The Texas Administrative Division’s Federal Center was housed in the old town hall, a fine-looking building a few minutes’ walk down the street from the Kyle Hotel, where she and everyone else in Temple was staying. She had an office inside the Federal Center, where she would be expected to compile her report on the military capabilities and intentions of the South American Federation and what, if any, additional US military forces might be necessary to counter any threat from them. She was grateful to Musso for having seen to that already. It was a pain when you had to work as hard at the cover story as you did on the mission behind it.

It was telling though, she thought, that Blackstone took Roberto seriously enough to have approached Seattle on the matter. After spending the last couple of years making life as difficult as possible for the feds, it had to be significant that the Governor had now turned around and begged them to commit more forces to the southern flank, as he insisted on calling it. Having so recently been in the Federation herself, Caitlin had no illusions about the malignant nature of Roberto Morales’s regime, but nor could she see it as a credible threat. Assuming he even survived – el Presidente por Vida or not – Morales would need another five to ten years to consolidate his rule, after which there’d be an unknown amount of time before he was able to project power very far beyond the borders of his empire. If he did manage to pull all of that off, it would be quite the strategic challenge for the next generation of American leaders, dealing with a hostile super-state stretching from the Panama Canal to the southern tip of Chile. But that was a long way off in the future, and chances were it would never happen. If she had to put money on the barrel head, Caitlin Monroe would bet heavily against any sort of unitary state surviving down there. It was only the chaos of la colapso that had enabled the Colombian gang boss to gather so much power to himself, so quickly. Once the imperative of survival passed, Morales, like all dictators, would soon build up a complex of grinding fault lines and fractures within the structure of his regime. What the old Soviets used to call ‘inherent contradictions’. She had seen it time and again, before and after the Wave: the more oppressive the dictatorship, the more stable it appeared to be, right up until the moment it collapsed. And they all collapsed in the end. Closed, authoritarian systems simply could not regulate themselves. The complexities eventually undid them.