Without warning

Sirens were audible, but there seemed to be hundreds of them, the distinctive warble and wail coming from all points of the compass. The city was alive with their discordant jangling sound.

Traffic along the roads around the hospital grounds was heavy, but grinding forward in fits and starts. Caitlin could see the strobing lights of both police and ambulance vehicles in three separate places. It was impossible to tell whether they were headed in her direction.

‘Killing and murdering are not the same thing. I killed them, sure. But I had good reason. That isn’t murder. It’s self-defence.’

‘Self-defence!’ Monique made a grab for her arm but Caitlin slipped out of her grip with practised ease. ‘You expect me to believe that? You attacked them and killed them like… a… machine! A thing. You are no activist. You are no surfer!’ Monique spat the last word at her.

‘Well, I used to surf, but I’m also a soldier,’ Caitlin replied. ‘Now, get in the fucking car, if you want to get out of this alive. Those men back there, they were soldiers too, like me. And there’ll be more of them looking for us.’

Caitlin retrieved one of the pistols from the leather jacket and swung the butt of the handle into the window, smashing it open and causing Monique to jump with surprise. There were over a dozen witnesses watching her, but nobody made any attempt to intervene as she popped the lock. More people came spilling out of the ER doors, some of them pointing her way, but none made any move towards her. It wouldn’t be long, however, before hospital security, the gendarmes or something worse turned up.

‘Clock’s a-tickin’, Monique. Hop in.’

The front seat of the Fuego was cluttered with papers, a bag of onions and a purse from which spilled a chequebook, iPod, mobile phone, make-up and more keys.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Caitlin. ‘Why not just get a big fucking bumper sticker that says “Steal my stuff”?’

She snatched a sturdy-looking steel pen from the jumble of items and used it to lever her way into the car’s accessory circuits, cracking open the plastic cover beneath the wheel with a couple of violent jerks. She sensed Monique hovering outside and swept the detritus from the seat. ‘Just get in. We’re running out of time.’

The French girl climbed in carefully, as if unwilling to touch the belongings of the unknown owner. Caitlin swore softly as she sparked the engine to life, giving herself a small electrical shock in the process. A brief glance over her shoulder revealed a growing knot of people on the steps of the hospital, all of them gesturing in her direction, some of them shouting. She threw the car into reverse, stamped on the gas and peeled out backwards from the parking slot with a squeal and the harsh smell of burnt rubber, reefing on the handbrake to tighten her turning circle. Both she and Monique jerked forward in their seats and she slammed the disc brakes, changed gear and accelerated away, barely missing the tail-lights of an adjacent Fiat.

‘You are not Cathy Mercure, are you?’ asked Monique as they negotiated a twisting course through the car park towards the exit and out into the traffic stream.

Caitlin’s first, unthinking reaction was to lie. Deceit and betrayal were so deeply ingrained by her training and the demands of her work that they had become elements of her true nature. But unless she was psychotic, her mission concerns were no longer relevant. Something bigger had happened, something infinitely worse than anything she had been prepared to fight. A painful throbbing on the injured side of her head grew more insistent as she allowed herself to contemplate anything beyond fight or flight for the first time since the shooting had begun back at the hospital.

‘No,’ she conceded to Monique. ‘I’m not Cathy Mercure. My name’s Caitlin. That’s all you need to know. That, and also that you’re in a lot of trouble.’

Blaring horns and some muffled Gallic abuse greeted their high-speed entry into the crowded Parisian road net. Caitlin opted to cut across the main flow of traffic, and forced her way through an intersection onto a lesser boulevard. She wasn’t familiar with the road but it had everything she wanted right at that moment. It was navigable at a good speed and it was taking them away from the place where somebody had just tried to put the zap on her.

‘I’m in trouble?’ Monique shot back. ‘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 blow-back of the battle at the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre 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.