To impress upon her that she was adrift on the seas of eternity, and completely within their control. They were good, too. She had been trained to listen for any clues in their conversation, to try to catch a glimpse of any timepieces or watches that might stray into her field of view. But Reynard and his men were good. On each of their wrists she found only a tan line, and for a long time, lost in the haze of beatings and interrogation, she did lose track of the days and weeks. But of course there was one thing they could not take or hide from her.

She was a woman, and three weeks into her capture, her period arrived, weak but unmistakable.

It had since pa.s.sed, marking a month since Monique had been killed, and she had collapsed in the hallway of the apartment block back on the rue d'Asnieres, betrayed by her own failing body. She kept the small morsel of knowledge, that she knew how long she'd been held, to herself. It was a small prize to covet in her ongoing battle with Reynard. And not the only one either. She knew things about him that he would not want her to know.

The Frenchman, for instance, was losing weight. She had taken note of where he notched his belt the first time he had interrogated her. It was two notches in from there now. At first, too, he had always been clean-shaven, and his suits freshly dry-cleaned and pressed. Recently, however, he had once or twice sported a five o'clock shadow, and she noted that his collars and cuffs were growing dark with grime. He, like her, was suffering. Dark bags had appeared under his eyes, and he had chewed the skin around his left thumbnail quite ragged.

She could not know what was happening in the city outside the fortress walls, she did not even know what was happening in the cells near her own, but Caitlin was willing to bet on systemic collapse. And so she taunted him along those lines, finally eliciting the angered reaction of a few moments past. She would wait now for her punishment. She composed herself, a task made somewhat easier because today she was able to lie flat on her slab. She was naked, but she had long since grown used to that. And most important they did not have her trussed into a stress position, sitting with her knees pulled right up and bound, and her hands cuffed behind her back. It was excruciating after a while, and they had forced her to maintain the posture by having two men stand over her with lengths of heavy rubber tubing to hand out a beating whenever she attempted to alter position.

After a few days of that, however, pressure sores covered her b.u.t.tocks and had become infected. That bought her a few days' respite while a medic treated her. After that they relented, in a fashion, resorting to a mix of stress positioning, waterboarding, and sensory bombardment, rotated in such a way as to maintain her torment without the inconvenience of needing to halt for treatment. It had almost broken her, but they had stopped after she sank her teeth into the wrist of a man who'd been attempting to place a hood over her head in preparation for another waterboarding session. Caitlin had bitten down as hard as she could, feeling the skin break, and hot, salty blood start flowing a split second before feeling the satisfying crack of a shattered bone.

The a.s.shole had screamed a lot louder than she ever did, something she'd been quick to point out to Reynard. After that they had reverted to beatings for a couple of days.

Beatings she could handle, and she had even begun to goad them, holding out the hope that somebody might lose control and kill her with an uncontrolled blow.

Because Reynard was right about one thing.

She was doomed. There was no point hanging on for the sake of the mission. There was no mission, and there would be no deliverance.

Caitlin was refusing to break simply because that was all she had left in the world. The only choice that remained in her life was how she left it.

She released a lungful of infected breath, carefully, slowly, so as not to set off another round of racking coughs. Slowly breathing in, she kept her eyes closed and tried to imagine the harsh fluorescent light hanging from the bare stone ceiling of the cell to be the sun. Her myriad agonies she repackaged as the well-earned scars of a hard day's surfing over exposed reef in the Mentawais. She had been there not twelve months ago, on a two-week vacation with her brother and some of his college friends.

(All gone.) They had surfed eight hours a day, and she had been pounded without mercy. Caitlin projected herself back there. She did not attempt to recall the entire trip, only one perfect ride, which she reconstructed from fragments of memory, recalling the kiss of warm tropical water flowing through her toes as she paddled out, the heat of the sun on her back, burning through a UV shirt, the salt spray in her mouth as she duck-dived through one broken wave after another, the tickle of bubbles she blew out through her nose while under the water, the ...

"Dreaming of your mother's apple pie, Caitlin?"

She was too nerve-dead and exhaused to startle. But inside she fell through negative s.p.a.ce, tumbling end over end. She knew who it was before opening her eyes. Her target.

Bilal Baumer.

Al-Banna.

"Are you an a.s.sa.s.sin, Willard?"

"What the f.u.c.k?"

"It's my Brando doing his Colonel Kurtz," said Baumer with a rich stagy laugh that bounced off the damp, moldy ceiling of her cell. He repeated the quote, amping up the grinding, nasal impersonation.

"Are you an a.s.sa.s.sin, Caitlin?"

(Okay. Just go with it.) She indulged him. "I'm a soldier."

"You're neither." He smiled, dropping out of character, but staying with the quote. "You're an errand girl sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill."

She smiled back at him, all b.l.o.o.d.y teeth and cold eyes, a feral creature that has learned the trick of imitating a human being. "Yeah. And you'll pay in full."

"I don't think so."

It was Reynard. He had changed into a fresh shirt and now stood behind Baumer, regarding her with restrained enmity.

"These theatrics, they weary me, Miss Monroe. As they must weary you, too, non? It is time, don't you think, that we shook off our roles. Me the nameless interrogator ..."

"Reynard'll do fine ..."

"You, the lone wolf, the hunter, who will never give in. It is all bulls.h.i.t. You have nothing to fight for."

"I didn't pick this fight," she said, suddenly angry. The sight of Baumer had brought back memories of Monique, and a more painful moral sensibility, a recognition of her abject failure to protect the girl.

"You sent your people in after me. I don't know why. Or I didn't, until he showed up."

"You still do not understand," Reynard a.s.sured her.

"What? So he belongs to you. He's a double? Big f.u.c.king deal."

"No," said Baumer. " I am not one of his."

Caitlin levered herself up a little farther, and fought down an urge to shield her naked body from Baumer. It would be an acknowledgment of weakness. She raised her cuffed hands to rub at her eyes. Her wrists were bound by plastic zip ties that had cut deeply into the skin. The wounds were raw in places, crusted over in others. Just another locus of pain to put in a box and hide far away at the back of her mind.

Her voice was faint and croaky, but she put as much strength into it as she could.

"What, you're telling me ol' Reynard here really is a cheese-eating surrender monkey? He's sold out to Osama?"

"No," said Baumer.

"So, what, he doesn't like cheese?"

The Frenchman squeezed his eyes shut and sucked in air through his nose.

"I have brought Bilal here to show you the futility of resistance," he explained. "The war you were fighting is over. Your country didn't lose. You lost your country. What is the point in clinging to ideas and loyalties that no longer exist? It is the definition of madness, Caitlin. Just tell us what you can of Echelon's operational structure in France and you can go. We understand you were no longer hunting Bilal. You are a stateless refugee. You need help. But we cannot do that until you help us."

Caitlin sucked her bruised and broken lower lip.

"Yeah, look, about that, weren't you the guy torturing me, the last few weeks? Why would I help you, exactly? And why would you let me go, when I did?"

Reynard sighed. "Caitlin. You are not an imbecile. Stop pretending otherwise. We are all serious people, and the work we do, the measures we must all take, they are serious, too. Non? You killed three innocent people during your cowboy shoot-out. You did not know that, did you? No, of course not. You could not know. But the postmortems put your bullets inside them, not ours."

She shrugged. He could be lying, probably was. Maybe she'd tagged that cyclist, but that was all, as best she recalled.

"Caitlin, we need to know what you know about Echelon. I understand that you work in cells. I am not expecting you to give me details you cannot provide. But even the most mundane of details might mean something to us while possibly meaning nothing to you. You have to understand, Caitlin. Your fellow agents are rogue operators now. They are more dangerous than ever. The situation outside is stable, but critical. There has been much unrest. Much distrust between peoples. Even bloodshed. Things have settled now, due to a great deal of effort and goodwill by all parties, but just one of your colleagues, carrying forward a single mission, hitting just one target, they could bring everything down. You must understand this. They must be stopped. For everyone's sake."

Bilal moved closer to the raised slab of concrete on which she lay.

He looked tired and stressed out, but he retained much of the easy, feline grace that she recalled from preop surveillance. He looked in much better shape than Reynard. An immature, irrational part of her wished that Monique could see him now, and could see that Caitlin had not been lying.

"Like you, Caitlin, I am merely a messenger," he said, sitting himself down carefully on the edge of her slab, keeping his eyes on her face and away from the bruises and wounds that covered her body. "I obey a Lord who is compa.s.sionate, who will make you a partner in peace or war."

Her mouth curved up in a vulpine sneer.

"Well, Billy, if you knew your Ibn Ishaq as well as your Coppola you would know the full context of that reference, that before whispering sweet nothings about peace and mung beans, the Prophet's companion Ubayy ibn Ka'b first spoke of settling matters with the sword at Khaybar, where the faithful would bring death to those who struggle against them. Or something like that. Maybe I'm getting confused with Conan the Barbarian. That was a great flick."

She had hoped to unsettle him, but Baumer nodded as though agreeing with her. He seemed almost pleased.

"So not just an errand girl, then," he said. "A scholar of the book, no less. In which case you would also know that Ishaq was not just a historian, but almost a prophet of sorts. A small-'p' prophet, if you like. What prescience he must have had, Caitlin, to write 'Evil was the state of our enemy so they lost the day. We slew them and left them in the dust. Those who escaped were choked with terror. A mult.i.tude of them were slain. This is Allah's war in which those who do not accept Islam will have no helper.' "

He reached out and brushed away a few matted strands of filthy hair that had fallen over her eyes. "I understand that you were a warrior, Caitlin Monroe. And you remain one. It is an honorable calling. But there is a time for war, and a time to put aside our swords and shields. The world has been wounded and it suffers gravely, Caitlin. We are all G.o.d's subjects, and we must bind up those wounds together. But we cannot do so without trust. That is why I am here, why 'Reynard' has invited me here, to make peace with my old enemies."

Her feet and hands were still bound, but if she could lock her arms around his head, she might still have a chance, with one wrenching pull, of separating his head from his spinal column.

"I can trust you, Caitlin, because I know you. Just like you know me. I know you must be calculating the odds of lashing out at me now. You must be measuring your strength against the damage and pain you have endured in here the last few weeks, perhaps weighing what residual skills you retain from all of your years of training, what strength of will you possess, even after Reynard has tried to break that will."

He grinned and flicked one eyebrow up in a gesture of camaraderie.

Then his hand shot out in a blur and he gripped one of hers, turning it back on her cuffed, bleeding wrists so quickly that a spike of pure white fire ran up her arms and she almost screamed, biting deeply into the inside of her cheek in a desperate attempt to draw her mind off the agony of the wrist lock.

The holy warrior known as al-Banna let her go.

"So, shall we stop f.u.c.king around?"

He drove a fist squarely into her face, a blow that detonated inside her head like sh.e.l.lfire. As the back of her skull hit the hard concrete slab, she felt his iron grip on her arms, wrenching her bodily over onto her stomach.

"Or shall we begin?" he snarled.

She tried to lash out with a feeble kick but only sc.r.a.ped more skin off her legs.

Another punch on the back of her neck stunned her, and she came to understand just how weakened she was by weeks of torture and illness. His hands clawed at her hips, dragging her toward him, confirming the worst.

The rape lasted only a few minutes, but she was still shaking hours later.

When Caitlin was a girl, maybe nine or ten years old, her family had traveled to California for a holiday, driving all the way from Charleston AFB, in South Carolina, where her daddy had been stationed with an airlift squadron. They had done all of the family things you do in California, visiting Disneyland, Hollywood, the beaches. But for her the standout memory had been climbing the bell tower on the Berkeley campus, just before the clock struck ten in the morning. The pealing of the bells was frighteningly loud, much louder than she had imagined it would be. She not only heard the thunderous clanging, she felt it, inside her chest and stomach, reverberating right down through her feet. The sensation, which was entirely unpleasant, remained with her ever after.

Lying on her slab, under a harsh flat white light in her cell at Noisy-le-Sec, she felt a powerful psychic echo of that same deep-body shock.

Her limbs quivered and shook, sometimes so violently that she resembled a victim of late-stage Parkinson's disease, but it was inside that she felt herself being torn apart by a quaking, shuddering violence that was entirely psychological.

n.o.body had entered the room since her violation. In her rational, calculating mind, the cold, mechanical killer's mind that had been honed to such a dangerous edge, she knew that that was just part of the "tactical questioning phase." But she could not rid herself of the burning shame and humiliation she felt. As hard as she tried to control herself, the awful, nauseating tremors reminded her of that day in the bell tower, which naturally led to thoughts of her family, especially her father, and with them came more unutterable shame.

She tried to focus on something simple, some goal she might start working toward, like driving a stiffened sword hand strike into Baumer's throat at the first opportunity, but that only reminded her how weak and unable to resist him she had been in the first place. She was curled into a tight, shivering fetal ball when the lights went out.

It was so unexpected, so out of the ordinary that Caitlin suffered a moment of total disorientation. She had been kept for so long in a cell flooded with bright artificial light that the sudden fall of darkness was terrifying, as though her eyes had been put out by sorcery. And then she heard something so familiar, but, like the sudden inky darkness, so unexpected, that her mind seized up for an instant.

Gunfire.

It was muted at first, far off in the distance somewhere in the underground maze of Noisy-le-Sec's interrogation cells. But it soon grew louder, and with it came more familiar sounds. Boots running. Men cursing. More gunfire, the ripping snarl of automatic weapons and the crash of large-bore single-shot rifles and pistols. A grenade exploded with a deafening roar in the enclosed tunnels outside her cell. She could see the flashes in the dark now and pick out individual voices, none of them familiar, all of them French.

Men ran past the heavy iron cage door locking her in. One stopped, briefly, and fired in through the bars, a short wild burst that largely missed her, although a ricochet did rake a painful burning graze along one hip. She groaned and rolled off the slab, letting herself fall as a deadweight to the floor. In the pitch darkness of the cell n.o.body could see her, and whoever had stopped to finish her off rushed on. Muzzle flashes soon accompanied the crash and zip of bullets, which reached a crescendo as more men rushed past her cell carrying their fight deeper into the complex.

In the blackness, Caitlin crawled into a blind corner, where she might just avoid getting shot, if she was lucky. She huddled there, naked, bleeding, and all alone, for what felt a long time.

PACOM HQ, Hawaii

"My G.o.d, it looks like the seventh level of h.e.l.l down there."

"Down there" meant the Valley of the Nile, for thousands of years a seat of human civilization, and now an eerie wasteland of oozing, radioactive mud dotted with the stubs of a few scattered ruins, both modern and ancient. To Ritchie it looked like nothing so much as an endless sea of black garden mulch littered with tens of millions of corpses being picked over by every vulture in northeast Africa. The few American recon teams that had ventured in described the buzzing of flies as being unbearably loud, something akin to a band saw. There were a handful of crazed survivors, one-in-ten-million lottery winners, of a sort. They were all, without exception, insane. The population of Egypt had been reduced to a few oasis dwellers deep in the Western Desert, and some wandering Bedouin, all moving south.

Ritchie stood grimfaced in front of the multipanel displays, many of them recently arrived from Qatar and the former headquarters of the coalition. The Pacific Command's war room was fully engaged monitoring the dozen or more chaotic conflicts now scattered across Ritchie's theater. This temporary facility had been constructed to maintain an overwatch of the former CENTCOM area, the nuclear wastelands of the Middle East. And as bad as the apocalyptic desolation of Egypt might have looked through the cameras of the two Global Hawks slowly circling above the Nile Valley and Delta, it was by no means the most horrifying vista arrayed in front of him.

On other screens smaller, more intimate, and, in a way, more dreadful images played out. In Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran the survivors were eating each other, literally. Thousands of burned and wounded but still living victims of the atomic strikes had swarmed out of the charred husks of their cities and fallen upon the rural hinterlands. With no reliable supplies of fuel, power, or even water in many areas, with almost no functioning transport system, the farming lands of those countries, already poisoned by fallout, had suffered an almost total collapse in their productivity. What little edible stores the smaller settlements had now needed to be defended against the hordes that fell upon them.

Ritchie had ordered that the worst of it not be allowed to run as a live feed. There was no tactical reason for having such grotesquerie on display. But as the senior officer he still had to view the unedited intelligence tape, which more often than not featured surveillance cover of village-level fratricide and cannibalism. It was heinous and terrible, disturbing at a cellular level, and it was repeated over and over again until he no longer possessed any moral capacity to react to the horror. It was all just pixels.

"Okay, I've seen enough," said General Franks.

The two men turned away as half of the video wall blinked out and switched over to standby feeds.

"I'm sorry," said Ritchie, as they left the room, dragging a tail of aides behind them. "Short of nuking the Israelis themselves I didn't see what I could ..."

"Forget about it," growled Franks. "They blindsided you. Me too. The warning I pa.s.sed on to Tehran just made it worse for them, meant they lost everything to the EMP. I guess we can count ourselves lucky they didn't fry us as collateral damage."

"There would have been consequences for that," said Ritchie.

"Yeah," Franks agreed. "Wouldn't have made any difference to me and my guys, though, would it? And that bulls.h.i.t target list. Brilliant really. But now they have to live with what they've done. And the Israelis know they can't do it again. The Russians will nuke them, and we won't lift a finger in their defense."

Ritchie said nothing to that. Three days after Armageddon, as the onesided atomic war had been christened by the Western press, an emergency session of the reconst.i.tuted UN Security Council in Geneva had pa.s.sed a unanimous resolution authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to respond to any further nuclear strikes. In contrast to the usual ambiguity surrounding such things, the Russian and Chinese amba.s.sadors had made it clear that that meant a ma.s.sive nuclear attack on Israel.

No other states had demurred.

"We still don't know where those other subs of theirs are hiding," said Ritchie.

"Not our problem," said Franks. "Not anymore. We're out of the world-policing business. Let the f.u.c.king French or the Brits find them. They have more to lose."

The small pod of military officers turned into a large briefing room that had been prepared for their arrival. Franks, the new acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs, waved everyone back to their seats as the a.s.sembled officers came to attention. He and Ritchie took their places at the head of the large conference table. There was no ceremony. Franks ordered the first briefer to the podium with a wave of his hand.

Colonel Maccomb nodded and smiled thinly at Ritchie as he moved around the table. The two men had seen a lot more of each other than their families in the last month. Ritchie had come to trust the intelligence man's judgment implicitly. He seemed able to read Jed Culver like an open book, for instance, and he'd warned of the possible Israeli strike days before it happened, which admittedly wasn't all that impressive, because the same predictions had been made many times in the press. But Maccomb had worked up a scenario predicting the attack almost exactly as it transpired. Unfortunately, the report had not made it to Ritchie's desk before Asher Warat arrived in his office. The admiral made certain that the much-chastened commander of the 500th Intelligence Brigade understood that he was never again to sit on any of Maccomb's reports if the colonel thought they should go up the line.