Al Banna.
Caitlin cursed softly under her breath. She had no idea what day it was. No idea how long she’d been out, or what had transpired in that time.
‘Are you all right?’ It was the French girl, Monique. The reason she was here, with these flakes.
‘I’m cool,’ said Caitlin. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked, pointing at the television that hung from the ceiling. ‘I feel like I’m lost or something. How’d the peace march go?’
‘Brilliant!’ said the red-headed woman. Aunty Celia. She was a Liverpudlian with a whining accent like an ice pick in the eardrums. ‘There was ‘undreds of thousands of people. Chirac sent a message and all. Berlin’s gonna be huge.’
‘Really?’ said Caitlin, feigning enthusiasm. ‘That’s great. Was there anything on the news about it? Or about the war?’ she continued, pointedly looking at the television.
‘Oh sorry,’ muttered Monique as she dug another remote control out of the blankets on Caitlin’s bed. Or Cathy’s bed, as she would have thought of it.
A flick of the remote and the screen lit up.
‘CNN?’ asked Caitlin.
Monique flicked through the channels, but couldn’t find the news network. White noise and static hissed out of the television from channel 13, where it should have been. She shrugged. There was nothing on MSNBC either, just an empty studio, but all of the French-language channels were available, as was BBC World.
‘Can we watch the Beeb then?’ asked Celia. ‘Me French, you know, it’s not the best.’
Caitlin really just wanted to carve out a couple of minutes to herself, so she could get her head back in the game. Her injuries must be serious, having put her under for three days, and although her cover was still intact, she didn’t want to take any chances. She needed to re-establish contact with Echelon. They’d have maintained overwatch while she was out. They could bring her back up to-
‘Eh up? What’s this then?’ blurted Celia.
Everyone’s eyes fixed on the screen, where an impeccably groomed Eurasian woman with a perfectly modulated BBC voice was struggling to maintain her composure.’… vanished. Communications links are apparently intact and fully functional, but remain unresponsive. Inbound commercial flights are either returning to their points of origin or being diverted to Halifax and Edmonton in Canada, or to airports throughout the West Indies, all of which remain unaffected so far.’
The women all began to chatter at once, much to Caitlin’s annoyance. On screen the BBC’s flustered anchorwoman explained that the ‘event horizon’ seemed to extend down past Mexico City, out into the Gulf, swallowing most of Cuba, encompassing all of the continental US and a big chunk of south-eastern Canada, including Montreal. Caitlin had no idea yet what she meant by the term ‘event horizon’, but it didn’t sound friendly. A hammer started pounding on the inside of her head as she watched the reporter stumble through the rest of her read.
‘… from a Canadian air base have not returned. US Naval flights out of Guantanamo Bay, at the southern tip of Cuba, have likewise dropped out of contact at the same point, seventy kilometres north of the base. Reuters is reporting that attempts by US military commanders at Guantanamo to contact the Castro government in Havana have also failed.’
Caitlin realised that the background buzz of the hospital had died away in the last few minutes. She heard a metallic clatter as a tray fell to the floor somewhere nearby. Caitlin had a passing acquaintance with the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre. There had to be nearly three thousand people in this hospital and at that moment they were all silent, the only human sounds coming from the television sets that hung in every room and ward, a discordant clashing of French and English voices, all of them speaking in the same clipped, urgent tone.
‘The Prime Minister, Mr Blair, has released a statement calling for calm and promising to devote the full resources of the British Government to resolving the crisis. A Ministry of Defence spokesman confirmed that British forces have gone onto full alert, but that NATO headquarters in Brussels has not yet issued any such orders. The Prime Minister rejected calls by the Social Democrats to immediately recall British forces deployed in the Middle East for expected operations against the regime of Saddam Hussein.’
‘That’d be fookin’ right,’ Aunty Celia muttered to herself.
The reporter was about to speak again when she stopped, placing a hand to one ear, obviously taking instructions from her producer.
‘Right, thank you,’ she said before continuing. ‘We have just received these pictures from a low-orbit commercial satellite that passed over the eastern seaboard of America a short time ago.’
The screen filled up with black-and-white still shots of New York. The imagery was not as sharp as some of the mil-grade stuff Caitlin had seen over the years, but it was good enough to easily pick out individual vehicles and quite small buildings.
‘This picture shows the centre of New York, as of twenty-three minutes ago,’ said the reporter. ‘Our technical department has cleaned up the image, allowing us to pull into a much tighter focus.’
Caitlin recognised Times Square from above. She quickly estimated the virtual height as being about two thousand metres, before the view reformatted down to something much closer, probably about five or six hundred feet. The Beeb’s IT guys were good. It was a remarkably clear image, but profoundly disturbing. Her brief curse was lost in the gasps and swearing of the other women. Fires, frozen in one frame of satellite imagery, burned throughout the square where hundreds of cars had smashed into each other. Smoke and flames also poured out from a few buildings. Buses and yellow cabs had run up onto the footpath and in some cases right into shopfronts and building facades. But nothing else moved. The photograph seemed to have captured an unnatural, ghostly moment. Not because they were looking at a still shot of a great metropolis in the grip of some weird, inexplicable disaster. But because nowhere in that eerie black-and-white image of one of the busiest cities in the world was there a single human being to be seen.