John Birmingham - Without warning

Beatings she could handle, and she had even begun to goad her captors, holding on to 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 in hanging on for the sake of the mission. There was no mission, and there would be no deliverance.

Caitlin Monroe was refusing to break, simply because that’s all she had left. The only choice that remained in her life was how she left it.

She released a lungful of infected breath, carefully, so as not to set off another round of racking coughs. Slowly breathing in, she kept her eyes closed and tried to imagine that the harsh, fluorescent light hanging from the bare stone ceiling of the cell was the sun. Her myriad agonies she repackaged as the well-earned scars of a hard day’s surfing over some exposed reef in the Mentawis. She’d been there not twelve months ago, on a two-week vacation with her brother and some of his college friends. They had surfed for eight hours a day and she’d 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 exhausted to startle. But inside she fell through negative space, tumbling end over end. She knew who it was before opening her eyes. Her target. Bilal Baumer.

Al Banna.

‘Are you an assassin, Willard?’

‘What the fuck?’

‘It’s my Brando doing Colonel Kurtz,’ laughed Baumer, a rich, stagy laugh that bounced off the damp, mouldy ceiling of her cell. He repeated the quote, amping up the grinding, nasal impersonation. ‘Are you an assassin, 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 bloody teeth and cold eyes, a feral creature that had learned the trick of imitating a human being. ‘Yeah,’ she sneered, ‘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” will do fine…’

‘You, the lone wolf, the hunter, who will never give in. It is all bullshit. You have nothing to fight for.’

‘I didn’t pick the 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 told her.

‘What? That he belongs to you – he’s a double? Big fucking deal.’

‘No,’ said Baumer. ‘I am not one of his.’

Caitlin levered herself up a little further, and fought down an urge to shield her naked body from Baumer. It would be an acknowledgement 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 had. ‘Okay, so you’re telling me ol’ Reynard here really is a cheese-eating surrender monkey. He’s sold out to Osama, right?’

‘No.’

‘You mean he doesn’t like cheese?’

The Frenchman squeezed his eyes shut and sucked air in through his teeth. ‘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, if 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 post-mortems put your bullets inside them, not ours.’

She shrugged. He could be lying, probably was.

‘Caitlin, we need to know what you know about Echelon,’ he went on. ‘I understand you work in cells, and 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, that 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 seemed tired and stressed out, but he retained much of the easy, feline grace that she recalled from pre-op 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 she had not been lying.

‘Like you, Caitlin, I am merely a messenger,’ he said, sitting himself down carefully on the edge of the concrete surface, keeping his eyes on her face and away from the bruises and wounds that covered her body. ‘I obey a Lord who is compassionate, 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 struggled 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 replied. ‘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 multitude of them were slain. This is Allah’s war in which those who do not accept Islam will have no helper.’”