When she was done with Blackstone, and when she had confirmed to the best of her abilities that al Banna was dead, she would be gone too. Gone from this open-air mausoleum, gone from the continent of the dead, gone from Echelon, gone from the world of her past. Gone to her future.

At the thought of her husband and child, Caitlin checked her watch again. Another three minutes until she would be able to make a secure connection. She put aside the various briefing papers now to finish her dinner. She didn’t want to be shoving food in her mouth while talking to Bret and Monique.

Taking the salad bowl with her, she walked over to the window, where she had drawn the curtains against the cold darkness as evening closed in. Dropping the room lights so that not even a fragment of her silhouette would show, she indulged herself in a moment of sightseeing, peeking out through a gap in the drapes.

For the most part, it was pitch-black out there. Her window looked towards the south-east, over the Missouri River. She thought she could make out the lights of the recently restored Hawthorne power plant in the distance. Somewhere near that location was a truck stop and travel plaza where convoys and buses readied for their journey across a landscape deserted by all but the most desperate or antisocial types. Caitlin closed the curtains before the void out there sucked all the joy from her soul.

She had never been to Kansas City before, but she’d learned from her briefings as Colonel Murdoch that it hadn’t changed much since being reclaimed as the US Government’s principal settlement centre in the Midwest. Her first few hours in the city, however, had confirmed what she’d been told about the great demographic changes resettlement had wrought here. The city’s population was still only half of its pre-Wave size, and just over fifty per cent of the current residents were migrants, many of them from India, working on the railroads, and many from China labouring on the government’s huge collective farms. It wasn’t yet public knowledge, but KC was also slated to take the lion’s share of the displaced aliens currently being detained on the East Coast.

She scoffed at that. Such a move would surely drive more people to Blackstone’s standard. On the rare instances when she allowed herself to ponder such things, she wondered what was in the water in Seattle. There had to be something, or perhaps it was the coffee. Again, not her problem.