After America (55 page)

“She is his girlfriend?” he asked dubiously. “Such arrangements are frowned upon here, you know.”

“No,” Caitlin said. “His mother.”

“Ah, I see.”

Mirsaad seemed satisfied with that. After all, it wasn’t too far removed from the way he might go about tracking a difficult contact for a story. If you can’t find them, find the people around them.

“So should we not we go back to the cafe and follow her?” he asked.

Caitlin smiled.

“No. I have the last known addresses for her. Residential and work. That office has moved, but she moved with it. She was living in a council flat down the end of this street as of three years ago. My best information is that she’s still there. Makes sense. She hasn’t gone anywhere else. She’ll walk past in a few minutes if she is there. Fabia is a tough old bird, but even she won’t linger long after dark on her own. We can wait. Besides, there’s not really enough road traffic to hide in if we had to follow her.”

Caitlin dimly registered a call to prayer somewhere outside, muted by the closed windows of the little Lada. Here and there she could see groups of people, some small gatherings and others quite numerous, making their way into local prayer rooms. When she had last stalked Baumer, she’d built up an encyclopedic knowledge of Neukolln’s ethnic and religious topography. But she had enjoyed much greater freedom of movement back then, and so many things had changed in the intervening time. Thousands more residents had flooded in, for a start, refugees from both France and the charred wastelands of the Middle East, making the already cramped suburb almost intolerably overcrowded. There was very little chance that Fabia would have given up her small but precious council flat.

“So why not just talk to her now, when she walks past?” Mirsaad asked.

“Now is not the time, Sadie. I just need to confirm she’s here. Then we’re going back to your place. You have my thanks and your marching orders. I’m afraid when I come back in here tonight, I’ll be coming on my own.”

“But this is madness,” he protested, turning his body toward her in the cramped confines of the car. He had to release the seat belt to do so. “You have seen how it is here. You cannot hope to move around unaccompanied. For you it will end badly. Very badly.”

“Not for me, buddy,” she assured him as movement in her peripheral vision caught her attention. It was Fabia, walking with a woman who was wrapped up in a dull gray ankle-length coat and escorted by a middle-aged man in a baseball cap. They paid the Lada no heed as they walked past, deep in conversation, and Caitlin held up her hand to forestall a question from Mirsaad. The presence of the other two might prove an inconvenience if Fabia Shah had taken in lodgers or had family staying. It was very common for extended families to squeeze themselves into the tiny one-and two-bedroom apartments. But they stopped and said their good-byes about fifty yards down the street as the man and woman disappeared into a large whitewashed apartment block on the left. Fabia waved them off and resumed the marching stride Caitlin had noted earlier in the day. A forceful gait from a woman emanating a very strong “don’t-fuck-with-me” vibe.

Good for you, Mrs. Shah
, she thought to herself.

Mirsaad watched her, too. A professional in his own right, he said nothing until the woman had entered her tenement at the far end of the street.

“Okay,” Caitlin said. “That’ll do us for now. Let’s get you safely home.”

He started the car and drove toward Fabia’s place, looking for a spot to perform a U-turn, but a line of angle-parked cars ran the length of the street, blocking the maneuver. It did give Caitlin a chance to scope out the target address as they drove past. Another blank-faced, grimy tenement looking out on the world through small square windows, about half of them dark.

Mirsaad took them around to the left at the end of the road, and another quick left took them back up to Hermannstrasse, the main road back toward the Jordanian’s apartment. Within a minute they were approaching the lines of stalls and makeshift markets through which they had driven that morning. The place still hummed with the same level of energy, but it was now all directed toward breaking down and putting away displays, trestle tables, racks of clothes, and piles of cardboard boxes. Street vendors pushed handcarts through the controlled chaos, calling their wares, pushing for a few last euros before their customers finished packing and took themselves off to worship.

“Caitlin, please,” said the reporter. He was almost pleading with her now. “I would ask you to reconsider your plan to come back alone. Bret will never forgive me if anything happens to you. There are bands of young men who rove these streets at night. Dignity Patrols they call themselves. They are looking for women just like you. Women they would teach a lesson to.”

The car passed out of the oppressive patchwork quilt of tenements and into the small green belt to the south of Neukolln at last. Caitlin turned in her seat to face Mirsaad.

“Sadie, I’m not going to bullshit you. What I have to do tonight is going to be dangerous. But you have to believe me when I tell you it’d be worse if you came along. I know what I’m doing. This is where my talents shine, buddy. But if they shine too brightly, people get burned. I don’t want you to get hurt. You’ve done me a great favor today. I needed you. But now I need you to back off and trust me, in fact, to forget about me and this day altogether. Like I was never here.”

Mirsaad frowned as they passed by an Islamic culture center between Thomasstrasse and Jonasstrasse. From the uncovered heads of the many unaccompanied women gathering on the footpath outside, laughing and talking happily, it was most likely a reformist operation. He shook his head sadly.

“I fear, Caitlin, that you are much more than a police officer.”

She said nothing. An eloquent response in itself.

“Well, you have my number. If you need help, please do not give it a thought. Just call me and I will come as quickly as I can, but … you know, with the children and my wife to think of …”

“It’s your children and wife I am thinking of,” Caitlin said.

By eleven-thirty in the evening the streets were almost empty. Caitlin parked in a deserted multilevel garage a good five miles from Neukolln. She hauled a smart phone out of her kit and spent some time typing up a report for Dalby, which she dispatched via an encrypted link to Berlin Control. The file wiped itself from the phone after transmission. Her own mission brief she covered quickly, noting that she had located Baumer’s mother and would question her at the first opportunity. The bulk of her transmission, however, detailed her impressions of how much the economy of the shariatown relied on goods obviously looted from the United States. Given the fighting in New York and the resources Echelon and the other agencies were devoting to anti-piracy operations, she knew it would be of interest.

So much interest, it turned out, that the phone buzzed in her jacket pocket about ten minutes after she’d zapped off the data package. Caitlin keyed in the security code and waited while the device exchanged encryption sets with the retransmission facility at Berlin Control. After a final series of bleeps and bloops she heard Dalby in the earpiece.

“Got your message,” he said. “Most interesting, I must say. We knew a lot of the product you saw was available on the continent, but not in the significant concentrations you found. Any chance you might look further into the relevant supply chains for us?” he asked. “At your end, I mean.”

Caitlin frowned. “I could do that,” she said, taking care to remain aware of her surroundings while she spoke in vague generalities with her handler. The call was encoded with military-grade encryption, but there was no sense taking chances. “I do have other purchases to make while I’m here, though. They remain my top priority.”

“Of course. Of course,” Dalby said. “It’s just that we’ve been asked to pay particular attention to this market, given what’s happened of late, and you are well positioned to do that for us. Management and our offshore partners insist.”

“I see,” said Caitlin. “I’ll do what I can, then.”

“Good lass,” Dalby replied. “Talk soon.”

The connection was severed at his end. Caitlin sat there, fuming and trying to get her anger under control. They had sent her out here, undeclared, a deniable asset, and now they wanted to retask her onto a basic intelligence-gathering job that some desk Johnny from the embassy could handle. She was so pissed off that she had to remind herself not to lose situational awareness. The parking garage was empty and looked like it had not been used in a long time, with a lot of rubbish and dead leaf matter lying in pools of dank water all around her car. But that did not mean she was alone there.

She checked her watch. Coming up on midnight. Time to move. Were she in London, she could have relied on the curfew to keep any innocent bystanders out of harm’s way. But in Berlin, even though it was eerily quiet compared to her memories of the city, there were still a few groups of young people here and there, and she couldn’t immediately mark them all down as hostile. She took a long, looping approach to Fabia Shah’s apartment, driving out to the eastern edge of the airport and creeping into Mahlowerstrasse via a street lined with dead trees that ran past a sports field at the northeastern corner of Tempelhof. Like most open spaces in Berlin, it had been dug up and converted to market gardens, with rows of tomato stakes and cornstalks poking up through a light ground mist, contrasting with the stark, leafless branches of all the trees that had died in the pollution storms back in ‘03.

She parked the
BMW
under an elm with at least some scattered surviving foliage and killed the engine. She was dressed as before, mostly in black, but had discarded the head scarf borrowed from Mirsaad. A few lights burned here and there and the flickering blue-green shadow play of television screens illuminated a few more windows, but given the two thousand or more people all living within a minute’s walk of Fabia Shah, the place was deathly quiet. Just how the Dignity Patrols liked it, she supposed.

Caitlin waited ten minutes behind the X5’s tinted glass, one of the Russian machine pistols within easy reach on the passenger seat. A couple of lights flicked out while she maintained her vigil, and one of the late-night TV addicts finally gave up and went to bed. Just after twelve-thirty she moved, holstering the automatic with its twin in the combat harness under her leather jacket and taking a set of lock picks from the small storage bin between the front seats. She set the car’s defenses and stepped out onto the grass footpath, closing the door softly behind her. Less than a minute later she was through the front door of the block where Fabia had been living four years ago, and within another a minute she had picked the lock on the letter box bearing a small handwritten name tag:
SHAH
.

A gas bill and a flyer from a shoe shop personally addressed to Baumer’s mother lay uncollected inside.

Caitlin took a few seconds to listen to the building, sending her finely honed senses out along hard echoing corridors, up stairwells, past doors secured by metal grilles. She faintly heard two babies crying and a couple deep in argument. A television droned on somewhere. Repeats of
Star Trek
dubbed into German to judge by the faint strains of the famous theme music she was able to hear.

But there appeared to be nobody moving about. Nobody lying in wait.

She glided up a set of stairs to her left, empty-handed but ready to go gunshot. On the third floor, she ghosted along the hallway until reaching the right door. Heavy steel bars protected the entrance, but the lock was a primitive arrangement, easily neutralized in about a minute and a half. The cheap hollow-core wooden door behind it took less than half that time, but it was still an anxious interlude, kneeling in front of the handle with a tension wrench and half diamond and hook pick, obviously up to no good.

She was glad to get through the locks and, after gently unlatching the front door, into the apartment. A short, darkened entry hall lay in front of her, with a doorway into a laundry and bathroom to her immediate left. She could smell detergent and the warm, almost comforting odor of tumble-dried clothes in there. Caitlin took a good two minutes to let her eyes adjust to the darkness. She had rejected the idea of using goggles for fear of being blinded should Fabia suddenly flick on a light.

It did not take long to begin picking shapes and objects out of the charcoal gray dimness. A pair of windows in a lounge room directly in front of her appeared to open onto an internal courtyard. She unholstered one of the machine pistols and fitted the long rubberized tube of the specially designed Reflex Suppressor. With the stock unfolded and resting against her armpit, she felt confident enough to move into the main area of the flat.

A small kitchen sat to the left, just beyond the laundry and looking out over a tiny open-plan living area. There were no more doors on that side and only one to the right. The bedroom. The assassin moved slowly, not even pushing dust motes in front of her. She controlled her breathing and allowed her senses to flow outward in a meditative technique she had learned while studying aikido in Japan. Rather than focusing attention down to a single point and letting the world fall away, she threw open the doors of all her senses and allowed everything to rush in. She could smell the meal Fabia had cooked for herself hours ago. Taste the spices at the back of her mouth. Hear a clock ticking and a woman breathing. Feel the thin, threadbare carpet beneath the soles of her boots. See all the depressing details of the flat’s spartan furnishings and the slight phosphorescent glow of a small TV screen on a sideboard crowded with photo frames. She knew that if she took the time to inspect those photographs, she would almost certainly find in some of them, smiling and innocent, the younger face of the man who had raped her back in Noisy-le-Sec.

She ghosted forward.

One hand reached out for the door, and she carefully pushed it open, ready to shoot if necessary. Instantly she was struck by the scent of Baumer’s mother. Cold cream. A harsh perfume. Soap. And perhaps an apple-scented shampoo. The woman’s breathing did not falter. She snored slightly and ground her teeth together, but Caitlin could tell that she was truly asleep.