A brief check of the GPS navigator placed them within a few blocks of the Parc de Choisy, a locale Caitlin knew well from a previous mission. A much quicker, cleaner job to shut down an official from the French Trade Ministry who had been selling perfectly mocked-up end-user certificates to a Lashkar-e-Toiba cell. Jeez, those were the days.
She swerved onto Avenue Edison and almost immediately threw the car into a hairpin turn around a small, arrow-shaped traffic island to run south-east alongside the park down Rue Charles Moureu. She was going to have to ditch the Volvo very soon. It had taken a horrible beating in the short time she’d been driving it and was certain to attract the attention of the gendarmes before long. In the seat next to her, covered in small diamonds of shattered windshield glass, Monique had curled up into a tight little ball and was shaking violently. The yellow wash of sodium lamps gave her features a gaunt, malarial cast. Caitlin dropped down through the gears and pulled over under the budding canopy of an ancient oak tree.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’re ditching the ride.’
‘Non,’ replied the French girl in a flat, affectless voice.
‘Fine. Die here then. Or in a cell at Noisy-le-Sec’
Monique turned an empty, uncomprehending face on her.
‘There’s an old fort there, run by the Action Division of your DGSE,’ Caitlin explained. ‘Spent some time there a few years ago. It sucked. Believe me, you don’t want to find out first-hand. So sit there if you want, but I’m outta here.’
She grabbed the phone and GPS unit before heading off towards 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 Caitlin remembered it. Soft white spotlights under-lit trees budding with the first intimation of the coming spring. She briefly consulted the GPS again 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 boltholes, safe houses, escape routes, dead drops, rat-runs, friendly and hostile camps and, naturally, a matrix of history – a personal and professional history of assignments, 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 arrondissement, but it was a good hour’s walk away, possibly more, and Caitlin did not fancy being exposed on foot for so long, especially not given her condition. She had already taken to thinking of the tumour as ‘my condition’. They 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 was 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 sharia towns like Clichy-sous-Bois, as she was with the global Paris of Montmartre, the Louvre and Avenue Montaigne.
‘Do you think everything will be all right?’ Monique asked in 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 exchange. Stiff limbs, jerky movements, voices pitched too high and sharp-edged like broken glass in the night.
‘No, Monique. Everything is not going to be all right.’ She faced her captive companion square on, hands on hips, jaw jutting out as her teeth ground together. Pain like a cold knife welled up from nowhere behind one eyeball. ‘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 ass from the alien butt-probing they got, the world will still never be the same. Your city is falling apart. The whole fucking world is falling apart. What do you think will happen – that you’ll all suck down a few celebratory bottles of Lafite now the left bank is the centre of the world again? That everyone will wake up tomorrow and go, “Hey, isn’t this cool, we don’t have to worry about big ol’ fat-assed America ruining everything with her shitty fucking 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 they’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 pushbikes pointing at them, but there was no aggressive intent to the gesture. They merely seemed to be amused by the crazy woman speaking in English, and had probably picked up on her American accent.
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ she said, running a hand through lank, greasy hair. ‘It’s been a helluva day, and it ain’t getting any better.’
‘I am sorry too,’ Monique replied in small, but surprisingly strong voice. ‘You have lost everything, non? You had family?’