Without Warning (13 page)

“News would be good.”

“Okay, don’t rush me,” he said. After some brief fiddling he brought up a news service. BBC World, according to the electronic watermark in the corner of the screen.

“… broke out between riot police and residents of the largely Muslim suburb after a man was arrested for allegedly stopping cars and demanding that the occupants join in the celebrations.”

“What the hell’s that about?” said Fifi.

Jules took the control from Pete and thumbed off the sound as she searched for a program guide.

“It happened last time, too.”

“Last time?”

“Nine eleven.”

“That’s great,” said Pete as the big flat Sony filled with images of burning cars and shops. “But we need to move our arses before someone else tries to grab this boat out from under them.”

Fifi, who by now had recovered from her earlier fright, shrugged and hefted her sawed-off shottie. “Let ‘em try.”

“Someone with more guns,” he added.

Mr. Lee looked over the main controls one last time, shaking his head, sadly.

“Yes, we can do this,” he said, somewhat paradoxically. “But not for long. We will need engineering johnnies, for begin.”

Pete nodded. They’d just come from inspecting the lower decks, specifically the engine room, which had gleamed whiter and cleaner than any human space he’d ever seen before, save for the remains of three more crew members. If you could ignore them, puddled on the floor, it was like the photos you sometimes saw of microchip plants in Taiwan. Not a speck of dust or grease anywhere. The boat was running perfectly for the moment, following a computer-controlled track to the south, but it was such a huge, complicated piece of machinery that there was no guarantee they’d be able to cope if anything went wrong. He allowed himself a little Captain Kirk moment, swiveling in the main command chair as Fifi and Jules reclined on a padded bench at the rear of the cabin. Late-afternoon light flooded in through the huge windows, bathing them all in a deepening golden glow. All in all it felt more like they were kicking back at the Bellagio in Vegas than scoping out a hijack at sea.

“We could get crew,” said Pete. “I know some guys in Acapulco, and down Panama way. German Willy still runs out of the canal zone. And Stan Lusevic, and Shoeless Dan.”

“Jesus Christ, Pete!” protested Jules. “Are we putting together a crew or a sheltered workshop for retired drunks and dick pullers?”

“Yes,” Mr. Lee agreed. “German Willy, too much drinking, too much willy. Other two morons. Without shoes. No good, Mr. Pete. No good.”

“Okay,” he conceded. “I take your point. But Lee’s also right about needing crew if we’re going to be doing anything other than selling this boat off at the first safe port we can find.”

Jules smiled wryly at him from deep inside the luxurious royal-blue padding of the bench that occupied the entire rear bulkhead. “Pete, I thought we were just minding this old tub for the Shark.”

Pete smiled sadly and shook his head.

“The Shark’s gone, baby.” He spared a glance at two viscous stains on the nonslip floor where Mr. Lee had cleaned up another two pools of human ooze and empty clothing. True to form, it hadn’t seemed to bother him.

“Most everyone north of here is gone for good,” Pete continued. “You’ve seen the news. If we’re
lucky
this’ll be some kind of space-monkey invasion, because at least then we’ll have someone to maintain order.”

“Like
Planet of the Apes,”
said Fifi in all seriousness.

“Sure, sweetheart, if you like. But me, I reckon the universe, or merciful Allah or the Great Pumpkin or whatever, sneezed and blew the good ol’ US of A right out of its arse, which as we’ve seen, a lot of people think of as A Good Deal. But me, I reckon it means we’re about three days away from a Hobbesian fucking meltdown.”

Fifi’s blank look spoke volumes for a formal education that had ended when she was only thirteen years old.

“Thomas Hobbes, darling,” explained Jules. “A Brit. He invented the idea of the violent clusterfuck, with everyone fighting each other. Like a Jackie Chan movie. Or a cage-wrestling free-for-all on the telly. You know,
Smack-down
or
Spankdown
or whatever it’s called.”

“Right,” agreed Pete, waving his hand in the general direction of the energy wave. “That thing out there, most people won’t realize it yet, but that thing has thrown us into a state of fucking nature, a war of all against all, dar-lin’. And I’ve been wondering whether the safest option might be to ride it out in the South Pacific for a couple of years. Island-hop. Trade a bit. Stay one step ahead of the chaos, because it’s coming, believe me.”

“Already here,” said Lee.

“What’s that?” asked Pete, spinning in his captain’s chair.

Lee was standing a few feet away, splitting his attention between a radar screen and an enormous pair of Zeiss binoculars, mounted on a pivot stand, through which he’d been watching the southern horizon. He’d peer through the glasses, check the screen, and peer through the glasses again, finally grunting once, emphatically.

“Twelve miles sou’-sou’east, Mr. Peter. Three go-fast boats I see. They making over sixty knots.”

“Heading?” asked Jules before Pete could open his mouth.

“Straight for us, I’ll bet,” said Pete in a flat, fatalistic voice.

Mr. Lee nodded. “Straight for us.”

“They packin’?” asked Fifi, suddenly on her feet, shotgun in hand. “You think I should go get the worm?”

“Too far away, cannot see,” said Lee.

“They’re packin’,” sighed Pete. “Come on,” he said, pushing himself up out of the chair. “It’s started. And yeah, Fifi. Go break out the worm, and get your cannon too.”

“Awesome.”

“NO!”

The French girl’s shriek was a raw, animal sound. Within it roiled pain, violation, horror, and outrage. Her face, a mask of dark, primal emotions, raged at Caitlin over the unwavering muzzle of the Glock 23. The assassin had long ago stopped counting the number of men and women whose last seconds she’d seen through crosshairs or iron gun sights, and she knew from that face that Monique’s cry was not a plea for life. It was a scream of protest at what had already been taken from her. Trust and intimacy and a whole world in which Caitlin—or Cathy, as Monique knew her—was a friend, and not a liar and murderer.

A hot flush washed over her, dizzying, unexpected.

She let her gun hand fall to her side, tired of it all. And they might still use Monique to get to al-Banna.

“If you stay here you will die,” she said. “Come with me right now, and you might live.”

The emergency room remained a still life by Goya. The first cries of staff and patients had been silenced by the shots she’d fired into the heads of her would-be killers—or captors. As Caitlin turned for the exit a spasm of movement
passed through the onlookers, as each flinched away from the line of her gaze. One man in a white coat, a doctor most likely, took a few hesitant steps in her direction, but a shake of her head and a casual wave of the pistol in his direction arrested any further advance. Caitlin did not check to see whether Monique was following her. She knew the girl would. Walking quickly but calmly toward a set of sliding doors, she stripped off her bloodied chambray shirt. The white T-shirt underneath was stained pink, but she hid the worst of it with a black leather motorcycle jacket, lifted from the corner of a bed on which a man with a heavily bandaged head lay unconscious. It was too big for her but would have to do for now. The guns, identical models, went into a couple of zippered pockets, and she plucked the last of the sensor leads from her filthy hair. A roll of thick surgical tape from a bedside tray went into another pocket. In the last few steps she turned and walked backward, scanning the room quickly for any more pursuers. Monique was glaring at her with unalloyed loathing, but she was following just a few feet behind, victim of a type of Stockholm syndrome that Caitlin had seen and exploited many times before.

The doors closed on the Pitié-Salpêtrière with a chime and the protesting grumble of old rubber wheels in dirty guide rails. Early evening had come with a hard frost, and she shivered inside the jacket, thankful for its warmth. Transport was her first and most urgent need, then shelter. When they were safely hidden she would contact Wales, her overwatch coordinator. Her cover was blown. Her image and the fight in the emergency room had certainly been captured on hospital security video.

“Where the fuck are we going, Cathy? What are you going to do? You killed those men. Murdered them.”

Monique’s tone was shrill, accusatory.

Caitlin shrugged her off, scanning the cars parked in front of the building as she hastened down the steps. A blue Renault Fuego had caught her eye, a good car, easily stolen, and as close to invisible in Paris as she could get on short notice. The front passenger-side window was open a crack.

“It’s not the same,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Monique demanded to know, hurrying to catch up beside her. Sirens were audible, but there seemed to be hundreds of them, the distinctive warble and wail coming from all points of the compass. The city was alive with their discordant, jangling sound. Traffic along the roads around the hospital grounds was heavy, but grinding forward in fits and starts. She could see the strobing lights of both police and ambulance vehicles in three separate places. It was impossible to tell whether they were headed in her direction.

“Killing and murdering are not the same thing. I killed them, sure. But I had good reason. That isn’t murder. It’s self-defense.”

“Self-defense!” Monique made a grab for her arm but Caitlin slipped out of her grip with practiced ease. “You expect me to believe that! You attacked them and killed them like … a … machine. A thing. You are no activist. You are no surfer!”

Monique spat the last word at her.

“Well, I used to surf, but I’m also a soldier,” said Caitlin. “Now get in the fucking car, if you want to get out of this alive. Those men back there, they were soldiers, too, like me. And there’ll be more of them looking for us.”

Caitlin retrieved one of the pistols and swung the butt of the handle into the window, smashing it open and causing Monique to jump with surprise. There were more than a dozen witnesses watching her but none made any attempt to intervene as she popped the lock. More people came spilling out of the ER doors, some of them pointing in her direction, but none made any move toward her. It wouldn’t be long, however, before hospital security, or the gendarmes, or something worse turned up.

“Clock’s a-tickin’, Monique. Hop in.”

The front seat of the Fuego was cluttered with papers, a bag of onions, and a clutch from which spilled a checkbook, iPod, cell phone, makeup, and more keys.

“Jesus Christ,” said Caitlin. “Why not just get a big fucking bumper sticker that says ‘Steal My Stuff?’ “

She snatched a sturdy-looking steel pen from the jumble of items and used it to lever her way into the car’s accessory circuits, cracking open the plastic cover beneath the wheel with a couple of violent jerks. She sensed Monique hovering outside and swept the detritus from the seat. “Just get in. We’re running out of time.”

The French girl climbed in carefully, as if unwilling to touch the belongings of the unknown owner. Caitlin swore softly as she sparked the engine to life, giving herself a small electrical shock in the process. A brief glance over her shoulder revealed a growing knot of people on the steps of the hospital, all of them gesturing in her direction, some of them shouting. She threw the car into reverse, stamped on the gas, and peeled out backward from the parking slot with a squeal and the harsh smell of burned rubber, reefing on the hand brake to tighten her turning circle. Both she and Monique jerked forward in their seats and she slammed the disk brakes, changed gear, and accelerated away, barely missing the taillights of an adjacent Fiat.

“You are not Cathy Mercure, are you?” asked Monique as they negotiated
a twisting course through the parking lot toward the exit and out into the traffic stream.

Caitlin’s first, unthinking reaction was to lie. Deceit and betrayal were so deeply ingrained by her training and the demands of her work that they had become elements of her true nature. But unless she was psychotic, her mission concerns were no longer relevant. Something bigger had happened, something infinitely worse than anything she had been prepared to fight. A painful throbbing on the injured side of her head grew more insistent as she allowed herself to contemplate anything beyond fight or flight for the first time since the shooting had begun back at the hospital.

“No,” she conceded to Monique. “I’m not Cathy Mercure. My name’s Caitlin. That’s all you need to know. That, and also that you’re in a lot of trouble.”

Blaring horns and some muffled Gallic abuse greeted their high-speed entry into the crowded Parisian road net. Caitlin opted to cut across the main flow of traffic, where they would be jammed in place, and forced her way through an intersection onto a lesser boulevard. She wasn’t familiar with the road, but it had everything she wanted right at that moment. It was navigable at a good speed and it was taking them away from the place where somebody had just tried to put the zap on her.