"So, you had any luck putting names to the bodies?" she asked as they hurried down a wide corridor past assessment and treatment rooms, most of them empty.

"I have some briefing notes for you," Dalby said. "All of your villains returned positive IDs from the national database, and we had further hits off the Yard and the Home Office's own restricted lists."

"They were professionals?" Caitlin asked.

"That would be overly generous." Dalby snorted. "Three very low-rent criminals and two from a little further up the evolutionary ladder, probably to run the operation, such as it was."

Again, Caitlin found herself intrigued by his voice. He had a definite strain of East London in his flat, nasal tone but spoke as though he'd been coached in elocution at an expensive boarding school. "They were well resourced, though," she cautioned, thinking of the cars and guns, neither of which were easy to come by in the United Kingdom now. Both tended to be assets of the government, not the private citizen.

"Indeed," Dalby said, as they turned a corner into a corridor off which a number of semiprivate wardrooms were accessible. Caitlin noted four beds in each room, about half of them occupied, although mostly by young people. A few years ago she'd have expected to see a good many wrinklies and fatties and chronically unhealthy specimens in a place like this, living off the public tit. No longer. From a few cursory glances she confirmed her suspicion that most of the bedridden were trauma cases, broken limbs and crushed bodies, almost certainly from the many farms in the district just like hers, where strong backs and straining muscles were the order of the day. Her mind wandered briefly, dwelling on the growing demand for horses in the district. She was on a waiting list herself. Caitlin shook the errant thought from her mind.

"Do we know who sent them?" she asked.

"Not yet," Dalby admitted. "Although the chap you left alive is helping us with our inquiries."

"When you say 'us,' you mean…"

"Our office," he answered. "Yours."

"Okay," Caitlin admitted. Dalby was here on Echelon business.

"Here we are, then," he announced as they made one final turn and fetched up outside a private room. Another man in a suit with a bulge under his jacket, much larger and more imposing than Dalby, nodded to them and opened the door.

"I'll give you a minute," Dalby said quietly. "I understand your daughter is asleep and Mister Melton has been lightly sedated."

Caitlin thanked him and pushed past the guard with her heart beating noticeably harder. The room was large and well lit, with a couple of windows looking out over plowed fields to a small lake a mile or two to the west. Monique was asleep, as she'd been told, but Bret blinked groggily and tried to smile at her. She shushed him quickly with a finger to her lips, indicating the sleeping child. A cursory examination showed that the baby was largely unharmed save for a few scratches on her face. Her husband, in contrast, looked terrible. The scars from Iraq, the stitches where they sewed up his shoulder, and his missing finger had new companions. Remnants of his ranger regiment tattoo provided a stark contrast to his pale, pasty complexion. He had lost a lot of blood back in the field and looked drained. Caitlin's stomach was clenched, and she felt a coppery taste at the back of her throat.

"I'm sorry…" he croaked. "Couldn't…"

The room blurred in front of her as the tears came, and she shushed him again, this time with one finger on his lips. They were swollen and cracked, and half of his face was mottled with bruising. One leg was fully bandaged and held aloft with a complicated series of wires and pulleys. He would be limping again, perhaps forever. She'd often teased him about the jagged scar where the combat support hospital in Kuwait had dug an old piece of wood from his ass. Bret usually responded by farting on cue, chasing her out of the bed briefly while she waved away the stench. Laughing at the crude absurdity, she would come back to the bed and find something else to tease him about.

It didn't seem so funny now.

"Don't," she whispered. "You did great, sweetie. Five guys with guns. You were unarmed, yet you protected Monique and you both got out. That's all that counts."

Bret pressed his lips together and squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head once, emphatically.

"I should have had a-"

"Hush now." She softly stroked his thick brown hair, blinking away her tears. "This is no time for beating yourself up. If I'd married any other man, I'd be a widow now and my daughter would be gone along with my husband. You did an amazing job to get her away from them."

"But we didn't get away," he croaked. "And if you hadn't come along…"

Caitlin shook her head.

"You know better than that, Bret. We don't do what-ifs in our line of work. Or mine, anyway. You're a farmer and a daddy now, and that's the most important thing. To me and the baby. You need to rest and get better and look after our little girl. And you need to let me worry about these bastards. Can you do that, Bret? Can you leave them to me?"

"Hooah," he whispered. "Leave them to you."

The effort of talking seemed to have exhausted him, and he nodded weakly as a long ragged breath leaked out between his lips with a wheezing sound. He groped for her hand and squeezed it.

Caitlin leaned forward and kissed his forehead.

"I love you," she said quietly. "And I promise you this will never happen again." Still in her bloodied running gear, Caitlin followed Dalby to his vehicle, an unmarked gray Mercedes W203 sedan. A small window tag displayed the logo of the British Home Office, promising to build a "safe, just, and tolerant society." Clouds obscured the sun, snuffing out what little warmth had been left in the day, and she was grateful when Dalby turned up the heat as he started the car.

"Perks of the job," he said. "It often seems this car is the only place where I can escape the chill these days. Bloody weather, being all over the shop."

Caitlin nodded without a word. Even with the resources of her own farm and the indulgences of the government, her family still felt the privations of the rationing system.

"We'll move your family to one of our secure estates," Dalby said as they drove away from the hospital, heading south toward the highway. The effort was slow going as he worked his way around a pod of cyclists and a horse-drawn cart. None of the bike riders were wrapped in Lycra. They weren't pedaling for their health. Dalby's was the only car on the road.

Caitlin watched the sides of the road, scanning for anything unusual.

"You won't have to worry about them," Dalby assured her. "We have secured the area."

Caitlin shook her head. "I can't help worrying, Mister Dalby. They're everything I have now."

"I'm sorry," he said. He seemed to open almost every sentence with an apology. "I meant that we will take care of them. And the farm. We'll keep Mister Melton and your little one under our wing while this situation gets sorted, and a manager has been sent to your estate at Mildenhall. One of our men. A good chap with the right background. His family has farmed this area for many years. But no, of course I didn't mean that you would feel no worry. That would be most insensitive."

"So Echelon sent you? Not the Home Office," Caitlin said, forcibly dragging her thoughts away from the hospital room as they entered the M4, heading west. That surprised her. She had been expecting to go to London.

"It's an interdepartmental issue. The lines of authority are somewhat blurred. Intentionally so," Dalby said as he maneuvered them onto the all but deserted highway. A few army trucks-lorries they called them-and two green-painted buses with British Army markings and steel mesh on the windows were the only vehicular traffic she could see. Dalby was finally able to tap into the power of the car, accelerating away from Swindon.


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