There was no time for contemplation or further questioning, however, because somebody was coming.

Caitlin spun up from the bed, as silent as quicksilver, bringing the fat black silencer of the gun to bear on the bedroom doorway.

Whispered voices, both male. Low and guttural.

She stood with knees bent slightly, breathing in through her nose, out through her mouth. Centered. Waiting for it to happen.

Behind her Fabia began to mumble about Bilal and America again.

The voices stopped, and with them all movement in the apartment.

No footfalls. No elbows brushing against walls. No creaking knee joints or the whisper of one pants leg against another.

"Bilal is back but gone. Gone away," Fabia murmured.

Caitlin resisted the urge to turn toward the only voice in the apartment. She kept the oversized suppressor targeted on the open doorway. She closed one eye as a precaution. Her night vision was dark-adapted so completely that simply flicking on a light would be enough to blind her.

Fabia snored, a long and ratcheting hawking noise that ended with a gulp.

Caitlin heard snickers from just outside the doorway.

She heard a few muttered words in Arabic.

"She is dreaming. There's nobody here. Abu smokes too much hash."

"We need to check, anyway."

The outline of a man appeared. Relatively young, she judged. Dressed in sports training gear. His eyes were drawn to the bed where the woman lay, and for a second he did not notice the assassin's form in the darkened room. Caitlin took in all she needed to know in less than a second. The man was carrying a blade and a pistol.

As his partner moved into frame just behind him, she silently cursed herself. She had left the iron cage open at the front of the apartment and all but invited these two inside.

At the very instant she made that judgment the first of them finally realized she was there. A jolt of surprise ran through his entire body, and he swore, back-pedaling into his partner, knocking them both off balance. Caitlin flared into action, closing the distance between them like a dark swift illusion, a flicker of malice. She pivoted on one foot, performing a nearly perfect spin en pointe, generating great centrifugal force as she whipped around in a tight circle, the outer edge of which was drawn with the muzzle of the heavy Reflex Suppressor. She smashed the improvised bludgeon into the temple of the nearer intruder, crushing the side of his skull like a chocolate egg. He grunted and dropped, a dead weight hitting the floor with a dense thud and metallic clang as the handgun struck ceramic tiles. Behind him the other man groaned, a small pathetic cry of abject fear, as he raised both hands in front of him to ward off the evil shadow that had just killed his partner. Caitlin pistoned out a front kick, driving it up into the man's groin and feeling a distinct pop as one of his testicles burst like a rotten grape. The pain was enough to cut off his strangled shriek as his body folded violently in half. Flowing forward with the momentum of her attack, she swung the machine pistol down on the back of his head as his body crumpled. Two vicious knee strikes into his face arrested the fall for just a split second as Caitlin swirled around him like a stream around a stone. Her free arm encircled his bloodied head, guiding his descent along the same circular path as her turn, until she savagely reversed direction and snapped his neck with a wet cracking sound.

His body finally tumbled on top of the other.

In the room next to them, Fabia snored again, deep in a drugged sleep.

Shit.

She needed a cleanup crew, now, but could not call on Berlin Control for backup.

She would have to extract herself and sanitize the site, but first she had to find out whether these clowns had been working alone. From the snatch of conversation she had heard, she feared not. It seemed as though they'd been alerted to her presence by an observer.

She tasted copper in her throat, and her heart accelerated noticeably. Was this some sort of trap? Had Baumer left people watching his mother, knowing that Caitlin would come looking for him? If he had, he'd chosen his men poorly. Or perhaps not. Perhaps these guys were the trip wire.

A quick inspection revealed the gun to be none the worse for its brief use as an improvised club. She wiped off some torn patches of scalp and blood on the track suit of one of the men she had just killed before folding the metal stock away but leaving the suppressor in place.

She checked the hallway through the small fish-eye lens in the front door. It appeared to be empty, but she stepped out with the gun raised, ready to fire.

Clear.

Caitlin spent a minute finding another stairwell that could take her down to the ground floor. She stopped at every level and checked for trouble. The building's occupants all seemed to be asleep now. Even the night owls and insomniacs had given up and shut down their televisions.

Reaching the ground floor, she was painfully aware of just how much her combat fitness had been reduced by pregnancy and childbirth. Still stronger and faster than many world-class athletes, she was nonetheless well below her own peak levels of readiness. Her breasts throbbed and leaked abominably, and she felt as though she might have torn something inside. Nothing large or vital, but enough to need eventual treatment. Instead, if she was clear, she was going to have to drag two bodies out of Fabia's apartment and do a rough and ready disposal, all in the next five minutes.

She peeked out onto the street, and the situation deteriorated immediately. Half a dozen youths, all of them dressed in flowing shirts and loose pants, some sporting black bandannas and some with baseball caps, were leaning against a brick fence about a hundred yards down the street.

A Dignity Patrol, she assumed.

But why would they be loitering in a quiet street with no passing traffic?

A quick look reassured her that her car was parked out of their line of sight, but she was certain their appearance had to be related to the two idiots she had just encountered.

Maybe they'd been tracking them, looking to impose a little jihadi-style vigilante justice. Or maybe the intruders were part of this crew. She simply did not have enough information, and there was almost no time.

She hurried back up to the flat, less concerned with stealth than with speed now.

Nothing had changed. The bodies lay where she had taken them down. Fabia still was snoring away like a buzz saw.

She had neither the strength nor the opportunity to drag the men out of the building and into her car for safe disposal somewhere far away, and she could not leave them there for Shah to find when she woke up. Caitlin's intrusion would stay with her as a bad dream at worst, easily dismissed and forgotten in the light of day. Two corpses bleeding out on her cheap brown carpet would be more problematic.

There was a quick and dirty solution, however.

She took the uppermost body by the wrists and dragged it out of the apartment, careful not to let any more blood leak out onto the floor. The sensation of having a bad stitch in her guts was back, but she ignored it, pulling the dead man all the way down the corridor to a utility room at the far end. She was ready to whip out her lock pick tools, but it was unnecessary because the door was unlocked. Once the body was deposited, she returned to the flat and repeated the performance, bundling the remains of the second man on top of the first. A quick search of their pockets turned up no ID, but she did find something more useful: a set of keys. Caitlin latched and closed the door before jamming an ill-fitting house key into the lock and snapping it off. That should secure them for a couple of hours in the morning.

A few blood smears marked the dirty tiled floor, but they weren't the only ones she could see. Just the freshest, and they would discolor quickly.