Without Warning (7 page)

“I think so, too.” Melton nodded. “But it doesn’t mean …”

“Hey, shut the fuck up!” somebody yelled from across the room. “It’s Saddam.”

The name acted like a spell, laying a hush over the room as Melton twisted around in his plastic chair to get a view of a television screen high on the wall behind him. The Iraqi leader appeared there, beaming like a pirate king who’d fallen ass-backward into a huge pile of both kinds of booty. The electronic watermark in the top right-hand corner of the screen belonged to the al-Jazeera network, and the report was in Arabic.

“What’s it saying?” somebody asked. Melton glanced back at al-Mirsaad for a translation, but before he could answer, an educated English voice rang out over the heads of the crowd. A handsome, well-groomed young man with South Asian features and an impeccable Etonian accent stood on a chair to get a clear view of the TV. Melton thought he recognized him. A BBC producer.

“It’s saying Hussein appeared briefly before a crowd at one of his palaces about forty minutes ago,” the man called out.

The footage showed a beaming dictator. Melton thought he was smiling so much that if he’d been a cartoon character the top of his head would have fallen off. Dressed in army greens and sporting a black beret, he fired six rounds from a pistol into the air as a small coterie of unctuously smiling generals watched and a no-doubt-handpicked crowd exploded into spasms of joy and tyrannophilia. Hussein began talking and an Arab voice-over cut in, after a few seconds, paraphrasing him. The English producer translated as the room full of journalists remained unnaturally still and quiet.

“He’s saying that Allah the merciful, the Almighty, has swept the crusaders from the very heart of their castle … from the very face of the earth which they defiled with their presence. He’s calling on General Franks to come out of his spider hole, to fight right now. He’s demanding that all of the Arab world rise up and throw out the invaders … and their dogs and puppets in Riyadh and Kuwait and Qatar … and he’s promising to lead a coalition of the fedayeen, the honorable, to drive the infidel and the apostate out of the holy lands.”

The Iraqi leader punched out a few more gunshots before spreading his arms wide and retreating inside the palace. Probably to haul ass to an underground
bunker before a Tomahawk caught him out in the open, thought Melton. He raised an eye at al-Mirsaad, and the Jordanian nodded, confirming the accuracy of the BBC man’s translation. Within a second the room was in an uproar again, even louder and somehow denser this time. Melton shifted in his seat and rolled his shoulders in a vain attempt to shrug off a growing sense of frustration.

He had no family back in the States. He was an only child, and his parents, who’d had him late in life, were both dead. For the first time in what felt a long and lonesome existence, he was glad to be on his own in the world. His work didn’t lend itself to stable relationships, and although he’d never had trouble finding women to date, none had ever lasted beyond a few weeks. Now, perversely, he was thankful for that. What must it be like for those poor fuckers around him who had family back home? A cursory glance around the canteen told him they were the ones whose voices were loudest, and whose faces were the most strained.

“What will you do, Bret?” asked al-Mirsaad.

He was about to throw out the standard reply of “my job” when it occurred to him what a ridiculous answer that would be. Did he even have a job anymore? His month’s salary and travel allowance were due to be automatically deposited overnight. Would they go through? He had no idea.

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly, raising his voice to be heard over the tumult. “What about you?”

Al-Mirsaad seemed almost ashamed.

“I have an assignment in Palestine,” he said. “They are celebrating there. Dancing in the streets. A big party. But soon I think there will be fighting, no?”

“Fighting?” muttered Bret Melton, as he contemplated the loss of his whole world, and the prospect of what remained falling to pieces beneath his feet. “I reckon so.”

A harried-looking man wearing a white coat over a dark suit appeared at the door and pushed past Maggie. Poleaxed by the TV news, she barely noticed him. The physician seemed to do his level best to ignore all of them, including Caitlin, even as he questioned her. A name tag on his white jacket read
COLBERT.

“Any pain? Discomfort? Anything?” he asked in French, addressing the query to his watch, which he was examining as though it was the most fascinating trinket in the world.

“Yes, Doctor,” she replied, in the same language. “When I tried to turn my head. My neck is very sore and I feel …”

She stopped short. To judge by the wide-eyed surprise on Monique’s face, the young woman had not known she could speak French.

Shit.

“Yes?” he asked, still in French. “You feel what?”

“My neck … is very stiff and sore,” she said, slowly, in English. “It hurts so much to turn it, I get sick. And I have a terrible ache in my head all the time.”

Monique’s hand fell away from hers. The young woman stared at her as if
she had grown a new limb. The others were still fixated on the BBC. More commercial satellite imagery, from all over the North American continent, was becoming available every minute. Forty-five minutes after the short burst of white noise that shut down all communication with the richest, most powerful nation in the world—and big chunks of the countries bordering her to the north and south—the truth was unavoidable. They were gone.

Caitlin had woken into some sort of Kafkaesque nightmare, and for a moment she clutched at the hope that it might just be an actual nightmare, or even a psychotic break, perhaps the result of an acquired brain injury.

“But you told us you could not speak French,” Monique said.

“Fookin’ ‘ell, lookit that.”

“Ms. Mercure, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you …”

Dr. Colbert was still mechanically checking his watch.

No shit, Sherlock,
thought Caitlin.

Monique, like the doctor, was also phase-locked in her own little world.

“But you
told
us. You told us you could not speak French.”

Caitlin stared at her, as the world broke up into jagged mirror shards of meaning and insanity. She improvised as best she could.

“I don’t speak it very well. It’s embarrassing to even try. You guys are like so hard-core about it, with all the eye rolling and the shrugging. I mean, you know,
lighten up.
“

The doctor saved her by cutting her off at that point, speaking in English.

“Excuse me. But my patient is very ill. Now is not twenty-questions time. Now is…”

“Fook me!”

Auntie Celia’s extra-loud cry finally brought everyone’s attention back to the TV, where a top-down image of Manhattan was displayed. Caitlin momentarily thought it might have been archival footage of the 9/11 attacks. Great plumes of black smoke curled away from collapsed high-rise buildings that burned at their cores like active volcanoes. But she quickly saw that there were too many of them, too widely spread over the island, at least eight or nine that she could count immediately.

“… if repeated across the country, the death toll might run into the millions,” read the anchorwoman.

“Everyone’s gone,” said Maggie in a flat voice. “This is fucked.
Where have they gone?”

“… At any one time many thousands of aircraft are aloft over the U.S., many of them above densely populated cities.”

The coverage switched to grainy video taken from a weathercam, somewhere high above Manhattan. As Caitlin watched, numb and disbelieving, a
Singapore Airlines jumbo jet plowed into the side of the Chrysler Building, one wing spinning offscreen.

Something snagged in Caitlin’s conscious mind. Something that she had almost missed.

“I’m ill?” she asked, suddenly picking up on the qualification the doctor had made. “I’m sick? Not just injured?”

Irrationally, she reached for the thought, hoping it might explain the psychotic bullshit on the television.

Dr. Colbert nodded distractedly. Now that he was watching the TV he seemed unable to wrench his attention away from it. The screen switched to a series of shots detailing the moments just before and after a giant tanker slammed into a wharf in a city she didn’t recognize. Two frames showed it heading straight in to the dockside. The next two captured the impact, with the front quarter of the supertanker crumpling back in on itself while the water around the vessel churned white and dockside cranes began to topple. A single frame caught the moment of detonation amidships, a blossom of white light spilling from the ruptured hull. And then the entire length of the supertanker was consumed by the birth of a dwarf star.

Maggie started swearing at the TV again, a stream of disconnected curses. Auntie Celia softly repeated the same thing over and over again.

“Fookin’ ‘ell… fookin’ ‘ell…”

Every time she said it, she unfolded and refolded her arms, like a malfunctioning animatronic figure. Monique, however, was refusing to even look at the screen anymore.

“You said you could not speak French at all,” she said.

Dr. Colbert shook his head like a dog emerging from water and waved her away with his clipboard, addressing himself only half to Caitlin. His eyes remained fixed on the catastrophe as it unfolded a few feet above the end of the bed.

“We have done scans while you were unconscious. You have a lesion on your hippocampus, a part of the brain intimately involved in the organization of memory. It may be a tumor,” he said in English. “But we need to take a biopsy to ascertain its nature. It may be serious. Much more serious than the injuries that brought you here. They are uncomfortable, but they can be dealt with.”

Caitlin Monroe had been an Echelon field agent for nearly five years. She had been intensively trained for three years before that. Her entire adult life she had lived in a crazy maze where every step she took, every corner she turned, she faced the possibility of betrayal and death. She had adapted to a contingent existence where nothing was taken for granted. She had faced her
own potential annihilation so many times that a doctor telling her she might be dying was completely passé. At least on a normal day.

But this was a thousand miles from being a normal day, and for once Caitlin found the idea of her life ending a completely novel and unsettling concept. It stuck in her mind, a barbed, immovable object that tugged painfully whenever she tried to pull at it.

“I’m dying?”

“No,” said Colbert. “But…”

The television went blank, the screen a dead black void.

“What the …”

Two words of plain white type appeared.

“Holy shit, it’s happing here now!” said Maggie.

“No!” said Caitlin, cutting off an outbreak of panic. They could all hear cries of alarm and distress from other rooms on the hospital floor. “Just wait.”

“Check the French news channels,” she said. “See if they’re still on. And the English sports channels.”

Monique abandoned the task of glaring at her to flip channels with the remote. As Caitlin had expected, the continental stations were still broadcasting, as were Sky Racing and the English football channels. Even the end of the world wouldn’t be allowed to interfere with interminable replays of last year’s Champions League.

“It’s nothing,” Caitlin assured them, rubbing at her throbbing temples with one hand, the one trailing slightly fewer sensor leads. “The government has taken control of the news broadcasters. It’s standard procedure in a national emergency. Just watch … And Doc … what’s your name again?”

“Colbert.”

“Dr. Colbert. I’m not dying?”

He gave the impression of a man greatly relieved to find himself back on familiar ground.

“Not yet. But you could, without proper treatment. You are not yet incapacitated but the lesion might well require intense therapy and very soon. But we can treat you as an outpatient for the moment… We need your bed.” He shrugged, smiling for the first time, almost apologetically.

A single, high-pitched tone filled the room for one second before the TV screen came back to life. Tony Blair was sitting at a desk in a book-lined room with a British flag prominently draped from a pole behind him. His eyes were haunted, and even beneath a very professional makeup job his skin looked blotchy and sallow.

“G … good evening,” he stammered.

Colbert wasn’t kidding about needing the bed. An hour later, still swaddled in bandages, trailing one rogue sensor lead that had become entangled with her unwashed hair, Caitlin Monroe was still in-character as Cathy Mercure, attempting to sign herself out of the Pitié-Salpêtrière while shaking off what she’d come to think of as her “secret squirrel detail.” The motley trio of professional antiwarmongers had closed around her like a fist as she’d dragged herself out of bed, dressed, and pushed her way through corridors now crowded with panicky idiots.