She could see a number of stress lines working away under the surface with Musso. It was real now. She was in play. But of course she was running more than one play, and while Kipper’s man in Texas had pledged to support her, he was also aware that his people would bear the consequences of any miscalculation by Colonel Katherine Murdoch. Even if Caitlin’s real mission was a washout, ‘Katherine’ could still have great influence over the next couple of days, for good or ill, and Tusk Musso was alone in knowing that she was largely unqualified to do what everybody else was expecting of her. Namely, to create a bridge between contending powers.

Musso knew, as did she, that creation was not her forte. Caitlin Monroe’s special gift was for destruction.

‘I’ll deal with the man on his merits,’ she assured him. ‘But I won’t be dissuaded from doing what I have to.’

*

A small convoy of Humvees followed by a solitary M35 cargo truck proceeded from Temple to Fort Hood, led off by a very seedy-looking Ty McCutcheon, who was undoubtedly still too drunk to drive his Jeep Wrangler, but who insisted on doing so anyway. Nobody was going to be pulling Governor Blackstone’s right-hand man over to the roadside for a breath test, and he wanted to take point to make sure there was no problem when they started hitting the ubiquitous checkpoints.

Caitlin thought about taking the passenger seat in his Jeep, but climbing into a car with someone who was still obviously over the limit was not something Colonel Murdoch would do. Instead, she sat in the back of a four-passenger Hummer with Musso, driven by the redoubtable Milosz, who seemed unaffected by the ravages of whiskey and cigars. Maybe he really had been suckled on potato vodka as a child.

The direct route between the federal outpost and Blackstone’s seat of power was much shorter than the long and winding detour Musso had taken from the airfield. The transition to the area controlled by the state government could not be missed. The devastation of the Wave and the entropy that ran wild as soon as humankind’s hand was lifted from the world disappeared when they crossed an invisible line south-west of Belton, a small satellite town nestled at the junction of I-35 and Route 190, which ran west to Killeen and the Hood. No rusting car hulks or broken-down machinery marred the landscape here. Out in the fields, hundreds of workers moved along freshly ploughed fields, hand-weeding winter crops. Caitlin wished she had a pair of binoculars. She was certain they all looked like guest workers from well south of this region. Officially, there were no migrants from south of the Rio Grande in Texas.