After America (22 page)

Dalby didn’t spare the warning sign a glance as he sped along the winding country road. They had seen dozens of such posters since entering the restricted military area but Dalby appeared to know his way around, skirting temporary roadblocks and turning down laneways and roads in defiance of the direst warnings.

“Do you come through here a lot, then, Mr. Dalby?” Caitlin asked.

“The last few years, yes, Ms. Monroe. And I spent a lot of time here as a young squaddie many, many years ago. It’s a miserable place, truth be known. But convenient.”

She nodded in an abstract way, staring at the fresh brown scars of tank tracks that crisscrossed a gently sloping hill to their left. She’d seen paratroopers drop onto a similar rise from a flight of C-17s shortly after they’d entered the Plain an hour earlier and had immediately thought of her husband, who had once run around jumping out of perfectly good aircraft for a living, perhaps even around this very part of the countryside. Her anger flared again. Bret had done a great job protecting Monique, but he had been very badly injured in doing so, losing half of one finger to a bullet and sustaining a fracture from the impact of another bullet on his right leg, along with a badly chipped elbow and a broken wrist from where he’d fallen and rolled. It was a mercy that Monique had come through unscathed, but a cold fury still washed over Caitlin when she thought about how it so easily could have turned out differently. Thinking of Monique, she suddenly realized how heavy and painful her breasts felt, the awareness arriving along with an unexpected moment of grief. She knew she would not be seeing either of them very soon, possibly not for weeks.

She would never breast-feed her daughter again.

She pressed her lips together tightly and stared out the window, trying to disconnect herself from any feelings that might dull her edge or distract her. Grief and mourning were not what her family needed.

“Dear me, here comes some ‘appy campers, then,” Dalby muttered as they rounded a blind corner and found themselves driving toward the rear of a double file of soldiers, heads down, tramping along the roadway in the cold rain. Dalby slowed and eased over to the side of the road, keeping a few feet of clearance between them. The troops were on Caitlin’s side of the car, and she tried not to stare openly at them as they inched past. There looked to be about two platoons’ worth of riflemen carrying a mix of SA-80s and M16s, most of them very young, very wet, and very, very disenchanted with the world.

“Conscripts, I’ll wager,” Dalby said. “Probably first few weeks in by the look of them.”

She nodded without comprehension. They did look young, but apart from that, why they’d be draftees rather than volunteers was beyond her. She assumed Dalby had an eye for such things, however, having been there himself.

“And this’ll be the slave driver in chief.” He grinned, as another young man, tall and seeming to revel in the unpleasant conditions, peeled away from the head of the column and stepped into the roadway in front of them, holding up his hand. The other men kept trudging forward.

“Pass me the clipboard, would you, Ms. Monroe?” Dolby asked as they pulled up alongside the officer. “In my experience, there’s no situation a fellow cannot handle with a clipboard and a sense of entitlement.”

The lieutenant in dripping wet battle dress twirled one finger to signal to Dalby that he should roll down his window. A pair of Warrior infantry fighting vehicles passed by, drowning out the officer briefly.

“Good morning, Lieutenant. Not a bad day for it, eh?” Dalby chirped as he passed over the clipboard without being asked.

The lieutenant wiped a stream of rainwater from the brim of his helmet, only to see it reappear moments later. He leaned forward, dangerously close to dripping into Dalby’s vehicle. “An excellent day for it, sir, and what would you be doing driving around my firing range?”

“Well, if you’ll read the top sheet, you’ll see it’s not all yours, Lieutenant … Hunter. We do have to share, you know.”

The officer, who spoke with the polished accent of the English upper class, turned down the corners of his mouth as he inspected the travel pass and Home Office authorization.

“I see,” he said somewhat despondently, almost as if he’d been looking forward to roaring through somebody other than his own men. “So it’s the village you’re off to, Mister Dalby and … Miss …”

“Monroe,” said Caitlin, sitting forward slightly. “Caitlin Monroe.”

“A consultant to the Home Office,” Dalby offered.

The lieutenant frowned. If he cared about her American accent, he gave no indication. “She’s not listed on the authorization. You’ll have to wait here while I check with my superiors.”

“She wouldn’t be,” Dalby said, letting some of the pleasant tone drop out of his voice. “If you took the trouble to read the note, you’d see that I’m authorized to transport whomever I damn well please wherever it takes my fucking fancy, Lieutenant. If I feel like driving this vehicle right up your ass and parallel parking it in the voluminous spaces there within, then that’s exactly what I shall do. And I believe your superiors would concur with that assessment. Luckily for you, however, I’m not so inclined. I just want to carry on to Imber.”

Lieutenant Hunter, who looked like he was chewing on a particularly sour dog turd by that point, sniffed in distaste. A drop of rain hung on the tip of his patrician nose. He wiped the brim of his helmet again, spattering a bit of misery onto Dalby’s coat.

“Imber. I see. Well, no need for attitude, sir. This is a dangerous part of the country, you know.”

“Everywhere is a dangerous part of the country nowadays, laddie. So if you don’t mind, I’ll have those papers back and be on my way.”

The rain was thickening, and the soldier contrived to get quite a bit of water into the warm, dry interior of the little Mercedes as he tossed the clipboard back into Dalby’s lap.

“Drive carefully, sir.” The lieutenant smiled. “Accidents do happen.”

Dalby snorted and shook his head as he raised the automatic window and placed the travel papers on the floor behind Caitlin’s seat.

“There’s a big puddle up ahead,” she said. “If you time it right, you could give him a hell of a dunking.”

Dalby smiled.

“Childish but as satisfying as that would be, Ms. Monroe, I shall resist. I do have to pass through here quite a lot, and although Imber is our patch of the manor, it doesn’t do to get the tin hats offside. A simple life, Caitlin. I crave a simple life. Do you mind me calling you Caitlin, by the way? That was rather presumptuous, wasn’t it?”

“No, you’re fine,” she said, trying to inject some warmth into her voice. It was difficult with the chill she felt settling around her soul. A killer’s cold detachment. “And thank you for looking after Bret and Monique, by the way. I was a bit out of it back at the hospital. I didn’t really think to say thank you for all you’ve done. I’m sure it must have been a hassle organizing everything on such short notice. And I know that resources are always an issue these days.”

“Think nothing of it,” he said as he drove carefully past the army officer. “Things are always tight; you’re correct. Those poor bloody squaddies of his, the conscripts at least, they wouldn’t be earning enough for a decent punt on ciggies and pints at the mess. No wonder they look so bloody sorry for themselves. Bloody Russians pay their troopers better than that. But there’s money for some things, and our little operation remains flush.”

Caitlin wondered why he never mentioned Echelon by name. It wasn’t as if the network of agencies, all of them based exclusively within the English-speaking world, was a state secret. Even Monique, the French girl after whom her daughter was named, had known something of it, gleaned from the pages of the French press before the Disappearance and the intifada. Perhaps Dalby was just an Old World kind of guy.

“Not too far now,” he announced a few minutes later as they drove past a plain white two-story building. It had no windows or doors, just empty spaces letting in the weather. She assumed it must be the first of Imber’s ghost buildings. The village had been taken by the army way back in 1943 to be used as a training facility for the invasion of mainland Europe, and although the inhabitants of that time had been promised they could return to their homes, the army had kept the place for itself.

“So this place has been off limits for what, sixty-three years now?” she asked.

Dalby made a gentle left-hand turn toward a thin stand of elm trees sheltering two more boxy-looking buildings like the one they’d just passed. Without windows or any of the usual signs of habitation, the empty shells looked entirely forlorn, although Caitlin assumed the army must have spent some time maintaining them. Structurally they appeared very sound, which should not have been the case after more than half a century of exposure to the elements.

“Back in the old days,” Dalby said, “before the Wave, the army opened the village up to sightseers quite a bit. After things changed, though, the Imber Range went dark again. Army still uses the village hulks for specialist training, but we have our own reception facility here, in the old pub, and first dibs on the rest of the place. It’s well away from prying eyes and secure naturally, being stuck in the middle of sixteen thousand hectares of live firing range space.”

The rain had eased to a light drizzle as they swept into the main street of the village. Leaf litter and food wrappers blown by the morning’s wind plastered the lower floors of the first structure past which they drove, a long rectangular building with a steeply pitched green roof. It was a featureless, rather ugly structure, not at all what Caitlin would have expected of a well-preserved English village. She caught a glimpse of a church steeple off to the southwest, tucked in behind a thick screen of oak and chestnut trees. The tall gray spire appeared to be leaning slightly off center, and she wondered if the army had maintained it to the same standard as the rest of the village.

“That’s Saint Giles through there,” said Dalby, who seemed to enjoy taking the role of tour guide. “A rather lovely old place it is, with some very fine wall paintings. From Shakespeare’s day, you know. About four or five hundred years old that makes it. Heritage listed.”

“Does it get used?” she asked.

“Used to, once a year. But lightning struck the steeple. In the year of the Wave, in fact. It’s been closed up ever since. Here we go, then.”

He swung the car hard left past a row of five stark and somber-looking whitewashed buildings, all of them exposed to the weather. The narrow gravel driveway opened up into a generous parking lot in which sat two civilian cars and an army Land Rover. A couple of soldiers, much older and more grizzled than the draftees they had passed earlier, walked from one building shell to another, cupping their hands around lit cigarettes as they went. Neither gave Dalby’s car more than a glance, and he made nothing of their presence.

“We’re over here in the old inn,” he said as the car crunched to a halt in front of a long, low-rise building that obviously predated the council flats they had seen.

“Looks old enough that Shakespeare might have stayed a night himself,” she said.

“Mmm. Would have had a thatched roof and all once upon a time. The walls are genuine wattle and daub. You can even see the handprints of the original builders here and there, and there’s some quite charming touches inside, old reed lamps and suchlike, but I’m afraid the accommodations are quite basic otherwise. It’s hardly boutique these days.”

She followed Dalby out of the car and in through the old wooden doors. A fat, cold drop of rainwater plopped right on the end of her nose. Inside, the outline of the old public bar was visible on the dark wooden floor as a lighter area. Very little else remained of the building’s history. Most of the long rectangular space was taken up with cheap government desks, plastic chairs, and a few filing cabinets. Dalby nodded to a middle-aged black woman typing at a computer. She smiled back but didn’t break rhythm at the keyboard.

“They downstairs, then, Jude?”

“Yes, Mister Dalby. In the old keg room.”

“Thanks, luv. Don’t forget to take your lunch break today. Can’t have you going all light-headed on us, can we?”

It must have been an old in-joke. Jude snickered and rolled her eyes but carried on.

“If you’ll follow me, Caitlin, our Mister Richardson is down here.”

She expected to follow him into the rear of the inn, but Dalby picked his way between a couple of desks, bent over, and hauled up a trapdoor. From its position relative to the outline of the old bar, she assumed it must have been where the cellarmen passed up supplies.

“The keg room?” she asked.

“Aye,” Dalby confirmed as he swung around and went backward down a very steep wooden ladder. “Watch how you go, Caitlin. It’s not an easy climb for an old duffer like me or a woman in your condition.”

“My condition is fine,” she said as she swung over the hole in the floor and slid down the ten-foot drop with her boots on the outer rails of the ladder and her hands only lightly gripping the side. Her breasts did ache a bit as she landed, but she would never admit that to anyone.

“Indeed, my mistake, then,” Dalby said with one raised eyebrow. “Through this way.”

Huge oaken barrels still lined two walls of the cellar, and dusty bottles, some hidden away behind spiderwebs, filled two wooden shelves along a third. A couple of men in casual clothes playing cards at a fold-up table greeted Dalby and waved him through to the end of the cellar space, where a wedge of yellow light spilled over the flagstones from a room obscured from view by an especially large wooden cask.

One of the two guards winked and blew a kiss at Caitlin as she walked past.

She stopped and smiled warmly, picked up his cards, and cocked an eye at his mate.

“He’s holding both red queens, a nine of hearts, and fuck all,” she said.

The other man roared with laughter as she walked on.

Dalby stood waiting for her at the entrance to a small, damp room that ran off the end of the cellar. Illuminated by a naked lightbulb, it contained two silent hovering guards and one chair, on which sat Richardson, the man who’d tried to kill or take her family a few hours earlier. Richardson was shaking and attempting to blink away runnels of fear sweat before they stung his eyes. His dreadlocks were matted with mud and leaves, and the right leg of his jeans had been cut away. A dirty, bloodstained bandage encircled his upper thigh, and his left arm had been roughly splinted after she’d broken it at the elbow.