Without Warning (14 page)

“I’m
in trouble?” protested Monique. “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 blowback of the battle at the Pitié-Salpêtrière 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. When they 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.” Caitlin shrugged, checking the mirrors for any sign of pursuit as she dialed back on their speed to blend into 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-story buildings. Warm golden light spilled out through their windows, which gave onto brief glimpses of packed tables and bars at which drinkers stood beneath thick clouds of cigarette smoke. For all the cosmopolitan charm 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 U.S., but from the driver’s seat of the stolen Renault, she could not tell.

Beside her, Monique was trying valiantly to control her crying, but she had already gone through at least a third of the tissues. She searched inside a pocket for a small flip-top cell phone, sniffling as she tried to key in a number. Caitlin slapped it out of her hands.

“What the fuck are you doing? Don’t you read your own conspiracy theories? You can be tracked with that thing. In fact…”

She reached over roughly and jammed her hand between Monique’s legs to retrieve the little Samsung.

“I’m just calling Billy!” she protested. “He can come for me. I don’t want to be alone with you, or anywhere near you, whoever you are.”

Monique gasped in shock as Caitlin threw the phone out the window.

“It won’t be Billy who comes for you if you make that call, darlin’. It’ll be more guys in ties, toting big fucking guns.”

“You bitch! That was my phone!” cried Monique, genuinely affronted.

“No. That was a chip tracking your every movement,” said Caitlin. “And forget about your boyfriend. His phone is being monitored, too.”

Caitlin checked her watch. They had been driving for nearly fifteen minutes, more than enough time for their descriptions and the car’s plate to have been pushed out over the police nets.

“We have to change cars, Monique,” she said. “I’m going to pull off the street up ahead at that corner and ditch this ride. I’m gonna ask you to come with me, but I’m not going to make you.”

She allowed herself a brief, measuring glance at her passenger. Monique’s eyes were puffy, and tear tracks had washed runnels of makeup from her face. It must have been expertly applied. Caitlin hadn’t even noticed before. She was upset, naturally, but she was angry, too. Very angry.

“Why should I come with you? I should go right to the police and report you.”

“You could do that,” she said as she turned the wheel to take them off the
narrow street and into an even narrower alleyway. “But those men I killed? The men who shot Maggie in the head? They were from your state security service. Secret police, if you like. If you walk in to the gendarmes and tell them what happened, your details will go onto their network and within half an hour more guys like that will turn up at the police station and take you away. The cops won’t stop them. But they will stop you leaving if you try.”

“But why? That is ridiculous.”

Caitlin pulled over, running their wheels up onto the very narrow footpath. It couldn’t have been more than two feet wide. She was glad she hadn’t had to reverse park. Her head and neck were aching painfully.

“They were after me, and I was with you, so now they’re after you, too. You have family? They’re being watched. Your boyfriend? Him too. It’s not you. It’s me. Your security service is conducting a hard target search for
me,
and as of half an hour ago, you are the key. Every phone call you have made for the last five years, every address you’ve lived at, or just stayed at, that can be tracked is being tracked. Every movement across every border, every purchase with your credit card, every transaction in your bank account, every mailing list your name appears on, every e-mail you’ve ever sent, every chat room or website you’ve ever visited, every Net search you’ve ever done, they are all being sifted and analyzed right now, by people
way
smarter than you, because you are alive, and free, and running from them. With me.”

Monique shook her head, refusing to believe what she was hearing. As she spoke, her words became clipped and fiercer.

“This is bullshit.
You
are bullshit. You come to us as a friend. You say you are against the war. But you are part of the war. You are a killer just like Bush and Blair. Those men, if they were from the police or the secret service, it was their duty to arrest you. And you killed them and got Maggie killed as well.”

Monique’s anger overwhelmed her and she emphasized her last point by slapping at Caitlin’s face. The American woman brushed off the ineffectual blows with one swift hand, not even flinching as Monique cried out with frustration and attempted to rake out her eyes. Caitlin grabbed one of the girl’s hands and turned it sharply back in on the wrist, making her gasp with pain and shock.

“Knock it off, princess. I didn’t come here to hurt you or your dumbass friends. I came to protect you.”

“What?”

Three young men, obviously drunk and in high spirits, came around the corner and past the car, banging on the windows and calling out to the two women to come out and play, to have a drink and celebrate with them. Caitlin glared at them, but they just laughed. One held up two fingers in a V
and stuck his tongue between them, waggling it obscenely. This was obviously the funniest thing his friends had seen all night, and they fell into the cobbled roadway, laughing hysterically.

“Assholes,” muttered Caitlin.

“What did you …”

“I
said, assholes.
“

“Non.
What did you say about
protecting
us?”

The drunks helped each other off the cold, damp road surface and continued on their way to the next bar, one of them turning awkwardly to grab his crotch and give it a bit of a squeeze for the benefit of the two dykes.

“See what you are missing, ladies?”

“How could you have been protecting us?” Monique repeated, ignoring her oafish countrymen. “From those skinheads at the tunnel? You couldn’t have known about that.”

Caitlin opened the door and stepped out, taking a handful of banknotes from the handbag with her. She left the door ajar. The Renault would not be here for long. Monique squeezed out on the other side, the car’s proximity to a brick wall making for a tight fit. The wall was covered with an inch of peeling posters, most of them for awful French rock bands, but the uppermost layer calling for a “National Day of Action” to stop the “Anglo War.” That was the gig her merry little band had been headed for when set upon by the National Front thugs who got lucky and put her in the hospital.

Where I got lucky and caught a fucking brain tumor!

Caitlin had to stop for a moment and lean against the wall as her head reeled. Whether it was from the illness, her injuries, or an adrenaline backwash she couldn’t tell. She stood still, closed her eyes, and sucked in a long draft of air. It was unpleasantly cold now, but the alleyway still reeked of garbage and dog shit, the signature smell of Paris behind the coffee
and pain au chocolat.

“Are you all right?” Monique asked grudgingly.

“I’ll be fine. Just give me a second.”

And the dizzy spell did pass quickly. She felt a little light-headed as they stepped off toward the high street again, but nothing too crippling. Monique supported Caitlin at the elbow anyway, a gesture she was happy to accept.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said, a little petulantly. “What did you mean before, about protecting us?”

“You wouldn’t believe me, not yet.”

“Try me.”

“No. If we’re still alive in a few days, I’ll tell you, and you will believe me,
every word I say. But for now, no. Come with me, or make your own way home, where they’ll be waiting for you. It’s all the same to me.”

They stopped at the intersection, where bright lights and heavy foot traffic created an effect a little like stepping back into the real world from some underground realm. A bus rumbled by, coughing thick gouts of acrid smoke into the air. Shoes scuffed and clicked on wet, gray flagstones, and around them roared hundreds of voices, all discussing the same thing: “the Disappearance.”

Caitlin’s heart sank. She had been hoping irrationally that the apparent normality of the street scene spoke of some disorder within her, some malady of the brain caused by her illness, that had manifested itself as a perverse hallucination of cataclysm. But no. The Parisians were agog with the news, and confirming for her that it was real was the sound of so many voices raised in good cheer and even merriment. That is what the three jerks who’d abused them before were drinking to. A world without America.

Fucking assholes.

“Pardonnez-moi?”

“Sorry. Didn’t think I was speaking aloud,” said Caitlin. “It’s nothing. We’ve got to get moving. Let’s go.”

They set off again, heading uphill. Caitlin’s eyes swept the road and the sidewalk ahead of them on both sides of the street for any sign of hostile action, but all she could see was late-rush-hour traffic and throngs of boule-vardiers, many of them seemingly toasting the day. Not all, admittedly. Here and there arguments raged in that Gallic way, all sound and fury without any real danger of violent contention.

“… It is a disaster, I tell you, a world-ending disaster …”

“No. A second chance is what we have been gifted by the gods …”

“So. You are a believer now, eh?”

“… this will mean horror, horror on an unimaginable scale …”

“… I shall be leaving for my farm this very night. Mark my words. Leave the city now or you will have …”

“All I will have is another glass of Billecart…”

Caitlin set her mouth in a grim, thin line and pushed on with her head down. Monique fell silent beside her. After a few minutes it became obvious that for each individual who saw the Disappearance as a malign catastrophe, another two or three thought it a fine thing. From the snatches of conversation she picked up as they hurried along it seemed that in this part of the world at least, a rough consensus had settled on a conspiracy theory about the Americans having destroyed themselves when testing some superweapon for
use in Iraq. Nobody seemed to imagine that any such fate might befall them here in Paris. But then, if they did, they’d hardly be out scarfing down aperitif and dinner, would they? Perhaps the freeways out of the city were jammed with more people like the man she’d heard planning to leave for his farm later that night. Although why he thought he’d be safe there from something that gobbled whole continents was a mystery.

“I am sorry.”

Caitlin almost didn’t hear her. Monique’s voice was small and timid and nearly lost in the roar of the busy street.

“What?”

“I am sorry, Cathy—Caitlin. I can hear what they are saying as well as you. It is disgraceful. Drinking to a tragedy. Saying your people deserved it.”

“Oh, fuck that,” replied Caitlin in pitch-perfect French. She really didn’t want to get tagged as an American at the moment. “This is one street, Monique. One little neighborhood where people of like minds will gather all the time. It’s just human nature. If some Algerian madman set off a nuke in Paris I could take you straight to a food court in any city in the U.S. and it’d take me all of three seconds to find some fat, doughnut-sucking slob who said you deserved it. People everywhere are fucked, that’s all.”

“No. Not everyone … Caitlin. Some people are led by the better angels.”

At that moment they passed a café outside which stood a small, elderly gentleman in a black jacket and red beret, both hands holding the crook of a walking stick, which he was banging into the ground for emphasis while arguing with a couple of men who looked to be a fraction of his age.

“I was with the Americans at Carentan. I saw them shed their blood for France. Your dishonor them and you dishonor France with this rubbish talk …”

Caitlin gifted the old man with a sad smile and a wink as she passed by. A siren brought her head up slowly, lest she draw attention to herself, but it was a fire engine a block over. She caught a glimpse of it muscling through traffic as they crossed an intersection.

“Down here,” she said, veering off toward a line of parked cars in a street of private houses and apartments. Only one shop, a liquor store, was open.

“Are you going to steal another car?” Monique asked warily.

No,
thought Caitlin.
I’m going to buy a couple of magnums of champagne and pass them around the surrender monkey set back there to help celebrate the cosmic cornholing of the great Satan.

Aloud she simply said, “You got it.”