Without Warning Part 13

"There's an old fort there. Run by the action division of your DGSE. Spent some time there a few years ago. It sucked. Believe me, you don't want to find out firsthand. So sit there if you want, but I'm outta here."

She grabbed the handbag left behind by the car's owner, tossing in the phone, GPS unit, iPod, and wallet before heading off toward the park. She smiled at finding an unused McDonald's towelette in one of the pockets of the bag-you should be ashamed of yourself, mademoiselle-and ripped it open, cleaning the worst of the blood from her face and hands. The park was beautiful at night, just as she remembered it. Soft white spotlights underlit trees budding with the first intimation of the coming spring. She briefly consulted the GPS and took her bearings. The screen seemed overly bright, and she dimmed it a fraction, so as not to degrade her night vision too badly. With time to think, she could finally place herself within a mental map of the city as she understood it: a matrix of bolt-holes, safe houses, escape routes, dead drops, rat runs, friendly and hostile camps, and, naturally, history; a personal and professional history of a.s.signments, targets, milk runs, black-bag jobs, and wetwork. An ocean of wetwork these past few years.

There was an apartment she could access on the rue de la Sabliere over in the next arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, but it was a good hour's walk away, possibly more, and Caitlin did not fancy being exposed on foot for so long, especially given her condition. She had already taken to thinking of the tumor as My Condition. She would have to steal another vehicle, if possible. A car door slammed behind her and she heard boot heels hammering on the road surface as Monique chased after her.

"Please, wait for me. I am scared."

"Everyone's scared," said Caitlin as she drew up. "Trick is to push through anyway. Come on."

They crossed an open area of the park, where the city put on moonlight cinema in the summer, always showing French films, and usually only those that had been filmed in the surrounding district. And they call us insular, she thought, before experiencing a weird episode of doublethink. Of course, there is no us anymore. This part of town was relatively quiet, but sirens still reached them from across the metro area, and from the banlieue, she imagined, the outer suburbs where generations of North African and Middle Eastern migrants had created their own pinched and grim little fiefs in the tenements and public housing projects of Paris. Caitlin was as familiar with them, with the slums and dangerous, gunned-up shariatowns like Clichy-sous-Bois, as she was with the global Paris of Montmartre, the Louvre, and the avenue Montaigne.

"Do you think everything will be all right?" Monique asked in a small, mousy voice.

Caitlin stopped dead in her tracks. They were halfway across the darkened park, two figures who stood out from the handful of wandering, self-obsessed lovers by the tension evident in their every interchange. Stiff limbs, jerky movements, voices pitched too high and sharp-edged like broken gla.s.s in the night.

"No, Monique. Everything is not going to be all right."

She faced her captive companion square-on, hands to hips, jaw jutting out as her teeth ground together painfully. Pain like a cold knife behind one eyeball welled up from nowhere.

"Start. Paying. Attention, sweetheart. Someone is trying to roll me up, and you with me. Hundreds of millions of people disappeared today. Important people, too. The guarantors of life as you know it. Even if they all get beamed back down tomorrow morning with nothing to show for it but a sore a.s.s from the alien b.u.t.t probing they got, the world would still never be the same. Your city is falling apart. The whole f.u.c.king world is falling apart. What do you think will happen? You'll all suck down a few celebratory bottles of Lafitte now that the Left Bank is the center of the world again? Everyone will wake up tomorrow and go, hey, isn't this cool, we don't have to worry about big ol' fat-a.s.sed America ruining everything with her s.h.i.tty f.u.c.king movies, and fast food, and violence? Is that what you think? Huh?"

Her delivery grew more intense and unbalanced with each question, until by the end of her little speech, Caitlin knew she was ranting but couldn't stop. Monique withered away under the lashing, shrinking into herself and dropping her eyes until she looked like a small child being shouted at by the scariest grown-up she'd ever met. Caitlin regretted her loss of control immediately. It was stupid and unprofessional, not at all the sort of thing she'd normally do, especially out in the field with hostiles on her case. She saw a couple of teenaged boys on push-bikes pointing at them, but there was no aggressive intent to the gesture. They merely seemed to be amused by the crazy woman, and had probably picked up on her American accent.

"Look, I'm sorry," she said in French, running a hand through lank, greasy hair. "It's been a h.e.l.luva day, and it ain't getting any better."

"I am sorry, too," Monique replied in a small but surprisingly strong voice. "You have lost everything, non? You had family?"

Caitlin nodded, a dark-blue wave of sadness breaking over her at the thought of her parents and siblings, now gone.

"What will you do ... Caitlin?"

She was still unsure of that name and p.r.o.nounced it with extra care.

"You cannot go home and cannot stay here. You are a spy, yes? A killer? I suppose you know how to disappear?"

They resumed walking through the park, heading northwest, back toward the old center of Paris, but still away from the hospital and the fighting they had happened across before.

Caitlin smiled sadly. "I'm better at making people disappear than doing it myself. I have ... well, let's not go there. You shouldn't even know any of this. It's only that things have changed so much, and ... well ... I'm sorta swinging out here on my own now."

They pa.s.sed a homeless man, making himself a bed on a wooden bench, balling up a copy of Le Figaro for a pillow. He smiled at them, a wide toothless grin, and doffed his filthy cloth cap as they pa.s.sed. Monique stopped and handed him a couple of crumpled banknotes.

"Merci, mademoiselle, merci."

"You know," said Caitlin a minute later as they neared the edge of the Parc de Choisy, "that guy back there doesn't know it, but he has a bunch of skill sets that are about to put him back at the top of the food chain."

"Why?" asked Monique.

"He's a survivor."

"I need to rest and eat," said Caitlin half an hour later, as they left behind the unattractive, modernist high-rise district of the Centre Commercial Italie on the rue Vandrezanne. Seven roads met in a great starburst of an intersection a short distance away. Some of them were major arterials, like Bobillot, which ran back into the huge roundabout at the place d'Italie. Others were smaller, tree-lined streets, on which cafes dealing in simple fare survived on local custom rather than the tourist trade. Monique steered her into one such venue, grabbing a table near the door, which Caitlin immediately rejected in favor of another where she could sit with her back to the wall and watch the entrance and the street.

"Does this place have a toilet out the back?" she asked. "Do we have access through the kitchen?"

"I don't know." Monique shrugged. "I come here sometimes, but I've never had to ask. Why? Do you need to go?"

"No," she said. "But we need another exit. Indulge me and ask them."

Monique rolled her eyes, which Caitlin took as a good sign. She was throwing off her shock, rea.s.serting herself. Still, she did as the American asked. While she chatted with the owner, Caitlin sat and leaned up against the redbrick wall. Faded posters of beach scenes in New Caledonia had been tacked up around the cafe, and they looked mightily inviting. She felt her head swimming with exhaustion and forced her eyes open, gesturing to the one waiter and asking for a double shot of espresso.

"I'll teach this tumor to mess with me," she muttered to herself.

After the violence at the hospital, and an hour or more on the run, she could have wept with relief at being able to just sit somewhere comfortable and warm, where people weren't hunting her. Nine other patrons were scattered about in ones and twos, and such conversation as she could hear was all about " la Disparition." The Disappearance. She ignored it as best she could. The cafe smelled of baking bread, fried garlic, and roast lamb. A man at the table next to her supped at a bowl of soup in which floated big white chunks of fish meat and black mussel sh.e.l.ls. He tore small pieces of bread from a baguette and dipped them into the stock, washing it down with a gla.s.s of wine poured from a bottle with no label. Caitlin's stomach rumbled in protest and saliva leaked into her mouth. Her coffee arrived just as Monique returned.

"There is a convenience out the back. You have to go through the kitchen and they do not normally allow it, but I have told them you have just been diagnosed with a cancer and they relented."

Caitlin favored her with a crooked half smile.

"n.o.body wants to disappoint the cancer girl. Good work, Monique. You're learning."

"I am," she nodded, even seeming a little pleased. "The toilet is in a separate block, in a small yard that opens onto an alleyway. The alleyway runs in both directions, linking up with rue Bobillot and Moulin des Pres."

"d.a.m.n." The American whistled. "You could do this for a living, sweetheart."

She spooned a single sugar into the coffee and threw it down in one go.

"I ordered some toasted sandwiches, croque monsieur," said Monique. "I thought you would want something simple."

"And fast," she added, dropping her voice. "We have to get to the apartment as soon as we can. See if I can contact anyone from my shop."

Two straw baskets arrived, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with thick, toasted white bread wrapped around ham, Gruyere cheese, and French mustard. Two gla.s.ses and a bottle of house wine landed next to them, a nameless vin blanc. Monique poured herself a gla.s.s and drained it in two swallows before filling Caitlin's and refilling her own. Dark half moons stood out under her eyes, which were puffy and red from crying. Her hand shook as she poured, but not so much that she spilled any. Caitlin took a careful sip of her own but was more interested in the food. The bread had been dipped in egg and pan-fried in b.u.t.ter, with more melted cheese drizzled on the outside. Her eyes watered with the intensity of flavors as she bit into the moist, heavy slab. Right then it seemed like the finest meal she had ever tasted. She wanted to close her eyes and savor each bite, but her training demanded that she continually scan their surroundings and the entrance to the cafe for any threats. Apart from the heart attack she was holding in her greasy hands, however, there was nothing.

They ate in silence for five minutes, chewing through their meals and sipping at the wine. Unspoken, but lying between them like a dead curse, was the fate of Monique's friends. She had not mentioned them again, but Caitlin could tell they were on her mind. She didn't raise the issue herself, not wanting to unsettle the precarious emotional balance that Monique seemed to have achieved. There would be time for that later. Perhaps.

She ordered another coffee and paid for the entire bill when it came, but didn't finish her wine. Even a few mouthfuls had left her feeling lightheaded and dizzy. It would have been luxurious to stay in the cafe for a few hours, drinking and smoking Gitanes as though all was right with the world, but Caitlin hauled herself to her feet as soon as she'd downed the second espresso.

"Come on," she said. "Let's go."

The American headed out through the kitchen toward the rear of the cafe. The owner nodded and tutted and tried to look as sympathetic as he could for the pretty cancer girl, although his eyes kept slipping back to the bank note. The kitchen was cramped and narrow, with crammed shelves running all the way up to a high ceiling. A woman in a stained ap.r.o.n gave them a querying look but the owner, her husband most likely, shushed her with one word, "Cancer."

Caitlin shut her eyes for a few seconds before pushing open the screen door and stepping out into the small darkened parking lot. A single pallid globe struggled to illuminate the courtyard in which two scooters and a battered old van were parked. She had shifted the guns into easy reach, but there was nothing in the scene to alarm her.

"Well, my Spidey senses ain't tingling," she told Monique, who gave her a weird look in return. "We're fine," she explained.

Two blocks later, she found a couple of bicycles chained to a cast-iron railing in front of a white, Moorish-looking tenement, and was pondering how to break the chains when Monique admonished her.

"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 a.s.s.

"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 arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, walking against the flow of one-way traffic along the b.u.t.te 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 cafes and bistros had been colonized by cl.u.s.ters of small round tables, all covered in immaculate white linen, and playing host to lovers, friends, gourmands, and modern boule-vardiers. Monique's cl.u.s.ter 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 pa.s.sed by. In contrast with Monique, n.o.body 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-na.s.se 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 f.u.c.k "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 a.s.sa.s.sin no less, working on their turf, there had been no call for that bulls.h.i.t back at the Salpetriere. This wasn't the movies. You didn't draw down on somebody and start banging away without serious f.u.c.king reason.

"Caitlin?"

Monique's voice was quiet but thick with emotion. They had pa.s.sed 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 embarra.s.sing, 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 m.u.f.fled, 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 f.u.c.king 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 n.o.body knows about, 'cept us and the guys who are hunting us. The rest of the world? It'll be a s.h.i.tload worse."

They'd started walking again, slowly, pa.s.sing 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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.k 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 b.l.o.o.d.y with it. But Monique, listen to me. We're all outside now and a hard f.u.c.kin' 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 f.u.c.king medieval. Pogroms. Food riots. Blood in the f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.kin' 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 a.s.s. 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 f.u.c.king hut to the ground? All as a prelude to s.n.a.t.c.hing them up as slaves for the rest of their miserable f.u.c.king 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 Montparna.s.se 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 a.s.sured 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 h.e.l.l they were up to, what greater scheme they served, she had no idea. It was obviously related to the day's events-such frontal a.s.saults 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.

As soon as the last idea occurred to her, she dismissed it. If the French were aggressively rolling up Echelon cells, they'd be staking out the emba.s.sies and consulates.

No. She was on her own.

March 21, 2003