Caitlin shut her eyes for a few seconds before pushing open the flyscreen door and stepping out into the small darkened car park. 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 ass. ‘Fine,’ she conceded. ‘No bikes. But we’re gonna need some wheels soon. If we get caught out in the open on foot we’re dead.’
They resumed their journey towards the 14th 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, so 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 footpath in front of the cafйs and bistros had been colonised by clusters of small round tables, all covered in immaculate white linen, and playing host to lovers, friends, gourmands and modern boulevardiers. 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 Montparnasse 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. Maybe even Wales. Although, what the fuck ‘bringing 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.
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 Hospital. 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 whether to steal another car or sneak 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?’ the American asked.
‘They were your friends too, Caitlin. Or so I believed.’
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 not wanting to construct a series of defensive lies around her previous actions either.
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 grey 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,’ Monique confided. ‘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 apartment building. Flickering blue-green light behind a set of drawn curtains in the ground-floor flat 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 feel that way,’ Caitlin continued. ‘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’ve 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, or 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 shit-load worse.’