Nothing.
She approached the bedroom with much less stealth this time, walking in and sitting on the mattress next to her mark.
"Fabia," she said in a conversational tone, not too loud and softened with a hint of kindness. "Fabia, it's time to wake up."
The woman stirred and gulped air. She stopped snoring but didn't rouse herself.
"Fabia," Caitlin repeated. "Wakey wakey…"
Jesus, she thought, I've been in England too long.
"Fabia, wake up. We need to talk now. About Bilal. I need to find Bilal."
"Bilal? Is that you?"
"No, Fabia. I am a friend of Bilal's. I need to find him. He needs my help."
The woman appeared to struggle against unconsciousness, lifting her head from the pillow, blinking her eyes slowly. She groaned and spoke in a slurred voice.
"Too tired."
"I know you're tired, Fabia. Just tell me where Bilal is and you can sleep. Is he here? In Neukolln?"
"Bilal…"
Caitlin suppressed her frustration. Questioning a drugged subject was never ideal, but Fabia would not raise an alarm and would remember this encounter only as a dream in the morning.
"Fabia, I need to see Bilal. Where is your son? Where is Bilal? Do you know?"
"Tired…"
"Where is Bilal, Fabia? His friends need him. Where is Bilal?"
"Not here," the woman said, speaking so faintly that Caitlin had to lean forward.
"What did you say, Fabia? Is Bilal here? In Berlin?"
"Bilal is gone," she said as the drug broke down more of her defenses. "He's gone away."
"Where?" Caitlin asked, containing her impatience. "Where has Bilal gone?"
"America."
Caitlin's surprise was so total that she nearly missed the snick of the door latch in the entry hall.
Baumer was in America.
But where?
The question answered itself.
He had to be in New York.
And how many possibilities opened up from that, like a poisonous flower budding in the dark? Fabia Shah mumbled on about Bilal and America and somebody called Abu, possibly Abu Bakr Shah, her brother, as Caitlin recalled from the al Banna case history.
There was no time for contemplation or further questioning, however, because somebody was coming.
Caitlin spun up from the bed, as silent as quicksilver, bringing the fat black silencer of the gun to bear on the bedroom doorway.
Whispered voices, both male. Low and guttural.
She stood with knees bent slightly, breathing in through her nose, out through her mouth. Centered. Waiting for it to happen.
Behind her Fabia began to mumble about Bilal and America again.
The voices stopped, and with them all movement in the apartment.
No footfalls. No elbows brushing against walls. No creaking knee joints or the whisper of one pants leg against another.
"Bilal is back but gone. Gone away," Fabia murmured.
Caitlin resisted the urge to turn toward the only voice in the apartment. She kept the oversized suppressor targeted on the open doorway. She closed one eye as a precaution. Her night vision was dark-adapted so completely that simply flicking on a light would be enough to blind her.
Fabia snored, a long and ratcheting hawking noise that ended with a gulp.
Caitlin heard snickers from just outside the doorway.
She heard a few muttered words in Arabic.
"She is dreaming. There's nobody here. Abu smokes too much hash."
"We need to check, anyway."
The outline of a man appeared. Relatively young, she judged. Dressed in sports training gear. His eyes were drawn to the bed where the woman lay, and for a second he did not notice the assassin's form in the darkened room. Caitlin took in all she needed to know in less than a second. The man was carrying a blade and a pistol.
As his partner moved into frame just behind him, she silently cursed herself. She had left the iron cage open at the front of the apartment and all but invited these two inside.
At the very instant she made that judgment the first of them finally realized she was there. A jolt of surprise ran through his entire body, and he swore, back-pedaling into his partner, knocking them both off balance. Caitlin flared into action, closing the distance between them like a dark swift illusion, a flicker of malice. She pivoted on one foot, performing a nearly perfect spin en pointe, generating great centrifugal force as she whipped around in a tight circle, the outer edge of which was drawn with the muzzle of the heavy Reflex Suppressor. She smashed the improvised bludgeon into the temple of the nearer intruder, crushing the side of his skull like a chocolate egg. He grunted and dropped, a dead weight hitting the floor with a dense thud and metallic clang as the handgun struck ceramic tiles. Behind him the other man groaned, a small pathetic cry of abject fear, as he raised both hands in front of him to ward off the evil shadow that had just killed his partner. Caitlin pistoned out a front kick, driving it up into the man's groin and feeling a distinct pop as one of his testicles burst like a rotten grape. The pain was enough to cut off his strangled shriek as his body folded violently in half. Flowing forward with the momentum of her attack, she swung the machine pistol down on the back of his head as his body crumpled. Two vicious knee strikes into his face arrested the fall for just a split second as Caitlin swirled around him like a stream around a stone. Her free arm encircled his bloodied head, guiding his descent along the same circular path as her turn, until she savagely reversed direction and snapped his neck with a wet cracking sound.
His body finally tumbled on top of the other.
In the room next to them, Fabia snored again, deep in a drugged sleep.
Shit.
She needed a cleanup crew, now, but could not call on Berlin Control for backup.
She would have to extract herself and sanitize the site, but first she had to find out whether these clowns had been working alone. From the snatch of conversation she had heard, she feared not. It seemed as though they'd been alerted to her presence by an observer.
She tasted copper in her throat, and her heart accelerated noticeably. Was this some sort of trap? Had Baumer left people watching his mother, knowing that Caitlin would come looking for him? If he had, he'd chosen his men poorly. Or perhaps not. Perhaps these guys were the trip wire.
A quick inspection revealed the gun to be none the worse for its brief use as an improvised club. She wiped off some torn patches of scalp and blood on the track suit of one of the men she had just killed before folding the metal stock away but leaving the suppressor in place.
She checked the hallway through the small fish-eye lens in the front door. It appeared to be empty, but she stepped out with the gun raised, ready to fire.
Clear.
Caitlin spent a minute finding another stairwell that could take her down to the ground floor. She stopped at every level and checked for trouble. The building's occupants all seemed to be asleep now. Even the night owls and insomniacs had given up and shut down their televisions.
Reaching the ground floor, she was painfully aware of just how much her combat fitness had been reduced by pregnancy and childbirth. Still stronger and faster than many world-class athletes, she was nonetheless well below her own peak levels of readiness. Her breasts throbbed and leaked abominably, and she felt as though she might have torn something inside. Nothing large or vital, but enough to need eventual treatment. Instead, if she was clear, she was going to have to drag two bodies out of Fabia's apartment and do a rough and ready disposal, all in the next five minutes.
She peeked out onto the street, and the situation deteriorated immediately. Half a dozen youths, all of them dressed in flowing shirts and loose pants, some sporting black bandannas and some with baseball caps, were leaning against a brick fence about a hundred yards down the street.
A Dignity Patrol, she assumed.
But why would they be loitering in a quiet street with no passing traffic?