{"product_id":"angels-of-vengeance-isbn-9780345502940","title":"Angels of Vengeance","description":"\u003cb\u003e“A seamless fusion of alternate history, postapocalyptic fiction, and espionage-fueled thriller.”—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen an inexplicable wave of energy slams into North America, the world is plunged into turmoil—as wars erupt, borders vanish, and the great and powerful fall. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAgainst this dramatic backdrop, three very different women navigate the chaos. Deep in a South American jungle, special agent Caitlin Monroe will stop at nothing to discover how a master terrorist escaped a secret detention center in French Guadeloupe to strike a fatal blow in New York City. Sofia Peiraro, a grieving teenager trying to rebuild her life in Kansas City, is drawn back to Texas by a vicious murder. And in the fashionable bars and boutiques of Darwin, the seething, growing freeport in Australia’s deep north, the British-born aristocrat-turned-smuggler Lady Julianne Balwyn hides a pistol in the small of her lovely back. She is hunting for the man who is hunting her. As these women fight for survival, justice, and revenge, humanity itself struggles toward its better angels—and to purge its worst demons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Birmingham knows how to write action. . . . I enjoy world building stories as well as post-apocalyptic tales. This is definitely a little of both.”—Bill Lawhorn, SFRevu\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A rollicking ride . . . fast-paced and thought-provoking.”—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Sun-Herald\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e (Sydney, Australia)\u003c\/b\u003e“A seamless fusion of alternate history, postapocalyptic fiction, and espionage-fueled thriller.”—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Birmingham knows how to write action. . . . I enjoy world building stories as well as post-apocalyptic tales. This is definitely a little of both.”—Bill Lawhorn, SFRevu\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A rollicking ride . . . fast-paced and thought-provoking.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Sun-Herald\u003c\/i\u003e (Sydney, Australia)\u003cb\u003eJohn Birmingham\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eAngels of Vengeance, After America, Without Warning, Final Impact, Designated Targets, Weapons of Choice,\u003c\/i\u003e and other novels, as well as \u003ci\u003eLeviathan,\u003c\/i\u003e which won the National Award for Nonfiction at Australia’s Adelaide Festival of the Arts. He has written for \u003ci\u003eThe Sydney Morning Herald, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Playboy,\u003c\/i\u003e and numerous other magazines. He lives at the beach with his wife, daughter, son, and two cats.1 \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eFORMER URUGUAYAN–ARGENTINIAN BORDER REGION, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Staff  Sergeant Michelle  Royse of the U.S. Army’s much diminished 160th  Special Operations  Aviation   Battalion,   scanned the northern banks of the river  delta as the Black Hawk pounded up the narrowing channel over dark,  choppy waters.  Through  her night vision goggles, the slightly fuzzy green imagery of heavily  wooded banks was blurred even further   by the shuddering  of the helicopter as it roared  along above the wave tops.  A solid nor’easter was blowing  directly  up the mouth of the river,  adding an extra thirty  knots to their airspeed but demanding extreme levels of concentration from  Captain Tim Lindell and his copilot as they guided the chopper through  hostile,  if poorly guarded,  airspace. Far behind  them,  no  one paid  their improvised helicopter carrier  much mind—a battered and rusty  container vessel salvaged from  Mexico.  Royse  didn’t like to ponder what would  have happened if the vessel  had been detected by the South American Federation Navy. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHell, probably not much to worry about, she consoled herself.  It’s just a paper navy at best. Most of their top ships laid up in docks anyhow, just rusting away. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA bit like the U.S. Navy nowadays, she thought. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLindell had not spoken for five minutes, which still made him  a hell of  a lot chattier than their  passenger: the spook. Michelle  knew  the woman had to be a spook  because in spite of the faded summer-weight BDUs she wore, the kit they had loaded for her was all high-spec exotic stuff, the sort  of gear the military simply couldn’t afford nowadays. No way the army or SOCOM  was running  this operation. They  were just providing  a  bus   service   for some  ghost  recon  superwoman   who’d drifted down from  far above the  upper  reaches of the tier-one food chain. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMichelle snuck  a sideways   glance  at  the  passenger.   The woman wasn’t unfriendly,  not like some of the ego monsters she’d met   while shuttling T1 operators around. But  she was entirely  self-contained; she spoke  only  when  necessary and had a way of discouraging questions without  actually asking  you to mind  your  own business.  She stood maybe an inch taller than Michelle, but even in her BDUs, body armor, webbing, and equipment,  she seemed . . . well,  not slighter—perhaps more wiry.  There  was a tightly  wound intensity about this spook that made being  in her  presence distinctly   uncomfortable. Impossible  to guess  her  age under   all  that  kit, but Michelle  thought  maybe early to middle thirties. The woman’s physique looked totally ripped, but her eyes were  old beneath a stray lock of dirty  blond hair. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRoyse looked away quickly  as their  mystery  passenger shifted position.  She was happy enough to attend to her duties while  Jane Bond sat in a furious still-life study  of cold impacted rage. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor the moment, those duties mostly  involved  scanning the shore- line north of the river.  Nothing appeared to move out there on what once had  been the Uruguayan  side of the border. Not  now, though. Now it was all part of la Federación. A few bright  emerald pinpricks of light  burned in a cluster  about ten miles inland, but the shoreline was dark. The Black Hawk banked gently  a few degrees to the northeast, taking  them over land for the first time.  Michelle   craned her  head to peer over her shoulder  into  the cabin, which  glowed like  a child’s idea of a fairy cave in her night vision goggles. Far ahead of them, she could make  out a faint  dome of opalescent light on the horizon,  marking  the location of the Federation Navy’s fleet base. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe  would  have sneered at the vanity  of the pompous title  “fleet base” if not for  the fact that their  own aircraft  was held together with hundred-mile-an-hour tape, bailing wire,  and promises  and that most of the U.S. military bases  she’d flown out of in the close to five years since March  2003  had all suffered  from  the same air of  neglect and making  do. Salvaged gear left  exposed to the elements or in compromised warehouses and storage depots took you only  so far. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYep, two paper tigers staring each other down in a burning barn—that’s the world of tomorrow. What a fucking joke. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Five minutes  to insertion.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCaptain Lindell’s voice barely registered  in her earphones over the roar  of the engine  and the deep thrumming bass note of the chopper blades. It was as though  the tension  had strangled  his  voice down  to a clenched murmur. Royse held up her hand with  all five fingers splayed and nodded at the spook. She was already preparing  herself  but nodded back, anyway. Michelle had watched the woman take inventory of her load before they lifted  off from  the container ship, three hundred miles  off  the coast. She  watched her  repeat the performance  now  that they were almost at their destination. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA minute  later, obviously  having reassured herself  that she had not forgotten her passport, wallet, or Gerber Mark  2 fighting knife,  the woman  closed her  eyes and let  her  head loll back  until her helmet touched the bulkhead behind her. It was the first human gesture, the first intimation  of weakness, or fear, or exhaustion  that Michelle  had seen her make, and as quickly  as it came, it passed. Her head snapped back up. Her eyes blinked  once. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Two minutes  out.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe woman  chambered a round   in her HK417, a metallic   Kerrchung  that never failed to lay a cold  finger at the base of Royse’s spine. The 5.56-mm HK416s she had seen here and there, but the 417 with the heavier 7.62-mm  round  had   been  a  rumor until tonight.  The spook’s brand-new Heckler  \u0026amp; Koch  was another sign that she wasn’t your standard issue self-loving spec-ops asshole whispering, “For I am the baddest motherfucker in the valley.” No piece-of-shit M16 or M4 for this chick. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFuck it, she figured. Another day, another dollar. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMichelle  readied herself  at the door, training the electric M134  mini- gun over the treetops, which rippled beneath her feet at 140 knots. Her knees  bent to compensate for  the sudden  twisting, diving flight path as Lindell began to track  the nap of the earth,  heading  for a small clearing marked  on their  maps as Objective Underwood. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Thirty  seconds.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Black Hawk pivoted, seeming to turn  on a dime,   as if Lindell were trying  to throw  them both out the rear hatch by way of momentum. The woman  braced herself  against the bulkhead, holding  tight to a grab bar over her right  shoulder.  Royse sank deeper into  a squat  until her knees were bent almost at right  angles. Then the inertia  bled away swiftly as they  came to hover  over  a patch of field between two clusters of trees. Michelle checked the ground  beneath them and reported that the aircraft  was clear. She signaled to the woman to step forward  and hook up. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe spook  needed no help  attaching  herself  to the fast-rope apparatus.  Royse  had one second to look  into  her  eyes before she stepped out and dropped away into  the night.  The woman did not look  scared, but there was something  haunting  her eyes. Something  in the back of the deep, clenched lines   that  made her  face appear unusually   long  and drawn in the low-light amplification of the NVGs. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne brief nod. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA thumbs-up   gesture and she was gone, dropping  down  into  the darkness. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCaitlin  fast-roped down to the clearing floor, which squelched under the tread of her canvas-sided jungle  boots. She scanned the tree line  for any hint   of enemy presence without  expecting to find it. If they were going  to be fired on, chances were she would  have seen the tracers arc- ing in while  she was dangling, all but defenseless, in midair. Releasing the rope, she signaled to Staff  Sergeant Royse that she was clear and hurried off to find cover as the chopper increased power and clawed up into the humid night. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA flick of the wrist revealed the time:  0126 hours. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe had four  hours  of movement before she would  have to lay up for the  day. It wouldn’t take  her  all the way  to  her  objective, but  she planned  to be well within observation range by the time the sun rose. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Echelon field agent moved quickly away from  the drop zone, heading north  by northeast, following  the track programmed into her mil-grade Navman GPS unit. The brush  wrapped itself  around her, slowing  her down as soon as she’d passed under  the first tree canopy. Night vision goggles resolved the environment into a flat, eerily phosphorescent landscape of sinuous  roots and vines, of fat nodding leaves and thick  snarls  of creeper, of rot  and genesis. The smell of decay and of new life growing  over the top of older  worn-out   vegetation was strong,  almost  cloying. Clusters   of  such flora  dotted the grassland steppe behind her during  this, the height of the South American sum- mer. It combined the worst  of all possible worlds:  a  main course of humidity with a side platter  of wide-open  kill zones,  topped off  with jungle-like collections of trees, brush,  and other plant life. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCaitlin  was familiar with the fecund crush of the jungle.  She’d spent a good  year  and  a half tracking  two targets through  the old-growth forests  of Sumatra  and Aceh long before the Disappearance while pos- ing  as a Peace Corps volunteer helping to build schools. She knew the jungle. They had come to terms. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut  the problem  now was more than one of terrain—this was a tactical nightmare. She proceeded to the nearest point  of cover and pushed farther inside the forest. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwo hundred yards in, she came to a small stream that was a couple of feet across and easily forded. Shallow  water gurgled down a slight but noticeable slope, where  Caitlin  spied a small animal drinking  up- stream from her, a squat, barrel-shaped  grazer  of some sort.  It sniffed the air cautiously a moment after she’d spotted it but returned to drinking  when  no obvious  threat  came charging out of the night.  A couple of boulders, huge moss-covered menhirs, formed a natural fort. Caitlin decided to lay up there  for  a minute. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe stream  led most  of  the distance to her  objective, covered by varying  degrees of thick  vegetation: it was the best bet for  a concealed approach in the dark.  It was also probably the most obvious . . . She pushed that thought  away. Nothing could  be done about it. Traipsing through  open grassland  in full gear was  a sure  way  to get a third  eye drilled into her forehead. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHundreds of bugs scuttled away as she laid her HK417 against the rock. A giant  centipede reared up as if to strike. Caitlin swiftly killed the insect with  one slash  of a spring-loaded wrist blade and then flicked the two halves away with  gloved fingers. The last thing she needed was to call in an extraction because of a bug sting. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe let her senses expand out into the surrounding landscape, listening for human speech or footfall,  the clink  and rattle of poorly secured equipment; she sniffed  the air just  as the animal had, tasting it for the scent of man, or the last meal he’d eaten,   or the soap he had washed with,  or not, as might  be. When  she was certain no immediate danger existed, she relaxed fractionally.  Or  rather, she redirected her energy to her first lay-up procedure. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAgain she inventoried  her equipment. Nobody wanted to be the guy who turned  up at the beach without his towel, or the state-sponsored killer who forgot her ninja throwing  stars . . . Okay,  she  conceded, I don’t have ninja throwing  stars. But it would be totally bad-ass if I did. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCaitlin flipped up the monocular night sight on her PVS-14s  to check the digital  map Velcroed to her left arm. As was so often the case nowadays, Echelon  resources didn’t stretch  to a live  overwatch  link. No  one had that—not even the Russian SVR had the resources for  live overwatch anymore. She was on her own, which  was not entirely  a bad thing.  Nobody was recording her every move for an embarrassing  moment with  the media farther  down the road. Nobody was barking  at her through a headset,   telling  her to do shit that made no sense. She had good data, though, and with  that and her experience, there wasn’t much else Caitlin  needed. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe little stream beside which  she’d laid up ran through the center of the dimly  illuminated  screen. Her position was marked with  a blue dot. She hoped to follow  the stream upslope for at least three  klicks before it began to  veer  away  from  her  intended destination, one of Roberto’s  many detention facilities,  this one tucked  away in an old police station  about ten kilometers inland. The best intelligence they had placed her  target  there.  Wales had called it a memory hole: a dark place where  the  regime  stuffed  away its mistakes,  embarrassments, and occasional secrets. Caitlin wondered if they understood the nature of the secret they had stashed down here in the back forty  of the former Uruguayan Republic. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe picked up the 417, resettled  her  pack a little  more comfortably, and took  a mouthful  of chilled Gatorade from  the camelback bladder woven into it. The brush reappeared in eldritch  green as she snapped the PVS-14  back down over her  dominant  eye. The potbellied  beast (was it a tapir—was that what they were called?) scuttled  back into the undergrowth as she began to move. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou’re a long way south, Caitlin thought  about the tapir.  Maybe it had gotten loose from  a zoo or something. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTime to move on herself.  Quickly  setting the GPS unit  to vibrate when  she had covered two  and a half kilometers, Caitlin carefully stepped down  onto the sandy creek bank from the small  grassy bend on which she’d been  resting. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe was her own point and cover, responsible  for her flanks and rear guard. She was alone, her natural  state of being. Consciously  pushing away thoughts  of her husband  and baby back at the safe house in Scot- land, willfully forgetting  the life  they had tried  to make for  themselves on the farm  in Wiltshire, Caitlin Monroe, Echelon’s senior surviving field  agent, let  her  true  nature  take  over.  A predator, she stalked through  the primordial   heat—claws out, fangs ready, all her  senses twitching and straining, searching for prey. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt didn’t matter to her that this part of the country, thinly  populated before the Disappearance, was even more  sparsely  peopled now. She had been trained to assume the worst,  to prepare for  ill chance and disaster  as a certainty. There  were no large townships  within thirty kilo- meters, and the terrain between here and the objective was undoubtedly deserted. El colapso  had emptied it, and Roberto Morales’s regime kept it that way. But  still, she would move forward  as though snares blocked her path at every turn. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe  advanced in a creeping crouch, her  knees bent, her  thigh  muscles and core strength  tested by the weight  of her  equipment  and the unnatural  movement. Her body had recovered well  from  pregnancy and childbirth,  however, and from  the rigors  of hunting  and fighting in the huge open mausoleum  of New  York last spring. Three  months back  home  with Bret and  Monique   had  helped  with that—three months in which  she regained her strength  and bound it tightly with new layers of resolution  and a fierce will to lay her hands on the man she blamed for  nearly destroying  her family. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBilal Hans Baumer. Al Banna. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr whatever he was calling himself these days. In Manhattan he had been known as the Emir. Now  he was the target. Her target. As  he had been for  a year before the old world  had fallen. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe barrel  of Caitlin’s 417 swept back and forth in a tight  arc as she moved up the creek like a  nightmare  black arachnid. The burbling splash  of the stream  covered the sound  of her  boots. She  took  care to step where the flow  of water would erase any sign  of  her  passage quickly.  Mosquitoes  hovered around her in a cloud, drawn  by the opportunity to feed but thwarted at the last moment by the odorless insect repellent she wore. As the environment adapted to her  presence, it also disguised her advance, enfolding her in the shrill, creaking chirrup  of a billion insects, the shriek of bats and nocturnal  birds  of prey, the rustle of larger animals moving through  the undergrowth,  and  once, as she ducked under  the limb  of a half-fallen  tree, the dry hiss  of a viper slithering  languidly along. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCaitlin dropped   a hand to the knife  at her hip and with  one fluid motion threw it at the snake,  spearing  it to the branch. While it was fixed in place, she crushed  its skull with a swift  stroke of the Heckler  \u0026amp; Koch’s buttstock. Pythons didn’t worry  her, but vipers were incredibly foul-tempered. Best not to take chances. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter  forty  minutes the Navman on her forearm began to vibrate ever so slightly,  warning  her that the stream  was about to veer away from  her intended heading. She slowed to a  stop and took her time absorbing the signs . . . She listened for the slightest  fluctuation in the wall  of sound thrown  up by the insects in her immediate vicinity,  the splash  of water across the creek bed, which  was slightly  rockier here. Her eyes took  in the noticeable brightening of the world  in her goggles under  a thinner canopy  as a strengthening breeze  opened a hole  in the silver-gray cloud cover to let moonlight  and starlight spill through. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut nothing human. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStill she waited. The slight delay  gave her an opportunity  to measure  her endurance against the task  at hand. She ignored  the humidity, which  lay on the landscape like a wet woolen blanket, making breathing difficult    and  leaving  her   with clammy   sweat  on   the   backs of her thighs.  No  one in her right mind would have been out  in this, Caitlin realized, but it was  a thought that neither  eroded her attention to detail nor  made her lower  her guard even marginally. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSatisfied   that  she  remained  alone, the  Echelon   agent moved  off, carefully climbing the northern  bank of the stream. Old mineral  survey maps had indicated that the soil  was thinner  here and the vegetation  less dense. It was still thick  enough to slow  her progress. With no natural  track  to follow,   she was forced to push  and occasionally hack her way through  while  trying  to keep all  noise  to a minimum. As much  as she could, she traded caution for  speed, keen to make as much ground  as possible on her  objective before the sun  climbed over the horizon. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eScreaming. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt began sometime  before dawn  as a feeble, plaintive wailing, a trembling  warble of  utter  hopelessness. Caitlin   recognized the exhausted protests of a man who thought  he was close to the limit of what he could endure.  She  knew  from personal  experience that  he was wrong. In the hands  of a capable torturer, you could endure far beyond the point  where you’d  first thought  you wanted to die to escape the pain and humiliation. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe humiliation  of torture was the surprise  for most people. They expected the  pain,  at least intellectually,   although  unless  they’d  been trained for it, the shock  was enough  to send most  over  the edge very quickly. The humiliation and shame, however, clung to them for  years after the pain had subsided. And  that was the jangling  note she recognized in the screaming:  the shame of someone who’d already broken and given up whatever he had, to no avail. The torture had continued. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was no concern of hers  except from a tactical  viewpoint. She didn’t want her  target, Ramón  Lupérico,  checking out before she’d had   a chance to interrogate him. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe exhaled slowly,  took a  sip of fluid from   her  camelback, and peeled the wrapping from a mocha-flavored protein bar. Breakfast  of champions. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe detention facility—a grand name for an adobe hut  at a straggling,  muddy crossing of the two main local roads—was  a single-story off-white  building  fronted by a slumping shaded porch. A high stone wall  ran  around  a compound  at the rear.  From  her position on a small hill two  hundred  meters  back into  the woods, overlooking  the site, Caitlin couldn’t see the prisoners’ enclosure,  but she’d studied the satellite  images closely at the pre-op briefing.  A well   appeared to provide drinking water,  and a beaten-down  path marked   the  circuit   the  in- mates were allowed to walk  for  exercise  each day. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAssuming they were allowed any, of course. She’d half  expected to see wooden  poles  driven into the earth for the traditional  blindfold  and last  cigarette, complete with   bloodstains  from   the coup de grâce, but there were none. The guards most likely  executed their victims in the cells and ordered any surviving captives to clean out the mess. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe wailing  spiraled up through the old familiar  stages. Horror. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDenial. Rejection. Pleading. Shock. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen the abject surrender. All in less than two minutes. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere  was no way to know  if the screamer was Lupérico.  A quick recon of the former police station confirmed the position of two guards outside: only  half dressed in uniform,  sipping some sort  of drink— probably coffee—under  the portico. She thought  she could even smell the brew. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHard to get good coffee these days . . . She  made a note to snag a bag of beans if the opportunity arose. Black  tea with milk and sugar at four  in the afternoon with  a fistful of cucumber sandwiches just  didn’t cut it. She  was sure  the guys  on her  extraction   chopper wouldn’t object to a little  extra cargo. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo, two men outside, at least four inside. Possibly  six.  Plus  the three prisoners  intel  said were inside,  only  one of whom was of interest  to her. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll of Caitlin’s training, all of her experience, everything, told her to wait this out, to lay up until nightfall, then strike  under  the cover of darkness. But she had reason to ignore  the training   and experience. Somewhere down there was Ramón  Lupérico,  the man who had re- leased Baumer from imprisonment in Guadeloupe. He  was a prisoner now himself, and it was  a righteous  certainty that he could tell her how al Banna  had effected that release from  his  custody, possibly  even how he then  came to control  the pirate  gangs and jihadist  militia  that had infested  Manhattan  back in April 2007. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe did not fool herself  that Lupérico  would  know  how or why Baumer  had chosen to reach out and lay his  malign  touch on her family, but that hardly  mattered. She was here because Echelon  had tasked her with  securing whatever information she could extract from  the tar- get. The coincidence of her personal and professional  interests  created an impetus toward immediate action. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  South American Federation was little  better  than  a mafia state, but it was the only reliable authority south of the Panama Canal Zone. It would  no sooner collaborate with Seattle than its self-proclaimed president  for life, Roberto Morales,  would  present himself   in The Hague to answer  the many charges of crimes  against humanity  that now stood against his name. In the anarchic, violent world that arose in the wake of the Disappearance, such diplomatic  impasses proved less frustrating than  they once had been. The states that survived tended to be those which acted to secure  their  interests directly, expediently, and swiftly. It was a perfectly  complete return to Hobbes’s state of nature, and Caitlin Monroe, a survivor and  a killer, was an instrument  of that universe. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe  crouched down, motionless  and unseen in her hiding  spot on the small  rise  overlooking  the crossroads, and resolved to give herself one hour  to gather as much intelligence  about the situation  on the ground  here as she could. And  then she would  act.Author of After America","brand":"Del Rey","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303990055141,"sku":"NP9780345502940","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345502940.jpg?v=1767721586","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/angels-of-vengeance-isbn-9780345502940","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}