Dr Colbert nodded distractedly. Now that he was watching the TV he seemed unable to wrench his attention away from it.
The screen switched to a series of shots detailing the moments just before and after a giant tanker had slammed into a wharf in a city she didn’t recognise. Two frames showed it heading straight into the dockside. The next two captured the impact, with the front quarter of the supertanker crumpling back in on itself while the water around the vessel churned white and dockside cranes began to topple. A single frame caught the moment of detonation amidships, a blossom of white light spilling from the ruptured hull. And then the entire length of the supertanker was consumed by the birth of a dwarf star.
Maggie started swearing at the TV again, a stream of disconnected curses. Aunty Celia softly repeated the same thing over and over again: ‘Fookin’ ‘ell… Fookin’ ‘ell…’ Every time she said it, she folded and unfolded her arms, like a malfunctioning animatronic figure. Monique, however, was refusing to even look at the screen anymore.
‘You said you could not speak French at all,’ she said, challenging Caitlin once more.
Dr Colbert shook his head like a dog emerging from water and waved the young woman away with his clipboard, addressing himself only half to Caitlin. His eyes remained fixed on the catastrophe as it unfolded a few feet above the end of the bed.
‘We have done scans while you were unconscious,’ he told his patient, in English. ‘You have a lesion on your hippocampus, a part of the brain intimately involved in the organisation of memory. It may be a tumour. But we need to take a biopsy to ascertain its nature. It may be serious. Much more serious than the injuries that brought you here. They are uncomfortable, but they can be dealt with.’
Caitlin Monroe had been an Echelon field agent for nearly five years. She had been intensively trained for three years before that. For her entire adult life, she had lived in a crazy maze where every step she took, every corner she turned, she faced the possibility of betrayal and death. She had adapted to a contingent existence where nothing was taken for granted. She had faced her own potential annihilation so many times that a doctor telling her she might be dying was completely passй. At least, on a normal day.
But this was a thousand miles from being a normal day, and for once Caitlin found the idea of her life ending to be a completely novel and unsettling experience. It stuck in her mind, a barbed, immovable object that tugged painfully whenever she tried to pull at it. ‘I’m dying?’ she asked him finally.
‘No,’ said Colbert. ‘But -’
The television went blank, the screen a dead, black void.
‘What the…?’
Two words of white, plain type appeared.
TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED.
‘Holy shit, it’s happening here now!’ Maggie exclaimed.
‘No!’ said Caitlin, cutting off an outbreak of panic. They could all hear cries of alarm and distress from other rooms on the hospital floor. ‘Just wait.’
‘Check the French news channels,’ she said. ‘See if they’re still on. And the English sports channels.’
Monique abandoned the task of glaring at her to flip through the channels with the remote. As Caitlin had expected, the continental stations were still broadcasting, as was Sky Racing and the English football channels. Even the end of the world wouldn’t be allowed to interfere with interminable replays of last year’s Champions League.
‘It’s nothing,’ Caitlin assured them, rubbing at her throbbing temples with one hand, the one trailing slightly fewer leads and sensors. ‘The government has taken control of the news broadcasters. It’s standard procedure in a national emergency. Just watch… And doc… what’s your name again?’
‘Colbert.’
‘Dr Colbert. I’m not dying?’
He gave the impression of a man greatly relieved to find himself back on familiar ground. ‘Not yet. But you could, without proper treatment. You are not yet incapacitated but the lesion might well require intensive therapy, and very soon. But we can treat you as an outpatient for the moment… We need your bed.’ He shrugged, smiling for the first time, almost apologetically.
A single, high-pitched tone filled the room for one second before the TV screen came back to life. Tony Blair was sitting at a desk in a book-lined room, with a British flag prominently draped from a pole behind him. His eyes were haunted and, even beneath a very professional make-up job, his skin looked blotchy and sallow.
‘G-good evening …’ he stammered.
Colbert wasn’t kidding about needing the bed. An hour later, still swaddled in bandages, and trailing one rogue sensor lead that had become entangled with her unwashed hair, Caitlin Monroe was still in-character as Cathy Mercure, attempting to sign herself out of the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre while shaking off what she’d come to think of as her Secret Squirrel detail. The motley collection of professional anti-warmongers had closed around her like a fist as she’d dragged herself out of bed, dressed, and pushed her way through corridors now crowded with fearful idiots.
Caitlin was surprised at the hysterical undertow that was running so strongly in the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre. But then again, the place was full of people who were already stressed out and had nothing much to do beyond watching television while they waited for some sort of traumatic medical procedure. On the way down to check out she witnessed any number of pedal-to-the-metal, full-bore freak-outs. One woman even barrelled right into her; a large, bug-eyed Parisian Mack Truck, she knocked Maggie right off her feet, screaming about the end of days, before disappearing down the hallway with her enormous, deeply dimpled butt swinging free in the rear of a badly strung hospital gown.
‘I’ll be a lot better off out of here,’ Caitlin assured her companions.
Apart from Monique, who remained suspicious after discovering Caitlin’s hidden gift for her native tongue, the secret squirrels weren’t doing much better than any of the ranting, unbalanced Frenchies around them. Maggie, after picking herself up off the floor, was blabbering on about needing to phone her sister in Connecticut. And Aunty Celia had settled on a never-ending string of curses and oaths as her favoured response. They’d all made perfunctory efforts to get her to stay in the hospital, to argue with Colbert that she was too ill to move, but Caitlin could tell that each was spinning off into her own little world of free-floating and violently unstable anxiety. The whole city was probably going to be like this. The whole fucking world.
For her part, she didn’t know what to think about the news out of the States. It was bordering on psychotic. But she did know that even if this all turned out to be some post-millennial War of the Worlds shakedown, if she’d been cut off from Echelon, she was travelling blind and unarmed in a world of predators. She had to run to ground as soon as possible, re-establish contact with Wales, her controller, and get some updated instructions. Christ only knew what had gone down while she’d been out of it. Plus, of course, Monique was eyeing her off with increasing suspicion.