Without warning

In a few mad moments the car was through the confrontation and back into clear space, as Caitlin swung through a roundabout and took the exit furthest from the direction in which they’d just come. She tried to organise her impressions in a coherent fashion, arranging a random series of images into something she could understand and maybe even use. It wasn’t just a riot, it was a brawl. The crowd, which she would have put at somewhere between seventy and a hundred strong, seemed almost evenly split between young white men and women, and perhaps a slightly larger number of African- and Arabic-looking youths. All of the latter had been males, as far as she could tell. The clash appeared undirected, and was probably a fight between the sort of moronic drunks she and Monique had encountered a little earlier, and a pack of Muslim yahoos, stoned on kif or possibly drunk as well. In her experience, for all of their sanctimonious posturing, many of the thugs from Paris’s Muslim districts liked a drink as much as the next hoodie. Still, it didn’t explain what they were doing all the way in here, she realised.

A brief 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-Toiba cell. Jeez, those were the days.

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

‘Fine. Die here then. Or in a cell at Noisy-le-Sec’

Monique turned an empty, uncomprehending face on her.

‘There’s an old fort there, run by the Action Division of your DGSE,’ Caitlin explained. ‘Spent some time there a few years ago. It sucked. Believe me, you don’t want to find out first-hand. So sit there if you want, but I’m outta here.’

She grabbed the phone and GPS unit before heading off towards 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 Caitlin remembered it. Soft white spotlights under-lit trees budding with the first intimation of the coming spring. She briefly consulted the GPS again 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 boltholes, safe houses, escape routes, dead drops, rat-runs, friendly and hostile camps and, naturally, a matrix of 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 Sabliere, 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 not given her condition. She had already taken to thinking of the tumour as ‘my condition’. They 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 was no ‘us’ anymore.