"I believe he was quite terrified," said the man from the Home Office. "And not of us."
"Not at first," Caitlin corrected.
Dalby seemed to give her comment more consideration than it was really due, sipping contemplatively at his cup of tea before dunking a cookie-or, rather, a biscuit-into it. He stood aside to let the guards drag Richardson's unconscious body past him. The criminal's dark skin was spotted with burn marks and torn by small, bleeding lacerations, hundreds of them, some crusted with salt. He reeked of sour sweat and the stink of his own urine and feces. As Caitlin kept her nose close to the coffee mug, attempting to block out the worst of the smell, she was reminded of a figure from history who used to carry a hollowed-out orange filled with perfume. He would sniff the orange to keep the miasma of the unwanted masses away.
What was that guy's name? She had heard it in some history class eons ago. She couldn't even remember the last time she had seen an edible orange.
Stop it, she told herself. Jesus Christ but her mind was not as sharp at it had been before the tumor. It seemed to wander so much now.
The smell didn't seem to bother Dalby in the least, but he was sensitive enough to her discomfort to move out of the room when the path was clear.
"Lads, why don't we pack our guest off to London?" Dalby said. "For a spell in the Cage."
"Yes, sir," one of the guards said. "Very good, Mister Dalby. We'll see to it."
The funk inside the small cell must have been especially thick, because the air in the musty, enclosed space of the main keg room tasted as sweet as an alpine forest when she was able to breathe freely once more. Caitlin did not tell the Englishman that Richardson's interrogation had brought back some deeply traumatic memories of her own treatment at the hands of al Banna, but Dalby would have been familiar with her file, and he had offered a number of times to take on the responsibility for the hostile debriefing alone.
She'd refused. Richardson and his crew had come after her through Bret and Monique. She wouldn't leave the room until he broke and told them why. Indeed, she believed her presence had probably contributed to undermining his will. He'd seen her execute his comrades, some of them in cold blood, and she gave him no reason to believe that she wouldn't be just as ruthless with him.
"Still and all, he did give a good accounting of himself in there, didn't he?" said Dalby as they reached the foot of the ladder leading up to the old barroom. "That was quite a job of work getting him to talk. Your Mister Baumer really knows how to put the frighteners on a chap."
Caitlin shook her head in disgust.
Bilal Baumer. Al Banna.
She thought she'd seen off that worthless blood clot years ago. But here he was, back in her face, even if it was only through the agency of cutouts and dupes like Richardson. She finished the dregs of her coffee before pulling herself up the old wooden ladder hand over hand. She was amused and a little touched to see that Dalby made a conspicuous effort not to stare at her butt as it swayed past his eyes.
He was good guy, old Dalby, she had decided, even if he was a little too ready with the shaving razor and the Zippo during interrogation. He followed her up the ladder and directed her through the small pod of desks, where the typist she had met earlier was having a late-afternoon tea, nibbling a jam-covered scone and reading an old gossip magazine. Not that there were any new gossip mags being published. Not in paper form, anyway. After all, a big swag of the world's celebrity supply had disappeared back in '03, but more important, the all-powerful Ministry of Resources had deemed august journals such as Hello! and OK! "surplus to the national emergency requirements," making them prohibitively expensive to publish. Like most of the print media, they had downsized and gone online, where they scrabbled over some very meager pickings from advertising and subscriptions.
"This way," Dalby said, using a key to open a door at the far end of the room. The day had grown even gloomier while they'd been downstairs, and outside it was so dark with the lowering clouds and rain that she could barely see beyond the windows. Springtime in England, she thought gloomily. A log fire burned in the center of the old barroom, providing welcome light and warmth, but fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling shone with a much harsher effect, laying a flat white light over everything. Caitlin tailed Dalby into the room, which looked like it might have been the pub manager's office at one time. It was furnished in the same spare utilitarian style as the main area, but he had softened the space with a few amateurish oil paintings and a potted fern, which he sprayed with water from a plastic bottle before sitting down. There were three framed pictures sitting on his desk, which was otherwise free of clutter. She assumed they were of his family but could not see from her side of the room.
"Sit down, sit down. That's the comfier perch," he said, indicating a very tired-looking leather armchair in a corner behind her. It sat next to a gray metal bookcase that was mostly filled with government documents and a few nonfiction books: The Legacy of Jihad, Bravo Two Zero, The Disappeared. There were two novels there, however, lying face up on the top shelf: a well-thumbed copy of The Cruel Sea and what looked like an unread science fiction title, Tearing Down Tuesday. She assumed it was sci-fi because of the green robot on the cover. She was probably sitting in Dalby's reading chair, she realized. It was, as he had said, a rather comfortable perch.
"I must apologize for the unpleasantness downstairs, Caitlin. It did get rather fraught once or twice."
"Big boys' rules," she said casually.
"Indeed. Which brings us to the question of which rules we're now playing by as regards Mister Baumer."
Caitlin shifted her position slightly in the chair. The mention of Baumer's name upset her more than she would care to admit. She could not avoid the image of her husband and child, her precious family, lying dead in a field had she not been there. And where was she now? Not by their side, that was for…
She forced her mind to stop rambling.
"I thought he was supposed to be chained up at the bottom of some hole in Guadeloupe, helping the gendarmes with their inquiries."
"Indeed," Dalby said with a quirk of the lips that might have been rueful or wryly amused.
"Our last information had him so situated. But that was a year ago, and I'm afraid that communications between metropolitan France and the territoires d'outre-mer are not what they might be. Frankly, Mr. Baumer was no longer an active concern of ours once it became obvious that we were never going to be given unfettered access to him. Or any access at all, beyond furnishing the DST with a list of questions they might just pass on to the Directorate of Military Intelligence, which took control of him back in 2003."
"So, what, all of our work on him was for nothing? Or was it because we were asking. Rather than MI6 or the Yard?"
"Could be," Dalby conceded with a wave of one hand. "We're not flavor of the month in the Elysee Palace. Never have been, which is only reasonable, I suppose, given our brief. Frankly, I would rather that Echelon had remained a private affair and hence deniable rather than declaring our hand as we did after the Vancouver Conference. I really don't think your Mister Kipper did us any favors there."
Caitlin leaned forward and placed her hands on her knees, locking her elbows straight, imitating her father without realizing she was doing so. She agreed with the Englishman but could not get worked up over it in the same way. Echelon had worked very well in the old world as a secret arrangement among the Anglophone powers to divide up responsibility for spying on the rest of the world. And it wasn't as if the rest of the world didn't know about them. Compromised elements of the DGSE in France had been able to roll up most of Echelon's network there in the first days of the intifada.