The small frosted window embedded in the door was covered with a wire grill, but there were no other obvious security measures. No wires, no cams, no back-to-base relays that she could spot. Her head was still spinning and her balance was off, but the door was a stationary target. She drove a powerful side kick into it, just inches below the rusted key lock. It gave way with a report like a gunshot and she hurried inside as the sound of more automatic fire drifted over the roof line from the street behind her.
She entered a storeroom, mostly empty, with just two large paper bags of flour lying on the concrete floor. Rats had chewed both of them open. A doorway led through to the baking room, where big commercial ovens stood cold and unattended, presumably for want of supplies. Or perhaps the boulanger, more closely attuned to the city’s increasingly serious hunger, had already taken his family and left.
Caitlin didn’t give a shit. She found the door she was looking for – the shop’s front door – punched through it, and emerged into the flat dismal light that leached through the thick blanket of toxic clouds now overhead. Rain started to spatter down again, burning her eyes and exposed skin. A black crow, seemingly unaffected by the pollution, picked at the carcass of a squirrel in the gutter just in front of her. She swore at her lack of goggles, a pair of which lay in the bag she’d left with Monique.
The assassin was caught unawares by the strength of her feelings for the girl. They were not comrades, more allies of convenience, thrown together only because of the extreme circumstances of the last week. And she had never allowed herself to grow attached to a target or an asset, but nor had she ever been diagnosed with a brain tumour or woken up to discover her whole world had vanished like a dream. As she ignored the increasingly difficult symptoms of her illness and pushed herself to the limits of endurance, Caitlin tried to convince herself she was simply worried, quite reasonably, at losing the vital support of a key asset.
A rising, ungovernable anger threatened to overwhelm her as she remembered her last sighting of Monique, jackknifed in pain, bleeding out onto the filthy floor of the old tenement. The girl was a ditz, but she had stuck by Caitlin when, really, she would have been better off lighting out on her own. If nothing else, the American owed her a settlement with whoever had shot her.
There were a dozen or more people milling about nervously on this street, flinching at the gunfire. Seeing her approaching, a young man called out a warning – ‘Attention, elle a une arme! - and they scattered like birds startled from a tree. Caitlin ran five doors down the street, back towards the hairpin corner around which she’d walked with Monique a lifetime ago. When she judged herself far enough along, she diverted in through the open garage doors of an auto repair business, yelling that she was the police and warning everyone to get down. ‘Tout le monde, planquez vouz! She heard more cries of alarm and noted two figures in coveralls cowering out of her way, but ignored them.
This building sat on the point formed by the meeting of the two roadways, so it had no back courtyard. The only open ground it boasted was a triangular concrete apron at the apex of the two streets, which appeared to be used as a parking bay for the business. It was possible to cut right across the workshop and emerge, hopefully, behind the white van and the last shooter. She quickly weaved her way through, dodging around a couple of pits over which sat a new Honda Accord and an ancient Trabant. A pair of double doors, identical to the ones she’d come through from the Rue du Bac, stood ajar, opening onto the wider thoroughfare of the Route d’Asnieres. She could just make out the rear of the van, splattered with blood, and an outstretched hand, lifeless on the sidewalk.
The FAMAS roared again, a long guttural snarl of fully automatic fire, none of it directed at her. Nonetheless, her heart lurched forward. She saw smoke and a muzzle flash light up the darkened cave of the tenement entrance where the last shooter had holed up – the doorway of the building in which Monique lay, disintegrated as the bullets struck.
Clearing burst, she thought. Right where she’s lying.
Caitlin took a second to check the shotgun and finish racking shells into the magazine. It was good to go, as near as she could tell. After she reloaded her Glock with a full mag, she stopped to think for a moment. What if there were more of them? There had to be more… Her eyes scanned the windows and rooftops, into stopped cars, taking in the few people still crazy enough to be on the street.
‘Nothing for it,’ she told herself. ‘Surprise is everything.’
The shooters lying on the footpath and roadway in front of her were dead. She hurried past the van, covering the man whose legs protruded from the rear cabin, but he too was gone. Bled out. The last known gunman was inside the building, just out of her sight.
She sped up, crouching to drop below the line of the windowsill as she reached the front door. Shotgun up, trigger on a half-pull, she took in the sight of Monique lying as still as a fallen log in the dark pool of her own fluids. Her head was a shattered mess of blood, gristle and grey matter. She was identifiable only because of the stupid little protest badges she still wore on her old jacket. Fury boiled over inside Caitlin’s head.
Oh, you filthy cocksucker. You and I will most certainly have a reckoning here directly.
Bloody footprints led away up the stairs and she heard the creak of a footfall overhead. Oh yes, Caitlin thought, pointing her shotgun at the ceiling. We’ll have that reckoning right now.
She pulled the trigger two, three, four times without giving a second thought to any collateral damage. Not a thought about the families who lived in the building or the crib she had fired beside. Each blast gouged giant plumes of plaster dust and atomised floorboard, which erupted and dropped down, coating the two women like a snowfall. She was rewarded with a strangled cry and a brief, uncontrolled snarl of gunfire, before a dead weight dropped to the floor above.
She looked over her shoulder, out the door behind her, still wary that someone else might show up. But there was no one in sight.
Taking off at speed again, she rushed up the stairs for the second time that morning. A round in the chamber, the Benelli’s muzzle described tight little arcs, as she aimed where she expected to find the body.
He was lying face down and still moving, but barely so. The last shooter, she hoped. Struck three times, once in the femoral artery, to judge by the rivers of rich, almost purple, lifeblood flowing out of him and onto the tacky brown carpet. He’d dropped the assault rifle in his dying spasm and Caitlin used her boot to kick it away, never once taking her aim off the back of his head.