Without warning

She found some peace by emptying her mind of all the troubles piling up around them, and imagining herself young again. Really young. Perhaps fifteen or sixteen, on a family beach holiday in Baja. Her dad was newly retired. Her older brother, Dom, was just about to leave home to take up a basketball scholarship all the way over in Vermont. Mom was still healthy. Caitlin lay shivering now in the darkness of the small, unheated apartment in a city tearing itself apart, and recalled an endless couple of weeks, surfing, swimming and hiking with her family. She managed a sad, lonesome smile at the memory of the surfing lessons she’d tried to give her parents. Her mother had wisely begged off after ten minutes, but Dad, he’d always been up for anything, and without the air force telling him what he could do with his life twenty-four,’ seven, Dave Monroe vowed that he would spend whatever was left of it living as a surf bum. He was probably joking. He already had a civilian job lined up with an air-freight company run by some buds who’d handed in their uniforms a couple of years before he did. But it was nice, Caitlin thought, to have him there to herself, with no prospect that he would ever again be called away to some third-world suckhole to get shot at by whackjobs and savages. It was nice to think of him living a life of ease, if only for a little while. And it was a pure delight when she finally taught him to stand up and dial into a little baby wave that carried him all of ten or twelve feet, whooping and hollering before he went A-over-T into the drink. She fell asleep with that happy memory as her last thought.

It didn’t last. Nightmares tormented her, some vivid, some half remembered. Her family was gone and she was left to wander a world denuded of love and kindness. She dreamed herself in a city she did not quite recognise, where decomposing bodies hung from lampposts. Swinging on rotted ropes, they twisted in the breeze and revealed themselves as her family – then Wales, even Monique. She ran and ran through the dream, deeper into a city where children laboured under the whip and scourge to build pyramids of severed heads, where monsters capered and ghouls in human form held dominion over all. Every barbarous malignancy of human nature was free to bloom and run free. She passed through this landscape of horrors as a shadow, unable to act, invisible to victim and tormentor alike. Every now and then she would come awake with her heart hammering and her mouth dry and she would attempt to find the happy place where she’d swum and played with her father in the surf off Baja, but to close her eyes meant falling back into dreams where the whole world had become a charnel house.

In the early hours of morning, sometime before the inky blankness of night gave way to the slightest hint of grey dawn she dreamed herself imprisoned in a cell, somewhere in the old fortress of Noisy-le-Sec. Her captors had beaten her, told her that as a ‘floater’, a deniable asset, she was already dead. She lay on an old cobblestone floor, in a pool of her own vomit and blood, her eyes closed almost shut by swelling. Two teeth were loose, probably knocked free of their roots. The pain from them alone was a hard, white supernova burning one side of her face. She could hear voices discussing her. Gutteral French, a smattering of German, and a few snatches of Arabic.

‘She is already a ghost. Let us be finished with it now.’

‘But the Americans, they know…’

‘But they can do nothing! She is Echelon. She does not exist.’

‘They dare to send her against us. They should learn such impudence is always punished.’

‘There will be reprisals.’

‘But of course!’

‘Oh, it is fine for you, al Banna, you are not…’

She tried to wrench herself back towards consciousness. Al Banna. Her target. Monique’s ‘boyfriend’.

‘It is all right for you. You are safe.’

‘Nobody is safe.’

‘She is not just a spy – she is a killer of the most dangerous kind.’

‘Then ensure she does not kill again.’

‘Bilal, it is not easy…’

Caitlin’s head felt as though it was wrapped in heavy blankets. Exhaustion and illness weighed her down, pressing her back into sleep, but a small part of her, an echo of her waking consciousness, forced her up out of the troubled sleep. The dream came apart like mist before a hard wind. Her head reeled with dizziness, but she was immediately aware that the horrendous pain and nausea had gone. Not just eased, but gone, at least for the moment.