A quick look reassured her that her car was parked out of their line of sight, but she was certain their appearance had to be related to the two idiots she had just encountered.
Maybe they'd been tracking them, looking to impose a little jihadi-style vigilante justice. Or maybe the intruders were part of this crew. She simply did not have enough information, and there was almost no time.
She hurried back up to the flat, less concerned with stealth than with speed now.
Nothing had changed. The bodies lay where she had taken them down. Fabia still was snoring away like a buzz saw.
She had neither the strength nor the opportunity to drag the men out of the building and into her car for safe disposal somewhere far away, and she could not leave them there for Shah to find when she woke up. Caitlin's intrusion would stay with her as a bad dream at worst, easily dismissed and forgotten in the light of day. Two corpses bleeding out on her cheap brown carpet would be more problematic.
There was a quick and dirty solution, however.
She took the uppermost body by the wrists and dragged it out of the apartment, careful not to let any more blood leak out onto the floor. The sensation of having a bad stitch in her guts was back, but she ignored it, pulling the dead man all the way down the corridor to a utility room at the far end. She was ready to whip out her lock pick tools, but it was unnecessary because the door was unlocked. Once the body was deposited, she returned to the flat and repeated the performance, bundling the remains of the second man on top of the first. A quick search of their pockets turned up no ID, but she did find something more usefuclass="underline" a set of keys. Caitlin latched and closed the door before jamming an ill-fitting house key into the lock and snapping it off. That should secure them for a couple of hours in the morning.
A few blood smears marked the dirty tiled floor, but they weren't the only ones she could see. Just the freshest, and they would discolor quickly.
She returned to the apartment and scanned it quickly for anything she might have dropped and left behind, but her training had taken hold at a cellular level and there was nothing beyond the bloodstains on the carpet, about which she could do little. The syringe she'd used on Baumer's mother was sitting snugly in a jacket pocket, recapped with its small orange plastic lid. She knelt down to see if the carpet was one of those old-style ones, laid down in squares that could be peeled up and moved around for occasions such as this-you know, when you've whacked a couple of dudes and don't want their brain fluids and blood on public display. But no, the carpet had been laid in one piece.
She shrugged it off.
It wasn't important because she would be gone from Berlin early the next morning.
This time, when leaving the flat, she closed and locked the door and the security grille. She would have preferred to have taken Fabia into custody for a full debrief, but she was working dark and had to go with what she had.
Baumer was in America.
The light in the hallway seemed flat and harsh after the gloom of Fabia's apartment, hurting her eyes and even making them water a little with the contrast. She double-timed away from the flat, moving toward the staircase she had taken before, machine pistol at the ready, hoping to navigate her way to the rear of the building and slip out onto a side street where she might get away undetected.
The two youths who emerged from the door at the end of the corridor deep-sixed that plan. They were obviously part of the group downstairs, dressed in white thobe shirts and loose-fitting cotton pants. They both carried whips, a little like South African sjamboks, but the first who emerged was also armed with a sawed-off shotgun. Caitlin did not falter in her approach as she saw them, but they did, obviously surprised to be confronted by a tall blond woman clad in black jeans and leather, covered in blood and advancing on them with murder in her eyes.
"It is her!" one of them shouted. "She is here."
She saw the shotgun start to rise, but it was too late for the shooter. Her PP-2000 was already at shoulder level, the wide black tube of the Reflex Suppressor unwavering as she squeezed the trigger twice. The weapon stuttered, and spent shell casings tinkled off the cold concrete walls as the men's white shirts were puffed and shredded by a small storm of 9-mm Parabellum. The gunman fell away, cracking his head on the wall and then the floor as he crashed down. The other spun backward into the stairwell again, forcing Caitlin to move a few steps forward, lower the muzzle, and put a finishing burst into his head, which came apart in spectacular fashion, spraying bright red sunbursts of blood and bone chips and gray matter everywhere.
"So much for stealth," she muttered before stepping over the men and hurrying down the stairs, sweeping for more challengers as she went.
They were already charging toward her, and these guys looked a lot more capable, all of them armed with hand cannons of some sort and moving as a fluid group, covering one another.
Two single shots crashed out, echoing and caroming off the steel handrail.
"Allahu akbar!"
"Oh, for fuck's sake," she sighed.
She worked quickly, covering the flight below with the machine gun, squeezing out a few bursts as she used her free hand to haul out the cigarette pack in which Gerty had hidden the small but powerful binary explosive. Caitlin stripped off the lid, pushed in the tab that allowed the two elements to mingle, set the rudimentary timer for seven seconds, and then calmly walked down the steps, firing off fast irregular volleys from the Russian gun, keeping the heads of her targets down until she rounded the last landing and tossed the small package down among them. She ducked back behind the shelter of the thick concrete steps as the bomblet exploded with a titanic crash that shook the entire building.
All need for stealth and care now gone, she took out the second PP-2000 and advanced firing both weapons. The second, unsilenced gun roared with an earsplitting report that completely drowned out the sound of the first. As she swung around on the last flight of steps, she saw that two of the men had been caught by the explosion and killed instantly, one of them split from neck to groin as though gutted by a butcher and the other simply taken apart into four or five large pieces. A third man was crawling away from the shattered glass entry, and she stitched him up along the spine, finishing with a head shot as another bullet cracked past her ear.
The fourth and final target had made it halfway to the footpath and was firing wildly over his shoulder. Two more bullets fizzed close by before she could draw a bead on him with the silenced gun. Before she could pull the trigger, his head disintegrated and his lifeless body tumbled over.
She dived for the nearest cover, a concrete pillar.
She scanned the darkness for the second shooter and heard the unmistakable growl of her BMW as it suddenly appeared in front of Fabia Shah's building with Dalby at the wheel.
"Come on," he called out. "Get a bloody move on."
She hurried down the steps as lights went on all over the street and a fire alarm wailed somewhere.
"What… fuck?" was all she could manage as she dived into the passenger seat through the door he had leaned over to fling open for her.
"Sorry," Dalby said. "Might have been fibbing about sending you out on your own." "What the fuck, Dalby!"
She waited until he pulled out of the street before punching him on the shoulder. The Englishman drove at the speed limit and was careful not to draw attention to them with any reckless maneuvers. He had mounted a scanner on the dashboard, and they could hear emergency calls going out to the police.
"I'm sorry, Ms. Monroe… Caitlin. But just as you were an undeclared asset, I'm afraid my presence here is, too. We're not inclined to take risks with our continental colleagues anymore."
The shakes took hold of her as they drove along the street where she and Mirsaad had investigated the market stalls early that morning. No, she corrected herself. That was yesterday morning. She was having trouble keeping it all straight and was annoyed at her jittery unprofessional response to the ambush, or at least to the aftermath, including Dalby's unexpected intervention.