Cesky had killed her friend. And maybe his family. And Cesky had been able to send this worthless shitbag to do that because she’d been so wrapped up in her own problems, she hadn’t made an effort to warn him, after Galveston, after Sydney.

A dark fog descended on the disused office, as though the blood pouring from Parmenter’s wounds had blinded her too. Hot gusts of fury blew through her mind and she became lost, detached from the world. She was distantly aware of insensate anger exploding from deep within her soul, emerging into the world in the form of a terrible violence. No one made a move for her until she’d emptied her entire clip into the mashed ruin of the killer’s shattered skull. Only after the third click did anyone attempt to restrain her.

She was kicking a corpse. No longer feeling even the slightest discomfort from her injuries. Just kicking and kicking the dead weight, feeling bones crack and skin tear. Until she was wailing like a little girl lost. Enfolded in Shah’s massive arms. Pouring oceans of tears into his shirt front. Falling and turning and reaching for something to hold on to.

But finding nothing.

50

FORT HOOD, KILLEEN, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION

Midnight in Blackstone’s Texas.

Once onto 27th Street, Caitlin did her best to look like she belonged. While there was not a great deal of pedestrian traffic so late at night, it wasn’t uncommon to see troopers in uniform and civvies moving about post. Vehicles passed her without slowing down. She had a moment of anxiety, when a Fort Hood police cruiser stopped at the intersection of 27th and 761st Tank Battalion Avenue, but after a short delay, they rolled on down the road.

Probably checking they got the right donuts, she thought.

In uniform, Caitlin was just scenery, part of the Fort Hood landscape. She wondered whether Milosz had finished his mandarins yet. He wasn’t far away, laid up in one of the hundreds of empty tract houses that lay between Robert Gray air base and the fort, waiting to meet up with her again when she was done. She had no concerns on his behalf. As with Corporal Summers, she’d run Milosz through the Echelon data-core, a process that also plugged into the FBI and NIA mainframes. He being a foreign national who’d been cleared to join the US Army as a special operator, the return on his query was extensive. Service in Iraq and New York, as he had said; but decorated twice in the latter theatre, which he hadn’t mentioned. She was confident that the kung fu of Master Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz, formerly of GROM, was more than a match for the TDF.

She just wondered whether she was.