Without Warning (22 page)

Still doesn’t explain what they’re doing all the way in here, though.

A quick 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-Taiba cell.

“Jeez, those were the days,” she sighed to herself.

She swerved onto the avenue Edison and almost immediately threw the car into a hairpin turn around a small, arrow-shaped traffic island to run southeast alongside the park down the rue Charles Moreau. 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 in a tight little ball and was shaking violently. The yellow wash of sodium lamps gave her features a gaunt, malarial cast. Caitlin dropped 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 flat, affectless voice.

“Fine. Die here then. Or in a cell at Noisy-le-Sec.”

Monique turned an empty, uncomprehending face to her.

“There’s an old fort there. Run by the action division of your DGSE. Spent some time there a few years ago. It sucked. Believe me, you don’t want to find out firsthand. So sit there if you want, but I’m outta here.”

She grabbed the handbag left behind by the car’s owner, tossing in the phone, GPS unit, iPod, and wallet before heading off toward 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 she remembered it. Soft white spotlights underlit trees budding with the first intimation of the coming spring. She briefly consulted the GPS 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 bolt-holes, safe houses, escape routes, dead drops, rat runs, friendly and hostile camps, and, naturally, 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 Sablière 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 given her condition. She had already taken to thinking of the tumor as My Condition. She 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
is
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 shariatowns like Clichy-sous-Bois, as she was with the global Paris of Montmartre, the Louvre, and the avenue Montaigne.

“Do you think everything will be all right?” Monique asked in a 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 interchange. 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 to hips, jaw jutting out as her teeth ground together painfully. Pain like a cold knife behind one eyeball welled up from nowhere.

“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 would still never be the same. Your city is falling apart. The whole fucking world is falling apart. What do you think will happen? You’ll all suck down a few celebratory bottles of Lafitte now that the Left Bank is the center of the world again? 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 she’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 push-bikes pointing at them, but there was no aggressive intent to the gesture. They merely seemed to be amused by the crazy woman, and had probably picked up on her American accent.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said in French, 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 a small but surprisingly strong voice. “You have lost everything,
non?
You had family?”

Caitlin nodded, a dark-blue wave of sadness breaking over her at the thought of her parents and siblings, now gone.

“What will you do
… Caitlin
?”

She was still unsure of that name and pronounced it with extra care.

“You cannot go home and cannot stay here. You are a spy, yes? A killer? I suppose you know how to disappear?”

They resumed walking through the park, heading northwest, back toward the old center of Paris, but still away from the hospital and the fighting they had happened across before.

Caitlin smiled sadly. “I’m better at making people disappear than doing it myself. I have … well, let’s not go there. You shouldn’t even know any of this. It’s only that things have changed so much, and … well … I’m sorta swinging out here on my own now.”

They passed a homeless man, making himself a bed on a wooden bench, balling up a copy of
Le Figaro
for a pillow. He smiled at them, a wide toothless grin, and doffed his filthy cloth cap as they passed. Monique stopped and handed him a couple of crumpled banknotes.

“Merci, mademoiselle, merci.”

“You know,” said Caitlin a minute later as they neared the edge of the Parc de Choisy, “that guy back there doesn’t know it, but he has a bunch of skill sets that are about to put him back at the top of the food chain.”

“Why?” asked Monique.

“He’s a survivor.”

“I need to rest and eat,” said Caitlin half an hour later, as they left behind the unattractive, modernist high-rise district of the Centre Commercial Italie on
the rue Vandrezanne. Seven roads met in a great starburst of an intersection a short distance away. Some of them were major arterials, like Bobillot, which ran back into the huge roundabout at the place d’Italie. Others were smaller, tree-lined streets, on which cafés dealing in simple fare survived on local custom rather than the tourist trade. Monique steered her into one such venue, grabbing a table near the door, which Caitlin immediately rejected in favor of another where she could sit with her back to the wall and watch the entrance and the street.

“Does this place have a toilet out the back?” she asked. “Do we have access through the kitchen?”

“I don’t know.” Monique shrugged. “I come here sometimes, but I’ve never had to ask. Why? Do you need to go?”

“No,” she said. “But we need another exit. Indulge me and ask them.”

Monique rolled her eyes, which Caitlin took as a good sign. She was throwing off her shock, reasserting herself. Still, she did as the American asked. While she chatted with the owner, Caitlin sat and leaned up against the redbrick wall. Faded posters of beach scenes in New Caledonia had been tacked up around the café, and they looked mightily inviting. She felt her head swimming with exhaustion and forced her eyes open, gesturing to the one waiter and asking for a double shot of espresso.

“I’ll teach this tumor to mess with me,” she muttered to herself.

After the violence at the hospital, and an hour or more on the run, she could have wept with relief at being able to just sit somewhere comfortable and warm, where people weren’t hunting her. Nine other patrons were scattered about in ones and twos, and such conversation as she could hear was all about “
la Disparition.”
The Disappearance. She ignored it as best she could. The café smelled of baking bread, fried garlic, and roast lamb. A man at the table next to her supped at a bowl of soup in which floated big white chunks of fish meat and black mussel shells. He tore small pieces of bread from a baguette and dipped them into the stock, washing it down with a glass of wine poured from a bottle with no label. Caitlin’s stomach rumbled in protest and saliva leaked into her mouth. Her coffee arrived just as Monique returned.

“There is a convenience out the back. You have to go through the kitchen and they do not normally allow it, but I have told them you have just been diagnosed with a cancer and they relented.”

Caitlin favored her with a crooked half smile.

“Nobody wants to disappoint the cancer girl. Good work, Monique. You’re learning.”

“I am,” she nodded, even seeming a little pleased. “The toilet is in a separate
block, in a small yard that opens onto an alleyway. The alleyway runs in both directions, linking up with rue Bobillot and Moulin des Prés.”

“Damn.” The American whistled. “You could do this for a living, sweetheart.”

She spooned a single sugar into the coffee and threw it down in one go.

“I ordered some toasted sandwiches,
croque monsieur,”
said Monique. “I thought you would want something simple.”

“And fast,” she added, dropping her voice. “We have to get to the apartment as soon as we can. See if I can contact anyone from my shop.”

Two straw baskets arrived, brimming with thick, toasted white bread wrapped around ham, Gruyère cheese, and French mustard. Two glasses and a bottle of house wine landed next to them, a nameless
vin blanc.
Monique poured herself a glass and drained it in two swallows before filling Caitlin’s and refilling her own. Dark half moons stood out under her eyes, which were puffy and red from crying. Her hand shook as she poured, but not so much that she spilled any. Caitlin took a careful sip of her own but was more interested in the food. The bread had been dipped in egg and pan-fried in butter, with more melted cheese drizzled on the outside. Her eyes watered with the intensity of flavors as she bit into the moist, heavy slab. Right then it seemed like the finest meal she had ever tasted. She wanted to close her eyes and savor each bite, but her training demanded that she continually scan their surroundings and the entrance to the café for any threats. Apart from the heart attack she was holding in her greasy hands, however, there was nothing.

They ate in silence for five minutes, chewing through their meals and sipping at the wine. Unspoken, but lying between them like a dead curse, was the fate of Monique’s friends. She had not mentioned them again, but Caitlin could tell they were on her mind. She didn’t raise the issue herself, not wanting to unsettle the precarious emotional balance that Monique seemed to have achieved. There would be time for that later. Perhaps.

She ordered another coffee and paid for the entire bill when it came, but didn’t finish her wine. Even a few mouthfuls had left her feeling lightheaded and dizzy. It would have been luxurious to stay in the café for a few hours, drinking and smoking Gitanes as though all was right with the world, but Caitlin hauled herself to her feet as soon as she’d downed the second espresso.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The American headed out through the kitchen toward the rear of the café. The owner nodded and tutted and tried to look as sympathetic as he could for the pretty cancer girl, although his eyes kept slipping back to the bank note. The kitchen was cramped and narrow, with crammed shelves running
all the way up to a high ceiling. A woman in a stained apron gave them a querying look but the owner, her husband most likely, shushed her with one word,
“Cancer.”

Caitlin shut her eyes for a few seconds before pushing open the screen door and stepping out into the small darkened parking lot. 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.