The doors closed on the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre 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 away 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. Caitlin 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-defence.’
‘Self-defence!’ Monique made a grab for her arm but Caitlin slipped out of her grip with practised 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,’ Caitlin replied. ‘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 from the leather jacket and swung the butt of the handle into the window, smashing it open and causing Monique to jump with surprise. There were over a dozen witnesses watching her, but nobody made any attempt to intervene as she popped the lock. More people came spilling out of the ER doors, some of them pointing her way, but none made any move towards her. It wouldn’t be long, however, before hospital security, 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 purse from which spilled a chequebook, iPod, mobile phone, make-up 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 backwards from the parking slot with a squeal and the harsh smell of burnt rubber, reefing on the handbrake to tighten her turning circle. Both she and Monique jerked forward in their seats and she slammed the disc brakes, changed gear and accelerated away, barely missing the tail-lights of an adjacent Fiat.
‘You are not Cathy Mercure, are you?’ asked Monique as they negotiated a twisting course through the car park towards 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, 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.
‘I’m in trouble?’ Monique shot back. ‘I have not killed anybody or stolen a car. I am not some sort of criminal. I did not get my friends shot back at…’
Her voice hitched and cracked as the emotional blow-back of the battle at the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre finally struck her. She had seen at least one of her friends shot down in front of her eyes, before watching another morph into a homicidal destroyer. Monique’s mouth gaped and her shoulders trembled as a squall of wild animus blew through her.
Caitlin rammed the little blue car through a series of gear changes as she threaded a course through a thicker pulse of traffic. Once they’d cleared the moving obstruction, she plucked a couple of paper tissues from a box jammed into the cup holder that lay between them.
‘I didn’t get your friends killed, Monique,’ she said firmly, but quietly. ‘I didn’t pull that trigger. But I took down the assholes who did. They’re avenged, for what it’s worth.’
‘Nothing! It’s worth nothing,’ shouted Monique, as the tears came at last.
‘Fair enough,’ shrugged Caitlin, checking the mirrors for any sign of pursuit as she dialled back on their speed to blend in to the surrounding traffic flow, and began to look for a landmark with which she could place them. She didn’t fancy asking the French girl for anything just yet.
The street had narrowed to just one lane running in each direction. Stunted, leafless trees lined the footpath, which was thick with people hurrying home from work, or out to dinner in one of the many bistros and wine bars that huddled up close together on the ground floors of the old four- and five-storey buildings. Warm, golden light spilled out through their windows, affording brief glimpses of packed tables and bars at which drinkers stood beneath thick clouds of cigarette smoke. For all the cosmopolitan charms, it was all so conventional. Had she been able to drive along here twenty-four hours earlier, Caitlin was certain she would have passed by almost exactly the same scene. Surely the only topic of conversation at those crowded tables would be the day’s news from the US; from the driver’s seat of the stolen Renault, however, she could not tell.