He frowned, apparently having trouble following her.

"Disingenuous. It means do as I fucking say or I'll shoot you in the face."

He opened his mouth to retort, and Caitlin did indeed shoot him, but in the hip, striding over quickly to launch one booted foot into his solar plexus as he spun to the floor. The snap kick drove all the air from his body, cutting off the scream that had begun to form in his throat. The woman cut off her own shriek of horror by jamming a couple of knuckles into her mouth. Caitlin quickly glanced at the door through which the bodyguard she'd killed just before had come, but she heard nothing in the hallway outside.

"Do you mind if I ask your name?" she asked in as soothing a voice as possible.

"Donna," replied the woman. "Donna Gambaro."

"Okay, Donna. Do you know if there are other guards on this floor? I haven't had a chance to check it out. Lucky you, yours was the first room I tried. That's why you need to close your windows. Even in a nice hotel like this one."

The Gambaro woman visibly attempted to compose herself. A train of emotions ran over her face. Fear. Shock. Rage. All them morphing together. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, pointing at the man who'd been using her for his pleasure.

"If you're worried about him hollerin', don't," she said. "You hear screaming like that all the time around here."

Caitlin took a second to examine the woman properly. She was half dressed now, buckling up her jeans and adding a gray T-shirt. This chick was not going to wait around for a second chance.

"So this was your room, Donna? This is where you stayed the whole time? Did they let you out at all? I'm trying to get a sense of what's waiting beyond that door, is all."

Donna pulled on an old jacket. It didn't fit and looked as though it might have belonged to a man.

"They caught me a month ago," she said, her voice faltering. "I was working salvage with my brother in Toronto. We were… freelancers."

Caitlin shrugged. What did she care about somebody looting a dead Canadian city?

"Your brother?" she asked.

"He's gone. They killed him when they took me."

Donna Gambaro looked like she was thinking about giving her captor a couple of kicks in the head to settle some of that debt.

"I'm sorry about your loss," said Caitlin, "but I have to ask for your help. I need you to focus, Donna. Have you been out of your room at all? Can you tell me about the setup here? How many men? What sort of security?"

Caitlin could see tears welling in the woman's eyes and knew she had very little time before she fell apart. She decided to try a different line of approach.

"I don't suppose you know the name of our friend here, do you?"

"I've heard his bodyguard call him Mister 'You Chick' or something," she said. "Something kinda foreign like that."

Keeping her gun trained on the man, who was moaning and snaking about in great pain, Caitlin powered up the PDA Velcroed to her gun arm.

"Sounds like 'You Chick,' you say? All right, let's see, then. That is ringing a bell for me."

She tried a few spelling combinations until the database threw up a possible match.

"Jukic? Does that sound right? Danton Jukic?"

He groaned as though she had struck him again, and Donna nodded enthusiastically as she wiped away a few tears.

"That's him. Rat bastard ass fucker. Not so fucking tough now, are you? Huh?"

Caitlin shifted position slightly to put herself between the two of them. Jukic was sweating profusely, and deep body tremors had taken hold of him. He was having trouble keeping his moans quiet.

"Are you like a cop or something?" Donna asked. She pointed at the PDA. "That looks like one of those computers they used to have in cop cars."

"No, I'm not a cop. They don't get to shoot people on general principles. Or torture them. You hear that, Jukic? We'll be moving along with the torture in a minute. Just so you know."

His groan was noticeably louder, and he kicked out with one leg as though trying to push himself toward the door. Donna Gambaro fetched a pair of running shoes from the same dresser drawer in which she had stored her jeans. She sat on the end of the bed to pull them on. Caitlin could see that her hands were shaking, but she was doing her best. She kept the gun on Jukic as she spoke to Gambaro.

"Do they have guards in the hallways, Donna, do you know?"

Donna paused in the job of trying to untangle a knotted shoelace.

"Not always, no," she said. "Only the big guys get bodyguards. Sometimes some of the guys who came through here were just fighters or soldiers, you know. They got sent here as a reward. I talked with some of them. They weren't all bad. Some were pigs, of course. You never knew what you were getting. But that's men all over, isn't it? Anyway, no. There's not always guards in the halls."

Caitlin fetched a couple of photographs of Bilal Baumer from one of her pockets.

"You ever see this guy come in?" she asked.

"No," Donna said, after a brief look. She began searching the drawers, as if looking for something lost in the clothing. Jukic levered himself up on one elbow and gave the impression of a man who was about to start protesting again, leading Caitlin to drive another kick into his guts to quiet him down.

"That's good to know," she said. "Now, Donna Gambaro, you look to me like someone who can handle herself. That's good, too. The thing is I have to ask old Jukic a few questions, and… well, things are probably going to get ugly. Very ugly. I'm afraid I can't let you go until I have the answers I need. When I get them, we can both leave together, out the same window I came in. I'll be on my way then. But if I were you, I'd probably get my ass hunkered down somewhere nearby as quickly as possible. Do you understand?"

"Miss," Donna Gambaro said as she located a locket that obviously meant something to her, "I don't know who you are, but I used to wait tables at Hooters. I know when things are about to get ugly and when it's time to go. You won't need to tell me twice. Are you going to torture him?" she asked, pointing at Jukic.

Caitlin took the fighting knife from the scabbard in her boot. "A little bit," she said.

In fact, she hardly needed to hurt him at all. Jukic, an Albanian, who was listed in her files as running a medium-size pirate crew of mostly Balkan origins, gave up the information she needed a few seconds after she cut off the tip of his little finger. She had thought she was going to have to harvest at least half of his digits, but perhaps kneeling on his hip wound as she made the cut helped.

She got an address no more than a few blocks away that the Albanian gang leader insisted was the last command post he knew of for the jihadi fighters who had brought so much grief to New York. It didn't show up on her PDA, so chances were that it hadn't been known to the military. There was no guarantee Baumer would be there, but if it was manned by his own people rather than pirates, she might have a shot at getting to someone with better information than Jukic.

He was now balled into a fetal position on the floor, shaking and sweating and keening in a high-pitched, almost childlike fashion as he bled all over the carpet. "Fucking Germans. Fucking Turks," he repeated over and over again until Caitlin put two bullets in his brain and shut him up forever.

She killed him without warning or obvious provocation, causing Donna to jump with fright again.

"Sorry," Caitlin said. "You don't mind, do you?" The former Hooters waitress looked at her the same way one might regard a dangerous dog one had stumbled across in a dark alley.

"No," Gambaro said, but none too certainly. "No, fuck him, I guess. Can we go now?"

The window in the bathroom was still open, giving them access to the roof of the apartment house across which Caitlin had come. She hadn't intended to enter the hotel through that particular window until she noticed the flickering light of a candle inside as she approached. The sash was already raised a few inches, and Caitlin was able to lift it without too much effort, although she did have to take her time with it lest the sound of the wooden window frame rumbling upward alerted the occupants. Luckily, Donna had had Jukic well and truly distracted as Caitlin came calling. It was her scream, however, upon seeing the assassin silhouetted in the doorway to the bathroom that had brought Jukic's bodyguard into the room. Caitlin had shot him twice in the head before pistol-whipping his boss into submission.