Without warning

Even though she was an undeclared operative – an assassin, no less – working on their turf, there had been no call for that bullshit back at the Hospital. This wasn’t the movies. You didn’t draw down on somebody and start banging away without serious fucking reason.

‘Caitlin?’ Monique’s voice was quiet but thick with emotion.

They had passed out of the busy, well-lit entertainment district and were back on the quieter streets. Caitlin checked the navigator, estimating that they had about twenty minutes to go before reaching the apartment. She’d have to decide very soon about whether to steal another car or sneak up on the building through the cemetery, investing a couple of hours in surveillance before heading in. Beside her, Monique’s eyes had welled up again and her shoulders were hitching beneath the thick jacket she wore.

‘You thinking about your friends?’ the American asked.

‘They were your friends too, Caitlin. Or so I believed.’

They were my mission, she thought. But aloud she said, ‘I liked them all right. Celia could be a self-righteous bore. And Maggie was kind of embarrassing, but…’ She shrugged off the rest of whatever she had been planning to say, not wanting to upset Monique further, but not wanting to construct a series of defensive lies around her previous actions either.

Thunder, distant and muffled, rolled over the city, although there didn’t appear to be a cloud anywhere in the sky. The city lights blotted out most of the stars, but only a few wispy strands of grey drifted across the face of the moon. Monique didn’t appear to notice and Caitlin said nothing. The French girl was upset enough without being told that something big had just exploded a few miles away.

‘I feel so guilty… about the hospital,’ Monique confided. ‘About Maggie and Celia and…’

‘It’s natural,’ said Caitlin. ‘It happens. You can’t understand why they got zapped and you didn’t. You keep telling yourself you should have done something, anything, to change it. You obsessively pick away at the memory like a wound, wondering if one small thing here or there might have changed it all, and kept them alive.’

‘Yes,’ she admitted in a small voice.

They stopped at the steps of a narrow-fronted apartment building. Flickering blue-green light behind a set of drawn curtains in the ground-floor flat indicated the presence of a television. Probably tuned into a news service. Sirens, police and fire service, swooped by a few streets away.

‘Well, don’t feel that way,’ Caitlin continued. ‘You’re gonna have to let it go at some point, Monique. May as well be now. Your friends got taken out by a couple of guys you would’ve called “fascists” just yesterday. I took them down in return. For what it’s worth, that’s about as much balance as the world ever achieves.’

Monique’s eyes looked hurt and almost resentful, but Caitlin continued anyway.

‘This isn’t over. I don’t know why I’ve been targeted like this, or whether it has anything to do with what happened back home today. But it isn’t over. They’ll keep coming until they get what they want or we get away. You need to toughen up, Monique. And you need to understand that I will not let them take me or you without paying a heavy fucking price. Some people have been killed. Some more will go that way before I’m done. And that’s just in our little world, which nobody knows about ‘cept us and the guys who are hunting us. The rest of the world? It’ll be a shit-load worse.’

They’d started walking again, slowly, passing under the branches of an ancient oak tree that covered a street corner in front of a small, darkened art gallery.

‘What do you mean, “worse”?’ asked Monique. ‘How can that be so?’

Caitlin laughed, although it was more of a bitter little cough, really. ‘Well, those guys at the hospital, and me, for that matter, we have our ways. You’d think them wrong, barbaric even. But if you understand the game and its rules, you can at least act with some sense of things playing themselves out right, one way or another.’ Which was why that splatter-fest at the hospital was so fucking out there, she thought. It simply should not have gone down like that.

Caitlin stopped again, this time fixing Monique with a hard stare.

‘But the Disappearance, you cannot underestimate how much that is going to fuck things up. I have to get out of Paris, out of France altogether. And so do you, if you want to survive. You ever read the English philosopher Hobbes? You’re French, right – you read philosophy with your croissant in the morning, non? Man exists in a state of nature – a war of all against all? That’s what modern society cured, at least so it didn’t interfere with the lives of people like you. People like me, on the other hand, we were still out there, getting bloody with it. But Monique, listen to me – we’re all outside now and a hard fuckin’ rain is gonna fall. You need to find shelter.’

‘How bad do you think it will be?’ she asked.