Without Warning (23 page)

“Please, Cathy … sorry,
Caitlin.
Bicycles? Look at them. They are not expensive models, no? The people who ride these do so because they cannot afford a car. Do not steal them, please. They will not be insured. You will only be spreading more misery.”

Caitlin’s irritation at the scolding was transitory. She was feeling quite ill now, and was coming to think she would need Monique to get through the next couple of days if she was unable to make contact with Echelon. It was better that the girl was feeling more confident, even if it meant she’d be less malleable and, frankly, more of a pain in the ass.

“Fine,” she conceded. “No bikes. But we are gonna need some wheels soon. If we get caught out in the open on foot we’re dead.”

The resumed their journey toward the fourteenth arrondissement, walking against the flow of one-way traffic along the Butte aux Cailles, which was alive with throngs of younger Parisians, all of them wealthy and well dressed, hopping from bars to clubs and restaurants as if this were a normal evening with a warm spring in the offing. The buildings here were smaller, with steeply pitched alpine roofs, and tended to be given over to commercial concerns, chichi diners and exclusive clubs, and the two fugitives stood out in their cheap, unwashed clothes. A few bookstores remained open for late-night browsers, and apple trees lined the street, perfuming the air with sticky pink blossoms. The sidewalk in front of the cafés and bistros had been colonized by clusters of small round tables, all covered in immaculate white linen, and playing host to lovers, friends, gourmands, and modern boule-vardiers. Monique’s cluster of angry political badges and sewn-on patches drew a score of withering glances and even open sneers. Caitlin tried to arrange her face in as neutral a fashion as possible, but something about her must have tripped warning beacons for most of those they passed by. In contrast
with Monique, nobody looked her in the eye or dared make any snide, slanting comment about her bloodstained pants and leather jacket.

Two police cars and an ambulance went rushing by at one point, forcing Caitlin to softly squeeze Monique’s arm and remind her to “be cool.” She felt terribly exposed on the expensive strip, and wondered whether it might be wiser to dive into a side street, but the GPS indicated that the route they were walking would get them quickly to the apartment opposite the Montpar-nasse cemetery. The longer she was out on the street, the more imperative her need for shelter. She hadn’t said anything yet, but her headache was getting worse, and now she was beginning to suffer from such severe nausea that it was possible she might lose her dinner all over the sidewalk. She had to get to that apartment. There she’d find shelter, weapons, money, clothes, and, just possibly, somebody from Echelon waiting to bring her in. Possibly even Wales. Although, what the fuck “bring her in” meant at the end of a day like this was a mystery. Perhaps a flight to London on one of the agency’s black renditions—if the French were still allowing them. Nothing that had gone down in the last few hours gave her any confidence on that score. She was certain the muscle at the hospital had been French secret service. But she had no idea why they’d come in hot.

If they wanted to parlez, why not just ask nicely?

Even though she was an undeclared operative, an assassin no less, working on their turf, there had been no call for that bullshit back at the Salpêtrière. This wasn’t the movies. You didn’t draw down on somebody and start banging away without serious fucking reason.

“Caitlin?”

Monique’s voice was quiet but thick with emotion. They had passed out of the busy, well-lit entertainment district and were back on the quieter streets. Caitlin checked the navigator, estimating that they had about twenty minutes to go before reaching the apartment. She’d have to decide very soon about stealing another car, or sneaking up on the building through the cemetery, investing a couple of hours in surveillance before heading in. Beside her, Monique’s eyes had welled up again, and her shoulders were hitching beneath the thick jacket she wore.

“You thinking about your friends?”

“They were your friends, too, Caitlin. Or at least I thought…”

They were my mission,
she thought. But aloud she said, “I liked them all right. Celia could be a self-righteous bore. And Maggie was kind of embarrassing, but…”

She shrugged off the rest of whatever she had been planning to say, not wanting to upset Monique further, but also not wanting to construct a series
of defensive lies around her previous actions. Thunder, distant and muffled, rolled over the city, although there didn’t appear to be a cloud anywhere in the sky. The city lights blotted out most of the stars, but only a few wispy strands of gray drifted across the face of the moon. Monique didn’t appear to notice, and Caitlin said nothing. The French girl was upset enough without being told that something big had just exploded a few miles away.

“I feel so guilty … about the hospital. About Maggie and Celia and …”

“It’s natural,” said Caitlin. “It happens. You can’t understand why they got zapped and you didn’t. You keep telling yourself you should have done something, anything, to change it. You obsessively pick away at the memory like a wound, wondering if one small thing here or there might have changed it all, and kept them alive.”

“Yes,” she admitted in a small voice.

They stopped at the steps of a narrow-fronted building. Flickering blue-green light behind a set of drawn curtains in the ground-floor apartment indicated the presence of a television. Probably tuned into a news service. Sirens, police and fire service, swooped by a few streets away.

“Well, don’t,” said Caitlin. “You’re gonna have to let it go at some point, Monique. May as well be now. Your friends got taken out by a couple of guys you would have called fascists just yesterday. I took them down in return. For what it’s worth, that’s about as much balance as the world ever achieves.”

Monique’s eyes looked hurt and almost resentful, but Caitlin continued anyway.

“This isn’t over. I don’t know why I’ve been targeted like this, whether it has anything to do with what happened back home today. But it isn’t over. They’ll keep coming until they get what they want, or we get away. You need to toughen up, Monique. And you need to understand that I will not let them take me or you without paying a heavy fucking price. Some people have been killed. Some more will go that way before I’m done. And that’s just in our little world, which nobody knows about, ‘cept us and the guys who are hunting us. The rest of the world? It’ll be a shitload worse.”

They’d started walking again, slowly, passing under the branches of an ancient oak tree that covered a street corner in front of a small, darkened art gallery.

“What do you mean, worse?” asked Monique. “How can that be so?”

Caitlin laughed, although it was more of a bitter little cough, really.

“Well, those guys at the hospital, and me, for that matter. We have our ways. You’d think them wrong, barbaric even. But if you understand the game and its rules, you can at least act with some sense of things playing themselves out right, one way or another.”

Which is why that splatterfest at the hospital was so fucking
out there.
It simply shouldn’t have gone down like that.

Caitlin stopped again, this time fixing Monique with a hard stare.

“But the Disappearance, you cannot underestimate how much that is going to fuck things up. I have to get out of Paris, out of France altogether. But so do you, if you want to survive. You ever read the English philosopher Hobbes? You’re French, right? You read philosophy with your croissant in the morning,
non?
Man exists in a state of nature? A war of all against all? That’s what modern society cured, at least so it didn’t interfere with the lives of people like you. People like me, on the other hand, we were still out there, getting bloody with it. But Monique, listen to me. We’re all outside now and a hard fuckin’ rain is gonna fall. You need to find shelter.”

“How bad do you think it will be?” she asked.

“I’m a pessimist,” said Caitlin as they crossed a road where the traffic lights seemed to have failed. “I think it’ll be totally fucking medieval. Pogroms. Food riots. Blood in the fucking streets. Maybe that’s just me. Whatever. But your friends? They’re not gonna miss much in the next little while.”

“The living will envy the dead, you mean?”

“That’s a bit too Metallica for me, but yeah, if you like. Economies are going to collapse all over the world. Not just slow down, or go a little wobbly. They will collapse like the Twin Towers into smoking fuckin’ rubble and anyone standing around underneath is gonna get smashed flat. Modern society is too complex to survive a shock like this. A simpler world, yeah, no worries. People would grow food in their back gardens. Cart water from the well. Live harder and closer to the bone for a few years. But you got what, fifteen million people in the greater metro area of Paris? How are they going to move around, how are they going to feed themselves and their families in two weeks when the stores are empty because there’s no more gas at the pumps?”

Monique tilted her head and gave Caitlin a quizzical look.

“But why would …”

“Why will the gas run out? Think of where it comes from, Monique. Think about what’s going to happen there now that the evil global overlord is no longer around to oppress everyone into behaving themselves. Think about what’s going to happen to the evil world financial system now that the planet’s greatest debtor nation has winked out of existence and won’t be meeting its loan repayments to anyone. Think about what happens when you take the lid off Pandora’s box and everything that we forgot about history comes spilling out to bite you in the ass. Do you know how unusual it is, in
human history, for children to be able to grow up in a place like this?” She waved her hands around to take in the city. “Never knowing the fear of someone riding over the horizon to steal their family’s crops and burn their fucking hut to the ground? All as a prelude to snatching them up as slaves for the rest of their miserable fucking lives?
That’s
normality, baby.
That’s
life as it has been lived by most human beings through most of our history.
That’s
what I’ve been fighting my entire adult life, variations on
that
theme.
That’s
what America protected you from. And now she’s gone. And you are all alone in the world. Except for me.”

They had reached the edge of the Montparnasse cemetery, a vast pool of darkness in the city of light. Monique’s lip was pushed out, giving her the appearance of a petulant child. She obviously didn’t want to hear any more, but neither did she argue with Caitlin.

The assassin checked their position, relying on memory now rather than the GPS device. They were on the far side of the graveyard from the safe house. It was time to get to work.

“Listen,” she said. “We’re going in here, and I’m going to go ahead some and check out the situation at the apartment. See if it’s been tumbled. If they got my number they might be rolling up the whole network. Are you going to be okay if I can stash you somewhere for a few hours?”

Monique looked alarmed. “A few hours?”

“It’s okay,” Caitlin assured her. “I have a layup point in here. Something I set up myself. You’ll be safe there. But alone. I need to recon the place, or else we could be walking into something like the hospital all over again. Will you be okay with that? Are you strong enough?”

Monique shivered as she contemplated the fields of the dead stretching away from them into the dark.

“I will try,” she promised.

“Cool,” said Caitlin, slapping her on the shoulder. “That’s all anyone can ever ask. Let’s go.”

Two vans had mounted the curb outside the apartment, a no-parking zone, and lights burned inside the third-floor apartment. Four or five men moved about inside without any pretense at stealth, turning the place over. Three hundred yards away, stretched out on a cracked, weed-covered grave site overhung by an ancient elm, Caitlin was able to observe them unmolested. She had no scope or binoculars, but that hardly mattered. Their very presence was enough to alert her.

The apartment was an Echelon safe harbor, a first sanctum known only to her and her controller, Wales Larrison. He should have been waiting for her there. Indeed, he might well have been. He could be tied to a chair somewhere inside right now, taking the first of many beatings that lay in his immediate future. Caitlin had no way of telling unless she was willing to stake out the scene for much longer than was prudent. She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing as a new wave of dizziness and nausea rolled over her. She couldn’t leave Monique on her own at the layup point farther back in the cemetery for too much longer, and she couldn’t interdict the search of the safe house in her current condition with no backup, minimal equipment, and no idea what sort of opposing force she’d encounter.

“I’m sorry, Wales,” she mouthed silently, before slowly crawling backward into the darkness of the cemetery.

She didn’t know whether her illness was affecting her judgment as badly as she knew it had affected her physical abilities, but Caitlin was annoyed and not a little perturbed to find herself feeling scared and lost. The shooters at the hospital were state-sponsored muscle—of that she was sure. And the team at the apartment looked like pros, too. From what little she could glimpse, they were taking the place apart in a precise, methodical fashion. Thinking it through again, if she had to bet on it, she’d lay down good money that they were French secret service, probably the action division of the DGSE, the designated point men for securing the Republic against the intrigues and depredations of Echelon.

What the hell they were up to, what greater scheme they served, she had no idea. It was obviously related to the day’s events—such frontal assaults on a “sister” service were almost unprecedented—but she could not be sure how.

What she did know was that her control cell was compromised and she would need to get herself to safety. To a U.S. or British military facility somewhere on the continent. Across the Channel, to friendly ground. Or, as a very last resort, to one of the diplomatic missions of Echelon’s member nations, the old, English-speaking democracies.