After America (63 page)

She was down.

The artillery barrage was short-lived but effective. Caitlin disposed of her chute and free-fall helmet, allowing her to fit the night vision goggles more comfortably before she moved out for the first objective, the Plaza Hotel. She wasn’t challenged as she pushed through the park. Her briefing notes had predicted she would find the area unoccupied. The open space was simply too dangerous for insurgents or pirates to move through without being interdicted from the air or by an artillery bombardment such as the one the army had used to cover her landing. Central Park was very much a no-man’s-land.

She stuck to the paths as she ran, moving forward in small increments to avoid running headlong into trouble, should there be any. If she had been confident of her footing, it would have been better to avoid the pathways, but so much of the park was overgrown and pitted with shell holes that she could not risk it. It took her nearly half an hour to make her way to the tumbledown ruins of a little stone bridge near the pond at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. She could smell the freshly churned earth and the metallic burning tang of high explosives from the diversionary attack. A few flames licked at the ruins of the old carousel off in the distance, but the persistent drizzle had put out most of the fires.

Caitlin could see that the Plaza was occupied. It wasn’t ablaze with light or crawling with activity, but here and there a few rooms appeared to be lit with the dim flickering of candles, and once or twice she saw figures outlined in those windows. In the fifteen minutes she lay concealed in the rubble of the old bridge, she saw three men leave the building and head downtown; two arrived at a trot, jogging through the Pulitzer Fountain. Her briefing documents had speculated that the Plaza was being used as some sort of rest and recreation facility. It had not been targeted partly because of the White House policy of preserving as much of the city’s infrastructure as possible but also because there were some indications of Americans and possibly other nationals being held captive there.

To Caitlin that felt a lot more like Baumer than this whole bullshit Jolly Roger routine. It would amuse that rapist motherfucker no end to fill his camp brothel with prisoners taken locally. It would probably also help establish his credibility as a player with some of the cruder gang lords he had recruited as muscle. It seemed as good a place as any to begin the search for him. She checked her watch. The sky was lightening just perceptibly in the east. She had maybe half an hour until dawn and then seven hours until the U.S. Air Force came through and pounded this place flat. Well, maybe not the Plaza, but definitely any other concentrations of enemy personnel in the midtown area. She had to move quickly.

Some tree cover had survived on the far side of the Pond, and Caitlin used it to safeguard her approach to the hotel. The hammering of weapons fire, the dull crump of air-dropped munitions, and the continual drumming of artillery all drifted up from the lower end of the island, helping to mask her approach as she double-timed it from one scrap of cover to the next, looping around from her hiding place to the southern edge of the Park. Central Park South was jammed with the wreckage of hundreds of vehicles that had piled into one another when they lost their occupants. She perched behind a yellow cab that had been knocked on its side by a truck, taking a few minutes to scope out her final approach.

She didn’t intend to effect an entry directly into the Plaza. Without knowing the disposition of the enemy inside, that was asking for trouble. A much smaller building abutted the hotel on Central Park South, however, and after observing it for a few minutes through the night vision goggles, Caitlin felt confident enough that it was empty to use as her way in. It appeared as though the roof of the building, housing apartments, perhaps, ought to give her access to the fifth or sixth floor of the hotel via a window. She unholstered her pistol and took a moment to fix the suppressor that Gerty had given her back at the London Cage. With the merest hint of gray, dismal dawn pushing back the shroud of night, Caitlin closed in on her quarry.

New York

“Go ahead. Try again. See what happens.”

The man glared at Caitlin over the fat black tube of the silencer-suppressor. A girl was huddled on the bed with her knees drawn up under her chin and a white cotton sheet pulled tightly around her. Her eyes were large with fear, flicking from Caitlin to the dead man bleeding out on the carpet just inside the door of the hotel room.

“No, please,” Caitlin said to the man. “I mean it. Try and call for help again. It’s been all of two minutes since I killed a man. I could use the practice.”

He looked European, possibly from the south. Caitlin gestured with the silenced pistol, and he raised his hands above his head.

“Hands behind your head,” she said. “Weave your fingers together and get down on your knees.”

“Who … who are you?” the girl asked in a quivering voice.

Caitlin did not take her eyes or her aim off the man kneeling in front of her. “Well, I’m not the hotel dick, sweetheart. Why don’t you get yourself dressed. You’ll need warm clothes and decent walking shoes if you can find a pair.”

“Are you here to rescue me?” The hope in her voice teetered on the verge of being both pathetic and heartbreaking.

“No,” Caitlin answered. “Rescues are totally not my thing. But if you want to slip out the window when I’m done and try to get away, be my guest. You’re a prisoner here, right?”

She could hear the girl moving off the bed. Her voice still sounded shaky and upset, which was only to be expected given that she had just witnessed Caitlin blow a man’s brains out.

“We’re all prisoners here,” she said. “There’s a bunch of us. But they keep us apart, don’t like us talking, I guess. Are you going to help the other girls?”

Covering her prisoner, she moved a few feet to the left, where she could keep the young woman in sight. “No,” she said. “I’m not going to help the other girls. I won’t be here that long. And if you want to live, you’ll get going, too.”

“Are you going to kill him or something?” the young woman asked as she climbed into a pair of jeans she took from a dresser drawer.

“That depends on how helpful he is,” Caitlin lied.

Her captive bristled at that. “You will get nothing from me, you whore.”

“Dude, as the guy who was raping this young lady not five minutes ago, I think it’s a little fucking disingenuous of you to be casting aspersions on my moral standing.”

He frowned, apparently having trouble following her.

“Disingenuous. It means do as I fucking say or I’ll shoot you in the face.”

He opened his mouth to retort, and Caitlin did indeed shoot him, but in the hip, striding over quickly to launch one booted foot into his solar plexus as he spun to the floor. The snap kick drove all the air from his body, cutting off the scream that had begun to form in his throat. The woman cut off her own shriek of horror by jamming a couple of knuckles into her mouth. Caitlin quickly glanced at the door through which the bodyguard she’d killed just before had come, but she heard nothing in the hallway outside.

“Do you mind if I ask your name?” she asked in as soothing a voice as possible.

“Donna,” replied the woman. “Donna Gambaro.”

“Okay, Donna. Do you know if there are other guards on this floor? I haven’t had a chance to check it out. Lucky you, yours was the first room I tried. That’s why you need to close your windows. Even in a nice hotel like this one.”

The Gambaro woman visibly attempted to compose herself. A train of emotions ran over her face. Fear. Shock. Rage. All them morphing together. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, pointing at the man who’d been using her for his pleasure.

“If you’re worried about him hollerin’, don’t,” she said. “You hear screaming like that all the time around here.”

Caitlin took a second to examine the woman properly. She was half dressed now, buckling up her jeans and adding a gray T-shirt. This chick was not going to wait around for a second chance.

“So this was your room, Donna? This is where you stayed the whole time? Did they let you out at all? I’m trying to get a sense of what’s waiting beyond that door, is all.”

Donna pulled on an old jacket. It didn’t fit and looked as though it might have belonged to a man.

“They caught me a month ago,” she said, her voice faltering. “I was working salvage with my brother in Toronto. We were … freelancers.”

Caitlin shrugged. What did she care about somebody looting a dead Canadian city?

“Your brother?” she asked.

“He’s gone. They killed him when they took me.”

Donna Gambaro looked like she was thinking about giving her captor a couple of kicks in the head to settle some of that debt.

“I’m sorry about your loss,” said Caitlin, “but I have to ask for your help. I need you to focus, Donna. Have you been out of your room at all? Can you tell me about the setup here? How many men? What sort of security?”

Caitlin could see tears welling in the woman’s eyes and knew she had very little time before she fell apart. She decided to try a different line of approach.

“I don’t suppose you know the name of our friend here, do you?”

“I’ve heard his bodyguard call him Mister ‘You Chick’ or something,” she said. “Something kinda foreign like that.”

Keeping her gun trained on the man, who was moaning and snaking about in great pain, Caitlin powered up the
PDA
Velcroed to her gun arm.

“Sounds like ‘You Chick,’ you say? All right, let’s see, then. That is ringing a bell for me.”

She tried a few spelling combinations until the database threw up a possible match.

“Jukic? Does that sound right? Danton Jukic?”

He groaned as though she had struck him again, and Donna nodded enthusiastically as she wiped away a few tears.

“That’s him. Rat bastard ass fucker. Not so fucking tough now, are you? Huh?”

Caitlin shifted position slightly to put herself between the two of them. Jukic was sweating profusely, and deep body tremors had taken hold of him. He was having trouble keeping his moans quiet.

“Are you like a cop or something?” Donna asked. She pointed at the
PDA
. “That looks like one of those computers they used to have in cop cars.”

“No, I’m not a cop. They don’t get to shoot people on general principles. Or torture them. You hear that, Jukic? We’ll be moving along with the torture in a minute. Just so you know.”

His groan was noticeably louder, and he kicked out with one leg as though trying to push himself toward the door. Donna Gambaro fetched a pair of running shoes from the same dresser drawer in which she had stored her jeans. She sat on the end of the bed to pull them on. Caitlin could see that her hands were shaking, but she was doing her best. She kept the gun on Jukic as she spoke to Gambaro.

“Do they have guards in the hallways, Donna, do you know?”

Donna paused in the job of trying to untangle a knotted shoelace.

“Not always, no,” she said. “Only the big guys get bodyguards. Sometimes some of the guys who came through here were just fighters or soldiers, you know. They got sent here as a reward. I talked with some of them. They weren’t all bad. Some were pigs, of course. You never knew what you were getting. But that’s men all over, isn’t it? Anyway, no. There’s not always guards in the halls.”

Caitlin fetched a couple of photographs of Bilal Baumer from one of her pockets.

“You ever see this guy come in?” she asked.

“No,” Donna said, after a brief look. She began searching the drawers, as if looking for something lost in the clothing. Jukic levered himself up on one elbow and gave the impression of a man who was about to start protesting again, leading Caitlin to drive another kick into his guts to quiet him down.

“That’s good to know,” she said. “Now, Donna Gambaro, you look to me like someone who can handle herself. That’s good, too. The thing is I have to ask old Jukic a few questions, and … well, things are probably going to get ugly. Very ugly. I’m afraid I can’t let you go until I have the answers I need. When I get them, we can both leave together, out the same window I came in. I’ll be on my way then. But if I were you, I’d probably get my ass hunkered down somewhere nearby as quickly as possible. Do you understand?”

“Miss,” Donna Gambaro said as she located a locket that obviously meant something to her, “I don’t know who you are, but I used to wait tables at Hooters. I know when things are about to get ugly and when it’s time to go. You won’t need to tell me twice. Are you going to torture him?” she asked, pointing at Jukic.

Caitlin took the fighting knife from the scabbard in her boot. “A little bit,” she said.

In fact, she hardly needed to hurt him at all. Jukic, an Albanian, who was listed in her files as running a medium-size pirate crew of mostly Balkan origins, gave up the information she needed a few seconds after she cut off the tip of his little finger. She had thought she was going to have to harvest at least half of his digits, but perhaps kneeling on his hip wound as she made the cut helped.